Directing the Actors

Now that you’ve bought your new video camera and you are ready to venture into the vast world of movie making you will need to know how to direct the actors. Directing actors is a strange process as you expect so much from them and yet you do not know them as people, at least not in the beginning.  It is imperative to meet them one on one as soon as possible in order to feel comfortable around each other.  Start by telling each other the truth and beginning the process of explaining the subtext, and fitting the uniqueness of the actor into the character.  A lot of work is needed, even for very little dialogue, but the care of every detail is the essence of filmmaking.  By concentrating on getting the mind of the actor focused, and getting the best of every line is the start of potentially good work.

The mind body connection is focussing on behaviour and letting the body guide the mind.  Good acting is based on experience in life; to emulate past rejection, love, aggression, greed, and lust.  Each time we portray the character we take from our past history.  Becoming a character means building a past history, and using this as a motivation to behaviour.  When we are in character we can access our own history, but from the viewpoint of the character.  It is when the actor literally becomes a character that the audience slips from reality.  The behaviour is the key to the character and the cue to the dialogue.  “To interpret is to bring out the meaning by artistic representation, and can be a very personal thing.”† It is when actors trust that they are willing to be vulnerable – trust themselves, their character and the director.

The techniques and skills needed by a director when working with an actor or actress are considerable.

Kinesics is the study of significant connection between physical behaviour and the spoken language.  Body movements can be understood like a language.  And are strong indicators of how one feels.  Body movements, gestures, the posture of someone, facial expressions, and most importantly eye contact.  Actors spend a lot of time understanding how their body language appear to an audience, and in doing so learn to manipulate this language to their benefit.  All cinematic dialogue must have a motivation, as all actions do.   Why would someone say that, how would they say it, what emotions are they feeling and what is their relationship with the person they are talking to.  By analysing the motivations, the behaviour will make sense and the dialogue will follow naturally.  With a script, the director must know the motivations of how his characters behave so he can translate this subtext to the actors.

Certain actions can be used to stimulate emotional memory, putting the actor immediately into character.  Anthony Hopkins in ‘The Remains Of The Day’ held a certain posture that is indefinable because it was a combination of subservience and aristocracy. I imagine him slowly becoming his character as he puts on his costumes and makeup – slowly coaxing him, and assuming slight mannerisms.  Like all great actors it is a question of intense concentration “using their work to purge themselves of their inner demons”.†

It is a complex process assuming the role of another person.  The character allows the actor a place to go to in their mind, and also allows them to be less self-conscious as they maintain focus by actually doing what their characters would do.  “Uncovering a character’s identity is far simpler than uncovering ones’ own.  Some of the most provocative moments of self discovery comes from the observation of others.” † It is not only the lines it is the subtext, blocking, camera movements, how the character moves, vocal characteristics, and vocal interference.  The only way is for the actor to completely understand and focus; then the complexity melts and he performs with truth.  The way to do this is to guide the actor into a rhythm of behaviour cued by emotional memory.  To act with a behaviour so that the lines become natural.   The whole process is a collaboration of talent and inspiration that lets a filmmaker create “an image of man in his many aspects”. †

Rabiger. Chapter 29 – Directing the actors – page 381

•    †Internet Resource
•    Mental focus leads to overall relaxation of mind and body, which leads to more realistic acting.
•    Watch actors for any sort of body language that tells you they are tense
•    When tense reassure and re-direct their attention.
•    An emotional memory is a task that will jar the actor back into character.
•    The body expresses the mind; no inner state exists without outward evidence.
•    When the mind is occupied – unconsciously the body will express what his character feels. “Directing is then arriving at a characters true state of mind, and helping the actor develop the actions that accompany it.”†

•    Explore what the characters will do in their circumstances.  Small behaviours and actions are incredibly important.  A simple gesture can effectively be the whole subtext of a scene.
•    A tear, a look, a movement of the hand.
•    Insecurity, fear, moods on the day, and circumstances can lead to a loss of focus.  Redirect their attention, reassure, get them to focus on something small and real.
•    Every real emotion is visible, so covering up an emotion is also visible.  Intense focus on the character will take care of self-consciousness.  Improvisation and rehearsals breakdown these barriers.  Encourage the actors to find their own solutions never show them how to act (this takes away the uniqueness of the actor).  Focus your actor on the character, never say be yourself, avoid negative instruction of any kind, be clever, use suggestions and guidance.
•    Create a small bubble where the crew does not exist. Never let them look at the camera.
•    Unfamiliar circumstances like filming cause people to fall back on their conditioning.  If this happens, use an emotional memory and behaviour to guide the actor back into character.

†Rabiger
Stripping the psychological obstacles away.

Ambiguity breeds imagination, it lets everyone make up the story, fill in the gaps, and reach their own conclusions.  To tell a story with the least amount of dialogue is the secret of a good director.  Behaviour and actions is the guidance of a good actor.  We as filmmakers, and visualists, want to tell stories, using images – with dialogue indicating directions but the images themselves telling the story.  It is for this reason that writing or finding a script of any value is so difficult.  “Directors employ a great deal of their ideology and history in a selection of scripts for production” Seager et al (1994). To portray a subtext of depth with simplicity and meaning is what filming is about.  Why overcomplicate if you can communicate with simple beautiful images.  Harold Aurman noted that the process of actively rehearsing actors, digging into the collective subconscious from which substantial subtexts are derived, is eventually absorbed into the production.  Once you have a subtext for a script that you believe in, the role of casing is facilitated in that you are now searching for a character in amongst the actors.  The director’s task is to strip away the psychological obstacles that prevent the actors from being.

As a director you must believe in the writing and acting before you even have a chance of creating something worthwhile.  “The collaboration between the director, performers and crew is at its most personal when its creators and receivers are challenged to question the collage of character elements present.”† When the actor becomes the character, and move about his space, his mind will simply follow his actions and become one.  The director guides him into the role.  This oneness of actor, director, and character is when the film becomes timeless and we are immersed in the make-believe.  When a director and actor let the audience feel a pure emotion, through a character, they expose themselves and their vulnerabilities.  The audience can sense this, a shared social response, and in this response the director has succeeded.
†Rabiger

“There can be no true act without living”. Stanislavski

The artist uses his work as a distorted mirror image of himself, and in doing so clarify aspects of their own existence.  The director, as artist, guides actors into the interpretation of the story.  The director chooses actors that reflect his inner vision of the character, which in essence is he.  The actor, as artist, uses his interpretation of the character to reflect a part of his identity.  This focus and concentration of creating a character is the most important part in the relationship of the director and actor.  For it removes the layers of protection, lets the mind flow naturally, and removes the barrier of self-consciousness. The mind and the body becomes one.

Roberto Rossellini 1906

If manipulated in a subtle way, Neorealism transcends the barrier of reality and fantasy.   It makes stories out of real life.  The world becomes a stage set and the people its actors.  It is such a simple and complex idea – detaching yourself and looking at the world from another angle, the visualisation of seeing beauty in the normal world.  Joseph Sudek, the Czechoslovakian photographed through his studio window into the garden for decades.  Through the mist, rain, and snow, came abstract black and white photos of a pure intensity.  He accomplished the feat of seeing the extraordinary in ordinary.  The Neorealists were very similar in this way of seeing.  They reacted to what was happening around them, and dealt with it in an artistic way. They expressed, through an almost documentary style, stories of dignity.  In their realm each expressed them individually but were united in a common purpose.  “To view Italy without preconceptions and develop a more honest, ethical, but no less poetic cinematic language.” ¹ It is without a doubt Visconti, Rossalini, and De Sica were key individuals in its recognition as a movement.  The moment in Italian cinema of Neorealism is considered an artistic evolution in artistic filmmaking.  “The Neorealists wanted to view their world afresh and form a new perspective, there by creating a ‘new reality’ through an artistic means.” ¹

Characteristics.

Neorealism has some general characteristics; “realistic treatment, popular setting, social content, historical actuality, and political commitment.” ² The movement is linked with poetic realism and the influence of Jean Renoir when he moved to Italy in 1942.  He had a lot of influence on Visconti’s ‘Obsession’.  The anti fascist resistance fostered Neorealism.  Italy’s infrastructure was in a mess with an urgency of people to understand what had happened and to move on.  It was an artistic response to the current situation and history.  In Visconti’s essay for ‘Cinema’ he states: “The most humble gesture of a man, his face, his hesitations and his impulses, in part poetry and life to the things which surround him and to the settings in which they take place.” ¹ They filmed the real human experience and explored social issues.  The settings were always real, and the locations and all supporting cast were generally real people.  The director slightly twisted the reality and added their own story into it.  To film without manipulation as authentically as possible, with compassion and non-judgement are all ground rules of Neorealism; however, each director put their own vision into their films and did manipulate them accordingly.  The presence of a camera already changes reality and then to add actors with a script, distorts it, but it is made from reality.

