Lars Von Trier Research Articles

Апокалиптическое сознание Ларса фон Триера в антропологии Дома, который построил не Джек

The subject of the study is the concept of the historical hero as a victor of the gods and his role in contemporary Western cultural heritage, with a focus on the reinterpretation of Scandinavian culture in the works of Lars von Trier. The research methodology is based on the analysis of Hollywood’s reception of neo-European rationalism and the ideas of individualism and free will in European culture. The author examines the influence of the implementation of freedom without morality on the exploration of the idea of the Übermensch (superman) and discusses unresolved questions in this context. The research findings highlight the importance of the themes of personal responsibility and freedom in Western culture, as well as the legacy of Scandinavian culture as a source of the manifestation of truths. The conclusions of the study emphasize the relevance and significance of the discussed issues in the contemporary cultural context. The main goal of the research is to identify the consistent stages of Lars von Trier’s apocalyptic consciousness, particularly in the context of resistance to the colonization of art by ontological philosophy and the dominance of Hollywood clichés and political sentiments in the film market. This work conducts a methodological investigation into how Lars von Trier applies the philosophy of images through cinematography as a tool to separate false and immaculate representations of the world, with a focus on the problem of sin in his composition. This work methodologically explores this process and analyzes how it interacts with contemporary culture and cinema. In the context of the scientific novelty of the research, a question arises about Lars von Trier describing himself as a ‘sadistic doctor’ who saves lives but remains, in the eyes of those saved, an antichrist and a criminal in the humanistic world and humanity’s defense of a world different from the existing one. The results of this research can be used to study philosophical anthropology in the field of film studies and visual arts, as well as in related social and humanitarian disciplines, to analyze how this theme interacts with culture and society.

On pairing visual shapes in painting and cinema

The paper presents an analysis of the interaction of visual forms in painting and cinema (on the example of the pairing of A. Durer's painting and the modern cinema). The empirical basis of the analytical part of the study was visual sources (films by Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman, Lars von Trier, Francis Ford Coppola, Lado Kvataniya, works of art by Albrecht Durer). During the conducted research, it was determined how painting and cinema correlate, whether the analysis of a painting in a film makes it possible to understand the general concept, the chronicle of what is happening, the image of the main character. The main hypothesis of the study was confirmed that the pictorial work is the conceptual basis or “ideology” of the film, which makes it possible to identify stable and reproducible forms of conjugation of historical painting in the modern cinema. It was found that the analyzed films raise questions of vitality, pure soul and the role of conscience, parting with peace and war, both external and internal. It is shown that in the film "Ivanov's childhood", "Execution" and "Dracula" the presence of works creates a conceptual field for understanding the images and plot, in "Melancholy" the pairing occurs at the junction of the interpretation of the names and the alignment of the frame. In the "Seventh Seal", the meaning of A. Durer's engraving is generally adjacent to the meaning of the director's painting, justifying the artistic connection of both creators.

Nordic Humour

Starting from my former empirical studies but supplemented with fresh fictional “data” from Lars von Trier’s latest TV series Riget Exodus (2022), I first describe how Danes use humour in very characteristic ways, also in cross-cultural professional settings. Next, I explain not only Danish humour but all national humour with the notion of humour socialisation, which integrates and combines national humour with the national language on the one hand, and the specific national process of civilisation on the other hand. Moving to Nordic humour, I focus on how Danes and Swedes perceive each other’s humour, and then explain divergences between the humour of these two Nordic countries. These differences, I conclude, are the result mainly of differences in their respective civilising processes, while I am waiting and hoping for deeper comparative linguistic studies of the use of ‘humour warning signals in Danish and Swedish.

Contemporary Nordic art film comedy

Critics tend to consider art cinema a serious and challenging form of cinema. Contemporary Nordic art cinema nevertheless includes many films by internationally recognized art film directors that use (dark) comedy as an expressive mode. The article examines the diverse ways that art cinema can merge with comedy. After outlining the concept of art cinema, emphasizing the films’ challenging style, ambiguity and gravity, I present approaches to humour, demonstrating how art film comedy challenges several premises of comedy. Analyses of three films, Lars von Trier’s The Boss of It All (2006), Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure (2014) and Grímur Hákonarson’s Rams (2015), highlight their comic aspects, but illustrate that they are comic in varying, ambiguous and challenging ways that violate genre expectations.

