Programme Notes: Lars von Trier

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CineMasters: Lars von Trier

“Let only God judge my alchemic attempts at creating life on celluloid. One thing is certain. Life outside the cinema can never be equalled, for it is his creation and therefore divine.”

The above excerpt is the concluding line of Lars von Trier’s artist statement for Europa (1991), the third instalment of his Europe Trilogy, encompassing also 1984’s The Element of Crime and 1987’s Epidemic. It seems a fitting encapsulation of the work of the Danish director, too. His life on celluloid, however, is far from heavenly and rarely a merciful one, prone to unsettling explorations of existentialism, abuse, religion, grief and depression.

For a director interested in the most forlorn of human experiences, postwar Europe proved a fruitful creative launching pad. With the first thematic trilogy of his career, von Trier toyed with style and form to root dystopia in the unprocessable truths of reality, opening a Pandora's Box of sorrow and pain that would guide much of his later work. This exercise in historical rereading, paired with the director’s fresh-out-of-film-school desire to emulate the work of his greatest influences, culminated in what is perhaps his most stylised work to date, the bewitching, Hichcockian Europa, a twisty psychological drama trailing an American of German descent who returns to his homeland post World War II.

If von Trier’s first trilogy relied on hyper stylisation to descend the viewer into the depths of hellish Europe with sepia and monochrome hues, actors interacting with projected images, and disorienting camera movements, the director’s next step proved an almost 180-degree turn. In 1995, von Trier partnered with friend and fellow Danish director Thomas Vinterberg to launch Dogma 95, a cinematic movement based on a manifesto mimicking François Truffaut’s 1954 Cahiers du cinéma article Une certaine tendance du cinema, which would go on to launch the French New Wave. The manifesto outlined a “Vow of Chastity,” which worked as a parameter of certification.

Von Trier’s first post-Dogma 95 film, 1996’s Breaking the Waves, would not earn the movement’s seal of approval, but it is as informed—or perhaps even more so—than his only official Dogma 95 offering, 1998’s The Idiots. It tells the tale of Bess (Emily Watson), a childlike woman living in an ultra-catholic community in the Scotland islands who falls in love and marries an oil rig worker, Jan (Stellan Skarsgård). Introduced by her husband to the wonders of a healthy sexual life and deeply enamoured, Bess suffers greatly whenever Jan sails offshore. Her ardent prayers for her husband’s company are one day answered in a vile von Trier twist.

Bess is the first protagonist in von Trier’s second thematic triad, the “Golden Hearts” trilogy, inspired by a children’s book about a young girl who, despite being tortured and battered, remains grateful to life’s pitiful clemencies. She is joined by Karen (Bodil Jørgensen), the impressionable woman who jets off with a group of anarchist misfits who devote their time to behaving as intellectually disabled adults in The Idiots and Björk’s infamous Selma in 2000’s musical Dancer in the Dark, the heartbreaking tale of a Czech immigrant with a degenerative eye condition who moves to the United States in search of the American dream but is instead swallowed by literal and metaphorical darkness. The “Golden Hearts” trilogy saw von Trier steer away from his mostly male protagonists and into a pattern that would follow the rest of his work: a prominent, tortured female lead. Both Watson and Björk received great accolades for their work with the director, the former Oscar-nominated for her work in Breaking the Waves, while the latter won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival for Dancer in the Dark, the film also earning that year’s coveted Palme d’Or.

The Dane found his next plagued woman in Nicole Kidman’s Grace, the anxious runaway who mysteriously arrives at the titular town of Dogville. If the “Golden Hearts” trilogy allowed von Trier to test and push the Dogma 95 ideals, then Dogville saw the filmmaker adapt and bend his learnings to radically defy the possibilities of cinematic storytelling. Set on a soundstage where locations are marked only by chalk lines and lighting, von Trier’s 2003 drama uncomfortably confronts what happens when one chooses to close their eyes to what sits glaringly in front of them. Somberly narrated by John Hurt and featuring a starry ensemble cast, Dogville was meant to be the first in von Trier’s “USA — Land of Opportunities” trilogy. While the director managed to realise a Kidman-less sequel in 2005’s Manderlay, shot in the same style and with Grace played by Bryce Dallas Howard, the third instalment, Washington, is yet to see the light of day.

For a filmmaker fascinated by evoking a documentary style in his fiction films, it took von Trier quite a long time to try his hand at a proper doc. In 2003, just two years before the official dissolution of Dogma 95, the director challenged his idol and fellow Dane Jørgen Leth to recreate The Perfect Human— Leth’s 1968 cult short film and one of von Trier’s personal favourites—five times, all under a series of mischievous constraints. The result is a cleverly woven and surprisingly moving ode to admiration turned adoration and a rare look inside von Trier’s non-diegetic creative process.

The playfulness of The Five Obstructions and work environment comedy The Boss of It All (2006) gave way to the aptly titled “Depression” trilogy. The three instalments of “Depression” star Charlotte Gainsbourg and focus on three different woes of the human experience: Antichrist (2009) is a violent, ruthless dissection of grief as told through a couple who just lost their small son; Melancholia is a deep dive into the thralls of depression as Justine’s (Kirsten Dunst) post-nuptial catatonia brings in the apocalypse; and Nymphomaniac Pts. I and II grapples with guilt through compulsive sexuality as self-declared nymphomaniac Joe (played by Stacy Martin and Gainsbourg) recounts her sordid life to deceivingly kindhearted Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård).

Many are the common thesis in von Trier’s sprawling filmography—the sacrificial death of children, a heightened focus on actors, explicit sexuality and violence, self-referential nods to his very public controversies and feuds and daring prods at not only the existence of a merciful God but the entire ecosystem that revolves around adoration, penitence and obedience. Still, while many might jump at the chance to neatly pigeonhole the work of the Danish enfant terrible, the director’s decades-long career is perhaps the furthest from homogeneity any modern arthouse director has ever ventured, and lucky are those of you about to embark on this twisted but infinitely rewarding ride.

Rafa Sales Ross

Film journalist

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