Une,  Due, Tre.

Visconti De Sica and Rosselini are the ‘auteurs’ ¹ of Neorealism.  The theories of the scriptwriter Zavanetti and the film critic André Bazin influenced them all.

Rossalini.

Rosselini’s masterpiece ‘Rome, Open City’ 1945 “alerted both public and the critics to a new direction in Italian film.” ¹ His film experience was in documentaries; moreover he cared about the consequences the war had on people.  Bringing together “fact and fiction, reality and artistic invention.” ³ He used voiceovers, news real footage, old film stock, and their existed always a documentary style in his filming.  He wanted a realistic stage to explore his thinking on the affects of war.  “Rome, Open City, moves freely from moments of documentary realism to others of theatrical intensity.” ¹ The movie was more a message of hope than one of cinema realism.  What was relevant how he accomplished the movie.  He made use with what he had and the result was exciting.  It meant that there were no boundary or constraints.  You didn’t need a huge budget, film sets, and everything used existed in real life.  You could gather life up and organise it to tell a story.

De Sica.

De Sica was a talented actor before directing and Zavattini wrote his best films.  He realised his work by careful planning being concerned with “transposing reality to realm of poetry.” ¹ He played with the illusion of reality in Italian society, combining non-professional location shooting and social themes.  De Sica proved that non-professional actors could give remarkable performances if chosen and guided carefully.  “The man in the street, particularly if he is directed by someone who is himself and actor, is raw material that can be moulded at will.” ¹ He proved his belief in normal people with the acting he got in ‘The Bicycle thief’.  There are moments of pure beauty in the simplest scenes, the father and son giving amazing portrayals.  De Sica used complex plots to portray Italian life and show humanity.  He created his own poetry and film.

Visconti.

Visconti was a gentleman from a famous family.  He was politically motivated, but his idealism sided more with arts.  Before the war he was involved with film intellectuals; during the war he was an antifascist who escaped from prison after capture.  He started with documentaries of resistance and liberation.  With backing from the Communist party he began filming ‘The Earth Trembles’.  He used extreme depths of field to create a very three-dimension world of activity combined with slow panning shots and long shots of objects.  He cinematography was beautiful, stark, and timeless in its rich black and white.  ‘The Earth Trembles’ deals with fisherman and their families.  He had no studio, no sets, no sound, and used lights only when necessary.  He would discuss the script with the people how best to portray themselves.  He was enriched by their talent, and was as authentic as possible to the people’s existence.  He, more than others, were a pure Neoralist.

A shift.

De Sica, Rosselini, Visconti and their films establish Neorealism as a movement.  Their work was followed by a secondary phase but it had drifted away from the original Neorealism.  De Sica’s later work even included pure fantasy as metaphors.  It is important to mention Antonioni, Zampa and De Santis to name a few.  There are many styles and interpretations but their inspiration was called Neorealism.  All of their work and thinking had huge implications, as Hollywood type movies suddenly did not matter.  People couldn’t make films with what they had and with a moral purpose.  The Neorealist’s greatest gift was freeing directors’ minds and taking away imaginary constraints.  A movie made in a local village, about humanity, with the bare minimum of production could be on a higher level than a Hollywood movie.  The movement liberated world cinema especially third world countries in Africa and Latin America.  “It gave them an aesthetic solution to expressing themselves.” ³

African and Latin American.

“African and Latin American cinema was in a shambles after the colonials pulled out, in a very similar situation to post-war Italy.” ³ They learned from the Italians how to make powerful movies from what you had.  The movement gave them a body of work to study and emulate.  It opened their eyes to a style that could retain its dignity.  “The Neorealists had a democratic spirit and they emphasised the social struggle, workers, and peasants.” ³ ‘The Bicycle Thief’ shows how the well being depends on a bicycle for survival.  This is very similar to a rural black family where a bicycle is independence and transportation.  The Africans and Latin Americans related to the style in its production, methods of shooting (often loosely framed), and it’s editing.  There were often long shots and the films moved at a slower pace.  They looked at details of reality, the simplicity of living, and human exchange.  It let the world know that you could make poetry from your own culture.

In conclusion.

Neorealism has affected world cinema to this day.   There was a revival in Italy itself in the late seventies.  Ermanno Olmi wrote, produced, directed and edited ‘The Tree Of The Wooden Clogs’.  Neorealism further went on the influence the Dogne movement of Denmark and America independent movies.  Neorealism seems the saviour of the art movie.  It frees the filmmaker from commercialism and gives him the power to challenge Hollywood movies with an alternative voice.  South Africans are at a pivotal point in history.  Neorealism offers a style that South African filmmakers can emulate.  There is a need for aesthetic movies about South Africans. We need to get world recognition as world-class filmmakers.  Neorealism is the working solution.  Grazie Italia.

Punk Auteur Lars von Trier

In the era after the Second World war, Scandinavia was admired for having the world’s most tolerant and provident societies. But Lars von Trier’s mother, who worked for the Danish social ministry in the 1950s and 1960s trying to find locations for institutions for people with learning difficulties, still encountered prejudice in affluent areas of Copenhagen where her family lived. Lars was born in 1956 and brought up in what he recalled as a culturally radical home where only strong emotions and religious faith were forbidden. He was a disturbed boy, who had ‘a phobia about everything but spiders, and he could easily develop that’; he particularly had an obsession with control, saying that he felt he had constantly to rearrange objects in his surroundings to avert disaster. At the age of 12 he ran away from school and then briefly attended a remedial day centre. He later referred to this as a ‘mental hospital’. Since he wanted to be mad, he felt ‘very much related to the outcast’.

Von Trier’s compulsions about arranging the world around him were a strong motivation for moviemaking, at first with a Super 8 camera given by his mother (he practised tracking shots on his bike) and later on 16mm at the Danish Film School. His education there gave him limitless opportunities for what he described as his ‘fetishistic attraction to film technology – it was just fantastic to be able to touch all these appliances’. This interest in technology set his early style in three student films (all won awards), his TV commercial output (he made dozens) and his first trilogy of features. He was capable of imitating the lighting, cutting and camera techniques of any of his favourite directors. His first widely-seen film, Europa (1991), was, remarked the critic Derek Malcolm, ‘Orson Welles crossed with Ingmar Bergman with a dash of Fellini stirred in … so dark a noir that even its shadows had shadows’. Von Trier acknowledged its debts to Hitchcock’s work of the 1940s but still liked issuing wild manifestos with his films, denouncing commercial cinema.

But after Europa, he left the cerebral, cinematic-referencing style behind. This was partly for personal reasons. He has said since that changes in his life shook its foundations. His father, who was Jewish, died; his mother told Lars that the dead man was not actually his father. Soon after, she also died. Von Trier was without identity (he had always thought himself of Jewish descent, if atheist and prone to flirtations with other religions), and without bearings. He had a breakdown. Moreover, during these uncertain years, his first marriage ended in divorce. Needing to earn money, von Trier undertook The Kingdom, a television soap-opera (later edited into a four-hour film released in 1994) influenced by David Lynch’s TV series Twin Peaks. Film commentator Jonathan Romney noted that it was done for the cash, but that it had ‘freed up a lot of energy for him’.
Von Trier’s 1995 film Breaking the Waves was five years in production. Its source was his favourite childhood book, a Danish fairy story, Golden Heart. It’s a tale of a girl who goes into the woods clothed and with bread in her pocket, and ends wandering naked, with nothing, but saying ‘I’ll be fine anyway’. Von Trier considered that to be the definition of martyrdom, of goodness – Breaking the Waves is a film about goodness. Paradox is its operating technique: it is a naturalistic movie about miracles; a Cinemascope film shot with a hand-held camera; a series of improvised and eccentrically-cut sequences, but the resulting film was electronically manipulated, transferred to video so that its colours could be enhanced, then returned to film stock.

