Director in the Dark: A Lars von Trier Essay

[DrewG]

I wrote this recently and since it's pretty long and I put a lot of time into it I figured I'd give it a post. It basically deals with the personality of von Trier and his upbringing and the reflection it has on his filmmaking methods and the "Goldenheart Trilogy".

---------------------------------------------

Danish director Lars von Trier, though wildly unpredictable in both his personal life and his creative process, can have his entire life defined by the idea of control. As different as each of his films are and as divisive as his methods may be, there is something inside each of them which all began with the feelings, or lack thereof, associated with his unusual upbringing. Born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1956, he was raised by bohemian communist parents who were radical in their political ideology and outlook on parenting. Though an atheist household, his earliest years were defined by no restrictions or boundaries and unfathomable amounts of freedom, which for his developing mind ironically left no room for feelings, religion, or enjoyment. The time he needed guidance the most is when he didn’t have it, growing in isolation. His outlet was cinema after his first Super-8 camera, and all these years later it remains his outlet amidst a dizzying amount of ideas about love, life, sacrifice and innovation in his filmmaking.

Though he debuted in 1984 with the hyper-stylized The Element of Crime, it is imperative to look at one of his more polarizing efforts in 2000’s Dancer in the Dark his 6th feature length film; an incredibly tragic, melodramatic musical that was championed and despised in equal measure. The story focuses on Czechoslovakian Selma (Björk) as an immigrant into America attempting to keep everything in order despite the fact that she is losing her eyesight, and refusing the grim reality of life in America by instead imagining it similar to the world represented in American musicals. She works to save money so that her son does not suffer the same fate but in the midst falls prey to a greedy neighbor and a one sided trial that accuses and convicts her of being a Communist and a murderer, leading to her execution.
Undeniably, in defying the very noticeable characteristics of the American musical (cheery, usually thoughtless affairs that are purely carried by music over plot) von Trier pushed buttons and created a picture that was very much his own, one he could freely manipulate and shape around the style he was currently focused on. This style was the Dogme95 manifesto, a movement crafted by him and his fellow Danish director Thomas Vinterberg, a general dedication to more bare bones, naturalistic filmmaking which included using natural light, handheld cameras, use of non-actors and filming on location without props.

Though Dancer in the Dark is not a completely Dogme95 picture, it has many of the trademarks and the basic look of what the manifesto advises. Apart from the elaborate musical sequences, the film has a rather unfinished documentary feel, in part thanks to the grainy digital camera filming and the movements influence from the French New Wave, Italian Neorealism and the New American Cinema movement of the 1960’s. The conversational scenes are shot through jittery handheld camera, the frame moving about as characters body parts go in and out of the frame. Its shooting and editing styles are defiant of traditional narrative; such as random zooming or using jump cuts not just as markers of time passed but cutting out in the middle of conversation and abruptly placing us in another to disorient us. Because von Trier is consciously working against this tradition of normally shooting dialogue, scenes such as Bill (David Morse) and Selma’s trailer conversations become simple affairs made chaotic, mirroring in their incomplete feel the sinister intentions hidden by Bill to rob Selma to support his overspending wife.

The scene in Dancer in the Dark where Björk, Catherine Deneuve, Peter Stormare, David Morse and Cara Seymour watch Selma’s son receive his new bicycle is an example of von Trier’s methods: in terms of screen time the scene last around 2 minutes but von Trier shot about 20 minutes worth of footage. In this way he creates freedom for himself in the editing room; he can stick to the written script if he likes, but what if something emerges within the extra shooting that he’d like to throw in? Oddly enough the scene also mirrors a kind of new freedom, Selma finally able to treat her son to something, for it is clear she loves him (she does in fact end up dying for him) but she lacks the means to flood him with material possessions to keep him happy, she has to truly be a good parent instead. This hyper extended demand for method acting came to a head on his production for 2003’s Dogville; the incredibly different environment for shooting along with the demanding changes for the characters made the actors go even more into a daze within the never ending task of staying in character. A small box was actually installed on the set that the actors could walk into whenever and confess what was on their mind, be it happiness or stress. These candid conversations later became the documentary Dogville Confessions, a film as much about von Trier always knowing what he desires while on set as it is about the actors and their confessionary cubicle.

