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Lars von Trier Thomas Beltzer, author of Antojitos: Little Cravings (Edwin Mellen Press, 2000), has two short films in production. He currently lives in Fredericksburg, Texas and teaches for San Antonio Community College. You can contact him at thomasbelc@juno.com. |
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| Lars von Trier:
The Little Knight In Tranceformer: A Portrait of Lars von Trier (Stig Björkman, 1997), a hand-held camera, without any preamble, shows us von Trier as he launches the documentary by stating with a malicious grin, “I'll gladly assert that everything said or written about me is a lie.”
Lars Trier (He added 'von' in the tradition of Eric von Stroheim) was born April 30, 1956 in Copenhagen to what Lucia Bozzola describes as “radical, nudist Communist parents.” (2) Speaking of his childhood, von Trier recollects: As a child, von Trier was under the impression that everything was permitted except “feelings, religion and enjoyment”, three things his films would deliver in spades in his later rebellion. At age 11 he began to make short films with his mother's Super 8 camera, and a year later he starred in the Scandinavian television series Clandestine Summer (1968). Left to his own devices, he dropped in and out of school, drank wine and watched movies. By the time he entered Copenhagen's film school in the early '80s he “…knew all the film classics. Knew them by heart,” according to Gislason. Von Trier describes himself as an enfant terrible during this period. Listening to him talk about his films, one senses that in school he developed a lifelong delight in breaking conventions and rules. He made the early films work despite (or because of) opaque story-lines, self-conscious voiceovers, and unusual manipulations of sound and image. Still, in the later films we are startled with drifting, hand-held cameras and improvised dialogue and blocking, not to mention soap-opera histrionics, uncomfortably real sex and art stills inserted into the narrative. His mother's death, which he speaks of with a sense of relief, seems to have been a turning point in his life. Even as he personally embraced the formality of Catholicism, his films went “low church” striving for spontaneity, speed and improvisation in contrast to his obsessively controlled early films. Borrowing “high church” language, he helped create the ironically named Dogme School, the film equivalent of punk rock. In yet another paradox, even as he rejected his parent's communism, he used it, with producer Peter Jensen, as a basis for their own film collective, thus wresting control of film production away from the Danish government. Although his films are a complex dialogic extension of his own paradoxical nature, in general they follow the trajectory of T.S. Eliot, first depicting the wasteland and then transcending it with faith. Von Trier's first three films – all presented in dazzling, baroque virtuosity – are a trilogy about a Europe that has been lulled to sleep in the midst of its own chaos and death. In all three films the hero (or anti-hero) is an idealist who wades confidently into a stinking quagmire, determined to right all wrongs, but, as von Trier points out, “you can be sure that when they've done the right thing, it's gone wrong and they also did it badly.” Von Trier repeatedly discovers that it is impossible to address evil without perpetuating it, a sin he maliciously passes on to the viewer.
