CBD Resource: Lars von Trier: Making You Uncomfortable

The ever controversial Lars von Trier is all about making the viewer uncomfortable. Through his works like Dancer in the Dark (2000), Dogville (2003), Antichrist (2009), Melancholia (2011) and Nymphomaniac (2013), he forces us to confront taboos and makes us wonder whether deep down we’ve been truthful to ourselves.

Transcript provided by Youtube:

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The films of Danish director Lars Von Trier are all about confronting the viewer.

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Watching his movies, we feel he’s being slightly violent towards us.

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And yet — while there are plenty of other directors and films out there that go for

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the same shock value — what sets Von Trier apart is that, on the other end of that violent viewing

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we may be changed.

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He’s not shocking us for the sake of it

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although we do get the sense he’s enjoying it quite a lot.

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But he’s also forcing us to confront taboos, people or ideas that challenge us

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and he makes us question why we’re uncomfortable,

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and whether we could open or adjust our minds to be more truthful.

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He exposes that, despite what we think we know, on the deepest level we’re probably

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not being truly honest with ourselves.

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“For him, the artist is a provocateur.

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The role of the artist is not to answer the questions of the meaning of life or pacify you,

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But to confront you.”

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“This ain’t rock n’ roll, this is genocide”

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As Joe in Nymphomaniac articulates her hatred of taboos, it feels she’s articulating something

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of Von Trier’s own philosophy on the subject.

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“Excuse me, but in my circles, it’s always been a mark of honor to call a spade a spade.

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Each time a word becomes prohibited, you remove a stone from the Democratic foundation.”

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Von Trier’s The Idiots is about a number of healthy people who enjoy acting like they

01:26

have mental disabilities.

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Like Nymphomaniac which includes a very graphic self-performed abortion,

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it’s a film that’s guaranteed to anger many people.

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Just as Joe’s listener criticizes her for talking about her abortion in such a graphic

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way, which is a meta-comment on the film’s choice to show it the same way.

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Some may at that point, or many others in Von Trier turn off

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“Serious abortions, the ones that save lives, far from our social spheres

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you can’t endanger them, just because you provocatively insist on showing the gory details”

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The conversation between Joe and her listener echoes and dramatizes

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the debate he imagines the viewer must be carrying on with the film itself.

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Voicing our protests for us in order to discuss them

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But Von Trier wants this clash, this violence

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The whole point is to make us challenge think about our taboos, even if that just means that we’re

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going to defend them to our unlistening screen.

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But by charging into this taboo territory, Von Trier does access something extremely unusual

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He’s challenging us to confront and possibly rewrite our opinions and feelings

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on topics that we don’t like to think about and so often haven’t actually thought about in any rigorous way.

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Even if we may espouse strongly held opinions or political stances on them

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We avoid what falls into the category of uncomfortable.

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But for Von Trier the things that make us uncomfortable are a battle that calls to us

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We have to face them to discover ourselves.

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So it’s not that he could get the same result by choosing another topic

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it has to be the things that we don’t want to talk about and don’t want to look at

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“All of the sudden, she knew the answer too her question all to well

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If she had acted like them, she could not have defended a single one of her actions

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and could not have condemned them harshly enough”

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“You can’t think about what he’s doing without considering how he wants you to have

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a strong response, and revulsion is one of the strongest responses.”

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“AntiChrist is a film clearly about grief and about trauma.

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And it is a film that is itself traumatic. Rather than allowing you to observe trauma

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it forces you to feel it, and to confront it and experience it.

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“you want to look away but you can’t.

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Same thing with Nymphomaniac where it is deliberately challenging your idea of sexuality on film.”

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And Dancer in the Dark, where he seems to be tormenting the character.

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He’s also happy to make himself uncomfortable as a filmmaker.

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He’s constantly exploring the power of limitations

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“We talk about this, you know, having control or giving away control.

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If you have some limitations when you work, like these rules or like other things, you are forced kind of to use your imagination.”

