melancholia (w&d von trier)

If cinema, as occasionally noted, is a synthesis of multiple elements (screenwriting, acting, photography, music, art direction, editing etc), then the art of the director is to employ each of these elements to the nth degree. It might seem counterintuitive that Von Trier, who comes from a lo-fi school, which sought a return to a pared-back methodology, should end up excelling in every aspect of this directorial remit, but in Melancholia, we witness a seemingly effortless mastery of the medium.

Screenwriting - when discussing the quality of screenwriting, what is involved? Firstly the idea that the screenplay will introduce and discuss ideas that provoke thought, a condition so often neglected by the mainstream. Second that the narrative should take the viewer with it, should be involving. Thirdly, that the dialogue should be credible, even at its more recondite. So when Dunst’s character says that the earth is evil, in another film this line might feel trite or contrived. Whereas, in Melancholia, it feels not only credible, coming from the mouth of this character, but also resonant of the more complex ideas the film is raising. Cinema is not philosophy. It struggles to explore concepts with subtlety or depth. Von Trier appears to be investigating a Schopenhauer- ian or Manichean argument about the overblown importance of humanity, its relative insignificance within the immensity of the universe. Dunst character explores these ideas convincingly, brilliantly, in a way that allows us to understand the questions the film is posing. Should the world end, would it really be such a tragedy? What would be lost? It’s an existential, anti-renaissance line, which feels all too pertinent in this 21st christian century.

Acting - Acting is by definition, fakery. Someone pretends to be someone else. The question then becomes, how well do they do this? Do they still feel human? Or does the fakery feel contrived? Perhaps the greatest testament to the director’s skill is the performance of Kiefer Sutherland, an actor who sometimes seemed to relish the fakery, the exaggeration of acting for the camera. Here, as the hassled husband of Gainsbourg and Dunst’s brother-in-law his exasperation is completely convincing.

Photography - I was lucky enough to watch the film on a big screen. There can be few more imposing visions than the great planet Melancholia soaring over the horizon, at the same time beauty, monster and avenger. There is something of the formal composition of certain scenes that is reminiscent of Resnais’ Last year in Marienbad. Then, in the opening half of the film, Von Trier’s DOP, Manuel Alberto Claro, captures the nuances and energy of a wedding with all the brillo of the days of Dogma, a homage, in its way, to Festen.

Music - Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde is used repeatedly throughout the film. Given the epic scale the film is looking to operate on, the choice feels just as apposite (and perhaps includes a nod and a wink) to Copolla’s uses of Wagner in Apocalypse Now.

Art Direction - someone (Simone Grau Roney) was doing something very clever indeed with the representation of the planet Melancholia, a second moon/ sun. The use of a simple piece of twisted wire as a messenger of salvation or doom is also extraordinary.

Editing - Editing is one of the least valued elements of the process of making cinema. You rarely get editors on the red carpet. Yet Molly Malene Stensgaard offers a masterclass. In the first half of the film, with its large cast, she ensures that the rhythm never drops as we flit from scene to scene, cutting at the perfect moment. In the second, which has only four characters, she ensures there is a rising sense of tension, propelling the film towards its glorious climax. 

fantastic machine (d. axel danielson, maximilien van aertryck)

Fantastic Machine is a documentary about the image and its evolution from pinhole camera to viral digital media. Given the broadness of the remit, it is perhaps unsurprising that the film doesn’t have too much of a central thesis, beyond the wonder and nightmare of the audiovisual arts. Perhaps the most telling moment comes when the then president of Ireland introduces the first screening of television in the country, likening the potential impact of this new technology to the power of a nuclear weapon. This man from another generation, speaking in severe black and white, comes across as a seer. The film touches on the way in which the image is something the medium has always manipulated even whilst purporting to be completely objective. This is represented through a neat edit sequence where the photographers are seen on the other side of a tragic, award-winning photograph. Fantastic Machine is full of these shiny moments, and is relentlessly entertaining, which sometimes seems at odds with the suggestion it is defrocking the superficiality of the image. It would have been lovely to have had something of Barthes, Virilio or even Baudrillard referenced in order to substantiate some of the ideas which are floated. Nevertheless, the film has a cracking and effective edit, and there are enough nuggets in there to keep anyone happy for an hour and a half. 