Becoming-lithic: elemental utopian possibility in the contemporary ecocatastrophe

ABSTRACT This article explores an emerging cluster of ecocatastrophe narratives that locate utopian possibility within the Earth’s sub-crustal lithosphere. Texts such as N. K. Jemisin’s “Broken Earth” trilogy (2015–2017), J. G. Ballard’s The Crystal World (1966), Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011), Irene Solà’s Catalan novel When I Sing, Mountains Dance (2019), and the first season of the Icelandic TV series Katla (Netflix, June 2021) uncover an inhuman ecology whose vibrant, lively agency can be discerned within the geologic temporalities of deep time. Unlike their “Hollow Earth” precursors (a late nineteenth-century subgenre of the literary utopia), in which human protagonists ventured below the Earth’s surface to discover rich worlds of utopian alterity, these contemporary lithic texts revoke their characters’ human sovereignty in images of encroaching human-lithic intimacy: a process that I call becoming-lithic. In conveying the lively potentialities of geological processes such as the rock cycle, plate tectonics, continental drift, orogenesis and subduction, igneous activity, these lithic texts encourage readers and viewers to reconsider our relationship between the geosphere and the biosphere. I trace their emerging elemental aesthetics, asking how we might parse their inhuman moments of possibility and, in the process, undertake the urgent task of decolonising utopian studies.

A History of Danish Cinema

A History of Danish Cinema

Searching for the Lost Tree of Life: An analysis of the Self-identity Process of the Heroine Joe in The NymphomaniacVol with Conceptual Metaphor Theory

people have been suffering from extreme loneliness, especially women, are more likely to feel lonely. For various reasons, modern women can't honestly express their sexual desires and needs, which makes it more difficult for them to realize self-identity. Lars von Trier shows a woman who challenges tradition and seeks her own identity from the perspective of feminism. How the heroine "Joe" in this film realizes her identity, her experience is very special, and it is worth exploring in depth, but relevant research is very scarce. Therefore, this paper uses the methods of narratology and conceptual metaphor to deeply analyze the women in the film. This paper uses the methods of video data and literature data, combined with narratology and conceptual metaphor, to analyze the film and its related literature. From a practical point of view, it provides a reference for women's identity positioning in real life, and deeply understands women's personal aspirations.

Is the beautiful moral? Lars von Trier, Schiller and Kant on morality of the work of art

The point of departure is a film by Lars von Trier,The House That Jack Built(2018). The most striking aspect of this film is that Jack has grounds for his actions. By committing a serial murder he is creating a work of art. He has his own primitive philosophy and affirms two theses: firstly,that art is the highest type of human activity and, secondly, that to be moral means to belong to the human herd. In spite of the primitiveness of these theses it is hard to disprove them. The common thesis in the Enlightenment was formulated by Diderot, Shaftesbury, and Winckelmann who claimed that aesthetic education favours morality. Schiller in his work,On the Aesthetic Education of Man(1795), espouses the same view but tries to ground the position in philosophy, showing that beauty is a balance between reality and form. We can explain modern art. If a painter is only interested in the formal aspects, he is producing abstract art and not engaged in the moral aspects at all. Then I turn to Kant’sCritique of the Power of Judgmentand reformulate his categorical imperative from the point of view of aesthetics:Create only according to the principle that the result of your creation will have universal acceptance!We can agree that it will not be achievable because the most important element for every artist is the freedom of creation. I insist that the most appropriate way is to analysegenius as the unifying form of human creative action.

Timon and Melancholia

Timon of Athens shows Timon as extravagantly generous and sociable in the first half of the play and misanthropic in the second, in which his desire for catastrophe is potentially enacted by Alcibiades’ planned assault on Athens. This article finds a parallel in Lars von Trier's 2011 film Melancholia, which is formally divided into two parts, the first showing the depressive Justine's wedding and the second the approach of the planet Melancholia on its collision course with the Earth. The comparison illuminates the interface between psychological and physical disasters in Timon.

Violence, Pregnant with Peace: Criminological Reading of Lars von Trier

In this article, the works of cinema director Lars von Trier are invoked as an instrument to explain various criminological theories. Mostly, the approach of cultural criminology is applied as well as other perspectives: dramaturgical-existential approach, peacemaking, and (anti)positivism. Both because of the topics presented (such as transgressing and questioning the socially acceptable norms, violence, fear, humiliation, deviant sexuality, despair, etc.) and the methodology of the filmmaking process, the self-labelled ‘best director in the world’ can be quite rightly described as one of the most thought-provoking criminologists in Europe. Paradoxically, ideas presented in his films, though seemingly violent and destructive, might be inspirational for those who seek peace and enlightenment.

