Lars von Trier's Renewal of Film 1984-2014 : Signal, Pixel, Diagram 9788771846379, 9788771842302

Table of contents :
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
Cover Back Side

Citation preview

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.

AARHUS UNIVERSITY PRESS

Lars von Trier’s Renewal of Film1984 -2014

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 his experiments with narrative forms, genre, camera usage, light, and colour tones, she shows how Trier’s unique and 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 a.o. on the haptic image, the diagram, affect, and the signaletic material.

Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen

Lars von Trier’s Renewal of Film 1984-2014

SIGNAL PIXEL DIAGRAM

“Lars von Trier’s Renewal of Film is a masterful study of the full breadth of von Trier’s work. The book presents a chronicle of the work, expertly situated in the history of the medium of film, in its relation to video and digital media. More than that – and this is what puts the book in a league of its own – Thomsen develops an original theory of the image unique enough to merit a new name: “signaletic materialism” might do. But don’t be misled by the weightiness of the term. It signposts an approach uniquely equipped to make felt immediacy of the image, accounting for its embodied nature and affective force with both evocative power and analytical precision. Thomsen’s in-depth, often scene-by-scene, analyses of von Trier’s compositional techniques go beyond formal analysis to convey how the logic of the medium is one with an event of perception, ever renewed and endlessly varied.” Brian Massumi author of Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts

Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen

“An inspiring and insightful work of passion and scholarly dedication, Bodil Thomsen’s thorough analysis of Lars von Trier’s oeuvre is an aesthetic revelation of haptic quality and potentialities. While the DeleuzeGuattarian inspired concept of the ‘affect diagram’ is the guiding method to navigate Trier’s audio-visual style across pixels, colors and digital signals, one can almost feel and touch the images on every page that disclose always new senses and sensations beyond the film’s stories and representations.” Patricia Pisters University of Amsterdam

Lars von Trier’s Renewal of Film 1984‑2014

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Lars von Trier’s Renewal of Film 1984‑2014 signal, pixel, diagram

Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen

aarhus university press | a

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To Andreas, Malthe and Thomas

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It is common knowledge that photography depends on an atmos‑ pheric perspective, which means that the contrast between light and shadow diminishes towards the background. Maybe an idea for an interesting abstraction lies in a conscious elimination of the atmospheric perspective – or, in other words, in relinquishing the much‑coveted depth – and the effect of distance. Instead one ought to work towards a wholly new construction of pictorial colour surfaces, which all lie on the same plane, forming one large, collated, multi‑coloured surface, so that the notion of the foreground, mid‑ dle ground and background fully disappears. One should, in other words, relinquish the perspectival image and begin working with pure surface effect. In this way it is possible that one will achieve very distinctive aesthetic effects, maybe precisely suited to film. Carl Th. Dreyer: Fantasi og Farve, 1955; in Om Filmen, 1959

One normally chooses a style for a film in order to highlight a story. We’ve done exactly the opposite. We’ve chosen a style that works against the story, which gives it the least opportunity to highlight itself. […] What we’ve done is to take a style and put it over the story like a filter. Like encoding a television signal, when you pay in order to see a film: here we are encoding a signal for the film, which the viewer will later ensure they decode. The raw, documentary style which I’ve laid over the film and which completely annuls and con‑ tests it, means that we accept the story as it is. That is, at any rate, my theory. Lars von Trier on Breaking the Waves in Sight & Sound Magazine, 1996

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Lars von Trier’s Renewal of Film 1984-2014 © 2018 the author and Aarhus University Press Cover illustration: Lars von Trier on the set of The Idiots. Photo: RGR Collection/Alamy stock Photo. Typesetting: Ryevad Grafisk Translated by Philip Mullarkey from the Danish edition, Lars von Triers fornyelse af filmen 1984-2014, published by Museum Tusculanum Press, 2016 This book is typeset in Vulpa E-book production: by Narayana Press, Denmark ISBN 978 87 7184 637 9

Aarhus University Press Finlandsgade 29 DK-8200 Aarhus N Denmark www.unipress.dk International distributors: Oxbow Books Ltd The Old Music Hall, 106–108 Cowley Road Oxford, OX4 1JE United Kingdom www.oxbowbooks.com ISD 70 Enterprise Drive, Suite 2 Bristol, CT 06010 USA www.isdistribution.com

Published with the financial support of: The Aarhus University Research Foundation

/ In accordance with requirements of the Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science, the certification means that a PhD level peer has made a written assessment justifying this book’s scientific quality.

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Contents

Preface

11

Introduction

18

CHAPTER 1 The theoretical landscape The »signaletic material« of film

29 37

Haptic surfaces and affective effects

39

CHAPTER 2 Haptic surfaces and spatial effects in Trier’s films of the 1980s

50

CHAPTER 3 A tiger in The Kingdom

64

The transformation from Gothic to grotesque A ghost story 65 From Gothic eeriness to grotesque laughter on the surface of the TV screen

68

The real‑time effect of electronic signals – introduction to The Kingdom I

75

Breaching – the conclusion of The Kingdom I

79

The perforation from upper to underside in the narrative’s Möbius strip

86

Grotesque real‑time interfaces: surveillance, scans and X‑ray 90 The technological and mythological credo of the video medium The haptic level in The Kingdom I and II

98

»The body without organs« and the »becoming‑animal«

106

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94

CHAPTER 4 Dogme 95 and The Idiots

112

A new form of realism The »Dogme 95 Manifesto« and the »Vow of Chastity«

115

A diagrammatic production of factual reality in the form of haptic »Figures«

120

The Dogme diagram – a generator of haptic compositions and modes of perception

125

Deformation of the face and the fall of the body 134

CHAPTER 5 Golden Hearts 1 and 3

139

Affective outflow into the landscape and the music The power of the rejected

146

Breaking the Waves and »faciality«

149

Any‑space‑whatever and colours in Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark

155

Dancer in the Dark and »the refrain«

163

CHAPTER 6 America films

175

Verfremdung and diagrammatic production Planes of composition in Dogville

177

Capitalistic segmentarity and terroristic micropolitics in Dogville

184

Microperceptual affect in Dogville

188

Compositional planes in Manderlay

194

Struggle in the binary segmentation

197

Dividual qualitative transformation and an ethics of affect

CHAPTER 7 The boss and the performative-biographical The aesthetics of the fall Heterotopy, diagram and divid

219

The one who falls: on Lars’ turning Jørgen into a performative I

227

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201

209

CHAPTER 8 Affective figures of depression, melancholia and mania Antichrist – in nature, chaos reigns

235

236

Nietzsche – The Dionysian and the Apollinian

241

Tarkovsky and the »eternal recurrence of the same«

255

Time as the »powers of the false«, creation and transformation Melancholia – the world’s Dionysian underground Iconoclasm

258

262

266

The rescue of melancholia from ›the world as will and idea‹

268

Tristan und Isolde – Wagner as intermediary 271 The end of the world – figures for interpretation Affect and event

273

276

Schopenhauer’s melancholia, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, and Arendt’s thinker 279 Affective diagrams: a haptic, signaletic material in Antichrist and Melancholia

284

Nymphomaniac – mania’s (self)destructive force

291

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

322

The sadistic woman’s unfolding in chapters 6‑8

327

CHAPTER 9 Concluding remarks on Lars von Trier’s filmic affect diagrams Bibliography

294

304

347 353

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Preface

Lars von Trier’s TV and film production has been vehemently discussed ever since his cinema debut with The Element of Crime (1984). From the outset, Trier has experimented with narrative forms, conventions of genre, camera usage, light, and colour tones. With films in foreign settings, international actors and English language dialogue, he referred immediately to a larger audience than in Denmark only, which was then unusual, and today Trier is a highly esteemed, internationally acknowledged director, who with each new project is, in fact, expected to set new standards for film. Furthermore, throughout his career he has been involved in setting up diverse interpretive frameworks for audience expecta‑ tions. With his public performances in the daily press and at the Cannes Film Festival as well as published diary notes and films behind the scenes, Lars von Trier was one of the first directors who explicitly utilised cinematic material productively – both as a performative mask and as a reinterpretation of the term ›realism‹.1 Trier is currently regarded by many people (himself included) as being amongst the greatest living film directors.2 In the spring of 2005, as Visiting Fulbright Professor at the Department of Scandinavian Studies, University of Washington, I personally experienced the extensive international interest in 1 To a large extent in connection with the film The Idiots (1998) where Trier created a broader para‑ textual, interpretive framework with the publication of Idioterne – manuskript og dagbog (Gyldendal 1998), a manuscript and diary written during the making of the film. Jesper Jargil’s documentary film, The Humiliated, concerning the making of The Idiots, which amongst other things was shown on Danish TV station DR2 (2 May 1999), also contributed to empahsising the new, realistic Dogme 95 movement as a happening that extended beyond the median of purely film. 2 Among these is Gilles Jacob, president of the Cannes Film festival 2000‑2015 (Lamy 2005, 7).

preface

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11

Trier’s particular auteur style. Whilst there I lectured a group of extremely interested students in »New Wave Danish and French Cinemas: Image, Affect, Ethics«. These students, from vastly dif‑ fering origins and national affiliations outside Central Europe (for example, USA, Canada, China, Japan and Iran), only had a relatively limited insight into European and Danish culture and thinking, but they were interested in film and participated eagerly in diverse international film festivals. From this exposure they knew Trier’s work, along with the Dogme manifesto and its films, which had gained almost cult status. It was clearly the rich composition of images that gave Trier’s films such an impact as the students had no knowledge of the broader cultural and film‑ historical contexts. For a Dane interested in film, an interpretive framework is formed from realistic, naturalistic and expression‑ istic impulses, which are so strongly represented in European film classics as well as the avant‑garde (cf. Vertov, Eisenstein, Wiene, Murnau, Lang, Buñuel, Artaud, etc.). But these were by no means obvious references for the American students. The Dogme manifesto’s actualisation of the French new wave understanding of realism, and simultaneous critique of Hollywood’s new (digital) possibilities for post‑production, meant that during the course it was necessary to introduce the students to the (film) avant‑garde and its diverse understanding of realism in Europe, as well as involving the work of Carl Theodor Dreyer and Jean Luc Godard especially, who had inspired Trier visually and thematically. It is Trier’s production, in particular from the end of the 1980s through to and including Nymphomaniac (2014), which consti‑ tutes the analytical framework in this book for a discussion of the ethically inclusive and affect‑creating style. This implies a focused look at Trier’s development of the creation of images and composi‑ tion, which in Dreyer’s words in this book’s introductory citation involves experiments with »pure surface effect« (Dreyer 1959, 91). The book’s starting point is in a description of the haptic style,3 as used in the films from the 1980s, namely The Element of Crime (1984), Epidemic (1987) and Europa (1991) as well as the made‑for‑ TV film Medea (1988), which is based on a previously unrealised 3

12

The term is defined further in the introduction.

lars von triers renewal of film 1984-2014

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film manuscript by Carl Theodor Dreyer and Preben Thomsen. This prelude is expanded in the analysis of The Kingdom I (1994) and The Kingdom II (1997), whose aesthetic play with the elec‑ tronic TV signal is brought into the development of the Dogme 95 manifesto and is given a filmic expression in the Golden Heart Trilogy.4 In addition, the use of unmasked Verfremdung realism is discussed as a way in which the media of books, theatres and com‑ puter games become remediated in the America films.5 Here the haptic affect‑involving images become clearly supplemented with the technological rules of diagrams, which at the behest of Trier are laid like a stylistic filter over the story (Trier, 1996). Trier thus places himself internationally as one of the most important inno‑ vators of filmic realism over a ten‑year period (from the Dogme 95 manifesto to Manderlay) through his involvement of the elec‑ tronic image quality of TV and video media. From The Boss of it All (2006) and onwards he works with digital modulations of the image that develop into new forms of affectively involving the au‑ dience in Antichrist (2009), which borrows material from horror films, and Melancholia (2011) which thematically paraphrases ca‑ tastrophe films. Both these films, however, work in contrast to their genre model, with descriptions of inner, mental affective states. Trier’s most recent film (at time of writing), Nymphomaniac, which together with Antichrist and Melancholia belongs to the so‑called Depression Trilogy, builds compositionally on literary material in particular as well as reuniting with Trieresque image compositions from The Kingdom and onwards. This book thus brings Trier’s oeuvre (provisionally) full circle, describing the period (especially) from Medea to Nymphomaniac. Theoretically I draw on Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical writ‑ ing and his works with Félix Guattari as well as current readings of these. The central taxonomy of images of movement and time in Deleuze’s film books, Cinema 1: Movement-image and Cinema 2: Time-image, has for many years inspired me analytically. It is clear in these works that Dreyer’s films, which were successful in France, had a decisive influence on Deleuze’s development of 4 5

That is, the films Breaking the Waves (1996), The Idiots (1998) and Dancer in the Dark (2000). Including the films Dogville (2003) and Manderlay (2005).

preface

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13

the affection image, in particular, and in his understanding of the spiritual choice in expressionist film. Deleuze, like Trier, praises the compositional ideas in Dreyer’s films, and both have formed a crucial fulcrum in the understanding of what is affective and ethically involving. Deleuze and Trier’s shared enthusiasm for Dreyer’s style has been a significant starting point for the analyses in this book, which represent the first attempts at giving a com‑ prehensive reading of Lars von Trier’s work in light of Deleuze’s (film) philosophy. Along the way, references to Deleuze are woven into the analysis of Trier’s work, just as the analyses also occasion discussions of broader theoretical categories of the haptic, the af‑ fective, the signaletic material, and of diagrams and interfaces6 all in the context of texts by Deleuze, Guattari, Alois Riegl, Walter Benjamin, Brian Massumi, Anna Munster, and many others. I had already worked on some of this project’s analytical and theoretical approach as part of the research project on realism, »Reality, Realism, and the Real in Visual Perspective« (1999‑2002), on which I was project leader. Later I concentrated on the haptic and the interface in relation to the video medium, as well as the digital medium’s real-time control, in the research project »The Aesthetics of Interface Culture« (2004‑07), which was led by Søren Pold, Aarhus University. This provided, amongst other things, a route to the article »The Haptic Interface« in Interface Criticism. Aesthetics Beyond the Buttons (Thomsen 2011) and to a concept‑developing article entitled »Signaletic, haptic and real‑ time material«, which initiated a collection of 13 articles, From Sign to Signal, relating to the theses in my article as seen from various types of art and media (Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, vol. 4, 2012).7 In the editorial team we placed emphasis on having many forms of art and media coming into play in the research on how the signal’s haptic noise has an influence on current (also digitally coded) expressions of art and culture. Finally, I have worked with the relation between haptic compo‑ sitions, affect and event in connection with an intensive workshop,

6 The terms will be further defined in the introduction. 7 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3402/jac.v4i0.18819 (last viewed 13 March 2015). I have edited the collection along with Ulla Angkjær Jørgensen and John Sundholm.

14

lars von triers renewal of film 1984-2014

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»Generating the Impossible«, led by Erin Manning, in the context of SenseLab (Montreal, July 2011). In extension of this I was co‑ editor on the theme of »Catastrophe and Affect« in the journal Peripeti no. 17, 2012, to which Jonas Fritsch and I contributed with an interview with Erin Manning and Brian Massumi: »Affec‑ tive Attunement in a Field of Catastrophe«.8 Together with Jonas Fritsch and a number of other researchers and artists in Canada, Australia and Europe, I am a participant in Erin Manning’s ongo‑ ing Canadian research project, »Immediations: Art, Media, Event« (2013‑20). Here work is carried out with ›immediation‹ which is conceived as the immediate, relational and affectively involved creative moment found in all perceptive exchanges. This account of where the subject‑object relation becomes indeterminable is investigated theoretically and artistically in connection with the terms of affect and event, which have been developed in Gilles Deleuze og Félix Guattari, Alfred North Whitehead, and William James, amongst others. The meeting between artists and research‑ ers in this project inspired me to advance the work with haptic compositions and those aspects in Trier’s films which create affect and events. Participation in the research project has also helped me to specify how the haptically arranged signaletic material in Trier’s film can contain affective moments which, in diagrammatic compositions, can further extend the film medium’s field to also accommodate interface events. This has recently resulted in a col‑ lective research project on Affects, Interfaces, Events, funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research, and led by me. Over a period of approximately ten years, I have had the op‑ portunity to work with some questions regarding how electronic and digital interfaces are embedded in haptic compositions and engender or call for special forms of involvement and affect. It was, for example, in connection with the work on haptic aesthetics and real‑time interfaces of the web camera that it became clear to me to what extent Trier’s work has recurrently been able to partly give artistic feedback on the prevalent media situation in the form of a remediation of other media (Bolter and Grusin 1999), and 8 Fritsch & Thomsen 2012, and Massumi 2015. http://www.peripeti.dk/2012/06/06/affective‑attune‑ ment‑in‑a‑field‑of‑catastrophe/comment‑page‑1/ (last viewed 10 February 2015).

preface

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15

to partly develop still newer methods by which the audience can be involved affectively. On several occasions I have had the opportunity to test the theoretical and analytical perspectives presented in this book. Apart from my course as Fulbright Professor at the University of Washington, I lectured on the films of Lars von Trier at a candidate course at the Department of Scandinavian Studies, Aarhus University, in 2009. In conjunction with the Brazilian universities‹ film festival, Festival Brasileiro de Cinema Univer‑ sitário (FBCU), I taught a master class in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2010. Here and in São Paulo I also held several well‑attended lectures on Trier’s film and the Dogme 95 manifesto and its films. In addition, at the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, I have on several occasions introduced haptic visuality and affect theory to diverse candidate courses. The interest and feedback of students as well as colleagues has had an invaluable importance on the project being kept alive over the years. Many colleagues have contributed with responsiveness and meaningful discussions in the development of the book’s central themes. The idea for the project occurred because of the enrich‑ ing and engaging discussions of new forms of realism which I encountered in the research »Reality, Realism, and the Real in Visual Perspective« with Rune Gade, Anne Jerslev, Britta Timm Knudsen, Karin Petersen, Mette Sandbye and Ann Lumbye Sø‑ rensen. In the project »The Aesthetic of Interface Culture,« Søren Pold, Morten Brejnbjerg, Lone Koefoed Hansen, Jacob Wam‑ berg, Lars Kiel Bertelsen, Henrik Kaare Nielsen and Christian Ulrik Andersen were involved in giving shape to my perspective of ›the haptic‹ in relation to electronic and digital interfaces. Other research colleagues who deserve a particular mention include An‑ drew Nestingen, C. Claire Thomson, Andrew Murphie, Lone Ber‑ telsen, Pia‑Ednie Brown and Anna Munster. Conversations, texts and feedback have played an important role in the development of the conceptual reasoning. I owe a special thank you to Lone Ber‑ telsen, Jonas Fritsch, C. Claire Thomson and Anna Birgit Rishede who have been invaluable readers of the manuscript. In the Nordic field in particular, Kristin Ørjasæter, Kjersti Bale, Christian Ref‑ sum, Sarah Paulson, Lill‑Ann Körber, Anita Seppä, John Sund‑ 16

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holm and Ulla Angkjær Jørgensen should be thanked for inspira‑ tion in connection with the completion of the book Globalizing Art: Negotiating Place, Identity and Nation in Contemporary Nordic Art (2011). In more recent years, my (former) PhD students and good colleagues Camilla Møhring Reestorff, Carsten Stage, Jo‑ nas Fritsch, Mathias Bonde Korsgaard and Tina Louise Sørensen have been excellent discussion partners. At home, Thomas, Malthe and Andreas Stavning Erslev, as well as Peter S. Meyer, have each in their own way been inspiring during the writing process. Finally, I would like to thank Aarhus University Press for its professional collaboration on the English edition and also Aarhus University’s Research Fund for its support in publishing the book. The book is, as mentioned, written over a ten‑year period, dur‑ ing which I have also published other articles on Lars von Trier’s film. These have primarily had the haptic as their pivotal point, but conversely they represent analytical preparatory work for the book. They are oriented more towards content and construction in the films rather than the analyses presented in this book, which have stylistic and philosophical intentions as their primary piv‑ otal points. The previously published articles on Trier can in this sense be read as supplements, but they are not included in this book. These are »On the Transmigration of Images: Flesh, Spirit and Haptic Vision in Dreyer’s Jeanne d’Arc and Trier’s Golden Heart Trilogy« in C. Claire Thomson (ed.): Northern Constellations, 2006; »The Performative Acts in Medea and Dogville and the Sense of ›Realism‹ in New Media« in Rune Gade and Anne Jerslev (eds.): Performative Realism, 2005; »Realism of the Senses: On Ethics, Space and Event in Lars von Trier’s 1990s Trilogy« in V. Oittinen (ed.): Spinoza in Nordic Countries, 2004; »Idiocy, Foolishness and Spastic Jesting« in p.o.v. A Danish Journal of Film Studies, no. 10, 2000; »Spiritus Sanctus. Lidelse og pas‑ sion i Breaking the Waves« in Birgit Eriksen and Niels Lehmann (eds.): Patos? Æstetikstudier 5, 1998. The analyses of Melancholia, Antichrist and Nymphomaniac expand on some of the analytic elements presented in »Antichrist – Chaos Reigns: the Event of Violence and the Haptic Image in Lars von Trier’s Films« in Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, vol. 1, 2009.

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17

Introduction

The new filmic forms of realism, whose audience‑involving aes‑ thetic based itself on investigations of media in relation to both electronic and digital technology can, in Denmark, be related to Lars von Trier and his work with the TV film Medea (1988), the TV series The Kingdom I and II (1994 and 97), together with the Dogme 95 manifesto and its ten‑year implementation (1995‑2005). 9 Tri‑ er’s work with the realistic intensity particular to this, which cre‑ ates intimacy and a more direct form of influence on more senses than those that traditionally bind film to a classic audio‑visual decoding, is made possible by, amongst other things, new, light‑ weight hand‑held DV cameras. In the 1960s and ’70s, where film and video cameras also became considerably easier to handle, one had a comparable experience of being able to get closer to the de‑ scription of reality, in the sense of sensation and experience.10 The hand‑held camera and its reality‑producing effect is thus nothing new,11 but in the 1990s the camera’s position became an acting in‑ 9 The TV medium’s reality TV and new documentary formats in the ›90s and ›00s also rediscover the possibilities for ›intimacy‹ and ›intensity’. Cf. Anne Jerslev in Vi ses på tv (2004). 10 Naturally, Italian neo‑realism should also be mentioned, which, because of the destruction of film studio facilities during the war, turned the city streets into scenography, and in which untrained actors acted in real surroundings. This was, in a compositional sense, part of modernising film language and setting it free from the organisational plot structures of literature and theatre (cf. André Bazin: What is cinema? Vol. 1 & 2 ([1958‑62] 1967‑71). 11 In Cinema 2: The Time-Image (p. 192 f.), Deleuze describes how the French and Canadian cinéma vérité directors Jean Rouch and Pierre Perrault exploited, in various ways, the camera being capable of serially connecting here and there, past and future. When time gains precedence over the action linked to the space in this way, reality can be created and recreated, and notions of representative forms of truth can be undermined. In utilising lightweight, hand‑held cameras, everyone had the possibility of being a cine‑ matographer, and classical distinctions between camera operator (subject) and character (object) could be blurred. The cinéma vérité directors were not so much concerned with filming the poor and downtrodden; rather, this new form of realism was concerned with turning the camera into a creative instrument in the

18

lars von triers renewal of film 1984-2014

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terfacial account between a subject of vision and an object of vision to an overall principle, gaining physical effects. The Dogme films of the 1990s provoked faint and nauseous reactions, and people exited cinema screenings in droves. The swinging, fuzzy, pixelated images and the bad, unfiltered sound was a novum, and it took audiences a while to become accustomed to it. In short, the ways in which ›90s realism was created in film and video changed previous understandings of the relation between reality and representation. As the audience’s physical sense perceptions and emotions take precedence over the reflexive decoding of a representational (and indexical) level, a totally different understanding opens up of what realism can be – namely an affective or performative realism.12 It does interact with the experiments from the 1960s, but it also ap‑ pears – in relation to Trier, in any case – as an aesthetic reaction to the new digital media and the interfaces13 that make interaction and participation possible in an extended field. It is evident in the Dogme 95 manifesto and the following films that, consciously or not, a processing or remediation (Bolter and Grusin, 1999) takes place in light of digital media. For though the declaration calls to arms against digital possibilities, through post‑production, to create (yet more) illusions backed up by rule number nine – that the film format should be Academy 35mm – The Idiots (1998) was hands of those who were carrying out the depictions. Depicting subjective and objective aspects of a per‑ son’s identity (fictive or real) is forsaken for creative simulations; a construction of identities, legends, and folk, which in Québec led to new common narratives: »Thus the cinema can call itself cinema-vérité, all the more because it will have destroyed every model of the true so as to become creator and producer of truth: this will not be a cinema of truth but the truth of cinema« (Deleuze 1989, 151). Jean‑Luc Godard, amongst others, was inspired by the free rein and reality‑creating style in cinéma vérité, and used a hand‑held cam‑ era in many of his film and video productions. 12 Cf. the results of the research project ›Reality, Realism, and the Real in Visual Perspective‹: Britta Timm Knudsen and Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen (eds.): Virkelighedshunger (2003); Karin Petersen and Mette Sandbye (eds.): Virkelighed, virkelighed! (2003); Rune Gade and Anne Jerslev (eds.); Performative Realism (2005). 13 The word ›interface‹ is used throughout the book as a term with a triadic combination, which has developed culturally from experiments with the possibility of feedback (in electronic music and video) in the 1960s. The body becomes an integrated part of the human-computer interface in that the actions (with tools such as, for example, camera, mouse, keyboard, microphones etc.) send electronic and/or digitally coded signals to a media format (for example, a computer game), which more or less simultaneously medi‑ ates and represents, giving feedback to the corporeal sensations and actions (cf. Andersen and Pold 2015). Forms of interfaces are a societal reality, which have meaning in the production of all culture and art, but some artists reflect this more than others. As a supplement to the broad definition of the interface, Anne Munster’s definition is used in relation to the artistic forms of interfaces which reflect the overlap between »to be in the body and to represent the body from outside« as a recordable, inventive creation of difference (Munster 2006, 142).

introduction

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(as the first of the Dogme films) shot completely on digital DV cameras. The rule on film formatting was thereafter changed prag‑ matically, so that it merely insisted that the film be distributed on Academy 35mm. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin define remediation as the way in which new media assimilates and reuses older media, and the way in which older media assimilates the new, in order to an‑ swer the challenges of this media. With historical examples, Bolter and Grusin describe how the representation of reality has been the cornerstone for the development of genres and art types as well as media. The representation reflects the medium either as hypermediacy or immediacy, which involves a consciousness of the medium’s setting of frameworks or taking aim at its eradication, respectively (for example, in the form of a sense of depth in an image). Both forms, so to speak, aim to heighten the degree of the user’s affinity to the surrounding world; but where immediacy sets its sights on increasing the experience of realism as authenticity in the form of blurring the medium’s techniques and approach, hypermediacy sets its sights on covering reality in the form of a presentation of the same. Bolter and Grusin do not concern them‑ selves with the particular ›haptic‹ form of media reflection which is the aim of this book. On the one hand, this is prioritised by the surface of the canvas or screen rather than depth and can thus be said to belong to hypermediacy, but on the other hand it invites the audience to see as if with a gaze that is (all too) near‑sighted, which rather borders on immediacy. The point, which will become clear in the analysis of Trier’s production, is that electronic as well as digital media often work with mixed forms between hypermediacy and immediacy,14 which is why we need new analytical approaches. The user’s sensory preparedness is, to a higher degree than pre‑ viously, involved in the visual process, by which it becomes more difficult to differentiate between what is representation and what is production. Consequently, the following analysis will include haptic, affective and diagrammatic dimensions.

14 Though Bolter and Grusin are aware of this, they do not follow through the consequences of this in the publication. Richard Grusin has later used the concept of affect in the book Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11 (2010).

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lars von triers renewal of film 1984-2014

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In my opinion, Trier works through the entirety of his pro‑ duction, but most clearly from the TV production Medea and onwards, in an attempt to qualify the haptic field’s affective po‑ tentials in audio‑visual material, where classic film techniques can be mixed with electronic and digital methods and techniques. Medea and The Kingdom I and II in particular investigate how electronic signal noise and the possibility to edit several recorded tracks together in one image can give a special form of haptic sensation. In The Idiots (1998), which as mentioned is shot with digital video cameras, much work is done to underline the traces of reality through the form of improvisation, continuous record‑ ing and the use of this on existing, real locations. But the filming of, for example, sexual excitement and a random aeroplane pass‑ ing by, which we normally associate with indexical traces of real phenomena,15 is here partly digitally recorded (with a possibility for unseen post‑production) and thus the entire film is, in and with the Dogme concept, framed like a staged experiment. In Breaking the Waves (1996) and Dancer in the Dark (2000), some use is made of haptic close‑ups and the creation of extended or virtual landscape spaces and musical spaces, which remediate the digital real‑time control. In The Five Obstructions (2003) with Jørgen Leth, experiments are carried out with classic forms of filmic editing, sampling techniques and documentary forms of reality traces. In Dogville (2003) and Manderlay (2005), the new hypermediated forms of control, which are recognisable from computer games, are clearly commented on, in that nar‑ rative forms of literature, film and the Verfremdung techniques of the cinema are remediated, and substantiate the more or less allegorical representations. Here classic haptic descriptions of skin without make‑up are mixed with digitally overlaid images (of Grace and apples in the frame of the truck), and the 3D effect of the barking dog, Moses, gains a shock effect when it suddenly materialises from its sketched 2D existence. In The Boss of it All (2006), a hypermediated, digitalised image capture technique be‑ comes a very visible part of an otherwise absurdly mundane, eve‑ ryday representation. In Antichrist (2009) and Melancholia (2011), 15

For a closer analysis of this cf. Jerslev 2002.

introduction

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digital forms of special effects are integrated in both an acoustic as well as a figurative level in ways that renew, and in which the compositional, as a symbolic layer, leads to a classic‑filmic form of representation. In Nymphomaniac (2013) the digitally modulated symbolic form is toned down. In addition, an obvious diagram‑ matical level in the narrative makes it possible for the viewer to follow how Trier’s accentuation of common human conditions can undermine classic, voyeuristic forms of desire. With this blending of indexical, iconic and diagrammatical signs, which elegantly overcome analogue and digital variations in perception, Trier creates narratives that depict inner states affectively in a motivic and stylistic manner, and in ways never before seen. Deleuze and Guattari’s conditions of the non‑dichotomous exchanges between rhizome and the tree structure, the smooth and the striated, the refrain’s de‑ and re‑territorialization and the diagram’s modulat‑ ing interaction are thus important theoretical inspirations for the book’s analyses. Based on the inspiration Trier finds in Dreyer’s composi‑ tion of images, Alois Riegl’s description of »haptic« visuality and Deleuze’s philosophical rethinking of the term will create the backdrop for a close analysis of how haptic gestalts of colour and spatiality noticeably break with the more traditional optic ways in which filmic narratives are organised. It is the thesis that Trier’s experiments with clarifying the haptic composition in diverse audio‑visual media formats (the analogue film in dialogue with electronic and digital forms) make it possible to describe non‑ representational forms of affect, in that filmic narratives are seen as – or actualise – events. The book aims to give a space for re‑ flection to the sensorial forms of perception, which the films call for, and also attempts to accommodate Trier’s own formulation (in the introductory quotation) on what happens if the analysis also takes account of the style being laid over the narrated story as a filter. When the style is so convincingly carried through, the aim of the analysis must primarily be shifted to the question of what Trier’s film does, and not be content – as has often been the case in analyses of Trier’s film – with discussing the political standpoint or ethical assertions in the represented content, the story. 22

lars von triers renewal of film 1984-2014

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Although Trier subscribes to the traditions of filmic realism and documentary, and in The Idiots positions himself close to forms of documentary representation (so‑called indexical, docu‑ mentable ›reality‹), the production of affect in viewers, in this film in particular, is contingent on the advanced projected position of the hand‑held camera in creating forms of affect on the level of perception. Consequently, it is a hypermediated practice which, for example, intensifies the viewer’s experience of actual dizziness or nausea. The hand‑held camera disturbs the viewer’s access to fabula, but in contrast makes one aware of the screen as a haptic surface that seemingly intensifies the actors‹ improvisation. The camera does not merely cover an indexical, recordable reality, but participates in the production of it. This propagates itself to the viewer’s bodily, immediate affect experience of perceptive intensity, which as a result includes mediation. Furthermore, the digital film’s pixelated, haptic materiality is rendered visible in the intermediate transfer from DV to the 35mm Academy screen‑ ing format, as discussed by C. Claire Thomson with reference to Anthony Dod Mantle’s ›breaking down‹ of the normal high resolution film image, which is capable of »intensifying the video noise to an interesting aesthetic dimension« (Thomson 2013a, 119). According to Thomson, the grainy images (porridgy im‑ ages) of this media transfer, after and including Medea, become to a large extent part of the viewer’s perception and affective sense perception (Thomson, op.cit., 20). This merging of the film’s haptic level and the viewer’s corporeal reality therefore, evidently, cannot be ascribed to in analyses of the film’s themes and style. This renewing term causes realism to ›happen‹ on the level of intensity which belongs to the sense perception itself, in that it emphasises that visual sense perception cannot be limited merely to the sense perception of the eyes and the decoding of the brain. This type of realism involves the entire body. My analysis does not follow on immediately from Bolter and Grusin’s general observation that »immediacy implies hyperme‑ diacy« (cf. Bolter og Grusin, 118‑19), as my interest goes beyond the effect created by the context of the medium. In my opinion, Trier uses the haptic image plane (cf. Riegl) as an invitation to the viewer to ›feel with the eyes‹, in line with the practice of hyperme‑ introduction

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diation which he developed in the Europa trilogy. So although The Idiots, for example, subscribes to aesthetics for the depiction of immediacy established in the tradition of 20th century realism and documentary, in Trier they clearly function as signs of hyperme‑ diacy. He emphasises the immediacy aspect, so it is clear that the signs can function stylistically detached from their original func‑ tion (to disguise the medium). As a consequence, the haptic surface of the TV or cinema screen becomes somewhat emphasised. The medium’s materiality is rendered visible in this way. When the surface becomes central to the perception, the viewer gains access to the film’s self‑reflecting, hypermediated meta‑level, but at the same time the screen image is so saturated with material informa‑ tion (unsteadiness, blurring, pixelation, graininess, noise, and so on) that it creates physical‑affective repercussions of immediacy. In Trier’s film the distinction between immediacy and hyperme‑ diacy becomes almost unusable, in that the haptic image and sound spaces, which create direct consequences of affect, come to include both in themselves. The haptic field extends even further in the films from 2000 and onwards, in and with the digital possibilities with which to create new types of fusions and combinations of im‑ ages and sound. With this extension, which affectively includes the viewer in the production and interpretation of the haptic field, it becomes possible to (re)think the filmic experience in the cinema as an interface which implicates the audience collectively. In the previous decade, Trier’s films can be described as allegorical or philosophical test pieces, which only to a lesser degree accentuate the confrontation with or remediation of classic film forms and film genres, but which in turn establish a wealth of different, af‑ fectively involving types of interfaces, where classic subject‑object relations are undermined.16 16 Trier’s stylistically experimental film in this way contested the validity of the classic interpretation of film, which most often takes its starting point in the story’s representational level. For the analysis of the creative potentials of the event for the exchange of actualisation, I could have chosen to use the term ›im‑ mediation‹ in my analysis, which is developed by Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, Alanna Thain, Christoph Brunner, Anna Munster, and others. The term indicates the moment in a perceptive event, for example, where a relational exchange displaces the division between subject and object that benefits creative action. It belongs to the definition of the term that all media takes part in the creation of events, but immediation might as well occur unmediated. I have not made use of the term, however, as the majority of the book was written before I participated in Erin Manning’s international research project »Immediations: Art, Media, Event« (2013‑2020).

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lars von triers renewal of film 1984-2014

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When Trier, along with other artists in the 1990s, makes real‑ ism haptic in this perspective, there is no radical split from the quotation‑minded hypermediation that the Europa Trilogy films, in the first postmodernistic phase, abounded in.17 As a continua‑ tion of the mythologising of Trier in the 1980s as an ironic master of concealment, one ought to understand the interplay with the diary form as a backstage performance (following on from The Idiots), and the ambiguous settings as deranged or works of genius respectively (following on from Antichrist), or as fascist or not (following on from Melancholia), or as more or less well‑executed performative gestures in the public (media) space. It is not my intention here to look closer at uncovering how the formal mix‑ ing of diverse traditions of immediacy and hypermediacy, as well as the performative, so‑called »fictional‑biographic« gestures, contribute to Trier’s constant renewal of the film medium.18 It is especially the relatively obscure haptic image composi‑ tion of the twentieth century, where materiality on the surface of the screen makes it possible for the film medium to commu‑ nicate affectively with its audience, which will be the recurrent element throughout the book. Though Walter Benjamin as early as 1936 (Benjamin [1936] 2005) analysed the tactile qualities of the film medium using Alois Riegl’s analysis of the tactile/ haptic as a background, and despite Carl Theodor Dreyer with The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) creating a sustained haptic film for a large cinema audience (Thomsen 2006),19 haptic forms of image composition were quite uncommon before the electronic video experiments in the 1960s placed the focus on the signal as a performative now (Thomsen 2012a). It is to Jean‑Luc Godard’s credit, amongst others, that the video medium signal has been introduced aesthetically in a qualitative interplay with the medium of film. It is to Trier’s credit that he accentuates the haptic ele‑ 17 To these belong The Element of Crime (1984), Epidemic (1987) and Europa (1991). 18 cf. Louise Brix Jacobsen, who uses the TV series Klovn (2005‑) and the film Klovn: The Movie (2010) as examples (Jacobsen 2008). I will use the terms immediacy and hypermediacy where evident, but my reading is, as mentioned, oriented on how Trier’s production transgresses the classic representational level of the TV and cinema screen – and implicates the viewer. 19 On the contrary, a large amount of experiments with haptic art film and video are to be found. Here Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage should be mentioned. In the longer film format, Jytte Rex was also an in‑ novator. Lars von Trier has himself named her films as an inspiration (Michelsen and Piil 2004).

introduction

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ment with the integration of video noise in the film medium,20 in which the experience of ›reality‹ increases. Furthermore, he utilises the affective potential of the haptic level to its full in link‑ ing with digital compositions.21 In reality, Trier’s media‑reflective artistic practice lies in a clear continuation of Walter Benjamin’s enumeration on the potentials of the film medium in a culturally industrial era, where art is no longer part of a cultic relation. In »The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction« Benjamin maintains that the medium of film (in light of, amongst others, Dziga Vertov’s and Dadaism’s avant‑gardist manifestations), with its direct tactile qualities, has the possibility to create culturally up‑to‑date forms of reflec‑ tion for the new mass audience (Benjamin [1936] 2005). Trier’s productions are avant‑gardist in Benjamin’s sense of the word, in that he is the leading light of the shock effect of tactility in the twenty‑first century. He is aware of the French avant‑garde of the 1960s and ›70s, which for its part remediated the film medium in relation to the electronic TV medium and the new consumer culture and pop culture. In continuation of this tradition, Trier remediates film in relation to the real‑time interfaces and game‑ performances of digital media. He contributes, though, more with a productive than an aesthetic perception, and ›reclamation‹ of the field, in that he, as Benjamin, is interested in the tactile and affective involvement of the viewer. As this book aims to explain how haptic images and affective events are composed and work, the analysis will primarily be concerned with Trier’s productions The Kingdom I and II and onwards; although my readings of these will take as their starting point an analytical exposé of the Europa trilogy, The Element of Crime, Epidemic and Europa, as well as Medea. My readings of Trier’s films will eventually conclude in some definitions – as a supplement to Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of filmic moving images and time images – of what one could call

20 Cf. introductory citation, where Trier discusses Breaking the Waves: video noise is integrated as an important, stylistic element (Björkman 1999, 166). The citation also forms part of my analysis of the film. 21 Cf. as mentioned in Dogville, where the dog Moses, which only exists as a 2D outline, later becomes a ›real‹ 3D dog creating affect, and barking with froth in its mouth.

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lars von triers renewal of film 1984-2014

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affect images.22 In Trier’s case these lead to the eye’s sensing in the direction of non‑representational tracks, delineations and diagrams in the filmic, signaletic material. It is in this connection that Trier’s dialogical remediation of earlier haptic‑oriented film‑ makers such as Dreyer and Tarkovsky can provide an analytical counter, in that the works, right down to the last detail, demon‑ strate an overall reflection of the status of the current film image. In the following, I will argue that this signature, amongst others, contains a critique of the current visual media, diverse joysticks, controllers and 3D glasses, collectively called »haptic technology«, in that they allow the viewer to obtain (renewed) immediate close contact with the screen’s representations. Trier’s films are haptic in the Deleuzian development of the term, referring to aesthetic composition and perception. They do not, however, remain for‑ mally reflexive towards material and media, in that they – viewed over a thirty‑year period – are capable of creating an aesthetic breakthrough to affective, physical forms of sensation, which raise awareness of the body being an important part of the interface. Trier’s films, as with Dreyer’s, praise the newly diversifying possibilities of abstraction in visual composition (cf. the book’s introductory citation, Dreyer 1959, 91), and it is surely not with‑ out reason that one of the films he made in film school is entitled Nocturne (1980), as Dreyer had on several occasions expressed great admiration for the American painter James Whistler (1834‑ 1903), who together with the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøj (1864‑1916) had inspired Dreyer’s style of images in The President (1919).23 Whistler was, amongst other things, known for his series of nocturnal paintings of landscapes in mist and fog, which, not dissimilar to J. M. W. Turner’s (1775‑1851) paintings, potentiated

22 It is furthermore interesting in Deleuze’s description of Robert Bresson’s films as haptic that the diagrammatic level also almost unfolds as he uses examples of the work of the hands in Pickpocket where the optic and audio sign underlines the hands‹ haptic connection to the space: »The hand doubles its pre‑ hensile function (of object) by a connective function (of space); but from that moment, it is the whole eye which doubles its optical function by a specifically ›grabbing‹ [haptique] one, if we follow Riegl’s formula for indicating a touching which is specific to the gaze« (Deleuze [1985] 1989, 13). See also Deleuze 2006, 315 together with the video from Deleuze’s lecture from 1987 on film and its creative action: http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=7DskjRer95s. (Last viewed 13 February 2015). 23 Cf. Jørgen Roos‹ documentary film Carl Th. Dreyer, 1966. cf. also Anne‑Birgitte Fonsmark (ed.): Hammershøi > Dreyer: Billedmagi. Ordrupgaard Museum (2006), which contains several articles on the influence of Hammershøi on Dreyer.

introduction

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the affective intensities in the surface of the canvas. However, one should make no mistake: Trier uses the haptic image style in a far more confrontational manner than Dreyer did. In this way, a very detailed copy of the glass door with bordered window panes, which had a central placement in Dreyer’s The President, is, in Trier’s Nocturne, perforated and destroyed as early as the opening scene, when a person (reportedly Trier himself)24 casts himself through the pane from outside and directly into the audience’s field of vision. The book aims to research in describing how Trier’s work with haptic images and their potential for affective involvement is developed further to also include diagrammatical components, whose effects reach beyond the iconic, indexical and symbolic sign categories in which we usually think when concerned with filmic representation. The book’s thesis is that Trier in this way manages to stretch out the film medium’s field to enable it to also reflect and include an interfacial folding between viewing and be‑ ing emotionally touched; consequently, the affective involvement in Trier’s films also comes to include that seeing always implies being seen.

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According to Nils Thorsen’s interview with Peter Aalbæk Jensen (Thorsen 2010, 196).

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CHAPTER 1

The theoretical landscape

In the introductory chapter to The New Media Reader, Lev Manovich cites relatively succinct real‑time network commu‑ nication and real‑time control as »qualitative new phenomena« (Manovich 2003, 22). He continues: when »a computer interprets or synthesizes human speech in real time, monitors sensors and modifies programs based on their input in real‑time, or controls other devices again in real‑time« (Manovich op. cit.), we are met with more than a speedy calculator that remediates other media. According to Manovich, it is on the basis of software’s real‑time control on mobile phones, on the Internet and in global news media, operative equipment and industrial technology – and not the digital as such – that discussing of new global media makes sense (Manovich 2013, 149). Though he concludes that »media becomes software«, he does retain the term ›new media‹, as this construction refers to software‑based media characterised by a »permanent possibility of expansion« (Manovich 2013, 156). Manovich maintains that the remediation of already existing content, styles and practices, by electronic and digital technolo‑ gies, ought to be recognised as an important precondition for terms such as ›the postmodern‹ and ›postmodernism‹ in the 1980s (Manovich 2003, 23). It is the software engineer or the com‑ puter nerd who facilitates the recycling of the aesthetic of previ‑ ous cultures, art forms and media, as they are made part of the computer’s archive. The computer and its possibilities are rightly enough not included in descriptions of the postmodern, though a number of Jean Baudrillard’s characteristics of the simulacral and of the simulation of reality in media in fact contemplate an the theoretical landscape

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aesthetic media reflection of this type.25 The cybernetic real‑time control that first broke through globally with the Internet and e‑mail in 199626 has not become related to the concept of the postmodern, which in the meantime has almost slipped out of use. In addition, throughout the 1990s there was a move away from the fascination with simulacral figures of metafiction, the labyrinth and the mirror, to new forms of realism demonstrating a certain affinity to the new forms of real‑time communication. In The Return of the Real (Foster 1996), Hal Foster registers a shift in postmodernist art forms in the direction of traumatic repetition. He writes that the postmodernists of the 1990s »want to possess the real thing«, in contrast to the first celebration of the liberated sign (Foster, 165). The Danish research project »Real‑ ity, Realism, the Real in Visual Perspective« (1999‑2002) was also concerned with this turn towards »the Real« and found in its analysis that it was the sensation rather than the representa‑ tion of something real that was indicative of 1990s realism in art performances, documentary and reality formats in TV and film, the snapshot aesthetic in photography, the short story in literature and so on. In 2002, in the anthology Virkelighedshunger – nyrealismen i visuel optik, this new form of realism was named »performative realism« (Knudsen and Thomsen, 10). Thus it is a »concept of ›reality‹ that is being worked on, which cannot stand unproblematically in contrast to a concept of ›fiction‹ or a con‑ cept of ›simulation‹ (Knudsen and Thomsen, 7). In other words, with the new real‑time media and tools there is a view that the sense perception of »reality« now also includes the sensation of the electronic and digital operation with which this reality can be described or captured (Thomsen 2002, 121f.). With current real‑time interfaces and Web 2.0, everyone must acknowledge software as a prerequisite for both postmodernism and, for example, the relational aesthetic (cf. Andersen and Pold,

25 Several classic theories of the postmodern, such as those of Linda Hutcheon, Fredric Jameson and Jan Kjærstad, however, see computer network logic as the successor to the postmodern. 26 As early as the 1980s, the Internet was used in American research, which Denmark, amongst others, became connected to in 1988; but it was with the commercialisation and development of the user interface www in 1993 that the Internet made its breakthrough (Den Store Danske: Internet reference. Last viewed 2 March 2015).

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2015). Real‑time media in the global information society creates new forms of immediacy, which sit somewhat removed from the previous (one‑way communicative) understanding of media, where information was facilitated by a medium. With the new media we experience »the process of passing through a medium« (Tomlinson, 154), in that the spatial extension of the human senses now encompasses sight, hearing, movement and touch in a real‑time interface, breaking with the representational surfaces of earlier media in the form of canvas, paper and screen. This does not mean that we have reached a state that is prior to or beyond the sign; rather, the »signaletic material’s« noise,27 which is also valid in the real‑time processes of the digital code, can be heard and seen as an extra layer in the interface. The real‑time interface’s signal noise is thus an integrated part of the commu‑ nication, which cannot be separated from its material form. The sign is overlaid with a new, mediated or ›signaletic‹ meaning; Norbert Wiener was already aware of this when he wrote that »the signal, where the message is sent, plays an equally important role as the signal, where the message is not sent« (cf. Paik 2003). If one substitutes ›medium‹ with ›signal‹ in Marshall McLuhan’s dictum »the medium is the message«, the statement becomes immediately understandable (McLuhan 1964). With new forms of software control and interfaces, a distinction between send‑ er and receiver becomes obsolete, because the intensity of the events and immediacy come to the fore.28 In Matter and Memory ([1886] 2004), Henri Bergson had al‑ ready described the body as a »section of the universal becoming«, as the »place of passage of the movements received and thrown back, a hyphen, a connecting link between the things which act 27 The term »signaletic material« is advanced by Gilles Deleuze in cinema 2: The Time Image (19839), and it has been applied in a number of current analyses in a specific cluster of articles, From Sign to Signal, in Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, vol. 4, 2012. 28 Cf. Christopher Brunner and Troy Rhodes‹ introduction to Inflexions, no. 4, 2010, where it is stated (as with Guattari 1995, 30) that transverse (transmodal) processes are more than merely communicative – they have the character of expressive intensities. The writers continue: »Here we see a shift from the com‑ municative binary of signal/noise, sender/receiver or message/content towards a more existential assem‑ blage, that of expression. […] Content and expression are as consubstantial as signal and noise. When an expression contracts into potential content, such content functions as shadow‑images for the field through which a new experience emerges by dint of another expression. What happens in these content‑expres‑ sion‑contractions is the emergence of the transversal forces of a field of experience that becomes malleable« (Brunner and Rhodes 2010).

the theoretical landscape

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upon me and the things upon which I act, – the seat, in a word, of the sensori‑motor phenomena« (Bergson 2004, 196; author’s italics). Similarly, in the current culture we can regard both the mediated and the non‑mediated corporeal sensation as an inter‑ face, where outer and inner cannot be distinguished, and where the body, in extension of Bergson and later Gilles Deleuze, is seen as itself an image and thus taking part in the images that are perceived; »and this is why it is a chimerical enterprise to seek to localize past or even present perceptions in the brain: they are not in it: it is the brain that is in them« (Bergson ibid.). In the global village realised through the Internet and real‑time transmission, à la McLuhan, previous representations of time and space, where time was measured in relation to the movement of the body in a Euclidean space, must also see themselves partially replaced by, for example, Bernhard Riemann’s descriptions of space, in which work is done with localised differences in angles, curves, surfaces and volumes. In Deleuze and Guattari’s inter‑ pretation of the Riemannian space, it is a matter of: a continuous variation that exceeds any distribution of constants and variables, the freeing of a line that does not pass between two points, the formations of a plane that does not proceed by parallel and perpen‑ dicular lines. (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2013, 567‑568)

What we are concerned with here is a spatial method of ori‑ entation, which relates itself not to a constant, but to localised differences and variations, and which takes one step at a time. Each step, each connection, creates a new space, new possibilities, which are consistent with the way in which an artist, a composer or a writer has to work – on a level with the material’s unfold‑ ing at close range and with responsiveness to detail and short‑ term memory (Deleuze and Guattari 2013, 572). Deleuze and Guattari operate here in continuation of, amongst others, Henri Bergson’s concept of qualitative time or variation (durée), which is described thus: The change is everywhere, but inward; we localize it here and there, but outwardly; and thus we constitute bodies which are both stable as

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to their qualities and mobile as to their positions, a mere change of place summing up in itself, to our eyes, the universal transformation. (Bergson 2004, 277)

And just as the image formation of time’s pure form in the film medium can render the categorisation in past, present and future superfluous, the electronic signal and digital media can priori‑ tise variability and modulation over the perception of time and space, which since the proliferation of the art of publishing has been prevalent for narratives.29 While the linguistic sign and the classical narrative support a linear thought process, where cause and effect are developed in relation to the verb’s past, present and future inflections and in relation to a represented space, the electronic and digital signal can never take the form of an object. Manovich wrote about this in 2001: In retrospect, the shift from a material object to a signal accomplished by electronic technologies represents a fundamental conceptual step towards computer media. In contrast to a permanent imprint in some material, a signal can be modified in real time by passing it through a filter or filters. Moreover, in contrast to manual modifications of a material object, an electronic filter can modify the signal all at once. Finally, and most important, all machines for electronic media synthe‑ sis, recording, transmission, and reception include controls for signal modification. As a result, an electronic signal does not have a singular identity – a particular state qualitatively different from all other possible states. (Manovich 2001, 132)

With the increasing dominance of electronic and digital signals and the still greater functions with which it is possible to change and adjust input, classic modes of the representation of time and space in the fictions of literature, theatre and film are undergo‑ ing rapid change. Today one sees more and more of the classic art forms resemble or remediate the operations of new media. An 29 Olafur Eliasson is a good example of a contemporary artist who, in keeping with Bergson’s philos‑ ophy, works with changeable markers of space and time in relation to the movement of the body. This is studied in the article »The Body as ›The Place of a Passage‹: On the Spatial Construction of Time in Olafur Eliasson’s Installations« (Jørgensen and Thomsen 2011).

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early example of a remediation of computer real‑time transmis‑ sion in TV and film formats was the four Dogme brothers‹ (Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg, Søren Kragh Jacobsen and Kris‑ tian Levring) so‑called ›Millennium Project‹, D-day, which took place in Denmark on the first day of the year 2000. Here, four tel‑ evision channels simultaneously transmitted four films (one from each of the four directors), which were filmed within the same period of time and immediately before their broadcast. The four directors edited each of their films simultaneously, each of which followed one of four actors, and in this way it was possible for the film viewer with his/her remote control to create an individual plot by zapping/editing between the four films, as if they were part of a computer game. The various broadcasts could be viewed on a four‑way split screen.30 The D-day experiment, the Dogme 95 manifesto and the films which were made following these inspired Lev Manovich in 2003 to the following comment: Rather than treating live action as a raw material to be later re‑arranged in post‑production, these filmmakers placed premier importance on the authenticity of the actors‹ performances. DV equipment is small enough to allow a filmmaker to literally be inside the action as it unfolds. (Manovich 2003, 19)

The most important thing with this strategy, which as mentioned has European forerunners in the new wave films and video ex‑ periments of the 1960s and ’70s, is, as Manovich also notes, the preoccupation with creating images of reality as immediacy (op. cit., 20). This endeavour includes the lightweight camera as an

30 Another version of the same principle is played out in the performance Super Night Shot by the group Gob Squad, which has been produced since 2003, and has been shown 200 times, in four languages, over six continents. In this piece all the raw material is filmed in the city in which the group is performing, immediately before the audience arrives at the theatre. Arriving at the performance with their equipment, the four who record and appear in the film are greeted by the audience, which is instructed to do so. This greeting is filmed and makes up the closing sequence in the performance that is anchored in reality, where the four different recordings of the local area are simultaneously edited and shown on four screens. It is this real‑time editing and projection of the four film tracks that makes up the performance. The actors/camera‑ men/editors do not appear on stage in person until the finale, where they bow and produce a ›living‹ token from the film in the form of a local participant, who has incidentally become involved in the documenting of the place. https://www.gobsquad.com/projects/super‑night‑shot (last viewed 13 February 2015).

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important tool, in that it is not until the electronic signal that the particular ›live‹ character can be sensed directly as the signal’s »noise« or »snow« (cf. Thomsen 2010). The sensation of this vis‑ ible »signaletic material«, which TV and video film represents, can, with regard to interaction, come extremely close to a real face‑to‑face communication (cf. Tomlinson 1999). The signal creates involvement and affective intensity. Later the effect of immediacy, which photography and, in part, film previously stood for, is replaced by the Internet user’s tactile possibilities to achieve real‑time control through diverse interfaces as in, for example, a community of MMORPG gamers. Today, the truth no longer re‑ sides (merely) in the medium’s indexical level in the form of a light trace on the negative.31 The experience of truth instead appears rather as an effect of intimacy or intensity, created in the user, in and with the now of the real‑time signal, which simultaneously connects separate spaces and places because the reproduction time is minimised (Jerslev, 16). The challenge for contemporary artists is to produce something that can both relate to the signal‑ etic material’s (electronic or digital) character of live-ness and at the same time create works with a longer lifespan. The intention of this book is to describe Lars von Trier’s aes‑ thetic remediation of film in view of the real‑time control and in‑ terfaces of electronic media and new software systems, to create an affective and haptic extended sense which goes beyond what can be understood by a representative horizon. Deleuze’s concept of signaletic material makes it possible to wrench film and electronic video forms free of narratology (Deleuze 1989), in order to philo‑ sophically explore the capacities of film’s aesthetic‑stylistic fea‑ tures. The following study will show how Trier manages to break with classic filmic narratives by entering into an aesthetic dialogue with electronic and digital forms of noise and affective interfaces. Jan Simons has previously used the term »interfaces« when discussing Trier’s film, and in the book Playing the Waves. Lars von Trier’s Game Cinema he uses the term »virtual realism«

31 That the photographic (and filmic) medium’s indexical substance of truth has, however, been just as much a myth as reality, is thoroughly analysed by Lars Kiel Bertelsen in Fotografiets grå mytologi (Bertelsen 2000).

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(Simons, 142) to describe Trier’s film style. Simons understands Trier’s films as interfaces, because they do not give access to representations of anything real or to reflections of the same. He underlines how simulated situations and given conditions and events are utilised, and a virtual space is consequently created: Because this redefines actual reality as the contingent actualisation of this virtuality, film, as the objective registration of profilmic events (in this instance, the simulation of a situation), is ideally suited to this portal and interface function. (Simons, 149)

This distribution between time and space, which the filmic rep‑ resentation traditionally carries out, changes accordingly through the strategies of simulation and sampling that Simons enumerates in Trier. Despite his clear description of the virtual as a dimen‑ sion that is inextricably linked to actual reality and, conversely, as physical reality that actualises something virtual (op. cit., 147), in Simons‹ description of Trier’s particular film style, I miss the philosophical reflection on how the films create interfaces in rela‑ tion to aesthetics or events. I will endeavour to make amends for this lack in the following film analyses of a philosophical‑stylistic nature. I will especially draw on Gilles Deleuze’s development of the concept with regard to the virtual in relation to the present, and on his analyses together with Félix Guattari of affect in re‑ lation to the event. Furthermore, I will relate the haptic to the time‑image and explore how the convention of creating compo‑ sitional »faciality« can be de‑territorialized,32 and how the refrain can contribute to reterritorializations and deterritorializations alike. Finally, I will address how filmic interfaces can create af‑ fective forms for encounters, by which spectators might notice the actualisation of the virtual as qualitative events through for example diagrammatic descriptions.

32 In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari use the term ›faciality‹ (visagéité) in relation to the preference in Western and Christian image traditions for divisions of foreground and background, based on facial structure, which are also expressed in landscape paintings.

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The »signaletic material« of film

Sensing transformation as movement and time respectively is, according to Deleuze, produced in the film medium thus: 1) as movement‑image, where the protagonist’s actions are followed in represented time and space; and 2) as descriptions of pure or qualitative time, neither needing to relate to chains of cause‑effect (for example, situations that lead to actions) nor being anchored in a represented space. Where the action in the movement‑image is typically created by the audience following the main protagonist’s aims and reac‑ tions in various situations and environments, the main character in the time‑image is, so to speak, no longer in charge. The lead characters are without aims and means, and the action leads no‑ where. David Lynch has specialised in depicting such aimless existences, lost and unable to interpret the environments they inhabit. The time‑image, which abandons the classic narrative’s drive, in fact makes it possible for the viewer to see and speculate on the film’s image and sound compositions. With the time‑image the film’s action takes a back seat in order for the images and compositions – which are remembered as for example crystal‑ lisations of mood or thought – to become prominent. The first film type was described by Deleuze in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (Deleuze [1983] 1986) and the latter, which manifested itself from the 1940s and onwards, in Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Deleuze [1985] 1989). Though the automatic movement‑image of film makes it possible for the medium to escape the corporeal binding of what is understood as movement, even the time‑image could not escape the film medium’s specific characteristic: to be preserved (canned) information when first it is recorded (Ryan, 21). This does not apply to the electronic and digital variants, such as TV, video and information technology, which are treated individually and positively in the final part of Cinema 2: The Time-Image. But as early as chapter two of this book, Deleuze proposes calling film’s basic material its »signaletic material« [matière signalétique] (Deleuze 1989, 29). This term is clearly created as an alternative description of the potentials of film, in direct opposition to the narratology and linguistic para‑ digms of the sign, which the semiologist Christian Metz never the theoretical landscape

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succeeded in applying to the film medium. Inspired by Bergson’s term on duration (durée), movement is qualified. Deleuze writes: These components of the movement‑image, from the dual point of view of specification and differentiation, constitute a signaletic material which includes all kinds of modulation features, sensory (visual and sound), kinetic, intensive, affective, rhythmic, tonal, and even verbal (oral and written). […] But even with its verbal elements, this is neither a language system nor a language. It is a plastic mass, an a‑signifying and a‑syntaxic material, a material not formed linguistically even though it is not amorphous and is formed semiotically, aesthetically and prag‑ matically. It is a condition, anterior by right to what it conditions. It is not an enunciation, and these are not utterances. It is an utterable. (Deleuze 1989, 29; author’s italics)

The compositional utterable of filmic signaletic material is not like the linguistic utterance which is conditional on the language system. It is created in and with the movement of images. In the conclusion of Cinema 2: The Time-Image Deleuze takes up these considerations in relation to the mechanical aspect of the film medium, in Jean‑Louis Schefer’s words »spiritual automata«, and he expresses them positively in reference to electronic and digital media, since the film’s »automata of movement made way for a new computer and cybernetic race, automata of computation and thought, automata with controls and feedback« (Deleuze 1989, 264‑265). He notices that power is diluted in the new informa‑ tion network, though he is not oblivious to instrumental forms of surveillance, which it also accommodates. Deleuze is aware that the new types of electronic automata change both the content and form in film, as well as other image types; but expectations about narrative and representation are also altered. The description of these electronic media develops to become almost a vision of how film’s signaletic material manifests itself in the new types of image: They are the object of a perpetual reorganization, in which a new image can arise from any point whatever of the preceding image. The organi‑ zation of space here loses its privileged directions, and first of all the privilege of the vertical which the position of the screen still displays, in

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favour of an omni‑directional space which constantly varies its angles and co‑ordinates, to exchange the vertical and the horizontal. And the screen itself, even if it keeps a vertical position by convention, no longer seems to refer to the human posture, like a window or a painting, but rather constitutes a table of information, an opaque surface on which are inscribed ›data‹, information replacing nature and the brain‑city, the third eye, replacing the eyes of nature. (op. cit., 265)

The image signal, just like the sound signal, affects the nervous system directly, and the classic models of mimetic representa‑ tion in art are replaced by the conjugation »brain‑information, brain‑city« (op. cit., 267). This clearly builds further on Walter Benjamin’s positive evaluation of the mechanical and automatic aspects of the film camera in the large cities of mass society (Ben‑ jamin [1936] 2005). In a similar manner, Deleuze describes the electronic and digital image processes as a break, but also as an understanding of the time‑image sign: when the frame or the screen functions as instrument panel, printing or computing table, the image is constantly being cut into another im‑ age, being printed through a visible mesh, sliding over other images in an ›incessant stream of messages‹, and the shot itself is less like an eye than an overloaded brain endlessly absorbing information […]. (Deleuze 1989, 267)

This description closely resembles Lev Manovich’s opinion of screen media, whose »sequential scanning – circular in the case of radar, horizontal in the medium of TV« never gives us a si‑ multaneous representation (an image) but only »lines [tracks] on a surface«, and therefore, he concludes, the traditional image »no longer exists« (Manovich 2001, 100). Haptic surfaces and affective effects

Deleuze, in other words, replaces the image as a sign with the »signaletic material« that is valid for film and electronic and digi‑ tal media, which in 1985, when Cinema 2: The Time-Image was published in France, was still in its infancy. In continuation of the theoretical landscape

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this, the analyses in the book will consider the medium of film as a signaletic material, which with regard to image autopoiesis, of first movement and later time, makes it possible to release it from both narratological and semiotic forms of representational analysis. In electronic and digital media the noise of the signal further becomes a visible and audible part of the utterance. The signal is present in every screen surface as electronic lines, points and pixels, which overall can be designated as »hap‑ tic« surfaces or spaces. With this description, based on Alois Riegl’s Late Roman Art Industry (Riegl [1902] 1985), Deleuze has, through his work, created an effective analytical differen‑ tiation between optical or striated space and haptic or smooth space.33 In the second edition of his book (1902), Alois Riegl substitutes ›tactile‹ with ›haptic‹, which in Greek means to grasp and to touch, in order to illustrate the ability of visual perceptions to sense a kind of ›contact‹ through visual perception, which can be experienced, for example, when one looks at patterns, carvings, reliefs or ornaments, and details in woven materials such as rugs and fabric. Riegl analysed this sensation of ›touching with the eyes‹ in relation to the well‑known designation ›optic‹. Optical ability is active when visual decoding is more oriented towards lines and depth perspectives, while the haptic quality is found, as a rule, in surfaces which are registered close up. Riegl relates the haptic view to near‑sightedness and the optical view to long‑sightedness. The smooth space of the haptic view makes it possible to »ex‑ tract sensation from representation« (Rajchman 2000, 130) and to create an experimental spatiality, where the appropriation of the seen or sensed gives way to a concentration on the purely material. The distinction between subject and object is thus mini‑ mised to the benefit of the plane of intensity, which contains both. Deleuze’s »time‑image« corresponds to this in its extraction of time as ›aion‹ or ›pure‹ temporal intensity from chronological time, which is organised as movement‑images within a body‑

33 Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraktion und Einfühlung (1908) and Henri Maldiney’s Regard, parole, espace (1973) also form the background for Deleuze and Guattari’s differentiation between the haptic or smooth (le lisse) and the optical or striated (le strié) in A Thousand Plateaus.