godland (w&d hlynur pálmason)

Anyone I know who has ever visited Iceland tells me that it has the most spectacular scenery. Godland’s irresistible cinematography, by Maria von Hausswolff, takes full measure of this, with the landscape featuring as an additional character and inspiring some of the most beautiful moments on film I have ever seen. If the image is to swoon for, this is countermanded by the bleak storyline, which narrates the journey of Lucas, a naive priest, as he travels from Denmark to a remote Icelandic settlement charged with constructing a church before the onset of winter. Lucas’ journey reminded me in some ways of an antipodean rival, Aguirre, with the knowledge that this mission is doomed to end badly. Another film which came to mind was Martel’s Zama, and there is plenty in the dreamy, loopy camerawork to compare to Martel’s epic. The film is split into two parts - Lucas’ journey to the settlement and his stay at the settlement. He is brought back from the dead, only to find that madness stalks his heels, and the presence of the comely daughter of the settlement’s head honcho serves to complicate matters. However, in so many ways the narrative is a secondary aspect of the film’s ambitions, which seem, as the title suggests, to range further, unto a meditation on the possibility of the divine, something which nature possesses to a degree humanity, cut off from nature, can never aspire to. Godland, with its mighty cascades, soaring peaks and virulent volcano feels like it could be classed as a pantheistic film, one where it is nature as much as man who kills (a man swept away by a raving river, a head crushed under rock), where the bones of the dead will be absorbed and cleansed by the soil as it proceeds at its own pace, which has nothing to do with the rushed rhythms of humanity. 

flee (w&d jonas poher rasmussen, w. amin nawabi)

As we settled down to watch Flee, we realised that we had seen it before. It was in Sundance last year, I believe, alongside Censor, which permitted us to watch it on their platform. However, within a few minutes of that strange sensation when you re-acquaint yourself with images that you’ve forgotten you’ve already seen, the film took over and it felt like the first time all over again. Flee is a film about a refugee, but it approaches the subject matter using animated recreations of filmed scenes, something the final image makes clear. The effect is enormously powerful. There are limits to the possibilities of naturalistic representation. There comes a point when the presence of an actor representing a supposedly real event interferes with the audience’s reception of that event. The scene doesn’t feel quite “true”. Rasmussen’s use of animation as he tells the story of Amin’s flight from Kabul to Moscow and eventually Copenhagen, erases this doubt. Using animation allows the viewer to avoid the question of literal, documentary truth and engage with the story on another register. The use of interspersed archive footage, from Afghanistan and Russia (something I don’t recall from the Sundance cut - was it added later?) helps to root us in the reality of these places, but we identify with Amin all the more because his story is not framed by an actor playing him. It’s a highly subtle form of storytelling which has the effect of making Amin’s experiences feel achingly real. 

the guilty (w&d gustav möller, w emil nygaard albertsen)

The Guilty was much heralded in the UK last year, so it was with a certain anticipation that I finally settled down to watch it. People had told me that it was gripping, compelling, an astonishing manipulation of meagre resources. Essentially the film is a fine advert for the Aristotelian virtues of time, place and action. There’s always a frisson to be had from engaging with a film in ‘real time’, watching the clock tick down. It permits the spectator to feel complicit in the action: if you were to leave now, would this affect the narrative? Hence, the edge of the seat-ness of the movie. In addition it’s a wonderful riposte to the “show/ don’t tell” brigade - because all the action occurs ‘offstage’. The protagonist, Asger, works as a police response handler, (He’s no longer on the beat for reasons which become clear as the movie unfolds), tracking an apparent kidnapping. He is trapped in the passivity of his situation, as he attempts to influence events beyond his immediate control, at the end of a phone line. The script provides numerous twists as it unravels, keeping the audience guessing. We are in the same place as Asger; we share his information and his ignorance, and as a result we ride the rollercoaster with him. It’s skilful and effective screenwriting, even if the milieu ends up feeling something out of an episode of a cop drama series, which restricts the narrative potency to a certain extent. 

