von Trier

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djross
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von Trier

Post by djross »

Today is the 60th birthday of Lars von Trier. If one asks, who are the filmmakers who in the last twenty years have really tried to push cinema in new directions, I would name four: Kiarostami, Malick, Noé and von Trier. Of course, many cinephiles would name other directors, like Tarr or Sokhurov or maybe Apichatpong Weerasethakul, but for my money, and without wanting to diminish their work, there is still something a little safe about their dedication to finely crafted "art films" (although admittedly I haven't seen quite so much of their work and should probably reserve judgment).

Least safe of all is von Trier, who seems driven to all manner of risk-taking and self-exposure. For this, of course, he has many detractors, who see his work as "self-indulgent" (usually an empty criticism at the best of times) or "emotionally manipulative" (as though there is a cinema that does not manipulate) or "misogynist" (attacking with the bluntest available instrument, and I think plainly wrong). Yes, if one compares von Trier and the great Kiarostami, the latter undeniably tries to give his audience the space and freedom to come to the film in their own way and with their own interpretation, and perhaps Kiarostami would despise the emotional control that von Trier prefers to exercise, yet there is really nothing about powerful affectivity that need prevent interpretation, and personally I love the way that von Trier brings every available means to bear in his quest to make an audience think and feel.

Although some people loved them, for me Antichrist (2009) and Melancholia (2011) represented the weakest period of von Trier's work (although I should probably see them both again), perhaps due to personal crises he was experiencing at that time, but with Nymphomaniac (2014) he clearly showed once again why he is the most fearless filmmaker on the planet. If you haven't seen it, choose the director's cut (that's the five and a half hour version): it makes a difference.

Here are just the films of his that made it into my top tier, most of them during the twenty years since his greatest accomplishment, Breaking the Waves (1996), one of only five movies to which I have given a perfect score. The top six films in the list below are all masterpieces:

    100. Breaking the Waves (1996)
    93. Dogville (2003)
    93. The Idiots (1998)
    92. Manderlay (2005)
    92. Epidemic (1987)
    91. Dancer in the Dark (2000)
    90. Nymphomaniac (2014)
    90. The Kingdom (1994)
    85. The Five Obstructions (2003)

Happy birthday Lars.

Anomaly
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Re: von Trier

Post by Anomaly »

djross wrote:(as though there is a cinema that does not manipulate)

Exactly! Cinema is inherently manipulative, all the way down to its most basic levels. Even the act of pointing the camera at something is subtly manipulative, because you are not pointing it at something else. But notice a key word I used there - "subtle." Great films manipulate you in such a way you don't even realize it's happening. I can't account for anyone else's reviews, but when I use the word "manipulative" to describe a film, I'm describing where this process has fallen apart, where the actions of the filmmaker become obvious to my eyes.

Lars von Trier is manipulative. His films do not subtly bend a constructed reality to a conclusion, rather he sledgehammers the audience until they emote. Or at least that's what it feels like. I have seen three films of his so far, and I did not enjoy the heavy-handiness with which he distorts cause and effect to come to some miserable conclusion. And they all feel really personal in a way, which makes me feel even more turned off because it makes von Trier seem like a rotten person on the inside, which I guess could be true. Sitting through a dour slog while rolling my eyes every five minutes is not my idea of a good time.

I still want to see The Kingdom, since almost everyone seems to praise it. But von Trier's films do not inspire much confidence in me that what I described above will not happen again, and as such I have little interest in watching them.

djross
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Re: von Trier

Post by djross »

Anomaly1 wrote:Great films manipulate you in such a way you don't even realize it's happening. I can't account for anyone else's reviews, but when I use the word "manipulative" to describe a film, I'm describing where this process has fallen apart, where the actions of the filmmaker become obvious to my eyes.


The distinction being described here corresponds to the difference between analysis and synthesis, in the sense of analysis as what breaks things into their constituent parts so that they can be understood in terms of the mechanics of the operation, if I can put it like that, whereas synthesis is the perceptual operation through which these operational parts function as if they were a unified whole. When we speak in everyday conversation, our relationship to language is mostly, in these terms, synthetic, a continuous flow and exchange of meaning. When we learn grammar, we analyse language in terms of its constituent parts. Of course, in the complex reality of existence, the analytical knowledge we possess can always intrude into our synthetic approach to language-use.