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space relation (Thomsen 2001).34 Both ›time‑image and ›haptic space‹ characterise the plane of intensity. But while the time‑ image attaches itself to a virtual plane, and cannot be exemplified with a particular image, the haptic space is related to micro‑ sensory planes in the image, which either find themselves in the marginal zone or disturb the decoding of what is seen. The sensation of the time‑image’s virtual horizon occurs as a singular passage, an event, which makes its generalisation impos‑ sible. In the event’s passage, something virtual can become actual beyond the described sensorimotor bodies, which represent time through actions in space. A thought can materialise in the encoun‑ ter with a composition and change the mode of sensation and in‑ terpretation. The intensification of a time‑image can in various ways amplify (for example, in a crystalline relation between some‑ one’s look in the mirror and the mirror image) the filmic composi‑ tion plane’s blocks of sensation, composed by affects and percepts, so that they can expand towards a virtual horizon. Percepts and affects belong to the field of art and exist, so to speak, outside that which can be described phenomenologically (as perceptions and affections/emotions). They belong to the composition and are in‑ dependent of a perceiving subject (the artist included): By means of the material, the aim of art is to wrest the percept from perceptions of objects and the states of a perceiving subject, to wrest the affect from affections as the transition from one state to another: to extract a bloc of sensations, a pure being of sensations. (Deleuze and Guattari [1991] 1994, 167)35

The haptic field or space can also be found in the composition, but in a different way. The haptic can be visible in the favouring of marginal parts of the image or in the inclusion of the noise that is found in the material, signals or pixels of the film, video or digi‑ tal image. Deleuze himself names Robert Bresson’s favouring of 34 Moreover, it is natural to understand the splitting of Deleuze’s work on film into two books (Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image) as being related to the concept of time as chronos and aion respectively. 35 Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy? contains many examples of how to understand percepts, affects and concepts.

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the hands and their ›grabbings‹ as a manual‑haptic kind of touch rather than the gaze in Pickpocket (1959) (Deleuze 1989, 13), but one could also name, for example, David Lynch’s cultivation of the screen’s partly‑darkened marginal zones in Lost Highway (1987). In more recent film it is not uncommon to see scenes described purely haptically, such as car windows reflecting the bright lights of Tokyo City in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003), or the flickering strobe light which represents the profoundly deaf girl’s experience of the discotheque in Alejando González Iñár‑ ritu’s Babel (2006). As with the time‑image, the sensation of the composition plane intensifies, but in this instance percepts and affects are intensified with the images‹ decay or materialisation as noise, materiality, signals and pixelated algorithms. Both the thought activation in the time‑image and the affective intensifi‑ cation in the haptic image must, in accordance with Deleuze, be combined with an opening towards the virtual. In the example of the hands‹ haptic‑manual fragmentation of a classic sensorimotor image construction in Robert Bresson, which Deleuze notices, the visual sense perception of the thief’s hands creates an alter‑ native spatiality, in that other kinds of relation, choice and con‑ nections are visualised, more so than if the face had been central in the image (Deleuze ibid.). The question of choice is expanded later in the book (Deleuze, op. cit. 176‑178), where Dreyer’s spir‑ itual automata, Rohmer’s marionettes and Bresson’s automatised movements are dealt with collectively, as they all create openings towards something virtual outside the world of fiction. For though the sensorimotor film holds the interpretation open in and with the movement, the time‑image opens towards that which lies outside fiction, in that it is not the relation between the individual images, but rather the intervening space between them which is empha‑ sised. Dreyer, Rohmer and Bresson snap back the sensorimotor reference to film as a whole in favour of an opening towards the virtual outside the framework of the individual film. In Bresson’s case it is the hands showing an »atonal« (Deleuze op. cit., 183) hap‑ tic spatiality that links vision and touch in a kinaesthetic manner, which opens towards the virtual.36 36

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Laura U. Marks builds on Deleuze’s use of the term ›haptic‹, and in the books The Skin of the Film

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With Deleuze’s theory of the signaletic material of film and electronic digital media – the analytic divisions between both movement‑images and time‑images, and optical and haptic space – a new starting point is created for the analysis of film, video and digital audio‑visual forms. Applied to Lars von Trier’s film we gain the possibility to lay bare the way intensities and power emanate from the often haptically organised surfaces and space, which in the form of time‑images, remediation and diagram‑ matical composition reflect on and create forms of audio‑visual connections that activate the virtual. The electronic image operates fundamentally within the haptic or smooth space of the screen surface, where the signal transforms endlessly, independent of classic forms of representa‑ tion – that is, time expressed as movement or space expressed as an optical or striped depth, foundation or background. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari describe an abstract haptic line thus: a line that delimits nothing, that describes no contour, that no longer goes from one point to another but instead passes between points, that is always declining from the horizontal and the vertical and deviating from the diagonal, that is constantly changing direction, a mutant line of this kind that is without outside or inside, form or background, beginning or end and that is as alive as a continuous variation – such a line is truly an abstract line, and describes a smooth space. It is not inexpressive. Yet it is true that it does not constitute a stable and symmetrical form of expression grounded in a resonance of points and a conjunction of lines. It is nevertheless accompanied by material traits of expression, the effects of which multiply step by step. (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus [1980] 2013, 578; author’s italics)

The signaletic material, which Trier presents in his films, has the same quality as the abstract or haptic line. The haptic surfaces in the film images, the electronic noise signals in video and the

(2000) and Touch (2002) shows how haptic compositions in film and video can communicate intimate sen‑ sory experiences in close up. Brian Massumi rather emphasises how the haptic (and the affect) kinaestheti‑ cally and virtually creates contact between experiences of sense perception (Massumi 2011, 71).

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algorithm’s fluctuating changing of the pixelation together make the signaletic material momentarily visible in/as the image.37 It is in this connection that the concept of affect, as it occurs at present within the analysis of art and culture as well as the social field,38 also gains particular relevance. The modern forms of catastrophe created by humans, such as climatic conditions and global economic crises, whose political effects are again intensified by the global real‑time media, are today reflected artistically to a large extent. Trier’s films have from the beginning (for example, in the Europa trilogy’s interest in hypnosis) been concerned with how intensities and affects can shift from one environment to another. In the following study of his films, I will relate the analysis of the haptic image and sound levels to the concept of affect, as it is presented by Deleuze, based on Baruch de Spinoza’s definition in part three of the Ethics (1677). Spinoza attaches the Latin word ›affectus‹ (erroneously translated into Danish as emotion, følelse)39 to good or bad encounters with the external modi of others: »By affect I understand affections of the body by which the power of acting of the body itself is increased, diminished, helped, or hindered, together with the ideas of these affections« (Spinoza [1677] 2001, 98). Deleuze advances this argument and writes that some modi are »good« and can create compositions with the body, while other encounters are »bad« and disintegrate it. The examples are food, illness, accidents or other forms of physical encounter. He continues: The passage to a greater perfection, or the increase of the power of acting, is called an affect, or feeling, of joy; the passage to a lesser per‑ fection or the diminution of the power of acting is called sadness. Thus the power of acting varies according to external causes for the same capacity for being affected. […] Even though our power of acting has 37 Cf. Anna Munster 2014. 38 Cf. Massumi (2002), Clough (2007), Gregg and Seigworth (2010) and Peripeti 17 (2012). 39 Spinoza differentiates between ›affectio‹ and ›affectus‹. In Danish the equivalent would be affection (devotion or tenderness) and affect (influence). Where affectio is experienced in the encounter with other bodies as devotion or the opposite, affectus characterises the variable influence itself, which increases or reduces the ability to act. We have affect in common with animals, and in that relation affect is pre‑indi‑ vidual, but different cultures or groups can develop different reactions to affect. The term ›affect‹ captures fundamentally the ability to live in variable surroundings and to react, so that life skills are strengthened (or weakened), and this can neither be captured in concepts nor represented by objects in the world.

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increased materially, we will remain passive, separated from our power, so long as we are not formally in control of it. That is why, from the standpoint of affects, the basic distinctions between two sorts of passions, sad passions and joyful passions, prepares for a very different distinc‑ tion, between passions and actions. (Deleuze 1988, 50; author’s italics)

This concept of affect is raised many times in Deleuze and Guat‑ tari’s A Thousand Plateaus, but Deleuze also employs the term affection in a slightly different analytical way in his books on film. The term ›affection‑image‹ should be understood as an image that can occasion devotion or tenderness, in that here we are concerned with »a pure quality or pure force, lying outside time and space. It is not actualised or incarnated in concrete relations, situations or persons« (Jørholt 1998, 105). The affection‑image is established as an icon in Charles Sanders Peirce’s terminology, and Deleuze mentions Carl Theodor Dreyer as its leading exponent. It is important to emphasise that Deleuze’s philosophical conception of affect aims to contain the forms of intensity or potential that are not conscious and decided by will – and thus pre‑individual – and which cannot be reflected in representa‑ tional thinking. However, the ›affect‹ term can convey approxi‑ mations to the forms of non‑conscious events of types such as ›infatuation‹ and ›catastrophe‹, whose range we have difficulty in grasping. Brian Massumi emphasises the relation of affect to the event’s virtual aspect, in that its point of intensity (as in chaos theory’s bifurcation point), from a virtual level, takes part in and almost »selects« an actual level, where the event plays out. In this way relations that normally belong to various planes and potentials interact. He names, amongst others, the relation and distinction between the potentials in spirit and body, will and cognition, joy and sadness, past and future, passivity and activity (Massumi 2002a, 33). His definition of affect as an autonomic »diagrammatical translation of the virtual dimension« (op. cit., 33) is as follows: What is being termed affect in this essay is precisely this two‑sidedness, the simultaneous participation of the virtual in the actual and the actual in the virtual, as one arises from and returns to the other. Affect is this

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two‑sideness as seen from the side of the actual thing, as couched in its perceptions and cognitions. Affect is the virtual as point of view, pro‑ vided the visual metaphor is used guardedly. For affect is synesthetic, implying a participation of the senses in each other: the measure of a living thing’s potential interactions is its ability to transform the ef‑ fects of one sensory mode into those of another. […] Affects are virtual synesthetic perspectives anchored in (functionally limited by) the actually existing, particular things that embody them. The autonomy of affect is its participation in the virtual. Its autonomy is its openness. Affect is autonomous to the degree to which it escapes confinement in the par‑ ticular body whose vitality, or potential for interaction, it is. (Massumi 2002b, 35; author’s italics)

For Massumi it is crucial that affect relates analytically to the event, which actualises and then – as a result thereof – can be experienced in an emotional way. When affect is captured and formed in situated perceptions and experiences, we are faced with emotion that expresses that »something has always and again escaped« (op. cit.). When we formulate an emotion such as love, for example, we attempt to express the experience of standing outside ourselves. That experience is simultaneously captured in this description of an emotion, when we remove ourselves from the corporeal experience of an affective intensification in vitality (op. cit., 35). Several people have presented the definitions of the terms in Deleuze as well as Massumi – including the difference between affect and emotion. Steven Shaviro sums up the terms and their differences in this way: For Massumi, affect is primary, non‑conscious, asubjective or pre‑ subjective, asignifying, unqualified, and intensive; while emotion is derivative, conscious, qualified, and meaningful, a »content« that can be attributed to an already‑constituted subject. Emotion is affect captured by a subject, or tamed and reduced to the extent that it becomes com‑ mensurate with that subject. Subjects are overwhelmed and traversed by affect, but they have or possess their own emotions. (Shaviro 2010, 3)

Lone Bertelsen and Andrew Murphie, for the sake of clarity, clas‑ sify the three types of affect: 1) the transitive, pre‑personal form 46

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of affect, which animals and humans have in common, and in which affective relations are collective in relation to a threat such as a natural catastrophe, for example; 2) the personal emotional experience of affective intensities in the form of physical condi‑ tions that, for example, manifest themselves as a beating heart or a trembling, which can generate (new) ideas, as »[f]eelings are complex strings of ideas traversing emotions as they remap them«; 3) the transitive form of affect which, so to speak, lies in between the two. Here affect is in constant variation between the »power to affect and be affected«, as the passage from one state to another is concerned with manoeuvring in relation to others in order to survive, protect, exchange, develop and so on. In this affect register the exchange between micro and macro levels hap‑ pens, for example, in the form of politics or ethics. The first type is described by Guattari, the second by Damasio and the third by Spinoza (cf. Bertelsen and Murphie 2010, 140). In addition, they summarise the complexity of the ›affect‹ term in Massumi thus: »nothing happens if affective intensity has not already paid us a visit« (op. cit., 147). It is difficult to define the affect qualitatively. It always escapes (Massumi op. cit., 35) while we are working on containing it. Differentiating between emotions such as a ›quali‑ fied‹ intensity and the intensity of affect, which is ›unqualified‹ (Bertelsen and Murphie, 148) is, however, an operative procedure. The book’s contextual interlacing of the analysis of Trier’s film and the sketched (primarily Deleuzian) tradition of theory is chosen with a view to developing a film theory that can iden‑ tify the haptic, affective and diagrammatical modulations and compositions which often remain unnoticed in film analyses. Also contained in the diagrammatical level are the expressive qualities of haptic compositions, colour, actions and the creation of arbitrary space, whose commonality is that they cannot be seen directly and immediately but they can be sensed perceptu‑ ally. The diagrammatical composition brings a virtual level in to the composition plane, so another plane can be sensed. As with Deleuze before him, Brian Massumi leans on Peirce’s definition: »The greatest point of art consists in the introduction of suitable abstractions. By this I mean such a transformation of our dia‑ grams that characters of one diagram may appear in another as the theoretical landscape

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things« (Massumi 2011, 99; Massumi quotes Peirce 1997, 226). As an example, Massumi mentions the diagrammatical func‑ tion, where the activation of the famous madeleine cake plays on fiction’s establishment of a kind of lived, virtual level in Marcel Proust’s great novel In Search of Lost Time (Massumi 2011, 25). But the list is, in principle, endless, as the artistic expression of creation is an expression for a constant diagrammatisation of relations which can be lived (Massumi 2011, 76). He continues: Each setup, each situational framing, will orient what happens more toward one end or the other of given polarities. It might, for example, bring narrativity out more than the affective in‑whichness, or try to do both equally, superimposing them on each other or oscillating between them. Or it might favor instrumental interactivity more than making the relationalities conditioning it appear. It may fuse vision with tactil‑ ity, or with kinesthesia, or spin one of them off from vision at vision’s own immanent limit. Or it might be forcefully disruptive, and make felt jolting disjunctions between sense modes, for example between sound and sight. It might spatialize more than eventuate. It might tend to root in the site‑specific, or fan out into a distributed network. The possibilities are as infinite as existence. (Massumi op. cit., 76)

The analyses of Lars von Trier’s film works presented in the fol‑ lowing chapters will draw attention to the way in which Trier diagrammatically‑stylistically overlays the film’s action (or fabula) with haptic and affective intensities, making it possible to create new forms of audience involvement or interfaces. In the analysis of The Kingdom I and II together with The Idiots especially, the focus is on the haptic, while the affective level is central in the analysis of Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark. The dia‑ grammatical level is unfolded in the analyses of Dogville, Manderlay and The Boss of it All in particular. In the analysis of Antichrist, Melancholia and Nymphomaniac, the theoretical concept is uniformly utilised. The concluding chapter summarises the use of haptic, affective and diagrammatic compositions in some definitions of the ongoing importance of signaletic material in Lars von Trier’s film. It appears clear that the haptic, signaletic overlaying of material, which creates affective involvement in The 48

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Kingdom and the Golden Heart trilogy, is expanded in the later films from the compositional plane to also include interfaces, where the viewer is involved through sense perceptions as well as cognition. Through his ever‑renewing film work, Trier makes the viewer’s body into a perceptible part of the filmic interface. The compositional, haptic layer in the audio‑visual signaletic material, which can both appear affectively involving and create diagrammatic events, thus pointing to meanings other than the narrative, will be further analysed in the following.

the theoretical landscape

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CHAPTER 2

Haptic surfaces and spatial effects in Trier’s films of the 1980s

Although I intend to continue with Deleuze’s method of starting in ›the middle‹ (that is, in the 1990s, with The Kingdom I and II), where the development of an aesthetic practice can be followed, in this chapter I will briefly look back at the films of the Europa trilogy, The Element of Crime, Epidemic and Europa, together with the TV production Medea. I will, however, first address a scene from Epidemic. The scene, which is centrally placed in the film, concerns the investigation of a tube of toothpaste, and interestingly enough binds a number of

Tunnel scene from Epidemic.

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the film’s elements together around the word ›signal‹. The theme is established by the manuscript writers for the film‑within‑the‑film, Niels and Lars (alias Niels Vørsel and Lars von Trier), discussing how the red stripe in Signal toothpaste is created. The two writers are on a car journey to Cologne; writing on a typewriter and film‑ ing as they drive. While travelling through the Ruhr district, the car windows reflect the passing industrial landscapes of the area as an intertextual salute to how the rural landscape of France, discussed by Jean‑Paul Belmondo, is laid in front of the car passenger’s gaze in Jean‑Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960). The two writers then drive through a motorway tunnel and a long sequence is presented con‑ taining only strips of light on both sides of the tunnel, along with their reflections in the windscreen of the car. The sequence is a clear remake (with musical accompaniment) of the tunnel scene in Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), which lasts more than four minutes; the car passenger travelling through several tunnels there alludes to space travel as well as to a strip of film. The sequence in Tarko‑ vsky’s film is likewise an acknowledgement of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), whose long time travel sequence, the »Stargate Corridor«, is described by Gene Youngblood as a blank mould for the computer film, because the scene, constructed in Douglas Trumbull’s so‑called slit-scan machine, »links together basic filmic techniques with computer and video science« (Young‑ blood 1970, 156).40 Incidentally, the spaceship’s time travel se‑ quence alternates with the haptic sequences, which project the shaking helmet and the astronaut’s unfocused eyes as a reaction to the time travel. In Epidemic one sees only the striped space of tunnel lamps (in black and white) as the car passes by, and not the more spec‑ tacular journey through time. But in this sequence one also pays extra attention to the film’s red logo or trademark, EPIDEMIC, followed by a small e in a circle, which mimics the small c for

40 Youngblood’s description also contains a reference to night‑time car travel: »The exposure […] pro‑ duced on the single frame is a controlled blur, much the same as time exposures of freeways at night that produce streaks of red taillights. The shifting panels of painted glass behind the slit alter the pattern of light coming through the slit as the camera approaches, producing an uneven or streaked blur. When the process is repeated for both sides of the frame, the effect is of an infinite corridor of lights and shapes advancing at enormous velocity.« (Youngblood, 154).

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copyright. This logo, invented by Vørsel and Trier, continuously holds part of the viewer’s attention fixed on the film’s surface, whether it appears on scenes from the film‑within‑the‑film, shot on 35mm film by Dreyer’s cinematographer Henning Berndtsen, or from the overall film, shot on hand‑held camera with 16mm

Lars (Lars von Trier) dissects the tube of Signal toothpaste in Epidemic. 52

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film by Kristoffer Nyholm. The two types of recording give a very different impression, but the film’s logo remains the same. The tunnel sequence ends with an image (from the film‑within‑the‑ film) of a woman being buried alive. In the following sequence, after having arrived in Cologne with Niels, Lars carries out a minor surgical procedure on a tube of Signal Plus toothpaste. This brand, which has not been available to purchase in Denmark for a long time, is distinguishable by four red stripes, which run like four »corners« in the paste when one squeezes the tube. The purpose of Lars‹ dissection is to demon‑ strate »that there are no stripes inside« and that the red stripes in the white paste appear because the paste passes through a nozzle. Lars concludes his dissection performance with: »There’s a noz‑ zle in which the white stuff pulls the red stuff along with it out through the opening. And that’s the story of ›Signal‹.« The point, which could be easily overlooked, is clearly the word ›tube‹, as in English this can mean ›tube‹, ›tunnel‹, ›channel‹, or ›underground railway‹. So far, so good. But for the penny to drop fully the final contextualising scene is essential. In the following sequence, in which Lars and Niels privately visit the actor Udo Kier in Co‑ logne, Udo recounts a story about his mother, who saw people jumping into the river and diving under the surface of the water in order to protect themselves against the phosphorous bombs dropped on the city during the war. The story ends with Kier’s emotionally laden descriptions of how his mother saw a pair of burned hands sticking out of the water; at which point he breaks down in tears. Viewed in context these sequences concern the material condi‑ tions of film media, finally summed up in Udo Kier’s story. Diverse materials such as phosphorous and celluloid, which are used in the production of both photographs and film, are important to the interpretation of these scenes, which appear motivically disparate if one tries to create a narrative connection between them. But as phosphorous is also used in bombs and toothpaste, the recollec‑ tion of the bombing of Cologne and the German toothpaste Signal becomes the deviation which in Epidemic motivates the excursion to Germany. This mise‑en‑abîme, in other words, lays bare the material production methods of the photographic and filmic sign haptic surfaces and spatial effects in trier’s films of the 1980s

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in modernistic ways. To this disclosure is also added a figure of in‑ terpretation, in which the relationship between the striped and the smooth comes to function as a kind of visual filter that the analysis must pass through. This reading – that the film celluloid’s phos‑ phorous was an ingredient in the burning bomb material of the Second World War and at the same time is present in something as ordinary as toothpaste – passes through visual demarcations which, just like the nozzle in the tube of Signal, stripe the material. And thus this relation between the striped and the smooth, and between the optic and the haptic, proliferates, from describing something based on its form to becoming an acid bath which also generates the film on a contextual level. When Doctor Mesmer (Lars von Trier), the idealist doctor in the film‑within‑the‑film, brings the epidemic with him, because he moves beyond the pro‑ tective walls of medical science, he functions as the nozzle which stripes the space in that he occupies it. The smooth, haptic space is striped/contained by the medical infection/vaccine. But in this process medical science’s striping is also dissolved/disintegrated with the help of the smooth space and the haptic images, which gain an increasing hold in the film and undermine each attempt at a traditional construction of a coherent fabula. Gradually, as the epidemic spreads through the film‑within‑ the‑film, the haptic 16mm images take over, and in the final scene, which shows an authentic hypnosis, the disease develops in the shape of boils breaking out on the skin of both the female hypno‑ tist medium and Niels and his wife (Cæcilia Holbek Trier). This haptically filmed final sequence with the centrally placed hypnotist anticipates, to a large extent, Trier’s cinematographic style in the 1990s, and creates a breakthrough to the fiction which, so to speak, shows itself as a virtual possibility in the documentary film framework, because the boils break out in the ›real‹ narra‑ tive framework. The film ends with everyone in the locale being infected through the hypnotic transportation between the fictive story and the ›real‹ framework. This is also indicated at the beginning of the film, where Niels and Lars paint the sequence of events for the film‑within‑the‑film on a wall. Close‑up images of the makeshift sequence of events reveal diffuse haptic dots, where the irregularities in the woodchip 54

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wallpaper break through the paint. A similar decomposition of haptic art is characterised in the walls in the basement of the Roy‑ al Library of Denmark, which Niels and Lars learn is caused by patches of saltpetre coming through the wallpaper. Lars and Niels are based here while researching the plague epidemic, which is to be part of the film‑within‑the‑film. Saltpetre is an old name for potassium nitrate, which was the chief ingredient in the particu‑ larly flammable nitrate film. In the early days of film, when electric light was not yet in common use, this nitrate film was produced with the help of limelight, and was particularly flammable.41 Epidemic is the film in the Europa trilogy where Trier, to a spe‑ cial extent, links the filmic material’s components (phosphorous, celluloid and nitrate) in a modernistic or avant‑garde aesthetic display of the means of production. It is interesting that this is achieved through drawing attention to a haptic image sensation, which again paves the way for a new interpretation of an ex‑ pressionistic style. Expressionism, which in Lotte Eisner relates to the gothic Romantic movement (Eisner 1952), can generally be described as a style in which the non‑organic life of a thing comes into view as a more or less monstrous figure, through a play between light and shadow, where opaque light, the broken line and phosphorescent or fluorescent light in particular attain an intensifying effect. It is interesting in this context that Deleuze explicitly names Wilhelm Worringer as the first theoretician of expressionism, in that he relates style to the haptic, broken line which, using Riegl as a starting point, is associated with the so‑called »gothic or Nordic decorative line«. Deleuze characterises this line in the following way: a broken line which forms no contour by which form and background might be distinguished, but passes in a zigzag between things, some‑

41 The close‑up images of the walls of The Royal Library also function as an intertextual reference to the walls in Carl Th. Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932) and to the general aesthetic in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), which both favour a haptic aesthetic (Thomsen 2006). Henning Bendtsen, Dreyer’s cinematogra‑ pher on The Word and Gertrud, shot Epidemic (and also Europa, 1991) on 35mm film, while the remainder of the film was shot on 16mm by, amongst others, Trier himself (DVD Lars von Trier Collection, Europa trilogy, disc 4, Added value: Interview with Lars von Trier by Bo Green Jensen, 2005).

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times drawing them into a bottomlessness in which it loses itself, sometimes whirling them into a formlessness into which it veers in a ›disorderly convulsion‹. Thus automata, robots and puppets are no longer mechanisms which validate or ›major‹ [majorent] a quantity of movement, but somnambulists, zombies or golems who express the intensity of this non-organic life […]. (Deleuze 1986, 51)

In Deleuze the haptic and expressionistic broken line anticipates filmic modernism. As early as silent film, expressionism made it possible to create spatial extensions of ›any-space-whatever‹ (l’espace quelconque), which shift the movement free of its interconnectedness to the coordinates of geometry and homogenous space. With the so-called ›gothic geometry‹ of expressionism it becomes possible to create the space rather than describe it, in that: […] it no longer proceeds by measuring out but by extension and accumulation. The lines are extended beyond all measure to their meeting-points, while their breaking-points produce accumulations. The accumulation may be of light or of shadow, just as the extensions may be of shadow or of light. (Deleuze 1986, 51)

The expressionist style is, for Deleuze, a precondition for the description of a random modernistic space, as the opaque, dark fields in the image being broken up by light create a form of depth in which the perspective is distorted or filled with shadows assuming contrasting and repellent forms. In this way, the contours of things disappear along with the individuality of people, and this benefits non-organic life forms in unbounded space (Deleuze op. cit., 157).42 In Trier’s Europa trilogy, expressionism’s gothic line and random space is effectuated in three ways. First, as mentioned, 42 In Philosophie de l’ornement. D’Orient en Occident (2008), Christine Buci-Glucksmann correspondingly links Riegl’s concept of the haptic together with Deleuze and Guattari’s description of the smooth space and the gothic line, together with an analysis of oriental style and its influence on French modernist art. Laura U. Marks does something similar when she relates Islamic philosophy and art to current media art in Enfoldment and Infinity. An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (2010).

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work is carried out both thematically and visually with haptic im‑ age surfaces and phosphorescent light, which together with the yellowish‑brownish sepia tones are ongoing throughout the three films. The Element of Crime, which takes place at night, is actu‑ ally even filmed in its entirety under the glare of sodium lamps, giving a distinct orange or yellow light but also superseding all other colours and, thus describing a haptic space. Secondly, in The Element of Crime, the notion of whether the Europe which the film describes can be expressed as a phenomenologically existing place or not becomes rather insignificant. The individual milieux remain unconnected, and there is no differentiation between virtual and actual places, so that the film’s spatial dimension ap‑ pears endless. Thirdly, in Europa (1991) Trier makes use of a kind of back projection (called bluescreen in film or chromakey in TV), which is in fact an expressionistic technique that negates depth in the background in favour of the foreground: Depth is the location of the struggle, which sometimes draws space into the bottomlessness of a black hole, and sometimes draws it toward the light. And of course, a character may also become strangely and terribly flat, against the background of a luminous circle, or his shadow may lose all its thickness, by backlighting [contre‑jour], on a white background; but it is by an ›inversion of the values of light and dark‹, by an inversion of perspective which puts depth to the forefront. […] The shadow extends to infinity. In this way it determines the virtual conjunctions which do not coincide with the state of things or the position of characters which produce it […]. (Deleuze 1986, 111‑112; Deleuze here refers to Lotte Eisner 1952)

This style, which Deleuze calls neo‑gothic, makes it possible for Trier to concern himself – in an ›impure‹ manner – partly with the actors from the Second World War in a random space named Germany, and partly in raising the haptic qualities of the expres‑ sionist aesthetic into the period of the electronic TV signal, in that the signaletic material in the medium of film is emphasised by way of back projection. The techniques used by Trier can be summed up as: 1. phosphorescent light effects, sepia tones and the play between light and shadow; 2. the construction of any‑space‑ haptic surfaces and spatial effects in trier’s films of the 1980s

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whatever and spatial expansion; 3. back projection. Together they create a haptic aesthetic, which leads on to the TV productions Medea and The Kingdom I and II.43 But aside from these stylistic markers, a breakthrough to the viewer’s time and space is postulated, especially in Epidemic, which by definition is closed country for the film medium. In Epidemic, the haptic, hand‑held framed narrative is infiltrated (an actual space) by the film‑within‑the‑film (a fictive space) and vice versa, in that the disease proliferates to the body, as described by Doctor Mesmer’s colleagues in their risk assessment of the dangers that lurk in an infected area: It may start with a small cough. But quickly and without mercy the respiratory organs are disabled by the infected air. The bacteria in the soil penetrate the skin and the flesh by the mere contact. And the water you drink will destroy you from inside. (English dialogue on the DVD)

With the hypnotic element that characterises all the films in the trilogy, the viewer gains direct access to its workings (through the counting in and out of the hypnosis in Element of Crime and Europa and, furthermore, in a visual manner in Epidemic). This diagrammatic audience‑involving element recurs in The Kingdom I and II as well as the Golden Heart trilogy. In the latter, landscapes, faces and musical space are broken down in haptic ways, as the affective effects intensify in correspondence with Carl Theodor Dreyer’s filmic aesthetic. Here one can say that the hypnosis (Gothic‑expressionistic) is created rather than described. Before presenting my interpretation of this I will briefly men‑ tion the TV film Medea (1988), which used Dreyer’s abandoned manuscript as a source. This relation makes it interesting to ob‑ serve how Trier’s TV version in many ways fulfils Dreyer’s ideas

43 In Medea this is created by the film being copied over to video and back again, and in The Kingdom I and II by hand‑held cameras (16 mm), poor lighting and sepia tones. The film editor Molly Stensgaard describes how the ghosts’ haptic ghostliness was created by several layers of images edited together in The Kingdom II. The organic element in the green eye, which overlays the TV image, was created by the use of scannings of a beef steak (cf. Schepelern 2000 and the interview with Molly Stensgaard in the extra mate‑ rial on the DVD: The Kingdom II).

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Medea (Kirsten Olesen) lying in the sea’s waves in the TV film’s prelude.

for film in the future concerning the »pure surface effect«, de‑ scribed prospectively as »a wholly new image‑related construction of surface colours, which all lay on the same plane, so they created one large, collated multi‑coloured plane, and consequently the concepts of foreground, middle ground and background disap‑ peared entirely« (Dreyer 1959, 91). Medea demonstrates a sustained haptic aesthetic – from its dramatic introduction showing Medea (Kirsten Olsen) lying at the water’s edge like a body washed ashore, with waves lapping over her and the camera lens, to its description of Jason’s (Udo Kier) delirious search for his past, which is likened to the bil‑ lowing movements of the ears of corn, surging here and there in the wind, engulfing first the horse’s body and then his own. It is noticeable how the sand on the beach and the graininess of the sea water, which washes over Medea’s body – clad in black – and the entire screen surface, seems to give her renewed energy to pursue her venture out in the world. She is bound to the element haptic surfaces and spatial effects in trier’s films of the 1980s

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of water. Furthermore, we see her several times walking around in the mist of the littoral meadow, where she collects berries.44 In contrast, Jason loses his strength when he is deprived of his prospective purpose in life. He realises too late that his luminous, striped and optic future as king, married to Creon’s (Henning Jensen) daughter, Glauce (Lumilla Glinska),45 can only be real‑ ised if the past (Medea and their two young sons) is included. Without children to continue his family line, he dies. Medea, on the contrary, thrives in the haptic, nomadic field from which she originates and returns to Aegeus‹ (Baard Owe) ship. Through her knowledge of nature’s herbs, she has contact with forces that Jason has no knowledge of.46 Her murderous plans, which reverse Creon’s decision, unfold in several stages. She begins by making poison and spreading it on her own bridal crown, which is in‑ tended to be brought to Glauce by the boys as a gift. Jason pays her a visit, and as she asks him a question, whether he recalls their love and the ensuing intercourse, the sky becomes a cyan blue colour and the water turns green. He leaves her, lashes out at her, and the blue tones take precedence. Then the deadly poison brings about the death of a horse and later Glauce, which is poetically depicted by the horse, galloping freely on the beach, disturbing a swarm of seagulls.47 As the gulls scatter, flying upwards, the sky is coloured magenta red. This colour tone also dominates the sequence in which Medea pulls the children along across the flat beach, and when Jason is encouraged by the people to enter the grave together with the dead Glauce. The three colour tones – red, blue and green – that make up the TV picture tube’s primary colours clearly form part of various types of overlayering towards the end;48 initially in the form of white dissolves of Jason to the 44 She thus remains in the same haptic register as the so‑called bleachers who, in the intro to The Kingdom I and II, moisten their cloth in the mossy ground which is the foundation beneath Riget (i.e. the Riget – or Kingdom – hospital). 45 It is curious that Jason says the name ›Glauce‹ and continues: »Your name means nymph, the woman I love«, which is later mirrored in the long dwell on the word ›nymph‹ in Nymphomaniac. 46 The haptic description of how Medea cultivates seeds, plant stems and roots by allowing them to come into contact with the water recurs later in Antichrist, where the camera zooms in on rotten plant stems in a vase next to the woman’s hospital bed. As in Medea, this heralds a virtual index of powers. 47 The horse’s distressed gallop recurs later into a similar manner in Melancholia. 48 Strictly speaking, they have already appeared in mixed form, in that the primary TV colours of blue, red and green are mixed in this way: red + green = yellow; red + blue = magenta; blue + green = cyan; and red + green + blue = white. Cf. Den Store Danske. Net reference: colour, last viewed 30 January 2016.

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horse, galloping freely while chased by two dogs. The horse falls, one of the dogs foaming at the mouth, as Jason is on the verge of insanity, committing suicide with his own sword. His body then becomes one with nature (as with Medea in the film’s intro): the flowing movement in the grass blends into the water’s haptic element,49 while the tide and wind help Aegeus‹ ship on its way, with Medea aboard. As she removes the calotte that has covered her head throughout the film, her hair’s red colour unfolds in the wind. The magenta red accentuation also fills the sails, and finally these red tones win out, so to speak, over Jason’s body and its green elements. The film ends on the complementary colours fused with the dark sea field. The colour tones in Medea are clearly closer to TV media than to film. One can relate Trier’s use of colour to Dreyer’s above cited vision of an anti‑naturalistic use of colour in film. Dreyer refers to Teinosuke Kinogasa’s film Gate of Hell (1953), which with simple techniques (amongst others, semi‑transparent veils and coloured fabrics) turns samurai battles into overwhelmingly abstract painterly impressions, prioritising the film’s foreground. But though Trier could certainly have been inspired by this film, he amplifies the effect of the colour surface in that Medea is as‑ cribed the electronic granularity and ›innate‹ artificial colour tones of the TV medium. Deleuze calls this colour scheme atmospheric, as it impregnates all others, while the absorbing colour scheme, which is characteristic of The Element of Crime, is defined from a virtual, purely affective level (Deleuze 1986, 118). Eva Jørholt dif‑ ferentiates in a similar manner, but she includes only The Element of Crime in her summation of how the absorbing colour, which is linked to the depiction of pure affect and Charles Sanders Peirce’s firstness, characterises postmodern film. She writes: Though I do believe there is a certain connection between the post‑ apocalyptic universe, which Trier unfolds in The Element of Crime, and his choice of the film’s toxic‑yellow base colour […], I would at the same time maintain that Deleuze’s thoughts on colour and affect can provide

49 This sequence, a description of the haptic which is closer to Tarkovsky’s than Dreyer’s, also recurs in the differentiation of mental conditions in Antichrist and Melancholia.

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some perspectives with regard to these films, which neither cognition theory nor psychosemiotics discern. Irrespective of the fact that the affect, which may be caused by the use of colour in these films, cannot be characterised as pure firstness, it occurs to me that Deleuze’s notion of the absorbing colour makes sense. A colour use that paves the way for an affect – joy, fear, uneasiness, shock, or whatever it might be – which is not dictated by, but rather ascribes the person’s emotions and/or actions. They are simply impregnated in an overriding, chromatically caused affect, somewhat similar to that which Peirce imagined as »a psychic feeling of red without us which arouses a sympathetic feeling of red in our senses«. (Jørholt 1998, 108; Jørholt quotes Peirce 1994; in English the ref. would be to Buchler [1949] 2012, 84)

Bearing in mind the use of colour, one could certainly see that in The Element of Crime and Medea respectively the affective pas‑ sion in the absorbing choice of yellowish colours in The Element of Crime is virtually determined (and intensified by the framed narrative of hypnosis), while the electronic‑haptic cooler col‑ our impregnation of selected affect scenes in Medea involves the viewer in a different way.50 For as colour here is less determining, it obtains a diagrammatical quality which will be more closely ac‑ counted for later, in relation to Nymphomaniac in particular. The diagrammatic overlaying of narrative with colour patches which, so to speak, belongs to the materiality of the TV screen, makes it possible for the viewer to enter into a dialogical or interfacial relation to what is viewed. Briefly stated, in his work from the 1980s Trier was already working with film as a signaletic material, whose haptic materiality was able to spread itself swiftly and profusely like a virus, engulf‑ ing or absorbing narrative configurations. The optical striping of space is found as narratives – though labyrinthine – in the Europa trilogy, whereas Medea can be viewed as a departure from a representational form of narrative and plot to instead focus on experiments with the materiality of TV matter, which is ›born‹ 50 This corresponds with McLuhan’s distinction in the first section of Understanding Media, where film is described as a »hot« medium compared to the medium of TV, which is »cool«. Film images, as with written fiction, can absorb the viewer or reader directly, while the TV medium, just like jazz and cartoons, demands involvement and participation in order to create meaning (McLuhan 1964, 22).

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as haptic‑signaletic. The films from the 1990s and onwards work creatively with the filmic, signaletic material in the form of rules, matrices and diagrams characterised by their approach to the viewer, rather than the absorbing neo‑noir narratives in the Eu‑ ropa trilogy. Striping and demarcations are necessary for Trier as creative configurations in playing with the relationship of order/ chaos, and territorialization/deterritorialization.

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CHAPTER 3

A tiger in The Kingdom The transformation from Gothic to grotesque

The television series The Kingdom – a ghost story I (1994) & II (1997)51 was, according to Lars von Trier, greatly inspired by David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks (1990‑1991), which was aired on Danish TV in 1991. As stated by Trier himself, The Kingdom was made »as if with the left hand« (DVD ed. 2004: disc 1), alluding to the apparent ease and insouciance of his approach. Trier’s slightly haphazard left‑handed signature illustrates the assertion: the grotesque form’s twisted, slightly uncontrollable signature appears on the sheet of white paper serving as a back‑ drop, which is partially covered by Trier’s back. It is precisely these chaotic touches, almost certainly provoked by the many restric‑ tions placed on the work by the entertainment division of DR (Denmark’s national broadcasting company), which according to Trier made the work creative, so the series could be »served up with great delight« (ibid.). The grotesque signature also appears at the end of each episode in the series as the demonically staged Trier, replete with ironic tone and dressed in Carl Th. Dreyer’s dinner jacket,52 extracts the moral from the story in a baroque, overdriven manner.53 The following analysis has two main aims: firstly, to clarify how the introduction of ghosts and spirits in The Kingdom I intensifies

51 In the analysis, I only reference the TV series, as released on DVD. 52 Dreyer gave his suit, which was made in Paris, to Henning Bendtsen, who then passed it on to Trier. Cf. http://www.carlthdreyer.dk/omdreyer/biografi/historien‑om‑dreyers‑smoking.aspx (last viewed 15 March 2015). 53 The model for this posture is Hitchcock’s introductions to the various episodes of one of the first series formats appearing on TV, Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955‑1962).

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the haptic organisation of the scanning field, creating a stylistic distance to the more obvious frameworks for the deconstruction of narrative forms and plots which were so prominent in the 1980s; secondly, to shed light on how Trier’s stylistic new inter‑ pretation of the grotesque, monstrous body and the laughter it occasions in The Kingdom II creates an uncontrollable ambiguity in the narrative. The analysis of The Kingdom I draws on Gilles Deleuze’s emphasis on the role of the Mummy in Dreyer and Artaud, while the analysis of The Kingdom II draws on Mikhael Bakhtin’s interpretation of François Rabelais‹ great Renaissance work Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532), together with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the body without organs. The chapter argues that through his work on The Kingdom I and II, Trier paves the way for later developments in the Dogme 95 manifesto’s ampu‑ tation of classic narrative constructions. In The Kingdom I, Trier takes as a starting point the haptic, Dreyeresque composition (in, amongst others, Vampyr, 1932), but in The Kingdom II he trans‑ poses the Gothic‑expressionistic form to a grotesque form which, helped by the signal noise of the electronic medium, threatens to dissolve the narrative framework. Stylistic experiments in this visionary series inform, so to speak, the direction through which Trier can later remediate the film, which is challenged by the new digital interfaces. The interaction of hypertext, computer games and interfaces with the user creates new forms of interfaces and experiences of time and space, which are anticipated in The Kingdom I and II. A ghost story

In its title sequence, The Kingdom is referred to as a ghost story. In the commentary Trier calls it a kind of »updating of the TV series Matador with a little soap added«.54 Diverse »disruptions«, such as »cracks« that are »starting to appear in the hospital« are

54

Matador was a popular Danish TV series, initially broadcast 1978‑1981.

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the final ingredients (citations from the DVD extra material).55 The term ›ghost story‹ can, as a literary genre, be traced back to the English ghost story, with one of the first examples being Hor‑ ace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). From the outset the settings within the genre have expressed an exceedingly marked interest in the Gothic architecture of the past (castles, manor houses and monasteries in a state of decay) as an antithesis to the ideals of both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. In The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Anne Radcliffe turns the Gothic villain into a hero of Byronesque dimensions.56 Gothic figures and settings are especially embedded in Ger‑ man expressionist film (Robert Wiene, F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, among others), and have subsequently inspired horror and film noir. The first expressionist films were full of shadows, dream‑ like visions and Gothic gestalts. One must not forget that the cinematic representations stem from visual illusion machines, and that the first film directors to a large extent applied Gothic apparitions and vampires as a way for the aesthetic to take advan‑ tage of, and reflect on, the ability of the medium to »resurrect the dead« in and with its mechanical reproduction. This characteristic is also clear in the films Vampyr (1932) and Ordet (1955) by Carl Th. Dreyer. As early as the 1920s, the cinematic versions of the Gothic extended the space – in principle – into a boundless size, in that the play between light and shadow, the opaque depth and the 55 The Kingdom I and II thematise a simple conflict between science and the occult. The gallery of characters and the demonic and ghost‑like transformations they undergo (from healthy to sick, from living to dead, from scientific to non‑scientific, from human to bestial – and vice versa) is enormous. In short, the hypochondriac patient Mrs Drusse (Kirsten Rolffes), playing the role of occult detective, is on the trail of a ghost in the hospital called Mary, because she has been wrongfully killed for the purposes of science. Mrs Drusse’s investigation, which places all forms of scientific enquiry on an equal footing, and especially involves the weak, the sick and the marginalised, eventually encompasses the demonic sides of medicinal science. Mary gets her burial, the demons are driven away, and the balance between good and evil forces is eventually neutralised. 56 The poet Lord Byron (1788‑1824), who was one of the first literary bohemians, was a genius with ardent passions and a disrespect for societal institutions. He participated in the development of the genre himself and became the Romantic hero par excellence. Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818) is said to have been written in his presence, just as John William Polidoras’ The Vampyre (1819) was inspired by him. Lord Byron’s bipolar traits are supposed to have formed the background for the powerful descriptions of demonic, supernatural, afflicted and deviant existences in Romantic art. The horror or ghost story was also popular in Germany (among others E.T.A. Hoffmann) and France (among others the Marquis de Sade). In a similar manner to Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe contributes to the reappearance of the gothic novel reinterpreted in a modern light.

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distorted lines and perspectives dominated the contours of objects and people. The expressive extended space, where the length of shadows sets the tone for the foreground, describes affect, passions and states of mind (Deleuze 1986, 111). According to Deleuze, expressionism’s Gothic horror also paved the way for lyrical abstractions in von Sternberg, Dreyer and Bresson. Here the affect of passion is crystallised on an ethical or spiritual level when the main character has to choose between two alterna‑ tives. Deleuze involves Kierkegaard’s concept of the true choice, where the choice itself entails an offering which paves the way for a spiritual or lyrical abstraction.57 When Dreyer’s Joan in The Passion of Joan of Arc or Johannes in Ordet thus choose to opt out of the dimensions of the normal life in favour of the spiritual interpretation, the representative, described physical space fades away in favour of a spiritual one. According to Deleuze, it is the white accent especially in Dreyer that opens up the – in principal, infinite – space. The Gothic‑expressionist tradition, which Trier utilises in The Kingdom I and II, includes ghosts, demons and other shadow‑ like gestalts, creating paradoxical effects in the ordered hospital world. Out of these encounters between the spiritual world of shadows and the white hospital world, grotesque storylines and carnal monstrosities are created. Throughout The Kingdom II the laughter of the grotesque form gradually displaces the Gothic form’s (slightly ironic) eeriness as the TV medium’s electronic (haptic) ›snow‹ and the green eye almost dominate the screen entirely. According to McLuhan, in the 1960s the TV medium’s electronic coolness necessitated the engagement of viewers, in that it differentiated itself appreciably from the mechanical film’s di‑ rect and one‑dimensional (hot) media form (McLuhan 1964, 22). McLuhan understands the TV medium’s coolness as avant‑garde (op. cit., 27), in that watching TV demands involvement (just like listening to jazz). McLuhan’s categorisation is historically incon‑ stant, and he notes that earlier »hot« media can seem laughable in 57 In Kierkegaard, Abraham choosing to sacrifice his son despite his love for him is interpreted as a true choice, which does not happen out of a sense of duty but out of his love of God, that love being greater than the human world. In this way the lyrical abstraction belongs to Christianity to a larger degree than, for example, to the Greek world of many gods (Deleuze 1986, 116).

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light of new, cool media. As a consequence, one could reason that the computer medium’s new form of coolness in the beginning of the 1990s created the background for the new interpretations for both David Lynch (with Twin Peaks) and Trier (with The Kingdom I and II) of the well‑known TV format, which previously gathered the family together around the prime‑time slot week after week. The imaginative and maniacal sense of humour together with the endless, labyrinthine narrative threads, which cannot be gathered together in a definitive ending – characteristic of both series – can be seen in extension of the postmodernist films of the 1980s. But today there is no doubt that both series‹ humorous germination, accentuating the interval rather than the connection between the individual episodes, was the basis for the open narratives of the new TV series.58 From Gothic eeriness to grotesque laughter on the surface of the TV screen

The Kingdom’s most uncanny element is thematised in the intro as Denmark’s 70‑metre‑high Rigshospitalet, called Riget,59 which while under construction in 1970 represented the dream of a functionalist hospital with 1,181 beds arranged on 17 floors. When Trier and Vørsel make this stronghold of medical research a place haunted by all sorts of spirits, the classic expressionism of film is turned inside out in an ironic way. The intro emphasises that it is »the arrogance and the persistent denial of the spiritual« among »the best brains in the nation« which begets the Gothic shadows and ghosts. The antithesis to Riget is the ground itself on Bleg‑ damsvej, upon which the Rigshospital is built. Here previously lay a large marshland, Blegedammene, which was used among other things for the bleaching of cloth.60 Trier and manuscript writer Niels Vørsel make use of this indication of reality in the 58 In discussion with Peter Bürger and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Joachim Grage also regards The Kingdom I and II as an avant‑garde TV series, which in surprising ways transplants documentary and art film formats into the popular format of the TV series (Grage 2012, 248). 59 Riget (literally ›The Kingdom‹) is the largest hospital in Denmark, and is situated in Copenhagen. 60 Across from Blegedammene, from 1879‑1975, lay Blegdams hospital, which admitted children stricken by epidemics such as cholera, smallpox and the plague, but also more widespread diseases such as scarlet fever, measles and polio. In the 1600s a so‑called pest‑house was situated in the same place.

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series’ recurring intro, which consists of two parts.61 The first part is dominated by the – very characteristic for Trier – yellowed, sepia-toned62 images in slow motion, accompanied by the following text, narrated as a voice-over: The Kingdom hospital rests on an ancient marshland, where the bleaching ponds once lay. Here the bleachers moistened their great spans of cloth in the shallow water in order to lay them there to be bleached. The steam evaporating from the wet cloth shrouded the place in a permanent fog. Centuries later the hospital was built here and the bleachers gave way to doctors and researchers, the best brains in the nation and the most perfect technology. And to crown their work they called the hospital The Kingdom. Now life was to be charted and ignorance and superstition were never to shake the bastions of science again. Perhaps their arrogance and persistent denial of the spiritual became too pronounced; for it is as if the cold and the damp have returned. Tiny signs of fatigue are appearing in the solid, modern edifice. No living person knows it yet, but the gateway to The Kingdom is opening once again.

In the final part of the voice-over narrative the camera pans down slowly to the underground, which first emerges as a black silhouette on the screen and later opens downwards towards a grottolike cave, from which a pair of hands slowly emerges.63 From this scene in slow motion there is an abrupt cut to a seemingly stable 61 Several real-life references can be found in the series: for example, a Masonic lodge is situated on Blegdamsvej 23 (built 1924-1927), where, from 1943, the Danish auxiliary corps under German service, Schalburgkorpset (the Schalburg corps), had their headquarters. The monumental Masonic lodge building is not shown in the TV series, but its rituals are portrayed in highly satirical form, as is its hierarchy (that mimics the hospital’s), which leads Drusse on the trail of the underworld’s order of rank. Consultant Moesgaard’s (Holger Juul Hansen) so-called »Operation Morgenluft«, whose aim is to improve communication between doctor and patient, also contains a possible hint at the German military’s appellation for the invasion of Denmark in 1940, Operation Weserübung. Other traces of reality include peculiar, eerie sounds in the upper levels of the hospital, which may be ascribed to the character of the building and which in Drusse’s search for Riget’s soul are signified as »birds of passage« that inform of the spectral presence. Finally, in Riget there was (as in all Danish hospitals up to the 1990s) a brain death criterion: a regular practice of lying dead patients with a bell tied on a toe in the so-called 6-hours room. This has in fact saved a number of apparently dead people from being buried alive and possibly explains the little bell that the ghost Mary carries throughout the series. Thanks to Ingrid Egerod, Msc (Nursing), PhD. 62 The sepia toning that gives the images a dated character can be created in a chemical process in which bleaching is an important part. Trier’s toning, however, is probably created with the help of filters. 63 This clearly refers to the scene in Epidemic in which Udo Kier tells of burned hands sticking up out of the river after the aerial bombardment of Cologne.

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concrete wall in which the letters spelling RIGET (The Kingdom) are stamped in relief. The wall cracks and under the cracking letters gushes a red substance, which can be associated with both bog water and blood. This sequence, where Riget’s Gothic history is embedded in its grotesque ground, is kept in earthen colours. After this there is an abrupt cut to the second part of the intro, where the staff of doctors, secretaries, patients, nurses, medical students, porters and kitchen personnel is introduced at a rapidly‑ edited tempo.64 Edited in between are fifteen close and distant shots of an ambulance driving with lights flashing in sepia‑toned negative images. This part, which ends with an establishing shot – also in negative – of the hospital, is accompanied by a melody with drums, sirens and an almost liturgical chant of a Latin‑sounding litany, or counting‑out rhyme, similar to the Danish schoolchil‑ dren’s classic »lægtilæs kulitorum femihverum«.65 The phrases are chanted by male voices, referencing the Gothic‑religious as well as the cultic and lodge‑like. The bipartite intro illustrates exemplarily how the Gothic style in The Kingdom I is superseded by the grotesque in The Kingdom II. The image of the cave and the wall cracking under the pressure of the red liquid constitutes the sudden change from Gothic to grotesque, when the association with the thin, brownish bog water yields in favour of an association with the thicker, redder liquid form of blood. Likewise, the bodies and faces of the bleachers are seen as shadows on the screen, thus making them anonymous, and must in the second part of the intro also give way to strong, diverse portraits of people expressing passions such as pain, angst, lust and abhorrence. It is already implied here that a vampire story from the horror genre is contained within the ghost story. There is an obvious association with Carl Th. Dreyer’s ghost story Vampyr (1932), in which a corpse is reanimated as a vampire with a lust for blood. In Dreyer the story is told as seen through a veil of mist, created by mounting a filter of gauze in front of the lens. It was this unintentional cinematic error in the first shots 64 This could be a pastiche of the American TV series St. Elsewhere (1982‑1988), which with black hu‑ mour described the conditions in a low‑ranked hospital in Boston. 65 This phrase mixes the rhythm of a monastic chant with a children’s play on words, and is intended to mimic the perceived rigidity of Latin.

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which Dreyer exploited as a visual effect. The haptic grey tone functioned as a reinforcement of the story of David Gray, who, in a kind of hypnotic dream, duplicates himself as one of the living dead and thus becomes capable of exorcising the vampire back down into the earth. The scene where Gray, in a seemingly lifeless state, is carried across the churchyard in a coffin with a window, in order for the film to show us the impossible – namely the perspective of the dead – comes close to tipping over into a demonstrative grotesque form but does not.66 Through the im‑ possible viewpoint and haptic picture quality, Dreyer manages to challenge thoughts within his viewers. Trier gives his TV ghost story a similar reflective undercur‑ rent through his »bleached« haptic image quality, which was established using transfers between various pixel formats.67 The 16mm film format (location shoot) and video format (studio shoot) is transferred first to videotape, lightening the workload of the many image layers necessitated by the creation of the ghosts. This is blown up to the final version, a 35mm film format, which is broadcast in an electronic TV format (cf. extra material on DVD, The Kingdom I). The video medium allows the creation of several layers in the image; likewise, its built‑in electronic »interference« is intentionally magnified. The result is the hap‑ tic effects that maintain the viewer’s attention on the screen’s modulated surface. The grainy veil functions like Dreyer’s gauze filter as a kind of abstraction membrane to the plane of events, underlining the Gothic ghost motif. Moreover, a predilection for the grainy white noise of TV screens, scanners and surveillance cameras is repeated in each episode. It is this electronic interfer‑ ence together with the use of hand‑held cameras and the forced ›jump‑cut‹ editing technique that opens the floodgates for the grotesque form’s more direct appeal to the audience. The misty 66 According to Roland Barthes, there is a question of whether Dreyer, in the aforementioned scene, crosses the boundary of representation, which follows the Renaissance perspective, the feudal absolute monarchy and the theatre’s viewpoint paradigm (Barthes [1973] 1977). In my article »Trompe‑l’æil og ån‑ delige automater« (Trompe l’œil and spiritual automatons) I use Hitchcock’s Psycho and Dreyer’s Vampyr respectively in order to clarify the difference between Lacan’s repesentational schemata, which relates to the baroque, and Deleuze’s foldings and multiplicities, in relation to contemporary art and film (Thomsen 2000a). 67 Cf. also Laura U. Marks, »Loving a Disappearing Image« in Touch (2002).

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and veiled images of diverse scans and X‑rays (of sound and brainwaves, fetuses, lungs, nocturnal ambulances, etc.), which make the TV screen’s white ›snow‹ active in the narrative, also contain the ›ghosts‹ that Trier, through detective patient Mrs Drusse, invites the audience to bury. The Gothic style’s dreamlike distance from the events, which dominates in Dreyer’s Vampyr, consequently loses ground quickly in The Kingdom I, and in The Kingdom II the grotesque figures‹ stylistic influence on the experience of the onlooker becomes decisive in the form of »the evil, green eye« and its characterisation of the screen, together with the toilet seat and its framing of the viewer position.68 The viewer is offered the role of the »the evil eye’s« victim or of the TV apparatus as such, which in a similar manner, with a double ironic twist, is pointed out as a culturally radical, feministic or psychoanalytic concept of the enemy.69 Alternatively, the viewer is degraded to an ab‑ ject (Kristeva [1980] 1982), sharing destiny with the floaters or sinkers that Swedish consultant Helmer (Ernst Hugo Järegård) flushes down the toilet. In this way Trier demonstratively brings the viewer into dialogue with the camera’s »doings«, and at the same time ironically addresses the diverse critical discourses on the camera from the 1980s. Trier demonstrates that the camera certainly can »look back« with a devastating gaze, so the viewer’s 68 The inspiration for the toilet seat could be Tómas Gislasson’s short documentary on the film crew’s living conditions in Poland during the filming of Europa (extra material with the Europa trilogy). 69 Cf. Jacques Lacan on the split between eye and gaze (Lacan [1973] 1977). This analysis inscribes, so to speak, everything visible in the pre‑structured field of desire, in that whatever is imagined but not (nec‑ essarily) seen becomes the object of desire’s ‘little a’. The point is, partly, that desire can never be satisfied, and partly that the gaze’s (French le regard) materialising is like the kiss of death. In this way they become momentary views of recognition which in both art and reality can reveal the gaze’s fatal affective power, leading to a kind of experience of »the Real« which lies outside of both the imaginary and the symbolic reg‑ ister. This analysis, together with Lacan’s analysis of the little child’s so‑called mirror stage, inspired Chris‑ tian Metz, in Le Signifiant Imaginaire: Psychanalyse et cinéma (Metz [1977] 1982), to make the film camera into the gaze’s imaginary sign, which releases the film viewer’s position. That the film camera constitutes a pre‑structured, voyeuristic and invisible (male) viewer position, intensifying sadistic lust and mastery in re‑ lation to the (female) object of visual desire, with a basis in Freud, is further analysed even earlier by Laura Mulvey in the article »Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema« (Mulvey [1975] 1989). These analyses often led to expectations of the camera gaze as a mastering instance, which film theory (especially the feminist approach) took up for the following decade. As many have pointed out, however, there was a marked re‑ sentment that the encounter with the gaze in Lacan can in fact bring about a traumatic encounter with the Real and not a mastery of the same. Furthermore, criticism of these film theories aimed at object ‘little a’ in relation to the subject is based on a constituting lack, pleasure within someone else’s field, which cannot be contained, and partly towards a voyeuristic (sadistic) aesthetic not unproblematically countered by the masochistic (see, among others, Studlar 1993, Thomsen 1997, Cowie 1997 and McGowan 2003).

