Von Trier and Tarkovsky: From Antithesis to Counter-sublime

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Lars von Trier’s lifelong engagement with the Russian master, which was openly admitted in his 2009 Antichrist’s shocking dedication. To unravel the complex relationship between the two directors, the chapter places them in the context of Harold Bloom’s rhetorical matrix of revisionary ratios and trace several stages of Tarkovsky’s influence on the Danish director: the early stage of antithetical completion, when the latter continuously attempted to push the former’s messianic project to new limits, and that of counter-sublime, characterized by von Trier’s impossible yet compulsive desire to forget Tarkovsky. The chapter also examines how von Trier simultaneously attacks and reinvents Tarkovsky’s spiritualist ideology of redemption from the position of European cynicism most vividly exemplified by Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason (1983).