While von Trier gives himself this room through his ways of putting together a film he also does it by allowing for improvisation and working around what he has strictly written in the screenplay. Some might argue this method is total anarchy but I would argue that it creates control for a man who once said (remarking on Breaking the Waves) that “every image contains a thought” and that meanings cannot be accidental, that in the perfect moment in the editing room or operating the camera, whatever happens was meant to; “it probably sounds arrogant…but I think that every image and every edit is thought through. There’s no coincidence at all” (Björkman 168). Through his strict passion and faith in this idea, he creates his own warped sense of complete control.

Interestingly, this portion of the films style and feel is remarkably contrasted by the construction of the elaborate song and dance numbers, written, composed and sang by Björk (with von Trier co-writing a select few). The Dogme system is absolutely disregarded in the song sequences such as “Cvalda” or “I’ve Seen It All” where von Trier uses not just stationary cameras that sit patiently static but also cameras rigged to move gracefully, and frequently, using over 100 digital cameras during the scenes in order to catch many angles of the musical numbers involving both Björk and countless extras dancing and singing about. One idea of this was attempting to get it all right in a singular go round, mistakes being part of the spontaneity and the music made authentic and real by being sung completely live, all at once, and not in fragments.

However, his transition into music is unique in that Björk’s character of Selma will hear the machines at her factory whirring, or footsteps of dancers or the sound of a train and this is when the music will start. Even her rhythmic beating of Bill’s head as she murders him leads into “Scatterheart”, a song attempting to make sense of the chaos that has just unfolded. It is an incredibly surreal feel going from the raw, “real world” of Selma’s crumbling life (Washington State, 1964) to the imagined world of song and dance that at times finds a way to clash with reality. An example would be during “In the Musicals” when Selma sings “there’s always someone to catch me, when I fall” as she falls into the hands of police officers, thus signaling the beginning of her end. The musical scenes though more polished than the Dogme scenes of Selma’s real world are still much less visually polished than other musicals being released shortly after Dancer in the Dark (such as Moulin Rouge! in 2001 or Chicago in 2002). In constructing his musical scenes von Trier does not just defy the tradition of Hollywood’s Golden Age musicals but also the oncoming tradition of the new flashy, modern American musicals that were critical and financial successes for their visual and cinematic bombastic flair.

[DrewG]

This method of going from dank life to glorious song is similar to the way Selma, a foreigner, has envisioned America via viewing American musicals featuring Fred Astaire, and the woman forever associated with him, Ginger Rogers. In actuality, von Trier acknowledges the ideal, almost utopian world view presented by these early American musicals when he films his character of Selma at the movies watching these American cinematic icons sing and dance charmingly in The Band Wagon. The connotations for certain viewers will be the mishaps, miscommunications and redemption that always fall upon the two actors in their films together even if they aren’t both in The Band Wagon. We associate Astaire and Rogers with famous films like Top Hat that find a way to work around sexual promiscuity and mistrust with the glory of song and dance and optimistic conclusions. This upbeat, life affirming idea of the American musical in the 1930’s is what presents Selma with the idea that America will be a land of opportunity and promise in 1964. Selma says that “in musicals nothing dreadful ever happens” but our belief in her sincerity of this statement is strained by von Trier’s depiction of Selma’s real and musical mindsets.

The film is able to establish unpredictability by mixing our feelings: one moment we feel misery and the next we have glimmers of hope. Hearing Selma’s friends have gotten money together for a better attorney is exciting news, but even this quickly fades when she instead gives the money to a doctor to perform on her son Gene (Vladica Kostic) so he does not lose his
eyesight as well. So in reality, the only truly “hopeful” scenes in the film are imagined or exaggerated. This is an even more hopeless way of von Trier putting together the story because even the music scenes eventually become smaller in scale and not signals of happiness, freedom or indifference to oncoming loss (Selma in “I’ve Seen It All” when being asked about not being able to see beauty sings “to be honest, I really don’t care”) but rather unrealistic escapes from the terrifying reality of her execution. Songs like “107 Steps” or “The Next to Last Song”, namely the latter, distinctly lack the visual polish or lyrical cheer of earlier numbers.