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position with the fail‑safe off (in the narrative) is weakened; but when this is shown through a grotesque filter or peephole, it is precisely this stylistic innovation that allows for the camera’s gaze to become funny or ludicrous. Trier thus continues Dreyer’s aforementioned dismantling of the fail‑safe audience position in Vampyr. Dreyer reduces the viewer to an object (in the form of a corpse), effectively under‑ mining the classic voyeuristic, narrative craving. The challenge for Dreyer’s David Gray is to go beyond the limit of narrative representation and thus evade the vampire’s power, and this is done through a conspicuous splitting or doubling of the repre‑ sentation of his body through the film medium. In allowing the audience a view from an impossible viewer position, outside that which can be represented, so to speak, Dreyer creates a kind of nothingness figure (cf. Maurice Blanchot 1994) and consequently shows that film can transcend a classic model of representation. The film medium is discussed positively by Deleuze as a »spir‑ itual automaton«, in continuation of Spinoza who uses this term to describe the way in which we are affected. Deleuze’s use of the term also calls to mind Walter Benjamin’s description of the film medium’s potential. According to Benjamin, film in the 1930s (to a greater extent than art) was able to shock audiences out of their mental and psychological preparedness and stimulate thoughts within them: It is only when movement becomes automatic that the artistic essence of the image is realized: producing a shock to thought, communicating vibrations to the cortex, touching the nervous and cerebral system directly. Because the cinematographic image itself »makes« movement, because it makes what the other arts are restricted to demanding (or to saying), it brings together what is essential in the other arts; it inherits it, it is as it were the directions for use in the other arts; it converts into potential what was only possibility. Automatic movement gives rise to a spiritual automaton in us, which reacts in turn on movement. (Deleuze 1989, 156; author’s italics and quotation marks)

It is Dreyer’s ability to portray the spiritual automaton in the mummy‑like faces of his figures that fascinates Gilles Deleuze. He a tiger in the kingdom

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sees Dreyer as a director who realises Artaud’s failed ambitions with the film medium: »The spiritual automaton has become the Mummy, this dismantled, paralysed, petrified, frozen instance which testifies to ›the impossibility of thinking that is thought‹» (Deleuze 1989, 166). Thus when Deleuze fosters »the spiritual automaton« in Dreyer’s figures it is clear that by doing so he es‑ tablishes a distance from the recharging of hallucinations, dreams and suppressed passions in expressionism and surrealism, as well as Eisenstein’s montage technique, because they create unified interpretations and appeal to action. For Deleuze it is an impor‑ tant point that Dreyer (as well as Artaud) consciously undermines the representation, creating »a hole in appearances« (op. cit., 167) and thus enables us to grasp that we are not yet thinking: It might be said that Artaud turns round Eisenstein’s argument: if it is true that thought depends on a shock which gives birth to it (the nerve, the brain matter), it can only think one thing, the fact that we are not yet thinking, the powerlessness to think the whole and to think oneself, thought which is always fossilized, dislocated, collapsed. (Deleuze 1989, 167; author’s italics)

In extension of this one might note that Dreyer’s film appeals to thought but not to grotesque transformation. Trier’s revival of the ghost motif in Dreyer fills the spiritual automaton’s anaemic mummy existence with the electronic TV medium’s signaletic material, so to speak, and consequently grotesque laughter is generated. When the TV viewers relate themselves to the TV medium’s »coolness«, the »hot« message loses its power, and the camera gaze (i.e. the gaze: cf. the evil, green eye; Mulvey [1975] 1989) can be treated as abject (i.e. faeces framed by the TV screen as a toilet seat). Though the viewer perhaps senses the camera gaze’s »demonising« or is affected by the notion that every critical sense is »flushed« down the toilet, and that objects are constantly reduced to abject, he/she must give in to the laughter, because classic filmic conventions are exposed to various forms of deter‑ ritorialization in and with the TV medium. The laughter activates the »fossilized, dislocated and collapsed« (Deleuze 1989, ibid.) properties of thought as a surplus. 74

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While Dreyer’s artistic strategy in Vampyr is implemented in David Gray’s transformation via the corpse’s reification to the resurrected ghostly existence, which clarifies the voyeuristic fos‑ silisation in which the viewer is placed, with The Kingdom I and II it is the opposite that occurs. Here life is embodied as power, in that the interaction with the TV viewer first and foremost depicts the »body« of the signaletic material in continuous transforma‑ tion. Mikhail Bakhtin’s »grotesque body« incisively describes the polyvalent forces in The Kingdom II: The grotesque body, as we have often stressed, is a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed: it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body. Moreover, the body swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world (let us recall the grotesque image in the episode of Gargantua’s birth on the feast of the cattle‑slaughtering) […]. Eating, drinking, defecation and other elimination (sweating, blowing of the nose, sneezing), as well as copulation, pregnancy, dismemberment, swallowing up by another body – all these acts are performed on the confines of the body and the outer world, or on the confines of the old and new body. In all these events, the beginning and end of life are closely linked and interwoven. (Bakhtin 1984, 317)

Aside from Trier’s stylistically precise references to and framing of the viewer, it is also, as mentioned above, the diffuse utilisation of the electronic signal’s haptic aesthetic that forces the grotesque deterritorialization of the Gothic figures. The real-time effect of electronic signals - introduction to The Kingdom I

The hastily speeding, phantom ambulance is presented in the in‑ tro like a Gothic element: the reoccuring images are either kept in black/white positive or negative, and clearly mimic the often poor quality of the surveillance camera image and perfunctory capture of the motif. Along with the image style of Vampyr, they draw on familiar Gothic elements such as the uncanny technology‑ made‑independent, exemplarily depicted in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s a tiger in the kingdom

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Surveillance image with clear visual grid in the introduction to The Kingdom I.

Der Sandmann (1817).70 The particularly grotesque thing about the scanner and the surveillance camera technique, which Trier makes into a still more manifest aesthetic means through the two parts of the series, is that they transmit signals in »real time«.71 This is given special attention as early as the very first scene (just after the intro), which introduces the segment »Den Hvide Flok« (»the white flock«) – signifying doctors as well as ghosts.72 But the visual preference for the haptic could also be contained in this appellation, which constitutes the first close‑up in the first episode: a flock of shining white pixels in negative. Parts of a car roof, flashing alarms and screens can be seen in several settings, where the individual pixels overshadow the motif. It is impossible

70 Hoffmann allows artificial extension of the domain of vision in the form of glasses, binoculars and a telescope that intensify the delusion of the mind. Freud built his study »Das Unheimliche« (1919) on this Gothic novel without, however, these visual apparatuses playing any greater role in the analysis. 71 Cf. Thomsen 2007, 2011 and 2012a. 72 The expression naturally relates intertextually to Brorson’s psalm »Den store hvide flok vi se« (1765), where it refers to the resurrected souls in heaven (literally »The great white flock we see”).

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to determine precisely what one is seeing until the camera zooms out and it becomes clear that the motif is an ambulance stopping next to a pedestrian crossing, shown through the representation of a surveillance camera. The dozing night porter, Hansen (Otto Brandenburg), wakes up and notices the ambulance, and in The Kingdom he acts throughout as a »normal person«, with whom viewers can identify (in contrast to Dreyer’s David Gray). He is drawn towards the mystical, while attempting to retain his com‑ mon sense. At first Hansen slowly registers the ambulance on the screen, which he scrutinises before rubbing his eyes and leaving the duty room in order to check out the vehicle in reality. The transition from the black/white surveillance images to the sight of the actual black and red ambulance happens slowly, as the camera follows Hansen who, half asleep, moves guardedly through two sliding doors while his shadow (as if he were a char‑ acter from Vampyr) is cast into relief on the wall of the modern building. The sensor‑activated sliding doors demonstrates – as does the surveillance camera – the new technology interfaces, which do not require conscious activation by a person. Hansen experiences (with the viewer) that all the windows of the vehicle are opaque white, so it is impossible to look inside. The nocturnal phantom ambulance, whose signals eerily ac‑ tivate diverse call and surveillance apparatuses in the hospital, functions as an autonomous alien or remote‑controlled technol‑ ogy, existing in an intermediate field between unreal and real, but nevertheless functioning as a virtual force in the narrative.73 In The Kingdom II Trier’s phantom ambulance gains a grotesque dimension when the »ghost driver« phenomenon becomes the subject of a duty room wager on which of the volunteer drivers (all called Falcon) will survive the staged blindfold drive (in the opposite direction against the traffic on Lyngby motorway). The Gothic eeriness of the ambulance in The Kingdom I is made clear 73 Of other alien elements in film history that indicate a virtual layer in the film’s narrative exposition, one could name the well‑known scene where Dracula’s closed coach – as a negative image in fast motion – moves supernaturally through the landscape in F. W. Murnau’s expressionist film Nosferatu. Eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922). Victor Sjöström’s Körkarlen (The Phantom Carriage) from 1920 should also be mentioned here as the carriage, which collects the dead in order to carry them to hell, has different drivers, just like the phantom ambulance in The Kingdom I and II (thanks to C. Claire Thomson for this last refer‑ ence).

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by the fact that it is driving itself, reified and humanly incom‑ prehensible. Nevertheless, as with the unconscious in Freud, it controls the storyline. In the grotesque version of the ambulance in The Kingdom II the audience is invited inside, into the driver’s seat, as »ghost drivers«, but without the potential steering. The blind driving ends in actual bodily injury and death. The rela‑ tionship between finding oneself physically outside and inside the self‑driving »machine« makes a big difference in the degree of audience participation in the Gothic and grotesque narrative respectively. After the porter Hansen has identified the closed ambulance, he shouts to the senior resident Jørgen Krogshøj74 (Søren Pilmark) in the hallway »Hey! Has anyone come in from that ambulance?« Krogshøj answers: »I’ve no idea«, and the camera moves in an arc around the two, until the door can be seen again, while Hansen replies »It’s weird…look at it.« But apart from the automatic doors there is nothing to see – for Krogshøj, Hansen or the viewer. The ambulance is not there, and Krogshøj looks at Hansen in a puz‑ zled way, as the characteristic sound effect of the series is heard for the first time: a sequence played backwards, which ends abruptly. The artificially generated extradiegetic sound indicates through‑ out the series that we have just been witness to a »portal« between the spirit world and the living world. In continuation of Vampyr, one could say that the sound illustrates »a hole in appearances«. The sound creates a disturbing effect of Gothic eeriness whereby confidence in the visible representation is undermined. After this Hansen goes back to the duty room, and is kept company by a large dog eating out of a bowl, called Bongo. Bongo then jumps up and barks in a threatening manner at the monitor, which now shows only an empty pedestrian crossing. Hansen is happy with the dog’s spontaneity and the scene ends with him asking the dog: »Do you think it’s weird, too?« Bongo, whose teeth, tongue and whiskers are filmed in close‑ up, is presented as an integrated part of the clinical white hospital environment. Hansen’s confidence in the dog stands in contrast to the mistrust he has just exhibited towards the monitor and the 74

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In the English DVD version his name is translated as »Hook«.

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ambulance. This mistrust towards the monitor and its recording of matter and the faith towards the dog’s animalistic sense follows the prevalent view of technology and (pet) animals respectively. The grotesque touch, in the shape of the dog’s munching action and whiskers in close up, also follows here as an extension of the Gothic eeriness that was felt at the beginning of the episode. But the real‑time monitoring is depicted as especially unreliable, provoking a sense of uneasiness, and it is indicated that the ghosts are created from the haptic flock of electronic pixels. Bongo functions throughout the series as a kind of guard and tracker dog for the porters Hansen and Bulder (Jens Okking), when they are sent on increasingly grotesque tasks via the hos‑ pital’s basement passageways by the patient Mrs Sigrid Drusse, who apart from having an interest in the occult, is also Bulder’s mother. Bongo is revealed to be the dog belonging to the demon Aage Krüger (Udo Kier), and therefore it can move about as he does in both the actual and the virtual world. Bongo is in other words a demon, and can materialise in a present version or dis‑ appear into the past or future, just like Krüger. Bongo, Krüger and later Lillebror (Udo Kier) make up an antithesis to the ghosts and the real‑time electronic transmissions and scans, which are eternally caught in the present. Breaching – the conclusion of The Kingdom I

As shown previously, the Gothic layer of the ghost story is com‑ bined with the grotesque from the outset. The ghosts that populate first Drusse’s mind, and later most others, in The Kingdom I go through a veritable transformation towards the end of episode 4, »The living dead«,75 so the grotesquely monstrous is brought to life with a vengeance. This happens first and foremost with the attempt to terminate Judith’s (Birgitte Raaberg’s) pregnancy,76

75 From a literary point of view, the expression has been coined to represent both zombies and vam‑ pires, but here it is most likely demons. 76 Judith is a medical student and is an object for many kinds of transformation. She is Krogshøj’s girl‑ friend and becomes pregnant but the child, Lillebror, reveals itself as the result of her previous relationship with the demon Aage Krüger. Judith’s love for Lillebror makes it possible for »good« to take over in the hospital.

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resulting in the birth of Lillebror (Udo Kier). As a filmic repre‑ sentation of Rabelais’ figure Gargantua, Lillebror makes space for both »good« spirits as well as »evil« demons. The image of Lillebror’s grotesque man’s head, far from inno‑ cent‑looking and smeared in blood, appears between Judith’s legs where one expects the head of a newborn. The scene sets an effec‑ tive full stop on a number of other scenes where various mediating »operations« between otherwise absolute conditions make it pos‑ sible to imagine a blending of genres between the Gothic and the grotesque. The countdown to this long conclusion begins with the two dishwashers with Down’s syndrome (Vita Jensen and Morten Rotne Leffers), who function like the chorus in ancient Greek thea‑ tre and foresee the course of events. According to them, this will be »a spooky evening«, where »the wicked will laugh, the good will cry«, but where it is added coyly »or so they say«, indicating an ironic, citable twist in meaning and in the way the uneasiness is presented. Next we follow six episodes in six rooms in the hospital, which are cross‑cut with an ongoing story about a so‑called »unannounced« visit to the labyrinthine basement passageways and the neurosur‑ gical department by the Health Minister (Lars Lunøe). The visit causes the white coats to be contaminated to an increasing degree with mucus, blood, amniotic fluid, semen and other of the body’s grotesquely depicted deposits. The story ends with the minister finding a head sawed off from its body (cf. below), prompting him to expel a scream of terror, which in the final seconds of The Kingdom I sparks a fearful reaction in all of the hospital’s residents. For the sake of clarity I will refer to the following six episodes separately, as if each sequence were rounded off. 1. First the medical student Mogge (Peter Mygind) is shown at‑ tempting to get rid of the head, which to add to the confusion resembles himself, and which he has earlier sawed off a dead body. He originally carried out this practical joke merely to get the attention of the sombre pathology consultant Bondo (Baard Owe). On numerous occasions throughout The Kingdom I the severed head pops up like a prop in a number of macabre and funny scenes, but Mogge has himself been followed by misfortune. In one scene Mogge (again) steals the head from 80

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Krogshøj’s refrigerator, because he wants to get it out of the way once and for all. Hidden in a rubbish bin, Mogge flings the head through the selfsame hole that Bulder has just made in the Kingdom’s basement wall. It returns, however, like re‑ pression in Freud, when a party of laughing spirits wearing carnival costumes and riding in a ghost carriage, having ob‑ viously slipped into the hospital through the same hole, pass right through the body of the Health Minister and toss away the head as rubbish. It is the relationship between ghost and copy or between the ghost’s reappearance and the machine’s repetition that is blended here. From being part of the whole‑ ness of the body, the severed head becomes an independent grotesque form, a metaphor for the becoming‑independence of fear (or the unconscious) which the Gothic story feeds off. In the final scene, however, it is reduced to tangible rubbish and when the Health Minister identifies his own facial traits in the dead facial features it becomes a concrete image of reality – death – which is not something one can dispose of. Neverthe‑ less, the image of the Health Minister staring at his apparition becomes ludicrous, because the viewer is privy to the whole previous history and must surrender to the kind of liberating insight that we all, as craniums, carry the same features. 2. While the Health Minister, the hospital’s Chief Executive Manager (Henning Jensen) and Moesgaard make their way through the passageways, the lights go out. Moesgaard ex‑ plains calmly that the emergency power is being tested. When the lights come on again they are – like Drusse and Bulder – witness to how the (senior) resident Krogshøj bricks up the hole in the wall, from which the ghost of Mary has been »ex‑ orcised« and into which the dog Bongo has also disappeared together with Mogge’s head. This sight is explained away with a formulation on »undermining professional boundaries« from Moesgaard’s pamphlet »Operation Morgenluft«.77 However, the sight of the patient, Sigrid Drusse, who has ectoplasm

77 As mentioned previously, the name refers to the German occupying power’s »Operation We‑ serübung«, which was the German forces‹name for the occupation of Denmark during the Second World War.

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in her hair as a result of the ghost’s expulsion,78 invokes the interrogative interest of the hospital’s Chief Executive Man‑ ager. When Drusse’s tight grip on her »exorcism stick« – in the form of a croquet mallet – stands in direct contrast to the nurse’s diagnostic explanation of »paralysis in the right arm«, the hospital Chief Executive Manager does not hesitate to demand that she be discharged the following morning. In Drusse’s later recollection of the sequence of events in the spiritual seance, she hears the minister’s scream of terror (on seeing Mogge’s decapitated head), to which she exclaims: »Oh, no! Maybe the gateway was open too long, after all«. The story of Mary’s »exorcism« from the hospital, so she can, accord‑ ing to Drusse, be reunited with her mother in Heaven, offers several transformations from spiritual to physical existence. Significantly, it is through Mary’s doll that Drusse finds the place where she died in 1919. The doll, with the inscription »Mary«, was left to Drusse by a deceased woman, Ellen Krüger (Solveig Sundborg), who was the legitimate daughter of Aage Krüger. Mary was murdered with chlorine gas by her biologi‑ cal father, Aage Krüger, who intentionally experimented on her, though she was perfectly healthy. Mary’s ghostly hands rip the doll out of the hands of Drusse through a grate in the floor. As a result, Drusse is told the entire story by Mary’s mother, who appears in spiritual form. Mary gets the doll, while Drusse »sees« Mary die in a vision.79 The blood, which streams from the nose of the ghost, manifests itself physically and becomes a dried mark on the basement floor, even after Drusse’s spiritual vision has disappeared. This »trace« of the crime is found in elevator hall 5, which was a part of the old hospital that Mary died in, and in this way it »documents« the true content behind the ghost story. Bulder helps his mother 78 Ectoplasm or teleplasm is, according to Encyclopædia Britannica, a term in occultism for »a myste‑ rious, usually light‑coloured, viscous substance that is said to exude from the body of a spiritualist medium in trance and may then take the shape of a face, a hand, or a complete body« (www.britannica.com; last viewed 22 November 2018). It is interesting in this context that the Nobel Prize winner J. J. Thomson, who discovered and identified electrons, making possible the development of radio tubes, transistors and picture tubes for TV, was himself interested in the occult (cf. the series Menneskets historie, 2012, USA; broadcast on Danish TV in spring 2015). 79 The image of the dying Mary resembles Edvard Munch’s The Sick Child (1886).

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in the expulsion scene primarily in order to bring an end to her spiritual stories, which he does not have much faith in. Krogshøj helps, on the other hand, because he recognises his girlfriend Judith’s former lover (and father to her unborn child) as being identical with the same Aage Krüger that is shown in a newspaper photograph from the 1910s with Mary and Bongo at his side. For this reason, Krogshøj has talked Judith into having an abortion, as there is a likelihood that the fetus is a »spirit which allows itself to be born«, as Drusse explains. Consequently, Krogshøj participates in two »occult« opera‑ tions this evening: the Gothic expulsion of Mary’s ghost from the hospital, in which Krüger’s crime is witnessed, and the grotesque expulsion of Mary’s biological half‑brother from Judith’s womb. The doll – which incidentally is an icon for the Gothic doppelgänger in both the Romantic and surrealist movements – takes Mary along to the portal. Bongo the dog, which as mentioned belongs to Krüger, disappears voluntarily through the hole.80 Mary’s doll, »Mary«, functions as a token of spiritual resurrection, while the dog demonstrates life as a cycle in contact with the dead. The doll’s general human like‑ ness can instil both desire and angst, while the dog’s senses and instincts can be partly controlled by humans. If the sounds and smells are strong enough, the dog does not obey human norms and limits for alive and dead, accessible and offensive. As with life itself, Bongo has the ability to resurrect, and in The Kingdom I and II, it functions as a figure traversing both a Gothic ghost world and a grotesque, vigorous world.81 3. After the »exorcism scene« in the basement, emphasis is si‑ multaneously put on what happens to Helmer, who has flown to Haiti along with a Haitian native in order to learn voodoo. While Helmer attempts to persuade his companion to bribe the locals, the Haitians are depicted in an ecstatic dance with

80 The dog has apparently been brought to life again after porter Hansen – in episode 2 – found it with a large laceration in its belly. As early as this second episode, Bongo is depicted with red, glowing eyes, indicating demonic possession. It also becomes clear that Krüger killed the dog in order to impede Drusse’s attempt to solve Mary’s murder. 81 Arthur Conan Doyle’s third novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1903), portrays a similarly super‑ natural dog, which perhaps could be a source for the Bongo figure (thanks to C. Claire Thomsen).

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painted faces, carrying animals bound together grotesquely. Helmer succeeds in getting his companion to wrest some poison from a witch doctor: a poison that according to his rejected medical colleague (Ghita Nørby) transforms humans into zombies, the so‑called »living dead«. Helmer has at the same time hired a local Haitian to perform voodoo on a fabric doll, representing Moesgaard, and Helmer cheerfully inter‑ rupts: »Come on then, you Danish bastard!« Here the purpose of the doll is to represent the living Moesgaard, who will feel pain telepathically where the needles pierce the body of the doll. The doll replaces a living person, so to speak, and is in this sense also the »living dead«, an expression for the belief in telepathic connections, which today are realised in the form of real‑time interfaces between two parties. 4. The inspection group in the hospital, led by Moesgaard, has reached the highly irregular operation of Bondo, who is regis‑ tered as Bayer in the neurosurgical operations department. The ongoing »fusion« of Gothic and grotesque here deals with the relation between heart and brain, and is demonstrated during the liver transplant that may save Bondo’s life, but which he himself impedes in order to secure his reputation as a man of science. The scene portrays modern medical science as gro‑ tesque cannibalism, when the diseased so‑called »hepatosar‑ coma«, which has grown to a large size in Bondo’s insides, is wrongfully implanted without consent from his family. This is a barely‑hidden critique of the doctors’ positive attitude towards the brain death criterion (introduced in Denmark in 1990), in that the idea of renown and collegial recognition turns life and the curing of disease into a secondary consideration. He would rather dream of »standing ovations« from his colleagues than survive. Therefore, he asks the same doctors to call off the operation that will free him from the diseased sarcoma and sub‑ sequently makes them oppose their own judgement and their Hippocratic Oaths. In this way Bondo incarnates the opposite of the dog Bongo, which follows its instincts. Bondo rejects life in order to attain the absolute in death: fame. As a pathologist he identifies with the corpse in a different way, which invokes the worship of the Gothic; but in his striving for the pure, blood‑ 84

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less Gothic form, Bondo becomes thoroughly infested by the grotesque – becoming a grotesque figure himself. 5. In the next operating theatre, the hospital’s Chief Executive Manager and the minister witness the preparations for Judith’s induced abortion, which culminates in the birth of Lillebror. This scene is shown as a grotesque condition of how, in the 1990s, it was possible to save a fetus down to approximately 1200 grams if it was born prematurely. Previously these fetuses would have featured in the statistics as spontaneous abortions. Judith’s 12‑week‑old fetus is born in this way despite the fact that it has been given 3 lethal injections. While Judith is in la‑ bour, Krogshøj strongly urges the gynaecologist to give her yet another injection, but it fails because the baby’s head breaches. At the same moment the nurse interrupts: »In the womb it was an abortion, outside it is murder!« The relationship between inner and outer in this scenario is therefore absolute, and an unfinished fetus, which cannot breathe of its own accord, is kept alive artificially because of this. 6. Finally the relationship between sexual daydream and real nocturnal sexuality is shown to the uninitiated and awestruck inspection group in the sleep laboratory. Mogge, who has been voluntarily subjected to medical experiments in his sleeping state in order to be close to the sexually attractive Camilla (Solbjørg Højfeldt), has finally succeeded with his enterprise. He has driven away his recurring nightmare (of old men who eat his flesh raw) by envisaging sexual scenes with Camilla. Camilla, who is supervising his brain activity on a monitor in real time, sees his arousal and is »turned on« by his lust in this scanner‑transmitted state. In The Kingdom II she shows herself to be a tool of the Devil, making Mogge’s half‑sleeping, half‑medicated body into her sexual instru‑ ment – naturally to the great surprise and consternation of the inspection group. In these six episodes Gothic gestalts transform themselves into grotesque bodies; spiritual existences become tangible or animal‑ istic; inner organs are shown on the outside; and daydreams are realised at night. All the episodes are finally collated in the gro‑ a tiger in the kingdom

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tesque image of Lillebror’s head between Judith’s legs. On a nar‑ rative level one can say that Drusse’s attempt to exorcise Mary’s spiritual, ghostly existence from the hospital, through bearing witness to Aage Krüger’s crime, opens a portal to what was in‑ troduced by Mrs. Drusse earlier as »the Swedenborg room«,82 a kind of waiting room for death, where the dying are met by both good and evil spirits. The perforation from upper to underside in the narrative’s Möbius strip

Though Mary actually escapes her Gothic ghostly existence in this world, the hole in the basement wall simultaneously opens up for Mary’s half‑brother, Lillebror, to »slip through« and be born as a grotesque monster in the selfsame world. This, though he (as a 12‑week‑old fetus, according to normal calculations) has just been given a lethal injection, only to then be ›born‹ as an abortion. This violent finale to The Kingdom I thus creates an inversion between Gothic and grotesque that up until then has dominated each side of the narrative Möbius strip, and separated the living and the dead.83 The grotesque style takes over in The Kingdom II where an active interface to the viewer is also created through the screen’s green, staring eye. In The Kingdom II the inner becomes the outer, by which the ghosts are driven out of the narrative of grotesque, monstrous existences.

82 Trier and Vørsel have named the room after Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688‑1772), a Swedish scien‑ tist and mystic. 83 A Möbius strip, which has only one surface, can be made with a long, thin rectangular strip of paper that is twisted through 180 degrees, after which its ends are stuck together. If one draws a line starting at a point on the Möbius strip’s upper side, the line will meet this point again after having reached the point that would normally make up the underside of the strip. The two points can meet, without crossing a bor‑ der or lifting one’s pen. This folding, which creates the mathematical sign for infinity, denotes the lack of a border between upper and underside, inner and outer. If one pricks a hole through a Möbius strip the dif‑ ference between the strip’s upper and underside disappears totally; they can meld together or switch places, as David Lynch demonstrated so precisely in the narrative structure in Lost Highway (1997). Here in the prison scene the initial Gothic noir atmosphere (Fred’s universe) is transformed to a coloured 50s‑inspired setting (Pete’s universe). Whereas Fred’s way of seeing the world leads to him murdering out of jealousy, in Pete’s case it leads to the proliferation and doubling of the world. Both parts are registered by the digital brain and the impersonal narrator, The Mystery Man, who functions like software in a computer – a kind of reflective interface that recreates the world in its own image. David Lynch himself mentions the Möbius strip as inspiration for the film (cf. Positif 431, Janvier 1997; thanks to Anne Jerslev, who has written on the film in Kritik, vol. 152, 2001).

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It is the grotesque image of Judith giving birth to a child with a grown man’s face that, through an intertextual reference, antici‑ pates both the dominance of the grotesque and the series‹ direct involvement of the viewer. The blood‑smeared man’s head, which appears between Judith’s legs and screams, is clearly a pastiche of the renowned painting Judith Slaying Holofernes (c. 1612), by the Italian baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi (see following page). In Gentileschi’s representation, the realistic depiction of the strenuous act of carrying out a decapitation comes closer to slaughter than to a mythological scene of heroism. An act such as this demands strength, demonstrated especially in the exposed arms of the women with their sleeves rolled‑up, together with the concentration in their facial expressions. But by centring Holofernes‹ head together with his muscular left shoulder and upper arm, which is highly reminiscent of a thigh as seen from the seated underside, it also gives the painting associations to an‑ other well‑known situation where a woman’s physical strength is required: when giving birth or assisting in a birth. In this way real‑ ism is given a grotesque turn, as was surely the intention, in that the composition is greatly influenced by known grotesque forms from the Renaissance, where the connection between life and death is portrayed as a body giving birth, which literally speaking has a head at both ends. Mikhail Bakhtin has given an extremely incisive description of this figure: The last thing one can say of the real grotesque is that it is static; on the contrary it seeks to grasp in its imagery the very act of becoming and growth, the eternal incomplete unfinished nature of being. Its images present simultaneously the two poles of becoming: that which is receding and dying, and that which is being born; they show two bodies in one, the budding and the division of the living cell. At the summit of grotesque and folklore realism, as in the death of one‑cell organisms, no dead body remains. (That is, when the single cell divides into two other organisms, it dies in a sense but also reproduces; there is no departure from life into death.) (Bakhtin 1984, 52)

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The image represents the decapitation of Holofernes from the Old Testament story of Judith, who together with her maid liberated her town, Bethulia, from the despotic Assyrian general. She is often described as a female freedom fighter who cunningly (using beauty, food and wine) pacified her opponent in order for him to be overpowered. But Gentileschi, who painted the picture after she herself had suffered both physical as well as psychological harm in a rape case, chose, through realistic means, to emphasise the physical power and skill Judith must have possessed in order to be able to carry out this decapitation at all.

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Judith giving birth to Lillebror in the closing scenes of The Kingdom I foreshad‑ ows the grotesque which unfolds in The Kingdom II.

It is hardly coincidental when Trier’s Judith, in labour, is pre‑ sented lying in a position resembling the one indicated by Gen‑ tileschi in the depiction of Judith’s decapitation of Holofernes. The realistic grotesque form in the painting is transformed in a particularly intelligent way by Trier, where Holofernes (or Aage Krüger) is reborn in the monstrous form of Lillebror. This ›breaching‹ of the Möbius strip indicates both a motivic as well as a stylistic liberating rebirth of the grotesque form at the end of the first phase of postmodernism,84 where the joining of fetus and geriatric, inner and outer condition, good and evil existence, human beings and animals, creates laughter and celebration. In The Kingdom II we are subsequently presented with a wealth of inversions, where human‑becoming‑animal, adult‑becoming‑ 84 Here I keep to Hal Foster’s outline of two phases in postmodernism, which are described in The Return of the Real (1996), where the insistence of 90s art on material, social and political elements marks itself as different from the sign’s implosion in the 1980s. Foster related this to the historical European avant‑gar‑ de, but one might have more luck relating it to 90s art or to the new interface in digital media.

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child, dead‑becoming‑living, good‑becoming‑evil are illustrated by carnivalism’s mantra of rebirth versus the chronological side of progress. But first of all it leaves the viewer in no doubt that this rebirth is a creative tribute to the material‑corporeal, as Bakhtin points out. Trier follows the comical degradation of the bodily nether regions with reference to the motif of rebirth, with which carnivalism’s classic grotesque forms are replete. In this way The Kingdom I and II are essentially different from David Lynch’s TV series Twin Peaks, which clearly cultivated the Gothic hor‑ ror but not the grotesque laughter. The metamorphoses in The Kingdom II seem liberating, as the idea of the Gothic‑sublime is transformed into a grotesque encounter with the material. This material level is reached in particular by using extreme haptic close‑ups, which are found close to the level of sensations.85 Grotesque real-time interfaces: surveillance, scans and X-ray

In discussions on The Kingdom I and II the majority of reviewers and critics have noted the extensive use of hand‑held cameras. This technique historically relates to the application of the video camera, which was introduced by Jean‑Luc Godard and Harun Farocki among others from 1968 and onwards. At that time the hand‑held principle of the video medium was closely connected with the possibility of creating direct interfaces between shoot‑ ing and screening, so the artist could interact with his or her surroundings. In 1974, Paul Ryan (inspired by McLuhan) wrote on the relation of videotape to the reel of film and the cybernetic feedback operation respectively: Film edits the experience of others for you. With videotape, on the other hand, you can pre‑edit your own experience simply by setting down your script on audiotape and following it in front of a camera.

85 As a side note, the transition from the Gothic‑expressionistic style in the Kingdom I to the grotesque transformative style in The Kingdom II is equal to a similar historical‑theoretical development of the term ›the haptic‹ from Riegl through Worringer to Deleuze and Guattari. The diagrammatical pulsating which ›calls for‹ the virtual and the event, makes up the most important difference between the term’s function in Riegl and Deleuze. This also applies to the difference between a Gothic haptic style in the Kingdom I and II.

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Film is the packaging of information in cans. Videotape is involved in the feeding back of process. Film rips information away from a situa‑ tion for use elsewhere. Videotape can feed back into a given situation and enrich experience. Film extends man as a spectator. Videotape extends man as a cybernator. Film imports information. Videotape implodes indigenous data. […] Portable videotape works with the raw, the uncooked data, the static of the surround. In the cauldron of a cabled culture, this kind of data could be more exciting than moon rocks. […] We do not yet understand the information contours of cul‑ ture well enough to cybernate smoothly. In this condition, raw data is Dada. (Ryan 1974, 21)

The real‑time interface of digital media in our time can actually be found anticipated in this text, where the feedback function of the video medium was new and employed as a kind of interface that could undermine the difference between an inner and outer side, just like a Möbius strip: »It offers us one continuous (sur) face with nothing to hide« (Ryan, 30). Both the technical and the aesthetic sides of video and TV media are relevant for any analysis of The Kingdom I and II. The video camera’s feedback possibility is exploited, in diverse forms of surveillance, but an interest in the haptic surface of the image, the ›white noise‹ of electronic signals, is also demonstrated to a high degree. This also applies to the hand‑held sequences – for example, the first morning conference in The Kingdom I, episode 1: »The white flock«, in which the surface becomes the foreground. Here the cameras follow the verbal duel as if they were tracking shots of real bodily movements. This is intensified by the fact that the image is out of focus in those seconds where movement occurs from side to side and around the table. The ›white noise‹ and its unfocused fields dominate the depiction of the morning conference and add greatly to the aggressive tone in the verbal duels. The amount of white – coats, coffee cups, curtains and light streaming through the slats in the venetian blinds – naturally also contributes to the scene’s emphasis on the surface of the image. Trier exploits the same advantage that directors and artists have valued highly since the 1960s: the relative ease of 16mm cameras and video technology in making filming possible in very small a tiger in the kingdom

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spaces. But the effect when the unfocused white noise becomes the most visible part of the image is particularly accentuated by Trier. During the course of The Kingdom I this opaque form of white noise is re‑established in the form of diverse screens, monitors and sound reproduction devices. For example, after the morning conference Helmer forces Krogshøj to participate in the X‑ray conference, so he can confront his lower‑ranked colleague once again with the cost of a CT scan. Scans of diverse »sections« of the brain are here hung up vertically on a light box to give the doctors an overview. The doctors‹ rationalistic universe is depicted in this way with the help of white on white. In episode 2, »Alliance Calling«,86 Mary appears as a white ghost to a patient who is being operated on under hypnosis. Helmer compares hypnotism – a running theme for Trier in the Europa trilogy – to circus magic and occultism, which he himself (along with the majority of doctors) performs secretively in The Kingdom II. Drusse, on the other hand, mixes light and dark. She communicates with a dying friend, who is supposed to make contact with Mary in the Swedenborg room, and here it is a white, luminous surface in the form of neon lighting in the ceiling that communicates the spectre’s messages to Drusse. Subsequently, while in a swimming pool, she is told the story of Mary by the senile Ellen Krüger. The white reflections in the water again cre‑ ate a blurring of the image foreground. The following attempt in the control room to record the radio calls made by the phantom ambulance, with the help of a reel‑to‑reel tape recorder, moves the focus of the camera to the tele‑radio transmitter. The camera zooms in on the radio speaker phone, and simultaneously the volume level increases, so the machine noise in the reproduced version becomes the most important part of the scene. Trier thus ensures that the media interfaces and their mutual effect on one another and on the surroundings is made into something which can be sensed in a haptic manner, where the sound and image sur‑ face or foreground is accentuated. In this way the viewer becomes accustomed to seeking motifs and explanations in the screen’s purposely indistinct foreground, where the ghosts reside, rather 86

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In the English DVD version this episode title is translated as »Thy Kingdom Come«.

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than in the narrative’s depth or substance, which in The Kingdom II becomes completely labyrinthine. Slowly but surely in these first two episodes of The Kingdom I a special attention is built up towards diverse objects in the hospital environment. A surveillance camera, a dictaphone, a scanner, a light box, a mirror, a neon light, a tape recorder, a radio answer phone and even a thermometer are described in a particular way, so their habitual meaning is given an extra dimension. These objects are made »estranged«, not merely in the Freudian psy‑ choanalytic meaning of ›uncanny‹ in Das Unheimliche (Freud 1919), but rather in the sense of ostranenie, which for the Russian formalist and realist Viktor Shklovsky (Shklovsky 1917) produces a creative disturbance of the accustomed content of meaning. With the help of zoom, panning, jump cuts and editing overlaps, Trier (following Walter Benjamin [1936] 2005) creates a distinct »opti‑ cal unconscious« perception of the object, which adds something to a conventional recognition. The making‑in‑dependent of these things induces a somewhat sinister atmosphere, but it is especially the aesthetic disconnected style in The Kingdom I that gives oc‑ casion to laughter. As shown, this strategy of alienation does not relate to a realism à la Brecht’s Verfremdung, as Trier allows the ghost story to be played out with the surface of the TV screen as a partner. The muddy pixels and the scratchy sound recording establishes a consistently more manifest attention on the medium, whose electronic signals, however, become embedded positively in the plot rather than being shown critically‑analytically. Trier is clearly on the way to developing the particular form of Dogme aesthetic with its affective involvement, which makes the TV me‑ dium’s »signaletic material« into a force (see the chapter on The Idiots). In episode 3, »A foreign body«, Drusse finds (during a hear‑ ing test) a very significant alien element by amplifying the record‑ ing of the sound in a soundproof room at the hospital. The scene where the technician amplifies and filters the quiet signal until the computer has isolated the sound is dominated by a long series of increasingly magnified haptic images in the form of electronic signals on a screen – alongside the ever stronger identification of Mary’s cry: »Why must I be killed?« As with the coincidental a tiger in the kingdom

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circumstances in the filtering of the stillness in the soundproofed room, the fetal scan of Judith’s child in the same episode also af‑ fords access to a space that is in principle inaccessible. The close‑ up of the scan is blown up so much that – as in the filtered zoom of the sound recording – one only sees the image’s white flicker‑ ing noise. In the sleep laboratory the electrical activity in Mogge’s brain is measured with the help of a corticographic apparatus and a brain scanner, which registers oscillations while Mogge has night‑ mares. Finally, in the last scene, the viewer is presented with the preserved body of the little girl, Mary, in a large glass cylinder; the medical scientists of the time having reserved it for research‑ related »internal use«. The open mouth on Mrs Drusse’s terror‑ stricken face emulates the open mouth on the preserved girl’s face, which is shown in ultra‑close‑up, before the camera zooms out in a staccato motion with a sound component which mimics the screeching violins in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). Mary’s body has become alien or estranged (ostranenie), isolated from its spirit or soul, hunting diverse measuring instruments, and it becomes Mrs Drusse’s task to reunite body and spirit. Elsewhere another foreign body is transplanted – a diseased hepatosarcoma – into Bondo’s body, and just like the nightmare in Mogge’s brain it is inserted as a foreign entity without a thought for the psychological, moral or ethical consequences. As mentioned, the series‹ »foreign body« can also be found, from this episode and onwards, however, in Trier’s utilisation of the video medium’s qualities, in that the viewer’s gaze is held on the screen’s grainy and often opaque surface. The technological and mythological credo of the video medium

Lars von Trier, cameraman Eric Kress, editors Jacob Thuesen, Tómas Gislason and Molly Stensgård, not least together with the actors, all experienced great improvisatory freedom during the production of The Kingdom I and II. The limited TV budget made it necessary to limit the artificial lighting. On the other hand the small 16mm film and video cameras made it possible to film in tight spaces on location. With The Kingdom I and II Trier brings the video artist’s interpretation of the medium into a successful appli‑ 94

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cation within the TV medium. As he allows the video transfer to be a common medium for film and video recordings, Trier gives the electronic videotape a central role as the »foreign body« created by white noise, which creates interfaces between ghosts and people, as well as the series‹ Gothic and grotesque sections. Nowadays it is only a few who remember the initial attraction of the video me‑ dium. It is described poetically in a passage from Bill Viola’s »The Sound of One Line Scanning«, first published in 1986:87 The video image is a standing wave pattern of electrical energy, a vibrat‑ ing system composed of specific frequencies, as one would expect to find in any resonating object. As has been described many times before, the image we see on the surface of the cathode ray tube is the trace of a single moving focused point of light from a stream of electrons hitting the screen from behind, causing its phosphor‑coated surface to glow. In video, a still image does not exist. The fabric of all video images, moving or still, is the activated, constantly sweeping electron beam – the steady stream of electrical impulses coming from the camera or video recorder. The divisions into lines or frames are solely divisions in time, the opening and closing of temporal windows that demarcate periods of activity within the flowing stream of electrons. Thus, the video image is a living dynamic energy field, a vibration appearing solid only because it exceeds our ability to discern such fine slices of time. (Viola 1998, 158)

Barbara Buckner compares this technological process with the recording, developing and viewing of film, which gains the char‑ acter of an eternal, immutable product. Buckner notes that the video medium is continuously »re‑lived« in that the encoded magnetism is translated to the monitor. She therefore believes, along with other artists of the time, that the medium possesses an »immediacy«, which has since, to a large extent, become the attribute of digital media. With his haptic close‑ups (of surveil‑ lance video, filtering and amplification of sound and images of scans), Trier emphasises the pulsing and living materiality of the 87 Barbara Buckner’s extremely detailed article from 1978, »Light and Darkness in the Electronic Landscape: Some Aspects of the Video Image«, describes the same in a more technical manner.

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electronic TV medium. Its inbuilt »resuscitation« amplifies – by use of media, so to speak – the stylistic transformation from the Gothic‑expressionist (filmic) form to the celebration of the ma‑ terial‑corporeal grotesque (electronic) form. Trier, to an even greater extent than Lynch in Twin Peaks, utilises the medium’s own material processes;88 as the TV screen’s own performative ›resuscitation‹ is exploited, the transformation from Gothic to grotesque is made noticeable, and at the same time a form of re‑ flection on the medium is generated made accessible to the viewer. Buckner also describes which image forms are especially suit‑ able for the video format in light of its technological basis. Video is not the medium of detail but rather the medium of modulation and insertion, as »up to eight or sixteen images« can be mixed and parts of an image can be inserted in another image to create an »image composite« of many image layers, where »the inside of one image may become the outside of the other image, the boundary of one appears as the inner body of the other. The contour or boundary of an object is conjoined electronically with another« (Buckner 1978). It is evident that the spectral entities in The Kingdom I and II owe their credibility largely to this edit‑ ing process, in that the ghost’s luminous existence functions as a remnant material that seems to be created and transmuted in the present time of the viewer – of the now. Outlines are created and disappear, just like the effects of light and shadow from the various layers of blended images. Furthermore Trier uses parts of the raw blank tape to create effects of chaos, and of eeriness. This also corresponds to Buckner’s observation of videotape: »In its unrecorded or raw state, the videotape is in a state of complete chaos. This is what we see as noise or ›snow‹ or ›salt and pepper‹ patterns on the screen when no signal or intelligence is being transmitted« (Buckner 1978). All of this taken into account, it is natural to see The Kingdom I and II as a suggestion for a TV series aesthetic, which takes a stand against what Paul Ryan calls the static »information layering« of film (Ryan 21). Here it is made clear (as also in the diverse experiments with the video medium from 1968 and onwards) that electronic media breaks radically 88

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In Inland Empire (2006) David Lynch experimented with the video format in a similar way.

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with the chronotope examples we know from novels and film respectively.89 In Bakhtin’s ›chronotope‹ term we understand the notion of immanence and the meaning of the transformative foldings in the still new appearances of immanence, which Deleuze develops philosophically. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari relate it explicitly to the novel’s experiments with and to the dif‑ ficulty of being able to »break through the wall of the signifier« (Deleuze and Guattari 2013, 219). Without naming the chrono‑ tope it is also here an assumption that one goes from a creation of meaning where the face’s European, organised, subjectified trait can be deterritorialised in a rhizomatic structure, which forms »a living block, a connecting of stems by which the traits of a face enter a real multiplicity« and »are no longer merely something reminiscent of something else« (op. cit., 222). In his left‑hand play with the video medium, Trier creates a grotesque turning‑inside‑out of the filmic aesthetic. The granu‑ lated, blown‑up and disturbed video image deterritorialises the filmic chronotope type, in which a body or a face moves or re‑ lates itself to a landscape. In The Kingdom the relation of time to space is amputated through the haptic video images and diverse real‑time interfaces. The present space and its people combine with past and future spaces and times, where inhuman or ani‑ malistic traits are made clear. Trier shows the way towards a new aesthetic, which transcends the aesthetic of film and novel, where the »prefacial inhumanity« (op. cit., 223) comes into being, at first like a head (Udo Kier as the demon Aage Krüger) that belongs to a body »that is already deterritorialized relatively and plugged into 89 The term ›chronotope‹ (time‑space), developed by Mikhail Bakhtin, signifies that the relationship between time and space gestalts differently in each individual work of art, which in this way inevitably in‑ terprets the work’s historical origin. There are four types of chronotope found in any text: the writer’s, the text’s, the reader’s and the reading’s chronotope. These are different but also blend in a discontinued and heterogenous manner, in that each reading, as is known, is an aesthetic recreation of the text and of the text’s chronotope as well as of the reader’s chronotope. When we make a distinction between various genres and discourses it is also, according to Bakhtin, an expression for registering various ways of organising chronotopes aesthetically. The classic epos is, for example, an expression of a culture of unity that is mono‑ logical in its legitimation of power. The incidents that the people in an epic are exposed to change neither their character properties nor the space they inhabit. The modern novel, which emerged as a continuation of the Renaissance, parodies and blends well‑known genres and creates dialogue. In the novel one can speak of matter and consciousness forming new sign formations, new meanings or non‑meaning in indi‑ vidual chronotopes.

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becomings‑spiritual/animal« (op. cit.) (Udo Kier as Aage Krüger’s positive incarnation Lillebror). The path to this point crosses Dreyer’s specific filmic style and in the reinterpretation of the haptic surface image, which is so exemplarily demonstrated in the conclusion of Vampyr, where granules of flour take over the screen (cf. Deleuze 1989, 170). One could also mention The Passion of Joan of Arc, where Joan’s facial characteristics become layered by the filter of the smoke, in order finally to become identical with the haptic surface of the screen. This is similar to Deleuze and Guattari’s description of the face as »a lunar landscape, with its pores, planes, matts, bright colors, whiteness, and holes: there is no need for a close‑up to make it inhuman; it is naturally a close‑ up, and naturally inhuman, a monstrous hood« (Deleuze and Guattari 2013, 222). In The Kingdom I and II this haptic level, in and with the remediation of the video medium’s electronic pulse, opens for the Dogme 95 experiment. The signal noise spreads just like the hypnosis in the Europa trilogy out over the descriptive level and assumes a diagrammatic function in which the border between the TV screen’s signaletic material and the TV viewer’s decoding of meaning is eroded.90 The haptic level in The Kingdom I and II

I employ the term ›haptic‹ as a continuation of Alois Riegl. In his book, Spätrömische Kunstindustrie (1901/02; English version: Late Roman Art Industry, 1985), he differentiates between three kinds of vision or artistically possible forms of perception: 1) a tactile short‑sightedness (Nahsicht), which is related to the join‑ ing of surfaces and figures in classical Egyptian art, so they exist on the same plane but are differentiated; 2) a tactile‑optic or normal‑sightedness (Normalsicht) with an orientation in Greek art, which indicates a beginning of the consequence of depth and an orientation towards subjective perception; and 3) a long‑ 90 As shown in my analysis of the Signal toothpaste’s diagrammatical function in Epidemic, it becomes almost impossible to distinguish the relation between the electronic signal’s content and the expressive qualities of its haptic noise. In Wiener’s »the signal is the message« and McLuhan’s »the media is the mes‑ sage«, a similar fusion takes place. In the following the signal noise – similar to the refrain in Deleuze and Guattari (see later) – describes both a stratification and a de‑stratification.

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sightedness (Fernsicht) with its orchestration of individual figures who, though projected on a surface, do not necessitate a tactile sensation, as their outlines are differentiated with the help of shadow and colour effects. In the latter category one finds the sketch‑influenced style of late Roman art, where the figure has not yet stepped into the infinite space, as is recognisable from the Renaissance. Nevertheless the spatial orientation becomes appreciable as a distinct dimension in the image that implies a subjective mastery of the relation between surface and ground. In Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (1993), Margaret Iversen describes how optical vision, which gives a sense of space without a tactile, sensory anchoring in the present space, for the first time shows itself in art history as a foreground, creating the impression of spatial distance from the background (Iversen 1993, 79‑80). In this way subjective interaction with the works first becomes a necessity from late Roman optical art onwards. The word haptic (Greek hapto) relates to actions of the hand: fastening, attaching, securing, grabbing, touching, seizing, catch‑ ing, attacking, and raising a hand to. In extended meanings it also includes vilifying, affronting, taking on board, grabbing hold of, comprehending, occupying oneself with, reaching, enjoying, and igniting. With the word ›haptic‹, Riegl emphasises the eye’s (and not the hand’s) ability to sense in relation to experiencing the pattern in a carpet or the structure in a weave. The haptic view thus resides in the surface textures and represents in Riegl a different use of (or approach to) the visual sensation from the optic, where orientation takes place through markers which create structure in, for example, an image.91 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are occupied explicitly with the notion of the haptic in the chapter »The Smooth and the Stri‑ ated« in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 2013). This chapter functions in many ways as a clarification of the intro‑ ductory chapter »Rhizome«. Deleuze and Guattari build further on Riegl’s notion of the haptic (the smooth) and the optical (the

91 In these structures, the background surface interacts with the form, allowing the image’s various surfaces to communicate. Depth together with the volume of things relates to the horizontal and vertical lines of the perspective, and light, shadow and colour effects add to this.

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striated), interpreted through Henri Maldiney’s introduction in the chapter »L’art et le pouvoir du fond« in Regard, Parole, Espace (Maldiney [1973] 1994), which also incorporates Heinrich Wölf‑ flin and Wilhelm Worringer’s various uses of Riegl. In Deleuze’s detail studies of Francis Bacon’s paintings in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation ([1981; 2002] 2013), the word ›haptic‹ is used to describe how the rhythmic intensity or modulation of the colours emphasises the space, in contrast to the optical sense perception of light (and time). Deleuze believes that in the haptic near‑sight, in great colourists such as Turner, Monet, Cézanne and van Gogh, one can sense tonal differences as if one were actually touch‑ ing them. Thus haptic vision allows us to sense the space as a qualitative relation between colours rather than as a quantifiable relation between foreground and background, which is often subordinate to an infinite three‑dimensional scaling (cf. Daniel W. Smith 2003, p. xxvi). The haptic image formation and view does not constitute an opposition to the optical in Deleuze and Guattari, either. Rather, one might mention an alterning, where the surface’s modulation of colour, movement and textural variations becomes more sig‑ nificant in the delineation of depth and figures. As optical beings we use both parts and cannot easily operate with a differentia‑ tion. But if for example one sees one’s reflection in a mirror, the optical view will correspond to one’s reading of bodily or facial contours or outlines, while the haptic view corresponds to focus‑ ing on a part of the body (the surface of the skin, for example, or the expression in the eyes). In the haptic dwelling on detail, the contour of the body and the spatial background become diffuse. But it is evident that since the Renaissance the art of painting has demonstrated more examples of optical compositions than hap‑ tic, on the strength of the one‑point perspective and its mode of organising in a mathematically infinite space. On the other hand, the haptic granulation of the canvas and screen surfaces generally comes to the foreground in modern painting (impressionism and expressionism), as well as in photography and film, and later in the visible grainy pixels of electronic and digital media. As described above, it is especially in the artistic utilisation of the electronic conditions of chaos that haptic qualities become 100

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evident. Deleuze does not consider chaos a condition in which all differences are dissolved. On the contrary, it is in chaos that forms of order emerge spontaneously like milieus which are variable and often with limited time, where certain kinds of repetitive codes can unfold themselves as life in relation to external factors (light, ener‑ gy and so on). A body consists of various cell milieus that revise and maintain their structures again and again. These milieus (hearts, lungs, brains, nerves, etc.) also function in solidarity and work together in relation to a heart rhythm that creates a qualitative relationship between respiration, blood pressure, brain impulses and so on; which in turn relates to and produces diversity. If one goes further with this description, these milieus and rhythms again become submissive territories. Creating territories is an action that stylistically and creatively organises the milieus and makes the rhythms creative. The human being submits corporeally to territo‑ ries through rhythms (for example, vocal intonation and nasal and guttural peculiarities in language), through embellishment and movement (for example, dance, fashion and rituals), and through territorial demarcation and marginalisation (cultural solidarity). If one now relates this description to the haptic it becomes clear the milieu takes shape as groupings or as a condensation of colours and pixels, while rhythm takes shape as patterns and the relations in and between these. A milieu of colours can, on a video image for example, form a kind of dimension or demarcated spatiality, but it is first in the expressive territorial action, which in the artistic composition creates rhythm, that an impression of fluctuating composition is created. It is not territorial space that creates the function of territorial demarcation; it is in the instant where for example the colour element is cultivated or repeated, or stands out as a quality, as delineation, that an artistic terri‑ tory is realised. Chapter 10 of A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari, 2013), »1730 – Becoming‑Intense, Becoming‑Animal, Becoming‑Imperceptible…«, describes how Klee, Kandinsky and Monet wrest the line away from the domination of the point and liberate it from having to describe an outline: The line has become the diagonal, which has broken free from the vertical and the horizontal. But the diagonal has already become the

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transversal, the semidiagonal or free straight line, the broken or an‑ gular line, or the curve—always in the midst of themselves. Between the white vertical and the black horizontal lie Klee’s gray, Kandinsky’s red, Monet’s purple; each forms a block of color. This line is without origin, since it always begins off the painting, which only holds it by the middle; it is without coordinates, because it melds with a plane of consistency upon which it floats and that it creates; it is without localiz‑ able connection, because it has lost not only its representative function but any function of outlining a form of any kind—by this token, the line has become abstract, truly abstract and mutant, a visual block; and under these conditions the point assumes creative functions again, as a color‑point or line‑point. The line is between points, in their midst, and no longer goes from one point to another. It does not outline a shape. (Deleuze and Guattari 2013, 347)

The artist marks his/her territory in the composition signature as well as the name signature, and it is the signature that sets both the subject and the work as entities. The possessive subject is therefore created by the territorial, artistic gesture – not the other way around. If one looks further at an artist’s continued work there will necessarily be mention of a continued work of deterritorialising and reterritorialising. Territories are to be continually created. They are variable, in the same way as an animal’s territorial demarcations are conditional on the seasons – decided by whether a possible mate is in proximity, whether the correct conditions are found, and so on. The individual territorial demarcations are found in a perpetual movement. This flux is characterised by the fact that the virtual level, in the form of previous and future demarcations, also plays a part in the creation of rhizomatic interlacing. All elements – including pauses, perforations, white noise, edits and omissions – play a role in the rhizomatic structure, of which the haptic view is also characteristic. It is not difficult to see that the haptic and rhizomatic view and way of thinking can, to a large extent, be made analytically valid for an artistic practice, including new electronic and digital media forms, whose characteristics of ›unfinished‑ness‹ and becoming are striking. In chapter 14 of A Thousand Plateaus, »The Smooth 102

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and the Striated«, the smooth space becomes synonymous with the nomadic space and the space in which the war machine is de‑ veloping, while the striped space signifies the space of the settled, and the space which is instituted by the apparatus of the state. Finally, the two heterogeneous modes of organising are summed up as techniques for textile production (felt‑making as opposed to weaving), musical techniques (rhythm as opposed to melody), spatial organising (Riemannian space as opposed to Euclidian space), and so on. According to this model, the haptic (the smooth space’s) organisation becomes a model for a nomadic (art)form. At the same time it should be underlined, however, that haptic spaces or modes of organisation cannot be separated in practice from the optical. Yet it could be summed up abstractedly that haptic space includes short‑reaching sensations (visual, auditive, as well as tactile), while striated space includes far‑reaching optical sensations. In Deleuze and Guattari the haptic space gains (as a continu‑ ation of Worringer) yet another qualification, in that the line is described as »abstract« or »Gothic«,92 »nomadic« and »not recti‑ linear« (2013, 577), in contrast to the »concrete« or straight lines in the optical space. In Deleuze and Guattari the abstract lines make independent an artistic will that is not organic, and does not create territories, imitate or represent. With the abstract, nomadic line, art is seen – as a rule exemplified with expressionism – as an »abstract machine«, although this does not exclude art from being figurative. In his later book on Francis Bacon, who paints figures – without being a figurative painter – Deleuze describes his special haptic‑manual and abstract style as a »realism of deformation« (cf. Thomsen 2001, 237). The same term could be used for Trier’s style in The Kingdom I and II, where it is significant that the hap‑ tic composition does not exclude the creation of figures and plot. The series cannot be described as either traditionally realistic or traditionally modernistic in its style. Abstraction and material sen‑ sations interact, as in Bacon, in that it is the intensity of the space

92 Cf. Deleuze (1986, 51), where the Gothic line’s zig‑zag movement between things is characterised. Instead of contours it creates intensity and forms of mixed‑up spasms in the image plane, for example in horror films from the 1930s and onwards.

