As one of the foremost scholars on Lars von Trier's entire oeuvre, Linda Badley's new in-depth study provides a fresh perspective, integrating extensive archival research, contemporary cultural references, and interviews with the director and his longtime collaborators. In examining some of the Danish auteur's most criticizedperhaps even despisedfilms, Lars von Trier: Beyond Depression uncovers multiple new approaches to understanding the processes that shaped their intensity and singularity.

Autorentext

Linda Badley

Klappentext

Lars von Trier built a reputation as a provocateur from the start but in the late 2000s, he entered an even more inflammatory phase. Amid Cannes controversies, Antichrist (2009), Melancholia (2011), Nymphomaniac (2013 14), and The House That Jack Built (2018) brandished the cinematic virtuosity von Trier once banned under the Dogme 95 Manifesto while subjecting audiences to extreme cinema. Following von Trier s experience of clinical depression in 2006 and 2007, these films took an aggressively personal and retrospective turn against the backdrop of the director s controversy-courting public appearances.

Playing against widespread assumptions, Linda Badley takes a reparative approach, offering an in-depth examination of these four films and the contexts that produced them. Drawing on numerous interviews with the director and his collaborators as well as inside access to archival materials, she provides a thorough and comprehensive account of von Trier s preproduction and creative process. Highlighting a transmedial turn, Badley tracks von Trier s artistic touchstones from Wagner, Proust, and the Marquis de Sade to Scandinavian erotic cinema and serial killer genre tropes. She considers his portrayals of mental illness and therapy, gender and sexuality, nature and extinction, shedding light on the thematic concerns that unite these films as a distinct cycle. Offering nuanced readings of these films, the book emphasizes the significance of von Trier s work for current critical and philosophical debates, showing how they engage with notions of the Anthropocene, dark ecology, and the postcinematic.

Zusammenfassung
Linda Badley offers an in-depth examination of Lars von Trier's Antichrist (2009), Melancholia (2011), Nymphomaniac (201314), and The House That Jack Built (2018) and the contexts that produced them. She draws on numerous interviews with the director and his collaborators as well as inside access to archival materials.

Inhalt

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Nature as Satan s Church: Antichrist s Dark Ecology
2. Melancholia: Wagner, Superkitsch, and Dark Ecology
3. Nymphomaniac: Digressionism, Collaboration, Hypotexts, Paratexts
4. The House That Jack Built: Murder as Art/Art as Murder
   Coda
   Appendix
   Notes
   Filmography
   Bibliography
   Index