Ever since in 1984 in Cannes, his film Element of Crime polarized film critics, who often referred to him as the narcissistic “self-promotor” and “mere manipulator”, von Trier constantly breaks waves and swims against the tide. When his film Nymphomaniac was shown in Berlin in 2014, he appeared on stage wearing a T-shirt with the sign 'Persona non grata'. Most likely that statement describes his author personality in the best way, even though it ironically refers to the rubbish he said about Nazism during a press conference in Cannes, which caused an ultimate, although fabricated, scandal.
Therefor we may never be certain about what is true or not in von Trier’s life. “I am glad to say that everything that has been said and written about me is pure lies”, said von Trier in Bjorkman’s documentary Tranceformer: Portrait of Lars von Trier. In it he describes his life as pure fabrication, even though his long-time producer Peter Jensen said that Lars never lies. Thus it is written in his biography that his father was a communist, mother a social democrat and both were nudists, while Trier, as a child, was allowed everything except “emotions, religion and pleasure”. Truth or lie? Who would know. He started to make films as an eleven-year old boy with his mother’s Super 8 camera, and a year later he starred in the TV series Clandestine Summer (1968). They say that he constantly skipped school, drank wine and watched lots of movies. When he enrolled to film school in Copenhagen, he knew all the film classics. Truth or lie?
Most of von Trier’s opus is made up of trilogies, finished and unfinished ones. The first trilogy is made up from his first three films - Element of Crime, Epidemic and Europa – that all deal with Europe lulled in its own chaos and death. The second trilogy about golden hearts is characterized by female protagonists who will do anything to become saints, and are ready to sacrifice themselves for a greater (Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark). The third trilogy is unfinished and the films in it are connected by the Brecht-like theatricality of critique of the American society. He directed two films in it (Dogville, Manderlay), and left it unfinished as he turned to some other of his films and interests, sex and apocalypse. He is searching for antichrist and provocation where that same provocation becomes harder – in the world of images and chaos that rules the world, while Tarkovsky is laughing in his grave.
That he knows all about the film classics is proven in the finale of his film Breaking the Waves, which can be observed as an homage to his countryman Carl Theodore Dreyer, who introduced utterly new rules in the film syntax while researching the eternal conflicts between orthodox religion and true faith. The character of Bess McNeill (Emily Watson) in this film is the same character of Karen in The Idiots; she is the only “normal” person in a group/commune of people pretending to be crazy. Her destiny is the contemporary variant of Joan of Arc (and here we meet the good old Dreyer again). To be an idiot these days is the biggest luxury. Idiots are people from the future. These are some of the one-liners from this beautiful perverse film by von Trier (in the US, the film was shown in a censored version). In the musical Dancer in the Dark we meet the amazing Bjork as an actress for the first time. Her character Selma sublimates the holy trinity of woman, mother and martyr, who gains almost angel-like attributes after a fatal purification of realization of a higher cause. And in the end she and the audience alike experience the purification.
The Idiots were the final attempt of his famous Dogma that, as is the case with many film manifestos and avant-gardes, spread in the sperm of his heroes. Even though his later films that probed America, the land of possibilities and toyed with deconstruction of Brecht’s parabola and followed its vow of chastity, they were not quite as devoted to it and used a minimalist set design that includes houses sketched with chalk. Once again we meet a woman with a golden heart, now embodied in the character of the graceful Grace (Nicole Kidman) who is on the run from gangsters. She finds refuge in a small isolated town where she becomes an object of torture of its hypocritical inhabitants. As it usually happens, von Trier takes on the role of the director-god who follows his characters on their long path of Christological suffering (observe Grace tied in chains) before they face their final judgment. As if the author is trying to make fun of the audience, as well as the other way around. Trier returns to Grace in his next Manderlay, in which she is no longer portrayed by Kidman, but by Bryce Dallas Howard. The town is also different; mountain landscape is replaced by the racial segregation of the American South where Grace and her father find shelter after a massacre in Dogvillu. Graphic trajectories and their symbolism outline a closed world in which film becomes a moral obligation with strict unwritten rules and legislations. It is a pure (im)perfect crime of film that identifies the culprits, motives and victims. Maybe its author will be alone in the world some day and he will have nothing else to do but masturbate isolated in his room watching the film Nymphomaniac. (Dragan Rubeša)