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rather than its extent which is described. It is the event as intensity and affect that becomes the object of description, not the imitation nor the representation of an existing world or genre. The abstract or Gothic line, which describes a dynamic force rather than organic harmony, does not seek territorial mastery, marking or framing, and its artistic will does not result in figura‑ tive representation, even though it can describe a figure. Deleuze and Guattari’s enthusiastic description of the abstract line’s prop‑ erties could in itself stand as a precise description of Trier’s aes‑ thetic practice in The Kingdom. The abstract line orients itself neither towards delineating a motif nor towards creating a difference between foreground and background, as it is constantly in motion and changing direc‑ tion. It makes up an expressive description of a smooth or haptic space without either beginning or end. Despite this instability, the abstract line has a significant strength of expression that relates itself to repetition, not the form. The effect of the abstract line’s haptic style can to a large extent be rediscovered in the hand‑held principle, intensified in the consciously rough and forced editing techniques of post‑production. On the whole, the hand‑held cam‑ era and jump‑cut editing functions as an abstract line, subverting the straight lines and concrete spaces in the modern buildings of the Rigshospital. The grotesque means, including the magnifica‑ tion of electronic signals and the presentation of technology as an estranged (ostranenie) but independent machinic power, add to the impression of mutation and haptic short‑sightedness. At no point does the TV viewer have an overview of the floors, elevators and rooms, and how they relate to one another. The building, which in the real world is functionalistic, appears labyrinthine or meandering. The image of the hospital’s exterior from diverse angles, such as the bird’s‑eye view, is in striking contrast to its chaotic, twisted interior, misleading everyone apart from the all‑ seeing dishwashers who, though they remain in the same place, are able to see everywhere. Most of the rooms are reorganised, changing function or character when the controlling forces are deflected. The morning conference room is transformed into a break room; the duty room becomes something between a control tower and a commentary box; the archive’s block of memories is 104

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transformed into a hypersensory space; and the sleep laboratory is transformed into a backdrop for pornography. In the beginning the basement is inhabited by Krogshøj (Hook), who in his own ingenious way marks out the shady territory where knowledge, services and »goods« are exchanged outside the control of the hospital. In a cleaning supplies room also located in the basement is the secret lodge, of which most of the doctors are members, in‑ cluding »Pigernes Ole«, who has discreetly established himself as a therapist in the subterranean space. The medical projects – whose purpose is order, reporting and control – fail, are diverted or change direction. Even the doctors‹ monologues, which through journals and dictaphones aim to control diverse territories, are undermined eventually by contact with patients, nursing staff, porters, the board of complaints, parking attendants, therapists and upper ministerial management. Very often these expansions of space, territories and properties occur by isolating and enlarging the particular haptic elementary forms of the video medium. These expansions transform the TV screen itself into a surface of sense impressions, which the viewers have in front of them. Continuing on from Deleuze and Guat‑ tari, one can say that the screen is comparable to the surface of the skin, which functions as an interface to another non‑organic body. The haptic skin‑like surface, especially in The Kingdom II, is formed and shaped like a piece of clay or wax, whose most im‑ portant function is to assume any kind of form as long as the sense impression is stronger than that which happens to be represented. The TV viewer must of necessity be activated by this interface, which in addition acts as an ironic commentary on the Lacanian term ›the Real‹, appearing in the form of a green eye and a toilet seat seen from below, and covering the entire screen. The green eye, with its extremely lifelike ›retina‹, only gives a blurred access to the motif, filling the entire screen in order for the viewer to become a victim and bearer of its evil, so to speak. Through the ›lens‹ of this evil eye we see the world from a not particularly flat‑ tering position: from within the demon itself. The alternative is to see the motif – Helmer’s face – filmed through a toilet’s surface water level, so the viewer’s position identifies with the position of the faeces. As stated earlier, Trier works here in continuation a tiger in the kingdom

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of Dreyer’s renowned camera perspective in Vampyr, but in ad‑ dition to the green eye and toilet seat as grotesque effects, atten‑ tion is drawn to the electronic medium’s haptic dimension. The description of this haptic line’s »Gothic incarnation« is also apt for the transformation from a Gothic mode in The Kingdom I to a grotesque mode in The Kingdom II: It is this nomadic line that he says is mechanical, but in free action and swirling; it is inorganic, yet alive, and all the more alive for being inorganic. It is distinguished both from the geometrical and the organic. It raises »mechanical« relations to the level of intuition. Heads (even a human being’s when it is not a face) unravel and coil into ribbons in a continuous process; mouths curl in spirals. Hair, clothes... This streaming, spiraling, zigzagging, snaking, feverish line of variation liberates a power of life that human beings had rectified and organisms had confined, and which matter now expresses as the trait, flow, or impulse traversing it. If everything is alive, it is not because everything is organic or organized but, on the contrary, because the organism is a diversion of life. (Deleuze and Guattari 2013, 579 authors’ italics)

When the body no longer exists on the level of the organism, new territories can emerge in the artistic field. In this instance, it is the form of a reinterpretation of the haptic as an artistic way of making apparent the »vitalization« or »becomings«, which in particular belong to the camera, starting with video and onwards. The ›white noise‹ = haptic surface = the film medium’s artistic transformation in an electronic and digital age. »The body without organs« and the »becominganimal«

The bodies in The Kingdom I transform into bodies without organs, which Deleuze and Guattari along with Antonin Artaud define as the »field of immanence of desire« (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2013, 179), where it is the thought of the organism rather than the organs that is attacked. The notion of the organism implies both a religious entity of body and soul and an organism of medical science, which can be described, have its functions 106

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determined and be treated. The thought of an organism also creates the image of the subject as an entity, who acts, has ill‑ nesses and endures psychological suffering. Deleuze and Guat‑ tari believe that Artaud’s endeavours and descriptions express a body without organs (BwO), where the »multiplicity of fusion« and the ability to »flow« can be privileged »as forces, essences, substances, elements, remissions, productions; manners of be‑ ing or modalities as produced intensities, vibrations, breaths, Numbers« (op. cit., 184). The term BwO is aimed especially toward the psychoanalytic description of desire as something that should be regulated, or as something that is analysed in the context of a deficiency. In Deleuze and Guattari desire is determined positively like a vital force (élan vital), the processual creating immanence, which is hindered in its search for fields of intensity through the functionalised understanding of the body, constantly demanding that it be regulated – first in the priest’s damnation and containment of sexuality and gender, and later by the psychoanalyst’s »damnation« of desire: »the negative law of lack, the external rule of pleasure, and the transcendent ideal of phantasy« (op. cit., 180). In The Kingdom II desire is also regarded as extremely posi‑ tive, and even the doctors‹ appointments reveal themselves in rapid progression to be controlled by desire. In The Kingdom II the gigantic body of Lillebror manifests itself both in a concrete sense as an incalculable haptic level and as a Body without Organs (BwO) of Artaudian dimensions. The skin on Lillebror’s gigantic body denotes an extensive field of sense perception, which like a seismograph registers even the tiniest emotional current in the hospital’s inhabitants. Lillebror pleads for euthanasia, his up‑ per body filling the whole wall and having to be supported with a stand, while his lower body rests on some beds. This is not an expression for self‑destructive behaviour, but the only way he can fight against the reach of evil. In spite of its size, this Body without Organs is paradoxically enough nothing but sheer intensity. Lille‑ bror surrenders his future, in that he lives through it together with his mother as a performance. Then he says goodbye to his body as agency and as the I’s field of self‑realisation, accompanied by Carl Nielsen’s »Solen er så rød, mor« (The sun is so red, mother). a tiger in the kingdom

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The invocation of death seems rather more life‑affirming than melancholic in this context. It is also in The Kingdom II that general becoming‑animals with human identities are to be found. Even in The Kingdom I Helmer is compared to a rat by Rigmor, who tries to shoot real experimental rats in order to be better able to hit Helmer. She compares herself to a badger, which can bite to the bone. The hospital’s Chief Executive Manager compares the lodge brothers to a herd of bellowing stags in rut, butting heads and fighting for territory in the preserve. The porters and guards call Krogshøj a fox, because he always seems to have several ways out. After ingesting Helmer’s zombie poison he slips into an almost lifeless condition, and being assumed dead is close to being cremated as well, before he re‑establishes his territory, only now without the cunning charm which is so characteristic of the fox‑made‑human. His human face becomes transformed into an animal head whose matter‑of‑fact stare has driven out the twinkle in his eyes, which was his trademark previously. This indicates that the non‑human and predatory instincts have taken over, and as with Lillebror’s BwO, Krogshøj’s becoming‑animal is characterised as a force with direct territorial and deterritorialising influence. During the course of The Kingdom II the medical profession’s ›intelligent brains‹ are reduced to a state where the instincts of the predator brain take over. In the episode »Gargantua« Mrs Drusse evokes Riget’s ›soul‹ in a hypnosis scene. Her son, Bulder, is the medium who finds the soul of the hospital in the form of a tiger, an anagram of R‑I‑G‑E‑T. In order to escape the confined predator, Bulder must metamorphosise into any animal he so chooses. In his angst he begins to flap his arms in a mechanical manner reminiscent of stiff wings, and thus he metamorphosises into a penguin; whereupon the hypnosis must be cut short. This visit to the hospital’s Gothic‑looking »innermost cellar«, which in a mostly comical way re‑gestalts the mechanical imitation – as mastered so brilliantly in the slapstick tradition of film – in Bulder’s too fat and – because of the hypnosis – too sluggish body, underlines how all values are inverted in the grotesque. In The Kingdom II the laughable is generally achieved by stressing the mechanical, repetitive functions of the body (for example, 108

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biological), which contrasts the doctors‹ moral characteristics with their ethical responsibilities. This contrast creates inversions and interference in the material of the characters and of the narrative, as the grotesque laughter gradually ruins all attempts to create order and a system in a complete organisation of meaning. The shallow non‑meaning, the intensities and the individual events take over the scene in a manner Deleuze summarises thus: Nonsense and sense have done away with their relation of dynamic opposition in order to enter into the co‑presence of a static genesis – as the nonsense of the surface and the sense which hovers over it. The tragic and the ironic give way to a new value, that of humor. For if irony is the co‑extensiveness of being with the individual, or of the I with representation, humor is the co‑extensiveness of sense with non‑ sense. Humor is the art of the surfaces and of the doubles, of nomad singularities and of the always displaced aleatory point; it is the art of the static genesis, the savoir faire of the pure event, and the »fourth per‑ son singular« – with every signification, denotation, and manifestation suspended, all height and depth abolished. (Deleuze [1969] 1990, 141)

Deleuze bases his analysis of humour partly on Henri Bergson’s analysis of laughter (Bergson [1900] 2017), which takes its start‑ ing point in the social nature of laughter, and which corresponds to Deleuze’s »fourth person singular« – that is to say, the use of »one« and »it« as in »one dies« and »it rains«. Here »Everything is singular, and thus both collective and private, particular and general, neither individual nor universal« (Deleuze op. cit., 152). The grotesque laughter’s surface, which negates the distinc‑ tion between high and low, is supplemented in The Kingdom II, as depicted in the vitalising of the haptic surface by the electronic signal. The living electronic pixels in the screen’s luminous green eye allow for the possibility of sensing the surface of the Now. In this living, electronic surface the space, body and face assume diverse grotesque forms; high becomes low, inner becomes outer and vice versa. The same applies to time, which cannot be delim‑ ited: past, present and future are intertwined with one another and determine one another. The virtual planes of past and pre‑ sent are just as real and effectual in the current schedule as the a tiger in the kingdom

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narrative’s development of a Now. Ghosts and demons meddle and time unfolds like a becoming that cannot be contained, but which can rise or fall in velocity. The Bakhtinian chronotope defies aesthetic consistence, in that the play between time and space is under constant displacement on a plane of immanence. On the other hand, The Kingdom II materialises this textural plane, which the electronic signal consists of, as an aesthetically forming rhythm and modulation. It is through the contraction and expansion of illuminating blocks in the electronic signals that we sense the work. The meaning of the form is itself and does not constitute part of a discourse of meaning; as Ronald Bogue writes with reference to Maldiney (Bogue 2003a, 118), the rhythm is the form: Rhythm is not to be confused with cadence or meter, says Maldiney, for the rhythm of form is not regulated by an external time measure. […] The rhythm of systole and diastole that plays through the self‑shaping activity of form in an artwork creates its own temporal framework, and when we experience the artwork we also enter into the implicated time of its form, a perpetual Now outside commonsense coordinates. (Bogue, 120‑21)

Trier carries out an aesthetic transformation from the Gothic‑ expressive style through the haptic surface effect to the grotesque, where the figures function more as blocks of sensation than as characters with a purpose in a narrative. Their reciprocal encoun‑ ters and confrontations create electronic patterns and rhythms, so the screen’s haptic surface blends with the signal’s revival of the Now in the foreground. From The Kingdom I and II onwards, Trier enables the film viewer to experience new ways of viewing and sensing. Not only is the space yanked free of its embeddedness in the one‑point perspective illusion of depth on the flat screen, as occurs in the Europa trilogy. With the help of the video medium, the space becomes a dimension on the screen’s surface, creating, according to Maldiney, phenomenological encounters similar to the rhythm of breathing, in which the viewer’s haptic senses are an important part. In continuation of Deleuze and Guattari, one can say that the space is yanked free of its spatio‑temporal 110

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coordinates and becomes intensities, where »smooth space is oc‑ cupied by intensities, wind and noise, forces, and sonorous and tactile qualities, as in the desert, steppe, or ice. The creaking of ice and the song of the sands« (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2013, 557). And thus in the Trieresque aesthetic there occurs not only a transformation from a Gothic to a grotesque‑expressionistic style, but also a transformation of the film medium via the video medium, so it becomes possible in the following film to remediate the digital media aesthetic too.

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CHAPTER 4

Dogme 95 and The Idiots A new form of realism

Taking its starting point in The Kingdom I and II, whose haptic compositions, hand‑held filming and uneven editing techniques also direct the viewer’s attention towards their own sense percep‑ tion, this chapter discusses the Dogme 95 manifesto and its rules by examining The Idiots (1998). The other films in the Golden Heart trilogy, Breaking the Waves (1996) and Dancer in the Dark (2000), are discussed in the following chapter (where The Idiots is again referenced), with particular attention given to the creation of a haptically orchestrated spatiality in the remediation of the landscape painting and the musical respectively. As has already been mentioned, Lev Manovich discussed the Dogme 95 project’s remediation of the film medium as an ef‑ fect of real‑time networks and forms of control. The new, light‑ weight DV equipment, which »allows the filmmaker to literally be inside the action as it unfolds« (Manovich 2003, 19), gives the film medium new ways to create effects of reality (as immediacy). Practically all filmic forms of realism in the 20th century have praised the way in which the new media allows for new ways of describing reality. From 1922 and onwards to the 30s, Dziga Vertov made use of them in a series of documentary films called Kino-Pravda (film‑truth). The group involved in the production of Kino-Pravda93 considered the camera a revolutionary tool, which was not only congruent with modern, industrial production processes, but could also register hidden contexts and provoke 93 The group consisted of Vertov’s wife, the film director Elizaveta Svilova, and his brother, Mikhail Kaufman.

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insights from the filmic montage of images. The Kino-Pravda group documented movement and rhythm in the new, modern city space, whose automatic processes were depicted as a utopian model for human development. In The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich regards the group’s filmic method – where data is collected without a manuscript source, with a view to editing later – as a kind of harbinger of the computer database. In the 1950s, Jean Rouch, Chris Marker and several others in France (together with Michel Brault and Gilles Groulx in the French department of The National Film Board of Canada) found new inspiration in the experiments of the Kino-Pravda group. The anthropological documentary film style called cinéma-verité94 used new lightweight apparatus with inbuilt sound, which enabled hand‑held and simultaneous live recording of sound. As in the Kino-Pravda group, the camera was viewed as a catalyst whose presence was welcome to be felt in the finished film. The two somewhat simultaneous experimental film move‑ ments in England (called Free Cinema with, amongst others, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson and Lorenza Mazzetti) and in the USA (called Direct Cinema with, amongst others, Robert Drew, Richard Leacock and D. A. Pennebaker) focused on documentary reportage, which did not disrupt the filmed action, but instead observed everyday life and political situations as they took place. Jean‑Luc Godard was very much inspired by Rouch’s anthro‑ pological style in the 1960s; for example, he adopted the jump‑ cut style in his new wave film. In the period 1968‑1972, he made a number of Marxist‑inspired films together with Jean‑Pierre Gorin. The collaboration was called the Dziga Vertov group95 and was inspired by the Kino-Pravda group’s experiments, which aimed to create a politically engaged audience. Godard and Gorin 94 It was the French sociologist Edgar Morin who, in an article in France-Observateur in 1960, literally translated kino-pravda to cinema-vérité. Furthermore, the same Morin was Jean Rouch’s partner in the production of Chronicle of a Summer (1961), where everyday French life was documented. The film became an important inspiration for nouvelle vague directors at the time. 95 According to Gorin, the name was used half in jest, but was also intended as a political bearing so that Vertov’s aesthetic could be seen as an alternative to the more well‑known Eisensteinian aesthetic. Cf. also the interview: http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC03folder/GorinIntThomson.html (last viewed 31 March 2015).

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exploited the video camera’s easier (than the film camera) access in order to depict the student protestors on the streets of Paris, the workers‹ strikes at the factories and relationship crises in the home. The Brechtian Verfremdung (distancing/alienation/ estrangement) effect was added in editing with the help of the – for Godard – already typical techniques, where questions, slogans and commentary broke the visual continuity. The common denominator for all these movements of filmic realism was the more easily managed equipment, which doc‑ umented or functioned as a catalyst for the depiction of life’s rhythms (everyday life, work life, the city’s pulse, demonstrations and election meetings). Instead of following a manuscript, the creative process lay in the recordings‹ documentation of reality as close as possible to the lived and experienced life. The political or anthropological adaption of the material lay more in the filmic selection of material than in the scripted part. The great advantage of using the electronic video medium was that one could film what one saw, then watch it again while on location, as well as delete and edit it. It was considerably less expensive and simul‑ taneously more ›live‹ than what one could achieve with heavier filming equipment. The period from the 1960s to the 70s, when both anthropological film and video art extensively experimented with developing the techniques for the production of ›live‑ness‹, was influenced by the fact that the electronic pulse in the signal was capable of something which film was not.96 Common to the forms of film and video realism was the desire to reach a higher level in their documentation of reality – either because it was perceived as being (too) familiar (imperceptible), not appreciated (unseen) or not apprehended (ideological). The experiments of the period were thus also driven by the question of what can be called real at all, and with which means experience of reality can be captured.

96 Cf., concerning the electronic signal, the above‑quoted article by Barbara Buckner (1978), as well as Thomsen 2010, 2011 and 2012.

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The »Dogme 95 Manifesto« and the »Vow of Chastity«

The Dogme films of the 1990s were especially concerned with the recordings being regarded as »raw material to be later re‑arranged in post‑production«, which in this case is of a digital kind where effects can be created and added (Manovich, op. cit.). The mani‑ festo for Dogme 95 was signed on 13 March 1995 by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, and later by Søren Kragh‑Jacobsen and Kristian Levring. On 22 March 1995 it was handed out in the form of flyers on red paper at an international film forum in Paris as the most important part of Trier’s performance at the conference »Le cinéma vers son deuxième siècle«. He was invited as a speaker to mark the occasion of 100 years since the first public film premiere. In several places the manifesto recalls the 1960s French new wave and the article written by François Truffaut entitled »Une certaine tendance du cinéma français«, which in January 1954 appeared in Cahiers du cinéma, no. 31 (Truffaut 1954). Dogme 95 was, however, far less analytically committed and much more politically charged film document than Truffaut’s, which with its launching of the auteur theory has since been criticised for stimulating the cult of the artist genius. Dogme 95 very explicitly challenges a collective revolt against all forms of reverence for a so‑called bourgeois aesthetic in film: DOGMA 95 MANIFESTO DOGMA MANIFESTO, DOGMA 9597 DOGMA 95 is a collection of film directors founded in Copenhagen in spring 1995. DOGMA 95 has the expressed goal of countering »certain tenden‑ cies« in the cinema today. DOGMA 95 is a rescue action! In 1960 enough was enough! The movie was dead and called for resur‑ rection. The goal was correct but the means were not! The new wave proved to be a ripple that washed ashore and turned to muck.

97 This version of the Dogma 95 manifesto was dowloaded from the official Dogma 95 website, when it still existed.

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Slogans of individualism and freedom created works for a while, but no changes. The wave was up for grabs, like the directors them‑ selves. The wave was never stronger than the men behind it. The anti‑ bourgeois cinema itself became bourgeois, because the foundations upon which its theories were based was the bourgeois perception of art. The auteur concept was bourgeois romanticism from the very start and thereby… false! To DOGMA 95 cinema is not individual! Today a technological storm is raging, the result of which will be the ultimate democratization of the cinema. For the first time, anyone can make movies. But the more accessible the medium becomes, the more important the avant‑garde. It is no accident that the phrase »avant‑ garde« has military connotations. Discipline is the answer… we must put our films into uniform, because the individual film will be decadent by definition! DOGMA 95 counters the individual film by the principle of pre‑ senting an indisputable set of rules known as THE VOW OF CHAS‑ TITY. In 1960 enough was enough! The movie had been cosmeticized to death, they said; yet since then the use of cosmetics has exploded. The »supreme« task of the decadent film‑makers is to fool the audi‑ ence. Is that what we are so proud of? Is that what the »100 years« have brought us? Illusions via which emotions can be communicated?…By the individual artist’s free choice of trickery? Predictability (dramaturgy) has become the golden calf around which we dance. Having the characters‹ inner lives justify the plot is too complicated, and not »high art«. As never before, the superficial action and the superficial movie are receiving all the praise. The result is barren. An illusion of pathos and an illusion of love. To DOGMA 95 the movie is not illusion! Today a technological storm is raging of which the result is the elevation of cosmetics to God. By using new technology anyone at any time can wash the last grains of truth away in the deadly embrace of sensation. The illusions are everything the movie can hide behind.

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DOGMA 95 counters the film of illusion by the presentation of an indisputable set of rules known as THE VOW OF CHASTITY.

The manifesto is a call to arms against filmic illusion‑making, pathos and cosmetics, no matter whether this happens in artistic decadence, in dramaturgic plots or in the name of blockbusters. The manifesto’s ten dogmatic rules, called the Vow of Chastity, are presented as a form of discipline, which aim to clear out of the way the inclination to individual, bourgeois aesthetics and create a path for collective, avant‑garde film production. The Dogme 95 rules have been a much discussed pivotal point for many analyses of The Idiots as well as the approximately 30 other Dogme films, which were produced in the space of the ten years the Dogme initiative lasted. After 22 March 2005 it became possible for anyone (without authorisation) to fill out the certificate on the Internet and distribute one’s film as a Dogme film.98 The Dogme rules‹ ten commandments – the vow of chastity – which until then had been applied as criteria in order to be able to furnish one’s film with a Dogme certificate, were formulated as follows: THE VOW OF CHASTITY99 I swear to submit to the following set of rules drawn up and confirmed by DOGMA 95: 1) Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found). 2) The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. (Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is being shot.) 3) The camera must be hand‑held. Any movement or immobility at‑ tainable in the hand is permitted.

98 The official Dogme 95 website is now discontinued, but in January 2011, 254 films appeared on the list of Dogme films. The accuracy of this number cannot be verified. 99 This version of The vow of Chastity was downloaded from the official Dogma 95 website, when it still existed.

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4) The film must be in color. Special lighting is not acceptable. (If there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera.) 5) Optical work and filters are forbidden. 6) The film must not contain superficial action. (Murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.) 7) Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden. (That is to say that the film takes place here and now.) 8) Genre movies are not acceptable. 9) The film format must be Academy 35 mm. 10) The director must not be credited. Furthermore I swear as a director to refrain from personal taste! I am no longer an artist. I swear to refrain from creating a »work«, as I regard the instant as more important than the whole. My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations. Thus I make my VOW OF CHASTITY. Copenhagen, Monday 13 March 1995 On behalf of DOGMA 95 Lars von Trier

Thomas Vinterberg

With regard to film recording, rule number nine was far from always adhered to. The quality in the new digital video apparatus made it possible to make quality film on low budgets, and there‑ fore one merely needed to transfer DV recordings to 35mm film. In extension of the rules it is natural to study the analogue film image’s indexical traces of reality, where truth connects itself to what has actually been seen and has taken place (cf. Jerslev 2002). One can also quite rightly maintain that Dogme 95 constituted a »challenge to the fiction film« with the aim of achieving a »dialectic between fiction and a quest for truth« (Schepelern 2000, 227). In the following analysis of The Idiots the Dogme rules‹ demand for immediacy, authenticity and the related effects of reality in the 118

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avant‑garde tradition will be co‑interpreted with the construction of hypermediacy in a visual surface, which invites the viewer to take part in the film, in a haptic way, as if it were an interface. I will argue that Trier’s experiments with developing a haptic visual composition and film composition in the Europa trilogy, which in The Kingdom I and II remediated the electronic signal’s possibilities of creating many layers and modulations on the sur‑ face of the images, continues with the Dogme 95 initiative, and that this can be sensed in The Idiots. The Dogme 95 rules and the hand‑held DV camera established a new form of haptically organised interface, which in and with the modulations on the screen surface involved the viewer in ways that were unseen up until then. As mentioned previously, sensations are prioritised over the subject and the material immanent qualities are priori‑ tised over the representation in the haptically organised surface and in the eye’s haptic sense perception. And though the analogue indexicality is recessive in the apprehension of the digital image, the electronic and digital form is just as involved in a material sense (Marks 2002, 174). We are today, to a higher degree than previously, capable of experiencing our own body as »one image among others«, as Deleuze (following Henri Bergson) proposed (Deleuze 1986, 58). In time we might also gain a greater understanding of the image’s affective potential, as Luciana Parisi and Tiziana Terranova sug‑ gest: When looking at digital images, we could ask not merely: Where is the other? but What is their speed? Which parts of a body are they affecting? Which circuits of a body are they opening up and which ones are they closing down? What kind of connections are they establishing? (Parisi and Terranova 2001, 125)

This description, which could also apply to the interface’s blur‑ ring of the classic subject‑object relationship, is also the basis for taking a closer look at Gilles Deleuze’s book on Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (1981),100 where the concept 100

The following quotations are from the English version, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (2013).

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of the haptic is developed in detail together with a description of the diagrammatic method. The following analyses further how the Dogme rules accentu‑ ate the filmic realism performatively, so immediacy and hyper‑ mediacy participate in endless orbits – a game. The analysis of The Idiots reveals how the filmic assimilation of both electronic and digital image forms allows for an interface where the screen’s plane of composition manifests itself physically. In both analyses I will draw on Deleuze’s concept of the diagram, which he develops in light of Francis Bacon’s paintings. A diagrammatic production of factual reality in the form of haptic »Figures«

In Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze works specifi‑ cally on reclaiming Bacon’s manual‑haptic style, which modu‑ lates the surface in the tradition of Paul Cézanne, so instead of figurative art, ›Figure‹ and ›Fact‹ are created with the help of a diagrammatic method.101 Deleuze identifies this in Bacon as »the operative set of asignifying and nonrepresentative lines and zones, line‑strokes and color‑patches« (Deleuze 2013, 71), which break with the figuration because on the one hand the possibility of creating an optical organisation of the painting is ruined, and on the other a kind of rhythm is established in the form of dynamic Figures, drawing attention to the painting as a surface.

101 The capital letters in Figure and Fact are Deleuze’s and indicate the ability of the diagram to create a distance from the figurative and what we normally understand as factual reality. Deleuze develops dia‑ grammatic thinking as an extension of Charles Sanders Peirce’s concept of the diagrammatic sign, which is described by Floyd Merrell (1998) as an icon, whose purpose is to extend itself in the direction of its object with a view to comparability. But the diagrammatic sign operates schematically rather than substantially, abstractly rather than analogously, concretely and through relations rather than merely through images. Merrell aligns himself with Deleuze and Guattari’s short and emphatic determination: »A diagram has nei‑ ther substance nor form, neither content nor expression« (Deleuze and Guattari 2013, 164), and proposes that instead of thinking of the diagram as a sign one ought to understand it as a folding between sensation and thinking, as an exchange between simple and complex systems (Merrell, 292). In addition, in Semblance and Event (2011) Brian Massumi links the diagram to the relational and the event. With a starting point in the Peirce citation: »The greatest point of art consists in the introduction of suitable abstractions. By this I mean such a transformation of our diagrams that the characters of one diagram may appear in another as things« (Peirce 1997, 226), Massumi understands (in accordance with Whitehead and Deleuze) a diagram as a technique of existence, which through abstraction can extract a potentiality that can be deter‑ mined as being concrete (Massumi 2011, 100).

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Deleuze believes that the diagram is present as a necessity in the art of modern painting, where the painter allows him/herself to be confronted with the abyss or the chaos that shows itself when the conscious breaks with classic visual coordinates and clichés. In van Gogh, for example, he sees the diagram as »the set of straight and curved hatch marks that raise and lower the ground, twist the trees, make the sky palpitate, and which assume a particular intensity from 1888 onward« (Deleuze 2013, 72). The coming to prominence of the diagram in the production of specific painters can, as it appears here, be dated, in that it at once brings »the col‑ lapse of visual coordinates« and unlocks new »areas of sensation« (Bacon’s expression, op. cit.), because the image’s moulding of ›chaos‹ and ›catastrophe‹ makes up a simultaneous germ or a shoot of a new order or rhythm (ibid.). According to Deleuze, 20th‑century painting offers three dif‑ ferent versions of the diagram which all renew painting art. The first is abstraction, which in the case of Piet Mondrian and, partly, Vassily Kandinsky, replace the diagram with a ›code‹ which can be compared with the binary code in the digital operation, where the qualities of the colour are to a certain extent comparable to the letters of an alphabet (op. cit., 73). The other is the direction of abstract expressionism, which in the case of Jackson Pollock and Morris Louis makes the whole image diagrammatic, in that the manual line fills the entirety and fails to create contours, delimita‑ tions and distinctions of any kind. Deleuze historically relates this tradition of painting the space ›between things‹ instead of things to J. M. W. Turner, and he finds in Pollock the ultimate »decomposi‑ tion of matter, which abandons us to its lineaments and granula‑ tions« (op. cit., 74). It is precisely this rhythm of the catastrophe diagram – a rhythm which emanates from the hand’s almost phys‑ ical‑material presence in the image in the form of »stick, brush, broom, rag, and even pastry bag« ahead of the paintbrush, which ascribes the hand’s movement to the eye’s impression (op. cit., 77). Pollock quite literally moves the screen from the horizontal of the wall (the optical) to the floor’s tactile ground (ibid.). The third is Bacon’s elaboration of the diagram. This goes neither in the di‑ rection of abstraction’s optical (›without hands‹) or catastrophe’s manual (›only hands‹) direction. In Bacon, the diagram is effective dogme 95 and the idiots · a new form of realism

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as a possibility for Figuration, in that instead of showing itself as abstraction or dominating the entire painting, it makes it possible to create precise and defined sensorial Figures under the patch, so to speak, with »a power of vibration and nonlocalization (the mouth that smiles or screams)« (op. cit., 77). This direction, where the diagram consists of both the sensa‑ tion and the frame (op. cit., 78), relates historically to Cézanne’s motif, which itself corresponded to the frame in a geometrical sense and to colour in sensation. Henri Maldiney, whose various studies of Cézanne are embedded in Deleuze’s readings, calls this exchange the work’s rhythm or breathing, which creates a phenomenological exchange between artist and world, world and viewer. In a well‑known analysis of one of Cézanne’s paintings of the Saint‑Victoire mountain, Maldiney writes: A red purple at the left edge of the painting, the shiny red to the right and more red furtive ones in the middle ensure the diffuse and precise dispersion, thereby sustaining an expansion of the gaze. Departing from each of these hotbeds the gaze is braced by more trajectories, which is why equal forces would make it flicker were it not suspended by the whole space. For this is one. Sky, earth and mountain are permeated by the same breath which, simultaneously, is the expression of their mutual exchange. (Maldiney [1993] 2003, 33)

Where Maldiney – with regard to Cézanne’s method – empha‑ sises the viewer’s sensation of the rhythm as breathing, which re‑manifests the painter’s phenomenological encounter with the open landscape, because the painter’s various sensory impres‑ sions are layered like heterogeneous, organised patches of colour, Deleuze emphasises the motif as an analogue diagram, which can modulate endlessly in the virtual field of sensations actualised by the painting. The diagram also has the potential to create a rhythm, which annuls the optical mastering of the surface as well as the classic figuration. Following on from C. S. Peirce’s thoughts on the icon that re‑ sembles its motif but also ›consists‹ of its diagram, and in that sense produces relations which »mark out possibilities of fact, but do not yet constitute a fact (the pictorial fact)« (Deleuze, op. cit., 72), 122

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Deleuze differentiates between analogue and digital diagrams.102 He believes that the painting is »the analogical art par excellence«, which becomes a language »by passing through a diagram« (op. cit., 82). Both abstract painters (such as Mondrian) and manual (such as Pollock) relate to the diagram’s analogue modulations as that which ›makes‹ painting, when there is no longer talk of a figura‑ tive likeness. As already stated, they use the diagram’s modulation differently. Mondrian develops his code through working with the image, in that the analogy is made into the object which is worked on, so analogy will »pass through a code rather than […] through a diagram« (op. cit., 82). On the other hand, Pollock allows the diagram to fill the whole canvas, in that he makes it into »the analogical flux itself, rather than making the flux pass through the diagram« (op. cit., 82). In this way Mondrian’s method al‑ lows the diagram to go beyond itself, in that it reveals itself in the code, while Pollock’s »no longer goes beyond itself in a code, but grounds itself in a scrambling« (ibid.). Bacon’s diagrammatical method lies in between these, but it is just as radical. He replaces the figurative painting’s perspec‑ tive with connections and collisions between planes (for example, vertical and horizontal), replaces chiaroscuro values with modula‑ tions through colours, and finally he turns the body as »mass and declination« into a size which »exceeds the organism and destroys the form‑background relationship« (ibid.). It is in this operation that Bacon’s diagrammatical method resembles Cézanne’s: By substituting for relations of value a juxtaposition of tints brought together in the order of the spectrum, modulation will define a double movement of expansion and contraction – an expansion in which the planes, and especially the horizontal and the vertical planes, are con‑ nected and even merged in depth; and at the same time, a contraction through which everything is restored to the body, to the mass, as a func‑ tion of a point of imbalance or a fall. It is through such a system that

102 He illustrates with the example of analogue modular synthesizers as opposed to digital integral synthesizers. It is possible for the senses to experience real moments with an analogue synthesizer, as the various modules are regulated in relation to one another. This regulation of when and how the sound is ac‑ tualised is diagrammatic. In digital synthesizers the diagrammatic operation is translated to sound through a binary data code.

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geometry becomes sensible, and sensations become clear and durable: one has »realized« the sensation, says Cézanne. Or, following Bacon’s formula, one has passed from the possibility of fact to the Fact, from the diagram to the painting. (Op. cit., 83)

According to Deleuze, Bacon has analogical language in com‑ mon with Cézanne, in that with him the motif is also found as a result of the geometry of the frame and the sensory qualities of the colours, but in Bacon the colours have an intense value, which further involves the contours of the bodily masses. For the contours in Bacon have – as in many expressionists – independent value. When they no longer function as a separation between form and ground, they can enter into a relationship with the painting’s structure as well as the body of the figure and function rather as a ›membrane‹ in a »relation of coexistence or proximity modulated by color« (op. cit., 84). Making the contour independent creates relations and convergences between the painting’s structure and figure in a modulation which sets powers free in order for the diagram to operate, meaning that »lines and colors are then able to constitute the Figure or the Fact, that is, to produce the new resemblance inside the visual whole, where the diagram must operate and be realized« (ibid.). It is not possible to physically sense the diagram, but neverthe‑ less it has real operative repercussions and can create physical, sensory and also analogical ›similitude‹ expressions in the shape of a Figure or a Fact, though these to a large extent hinder (in the classic sense) figurative readings. It is in the creation of diagrams that Bacon, working with contours, structures and colour effects in his non‑figurative Figures, creates a variable form, where an‑ other form of flat spatiality than the three‑dimensional illusion of depth can occur (become a Fact) on the canvas: There is neither an inside nor an outside, but only a continuous crea‑ tion of space, the spatializing energy of color. By avoiding abstraction, colorism avoids both figuration and narration, and moves infinitely closer to the pure state of a pictorial »fact« which has nothing left to narrate. This fact is the constitution or reconstitution of a haptic func‑ tion of sight. (Op. cit., 93)

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The diagram’s disruptive marks, modulations and colour ef‑ fects draw attention to the surface, demonstrating the optical organisation in the depth and making possible haptic sensations of warmth and cold, expansion and contraction (op. cit., 96), as relations between various pure and broken colour tones are cre‑ ated or decomposed (op. cit., 99). In other words, the diagram’s patches, strokes and non‑representing lines allow the viewer to maintain part of the sensations in the middle ground, the shallow depths, depicting »the foreground plane of the Figure and the background plane of the field«, which in this way create a haptic space (op. cit., 99). In the following I will consider the manifesto for Dogme 95 and its ten rules as a diagrammatical method, which in The Idiots stimulates the film’s detachment from dominant plot figurations, constructions and conventions towards new Figures and types of Fact. As with Bacon, Trier is not a pure expressionist, but seeks to develop the language of the image from within the image itself. The diagram of Dogme rules, similar to Bacon’s smeared zones, brushstrokes, re‑painting and patches, gives the possibility of performing a somewhat new orienting in the film image. The Dogme diagram – a generator of haptic compositions and modes of perception

The electronic and digital image is never stable, as it constantly re‑ generates through scanning and algorithmic codes. It is a »discon‑ tinued, fluctuating and pointillist image, both spatial and temporal unity are unknown to it« (Rodowick, 138). Trier’s experiments in The Kingdom I and II, creating haptic effects through the many image layers of the video medium, encouraged him to take the ini‑ tiative with the Dogme manifesto and thus set in motion a reme‑ diation of its style for the film medium.103 Just as in The Kingdom, 103 One can read Deleuze’s analyses of Francis Bacon’s diagrammatic method as a remediating analysis of Bacon’s way of assimilating and molesting the photograph in his work, with a view to strengthening the painting. According to Deleuze, Bacon is critical of the photographic figuration, explaining through a state‑ ment attributable to Lawrence how this is not because it is too true or accurate, but because it is not faithful enough (op. cit., 68.). It is because of this, Deleuze believes, that Bacon works on creating manual‑haptic deformations of the photograph’s figuration, so the diagram’s Figure or Figures can dominate the composi‑ tion and create new types of sensations.

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where he molested those conventions which, until then, had been valid for the production of series in the TV medium, he uses the Dogme rules as a diagrammatic method, a crowbar, with which to open the filmic conventions of dramaturgy and narrative. The first five rules are concerned with the production process of the Dogme films. Here it is decided that the chosen location must not be equipped with props from outside, that the music should be diegetic, that the camera should be hand‑held and follow the film (not vice versa), that it should be filmed in colour without lighting (though a single lamp can be mounted on the camera), and finally that optical work and filters are forbidden. Interestingly enough, these five rules in particular complement the qualities of the DV equipment used for Vinterberg’s The Celebration (Festen) in part and later The Idiots.104 This was not the intention when the Dogme rules were formulated, but this is the very thing Lev Manovich paid attention to as it »allows the filmmaker to literally be inside the action as it unfolds« (Manovich 2003, 19). The rules support everyone, in that the film‑maker and actors are present in such a way that the impression of immediacy in improvisation as well as in the camera’s capture of it is height‑ ened. When limitations are exposed as invariable Dogme rules, the diagrammatic modulation of the image surface is also pos‑ sible, and this made some particular style elements recognisable as Dogme traits no matter whether they were created by film or video technology. The production of an intensive form of realism, which for example is created in and with the hand‑held coverage of the film’s more or less improvised scenes, should in the follow‑ ing be read in relation to the diagram effect, which is the result of the collective Dogme rules. The diagrammatic method draws attention to the medium and the film screen as a hypermediated surface through which the classic distance between screen and viewer, which privileges empathy in the film narrative’s depth, is disturbed and potentially subverted. In addition, the haptic in‑ terface between the film screen and the viewer is activated. In the attempt to follow the camera’s dizzying recordings, which distort 104 For a detailed development of this, see C. Claire Thomson’s analysis of The Celebration (Thomson 2013a).

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and disturb the capture of a motif that is also often in motion – thus accentuating attention on the screen’s surface – the viewer is influenced affectively. Dizziness, nausea and even vomiting were frequent occurrences amongst audiences, as physical manifesta‑ tions of the first Dogme films. Whereas Francis Bacon, according to Deleuze, constantly transformed the tendency for figurative creation through the diagram’s lines, patches and smearing, so that intensities could be created (Figure and Fact) instead on the surface of the canvas, in The Idiots Trier subverts the formation of classic motifs and figures. The first five Dogme rules constitute the diagrammatic method for this. When the camera is hand‑held, and the light is natural, the colours become indistinct and at times turbid. The image’s grainy fuzziness, which accompanies the violent scenes the characters (especially Stoffer – Jens Albinus) find themselves in when they perform ›spastic jesting‹ in order to reach their ›inner idiot‹, in‑ tensifies the screen’s haptic surface level and causes the viewer to feel dizzy. Just as in Bacon, there is a great emphasis on the body and on how its boundaries can be attacked or modulated. A large part of the additional episodic ›action‹ actually depicts the body bordering on states of spasm or in attempted trans‑ gression. This is clear from the first scene, where the depressed and inhibited Karen (Bodil Jørgensen) is pressured along in the taxi because the group’s leader and ›Spaz‑in‑Chief‹, Stoffer, will not let go of her. This also applies to the corporeal blending of spontaneous play, impulse and molestation in the bathing scenes. It is likewise applicable to Stoffer’s unbridled attack on the com‑ munity official and his car, which prompts the group to intervene and forcibly immobilise Stoffer’s naked body. It happens to the shy Jeppe (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) when he is involuntary dragged to toilet by friendly bikers, who take him for a disabled and speech hindered person. It applies also to the group’s experiments with akward ways to stumble or fall. The uninhibited gorging on caviar and the attempt to carry out a gang bang.105 105 For analyses of the action/narrative plane in The Idiots, see Thomsen 2000b, 2000c, 2002 and 2004.

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In all these scenes it is the bodies that breach the boundaries – often in interplay with or in relation to the intervention of an unsympathetic outside world. Vulnerability, exposure, openness, spontaneity, joy and sorrow are emotions that are often present in and with the constant physical transformations of the bodies. To a large extent it is the body’s almost monstrous coordination of incompatible elements (ski jump on grass, wheelchair in nature, attack on car) that lead to spasms, submission, anger, orgasm, grief and laughter, making it impossible to see past the film’s af‑ fective influence.106 This level is created through the diagrammatic clarification of the composition plane: when the hand‑held camera ›sketches‹ diagrams in this way it assumes a kind of ›spasmodic physicalisa‑ tion‹, intensified by the first five Dogme rules. It is due to this that the viewer cannot avoid having their attention directed towards the medium’s continuous modulation of the screen’s surface, which provokes the affective sensations of Figure and Fact – and an encounter with a plane of intensity of a non‑figurative kind. The hand‑held rule in particular, and the prohibition of lighting and filters, become directly obvious and noticeable on the screen as »asignifying and nonrepresentative lines and zones, line‑strokes and color‑patches« (Deleuze 2013, 71). The lack of adequate light in relation to the demand on the limitations of colour film likewise increases the haptic modulation, in that the broken and granulated colour tones are intensified and can be seen as belonging to the surface of the screen. Here also Deleuze’s description of Bacon’s use of colour and light can be inspiring. As an extension of the colouristic tradition from van Gogh and onwards, he writes: 106 I here refer to Baruch de Spinoza’s concept of affect in his Ethics, book III: »By affect I understand affections of the body, by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or constrained, and at the same time the ideas of these affections« (Curley 1985, 493). It is important that affect is deter‑ mined through a direct influencing of the body. Examples might be poisoned food, which brings with it nausea, vomiting or death – or encounters with other people, which can provoke sadness or joy. In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari define the creation of art as a creation of ›sense blocks‹ of affects and precepts. These can be preserved in the form of art – independent of time and space – just as the concepts of philosophy also exist outside of time and the places which caused them. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari likewise use the recurrent affect as a physical form of affect, a tactile type of sensation which impacts on a non‑reflective plane. In an extension of this, Brian Massumi describes the autonomy of affect in Parables of the Virtual (2002) as an embedded corporeal experience of intensity, which cannot be fully expressed linguistically. Furthermore in Semblance and Event (2011) Massumi relates the concept of affect to the event and to the Lange‑James theory, where affect leads to sensations – and not vice versa.

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Colorism (modulation) does consist not only of relations of warm and cool, of expansion and contraction, which vary in accordance with the colors considered. It also consists of regimes of colors, the relation between these regimes, and the harmonies between pure tones and broken tones. What is called haptic vision is precisely this sense of colors. (Deleuze 2013, 113)

Though there is mention here of the painter’s active sense and usage of colour, the argument is still relevant to the blurred colour scheme that is the result of hand‑held unevenness, which is em‑ phasised in the editing, in jump‑cuts and the haptic accentuation of close‑up images. The body’s monstrous nakedness is depicted using the skin’s red and blue nuances and the greenish or yellow‑ ish mixing between them. In the following we will look closer at colour preferences and haptic blending, especially in close‑ups. As early as in the first scene, where the viewer is introduced to Karen in Dyrehaven park, the ochre yellow colour of her knitted sweater dominates the picture. This colour is supplemented by the reddish and brownish earth colours of Stoffer and Henrik’s (Troels Lyby) shirts in the taxi. In the following scene in the Rock‑ wool factory these expressions are intensified further by the deep orange colour of the factory logo and the boiler suits, contrasted with the strong blue of the factory guide’s work jacket and the mobility car, which is replete with an orange disability sticker. The car torpedoes the Rockwool packages and their orange logos several times and here is the first indication of the aesthetic of confrontational colours, which are scattered throughout the entire film: blue‑orange‑red, corresponding to skin tones.107 In the film’s most harmonious sequences the images are domi‑ nated, to a considerable degree, by the mixing of red‑yellow‑ orange. A good example is when Karen’s ›initiation‹ as a spaz is celebrated with a baptism of sorts in the swimming pool. Here,

107 Van Gogh was acquainted with and referenced the colour circle of the colour scale, where mixing red and yellow produces orange; blue and yellow gives green; and red and blue gives purple. In opposition to these harmonious blendings stands the contrast colours of blue and orange, red and green, yellow and purple. Charles Blanc, who wrote on Delacroix in Les Artistes de mon Temps (1876), was van Gogh’s source (cf. Bogue 2003a, p. 151). The expressionist Johannes Itten, who was the colour teacher in Bauhaus, for‑ malised this diagram in several books, including Kunst der Farbe (1961).

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Colour contrasts and mix during the Rockwool visit.

Susanne (Anne Louise Hassing), Karen (Bodil Jørgensen) and Jeppe (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) in the swimming pool surrounded by green, yellow and red colours.

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The faces merge together in a red‑yellow composition of skin, hair and bones.

with her head tilted horizontally, Karen’s face is seen in an in‑ timate close‑up encircled by the faces of Jeppe and Susanne. Afterwards as Karen allows her sorrow to be expressed in tears, Susanne and Jeppe’s consoling faces come closer, and the result is a blushing image, which slowly displaces the blue tinge caused by the chlorinated water. The blushing image, linked to Karen, repeats itself several times and most clearly in the final scene, where she visits her overly full (childhood) home. The warm or‑ ange colour is continuously found in Karen’s cardigan and the lamp by her side, but also at her side is the dark blue colour of her sister’s (Regitze Estrup) clothing and the pale blue of Anders‹ (Hans Henrik Clemensen) shirt. As the slap in the face connects, as a result of Karen’s abject spazzing behaviour with cake and cof‑ fee at the coffee table, the two colours collide in a chaotic jumble, before finally – when the camera’s gothic zig‑zag movements have calmed down – being neutralised by Susanne’s grey silk blouse. In this diagrammatic approach to the film one can state that the first five rules in the vow of chastity are related to produc‑ dogme 95 and the idiots · a new form of realism

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tion, enabling the creation of diagrammatic effects, while the last five are concerned with the film’s content and framework. Herein it is decided that the film must not contain so‑called »superficial action« (of the type which is contained in certain film genres, such as horror films, thrillers or excessively violent narratives), that the film must be set here and now (that is, it must not be moved either in historical time or in geographic space, thus hindering flashback and flash‑forward), that genre films are not accepted, that the film should be in 35mm (as has already been mentioned, this was dispensed with, but the films were shown in cinemas in 35mm), and finally that the director should not be named. The manifesto ends with an adjuration wherein the director signs a promise to refrain from any form of ›personal taste‹ as an artist in relation to ›works‹, in that the filmic ›truth‹ in the characters and the staging of scenes must be prioritised over ›good taste‹ and ›aesthetic considerations‹. The last five rules determine (mostly negatively) content, genre and framing, and concern the choices which are taken in the film’s pre‑ and post‑production phases. Together the ten rules create a diagram, making it possible to create chaos in the conventions that traditionally shape ex‑ pectations for a cinema film. Thus Deleuze’s description of the diagram’s effects in Bacon’s canvases can function succesfully in rounding off the diagrammatic body and colour analysis of Trier’s Dogme film The Idiots: bodies are thrown off balance, they are in a state of perpetual fall; the planes collide with each other; colors become confused and no longer delimit an object. In order for the rupture with figurative resemblance to avoid perpetuating the catastrophe, in order for it to succeed in producing a more profound resemblance, the planes, starting with the diagram, must maintain their junction; the body’s mass must integrate the imbalance in a deformation (neither transformation nor decompo‑ sition, but the »place« of a force); and above all, modulation must find its true meaning and technical formula as the law of Analogy. It must act as a variable and continuous mold, which is not simply opposed to relief in chiaroscuro, but invents a new type of relief through color. (Deleuze 2013, 83)

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There is no doubt that Trier’s inelegant use of the hand‑held camera, jump‑cuts, chaotic movement and the contrast of blue and red means that the filmic image planes collide and together support an aesthetic of the fall. Roland Bogue’s words, following on from Deleuze’s analysis of one of Bacon’s paintings, could also be applicable to the diagram’s modulating factor in The Idiots: It’s [the diagram’s] modulation generates haptic color relations, but these relations are themselves modulations, continuous and variable movements – oscillations, perturbations, flows, twists, spasms, jolts – that issue forth from interacting hues and result in the forms of the completed canvas, not as objects to be represented, but as products of a self‑forming process whereby color in its systole diastole unfolding ›spatializes space‹, spreads into monochrome fields, fills out figures, communicates across contour membranes. (Bogue 2003a, 157)

The diagrammatic effects, which in Trier’s The Idiots follow on from the Dogme rules, can thus be seen in an analytic extension of Francis Bacon’s style of deformed realism. As becomes clear in the above citation, they also have somewhat the same ambi‑ tion, namely to present a force of sense perception in a haptically organised image plane with reference to engendering affect. Trier renews the deformed realism style in The Idiots. Apart from the Dogme rules binding this style to a European avant‑ garde tradition of realism (Vertov, cinema‑vérité, nouvelle vague), Trier also frames the film in the tradition of performative realism, which emerged in the 1990s;108 simultaneously with the film’s release he published a manuscript and diary in a collected book (Trier 1998). This documents the film’s production process with intimate details on the director’s own emotional make‑up. As a back-stage performance the diary weaves itself intertextually with the middle-stage performances (Meyrowitz 1985), which repeat‑ edly break the filmic action in The Idiots in the form of Trier’s interviews with the actors.

108 Cf. the books Virkelighedshunger, edited by Britta Timm Knudsen and Bodil Marie Thomsen (2003), and Virkelighed, virkelighed!, edited by Karin Petersen and Mette Sandbye (2003), as well as Performative Realism, edited by Rune Gade and Anne Jerslev (2005).

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These interviews, which mimic the presentation of ›direct speech‹ and obvious statements in the TV media, clearly appear to be constructed. The actors speak as private persons about their understanding of what the film depicts, and about their feelings towards their fellow actors, with the interviews taking place a long time after the production is over. And though many of them have changed their appearance and hair styles, it is the characters‹ names and not the actors‹ own names that are used, as if the char‑ acters were authentic people. In mimicking a documentary or TV reportage’s illusion of direct speech, Trier attempts both to cast doubt on the film’s fictive point of enunciation and to strengthen the idea that it depicts an authentic experiment without a manu‑ script – while stretching the fictive field to also include new TV formats such as reality shows, which represent the TV medium’s simultaneous remediation of computer interactivity. The diary and the constructed interviews thus lead to the Dogme rules, as a further diagrammatic layer, but they modulate (in contrast to the rules) the fictive film’s position of enunciation, both in the expectations for and the reception of the film. Finally, linked to this is Jesper Jargil’s documentary film The Humiliated (1998), which followed the film’s creation closely, and which to a large extent strengthened the impression that the aim of the Dogme initiative was to find a new (realistic) form of authenticity.109 Deformation of the face and the fall of the body

Judged in accordance with the diagrammatic effects of the Dogme rules, The Idiots is without doubt the most successful of the Dogme films. The film amputates classic audience expectations of entertainment, as it clearly derides and questions the classic judgements of film aesthetics. The example with Karen shows a deformation from an ordinary face to a crying, spazzing and dis‑ torted face, which is finally reduced to a grimacing abject function of cake and coffee. It is in this scene that the viewer simultaneously 109 The film was followed in the year 2000 by The Exhibited (concerning Trier’s exhibition with accom‑ panying performance, Psychomobile #1: The World Clock, 1999) and in 2002 by The Purified (concerning the Dogme intitiative and the Dogme brothers). These three films by Jesper Jargil together form the trilogy »The Kingdom of Credibility«.

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realises a discord between on the one hand (finally) being able to identify empathically with Karen (as a person who has been traumatised), and on the other hand being hit by affective disgust and idiosyncrasy (along with her family) at the sight of her abject secretion. This tension between close proximity and distance is carefully arranged, because the final scene, which makes it pos‑ sible to understand the eccentric Karen and thus (maybe for the first time in the film) grasp the extent of the idiot position, is also interrupted explosively by the stinging slap in the face. That the viewer is ›hit‹, so to speak, mid‑way between two feelings – the identification with Karen’s emotions ›from within‹ and the revulsion at Karen’s abject distastefulness seen ›from without‹ – with the slap in the face, allows them to sense the physical space that exists, like an interface, in between the cinema seat and the screen, according to the definition proposed by the Australian art and media theorist Anna Munster. She describes the aesthetic potentials in the interface, defined as the duplicity of »being in the body and representing/mapping the body from the outside« (Munster 2006, 142; author’s italics). In the chapter »In‑ terfaciality« Munster describes how digital interfaces or foldings between human ›matter‹ and machine ›code‹ can create affective qualities (op. cit., 139), as the matter in the interface has become »a substrate readable and accessible only in the third person, and the third person is a perspective rendered by the machine« (op. cit., 141). Following on from Benjamin’s positive reflection on the film medium (Benjamin 1936) and in keeping with Deleuze’s likewise positive description of the film as a ›spiritual automaton‹ (Deleuze 1986), the technologically enabled third perspective in the interface is understood as a contribution to the creation of new forms of affective effects – not necessarily equivalent to filmic excess, but rather in the form of »expressive dearth« (op. cit., 140). This aesthetically reflective definition of the interface also makes it possible to see how Trier’s diagrammatic method in The Idiots succeeds in intervening in the textural material and creates an affectively engaging interface, involving the audience physically. The hand‑held camera aesthetic, the agitated edit‑ ing, the contrasting colours and colliding bodies together create dogme 95 and the idiots · a new form of realism

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diagrammatic effects which are eventually released by the slap in the face. This brings the agitation (and, for some, revulsion and nausea) to a halt, by which the identification with Karen as well as the abject involvement in the situation seen from with‑ out can give access to the interface’s third position. The camera movements in the final scene of The Idiots are characterised by a third, diagrammatic modulating instance, which enables the viewer’s experience of a folding between ›being in Karen’s body‹ and ›seeing it from without‹.110 This double perspective, which the true idiot of course can never attain,111 is created in the diagram’s modulating organisation, which through the inclusive gesture of the slap in the face allows the viewer to experience a third, haptic position – in between subject and object. The experience of this affectively inclusive position occurs on the background of ›expressive dearth‹, in that the film up until then has given nei‑ ther aesthetic pleasure nor representational meaning. The slap in the face short‑circuits and implodes both expectations, and it becomes possible to experience (in the form of dearth) the classic diagram for filmic identification and enjoyment. With the realisation of the Dogme rules in The Idiots, filmed with DV equipment,112 Lars von Trier creates a new diagram‑ matic field of modulation, which furthers the experiences of The Kingdom I and II (16mm recordings and the reproduction in the TV format). The result is more important than the rules being followed in detail, which is why the method (DV recording that Trier himself, to a comprehensive degree, is responsible for) at hand is the best technological answer to realising the desired aesthetic result.

110 This shared interface, made possible by the camera being involved as a third instance, is described tellingly on the DVD cover of the English‑American version: »a film about idiots, made by idiots, for idi‑ ots«. 111 Cf. my reading of The Idiots (Thomsen 2000b). It should also be mentioned that Akira Kurosawa’s The Idiot (1951), based on Dostoyevsky’s novel of the same name, can be seen as a kind of source for Trier’s The Idiots, in that the idiot’s incomprehensible goodness, depicted in many close‑up images of faces, which are reflected and doubled, here also becomes a kind of »anti‑aesthetic poison« (Chin 2005), which in the implosion of social power structures and conventions, reveals the field of tragedy. 112 It was Jesper Jargil, utilising a DV camera in the production of the film The Exhibited (1996), con‑ cerning Trier’s performance work Psychomobile # 1: The World Clock, who together with Søren Kragh‑Ja‑ cobsen has gained the honour of being the reason why Dogme film was shot on DV (Thorsen 2010, 293).

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In The Idiots as well as the two other films in the Golden Heart trilogy, the film medium is remediated, so realism is given an affective accent. The experiments with remediating the film me‑ dium across various analogue and digital film formats is exposed differently in Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark respec‑ tively, which precede and follow The Idiots. In Breaking the Waves, shot on 35mm film, the hand‑held, often shaky and out‑of‑focus close‑ups of faces and bodies in physical and psychological agi‑ tation or affect are contrasted by the lingering reproductions of painterly landscapes in the chapter divisions, which, however, are far from analogous with classic, romantic landscape painting. The landscapes in the film each contain an added digital element (a driving car, trickling water, drifting fog, etc.) on the background of Per Kirkeby’s free interpretations of romantic landscapes. In Dancer in the Dark, which is predominantly shot in DV format, the reflection of remediation becomes clearest in the phasing in and out between on the one hand the broken colour scheme, which characterises everyday life, and on the other hand the song and dance scenes saturated with colour and pixelation (recorded with 100 cameras), where the digital overloading of sensory sound and image material is likewise experienced as an intensifying, added element. In her article on how electronic signal modulation is also found in the digital field, Anna Munster addresses the integration of analogue and digital processes in the current art scene. She writes: In cross‑signal processing audiovisual events, especially in live and somewhat aleatory circumstances, digital synthesis loses its tendency toward the synthetic a priori. Sensation that finds lines of expression through cross‑signal processing is no longer causal nor is it a fixed phenomenon. Rather it becomes visual signification, sonic visualiza‑ tion, diagramming a resonating, moving architecture. Not structural but relational. Not synthesized but conjunctive. Something that builds rather than is built. A digital syn‑aesthetics finding its compositionality in analogue mode. (Munster 2010, 11)

This way of perceiving The Idiots as an aesthetic, diagrammatic crowbar with which to open the other two films in the Golden dogme 95 and the idiots · a new form of realism

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Heart trilogy is in many ways different from readings which see the film as realistic in a more or less classic sense.113 The validity of these interpretations should not be contested, but the following will argue further that the trilogy, viewed collectively, exercises more than merely a recognisable avant‑garde aesthetic. The tril‑ ogy, in the way in which it is programmatically developed in The Idiots, allows for diagrammatic modulations of haptic‑realistic art. These create deformations, spasms and affective planes of intensity in the form of non‑organic »bodies without organs« (BwO), defined in the following: Thus the BwO is never yours or mine. It is always a body. It is no more projective than it is regressive. It is an involution, but always a contem‑ porary, creative involution. The organs distribute themselves on the BwO, but they distribute themselves independently of the form of the organism; forms become contingent, organs are no longer anything more than intensities that are produced, flows, thresholds, and gradi‑ ents. »A« stomach, »an« eye, »a« mouth: the indefinite article does not lack anything; it is not indeterminate or undifferentiated, but expresses the pure determination of intensity, intensive difference. (Deleuze and Guattari 2013, 191)114

One merely needs to consider the gang bang scene in The Idiots to recall the BwO’s uniform plane of intensity unfolded in eating, penetration, chasing, dance and not least an undifferentiated pile of pure bodies. These singular BwO, which lay bare the plane of intensity, are illustrated in Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark, which express the affective powers of painting and music respectively.115

113 Jerslev provides a fine example of realism activating and revising analysis (Jerslev 2002). 114 Deleuze and Guattari’s definition is based on Spinoza’s ›attributes‹, which in the Ethics (1677) des‑ ignates those forces and intensities that a particular substance or matrice produces, as well as their own summation of a plane of immanence of desire (Deleuze and Guattari 2013, 191), and Antonin Artaud’s writings on the Theatre of Cruelty in, amongst others, Heliogabale and Les Tarahumaras (Oevres Completes 1956‑1994), where the body’s singular intensities shake themselves free from the organism’s organisation in ›self‹ and ›other‹ (Deleuze and Guattari 2013, 184). 115 In my articles (Thomsen 2002 and 2004) this perspective is pursued in thematic readings. The fol‑ lowing notes the stylistic‑philosophical analytic perspective of these.

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CHAPTER 5

Golden Hearts 1 and 3 Affective outflow into the landscape and the music

The abject deformation (and the encounter with a filmic interface) in The Idiots definitively opens an affective field in Trier’s produc‑ tion. The film contains some of the grotesque elements that were opened up by the gateway in The Kingdom II, but classic genre readings are undermined from beginning to end. The viewers‹ doubt over what is being presented to them is vented in the clos‑ ing scene’s unfiltered affection image of Karen’s candid face. Her abject spastic jesting results in a radical deformation (the slap in the face), which, in part with the help of the hand‑held camera, involves the viewer, asking the central question from the perspec‑ tive of the idiot: What is a human face? The Idiots opens with this deformation, involving the viewer in something that should be impossible, namely a filmic interface – and this without calling upon hypnotism’s fusion of planes of reality, as in the Europa trilogy. In the following analysis of Breaking the Waves, I will show116 how the character Bess also invites 116 In short, the film concerns the devout Bess McNeill (Emily Watson) and her marriage to the non‑native Jan Nyman (Stellan Skarsgård), who works on an oil platform off the coast of Scotland. Bess is fragile, and in missing her husband she prays that he may return home, which happens when Jan has an accident in work, paralysing him from the neck down. During the course of his debilitation, which shows no improvement, he wishes to set her free so she can experience physical love again. She is appalled but he asks her to seek out erotic relationships for his sake, in order for him to stay alive. She obeys, despite warnings from the strictly religious community, to which her mother (Sandra Voe), her sister‑in‑law Dodo (Katrin Cartlidge) and the psychiatrist Dr Richardson (Adrian Rawlins) belong, and Bess slides further and further into prostitution. She is rejected by the church and by her family, but she maintains her strong faith, and despite the fact that she ends dying of the injuries that she has somewhat inflicted on herself by way of a sadistic assault, she believes until the end that she can save Jan. He recovers miraculously, and with this outcome even Dr Richardson believes that she should be described as ›good‹ rather than as suffering from a psychiatric condition. Jan ensures that her body is snatched from the judgemental parish so that he, together with his friends, can release it into the sea from a ship. This action is answered from above with the ringing of church bells over the landscape.

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the viewer to participate in an affectively determined interface, where the third instance, which makes it possible to see ›oneself‹ from without, while one experiences ›oneself‹ from within, is carried out by an animation of the Romantic landscape painting. Where Caspar David Friedrich in Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) or Moonrise over the Sea (1822) allows the people in the foreground of the pictures, with their backs turned, to stare longingly towards a lost, often fog-covered nature – which although sublimely depicted is controlled visually – Trier allows his main character Bess to be engulfed in/by the landscape. As in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), the viewer is offered extreme close-up images of a passionate face.117 But the immersion in Bess’s facial expression rather invites the viewer to linger on the micro movements in the affective expressions of the skin and eyes. In Breaking the Waves these haptic descriptions of the face also come to include the deterritorialised and porous landscape, which in the wind and rain challenges existence. Where Joan’s (Maria Falconetti) transfiguration from human to saint goes through the rising smoke of the fire, Bess’ transfiguration occurs through the element of water towards the seabed. Joan’s body transcends its earthly existence through the purification of fire and air; Bess’ unites with the elements of earth and water. Her perils describe becoming one with the landscape’s non-human molecular point zero. Bess remains linked to the bodies without organs (BwO) of immanence, to expression’s blocks of sensation, which remains true to the sensory encounter, while opening for a virtual creation of events. Transcendence towards the spiritual must be described here rather as the virtual penetration into immanence, a confirmation of eternal becoming (aion), which runs parallel with specified time and space (chronos).118 This can be formulated thus:

117 Deleuze writes on Dreyer’s so-called »aesthetic method«: »[T]he more the image is spatially closed, even reduced to two dimensions, the greater is its capacity to open itself on to a fourth dimension which is time, and on to a fifth which is Spirit, the spiritual decision of Jeanne or Gertrud« (Deleuze 1986, 17; Deleuze underlines). Joan of Arc is Jeanne d’Arc in French, as in Dreyer’s title in Danish: Jeanne d’Arcs lidelse og død. Gertrud refers to another of Dreyer’s films, Gertrud (1964). 118 Cf. more on this in Thomsen 2001.