His total control creates our total horror in the fact that he is the creative mind that decides through his unorthodox modes of production how to switch us between drastically different environments within the same world, the rapid shift from high to low a perplexing experience. This ability to operate between the two styles (gritty realism and high stylization) is evident in the film’s final scene, the aforementioned “The Next To Last Song” where the world of Selma’s imagined musical finally collides with Dogme visual style, thus signifying her total loss of control in faking that all is well despite her loss of sight or oncoming death. Here, she cannot deny the noose fastened around her neck, but sings anyway.

On “The Next to Last Song” the camera circles jaggedly in extreme close up and close up on Selma’s closed eyes and open mouth, singing her last song. There are no dancers or elaborate camera movement and it abruptly ends when her executioners take the floor out from under her, killing her. In a way her death is shot in a “hopeful” fashion because it mirrors her line to Bill earlier in the film: “Because you just know when it goes really big... and the camera goes like out of the roof... and you just know it's going to end. I hate that. I would leave just after the next to last song... and the film would just go on forever.” There is no complex tracking shot, no snazzy scene transition or foreboding score playing over. Instead the camera sits and monitors Selma’s hanging body as it sways while her killers make sure she has perished and 3 people sit stationed, nearly motionless at the bottom left of the frame. But then the camera does travel upward, past the roof and into the black screen for its credits. Killed in the midst of the song is in a way, a gift from von Trier to Selma, a silver lining in an ending where a wronged, confused woman was punished excessively. The final shot is exactly what Selma hated and she dies before this becomes a reality; as von Trier says in a final title card “They say it's the last song. They don't know us, you see. It's only the last song if we let it be.” In von Trier’s unpredictable method of cutting, and shooting by mixing two distinctly different styles, he has mirrored the tumultuous, unpredictable experience we call life, a constant series of ups and downs. Though the film boxes Selma into a corner of decisions and subsequent tragedy that some may argue is avoidable and streamlined, it is hard to deny the role of von Trier as total emotional puppeteer through his controlling methods of production, both creating and conforming to his criteria of Dogme but also abandoning it for sake of not making visuals just something we see, but something that enhances the characters and the narrative they are weaved into.

A similar final scene for von Trier with a heavy stylistic change, though this goes from nearly completely Dogme to non-Dogme, is found in the first film by von Trier in this trilogy (the “Golden Heart” trilogy), 1996’s Breaking the Waves. It runs in line with T.S. Eliot’s remarks in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” where it is said that “for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered” (506). The film tells of a small, devoutly religious town in the 1970’s Scottish Highlands where Bess McNeil (Emily Watson), who though seen as childish and fragile, finds love and new life in her husband Jan (Stellan Skarsgård). When Jan paralyzes himself in an oil rig accident, he encourages Bess to take other lovers and tell him the details for their abilities for sexual exploration have been completely devastated by the accident. Eventually Bess convinces herself that her deviant behavior is through the guidance of God and is helping Jan recover.

The film attains the typicality’s of Dogme that Dancer in the Dark has in terms of rough, handheld cinematography but departs from the manifesto in use of non-diegetic music during chapter breaks and the film taking place in the past (as Dancer does by taking place in 1964). The film also has a hypnotic feel, considering its mix of the older technology of CinemaScope for widescreen being mixed with the jerky handheld cinematography. One of the film’s important lines come in Jan’s inquiry of the town’s minister on why there were no bells on the church, to which The Minister replies “we do not need bells in our church to worship God.” Much of Breaking the Waves is focused on the camera shaking about as we watch Bess craft conversations between herself and God, shifting between two voices. We, throughout the films 2 ½ hour running time, will probably assume that this is another aspect of her young foolishness. However, as Eliot indicates, the “novelty” of the Dogme visual style complementing the tragic narrative is completely “altered” by an extreme departure in the final scene that changes much about what has preceded it in the film, especially teaching us something new about Bess, who in her behavior is eventually killed by a sadistic sailor (Udo Kier) and condemned as a whore by her town’s religious leaders.