The same distinction can be applied to all forms of perceptual apprehension: when we look at the world about us, for example, our stereoscopic vision puts together two separate images from two different perspectives and synthesises them into a single image, even though, "geometrically" speaking, this is strictly impossible. But if we look out of one eye and then the other, we can break this down into its constituent images, which enables us to think about, that is, analyse, the process involved in this synthetic composition. We can do so because the process falls apart.

This is equally true for aesthetic objects of all kinds, such as music, paintings, television and cinema. The composer who writes music relies on an analytical understanding of music to be able to construct pieces of music that we hear synthetically. But if we, the audience for that music, have an education in music, then we are able to bring to our synthetic apprehension of music an analytical appreciation of its composition. This is, precisely, a question of skills acquired in education. Similarly, when we read literature, we can always, to a greater or lesser degree, understand the novel not just synthetically as a narrative whole whose story we follow along line by line, but analytically, and the reason we can do so is that to be able to read, we must also be able, in some way, to write. We must, in other words, have some analytical understanding of writing, without which we cannot read, and which always means that the writing itself can intrude into our perception as the subject of analytic judgments.

Writing, in other words, depends on a certain level of overlap between the producer of the writing and the consumer, an overlap in terms of the relationship between the analysis required to produce writing and the synthesis involved in consuming it. The invention of cinema and television does not involve this overlap in anything like the same way. It is possible to consume television and cinema synthetically with almost no analytical understanding of the operations required to produce the program or the movie. Most cinema is premised on the idea that the intention should always be to have an audience synthetically "immersed" in the experience of consuming the film. An appreciation of cinema that involves analytic capabilities is possible only through an education that succeeds in drawing the viewer's attention to the analytical operations that lie behind the synthetic apprehension of the whole (but, as an aside, the much greater ease of use and ability to access filmmaking that has arisen with digital video somewhat tends to, once again, make consumers more like producers, and so, at least a little, encourages the acquisition of analytical capacities).

In theatre, the systematic attempt to use theatre itself to conduct this education is what Brecht attempted to achieve through the utilisation of "alienation devices" that "distance" the audience from the play and hence make possible a kind of demystifying de-synthesisation. For Brecht, this aesthetic counter-effect was a political virtue that placed the audience into an active, that is, analytical, relation to the art object. It can be contrasted, for example, with Wagner's goal of creating an operatic Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, that would overwhelm the viewer and induce complete synthetic immersion for the audience: absolute mystification (of course, this does not mean that the worshipful, cult-like audiences at Bayreuth are simply hypnotised fools, given that they may well possess, through dint of years of obsessional effort, analytical capacities in relation to music that most likely outstrip the equivalent capacities possessed by many cinephiles in relation to cinema).

Most cinema corresponds to the Wagnerian imperative rather than Brecht's, but not all, and perhaps no cinema can ever absolutely achieve Wagner's aim. Syberberg's Hitler – A Film from Germany is an explicit attempt to create an impossible cinematic marriage between Wagner and Brecht that retains the virtues of both: to absolutely immerse the viewer in the affective power of synthetic apprehension, as a means of making the viewer "see" and "feel" the mystifying power and sweep of culture that led to the catastrophe that absolutely demands of us, those who come after this catastrophe, that we apply the sharpest analytical insights in order to take apart the mechanics of this affective power. The intention of the film, which is to explore, as deeply as possible, the sources and meaning of the Hitler phenomenon, is matched by an equally profound reflection on what it is to watch a movie, both analytically and synthetically. This is why, despite the artificial theatricality of the low-budget production, I said in my review of this film that it is "the most audacious cinematic experiment of all time", because it "attempts to do the most that can be done on celluloid".

For me, von Trier is also clearly trying to marry analytic and synthetic characteristics. He wants the audience to feel the power cinema has to draw the viewer into an affective universe: unlike Brecht, and more like Syberberg, he does not think that "alienation" is enough for the viewer to understand the world around them, because if the audience is left with only a sense of the "mechanics" of ideology, for example, then they will not understand how this also applies to them. But at the same time, I do not at all think that von Trier simply wants to manipulate without any conscious awareness of the machinery he uses to achieve this manipulation: it is not accidental, not just a failure of synthesis, that means the audience becomes aware of being manipulated. If the "process has fallen apart", this is absolutely the filmmaker's intention.