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Watching the film, it struck me that there might be another reason for its effectiveness. In a way, Asger’s situation reflects and captures the modern condition. We are all prisoners in our private shells today. Incarcerated by information we receive through our phones or our computers. We stare at screens which deliver terrifying information and search for a way to influence events from a position of passive ignorance. These events, as seen through the screen, are also deceptive. The heroic anti-establishment Assange becomes a stool pigeon of the Bannonite extremists. Our judgement is faulty, unreliable. Our impotence is repeatedly exposed. We could, like Asger, smash up the furniture in anger at the destruction of the rainforest or the contamination of the seas or the latest racist comment by a politician we have no way of ejecting, but this anger serves no purpose at all. Gustav Möller’s film is an excruciating metaphor for the tragic hopelessness caused by our modern technological servitude. 

companions [christina hesselholdt]

Companions is a chunky novel, composed of monologues spoken by five different characters: Alma, Camilla, Alwilda, Kristian and Edward, all of them Danish. The novel opens with Alma and Kristian, a couple, on holiday in the UK, retracing Wordsworth’s steps and recounting the visit from their differing perspectives. It also provides, for a British audience, the fascinating  experience of viewing one’s homeland through a European lens. The writer uses her scalpel to slice up their soon-to-be-doomed relationship. The literary references continue with visits to the homes of the Brontës and Virginia Woolf. The novel operates on all kinds of levels, and it’s a luminous, absorbing opening.

The format of the novel, this succession of monologues, suggests an extension of this fractal pattern. Something along the lines of a roman á clef, divided by five. This suggestion is deceptive. In fact, Camilla emerges as the dominant voice, with Alma as the secondary one. The other three characters have cameo roles, nothing more. Camilla’s relationship with her mother gradually establishes itself as the book’s dominant theme. The engaging, worldly Camilla and the more phlegmatic Alma (who is a novelist) begin to feel like twin manifestations of the author’s id. The two women dovetail memories, share journeys together. The novel rambles. It has no set destination. The event which draws the book to its conclusion seems slightly Hollywood. In the end Companions has the feel of a memoir as much as a novel, even though we have no way of knowing whether Camilla and Alma’s anecdotes are drawn from the author’s life or are entirely fictitious. 

The writing retains a savvy, erudite tone. These are strong Danish women, whose romanticism is kept in check. They visit Sylvia Plath’s home, but neither are the type to put their head in an oven, in spite of a history of attempted suicide in Camilla’s family. At times it almost feels as though both women pine for that Brontëan moment, which history and culture has neglected to give them. Instead, Camilla and Alma substitute a restless, Proustian roving through their history, a sublimation of the lived passion which eludes them, or in which the writer has less interest. It’s perhaps revealing that when Alma does start a relationship with one of the other narrators, Edward, this happens almost entirely off-screen, so to speak. This is a novel which skirts passion; one which is more preoccupied with the binds of friendship or family. To what extent this might be a Danish trait is hard to know; although there are echoes of Vinterberg’s The Commune. 

the commune (w&d thomas vinterberg; w tobias lindholm)

About a week ago I finally caught up with Vinterberg’s The Hunt. I’d got somewhat railroaded by watching It’s About Love a few years ago, a film that seemed so preposterous that it looked to me as though the director had managed to annihilate the monstrous talent he showed in Festen. Fortunately I was wrong. The Hunt’s critical success was more than merited. It’s as well-made a film as the 21st century has produced so far, combining a ruthless narrative with a gripping premise and some great acting. It pulled off the trick of creating a thriller where no-one is killed and the violence is below the surface rather than above it.

