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Lars von Trier Beyond Depression
Contexts and Collaborations
by Linda Badley
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Book Presentation:
Lars von Trier built a reputation as a provocateur from the start—but in the late 2000s, he entered an even more inflammatory phase. Amid Cannes controversies, Antichrist (2009), Melancholia (2011), Nymphomaniac (2013–14), 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 Trier’s experience of clinical depression in 2006 and 2007, these films took an aggressively personal and retrospective turn against the backdrop of the director’s 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 Trier’s preproduction and creative process. Highlighting a transmedial turn, Badley tracks von Trier’s 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 Trier’s work for current critical and philosophical debates, showing how they engage with notions of the Anthropocene, “dark ecology,” and the postcinematic.
About the Author:
Linda Badley is professor emerita of English at Middle Tennessee State University. She is the author of Lars von Trier (2011) and coeditor of Nordic Noir, Adaptation, and Appropriation (2020), among other books.
Press Reviews:
Linda Badley’s book is indispensable not only for those drawn, in spite of ourselves, to von Trier’s films, but also to all experiencing our contemporary moment in the register of despair and anxiety. Informed by personal conversations with von Trier, deeply ensconced in the filmmaking process and all its collaborators, and attentive to von Trier’s deliberate bad taste as well as his play with bending genre, Badley’s provocative readings of each film locate them in the director’s psyche while also showing that they offer a deft diagnosis of misogyny, climate disaster, capitalism, and hypocrisy run amok. Lori Marso, coeditor of Politics, Theory, and Film: Critical Encounters with Lars von Trier
Lars von Trier Beyond Depression is the first comprehensive account of the recent work of Lars von Trier, offering a lively and compelling critical evaluation of his cycle of ‘post-depression’ films that began with Melancholia (2009). A definitive resource on this period of von Trier’s output, its engagement with primary source material, interviews, and its incisive close readings will be indispensable to anyone interested in the filmmaker and his place within contemporary cinema. Tina Kendall, Anglia Ruskin University
We should be grateful to Linda Badley for leading us into the darkness of Lars von Trier's cinematic world and illuminating it. Lars von Trier Beyond Depression draws on Badley's extraordinary knowledge of Trier and his cinema to study Antichrist, Melancholia, Nymphomaniac, and The House that Jack Built. Badley uses interviews of Trier and his collaborators, close analysis, genre studies, film-philosophy, ecocriticism, discussions of extreme cinema, and postcritical and postcinematic discussion to unfurl the strata of Trier's films. The book is a tour de force. Any reader interested in Trier or auteur cinema and its afterlife should read it. Andrew Nestingen, author of The Cinema of Aki Kaurismaki
Based on careful archival research and on highly productive insights from countless practitioner interviews, Lars von Trier Beyond Depression offers a compelling account of Antichrist, Melancholia, Nymphomaniac, and The House That Jack Built. Focusing on the intentions, self-understandings, and personal experiences of von Trier and such theoretical lenses as dark ecology and psychoanalysis/therapy, Linda Badley evokes the contours of an ethical project in the Danish director’s contributions to trauma cinema and extreme cinema. Mette Hjort, chair professor of humanities and dean of arts, Hong Kong Baptist University
Lars von Trier Beyond Depression presents new, insightful readings into the director’s latest films, including valuable reflections on the creative processes and sources of inspiration in von Trier’s work based on extensive archival material, notes, statements, and drafts. These are supplemented with new interviews regarding key questions, which generates a fascinating explorative text on the cultural influences and impacts issuing from one of our finest film directors today. With her impressive and meticulous contribution, Linda Badley not only succeeds in giving new perspectives on von Trier’s films, she also manages to substantiate in depth how Danish and European culture and ways of thinking differ from American. Anyone interested in Lars von Trier’s oeuvre should start with reading this book infused with genuine ideas and perspectives. Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen, author of Lars von Trier's Renewal of Film 1984-2014: Signal, Pixel, Diagram
As one of the foremost scholars on Lars von Trier’s entire oeuvre, Linda Badley’s new in-depth study provides a fresh perspective, integrating extensive archival research, contemporary cultural references, and interviews with the director and his longtime collaborators. In examining some of the Danish auteur’s most criticized—perhaps even despised—films, Lars von Trier: Beyond Depression uncovers multiple new approaches to understanding the processes that shaped their intensity and singularity. Anna Westerstahl Stenport, coeditor of Nordic Film Cultures and Cinemas of Elsewhere
See the publisher website: Wallflower Press
See the complete filmography of Lars von Trier on the website: IMDB ...
> From the same author:
Indie Reframed (2016)
Women's Filmmaking and Contemporary American Independent Cinema
Dir. Linda Badley, Claire Perkins and Michele Schreiber
Subject: Genre > Independent cinema
Traditions in World Cinema (2006)
Dir. Linda Badley, R. Barton Palmer and Steven Jay Schneider
Traditions in World Cinema (2005)
Dir. Linda Badley, R. Barton Palmer and Steven Jay Schneider
> On a related topic:
Lars von Trier's Cinema (2023)
Excess, Evil, and the Prophetic Voice
by Rebecca Ver Straten-McSparran
Subject: Director > Lars von Trier
Politics, Theory, and Film (2016)
Critical Encounters with Lars von Trier
Dir. Bonnie Honig and Lori J. Marso
Subject: Theory
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