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Von Trier’s visual style likewise underlines this feeling of discomfort and immediacy.

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His style is wrapped up in his past as co-founder of Dogma 95 movement.

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He and director Thomas Vinterberg started that movement to reject common Hollywood clichés and production standards,

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Vowing to make movies using almost nothing artificial

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at all (including lights, dollies, or even genre plot devices like guns or a crime).

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Following Vinterberg’s Festen, The Idiots in 1998 was the second Dogme film produced.

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“So Lars Von Trier’s biggest influence on world filmmaking is being part of the dogma movement or starting the dogma movement with Thomas Vinterberg.

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So restrictions we often think of as obstacles, for Von Trier, what dogma says is everything you confront as an artist is an opportunity to be creative.

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And it’s also anti-Hollywood. He’s basically saying Hollywood is a system of storytelling conventions and encouraging people to think in other ways–

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think outside of them and use your inherent creativity as a filmmaker and to come up with solutions to these restrictions”

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Limiting himself this way might not result in the best possible film; it certainly won’t

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result in the most perfect film.

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Yet for him, it will yield the most interesting film, the most illuminating experiment, that

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reveals something both about human nature and about the power of the film medium itself.

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Von Trier is still all about the handheld camera and unobtrusive, natural lighting.

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His stripped-down visuals feel as if anyone with a camera might just walk into a room

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and film this, almost like a documentary meets an improvisation.

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And this combination of a doc-improv feel underlines his relationship to truth.

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He’s seeking to capture a truth by putting a camera into a dynamic, slightly dangerous

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situation, and seeing what’s revealed.

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“I think so many films today have the dogma look to them.

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I think that the idea of the restless moving camera is something that comes from the dogma tradition or the dogma movement.

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Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine is kind of like a dogma film,

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in the way that it seems sort of haphazard and it’s construction, seems like very arbitrary,

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and there doesn’t seem to be real like a rigorous approach to composition,

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but what it has instead is the dogma approach– trying to get the truth, emotional truth

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out of the scenes and have the actors be invested in that performance

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and so their solution to having a very low budget film is to insist on authenticity.

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Lars Von Trier’s influence is often prompting other directors to seek that kind of authenticity.”

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Meanwhile, interplaying with this naturalism, he also introduces gestures of artifice and

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stylization into some of his films.

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Look at Dogville, which is set up like a high-school production of Our Town.

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Seeing a movie that looks beautiful is a comfort to us — but by making his movie look this

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way, Von Trier is refusing us this comfort.

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“What star is that?”

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Melancholia, too, while it’s generally filmed in a Dogma style, opens with a highly stylized

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sequence that evokes a painting — making us think about how melancholy may appear beautiful

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when seen from an artful distance, compared to the actual reality of depression that we’re about to see.

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The opening, like the introduction to an opera, introduces the film’s leitmotifs and expresses in a few images

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what we are about to see in the drama.

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Dancer in the Dark uses jump cuts, not unlike the French New Wave,

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and it plays with color

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changes and camera changes to designate the musical parts and the real-world of the film.

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But he often reserves these stylized parts for a key sequence, a key moment or something that he wants emphasize

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in contrast to the main body of the film.

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Near the ending of Dogville, this change to the shot of Nicole Kidman among apples, which might be a

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very normal shot in another film, gives us an almost radical feeling of relief.

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“His films are described often as metacinematic.

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They’re about the artist’s role in society and the artist’s role in the world

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and they’re also about the nature of filmmaking itself.

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His films often have these kinds of structures where you’re very conscience of the structures,

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and you have in The Dancer in the Dark a musical. Musicals are supposed to be happy and upbeat,

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and it’s the most despairing, depressing musical ever made.

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And the idea is to make you think about filmmaking,

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to make you think about what happens in a typical movie and to give you something else”

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Von Trier’s films often follow a general structure of exhilaration and intellectual seduction,

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that’s followed by a downfall,

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an exposing of the ugly truth or the downside

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of the ideas he’s presented more appealingly at the start.