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Eternity is not an immortality which remains tied to a certain linear temporality, simply put, a before‑and‑after. Rather eternity is here and now. We might say that it parallels, or doubles, our own finitude. This is the infinite as ground of the finite. (O’Sullivan 2012, 23)

Bess’ transfiguration, which evokes the landscape, can further be described – with O’Sullivan – as an intensive, non‑conceptual knowledge, which opposes the highest wisdom (in Spinoza) that beauty »expresses all of God from God’s point of view […and] thus assumes a perspective of eternity; or in other terms, the finite understands and accesses the infinite of which it is a part« (op.cit., 27).119 This happens, one might say – independent of whether one interprets the ending religiously or ironically – when the body’s disappearance in the sea’s abyss gives rise to the church bells‹ eternal perspective on the landscape.120 Similarly, Dancer in the Dark develops a relation between an infinite (aion) and a finite (chronos) perspective.121 Selma’s (Björk) haptic‑sensorial microperception of sounds and rhythm‑ sare transformed into the music’s haptic‑auditive field of inten‑ sity. The dream intermezzos of classic film musicals are here re‑functionalised into virtual interventions, which actively revise and speed up the current narrative. The colour‑saturated musi‑ cal sequences reinterpret, from the perspective of aion, Selma’s demise, which unfolds in earthy colours on a social‑realistic level according to chronos‹ coordinates of time and space. Selma finds the infinite rhythms of music in everything: the noise of the fac‑ tory presses coming into contact with the metal, the clicking of the peg as it hits the spokes on a bicycle wheel, the crackle of the 119 Cf. also Deleuze on eternity (Deleuze 1988, 65). 120 Cf. both Kyndrup (1998) and Thomsen (1998). 121 In short, the film is about the almost blind Selma Jezkova (the Icelandic singer Björk), who loves musicals. She works hard in order to save up money for her son Eugene’s (Vladica Kostic) eye operation. The money is stolen by her landlord, Bill Houston (David Morse), who intends to cover his and his wife Linda’s (Cara Seymour) excessive spending. Bill’s murder is the price Selma pays to recover the money, which she then takes to the doctor who is to carry out her son’s eye operation. During the court process, her friends Kathy (Catherine Deneuve) and Jeff (Peter Stormare) find out about the existence of the money and they want to use it to pay for a lawyer so that Selma may avoid the death penalty. Selma declines, is hanged, and the money fulfils its original function: to save Eugene’s sight. The money and lack of it thus makes up the undercurrent associated with secrets and hiding places, but which to a large extent deter‑ mines the film’s fabula, while Selma’s secret – her increasing blindness and, as a result of this, the rhythm – occasions the virtual level of the musical sequences.

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gramophone needle as it touches the nylon LP, the clunking of train wheels as they hit the tracks and the resonance of footsteps on the metal of the prison staircase. With these non‑human, me‑ chanical rhythms, Selma connects herself to the here and now of the infinite which, activated in this way, can repeat what hap‑ pens in her finite life. The joy Selma generates through creating music links to the greater narrative frameworks of the virtual, indicating an affective pre‑personal field, which transcends her character. Selma’s body is the expressive exponent of the music, just as Bess’ facial expressions reflect the landscape with which she finally becomes one. Where the viewer in Breaking the Waves is offered contact with the virtual infinite in the minutest twitches of Bess’ face and in the landscape’s large‑scale level, in Dancer in the Dark this is offered through Selma’s sensory responsiveness to everyday rhythms, so the greatest musical affect occurs because of the tiniest sound. In Bess’ case, and Deleuze and Guattari’s reasoning, the Chris‑ tian faciality (visagéité) deterritorialises,122 in that the human face proliferates out into the uncontrollable landscape. Classic film interpretations are questioned and the viewer’s understanding is cast into doubt. One cannot unequivocally affirm the interpreta‑ tion of the chiming church bells in the final scene, because it is not clear whether one should believe in divine miracles or resign oneself to irony. And it is precisely through this that it is possible to realise the classic viewer position. Now free of the framework, the viewer – as in the interface – is able to see themselves. In Breaking the Waves, the changes in Bess’ haptically described face, which in the course of the film deterritorialises Christian faciality, become the diagrammatic trail which the viewer must follow affectively in order for the outflow of passion in the infinite to achieve interpretive validity at all. In Deleuze and Guattari’s sense, Dancer in the Dark deals with a deterritorialization of the 122 In chapter 7 of A Thousand Plateaus, »Year Zero: Faciality«, Deleuze and Guattari maintain a link between the Christian faith and the particular anthropomorphic stratification which creates a relation between the face (and its holes) and the landscape (white wall). The relation creates a dynamic, dualistic interpretive unity in the Western landscape painting’s relationship between the face’s foreground and the landscape’s depth, in that the Western white man’s vision will always be prime (see Deleuze and Guattari 2013, 195). There is no doubt that the term ›faciality‹ was developed by Guattari in The Machinic Unconscious (Guattari 2011).

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musical refrain.123 Here themes from the greatest romantic film musical of all, The Sound of Music,124 are re‑figured together with Björk’s own compositions, which are experienced in the film’s music and dance sequences as existing based on the (digitally recorded and remediated) rhythms and noise formations of real sounds.125 The music score is built up over rhythmic real sounds that affectively‑haptically make up the diagram the viewers must follow in order to reach beyond the level of mere representation. Through the experience of the music’s here‑and‑now in the musi‑ cal’s virtually interpreted ›dream sequences‹, the film gives access to a parallel, infinite plane of experience. If the viewer resists following the various asubjectifying dia‑ grams of the two films, he/she is merely witness to misogynistic narratives concerning female victims. If one follows the diagrams that are found in the haptic immersion into Bess’ passionate fa‑ cial expressions of wonder, joy, fear and loneliness, or in Selma’s passionate conversion of haptic noise into rhythms with wholly unexpected musical sensations, then contact with a virtual plane of events is established. This occurs by direct sensing, through the physical‑affective influencing of the viewer’s nervous system. It is through these diagrammatical actualisations that the films allow access to an affirmative register where life can be experienced as a creation or constant transformation, like an eternal recurrence (in line with Nietzsche) of the same, because intensities and affects belonging to the BwO in an infinite register desire repetition. And only in this way is an ethical level (beyond morality) linked to our passionate existence, as it is only life as immanent creation which,

123 In chapter 11 of A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari make »1837 – On the Refrain« into a substantial instance of striving for territorialization or making homely in both humans and animals (birds), through creating a refrain. It can also, however, appear to be deterritorialising when the refrain stops being functional in order to – in and with the expression of rhythm – go beyond the territorial marking of func‑ tion, environment and action. The expressive, stylistic qualities of the refrain can establish new relations in art and reality (Deleuze and Guattari 2013, 361). There is no doubt that this term ›refrain‹ was developed by Guattari in The Machinic Unconscious (Guattari 2011). 124 Trier also mentions TV broadcasts from his childhood of the many dance musicals with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, as well as Gene Kelly, which were choreographed to the minutest detail, as inspiration for the film (DVD: Dancer in the Dark). 125 On the film’s audio commentary track, Lars von Trier and sound designer Per Streit recount how they had wanted yet more real sounds than actually occur in the final film and how the ›hacking up‹ of the music could have been mixed with Björk’s compositions. This was one of the disputed issues between di‑ rector and composer during the course of filming.

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according to Deleuze, can actually return (O’Sullivan, 33) – and which can confirm existence in an ethos of life force (élan vital). Following on from Spinoza’s Ethics, Deleuze develops the description of consciousness as an awareness of what benefits our coenaesthesia and our ability to cope, and what impedes our self‑ expression: »Consciousness is the passage, or rather the awareness of the passage from these less potent totalities to more potent ones, and vice versa. It is purely transitive« (Deleuze 1988, 21). This view of consciousness and coping as linked to affective expe‑ riences of various kinds paves the way for the following reflection: In this way, Ethics, which is to say, a typology of immanent modes of existence, replaces Morality, which always refers existence to trans‑ cendent values. Morality is the judgment of God, the system of Judgment. But Ethics overthrows the system of judgment. The opposition of values (Good‑Evil) is supplanted by the qualitative difference of modes of existence (good‑bad). (Deleuze 1988, 23)

As has been mentioned, it is the diagram’s direct establishing of affective contact surfaces with the field of ethics, understood as »a typology of immanent modes of existence« (op. cit), which in Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark makes it possible for a partial detachment to take place from binary codes of representa‑ tion, the organism’s reflection, the face and the stratified refrain. This is summed up precisely in A Thousand Plateaus, almost as if the authors had these two films in mind at time of writing: There is no more face to be in redundancy with a landscape, painting, or little phrase of music, each perpetually bringing the other to mind, on the unified surface of the wall or the central swirl of the black hole. Each freed faciality trait forms a rhizome with a freed trait of land‑ scapity, picturality, or musicality. This is not a collection of part‑objects but a living block, a connecting of stems by which the traits of a face enter a real multiplicity or diagram with a trait of an unknown land‑ scape, a trait of painting or music that is thereby effectively produced, created, according to quanta of absolute, positive deterritorialization – not evoked or recalled according to systems of reterritorialization. (Deleuze and Guattari 2013, 222)

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The most essential thing in chapter 7, »Year Zero: Faciality«, is that year zero (the birth of Christ) signifies the caesura which in fine art as well as in architecture, and later in film, creates an interpretive relation between face and landscape according to the »white wall/black hole« system (Deleuze and Guattari op. cit., 196), where faces call to mind landscapes, and where landscapes evoke faces (ibid.).126 The white man’s Christian face thus creates the strata (including racism) which we in the West orient ourselves by. If one is to deterritorialise this model, one must follow passion, love and life. One cannot, however, merely return to a condition before faciality, to »the presignifying and presubjective semiotics of primitive peoples« (op. cit., 220), but must annul interpreta‑ tion and meaning by actively submerging into »the black hole of subjective consciousness and passion« (ibid.) in order to be capable of establishing: a nonsubjective, living love in which each party connects with unknown tracts in the other without entering or conquering them, in which the lines composed are broken lines. Only on your face and at the bot‑ tom of your black hole and upon your white wall will you be able to set faciality traits free like birds, not in order to return to a primitive head, but to invent the combinations by which those traits connect with landscapity traits that have themselves been freed from the landscape and with traits of picturality and musicality that have also been freed from their respective codes. (Op. cit., 221)

These almost manifesto‑like formulations, published in French in 1980, could also be valid in challenging melodrama’s genre form and the description of ›goodness‹ which Trier unfolds in the 1990s Golden Heart trilogy, when he tests the powers in the voices of the physically ill, the idiot and the nomad respectively. It is here worth citing Félix Guattari’s description of how leg‑ islative and psychological metalanguage to a large extent forms control measures for the regulation of the individual person’s

126 In the film’s field this is created by the relationship between camera and screen; Deleuze and Guat‑ tari themselves name Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc as the film which shows this relation par excellence (Deleuze and Guattari 2013, 206).

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lack of a ›normal‹ facial expression and refrain through the ques‑ tion: »does it pass or not, is it made of signification?« (Guattari [1979] 2011, 95). Dr Richardson, the psychologist in Breaking the Waves, is given this function as he, in the post‑mortem exami‑ nation after Bess’ death, has to answer the question of whether she should be diagnosed as »psychotic«, »neurotic« or merely »good«. In Dancer in the Dark it is the lawyer who, in legisla‑ tive metalanguage, links Selma’s lies about her familial origin together with the true testimony (for example, that she is almost blind), which problematises her claim to be in the country at all. Both Bess and Selma are denied passage through the regulat‑ ing, significant discourse, and thus it is possible for them to be figures of transformation. The power of the rejected

While the character of Karen in The Idiots can be regarded as a victim or, in an etymological sense, an idiot (Greek ›private per‑ son‹), who like Dostoyevsky’s idiot lacks the ability to be sociable and precisely for that reason opens abysses in the lives of others, then the characters of Bess and Selma are literally rejected and sacrificed by the societies to which they belong. In both films, however, we see how their active choices – to go down the route of (self) sacrifice – determine the health of Bess’ husband and Selma’s son respectively (cf. Thomsen 2002 and 2006). In other words, a change takes place from depicting a victim in The Idiots – who through an abject strategy (Karen’s spastic jesting) can form a creative distance, but also a possible renewal of the oppressive society – to depicting (self) sacrifice, where it is the person who is abjected (Bess as a whore and Selma as a murderer). The sacrifice can thus be sanctioned (by the church, the psychological system of control and the law) and then take place outside the church community and society, so to speak. It is, amongst other things, the thematic difference between being a victim and being sacri‑ ficed which, as described above, creates another affective level for filmic sensory perception in that it is less possible to identify with Bess and Selma than it is with Karen. The first two are outside the law, outside the narrative, outside the aesthetic register. They are 146

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described like Oedipus in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex as belonging to a register outside the narrative.127 Julia Kristeva works with the relation between abjection and the figure of sacrifice in the religious constitution of society (Kristeva [1980] 1982). She describes how new mothers are held outside the Jewish religion128 because their bodily secretions mark the semi‑ otic division between being and not being, a subject who has the (father’s) right to speak (Kristeva 1982, 94). In Christianity, on the other hand, the abjections of the sacrificed Christ are integrated with the incorporation of bread (body of Jesus) and wine (blood of Jesus) in the Communion; but it is also made clear in Catholic confessions and in absolution how the Old Testament’s exclusion of the abject border phenomena are reinterpreted and become part of the transformation from body to spirit. In secular socie‑ ties artistic transformations can, according to Kristeva, become a kind of channel for abject impulses. These can metaphorically or figuratively rewrite the indications of abjection in culture, or the artist can make direct use of the abject material. Composi‑ tion and rhythm investigate the transformation from sacrifice to making sacred, which has been lost, and which modern society can only integrate with some difficulty.129 The abject semiotic interface between language and non‑language is not processed in art in order to transform the abject so that society’s religion, judicial system, ethical and aesthetic judgements can endure. But there will always be some kind of challenging of the boundaries for cultural norms, which according to Kristeva are valid in lit‑ erature’s utilisation of, for example, vulgar expressions, and in film’s searching for image types that transgress boundaries (for example, in the horror genre).

127 Oedipus understands that he has both murdered his father and become guilty of an incestuous rela‑ tionship with his mother. The result is self‑sacrifice. He gouges out his own eyes, seeks exile and is buried in an unmarked grave (cf. Thomsen 1998). 128 In the Old Testament, the writings of the third book of Moses, Leviticus, Chapter 12, it is described how a new mother should be regarded as impure for seven days after a birth if she has given birth to a boy, or 14 days after if she has given birth to a girl. She must likewise not enter the sanctuary for 33 days if she has given birth to a son and for 66 days if she has given birth to a girl. In addition, the boy should be cir‑ cumcised eight days after birth, which Kristeva considers to be a significant ascription of importance on the son in relation to the laws of the religion as opposed to the girl (Kristeva 1982, 94). 129 According to Sara Beardsworth’s reading of Kristeva it is the »impossible mourning«, which be‑ comes art’s pivotal point in modernity (Beardsworth 2004, 164).

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Lars von Trier’s aesthetic tour de force of the victim phenom‑ enon and sacrifice in connection with the Golden Heart trilogy’s investigation of the good as a driving force130 can clearly be de‑ scribed as an investigation of the abject and its power rather than as a misogynistic depiction of female victims and sacrificed women. The films take their starting points in the discourses on abjection, which lie in close proximity to the female or mother’s body, after which they are twisted so the audience has opportunity to iden‑ tify with or take up the position of the victim – or alternatively be repelled by the film’s passionate obstinacy.131 In extension of the aesthetics in The Kingdom I and II Trier works with a direct influence on the public’s senses, which punctures Romantic atone‑ ment and idealisation to the advantage of intensity and affect. It is worth noting, however, that the access to this level is achieved in a melodramatic way, as it is the description of the mother’s loss, the resignation or rejection of one’s child, which in the films lead to the affective endings. In accordance with the ›weepy‹ film’s recipe of the mother renouncing her sovereign position to the advantage of the patriarchal instance of upbringing, the films’ ›point of no re‑ turn‹ scenes are found in Karen lingering on the photograph of her dead child, in Selma’s choice of Gene’s eyesight over motherhood and in the mother’s front door remaining closed to Bess.132 But the point is that the endings in no way support the lamentations of maternal melodrama and thus the strengthening of the patriarchal supremacy. Instead one can almost say that the abject leftovers and

130 Apart from the reference to Dreyer’s film Ordet, which contains a miracle, and Gertrud, which de‑ scribes the yearning and abandonment to love (Trier 1996, 4‑5), Lars von Trier states (in »Von Trier’s 100 eyes«, the extra material on the Dancer in the Dark DVD, as well as elsewhere) that the source of the trilogy was the fairytale Guld Hjerte (Golden Heart), where the little girl gives everything (including, finally, her heart) to the prince with the words »I’ll be fine anyway« (see also Schepelern 2000, 213). In the »Director’s note – this film is about ›good‹“, Trier also explains the project in this way: »For a long time I have been wanting to conceive a film in which all driving forces are ›good‹. In the film there should only be ›good‹, but since the ›good‹ is misunderstood or confused with something else, because it is such a rare thing for us to meet, tensions arise« (Trier 1996, 20). 131 There is no instance in Breaking the Waves to show that Trier was inspired by Nietzsche’s castigation of the Christian good (and the linking of this with the woman’s goodness) in, for example, Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche [1886] 1990). However, the connection is all the more obvious because Bess’ figure borrows so much from the Christ figure’s suffering and death. The difference is that the ultimative abjection, the body, which is also the ultimative proof of faith, with which Jesus assumes all sin (and becomes good), in Bess’ case confirms the power of physical love. As in Kristeva, the abjection forms the basis for the Chris‑ tian incorporation of it, in Communion. 132 Cf. Linda Williams (1984), Mary Ann Doane (1987), E. Ann Kaplan (1987).

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bodies shape themselves into a kind of BwO, whose influence is a more unpredictable force. Breaking the Waves and »faciality«

The affective style that involves the viewer directly sets the tone in the first scene of the trilogy, where Bess’ direct camera gaze punc‑ tures the ›white wall/black hole‹ relation, which Dreyer mastered. Bess’ face mimics Joan’s, and the editing between their faces and the priests/the scribes is remarkably similar. The same is true in relation to the faces of Bess and Joan when they turn to their gods. But there is one marked difference here. The direct camera gaze, in which the viewer is captured in Breaking the Waves,133 can be seen parallel with Bess’ private conversations with God, which per‑ haps becomes most obvious in the chapter »Bess’ Sacrifice«, where the final conversation ends with her looking directly into the cam‑ era, at the audience. In other words, the viewer is assigned a God’s‑ eye view, following and thus sanctioning her decision. Before this film, the direct look into the camera was an avant‑garde exception, practised by, amongst others, Godard and Bergman. Because Trier radicalises the look by giving the viewer a gaze that sanctions, the stratification of the ›white wall/black hole‹ is perforated – as when the representative illusion is broken to the advantage of an affective result, which opens to direct, diagrammatic delineations in and of physically operative landscapes: ›seeing‹ becomes an event, an act of witnessing. The result of this gaze‑like interface can be compared with the image which Brian Massumi uses to explain how thoughts are real and transformative – and not merely reflections of the real: Thought strikes like lightning, with sheering ontogenetic force. It is felt. The highest operation of thought is not to choose, but to harbour and convey that felt force, repotentialized. The thinking is not contained in the designations, manifestations, and significations of language, as 133 Some of Bess’ most explicit direct gazes into the camera are 1) by the church wall, 2) behind her veil on the way to the altar, 3) when her husband, Jan, takes her virginity, 4) in bed after she has prayed to God to send Jan home, 5) when Jan comes home from hospital, 6) when she thanks God just before her (self) sacrifice on the ship.

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owned by a subject. These are only partial expressions of it: pale re‑ flections of its flash. The thinking is all along the line. It is the process: its own event. To think along the line, conveying and magnifying its creative momentum, does not involve a mastery of it. The tarantella of thought is a mimickry of that event, not a mirroring or moulding of expression to content. There is nothing, actually, in thought as such with which to conform or correspond. It only has force to deform. Thinking is of potential. (Massumi 2002a, xxxi‑xxxii; author’s italics)

The vison‑like interface, which confuses the ›white wall/black hole‹ relation, involves the body in the thought.134 Bess’ expres‑ sive‑haptic face in close‑up makes the illusion of depth, as well as the film’s story, into a backdrop for a diagrammatic field of events which, although invisible, allow an affective access to the film’s often pathos‑filled scenes.135 Lars von Trier himself says of the static composition in Breaking the Waves: One normally chooses a style for a film in order to highlight a story. We’ve done exactly the opposite. We’ve chosen a style that works against the story, which gives it the least opportunity to highlight itself. […] What we’ve done is to take a style and put it over the story like a filter. Like encoding a television signal, when you pay in order to see a film: here we are encoding a signal for the film, which the viewer will later ensure they decode. The raw, documentary style which I’ve laid over the [Panavision] film and which completely annuls and contests it, means that we accept the story as it is. That is, at any rate, my theory. The whole thing is very theoretical. Later we manipulated the images electronically. We transferred the film to video, and worked on the colors there, before we transferred it back to film again. (Lars von Trier in Sight & Sound Magazine, October 1996)136

134 Cf. the chapter »The Thinking‑Feeling of What Happens: Putting the Radical Back in Empiricism« (Massumi 2011). One could also choose to see shock in relation to Kristin Thompson’s concept of the ›ex‑ cessive‹ surplus of meaning, which undermines the narrative from within, and which she further analyses in Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (Thompson 1996). Meanwhile the theory of excess, like Roland Barthes theory of »the third meaning« (Barthes 1977) on which Thompson bases her theory, is developed within a semiotic frame of narration, which does not destroy the impression that filmic semiosis takes place within a plot‑story relation. 135 Cf. Thomsen (1998). 136 The citation is a linguistically corrected version of Björkman’s interview (Björkman 1999, 166). (http://www.industrycentral.net/director_interviews/LVT01.HTM) Last viewed 10 March 2017.

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The direct look into the camera and the haptic aesthetic enable the viewer to take part in the expressive event in which the film’s story is in this way stylistically embedded. For though the story is clear and gripping, the haptic‑affective involvement in the vi‑ sion‑like event is, for the viewer, more forceful, and disturbs the normal expression‑content parameters for encoding. Massumi summarises this precisely: If the expressive momentum hits the body with its full ontogenetic force, it produces a compression shock. To convey the expressive poten‑ tial ›faithfully‹ (with sufficient, creative absurdity) the body must trans‑ mit the reality of the shock. It’s a torture, a multi‑level, interlocking, self‑magnifying torture. The body is wracked. A tarantella of atypical expression pours forth, deforming. Its outpouring relays the torture to the conventional forms of content and expression with which or to which the body is expected to speak and gesture. The body has become an expressive event: a voluble singularity. (Massumi 2002a, xxxi)

The direct look into the camera in Breaking the Waves affec‑ tively discontinues the voyeuristic motor towards the narrative’s ›depth‹ or ›truth‹, just as the slap in the face did in The Idiots. The gaze makes the camera perceptibly present and halts mo‑ mentarily the friction‑free exchange of meaning between ›white wall‹ and ›black hole‹. Together with the spasm of unrest and dizziness, which the hand‑held principle and the grainy signal noise from the video transfer causes on the screen’s surface, the direct look into the camera enables the ›third gaze‹ of the interface to be created diagrammatically.137 When the viewer is addressed directly in this way, as a witness with divine powers (to forgive and condemn), it is made clear that the classic filmic relation between screen and viewer (›white wall/black hole‹) has 137 Birger Langkjær also emphasises the parallel with the hand‑held camera in the »non‑fictional pres‑ ence« (p. 224) in the form of overloaded, loud or distorted sound in Breaking the Waves. This, he believes, in agreement with Morten Kyndrup’s analysis of the film (1997), draws attention to the constructed, to the »abstraction which paralyses the experience. And it is from this abstraction that the middle ground between fiction and non‑fiction appears, the continuous transition in which the film unfolds« (p. 227). I agree that this middle ground occurs (cf. Thomsen, 1997), but I choose to emphasise this hyper(im)mediacy as the film’s condition of possibility in order to establish another, haptically involving interface, where the sensa‑ tion of abstraction (›thinking‑feeling‹) occurs together with the experience of physical, sensational effect.

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Bess’ (Emily Watson) first direct look into the camera in Breaking the Waves.

a religious mooring. By allowing the viewer to follow Bess’ ex‑ ploration of the field of faciality, in which any Christian as well as any lover is suspended, Trier indicates another affective way, just as Bacon does, ›out of‹ the play between story and plot or the ›white wall/black hole‹ relation. The look into the camera and the haptic‑realistic style involves the viewer affectively, but also renders the camera visible, enabling the activation of the interface’s third, diagrammatic position, which can show how the medium of film in fact contains a relation between the three – the face, the landscape and the camera – that breaks the stratifying effect of faciality. This approach is explicitly dramaturgic in the scene where Bess seeks refuge in the church after the first assault. Here she hears one of the churchgoers say: »Because there is only one thing for us, sinners that we are, to achieve perfection in the eyes of God through unconditional love for the word that is written… through unconditional love for the law.« This linking of the words ›love‹, ›the word‹ and ›the law‹ has a violent impact on Bess, and she states: »I don’t understand what you’re saying. How can you love a word? You cannot love words. You cannot be in love with a word. You can love another human being. That’s perfection.« This reasoning is interrupted 152

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abruptly by the priest who turns her away with the words: »No woman speaks here! Bess McNeill, The Kirk session has decided this day that henceforth you shall no longer have access to this church. They who know you shall not know you. Be gone, Bess McNeill, from the house of God!« These words from a fallen woman, who insists on the physi‑ cal side of love being integrated in the Christian interpretation, appear with the same abject force as the layer cake which falls awkwardly out of Karen’s mouth in The Idiots. The obvious cor‑ poreality that is displaced, denied and prejudiced in Christian religion finds expression in this parish in turning (fallen) women into sinners on their way towards abject perdition, which is then played out in the film. First Bess is confronted with the message that she is to be committed to a mental hospital; then she meets a closed door at her mother’s house, and finally she faints when seeking out the church’s white wall on the hilltop. It is here, strug‑ gling with her motor scooter like Jesus with his cross, and with the children of the village following along mocking her, that she makes the abject power her own, and in light of the information concerning her husband’s impending death decides to sacrifice herself in the name of love. It is after being ostracised from the united religious community that she becomes pure abjection, but also that her body becomes (and can be attributed) pure will. Her body becomes a BwO, a purely creative or (self)destructive power. But it is also worth noting here that she – in the degradation from an organic body which belongs to the God of the parish (›white wall/black hole‹) to a body without organs, an abjection – with the pure, affective power of sacrifice, can withdraw herself from the religious transformation of abjection to meaning (or word). Only in this way can she avoid confirming the judgement of the parish which carries out the sacrifice/ostracism. The suffering of Jesus and his abject function, as the one who through the crucifixion (in the degradation from divine to human body) has taken the world’s pain on himself, is here given an alternative (female) face. Bess advocates love for the body of another as a condition of love for God, and thus denounces (in a different, more secular way than Joan in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc) the word of law, which separates spirit from body. golden hearts 1 and 3 · affective outflow

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In Breaking the Waves the viewer witnesses the struggle for the right to the body, which materialises both in facial micro move‑ ments of pure potentiality and in the corporeality of the landscape’s haptic surfaces. As the viewer has become the divinely staged re‑ cipient of Bess’ direct gaze into the camera, and her speech, the viewer must affectively witness Bess’ struggle against faciality. Though the flesh is sacrificed in the battle between the word and faith, as it is also in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, Bess’ face does not strive towards heaven. It disintegrates into the landscape with the rest of her body, and it is precisely this immersion in im‑ manence that creates a physical, sensory affect in the viewer. It is in the film’s epilogue with the divine applause from the church bells that the abject transformation is stolen from the par‑ ish, and the covenant which the filmic interface has created by involvement (belief in love or belief in religion) is confirmed and made ironic respectively. No matter whether one chooses to inter‑ pret the ringing bells as an act of irony or on the contrary as a pa‑ thetic gesture, the film shakes the viewer free of the ethical demand based on the moral values of the religious community. For as the corpse is cast out over the ship’s railing without religious ritual, like a lifeless abject body (cadaver = demise), and disappears without marking or trace (like Oedipus in Oedipus Rex), conditions of new potentials are created, different from events of faciality. In Deleuze and Guattari these are described as »probe-heads (têtes chercheuses, guidance devices)« (Deleuze and Guattari 2013, 222). The landscape in the closing scene is evoned vertically by the sonorous clanging of the church bells, whose movement can be seen as a gothic line which creates a: streaming, spiraling, zigzagging, snaking, feverish line of variation [which] liberates a power of life that human beings had rectified and organisms had confined, and which matter now expresses as the trait, flow, or impulse traversing it. (Deleuze and Guattari 2013, 579)

This chaotic soundscape definitively erases the ›white wall/black hole‹ relation of meaning. This is advantageous for a dominant, powerful soundscape, which finally answers the demands of Jan’s friend, Terry (Jean‑Marc Barr), after the wedding ceremony: 154

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»Ring the bells then«!138 It is the same Terry who, in an emer‑ gency exercise on the drilling platform, brings about Jan’s brain injury when he jokingly pretends to fall, after which the pump in the ›rescue‹ hits Jan’s head as if it were a bell. These images of Terry’s horizontally placed, laughing face, which is covered by Jan as it is next hit vertically by the pump – the greyish contents of which transform his face into a head without human charac‑ teristics – have diagrammatic power. Jan’s face transforms in and due to this haptic‑affective event into a figure which contains two marginalised forms in one grotesque shape: the horizontal mummified shape of a corpse and the inhuman head of an ani‑ mal (not unlike the figures in Bacon’s paintings). It is this figure’s introduction into the small Scottish community which, as an al‑ ien element, comes to function as a »probe‑head«. With Bess as a medium who, according to her friend and protector (Katrin Cartlidge), »is not right in the head«, the »alien«, demonic Jan, whose illness disturbs his mind, first of all corrupts and disturbs the mainlanders‹ religious striation.139 In Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc Joan’s shaved head is also revealed, but she remains good – never animalistic and demonic. Her close‑shaven head reveals a humane, soaring face, while Jan’s half‑shaven head is best described as abject. He can neither eat nor drink unaided, and must be fed like a small child; thus his paralysed, horizontal body prepares the way for Bess’s mummified corpse, which causes the narrative to diffuse and implode into the landscape. Any-space-whatever and colours in Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark

While Breaking the Waves ends on a dominant acoustic image, both the opening and ending of Dancer in the Dark are devoid of sound. This makes sense, if one recognises that Breaking the Waves the‑

138 Throughout the film there are a number of bells or allusions to bells: hailstones from above replace the wedding bells; Bess (and later Jan) hammers forcefully, hilariously on a large metal crane on the har‑ bour; Bess waves with a Christmas bell at Jan’s homecoming from hospital; the captain who brings prosti‑ tutes to his large ship in the harbour rings the ship’s bell. 139 Note that according to Trier’s first draft, the film was also meant to depict the demonic corruption of Justine from the Marquis de Sade’s novel of the same name (Schepelern 2000, 205f).

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matises seeing and landscapes, while Dancer in the Dark thema‑ tises hearing and music. Therefore, in the next section I will leave Trier’s break with faciality and focus on an analysis of his break with the stratifying refrain. But if one takes the remediation of the Romantic landscape in the chapter divisions in Breaking the Waves and the musical dream sequences in Dancer in the Dark ad notam, yet another question is raised: How do the »probe‑heads« arrange themselves, if not in accordance with the ›white wall/black hole‹? In the following I will briefly introduce some considerations on how the term »any‑space‑whatever« in Deleuze enables the time‑image. In the chapter on the affection‑image in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (Deleuze 1986), Deleuze describes how Dreyer fur‑ ther developed expressionism’s alternating between light, dark and shadow to achieve a lyrical abstraction, making possible a thorough affective contact with a spiritual choice, such as that de‑ scribed by Søren Kierkegaard. Deleuze thus writes about Dreyer’s heroines (along with Joan, Anne in Day of Wrath, Inger in The Word and Gertrud in Gertrud) and how they are aware that their choices go via the physical body, but also beyond it: It is definitely a question of the affect; for […] the character who makes true choice raises the affect to its pure power or potentiality, as in Lancelot’s courtly love, but also embodies it and carries it into effect all the more as it liberates in him the part of that which does not let itself be actualised, of that which goes beyond all execution (the eternal rebirth). (Deleuze 1986, 115‑116)

It is in the interplay between light and dark that the relation be‑ tween the physical and the metaphysical unfolds in Dreyer’s black and white images, and according to Deleuze it is initially in the lyrical abstraction of both – in the shadows – that the physical (or metaphysical) can be re‑manifested. In relation to Kristeva’s argument concerning the engagement of modern artists in abjec‑ tion, one can say that Dreyer carefully follows Joan’s corporeal transformation to abjection (the removal of individual markers such as hair, clothes and jewellery), and he gives the shadows a large presence in the scene where she is burned at the stake as a witch. It is the thick smoke in particular, shown from all possi‑ 156

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ble and impossible angles, which is ascribed (in accordance with Deleuze) spiritual value: Space is no longer determined, it has become the any-space-whatever which is identical to the power of the spirit, to the perpetually renewed spiritual decision: it is this decision which constitutes the affect, or the ›auto‑ affection‹, and which takes upon itself the linking of parts. (Deleuze 1986, 117; author’s italics)

It is clear that Dreyer’s filmic aesthetic imitates the sacrificial religious figure in order to give the viewer an affective, passionate identification with a humane and, of course, female face.140 This is achieved by linking the face’s affection‑image, which depicts pas‑ sion and suffering, to the space’s non‑localised character through the lyrical abstraction of lighting effects. Even though both the interior space and the exterior walls and open spaces in The Passion of Joan of Arc are modelled on paintings and drawings from the Middle Ages, in order to intensify the experience of the actual city of Rouen, in which the trial took place, the consciously chosen expressionistic style prioritises the faith‑related aspects of the story of suffering over exterior accuracies.141 Deleuze places the close‑up (the icon in Peirce) on an equal footing with the creation of any‑space‑whatever (espace quelconque; qualisign in Peirce) (op. cit., 109). Where the close‑up can collect the emotional power and quality in, for example, a face, an any‑space‑whatever can, without »its own co‑ordinates and its metric relations«, create a »tactile space« (ibid.). For though the any‑space‑whatever is singular, without its metric relations it has lost its homogeneity, and it can thus be related to other virtual spaces in a number of ways. An any‑space‑whatever contains a potentiality, which the closing scene of The Passion of Joan of Arc qualifies spiritually. 140 The transformation in Dreyer is constantly spiritual and religious. Even though he accentuates how religion creates abjections of people, his films from 1928 can also be regarded as a sanctioning of the Cath‑ olic church’s canonisation of Joan of Arc in 1920. 141 Models of the buildings and location were made. Britta Martensen‑Larsen describes how Dreyer, the expressionist film architect Hermann Warm, the painter Jean Hugo and the costume designer Valentine Hugo, on the basis of naive sketches from the 15th century, succeeded in creating the mix between the true and the expressionistic which, in Dreyer’s words, could support »the drama which takes place within the souls« ahead of the »objective drama« (Martensen‑Larsen 1993). Cf. also Edwin Kau on Dreyer’s camera work, which qualifies the arbitrary, tactile space (Kau 1989).

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In Breaking the Waves the description of the any‑space‑what‑ ever is shifted away from the unequivocal religious interpretive framework, though its visual potentiality comes through as church bells. These cannot, however, be separated from the sonic inferno they emit. Sound and image together mark a haptic, endlessly combinable any‑space‑whatever. If one takes the film’s title ad notam (and the allusion to sound waves and broadcast waves), it is obvious to assume that the aim is to break with the »metric co‑ordinates« (ibid.), which permeate everything (represented by systems of echo sounding and radar). In addition there is space for the potential (here miraculous) forces of »pure optical and sound situations« (Deleuze 1986, 120). This, the signaletic material of the film medium, shows itself most clearly in modern film, which is qualified as such precisely by this. Apart from the already described forms of affective influence, the landscapes in the chapter images set the scene for the affective power of the haptic any‑space‑whatever in a way which can be both sensed and reflected upon. The source of these panoramic hybrids of painterly texture, computer pixels and filmic frames was the photographs and films of the Scottish landscape by the photographer Robby Müller, which were considered as possible locations for the film. In Per Kirkeby’s rendering they became filtered through ›the typically romantic‹, to which movement and colour is added digitally before the film is transferred (Sight & Sound Magazine 1996). Per Kirkeby writes about the composition and effect of the images: They are not still, but moving sequences. They all have a pulse beat. Several have dramatic shifts in normally far slower processes, and all this in a time frame of under a minute. Yet most people remember the pictures as motionless. I think this is a sign that they function as they were intended to. They are insidious, so to speak; they leave their symbol‑traces unremarked. Their effect lies primarily in the symbolic power of changes in the light. It’s an ancient, banal, quite unverbalised message. In a painting, of course, this takes place with infinite subtlety, with the entire process fixed as if by magic on a timeless surface; but precisely by not abhorring any form of banality the mechanical medium was able to take on something of the same quality. (Trier 1996, 13f)

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The panoramic chapter divisions in Breaking the Waves clearly depict the land‑ scapes as Romantically constructed, allowing for the diagrammatic approach to be rendered visible.

The visual power of these ›vitalizations‹ of kitsch remakes can be compared with Dreyer’s modification of the expressionist style in The Passion of Joan of Arc. But because the projection of the soul’s struggle out in the landscape adds clearly manipulated movements and digitally enhanced colours, this is contrasted by flat arbitrari‑ ness. In the remediation’s hybrid the images become visible as signaletic material, so to speak, and the affectively influenced viewer senses the diagrammatic composition. The chapter images intensify the potential or virtual level, which is diagrammatically attached to the story or fabula, and for this reason Peirce’s defi‑ nition of the diagram should be repeated briefly: »The greatest point of art consist in the introduction of suitable abstractions. By this I mean such transformation of our diagrams that characters of one diagram may appear in another as things« (Peirce 1997, 226; author’s italics; here cited from Massumi 2011, 99). Thus the diagram makes up a ›third‹ actively creative place for con‑ crete abstraction, which can activate forces that aim to transform. Deleuze likewise writes of Foucault’s diagrammatic thinking as a third outer instance, which abstracts and transforms: golden hearts 1 and 3 · affective outflow

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The diagram stems from the outside but the outside does not merge with any diagram, and continues instead to ›draw‹ new ones. In this way the outside is always an opening on to a future: nothing ends, since nothing has begun, but everything is transformed. In this sense force displays potentiality with respect to the diagram containing it, or possesses a third power which presents itself as the possibility of ›resistance‹. In fact, alongside (or rather opposite) particular features of power which correspond to its relations, a diagram of forces presents particular features of resistance, such as ›points, knots or focuses‹ which act in turn on the strata, but in such a way as to make change possible. (Deleuze 1988, 89)

The diagram’s ›third‹, which activates an abstract relation between the ›romantic painterly‹ and the ›manipulated digital‹, occurs perhaps most clearly in the encounter between movement and the static (for example, the car’s movements in the landscape in chapter 6). The unnatural movement and colour chromatics create diagrammatic ›points‹, ›knots‹ or ›focuses‹ (cf. the citation above), drawing attention to this being an any‑space‑whatever, which is not bound to time, place or filmic story. Just as Trier consciously utilises the iconic and haptic qualities of the close‑up in the film’s fabula in order to further the viewer’s affective involvement, so the chapter sequences are able to focus on parts of movements and unnatural colours that contain the possibility of intensifying non‑linguistic, diagrammatic sensory abstractions in the material.142 These are also found isolated as affective blocks of sensation in the film’s fabula (most clearly in Bess’s ultra‑white bridal gown and ultra‑red leather skirt), but here they also have a symbolic meaning in the plot. On the contrary, in the chapter sequences, movements and colours are given an independent, iconic and affective value, presenting the remediated landscapes as simulacra, which are only suited to the ›white wall/black hole‹ of faciality in a figurative sense. When the 142 With his painting In the Beginning Was the Image (1965), Asger Jorn, who criticised the logocentrism of the Christian world, had a similar mission. He formulated it thus: »Words are blinding, words hinder one from seeing…Every artistic field that is invaded by words suffocates. I fear that one might kill the last seed leaf with the venom of words… » (Berlinske Tidende newspaper, 3 March 1969). A similar manifestation of the image could apply to both Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc as well as Trier’s Breaking the Waves.

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digitally added car moves up over the hybrid landscape, the affects run out in the changeable field of the event in a literal sense. While the diagrammatic expedients are found in the panorama images from the chapter divisions in Breaking the Waves, they are found in the musical sequences in Dancer in the Dark, which dismantle the fabula we have just been presented with. Here the splintered perspectives of the 100 video cameras intensify the haptic qualities of the virtual space. The upright bodies‹ rhythmic leaps, twirls and falls, and body parts such as legs, arms, hands and heads are extracted from the narrative storyline. Furthermore, because the rhythm dominates, the de‑individualised bodies are transformed into BwO. As in the chapter sequences in Breaking the Waves, the glow and depth of the colours are intensified in the musical sequences. This is not surprising, as the three filmic forms of colour usage that Deleuze mentions appear in the film musical’s creation of vir‑ tual dream spaces out of mundane, realistic space (Deleuze 1986, 118). The three forms are »the surface‑colour of the great uniform tints [grand aplat], the atmospheric colour which pervades all the others, movement‑colour which passes from one tone to anoth‑ er« (ibid.). Though the first two colour schemes are also found in painting, and hence it is only the movement‑colour which is devel‑ oped in film, Deleuze occupies himself especially with a fourth ab‑ sorbent form, which is also recognised in, for example, van Gogh. Here the colour appears as an affective force which is capable of creating more than symbolic correspondence (green = hope), as »[c]olour is […] the affect itself, that is, the virtual conjunction of all the objects which it picks up« (Deleuze op. cit., 118). In this connection Eva Jørholt notes that the absorbent form is particu‑ larly prevalent amongst postmodern directors, and she specifically mentions Trier’s use of poisonous yellow colours in the films The Element of Crime and Medea (Jørholt 1998, 108). She further char‑ acterises the absorbent, affective use of colour as: A colour use that paves the way for an affect – joy, fear, uneasiness, shock, or whatever it might be – which is not dictated by, but rather ascribes the person’s emotions and/or actions. They are simply impreg‑ nated in an overriding, chromatically caused affect, somewhat similar to

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that which Peirce imagined as »a psychic feeling of red without us which arouses a sympathetic feeling of red in our senses«. (Jørholt op. cit.)143

The important thing – making the affect independent, which subjugates all other emotions, actions and expressions – is, in accordance with the function of the diagram, that which from a virtual ›exterior‹ shows the possibility of the transformation, in that a sign in a diagram (as described above) can appear in another as a thing (Peirce 1997, 226). The intensification of colours during the musical sequences in Dancer in the Dark as well as in the chapter sequences in Breaking the Waves fully displaces the green‑yellow colour scheme144 that dominates the films‹ narration. A kind of refuge is created, a pause for reflection, which liberates the affects from their melodramati‑ cally involved story level. Viewed autonomously, isolated from their relation to emotions and action, the rhythm’s outflow in the musi‑ cal sequences creates synaesthetic resistance to the stratification of the melodramatic genre. In each of the digitally processed musical pieces, with slightly hacking oscillations between hearing and vi‑ sion, movement and song – added in the editing – the seemingly irreversible tracks of action are transformed and reversed. In the chapter on the affection‑image, which also includes the aforemen‑ tioned reflections on colour, any‑space‑whatever and pure optical and sound situations, Deleuze describes how Antonioni’s use of an absorbent colour makes the space into a void any‑space‑whatever, because the absorbed is effaced with the cessation of the events. According to Deleuze, the affective isolation is also found in Berg‑ man in the form of a potentialising of the facial close‑up, which meanwhile is confronted with the void space instead of dissolving therein. On the basis of this, Deleuze notes two states in the ›quali‑ sign‹ of the any‑space‑whatever: the disconnected and the empty qualisigns, which, though they bring about or imply one another, 143 Jørholt cites Peirce (cf. Buchler, 84). Peirce’s description is comparable with the empirical theory of emotion that was put forward by both the Dane Carl Lange and the American William James, who pro‑ posed that we derive our emotions from the bodily sensations we receive. The theory is summed up thus by James: »We feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not … cry, strike or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, afraid« (Koch 2000, 190). 144 I believe that one can characterise this colour scheme as ›atmospheric‹, where the ›absorbent‹ form together with the ›movement‹ form in the following is reserved for the musical scenes.

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can be distinguished by the fact that the first sign type is ›before‹ and the other is ›after‹ (Deleuze 1986, 120). He continues: The any‑space‑whatever retains one and the same nature: it no longer has co‑ordinates, it is a pure potential, it shows only pure Powers and Qualities, independently of the states of things or milieux which actu‑ alise them (have actualised them or will actualise them, or neither the one nor the other – it hardly matters). (ibid.)

Taking Deleuze’s comparison of Bergman and Antonioni’s dif‑ ferent ways of potentialising the affective qualities of the any‑ space‑whatever as an outset, I will conclude that in the chapter sequences in Breaking the Waves and the musical sequences in Dancer in the Dark Trier creates a kind of void but potentialised any‑space‑whatever, which is placed before or after the action time, or the human and emotional time. They turn the affect into pure optical and sound situations, detached from the story, and it is precisely this which gives thoughts access to the line of flight’s possibility for change. The obvious focusing on close‑ups of the female protagonists’ faces in the trilogy, as already described in the analyses of The Idiots and Breaking the Waves, allows for a confrontational strategy against faciality. The musical theme in Dancer in the Dark furthermore allows for a possible dialogical confrontation with the meaning of the refrain. Dancer in the Dark and »the refrain«

While Trier lets Bess disappear into the sensorial haptic surface of the landscape and thus enables the viewer to establish a distance to the stratification of faciality, in Dancer in the Dark he equates Selma with music, song and the corporeal affective impacts they bring about. The fact that Selma is extremely myopic and on her way to becoming blind is emphasised repeatedly in the film’s story, and that is, so to speak, the whole point, that she sacrifices herself; she sacrifices herself in order that her son will not suffer the same fate.145 When the death sentence is finally implemented, 145

Cf. his name, Eugene, which means ›well born‹.

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and Eugene’s spectacles land on the floor simultaneously as Selma dies, the aural shock caused by the trapdoor panel opening and the song dying down is rewarded – in a melodramatic way – with the son maintaining his sight in the future. He is not present in the room, however, so we cannot ›see‹ as if with his eyes, but the final composition, which accompanies the film’s reprise image and list of actors, bears the hopeful title »New World«.146 This composition also functions as the film’s overture. But here the audience senses how the reduction in sight intensifies the hearing. At the premiere in Cannes and in Danish cinemas, the overture was heard while the screen was black/contained no images. In other countries and in the video/DVD versions the overture was accompanied by Per Kirkeby’s drawings, in which shapes and patterns appeared and disappeared with the music’s instrumental sounds.147 In both versions the audience is con‑ fronted affectively with a failing or lack of sight – in the cinema, where the sensation of sight traditionally has precedence – as the audio comes to the fore. The digitally processed overtones from the one introductory image to the next do follow the afore‑ mentioned ›absorbent‹ colour scheme. In addition, they could be ideal examples of filmic ›movement‑colour‹ which is precisely defined by colour passing »from one tone to another« (Deleuze 1986, 118), as it must be emphasised that, in this instance, it is the music’s tones which control the fade‑in‑ and fade‑out of the images. In this way the overture already shows that the musical’s song and dance sequences ought to be approached as blocks of audio‑visual sensations. The film’s first action sequence shows Selma and Kathy’s first song and dance rehearsal of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s »My Favourite Things« from the musical The Sound of Music. The viewer immediately notices that Selma’s performance in no way resembles the idealised aesthetic of the original, and backstage the co‑director reckons that she sings »funny«, and doesn’t dance 146 The theme has certain similarities (though with sombre undertones) with the central horn theme in Richard Strauss‹ Also sprach Zarathustra, which Stanley Kubrick used both as an intro as closing music in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). 147 Kirkeby was instructed to attempt to depict a progressive blindness (Trier on the DVD audio com‑ mentary).

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particularly well either. Already it is made clear that Selma has problems with her eyesight and coordination but, on the other hand, she adds tap dancing to the musical on the basis that: »It really needs rhythm. Drums or something.« The rhythm is her life force, and Selma mentions this when she confides in her land‑ lord, Bill, as they exchange secrets about their closely impending fates: his bankruptcy and her blindness. Selma explains that, when working at the factory, she sometimes daydreams to the rhythms of the machines, so everything becomes music. This fits well with Deleuze and Guattari’s introduction to chapter 11 in A Thousand Plateaus, »1837: Of the Refrain«: A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos. Perhaps the child skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself is already a skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment. There is always sonority in Ariadne’s thread. Or the song of Orpheus. (Deleuze and Guattari 2013, 362)

Selma, who as an immigrant in the USA is on foreign cultural ground, speaks here of the territorialised forces of rhythm, song and tap dance, but as Deleuze and Guattari show, three aspects are found in the refrain [ritournelle] which are often found si‑ multaneously or mixed: Sometimes chaos is an immense black hole in which one endeavors to fix a fragile point as a center. Sometimes one organizes around that point a calm and stable »pace« (rather than a form): the black hole has become a home. Sometimes one grafts onto that pace a breakaway from that hole. (Op. cit., 363)

This can also be stated more concisely: »The refrain moves in the direction of the territorial assemblage and lodges itself there or leaves« (op. cit., 376). Inasmuch as Deleuze and Guattari here draw on a description of the three forms by Paul Klee and Henri golden hearts 1 and 3 · affective outflow

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Maldiney,148 which are combined with the territorial demarcation of birdsong, as described in the Umwelt of biology,149 ›refrain‹ becomes a very broad term. According to Deleuze and Guattari, its most crucial component, which is valid for all aspects of the refrain, is the expression. In the first aspect a signature or demar‑ cation of a territory is created, not as in a march to the beat, but by the rhythm which makes anything into a »matter of expression« (op. cit., 369). This expressive signature, which is also art’s, turns into style in the second aspect: expressive qualities or matters of expression enter shifting relations with one another that »express« the relation of the territory they draw to the interior milieu of impulses and exterior milieu of circumstances. (op. cit., 369; author’s italics)

Style sets greater relations in motion between interior impulses and exterior circumstances, and just as it is valid in the qualification of the choice of colours, rhythm can create motifs and counterpoint in its expressive variations (constancy, the increase or decrease of sound, rising and falling variables, and so on). The relation to joy and sadness, the sun, danger, perfection, is given in the motif and counterpoint, even if the term of each of these relations is not given. In the motif and the counterpoint, the sun, joy or sad‑ ness, danger, becomes sonorous, rhythmic, or melodic. (Op. cit., 371)

In this way the expressive rhythm’s motif attracts milieux and peo‑ ple, so one can determine that the motif stylistically »constitutes a rhythmic character« or landscape (op. cit., 371), and with this a »reorganization of functions and a regrouping of forces« (op. cit., 373; author’s italics). It is also here, in the creation of consistency between motifs and counterpoint relations, that as a third aspect new assemblages and components can form which pave the way for a perpetual exchange between de‑ and reterritorialising (op. cit., 376 and 380). Deleuze and Guattari decisively incorporate a 148 149

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Klee 1998 and Maldiney 1994. Amongst others, Uexküll 1984.

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fourth aspect, which prepares the way for territory linked to the ground that is to be finally abandoned in favour of the »Cosmos as an immense deterritorialized refrain« (op. cit., 381). This is first found in art in Romanticism and later in the philosophy of Nietzsche; the »essential thing is no longer forms and matters, or themes, but forces, densities, intensities« (op. cit., 399). This applies to the artist in capturing matter rather than expressing it, which in Deleuze and Guattari, for example, is redeemed with the synthesiser’s machinic sound, which makes possible: the sound process itself, the production of that process, and puts us in contact with still other elements beyond sound matter. It unites dispa‑ rate elements in the material, and transposes the parameters from one formula to another. The synthesizer, with its operation of consistency, has taken the place of the ground in a priori synthetic judgement: its synthesis is of the molecular and the cosmic, material and force, not form and matter, Grund and territory. (Deleuze and Guattari op. cit., 399; author’s italics)

As in the analysis of The Idiots, Deleuze describes the modular analogue synthesiser’s regulation of the actualisation of sound as diagrammatic, in that the sound is made into sensations through the regulation of the modules. He also states that the diagram’s operation is incorporated in the binary code in digital synthesisers (Deleuze 2013, 81‑82). In Dancer in the Dark, it was Lars von Trier’s intention to allow the musical sequences to occur on the basis of real sound from the film’s fabula plane.150 In this way the diagrammatic modulation between the film’s plane and that of Björk’s digitally produced musical sequences (supplemented with the rhythm hacked up into smaller units as montages from the 100 DV cameras) would have been sensory on a micro level. However, the film‑makers only received Björk’s approval to allow the sound in the plane of reality to infiltrate the already recorded and digitally mixed music soundtrack on certain occasions. One can 150 Cf. the audio commentary on the DVD with Lars von Trier and sound designer Per Streit. Cf. also Björkman 1999, 230 and 239.

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Selma (Björk) in the musical sequence »I’ve seen it all«, recorded with 100 cameras, which both makes the scene haptic and draws attention to the dia‑ grammatic composition.

only speculate on the disagreement between the two artists, and whether the diagrammatic operation ought to have been held within the music field (supplemented by the recordings from the 100 cameras), or whether it should modulate the film’s fabula plane with musical sequences. The vigilant auditor will realise that the transition between the filmic ›real plane‹ and the ›virtual plane‹ of the musical sequences is adjusted in the filmic technical sound, and that the sound in the real plane is seldom found in the music and never modulates it. Though Trier may have wished for »a cleaner musical where they start to sing for no reason« he writes that he was able »to keep this random effect or ›life‹ or whatever by putting up a lot of fixed cameras instead of staging a scene for a camera«.151 He also states that a rule for shooting with the 100 cameras was that remote control must not be used, and this gave positive surprises in the material. This uncontrolled form creates an interesting remediation of the music video in

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Interview with Lars von Trier, DVD extra material.

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the musical sequences152 because the hacking, arrhythmic plane is preserved in editing, drawing attention to the diagrammatic modulation. It was Trier’s intention, in Deleuze and Guattari’s words, to »deterritorialize the refrain« and to create a new chro‑ maticism, which: does not eliminate the bad or mediocre refrain, or the bad usage of the refrain, but on the contrary carries it along, or uses it as a springboard. […] Childhood or bird refrain, folk song, drinking song, Viennese waltz, cow bells: music uses anything and sweeps everything away. Not that a folk song, bird song, or children’s song is reducible to the kind of closed and associative formula we just mentioned. Instead, what needs to be shown is that a musician requires a first type of refrain, a territorial or assemblage refrain, in order to transform it from within, deterritorialize it, producing a refrain of the second type as the final end of music: the cosmic refrain of a sound machine. […] We go from assembled refrains (territorial, popular, romantic, etc.) to the great cosmic machined re‑ frain. (Deleuze and Guattari 2013, 406‑407; author’s italics)

It is Schumann’s symphonic studies based on amateur composi‑ tions, which he worked on from 1837,153 that form the background for these reflections. But there is no doubt that with Dancer in the Dark Trier aimed to deterritorialise the refrain by allowing the Golden Heart’s child‑like, simple form of being to infiltrate the musical’s grandiose, popular form, from which it explodes in diagrammatic ways in the many perspectives of the 100 cameras and the acoustic potential in Björk’s music and voice.154 What is interesting is that Deleuze and Guattari also point to the draw‑ ings and rhymes of children as a field of transformation, which – though this also has to be brought forward through composition – can open the field to new intensities, and new forms of refrain.

152 This impression is also to a large extent due to Björk’s style of musical composition, which in its own right remediates the classic material of the music video; cf. Korsgaard 2011. 153 Hence the title »1837: On the Refrain«. 154 Cf. Nicola Dibben, who describes how intimacy with Björk’s voice and a continuous disturbance of this intimacy through interruptions and ›hacking‹ creates a visualisation of the creative interface of technol‑ ogy with reality (Dibben 2009, 79 and 145f.).

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Intense, child‑like experiences function throughout as fields of transformation in both Breaking the Waves as well as Dancer in the Dark. Child‑like joy is represented explicitly in the cinema scenes where Bess, with Jan by her side, indulges in a reunion scene from the film Lassie, and Selma hears the music and ›sees‹ in the palm of her hand the steps to a musical which Kathy expresses with her fingers. Jan and Kathy’s sympathetic insight thus invites the viewer to embrace the affective potentials of the close‑up. Deleuze writes that in the film’s affection‑image the close‑up has iconic value and virtual potential. The affect can be modified through very small changes in facial relations (turning away or towards), and in prioritising whether a milder or sterner facial expression is shown (Deleuze 1986, 105). He writes in this connection: The expresssed entity is what the Middle Ages called the ›signifiable complex‹ of a proposition, distinct from the state of things. The ex‑ pressed – that is the affect – is complex because it is made up of all sorts of singularities that it sometimes connects and into which it some‑ times divides. This is why it constantly varies and changes qualitatively according to the connections that it carries out or the divisions that it undergoes. This is the Dividual, that which neither increases nor decreases without changing qualitatively. What produces the unity of the affect at each instant is the virtual conjunction assured by the expression, face or proposition. (Deleuze op. cit., 105)

The close‑up (of the face, for example) can thus collect or dis‑ seminate and qualitatively change a whole situation, but as the affection‑image it has a virtual quality or power – just as the colour red is an icon (according to Peirce) – which stretches beyond the milieu in which it functions. Deleuze mentions Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc as »the affective film par excellence« (Deleuze op.cit., 106). Although the close‑up image of Falconetti’s frontal, open face belongs in both the trial and the passion, and though the reasons and effects are performed in the state of things, which leads to judgements and death, the film as an affective event does not absorb itself in the actualisation created by the narrative. The anger becomes a quality, which in Dreyer links itself to the sacrifice and the martyrdom: 170

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To extract the Passion from the trial, to extract from the event this inexhaustible and brilliant part which goes beyond its own actualisa‑ tion, ›the completion which is never completed‹. The affect is like the expressed of the state of things, but this expressed does not refer to the state of things, it only refers to the faces which express it and, coming together or separating, give it its proper moving context. Made up of short close‑ups, the film took upon itself that part of the event which does not allow itself to be actualised in a determinate milieu. (Deleuze op.cit., 106)

The expressive, affective close‑up stretches out beyond the film’s milieu as a cause and effect structure, because as a singular, iconic power it can contain the event, which in Dreyer gains a spiritual interpretation. In Trier the facial affection‑image is exploited to include the viewer, as its potential is combined with shock and thus has a part in the event of interpretation. In The Idiots it is the unexpected slap in the face, which almost physically breaks the viewer’s empathy with Karen’s abject spastic jesting. In Breaking the Waves it is the clanging bells which unexpectedly and vertically force the viewer to confront him/herself with two incongruous figures of representation. In Dancer in the Dark it is likewise the body’s unexpected vertical fall at the hanging which in a physical sense stops the song and abruptly amputates the musical cre‑ scendo. In the closing scenes of the first two films, the viewer’s sensorial shock is eased as the affective energy can be relayed to the main character’s closest relations – to the faces of Susanne and Jan respectively – immediately after the action is brought to a conclusion. Consequently, in the most literal sense an interface occurs between two faces, which the viewer, in a physically af‑ fective sense, is involved in via the hand‑held filming of the slap in the face, including the whole image, and the inferno of sound from the church bells, which in a haptic manner likewise overlays the perception of image depth. These physical‑affective shocks, which are found motivated within the action, are framed by the affection‑image of Karen on the one side, and on the other side the sympathetic faces of her closest relatives, which emotionally interpret the viewer’s physical‑affective shock. Here – at the sight of Susanne’s tearful face and Jan’s face radiant with joy – the golden hearts 1 and 3 · affective outflow

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The shot of Eugene’s spectacles forms an affect image.

viewer encounters an interpretation in the form of an emotional reaction to the exterior events.155 But in Dancer in the Dark one finds the prison guard’s sym‑ pathetic face beside Selma’s suffering, and the interface between affective influence and emotion is replaced by a zoom towards (the absent) Gene’s spectacles as they fall out of Selma’s hands and land on the concrete floor. But each close‑up (whatever it is) is, according to Deleuze, an affection‑image (Deleuze 1986, 87). The effect is the same: the affective interface between the exterior sensory influence, which here is haptic, and the interior emotions in connection with the affection‑image (of the specta‑ cles) is so effectively emphasised that it affects the interpretation long after one has exited the cinema. In all three endings, Lars von Trier succeeds in involving the viewer by effectively utilising the virtual potential in the affection‑image. The violent, affec‑ tive effect – which to a large degree is created by establishing a haptic surface effect that is vast and without depth – is mitigated 155 This use of the face to express affect is also found in Medea, which as mentioned is based on Drey‑ er’s manuscript. Here the viewer must study Medea’s face while she hangs her sons.

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through fade‑out, where a sympathetic affection‑image creates calm anew, so the viewer can leave the cinema with a certain sense of serenity. If one looks closer at the closing scene of Dancer in the Dark, it is worth noting that this fade‑out is lacking. The close‑up of the singing Selma is abruptly interrupted by the fall of the body and spectacles. In addition, the sorrow in Selma’s face is repeated in an ultra‑close shot, just as the angst in her voice breaking up and, not least, the graininess, is captured as she sings: Dear Gene, of course you are near. And now there’s nothing to fear. I should have known, I was never alone. It isn’t the last song, there’s no violin, the choir is so quiet, and no‑one takes a spin. This is the next to last song, and that’s all. Remember what I have said: remember to wrap up the bread, do this, do that, make your bed. This isn’t the last song, there’s no violin, the choir is quiet and no‑one takes a spin. It’s the next to last song, and that’s all. (Dancer in the Dark, final scene of the DVD)156

Her facial expression, hair and mouth are filmed in extreme close‑ up, so the haptic and affective almost slide together, as the voice is silenced in a violent manner with the words »and that’s all«. The doubt about whether or not she is finally pardoned is brought to shame abruptly, in and with the musical sequence without background music mixing with the real plane of the nar‑ rative. There is no doubt, no hope – apart from for her son, who is not present in the scene and the melodramatic ending it paves the way for. In a figurative sense he avoids the short‑sighted haptic vision which leads to the dark of blindness, in that his mother

156 On the DVD audio commentary, Lars von Trier and Per Streit say that the friend Kathy’s line: »You were right, Selma: Listen to your heart« on the soundtrack was meant to be a cue for the sound of Björk’s heart – captured in real‑time by a microphone – to create the rhythm to her a capella song. Because of the disagreements between Björk and Trier, this idea could not be realised. But the idea shows clearly that the affective‑haptic level has been thought through by Trier.

