Trier on Von Trier [Paperback]

Von Trier is perfect for this kind of book, given that he has demonstrated in the past, with documentaries like the Five Obstructions as well as The Humiliated and von Trier's One Hundred Eyes, to be a filmmaker who - although prone to fabrication - is far from shy when it comes to promoting himself and voicing his own personal ideologies on life, cinema, etc. His obsession with lists, restrictions and manifestos is charted throughout the book, and worked into the framing of von Trier's cinematic-life chronologically, whilst as a host and subject, von Trier is lively, playful, witty and intelligent, knowingly admitting his own strengths and even shortcomings as a filmmaker, whilst discussing his work from his early short films like The Orchid Gardener and his breakthrough student-piece, Images of Liberation, right up to acclaimed cinematic masterworks like Breaking the Waves and The Idiots. Along the way we get anecdotes, trivia, back-stories and vivid exaggeration, as von Trier tells us of his life-long obsession with films and filmmaking and how his childhood and adolescence have shaped his work and the themes that we now associate with it.

The most interesting chapters of the book, for me, are the ones in which von Trier finally gets down to discussing his own work, casting an all-to-critical eye over Images of Liberation - which he now thinks of as vapid, pretentious and obvious in it's references - right up to how his notion of the Dogme manifesto helped to shape and define the script for Breaking the Waves - a film that many consider to be von Trier's masterpiece. It's nice to see the pre-dogme films getting a decent treatment too, with von Trier in the past dismissing his first three films, The Element of Crime, Epidemic and Europa as well as the TV play he directed from Carl Th. Dreyer's posthumous script, Medea. Here, von Trier talks about the difficulties he faced in getting these films made, his relationship with his co-writers and close collaborators, as well as the actors that he worked with. We also see how the stories developed from one film to another and how his first three films came to form the loose conceptual trilogy "Europa-film", as well as how and why von Trier set about visualising his work in such a grandiose and overtly provocative way. In his reflections, von Trier is adamant that both Medea and The Element of Crime are merely preposterous experiments in style and self-reference without any serious cinematic or historical merit (which is rather unfair, really), though he still thinks fondly of the experimental project Epidemic (why is this not available in the UK?) and his breakthrough success, the visually sublime film-noir, Europa.

He is most open about his later films, the epic TV horror of the Kingdom (will there be a third series...? von Trier seems to think so!) and the celebrated likes of Breaking the Waves, The Idiots and Dancer in the Dark, as well as a brief look at Dogville, which von Trier had just completed around the time of this book's publication. Unlike other von Trier releated books, Bjorkman analyses the whole concept of the Dogme 95 manifesto in relation to von Trier's films alone, without feeling compelled to give a three-page review on the other films of the movement (Festen, Mifune, The King is Alive, etc). Because of this, we get a much clearer view of how the Dogme movement came about and how it's idea of radical deconstruction of boundaries and conventions tied into von Trier's then state-of-mind (the break-up of his first marriage, a lengthy affair, his unspoken love for the late Katrin Cartlidge and the birth of his third child). Although there is no denying that von Trier is a character that seems to revel in pretension and delight in creating his own myths, this book manages to go some lengths in removing that façade and introducing us to the sensitive and intelligent filmmaker behind some of the most interesting films of the last twenty years.

As was evident from his previous Q&A style discussions with those other troubled geniuses, Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen, Bjorkman is able to bring out the inner-character of the artist and find out how much of "them" as a person is encoded into their work and how much of it is merely created in reference to those they admire (as with Allen, von Trier speaks of a strong obsession with Bergman, even going so far as to label him a "cinematic-father"). Bjorkman's book gives us an enjoyable and informative insight into one of contemporary cinema's great-misunderstood auteurs, and is of interest to both von Trier fans and cineastes alike.