At this point, Von Trier seems to have re-read his old manifestos as an inspiration for Dogma 95, both a group of movie-makers and a set of principles, ‘a vow of cinematic chastity’. Dogma 95 set out to establish a ‘new form of honest cinema’ without artificial lighting, added music or bought-in props. All films were to be shot in sequence with handheld cameras and the directors were not to be credited (von Trier had, much earlier on, said ‘The auteur concept was bourgeoise romanticism from the very start, and therefore false’). The Idiots (1998), was supposed to have been made under Dogma rules, involving improvisation – the actors followed their characters by imitating symptoms of cerebral palsy and Down’s syndrome (’spassing about to find their inner idiot’, their inner ‘unadulterated purity’). The improvisations went as far as filming genuine sexual reactions – ‘a hard-on,’ von Trier said, ‘has to be reality’. In fact the film failed to pass the censors for public showing in several countries. Von Trier’s newest work, Dancer in the Dark, was premièred at this year’s Cannes, where it won both the Palme d’Or and loud derision in the theatre. It certainly many Dogma 95 rules: although a melodrama about a Czech refugee put upon cruelly by fate, sickness, accident and the US law, it has prolonged fantasy sequences based on her entrancement by Hollywood musicals.

Von Trier’s next project has not yet been made public – although we’re not to worry, since ‘I get my ideas from my anxieties, and there’s enough material there for years’. However, we do know about his most peculiar concept, the film Dimension, which is being shot at a rate of two or three minutes annually and is scheduled for completion in 2024. ‘It’s a whodunit,’ von Trier explains wickedly, ‘but we don’t know who done it yet, because we don’t know who’s alive in 20 years’ time.

filmography

Orchidegartneren (1977)

Menthe La Bienheureuse (1979)

Nocturne (1981)

Sidste Detalje Den (1981)

Images of liberation / Befrielsesbilleder (1982)

Element of Crime / Forbrydelsens element (1984)

Epidemic (1987)

Medea (1988)

Europa / Zentropa (1991)

The Kingdom / Riget (1994)

Breaking The Waves (1996)

The Kingdom 2 / Riget (1997)

The Idiots

Dancer in the dark (1999)

D-Dag (TV) (2000)
Dogville

Dimension (2024)
Reviews:
“The morality of the police is no different from that of society.”

Original Title: Forbrydelsens Element
Starring: Michael Elphick, Esmond Knight, Me Me Lai, Jerold Wells
Director: Lars von Trier
Screenplay: Lars von Trier and Niels Vørsen
Cinematography: Michael Ellis

Sombre. Enigmatic. Brooding. Opaque. Ambitious. THE ELEMENT OF CRIME, Lars von Trier’s first film, inspires adjectives and defies explanation. It is a sophisticated experiment in film noir, at once homage and update and critique. It is the type of work that can only exist late in the life of a genre, when all the patterns are established and known, and so can be unstitched, picked apart, reworked.

It is similar, in many ways, to Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, also written in the mid 80s: both works take the building blocks of the detective story and rearrange them, turning them into the foundation for complex existential and epistemological explorations. We begin with detective Fisher (Michael Elphick), returning to England after years of exile in Cairo. He meets his former boss and mentor, Osborne (Esmond Knight), who has written a book called “The Element of Crime,” which outlines an investigative methodology based on identification with the criminal. Fisher is then called to investigate the latest in a series of brutal child murders. Naturally, he applies Osborne’s theories to the case.

He learns that the murders may or may not have been committed by a man named Harry Gray, who may or may not be dead, and who may or may not be preparing to kill again, to complete the (hypothetical) pattern he has begun. Fisher retraces Gray’s route from one murder scene to the next, trying to intuit the pattern and anticipate the next crime; as he does so, he begins to identify, on some level, with the (hypothetical) murderer. It’s complicated.

Superficially, much of what goes on follows the familiar routines of film noir: the detective is a loner with his own peculiar code of honour; he meets an elegant, sexy woman (Me Me Lai) who may be connected to the crime, and has an affair with her; his pursuit of the truth is haunted by a fatalistic sense of irrelevance. But traditional detective stories expand: as the detective meets new suspects, finds new evidence, a larger pattern emerges. The story grows as it goes. Here, the story contracts, shrinks, coils in on itself, becomes impacted and internal: Fisher becomes his own suspect, as he doubts his motivations, his capabilities, and perhaps his sanity.

Or maybe that’s not what happens. The film is ambiguous and non-literal to the point of being maddening. It encourages many interpretations, but ratifies none of them. Consider a scene in which we see Osborne on TV, answering questions about his theory-cum-book: “The element of crime,” he says, “sets up a series of mental exercises designed to improve our understanding of the behavioural pattern of the criminal.” Of course, the title of his book is also the title of the movie, and so as we hear this the meaning is doubled: Osborne is explaining how his book is to be read, and von Trier is explaining how his film is to be understood. Or is he? As we move on, the statement’s usefulness diminishes, and soon we disregard it as overly simplistic.

This postmodern play of frames within frames, texts within texts, readings within readings, is typical of the movie as a whole, which contrives to be at once dense with import and thoroughly pointless. You can follow the ideas through, try to unravel the tangled knots of significance, but why bother? Von Trier does not have a story of his own to tell: this a story about other stories. It is art theory disguised as art. There is no sense of engagement, of passion, of urgency: it is otiose and abstracted, and so its relationship to quotidian life is tangential at best. You could easily write a compelling thesis on THE ELEMENT OF CRIME, but only with difficulty could you extract any practical wisdom, any human insight.

This is partly because the story does not take place in anything like the “real” world, but rather in an impressionistic refraction of post-war industrial Europe, a post-holocaust England where the place names are German, a rain-dark realm of derelict edifices and unsmiling citizens. All is sepia-toned, slow-moving, shrouded in murk and shadow, seen from strange angles. Von Trier uses silence and slow motion with subtlety and precision, deepening the vivid sense of the unreal, and he returns again and again to particular images–broken glass, a horse, blue light–so that they take on elusive, oneiric significance.

It is a splendid piece of cinematic showmanship, a tour-de-force of atmosphere, and for ambience alone, the film has few equals–which is not surprising, given that von Trier is one of the finest directors at work today. But THE ELEMENT OF CRIME is all ambience, all potential: it envisions a world in which memorable things might happen, but then they do not. When he found his own stories to tell, in ZENTROPA and BREAKING THE WAVES and THE KINGDOM, von Trier came into his own. In this, his debut, he shows that he knows what to do with a camera, but not what to say with it. In the end, it’s hard to say if it’s a good film or a bad film. It’s complicated.
Review by David Dalgleish (posted on January 18th, 1999)

EUROPA
Date of publication: 07/03/1992

Zentropa” is a strange, haunting, labyrinthine film about a naive American in Germany just after the end of World War II. The American, named Leo, doesn’t quite know what he’s doing there; he has come to take a role in rebuilding the country because, he explains, it’s about time Germany was shown some kindness. No matter how that sounds, he is not a Nazi sympathizer or even particularly pro-German – just confused. His uncle, who works on the railroad, gets Leo a job as a conductor on a Pullman car, and he is gradually drawn into a whirlpool of Germany’s shames and secrets.

This process begins when Leo (Jean-Marc Barr) meets a sexy heiress (Barbara Sukowa) on the train. She seduces him and then takes him home to meet her family, which owns the company – named Zentropa – which manufactures the trains. These were the very trains that took Jews to their deaths during the war, but now they run a humdrum daily schedule, and the woman’s Uncle Kessler (Ernst-Hugo Jaregard) poses as another one of those good Germans who were only doing their jobs. Another guest at the house is a shadowy American intelligence man (Eddie Constantine, who has played the gravel-voiced Yankee in countless European productions). He has the goods on Uncle Kessler and can prove he was a war criminal, but it is all just confusing to Leo. Americans have been portrayed as naive innocents abroad for generations, but rarely has an American been more feckless than Leo, who goes back to his job on what increasingly looks like his own personal death train.

The narrative is told in a deliberately disjointed style by the film’s Danish director, Lars Von Trier, whose strength is in the film’s astonishing visuals. He shoots in black and white and color, he uses double-exposures, optical effects and trick photography, he places his characters inside a manylayered visual universe so that they sometimes seem like insects, caught between glass for our closer examination.

The movie is symbolic, although perhaps in a different way for every viewer. I read it as a film about the death throes of Nazism, which is represented by the train, and the moral culpability of Americans and others who turned up too late to save the victims of these trains and the camps where they delivered their doomed human cargo. The train, and the Nazi state, are dead, but like cartoon figures they continue to jerk through their motions; the message from the brain has not reached the body.

The best moments in the movie are the purely visual ones. Two trains shunting back and forth, Barr on one and Sukowa on another. An underwater shot of blood spreading. An incredibly evocative sequence on what it must be like to drown. And a hypnotic shot of train tracks, while Max von Sydow’s voice invites us to return to Europe with him, and surrender our wills.