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saves him into the light.157 The moral, which is projected on the image at the end, »They say it’s the last song. They don’t know us, you see. It’s only the last song if we let it be«, brings to mind Selma confiding in her landlord, Bill. Here she tells him that she always leaves the cinema when the musical’s »next to last song« begins, so she can imagine that the song and dance never ends. But hope arises in the hanging process, as Kathy tells how Gene’s (and Selma’s own) degenerative vision can be cured, and thus the next to last song gains a meaning: the family line can continue. But because the eyesight endures, the voice is silenced. And immedi‑ ately after her life and voice are shockingly interrupted, the film’s plane of reality and the audience’s reality ›meets‹: the curtains are drawn, the camera rises up through the prison loft into the dark and the audience, along with the witnesses to the hanging, must leave the room. Instead of it never ending, everything ends – in‑ cluding the melodramatic pathos, which the endings in the first two films in the trilogy rely on so much.158 It becomes clear that »The next to last song« does not constitute a territorial song with a final refrain. It is not the ground and the territory that is sung about; it is the genetic‑cosmic continuation of sight and voice in a nomadic BwO that is celebrated in the final part of the trilogy, where the non‑integrated surplus of affect is heard as silence – a silence of Spinozian dimensions.159

157 In this sense the film represents a mixture of a maternal melodrama and the most romantic melo‑ drama of them all, Dark Victory (1939), where the heroine (Bette Davis) becomes blind and dies of her tumour, alone, because she sends away everyone who loved her. 158 Cf. Kyndrup (1998) and Thomsen (1998). 159 Cf. Trier’s description »About the film« (Björkman 1999, 238‑240), where he states: »She knows what a body can do…when it does its best to attain perfection in dance, like in the big films, and she knows how the joy and pain of everyday life can be expressed in movement. […] The dance has no façade…it faces every direction…it has no boundaries…a fingertip touching a surface is dance!”

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CHAPTER 6

America films Verfremdung and diagrammatic production

While the Golden Heart trilogy examined whether it is possible to represent ›goodness‹ in a convincing way, it was the develop‑ ment of wickedness and the act of revenge that interested Lars von Trier in the films Dogville (2003) and Manderlay (2005), which were intended to comment on the land of opportunity, America.160 As previously shown, the goodness in the trilogy is noticeably present in the form of the affection‑image’s involve‑ ment of the viewer, whereas in the duology it is the eruption of vengeance which creates a reflective interface, loosely based on the Brechtian principles of Verfremdung.161 While the Golden Heart trilogy, towards the end, affectively challenges the viewer in an impossible choice between pathos and irony, the challenges in Dogville and Manderlay lie in a more reflective play, but in an equally difficult decision as to which of the two parties is acting most maliciously. Here the viewer is challenged both affectively and intellectually on ethical (both Christian and socialistic) ide‑ as of community and their transgression. It is the expectation 160 A third film in the same vein was planned; together they were to create a trilogy depicting a woman’s process of maturing from idealism to realism. Therefore, in the following, the word duology is used. 161 Trier was inspired by Pirate Jenny’s revenge song in the Danish version of Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera (Brecht 1965, 195), but in particular by the singer Sebastian’s version from 1979. Trier mentions his interest in Brecht as secondary, in that it was filtered through his mother’s predilection for both Brecht and Kurt Weill (Björkman, 243‑244). Brecht’s‹ concept of Verfremdung is aimed partly towards negating the creation of illusion and narrative empathy towards the characters in Aristotelian theatre, and partly towards displaying what is not immediately apparent, namely the structure and character of capitalist society. Char‑ acters were reduced and the theatre space’s fourth wall – the normally invisible place – was made obvious with the help of author commentary, songs and posters challenging the audience to be reflective. In this way, the theatre’s sensory involvement of the audience was also accentuated, as was the possibility of creat‑ ing distance from and reflecting on the events playing out on the stage (for more on Verfremdung in relation to Dogville, see Penzendorfer 2010).

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of good and evil in Western culture that Trier subjects to close scrutiny. In the following I will attempt to sharpen these theses, in considering the ethical implications of the term ›affect‹. The analysis will include both Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza’s Ethics as belonging to a plane of immanence,162 and Deleuze and Guat‑ tari’s differentiation between micropolitics and segmentarity in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 2013). The parties in Dogville are the citizens of a small town in Colo‑ rado, Dogville,163 and the runaway Grace (Nicole Kidman) who desires a life at peace within her surroundings. In Manderlay the estate’s poor slaves are faced with the outsider Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard), who aims to teach them how democratic freedom and responsibility is practised. In Dogville, Grace is in hiding from her gangster father, The Big Man, whom she joins, however, in the final showdown with the inhabitants of the town. In the beginning of Manderlay she leaves him again, in Alabama, as she wishes to convince him that democracy can be created where tyranny now rules. But in the film’s final scenes she must again flee when she realises that, despite the abolition of slavery, the slaves themselves have chosen to continue living in Manderlay. Both films depict idealistic demands as a driving force – with Grace wanting to show the possibility of better societal constructs than those exploited by the mafia. But Grace’s idealism meets with resistance in the form of the human proclivity to take advantage of others and the situations they find themselves in. Though Grace’s father in the final scenes of Dogville characterises this power and obstinate desire as despicable, and compares it with the instincts of a dog, he does not believe that Grace’s framework of explanations is any better – she does not judge the inhabitants of Dogville according to the same ethical criteria as she judges herself, and therefore he calls her arrogant. Hidden structures and motifs are thus made apparent, as with Brecht. Grace’s final act of revenge in Dogville, 162 This with particular reference to Deleuze 1988. 163 Trier conceived the name Dogville as well as the misspelling, which he blames on the fact that he has never been to the USA: »I think that’s interesting – another blunder by a non‑American filmmaker. I believe in these small faults. They humanize the project and put things in perspective« (Lumholdt 2003). This and the criticism of the same in the reception of Dancer in the Dark in Cannes are cited by Trier as the greatest inspirations for the America trilogy. For, as he says, the Americans knew nothing about Morocco when they filmed Casablanca (op. cit. and Björkman, 245).

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as well as in Manderlay, involves the viewer in reflections on the legitimacy of idealistic demands.164 Trier utilises Brecht’s technique of Verfremdung, so the viewer gains insight into the relationship between idealisation and reality, but he differentiates himself from Brecht in the way that – and in light of the global sovereignty of capitalism (and the American film industry) – he also subjects the notions of socialism and democracy to a ›reality check‹. The contemporaneous ›war on terror‹ indicated that the cold war’s fragile balance of power after the fall of Nazism in 1945 was replaced by another kind of »micropolitical« strategy (Deleuze and Guattari 2013, 250-251), where it is not so easy to identify the villain from the hero. One of Brecht’s most famous plays is Mother Courage and Her Children (1939), which takes place during the Thirty Years War, and was intended as a response to the rise of fascism in Germany. The play sets out to illustrate that the logic of war is essentially different from that of peace, causing shortcomings in even the capitalist market and commercial trading. In this way Mother Courage, with her attempted black market transactions in the shadow of the logic of war, sees her children ruined. This insight in Brecht is developed by Trier, who allows a whole town to be corrupted by money – most clearly exemplified by Grace’s apparent protector, Tom – before finally coming to an end in the violent action of the gangster discourse. Planes of composition in Dogville

Dogville and Manderlay are somewhat like allegorical doctrines of human behaviour since the Great Depression of the 1930s,165 which in addition to fascism in Europe gave rise to black market transactions and gangster organisations in the USA, and was reflected in the medium of film as the inspiration for film

164 165

Trier himself characterises these as »the shortcomings of humanism« (Björkman 2003, 251). Cf. also Schepelern 2003.

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noir.166 Together with the Brechtian inspiration, this film type constitutes the backdrop for Dogville,167 with its style favouring chiaroscuro ahead of a clear differentiation between dark and light forces. But at the launch in Cannes as well as in subse‑ quent interviews, Trier stressed that the then current political motivation was the American (and Danish) so‑called ›war on terror‹, after the terrorist attacks of 9/11.168 Caroline Bainbridge draws attention to how the films Dancer in the Dark, Dogville and Manderlay are interpreted by the American public allegori‑ cally as didactic pieces of self‑reflection (Bainbridge 2007, 141). Trier also mentions that they should be viewed as a comment in relation to the then new regulations in Denmark concerning immigrants (Lumholdt, 209).169 166 There is agreement in film theory that the film noir style is inspired by German semi‑obscurity (chiaroscuro) and that the style makes the battleground between dark and light forces into an unclear field because the detective himself is invariably attracted to and becomes infected by the shady side of sexual desire and power. The question of how far film noir can be characterised as an independent genre or rather should be seen as melodrama with specific stylistic traits (cars, hats, cigarettes, city backdrops etc.) is the subject of an ongoing discussion. 167 In short, the film concerns the beautiful Grace Margaret Mulligan’s (Nicole Kidman) arrival and residence in the small town of Dogville, in Colorado. She is both on the run from her gangster father, The Big Man (James Caan), and on the lookout for a more harmonious existence, where people respect one another. The budding writer Tom Edison Jr. (Paul Bettany), who lives in Dogville, is at the same time also looking for something that can illustrate to the citizens of Dogville that there is space for improvement in the little community’s unity and ethical requirements. When Grace steals a bone from Moses the dog, it barks and she is discovered by Tom, who immediately sees her as an instrument – a gift – for the perfect illustration. He suggests to the town’s inhabitants that they can help the fugitive Grace and give her shelter. They agree to a two‑week trial period, and Grace offers her help to everyone. She speaks with the blind Jack (Ben Gazzara), who pretends he can see; she takes care of Ma Ginger’s (Lauren Bacall) gooseberry bushes; she looks after Vera (Patricia Clarkson) and Chuck’s (Stellan Skarsgaard) children and helps Chuck in the apple orchard, and so on, and the good atmosphere grows. When the police return for a second time with an inquiry (about a bank robbery she cannot have committed), and the citizens realise that Grace has wealth behind her, they demand that she works twice as hard and have lower wages. In her haste, she makes small mistakes, is humiliated by Vera, because her son Jason (Miles Purinton) claims that she has hit him, and is raped by Chuck. An attempt to escape in Ben’s (Zeljko Ivanek) truck fails when Ben, after having exploited her sexually, reveals her plan. She is accused of robbery, and she is quickly degraded to a slave, attached to a millstone via a neck collar and iron chain. All assaults – including daily rapes – are allowed by Tom, who is the only one who does not gain access to her, as Grace hopes for them to be together in a loving relationship and freedom. The rejected Tom contacts The Big Man, who has previously given him his calling card, and the town finally meets its match. The town’s inhabitants are rounded up like dogs, and after a conversation with her father, Grace is reconciled with him and given absolute power to, amongst other things, decide the fate of the town. Grace chooses to have the townsfolk shot – shooting Tom herself – and orders the town to be burned down, but the dog Moses is spared, being the only inhabitant who has ever given her something. 168 The invasion of Iraq in spring 2003 took place immediately before the film’s presentation in Cannes. In the DVD Added value to Dogville, Trier states that his agenda is to supplement the Americans‹ »Free Iraq Campaign« with a »Free America Campaign«. 169 In 2002 the government implemented a considerable tightening of immigrant laws which, amongst other things, meant heightened demands on the conditions for refugee status (such as risk of the death penalty or torture in the displaced person’s homeland) and increased demands for family reunification (that

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Bainbridge shows that Dogville’s references to the master of light, Thomas Edison170 – who apart from the electric light bulb also invented the phonograph, patented the film camera and later founded The Motion Picture Patents Company – functions as an intertextual reference to his (and America’s) »formative role in the shaping of the commercialisation of cinema« (op. cit., 147). One could add that Trier, by giving the role of shop owner Ma Ginger to Lauren Bacall, also implants the most unpredictable element of film noir: the femme fatale. For though Grace rep‑ resents such a type, Lauren Bacall is a living embodiment of the element of desire, which stretched between her and Humphrey Bogart in the greatest film noir of them all, The Big Sleep (1946). As with the name Edison, she represents the classic (now ageing) American film tradition, seen through Trier’s Danish eyes. Bain‑ bridge notes how the commercialisation of the film industry then and now in relation to geopolitical agendas, including from the contemporary political scene, together with the Brechtian Verfremdung is folded into the America films in altogether complex ways (Bainbridge, 148). Her analysis is misleading, however, in that she simultaneously describes postmodernism as inauthentic and as not being capable of depicting something authentically. As mentioned earlier, in his many remediations Trier does not dif‑ ferentiate between »authenticity and artifice«, which is the subtitle of Caroline Bainbridge’s book. He creatively plays out authenticity and fiction against one another (in the form of game rules, for example) and creates new mixed forms in diverse remediation and diagrammatically orchestrated interfaces. The same is valid for Dogville and Manderlay – with the Brechtian Verfremdung as a contribution, which is meant to stimulate reflection – where the hegemonic, basic types of realism in classic Hollywood films are challenged, and with this, in turn, their accentuating of narrative continuity. As we shall see, Trier utilises a micropolitical strat‑ egy which, combined with the rendering visible of diagrammatic both parents should be over 24 years of age, and that their connection to Denmark should be documented as well as the ability to support themselves). Cf. also Reestorff 2017, who looks at this as well as political and artistic practice during the period in light of globalisation. 170 This in the form of Tom and his father (Philip Baker Hall), who bear the names Thomas Edison Junior and Senior respectively.

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codes, brings Brecht’s methods on a par with new media. The filmic dialogue with the theatrical forms of Verfremdung dem‑ onstrates a filmic remediation of the computer’s user interface, but the grid mounted with cameras above the stage also enables a particularly diagrammatic interface, with a degree of camera involvement, which will be described in more detail below. For this entire grid covering which, so to speak, ascribes the filmic possibility to create visual events in the material for all forms of media is, in my opinion, created in order for the artificial staging to be fleshed out affectively and haptically. Trier sheds light on the current status of the film medium in that (together with the book and the theatre) it is remediated through the dramaturgy of the computer game – but what is more, Brechtian hypermediated realism, which also reflects the mass media of the age (Laak 2009, 302), can be perceived as equal parts of immediacy. Trier himself calls Dogville a »fusion film«, which could be further described thus: [T]he real essence of the whole thing is that the elements that have been taken from theatre and literature are not just mixed up with the forms of expression offered by film. The whole thing has to function as a cohesive fusion, thoroughly blended. (Björkman 2003, 242)

In the same interview Trier mentions that he was also inspired by the Danish TV broadcast (in the 1980s) of Trevor Nunn’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby (1838‑1839). In this series, actors from The Royal Shakespeare Company ap‑ peared to improvise and there was no attempt to hide the fact that the play took place on a theatre stage (op. cit., 245). Trier likewise names Thornton Wilder’s American play Our Town (1938), where the actors mime the action without scenography and props, and where the stage manager appears as the narrator of the piece. In this way the extradiegetic voice‑over narrator, which is so essential in film noir, is remediated unproblemati‑ cally in both the theatre as well as the novel. The last element detailed by Trier is that the entire town should be viewed »as though laid out on a map« (op. cit., 245). He mentions this idea

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elsewhere171 as originating with the computer game Silent Hill, where one also finds an Elm Street.172 Trier does not mention here that the film’s hypermediated overview, which in the computer game is used to survey diverse routes and obstacles, is due to a grid on which 13 DV cameras were hung. The grid, which was moveable, made it possible to cover the entire stage from 160 perspectives in total, seen from above. The individual sequences were filmed from the grid on a green back‑ ground and were later compiled on a computer.173 The artificial staging takes place partly through the overview perspective as a transcendent, extradiegetic place, which is also ›inhabited‹ by the omnipotent voice‑over narrator,174 and partly through the sceno‑ graphic elements, which are supposed to intensify the Brechtian Verfremdung. The latter is found especially on the floor plan, where the houses have neither walls nor doors but are made from chalk outlines, as are the contours of the dog Moses and Ma Ginger’s gooseberry bushes. Verfremdung is also created by the light from the ›Sun‹ and ›Moon‹ clearly emanating from lamps. The film me‑ dium’s indexical elements, which support classic forms of film realism, are in this way clearly toned down in order to intensify theatrical and literary elements. Trier emphasises that the chalk outlines can be just as real as tangible walls, and that the audi‑ ence can engage with this if the illusion is consistent and carried through: They’re real in the same way that a child’s drawing is real. If you give a small child some crayons and ask him or her to draw a house, you’ll get a house made of a few simple lines. That’s how our scenery works. We’re establishing an agreement with the audience under which these

171 Interview in CinemaZone.dk with Jesper Vestergaard, 4 June 2003: http://www.cinemazone.dk/arti‑ cle.asp?id=560&area=3 (last viewed 23 April 2013). In The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1944) Brecht also uses chalk lines on the floor as an important part of the scenography. 172 Another reference is Wes Craven’s horror film A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Both the computer game and the film can, however, also refer to another event, namely the assassination of Kennedy, which took place on Elm Street in Dallas, Texas, 22 November 1963. 173 Described by Peter Hjort in »Visual Effects Featurette« on disc 2 of the DVD. 174 Lothar van Laak stresses that the narrator’s »strong performative function« in Dogville and Manderlay, where the characters partly illustrate the words and bring them to life, but where there are also tensions (of, for example, the ironic kind) between the two levels, makes Trier’s allegories more open to the epic grand form than Brecht’s theatre plays (Laak 2009, 332‑335).

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circumstances are accepted. If that agreement is clear enough then I don’t think there are any boundaries to what you can do. (Björkman, 246)

During the filming of Dogville it was crucial for Trier that all 16 actors (+ children) were present simultaneously for the six weeks of shooting in the film’s scenery – even if they perhaps did not have any lines. The six weeks correspond to the narrative span; that is, the time in which Grace finds herself in Dogville. This performative real‑time element and the Verfremdung elements are the crucial rules of the game. As Trier explains in the citation above, the Brechtian Verfremdung can, just like a child’s drawing utilising only a few simple means (such as chalk outlines), create a contract of reality. The viewer accepts that the chalk outlines can denote real house walls, while simultaneously establishing a reflexive distance from the events on the stage, since they are clearly scenery. Trier also utilises the scenery to give more impor‑ tance to the actors‹ improvisation, which gains a kind of real‑time effect because everyone is present and intimate witnesses to one another’s performances. These approaches link well to the im‑ plementation of the Dogme rules in The Idiots, where the actors also lived together, but here there were elements of Verfremdung attached later in the form of Trier’s interviews with the actors concerning their experiences of the project.175 These approaches are also made explicit in and with Dogville (cf. Trier’s critique of the widespread use of digital post‑ production in mainstream film in the same interview; Björkman ibid.). But he also mentions in the same place and several others the lunar landings broadcast on TV in 1969 as a source for the film.176 He is curious as to whether this real‑time broadcast from NASA actually took place, or whether it, as certain conspiracy 175 In connection with the filming of Dogville, a room was also constructed for confessions where actors could enter alone and comment on events, recording themselves on video. 176 In Sami Saif’s film Dogville Confessions, amongst others, a particular style of filming is utilised as a recurrent framing (from above or from a remotely controlled camera on ground level), which is indicative of the filming from the surface of the moon. In the beginning of this film, which is identical with the begin‑ ning of Dogville, Trier says: »This film is a lunar landing. As the film is now, we have landed on the moon.« Later a soundbite with astronaut Neil Armstrong’s voice is added to Dogville’s chronicled stage environ‑ ment, where he announces: »One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind« (Added Value, disc 2 of the DVD edition of Dogville).

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theories claim, was merely a studio recording.177 It is thus the field between transparency and opacity which in this film inspires Trier to develop the concept of Verfremdung, so it can also contain the diagrammatic as a micropolitical prism. It is in this field of ten‑ sion that the film’s unresolved conflict plays out – and that the interface between the territorialised overview perspective and the deterritorialised Verfremdung perspective develops. Consequently the camera grid in the ceiling of the film studio becomes central. From here the hypermediacy perspective can be partly established, and diagrammatic, haptic delineations in the narrative as material can be partly created. Peter Hjort mentions that the camera grid made it possible to create imperceptible transi‑ tions between night and day, to create a semi‑transparent layer of haze over the town, to create a painterly form of transparency in the surface of the truck’s tarpaulin covering and, not least, to create the spiral motion imitating the shape of a corkscrew in the zoom from the floor level and up, which brings Chuck’s rape of Grace up onto the same level of reflection as the voice‑over (see below).178 The first two examples change the scene so it is covered by semi‑transparent haptic layers, which negate depth, thus enabling audiences to ab‑ stract themselves from the narrative. The last example, where the camera turns on its own axis, spiralling from the ground level up, enables the viewer to maintain a distance from the haptic‑affective contact with the violence of the events. This alternating between the (semi)transparent and the opaque is, as far as I am concerned, the filmic idea which makes the remediation of the many involved media so successful, as the viewer has no problem connecting with the somewhat untraditional filmic setting. But the play between the (semi)transparent and the opaque is also given a political con‑ tentual meaning in Dogville. In the following we shall look closer at the composition of Dogville in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between micoropolitics and segmentarity.

177 In Denmark this meant that the majority of people (including children) stayed awake most of the night in order to follow the transmission. 178 Cf. Peter Hjort’s explanation in »Visual Effects Featurette« on the DVD’s Added value.

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Capitalistic segmentarity and terroristic micropolitics in Dogville

In chapter 9 of A Thousand Plateaus, »1933: Micropolitics and Seg‑ mentarity«, Deleuze and Guattari analyse fascism as a micropo‑ litical activity which, from 1933 and onwards, was in the process of undermining capitalist segmentarity. They put forward several types of segmentarity: binary (for example, social classes, men‑ women, adults‑children); circular (myself, my neighbourhood, my city, my country, the world); and linear (the linear processes of the school and army). These are found transversely in various forms in every society, but there is a tendency that ›primitive‹ societies cre‑ ate supple types and ›modern‹ societies create rigid types (Deleuze and Guattari 2013, 244‑246). However, the latter should not be understood so that ›supple‹ and ›primitive‹ always follow one an‑ other, as rigid segments are also found here. One ought to under‑ stand it almost as molar (fabric regarded as whole or mass) and mo‑ lecular structures in every society and individual, and that is why: In short, everything is political, but every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics. Take aggregates of the perception or feeling type: their molar organization, their rigid segmentarity, does not preclude the existence of an entire world of unconscious micro‑ percepts, unconscious affects, fine segmentations that grasp or expe‑ rience different things, are distributed and operate differently. There is a micropolitics of perception, affection, conversation, and so forth. (Op. cit., 249; author’s italics).

Kafka’s description of bureaucracy is Deleuze and Guattari’s ex‑ ample of rigid segmentarity with ›soft‹ non‑definitive boundaries. Fascism is an example of a molecular system of »a proliferation of molecular focuses in interaction, which skip from point to point, before beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist State« (op. cit., 250‑251; author’s italics). According to Deleuze and Guattari, Hitler »had at his disposal micro‑organizations«, which meant that National Socialism became »flows capable of suffusing every kind of cell« (op. cit., 250‑251). Here Deleuze and Guattari make a connection with the depiction of fascist micro‑ organising in American films: 184

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What makes fascism dangerous is its molecular or micropolitical power, for it is a mass movement: a cancerous body rather than a totalitar‑ ian organism. American film has often depicted these molecular focal points; band, gang, sect, family, town, neighbourhood, vehicle fascisms spare no one. (Op. cit., 251)

It is obvious to associate this with film noir, whose icons are so clearly paraphrased in Dogville. Aside from the femme fatale, there is the gang and the authentic cars from the 1930s, which are driven in and out of the scene, each time to considerable effect. In addition the town turns out to be much less peaceful than first assumed when Grace, the ›intruder‹, disturbs its order. That the inhabitants of the town of Dogville ignite a molecular fire as a result of their (also individually different) micropoliti‑ cal relations to Grace is, in fact, the pivotal point in the entire film – its conundrum. Everything is grounded in the illustrated Verfremdung, which Tom addresses to the audience (alias Trier with Dogville). Tom is a person who would like to be able to ›ride on‹ the molecular lines of flight in the dream of winning power and fame as an author. He aims both to create chaos and to con‑ trol the flows which escape and mutate. This is the background for his ›illustration‹, where the inhabitants of Dogville are sum‑ moned in order to participate in an experiment on ethics and humane conduct. According to Deleuze and Guattari, this form of controlled experiment in the »closed vessel« marks the way to totalitarianism (op. cit., 267). We witness in the film how Tom’s barely hidden power strategy proliferates to every cell in the town, whose base structure is segmented in a capitalist manner with a primary production (mine and orchard), a secondary production (glass manufacture and transportation), a service sector (shop and cleaning) and an official sector (priest and doctor), together with budding artists (painting and literature). Tom’s experiment, in which Grace acts as the central ingredi‑ ent (a gift) facilitating new forms of exchange in the small town society, is eventually derailed. Tom’s ›gift‹ poisons the relations which were already frayed, and rather than strengthening unity, it all ends with conflict between everyone and the removal of Grace, who does not have a clearly defined function in the seg‑ america films · verfremdung and diagrammatic production

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mented society – and who therefore elicits unpredictable forms of passionate, barrier‑breaking and unsavoury behaviour, before she is contained and chained like a scapegoat. If one thinks of Tom’s ›gift‹ as a pharmakon (which means both poison and rem‑ edy) in extension of Derrida’s critical reading of Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, it fits better with the film’s outcome. Derrida links the double meaning of the word pharmakon – together with the words pharmakeon (wizard, magician) and pharmakos (scapegoat) – to writing, and he shows that Plato (with Socrates) also sees writing as more than poison, in light of philosophically true speech con‑ nected to actual phenomena. Writing has an ambivalent character with double meanings in all relations: If the pharmakon is »ambivalent«, it is because it constitutes the medium in which opposites are opposed, the movement and the play that links them among themselves, reverses them or makes one side cross over into the other (soul/body, good/evil, inside/outside, memory/forgetful‑ ness, speech/writing, etc.). […] The pharmakon is the movement, the locus, and the play: (the production of) difference. It is the differance [la différance] of difference. (Derrida 1981, 127; author’s italics)

Grace becomes the extra ingredient, the pharmakon, which Tom imagines could potentially make the ideal Dogville real in writing, but she ends as a scapegoat rather than as a joker. She does not become a sacrifice (like Bess and Selma in Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark respectively), however, because she refuses to give in to the nuances and ambivalence which can be said to characterise each incident. But she learns by experience, and in several ways the middle ground of nuances, which both she and Tom praise, must yield when events are given an outlet in actions. A good example is her relationship to Chuck and Vera’s son, Jason, whom Grace devotedly attends to. He displays a tyrannical side when he, in his disdainful manner, seeks (more) physical contact and presses Grace to hit him. He is victorious when she reacts physically, and her principles of non‑violence are eroded. Jason, who understands the adult forms of ceasefire, then ›tells‹ on her to his mother, Vera, without letting on that it was he who manipulated Grace into hitting him. At this point Vera also 186

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believes that Grace has seduced her husband, so she confronts Grace determinedly and smashes the children’s figurines which Grace has collected. At the same time she exploits the situation to teach Grace a lesson in stoic calm: if Grace can hold back her tears, Vera will spare the last five figures. This instructive lesson in ›controlling one’s emotions‹ develops during the violent shoot‑ ing in the film’s final act to yet another retributive action – but this time with living children – as Grace instructs the gangsters that the children will be spared if Vera can hold back her tears. Stoic intervention and the mastering of the machinations of affect against the body thus strike in terroristic retaliatory ac‑ tivities.179 The violent assaults on Grace escalate from and with her pun‑ ishment of Jason. Here her weakness is laid bare. Her idealistic demand – the creation of an alternative to the terroristic forms of control in the gangster milieu – means that she cannot re‑ spond. Her rape at the hands of Chuck follows the same pattern, and happens because Chuck demands physical evidence of her ›respect‹. As with his son, Jason, Chuck gives Grace as good as he gets in that he threatens to report her to the FBI, and the rape functions in this way as payment for his silence. Chuck ex‑ ploits his physical superiority, and this is followed by the posters which the police have distributed being changed from »missing« to »wanted«. As the reward for reporting her to the police rises more and more, Chuck is correct when he says: »You’re far too beautiful and frail for this place«. Her worth must be devalued, if she is to survive. After this Grace has no defence against her social collapse, as all the men in the town (apart from Tom) regard access to her body as their right. Tom must maintain that she is a gift, when she insists that their reciprocal vows of love must not be sullied. After an unsuccessful attempt to escape, set up by Tom, his chivalrousness crumbles, though, and he goes along with the decision of the townsfolk to place her in chains. Escape is now 179 For a more developed analysis of the Jason and Medea theme in Euripides and Trier, see Thomsen 2005. Also in Trier’s Medea, the titular character displays stoic calm in the hanging of her children, which repeats the motif of violence several times: Jason’s violence (leaving his family without thinking about Medea and the children) leads to Medea’s (to rob Jason of a future, in the form of the children), and this demands of her that she carries out her project stoically, in order for Jason’s cynicism to be revealed.

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out of the question; meanwhile, the exploitation and contempt occur on a daily basis. This is how Grace is transformed from functioning as a gift for the development of ethical forms of col‑ laboration in a capitalistic segmentation to being a hostage who, as a commodity, can be exchanged for hard cash at any time. From now on Grace sees no other way out than terroristic action, and she – not Tom – finally collects the energy from the molecular »micropercepts, unconscious affects, [and] fine segmentations« (Deleuze and Guattari 2013, 249). As with her female forerun‑ ners, Brecht’s Pirate Jenny and Euripides’ Medea, Grace cuts short the process, but before this the audience gains access to the perceptive microprocesses that she goes through. Microperceptual affect in Dogville

In the following we will look closer at how the style of classic film noir and the Brechtian Verfremdung strategy work together in a purely filmic sense – this in relation to the description of the mi‑ cropolitical form, emanating from the rape and gaining an outlet in the mass execution in the final scenes, which is reminiscent of the methods for a final solution associated with Nazism, gangsters and the so‑called shock‑and‑awe tactics against Iraq. Deleuze and Guattari emphasise that the biggest threat of the molecular flow is the capture not of reterritorialization, but of the line of flight: »instead of connecting with other lines and each time augmenting its valence, turning to destruction, abolition pure and simple, the passion of abolition« (op. cit., 268‑269). This could be valid for both Tom’s and Grace’s lines of flight. They both fail, but it is Grace who draws the longest (or shortest) straw, when her father’s obscured rescue operation gives her power to allow the molecular flow to result in a terroristic solution.180 Neverthe‑ less, one might say that during the final scenes Tom is suicidal in his passionate desire for power and fame. His final line to Grace, when the townsfolk are shot and the houses burned down, is: »Bingo Grace. Bingo. I have to tell you your illustration beat the 180 This solution can to a large extent also be seen as a Trieresque comment on the so‑called ›war on terror‹, which proclaimed democracy on the agenda in Iraq.

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hell out of mine. It’s frightening. Yes, but so clear. Do you think I can allow myself to use it as an inspiration in my writing?« Even at the end he holds on to the idea that written rhetoric must extract its content from living life – by witnessing that this can cost him his own life.181 A similar form of suicidal passion also occurred in the ›war machine‹ of German fascism, with its objective, as Hitler formulated it, being absolute war and the ruin of the State if the war was lost (op. cit., 270). Both Tom and Grace thus perpetrate micropolitical activ‑ ity – Tom on the grounds of strategies of power and Grace out of necessity. The micropolitical, molecular flows, according to Deleuze and Guattari, can be of both right‑ and left‑wing ori‑ ented convictions and can hardly be understood and regulated by a classic State power, which one also experienced in Paris in May 1968. But the flows change their course and again create molar segments, and it is extremely difficult to differentiate between the de‑ and reterritorialised movements, because: [The] first eludes the second, or the second arrests the first, prevents it from flowing further; but at the same time, they are strictly com‑ plementary and coexistent, because one exists only as a function of the other; yet they are different and in direct relation to each other, although corresponding term by term, because the second only ef‑ fectively arrests the first on a »plane« that is not the plane specific to the first, while the momentum of the first continues on its own plane. (Op. cit., 256‑257)

It is worth noting that Tom’s literary experiment with Dogville’s de‑ and reterritorialising fails, while Grace’s reterritorialising of her own body only succeeds because of another micropolitical agenda (namely that of the gangsters), on which the events in the town have continuously been conditional from outside, so to speak. It is Tom’s deceit and delusion – that he has not destroyed The Big Man’s card – that takes over the scene from another 181 For me there is no doubt that Trier in this sense comments on his own artistic behaviour, where the chaos incites the desire to be able to control creativity, and vice versa. The possibility that the moon landing in 1969 could be a precisely staged studio recording functions as a kind of antithesis to the whole of this sense of creative chaos.

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The repercussions of Grace’s (Nicole Kidman) deliberations can be experienced as an event, as the moonlight hits the town and Grace’s face.

plane in an unexpected and molecular way and reterritorializes Grace’s body as having another (familial) connection than Dog‑ ville’s. But throughout the entire film there is a suggestion that such a turn could take place. The identification with Grace in‑ creases motivically in and with the camera’s zoom from the rape up to the reflective, perspectival overview of the voice‑over. The camera’s spiralling movement includes the Verfremdung form of Brechtian theatre and the strategic form of hypermediacy from computer games, and in this way seals Grace’s fate as a part of the interface control, which with the voice‑over’s extradiegetic figure has constantly spoken to the viewer. But it is at the height of the body and head, in the human reactions, that the microperceptive forms of affective emotion become crucial for the film’s unfold‑ ing of micropolitical ethics. The crucial event becomes an effect of the moonlight’s activation of the relation between ceiling and floor. The moonlight shifts several times in the film, but the final, qualitative shift, where Grace considers whether she ought to fol‑ low macropolitical or micropolitical ethics, gains a diagrammatic meaning as that which frames the film’s event. The voice‑over advances her inner feelings: 190

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The cloud scattered and let the moonlight through. And Dogville un‑ derwent another of these little changes of light. It was as if the light, previously so merciful and faint, finally refused to cover up for the town any longer. Suddenly you could no longer imagine a berry that would appear on a gooseberry bush, but only see the thorn that was there right now. The light now penetrated every unevenness and flaw in the buildings and in the people! And all of a sudden she knew the answer to her question all too well. If she had acted like them, she could not have defended a single one of her actions and could not have condemned them harshly enough. It was as if her sorrow and pain finally assumed their rightful place. No, what they had done was not good enough. (Voice‑over from Dogville’s DVD)

This description of the event is in full accordance with Deleuze’s description (in extension of Spinoza), in that the affective collision simultaneously regulates a transition where the body goes from one capacity or condition to another – a respectively minimised or increased ability to act. In an interview with Brian Massumi, he remarks on how this can be experienced. It leaves traces and corporeal memory, which is virtually reactivated in the passage towards the future – and »[t]his in‑between time or transversal time is the time of the event« (Massumi 2015, 49). In the same interview he expounds how this, occurring ahead of an event, can have the character of microperceptual shocks, which each moment is filled with: For example a change in focus, or a rustle at the periphery of vision that draws the gaze toward it. In every shift of attention there is an inter‑ ruption, a momentary cut in the mode of onward deployment of life. The cut can pass unnoticed, striking imperceptibly with only its effects entering conscious awareness as they unroll. […] Microperception is not smaller perception; it’s a perception of a qualitatively different kind. It’s something that is felt without registering consciously. It registers only in its effects. (Massumi 2015, 53)

These microperceptions are thus present in each moment as a potential extension of the forms of continuity that occur on the surface. They can be experienced when, for example, one is america films · verfremdung and diagrammatic production

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shocked without knowing what caused the shock, and when one only slowly realises that it is the traces from an earlier shock that are influencing the event. We are not conscious of these affects, which are experienced on a micro level, just as we are not aware of how a thought is born and develops in our consciousness. But nevertheless they gain a critical influence on the formation of an event, as happens with Grace when the moonlight reveals a new tonality in Dogville. The changes in lighting reveal for her (and the viewer) the town’s faults and inadequacies, to which Grace has turned a blind eye. The viewer, who perhaps has already judged the town’s inhabitants in light of their actions, can only follow, but not necessarily appreciate Grace’s violent reaction that follows afterwards. Grace’s microperceptual transformation also leads to a pause for reflection for the viewer. Here the film’s events can be collated and brought on par with the ethical question Tom’s narrative ambitions and the narrator’s reasoning have laid out as guiding principles. Grace’s actions can thus be seen as an act of mercy (cf. the name Grace), which liberate the world and herself from debasement and self‑degradation. All lines of flight from the town and its inhabitants have shown themselves to be impossible, and the affective event takes over: The microshocks don’t stop. They come in droves, all in intervals smaller than the smallest perceivable. All cut, all the time in infinite division. It is only because an affective tonality envelops groupings of them, continues through or around them, that we feel the moment as having extension, rather than feeling it implode into an infinitely proliferating fractal cut. It is the quality of the experience that makes the moment. The present is held aloft by affect. This is also something that Whitehead insists on: affect is not in time, it makes time, it makes time present, it makes the present moment, it’s a creative factor in the emergence of time as we effectively experience it; it’s constitutive of lived time. (Massumi 2015, 61)

The microperceptual registering, which Grace has experienced throughout (witnessed by the viewer through the voice‑over’s slightly ironic comments), disconnects in the affect narrative – to raze the town and its inhabitants to the ground. This action can 192

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naturally be interpreted both positively and negatively: regarded as Grace’s liberation from exploitation and coercion, it is positive, but regarded externally, it is an act of terror, whose legitimation (that is, to measure its fellow humans by its own standards) is no better than the legitimation of the war in Iraq (that is, the intro‑ duction of Western democracy).182 Grace spares the dog, Moses, which only barks because she once took a bone from it. Animals are not scheming, calculating or abusive, and therefore the dog is spared. It is here – in the film’s final image, which has been dominated by the red, iconic colour reflecting on Grace’s tearful face – that Moses is suddenly ren‑ dered real and heard in a three‑dimensional way. The film’s final image shows the barking Moses rise from its two‑dimensional, chalk‑delineated form, and bare its teeth to the camera – an im‑ age of pure affective, transformative potentiality.183 Here we see how Trier in an actual sense utilises the diagrammatic sign in a creative, artistic manner. The dog, according to the Brechtian method, was only a drawn outline and now appears in accor‑ dance with Peirce’s formulation (Peirce 1997, 226) as a thing in another diagram (the filmic), which has almost always worked indexically. By reducing the film’s houses, plants and animals to chalk lines, the indexical evocation of the dog in the final image is given a noticeable affective effect. The barking Moses turns into a diagrammatic dog, whose sharp canine teeth have bite and thus involve the audience in a kind of transition from theatre to film, which in a historical context implies the interface of the computer game. In addition, the closing image is an antithesis of the image of the violated Grace, because the camera moves away. The rape can thus be contained within the diegesis, so to speak, just as the inhabitants of Dogville can also contain that which they ›know of‹ without seeing. In contrast, the transformed image of Moses‹ affective bark is effective, in that it links to the audience’s own microperceptive recollections of snarling and barking dogs. 182 Andrea Brighenti, who with Girard and Agamben in »Dogville, or, the Dirty Birth of Law« analyses the role of the sacrificed figure and how they can err, also describes the viral effect of violence: »If the vio‑ lence released in the sacrifice is not well circumscribed, it will spread like a virus, like a maddened pharma‑ kon, an infectious vaccine« (Brighenti 2006, 108). 183 The image is not unlike the image of Bongo in the first episode of The Kingdom I.

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The barking dog, Moses, is rendered visible from its 2D existence.

All in all, one can say that with this film Trier takes hold of the micropolitical layer, which can be seen diagrammatically as signaletic flows in the form of lighting effects and the indexical evocation of micropolitical affect. Compositional planes in Manderlay

In the beginning of Manderlay, which is set in the year 1933,184 Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard) follows her gangster father (Wil‑ 184 The date refers to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inaugural speech (cf. the documentary The Road to Manderlay, Added value, disc 2 of the DVD), but it could also refer to Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag, which paved the way for his seizure of power in 1934. The film tells how Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard), with the best intentions of educating the slaves on the cotton farm Manderlay in the ways of democracy, in reality only ends up repeating the white, racist forms of power. She is shocked that the owner Mam (Lauren Bacall) in 1933 – 70 years after the abolition of slavery – still whips the slaves, but in the film’s final scenes she herself carries out the same punishment. In the meantime, she has thrown the white owners out in the understanding that they have to work just as hard and with the same food rations as their slaves formerly received. The slaves, on the other hand, receive shared property rights, and she educates them in the democratic principles of equality, voting and the distribution of goods. She also edu‑ cates them on being receptive to values and repairing the houses, because the wood for this must be taken from the border of trees which functions as the estate’s garden. That the garden has in reality functioned as a windbreak, which has protected the fields against the yearly sandstorms, and that sowing‑time has to follow directly if it is to be harvested, are insights which Grace must learn the hard way. Starvation follows the sandstorm and after the vote Grace must execute the old woman, Wilma (Mona Hammond), who eats a sick girl’s food out of necessity because she can no longer bear eating soil. But it is Grace’s own fascination

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lem Dafoe) from Colorado to Alabama in the hunt for new ter‑ ritories for illicit activities.185 Grace, in the meantime, leaves her father after becoming annoyed with his boasting that all women have fantasies of being in a harem or dream of being chased by natives with torches, even though they wish for democracy and civilisation. His ideas, which see sexual attraction as the most vital interaction between men and women, are, according to Grace, outdated. Here – by the gate to the Manderlay estate – the nar‑ rative also leaves the stylistic film noir genre. Grace goes from being a kind of free radical,186 a femme fatale who makes up the pivotal point of desire but who must at the same time be left in a capitalistic segmenting, to being an insistent pioneer whose con‑ scious wish it is to educate a group of (former) slaves to live and work according to democratic principles. When Grace arrives, the estate is organised in a feudal manner with slaves who work without wages and are punished for minor errors. When it be‑ comes clear for Grace in the film’s final scene that her democratic attempt at reform has failed, the status quo returns – with the addition that the former slaves are now wholly aware of what form of conscious stratification they have been exposed to. However, it remains unclear whether the set of rules for this ›mind control‹, Mam’s Law, will be destroyed, or whether in the future it can be the starting point for new repetitions. With a starting point in Moses‹ becoming‑animal in the final scene of Dogville, Trier sets a slightly despondent question in Manderlay about how an with the obstinate Timothy (Isaach de Bancolé) that once and for all tips the balance. When she – after having given herself to him sexually – discovers that he has stolen and gambled away the community money for the harvest, she finally finds support in the subdivision of slaves according to their humane characters, which are noted in the so‑called Mam’s Law. The problem, which Grace is struck by in the meantime, is the fact that this book was originally written by the elderly slave, Wilhelm (Danny Glover), who after the abolition of slavery realised that the slaves would not be able to survive in a liberally organised world outside of Manderlay. 185 This is shown cartographically by cars in miniature moving across a map of the USA, on which the states are demarcated. The scene is reminiscent of the opening of both Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942) and Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco (1930), which both describe a Western idea of Morocco. 186 I refer to the definition on the website of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Free Radical Chemistry and Biotechnology: »Free radicals are molecules with unpaired electrons. They are everywhere – in the air, our bodies and the materials around us. In their quest to find another electron, they are very reactive and can cause damage to surrounding molecules. They cause the deterioration of plastics, the fading of paint, the degradation of works of art, aging related illnesses, and can contribute to heart attacks, stroke and can‑ cers. However, free radicals are also useful because they help important reactions in our bodies take place and can be utilised to manufacture pharmaceuticals, custom‑designed plastics and other innovative materi‑ als« (http://www.freeradical.org.au).

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affect‑born alternative to a capitalistic form of organisation can be found – a form which does not follow the form for faciality: white wall/black hole.187 Chalk lines, whose scenography clearly segments the unequal relationship between the rich main building and the poor huts where the slaves live, are retained from Dogville, but the floor is lit in the background instead of being dark, and this is why the houses, well, barn and garden are drawn in black. The film has certain clear intertextual references to Brecht’s political‑satirical opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930), whose body of songs, amongst others, includes the well‑known »Alabama Song« and »The Mandalay Song«, and in which a tornado plays a crucial role in the narrative. The extradiegetic narrator func‑ tion from the voice‑over is also retained from Dogville, and the camera perspective from the ceiling grid, which, for example, can generate haptic effects of migrating birds and sandstorms, is just as effective.188 Stylistically the film has features in common with the work of Josef von Sternberg, whom Deleuze calls anti‑ expressionistic – this should not be understood as an alternative to expressionism but rather as a kind of rival to expressionism’s strong antithesis between black and white. In Sternberg the re‑ flection of light is prioritised in the white face supplemented with diverse nets, blinds and veils, which break up the light. These alternations between white and various degrees of white and shadow become a principle, which breaks with the obscurity of expressionism (Deleuze 1986, 95). In the majority of Sternberg’s films featuring Marlene Dietrich, the white screen’s expressive quality is reflected in the face of the film diva, by which Stern‑ berg’s masochistic aesthetic is accentuated. This aesthetic tones

187 This question could have feminist undertones because in the beginning of the film Grace reacts to her father’s misogynistic statements. The slaves (and their return to the known, patriarchal order) will in this construction, like the women’s lot in a patriarchy, be seen as effects of a patriarchal organisation of society, which functions as the foundation for a capitalistic economy of goods. Mam’s Law will be identical with the (self)oppressive functions that women are made to fulfil as mothers and educationists. Thanks to C. Claire Thomson for this point. 188 The camera grid with 13 cameras, which film the stage from above, is, however, extended and covers a greater area (100m2). In order for the compilation of images in the computer to be able to cover the entire surface (though neither seemlessly nor from a singular perspective), the entire floor of the stage is turned into a green screen measuring 76 x 30 metres (Peter Hjort in »Visual Effects in the Making of Manderlay«, Added value, disc 2, DVD).

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down the narrative in order to achieve greater tonal atmosphere, paying tribute to the masochist’s woman, who like Lola (Dietrich) attracts men like an electric bulb attracts moths (cf. The Blue Angel 1929/1930).189 The alternative to this role is submission and a nomadic existence, as illustrated in Morocco, where Amy Jolly (Dietrich) in the final scenes steps out of her stilettos in order to follow her lover into the desert’s white boundlessness. Struggle in the binary segmentation

According to Trier himself it was not Leopold von Sacher‑Mas‑ och’s (hence the word ›masochism‹) type of woman, depicted in Venus in Furs (1870), which inspired him to create the Grace character in Manderlay (and Dogville). Rather, it was the Marquis de Sade’s (hence the word ›sadism‹) depiction of the maltreatment of the pious, tender‑hearted Justine in Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue (1791). In Manderlay, Trier investigates what would hap‑ pen if the Justine character, Grace, had armed power and did not merely act passively, as in the majority of Dogville.190 The film’s outcome is, on the surface, almost identical. When the gangsters are no longer protecting her, Grace becomes a victim of Timothy just as easily as she became Chuck’s victim in Dogville. Where Chuck had his way by threatening to hand in her silk scarf to the police, Timothy covers her face with a white cotton scarf in order to take her. This, according to the »ancient traditions«, which in and with the representation in the film gains the character of a notion of Western orientalism, is strengthened by the portrayal of Timothy’s sexuality as being animalistic. In contrast to the shame and powerlessness which followed her rape at the hands of Chuck, Grace experiences orgastic satisfac‑ tion with Timothy. At first it appears as if Grace, also after the event, acknowledges her abandonment to Timothy even though this would confirm her father’s misogynistic remarks that all women dream of sexual submission. It is possible that she ima‑

189 See an analysis of all Sternberg’s films in Thomsen 1997. On the aesthetics of masochism, see Deleuze [1967] 1989 and Studlar 1993. 190 Trier in The Road to Manderlay, Added value, disc 2, Manderlay DVD.

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Timothy (Isaach de Bankolé) covers Grace’s (Bryce Dallas Howard) face with a white scarf prior to intercourse.

gines how she, in relation to Timothy, can abolish the racial seg‑ regation. Shortly afterwards, when it turns out that he drinks, lies and steals, and thus oversteps other boundaries for civilised and democratic behaviour, she punishes him with the whip. The anger that accompanies the punishment and shows in Grace’s tearful face while she whips with all her might is, however, just as much turned towards herself, because she had erroneously assumed that Timothy (according to Mam’s Law) was a slave in category 1 (the proud type of royal kinship) instead of being category 7 (the fraudulent and coquettish type). In this way it shows clearly at the end of Manderlay that Grace has been guilty of a slightly different type of arrogance than that she displayed in Dogville, where, according to her father, she felt she was better than the townsfolk and therefore judged them according to a different standard than she judged herself. In Manderlay the arrogance is shown with her submission to Timothy being conditional on a hidden (but erroneous) knowledge that he belongs to a higher rank than the other former slaves. Even when the teaching of democratic principles is lost on Timothy, who in addition heroi‑ cally demonstrates to her how one masters the forces of nature, 198

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she believes she has found evidence of his more noble nature. When this leads to her wholly and completely surrendering to his sexuality, she implicates herself in a classic form of racist arrogance where democratic principles of liberty, equality and fraternity are set in parenthesis in sexual desire towards associ‑ ating themselves with, or submitting (themselves) to, the ›noble savage‹. From a democratic viewpoint the desire can, however, simultaneously be legitimised in an overriding wish for interracial reform. White arrogance is due to the white person’s own position being regarded as superior – no matter what the positioning. Grace’s attempt to create (yet another) alternative to her father’s ideas is at first regarded as being mistaken – viewed from Grace’s individual position. If, on the other hand, one views Manderlay as an allegorical illustration of the difficulties of introducing a democratic system of control in a society that is organised hierarchically, it is logical to see the film as not merely a comment on the historical form of (American) racism and capitalism, but also as a critique of the American strategy in Iraq, which Denmark also participated in. The alleged pres‑ ence of ›weapons of mass destruction‹ and the introduction of ›democracy‹ was the motive which was presented, so the impor‑ tant possibility of accessing oil reserves became secondary in the discourse. In this light, the Grace figure and her actions – par‑ ticularly in Manderlay – become a negative illustration of how the Western form of arrogance might look when viewed from a more collectively grounded view. In my opinion, Trier, with a starting point in Brechtian Verfremdung (attached to a performa‑ tive narrator with space for irony), encourages criticism of the Western understanding of the individual as an integrated part of a capitalistically organised democracy. In fact, Trier points to how Grace’s misinterpretations are caused by the fact that she can abandon neither her individual perspective nor the belief that the individual can make a difference, though she attempts to organise a kind of commune embedded in capitalistic market principles of supply and demand, the so‑called Free Enterprise Manderlay. Aside from the already mentioned example, where Timothy is ›celebrated‹ as the individual in the group, sealing both his and america films · verfremdung and diagrammatic production

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Grace’s fate in Manderlay, the clearest example of Grace’s belief in the individual is paradoxically enough that she fails to identify Venus‹ son, Jim. After Venus has implied that Jim’s awkward dis‑ position is due to the fact that he has artistic gifts, which cannot find expression, Grace sees this as a way to prove that Timothy is wrong when claiming that she is not interested in black people as people, and that she, just like all other white people, has difficulty in seeing the difference in individual persons from another race. Grace’s answer is to give Jim painting equipment and an easel, after having observed his face in detail and noticing, as she relays to Venus, that it contains an artistic sensibility. But she cannot differentiate him from Jack, who comes out at the same time as Jim when their mother calls. Here she comes up short with the group and with Timothy, who scornfully uses the word »charity« in relation to her mixing of ideas that she is morally obliged and that individuals can raise themselves above the collective. With regard to her failure in identifying Jim the individual, the voice‑ over comments on this as a »blunder«, which in her former life would have elicited a little laughter but is socially catastrophic for her in Manderlay. This scene ends with the camera following her as an object from the perspective of the slaves, as she leaves the stage in order to take refuge in the main building. The entirety of this scene, in which Grace persists with her white ideas of benevolence, is kept in white tones and the white accentuation appears again each time Grace more or less suc‑ cessfully attempts her ›white‹ arguments, until the crucial turn, where Timothy attempts to cover her in a bestial way, in that he first has her white face covered with his white neck scarf. She introduces, for example, the idea that the former owners of the plantation should paint their faces black and be waiters to the blacks, because they (certainly) will not play along with the demo‑ cratic principles but will instead maintain that the needs of the slaves and their own, as laid out in Mam’s Law, are just as varied as oxen and rabbits. However, Grace realises that this lesson, in which she sets black against black, is just as humiliating for the blacks as it is for the whites. When the storm comes and cov‑ ers everything with reddish sand, this conflict between blacks and whites is reconciled, while the actual leadership is slowly 200

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taken over by Timothy, who has experience in navigating through the hopelessness. Grace’s aloof position is reduced accordingly, and in hunger she even finds herself side by side with the black women who eat soil. She is now sexually attracted to black skin and especially Timothy’s, which is depicted in dark lighting and by the voice‑over as nocturnal vision. After Grace has, against her will, carried out the decision of the community to execute old Wilma,191 who had unjustly eaten the food ration of a sick child, a form of deep idyll sets in and it appears that Timothy’s near‑ fatal struggle in the storm in order to save some of the planted areas has borne fruit. In the description of the cotton harvest, it is the light’s white tone that dominates once more and the orders of Grace have seemingly prevailed – up until Timothy shows his true face, as he covers hers. But one might say that Grace’s need to individualise the slaves also makes it possible for a repeat of the principles in Mam’s Law of »bondage, even through psychology«, and the conclusion of the struggle between the whites and blacks remains uncertain. For the revelation that Timothy belongs to the group of »pleasing niggers« (that is, a chameleon who can be whatever type the beholder wishes to see) belongs only to a limited truth, which Mam’s Law is an expression of – and in addition it is revealed that the book was written by Wilhelm in order to protect the group of former slaves. Dividual qualitative transformation and an ethics of affect

One could say that Timothy, just like Grace in Dogville, plays the role of a free radical in Manderlay. Or one could – with the ac‑ centuation of white against black in mind – say that Timothy, in a masochistic play on forms of dominance and submission, becomes a kind of homme fatale in a film blanc. His dark and compelling being becomes increasingly ill‑fated in direct relation to Grace’s increasing interest in him. But in contrast to the femme fatale in film noir, the enigma of Timothy does not bring the story to a 191 It cannot, however, be decided whether the vote here follows Mam’s Law to the same degree, ac‑ cording to which Wilma is characterised as a »Loser‑nigger« (34:36).

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conclusion, for his figure does not harbour a narrative, voyeuristic desire. The film’s ending is almost identical with its beginning, and Timothy is depicted as obeying cyclical and collective process‑ es of nature. He reacts spontaneously to the affects he is exposed to, and his actions are controlled by his need for food, sexuality and oblivion. He lives in the actual and can neither postpone his needs nor obey abstract (for example, ethical) rules. He is depicted as a divid, who must be understood as wholly different from an individual. As mentioned earlier, Deleuze defines the dividual as being linked to the ever modulating qualitative transformations of the expression and the affect (Deleuze 1986, 105). Timothy is depicted as a dividual, pure expression, who quali‑ tatively participates in transformations – from one situation to the other. This can be understood positively as noble, animalistic, original or pure potentiality – or negatively like the chameleon’s ability to change itself in relation to the situation. What is crucial is that the divid cannot be presented as a demarcated entity, but can only be presented as if seen through a diagram. In this molecular form facial traits cannot necessarily be released.192 The problem that the individual Grace encounters with the divid Timothy, is that he cannot individualise himself as »white, male, adult and ›rational‹» (cf. Deleuze and Guattari 2013, 341) – and also her phantasmatic desire for that which her white, masculine gangster father has mentioned as the oriental other: the black, the animal‑ istic, the child‑like and unpredictable. Both Grace and Timothy are to a certain extent remotely controlled by the voting down faciality and reminiscences of the white man, to whom the child, the woman and the black person only have »childhood memo‑ ries«, […] conjugal, or colonial memories« (op. cit., 341). None of them can position themselves in the white man’s face, the highest point of authority. Therefore Timothy must again and again ac‑ cept the whip because he, as an expressive divid, belongs to the so‑called primitive society, where the face plays a lesser role than the semiotic of affect modulation: »their semiotic is nonsignifying,

192 Cf. Félix Guattari’s two types of faciality, the molar and the molecular type (Guattari [1979] 2011, 79), where the latter is described as having a »faciality‑occurrence that thwarts signifying traps and whose stakes are decisive for the introduction of diagrammatic processes of semiotic control (for better or worse)«.

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non‑subjective, essentially collective, polyvocal, and corporeal, playing on very diverse forms and substances« (op. cit., 205). Likewise Grace must leave the stage once she finally understands that the face is not universal, that the dividual affect is collective and not individualising and that she as a Western individual in a capitalistic stratification cannot go back and unite herself with this pre‑faciality. Nevertheless, time on Manderlay has demonstrated for Grace (and the film’s audience) that there is a limit to what one can vote on (what the time is, and the regulation of laughter, for example). In Manderlay there is no actual event where a form of affec‑ tive momentum is virtually created and is turned into active ac‑ tion, such as the change of lighting in Dogville. Though Timothy consciously relates himself micropolitically to faciality, by both covering and uncovering »the passional power operating through the face of the loved one« (op. cit., 205), this does not create the background for an eruptive event; and the camera grid, which can cover the space seen from above, is not utilised in a marked way. Perhaps it was possible to utilise this more effectually in Dogville, where the small town already represented the deeds of a capitalistically segmented society, than in Manderlay, where the binary relations proliferate endlessly and obstruct the stability of the capitalist society. Though Manderlay is clearly alienated by Christian faciality and the dawning of capitalistic segmentation, this is still in its nascency. As with the conditions in occupied Iraq (or Afghanistan), the molecular functions are not yet brought to a halt in a reterritorialization. But something has happened with Manderlay and its inhabitants: hopelessness is broken by fissures of hope, and the alienated faciality has become so visible that crea‑ tive experiments in breaking the ›white wall/black hole‹ creation of meaning might potentially take place. In that sense one can imagine that the camera grid, which in Dancer in the Dark was developed as 100 eyes to create affects comparable to real‑time events, has gained an independent and more defined function in Manderlay as a diagram that: does not function in order to represent a ›persisting world‹ but rather aims to produce a ›new kind of reality‹ and a new model of truth. It

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is not implicated in a subject of history and neither does it pretend to survey history. Its task is to ›make history‹ by ›unmaking preceding realities and significations‹, and it aims to do this by producing ›unex‑ pected conjunctions‹ and ›improbable continuums‹. It thus ›doubles history with a sense of continual evolution‹. (Pearson 1999, 223)

Pearson here paraphrases Deleuze’s description of the diagram in Foucault ([1986] 2004), in that he simultaneously aims to characterise what is particular in Deleuze’s philosophy. I will say that this description also lends itself to a characteristic of Trier’s film. Though Manderlay is not Trier’s most well‑received film, it is in fact consistent in its use of the diagram in relation to the way in which it can orchestrate affects that come from outside and are greater than the diagram; this is clarified by Deleuze: »The diagram stems from the outside but the outside does not merge with any diagram, and continues instead to ›draw‹ new ones« (Deleuze 2013, 89). As an extension of this, if one regards the camera grid as a diagram, giving the viewer an insight into the invisible stratification and faciality that is ›layered‹ over events and relations in Manderlay, it becomes evident that the film cannot end in a conclusive eruption, because the various forms of de‑ and reterritorialization, for example between blacks and whites or democracy (Grace) and despotism (The Big Man), cannot solve the conflict of stratification between smooth and striated space. Instead the diagram becomes visible as an ab‑ stract machine, which does not operates iconically, indexically or symbolically, but rather: plays a piloting role. The diagrammatic or abstract machine does not function to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality. Thus when it constitutes points of creation or potentiality it does not stand outside history but is instead always ›prior‹ to history. Everything escapes, everything cre‑ ates – never alone, but through an abstract machine that produces continuums of intensity, effects conjunctions of deterritorialization, and extracts expressions and contents. This Real‑Abstract is totally different from the fictitious abstraction of a supposedly pure machine of expression. It is an Absolute, but one that is neither undifferentiated

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nor transcendent. Abstract machines thus have proper names (as well as dates), which of course designate not persons or subjects but matters and functions. (Deluze and Guattari 2013, 164‑165)

The abstract machine in Manderlay also marks itself with a year, namely 1933, which in a distinctly allegorical manner situates a real event as its diagrammatic starting point. And instead of the event as an interfacial involvement the viewer is presented – as also in Dogville – at the end with an excerpt of Jacob Holdt’s American Pictures (Amerikanske Billeder), which photographically and analogically documents social and human misery and pov‑ erty among black Americans.193 Here Trier refers to something outside the diagrammatically enabled allegory by which the film finds itself in the social and political present where resistance can take its starting point, because: power relations operate completely within the diagram, while resist‑ ances necessarily operate in a direct relation with the outside from which the diagrams emerge. This means that a social field offers more resistance than strategies, and the thought of the outside is a thought of resistance. (Deleuze op. cit. 89‑90)

Trier does not attempt to reconcile current conflicts but by open‑ ing diagrammatically he aims to enable the viewer to reflectively connect the segments allegorically – in which they are culturally and socially embedded – previously, currently, and in the future. Both the use of Verfremdung and the diagrammatic knots, which follow the favouring of light and dark respectively, strength‑ en the rhetorical power in the allegorical form, that is, speaking in other terms, in that an expression is overlaid with a different content than what is formally described or shown, by which two meanings are held in one expression. Walter Benjamin describes Baudelaire’s method as an heir to Baroque tragedy, which al‑ legorically endows time with a processual and undecided – that 193 The transition between the fiction, DV and computer‑edited levels and the documentary, analogue level, accompanied in both Dogville and Manderlay by David Bowie’s Young Americans from 1975, appeared shocking to many. The political strength that the documented analogue images had then is reinvested in the remediated form in a real social context, which develops the level of fiction indexically.

