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Lars von Trier built a reputation as a provocateur from the start—but in the late 2000s, he entered an even more inflammatory phase. Amid Cannes controversies, Antichrist (2009), Melancholia (2011), Nymphomaniac (2013–14), and The House That Jack Built (2018) brandished the cinematic virtuosity von Trier once banned under the Dogme 95 Manifesto while subjecting audiences to “extreme” cinema. Following von Trier’s experience of clinical depression in 2006 and 2007, these films took an aggressively personal and retrospective turn against the backdrop of the director’s controversy-courting public appearances. Playing against widespread assumptions, Linda Badley takes a reparative approach, offering an in-depth examination of these four films and the contexts that produced them. Drawing on numerous interviews with the director and his collaborators as well as inside access to archival materials, she provides a thorough and comprehensive account of von Trier’s preproduction and creative process. Highlighting a transmedial turn, Badley tracks von Trier’s artistic touchstones from Wagner, Proust, and the Marquis de Sade to Scandinavian erotic cinema and serial killer genre tropes. She considers his portrayals of mental illness and therapy, gender and sexuality, nature and extinction, shedding light on the thematic concerns that unite these films as a distinct cycle. Offering nuanced readings of these films, the book emphasizes the significance of von Trier’s work for current critical and philosophical debates, showing how they engage with notions of the Anthropocene, “dark ecology,” and the postcinematic.
This volume provides an overview of von Trier's career while focusing on his more recent work, including the Gold Heart Trilogy, the USA Trilogy, and individual projects such as the comedy The Boss of It All and the horror psychodrama Antichrist. The author draws on a range of cultural references and critical approaches, including genre, gender, and cultural studies, performance theory, and trauma culture and includes two interviews with Trier.
The films of Lars von Trier offer unique opportunities for thinking deeply about how Philosophy and Cinema speak to one another. The book addresses von Trier’s films in order of their release. The earlier chapters discuss his Golden Heart trilogy and USA: Land of Opportunities series by addressing issues of potential misogyny, ethical critique, and racial justice. The later chapters focus on his Depression Trilogy and address the undermining of gender binaries, the psychoanalytic meaning of the sacrifice of children and depression, and philosophical questions provoked by the depiction of the end of the world. Taken together, the volume explores the topics of Philosophical Psychology, Social Theory, Political Theory, Theories of the Self, Philosophy of Race, and Feminist Thought, and opens a conversation about von Trier’s important work.
The book proposes a new perspective on avant-garde cinema, utilising approaches from intermediality to explore how the spirit of experimentation, a hallmark of historical avant-garde and post-war artistic movements, is still present in contemporary filmmaking today. The volume explores how contemporary avant-garde filmmakers have brought innovation to modern cinema. Filmmakers, such as, Jean-Luc Godard, Lars von Trier, and Alexander Sokurov and their contemporary works will be analyzed, reflecting on their experimentation with cinematic techniques and the mixing of the film medium with other media, such as literature, theatre, and painting. Important research questions considered throughout the book include: How do intermedial experiments convey meaning in films? What is the impact on the spectator of the mixing of various media forms in cinema? And how are the contemporary films of Jean-Luc Godard, Lars von Trier, and Alexander Sokurov innovative and experimental? The book is devoted to all these themes and provides a thorough analysis of contemporary films examined through an intermedial perspective. Providing a comprehensive analysis of contemporary avant-garde filmmaking from an intermedial perspective, this book will be of interest to graduate students and scholars working in intermedial studies, film and media studies, and cultural studies.
The Danish director Lars von Trier is undoubtedly one of the world's most important and controversial filmmakers, and arguably so because of the depiction of women in his films. He has been criticized for subjecting his female characters to unacceptable levels of violence or reducing them to masochistic self-abnegation, as with Bess in Breaking the Waves, 'She' in Antichrist and Joe in Nymphomaniac. At other times, it is the women in his films who are dominant or break out in violence, as in his adaptation of Euripides' Medea, the conclusion of Dogville and perhaps throughout Nymphomaniac. Lars von Trier's Women confronts these dichotomies head on. Editors Rex Butler and David Denny do not take a position either for or against von Trier, but rather consider how both attitudes fall short of the real difficulty of his films, which may simply not conform to any kind of feminist or indeed anti-feminist politics as they are currently configured. Using Lacanian psychoanalysis and acknowledging the work of prior scholars on the films, Lars von Trier's Women reveals hidden resources for a renewed 'feminist' politics and social practice.
