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.
Author(s): Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen
Publisher: Aarhus University Press
Year: 2018
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
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