His second film Epidemic (1987) is not available in the U.S. and this is a shame because it is a brilliant and beautiful film. Also, it is as clear a statement as we're likely to get of von Trier's philosophy of film and his working methods as he attempts to apply his theories. Von Trier and Niels Voersel (co-writer on Element, Zentropa & Kingdom I & II), playing themselves, write a screenplay about a character called Dr. Mesmer, who seeks to cure an epidemic, unaware that it is he who is spreading it. This is rendered beautifully in the film within the film. This continues until, via a hypnotized girl, it is spread to the writers themselves (fiction coming alive and entering reality) and the producer to whom they are pitching their screenplay to. In Epidemic we see the director's two distinct styles; on the one hand there are the breathtakingly composed shots for the film within the film, yet also present are the hand-held cameras, natural light and a five-day improvised script for the story about the writers. We learn about von Trier's phobias (underground structures, flying, illness, hospitals), his ideological obsessions (idealism, truth, individualism), his writing methods (outlining on walls, ironic referencing, utilising his own pain and that of others) and his aesthetics. He consciously stacks elements in his films against one another - stirring Wagner music to accompany the spread of the plague, sincerity cut with cynicism and vice versa. We learn that he is never literal, always metaphorical, and though always sincere, he is also always kidding, a vulnerable, self-protecting stance common among this generation of filmmakers (i.e. Jarmusch, Linklater, Tykwer, Aronofsky). In a sense, Epidemic is a documentary about himself. Made for Danish Television, Medea (1988) creates a similar atmosphere of brooding malaise through its visualization of the dark heart of the witch, Medea. In it, von Trier improves on the Euripides play (presumably with Carl Dreyer's posthumous help) by avoiding the deus ex machina and by telling the story (in a style more visual than narrative) of the witch who murders her own children. Jason's nubile new bride Glauce, given a name and a voice, becomes a central (and frequently naked) character, though she is barely present in the original play. When one of Medea's children assists in his own brutal hanging, a key autobiographical theme is highlighted, namely that children are being sacrificed for the selfish desires of adults. Many of Element's images (blowing sheets, dead horses, deathly water) are reprised in Medea. Perhaps his most beautiful and elegant film, it is currently a lost treasure, largely unavailable in the U.S. except for occasional runs on cable.
The Kingdom (1994), a tour-de-farce television mini-series about a hunted hospital, effected the translation of von Trier from one film persona to another. It is an extended satirical critique of the hubris of reason and the denial of the spiritual. Although I am skipping over it lightly here, I recommend it as a good starting place for appreciating the von Trier oeuvre because the story is fairly straightforward (though not conventional) and the shocks are minor (excluding the eye-wrenching shocks at the ends of both parts I and II). The Vonnegut-like black humor is also very effective and funny, especially in the second season which is currently unavailable. In The Kingdom we see von Trier moving from formalism to a kind of dogmatic informalism. Breaking the Waves (1996) begins his trilogy about holy fools, women who sacrifice everything and achieve sainthood. Jan, a foreigner to the strict Scottish community and paralysed by an accident, asks his simple-minded and pious wife, Bess, to sleep with other men and tell him about it, an activity which results in her brutal death. Von Trier's newfound religious emphasis, however, did not make his vision any more positive. With reference to The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Anderson, von Trier remarked:
This theme and this irony are disturbingly present in The Idiots (1998) in which the lead spazz, Stoffer, 'directs' a group of peers pretending to be retarded in public (surely a satirical conceit of movie-making?) which eventually leads to a (now notorious) orgy and Stoffer's challenge to his 'idiots' to take their spazzing home to their real lives. At this last request, all of them balk except for Karen, the 'golden heart' of this film, who spazzes in the presence of grieving family members. The orgy scene is mostly silly and strikes me as von Trier poking fun at communes (remember, he was raised in one and currently works closely with another) (3). Karen's spazz at home is, on the other hand, profoundly disturbing, essentially making the same point as the climax of Epidemic. In it we learn that she has already broken a basic societal norm by running away at the death of her child; then we watch her drool and spazz in front of her grief-stricken family, continuing the silly game (which for her has become real) in the worst possible circumstance. Anyone who accuses von Trier of making fun of retarded people, in my opinion, doesn't really see the point of the film. He is making fun of himself and yearning for an escape from reason, just like every romantic since William Blake. Of the three 'saints' Karen is by far the most troubled as she seems to have no ideals or pure motives that explain her incredibly hurtful, symbolic self-immolation.
