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A Rock in the Shoe: Lars von Trier

TitleA Rock in the Shoe: Lars von Trier

The title is taken from Trier’s quote, “A film should be like a rock in the shoe”, and refers to just how uncomfortable a von Trier movie can be for the general audience.

Basic IdeaA documentary on the life of Danish director and cinema’s enfant terrible, Lars von Trier.

A little about Lars von Trier(This section culled from the essay Lars von Trier: The Little Knight by Thomas Beltzer, Senses of Cinema)

In Tranceformer: A Portrait of Lars von Trier (Stig Björkman, 1997), a hand-held camera, without any preamble, shows us von Trier as he launches the documentary by stating with a malicious grin, “I'll gladly assert that everything said or written about me is a lie.” This statement could be true of the Björkman documentary, this essay and anything von Trier may say about himself in the future. All the same it is a significant caveat for any approach to von Trier and perhaps the only true thing that can be said about him. Later in Tranceformer, he describes his own life as a fabrication, yet his long-time producer, Peter Jensen, says that he never lies. This paradox can be resolved, however, once we accept that von Trier's life and work are offered to the world as a seamless fictional whole and that all fiction is fabrication and subject to multiple interpretations. His editor and film school partner, Tomas Gislason, describes him as “a…playful rascal.” His lead in two films, Ernst-Hugo Jaeregard, offers that he is an “absolute opponent to all kinds of intellectual authority.” Von Trier describes himself and his work as “a provocation.” Peter Jensen says, “his loyalty is also of a Middle Ages order. He's a knight. A little knight.” This last assessment provides a key to reading the text that is von Trier: he is an idealist and a believer who suffers the pangs of true belief and who constantly 'tilts' for his ideals. In contrast to Ingmar Bergman, whose films are about the angst of the unbeliever and the yearning to believe, von Trier's films are all about the angst of the believer and wanting to not believe.Lars Trier (he added 'von' in the tradition of Eric von Stroheim) was born April 30, 1956 in Copenhagen to what Lucia Bozzola describes as “radical, nudist Communist parents.” Speaking of his childhood, von Trier recollects:

According to me, I was too free, as it is such a cause of anxieties …I missed the love an authority with definite parameters can bring, because that is a form of love.

As a child, von Trier was under the impression that everything was permitted except “feelings, religion and enjoyment”, three things his films would deliver in spades in his later rebellion. At age 11 he began to make short films with his mother's Super 8 camera, and a year later he starred in theScandinavian television series Clandestine Summer (1968). Left to his own devices, he dropped in and out of school, drank wine and watched movies. By the time he entered Copenhagen's film school in the early '80s he “…knew all the film classics. Knew them by heart,” according to Gislason. Von Trier describes himself as an enfant terrible during this period.Listening to him talk about his films, one senses that in school he developed a lifelong delight in breaking conventions and rules. He made the early films work despite (or because of) opaque story-lines, self-conscious voiceovers, and unusual manipulations of sound and image. Still, in the later