The Commune is not quite as complete a cinematic experience, but then few films have been or will be. Nevertheless, it showcases Vinterberg’s un-flashy hallmarks. At times it feels as though he’s the anti-Refn, though it’s a lucky country that produces two such distinguished filmmakers (not to mention the others). The idea of community underpins all of Vinterberg’s work. The Commune looks at a community that is constructed from scratch, almost as a whim of Anna, the news anchor who is bored of her marriage and decides to invite a host of others to come and live with her and her husband, Erik and daughter, Freja. The film starts with a feelgood vibe as we get to know this odd bunch and see how they interact. Gradually, however, we move into Bergman territory: this is a portrait of a marriage which is imploding. When Erik has an affair and Anna invites his lover to join the commune, her whim comes back to bite her. The second half of the film becomes a study in her disintegration (she looks a like Gina Rowlands in a Cassavetes film). Trine Dryrholm gives a remarkable performance. The family of Anna, Erik and Freya is one kind of collective, which doesn’t survive. However, the collective which Anna has concocted does, in spite of its chaotic nature. When the child of a couple who live there dies, the collective offers real succour to those parents. The Commune offers a more positive vision of communal living than Festen or The Hunt. The collective/ commune might not defend everyone’s interests, but it can offer an antidote to society’s harshness, especially to the weaker members, the oddballs who don’t know how they fit in. 

This brief summary doesn’t really do the film justice. Which is part of what’s appealing about the film. It’s a film which isn’t afraid to grapple with ideas, but is prepared to locate those ideas within a very human world. There are small touches, such as when Erik tells Emma that he’s not interested in Le Corbusier’s modular architecture, or the editorial team discuss how much airtime Pol Pot should be given, which reveal the film’s wider intellectual remit. This feels like the work of a director who wants to explore what it means to live in a community, explore the role of love within our modern society, who wants to grapple with big issues, but to do so in a way that resists pretension. It’s drama which is shaped in the shadow of Ibsen, (the script is adapted from a stage play.) It’s refreshing to see a filmmaker believing in the capacity of cinema to take itself seriously, without taking itself over-seriously. The Commune (whose title in Danish is Kollektivet) is an accomplished addition to the Vinterberg canon. 

the neon demon (w&d. refn, w. polly stenham & mary laws)

Refn’s film has all the hallmarks. It’s shiny, so much so that at times the screen dazzles. It’s shallow, so shallow that the lead is killed in an empty swimming pool. It has hidden depths, which are so hidden that they can only be represented by an abstract, demonic symbol. It’s provocative. So provocative that many critics have fallen for the bait and decried the film’s taboo-breaking, as though the guiding hand was Nietzsche’s. 

Is this the twilight of the gods? It would be hard to make a case. Refn is more of a tease than a terror. There’s a scene of necrophilia but Roeg did this far more dangerously in Bad Timing. There’s cannibalism, but that’s off-screen. There’s very little sex. There’s a soft-porn lesbian shower scene, doused in blood, but it’s so kitsch you suspect that Refn finds this hilarious, not shocking. If anything this would appear to be a film which purports to be about smashing up the family china; but a film that never goes so far as to actually smash up the family china. 

In contrast to received notions of sensationalist films, Neon Demon is stately in its pacing. More Bergman than Fast ’n Furious. The director and editor delight in the wondrous images captured by the DOP, Natasha Braier. Rightly so. This is a cinema of the image and the images are ravishing. There’s some neat dialogue supplied by the playwrights Refn has drafted in, but the plot is wafer-thin and the denouement has no tension. It’s an aggressively semiotic film: a film constructed out of images which are all about what we choose to see. We choose pretty young things. We choose baubles. We choose the surface. Perhaps the film’s most radical moment comes towards the end when one of the characters eats a regurgitated eyeball. Pop will eat itself.

