Lars von Trier

[domino harvey]

Do we know which discs do not have SDH English subtitles? From what I've watched so far, only The House That Jack Built doesn't (and stuff like Europa doesn't either, if it already has English cc subs for non-English language, but that means the English isn't subbed)

Their newly encoded disc appear to have English subs for the foreign parts and the ones they reused are without subs. This and the occasionally strong difference in encoding quality compared to the excellent new discs makes them being lazy here a little frustrating. This is what I see in the set:

The Orchid Gardener - English Subtitles
The Element of Crime - no subs (fully English)
Epidemic - partial English Subtitles
Medea - English Subtitles
Europa - partial English Subtitles
Breaking the Waves - no subs (old disc)
The Idiots - English Subtitles
Dogville - English SDH Subtitles
The Five Obstructions - English Subtitles
Manderlay - English SDH Subtitles
The Boss of it All - English Subtitles
Antichrist - no subs (old disc)
Melancholia - English SDH Subtitles
Nymphomaniac - no subs (old discs)
The House that Jack Built - no subs (old discs)

Thanks for this rundown nicolas. I finally started going through this set and found the Element of Crime unnecessarily hard to comprehend without English subtitles. Thankfully I don't think it really matters if you miss a line or word here or there for a film this (playfully) obtuse, but it was still annoying, especially since we know subs exist from other editions of it. For anyone who wants to read more about the film, Colin's got some great extended thoughts on the film from elsewhere on the forum that I highly recommend searching for, by the way

[colinr0380]

Thanks for the kind words domino! Although I have to admit to having been helped enormously in getting my head around Element of Crime by the Stig Bjorkman and Peter Schepelern commentary, which would place high on my list of all time best commentaries! The Element of Crime has really grown on me over multiple re-watches, especially when now it seems like a savage critique of 'echo chambers' and people who become so trapped by the intellectual prisons that they have constructed for themselves that not only can they not view a situation from a different perspective, they actively railroad themselves into performing some of the most horrible acts of all to avoid having to do so. Because that's what is expected if you follow that train of thought to its 'logical' conclusion. In The Element of Crime it is:

Spoilers for The Element of CrimeShow

A detective who is so in thrall to his mentor who taught him everything that he knows that the mentor is the first person he turns to in order to understand the mindset of a child murderer. However he is left alone to pore through the work left behind after his mentor inexplicably commits suicide. So he uses his mentor's teachings to set up sting situations and bait the killer into revealing themselves, only the killer never comes. Eventually things are so dire that, to protect the thesis of his mentor from being exposed as completely wrongheaded, Fisher has to actively step in and commit the final child murder himself, to ensure that the 'pattern' remains unbroken. Then we get the ultimate irony that Fisher's mentor was the original murderer; that this was why his mentor had such a 'privileged insight' into the mind of a killer and why the murders so 'suddenly' stopped; and that Fisher wasn't just his idolising protege but eventually also his unwitting accomplice too! And may also have accidentally provided his mentor with the perfect alibi, as how could the mentor have killed that final girl?

It also makes the compsed to within an inch of their lives images feel meaningful for being presented in that fashion, as if a person does not have any interest or empathy for other people (or animals) as anything more than manipulatable puppets in their private little psychodramas (psycho-dioramas?), then it may be all too easy to end up committing some of the acts that occur in this film (and maybe is a self-critique by Von Trier?). And the flashback under hypnosis structure ironic too - is this Fisher flashing back in prison, or has he just been put on 'extended leave of absence' to take a trip to the Middle East and intellectualise about his own crimes? We're seeing a man who doesn't understand - doesn't want to understand - his part in events having his confusing account of what happened being dragged out of him. One where we see the spirit animal in the gnomic final shot, but never go deeper and actually understand what that means.

Continuing in that vein of thought, that makes Fisher in The Element of Crime a very important early example of perhaps one of Von Trier's most important character types: the ineffectual intellectual. We see that character type crop up in both of the 'Europe' films, with the doctor (and the filmmakers!) in Epidemic spreading the infection wider; and the main character being manipulated by everyone else in Europa. Everyone in the commune situation of The Idiots is in the process of self-justifying their own actions. There is the doctor in Breaking The Waves who dismisses Bess's 'God voice', as does her Church, because they're trapped within their own paradigms. The completely useless whilst trying to pretend they are in control of the situation until the bitterest of ends Paul Bettany character in Dogville turns into Grace herself being the deluded one in Manderley. Willem Dafoe's character in Antichrist, whose attempts to intellectualise the situation are completely overwhelmed by the irrational. Stig Helmer in The Kingdom, who is so annoyed about the anti-medical and utterly irrational ideas that are infecting every corner of his hospital that ironically he ends up turning to voodoo to counter it! Keifer Sutherland's character in Melancholia who tries to remain in control of the situation of the approaching planet until it becomes too big to deny any more, and in the most selfish move in the whole film commits suicide rather than remaining with his family until the end. The whole of Matt Dillon's character in the The House That Jack Built. Charlotte Gainsbourg's and especially Stellan Skarsgard's character in Nymphomaniac, with their conversations being the heart of that film. They're all doing damage to others, but eventually end up hurting themselves the most because they cannot adapt to the idea of being made powerless by having their worldview challenged by outside forces.

