Lars von Trier and the end of cinema : melancholia

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.