Download or read book Lars von Trier Beyond Depression written by Linda Badley and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Lars Von Trier written by Jack Stevenson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the international success of Breaking the Waves (1996) and Dancer in the Dark (2000), Lars von Trier has established himself as a one of the most provocative and daring film directors working today. The founding father of Dogma 95, he made the movement's most controversial film, The Idiots (1998), and has played a leading role in the recent resurgence of Danish cinema. Yet despite his success, von Trier remains something of an polarising and enigmatic figure hailed as the new Godard by some and a charlatan by others. In this new study, Jack Stevenson explores the achievements as well as the paradoxes of Lars von Trier, assessing his life, work, and critical reception. The book follows von Trier from his early life as a troubled son of 'Cultural Radical' parents through to his student days at the Danish Film School, diligently spent making films that were as innovative and disturbing as his later features have proved to be. These films (consisting of the Europa and Gold-Hearted trilogies) are fully examined together with considerations of his creative detours into other media and his current work in progress, Dogville. Based in Denmark, the author brings a unique perspective to Lars von Trier creating a multi-dimensional portrait of the director. Utilising sources heretofore unavailable in English, Stevenson's lively yet fact-filled narrative is accessible to students and film enthusiasts alike. The book is indispensable to anyone interested in Lars von Trier and the broader issues that surround modern Danish film and its current renaissance.
Download or read book Playing the Waves written by Jan Simons and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dogma 95, the avant-garde filmmaking movement founded by the Danish director Lars von Trier and three of his fellow directors, was launched in 1995 at an elite cinema conference in Paris—when von Trier was called upon to speak about the future of film but instead showered the audience with pamphlets announcing the new movement and its manifesto. A refreshingly original critical commentary on the director and his practice, Playing the Waves is a paramount addition to one of new media’s most provocative genres: games and gaming. Playing the Waves cleverly puns on the title of one of von Trier’s most famous features and argues that Dogma 95, like much of the director’s low-budget realist productions, is a game that takes cinema beyond the traditional confines of film aesthetics and dramatic rules. Simons articulates the ways in which von Trier redefines the practice of filmmaking as a rule-bound activity, and stipulates the forms and structures of games von Trier brings to bear on his films, as well as the sobering lessons he draws from economic and evolutionary game theory. Much like the director’s films, this fascinating volume takes the traditional point of view of film theory and film aesthetics to the next level and demonstrates we have much to learn from the perspective of game studies and game theory.
Download or read book Interviews written by Jan Lumholdt and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2003 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of interviews with the most intriguing film director to emerge in Denmark since the days of his great mentor in spirit Carl Theodor Dreyer
Download or read book The Films of Lars von Trier and Philosophy written by José A. Haro and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-08-31 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Lars Von Trier written by Linda Badley and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Politics as Form in Lars Von Trier written by Angelos Koutsourakis and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-10-24 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first study that employs a materialist framework to discuss the political implications of form in the films of Lars von Trier. Focusing mainly on early films, Politics as Form in Lars von Trier identifies recurring formal elements in von Trier s oeuvre and discusses the formal complexity of his films under the rubric of the post-Brechtian. Through an in depth formal analysis, the book shows that Brecht is more important to von Trier s work than what most critics seem to acknowledge and deems von Trier as a dialectical filmmaker. This study draws on many untranslated resources and features an interview with Lars von Trier, and another one with his mentor the great Danish director Jørgen Leth.
Download or read book Lars von Trier s Cinema written by Rebecca Ver Straten-McSparran and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-12 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a bold and dynamic examination of Lars von Trier’s cinema by interweaving philosophy and theology with close attention to aesthetics through style and narrative. It explores the prophetic voice of von Trier's films, juxtaposing them with Ezekiel's prophecy and Ricoeur’s symbols of evil, myth, and hermeneutics of revelation. The films of Lars von Trier are categorized as extreme cinema, inducing trauma and emotional rupture rarely paralleled, while challenging audiences to respond in new ways. This volume argues that the spiritual, biblical content of the films holds a key to understanding von Trier’s oeuvre of excess. Spiritual conflict is the mechanism that unpacks the films’ notorious excess with explosive, centrifugal force. By confronting the spectator with spiritual conflict through evil, von Trier's films truthfully and prophetically expose the spectator’s complicity in personal and structural evil, forcing self-examination through theological themes, analogous to the prophetic voice of the transgressive Hebrew prophet Ezekiel, his prophecy, and its form of delivery. Placed in context with the prophetic voices of Dante, Milton, Dostoyevsky, O’Connor, and Tarkovsky, this volume offers a theoretical framework beyond von Trier. It will be of great interest to scholars in Film Studies, Film and Philosophy, Film and Theology.
Download or read book The Cinema of Lars Von Trier written by Caroline Bainbridge and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lars von Trier is the most controversial figure of contemporary European cinema. This volume is the first book to analyse in depth the changes he has brought to modern film. Since founding the back-to-basics Dogme philosophy of filmmaking in 1995, von Trier's name has become a by-word for taboo-breaking cinema. As a director, he has courted media controversy through films such as The Idiots (1998), with its unsimulated sex and non-conformist politics, and through his complex relationships with actresses such as Bj'rk and Nicole Kidman, from whom he coaxed career-best performances in Dancer in the Dark (2000) and Dogville (2003) respectively. Analysing these films as well as recent works such as The Five Obstructions (2004) from a psychoanalytic perspective, it forges a new understanding of the founder of Dogme 95 as a great democratiser of cinema in the digital age, presenting von Trier as one of the most daring cinematic exponents of postmodern politics and satire.