From AI to climate change, recent technological, ecological, cultural, and social transformations have unsettled established assumptions about the relationship between the human and the more-than-human world. Screening the Posthuman addresses a heterogenous body of twenty-first century films that turn to the figure of the "posthuman" as a means of exploring this development. Through close analyses of films as diverse as Kûki ningyô [Air Doll] (dir. Hirokazu Koreeda 2009), Testrol és lélekrol[On Body and Soul] (dir. Ildiko Enyedi 2017) and Nomadland (dir. Chloé Zhao 2020), this wide-ranging volume shows that, while often identified as the remit of science fiction, the "posthuman on screen" crosses filmic genres, national contexts, and industrial settings. In the process, posthuman cinema emphasizes humanity's entanglement in broader biological, technological, and social worlds and exposes new models of subjectivity, politics, community, relationality and desire. In advancing these arguments, Screening the Posthuman draws on scholarship associated with critical posthumanist theory-an ongoing project unified by a decentering of the "human". As the first systematic, full-length application of this body of scholarship to cinema, Screening the Posthuman advocates for a rigorous posthumanist critique that avoids both humanist nostalgia and transhumanist fantasy in its attention to the excitements and anxieties of posthuman existence.
This book is a unique study of the historical, theoretical, and cultural interpretations of ‘madness’ including interviews with those who have experiences of ‘madness’. It takes a transdisciplinary approach, employing historical, psychological, and sociological perspectives through an intersectional lens. This work explains how the prioritization of thinking over feeling in Western thought means the transrational imagination has frequently been negated in tackling mental health with detrimental results. This book, therefore, examines creative media, especially film, as a transrational form of human expression for healing and wellbeing, along with television, theatre, social media, music, and computer games. ‘Madness’ with regards to gender, sexuality, adolescence, and class in media and film is interrogated, as well as ‘madness’ and race through a focus on colonialism, post-colonialism, and psychiatry. It analyses group psychosis, including celebrity culture, and the ‘madness’ of leaders and gurus. This book challenges the lasting influence of the Age of Reason by furthering our understanding of the value of transrationality and the diverse ways of being human.
Critical Approaches to Sjón: North of the Sun is the first English-language book-length study of the works of the Icelandic contemporary poet Sjón (Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson, b. 1962), who is considered by some to be Iceland’s most distinctive and multifaceted contemporary author. This collection of essays introduces readers to Sjón’s rich body of writing and its transmedial and stylistic range, cultural breadth, thematic diversity, and intellectual depth. Essays in the volume have been brought together from around the world and cover Sjóns's beginnings as a neo-surrealist performance artist and poet (translated into over 20 languages), his career as a novelist (translated into over 30 languages), and his collaborations with translators, singer-songwriters, film directors, and other writers. Approaches range from the narratological, historical, ethical, epistemological, and mythological to theoretical methodologies such as thing theory, queer theory, disability studies, and ecocriticism.
The Danish director Lars von Trier is undoubtedly one of the world's most important and controversial filmmakers, and arguably so because of the depiction of women in his films. He has been criticized for subjecting his female characters to unacceptable levels of violence or reducing them to masochistic self-abnegation, as with Bess in Breaking the Waves, 'She' in Antichrist and Joe in Nymphomaniac. At other times, it is the women in his films who are dominant or break out in violence, as in his adaptation of Euripides' Medea, the conclusion of Dogville and perhaps throughout Nymphomaniac. Lars von Trier's Women confronts these dichotomies head on. Editors Rex Butler and David Denny do not take a position either for or against von Trier, but rather consider how both attitudes fall short of the real difficulty of his films, which may simply not conform to any kind of feminist or indeed anti-feminist politics as they are currently configured. Using Lacanian psychoanalysis and acknowledging the work of prior scholars on the films, Lars von Trier's Women reveals hidden resources for a renewed 'feminist' politics and social practice.
This book is the first to focus on the role of European television crime drama on the international market. As a genre, the television crime drama has enjoyed a long and successful career, routinely serving as a prism from which to observe the local, national and even transnational issues that are prevalent in society. This extensive volume explores a wide range of countries, from the US to European countries such as Spain, Italy, the Scandinavian countries, Germany, England and Wales, in order to reveal the very currencies that are at work in the global production and circulation of the TV crime drama. The chapters, all written by leading television and crime fiction scholars, provide readings of crime dramas such as the Swedish-Danish The Bridge, the Welsh Hinterland, the Spanish Under Suspicion, the Italian Gomorrah, the German Tatort and the Turkish Cinayet. By examining both European texts and the ‘European-ness’ of various international dramas, this book ultimately demonstrates that transnationalism is at the very core of TV crime drama in Europe and beyond.