Abstract
I want to begin with a perhaps contentious claim, which is that the Danish director Lars von Trier is a fundamentally negative film-maker. Needless to say, 'negative' should not be understood in a derisive sense. Nor, for that matter, do I was to suggest that he deals exclusively with negative or depressive content (though a case could certainly be made for this point). Rather, I want to argue that von Trier's approach to cinema is 'negative' insofar he is at his best when he's sucking the life out of a film, leaving something like an empty husk, the mere shell of a film. And he's at his very best when he does this by inhabiting and exploding established Hollywood genres.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | The London Film & Media Reader 3: The Pleasures of the Spectacle |
Editors | Phillip Drummond |
Place of Publication | U.K. |
Publisher | London Symposium |
Pages | 122-132 |
Number of pages | 11 |
ISBN (Print) | 9780957363151 |
Publication status | Published - 2015 |
Keywords
- Trier, Lars von, 1956-
- ontology
- film criticism
- cinema