A classical example is the final shot of Breaking the Waves: many "rational" viewers find the shot of the bells to be the last straw in von Trier's religious manipulation of the audience. I believe such responses are totally off the mark, but also show what the filmmaker is doing: this utterly kitschy moment is there to produce a conflict in the audience, to draw them in at the same time as giving them a feeling of wanting to resist or break into a laugh (which is a form of resistance...to synthesis, precisely), not just, as in Brecht, so that they see the mechanics behind theologico-political ideology, but so that they may become unsure about the dogmatic certainties they hold about certain kinds of oppositions (between the secular and the religious, for example, or the clever and the stupid, or the body and the soul, or the rational and the irrational, or the mundane and the ultramundane).

For von Trier, as he has said, a good film should be like a stone in your shoe: this is an extremely mundane virtue, to disturb and disrupt your outlook, which means, your outlook upon the film itself, the way you come at the movie, but it is also ultramundane, an attempt to draw your attention to the inescapability of something more mysterious. This mysteriousness is not just something cosmological, not just the "oceanic" feeling Freud described when absorbing the awe-inspiring immensity of the cosmos, but a mysteriousness belonging to the mystagogical character of the work of art, and of the work done by the work of art. Because work, more than anything, means the use of energy to effect a transformation.

Of course, that doesn't mean you have to like von Trier.

djross
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Re: von Trier

Post by djross »

That said, I should add that I tend to find Melancholia more plainly kitschy, with less of the redeeming characteristics I find in undeniably manipulative films like Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark. Lars von Trier himself seems to have similar doubts about Melancholia, and precisely in relation to its Wagnerianism:

It consists of a lot of over-the-top clichés and an aesthetic that I would distance myself from under any other circumstances. I hope that under all of that, a film is hiding that I actually have some love for. It reminds me of those Luchino Visconti films I always enjoyed that were like whipped cream on top of whipped cream. I went overboard, blasting Richard Wagner. I made the film with a pure heart and I couldn’t have done it better, and everyone did a good job. But when I see clips from it, I think, “I’d be damned. That was unpleasant.” I’m usually madly in love with everything I do. I’m probably the most self-satisfied director you’ll ever meet. But this film is perilously close to the aesthetic of American mainstream films. The only redeeming factor about it, you might say, is that the world ends.


And the significance of this problem is also something of which the filmmaker is completely aware:

He worried that some moments in “Melancholia” have ended up “in the area of kitsch,” which both attracts and disgusts him. Referring to a tableau in the film in which Ms. Dunst’s character lies naked on a riverbank under a glowing blue orb in the sky, Mr. von Trier said, “Hitler would have thought this is really art, and that’s also a little shameful that you are now suddenly into this art of the Third Reich.”

This brought him back to the question that started it all. “The vulgarity of the fascistic art has a naïveté and a power that is quite interesting,” he said. He called the architect Albert Speer and the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl “wonderful artists,” and emphasized that he was expressing admiration for aesthetics and not ideology. “The ideology, since it’s so clear, since it’s one-sided, makes it easier to make a design that has some power to it,” he added.


To me, these quotes are also examples, beyond the works themselves, of why von Trier is, among artists, both courageous and honest in quite a rare way.

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Re: von Trier

Post by Anomaly »

An interesting argument, though I feel it doesn't really do much to address my argument (though, being based on our personal tastes, that's probably going to keep happening). Perhaps "manipulative" didn't quite capture what I was intending, but what word would? Maybe "maudlin" would, at least in the case of Dancer in the Dark. But I have enjoyed other films that take a more analytic method, or at least try to force the audience to be more active in their experience (see Gasper Noe, Michael Haneke, and Hideaki Anno, among others), and that leads me to the point I was perhaps really trying to make.

Why did I enjoy those and not von Trier's films? Even in those works that tried to confront me and make me an active viewer (the ones I felt worked, at least), I was still "immersed" in a sense. Even if the synthesis may have "fallen apart," I was still engaged, if not a little confused. Did the analytic parts still make sense in the film's synthetic whole? I feel like that must be it. There must be some sort of emotional or logical "hook" to allow synthesis in the first place, before you even get to the analysis, which then must grow organically from that. In my opinion, von Trier doesn't achieve this first step, leaving me on the outside from the get go. His attempts at adding an analytic element to disrupt synthesis have themselves fallen apart.

djross wrote:An appreciation of cinema that involves analytic capabilities is possible only through an education that succeeds in drawing the viewer's attention to the analytical operations that lie behind the synthetic apprehension of the whole


An aside, wanted to ask you about this line. What do you believe provides or constitutes such an education, or in other words, what must a person understand to be educated in this subject? Maybe this is too vague a question.

djross
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Re: von Trier

Post by djross »

Anomaly1 wrote:what must a person understand to be educated in this subject?