“Zentropa,” originally titled “Europa,” won both the directing award and a technical prize at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, although both together did not satisfy Von Trier. Clearly thinking his film deserved the Palme d’Or (which went to “Barton Fink” for a film with certain similarities), he gave the jury the finger and stalked off. His anger is reflected in “Zentropa,” but so is the technical mastery the jury was honoring. The film is too confusing to be successful, but too striking and visually beautiful to be ignored.

BREAKING THE WAVES

Starring Emily Watson, Stellan Skarsgard and Katrin Cartlidge. Directed and written by Lars von Trier. Produced by Vibeke Windelov. An October Films release.
Drama. Rated R for strong graphic sexuality, nudity, language, and some violence. Running time: 158 min. Screened at Cannes; won Grand Prix. Opens 11/13 NY/LA.

A ludicrous soap opera with pretensions of grandeur, “Breaking the Waves” required an epic length and laborious contrivances to generate its main gimmick: a simple-minded, pure-of-soul newlywed woman who feels compelled by faith to have sex with strangers. When Bess (Emily Watson) marries the manly Jan (Stellan Skarsgard), she believes God has finally rewarded her piety. But soon an accident renders Jan a paraplegic clinging to life. The only thing that will give him the will to live, he tells her, is if she takes lovers and then describes the sex to him. Yeah, right. Bess obeys-in her first attempt, her face reflects both disgust and determination as she gives a surprised passenger a hand-job on the bus-but at a huge cost to herself. The soapy scenario includes a doctor suddenly professing his love for Bess, and a gloppy final image as viewed from heaven. Unlike a soap, however, director and writer Lars von Trier has imbued the situation with depth and humanity. The film’s main strength is Watson’s tremulous, sometimes goofy Bess, who comes to believe her acts have a direct effect on Jan’s health, the way she believed her prayers once did. Bess lives in a Scottish coastal village, whose stern-faced church leaders don’t allow women to speak at services; excommunication from church means excommunication from society and family. The conflict “Breaking the Waves” explores-true love versus religious faith and love for self-is a fascinating one, and the exploration is wrenching. That is, until the film exploits its heroine by turning her from a wispy creature in a Peter Pan collar into a strumpet in vinyl hotpants.

-Melissa Morrison

How do you Solve a Problem like Von Trier?

by Jose Arroyo of Sight & Sound Magazine

Lars von Trier’s anti-musical ‘Dancer in the Dark’ sparked protests when it won the Palme d’Or this year, but José Arroyo thinks it’s as exhilarating as it is exasperating.Watching Dancer in the Dark I kept wondering whether director Lars von Trier wasn’t experimenting his film right down the toilet. Here Denmark’s ageing enfant terrible mixes genres, bucks conventions and eschews celluloid; his direction is formally innovative and visually daring. The performances, particularly Björk’s, are riveting. But is this film that begins with a song from The Sound of Music, ‘My Favourite Things’, and ends with its heroine hanged from the gallows a challenge or a cheat? Does it all add up? For once reports of booing and hissing at Cannes can be believed. Yet the wildly differing receptions this film received there were probably not between individuals but within them: Dancer is as exasperating as it is extraordinary.

It tells a simple, melodramatic story: Selma (Björk) works day and night to afford the operation that will save her son Gene (Vladica Kostic) from the blindness he will genetically inherit from her. Bill (David Morse), a cop neighbour, attempts to steal her money and forces her to kill him. It looks like murder: her goodness makes her a victim. That there is no last-minute reprieve is not the most unusual thing about this story. To begin with, it’s told as a musical. Making Dancer in the Dark a musical melodrama is an odd choice and an inspired one. Musicals and melodramas both deal with expression and emotion, but in very different ways. In musicals, characters leap into dance or break into song when they’re bursting with a feeling they can’t contain; in melodrama, the protagonists also feel intensely but they have to repress its expression – only the audience is witness to the burdens of their knowledge. Where the terrain of musicals is romantic love and the formation of community, the terrain of melodrama is generally that of the family, romance and the psychosexual havoc which results from trying to live up to socially imposed sexual mores. At their best, say Meet Me in St Louis (1944) or Written on the Wind (1956), musicals and melodramas are lush, stylish, excessive – they accentuate or reveal emotional states through mise-en-scène.

Using a melodramatic situation as a structure for a musical offers von Trier a basis from which to work against the musical’s conventions. First of all, it is rare that characters in musicals have any kind of job except in show business. Here Selma is a factory worker, seen working at a steel press. Moreover, in the rare musical where factory work is involved, such as The Pajama Game (1957), the musical numbers are an indication of a sharing in community. Here Selma has to withdraw from the community into her own head before the music starts.

In combining the conventions of musicals and melodramas while simultaneously working against them, von Trier has achieved a rare feat: Dancer is a musical about alienation. Selma is loved by her best friend Kathy (Catherine Deneuve) and her admirer Jeff (Peter Stormare). Even the cop Bill admires and, one suspects, loves her, not the least for her goodness. But it is this very goodness, combined with a single-minded certainty, that cuts her off from them and from the world. Selma’s love for her son Gene is overwhelming, overriding every other human relationship. She can’t allow herself any other emotional attachments, and can’t even allow her son to feel loved because he needs to be tough to face the future that awaits him. Selma’s estrangement has a purpose, but her resulting isolation is no less intensely felt.

If Selma’s love for her son cuts her off from the world, it’s her love of music that makes her feel alive. In her interior dream world, abstract noises become concrete as music. A good example of this is the ‘Cvalda’ number early in the film. Selma is at the factory. The noise of the machines is the traditional cue that a number is about to begin. Industrial noises create a rhythm that is then enveloped, developed and swept up by a full orchestra on the soundtrack. Selma sings, “Clang the machine, what a magical sound, so clang the machines, they greet you and say, we tap out a rhythm and sweep you away.” Her co-workers join in the dancing as Selma sings, but at the end of the number, when Kathy wakes her from her dream world, she finds herself alone. Moreover, her lack of attention to her work has meant she has almost broken the machinery. The number is not about the celebration of work, as in the Eastern Bloc musicals the film refers to; it’s about how work is such a drudge that even industrial sounds provide an escape. The escape into herself is depicted as a joy, yet a dangerous one because it puts what is already a threadbare living in danger.

Generous resignation

Aspects of Dancer in the Dark are so recklessly ambitious they’re thrilling. Is it conceivable for musicals to be gothic? Well, Dancer has a musical number with a corpse. After shooting Bill, Selma breaks into a musical dialogue with his ghost where explanations are given and forgiveness is granted. Selma even sings to Bill’s wife, gently judging and blaming her for being criminally unconscious of what is happening around her. This kind of song dialogue risks risibility. It’s what the Marx Brothers used Margaret Dumont to caricature in their films – the fat lady at the opera who has to struggle through several octaves merely to trill ‘open the door’. But as lovers of opera know, these musical dialogues, properly judged, are the grounds for differentials of knowledge among characters that create a moral dimension to the work and allow it the scope of tragedy which is closed to traditional operetta and musical comedy. Here Selma and Bill know the reason for the killing. The fact that Bill’s wife, representing the rest of society, is ignorant and misunderstands everything, is what enables the film to take on a tragic dimension. The highly stylised, quasi-gothic form of this number is balanced by the effect of emotional realism that Björk and her music succeed in conveying.

Dancer in the Dark

The most beautiful number in the film is ‘I’ve Seen It All’. It takes place shortly before Selma kills Bill. Selma is walking home along the railroad having been fired from her job. Her admirer Jeff, who is following her, realizes that she is going blind when she is nearly hit by an oncoming train. Just as with Judy Garland in The Harvey Girls, the sounds of the train’s wheels on the track are the cue for a song. As Selma starts to imagine herself inside a musical number, the cinematography seems to be filtered by amber tones, and moments appear in slow motion. While Selma removes her glasses and prances, the song she is joyfully singing indicates a generous resignation to a life already lived: “I’ve seen what I was and I’ve seen what I’ll be, I’ve seen it all there is no more to see.” While the duet is being played out, the men on the train dressed in western gear mournfully perform some slow movements: they may look like the exuberant frontier men in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, but their actions are gracefully restrained, almost muted. The number is the emotional core of the film, but also indicates why the film doesn’t work as a musical: there are problems with the music, the dancing, the tone.