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films we are startled with drifting, hand-held cameras and improvised dialogue and blocking, not to mention soap-opera histrionics, uncomfortably real sex and art stills inserted into the narrative. His mother's death, which he speaks of with a sense of relief, seems to have been a turning point in his life. Even as he personally embraced the formality of Catholicism, his films went “low church” striving for spontaneity, speed and improvisation in contrast to his obsessively controlled early films. Borrowing “high church” language, he helped create the ironically named Dogme School, the film equivalent of punk rock. In yet another paradox, even as he rejected his parent's communism, he used it, with producer Peter Jensen, as a basis for their own film collective, thus wresting control of film production away from the Danish government. Although his films are a complex dialogic extension of his own paradoxical nature, in general they follow the trajectory of T.S. Eliot, first depicting the wasteland and then transcending it with faith.Von Trier's first three films – all presented in dazzling, baroque virtuosity – are a trilogy about a Europe that has been lulled to sleep in the midst of its own chaos and death. In all three films the hero (or anti-hero) is an idealist who wades confidently into a stinking quagmire, determined to right all wrongs, but, as von Trier points out, “you can be sure that when they've done the right thing, itsgone wrong and they also did it badly.” Von Trier repeatedly discovers that it is impossible to address evil without perpetuating it, a sin he maliciously passes on to the viewer.In a creative mix of Kafka and Borges, The Element of Crime (1984) is a tale of labyrinthine absurdity in which Fisher, a symbolically named detective, becomes Harry Gray, the serial killer he is pursuing. Fisher's downfall is the result of his unquestioning belief in the book on criminology written by Osborne, his ailing professor. “I cannot stop until I understand. I must do things by the book,” Fisher tells his prostitute partner, Kim, who replies that she cannot follow him that far. The hypnotist/narrator who has led him into this nightmare Europe says, “I'm afraid you leave me behind too, Harry” (calling him by the killer's name). Indeed, his blind faith in the method leaves us all behind because he becomes an evil child killer as a result. Among other things, The Element of Crimeis von Trier's critique of fundamentalism of all sorts (religious, political, artistic) and of his ironic, self-loathing view of his own film-school skill. Without showing any graphic violence or carnage, he uses jaundiced color and flooded, ruined sets to create the most menacing and horrific environment in recent memory.His second film Epidemic (1987) is not available in the U.S. and this is a shame because it is a brilliant and beautiful film. Also, it is as clear a statement as we're likely to get of von Trier's philosophy of film and his working methods as he attempts to apply his theories. Von Trier and Niels Voersel (co-writer on Element, Zentropa & Kingdom I & II), playing themselves, write a screenplay about a character called Dr. Mesmer, who seeks to cure an epidemic, unaware that it is he who is spreading it. This is rendered beautifully in the film within the film. This continues until, via a hypnotized girl, it is spread to the writers themselves (fiction coming alive and entering reality) and the producer to whom they are pitching their screenplay to. In Epidemic we see the director's two distinct styles; on the one hand there are the breathtakingly composed shots for the film within the film, yet also present are the hand-held cameras, natural light and a five-day improvised script for the story about the writers. We learn about von Trier's phobias (underground structures, flying, illness, hospitals), his ideological obsessions (idealism, truth, individualism), his writing methods (outlining on walls, ironic referencing, utilizing his own pain and that of others) and his aesthetics. He consciously stacks elements in his films against one another - stirring Wagner music to accompany the spread of the plague, sincerity cut with cynicism and vice versa. We learn that he is never literal, always metaphorical, and though always sincere, he is also always kidding, a vulnerable, self-protecting stance common among this generation of filmmakers (i.e. Jarmusch, Linklater, Tykwer, Aronofsky). In a sense, Epidemic is a documentary about himself.Made for Danish Television, Medea (1988) creates a similar atmosphere of brooding malaise through its visualization of the dark heart of the witch, Medea. In it, von Trier improves on the Euripides play (presumably with Carl Dreyer's posthumous help) by avoiding the deus ex machina and by telling the story (in a style more visual than narrative) of the witch who murders her own children. Jason's

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nubile new bride Glauce, given a name and a voice, becomes a central (and frequently naked) character, though she is barely present in the original play. When one of Medea's children assists in his own brutal hanging, a key autobiographical theme is highlighted, namely that children are being sacrificed for the selfish desires of adults. Many of Element's images (blowing sheets, dead horses, deathly water) are reprised in Medea. Perhaps his most beautiful and elegant film, it is currently a lost treasure, largely unavailable in the U.S. except for occasional runs on cable. Zentropa (1991), the film that first caught the world's attention, is about a young American who works on a post-WWII German sleeping car as a gesture of 'non-involved' pacifist goodwill, but ends up furthering the evil plans of others with his every move. Frequently critics dismiss this film as a calculating, academic exercise but I feel that beneath the Wellesian virtuosity is a seething emotional attack against U.S. foreign policy and a somnambulant, complicit Europe. Also, it is a romantic cry of impotent rage and despair. The stunning visual juxtapositions constantly highlight the story. The protagonist Leo and (through the ominous, direct addressing of the audience by the hypnotist narrator) the viewer are drifting in and out of a Kafkaesque dream; black and white for dream state, color for waking. Zentropa is about a Europe on the verge of waking up from an evil nightmare, and although it is about the post-war reconstruction of Germany, it feels like it is about the consumption-induced stupor of the present. Interestingly, it depicts a Roman Catholic Church cooperating with Nazis, the same church von Trier would join a few years later.The Kingdom (1994), a tour-de-farce television mini-series about a hunted hospital, effected the translation of von Trier from one film persona to another. It is an extended satirical critique of the hubris of reason and the denial of the spiritual. Although I am skipping over it lightly here, I recommend it as a good starting place for appreciating the von Trier oeuvre because the story is fairly straightforward (though not conventional) and the shocks are minor (excluding the eye-wrenching shocks at the ends of both parts I and II). The Vonnegut-like black humor is also very effective and funny, especially in the second season which is currently unavailable. In The Kingdomwe see von Trier moving from formalism to a kind of dogmatic informalism.Breaking the Waves (1996) begins his trilogy about holy fools, women who sacrifice everything and achieve sainthood. Jan, a foreigner to the strict Scottish community and paralyzed by an accident, asks his simple-minded and pious wife, Bess, to sleep with other men and tell him about it, an activity which results in her brutal death. Von Trier's newfound religious emphasis, however, did not make his vision any more positive. With reference to The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Anderson, von Trier remarked:

I have a troll's shard in my eye...I remember there is a boy who at some stage gets a troll shard in his eye and sees things ugly.

However, von Trier has gone beyond seeing ugly; he may be a troll himself, planting shards in our eyes. Perhaps this is needed at a time when European cinema is trying to compete with Hollywood's lucrative sentimentality. Breaking the Waves has probably violated everyone's sensibilities in one way or another, but that it is a masterful work of high artistic achievement is usually admitted. The cheers and boos with which it was received at Cannes reminds us that civilization prefers its geniuses dead and safely museumed. A latent theme in his earlier work is now made explicit - religion (and, more specifically, belief) is not just a crutch or an opiate, it is also a terrible burden and a terrifying mystery. However, the irony is also here, for what is Jan but an evil-minded director asking his 'actor' to do terrible things for his pleasure?This theme and this irony are disturbingly present in The Idiots (1998) in which the lead spazz, Stoffer, 'directs' a group of peers pretending to be retarded in public (surely a satirical conceit of movie-making?) which eventually leads to a (now notorious) orgy and Stoffer's challenge to his 'idiots' to take their spazzing home to their real lives. At this last request, all of them balk except for Karen, the 'golden heart' of this film, who spazzes in the presence of grieving family members. The orgy scene is mostly silly and strikes me as von Trier poking fun at communes (remember, he was raised in one and currently works closely with another). Karen's spazz at home is, on the other hand, profoundly disturbing, essentially making the same point as the climax of Epidemic. In it we learn

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that she has already broken a basic societal norm by running away at the death of her child; then we watch her drool and spazz in front of her grief-stricken family, continuing the silly game (which for her has become real) in the worst possible circumstance. Anyone who accuses von Trier of making fun of retarded people, in my opinion, doesn't really see the point of the film. He is making fun of himself and yearning for an escape from reason, just like every romantic since William Blake. Of the three 'saints' Karen is by far the most troubled as she seems to have no ideals or pure motives that explain her incredibly hurtful, symbolic self-immolation.Dancer In the Dark (2000) has no explicit sex or violence, but it certainly provides no relief for the sensitive. As we watch Selma move from one torment to another for the sake of her son, we feel emotionally violated, a sentiment that Björk, the mercurial star of Dancer, is reported to have also felt during production. As a musical, (in emotional tenor, it is more an opera) it is unique. Not only are Björk's musical numbers and von Trier's method of capturing them different from anything else we've heard or seen, unlike most musicals, the set pieces provide little relief. Like a Greek chorus, they function as an analysis and commentary on the action of the story which is heart-breaking melodrama from beginning to end. Unlike Bess and Karen, Selma's goodness completely captures our sympathy, so it is difficult to watch her suffering with any detachment. Thus, it is von Trier's most intimate film, a feeling his handheld camera encourages.At one point in Björkman's Tranceformer, von Trier, shaking his firsts in trembling frustration, says that the worst betrayal of all is the betrayal of one's ideals, and it is clear that he has personally experienced this betrayal. He demonstrates, from Element to Dancer, that being an idealist does not mean imparting a rosy, unrealistic view of things. In Element, Epidemic, Zentropa, Medea and The Kingdom, the protagonists are idealists who are so helpless in living out their ideals that they actually end up being a catalyst for evil rather than an ameliorative factor. In Breaking, Idiots and Dancer, the female saints may 'deny themselves' as the gospel tells us to, but all do so in a decidedly un-Christian way - the saint as adulterer, anarchist and murderer. Like all great artists, von Trier practices an aesthetic that transcends categories so his work cannot be reduced to anyone's message, not even his own. Like a knight of old, his causes may grow cloudy and his wounds may be sometimes self-inflicted, but he will fight on anyway, until the last dragon is slain, even the dragon within.