It is not just a matter of developing an understanding of the technical processes involved in making films, but a matter of understanding how those processes relate to the generation of meaning and significance for the audience. It is true that much of so-called film theory fails to do this very well, in part because of a deficient understanding of exactly what kind of thing a movie is (I have thought this for the last twenty years), but obviously not all the effort involved in writing and thinking about cinema has been a complete waste, and consuming the best portion of it can certainly contribute to such an education. Such reading, however, should not be confined to film theory, and obviously extends, at the very minimum, to other debates in the history of aesthetics and the philosophy of aesthetics.

Nor, however, is it just a matter of an education in cinema itself. Films are artistic (and industrial) objects that also belong to a wider cultural world, including, for example, literature and cave painting. How does cinema relate to these other aesthetic objects? This question is, at the very least, philosophical, aesthetic and anthropological. Writers on film tend not to ask themselves such a question, or not to do so profoundly enough, but there is a price to be paid for this neglect.

There is also a price to be paid for failing to be sufficiently aware of those other cultural spheres: can we really understand Sokurov's Faust without an education in literature, or Sion Sono's Guilty of Romance, to pick two literate movies that I happen to have recently watched? But are those who profess to write about film as a profession in possession of such an education in literature? Do they then expect films not to require that kind of education? Often I ask myself why it is that Syberberg's Hitler film has to a large extent been forgotten, even by so-called cinephiles, and I cannot help but wonder if it is not because there is not an audience capable of watching it. Perhaps that sounds pretentious: should not a film make itself available to the viewer, and if it fails to do so, is it not the film that is at fault? Such an argument has a point, but it also has a limit: should not the viewer make himself or herself available to the film, if it is a film that merits the doing of work? There are films that do so merit, however few.

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Re: von Trier

Post by djross »

zopz wrote:it was slightly troubling given the context, suggesting that some kind of academic education is necessary in order that x mode of appreciation is valid.


Whatever may be the case for Eagleton, I would point out that the word "academic" was not one I used here.

zopz wrote:Basically, why is it not okay to simply be in the possession of some body of knowledge and allow for the apprehension of [x, y, z] to find its place within, and partake of, this novel order?


It may be apocryphal that audiences in 1895 were terrified that the train approaching the screen was going to hit them, but it nevertheless serves to indicate, I think, that audiences of today have undergone a different kind of cinematic education than those of 120 years ago. There is no such thing as no education, even if there is such a thing as the degradation of education, and it is certainly the case that education is always a question not just of theory but of practice, and, in the aesthetic realm, by necessity involves the practice of frequenting works of art. Hence the practice of, for example, attending museums in order to make copies of existing paintings by the "old masters", or the practice of obtaining sheet music in order better to appreciate live performance (both of these forms of educational aesthetic practice obviously having gone into massive decline).

zopz wrote:And here I suppose I have to ask, then, where exactly it ceases, the cultural familiarity necessary to successful 'reading'


Again, "successful" is not a word I would have chosen. Failure is sometimes success. Success is sometimes failure.

zopz wrote:In that sense, what comprises aesthetic knowledge as distinct from the mere familiarity with processes of mechanical construction and the generation of textual meaning?


The point, when asking a large question such as this one, is to recognise that one is not the first to ask it, that it in fact has a long and distinguished history, and so to take the time and make the effort to become acquainted with that history in order to determine its merits, rather than to expect an answer that enables you somehow to imagine that it is possible to simply bypass the question of that history. Even if it turns out that most of that history can in the end be dismissed, it cannot be dismissed until one knows what one is dismissing.

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Re: von Trier

Post by iconogassed »

zopz wrote:Basically, why is it not okay to simply be in the possession of some body of knowledge and allow for the apprehension of [x, y, z] to find its place within, and partake of, this novel order? I find it more interesting, if, confessedly, less useful than striving to adapt to convention. This process is also potentially unavoidable.

I must commend you: this is the furthest I've ever seen anyone stretch for "ignorance is bliss"

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