THE CINEMA OF LARS VON TRIER

Lars von Trier is the most controversial figure of contemporary European cinema. This volume is the first book to analyse in depth the changes he has brought to modern film. Since founding the back-to-basics Dogme philosophy of filmmaking in 1995, von Trier’s name has become a by-word for taboo-breaking cinema. As a director, he has courted media controversy through films such as The Idiots (1998), with its unsimulated sex and non-conformist politics, and through his complex relationships with actresses such as Björk and Nicole Kidman, from whom he coaxed career-best performances in Dancer in the Dark (2000) and Dogville (2003) respectively. Analysing these films as well as recent works such as The Five Obstructions (2004) and The Boss of it All (2006), it forges a new understanding of the founder of Dogme 95 as a great democratiser of cinema in the digital age, presenting von Trier as one of the most daring cinematic exponents of postmodern politics and satire.

January 2007
224 pages

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Caroline Bainbridge is Reader in Media and Cultural Studies at Roehampton University. She has published articles in a range of journals including Screen, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, Journal for Cultural Research and Paragraph.

'A cogent collection of essays on a variety of related topics, the book tackles Trier’s approach and technique from a variety of angles, providing a significant piece of analysis that will be of great interest to the Film Studies crowd, for whom it will be a cornerstone work.'  – Howard Maxford, Film Review****

‘Insightful, generous and wide-ranging, this volume provides the kind of sustained analysis in English that this remarkable Danish auteur so clearly deserves.’ – Mette Hjort, Lingnan University, Hong Kong

‘An engaging and accessible introduction to the work of Lars von Trier. Drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives, this study invites us to reconsider von Trier as a profoundly European filmmaker, whose play with history, nation, gender and ethics unfolds on a much larger stage than that of his native Denmark.’ – Claire Thomson, University College London

'Bridging spaces between film, filmmaker and spectator, Bainbridge's work is a highly valuable and accessible contribution to studies of von Trier that inspires further viewings and new reconsiderations of his work. Above all, at the heart of Bainbridge's book lies a challenge to the reader to embrace von Trier's film experience and think afresh the possibilities of its intensely felt sensations.' – Davina Quinlivan, Kings College London, for Film-Philosophy Journal