Jan, who apart from using a single crutch is now walking on his own (opening our suspicion on whether Bess has worked a miracle) is awoken from his sleep at sea and called out to look at the radar. Technology says there is nothing out there, but as the camera follows Jan out onto the deck amidst a cloudy day we begin to hear bells ringing incessantly, as Jan and friends stare upward at the sky in wonder, smiles overcoming their faces, tears of joy overcoming Jan. The final shot, a total destruction to Dogme in its reliance on artificiality of post production, is a special effects produced shot of two bells ringing high in the sky, the extreme long shot placing the bells on the left and right of the frame, Jan and crews vessel a miniscule dot in the center.

[DrewG]

In one sense this tells us of Bess’ descent to heaven despite being proclaimed as a whore by the vicious, judgmental townspeople but also that her conversations with God were not imagined, but a reality. In a film full of real actions and consequences and restrained camera work to reflect it all, this final scene is one of outright fantasy that forces us to rethink everything we’ve known before. von Trier’s uncanny control is as evident here as it is in the reversal finale of Dancer in the Dark; in establishing such a strict style for the length of the film and then ending on a totally different note, he has crafted something unpredictable. These endings (the ringing bells of Breaking the Waves, the optimistic final title card of Dancer in the Dark) tell us something new about this piece of cinema we’ve invested time in, and give our characters sacrifice tremendous meaning as von Trier’s sudden switching of the proverbial stylistics gears only enhances their effect in conclusions that are both emotionally shattering and life affirming in these women didn’t die for nothing; Jan can now walk, and Gene will forever have the gift of sight.

This atypical outlook on control is something interviewer Guy Flatley for BNET.com helps von Trier touch on in an interview conducted shortly after Dancer came out in 2000. Flatley questions this idea of “women as martyrs” in the “Golden Heart Trilogy” and wonders what made von Trier come up with this view that he spans across three long, emotionally exhaustive films. He remarks that the women in the films (Karen in The Idiots, Selma in Dancer in the Dark and Bess in Breaking the Waves) all have choices and it’s what makes them strong. He remarks that it doesn’t matter if they are women or men, it would be a beautiful gesture to give up your life for someone. But then he gets personal: “My whole life has been about control. To give up control to that degree would require great strength” (Flatley).

In this way it seems that von Trier can live vicariously through his characters and the freedom they inhabit in what some audiences might perceive as misguided nativity, von Trier in fact seems jealous of their oppressive situation that forces them into extreme decisions, causing their death or unraveling. This also creates in a way a catch-22; in constructing this vision of America 1964 (ie: Dancer in the Dark) he seems to be wanting to craft commentary on America as a country but in his admittance of his romantic view of these female characters it seems more or less that these are his fantasies of characters performing selfless, extraordinary acts at the risk of destroying themselves. Filmmaking is his attempt at controlling what he actually desires, whereas his development was marred by his parents giving him too much freedom. In these situations these characters are given choices in a confined, cruel situation. In an odd way, von Trier is intrigued by this because it was sorely missing from his own life when he needed to be controlled and monitored the most.

In 1998’s The Idiots, a strictly Dogme95 film (the title card reads Dogma2: “The Idiots” written in chalk on a wooden floor) von Trier examines the attitude of society at large toward the mentally retarded in one of his most bizarre and controversial efforts, one that he shot “about ninety per cent” of along with writing and directing it (Björkman 214). The film’s most heartfelt
moments come in these instances where the characters do in fact begin to lose themselves, mixing their true feelings with their manufactured spassing (the word used by the group to describe when they act disabled). The most prominent example, relayed not through contrived dialogue but powerful performances, is in the midst of the film’s most infamous moment (one that also signals the beginning of the end), a graphic group sex scene as the house residents fly completely in and out of their characters on Stoffer’s (Jens Albinus) “birthday”. Two of the characters, Jeppe (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) and Josephine (Louise Mieritz) have departed from the rest of the group and found their own room. At first they move slowly, mouths agape, making unintelligible noises. In other words they seem to be spassing.

