Von
Trier is laying out how, to his mind, art is unbound by moral decency.
Significantly, von
Trier's apocalyptic drama "Melancholia" was kept in competition for the Palme d'Or, one of the most coveted honors in cinema, to be awarded at the end of the festival Sunday.
"Before she died," von
Trier recalled the moment in a 2005 interview with the German weekly Die Zeit, "my mother told me to be happy that I was the son of this other man.
Trier is located alongside the River Moselle and vineyards can be seen on the valley slopes for miles around.
Von
Trier himself did "about ninety per cent" of the camerawork (Bjorkman
Trier on Von
Trier 214).
What's particularly engaging about "Eric Nietzsche" is the way von
Trier segues his character through the survivalist techniques of film school, and the way Thuesen meshes dreamy adolescence with the onset of cynicism, whether through the use of some glorious music, or his occasionally blissful flights with the camera.
The fact that von
Trier, with Dancer in the Dark, conceives of joy as momentary doesn't mean that his rendering of joy's importance is in any way diminished; however grim or deterministic the context, we can actually feel the lift, and the expressed happiness is, as a result, neither frivolous nor mawkish.
Dogville abounds with references to art from the interwar years--even aside from the character of Tom, von
Trier's parody of a Depression-era writer obsessed with "illustrating" profound moral truths about Man.
Von
Trier has always hailedfellow Danish film-maker Jorgen Leth as a major influence.
Lars von
Trier, a highly successful Danish television producer, filmmaker, and cinema rebel, is full of psychological contradictions.