Lars von Trier

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Lars von Trier Biography

Acclaimed independent director known for emotionally powerful films like Breaking The Waves and Melancholia.

His first breakthrough film was the 1984 The Element of Crime, which won the technical prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

He admitted to many phobias, including flying, all of which influenced his films.

He grew up in a New Age household. His parents refused to make any rules for their children.

He made the award-nominated film Dogville starring Nicole Kidman and notable for using only chalk outlines to represent sets.

Lars von Trier (born Lars Trier; 30 April 1956) is a Danish film director and screenwriter with a prolific and controversial career spanning almost four decades. His work is known for its genre and technical innovation; confrontational examination of existential, social, and political issues; and his treatment of subjects such as mercy, sacrifice, and mental health.

Von Trier has occasionally referred to his films as falling into thematic and stylistic trilogies. This pattern began with The Element of Crime (1984), the first of the Europa trilogy, which illuminated traumatic periods in Europe both in the past and the future. It includes The Element of Crime (1984), Epidemic (1987), and Europa (1991).

In 1984, The Element of Crime, von Trier’s breakthrough film, received twelve awards at seven international festivals including the Technical Grand Prize at Cannes, and a nomination for the Palme d’Or. The film’s slow, non-linear pace, innovative and multi-leveled plot design, and dark dreamlike visual effects combine to create an allegory for traumatic European historical events.

His next film, Epidemic (1987), was also shown at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard section. The film features two story lines that ultimately collide: the chronicle of two filmmakers (played by von Trier and screenwriter Niels Vørse) in the midst of developing a new project, and a dark science fiction tale of a futuristic plague – the very film von Trier and Vørsel are depicted making.

Von Trier directed Medea (1988) for television, which won him the Jean d’Arcy prize in France. It is based on a screenplay by Carl Th. Dreyer and stars Udo Kier. Trier completed the Europa trilogy in 1991 with Europa (released as Zentropa in the US), which won the Prix du Jury at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, and picked up awards at other major festivals. In 1990 he also directed the music video for the song “Bakerman” by Laid Back. This video was re-used in 2006 by the English DJ and artist Shaun Baker in his remake of the song.

In 1989, von Trier’s mother told him on her deathbed that the man von Trier thought was his biological father was not, and that he was the result of a liaison she had with her former employer, Fritz Michael Hartmann (1909–2000), who was descended from a long line of German-speaking, Roman Catholic classical musicians. Hartmann’s grandfather was Emil Hartmann, his great-grandfather J. P. E. Hartmann, his uncles included Niels Gade and Johan Ernst Hartmann, and Niels Viggo Bentzon was his cousin. She stated that she did this to give her son “artistic genes”.

Von Trier was born in Kongens Lyngby, Denmark, north of Copenhagen, to Inger Høst and Fritz Michael Hartmann (the head of Denmark’s Ministry of Social Affairs and a World War II resistance fighter). He received his surname from Høst’s husband, Ulf Trier, whom he believed was his biological father until 1989.

Seeking financial independence and creative control over their projects, in 1992 von Trier and producer Peter Aalbæk Jensen founded the film production company Zentropa Entertainment. Named after a fictional railway company in Europa, their most recent film at the time, Zentropa has produced many movies other than Trier’s own, as well as several television series. It has also produced hardcore sex films: Constance (1998), Pink Prison (1999), HotMen CoolBoyz (2000), and All About Anna (2005). To make money for his newly founded company, von Trier made The Kingdom (Danish title Riget, 1994) and The Kingdom II (Riget II, 1997), a pair of miniseries recorded in the Danish national hospital, the name “Riget” being a colloquial name for the hospital known as Rigshospitalet (lit. The Kingdom’s Hospital) in Danish. A projected third season of the series was derailed by the death in 1998 of Ernst-Hugo Järegård, who played Dr. Helmer, and that of Kirsten Rolffes, who played Mrs. Drusse, in 2000, two of the major characters.

In 1995 von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg presented their manifesto for a new cinematic movement, which they called Dogme 95. The Dogme 95 concept, which led to international interest in Danish film, inspired filmmakers all over the world. In 2008, together with their fellow Dogme directors Kristian Levring and Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg received the European film award for European Achievement in World Cinema.

Breaking the Waves (1996), the first film in his Golden Heart trilogy, won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival and featured Emily Watson, who was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. Its grainy images, and hand-held photography, pointed towards Dogme 95 but violated several of the manifesto’s rules, and therefore does not qualify as a Dogme 95 film.

