Lars von Trier's Renewal of Film 1984-2014 : Signal, Pixel, Diagram

Description

Danish director Lars von Trier has produced more than 20 films since his first appearance with The Elements of Crime in 1984. One of the most acknowledged - and most controversial - film directors of our time, Trier's films often escape the representational production of meaning. In Lars von Trier's Renewal of Film 1984-2014. Signal, Pixel, Diagram scholar Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen offers a comprehensive discussion of Lars von Trier's collected works. Examining Trier's experiments with narrative forms, genre, camera usage, light, and colour tones, she shows how Trier's unique ethically involving style activates the viewer's entire perception apparatus. In understanding this affective involvement, the author frames the discussion around concepts from Gilles Deleuze, Alois Riegl, Brian Massumi and others on the haptic image, the diagram, affect and the signaletic material. Front Page Title Page Colophon Contents Preface Introduction The theoretical landscape The »signaletic material« of film Haptic surfaces and affective effects Haptic surfaces and spatial effects in Trier’s films of the 1980s A tiger in The Kingdom The transformation from Gothic to grotesque A ghost story From Gothic eeriness to grotesque laughter on the surface of the TV screen The real-time effect of electronic signals - introduction to The Kingdom I Breaching – the conclusion of The Kingdom I The perforation from upper to underside in the narrative’s Möbius strip Grotesque real-time interfaces: surveillance, scans and X-ray The technological and mythological credo of the video medium The haptic level in The Kingdom I and II »The body without organs« and the »becoming-animal Dogme 95 and The Idiots A new form of realism The »Dogme 95 Manifesto« and the »Vow of Chastity« A diagrammatic production of factual reality in the form of haptic »Figures« The Dogme diagram – a generator of haptic compositions and modes of perception Deformation of the face and the fall of the body Golden Hearts 1 and 3 Affective outflow into the landscape and the music The power of the rejected Breaking the Waves and »faciality« Any-space-whatever and colours in Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark Dancer in the Dark and »the refrain« America films Verfremdung and diagrammatic production Planes of composition in Dogville Capitalistic segmentarity and terroristic micropolitics in Dogville Microperceptual affect in Dogville Compositional planes in Manderlay Struggle in the binary segmentation Dividual qualitative transformation and an ethics of affect The boss and the performative-biographical The aesthetics of the fall Heterotopy, diagram and divid The one who falls: on Lars' turning Jørgen into a performative I Affective figures of depression, melancholia and mania Antichrist – in nature, chaos reigns Nietzsche – The Dionysian and the Apollinian Tarkovsky and the »eternal recurrence of the same« Time as the »powers of the false«, creation and transformation Melancholia – the world’s Dionysian underground Iconoclasm The rescue of melancholia from ›the world as will and idea‹ Tristan und Isolde – Wagner as intermediary The end of the world – figures for interpretation Affect and event Schopenhauer’s melancholia, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, and Arendt’s thinker Affective diagrams: a haptic, signaletic material in Antichrist and Melancholia Nymphomaniac – mania’s (self)destructive force Two kinds of diagram: material signs and signaletic material The subversive potential of sexual desire in chapters 1-4 The asexual, super sensual woman in chapter 5 The sadistic woman’s unfolding in chapters 6-8 Concluding remarks on Lars von Trier’s filmic affect diagrams Bibliography Cover Back Side