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.

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