Refn is a provocateur, not a theorist. People might detect allegories of how LA eats its young, or capitalism turns its young into products and then eats them, or how coming of age in a capitalist society is about preparing oneself to become a sacrificial lamb. All these readings and more would seem applicable. Like a Dali painting, the film’s bland but seductive surface allows for multiple interpretation. Which might be its skill, or it might be the Neon Demon’s achilles heel. If heels are something that neon demons possess. 

drive (d nicolas refn, w hossein amini)

It's been almost a week since I saw Drive and the predominant memory is not the violence or Gosling's assured performance or the beautifully rendered love story or even the eurotrash score. It's the shocking pink font used for the titles and credits.

This pinkness lends a neon brashness to proceedings from the start. It has the feel of a directorial flourish. As though to suggest that nothing we see needs to be taken too seriously. It also has the feeling of a foreigner's take on LA: bright party colours and recklessness. There's a moment in the film when Albert Brooks' gangster says that he used to be in the film business years ago. He describes the films he made, films which sound suitably commercial for a gangster boss, and at the end he says: they used to call them European. It feels as though Refn's Drive is fulfilling that same brief: a Hollywood notion of what a European film might be, in their dreams. (Not the Europeans).

Refn, with his flair for mood and violence, feels like the kind of European who'd fit in well in Hollywood. Which isn't an insult. If Drive is essentially 'noir' it's easy to forget now that that style, later re-appropriated by the Europeans, was developed in the US by exiles, the likes of Fritz Lang, Wilder, Siodmak etc. The city is reduced to a grid wherein human passions are worked out with all their dramatic implications. LA, with its lack of recognisable landmarks, is the perfect laboratory. Gosling spends his time driving through anonymous streets. There's no hint of where he comes from. He's a perfectly alienated twenty first century being. The first thing that appears to give any meaning to his life is the appearance in it of the gamine Irene, another apparent drifter.

On many levels therefore, Drive might be seen as a cynical movie. The throwaway violence, the rootlessness, the pink font: it's as though the hyper-smart Refn is both showing off with his technical acumen and also suggesting that this is basically a Hollywood B-movie and we shouldn't take it too seriously. (I'd even include the way he directs Gosling in this, for all the plaudits the pair have received: to my mind it's almost a tongue-in-cheek performance, an homage rather than something rooted in any genuine feeling.) However, there's one aspect of the film which transcends everything else. Which is the love affair: not so much in that it happens, as it's a necessary plot requirement, but in the way in which it is portrayed. It's not often that you'll see a director pinpoint the mechanics of love as beautifully as Refn does in Drive. All of a sudden, his taciturn style pays dividends. Mulligan and Gosling barely speak to one another. Yet it's evident that each has transformed the other's life utterly. It's all in the not-said, even the not-done. There's one moment where she places her hand on his, and this tells you all you need to know.

So, underneath the cynicism, there lurks a romantic sensibility. I got the feeling throughout the film that Refn's directing was like watching a sportsman playing at half-pace. In his depiction of the love affair, it suddenly feels like he's moving up through the gears. The rest is functional and assured. You can't help wondering what kind of film Refn will make when he's really going for it; as well as wondering if he's so good at playing the system that he'll never really have to stretch himself.

armadillo (d. janus metz pedersen)

It's interesting to learn that Metz's film has attracted criticism on the basis that it's too aesthetic. This, it has been noted, is a war documentary that looks like a feature film. The cinematography, the use of music and editing, all serve to heighten the viewer's experience. This attention to technical detail also raises the viewer's awareness of the silent hands at work behind the camera. There appears to be something of a paradox here, because, in spite of the fact they, (at the very least the director and Lars Skree, the cinematographer) are present at all times, in the midst of fire-fights and porn-watching sessions, this is not the kind of doc where the filmmakers become characters within their own movie. Metz and Skree try to absent themselves as far as possible and let the soldiers tell their own story.

