You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
To watch a film is to take in a story in through our senses – through images, words, and music. In this film essay I will attempt to explore the content of a film through other channels than the immediate visual story – by thinking, wondering, reasoning, and symbolization. This may often be a somewhat difficult project, as the distance between the direct experience of a film and written language may become too great. Some would therefore argue that it is important just to let the story in the film speak for itself – to allow it simply to live in us and through us. Many films tend to pass through us unreflected, gliding through our inner emotional terrain. My suggestion however is that other films need to be reflected upon, if only to reduce the almost traumatizing effect they have on us. We need to be detoxified. I think Lars von Trier’s films need this kind of rework. We are not offered a comfortable experience of catharsis when we are led through his films, but rather an experience of being deeply shaken.
Von Trier’s films bring us often into a nightmarish and claustrophobic state of mind, where it is difficult to achieve a distance to the experience. As a result, we lose our ability to symbolize what we have gone through and thereby digest what we experience, both during the film itself and after. Some have argued that Von Trier is merely living out his sadism in his films; he wants to provoke, and he usually goes to extremes to achieve just this. He draws the viewers into horrors and turns the vise tighter and tighter. The film “Dancer in the Dark” has aroused great enthusiasm among many, while others have experienced it as being revolting. That is how it typically is with von Trier’s films: people often fall into two opposing camps. We are seldom indifferent to his films.
Psychoanalysis was originally solely a treatment for the neuroses, but rapidly became a more ambitious project: Freud developed psychoanalysis into