Von Trier achieved his greatest international success with his Golden Heart trilogy. Each film in the trilogy is about naive heroines who maintain their “golden hearts” despite the tragedies they experience. This trilogy consists of: Breaking the Waves (1996), The Idiots (1998), and Dancer in the Dark (2000). While all three films are sometimes associated with the Dogme 95 movement, only The Idiots is a certified Dogme 95 film.

In 1996 von Trier conducted an unusual theatrical experiment in Copenhagen involving 53 actors, which he titled Psychomobile 1: The World Clock. A documentary chronicling the project was directed by Jesper Jargil, and was released in 2000 with the title De Udstillede (The Exhibited).

The second film in the trilogy, The Idiots (1998), was nominated for a Palme d’Or, with which he was presented in person at the Cannes Film Festival despite his dislike of traveling.

In 2000 von Trier premiered a musical featuring Icelandic musician Björk, Dancer in the Dark. The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. The song “I’ve Seen It All” (co-written by von Trier) received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song.

A proposed trilogy, von Trier’s Land of Opportunities consists of Dogville (2003), Manderlay (2005), and Wasington, which is yet to be made. Dogville and Manderlay were both shot with the same distinctive, extremely stylized approach, placing the actors on a bare sound stage with no set decoration and the buildings’ walls marked by chalk lines on the floor, a style inspired by 1970s televised theatre. Dogville (2003) starred Nicole Kidman and Manderlay (2005) starred Bryce Dallas Howard in the same main role as Grace Margaret Mulligan. Both films have casts of major international actors, including Harriet Andersson, Lauren Bacall, James Caan, Danny Glover, and Willem Dafoe, and question various issues relating to American society, such as intolerance (in Dogville) and slavery (in Manderlay).

The Five Obstructions (2003), made by von Trier and Jørgen Leth, is a documentary that incorporates lengthy sections of experimental films. The premise is that von Trier challenges director Jørgen Leth, his friend and mentor, to remake his old experimental film The Perfect Human (1967) five times, each time with a different “obstruction” (or obstacle) specified by von Trier.

In a 2005 interview with Die Zeit, von Trier said, “I don’t know if I’m all that Catholic really. I’m probably not. Denmark is a very Protestant country. Perhaps I only turned Catholic to piss off a few of my countrymen.”

In 2006 von Trier released a Danish-language comedy film, The Boss of It All. It was shot using an experimental process that he has called Automavision, which involves the director choosing the best possible fixed camera position and then allowing a computer to randomly choose when to tilt, pan, or zoom.

Following The Boss of It All, von Trier scripted an autobiographical film, The Early Years: Erik Nietzsche Part 1 [da] in 2007, which went on to be directed by Jacob Thuesen. The film tells the story of von Trier’s years as a student at the National Film School of Denmark. It stars Jonatan Spang as von Trier’s alter ego, called “Erik Nietzsche”, and is narrated by von Trier himself. All the main characters in the film are based on real people from the Danish film industry, with thinly veiled portrayals including Jens Albinus as director Nils Malmros, Dejan Čukić as screenwriter Mogens Rukov, and Søren Pilmark.

In 2009, he said, “I’m a very bad Catholic. In fact I’m becoming more and more of an atheist.”

Von Trier would later return to explicit images in Antichrist (2009), exploring darker themes, but he ran into problems when he tried once more with Nymphomaniac, which had 90 minutes cut out (reducing it from five-and-one-half to four hours) for its international release in 2013 in order to be commercially viable, taking nearly a year to be shown complete anywhere in an uncensored director’s cut.

Von Trier’s next feature film was Antichrist, a film about “a grieving couple who retreat to their cabin in the woods, hoping a return to Eden will repair their broken hearts and troubled marriage; but nature takes its course and things go from bad to worse”. The film stars Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg. It premiered in competition at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, where the festival’s jury honoured the movie by giving the Best Actress award to Gainsbourg.

In 2011 von Trier released Melancholia, a psychological drama. The film was in competition at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.

For its public release in the United Kingdom, the four-hour version of Nymphomaniac was divided into two “volumes” – Volume I and Volume II – and the film’s British premiere was on 22 February 2014. In interviews prior to the release date, Gainsbourg and co-star Stacy Martin revealed that prosthetic vaginas, body doubles, and special effects were used for the production of the film. Martin also stated that the film’s characters were a reflection of the director himself and referred to the experience as an “honour” that she enjoyed.

