Von Trier Research Articles

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.

Musical marionettes: sound and music in Lars von Trier’s Europe trilogy

ABSTRACT Several contemporary film directors have created distinct auteur-signatures through their approach to music. The article analyzes how Lars von Trier has used music and sound to enhance his idiosyncratic visions from early on in his dystopian Europe-trilogy comprising The Element of Crime (1984), Epidemic (1987), and Europa (1991). These films playfully invoke film and film music stereotypes and references as part of their apocalyptic visions. They do so, however, in very different ways: The generic music mood-approach in The Element of Crime; the claim on big emotions through the use of Wagner’s overture to Tannhäuser in Epidemic; and an emphasis on stylistic elements rather than on character action in combination with musical salutations to film history in Europa. These various forms of music seldom provide access to characters’ psychology or invite emotional engagement in them. Rather, the music enhances stylistic patterns, which adds a dissonant beauty to the brutal sceneries and disconnect the male protagonists from a classical goal oriented series of actions. Trier thereby ambiguously situates his characters in a narrative of which they – despite their best intention – have no control. Instead, the protagonists finally surrender to their fate as marionettes in a musically orchestrated narrative.

The melancholy condition of realism

Drawing on the work of Sigmund Freud (1891, 1917) and Carl Schmitt (1956), I show how twentieth‐century accounts of melancholia, in psychoanalysis and in political theory, entail a presentation of the world that dovetails with nineteenth‐century realism. This suggests that realism is fundamentally a response to the melancholy condition that underlies modernity, and could be analyzed as such; it also suggests that realism persists in the twentieth century as a peculiar configuration of melancholia. Erwin Panofsky’s film theory (1936) exemplifies this position. Based staunchly in realism, Panofsky’s film theory is consistent with his comprehensive early exploration of melancholia (1923); no less than the rationale of cinema is thus shown to be moored in the melancholy condition of realism. It is a juncture explored by Lars von Trier in Melancholia (2011): while studiously arranging his cinematic study of melancholia around realism, Trier implies that film’s likely neglect of realism in the twenty‐first century amounts to cinematic suicide and, consequently, to the end of the modern world.

Reflections on Borders and their Crossing in Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003)

Reflections on Borders and their Crossing in Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003)

Датские эксперименты Томаса Винтерберга

The article is devoted to the work of the Danish film director T. Winterberg. The aim of the article is to study the plot originality of the stories told by T. Winterberg by methods of cinema, to understand the genre specificity of his films, highlighting the experiment as the most significant component of their artistic and mental originality. Descriptive, hermeneutic, diachronic, historical-genetic, comparative, analytical and biographical methods, used in a complex manner, allow one to come to certain conclusions. These conclusions are that T. Winterberg's cinematography relies on experiment as a way of plotting, which determines the genre character of the director's films. This is confirmed by the luck that accompanied exactly those films of T. Winterberg, which are built on Danish material, and the much less success of films created on plots that are associated with other toposes (Soviet, American, British). T. Winterberg became world famous after the release of the film "Family Celebration", made within the framework of such originally Danish phenomenon as «Dogma-95». Collation of the author's manner of T. Winterberg with the master of Danish (and world) cinema and originator of «Dogma» L. von Trier allows us to compare the ways of organizing the narrative of two famous film directors: if L. von Trier's films are based on provocation, then T. Winterberg – exactly on experiment. Being rooted on national soil, this experiment transcends ethnic narrow-mindedness itself, acquiring a universal, between-national character.

Decoding Tableaux Vivants: the Metareferential Potential of Painterly References in Cinema

Abstract The article focuses on the intermedial relationship between cinema and painting, viewed as a self-referential process, and tries to determine various ways in which this type of signifying process can be used to “encode” various messages (within the work itself), or become an integral part of this (meta)communicative operation. Starting from a broad definition of intermedial references and continuing with a brief recontextualized detour through Gérard Genette’s taxonomy of transtextual instances, the author narrows down a specific technique that exemplifies this type of “codifying” procedure, namely the tableau vivant. In accordance with Werner Wolf’s proposed terminology, he attempts to determine the metareferential potential of this extra-compositional self-referential technique. The case studies focus on films by Peter Greenaway and Lars von Trier.