At one point in Björkman's Tranceformer, von Trier, shaking his firsts in trembling frustration, says that the worst betrayal of all is the betrayal of one's ideals, and it is clear that he has personally experienced this betrayal. He demonstrates, from Element to Dancer, that being an idealist does not mean imparting a rosy, unrealistic view of things. In Element, Epidemic, Zentropa, Medea and The Kingdom, the protagonists are idealists who are so helpless in living out their ideals that they actually end up being a catalyst for evil rather than an ameliorative factor. In Breaking, Idiots and Dancer, the female saints may 'deny themselves' as the gospel tells us to, but all do so in a decidedly un-Christian way - the saint as adulterer, anarchist and murderer. Like all great artists, von Trier practices an aesthetic that transcends categories so his work cannot be reduced to anyone's message, not even his own. Like a knight of old, his causes may grow cloudy and his wounds may be sometimes self-inflicted, but he will fight on anyway, until the last dragon is slain, even the dragon within. Dogville: an addendum Allegory is back. Reportage from Cannes this year paired George Lucas' political allegory (Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith) with von Trier's (Mandalay). This parallel presentation of art and entertainment is something of a culmination of the past 20 years. In cinema, the last great period of realism of character, setting, and story occurred in the late 1970s, and since the early '80s, film culture has been creeping back into the medieval realm of broad characters who serve to illustrate ideas, values and types. Hollywood first sounded the new note with Star Wars, and now it seems that nearly everybody, even those not working within the Hollywood system, is playing in the same style. Much of this work is guilty of what allegory has always been accused of – simplistic obviousness, lack of subtlety, pedantry, irrelevant fantasy and absolutism, just to name a few of allegory's traditional sins. Some of the more famous allegories (Pilgrim's Progress, Everyman, Aesop's fables) can stand accused, but allegory doesn't have to be simple and obvious as Dante, Chaucer and Blake taught us long ago. In Dogville (2003), Lars von Trier took cinematic allegory to its logical conclusion and reminded us that it can be (and should be) complex, subtle, dialectical, real and open to multiple readings. Dogville has been frequently compared to Thornton Wilder's Our Town, but it reminds me more of the brilliantly complex allegories of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. In many of their tales, it is obvious that the characters represent specific ideas, but when we begin to read the tales on an ideological level, their meaning cannot be determined with any certainty. This may be bad religion and bad politics, but it is great art. For example, we know that in Hawthorne's “Young Goodman Brown”, the titular character represents innocence and that his wife, Faith, represents, well, his faith, but what happens in the woods with the devil is inconclusive, as is the final denouement. In Melville's Moby Dick, the white whale is God, and Ahab pursues him to his own death but what does that mean? Von Trier is also working in the realm of complex religious allegory. Tom Edison (Paul Bettany) is Tom Sawyer (note the novel prominently displayed in Edison Senior's [Philip Baker Hall] hands) and the American inventor. Grace (Nicole Kidman) is God's sacramental grace come to Dogville. She becomes “eyes for McCay, a mother for Ben, a friend for Vera, brains for Bill” and reacts to the abuses of the town as only a saint could. However, when we try to interpret Dogville, we find ourselves in the realm of undecidability. This is a good thing. In his afterwards to The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco tells us:
I think that Dogville certainly has this “poetic effect”. Von Trier went out of his way to ask for a non-literal reading of his film, with its artificial set, British-style narration and ritualistically formal acting and dialogue. Nevertheless, many American reviewers reacted with literal-minded fundamentalism (much like the Islamic fundamentalists reacted to Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses). Roger Ebert is a telling example of America's post-Trade Centre attack jingoism. In his review of Dogville, he claims that von Trier “approaches the ideological subtlety of a raving prophet on a street corner.” Ebert goes on to reveal his own inability to perceive subtlety when he writes “I doubt that we [Americans] have any villages where the helpless visitor would eventually be chained to a bed and raped by every man in town.” In my view this is an impossibly literal reading of the film and an assumption that the presentation of the town Dogville is an attempt to realistically portray America. Also, many reviewers seem to be caught up in the fact that Von Trier has never been to America, so “how dare he say anything about us!” In an interview at Cannes Film Festival 2005, the filmmaker articulated his defense and how he and many others in the rest of the world feel:
A quick scan of reviews reveals just how complex and subtle Dogville actually is. James Berardinelli, on his website Reelviews, muses, “What does it all mean? The film is cleverly developed so that there are at least two apparent interpretations” and goes on to suggest that Grace could either represent the oppressed masses or North America, as in the formerly exploited and now oppressing North America. Stephen Holden of The New York Times reads it as “depicting as a lie the ideal of embracing human community (and especially the cozy, cookie-baking dream of small-town America)” and that its message is “that good people are resented for their virtue.” Elbert Ventura of Allmovie.com, says that it “comments on the essential hypocrisy and meanness of America” but that the end-credit photo montage presented to the tune of David Bowie's “Young Americans” asks for “a more limited reading.” If I may join in the fun, I'd like to offer two more “readings” that by no mean cancel out the above interpretations. That is the pleasure of art. Firstly, I think the film is meant to illustrate an aphorism of Saint Isaac the Syrian (whether or not von Trier has read Saint Isaac). In Homily 51, Saint Isaac says, “As grass and fire cannot coexist in one place, justice and mercy cannot abide in one soul.” Saint Isaac refers to the human soul, of course, because within the Christian tradition God is always both a God of justice and a God of mercy. It seems to me that von Trier, as a Roman Catholic, is meditating on the face of justice presented in the Old Testament and the face of mercy presented in the New Testament. Along with this biblical theme, the film continues his obsession with persecuted women. Frequently accused of misogyny in his films, he explains to Newsweek that this is not the case. His heroines, he says, are infused with his own experiences. “Those characters are not women, not female at all,” he says. “They are self-portraits.” Why does von Trier use women as his stand-ins, the literal-minded may ask? Vibeke Windelov, his producer explains:
Layering this factor into his meditation, the end of Dogville could be interpreted as von Trier (with Grace as his avatar) struggling to acquire the virtue of mercy while trying to understand how mercy relates to justice. Finally, perhaps, he mistakes the passion of vengeance for the virtue of justice. Secondly, perhaps Dogville represents Denmark, Scandinavia, Europe and the rest of the world. After all, a British-style narrator presents us with a town (he refers to it constantly as a township; I've never heard an American say that) that has socialist, secular services of moral rearmament, a town whose people discuss stoicism, give their children names out of Homer, engage in fertility rites, and write Latin graffiti on the mine entrance. None of this seems at all characteristic of Americans. Further, they are relatively poor, compared to the gangsters, I mean. What if Grace and her gangster family are the Americans? What if the people of Dogville are only the “young Americans”? After all, the people of the world are all becoming young Americans now in the face of an ever-expanding American Empire. How does that scan? Americans send some of our people overseas to “help” and we are used and abused in return. But watch out, von Trier warns, America will show up and destroy you all someday. Like Randy Newman sang with great cynicism many years ago:
Have we all become so “Sithian” in our absolutes that we are now incapable of understanding the figurative? Incapable of considering multiple points of view? Have the fundamentalist terrorists reduced us to a jingoistic tribalism of our own? I see Lars von Trier as a modern-day Dostoevsky. Like the Russian novelist, he may be reactionary, neurotic and anti-modern, but he presents us with an artistic canvas of dialectic complexity capable of resonating in interesting ways with mature and educated minds.
© Thomas Beltzer, August 2002 Addendum © 2005 Thomas Beltzer Endnotes:
Filmography Films directed by von Trier: Befrielsesbilleder
(1983) (Documentary) The Kingdom (Riget) (1994) (Made for television)
Breaking
the Waves (1996) The Kingdom
II (Riget II) (1997) Film about von Trier: Tranceformer - A Portrait of Lars von Trier (1997) Directed by Stig Björkman. Available on The Element of Crime DVD 
Select Bibliography Books:
Articles in Senses of Cinema Dancer
in the Dark by
Rhys Graham
Web Resources Compiled by the author and Albert Fung Tranceformer:
A Portrait of Lars von Trier. Lars
von Trier Web Space Artistic
and Intellectual Confusion in Lars von Trier's The Idiots
Dancer
in the Dark LarsVonTrier.net We
are all sinners Zentropa
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