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Many of his films have this dual structure: Melancholia has two parts.

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In the first, Justine played by Kirsten Dunst is a bride, attempting to commit to a happy life

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but finding, by the end of the wedding night, that her self-destructive depression, can’t be contained

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In the second part, this depression has fully taken over her

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yet –as the end of the world nears — society’s assumptions about depression are reversed.

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The thesis of the film is that depressed people are better equipped for apocalypse because,

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having previously imagined catastrophe and disaster, they can accept and deal with the reality.

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Thus while the second part of the film is a coming down, it’s also a reversal and a release.

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Once we overcome the false truth of the first part

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the idea that she should defeat her depression and be happy with her husband

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we find another unexpected truth

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that while her depression makes her terrible to those around her in everyday life, it also

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helps her guide her family through the end of days.

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In Nymphomaniac, the two parts are even separated into two distinct movies, or volumes

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the first corresponding to the “nymph” and the second to the “mania” of Joe’s obsession with sex

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Nymphomaniac Volume 1 is fun and funny

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The viewer might enjoy seeing the character behaving a little wild and against social norms.

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And like the man who is listening to her story in the movie

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we don’t quite yet understand why she views herself as such a terrible person

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But by Volume 2, as we see her extreme masochistic behavior, her abandoning of her child, and her

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deteriorating body, it becomes so challenging that many might consider it unwatchable

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and it might inspire resentment or backlash from us.

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The ending of Dogville is so effective because Nicole Kidman’s character undergoes a complete 180

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that reveals who she really was all along.

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She’s been taking the town’s escalating abuse, seeming a martyr whose generous kindness has been punished with inhumane cruelty.

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But her father tells her that her passivity is actually a kind of superiority

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“So I’m arrogant. I’m arrogant because I forgive people?”

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“My God. Can’t you see how condescending you are when you say that?”

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I mean you have, you have this preconceived notion that nobody,

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listen, that nobody can’t possibly attain the same high ethical standards as you, so you exonerate them.

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I cannot, I cannot think of anything more arrogant than that.

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You… you forgive others with excuses that you would never in the world permit for yourself.

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Von Trier Also deals a lot with the scorned, fallen, or unstable woman.

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And he’s stoking the flames, challenging us to judge or disapprove of these women

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He puts us in a very tough position,

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by making them guilty of the behaviors that society most condemns, especially in women

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child endangerment, sexual infidelity and promiscuity, instability, unhappiness or even simple rudeness.

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These films all feature lead women who are making society uncomfortable.

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They’re expressing desire.

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They’re expressing inconvenient aspects of their psyche — aspects that we may view

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as unhealthy, or see as needing to be cured, treated, or even repressed.

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But Von Trier is not interested in seeing these women “cured.”

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Controversially, he often embraces their perceived dysfunction as a hidden strength, or something

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that should not be rejected.

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“My name is Joe and I’m a nymphomaniac”

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“We say sex addict”

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“I am a nymphomaniac, but above all, I love my c*nt”

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It goes without saying that a Von Trier film is never going to end with a politically correct message.

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Yet he has given us many films in which vastly complex and imperfect female protagonists

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get to explore the extremes of their desires and the truths of their inner natures.

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Watching the film, we may start to have intellectual insights or revelations,

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and we may start to expect that we’ll arrive somewhere definite and grasp some kind of answer to the questions he’s posing.

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But usually this is a false expectation.

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As we’ve said, Melancholia does illustrate his thesis that depressed people are better in a crisis

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because they can face the truth.

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But in the end, we just cut out.

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And we’re left wondering how useful that talent for facing apocalypse really is,

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if everyone just dies pretty quickly anyway.

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The impulse that most of us have to hope for some resolution or message in the end is again thwarted,

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because that resolution or message would reduce everything we’ve just seen to something comfortable.

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And the last thing Von Trier ever wants is to make us feel comfortable.

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“But you, you’ve f*cked thousands of men”

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