Melancholy and its sisters: transformations of a concept from Homer to Lars von Trier

ABSTRACT This introduction argues for competing diachronic and synchronic accounts of melancholy in European and American culture. Taking the pioneering and yet belated work Saturn and Melancholy (1964) of Erwin Panofsky, Fritz Saxl, and Raymond Klibansky as its starting point, this article situates melancholy as at once its own, often local and non-specialist discourse as well as a conceptual web binding together medical, artistic, and social innovations, competitions, and turmoil. As a subject, melancholy demands interdisciplinary study, as Dürer’s print Melencolia I continues to prove. As a locus of methodological innovation, melancholy in the wake of Panofsky, Saxl, and Klibansky continues to yield the alternative genealogies, conceptual histories, and formal artistic vocabularies of this volume’s contributions whether moving backwards from Dürer to Homer or forward to the present day with Lars von Trier and major European novelists.

The Violence of the Frame: Image, Animal, Interval in Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac

The Violence of the Frame:Image, Animal, Interval in Lars Von Trier's Nymphomaniac Steven Swarbrick (bio) All authentic reading is in its own way violent, or it is nothing but the complaisance of a paraphrase. — Pierre Macherey (113) Imago, n. 1. a. Entomology. The final or adult stage in the development of an insect, during which it is sexually mature. 2. Psychoanalysis. A subjective image of someone (esp. a parent) which a person has subconsciously formed and which continues to influence his or her attitudes and behavior. —Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. What is a nymph, and how do we recognize her/its appearance in Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac (2013)?1 The film's title—spelled Nymph()maniac—points to a difference without recognition. I am referring to the parenthetical lips that hollow out the film's center. Those lips, when read through a Foucauldian lens of power-knowledge-pleasure, are certainly not the same lips that, in saying yes to sex, believe they are saying no to power. The lips of von Trier's title do not speak the truth of one's sexual identity, much less the protagonist Joe's (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Instead, suspicious of the repressive hypothesis and its attendant sex-positive formulations, the lips of Nymphomaniac are more akin to the lips theorized in Luce Irigaray's essay "When Our Lips Speak Together," which posits a sexual ethics based on difference and self-fracture rather than a unified politics of the One. At the center of my question, then, there is a (w)hole fractured by two parentheticals. And yet the interval that interrupts my question is the same interval that arouses so much speculation about [End Page 131] the future of the image, as theorized by Jacques Rancière, and the image of life at the heart of biopolitics. Rancière frames the question of the image and its future in terms of the "interstice" and its distribution. Following Gilles Deleuze, Rancière states, "Thenceforward, what creates the link is the absence of the link: the interstice between images commands a re-arrangement from the void and not a sensory-motor arrangement" (Film Fables 108). Rancière continues his post-Deleuzian investigation into "the interstice between images" in The Future of the Image, where he is primarily concerned with the category of the new, that is, with what the image can be after the breakdown of the sensory-motor link between images. Notably, this absence of the link is also what governs the image of life within biopolitics, as "life itself" tends more and more toward molecularization and the recombination of elements (Myers 2015).2 Rancière highlights the connection between "life itself" and the image-link problematic in his essay on Deleuze, in which he calls Deleuze's cinema books works of "natural history." My goal—somewhat at odds with Rancière's—is to embrace Deleuze's notion of the image-link problematic by tracing the propulsive force of nature's queer negativity, the interval or gap between images, in von Trier's cinema. What creates the link in Nymphomaniac is the absence of the link—nature's hollow center. Among the first to read nature's absent center was Spinoza. According to Warren Montag, Spinoza reads nature in the same way he reads Scripture, by paying painstaking attention to the materiality of the letter, its gaps and contradictions—in a word, its form. Spinoza shows that there is not a coherent, undivided meaning beyond or behind the letter of the text, but a swarming assemblage of material bodies whose swarming encircles a void—text without substance. Montag relates Spinoza's reading practice to a series of natural disasters: Spinoza's method has been compared to an archaeology but, if anything, it resembles the activity of modern paleontology which in place of the gradual, uniform and continuous evolution imagined by Darwin … has restored to the fossil record its gaps and discontinuities, and in the process demonstrated the existence of a natural history replete with catastrophes and reversals. (11) This chain of catastrophes tells us how Spinoza's philosophy of reading connects to his metaphysics: nature is not a self-present totality...