An anti-musical

Dancer in the Dark underlines its intertextuality and cues the audience to its uniqueness by generic references that are meant to situate it within and distinguish it from the musical. At the beginning of the film we are told how unrealistic it is when characters burst into song in musicals. Selma talks about how in the last number in a musical, a sweeping crane shot always makes the camera seem to go up through the roof; she says she always tries to miss this bit because it’s a sign that the film is about to end and she prefers to think the singing and dancing go on forever. Later on, when she’s walking to the gallows, she sings about how there’s always someone to catch her when she falls, because this is a musical. But of course there isn’t. It isn’t that type of musical.
But what type of musical is it? The film refers to Busby Berkeley by citing his famous geometric overhead shots. There are also plenty of references to the MGM musicals directed by Vincente Minnelli, Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly. The presence in the film of Deneuve and Joel Grey instantly brings to mind Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) and Cabaret (1972). Grey’s character, the Czech tap dancer Oldrich Novy, carries an awareness of musicals from what used to be called ‘Iron Curtain’ countries. And of course, The Sound of Music, which Selma is rehearsing with the local amateur dramatic group, refers to the famous ‘integrated’ musicals from Broadway which Rodgers and Hammerstein are credited with inventing with Oklahoma! (1955). But Dancer is not quite like any of these models, for though it shows an extraordinary awareness of the genre, it doesn’t show much sensitivity to an audience’s pleasure in it.

One of the reasons why Dancer is exasperating is that music, dancing and mise-en-scène are all problematic, albeit in different ways. The problem is not necessarily the music per se. Björk has composed an extraordinary score, melodic and complex, which contributes to and develops the film’s narrative. Hearing it on CD, my admiration increases with each listen. But watching the film, one only hears it once, and on first listen it sounds samey. Possibly this is because Björk is the only singer in the film, and has a very particular and distinctive style. As the film unfolds, the songs become hard to distinguish from each other. One does not whistle a happy tune coming out of this film.

Dancer is also insensitive to dance. Von Trier has bragged about how he used 100 cameras to film the musical numbers as it freed him and the performers and offered surprise moments that wouldn’t have been captured if the numbers had been carefully storyboarded. However, this also meant it was impossible to co-ordinate dancers and camera and thus construct a true filmed choreography. There are snatches of the numbers in the factory and the railway that suggest that Vincent Paterson’s choreography might have been marvellous. But who’s to know? The way the numbers are filmed and edited privileges ’surprise moments’, so what we get is a series of occasionally interesting movements rather than the poetic communication of mood, tone and intensity of feeling we expect of filmed dance.

The film’s look also contributes to its status as an ‘anti-musical’. First of all, it’s drab: Selma wears ugly, worn print dresses; her house is so bare, a tin chocolate box becomes a symbol of richness; the non-musical sequences are shot in dreary browns and metallic greys. Second, the film is shot on digital video, which makes the image feel thin and somehow incomplete. Traditionally musicals and melodramas convey a feeling of richness, which derives partly from costume, colour and camera movement, but partly from the use of celluloid itself.

Celluloid gives a rich, textured image with a depth of tonalities and a range of sensitivity to light. In 35mm even scarcity comes across as plenitude, and it seems perverse to film a story dealing with extreme states of feeling in thin digital video. But of course, frustrating as they are, all of these elements add up to a carefully chosen aesthetic. It’s frustrating in terms of expectations of the traditional pleasures of the musical or the melodrama, but the various elements cohere as an organic attempt at a stylised kind of realism. The film becomes thrilling in the moments when one is aware that these odd, usually impossible, choices actually work.

A punk auteur

Many elements in Dancer in the Dark initially come across as profoundly irritating, but as the film progresses their raison d’être as aesthetic choices becomes clear. As in von Trier’s earlier Breaking the Waves (1996), the film is mostly shot with handheld camera and plays with the traditional rules of continuity editing. Rather than cutting to a reverse shot in a conversation, for example, von Trier does a swish pan (the equivalent in literature of constantly repeating ‘he said’ or ’she said’ after every line rather than merely using quotation marks). However, as the film continues to anchor itself in characters’ faces, it becomes clear that the swish pan, a non-cut, also has a narrative value. The device creates an urgent expectation of a response. Likewise filming on digital video initially feels like a cheat. Then one realises that this thin look fits in with the grimness of Selma’s life. Moreover, cinematographer Robby Müller creates a look for the musical numbers that is similar to old 8mm Technicolor footage. The cinematography thus creates a sense of ‘pastness’, an evocation of memories in danger of fading. The film is set in the 1960s in an imaginary America, and its look underlines that the past is another country, at the same time evoking both an attachment to and an estrangement from it.

Watching the final scene, I could only think, “What a bastard.” One could imagine von Trier gleefully thinking up how best to upset his audience: wouldn’t it be fun and completely different to make a musical about this great sacrificial mother and then hang her during the finale? It seems like a perverse theatrical shock tactic. Yet as the final number unfolds one finds oneself moved. The old punk aesthetic of publicly reveling in the display of the socially forbidden has been evident in von Trier’s work since his debut The Element of Crime (1984).

If Dancer in the Dark is exciting to watch in itself, it becomes positively exhilarating when seen as a von Trier film, for the man seems capable of anything. The hallucinogenic visuals of The Element of Crime stayed in the mind long after the plot was forgotten. The hypnotic work on memory in Europa (1991), with its dazzling use of back projection, made it an extraordinary work of art cinema. In The Kingdom/Riget (1994), von Trier produced great television that wove black humour, a gothic story and social critique into a seamless and gripping narrative. Breaking the Waves proved his virtuosity with melodrama. Here, in spite of the dazzling technique on display, the use of jump cuts, zooms and so on, von Trier always lets his camera rest on faces, often in extreme close-up. As in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1927), what the faces reveal is the film’s truth; what they represent is a condemnation of the fact that a society would kill a person with the very virtues it claims to protect and uphold.

Björk’s performance has been described as one that is ‘felt’ – she couldn’t act, she could just be. Yet what is important is what she represents and conveys; how she achieved this is beside the point. And her performance is a tour de force: seeming plain one moment, exotically beautiful the next, she conveys the extraordinary intensity of Selma’s repression. Indeed often in Dancer in the Dark it feels as if von Trier and Björk are two virtuosos on a collision course (Catherine Deneuve is often caught unawares by the camera, seeming to stand back, as if dazed and confused at the carry ons). Yet whether it’s through collision or collaboration, art is what von Trier and Björk have succeeded in producing.
Interview about “Breaking the Waves”
Stig Bjorkman

A sailor, a virgin, a romantic landscape: these are the elements in Lars von Trier’s compelling new film ‘Breaking the Waves’.
Over a colour-enhanced panoramic view of a Skye bridge, David Bowie sings the opening lines of ‘Life on Mars’: “It’s a godawful small affair, to the girl with the mousy hair.” This moment, when director Lars von Trier is, in his own words, “striving for a grand gesture”, is one of several featuring 70s pop songs in Breaking the Waves, which many feel should have won this year’s Palme d’Or in Cannes. But such moments (designed to “expose a greater banality”) are pauses in an otherwise harrowing and realistic tale about a woman driven to self-destruction by her passion for her paralysed husband. Though this need to seek relief from extreme emotion was considered a flaw in his earlier work, now he has successfully worked it into a searing drama about the power of faith.

Von Trier first came to international prominence with an English-language film, The Element of Crime in 1984, a bewildering narrative about a detective trying to unravel a series of child murders. It was, says von Trier, a sort of “latter-day film noir”, haunted by cinema history, marked by startling images and pitched on an operatic scale, as were the other two films which complete the trilogy: Epidemic (1986, though not released in the UK) and Europa (1991). But all three were criticised for their obsession with technique, and lack of interest in characters. “I had an almost fetishistic attraction to film technology,” von Trier says. He was aware of the “limitless possibilities” that the equipment at film school offered. “It was fantastic just to be able to touch all these appliances.” He began experimenting, with his fellow students, cinematographer Tom Elling and editor Tomas Gislason, who would work with him on The Element of Crime.

The breakaway from this formalist style of film-making came with von Trier’s 1994 television hospital-drama series, the bizarre black comedy The Kingdom, with its mobile hand-held camera style and gleeful delight in the conventions of melodrama. This kind of film-making “is a lot more intuitive,” von Trier says, “it means I can work a lot faster. The rapidity and the more intensive contact with collaborators has given me back the desire to work.” But even The Kingdom could not have prepared anyone for the creative brinkmanship of Breaking the Waves.