However, once they get closer and actually begin to kiss their movements are more deliberate and the look in Josephine’s eyes is that of genuine excitement, totally aware of the moment, one we sense she might have been wishing for. Smiling only for a moment before beginning to cry, she tells him that she loves him and they continue on, falling into each other’s embrace even more, but also holding back her hysterics even harder. Their love is restricted if they do it whilst in search of their inner idiot, but they must break character in order to experience what they both strive for. What is more important, their companionship or the allure of the happiness that the house they live this alternate life in grants them? Even Karen (Bodil Jørgensen) in the end shows the terror of this debate; her spassing is only met by being viciously smacked by her husband. We learn that as much as they want to be able to mix their own lives with this house, it truly is either one or the other, it cannot be both. Running two lives is far out of their realm of realistic control, it is an impossible desire. Some characters cannot continue their spassing in public, striving for the control of acting how they truly are, that being not mentally retarded. But some, such as Karen, choose their “inner idiot” and control their imitation retardation in order to find out about those around them. While Dancer in the Dark and Breaking the Waves exemplify this emotional control through switching in and out of Dogme, The Idiots keeps it entirely, strictly Dogme.

But some can argue that his control is merely modernized and ugly in its depression tactics when compared to von Trier’s influences in Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer and Swedish legend Ingmar Bergman. We of course, are looking in terms purely of von Trier’s “Gold Heart Trilogy” and its women in peril as opposed to something like the “Europe Trilogy” which matches Dreyer and the Bergman/Sven Nykvist combo in terms of pure aesthetic beauty with the use of light, soundtrack and other filmic aspects denied by Dogme. In “Something Borrowed” by Malcom Gladwell, an investigation of plagiarism leads a writer to a friend’s aid and is enlightened on musical plagiarism in the process. The realization for the friend was worded by Gladwell: “did this example upset him? Of course not, because he knew enough about music to know that these patterns of influence—cribbing, tweaking, transforming—were at the very heart of the creative process” (Gladwell 569). The argument to save von Trier from being accused as derivative is very much engrained in this thought process.

Dreyer was often known for his incredibly strict methods of shooting his films and coaching his players so much so that the quantity of his cinematic output ended up being significantly shorter than some imagined it could have been. However it is this devotion to fleshing out his art that made his films indisputable classics, such as The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) or Ordet (1955). Ordet is similar to Breaking the Waves in its setting of small religious town, a woman going against the community and creating division and an ending of outright fantasy, a woman rising from dead. Further showing an admiration for Dreyer von Trier had originally planned to title Breaking the Waves with Amor Omnie (Love is in Everything), the epitaph the character of Gertrud wanted on her grave in Dreyer’s 1964 film, Gertrud (Björkman 175). Even controversial, sensationalistic, more modern cinema such as Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974), a film von Trier worships, showcases his fascination with women in bizarre situations.

von Trier also shows this attachment to Dreyer in the fact that he took on 1988’s Medea, a television production that had Dreyer slated to direct. In the opening not only is Dreyer credited but honored by von Trier, making the film homage, shot in a mix of silent, meandering lenses (similar to von Trier’s opening for The Kingdom) and making a thoroughly complex female lead, except this one is wronged and thus seeks a violent vigilante like path to make it “right” (similar to Joan of Arc in The Passion of Joan of Arc, who in martyrdom rights her unjust death, not through murder). Interestingly by making Dancer in the Dark von Trier creates a kind of parallel universe for Medea; while Medea sacrifices her children and runs to exile, Selma sacrifices herself for her children and is executed. von Trier also says that, while Medea now only means anything to him on a “superficial level” he claims his attempts to capture Dreyer’s vision of Euripides play was “possibly a precursor to Breaking the Waves in some of its usage of melodramatic form” (Björkman 121). von Trier, like Dreyer, makes films that are essentially completely bankrupt of any comic relief, using the extra space for deepening the drama and his characters. Further, von Trier evokes his perfectionist attitude in working on the script of Breaking the Waves for several years: “I’ve been a bit like Dreyer, cutting bits out, condensing and refining it” (Björkman 164).