Justice, Revenge, and Unexpected Theodicy in Lars Von Trier's Dogville and Euripides' Medea

Lars von Trier's 2003 film Dogville shares extensive plot parallels with Euripides' Medea. Through elements such as classical and Biblical names (Jason, Achilles, Grace) and Greek words scrawled on a chalkboard, von Trier invites his viewer to read the film against its classical intertexts. Most prominent is the film's Medea-like plot, in which a female protagonist seeks refuge within a strange community, gradually comes to be abused by this same community, is confronted with patently fantastical and sophistic attempts to rationalize this abuse, and, in a significant departure from the audience's understanding of the rules governing the dramatic universe at the outset, is revealed to possess unimaginable power to judge and punish those who have wronged her. In a final scene resembling a Greek divine epiphany, this female protagonist appears: in Medea's case, as a deus ex machina, and in Grace's, as a female reimagining of Christ in Judgment, capable of wreaking horrific vengeance on a group of complicit abusers who believed their power to be unquestioned and unassailable. Through these extended parallels with Euripides' play of 431 B.C.E., von Trier explores the nature of Hannah Arendt's famous paradox of the banality of evil: how do seemingly open, well-intentioned, and democratic communities commit and conceal from themselves the most evil crimes against humanity?

The wings of melancholy, or: a life on the border: on the relevance of melancholy and apocalypse in art and contemporary society

ABSTRACT This paper argues for the contemporary relevance of melancholy as something different than depression or a state of mental illness. Instead, through examples of a literary, philosophical, and artistic nature, it is shown that melancholy functions as a force-field – a topos where the finite and the infinite, the earthly and the heavenly, the physical and the spiritual come together and meet in huge tension. By means of an exploration of the historical notion of melancholy and a revisit of Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514), coupled to a much more recent example, Lars von Trier’s film melancholia (DK/SE/FR/DE 2011), this paper shows how the melancholic motif continues to play an essential role in our contemporary society. The melancholic is described as a person who lives a life on the border: who intuits the point where two worlds meet and who longs for a revelation of the beyond – an apocalypse (literally: ‘an uncovering’). It is this longing – a nostalgia for being – that increasingly pervades our contemporary world, a world that represses the heterogeneous through numerous social and political conditions. The study of melancholy here undertaken therefore provides a valuable contribution to the understanding of melancholy in our (post-) modern time.

The House that Lars Built. The Architecture of Transgression

This article discusses the motif of the “architecture of transgression”, which is present most implicitly, in Lars von Trier’s The House that Jack Built. The analysis concerns both the construction of cinematic narrative itself and the subtle allusions, inserted in the script, to two architectural metaphors: the Nietzschean (and Jungian) labyrinth and the Heideggerian die Hütte. Von Trier’s film may be read as an oeuvre immersed in literary tradition—from Dante’s Divine Comedy to the modern Bildungsroman—as well as inspired by modern philosophy, particularly George Bataille’s philosophy of transgression, (as expound in his Erotism and his short 1929 essay on Architecture).

Björk on the Gallows: Performance, Persona, and Authenticity in Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark

In Dancer in the Dark (2000), Icelandic popstar Björk portrays the main character of Selma. Lars von Trier, the director, described his film as an exercise in emotionally manipulating the audience. Drawing on Philip Auslander’s concept of the “musical persona,” this study argues that the decision to cast a popstar, in combination with the structure of the film, serves von Trier’s purpose of intensifying the film’s manipulative potential, by evoking an impression of shocking realism or authenticity. This study furthermore places the presentation of the filmic character in conversation with Björk’s popstar status, critical reception of the film, as well as reception of her performance within it. Extending Auslander’s concept of persona through a transmedial approach provides new perspectives on Björk’s performance, Dancer’s polarized reception, and analytical models for performers’ public reception.