The film is set during the 70s, in a tiny Presbyterian community on the West Coast of Scotland. Bess (Emily Watson), a trembling imp of a local girl, marries Jan (Stellan Starsgard), a hearty oil-rig worker, courting the disapproval of the village elders. After the sexual ecstasy of their honeymoon, Bess can’t bear having Jan return to the rigs. She begs God to return Jan to her, saying she’d put up with any trial of her faith. An accident on the oil rig leaves Jan paralysed from the waist down. Bess is consumed by guilt. Under the influence of his medication, Jan tells Bess she must make love to others and describe her experiences to him. She comes to believe that prostituting herself is her penance, the only chance of a cure for Jan.

Stig Bjorkman: ‘Breaking the Waves’ has taken five years and four million pounds to realise. Where did the original idea for the film come from?

Lars von Trier: I prefer to work with unassailable ideas. And I wanted to do a film about goodness. When I was little I had a children’s book called Golden Heart (a Danish fairytale) which I have a very strong and fond memory of. It was a picturebook about a little girl who went out into the woods with pieces of bread and other things in her pocket. But at the end of the book, after she’s passed through the woods, she stands naked and without anything. And the last sentence in the book was: “‘I’ll be fine anyway,’ said Golden Heart.” it expressed the role of the martyr in its most extreme form. I reread the book several times, even though my father regarded it as the worst trash you could imagine. The story for Breaking the Waves probably has its origin there. Golden Heart is the film’s Bess. I also wanted t do a film with a religious motif, a film about miracles. At the same time I wanted to do a completely naturalistic film.
The story has changed through the years. I first thought of shooting it on the west coast of Jutland, later in Norway, then Ostend in Belgium, then Ireland, before it finally became Scotland. It is probably no coincidence that it largely takes place on the Isle of Skye, where many painters and writers moved during the English Romantic period of the nineteenth century. I have reworked the script a lot through the years, being somewhat Dreyer-like in cutting it down, confining and reducing. Then just before shooting began, I lost enthusiasm for it. So many years had passed getting the project realised, and I was tired of it, close to leaving it.

SB: I understand that. It can be difficult holding onto one and the same idea for so long. New ideas for new films and new projects turn up all the time.

LvT: Yes, the risk is that you furnish the project with new suggestions to try and freshen it up; it’s not always beneficial. You risk betraying the original intention with the story, forgetting what it is you really want to portray. But it took a long time to get the film financed.

SB: That’s strange, because this is perhaps the film of yours with the biggest commercial possibilities.

LvT: Yes. I have quite a funny story with regard to that. We got financial support for the script from something which I think is called the European Script Fund. The readers there had been heavily criticised for their work. So to defend their activity they undertook a computer analysis of around ten of the projects they’d received. It was claimed that a computer would be able to ascertain a project’s artistic and commercial significance. And Breaking the Waves got top marks! That’s quite funny. The right ingredients were probably there: a sailor and a virgin and a romantic landscape – everything that the computer loved.

SB: Did the idea of the film’s very special technique – hand-held camera, Cinemascope format – arrive at the same time as the idea for the story?

LvT: No, that comes from the experience of The Kingdom. The new film has some of the cliche-like ingredients as in The Kingdom: that’s why I felt it important to give it as realistic a form as possible. A more documentary touch. If Breaking the Waves had been rendered with a conventional technique, I don’t think you could have tolerated the story. I think it is important that you furnish a story with a definite style, so that the project on the whole can be realised. One normally chooses a style for a film in order to highlight a story. We’ve done exactly the opposite. We’ve chosen a style that works against the story, which gives it the least opportunity to highlight itself.

SB: Yes, if you’d chosen to do a sort of Merchant-Ivory ‘Breaking the Waves’, it would certainly be regarded as too romantic or too melodramatic.

LvT: It would have been far too suffocating. You would not have been able to stand it. What we’ve done is to take a style and put it over the story like a filter. Like encoding a television signal, when you pay in order to see a film: here we are encoding a signal for the film, which the viewer will later ensure they decode. The raw, documentary style which I’ve laid over the film and which completely annuls and contests it, means that we accept the story as it is. That is, at any rate, my theory. The whole thing is very theoretical. Later we manipulated the images electronically. We transferred the film to video, and worked on the colours there, before we transferred it back to film again.

SB: As is ‘Medea’, which you shot on video and then transferred to film in order to recopy onto video?

LvT: No, there we worked much more crudely, and filmed the television monitor directly. In The Kingdom, the transfer process was somewhat more elaborate. And here the result is even more refined. It was interesting to transfer Panavision images to video and back to film again. It is perhaps even a little too beautiful… In between are also the completely digitally generated panoramic images that lead into the various episodes of the film.

SB: They also remind one of the classic English novel, with chapter divisions and headings which herald events.

LvT: I collaborated on these images with a Danish artist, Per Kirkeby, who used Romantic painting as a base. He is an expert in the field and the result is very interesting. There are many different expressions for Romantic painting. Partly there are those painting that you can see on walls in people’s homes and then there is the more genuine art reserved for museum visitors. Our images have perhaps become more abstract than I’d imagined from the beginning.

SB: Just over a year ago you published ‘Dogma 95′, a manifesto with the goal of counteracting certain tendencies within contemporary film. This propagandised against illusory film, and for naturalistic film, through a number of rules – such as that filming should take place on location, with a hand-held camera, without lighting and with sync sound. A last directive was that the film should be unsigned. Big budget aside, ‘Breaking the Waves’ largely follows this manifesto.

LvT: But actually the manifesto goes a few steps further, something which is important for me personally, when I am thinking of doing a film myself according to its directives. In fact, as you can see yourself, Breaking the Waves couldn’t follow the manifesto’s every comma or fullstop. I haven’t kept myself from manipulating the film in post-production, both technically and in the colours. If I had been faithful to my own theory, I perhaps shouldn’t have done that. But I did feel a need to give myself parameters, and it is in that spirit that the manifesto came into being.

SB: You naturally also betray the directive that the film should be unsigned. ‘Breaking the Waves’ is undeniably “A film by Lars von Trier.” It’s been said that, “The decline of Art begins with the signature.” That is, a work of art will always be judged in relation to its creator. Do you see this as something positive or negative?

LvT: I see it as positive. I have no problem with that. When I was younger, I was fascinated by David Bowie, for example. he had created an entire myth around himself. It was as important as his music. If Bowie had composed music which he didn’t need to sign, he would perhaps have had the opportunity to learn something else. I don’t see this; I don’t see why one shouldn’t be credited for a work. It’s something important in the relationship between the artist and his public. The importance lies in the process through which the work of art comes into being. The manifesto is pure theory. But at the same time the theory is more important than the individual. It is this that I wanted to express. Who the author of a film is will still get out, one way or another. Zentropa (von Trier’s own company” will be producing five Dogma films, and you will surely see who has done what there.

SB: I think you can recognise the signature of most conscious film-makers, whether it is there in writing or not.

LvT: Yes, I’ve always placed a great importance on one being able to see on a film that I’ve made that it’s been made by me.
SB: So what for you is unique about your signature? What is it that enables one to see a film is made by you?

LvT: Perhaps it sounds pretentious, but in one way or another I hope that you can see that every image contains an idea. It certainly sounds presumptuous – and perhaps it’s also untruthful. But as I see it, every image and every cut is thought out. They are not there by chance.

SB: ‘Breaking the Waves’ has a deeply religious background. Why did you want to give the film that?

LvT: Probably because I’m religious myself. I’m a Catholic, but I don’t worship Catholicism for Catholicism’s own sake. I have felt the need to experience a sense of belonging with a religious community, because my parents were convinced atheists. I flirted with religion quite a bit as a youngster. You perhaps search for a more extreme religion as a youngster. You either go to Tibet or seek out the most rigorous of all faiths. With total abstinence and such like. I think I have a more Dreyer-like view of the whole thing. Because Dreyer’s religious view is in essence humanistic. He also accuses religion in all his films. Religion is accursed, but not God. It’s like that as well in Breaking the Waves.

SB: You describe religion as a power-structure in the film. The mechanics and enigma of power are things that you have treated in several of your films.

LvT: My intention has not been to criticise a particular religious community, such as the one that exists in this Scottish environment. That doesn’t interest me. That is far too simplistic. And it’s nothing I want to concern myself with. To adopt a viewpoint that is easily accessible and universally applicable. That’s like fishing in shallow water. In many ways I also have an understanding for – or rather, that people are engaged by spiritual questions and that they are so in an extreme manner. It is just that, if you want to create a melodrama, you have to furnish it with certain obstacles. And religion provided me with a suitable obstacle.

SB: Bess’ conversation with God has a directness and intensity which gives the religious motif a human voice.