[DrewG]

While they both were strict in coaching their actors, von Trier as stated pushes these tragic females with strict dedication to the role through long takes he shoots himself for even more control in obtaining how he is has visually imagined what he has written. von Trier follows in the steps of Bergman in films debating religion, the existence of God and the strength of faith. In Stig Björkman’s interview with von Trier about The Idiots, Björkman reminds him that he referred to the production as a game: “it’s nice that it’s my game were playing…it’s a tiny, little game that tiny, little Lars has set up” (Björkman 207). This game implies himself as the master, the one with all the pieces to shape and shift. While von Trier sees it as a game he also mentions a much more literal interpretation of the exhilaration from control when he touches on the ecstasy Ingmar Bergman felt when filming police, considering he was now the authority when he was usually so intimidated by their authority.

Interestingly, Bergman used a trilogy for the theme of faith/doubt in God, in similar fashion that his (and later on, von Trier’s) creative ambition and inner demons needed 3 films to flesh them out and begin to make sense of them. While Bergman was scared of authority and whether God may or may not exist, von Trier grew up around those who preached that there was no God, and parenting that gave him no chance to grow tired or scared of authority, possibly even craving some. While Dreyer and Cavani makes martyrs or extraordinary females out of history and actuality (Joan of Arc in Joan of Arc, and a Holocaust survivor in The Night Porter) von Trier makes them out of dire imagined circumstance. He uses their foundations of ideas but spurts from them in visual nakedness and his own fictional storytelling and controlling the filmmaking process, from doing his own cinematography to writing the screenplays. While von Trier makes these films with similar themes, he also ties them together in his own unique ways, such as the idea of making Bess’ conversations with God and Selma’s musical flights of fancy as ways our characters depart into their own world they control, a temporary escape from judgment and misery. These great departures from the rest of the film surrounding them and the subsequent conclusions are indication further of von Trier’s innovativeness and the balance and counterbalance of shifting between multiple modes of filmmaking and unfurling his twisted narrative, both engrained and departed from traditions.

Lars von Trier has been well documented in his struggle with intense anxiety and phobias. This includes his fear of flying which has restricted him from ever coming to America, shooting his films in Denmark and Sweden. But von Trier also suffers from depression which in May of 2007 was seen as so severe that he found a return to filmmaking unlikely. How would von Trier ever survive without filmmaking I ponder, a man that once said “basically, I'm afraid of everything in life, except filmmaking.” His depression and idiosyncrasies are combated by the control he exhibits within in his cinema, especially the “Golden Heart” trilogy; a world of diverse characters, different time periods and the beauty of self-sacrifice. His defiance and reliance of his influences, his creation and destruction of self boundaries is what we sense has made his life possible to live; the cinema came to his aid as a child and now as an adult it is still his savior. In a 1989 interview he described himself as “a melancholy Dane dancing in the dark to images on the silver screen” (Burke). Without the power of his control and his creative mind, von Trier’s depression may very well continue to consume him and the dance will stop, the silver screen fading to black. We can only hope his future control of this depression becomes as apparent as his control towards cinema, a cinematic provocateur, making films both expected because of his upbringing and influences but unexpected because of his aesthetics and ability to craft, dark unconventional stories of people in dire straits.

Further Reading

Björkman, Stig. Trier on von Trier. London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2003.

Burke, Jason. "Dark days for filmmaking world as depression lays Von Trier low." The Observer. 13 May 2007. Guardian. 5 May 2008 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/may/13/film.filmnews>.

Eliot, T.S. "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Writing the Essay: Art in the World, The World Through Art. Ed. Darlene A. Forest, Pat C. Hoy II, Randy Martin. New York: McGraw Hill, 2007.

Flatley, Guy. "Lars Von Trier - Interview." BNET. Oct 2000. CNET. 4 May 2008 <http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1285/is_10_30/ai_66675869>.

Gladwell, Malcolm. "Something Borrowed." Writing the Essay: Art in the World, The World Through Aart. Ed. Darlene A. Forest, Pat C. Hoy II, Randy Martin. New York: McGraw Hill, 2007.