Something which can't ever, quite, be done. Firstly, some of the conversations between the Helmand based soldiers, where they talk about what they think of the war they're waging, feel staged and even awkward. Secondly, the film includes several 'debriefings' including one key scene where a soldier appears to boast about his clinical execution of four Taliban, killed in a ditch during a firefight the viewer has already witnessed. Did the presence of the cameras, no matter how used the soldiers might be to them, have some kind of an impact? Were Rasmus and the others starting to take on roles within the as-yet uncompleted film? I don't think it's to the film's detriment that it raises questions about what the impact of having a camera trained on you as you go through meltdown in Afghanistan might be, but this issue does skew the notion of capturing 'reality'. Reality with a camera is not the same as reality without one. Not yet, anyhow.

As mentioned, Armadillo has been criticised as being dishonest. However, in some ways this means that when it does capture moments which feel inherently, indubitably 'truthful', these are all the more powerful. Such as when the bug-eyed wounded soldier sits by the side of a ditch, in a state of delayed terror, traces of which still seem present in his demeanour when the company visit him in the medical camp a few days later. Or, tellingly, the attitudes of the Afghans themselves. Their candour seems at odds with that of the Danes: they say it like it is. "You should go home. The Taliban are going to kill you all." Or: "My wife and child are dead." They don't look at the camera, which presumably, from their point of view, is wielded by another of the robocop aliens who have descended on their land and keep requesting them to put their lives on the line and co-operate. Armadillo's capturing of the problematic dynamic between the occupying forces of 'the West' and the locals themselves, often glimpsed as figures fleeing the latest skirmish to affect their village, is as potent as anything the film tells us about Danish army life.

The film's aesthetics do raise issues and imply a contradiction between the filmmakers desire to deliver a portrayal of the truth of war and their intention to create a well-crafted film. All the same, the very act of capturing war is perhaps, for now, an endeavour beyond the reach of filmmakers. At some point, an inherent dishonesty creeps in. It may be that videos filmed by soldiers on their mobile phones in Iraq or Libya etc are a truer account, but these tell only the most fractured of narratives, they confuse as much as they enlighten. The sequence when the Danes are attacked and fight back, provoking the potential human rights abuse, is baffling, as war must be: who's fighting whom? Are we shooting in the right direction? What the fuck is going on?

My take on the way Metz has gone about this is that he has recognised this inherent dishonesty in the bid to capture war on film, and has therefore embraced it. The very last scene shows the tough Rasmus, back in Denmark, in the shower in his home. This scene is clearly and unambiguously staged. As though the filmmakers are acknowledging the artifice behind their art. Whilst stating, as we have seen to be true, that this doesn't mean that the things that we have witnessed did not occur. Nor that a price has been paid which we, the viewer, even after watching the film, still cannot fathom.

valhalla rising (w&d nicolas refn, w. roy jacobsen)

This was not the movie any of us expected, after another Sunday evening excursion. It did admittedly contain an appropriate amount of gore, it did contain a single Viking, a one-eyed Viking called One-Eye. But that's as far as it goes. Refn's poster suggests a canter through some millenial pillaging, but the film is a meditative, psychotropic crawl, exploring an unlikely but perhaps feasible voyage towards death.

One-Eye has been captured by a pagan Scottish tribe, and is their resident, caged Giant Haystacks, defeating all-comers. When he escapes, he hooks up with a bunch of witless would-be Scottish Crusaders. Their boat goes the wrong way, drifting Westwards through a pea-souper to arrive on the shores of Vineland, where all and sundry meet their fate, either at each other's hands or those of the unfriendly natives. The spectre of Aguire overshadows the story, even if Refn's adventurers arrive in the New World five hundred years earlier. In an interview, Refn also mentions Tarkovsky, whose debt is evident in the film's stately, anti-dramatic pacing, albeit a pacing interrupted by moments of crude violence.