In early December 2013, a four-hour version of the five-and-a-half-hour film was shown to the press in a private preview session. The cast also included Stellan Skarsgård (in his sixth film for von Trier), Shia LaBeouf, Willem Dafoe, Jamie Bell, Christian Slater, and Uma Thurman. In response to claims that he had merely created a “porn film”, Skarsgård stated “… if you look at this film, it’s actually a really bad porn movie, even if you fast forward. And after a while you find you don’t even react to the explicit scenes. They become as natural as seeing someone eating a bowl of cereal.” Von Trier refused to attend the private screening due to the negative response to Nazi-related remarks he had made at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, which had led to his expulsion from it. In the director’s defense, Skarsgård stated at the screening, “Everyone knows he’s not a Nazi, and it was disgraceful the way the press had these headlines saying he was.”

Known to be provocative in interviews, von Trier’s remarks during the press conference before the premiere of Melancholia in Cannes caused significant controversy in the media, leading the festival to declare him persona non grata and to ban him from the festival for one year (without, however, excluding Melancholia from that year’s competition). Minutes before the end of the interview, Trier was asked by a journalist about his German roots and the Nazi aesthetic in response to the director’s description of the film’s genre as “German romance”. The director, who was brought up with his Jewish father and only found out later in life that his biological father was a non-Jewish German, appeared offended by the connotation and responded by discussing his German identity. He joked that since he was no longer Jewish he now “understands” and “sympathizes” with Hitler, that he is not against the Jews except for Israel which is “a pain in the ass” and that he is a Nazi. These remarks caused a stir in the media which, for the most part, presented the incident as an antisemitic scandal. The director released a formal apology immediately after the controversial press conference and kept apologizing for his joke during all of the interviews he gave in the weeks following the incident, admitting that he was not sober, and saying that he did not need to explain that he is not a Nazi. The actors of Melancholia who were present during the incident – Dunst, Gainsbourg, Skarsgård – defended the director, pointing to his provocative sense of humor and his depression. The director of the Cannes festival later characterized the controversy as “unfair” and as “stupid” as von Trier’s bad joke, concluding that his films are welcome at the festival and that von Trier is considered a “friend”. In 2019, von Trier stated that he made this remark at the “only press conference I ever had when I was sober.”

Known to be provocative in interviews, von Trier’s remarks during the press conference before the premiere of Melancholia in Cannes caused significant controversy in the media, leading the festival to declare him persona non grata and to ban him from the festival for one year (without, however, excluding Melancholia from that year’s competition). Minutes before the end of the interview, Trier was asked by a journalist about his German roots and the Nazi aesthetic in response to the director’s description of the film’s genre as “German romance”. The director, who was brought up with his Jewish father and only found out later in life that his biological father was a non-Jewish German, appeared offended by the connotation and responded by discussing his German identity. He joked that since he was no longer Jewish he now “understands” and “sympathizes” with Hitler, that he is not against the Jews except for Israel which is “a pain in the ass” and that he is a Nazi. These remarks caused a stir in the media which, for the most part, presented the incident as an antisemitic scandal. The director released a formal apology immediately after the controversial press conference and kept apologizing for his joke during all of the interviews he gave in the weeks following the incident, admitting that he was not sober, and saying that he did not need to explain that he is not a Nazi. The actors of Melancholia who were present during the incident – Dunst, Gainsbourg, Skarsgård – defended the director, pointing to his provocative sense of humor and his depression. The director of the Cannes festival later characterized the controversy as “unfair” and as “stupid” as von Trier’s bad joke, concluding that his films are welcome at the festival and that von Trier is considered a “friend”. In 2019, von Trier stated that he made this remark at the “only press conference I ever had when I was sober.”

The film was also released in two “volumes” for the Australian release on 20 March 2014, with an interval separating the back-to-back sections. In his review of the film for 3RRR’s film criticism program, Plato’s Cave, presenter Josh Nelson stated that, since the production of Breaking the Waves, the filmmaker von Trier is most akin to is Alfred Hitchcock, due to his portrayal of feminine issues. Nelson also mentioned filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky as another influence whom Trier himself has also cited.

In 2015, von Trier started to work on a new feature film, The House That Jack Built (2018), which was originally planned as an eight-part television series. The story is about a serial killer, seen from the murderer’s point of view. Shooting started in March 2017 in Sweden, with shooting moving to Copenhagen in May.

In October 2017, Björk made a public statement regarding von Trier’s sexual harassment during the production of Dancer in the Dark, in which von Trier remains unnamed, though the Los Angeles Times has found corroboration identifying him. In the Facebook posting, Björk describes the difficulties in facing his retribution:

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