Immanent Frames: Postsecular Cinema between Malick and von Trier

This is a book review of John Caruana and Mark Cauchi, eds., Immanent Frames: Postsecular Cinema between Malick and von Trier.

Doubled visions: reflexivity, intermediality and co-creation in Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso and von Trier’s and Leth’s The Five Obstructions

ABSTRACT Henri-George Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso (1956) and Lars von Trier’s and Jørgen Leth’s The Five Obstructions (2003) are celebrated experimental documentaries on the creative process in the visual arts and cinema made (or co-made) by renowned narrative film auteurs. Ludic exercises in on-and off-screen cinematic co-creation, together they foreground creativity and its constraints; artistic style and authorship; and filmmaking as simultaneously a means of personal expression and a collaborative enterprise. The main concerns of this article, both films are also marked by an overlapping self-reflexivity, intermediality, and formal hybridity, rooted in their innovative incorporation –or nesting– of pre-existing and in-progress art works (films, paintings, drawings). Focused on multiple forms of reflexivity and a distinctly process-based incorporation of works-within-the-work, juxtaposition of the films sheds new light on these dynamics generally, as well as on the styles and careers of Clouzot and Picasso, Leth and von Trier.

Visual hybridizations in two audiovisual productions

This paper aims to analyze and discuss two films that present hybrid aesthetics: Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003) and Welchman´s and Kobiela´s Loving Vincent ( 2017). Dogville evokes the theatre language in its construction and develops an intertextual relationship by using Brecht’s epic theatre, while Loving Vincent is a tribute film to Vincent van Gogh, essentially intertextual because it is based on letters that van Gogh once wrote, as well as his own works of art. The theoretical frame of reference on the processes of dialogism, polyphony, hybridization, intermediality and intertextuality is provided by Araujo, Bazin, Bakhtin, Brecht, Kristeva, Metz, Muller, Nagib e Rajewski.

The Eroticism of Landscape in Contemporary Contemplative Cinema

ABSTRACT This article questions how contemplative contemporary cinema “sexualize” the landscapes. Through the filmography of four directors, Abbas Kiarostami, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Lars von Trier and Bruno Dumont, the relationships between nature and human body are highlighted. Furthermore, based on the “eroticism” notion developed by Georges Bataille, our study tries to emphasize how these relationships turn out to be synonymous with bliss but at the same time with terror.

„The bloodiest flower”. Myth of Medea According to Pier Paolo Pasolini

The article discusses Pier Paolo Pasolini’s reinterpretation of the myth of Medea in his 1969 fi lm by placing it in a range of artistic contexts, primarily painting. It fi rst recounts the history of mythological sorceress from ancient Kolchida, known from Greek myths and Eurypides’s play. A number of artistic works dedicated to Medea are referred to, including Seneca’s tragedy, Lars von Trier’s movie, Christa Wolf’s novel, Victor Mottez’s and Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s paintings. The methodological framework is based on the work of critics such as Alicja Helman, Kinga Anna Gajda, Piotr Kletowski and Janusz Kossak.

The Moving Image and the Time of Prophecy: Trauma and Precognition in L. Von Trier’s Melancholia (2011) and D. Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016)

The Moving Image and the Time of Prophecy: Trauma and Precognition in L. Von Trier’s Melancholia (2011) and D. Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016)

Framing Lars von Trier’s Medea

AbstractLars von Trier’s Medea renders on the silver screen Carl Th. Dreyer’s unrealized script from Euripides’ play. Von Trier considers Dreyer one of his greatest cinematic influences and fashions his film as a ‘personal interpretation and homage to the master’. Two prominent narrative features of Dreyer’s cinematic oeuvre are a cause/effect logic and parallelism, which create formally rigid and closed worlds governed by an abstract, impersonal order. Von Trier applies these features especially to the frame of Medea in order to enhance the theodicy of Euripides’ tragedy and Dreyer’s adaptation of it. He also plays games of cinematic reflexivity in conscious or unconscious competition with Dreyer. Finally, his directorial virtuosity manifests itself most spectacularly in the editing of the film’s frame, which arranges the segments of the prologue and the epilogue so as to engage reception as a temporal activity rooted in the past, undertaken in the present, and directed to the future.