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is, spatial – dimension. Baudelaire transforms the melancholic experience in the encounter with the modern and allegorical sign of ›sudden discontinuity‹, and in this way makes modern the frag‑ mented perspective of the baroque (Cowan 1981, 119‑120). Craig Owens later utilises the Benjaminian determination of allegory to a characteristic of the postmodern art of appropriation, where the original meaning is replaced or overlaid with a supplement, and gains the character of excess (Owens 2003, 1032). He is, however, not so interested in the significance of the allegorical figure according to Benjamin – namely that the spatialising of time can be maintained as a becoming without end. The stretchability between the molecular forces in the de‑ pression and pre‑war environments of the 1930s in the America duology, and an actual experience of various attempts to fight micropolitically against terror in Western Europe and the USA, can be seen in light of Benjamin’s categorisation of the allego‑ ry. The power in the two films is that they allegorically open up for time as creation, which contains a virtual wealth of possible events and outcomes, and it is in the utilisation of the diagram and the Brechtian Verfremdung that the possible short circuit in the political‑global means is shown. In other words, Trier draws attention to the notion that the micropolitical, molecular level can relatively easily deterritorialise well‑established molar orbits, and that the two levels are incommensurable with and therefore incongruently effective in the constant de‑ and reterritorializa‑ tions we are witnessing, then as well as now. Therefore, in my opinion, I do not believe that Trier attempts to illustrate the ethical turn in Dogville, which in the comment on the film by French philosopher Jacques Rancière follows the fact that the ethics are being stretched into particular forms of legislation connected to the ›ethical values‹ the Americans urged in the fight against the ›axis of evil‹, from and with the invasion of Iraq. For Rancière, this ethical turn demonstrates a consensus based on the idea that the separation of the law from the factual reality, which is normally negotiated morally, is suppressed. In a global, political consensus the legislation is executed as a kind of inner necessity of modernity and with reference to a preventative politics of security. Rancière believes that the town of Dogville 206

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represents such a consensus society, and that Grace becomes a sacrifice for the town’s administration of its politics of security, which in the utmost instance can legitimise murder. Furthermore, he believes that the aesthetic radicalisation (cf. the execution of the town’s inhabitants) is a sign that the ethical turn dominates even the aesthetic, and that the representation of the division of time in a decisive event is no longer directed towards the future (a revolution) but towards the past. For Rancière, Dogville’s end‑ ing represents the viewer’s witnessing of what is unrepresentably catastrophic (Rancière [2004] 2010, 192). A reading such as this seems to look past the diagrammatic em‑ bedding of the Brechtian Verfremdung as allegory’s time‑related, undetermined form in a possibly critical interface with the viewer, who can thus attain a reflective distance from the actual political events. In addition, as I have shown analytically, Trier trans‑ fers the ethical perspective from the large global‑political level to the body’s microsensoric level in accordance with Spinoza’s ethics, where it is the immanent modi of existence decided by the encounter with other bodies which replace the reference to transcendent values in morality (Deleuze 1988, 23). In Spinoza’s Ethics, absolute conceptions of good and evil are replaced with the qualitative differences between good and bad modi of existence, conditional on encounters with food, conditions of life and other bodies fitting well or poorly into our nature: That individual will be called good (or free, or rational, or strong) who strives, insofar he is capable, to organize his encounters, to join with whatever agrees with his nature, to combine his relation with relations that are compatible with his, and thereby to increase his power. For goodness is a matter of dynamism, power, and the composition of powers. That individual will be called bad, or servile, or weak, or fool‑ ish, who lives haphazardly, who is content to undergo the effects of his encounters, but wails and accuses every time the effect undergone does not agree with him and reveals his own impotence. (Deleuze op. cit., 23; author’s italics)

Bad or sad passions do not lead to anything good in Spinoza’s philosophy of life, where conduct and what a body is capable of america films · verfremdung and diagrammatic production

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in a given milieu creates the basis for ethics, which involves rela‑ tions of affect between people, animals and environments. The sad passions for Spinoza only lead to »hatred, aversion, mockery, fear, despair, morsus conscientiaer, pity, indignation, envy, humil‑ ity, repentence, self‑abasement, shame, regret, anger, vengeance, cruelty« (Deleuze op. cit., 26; author’s italics). Deleuze continues: even in hope194 and security he [the sad individual] is able to find that grain of sadness that suffices to make these the feelings of slaves. The true city offers citizens the love of freedom instead of the hope of re‑ wards or even the security of possessions; for »it is slaves not free men, who are given rewards for virtue«. (Deleuze 1988, 26; author’s italics)

This fits well in a characteristic of what it is the America duology depicts, but it is also interesting in relation to Rancière’s critique, that it is security in particular that is being targeted. For if one regards the act of revenge in Dogville as a break with the secu‑ rity discourse, which binds individuals to sad passions, it also becomes a suggestion for another affectively motivated form of ethics where the question of what a body is capable of under given relations and conditions becomes central. It is this question which is brought further in Manderlay, though it is in no way brought to an enduring reversal in an ethics based on good encounters. Antichrist (2009), Melancholia (2011) and Nymphomaniac (2013) continue the investigation of the sad passions, and these will in a later chapter be analysed in the context of ideas on the value of art from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. But before these films – making up yet another trilogy – Trier made The Boss of it All (2006), which will be discussed by making use of elements from The Five Obstructions (2003), a collaboration between Trier and Jørgen Leth, in the sense that the former provoked the sad pas‑ sions in the latter’s aesthetic practice.

194 Here the English translation has erroneously translated ›espoir‹ as ›despair‹. I have corrected it to read ›hope‹.

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CHAPTER 7

The boss and the performative-biographical The aesthetics of the fall

Trier stopped working on the manuscript for the announced third film in the America series (with the working title Wasington – without the h), because according to him it became »a piece of shit«.195 Instead he made The Boss of It All,196 which he himself de‑ scribes as »a film in the light comedy genre«;197 though it must be made clear that the comedy form is absurd, in the style of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952). Another obvious reference is the mockumentary series The Office, which is found in both a British (2001‑2003) and an American (2005‑2013) version, and where the office environment is represented in ultra‑documentary style – for example, in the camera work, where the unfinished verité style is imitated. The jump‑cut aesthetic of Dogme is also noticeable in The Boss of It All, while the hand‑held principle is replaced with the mathematically decided set of rules called Au‑ tomavision®, which was developed specially for this film by Trier and the technician Peter Hjort. According to Hjort, 35mm film is used, which has not been manipulated, but each shot makes use of the camera settings that have been mathematically decided in advance, so the »shooting angle, editing, exposure and sound level are set according to a computer‑controlled principle of chance« (Hjort 2006). A press of a button gave »a number of camera set‑ tings«, and the accepted rule was that it was »forbidden to rectify 195 Cf. the daily newspaper Politiken, 17 May 2005, citing Ritzau news agency. 196 Though the film also has an English title, The Boss of It All, only Danish actors are involved, and only Danish is spoken (and Icelandic). 197 Jyllands Posten, 22 September 2006, http://jyllands‑posten.dk/jptv/ECE3976703/trier‑film‑inter‑ views/ (last viewed 4 April 2015).

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Automavision’s ® ‘machinic autopoieses’ creates absurd framings such as here where the projector, socket and computer monitor dominate the foreground.

the numbers manually« (op. cit.). According to Hjort, Trier chose »a formula whereby approximately every 30th setting became totally crooked, while the rest lie within what one would call the normal field« (op. cit.). Apart from this mathematically regulated principle of ran‑ domness, it uses neither light settings nor filters, and filming takes place in an already existing office environment. Therefore the interior’s various grey, blue and white tones fill much of the finished film. In addition, Automavision® gives problems with overexposure, creating an intensified experience of abrupt jumps in the visual representation around scene changes. The auto‑ matic editing also means that objects in the interior, for example a computer screen or a coffee cup, can be fully central, and thus the non‑perfection of the image is given a lot of attention. On the other hand, it also means that certain central actors from time to time are reduced and appear as peripheral or flat, in that their images are edited in such a way that, for example, one only sees the upper part of their heads in the bottom part of the image, while the upper part of the framing shows a greyish whiteboard. In other words, this mathematically controlled principle of ran‑ domness creates focus on the signaletic qualities of the image flow, which here support the absurd laughter. The machinic pre‑ 210

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A nondescript window in a grey office building gains the possibility of function‑ ing as a multi‑layered opportunity for reflection.

programming of the camera in The Boss of It All seems creationist with regard to the recorded ›data‹, which for the same reason are experienced as dispersed and expressive, individual components. This corresponds (in a regime of signs) to the diagrammatic component which according to Deleuze and Guattari operates »by the emergence of ever‑new abstract machines« (Deleuze and Guattari 2013, 169), but also to the machinic component that »outlin[es] the program of the assemblages that distribute eve‑ rything and bring a circulation of movement with alternatives, jumps, and mutations« (op. cit. 169; author’s italics). The effect of Trier and Hjort’s Automavision® could be fittingly characterised by Guattari’s description of the ›machinic heterogenesis‹ or ›au‑ topoiesis‹, which is also described as a machinic interface where all value is created between the real and the virtual (cf. Guattari [1992] 1995, »Machinic Heterogenesis«, 33). This machinic heter‑ ogenesis is characterised by asserting a non‑human independence that submits both to the dependences it is ascribed in the opera‑ tion, and the possible relations with previous forms and future mutations of its function. The essential thing here – the creation of new values – is distilled from the virtual point of view, which in abstract machinic (non‑corporeal and non‑humane) expression creates accentuations or »zones of proto‑subjectivation« that are consistent or comparable with discursive realities (op. cit. 54). the boss and the performative‑biographical

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Such a machinic heterogenesis is introduced effectively in the very first shot in The Boss of It All, where the camera’s independent creative gesture shows grey wall cladding that is substituted by a window in which a gigantic camera is reflected. As an integrated part of the camera, Trier can be seen sitting behind it, reduced to a function. This proto‑subjectifivation, the camera operator, is again fixed in a machinic function, a dolly, which is immediately made independent. The dolly enables a very unglamorous estab‑ lishing shot of a grey industrial building with identical windows, looking onto the naked branches of a tree. The camera operator’s dolly eventually finds its way to the office window behind which the action takes place.198 Trier’s meta‑commenting voice‑over, which again underlines the film medium’s machinic side, simultaneously introduces the film: So, here is a film. And though it might already come across as somewhat weird, hang around, because with this film everyone can watch along with it, I promise. And even though I now appear as a reflection, trust me: this film isn’t worth a single reflection. It’s a comedy and, as such, harmless. No attempt has been made to educate or shape opinions here. Feel good, in other words. And what better place for this feel good than in the ridiculing of fine culture. So, in other words, what we have here is a self‑important – read out‑of‑work – actor who has somehow, miraculously, just got a job; a rather special job. (DVD subtitles)199

With Trier’s reassuring commentary that the film should be re‑ garded as harmless entertainment, the camera zooms in on Krist‑

198 With this gesture it is possible to see an intertextual, ironic reference to Hitchcock’s well‑known appearances in front of the camera – making the camera into a ›machinic‹ agent, an all‑seeing divine eye, seeing and revealing that which is concealed from the viewer and thus inviting the viewer to take up a voy‑ euristic position. 199 In the video Lars von Trier – »Direktøren for det hele«, uploaded on YouTube on December 2006, Trier gives another metafilmic commentary on performative art. He announces a competition to find the so‑called ›lookies‹, which allegedly are hidden in the film, as in the old Donald Duck comics, and which one can hunt for. Naturally this means that one needs to »see the film over and over again, which will give a direct financial outcome for the rights holders«. Trier substantiates this gimmick with: »We have to fill the empty space between the cradle and the grave with something or other. Lookies could be an idea for this« (https://youtu.be/WWl1HG9fMnY; last viewed 11 April 2017), which anticipates that the film will not be a great cinema success. But the surveillance perspective, lying implicitly in the ›machinic eye‹ that Automavi‑ sion® represents, also alludes to the fact that a ›lookie‹ formed as a key – whose lens mounting represents an eye – is shown in the final scenes of the video.

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offer (Jens Albinus) standing by the window and fumbling with something, which later turns out to be a piece of charcoal. The job that has been devolved to Kristoffer involves him following a note consisting of two lines: »Hi, so we meet at last. I am the boss« and »I have handed over all authority with regard to the deal to Mr Ravn«. The first line of the note is intended to affirm the identity of the ›boss‹ to whoever seeks him, after which the other line immediately gives his authority to ›Mr Ravn‹.200 The lines of dialogue reveal that Kristoffer’s contract of employment is also a contract of secrecy: there are games with masks, but these have to be as real – that is, as concealed – as possible. This metaform, which to a large extent is recognisable from modern theatre and more specifically from Luigi Pirandello’s plays, where the question of identity proliferates in almost absurd ways in diverse forms of anti‑character, is also immediately verbalised by Kristoffer, who mentions that he is inspired by Gambini’s absurd play Den hængte kat (The Hanged Cat), with the famous »Skortensfejermonolog fra byen uden skorstene« (Chimney sweep’s monologue from the city without chimneys), and that »the theatre presents itself clearest precisely at the point where it ends«. Neither Gambini nor the play are real,201 but Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) is real and, just as in The Boss of It All, constantly 200 In short, the film is concerned with Kristoffer (Jens Albinus) who is hired by Ravn (Peter Ganztler) to play the boss (Svend E.) of a small IT company that Ravn intends to sell to an Icelandic buyer, Finnur (Fridrik Thor Fridrikson). Upon being employed by Ravn, Kristoffer signs a secrecy contract. During the course of the film we discover that Ravn plans to cheat the six other employees, Lise (Iben Hjejle), Nalle (Henrik Prip), Heidi A. (Mia Lyhne), Gorm (Casper Christensen), Mette (Louise Mieritz) and Spencer (Jean‑Marc Barr), by having them discharged from their jobs, thus allowing Ravn to hold on to the profits from the deal himself. Ravn has been acting as an undisclosed director, while the other employees have been under the impression – instigated by Ravn – that the director of the company is living in the USA and is only accessible via e‑mail. Ravn employs Kristoffer in connection with the sale, as Finnur will not deal with assistants but only with the director in person. It is this scenario that Kristoffer unwittingly finds himself in and aims to flesh out with a character. However, it quickly becomes apparent that his charac‑ terisation of the director is already fleshed out with all manner of demands, passions, questions of blame and proposals. Kristoffer’s ex‑girlfriend, Kisser (Sofie Gråbøl), who is Finnur’s lawyer, becomes the one who gives him a mission – namely to get Ravn to come to his senses and in this way avoid the other six employees being cheated from their share of the products that they have developed together with Ravn. This is thwarted, however, when Kristoffer makes a decision in his ambivalent character and signs the deal, whereafter the piece ends with a tribute to absurdism, as Kristoffer, hidden behind a curtain, presents his silent ›chimney sweep’s monologue from the city without chimneys‹‑ making the facts and passions of real‑ ity trivialise both the demands of fiction and the validity of illusion. 201 The Gambino family, on the other hand, do exist, as one of the five largest mafia families to have operated in the USA; its intricate system of leadership is portrayed in Martin Scorsese’s film GoodFellas (1990), amongst others.

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challenges – in hypermediated ways – the fine line between stories of life and theatrical illusion. Pirandello’s play breaks with natu‑ ralistic theatre in that the six people are searching for an author in order to be able to step into character, so to speak, a quest that naturally does not meet with success. The theatre director, who consents to pose as the author and set up the living relations in dramatic form with the six actors, does not succeed in his project because the negotiations between the real persons and the actors constantly break the plot. The play ends when life (in the form of death) comes to act itself out on the stage – and thus actors as well as the ›real‹ people and the director give up keeping track of what is what. In Pirandello’s play the six persons consist of a broken family with relationships characterised by betrayal, loss and incestuous assault, while the six characters in The Boss of It All are the ›good old six‹, who together with the company’s lawyer, Ravn, have been with the company from the start and, amongst other things, have developed the IT system Brook of Five. Also here – behind the IT office’s façade, devoid of passion, with technical meetings and boring copy rooms – one finds betrayal, loss and assault, which above all is due to the fact that the boss of it all, namely Ravn, operates behind multiple masks. Through e‑mails (supposedly sent from abroad) Ravn single‑handedly controls the group and their relationships to one another. Special favours, threats or lack of recognition turn the individual members of the group into his puppets. This comes to a head one day when the Icelandic buyer, Finnur, refuses to deal with a substitute for the Director; with reference to the Edda poem, he states: »He who deals with assis‑ tants, deals with no‑one.« Kristoffer must therefore stay for the week and incarnate the boss of it all, in the form of the character Sven E. Hereafter the absurd drama unfolds. There is Gorm’s pent‑up anger over not being given the credit he deserves, Heidi A.’s revelation that Sven has proposed to her, Lise’s evidence that Sven is not gay, Nalle’s position as a victim of bullying and Lise’s reports that Spencer’s Danish lessons have been suspended by Sven because he told of Mette’s fear of the photocopy machine being due to the fact that her husband hanged himself with an IT cable when Sven dismissed him from his job. 214

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Even though the employees only exhibit one‑dimensional character traits, which are recognisable from the Holberg comedy world and contemporarily from the Danish TV series Klovn,202 in which several of the actors among the ›good old six‹ enact their own biographies mixed with fictive traits, Kristoffer must on sev‑ eral occasions confront Ravn with these roughly sketched desti‑ nies. But Kristoffer and Ravn both treat the missing information as data, which is to be filled out in order for the character to be played, the act to continue and the contract to be played out in real life – without any interest in moral questions. In addition, Ravn is worried about the sale only because he wishes to maintain his identity as the well‑liked, cuddly teddy bear with everyone’s best interests at heart, rather than the person who in reality wants to deceive them. Kristoffer is only interested in the shaping of his character in relation to this ›life project‹; the question of who is deceiving who is immaterial. It is only when Kristoffer’s ex‑girl‑ friend, Kisser, derides him for being a bad actor and at the same time makes it clear to him that Ravn’s desire to be sympathetic is his Achilles‹ heel, that it becomes possible for Kristoffer to get into character as ›the boss of it all‹. He invents yet another layer in the decision‑making process in the form of ›the boss of the boss of it all‹, which enables him to take on Ravn’s role as the popular ›cuddly fella‹, and in this way he is able both to carry through the company day trip and treat everyone to a little extra. With the clos‑ ing deal, which is witnessed by the good old six, Kristoffer plays his final hand, lauding Ravn with sentimental clichés in the spirit of the radio programme Giro 413.203 Although Ravn thereafter con‑ fesses to the six original employees and annuls the deal, Kristoffer carries on with his signature, this time seconded by Finnur, who

202 In both the TV series Klovn (2005‑2009) and the film Klovn, The Movie (2010), Iben Hjejle, Mia Lyhne and Casper Christensen appear. This fictio‑biographical comedy form has amongst its predecessors the American HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm, with Larry David in the central role. See also Jacobsen 2008. 203 Giro 413 is a radio programme that has been broadcast since the late 1940s as a listener programme in support of charitable purposes, and organised by Save The Children and other institutions. The concept is that the listeners collect money – often at parties – in order for their musical wishes to be played on the radio. Over the years, the methods of collection have become both more spectacular and absurd, and Krist‑ offer begins his speech to Ravn in this way, with the words: »At Auntie Tut and Uncle Karl’s silver wedding anniversary, a collection was made in an old sock«, in which the absurd element of the pathetic pomposity becomes identifiable as the nerve of the popular comedy, which the film emphasises and isolates.

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leans on a new interpretation of the Edda poem: »He who deals with a man without authority, deals with no‑one.« As it becomes apparent that Finnur also pays homage to Gambini as the master of absurdity, Kristoffer outdoes his immoral gesture as Sven E. by becoming no‑one in the film’s finale – standing behind a curtain with a charcoal mark on his forehead, while presenting the silent ›chimney sweep’s monologue from the city without chimneys‹. At the end, just like the filmed director Kristoffer, Trier also exits the scene, in that he zooms out from Kristoffer’s back – out of sight to the others – against the window, which is identical with the other windows in the office complex without chimneys, and then sums up: »And just like that we made it to the end of the comedy. Perhaps we were on the verge of giving up. I will also finish because I, just like everyone else, wants to go home. Apologies to those who expected more, as well as to those who expected less. Those who got what they came for, deserved it«.

Luigi Pirandello ends his play in a similar manner with an excla‑ mation from the director who has played the author: »Pretence? Reality? To hell with it all! Never in my life has such a thing happened to me. I’ve lost a whole day over these people, a whole day!« (Pirandello [1921] 2014). The pivotal point of the absurd in Pirandello is the question of whether it is possible to discern a real identity from an actor’s character. Pirandello discusses whether one finds the true ›being‹ in the real human or in the playwright’s bringing to life »living beings more alive than those who breathe and wear clothes: beings less real perhaps, but truer!« (Pirandello op. cit., act 1). As mentioned, Trier answers the question forensi‑ cally as Kristoffer finally gives his character identity only in the moment when Finnur, with reference to the Edda poem, gives the intermediary (the actor) the chance to sign the contract. But this identity is abandoned immediately after – as it is in the two sentences in Ravn’s note that Kristoffer’s character interprets. In the ›chimney sweep’s monologue from the city without chimneys‹ Kristoffer, with the marker of a ›black charcoal stroke on the forehead‹, finally becomes no‑one. 216

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By turning identities into masks worn by actors who are fi‑ nally turned into nothing, Trier links absurd theatre with non‑ representational, affective intensities, which Deleuze along with Carmelo Bene, for example, sees as the reason for the performa‑ tive. Lone Bertelsen and Andrew Murphie, in their article »Affect, ›subtraction‹ and ›non‑performance‹» (Bertelsen and Murphie 2012), describe how Deleuze construes Bene’s performative strategy of ›stealing‹ or subtracting characters or representative figures and forces in plays such as Romeo and Juliet or Richard III, so neither the ›ego‹ nor the actor remains in the play. Through this non‑performance the character is reduced to nothing more than, in Deleuze’s words, »the totality of the scenic assemblages, colors, lights, gestures, words« (Deleuze in Boundas 1993, 206).204 Bertelsen and Murphie continue: For Deleuze then, what we experience in Bene’s plays are »the continu‑ ous series of metamorphosis and variations« (1993, 206), not the life of a subject. We might say that we become immersed in the affect of the world rather than of the character per se. The experience is no longer primarily one of a subject performing or a character being performed. Rather it is experience of a relational constellation of forces at work. The works allow the operation of affect itself to come to the fore. Affect becomes not a state for a subject, so much as an event of affecting and being affected. (Bertelsen and Murphie, 80)

It is this reduction we see unfolded in the figure of Kristoffer, who is reduced from an out‑of‑work actor to a fictive director of nothing. Kristoffer’s fickleness gives the office environment and its employees an absurd surplus of meaning. It is evident in this reading that one could also involve Svend Aage Madsen’s play, Nøgne masker (Naked Masks) from 1987, as it constitutes an interesting connection between the discussions of Pirandello and Trier on how far one can connect ›identity‹ to the pronoun ›I‹, which constantly finds itself in a delicate balance be‑ tween fiction’s idealised truth and naked ›truth‹. In Madsen, Luigi Pirandello appears in the role of a theatre director who accuses 204

The reference here and in the citation is from The Deleuze Reader (1993).

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Sigmund Freud – with his ideas on Oedipal trauma, repression and the unconscious – of »attempting to represent the human being as a clanking machine, bound to a one story, from which it cannot release itself« – whereas Pirandello »believes that we have numerous stories in us which we choose between« (Madsen 1987, 39). It is equally simple for Deleuze and Guattari’s critique in so far as Freud, in his analysis of the Wolf‑Man, sees only Oedipal structures and thus ignores the multiplicity which is found pre‑ cisely in the animalistic as well as the human flock. They write: »Freud tried to approach crowd phenomena from the point of view of the unconscious, but he did not see clearly, he did not see that the unconscious itself was fundamentally a crowd« (Deleze and Guattari 2013, 33). The crowd’s multiplicity makes up a body without organs (BwO), and as such is rhizomatic. The intensity of the swarm and the crowd consists of the variation in a single element immediately leading to a modification of the swarm’s whole nature (op. cit., 34‑35). In the multiplicity’s body without organs one is met with passion or emotion – for example, love – not of the representation or symbolisation, which can be affirmed in an identity. In Deleuze and Guattari’s schizo‑analysis, which is advanced as an alternative to Freud’s favouring of the Oedipal neurotic, they put forward a description of subjectivisation based on multiplicity: There are no individual statements, there never are. Every statement is the product of a machinic assemblage, in other words, of collective agents of enunciation (take »collective agents« to mean not peoples or societies but multiplicities). The proper name (nom propre) does not designate an individual: it is on the contrary when the individual opens up to the multiplicities pervading him or her, at the outcome of the most severe operation of depersonalization, that he or she acquires his or her true proper name. The proper name is the instantaneous ap‑ prehension of a multiplicity. The proper name is the subject of a pure infinitive comprehended as such in a field of intensity. (Op. cit., 42‑43)

With this description the chimney sweep’s monologue in fact makes sense, because it can be described as the intensive culmi‑ nation of depersonalisation: the charcoal mark on the forehead 218

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signifies Kristoffer as the any‑sign‑whatever, which thus can also be no‑one – hidden behind a curtain. This double negation (as a type and as a depersonalised part of the surroundings) is absurd and necessary in order for one to have a random identity – actor, director or no‑one. Trier intensifies this performative (subtract‑ ing) operation by, as mentioned, giving the camera a visible role as a machine for independent heterogenesis in the framing of the film, but it is in the use of Automavision® that he surrenders control to the signaletic, machinic flux, which potentialises the viewer’s contact with the film as a pure affective event. Heterotopy, diagram and divid

The drama in The Boss of It All, as in Pirandello, is constantly ob‑ scured with ever‑new hypermediated layers being added on, with which both the naturalistic drama and the theatre’s illusion‑mak‑ ing is undermined.205 In addition, it is in the abovementioned techniques – the machinic autopoiesis of Automavision® and the extradiegetic level from which Trier on several occasions addresses his audience directly, especially in the use of a non‑ linear dramaturgical sequence – that the absurd elements are noticed. This happens visibly as eruptive breaks in the diegesis when Ravn and Kristoffer meet on ›neutral ground‹ outside the office on several occasions, where identities change places. This free space, where they seek to adapt their expectations of one another, is a place for enjoyment, relaxation and diversion. The two eat hotdogs at a stand in a shopping centre, look at figurines of dogs in a garden centre, ride horses on a merry‑go‑round in an amusement park, eat ice creams in the cinema and study elephants at the zoo. 205 In »The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction« (1936), Walter Benjamin names Pi‑ randello as one of the first to register that theatre must relate to the new types of actors in film who appear when the audience’s reactions are replaced by the camera’s mechanical form of testing. He cites Pirandello, who characterises the actor in silent films as being »exiled not only from the stage but also from himself. With a vague sense of discomfort he feels inexplicable emptiness: his body loses corporality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality, life, voice, and the noises caused by his moving about, in order to be changed into a mute image, flickering an instant on the screen, then vanishing into silence… The projector will play with his shadow before the public, and he himself must be content to play before the camera.« Benjamin quotes from Pirandello’s text »On tourne« from Léon Pierre‑Quint’s »Signification du cinéma« in L’Art cinématographique, vol. 2 (Paris, 1927; http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf, last viewed 11 April 2017).

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These environments, where pop culture and animal motifs form the backdrop for metatextual discussions on dramaturgy and law, function, in Michel Foucault’s words, as heterotopias. Het‑ erotopias should not be mistaken for utopias or dystopias. Het‑ erotopias exist as real places, things or arrangements, in contrast to utopias and their forms of organisation that give rise to several forms of experience – often opposite in direction – in one.206 The interesting thing in this context is that Foucault mentions the mirror, which apart from being able to reproduce a (utopian) place that does not exist, can also be an exemplary description of a heterotopia that exists in reality, and which gives a counter to the I‑position of the one who is reflected: In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconsti‑ tute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all 206 Foucault names six principles or traits for heterotopias: 1) places for crises (for example, coming of age rituals), which today have become deviations (rest homes); 2) places for the dead, which were once placed centrally (sacral) in the cities and are today linked to a general death cult and the dead body’s right to ›own‹ a place outside of the city; 3) universalising, microcosmic places where several spaces are brought together in one, such as gardens or oriental rugs, whose modern forms are the theatre, the zoo and the cinema; 4) places for archiving time, such as museums of modernity and libraries, where several times are gathered together outside of time, and whose opposites are festivals and market places. The new event sites where one can holiday, for example, as if back in Viking times, blend the eternity of archiving with the rediscovery of time as an apparent space of knowledge; 5) places which publicly administer entrance and exit points or ritual purification rooms for the living bodies, such as Muslim baths or Scandinavian saunas which today are found in the form of the motel, where more or less unlegalised sexual interaction takes place; 6) places with functions that can create the illusion of, or compensate for, all other places – which bordellos and colonies respectively have been, in various ways, but the ship, in particular, which has always found itself in an infinite sea between these, can be said to constitute the heterotopic space par excellence (cf. Foucault [1967] 1984).

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the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there. (Foucault [1967] 1984)

This description of the mirror as a heterotopian space, which must necessarily fold itself around a virtual point in order to render the reflections as present, is equivalent to Deleuze’s de‑ scription of the modulation between actual and virtual in the crystal‑image, a version of the time‑image. The time‑image oc‑ curs when filmic time is no longer indirect (that is, an effect of the body’s movement in filmic representation). When the film goes from actualising something virtual to crystallising itself in pure time‑images (for example, in a reflection) or in false nar‑ ratives (for example, in the blending of documentary and fictive layers), the viewer can unleash his or her expectations of the film as representing something real or something true respectively. According to Deleuze, this happened first with Hitchcock, Fritz Lang and Orson Welles, who mixed the objective gaze (the camera operator’s) and the subjective gaze (the actor’s) so one as a viewer lost faith in the narrative’s veracity – fictive or not (Deleuze 1989, 148). This confrontation with narratives as simulations stands in direct contrast to the understanding of the documentary genre as describing the truth. But according to Deleuze, it was initially with cinéma verité in the 1960s, when Pierre Perrault and Jean Rouch amongst others attempted to give voice to the poor, op‑ pressed and colonised in society, that one actually eliminated the relation of fiction not only to truth, but also to the notion that the actual was the opposite of fiction. That is, one realised the camera’s »pure and simple story-telling function« (op. cit., 150; author’s italics).207 For these directors the camera could become part of the recounted, so it functioned as a kind of narrative in‑ stance or intercessor. In, for example, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s film Chronicle of a Summer (Cronique d’un été, 1961), the camera participates (as if it were a questioning or attentive

207 The English translation of the French »fonction de fabulation« to »story‑telling function« diminishes Nietzsche’s notion of the power of the false, which influenced Deleuze’s use of the word ›fabulation‹ in chapter 6: »The powers of the false.«

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person) in discussions on how one sees oneself as happy or not, what political engagement is, and so on. What is interesting is that those participating relate to the questions that are asked, but to a large extent they also integrate the camera’s presence in their answers and actions. In so doing both the situation and the per‑ sons change constantly. The camera can in this way be described as creative or as a ›power of the false‹, which as an ›intercessor‹ enables a change of reality: What cinema must grasp is not the identity of a character, whether real or fictional, through his objective and subjective aspects. It is the becoming of the real character when he himself starts to ›make fiction‹, when he enters into ›the flagrant offence of making up legends‹ and so contributes to the invention of his people. The character is inseparable from a before and an after, but he reunites these in the passage from one state to the other. He himself becomes another, when he begins to tell stories [met à fabuler] without ever being fictional. And the film‑ maker for his part becomes another when there are ›interposed‹, in this way, real characters, who wholly replace his own fictions by their own story‑telling [Fr.: fabulation]. (Deleuze 1989, 150; author’s italics)

When neither we nor the director can confirm whether the char‑ acter belongs to a fictive or a real space, and when the character constantly becomes another in and with his or her narrative, a direct time‑image is created (Deleuze op. cit., 152). It is this which the nouvelle vague directors, and in particular Godard, learned from in their blending of fiction and reality, subjective and objec‑ tive, before and after – and which on Danish soil Jørgen Leth and Lars von Trier, amongst others, have inherited. Deleuze sums up: It is under these conditions of the time‑image that the same transfor‑ mation involves the cinema of fiction and the cinema of reality and blurs their differences; in the same movement, descriptions become pure, purely optical and sound, narrations falsifying and stories, simulations. The whole cinema becomes a free, indirect discourse, operating in reality. (Deleuze 1989, 155)

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It is clear that, with Trier’s The Boss of It All, we are dealing with something other than the remediated blending of hypermediated and immediated stylistic traits from the 1960s, of which The Idiots was an expression. But nonetheless it is the same form of »free indirect discourse« (op. cit.) that the film’s new time‑image allows for, and which in The Boss of It All gives access to an experience wherein nothing can be affirmed: »I is [always] another« (Deleuze op. cit., 154). It is not only in the absurd comedy but also in the relation between the many dysfunctional heterotopias and the in‑ different manner of filming, which is due to Automavision®, that attention is drawn to the fact that the constituting of the I, alias boss‑of‑it‑all, as the one who is in control is also identical with the one who turns into no‑one. The gulf between the many scene and role changes and the manufactured surveillance perspective marks an absolute ›outer‹ – a Verfremdung – that the viewer can‑ not ignore. The empathy is hindered consistently as the narra‑ tor in a certain sense disappears in the machinic autopoiesis of Automavision®. The camera’s function is, in addition, stipulated as a registered trademark. The diagrammatically orchestrated Automavision® makes up a machinic heterogenesis, leaving large parts of the film without a direction. Without this function the filmed ›signaletic material‹ of Automavision® becomes obvious to the viewer.208 With The Boss of it All, Trier has established a perceptive non‑ place that can be identified as an encounter – which has something missing – between the camera and the absurd story that unfolds. This absence of a relationship between narrator and story can give rise to an affective encounter with the signaletic material as such. But just as the virtual has a function in the reality of Foucault’s mirroring heterotopia,209 the automatic settings in Automavision® create with Deleuze a reflecting point of crystallisation where the virtual cannot be differentiated from the actual. Because Automa‑

208 One might say that this was already found in embryonic form in Epidemic, where the signaletic material is emphasised through the many references to the physical materiality of the film medium, partly through the small red trademark ›e‹ in the film’s top‑right corner. 209 Amongst other things, Foucault utilises the heterotopian space’s reflective function to analyse how the artist Diego Velázquez can diagrammatically present both a classic form of representation and a more modern visual episteme in the painting Las Meninas (1656; Foucault [1966] 2005).

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vision® in The Boss of It All depicts all the vicissitudes, affects and emotions according to the same automatic principle of random‑ ness, attention is afforded to the diagrammatic, which apart from creating identifiable meaning, transforms the filmed things and persons into zones of intensity in the diagram. When characters and individuals are thus transformed into divids, something else is rendered visible. Peirce believes that art can create diagrammatic effects (Peirce 1997, 226), and virtual relations can become actual, but conversely they can also open to the fact that actual relations link themselves affectively to the virtual as events. This happens in this film by signaletic material making itself independent through Automavision’s® machinic autopoiesis. For some viewers this gives access to the laughter cramps of the absurd, which can give rise to new thoughts. The tradition in comedy of reducing people to things or equip‑ ping them with similar properties to things is recognised from Holberg and Jonathan Swift. The absurd comedy form of the 20th century especially (perhaps inspired by the then new sociologi‑ cal analysis) has an eye for how the individual within a society of industrialisation and commodity transforms him/herself into a mass individual. One of Brecht’s early theatre plays, Man Equals Man (Mann ist Mann), which premiered in 1926, describes this in an absurd‑surreal way, when an ordinary person is transformed into a human war machine. With the play’s title Brecht empha‑ sises how every man answers to one another in the military. This dividual principal, which Brecht, and to a large extent modern‑ ism’s master of the absurd, Samuel Beckett, already had a scent of before the Second World War, can be rediscovered in Foucault’s description of the biopolitical society of control where human life is reduced to statistical components in order to enable state regulation from the cradle to the grave. In »Postscript on the Societies of Control« (Deleuze 1992), Deleuze clarifies that Fou‑ cault’s epistemic disciplinarian society, which functioned in the 18th and 19th centuries, changed rapidly after the Second World War into the current society of control. The difference between the two regimes is identified first and foremost by the discipli‑ narian society’s spatial control (in schools, factories and prisons) changing into a constant but discrete surveillance. This structure 224

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generates the pairing of the individual/masses and divid/data bank respectively, and is thus defined more precisely by Deleuze: The disciplinary societies have two poles: the signature that designates the individual, and the number or administrative numeration that indi‑ cates his or her position within a mass. […] In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password […]. The numerical lan‑ guage of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become »dividuals«, and masses, samples, data, markets, or »banks«. (Deleuze 1992, 5; author’s italics)

Although Brecht combines divid and masses in Man Equals Man, there is no doubt that the play criticises the individual’s reduction to the divid. The reduction of characters, stories and language to the minimalistic is also the essence of Beckett’s theatre plays, but here an absurd tour de force is also opened up in the sense of whether one could grasp a non‑individualised person at all outside of the fabula of fiction. The Boss of It All opens in similarly absurd ways, with Kristof‑ fer’s introductory comments on how he imagines his character unfolding: »It is often things characters do not have that define them much more than what they do have.« And thus Trier shows that he is thinking about both the absurd theatre and the power of the false, which filmically is (re)found in the cinéma verité and nouvelle vague of the 1960s, where the character’s pre‑fictive and fictive status, according to Deleuze, cannot be separated because the character itself becomes another and takes part in the nar‑ ration of his or her character (Deleuze 1989, 150). This creative power of the false, which the camera as ›intercessor‹ could activate between subject and object in Jean Rouch and Pierre Perrault’s documentary films from the 1960s, is, in The Boss of It All, a con‑ nection that is made in an innovative manner, as Automavision® in particular intensifies the camera’s machinic heterogenesis. This machinic autopoiesis, however, no longer challenges the paired fiction/reality. It makes contact with an affective immanent level, in that the film’s fabula part, in an accomplished absurd the boss and the performative‑biographical

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way, amputates all attempts at identity‑narration, and its sjuzhet (created by the closed Automavision® system) radically hinders every empathic insight into the characters – for example when a vacuum flask or kitchen roll randomly comes into focus instead of the characters, who are now speaking and acting outside the frame. The gulf between fabula and sjuzhet thus widens with the society of control’s machinic heterogenesis, the digital databank in the form of Automavision®. Its random diagrams create pass‑ words for the divid’s absurd non‑acting, which effectively makes the absurd comedy and the film about it difficult to identify within what we normally regard as filmic. Following on from Deleuze’s discussion of how syntax is broken down into a creative, fabulat‑ ing nonsense in writers such as Beckett, Luca, Péguy, Roussel and others, one can say that Trier in The Boss of It All plays with creating an ›outside‹, and not merely something that is found marginally or outside of that which we understand as the syntax of the cinematographic film.210 In his book Post-Cinematic Affect (Shaviro 2010), Steven Shaviro further analyses how the affective influence comes to the fore in ›post‑filmic‹ works. He relates mass production of film in factories to the modern surveillance society as described by Foucault, while the post‑filmic, which includes the electronic signal, the digital code and diverse formats of display, is related to the society of control, which according to Deleuze formed after 1945 (Deleuze 1992). His analysis tends towards the dysto‑ pian; for example, in »Corporate Cannibal«, where a neoliberal world without alternatives only offers us the modulation that the globalised network society allows. Here Trier’s vision is more lib‑ erating and humorous. The absurd comedy’s affective influence is answered wholly instinctively, with laughter, when the viewer comes to realise that the character Kristoffer will never be able to get into character. He has, like us, left the mass society and can become neither an individual nor no‑one. He is a divid in a network of ›big data‹, which can accommodate diverse needs on insights from the market, the tax authorities, the education system or the bank – and as such he is forever modular‑like. But 210

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Cf. Deleuze’s article »He stuttered«, Essays Clinical and Critical [1993] 1997, 107.

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with this there also comes a liberation from ›meaning‹, ›context‹, ›individuality‹ and ›character‹, benefiting an investigation of what potential the (post)filmic signaletic material contains. The one who falls: on Lars turning Jørgen into a performative I

The Boss of It All premiered three years after The Five Obstructions (2003),211 which Trier produced together with Jørgen Leth.212 It is the latter’s aesthetic choice in the film The Perfect Human (1967), presented as »a filmic pearl, to be destroyed« by Trier, which was the point of reference for The Five Obstructions. Nevertheless, one can say that Trier has the main role as a kind of boss‑of‑it‑all. He turns Leth into a marionette who is sent out into the world in order to fulfil diverse rules that force him diagrammatically to submit himself to another, more affectively involved aesthetic. The Perfect Human has certain similarities with Godard’s and War‑ hol’s more or less critical use of pop culture’s readymades, while Trier’s Dogme film The Idiots (1996), together with a number of other concurrent film and video projects, worked in extension of the performative‑documentary tradition213 which is also found in both Godard and Warhol. As in the Dogme films, the performa‑ tive documentaries – in different ways – make use of the power of the false, which is created when the camera as ›intercessor‹ acts together with or takes part in the performance that is being documented, and as a result the decoding of the film’s fictive or genre‑like framing is obstructed. But the camera’s empathy is haptically visible and audible as ›noise‹. So while the realistic film tradition from the 1920s rendered visible the camera as a ma‑ chine of reproduction, and the involving aesthetics of the 1960s turned it into a force of artistic production, in the 1990s it gained 211 The characters in this film, whose English title is The Five Obstructions, also speak Danish, and it was perhaps primarily aimed at a Danish audience, though it has also been successful in other countries (cf. Mette Hjort 2008). 212 Jørgen Leth (born 1937) came to prominence in the 1960s, partly from the Danish avant‑garde mi‑ lieu within film and poetry and partly as a sports journalist and commentator. 213 Aside from a number of Dogme films, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Linda Vestrik’s intimate documentary Pappa & jag (2000) can be mentioned as examples of this investigation in the performative‑documentary field.

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a direct, physical‑affective effect on the viewer. There are at least three consequences of this: 1. When the viewer has to concentrate hard in order to under‑ stand what the film shows, he/she becomes aware of him/her‑ self as a corporeal and mental co‑producing instance. Interest in the fiction and narrative framework must give way to the benefit of the interpretive work, with regards to the delineation between viewer subject and work. 2. When the camera operator/director involves him/herself in a performative way, the border between that artistic I and the private person is blurred, which again influences the viewer’s interpretive work. 3. When the relation between screen and viewer becomes central to the film experience, the film as a work slides into the back‑ ground. The question of how the film is first and foremost a fictive medium, which organises our (genre) expectation and decoding, or whether its indexicality triumphs over narration and plot, becomes secondary. The film establishes an interface, making it impossible to determine where the work ends and when the interpretation begins. The Dogme rules strengthened the possibility of DV apparatus getting close to the events and gave actors new improvisational options. The production process in the majority of Dogme films takes the character of an investigation, where the camera func‑ tions as the director’s alter ego. The camera’s work thus becomes the director’s signature. The Dogme rules‹ ban on genre formats also makes the camera’s work more visible, in that the classic conventions to a large extent were developed in relation to the neutrally registered camera. The actors‹ improvisation convinced the majority of the justification of the Dogme rules, but it was perhaps the limiting of known filmic means and of the romantic idea of the director as an artistic genius that made the DV cam‑ era’s signaletic work in the foreground more obvious. The following will show Trier’s collaboration with Leth in The Five Obstructions as a controlled attempt to supplement Leth’s aesthetic with the Dogme rules‹ techniques for involving the 228

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public – an attempt that within the film’s framework fails. The idea for The Five Obstructions was Trier’s. He staged the process as an exploratorium controlled by rules, which pours scorn on Leth’s descriptive practice in The Five Obstructions in such a way that Leth is forced to break with his own style. Trier’s rules, so to speak, ought to function as diagrams that can open for a new creative outflow of Leth’s practice. The Perfect Human is shot in black and white, and documents the science of gestures and physical activities (such as dancing, falling, eating, kissing and shaving) in an objective, minimalistic and poetically descriptive manner. It was shot with a stationary camera on a white background and with few obvious edits. Leth’s consciously alienating and dissecting style emphasises the various planes of sound and image, as when he allows the actor Claus Nissen to dance without background music and then comments on it in the voice‑over. Jørgen Leth’s inquiring voice functions as both a disjunctive and a linking element in the film. Leth’s use of the voice marks the phenomenological poetics which in the 1960s blended realism and modernism, as the film camera’s registering of the surface occurs afterwards in the lin‑ guistic description – or vice versa. Apart from the Godardesque inspiration, Leth’s filmic and literary practice is also inspired by Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe‑Grillet; both worked together with the director Alain Resnais, on the films Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961) respectively. In The Perfect Human the hand‑held camera is not used, and although there is improvisation, the traits of documentary and realism are toned down (as are the locations). Leth’s descriptions of realism are linked to a literary tradition, where the phenom‑ enological sense of detail can momentarily break with the purely descriptive meaning. Therefore, for Leth, it becomes crucial to hit the right tone, the right lighting, the right gesture. In The Perfect Human and others of his short films from the period, these tonalities are just as crucial as rhythm is to poetry. In The Five Obstructions Trier teases Leth with accusations of being a controlling onlooker, who creates a »perverse« objectifi‑ cation of that which he describes. The filmic rules, which Trier changes for every filmic obstruction, are generated in order to the boss and the performative‑biographical

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Jørgen Leth in the re‑filming of the meal scene from The Perfect Human.

force Leth’s distancing aesthetic to fall. Trier aims to see Leth »ba‑ nalized«, out of control and becoming a mere human. Trier also goes after the player rather than the ball, creating a »therapeutic situation« for Leth, where aesthetic control over what is filmed is denied, in that »the perfect« is abandoned at the expense of the »human«. In consultation with Leth himself, Trier sends him to places that for the Westerner are mythological or oriental, such as Cuba and Mumbai, and he gives him technological hindrances in the form of »no edits over 12 frames«. In other words, he uses the experiences from the Dogme films to ›trip up‹ Leth’s non‑ involving (self)mythologised aesthetic and aims to shake the filmic representation in order for the artist’s body and its fall to be felt by the viewer. This does not happen, though. In Asger Leth’s hand‑held video documentation of his father’s work on the production of the requested film Leth considers Trier’s experiment as »a romantic story«, as »one becomes so affected by being in a situ‑ ation in which a social drama occurs« that it can be seen in the aesthetic product. In the next scene, where Leth gives a female beggar some coins out of the car window, it appears that he, nevertheless, is affected by his surroundings. However, this does 230

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not seem to be expressed in film number two, which is located in the red light district in Mumbai. A semi‑transparent backdrop partly screens Leth from physical contact with his surroundings, the prostitutes and their children, while also partly giving a hapti‑ cally beautiful impression of them. But it also implies that Leth is cool, and perfectly controlled. Trier’s ambition – that we need to »damage Leth«; that he should make something »unsatisfac‑ tory« – does not succeed in the first four films. As a consequence, Trier makes the last film on the basis of Asger Leth’s backstage video material, but Jørgen Leth is to be credited as director and thus take responsibility for this castigation of himself. In this film Leth appears partly as a character with rumpled hair and bags under his eyes, and partly incarnated as a voice‑over in Trier’s text, which sums up: nothing showed itself and nothing was of any help. I didn’t come stag‑ gering out of the ruins to thank you, Lars. And yet, at this moment, you have me. This text is yours, after all, which you have forced me to read aloud. So let’s get it over with: Dear Lars, thank you for the obstruc‑ tions. They have taught me to see what I actually am: a contemptible human being. (DVD subtitles)

But the text also turns round in a chastising and ambivalent way towards Trier’s attack and desire for control of Leth’s fall, end‑ ing with »and you [that is, Trier] fell on your face. How does the perfect human fall? This is how the perfect human falls«. These final words in the film are illustrated paradoxically enough by Leth’s somewhat awkward falling actions in a hotel room. The four short obstruction films made by Leth are related to a literary tradition where the body only involves itself in forms of tonality and rhythmic deposits in the voice. The fifth film (in the film), which Trier edits on the basis of Asger Leth’s Dogme‑like recordings, shows Leth as a body with corporeal affects and thus attaches itself to the first films as backstage information. How‑ ever, it brings down Leth’s aesthetic only indirectly by placing the words in his mouth. Here Trier utilises the filmic affordance of editing, for example, to create a ›power of the false‹, with which he also underlines that the flow of words commentating on the the boss and the performative‑biographical

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Asger Leth’s documenting of Jørgen Leth practising how to fall during the final film within the film.

action make up a bond, a power in Leth’s aesthetic practice, with or without the medium. And it is precisely this incongruence between two aesthetics – a realistic‑phenomenological literary aesthetic and a realistic‑performative filmic aesthetic – which makes The Five Obstructions inspiring. For while neither of the two directors in reality wins the fight, the viewer becomes a wit‑ ness to Trier’s tackling of Leth’s body and Leth’s redress by the use of the voice. If on the other hand one looks primarily at the exposure of each director’s artistic ›I‹ in the film, it can be seen as an example of »fictio‑biographism«, where »the well‑known play themselves« in a way in which »the role cannot be unequivocally defined from the person’s real life« (Jacobsen 2008). This phenomenon, which from around the turn of the century and onwards has the (male) body and its actions as an object of investigation, extends the per‑ formative as well as the absurd comedy’s search for the individual between the biographic and the fictive, as in the creative invest‑ ment therein in the 1960s. In this ficto‑biographism the male figure is objectified in the same way as the female figure usually is. Leth’s fall, which Trier searches for, but which only happens because of a substitution in The Five Obstructions, can be seen as 232

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a demonstration of the performative method. Leth realised the method later, however, in Det uperfekte menneske (2005) and Det uperfekte menneske 2 (2007), where, for example, the description of an affair with a Cuban woman, Vivian, who appeared briefly in the first obstruction film from Cuba, is described in a performa‑ tively involved manner.214 Leth has thus literarily embedded the fall and the body’s aes‑ thetic, which in Trier’s Dogme film The Idiots makes it impossible to determine between a ›true‹ representation (of tears, erections, ejaculation, blood and so on), and a construction (artificial tears, porn extras and fake blood). The Dogme film’s affective involve‑ ment is naturally more difficult to create in a written representa‑ tion, but Leth makes an attempt by not differentiating between the descriptions of intimate backstage experiences and more public front stage situations (cf. Meyrowitz 1985). Leth’s literary practice after The Five Obstructions is thus clearly influenced by the aes‑ thetic of the fall, which Trier challenges him to engage with. The affective intensity and performative realism, which only shows itself momentarily in The Five Obstructions in the form that Trier is looking for, attaches itself to Leth’s descriptive poetics, which also contain the sports journalist’s openness to the event and the moment.215 And in this way the ring is closed: Leth’s descriptive camera and voice relate to the aesthetics of the 1960s, and its then new experience of the electronic TV medium’s transmission, and the documentation of the performative now in art video, just as Trier’s Dogme experiment The Idiots can be said to reflect the 1990s experience with digital, real‑time interfaces. The difference be‑ tween the two artists‹ aesthetics can be described in relation to the degree of, or lack of, control. Leth’s own I is invariably exposed the more intimate (and seemingly non‑controlling) Trier’s text is, with, for example, its use of backstage reporting. The closing

214 Leth’s description in the same place that he had sexual access to the »cook’s daughter«, whenever he wanted, created a media storm, which in 2005 led to his dismissal as a commentator on the Tour de France for the Danish TV station TV2. However, he was reinstated in 2008. 215 In Jørgen Leth’s Det erotiske menneske (2010), a kind of clash is created between the melancholic voice of the poet and the beautiful young women who together inhabit orientalised or heterotopian places in Haiti and Brazil.

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voice‑over narrative in The Five Obstructions is regarded bio‑ graphically, even though the opposite perhaps was intended. This does not happen to the same degree as in Trier’s filmic Dogme realism. For even though everyone knows who directed The Idiots, the camera’s shaking, hand‑held registering blends with the viewer’s sensations in a physically appreciable manner. The blurred border between subject and object and the fact that it is not possible for the viewer to determine whether depic‑ tions are fiction or documentary can be aesthetically productive in several media. And though the constellation of camera and body can create another type of physically perceptible shaking in the film image than the co‑ordination of writing and voice in the book’s (expanded) form, the discussion of the artistic I (in the performative play between real and staged) also creates affective repercussions which render superfluous a distinction between fiction and reality in the classic sense. But the question Trier asks in The Boss of It All is not whether both the heterotopic places and the notion of intimacy and in‑ tensity have lost ground today, where ubiquitous surveillance has seemingly territorialised every dream of deterritorialising. In this experiment Trier plays with the notion of what would happen if one could create a (surveillance) diagram, where the narrator becomes a divid amongst others, while in The Five Obstructions he attempts to make the narrator, Leth, become part of the diagram, so he is reduced to a divid and a »contemptible human being«. In the following film Trier abandons the notion of outer influence to instead concentrate on the description of inner emotion and affective states, which can also, however, have affective repercus‑ sions.

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CHAPTER 8

Affective figures of depression, melancholia and mania

Lars von Trier’s so‑called ›Depression Trilogy‹, consisting of Antichrist (2009), Melancholia (2011) and Nymphomaniac (2013/2014), offers various accounts of psychological states before the word ›psyche‹ became synonymous with Freudian psychoa‑ nalysis. In the ancient Greek language, the word meant the soul of life, which left the body when one died. ›Psyche‹ was seen as different from ›thumos‹, which linked to the body’s force, initia‑ tive and will. Today the word ›psyche‹ incorporates both the soul and spirit, and is used generally with regard to ›the mental life‹.216 In the following account of the compositional choices in the three films, I will take the inspiration Trier draws from Nietzsche as my starting point in the reading of Antichrist, and particularly the representation of the struggle between Dionysian and Apol‑ linian forces. In the reading of Melancholia, the starting point is the various interpretations of the ›notions‹ of melancholia and tragedy found in the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche respectively. This film actualises the opera of dissonant creation Tristan und Isolde (1865), which Wagner composed while inspired by the works of Schopenhauer. The analysis explores the repeti‑ tion of the distinctive Tristan chord, but also how the Dionysian and Apollinian figures are advanced – this time supplemented by Deleuze and Guattari’s smooth and striated relational spatiality. These spatialities and conceptual figures are taken up again in the analysis of Nymphomaniac, which diagrammatically creates 216 Cf. http://www.denstoredanske.dk/Sprog,_religion_og_filosofi/Religion_og_mystik/Guder_i_ antik_litteratur/psyke (last viewed 4 April 2015).

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a dialogue between the two positions, illustrating them in diverse literary, filmic and artistic nodal points and in the form of plot renewals from the entirety of Trier’s catalogue. This reading of the trilogy as an alternative description of the power contained in various mental states is expanded at the end of the chapter to include a critique of the way in which Western society has itself suppressed and subsumed the forms of desire. Nymphomaniac in particular supports such a reading, hence the reason why Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari 1972) has been an inspiration in the analysis of this film. Antichrist – in nature, chaos reigns

In the title sequence of Trier’s Antichrist the letter ›t‹ in the word ›Christ‹ is replaced by a mixture of the sign of the cross and the sign for the female gender. This clear symbol will, in the fol‑ lowing, be the first interpretive clue.217 The blending is an obvi‑ ous comment on Dreyer’s depiction of a witch trial in Day of Wrath (1943), which is introduced with the accusative shadow of a cross.218 Trier’s combination of the cross and the female symbol could, in extension of this, be read as a positive understanding of the Antichrist, because the film also clearly refers to Nietzsche’s attack on Christianity, The Anti-Christ (Nietzsche 1888), which Lars von Trier, according to his own assertion, has had lying on his table since the age of twelve.219 The other interpretive trace is compositional and emanates from the film’s final image, where Trier dedicates his film to Andrei Tarkovsky (1932‑1986). Several of Tarkovsky’s films could have visually inspired Trier’s aesthetics, but on a compositional plane The Sacrifice (1986) in particular must be said to create an explicit dialogical frame for the motifs

217 This in particular because Trier has stated that with Antichrist he has made the thing which he most hates, namely a symbolic film. Cf. the interview in Filmmagasinet Ekko, May 2009: http://www.ekkofilm. dk/ (last viewed 4 April 2015). 218 Thanks to C. Claire Thomson for this intertextual point. 219 Cf. the interview in Film # 66, DFI, May 2009: http://www.antichristthemovie.com/?cat=8&lan‑ guage=da (last viewed 4 April, 2015). In the following I refer to Nietzsche’s Der Antichrist in Peter Thielst’s Danish translation, Antikrist, to avoid any confusion between book and film.

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in Antichrist.220 With a basis in these two tracks, a philosophical and a filmic, separated by 100 years, the following analysis will lead into an interpretation of the affective power of haptic images. An accent on the haptic is established as early as the black and white prologue, by the film’s traumatically pivotal starting point. This sequence, lasting more than five minutes, unfolds a haptic organisation of images in the most beautiful way. Dominated by close‑ups in ›slow motion‹ of naked flesh, faces, and slowly falling water drops and snowflakes, the sequence forces the eye to rest on the modulations in the surface of the image. But the images that appear to be in slow motion are in fact high-speed recordings with an auto‑digital camera, a so‑called Phantom Camera, which can film 1000 frames per second as opposed to the normal 24 frames per second. This makes it possible to create a kind of ultra‑slow motion in filmic time (cf. the interview with Anthony Dod Mantle in the DVD extra material). Aside from the haptic surface levels,

220 In short, the film’s narrative action begins with the depiction of an unnamed couple and the death of their young son, Nick (approximately three years old at the time), who falls out of a window while his parents are having sex. The mother (Charlotte Gainsbourg) develops severe depression and is admitted to hospital. The father (Willem Defoe), who is a psychotherapist, contests her hospitalisation and takes responsibility for her (albeit unwilling) discharge from hospital. Back at home he receives a letter from the hospital. He places it, unopened, in his jacket pocket. She throws away her pills, but her condition worsens, and he calms her angst through sexual intercourse. He convinces her that she must go through the pain and confront her angst. Together they travel to their holiday cabin, Eden, which lies in a dense forest, and is a place of anxiety for her. During their hike out to the cabin, the man sees a fallow deer with a stillborn calf hanging out of its rear. In the first part of their stay in Eden she overcomes her anxiety about nature, helped by his exercises in stamina. However, he is not happy about her progress and becomes suspicious. Alone in the forest, amongst the ferns, he sees an animal lying down. It is revealed as a fox, eating its own entrails and speaking the words »chaos reigns«. Next a storm arrives, and he finds her lost thesis on Euro‑ pean witch trials, which contains images of the torture of witches, and he notices that her writing becomes increasingly unintelligible and indistinct. He confronts her with this, and she confirms that in the writing process she became persuaded of the dangerous and demonic in nature. He withdraws from her, and at night she runs frustratedly out in front of the house where she masturbates, naked, by the roots of a tree. He becomes involved and they have orgiastic intercourse, while naked hands reach up between the roots of the tree. The following day she finds the post‑mortem report from the hospital, and he connects the mal‑ formed shape from the x‑ray of their son’s foot together with other pictures he finds, where Nick’s shoes appear to sit the opposite way around. He retreats to the shed. She attacks him with accusations of wanting to leave her, and in haste knocks him unconscious with a piece of firewood, fixes a grindstone to his leg and throws the wrench under the shed. He awakens, fearing for his life, and retreats to a foxhole close by. She searches for him and finally finds him when the fox’s cry exposes his location. She buries him alive and it is not until later at night that she regrets her actions and saves him, taking him to the shed again. Here it occurs to her that she could have avoided her son’s death, and she cuts off her clitoris and inner labia. He is awakened by a hailstorm and the fallow deer and fox enter inside. At that moment he hears the raven under the floorboards and knocks through a hole, upon which the raven joins the other animals while he gains access to the wrench and frees himself from the grindstone. He strangles and then burns the woman on the ladder. In the epilogue, which is black and white just like the intro, he hobbles around in the forest and eats berries, while tenebrous women gather around him.

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The man (Willem Dafoe) and the woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in the haptic intro sequence.

the intro sequence’s documentary‑prosaic ›nakedness‹ creates allusions to the porn film genre, along with the intensifying of everyday objects such as the washing machine. But because of the high‑speed technique this scene contains the same form of monumental beauty as later in the film, when the man’s visions are depicted.221 The prologue is accompanied by the soprano aria »Lascia ch’io pianga« (Let me weep) from Georg Friedrich Händel’s opera Rinaldo (1711). The aria was performed by Tuva Svenningsen and the Baroque soloists and recorded especially for the film, so that it followed the rhythm of the image sequence precisely (DVD extra material). The bleak vocal tone is thus able to create a form of affective absorption, so that the otherwise haptically described space expands symbolically and movingly. Aside from the aria, the soundtrack is a mental form of horror

221 Mantle lists four different filmic methods utilised in Antichrist: 1) a naturalistic, semi‑documentary style filmed with a normal, moving camera; 2) a monumental style used, for example, in the man’s vision scenes with the deer and fox, and filmed with a high‑speed camera; 3) a montage style, used for the de‑ scription of panic attacks, and filmed with small, cheap lenses (lens‑babies), which decay the image; 4) a transition style, where the description goes from hand‑held to linear images in balance (from the DVD extra material).

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The fall of the son, Nic (Storm Acheche Sahlstrøm), is composed together with the ‘fall’ of the mother and father’s orgasmic faces.