And maybe the most viciously scathing of all (because its a documentary) is Jorgen Leth in The Five Obstructions, where at one point Von Trier gets him to recreate his short film about eating in the street of a third world country, with all the 'real people' separated but visible through a plastic sheet barrier. Its like Von Trier is the mentor in that instance, and Leth is Fisher desperately trying to follow Von Trier's gnomically given (and maybe self-harming) instructions!

[domino harvey]

Yes, I think that's a good reading of a through-line through many of von Trier's films (though I haven't seen all of your examples-- yet! 2025 is a year of me filling in auteur gaps, so hopefully I'll be returning to this thread more as the year goes on), and I think there's an important distinction in the target being "ineffectual intellectuals" as you put it versus a general anti-intellectualism. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why a puckish intellectual like Zizek finds so much of interest in von Trier, because there's a kind of exasperation at the limitations of most "authorities" that comes from respecting the intellectual tradition they are supposed to represent. To add to your examples, I think Gainsbourg too in Antichrist is targeted even further along these lines, as here we have the excessive pursuit of knowledge itself as a Bad Thing: she investigated witches so much she became one, essentially. In a sense it's the ultimate pessimism: the deeper you look, the less there is to comfort you. No answers, no hope.

And while it's inscrutability can be frustrating at times, I enjoyed the Element of Crime on a kind of instinctual level of aesthetics and homage, which is exactly where I think it was pitched. Truly this is Touch of Evil by way of Tarkovsky, and that's not as reductionist as these kind of comparisons often are because regardless of its anticedents it truly takes a madman to make a film like this as your debut (and, more to the point, to get someone to fund and distribute it). I do wonder if renowned movie buff John Vanderslice's "Continuation" isn't in some part inspired by the film as well

[colinr0380]

I’m still wrestling with a lot of the ideas in Lars von Trier’s films so I cannot be too confident in my readings of them as yet, but I do wonder whether beyond opposing forces of intellectual versus instinctual, we are seeing ‘order’ and ‘disorder’ clashing together, and maybe without one overriding the other as to how ‘correct’ it should be seen as (though I would guess that Von Trier loves the disruptive element overturning bourgeoisie norms!) Every action getting its own equal and opposite reaction maybe!

A lot of the characters who seem to be over confident in their roles in the world get undermined, or reveal their insecurities and/or fundamental corruption. Whilst those who never really fit in (or were allowed to fit in) are usually sympathised with a lot more in a Lars von Trier film, though they are usually the most victimised of all! And there is often that difficult, somewhat uncomfortably awkward sense (almost to a masochistic extent) that some of our victimised main characters are complicit in allowing themselves to be victimised, as part of a kind of mortification ritual on their way to a redemption that some of the more Earth-bound characters will never attain, or even have a notion was ever a goal in the first place! “All of us are in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde!

I’m thinking of something like the contrast between the beatifically assured on the path that she has set for herself Selma in Dancer In The Dark whose ‘downfall’ is caused by David Morse’s policeman neighbour being so desperate for money in order to keep up the social status and appearance of being financially afloat to his wife that he tries to steal from Selma, and eventually after the tussle and accidental first gunshot begging her to finish him off by killing him in order to preserve his reputation (and in the process turn him into the innocent victim and Selma purely into an irredeemable killer, eventually with his respected policeman status and questions of “why would he need to steal your money anyway?” being thrown at Selma as indictments of her own character during the trial)

Or say the commune in The Idiots where having a sense of rules to govern the group freak outs becomes the way of the individual characters losing themselves in transgressive behaviour without having to take full responsibility for the consequences of their liberation. Until certain boundaries are crossed and the commune collapses, leaving all the characters struggling for reasons to self-justify their actions, or ennoble their Idiot lifestyles. Because if they do not have a manifesto, they’re just individual crazies wandering the streets and making nuisances of themselves. They’re too invested now to be able to give up on the ideas, even though the commune has obviously collapsed, and so need a way to make their actions have meaning and justification again, back in the ‘normal’ world.

But I am also not sure if one side or the other in the order versus chaos/rational versus irrational/intellectual versus instinctual clashes takes full primacy in Von Trier’s work. There feels like there is something more going on than just sympathy for the underdog, or the beatific innocent, or the abused victim of circumstances. The situations seem more symbiotic, where you cannot have utter chaos without first having some order to tear down to create that chaos! And you cannot create order again without having utter disorder to be able to bring some semblance of sense back to!