Scope of the DocumentaryThe film will be an examination of von Trier’s work, and deconstruct that vis-à-vis his life experiences, in an attempt to understand the man better. The film will specifically tackle the allegations that von Trier intentionally provokes in a desperate bid for attention, and of misogynism.By interviewing various people who have worked with von Trier over the years, and by mining his films for subtext and autobiographical glimpses (especially in the female characters), the documentary will attempt to understand the working of von Trier.The people who will be interviewed include:

1. Charlotte Gainsburg, Actress. Worked with von Trier on Antichrist.2. Björk, Singer/Actress. Had a hell-ish working experience with von Trier on Dancer in the

Dark.3. Nicole Kidman, Actress. Worked with von Trier on Dogville.4. Bryce Dallas Howard, Actress. Worked on von Trier’s Maderlay.5. Willem Dafoe, Actor. Regular von Trier collaborator.6. Roger Ebert, Film Critic.7. Mads Karlsen Bækkevold, Filmmaking Student. Currently writing a research paper on von

Trier.8. Jørgen Leth, Poet and Filmmaker. Cited by von Trier as his mentor.9. Thomas Vinterberg, Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, Kristian Levring, Film directors. Co-founders of

the Dogme 95 movement with Trier.

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10. Peter Aalbæk Jensen, Film producer. Partner in Zentropa Entertainments, Trier’s production house.

11. Cæcilia Holbek, Ex-wife.12. Bente Frøge, Current wife.13. Lars von Trier.

Various detractors will also be quoted.The interview with Björk will be the highlight of the documentary. Bjork had a very rocky work relation with von Trier on the sets of Dancer in the Dark. At one point, felt so frustrated and manipulated that she ran into the forest, ate her costume, and vowed never to act again.The documentary will start with the outrage Antichrist was met with at Cannes, using actual footage from the press conference (specially the part where one critic asked von Trier to “justify” himself), and move chronologically backward from there, ending with his mother’s death bed confession and the birth of the Dogme 95 movement.

StyleStylistically, the documentary will use a Dogme 95 approach. Dogme 95 rules:

1. Filming must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in. If a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found.

2. The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. Music must not be used unless it occurs within the scene being filmed, i.e., diegetic.

3. The camera must be a hand-held camera. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted. The film must not take place where the camera is standing; filming must take place where the action takes place.

4. The film must be in color. Special lighting is not acceptable (if there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera).

5. Optical work and filters are forbidden.6. The film must not contain superficial action (murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.)7. Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden (that is to say that the film takes place

here and now).8. Genre movies are not acceptable.9. The final picture must be transferred to the Academy 35mm film, with an aspect ratio of 4:3,

that is, not widescreen.10. The director must not be credited.

Not only is Dogme 95 perfectly suited for documentaries, but a documentary on von Trier, one of the founders of the movement, not shot as a Dogme 95 movie just is a cardinal sin.Also, the approach will help cut costs in the following ways:

Shoot crew can be small. Without the luxury of complex sound mixing or dubbing (which are forbidden by the Dogme

95 doctrine), the edit will be simple, swift and hence, inexpensive.

FundingDue to its ridiculously huge scope, and the insane amounts of travelling required to interview everyone (von Trier is notorious for not flying, not even for his shoots), the budget will have to be pretty sizeable, in the region of $500,000-$750,000.The production will save costs on camera, using consumer level cameras to add an extra layer of rough authenticity while keeping the costs down, and in post production.Some of the potential financers are:

1. Martin Scorsese, who has always expressed interest in working with von Trier.2. Thomas Vinterberg, Søren Kragh-Jacobsen and Kristian Levring.

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3. Zentropa Entertainments.4. The National Film Board of Denmark.5. Nicole Kidman.6. Ron Howard and Bryce Dallas Howard.7. Danmarks Radio, the Danish national broadcasting corporation, and the channel which

carried von Trier’s TV series, Riget (The Kingdom) and Riget II (The Kingdom II).8. Canal+.9. FilmFour.10. Pathé.

Funds will also be raised through donations solicited over the internet, and from family and friends.

Screening and Marketing The documentary will receive a limited theatrical release. If Danmarks Radio, Canal+ or Film Four come on board as producers, the film will also be

aired on their TV channels. Online digital downloads will be made available to tap into von Trier’s cult fan base.

Awards CircuitThe documentary will be taken to various international film festivals like

The International Documentary Film Festival (Amsterdam) Palm Springs International Film Festival Seattle International Film Festival Sundance film Festival Cannes Film Festival Mumbai International Film Festival