Alienation Occurred in “Melancholia” Movie

A movie may mirror a person's experiences in life and is not just for amusement. Movies include moral lessons that viewers may learn from. It educates us about attitudes, behaviors, language, culture, and culture. It's simple for individuals to appreciate movies visually as literary. Melancholy is appropriately examined utilizing the alienation idea based on the movie's plot. Human alienation was at first a social phenomenon in contemporary life (Darma, 1995 in Efendi, 2005). Social psychology refers to this as alienation. According to Melville's 1996 short story "About Bartleby," alienation is a type of self-separation from everyone and everything, including other people (Bloom, 2009). The alienated emotion toward anything, including internal and exterior components, is the complexity of estrangement in and of itself. This could incite someone to be antagonistic toward other individuals or society. The purpose of this study was to identify the ways in which Justine, the main character in the film Melancholia, was alienated. The article utilizes some of the earlier research on melancholia that has been conducted by a small number of academics in order to analyze the film. This research was produced under the auspices of the alienation theory. This research fell under the heading of literature philosophy. The Lars von Trier film Melancholia, which was released in 2011, served as the study's main source of information. Analyzing the presence of alienation in the film involved observing, transcribing the screenplay, and categorizing the conversation in accordance with the subject of alienation. A type of mental disease in humans called alienation is defined by emotions of being foreign or weird to others, to nature, the environment, God, and even to oneself. Alienation is discussed in connections with oneself, other people, society, objects/nature, and capitalism in Lars von Trier's film Melancholia. The social lives of those who don't take care about their families' or children's issues are criticized in this movie. They don't express any emotional existence; only physical existence

The Musical Idea Work Group: Production and Reception of Pre-existing Music in Film

AbstractHow do filmmakers work with pre-existing music? To answer this question, I conducted interviews with the musicians, composers, editors, sound designers, and music researchers for Lars von Trier's films. This article combines previously unpublished insider information with an original analytical methodology to clarify the working processes of contemporary filmmakers who utilize pre-existing music. I build on Ian Macdonald's production-situated conception of the ‘Screen Idea Work Group’ to posit the ‘Musical Idea Work Group’, a notional framework emerging from the teams who develop film-musical ideas. While previous film music research tends to analyse artists (persons) or music (products), here I focus on contrasting descriptions of highly collaborative working processes with the prescriptive mechanisms of film reception. In this way, I demonstrate a more holistic understanding of filmic authorship while accounting for previous constructions of Trier as an ‘auteur mélomane’ based on critical perceptions of how he utilizes music.

A Seafloor for the Disaster

Across discourses and genres, stories of climate change often follow a race-against-time plot, as if confronting environmental disaster meant accepting the terms of the disaster film genre. The objective of this article is to elucidate some of the anxieties these terms manage, in particular, anxiety provoked, paradoxically, by the stability of the earth even in the worst-case scenarios—even, for example, in the case of the total uninhabitability of the earth for human beings. Within the framework of the race-against-time plot, the earth cannot appear as simultaneously stable and uninhabitable; uninhabitability can appear only as a breakdown of stability. Through readings of Sylvia Wynter, Jules Michelet, Jules Verne, and Lars von Trier, who takes the disaster film genre to its limit in Melancholia, this article elaborates an alternative to this splitting, starting from the seafloor, whose primal uninhabitability for human beings is unaffected by the wells that now puncture it and the cables that now cross it. Of course, there is a difference between the disastrous uninhabitability caused by capitalist production and the uninhabitability that precedes it primordially, but the latter is part and parcel of the stability that holds even in the worst-case scenarios. That this limit cannot be destroyed does not mean that there is any limit to how far the desire to destroy it can go. Rather, it helps account for the inextinguishability of the destructive desire, the acknowledgment of which, a condition for change, cannot happen within the terms of the race-against-time plot.

영화 <도그빌>의 하마르티아와 비극적 인간상

Lars von Trier’s films used to surprise critics and audiences with their unique form and unconventional content. In Trier’s films, the theme of 'Exploring humanity through suffering women’ continues. In <Dogville>, the community’s ethics is reflected through the suffering of a stranger visiting an isolated community. <Dogville> is a text that is open to various interpretations with the introduction of an unusual and unfamiliar film form, the illumination of the dark inner side of the everyday crowd, and the richness of allegory. In various interpretations, this study grasped the director's intention for the film by examining the formal aesthetics of the film, and examined the cause of the tragedy through Hamartia. As a result, the unusual formal aesthetic of <Dogville>, which is as if the theater stage has been moved as it is, is pursued as follows. It was to allow the audience to directly reflect on ethical issues related to people and communities by focusing on characters and events from an omniscient position. And by looking closely at the character of Grace through Hamartia, we looked into the true nature of the tragedy that comes from a reality that goes against her ideals.

A New Paradigm of Home-Mapping for Literary Cartography

A New Paradigm of Home-Mapping for Literary Cartography

The Politics of Nordsploitation: History, Industry, Audiences

The Politics of Nordsploitation: History, Industry, Audiences

Don’t Look Askance

The paper is a discussion of film expressions of environmental emotions, in particular of eco-anger. It discusses several distinctions within the notion of anger (in particular that of honour-related vs. justice-related anger) and argues that eco-anger can take accordingly varied forms. As an expression of honour-related eco-anger, the film Don’t Look Up and its cinematic tools are analysed. This film is contrasted with justice-related forms of eco-anger (as embodied in the movement of Fridays for Future), and, further, with Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. While Melancholia has (probably) no authorial environmentalist intention, its plot (strongly reminiscent of that of Don’t Look Up) invites environmentalist readings: as a lucidly pessimist film, fully free of any condescension or a tendency to take artistic vengeance on the deniers of the upcoming catastrophe.

