Lars von Trier Beyond Depression

Lars von Trier built a reputation as a provocateur from the startbut in the late 2000s, he entered an even more inflammatory phase. Amid Cannes controversies, Antichrist (2009), Melancholia (2011), Nymphomaniac (201314), 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 Triers experience of clinical depression in 2006 and 2007, these films took an aggressively personal and retrospective turn against the backdrop of the directors 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 Triers preproduction and creative process. Highlighting a transmedial turn, Badley tracks von Triers 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 Triers work for current critical and philosophical debates, showing how they engage with notions of the Anthropocene, dark ecology, and the postcinematic.