The Cinema of Lars Von Trier
Caroline BainbridgeSince founding the back-to-basics Dogme philosophy of filmmaking in 1995, von Trier's name has become a by-word for taboo-breaking cinema. As a director, he has courted media controversy through films such as The Idiots (1998), with its unsimulated sex and non-conformist politics, and through his complex relationships with actresses such as Bj'rk and Nicole Kidman, from whom he coaxed career-best performances in Dancer in the Dark (2000) and Dogville (2003) respectively.
Analysing these films as well as recent works such as The Five Obstructions (2004) from a psychoanalytic perspective, it forges a new understanding of the founder of Dogme 95 as a great democratiser of cinema in the digital age, presenting von Trier as one of the most daring cinematic exponents of postmodern politics and satire.