LvT: Bess is also an expression of the same religion. Religion is her foundation and she accepts its conditions completely. In the burial scene at the beginning, for instance, the priest condemns the deceased to eternal damnation in hell, something that Bess finds quite natural. She has no scruples with regard to that. It is we that have them. Bess is confronted with many different power-structures, including the power that the hospital and the doctors exercise. And she’s forced to adopt a position with the purity of heart that she possesses.

SB: To a great degree the film has its basis in the performances. Do you think that your relationship to actors has changed and developed in ‘Breaking the Waves’?

LvT: You could say that. But I also made use of a different technique inBreaking the Waves. And that technique is based upon a relationship of trust between the director and cast, a classic technique. I have probably also come closer to the actors in this film. But this is very easy to state: that now von Trier has learned this technique also! In the earlier films it was a conscious decision not to be too close to the actors.

SB: How come you chose Emily Watson for Bess? It was a fantastic performance by an actress untried in a film context. Was it pure luck that it happened to be her?

LvT: One problem with financing this expensive production was that we could not have any big name actors in the leading roles. We realised this at an early stage, because we couldn’t find any big names who wanted to participate in the film. They were afraid of the nature of the film.

SB: Because of the erotic scenes?

LvT: Probably because of the whole story. It is a curious mixture of religion and eroticism and possession. The well-known actors we turned to didn’t dare put their careers on the line – for example Helena Bonham Carter pulled out of the production at the very last minute. That’s why it felt important to find some actors who really had the enthusiasm to participate. And I think it feels as if the heart is in it among those we finally chose. We screen-tested quite a number of actresses for the role of Bess. Late I watched the video together with Bente (von Trier’s partner), and she saw it as quite obvious that Emily Watson should get the role. I was also engaged by Emily’s performance, but it was Bente’s enthusiasm above all which convinced me. I also remember that Emily was the only one who came to the casting barefoot and with no make-up at all! There was something Jesus-like about her which attracted me. She had had no earlier film experience. Which means that she was, to a great extent, forced to trust me as a director. The collaboration was also extremely easy. The funny thing is that where Emily is concerned I consistently used the last take of every scene. With Katrin Cartlidge, on the other hand, I consistently chose the first. What is decisive is their different performance techniques. We worked in a very improvised fashion, ignoring continuity and giving the actors a lot of freedom in their performance. With Katrin, who is a more experienced actress, the intensity in her performance diminished with every new take. In Emily’s case I furnished more exact instructions, which resulted in her fine-tuning her performance progressively for each new take.

SB: The film has a very audacious editing style, going against all rules and codes. Was it time-consuming?

LvT: No, it was very easy. We had shot very long scenes and no scene was like the other. The actors were allowed to move within the scene as they pleased and they never needed to follow any determined action. When we later cut down the scenes, our only thought was to increase the intensity in the performance, without regard as to whether the image is in focus, well composed or as to whether we cross the line. This has resulted in sudden jumps in time within the scenes that you perhaps don’t comprehend as jumps in time. Rather, they give an impression of compression. I have worked further from the experiences The Kingdom gave me.

SB: You have several times named Dreyer as a source of inspiration. Has he been that even here?

LvT: Yes, probably films like La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc and Gertrud have had their relevance in connection to Breaking the Waves. His films are naturally more academic, more refined. What is new for me is that a woman is at the centre of the story. All of Dreyer’s films have a woman as the central character. And the suffering woman besides. The original title was Amor Omnie (ie, ‘Love is Omnipresent’), the motto Gertrud wanted on her gravestone in Dreyer’s film. But when my producer heard that title, he almost hit the roof. he found it difficult to imagine that anyone would want to see a film called Amor Omnie.

SB: Something that unites most of your earlier films is irony. But you don’t feel an ironical stance here.

LvT: When I was in film school, it was said that all good films were characterised by some form of humour. All films except Dreyer’s! Many of his films are thoroughly vacuum-cleaned of humour. You could say that when you introduce humour to your work, you also step back a little from it. You create a distance. Here I didn’t want to distance myself from the strong emotions that the story and its characters contain.
I think that this strong emotional engagement was very important for me. Because I grew up in a home, a culturally radical home, where strong emotions were forbidden. The members of my family that I’ve shown the film to have also been severely critical toward it. My brother thought the film was indifferent and tedious and my uncle (Borge Host, Danish director and producer of short films and documentaries) saw the whole thing as an abject failure from beginning to end. But with my earlier films, he supported me in all possible ways. So perhaps Breaking the Waves is my adolescent revolt.

INTERVIEW WITH LARS VON TRIER – DANCER IN THE DARK

Danish director and Dogme superstar Lars Von Trier (’Breaking The Waves’, ‘The Idiots’) won the Palme D’Or at Cannes this year for his fiercely unconventional musical collaboration with Bjork, ‘Dancer In The Dark’…

“It sounded so simple, to do a musical. It’s an idea I’d always had. But who knows how to make a musical? I often try to go back to find the fascination I had as a child when I saw musicals on television, the ones with Gene Kelly. They were always very appealing and I thought that maybe I could recreate some of that feeling. I don’t see musicals very often anymore but then, I saw them loads of times. Of course, my parents were communists and they thought that all musicals were American rubbish…
I suppose that musicals are part of the family of melodrama but the ones I saw as a child were never really dangerous. You didn’t cry. Musicals are like operettas; they’re characterised by lightness. As a genre, they don’t demand much of you – almost nothing. The first musicals I saw were very light. Then along came a fantastic one, “West Side Story”, that was more like a dramatic story.

The difference between an opera and an operetta is that the heavy stuff is in the opera. “West Side Story” is more of an opera story than, say, “Singing in the Rain” where Debbie Reynolds’ drama is that she almost loses a career… or does she get a career? Whatever. It’s normally smaller things that happen in a musical. What I wanted to achieve with “Dancer in the Dark” is that you take things as seriously as you do in an opera. Some years ago, people really cried at operas. I think it’s a skill to be able to find such emotion in something so stylised. I would love to feel that much for someone who’s been killed with a cardboard sword…

I’m not particularly proud of the little tricks I’ve used for the musical numbers in “Dancer in the Dark”… I like the idea that Selma has these fantasies or this ability to hear music in everyday sounds, but I am not very proud that we didn’t dare to make it cleaner and just allow them to sing for no reason. The problem is that when the music suddenly pours down from the sky, you have a tendency to do like they do in “The Muppet Show”, where everyone looks up to see where all the violins are located. That takes some of the pain and the danger away from the whole thing. I wanted the emotion and I wanted to communicate that emotion so we used this little trick and I hope it works.

This film is put together from two ’shapes’: the musical scenes and some almost documentary scenes. I thought it would be interesting to put the documentary style up against the musical but I believe that I act from admiration for the way musicals are – I’m not trying to subvert or destroy anything. I’m trying to make it richer by somehow importing true emotion. It is such a beautiful cocktail, emotion and music. Also, I think that to take something like musicals seriously is interesting. Gene Kelly did it to some degree and again, “West Side Story” did it. Most musicals exist only to entertain but I think they can contain so much more.

The technique of using a hand-held camera and video has been extended to the musical scenes to keep the random effect, a ‘live’ quality. By using a lot of fixed cameras instead of staging a scene for one camera you should be able NOT to control the scene. You put up a lot of cameras and you get some gifts, in the same way you do when you work with a hand-held camera. If you want to bring the qualities of the ‘looser’ way of filmmaking we used in “Breaking the Waves” and “The Idiots” to the dance, I think this was the way to start. It’s not perfected in any way; this was kind of a first stab at it but the 100 cameras enabled us to get shots that we wouldn’t have had if we’d used a storyboard, some ‘golden moments’. We actually could have used a lot more cameras – we had 100; we could have used 100 more. What the technique has proved is that it’s a cheap way to achieve relatively high production values. In one scene, we danced for two days using 100 cameras. If we’d had one camera and a storyboard, it would have taken two weeks.

Early on in my career if I had made a musical, I would have made it in a very traditional way with a lot of tracking shots and crane shots; it’s logical, that’s how to make image and music work together. But now, I have a tendency to put down rules for myself so I thought, ‘No, let’s go in the opposite direction and use only fixed cameras.’ The idea was to get more gifts and to have less control. It’s like a transmission or a live performance, not something filmed. If you watch a concert, somebody on a stage singing for example, you get closer because it hasn’t been put together afterwards. Perhaps you can’t see the difference, but you can feel it. In film, people have a tendency not to like direct transmission because they think it’s like television or theatre. But the direction I have moved in for some time is actually more in that line. The best thing would have been if we could have done all of the song and dance numbers live and then lived with the mistakes. Bjork had a very good idea in the beginning that the songs should be performed and recorded live but unfortunately we couldn’t pull it off. The logistics of it turned out to be too difficult.