Download or read book Lars von Trier s Women written by Rex Butler and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-11-17 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Cinematic Nihilism written by John Marmysz and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-26 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through case studies of popular films, including Prometheus, The Dark Knight Rises, Dawn of the Dead and The Human Centipede, this book re-emphasises the constructive potential of cinematic nihilism.
Download or read book Politics Theory and Film written by Bonnie Honig and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-26 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lars von Trier's intense, disturbing, and sometimes funny films have led many to condemn him as misogynist or misanthropic. The same films inspire this collection's reflections on how our fears and desires regarding gender, power, race, finitude, family, and fate often thwart -- and sometimes feed -- our best democratic aspirations. The essays in this volume attend to von Trier's role as provocateur, as well as to his films' techniques, topics, and storytelling. Where others accuse von Trier of being clichéd, the editors argue that he intensifies the "clichés of our times" in ways that direct our political energies towards apprehending and repairing a shattered world. The book is certainly for von Trier lovers and haters but, at the same time, political, critical, and feminist theorists entirely unfamiliar with von Trier's films will find this volume's essays of interest. Most of the contributors tarry with von Trier to develop new readings of major thinkers and writers, including Agamben, Bataille, Beauvoir, Benjamin, Deleuze, Euripides, Freud, Kierkegaard, Ranciére, Nietzsche, Winnicott, and many more. Von Trier is both central and irrelevant to much of this work. Writing from the fields of classics, literature, gender studies, philosophy, film and political theory, the authors stage an interdisciplinary intervention in film studies.
Download or read book New Punk Cinema written by Nicholas Rombes and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Punk Cinema is the first book to examine a new breed of film that is indebted to the punk spirit of experimentation, do-it-yourself ethos, and an uneasy, often defiant relationship with the mainstream. An array of established and emerging scholars trace and map the contours of new punk cinema, from its roots in neorealism and the French New Wave, to its flowering in the work of Lars von Trier and the Dogma 95 movement. Subsequent chapters explore the potentially democratic and even anarchic forces of digital filmmaking, the influences of hypertext and other new media, the increased role of the viewer in arranging and manipulating the chronology of a film, and the role of new punk cinema in plotting a course beyond the postmodern. The book examines a range of films, including The Blair Witch Project, Time Code, Run Lola Run, Memento, The Celebration, Gummo, and Requiem for a Dream.New Punk Cinema is ideal for classroom use at the undergraduate and graduate levels, as well as for film scholars interested in fresh approaches to the emergence of this vital new turn in cinema.Features* Offers a comprehensive examination of the term 'new punk' cinema.* Provides several new approaches for the study of digital cinema.* Includes close analysis of several key new punk films and directors.
Download or read book Version Control written by Dexter Palmer and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-01-10 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although Rebecca Wright has pieced her life back together after a major tragedy, she can’t shake a sense that the world around her feels off-kilter. Meanwhile, her husband’s dedication to his invention, “the causality violation device” (which he would greatly prefer you not call a time machine) has effectively stalled his career—but he may be closer to success than either of them can possibly imagine. Emotionally powerful and wickedly intelligent, Version Control is a stunningly prescient novel about the effects of science and technology on our lives, our friendships, and our sense of self that will alter the way you see the future—and the present.
Download or read book Woman in Lars von Trier s Cinema 1996 2014 written by Ahmed Elbeshlawy and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-10-11 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses the figure of Woman in Lars von Trier’s distinctive cinematic productions from 1996 to 2014. It takes the notorious legacy of violence against women in von Trier’s cinema beyond the perceived gender division, elevating the director’s image above being a mere provocateur. By raising fundamental questions about woman, sexuality, and desire, Elbeshlawy shows that Trier’s cinematic Woman is an attempt at creating an image of a genderless subject that is not inhibited by the confines of ideology and culture. But this attempt is perennially ill-fated. And it is this failure that not only fosters viewing enjoyment but also gives the films their political importance, elevating them above both commendations and condemnations of feminist discourse.
Download or read book Dancer in the Dark written by Lars von Trier and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Immanent Frames written by John Caruana and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For some time now, thinkers across the humanities and social sciences have increasingly called into question the once-dominant view of the relationship between modernity and secularism, prompting some to speak of a "postsecular turn." Until now, film studies has largely been silent about this development, even though cinema itself has been a major vehicle for such reflection. This fact became inescapable in 2011 when Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life and Lars von Trier's Melancholia were released within days of each other. While these two audacious and controversial films present seemingly opposite perspectives—the former a thoughtful meditation on faith, the latter a portrayal of nontriumphalist atheism—together they raise critical questions about transcendence and immanence in modern life. These films are, however, only the most conspicuous of a growing body of works that call forth similar and related questions—what this collection aptly calls "postsecular cinema." Taking the nearly simultaneous release of The Tree of Life and Melancholia as its starting point and framing device, this pioneering collection sets out to establish the idea of postsecular cinema as a distinct body of films and a viable critical category. Adopting a film-philosophy approach, one group of essays examines Malick's and von Trier's films, while another looks at works by Chantal Akerman, Denys Arcand, the Dardenne brothers, and John Michael McDonagh, among others. The volume closes with two important interviews with Luc Dardenne and Jean-Luc Nancy that invite us to reflect more deeply on some of the central concerns of postsecular cinema.