(Or put in other terms God cannot exist without the Devil, but that means that even in the most hellish depths (such as in those plumbed in The House That Jack Built) there is the implicit acknowledgement of the contrast that it proves that heaven must therefore exist too. If only the heaven that exists in the character’s mind. Similarly, Atheism cannot exist without organised religion, in the sense that denying God implicitly suggests the presence of a God to vociferously deny! Similarly you can't achieve martyr status without having an oppressor to do the martyring. Utter indifference is perhaps the more deadly, true inertia of nothing having any meaning, because that contains the notion that nothing will change, or offer the possibility of change)

You need the structure of rules (like the Dogme manifesto) to then make an impact by breaking those rules. Otherwise you’re just acting free-form lunatic! The contrast seems key, and perhaps our sympathies as an audience are meant not to particularly lie with either side in those conflicts but more in a detached top-down God-like POV. Such as in Melancholia where any response to impending annihilation is sort of irrelevant on the cosmic level, yet remains meaningful for the individual characters. The characters may never be ‘understood’ by the bigger forces in the world – may even be damned by them and swept from the annals of history, or were never significant enough to have ever been more than a blip on the historical record in the first place – but they still have (or had) a place in the world, and the ability to see it their own way, and the films respect and even elevate that aspect into significance that holds as much, if not more, weight than any tangible threat coming from the outside. Although even that seems to be approached as a kind of amoral thing in itself: the characters may be the ultimate victim but able to transcend through suffering (of themselves or others) or it may just be their own entirely deluded and self-created insane response to the pressures of the world around them. Were they ‘driven that way’ or would they always have had an idiosyncratic approach to the world in any event?

Would Bess have always challenged her Church leaders not out of any active design but through the simple fact of her existence? Would Selma have had a tendency to turn everything into musical numbers and drift off into reveries whatever she did in her life? Would Jack always have had that urge to kill inside him? And would the main character in Nymphomaniac always been on the path to searching out more and more partners?

In some ways that makes The House That Jack Built and Nymphomaniac into a fascinating matched pair capping off Von Trier’s filmography, where they are encompassing entire lives but also as much about the characters self-‘autobiographising’/self-mythologising as they are about how the world around them allowed them to foster and provide fodder for their interests. Giant intellectual exercises which through the gaps and inconsistencies (and debates) reveal the folly of order as a construct and a kind of self-willed delusion imposed onto a situation (For one’s own comfort? That there was a purpose to it all, to any of it? One that at the end of things might be seen and acknowledged as having been done for a necessary reason by a Higher Power?), but also suggest how that is another beautiful aspect of the human condition. Like seeing the shapes of objects in clouds, its an imposition (potentially a dangerous one if taken too far, or without thought for how it affects others) and finding meaning where there may have been none intended, but just what human beings do to make sense of their place in the world.

[pianocrash]

I do wonder if renowned movie buff John Vanderslice's "Continuation" isn't in some part inspired by the film as well

JV would constantly mention this film in his instagram stories before his account got "Zucked" (his words, not mine). Sadly, his mind seems to have ventured into a no-man's land of memelordism & silk road drugs in the past year or so, and I think the guy who wrote all those great songs is a long way's gone at this point.

[domino harvey]

I do wonder if renowned movie buff John Vanderslice's "Continuation" isn't in some part inspired by the film as well

JV would constantly mention this film in his instagram stories before his account got "Zucked" (his words, not mine). Sadly, his mind seems to have ventured into a no-man's land of memelordism & silk road drugs in the past year or so, and I think the guy who wrote all those great songs is a long way's gone at this point.

That's too bad. I saw him with Okkervil River (I can't remember which was the headliner) almost two decades ago and he came out and watched their set next to me and my friend and spent the whole time talking with us, was a super nice guy. I also fondly remember how in the early days of mp3, he offered all of his albums as free high quality downloads on his website-- always wondered how his label let him do that!

Colin, interesting thoughts as always. I haven't seen most of your examples though, so I'll have to wait to weigh in more until I catch up!

[domino harvey]

Von Trier has moved into an assisted living facility

[colinr0380]

As someone who lived with a father who had Parkinsons, I found out a lot about it (more than I ever really wanted to know) over that period. Unfortunately including that life expentancy is about a decade at most from initial diagnosis, and usually the official diagnosis is rather belated because tremors and suchlike have to have developed into a serious and noticeable issue (In my father's case it was interfering with him driving to a such an extent it forced it into having to be acknowledged. And it tracked almost exactly for my dad from 2012 to 2021). So as soon as von Trier revealed his diagnosis in 2022, and then those retrospective boxsets started appearing, I was preparing myself for this kind of unfortunate news (also I would suspect that business about von Trier advertising for a partner a couple of years ago may have been more about someone to help with activities of daily living as much as anything else)

[Captain Paranoia]

If we lose Von Trier this year, then I don't want to imagine who else is next, and it will only further prove how awful this year has been with the loss of brilliant artists.

[colinr0380]

The parallels between The Kindgom: Exodus and Twin Peaks: The Return are quite striking in that sense, as being late period long-form works revisiting and in some ways bidding farewell to significant previous works of a career.