Lars von Trier Beyond Depression

Contexts and Collaborations
Erscheinungsjahr 2022
ISBN: 978-0-231-19153-1
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 288 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 150 mm x 225 mm, Gewicht: 448 g

Lars von Trier built a reputation as a provocateur from the start—but in the late 2000s, he entered an even more inflammatory phase. Amid Cannes controversies, Antichrist (2009), Melancholia (2011), Nymphomaniac (2013–14), and The House That Jack Built (2018) brandished the cinematic virtuosity von Trier once banned under the Dogme 95 Manifesto while subjecting audiences to “extreme” cinema. Following von Trier’s experience of clinical depression in 2006 and 2007, these films took an aggressively personal and retrospective turn against the backdrop of the director’s controversy-courting public appearances.

Playing against widespread assumptions, Linda Badley takes a reparative approach, offering an in-depth examination of these four films and the contexts that produced them. Drawing on numerous interviews with the director and his collaborators as well as inside access to archival materials, she provides a thorough and comprehensive account of von Trier’s preproduction and creative process. Highlighting a transmedial turn, Badley tracks von Trier’s artistic touchstones from Wagner, Proust, and the Marquis de Sade to Scandinavian erotic cinema and serial killer genre tropes. She considers his portrayals of mental illness and therapy, gender and sexuality, nature and extinction, shedding light on the thematic concerns that unite these films as a distinct cycle. Offering nuanced readings of these films, the book emphasizes the significance of von Trier’s work for current critical and philosophical debates, showing how they engage with notions of the Anthropocene, “dark ecology,” and the postcinematic.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Badley, Linda

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Filmwissenschaft, Fernsehen, Radio Filmgattungen, Filmgenre
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Filmwissenschaft, Fernsehen, Radio Filmgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Filmwissenschaft, Fernsehen, Radio Einzelne Filmschauspieler, Filmregisseure, Drehbuchautoren
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Filmwissenschaft, Fernsehen, Radio Filmtheorie, Filmanalyse

Über Autor(innen)

Linda Badley is professor emerita of English at Middle Tennessee State University. She is the author of Lars von Trier (2011) and coeditor of Nordic Noir, Adaptation, and Appropriation (2020), among other books.