SINTAGMATSKA I PARADIGMATSKA OSA DANTEOVOG „PAKLA“ I FILMA „KUĆA KOJU JE DžEK SAGRADIO“

Due to the parallel analysis of Dante’s Inferno and the film The House That Jack Built, and therefore of poetry and film, it was necessary to include a methodological approach that would allow interpretation in both linguistic and visual plan in this paper. Therefore, the relationship of linguistic and visual units of varying scope was analyzed using the syntagmatic and para- digmatic axis. The specificity of the analysis comes from the fact that this Dante’s epic poem is a combination of metonymy and metaphor (but also allegory), that is, they represent poetic excerpts of combination and selection. In the analysis, we start from the points of view of De Saussure (“horizontal”, syntagmatic axis and sequences), Jakobson (selection of units and their combinations), Lotman (series of shots that alternate with each other), Mitry and Hutch- eon (adaptation of a literary work). Then we will interpret Dante’s Inferno and Von Trier’s film in parallel, starting with Frisardi and Keen (Divine Comedy, narrative), Mez (alternating editing, images from the “A” and “B” series), Camilletti (linguistic and narrative structures), Hui (meaning of ombre [shadow] in Dante), etc. The aim of this paper is to use the mentioned methods to investigate the intertextual connections between Dante’s work and Lars von Trier’s film, through parallel interpretation and direct connection of the verses and dialogues from Hell (through them and descriptions of places and events) with the film frames and scenes. Several works have been published so far about the film The House That Jack Built, but only one partially deals with the relationship between Dante’s Hell and this Von Trier’s film. How- ever, even in this work, entitled The play of iconicity in Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built, Danish author Bodil Thomsen does not make intertextual connections through concrete verses and dialogues from Hell, and film frames and scenes.

The tragedy of otherness. Reflection on Lars von Trier’s film "Nymphomaniac"

The authors of the article, using a transdisciplinary method of research from the standpoint of cultural studies, art history, philology, philosophy, religious studies, psychology and social philosophy, try to comprehend and identify the main meanings and symbols of Lars von Trier's film "Nymphomaniac", to find the main purpose of this film. At the same time, M. Epstein draws attention, first of all, to the aspect of the pathological sensuality of the main character - Joe, her nymphomania and, appealing to a woman and a man before the fall in the Bible, whom God blessed to be fruitful and multiply, shows an unusual angle of sexual relations, gradually reveals stepping the way to love and holiness through debauchery and makes a shocking conclusion, which at the same time has the right to exist, about the purifying role of hellish debauchery for gaining holiness. N. Shelkovaya pays more attention to the disclosure of symbols in the film: trees, dry leaves, a mountain, Joe's climb up the mountain in search of his soul tree, the number 8, Seligman's yard as a crypt, Joe's son's exit to the balcony, somatic self-knowledge. As a result the authors come to the general conclusion that the film by Lars von Trier "Nymphomaniac" is not a pornographic, but a deeply philosophical and psychological film, showing a distorted path to love, God, Heaven, True Love in a distorted insensitive society, which only irrational love can save from destruction.

Sisyphean Unproductivity in Narrative Film

This article examines the relationship between labour, productivity and film. The purpose of this intervention is to suggest that narrative film can show us the unproductive tendencies that humans carry within them but that cannot always make themselves known. These leisurely desires erupt as musicality, ecstasy, and the undoing of the self when we carry out the repetitive gestures of work. This article compares Camus's freedom and Georges Bataille's sovereignty as they share an interest in anti-futurity and anti-productivity and it uses these concepts to propose worker's ecstatic escapes from labour as Sisyphean unproductivity. Using this theoretical framework, I carry out a comparative and formal analysis of Sisyphus (Marcell Jankovics, 1974), Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, 1936), The Apartment (Billy Wilder,1960) , Saut ma ville (Chantal Akerman, 1971) and Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier, 2000). While the field of film studies has highlighted the role of cinema as a tool for propagating ideologies of productivity, the scenes examined suggest that film also has a history of subverting ideologies of productivity through repetitive, Sisyphean unproductivity. By updating the plight of the Greek hero to 20thand 21stcentury capitalism, these directors uncover a fundamental, yet impossible, human desire for non-productive activities This re-centering of the unproductive could be useful in future academic re-categorizations of the working class through its desires to not work, that is, it provides preliminary materials for understanding class identities through their deformation, and not just their formation.