The style of the music is the result of a collision between me and Bjork. She’s the one who knows about music and the film is about a woman who likes the same musicals as I liked back then. The biggest problem when you’re making a musical is, of course, to decide what music you’re going to put in and I had absolutely no idea. That’s where Bjork came in and I like the music she created very much. Some of it I had to learn to like but I did, very much, and it’s a big part of the film. I couldn’t have asked for a better performer in any way. The day before we started to shoot, I realised there was something I’d forgotten to do and that was to screen test Bjork. But she gives an incredible performance and it’s not acted, it’s felt.

This collision between cultures and people and different approaches is what makes films interesting. Catherine Deneuve hired herself – she wrote me a letter and asked if she could have a part and I said, “Of course!” It seemed logical to offer her the part of Bjork’s ‘partner’, the other half of this very strange pair and I like them together. Although musicals are an American thing, there are some European ones and I knew the ones Catherine Deneuve starred in. To a degree, I was inspired by some of the scenes in those films.

“Dancer in the Dark” is set in America because that’s where musicals come from but also because it’s a place I’ve never been to and will probably never visit because I don’t go on airplanes. It’s a kind of mythological country for me. We shot in Sweden and places that could look like America, and that may be more interesting than actually going to America. I’m always reminded of Kafka’s “Amerika”. He had never been there and in the first pages of the novel, when he sails into the harbour of New York, he describes the Statue of Liberty carrying a big sword…I always thought that was quite poetic.

I think that most people in Denmark find the death penalty very foreign. I’m not saying that Danish people are more humane than others, just that it’s a tradition foreign to Scandinavians. Punishment altogether is illogical but I suppose you have to have punishments if a society is going to work. The death penalty doesn’t seem like a punishment, however, it’s more like revenge and it’s dangerous to allow the state to have anything to do with revenge. I’m deeply against the death penalty. On the other hand, execution scenes are God’s gift to directors. They’re very efficient. If you’re going to be a martyr you have to die…

Selma’s execution is a part of the melodrama, that and her blindness. There wasn’t any blindness in the first script I sent to Bjork but then I saw this beautiful cartoon, a Warner Brothers cartoon from the 1930s, extremely cleverly done. A policeman in New York finds a doll and takes it to a woman he is in love with to give to her daughter. The little girl is sitting on the stairs playing with the doll and she drops it. When she goes to pick it up, she taps about on the ground without looking down – that’s all you see and you understand that she’s blind. It’s extremely effective, very refined.

The whole idea is that the little girl has never seen her mother, she’s never seen the city and there are a lot of sounds around her. It’s actually quite close to the story of “Dancer in the Dark”. The child imagines that the doll comes to life and takes her around to see all these things. She imagines that the sound of the subway is a roller-coaster and there are flowers everywhere which of course isn’t true because it’s actually a slum in New York. And then she imagines that she sees her mother…very melodramatic and very beautiful.

I think that the more I work, the less my own person is involved. If you really work with a character, with an actor, it’s as if you were making a documentary. You don’t design something, you investigate something that is already there. Because it isn’t my person and since it isn’t only about things that happen in my twisted little brain, perhaps the work becomes more accessible.”

Interview by kind permission of Liz Miller

Dogme 95

.. is a collective of film directors founded in Copenhagen in spring 1995.
DOGME 95 has the expressed goal of countering “certain tendencies” in the cinema today.

DOGME 95 is a rescue action!

In 1960 enough was enough! The movie was dead and called for resurrection. The goal was correct but the means were not! The new wave proved to be a ripple that washed ashore and turned to muck.
Slogans of individualism and freedom created works for a while, but no changes. The wave was up for grabs, like the directors themselves. The wave was never stronger than the men behind it. The anti-bourgeois cinema itself became bourgeois, because the foundations upon which its theories were based was the bourgeois perception of art. The auteur concept was bourgeois romanticism from the very start and thereby … false!
To DOGME 95 cinema is not individual!

Today a technological storm is raging, the result of which will be the ultimate democratisation of the cinema. For the first time, anyone can make movies. But the more accessible the media becomes, the more important the avant-garde, It is no accident that the phrase “avant-garde” has military connotations. Discipline is the answer … we must put our films into uniform, because the individual film will be decadent by definition!

DOGME 95 counters the individual film by the principle of presenting an indisputable set of rules known as THE VOW OF CHASTITY.
In 1960 enough was enough! The movie had been cosmeticised to death, they said; yet since then the use of cosmetics has exploded.
The “supreme” task of the decadent film-makers is to fool the audience. Is that what we are so proud of? Is that what the “100 years” have brought us? Illusions via which emotions can be communicated? … By the individual artist’s free choice of trickery?
Predictability (dramaturgy) has become the golden calf around which we dance. Having the characters’ inner lives justify the plot is too complicated, and not “high art”. As never before, the superficial action and the superficial movie are receiving all the praise.

The result is barren. An illusion of pathos and an illusion of love.
To DOGME 95 the movie is not illusion!
Today a technological storm is raging of which the result is the elevation of cosmetics to God. By using new technology anyone at any time can wash the last grains of truth away in the deadly embrace of sensation. The illusions are everything the movie can hide behind.
DOGME 95 counters the film of illusion by the presentation of an indisputable set of rules known as THE VOW OF CHASTITY.
THE VOW OF CHASTITY
I swear to submit to the following set of rules drawn up and confirmed by DOGME 95:

1. Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found).
2. The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. (Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is being shot).
3. The camera must be hand-held. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted. (The film must not take place where the camera is standing; shooting must take place where the film takes place).
4. The film must be in colour. Special lighting is not acceptable. (If there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera).
5. Optical work and filters are forbidden.
6. The film must not contain superficial action. (Murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.)
7. Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden. (That is to say that the film takes place here and now.)
8. Genre movies are not acceptable.
9. The film format must be Academy 35 mm.
10. The director must not be credited.

Furthermore I swear as a director to refrain from personal taste! I am no longer an artist. I swear to refrain from creating a “work”, as I regard the instant as more important than the whole. My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations.
Thus I make my VOW OF CHASTITY.

Copenhagen, Monday 13 March 1995

Thomas Vinterberg – Lars Von Trier – Søren Kragh-Jacobsen – Kristian Levring
manifesto

I confess!

All is seemingly well: the film director Lars von Trier is a man of science, an artist and a human being. And yet I could equally state that I am a human being but an artist, but a man of science, but a film director.
The sin I want to confess is intolerance. The excuse that I was seduced by the arrogance of science is itself a lie that plummets to the ground. Perhaps it is true, I did try to intoxicate myself in a cloud of sophistry about the meaning of art and the duty of the artist; that I invented ingenious theories about the anatomy and nature of film; but, and this I openly confess, at no time was I ever able, with this simple smoke screen, to suppress my deepest passion: my carnal need.

Our attitude to film can be described in so many ways and lead us in so many different directions.

We can drape it in profound theories, we can climb aboard it and let ourselves be carried off on a voyage of discovery to unknown lands, or we can insist that film is the potion we use to influence our audience and make them smile, or weep and pay. All this sounds very convincing, and yet I don’t believe it. There is only one excuse for having to go through and to force others to go through the hell that is the creative process of the film: the carnal pleasure of that split second in the cinemas, when the projector and the loudspeakers, in unison, allow the illusion of sound and motion to burst forth, like an electron abandoning its orbit to generate light, and create the ultimate: a miraculous surge of life. It is this, and this alone, that is the film maker’s reward, his hope, his claim.

When the magic of the film really works and the sensuous feeling it creates sweeps through the body in orgasmic waves…that is the experience I seek; that and that alone has always been the driving force behind my work. Nothing else. There! I have written it and it feels good. Forget all the excuses, “the childish fascination” and “the all embracing humility”, for this is my confession, black on white:

I, Lars von Trier, am but a simple masturbator of the silver screen.

And yet, “EUROPA”, the third part of the trilogy, is without even the faintest trace of the smallest red herring.
Purity and clarity have, at last, been achieved. There is nothing left to stifle reality under clinging layers of “Art”…, no trick is too crass, no method too cheap, no effect too vulgar for this film. Give me but a solitary tear or a single drop of sweat, and I will gladly exchange all the “art” in the world for it.

And finally, I submit my alchemic attempts with life from celluloid to God for His judgment. One thing is certain…God’s real life, that we meet when we leave the cinema, can never be matched…for it is His creation and, as such, divine…