The premise, with its Scandanavian twist on history, is engaging. The Vikings did make their way to the place which was later named America, and doubtless more than a few suffered desperate, unheralded fates. It wouldn't be hard to read a kind of anti-history into the narrative. The unspoilt Eden of the Americas remains pure, the barbarity of Western ideology, shaped around religion, snuffed out at birth. In an otherwise patchy dialogue, one of the Crusaders remarks of an arrowhead that it's made of stone, not metal, and takes this as evidence that the natives are savages; but in the end it's the Crusaders savagery which is laid bare.

The looseness of the episodic narrative invites a hermeneutic approach which the film itself probably doesn't quite justify. It's something of a curiosity. In an interview where he also says he'd like to direct Wonderwoman, Refn talks about his film as a drug. You could probably read it as a classic bad trip, inclusive of dodgy 'blood-soaked' imagery. Nevertheless, in spite of the iffy dialogue and its general wooziness, the film got under my skin, its refusal to give the audience what it's expecting suggesting a perverse talent.

(Nb - I have not seen Pusher, but have had it recommended to me, and I can imagine that in more concrete, contemporary surroundings, the filmmaker's hypnotic approach could feel revelatory.)

anti-christ (w&d von trier)

Thought #1 on walk back through Notting Hill, the size of the stucco facaded houses still catching me by surprise. Every film of Von Trier's could be viewed as some kind of Situationist provocation, less of a film and more of an artwork. And Anti-Christ is no exception.

Except for Thought #2 which occured before it all kicked off in the final part of the film, which is that Von Trier identifies and tackles subjects that few filmmakers are brave enough to go for. In this case the power of nature and the potential differences between a female and a male consciousness. (Which might exist, and be more subtle than preferring shopping to watching football or chardonnay to rioja, or any of the other neutralised terms in which that difference has come to be permitted within a consumer culture.) Among other things. If you removed the graphic sex, and the somewhat operatic prologue, there's a serious treatise looking to be made, no matter how much the fireworks would appear to distract.

Thought #3: the film's dedicated to Tarkovsky, which many will consider a cheek of itself, but there's also echoes of Antonioni and obviously Don't Look Now, as well as Mercy and probably a few hundred horror flicks I've never seen. His engagement with the medium is so much more absolute than any of his contemporaries. My brother gave me the box set of his first three films for Christmas, and its astonishing how visually and technically assured a filmmaker he was from the beginning. His relationship with Dogme was always a game within a game; and in Anti-Christ his capacity to conjure astonishing imagery goes hand in hand with Dodd Mantle's shaky, edge of the bed camerawork. All of which contributes to the constant presence of the filmmaker behind the lens, playing with his audience, challenging and provoking them and sometimes laughing (with or at) them - in particular in the beautifully cheeky talking fox moment. Von Trier is as Brechtian as Godard, whilst also being as big a showman as Tony Scott. The contradictions are part of his charm.

I have just written and scrubbed Thought #4 which was along the lines of whether the film, in all its excessive dramatic glory, is any good or not. You're going to be a fairly strange type of character if you get through the final scenes and say that you enjoyed them. Then again, as Von Trier is well aware (he sometimes makes porn films), the things that disturb are just the flip side of the kind of things people watch for their most basic pleasure. They're all images, so what's not to like? (The scene with Dafoe being dug out of the mud seemed to even hint at Ian's fate in Blasted). For every Von Trier film I like there's one I don't like (mas o menos). In a way that's all part of the game which the director is playing, reminding you that he's on his side of the fence and you're on yours, and through that act of reminding bringing us closer together. It's not about liking what's going on: it's about the taking part. And it's pretty hard not to feel as though you've participated in something, no matter how gratuitously gruelling, along with the poor actors Dafoe and Gainsbourg. This is not far off being cinema as mud wrestling, and what else should we want cinema to be?