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The monumental style; here used to underline the man’s reflection.

produced especially for the film by Kristian Eidnes Andersen, who together with Trier produced samples and modulated the sound produced by organic materials (for example, horse hair dragged over thin branches or whistling sounds with blades of grass). In addition, recordings of inner bodily sounds (the flow of blood and heartbeats) were utilised in the scenes depicting panic attacks. Both this original, organically created sound tapestry and the haptic intro belong to the film’s signaletic material, which helps intensify the film’s affective impact. The perception of the hapti‑ cally modulating real‑time effect, the monumental vision images and the unknown sounds make viewers vigilant and sharpen their senses affectively. The mental frame of mind is, so to speak, tan‑ gible. The real‑time effect in the intro’s high‑speed recordings is overlaid with a documentary level, depicting the moment of tragedy/point of orgasm, and should also be seen as a signal‑ etic material, in that through the modulation in the image, the space is created. The image organises a relational space, which nonetheless remains within the frame. Though indexically speak‑ ing it depicts something, it is the individual processes within the frame that capture the attention. In this case, it is the relations between individual elements, creating real‑time effects, which 240

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appear claustrophobic. The boy’s exit or line of flight seemingly puts an end to this level, but as the film shows all forms lead to lines of flight (in the form of therapy) or exits (in the form of violence and death) straight back to the event’s signaletic level, which in this film is described through depression.222 Nietzsche – The Dionysian and the Apollinian

Friedrich Nietzsche published The Anti-Christ (1888) as a con‑ troversial treatise immediately before he wrote Ecce Homo (pub‑ lished in 1908), in which he signed himself as »Dionysos against the Crucified« (Nietzsche [1908] 1992, 104). Prior to these On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885) were published. They were all related more or less to The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872), which with its republication in 1886 was given a new subtitle (Or: Hellenism and Pessimism) and a new preface. After The Anti-Christ came Twilight of the Idols in January 1889, thus ending his authorship. A few weeks after this final publica‑ tion, Nietzsche broke down in the street. He never overcame this psychological breakdown. In this context it is most important to maintain that Nietzsche makes Dionysos and the Antichrist into identical figures. Nietzsche endows the Antichrist with an untamed nature – with the Dionysian forces that in ancient Greece were the noctur‑ nal side of Apollinian order. Where Apollo, the god of sculpture, represented structure, marked boundaries, plastic forms, images, consciousness, thought and concepts – in a word, form – Dio‑ nysos, the god of wine, represented the unbounded, the timeless, the imageless, the unreflecting, music, drunkenness, but also the will, which is noticeably physical and not metaphysical. As men‑ tioned, in the new preface to the reprint of The Birth of Tragedy in 1886, Nietzsche wrote that he had given himself the freedom of making Dionysos into the opposite of Christian morality, and thus accorded the Antichrist the name Dionysos. But there is yet 222 Shaviro, in agreement with Rodowick, regards real‑time modulation negatively as a »perpetual pres‑ ent« (Shaviro 2010, 16). In other words, he does not see the expressive potential of haptic noise.

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another contrast, namely between the male and the female, in that the Dionysian motif in Nietzsche is more conventionally femi‑ nine than masculine, as several researchers have noted (Oppel).223 Nietzsche’s preference for the female symbol in relation to the Dionysian figure has a certain justification in the ecstasy of the cult, which liberates one (traditionally the man) from being one‑ self – including one’s gender. In addition, as far back as ancient Greece, the Dionysian figure has been presented as one that bal‑ ances between fantasy and reality, with both a male and a female exterior; or, more precisely: the older the cult is, the more female features Dionysos is given.224 The cultic Dionysos feasts consist of three ritual phases. Firstly wine, which the god inhabits, is drunk or inhaled from specific Dionysian cups. In this way the god’s spirit is ingested and one reaches ecstasy, where one ›stands outside one‑ self‹, allowing a space for the god, who in enthousiasmos enters the body. Next mania occurs, a manic rage, where one loses oneself because the god takes over and the reveller becomes one with the group of maenads. This momentary madness is expressed in wild dance. Finally one achieves peace and joy, which is the harbinger of the catharsis of tragedy, and is the reason why Dionysos is also the god of theatre and in the tragedies had the narrator function in the choir.225 Frances Nesbitt Oppel notes that in the Dionysos figure Nietzsche in fact also includes the maenads, the women who carried out the majority of the practices of the Dionysos cult. According to Oppel, they represent the pain, emotion and ec‑ stasy associated with childbirth. The pain, the emotion and the ecstasy transgress and subvert the boundaries in a similar manner to intoxication (Oppel, 73). The Dionysos figure and the cult are namely also connected with everything natural, the antithesis of an edifying state, which brings life as well as death. The cult of Dio‑ nysos thus stands for natural sensations formed non‑aesthetically, which should be balanced with the Apollinian aesthetic and con‑ ceptualised forming of the world. 223 This is most likely one of the main reasons for Nietzsche’s, to put it mildly, schizophrenic view of women. He noticeably does not praise actual women – especially when they are educated. On the woman’s meaning in Nietzsche and on his significance for (post)feministic philosophy, see Thomsen 1985. 224 Cf. the exhibition Dionysos – Verwandlung und Ekstase 2008‑2009, Museumsinsel, Berlin. 225 On the phases of the cult and Dionysos‹ importance to the theatre, see Hjortsø 1984.

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Returning to Trier’s Antichrist, which has been furnished in its title with the symbol for female gender (in Denmark synonymous with feminism in the 1970s), it is striking that here, after the intro, we also find a trichotomy in: 1) grief, represented by the fallow deer bearing an unborn or stillborn calf; 2) pain, represented by the fox, who eats its own entrails; and 3) despair, represented by the raven that cannot die. But where the first two of these chapters might relate to stages in psychoanalytic therapy, which the man exposes the woman to, the third chapter, Despair (with the subtitle Gynocide), is the opposite of psychic well‑being in an individual‑psychological sense. On the other hand, this chapter allows one to see the film from a larger perspective, with regard to the ›social body‹ and the cathartic form of purification, which in its day was effected by the trichotomy of the feast of Dionysos. The Dionysian figure has been actualised in Michel Maffesoli’s sociological work The Shadow of Dionysus. A Contribution to the Sociology of the Orgy (Maffesoli [1982] 1993). Maffesoli takes his starting point in the idea that desperation and despair is in many (also modern) cultures the background for many kinds of unre‑ strained or violent ritual behaviour. To these ritualised forms of behaviour, often practised by youth in the form of, for example, wild parties, Maffesoli applies the German expression zwecklos aber sinnvoll (purposeless but meaningful; Maffesoli, 144). He emphasises that it is nature’s cyclical time or (with Nietzsche) the eternal recurrence that is the magical centre for such rituals and parties (Maffesoli, 29). It is this cyclical time that Apollinian reason and later the desire of Christianity, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and indeed also Marxism dominated and replaced with a coherent and linear time that can be controlled. The eternal recurrence of the same implies a Dionysian affirmation of life where, as in the cyclical ecstasy, there also occurs a reappraisal of all values. This event is always one and the same, a confirma‑ tion of life. Nature is thus not merely cosmos but is just as much chaos and randomness. The same is true for the social, which in all societies and cultures has become regulated through totem and taboo. In many societies the animal, the stone or the tree are in this way forms of totems, which indicate a link between the individual and the cosmos (Maffesoli, 38). These totemic figures affective figures of depression, melancholia and mania

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appear in Antichrist as well as in Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, to which I shall return. In Trier’s Antichrist it is the man (Willem Dafoe) who sees the totemic figures, the animals, as types of visions, which influence his interpretation. But the woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg), through her study of witch rituals, is already familiar with the three beggars: the deer, the fox and the raven. As the man adheres to the psycho‑ analytical doctrine, where the word is supposed to pave the way for reason and self‑insight, the vision of the three beggars, however, only gives (for the sake of the viewer) cause for his wonder. And yet they seem to anticipate (at least for the viewer) the progress of things (the way in which things are to play out), but it is not until the film’s ending that they cede, in a specific constellation, a sense of meaning. Through the vision of the self‑devouring fox, invoking the chaotic tone in the Garden of Eden at the end of the »Grief« chapter, comes first rain and twilight and finally the night. Both the Greek and Roman feasts of Dionysos, as well as the much later witches‹ Sabbath, worshipped the night. It is only after the man has noticed in the attic of the cabin the woman’s uncompleted thesis on gynocide – whose final pages are dominated by disintegrated handwriting – that he chooses to confront her with what he views, from his Apollinian place of reason, as a psychological breakdown, a possession or even worse: the worship of Dionysian forces. He is finally on the trail of something concrete, a reason, which has effects. And hereafter the events go at a pace. The anti‑Christian anger unfolds in a manner that transforms not only the individu‑ als, but also the film’s body. Thoughts and fantasies materialise at a furious rate in the narrative, in the unfolding of the form of direct time‑images, which Deleuze calls »peaks of present« (pointes de présent; Deleuze 1989, 98). That is, various accents or viewpoints existing simultaneously (for example, are linked to various char‑ acters) so that which is the memory or notion of one can in no way be recalled by the other.226 226 Deleuze mentions Robbe‑Grillet and Alain Resnais‹ Last Year at Marienbad (1961) as a film domi‑ nated by peaks of present. As there is no clear order of events, but a simultaneity of »a present of the future, a present of the present and a present of the past« (Deleuze 1989, 100), time becomes inexplicable and frightening, and it becomes impossible to decide who is lying, who is not guilty, who attempts to mislead and whether anyone speaks from the »system of judgement« (Deleuze 1989, 133).

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The film’s ›point of no return‹ is reached when the man in‑ vites the woman to participate in roleplay, where it is his role to represent the nature that provokes her anxiety, while she must relate rationally to the same. The dialogue goes like this: I’m Nature. All the things that you call nature./ Okay, Mr Nature. What do you want?/ To hurt you as much as I can./ How?/ How do you think?/ By frightening me?/ By killing you./ Nature can’t harm me. You’re just all the greenery outside./ No, I’m more than that./ I don’t understand./ I’m outside, but also …within. I’m nature of all human beings./ Oh, that kind of nature. The kind of nature that causes people to do evil things against women?/ That’s exactly who I am./ That kind of nature interested me a lot when I was up here. That kind of nature was the subject of my thesis. But you shouldn’t underestimate Eden./ What did Eden do?/ I discovered something else in my material than I expected. If human nature is evil, then that goes as well for the nature of…/ Of the women? Female nature?/ The nature of all the sisters. Women do not control their own bodies. Nature does. I have it in writing in my books. (Antichrist DVD, chapter 8)

Here the forces of nature are linked via the woman to societal violence against women, which again is linked to the Garden of Eden, to the Paradise from which, according to the Bible, hu‑ manity’s original sin emanates, where Eve is made guilty because of her misalliance with the snake. It was precisely this that was a central pivotal point for the European witch trials and for Malleus Maleficarum (Mackay 2009), a Latin text published in Germany in 1486. This book, which had the Danish title Heksehammeren (The Hammer of Witches), was the canonical background for the more than 50,000 public murders in the form of burnings of people (most often women), which took place especially in Europe in the period 1575‑1675. The last judicial witch trial took place in Poland as late as 1793. In Denmark, the 1,000 witch burnings took place from 1540 to 1693.227 In the film’s chapter »Despair«, this book is the direct inspiration for a number of scenes contain‑ 227 Source: Den Store Danske Encyklopædi. [(http://www.denstoredanske.dk/Livsstil,_sport_og_fritid/ Folketro_og_folkemindevidenskab/heks (last viewed 4 April 2015).

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ing strong images. First and foremost it is concerned with the images in the woman’s dissertation, which reproduces some of the illustrations from Malleus Maleficarum, of witches, wizards and witch burnings, but soon after the cited dialogue the type of images also materialise directly in the filmic material. During the nocturnal intercourse, when the woman is to expe‑ rience the violence, the body, the pain (possibly in order to feel her body’s limits or maybe, on the contrary, in order to unite herself with a collective, Dionysian body), she leaves the marital bed and masturbates out in nature, lying at the foot of a large tree with gi‑ gantic roots. When the man becomes involved, he reveals himself as the Devil, which he has perhaps been the entire time. A form of witches‹ Sabbath takes place in their copulation by the tree’s roots, from which a number of hands slowly reveal themselves. This scene more than implies the kind of fantasies concerning orgies that Maffesoli sees as derivative of the Dionysos cult: The fantasy of the Witches’ Sabbath and black masses are equally a form that draws on the Dionysian. He then becomes demonic. It is, of course, the Sabbath that remains the model of the genre, centered on the goat personifying the maleficent, licentious devil which also recalls Dionysus or the god Pan. In the phantasm of the Sabbath and in the imagery which represents it, the orgiastic ceremonies hold a choice place; a nude woman is adored for a young woman ritually deflowered, acts that inaugurate and unbridled debauchery dedicated to the god of evil, the devil in person. (Maffesoli, 144)

The image of the woman’s masturbation, which the man partici‑ pates in, is overlaid with demonic grunting, but the interesting thing is that Trier, in the midst of the orgiastic act, allows the woman to reference Malleus Maleficarum, as she says: »The sis‑ ters from Ratisbon could start a hailstorm.« And a well‑known drawing depicting two women condemned as witches, Agnes and Anne from Ratisbon, is glimpsed emerging at the front of the screen. In Malleus Maleficarum, the hailstorm plays a central role; as a symbol it is synonymous with the Devil. The account of the two condemned witches is a slightly hidden reference to both masturbation and the intercourse occasioned by the woman’s 246

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lust. In Malleus Maleficarum hail is interpreted as an initiation of a diabolical relation, in that the witch becomes a helper who can intensify demonic acts. Furthermore, the Devil materialises especially through water and air, and mixtures in between – for example, fog and hail. The following day, after this nocturnal orgy, the man attempts to teach the woman that wickedness and goodness have noth‑ ing to do with therapy, and that this form of natural evil, which phantasmically reveals itself in the Sabbath, is a possession or compulsion neurosis that cannot materialise in reality. Accord‑ ing to the man, the same is valid for the angst that would be able to make one do things one normally would not do, even without hypnosis. Shortly after this, however, he becomes a victim of his own ideas when the woman finds the post‑mortem report that, it is worth noting, is only read and seen by him (and the viewer). One thing he notices (in a flashback) is the enclosed x‑ray image, showing a slight deformity in a bone in the child’s foot. But this image, as mentioned, is not seen by the woman. He confronts her instead in an interrogative manner with photographs of Nick from the past summer, which she spent in Eden together with the child, around the same time as she was meant to finish her thesis on witch trials. In the photograph the child’s left boot sits on his right foot, and vice versa. The tacit guilt is laid upon her, because she has mixed up the boots. The x‑ray image (in flashback) is thus replaced or overlaid immediately by the photograph, with which she is confronted, and which for the viewer indicates that she has acted consciously. In addition, we preserve (as does the man) the recollection of the x‑ray image as the hidden truth, which, as a result of the mother’s maltreatment of the boy’s foot, could be the reason for the boy’s fall.228 And the Devil’s goat or satyr hoof attaches itself phantasmically to the x‑ray image, thus appearing as an intensified image element. Hereafter the camera follows the man, as he walks towards the shed through the fog, which in Malleus Maleficarum is sig‑

228 In keeping with the analysis of how the x‑ray and scanning images are utilised in The Kingdom I and II, one can say that a Gothic level (the skeleton shining through), so to speak, gains new grotesque‑demonic repercussions when it is shifted from a past level to a present.

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nified as the Devil’s preferred medium of transportation (cf. ground mist, which in Danish is described as ›mosekonens bryg‹, ›the brew of the moor‑wife‹). Here the viewer is presented with several images of Nick with boots turned the wrong way. In yet another flashback the man/viewer ›sees‹ how the woman forces the child’s feet into the wrong boots – against his will. This representation of the woman’s intentional, wicked action thereafter becomes the cause‑effect relationship that legitimises the following events, in accordance with the logic of the action‑ image, where a situation leads to an action, which again leads to a new situation. However, on top of this figurative ›production of evidence‹ is added yet another layering of a more deconstruc‑ tive kind. This time it takes the form of an equivocal linguistic demarcation. The man has hidden his psychological investigative work, consisting of a sketched triangle on a piece of paper upon which he has earlier noted the possible reasons for the woman’s angst. He produces it from a hiding place in the shed. In the triangle’s lower section he has previously written »leaves« and »trees«, on top of this »forest«, then »Eden (the garden)«, and at the head of the page »nature« and »Satan«, which are both, in the best Lacanian style, crossed out. Now he writes »ME« in quotation marks at the same time as he says out loud: »herself«. This finesse, where the personal pronoun ›me‹ also naturally includes himself, in that it as a linguistic sign contains the one who says it and generally includes both genders, indicates clearly that the symbiosis has reached a mutilating stage. If this is related to the altogether intricate ways in which Malleus Maleficarum makes judgements, then it means that one can‑ not differentiate objects of desire or angst from the desirous or anxious person. The difference between you and I, woman and man, ›herself‹ and ›me‹ is eliminated when a woman is determined to be a witch and an instrument of the Devil. The witch assumes this form, so to speak, in and with the fact that she becomes an object for the projection of various kinds of individual desire and social angst in a local society. In the film a possible re‑establish‑ ment of the loving relationship between the man and the woman is eliminated by this displacement between ›me‹ and ›herself‹ in favour of the question of who is the object of desire or angst – and 248

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as such bears the blame.229 From that point onwards the struggle between good and evil is found in the violence and the regime of sacrifice, which has replaced the ecstasy and madness of the Dionysos cult. In Malleus Maleficarum, as well as in the chapter »Despair«, the man and the woman can thus – to use an expres‑ sion from the Middle Ages – transmigrate (metempsychosis) to devil and witch and back again quickly. Time is annulled when we find ourselves in an absolute or immediate time, which again, according to Malleus Maleficarum, is characteristic of the Devil: he himself knows our innermost thoughts and travels at the speed of light. Through this the film finds itself in the regime of violent ecstasy where the woman attempts to drive out the Devil from the man (in that she crushes his genitals, so his penis ejaculates blood), chains him (to a grindstone) and buries him alive. In the final scene the sadomasochistic relationship becomes wholly evi‑ dent: she hates and loves him; she wants to kill him and yet longs for him. She calls to him and implores his help, so she can kill him. She wants to have him out of his hiding place, the foxhole, and when that fails, she buries him and calls him a bastard. The chapter ends with the man finding the third totemic animal, the raven, who like himself is buried in the foxhole. As he frees the raven from the ground, its cry betrays his hiding place and he unsuccessfully attempts to kill it. In the following chapter, »The Three Beggars«, the three to‑ temic figures are assembled. Each of them has influenced the chain of events through nature with its death contingency and chaos, which is characteristic of Dionysian and demonic forces. The three figures are, according to Trier himself, his own inventions and are allegedly figures he has met on the shamanic journeys he has participated in through the course of his therapy.230 The birthing

229 Very much like the Bible’s Garden of Eden, where the woman is judged guilty according to God’s prohibition because she tempted the man. The blame often lies (also in the witch trial) on the object (the temptress) and not necessarily on the one who is committing the misdeed (the tempted). 230 Cf. the conversation with Murray Smith on the DVD’s commentary soundtrack. Jacob Bøggild mentions Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968) as possible sources (Bøggild 2010).

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The ›false‹ flashback, where the woman ›sees‹ that her son has left his bed.

deer,231 the self‑destructive fox232 and the ever‑recurring raven233 all belong to the Dionysian‑cyclical understanding of time, which threatens chronological‑linear time. As with all totemic figures they can also function as talismans, which they in fact do in the film’s opening scene where three human figures named Grief, Pain and Despair stand next to the child’s bed. The figures in the puzzle, which menacingly falls out of its frame during the parents‹ copu‑ lation, also represent the deer, the fox and the raven respectively. In hindsight, watching the film’s intro one might be in doubt as to which of these figures holds the Devil away, or whether they invite him inside. This occurs when, in the final scene, a ›false‹ flashback of the intro scene is set in, depicting the woman, who in the grip

231 In the Middle Ages the deer, or hart, was synonymous with all that was not reared in nature. In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1602) there is a play on words between the audible syncretism of heart and hart. 232 The fox has since olden times been the object of mythological interpretation. It has denoted intel‑ ligence, cunning and resourcefulness, but also – in the form of werewolves and other mixtures between animals and humans – has been both divine and demonised. 233 The raven can be associated partly with Odin’s ravens Huginn and Muninn, which, in Nordic my‑ thology, denoted memory and remembrance, in that they flew out each morning and returned each evening with news about the world; and partly with Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven (1845), where the raven with its eternal refrain »(N)evermore« warns of the death of the narrator. In the final verse, the raven’s eyes are described as being demonic: »And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming«.

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of orgasm in fact opens her eyes and sees the child, but chooses to ignore him. In other words, she sets her lust for orgasm higher than her obligations as a mother. Immediately after this the child climbs up onto a chair, bats away the three beggars and moves, full of self‑confidence in his own power, towards the open window. As mentioned, the flashback is consciously misleading, in that if one watches the intro scene again, the woman clearly does not open her eyes. But nevertheless this could be viewed as a recollection or a vision, and again this points towards the idea that what we may be encountering indicates that the woman’s judgement is false, which is underlined by her own self‑imprecation: »A crying woman is a scheming woman«, who according to the rhyme is »false in legs, thighs, breast, teeth, hair and eyes«. Next the woman is sac‑ rificed in the same way as Anne in Dreyer’s Day of Wrath, where she acknowledges the accusations of witchcraft, having placed her corporeal lust above her duties. In Trier the woman first mutilates herself by carrying out a circumcision (type II: excision or clitori‑ dectomy) with a pair of scissors. Her screams summon the deer, and the constellation which represents the three beggars, Grief (the deer), Pain (the fox) and Despair (the raven), is revealed to the man. Next follows a hailstorm, during which the deer and the ra‑ ven materialise in the shed.234 Finally it is the raven’s cry from the space under the floorboards that attracts the man’s attention and thus reveals where the woman has hidden the wrench. In this way the raven becomes the man’s helper – his extended recollection. While the man is freeing himself from the grindstone, the woman attacks him with a pair of scissors. The panic attack overpowers him (as it has previously with the woman) in a series of black and white close‑ups of pulse, dilated pupils and trembling fingers. He manages to cut the process short and strangles her, thereafter burning the body, which as in Day of Wrath is lashed tightly to a ladder – the same ladder that the man used to gain access to the unfinished thesis and the illustrations of witch burnings in Eden’s attic.

234 According to Malleus Maleficarum, the Devil, having animalistic senses, can show itself in the form of an animal (the snake and the fox in particular are mentioned).

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That the man/Devil kills in cold blood at the very moment the woman repents her actions, and that there is a notion (as al‑ most always in a patriarchal culture) of a female victim, is almost unbearable in the film. It is perhaps also the most crucial reason for the feminist critique it received, primarily in Sweden.235 But it can also be regarded as Trier’s comment on the age we live in, where women as well as other manifestations of scapegoats are linked to the sovereign position of power, which is the reason why humans can be killed or sacrificed, just as in the age of witch gynocides – and, more to the point, this without the illusion of a new, reborn established order rising up.236 This chapter in the film ends with the man moving incredibly slowly past the with‑ ered tree, and the landscape changing with each step he takes, so finally it consists of nothing but naked human bodies. The naked hands, which first materialised when the couple copulated by the tree roots, now appear as naked bodies or corpses, issuing from or out of the ground. In the film’s epilogue we see the wounded man/Devil walking with his crutches outside the cabin. He collects berries, enjoys eating them, and then discovers the traces (feathers) of the ea‑ gle’s meal (its own young, fallen or pushed from the nest). This sight, which symbolically captures the motif of the whole film, causes a (possibly demonic) knowing smile to cross the man’s face, as he turns and sees the three beggars materialise in the long grass. The smile resembles Nick’s smile when he turns towards the camera during the prologue, as a kind of Peeping Tom, having just witnessed his parents‹ copulation. Nick also caught sight of the three beggars, Grief, Pain and Despair, when he knowingly turned towards the window that he later fell from. Father and son thus resemble one another, if one compares the prologue and epilogue. The expression on the son’s falling face and the father’s orgiastic face are likewise identical in the prologue. The faces are edited next to one another: first the 235 The debate was raised in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter on 28 July 2009 by Maria Sveland and Katarina Wennstam, both authors and journalists. In Denmark, the then director for KVINFO (the Danish centre for the study of and work with issues relating to gender, equality and diversity), Elisabeth Møller Jensen, amongst others, followed up the debate. 236 Cf. Agamben’s description in Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Agamben 1998).

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son, then the father. Here nature’s violent cycle is more than implied: just as the eagle in nature eats its own young, Satan, the Antichrist and Dionysos also live off their own progeny. The notion that we are doomed to die in order for life to go on is the gruesome and yet cheerful wisdom of the Nietzschean – and also the Trieresque – Antichrist. In the final shot a mass of female bodies with blurred faces gather around the man, which could be seen as a group of maenads or witches, heralding their new leader. No matter whether one regards the scene as liberating or the opposite, it is clear that the Dionysian or Antichrist‑like natural order is intensified in the final scenes of the film. To use an expression from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, one might say that the transformation the man undertakes in the course of the film is as a ›becoming‑animal‹, an acknowledge‑ ment of life’s forces at the cost of the various proto‑scenes of both psychoanalysis and Christianity. The psychoanalytic proto‑ scene is amputated at the start of the film, where the lust shining from man and woman, as well as son – intensified by the aria »Laschia ch’io pianga« – gives the entire film an affirmative power despite its sombre egress. And the Christian proto‑scene, which is presumably intended to represent a confrontation with nature (the snake in the Garden of Eden), is not followed up by an expulsion from paradise, after which working with edifica‑ tion and the cultivation of earth would be able to take place in a religious yearning for a return to a Paradise beyond. Antichrist is concerned with neither the striation (Deleuze and Guattari 2013, 551f.) of the earth (in a religious frame of reference) nor the striation of consciousness (in a psychological frame of reference); rather, its focus is on how desire and angst are culturally mnemotechnically linked with the victims and vio‑ lent assaults on individuals and groups that take place prior to stratification, such as reason, churches, enlightenment thinking, psychoanalysis and so on; for although violence in Nietzsche can be described in connection with the Dionysian in culture, it is not a force of nature, standing outside of culture. As Foucault also explains (Foucault 1975), violence also registers itself directly in the bodies that react in relation to the culturally set framework of violence, in the form of desire, and the production and reproduc‑ affective figures of depression, melancholia and mania

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tion of, for example, the relationship between the genders. The cultural memory, the language and the system of signs have a violent background, which is often neglected if one, for example, sees ideological and democratic processes exclusively: Cruelty has nothing to do with some ill‑defined or natural violence that might be commissioned to explain the history of mankind; cruelty is the movement of culture that is realized in bodies and inscribed on them, belaboring them. That is what cruelty means. This culture is not the movement of ideology: on the contrary, it forcibly injects production into desire, and conversely, it forcibly inserts desire into social pro‑ duction and reproduction. For even death, punishment, and torture are desired, and are instances of production (compare the history of fatalism). It makes men or their organs into the parts and the wheels of the social machine. The sign is a position of desire; but the first signs are the territorial signs that plant their flags in bodies. (Deleuze and Guattari 2013, 145)

The female murder in Antichrist has the character of a sacrifice in which the man, whose eyes the viewer is forced to look through, himself becomes an Antichrist – through a ›becoming‑woman‹, ›becoming‑animal‹. Out of the chaos, something new emerges. The Apollinian is, as a rule, victorious over the Dionysian, but here, on the contrary, the man has become a new demon or maybe a Dionysian god, who plucks the forest’s wild berries and is the new attraction amongst maenads or witches. The edification lies somewhere other than in the Apollinian order. What is depicted in the final scene is (with Deleuze and Guattari) a nomadic, smooth or haptic space, to which I shall return. Here, in preparation, Malleus Maleficarum’s graphic de‑ piction of the Devil, as he acts in God’s blessed garden, should be quoted: Every heretic can be called a boar, because he is in fact a boar from the forest, who destroys and ruins the plentiful fruits of the Faith by sowing the brambles of heresy among the vine shoots. He is also called a coiling, poison‑spitting snake, but he is actually the wicked Foe of our human race: the Devil and Satan. The wish that is fixed most in our heart,

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more than all the desires that we can conceive, is that in our times this Church should abound in plenty, and that the vine shoots and the fruits of this vineyard of the Lord should not be devoured and consumed by the heretical boar from the forest or poisoned by the snake’s injection of the poison of heretical depravity into it. (Mackay, 627)

This text could have formed the inspiration for the film’s final scene. No matter what source material has inspired its inception,237 for me there is no doubt that the film deals with Nietzsche’s interpretation of the Dionysian cyclus, the eternal recurrence of the same, where the Christian questions of guilt and non-guilt are irrelevant. Tarkovsky and the »eternal recurrence of the same«

Filming on Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice took place in 1985, while he was living in exile in Sweden. It was filmed on Gotland, and Tarkovsky, who was a great admirer of Bergman, used some actors who were known from his films. The Sacrifice was Tarkovsky’s final film; he was diagnosed with cancer shortly after the shooting was complete. He participated in the editing phase from his sickbed and died in 1986. According to his wife, the idea for the film was written in his diary as far back as 1978. Tarkovsky explains: There are two types of dreams: in one the dreamer steers events. He controls what is happening and what will happen: He is a demiurge. In the other he is incapable of control and is subjected to violence he cannot defend himself against. Everything results in suffering and anguish. (Offeret, DVD disc 2: English subtitles to »Regi Andrei Tarkovskij«)

The script for The Sacrifice is from 1983, and consists of a »witch« and a »sacrifice«, together with »a son who is forbidden to speak« (op. cit.). At the end of the film, when the son has regained the use of his voice, he says: »In the beginning was the Word. Why is that,

237 A good suggestion is a scene from a 1970s documentary film, where a group of women from the women’s liberation movement, gathered around a large oak tree, run up a hill laughing (cf. the broadcast »Do you remember…’70s women«, 2015; first broadcast 7 February 2015 on TV station DR2).

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Papa?« Here the son expresses himself in extension of the tradition which throughout the film is broken down due to the alliance of the father, Alexander, with the witch, Maria, and the inversion of all values which follows. In other words, it is the father who destroys the Apollinian values that he himself has practised for his entire life. This benefits a Dionysian sense perception, which makes it possible for him to annul a third world war taking place in a linear time. Through his intervention, the father maintains his child’s innocence because he rewinds time in order for everything to re‑ main the same, even the tradition. In addition, he must sacrifice his reason and is exiled from the normalised, civil community. Al‑ exander, weary of being an actor, philosopher, aesthete and liter‑ ary critic, listens at the start of the film to the postman, or nomad, Otto. Later we learn that Otto is also a collector of inexplicable but true incidences, where past events, amongst other things, actualise themselves in that which we call the present. It is Otto’s narrative on Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885) and on the eternal recurrence of the same that leads to the film’s first sequence of ver‑ tically filmed black and white images of chaos, which in the form of a vision that reveals itself to Alexander, anticipate both the war and the son’s possible death. During the bomber plane’s invocation of the war Alexander goes into panic, and his first impulse is to shoot his son in order to save him from the Apollinian catastrophe. He composes him‑ self, changes his mind and instead, for the first time in his life, prays to God. He wishes to recall the events of the war, in order that his son’s life might be saved. If God hears his prayer, he will sacrifice the use of his voice as a thank you. But Otto pays him a visit and urges him to seek out the witch Maria, whom he sleeps with one night. Together with Maria in sexual orgiastic abandon‑ ment, Alexander succeeds in forgetting his angst for the future, so the violent potentiality of the events does not take place. As an end to the copulation, where the couple hover in the air, raised high above the bed, Alexander’s vision is repeated: the black and white film sequence showing vertical images of chaos. But this sequence has appreciable differences from the earlier one. The vision is now populated by people, and the final image shows the son sleeping safely on a pillow. 256

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This depiction of the time of copulation, where past, present and future co‑exist in an achronological, simultaneous time, can occur with what Deleuze calls »pure« or »virtual« time. Deleuze believes it is possible for film to illustrate this time in the time‑ image’s peaks of present (Deleuze 1989, 101). The immediate, passing present is deactualised and chronological time, which is created by sequences of the cause‑effect relation, is overlaid by the time of the event. In the co‑existence of points of present, this time‑image escapes the spatio‑temporal and causal em‑ bedment that is characteristic of the action‑image. All peaks of present – the future’s present, present’s present and the past’s present – co‑exist at the same time, and this simultaneity pre‑ cludes the creation of an ongoing narrative. Instead the viewer is invited to dwell on the individual points or images of the events, or more specifically to investigate the intermediate spaces between the event’s individual points, so the event can be expe‑ rienced as fullness in time or as an extension. Deleuze explains this in a way that is extremely appropriate to the development of events in both Trier’s Antichrist and Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice: We are, then, passing along different events, in accordance with an explicit time or a form of succession which entails that a variety of things fill the present one after another. It is quite different if we are established inside one single event; if we plunge into an event that is in preparation, arrives and is over; if for a longitudinal, pragmatic view we substitute a vision which is purely optical, vertical, or, rather, one in depth. The event is no longer confused with the space which serves as its place, nor with the actual present which is passing: ›the time of the event comes to an end before the event does, so the event will start again at another time … the whole event is as it were in the time where nothing happens‹, and it is in empty time that we anticipate recollection, break up what is actual and locate the recollection once it is formed. (Deleuze op. cit., 100)238

The development of the events in a pure, virtual time is shown in The Sacrifice in the black and white sequences, which are found 238

Deleuze cites Bernard Groethuysen’s text on time in Recherches philosophiques, vol. 5, 1935‑1936.

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on the screen’s surface, where one is able to sense the individual image elements in relation to one another in haptic ways. It becomes possible for Alexander to escape the traumas of the past and in so doing his angst for the future because he, in his copulation with the witch Maria, experiences that all times have several virtually possible results. In the joy of his newly found freedom, Alexander sets fire to the past, represented by the fam‑ ily’s beautiful wooden house. He enjoys the anti‑aesthetic chaos and accepts its repercussions on himself: his exile as a fool and being labelled crazy. After the father trying all manner of things in order to save his son’s innocence and happiness, the boy wanders around the dead tree like a monk, which according to the father’s story allowed life to return to the tree. In other words, the son returns to the tradition, but whether this relates to a religious practice or not remains unanswered and irrelevant. The most important thing is that the withered tree transforms itself into the tree of life through the constantly returning monk and his efforts to water it. This is the cyclical practice the son undertakes. Tarkovsky shows that if the experience of time as an event and as a celebration of the eternal recurrence of the same is to be achieved then it demands a sacrifice: the sacrifice of the Apollinian form. And it is precisely this that the artist must be aware of. Time as the »powers of the false«, creation and transformation

If we now return one final time to Trier’s Antichrist, the inspiration from Tarkovsky becomes clear. The low‑flying aeroplanes in The Sacrifice become in Antichrist the fallen acorns and later the hail‑ storm. The witch’s song transforms into the many strange sounds of nature (including the phantom wailing of the child, which ac‑ cording to Malleus Maleficarum is an expression of pure devilry). The forest, the withered tree, the house made of wood, the in‑ nocent child and the burning, which initiates a new order, are all symbolic ingredients Trier recycles from The Sacrifice. But Trier’s dedication to Tarkovsky in Antichrist’s final scenes is probably due to the style of images in particular. For Trier builds further on the potential Tarkovsky shows when he allows the viewer to experience 258

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the event’s inner, virtual time through the peaks of present’s im‑ ages of pure time. They contain an inbuilt duplicity: no peaks of present can be true simultaneously, and they are so enfolded that they cannot be separated. If the points of present appear in series, they can express time as a force or creation. This time‑image has the ability to act as a power of the false, in that time as creation and change constantly transforms stable and ›true‹ identities, so they are seen and experienced as unstable and false. In the concept of the powers of the false in Deleuze, we redis‑ cover Nietzsche and his interpretation of such falseness (beyond lies and truth), such as the Dionysian force. Neither Tarkovsky nor Trier support a classic contrast of truth and lies, but through the powers of the false they create power of change in the filmic material itself. This is the power of creation we are emotionally struck by in haptic images, which in Trier are re‑worked in a very specific way. Not unlike the use of the haptic images which are manifest as visible pixels on the surface of the screen in The Kingdom I and II, Trier transforms the film medium in order to be able to document the creation of time, so it resembles the real‑time transmission we recognise from electronic and digital images. With his haptic forming of one of virtual time’s pure forms – the peaks of present – Trier creates a Dionysian celebra‑ tion of time’s becoming and constant transformation. The haptic can in this way characterise how the medium and its chronological form can be rendered visible on the surface of the TV or cinema screen. The time‑image’s peaks of present can thus be sensed corporeally and directly on the screen, so to speak, before the reflexive re‑working of what is seen is established. The texture of the haptic surface, which as described is used in the majority of Trier’s films in order to interpret psychic and hypnotic bound‑ ary states, is here given a demonic charge. The classic function of the screen as an interface for the viewer’s voyeuristic, secured identification is problematised stylistically as well as thematically. The intro’s haptic‑affective layer ›performs‹ the event in that the layer of signaletic material (the effect of the film’s high‑speed recording) can be seen independently, similar to the falling snow. The child’s fall follows on from both the woman’s and the man’s orgiastic fall – but notably only after the child’s direct look into affective figures of depression, melancholia and mania

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the camera has broken the viewer’s voyeuristic identification with Trier’s barely hidden reference to a pornographic scenario. The soprano aria »Lascia ch’io pianga« following the sequence of im‑ ages is a contributory factor in emphasising the event’s aspect in the intro. It is not the case that the viewed sequence is merely ›filled in‹ with this or that – with (in a filmic sense, pragmatic) content (cf. Deleuze 1989, 100, quoted above) – but, on the con‑ trary, the signaletic material performs an event in front of the eyes of the viewer, who is, so to speak, ›caught by surprise‹. The event is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. The fall of the child’s body is the visible, traumatic expression for the event, but its actualisation is found in the audio‑visual sensation of the time‑image’s peaks of present. In extension of this we will return to how the film’s ending and beginning, which both unfold as haptic black and white peaks of present, relate to one another. In the final scenes where the woman simultaneously confirms her identity as a witch and as a Christian repenting her sins, because she has placed her lust be‑ fore her maternal instincts, a flashback to the introductory event is shown, which at the first viewing withheld its question of guilt, responsibility, truth and falseness. As mentioned previously, this flashback of the woman with open, informed eyes is not congru‑ ent with the intro scene’s images of the woman, who abandons herself to the sexual act with closed eyes. There is no question of any reconstruction of an empirical sequence. There is, on the other hand, the question of a false flashback where she (as was the purpose of the man’s therapy the entire time) returns to and re‑experiences the event from within – corresponding to the ex‑ perience of nature as something ›inner‹ and not merely something that lies outside of one’s own corporeality. She acknowledges in this scene that she cannot live with her guilt, and consequently she chooses her own fate. Like Alexander in Tarkovsky’s film, in full consciousness turning his back on the edifying aesthetic‑forming world and choosing madness, the woman in Trier consciously embraces her own ruin. The two worlds cannot co‑exist when a judgement is to fall on truth or falsity. Some of the virtual must be actualised and become form, identity or non‑identity. In the same moment the woman renounces her own existence as iden‑ 260

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tity and sacrifices herself/is killed as a person, the man becomes a Dionysian, demonic, animalistic gestalt who, just as in nature, breaks with all forms of linear time‑order, and who exists in all the chaotic, intervening spaces in the peaks of present of the event. It is this endlessly beautiful extension of the event’s virtual time that we are presented with in the beginning of Antichrist, and which shows itself in mystic ways in the final scenes. It is a de‑individualised time, a non‑anchored, non‑materialised, non‑ sensorimotor time; although what we see most of all are bodies. Both Tarkovsky and Trier choose to make this time sensory and visible through haptic images which materialise in the surface of the screen and negate depth. The haptic image is the constant transformation of Dionysos and the Antichrist that creates meta‑ morphoses, without finding calm in an unambiguous aesthetic form or a concluded self‑identical narrative. Perhaps that is why this film cannot be dismissed, and no‑one wishes to know of the judgement of others. As the man sees the woman as possessed and does not include himself in the ›ME‹, which is expressed as »her‑ self«, the woman sees the man as an objectifying therapist or as the Devil himself. As the two interpretations of the woman’s way of being present – either jouissance with closed eyes or informed with open eyes – exist simultaneously, Trier makes it impossible in Antichrist to determine what is true and who is guilty. But conversely, the viewer can experience truth as something that is created, in that the event unfolds in an actualisation. And it is here – in the midst of the development of the event – that the greatest failure and the most violent transformation can take place in relations; for example, between two people: Two people know each other, but already knew each other and do not yet know each other. Betrayal happens, it never happened, and yet has happened and will happen, sometimes one betraying the other and sometimes the other betraying the first – all at the same time. (Deleuze 1989, 101)

This might perhaps answer the question of why the second ›t‹ in the title Antichrist resembles a mixture of the female sign and a cross: because the woman in Antichrist resembles Nietzsche’s affective figures of depression, melancholia and mania

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notion about the Antichrist in that both relate to the potential of the forces of nature to bring about change and search for a kind of haptic counter‑violence or smooth space, which can reverse an Apollinian (or religious) endeavour towards the thoroughly organised optic space. Nietzsche makes a working drawing of the Antichrist as a potential for resistance, which actually ex‑ ists, even if marginalised in Christianity itself, and because Trier transfers this potential to the power of the female sign and also historically implicates Christianity’s demonising of the female, he re‑actualises Nietzsche’s orbit of the Dionysian, Antichrist‑ like forces. The battle between Dionysian and Apollinian forces develops, according to both Nietzsche and Trier (and Deleuze), always and on all levels of the social space. And perhaps it is the shadow of Dionysos or the Antichrist, as Maffesoli sees it in light of his cyclical contingency, which in the end preserves tradi‑ tion; for though collective forms of ›orgies‹ can create panic and be transcendent, »Dionysian wisdom, even in its most shocking forms, remains the lesser evil« (Maffesoli, 102). This insight can also be said to be valid for the use of the power of the false in the form of the open, orgiastic female face and in the use of the female sign in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. Melancholia – the world’s Dionysian underground

Melancholia, Lars von Trier’s second film in the Depression Tril‑ ogy, is, like Antichrist, an intertextual cocktail of symbolic, trans‑ gressive images and an ultra‑close‑up registering of the processes of nature, which is stylistically indebted to Tarkovsky. But while Antichrist borrows traits from horror films of the 1980s and on‑ wards, characterised by unnatural colours, body parts acting in‑ dependently and overwhelming sound, Melancholia places a more edifying emphasis on the creativity a melancholic‑depressive dis‑ position can activate. An obvious shared trait in the two films is the classical music of the overture, accompanied by digitally modulat‑ ed images in slow motion.239 The overture’s acoustic parts together 239 As mentioned earlier, these are particular recordings filmed at high speed and played back at a nor‑ mal or slower speed. The video artist Bill Viola is also known for his experiments with high‑speed images.

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strike several philosophical modes, which are repeated through‑ out the narrative and, as with a symphony or opera, are redeemed in the finale’s crescendo. Clear interpretive cues are laid out for the analyst in both films, but one finds – as always in Trier – just as many prosaic or ironic references.240 This chapter will pursue the philosophical line and the tone set by the Tristan chord, from Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (1865), which is also found as a recurrent theme in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872)241 – a work that, like Wagner’s opera, was inspired by the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. This chapter will also briefly refer to August Blom’s Danish silent film The End of the World (1916).242 Antichrist ends by depicting the man in the same way as Malleus Malleficarum describes the Devil: as an animal, helping it‑ self to the fruits and berries of the forest without heeding the thorns. But as mentioned previously, his gaze displays an enjoy‑ ment and indulgence reminiscent of – in a Nietzschean sense – the Antichrist‑like Dionysos. The eternal cycle of nature, upon which our fragmentary life rests, must be validated in art, where the potential for change (with Deleuze [1962] 2006) includes a becoming‑woman and becoming‑animal. In Julia Kristeva, the artist’s ability to transgress the established order and the predomi‑ nant language (in, for example, the horror genre) becomes vital for the regeneration of culture (Kristeva 1982). She maintains that the artist must associate with the abject as something that is neither subject nor object, but which nonetheless is inseparable from his/her own being (man or woman), in order to transgress merely intellectual practice. She continues: For abjection, when all is said and done, is the other facet of religious, moral, and ideological codes on which rest the sleep of individuals and the breathing spells of societies. Such codes are abjection’s purification and repression. But the return of their repressed make up our »apoca‑

240 In Melancholia there is a repetition of the phrase »Enjoy it while it lasts!«, which is associated with the popular Carlsberg beer advertisement from the 2010s. 241 The subtitle of this section refers additionally to the final page of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy: »of that foundation of all existence, that Dionysiac underground of the world« (Nietzsche [1872] 1999, 115). NB: I have referred to the Cambridge translation by Ronald Speirs throughout, in which he chooses the term ›Dionysiac‹, whereas I prefer to use ›Dionysian‹. 242 For a more detailed description of The End of the World, see Claire Thomson 2013b.

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lypse,« and that is why we cannot escape the dramatic convulsions of religious crises. In the end, our only difference [from the artists] is our unwilling‑ ness to have a face‑to‑face confrontation with the abject. Who would want to be a prophet? For we have lost faith in One Master Signifier. We prefer to foresee or seduce; to plan ahead, promise a recovery, or esthetize; to provide social security or make art not too far removed from the level of the media. (Kristeva 1982, 209)

This argument pervades the following analysis of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, since the abject in Kristeva is, in this context, another word for Dionysian creation in Nietzsche, whose book The Birth of Tragedy (1872) plays an equally important role in Melancholia as his book The Anti-Christ (1888) played in Trier’s film Antichrist (2009). With The Birth of Tragedy, whose first two editions had the subtitle »‑ from the Spirit of Music«, Nietzsche advances a kind of manifesto for artistic creation, which with a background in musical tonality can strike a Dionysian insight or artistic will, tearing apart the limited (Apollinian) individualising world of images in order to gain insight into more collective Dionysian forces, which appear to affect all things. The Dionysian creative force corresponds with the abject’s mould‑breaking and renewing role in (horror) fiction in Kristeva, and this again plays well with the affective potentials in art and culture established by Deleuze and later Brian Massumi. In contrast to Trier’s Antichrist, where a classic horror motif prevails, the following analysis will show how Melancholia invites a reinter‑ pretation of Nietzsche’s concept of the tragic and Schopenhauer’s concept of the melancholic position – and how interpretations of both are contained in Trier’s film. ›Melancholia‹ is the Greek designation for black bile, which from circa 400 BC was believed to be behind the pessimistic or depressed character, and constituted one of the four tempera‑ ments, the others being sanguine (optimistic), choleric (irascible) and phlegmatic (steady). In Melancholia it is clear that Justine (Kirsten Dunst)243 plays out Trier’s alter ego in her role as an artist 243 Lars von Trier has often mentioned a fascination with the Marquis de Sade’s Justine (written in 1787 and published in several versions in 1781, 1801 and 1815 respectively). The novel tells of how Justine and

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who dares to confront the abject or Dionysian forces. Her melan‑ cholic register is described as being particularly sensitive towards the affective exchanges created by the catastrophe. It wakes her lethargic creative forces into life, so that in the eye of the hurri‑ cane she shows herself to have Herculean strength. This register remains unintelligible to the other temperaments, represented by her choleric mother, Gaby (Charlotte Rampling), her sanguine father, Dexter (John Hurt), and her phlegmatic boss, Jack (Stellan Skarsgård). Her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and brother‑ in‑law John (Kiefer Sutherland) attempt, in various ways, to steer clear of the chaotic limbo by controlling any sign of affect and every penetration from without that might disturb the order that reigns in their immediate surroundings. The couple’s strategies alter‑ natingly predict, plan and aestheticise (cf. citation from Kristeva above), in order for them to steer clear of the Dionysian, affective force here depicted as nothing less than the end of the world – and which I along with Nietzsche will interpret as the »Dionysiac un‑ derground of the world« (cf. Nietzsche [1872] 1999, 115). The film’s plot falls into two parts. In the first, »Justine«, a lavish wedding party is held for Justine and Michael (Alexander Skarsgaard) at Claire and John’s Tudor‑style property.244 The wedding disintegrates, in part because it is infected by Justine’s extremely depressive condition, which makes the groom as well as the guests withdraw. The reason for her unrest is the planet Melancholia, which shows itself in the sky during the party, and which in the film’s second part, »Claire«, makes up the orbit of the catastrophe. Here an insight into Justine’s affective register is sup‑ plemented with an insight into the patterns of conduct laid out for the day by Claire and John. Justine, who breaks free from her de‑ pressive paralysis and shows energy in the chaos of the apocalypse, helps both Claire and her and John’s son, Leo (Cameron Spurr), to (with Nietzsche) meet the Dionysian‑lyrical »swirl of images«.245 her sister Juliette survive as noblewomen without parents and without means. They use their sexuality in various ways. Juliette uses her sexuality with cunning, so she eventually gains both riches and status, while Justine, who tries in vain to follow the righteous path, is abused sexually by people of all social classes. 244 The exterior shots are from the Swedish castle Tjolöholm, which was rebuilt in the English‑inspired Tudor style in the period 1898‑1904. 245 Cf. Isak Winkel Holm’s preface to the Danish edition of The Birth of Tragedy. The Danish word is »billedhvirvel« (Holm 1996, 14).

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In accordance with the majority of Trier’s films after the Dogme experiment, this swirl of images is depicted with the help of hand‑held camerawork, which afterwards can develop into an entire aesthetic, where error and misunderstandings are cel‑ ebrated. Melancholia’s Director of Photography, Manuel Alberto Claro, describes Trier’s instructions to him in this way: »Follow the energy, follow the acting. Don’t worry about mistakes. I love mistakes. Mistakes are gifts«. Claro concludes: I think one of the basic things in Lars von Trier’s camera style is that the camera must not know anything of what is going on. It has to react instantly or impulsively to what’s happening. And we do that by not preparing anything, but even the actors, they don’t know what to do. They don’t get any directions for the first take. You do the first take, and nobody knows anything. They just do whatever they believe is written in the script, and then Lars adjusts from there. (Manuel Alberto Claro, DVD extra material)

Trier himself comments that one becomes seasick watching foot‑ age from the hand‑held camera if one attempts to see the frame the entire time – but not if one focuses on what happens inside the frame (DVD extra material). This defence of the signaletic material and the haptic reality effect of the hand‑held camera shows clearly how Trier prioritises the expressive, the intuitive and immediate, which puts the forces of affect in the foreground.246 Iconoclasm

After seeing the planet Melancholia for the first time in the first part of the film, Justine renounces the role of the happy bride in the narrative of great love, which is bound in religious and social rituals. She rudely ignores Michael’s notion of the family with children, which is presented to her in the form of a ›paradisiacal‹ photograph of an apple orchard. She also refuses to prostitute herself over another image showing three naked 246 Additionally, in Melancholia the same visual means are used as in Antichrist (though not the small baby lenses, which depicted the panic attacks).

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female characters lying on the floor, as if they were skewered by table legs.247 This image, projected in large format, is displayed by Jack during the wedding meal, as he simultaneously demands that Justine, on account of her promotion to art director, should that same evening give the image a slogan. She refuses and as‑ saults Jack’s errand boy, Tim (Brady Corbet). Later she gives Jack a piece of her mind and speaks from the heart, like Cordelia in Shakespeare’s King Lear. Both Cordelia and Justine reply with the word ›Nothing‹ when they are expected to say something complimentary and flattering. Justine turns her back on the easy money, which always tempts the artist, with the words: »You are a despicable power‑hungry little man, Jack.« But her most radical manifestation of the affective Dionysian force, which destroys the wedding’s compulsion towards form, takes place in the library in the form of a kind of iconoclasm. Claire has just chided her sister with the words: »You’re lying to all of us«, because Justine has turned her back on Michael’s naïve dream of the future. Later, when she is alone, a teary Justine notices the shelving of a number of art books, which amongst other things show concrete abstractions of Kazimir Malevich. She affectively tears down – depicted with clearly hand‑held camera work – book after book and pores over them until she finds references to more classic works with identifiable motifs: Bruegel the Elder’s Hunters in the Snow (1565), John Everett Millais’ Ophelia (1851), Bruegel the Elder’s The Land of Cockaigne (1567),248 Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath (c. 1610) and Carl Fredrik Hill’s Crying Deer (end of the 1900s). In this juxtaposed composition they make up both an homage to Melancholia’s gloomy tone (the winter landscape) and indicate possible ways out of the condi‑ tion (suicide, losing oneself in wine and food, the victory of the brave over his superior).249 247 With intertextual reference to Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s horror pastiche From Dusk till Dawn (1996), where demons in female form are skewered with table legs. 248 This painting also depicts three bodies under a table. These are, however, well‑fed men who have stuffed themselves with good food and wine, while the aforementioned advertisment image depicts three naked, anorexic women. 249 In his informative article on Dürer’s Melancholia, Tsu‑Chung Su writes that in several places he illustrated the four temperaments in the form of animal motifs. Thus in Adam og Eve (1504) the bull is de‑ scribed as phlegmatic, the red deer as melancholic, the rabbit as sanguine and the cat as choleric (Su 2007).

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This manifestation sets the tone for the destructive Dionysian force of the depressive condition, whose affective tonality is shown in Justine’s mother, Gaby, and her refusal to answer her daugh‑ ter’s cry for help. She chooses to interpret Justine’s registering of the coming catastrophe as self‑centredness. Just like Justine’s father, Dexter, she follows her own needs and escapes. The jilted groom and the guests do the same, as the melancholic register leaves no naïve hope for anyone. The rescue of melancholia from ›the world as will and idea‹

In part two, »Claire«, Justine arrives in a lethargic, depressive state in order to be cared for by Claire and John, and she is transformed with the help of the planet Melancholia. This happens especially after her nocturnal bathing in the light from the planet.250 In this scene the bluish colour is clearly perceived as melancholic ton‑ ing, which stands in contrast to the warmer, golden toning in the first part of the film (cf. Director of Photography Manuel Alberto Claro’s explanation in the DVD’s extra material). In this beautiful scene, where the planet’s blue and translucent membrane of light almost melds together with Justine’s naked flesh as if in osmosis, the film creates a kind of visual, symbolic recognition of Dionysian forces in an artistic context. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche describes the Dionysian impulse in relation to the intoxication of forgetting oneself: These Dionysiac stirrings, which, as they grow in intensity, cause sub‑ jectivity to vanish to the point of complete self‑forgetting, awaken either under the influence of narcotic drink, of which all human beings and peoples who are close to the origin of things speak in their hymns, or at the approach of spring when the whole of nature is pervaded by lust for life. […] There are those who, whether from lack of experience

250 Cf. lunacy or capriciousness, which since Aristotle has been a designation for insanity, in that it was assumed that the full moon affected the fluid in the brain, in a similar manner to the way the sun and moon affect the tide. No scientific reason can be given for this. The scene where Justine goes ›skinny dipping‹ in Melancholia’s light mimics very precisely the poster for Holger Madsen’s A Trip to Mars (1918), which was re‑released on the same DVD as The End of the World (1916), and which I will discuss later.

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Justine (Kirsten Dunst) bathes in Melancholia’s nocturnal light.

or from dullness of spirit, turn away in scorn or pity from such phe‑ nomena, regarding them as ›popular diseases‹ while believing in their own good health; of course, these poor creatures have not the slightest inkling of how spectral and deathly pale their ›health‹ seems when the glowing life of Dionysiac enthusiasts storms past them. (Nietzsche [1872] 1999, 17‑18)

Nietzsche’s Dionysos emphasises the exchange with the forces of nature found in ecstasy and intoxication, and makes the cult’s pro‑ to‑forces into an antithesis of the Apollinian forces, which create order and systems (in music, poetry and medicine). On the other hand, if we follow Arthur Schopenhauer, who was Nietzsche’s inspiration for The Birth of Tragedy, the power of the will that occurs in everything as will to life is something to be renounced. In The World as Will and Idea (1818), Schopenhauer revises Kant’s notion of an object ›in itself‹ (an Sich), in that it is in its appear‑ ance that it gains a kind of effect on the subject. Schopenhauer argues that »cause and effect exist only for the understanding,

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which is nothing but their subjective correlative« (op. cit., 45).251 The subject is reduced to representation and is unable to go be‑ yond it, and the existence of the world is founded here, which is why »all knowledge of an object proper, of an idea perceived in space, exists only through and for the understanding; therefore not before, but only subsequently to its operation« (op. cit., 46). Philosophy occurs as a necessary reflection on the agonising and enigmatic world, and as a biological and physiological basis for thought (the brain). Humans are equipped with their own will; this will or ›inner nature of everything‹, which we have access to through our own corporeal senses and will to survive, is in its way animalistic and cyclical and cannot be realised or ordered by our intellect. The worst incarnation of the will is found in humans who hunt, and exploit and consume nature, including other humans. Schopenhauer expresses it – in this context – in an appropriate way: Now the nature of man consists in this, that his will strives, is satisfied and strives anew, and so on for ever. Indeed, his happiness and well‑ being consist simply in the quick transition from wish to satisfaction, and from satisfaction to a new wish. For the absence of satisfaction is suffering, the empty longing for a new wish, languor, ennui. (Op. cit., 339; author’s italics)252

This being refers to a life of suffering, subsumed by the will’s insa‑ tiable demands, and can either be lightened through the contem‑ plation of art’s repetition of the idea (in a Platonic sense) where the flux of time can be halted momentarily, or be repudiated in the pain of melancholia, or (more seldom) in an »inward, intui‑ tive knowledge« (op. cit., 489). Schopenhauer’s final sentence in The World as Will and Idea sends us directly back to Melancholia. He writes:

251 Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. 2, in Werke in fünf Bänden. Ludger Lütkehaus: Zürich, 1988. Here quoted from the English version, in The Project Gutenberg eBook: www.gutenberg.org/ files/38427/38427‑pdf.pdf (last viewed 22 June 2017). 252 My reading of Schopenhauer’s philosophy is indebted to Søren R. Fauth’s interpretation (Fauth 2009), quoted in more depth in the Danish version of Lars von Trier’s Renewal of Film (1984-2014).

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Rather do we [the philosopher rooted in melancholia with no comfort in mysticism] freely acknowledge that what remains after the entire abolition of will is for all those who are still full of will certainly nothing; but conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and has denied itself, this our world, which is so real, with all its suns and milky‑ways – is nothing. (Op. cit., 526)

It is this – romantic melancholia’s repudiation of the striving of will – which Trier (with Nietzsche) turns on its head in Melancholia. As is evident in Nietzsche’s description of the intoxication, sympathy exists only in the will’s Dionysian‑creating power. This power, which can also be said to be the driving force for the mod‑ ern (cf. Freud and Lacan), becomes in Trier a pivotal point for the idea that melancholic depression is depicted as a particular register for affective influences and exchanges, illustrated by the planet’s modulating blue surface, which is reflected in Justine. As in Nietzsche’s interpretation of the ancient myths, Dionysian (self) destruction and mutilation is the condition for artistic crea‑ tion and the reinterpretation of all values. Tristan und Isolde – Wagner as intermediary

According to Schopenhauer, music can give us a cognitive short‑ cut to the will of the world. It is in the paradoxical recognition of music’s non‑linguistic power as being superior not only to all genres of art but also to philosophy that we find one of the keys to understanding contemporary Romanticism. It is in the idea of the familial relation of music and religion that both Nietzsche and Wagner find inspiration in Schopenhauer. He regards music as an immediate representation of the powers of the world’s will: joy, sorrow, suffering and pain in itself – and though not necessarily attached to this or that sorrow or joy, Schopenhauer believes that music, as a direct interpretation of the mental state, is capable of creating a form of resistance in its dissonances and harmonisations, and treating various forms of suffering brought about by the life‑will. Although it cannot directly represent our actual suffering, music can nevertheless appear as a momentary release from it. And music goes one bet‑ affective figures of depression, melancholia and mania

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ter than the other art forms: it can be both obscure and removed, yet communicate inner affective states (Lütkehaus, 103). Wagner was greatly inspired by the philosophy of Schopenhauer when he wrote Tristan und Isolde, which premiered in 1865. Nietzsche considered – also after his break with Wagner – the opera as an eminent interpretation of the eternal struggle between Dionysian and Apollinian forces, and he especially extolled the melancholic dissonance in the so‑called ›Tristan chord‹. Where the lacking harmonisation was a source of dissociation in Wagner’s time, it is precisely the characteristic use of triads with dissonant inter‑ vals and unfinished cadences that Nietzsche draws attention to in The Birth of Tragedy: The pleasure engendered by the tragic myth comes from the same homeland as our pleasurable sensation of dissonance in music. The Dionysiac,253 with the primal pleasure it perceives even in pain, is the common womb from which both music and the tragic myth are born. (Nietzsche op. cit., 114)

Where Schopenhauer diagnoses both classical art and traditional philosophy as having become displaced in the contemporary world and prescribes withdrawal or musical confrontation against the power of the will, the ›philosopher with a hammer‹, Nietzsche, prescribes an overthrow and re‑evaluation of all values, giving space to the Dionysian destructive, but also affirmative, power. Because art can achieve more than nihilism, in Nietzsche it is given the role of the spearhead of philosophy. Art can confront us with the abyss – the Dionysian underground – and present nothingness, which is the condition for creativity. And it is this – his and Wagner’s romantic gesture towards that which cannot (yet) be represented and symbolically or emotionally contained – that sets the tone for the modern world. It is in this abyss/underground that Lars von Trier’s Melancholia allows the world to go to ruin and thus be resurrected as a

253 In the quoted sections from the Cambridge University Press translation of The Birth of Tragedy, the term ›Dionysiac‹ is used. However, I prefer the term ›Dionysian‹ instead, and have used this throughout the remainder of the book.

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film. In the figure of Justine we find, without doubt, an autobio‑ graphical depiction of the melancholic/depressive register, which through an artistic reworking – the film Melancholia – creates, in Kristeva’s words, a link between affect and sign (Lechte 1990, 36). The unrepresentable becomes interpreted when it is given a voice, sound and images. As with the characters in Tarkovsky, Justine seeks the absolute, and as in Nostalgia (1983) and Stalker (1979), the earth becomes porous and its fissures and cracks be‑ come inviting.254 But rather than embarking on a futile attempt to escape – as with Claire – Justine embraces the creative chaos, which in fact gives her strength to be in the event’s reinterpreting creation. As in Nietzschean philosophy, she seeks melancholia’s creative abyss, and Trier attempts to ensure that the viewer also remains there – submerged in reflections of whether the inherit‑ ance from Wagner and Nietzsche still holds true today, more than 70 years after the Nazi interpretation and political application of them.255 The end of the world – figures for interpretation

The overture to Tristan und Isolde at the beginning of the film plays over the image of a pale Justine, who slowly opens her eyes. They are without spark – empty. The viewer is invited to see with her melancholic gaze, just as the viewer at the beginning of Antichrist is invited to see as if through the boy’s – Nick, the lit‑ tle demon – knowing and slightly teasing gaze. The film’s central visual elements are then presented in the so‑called visualisation scenes, which are also employed in Antichrist, where the monu‑

254 Stylistically, in this film Trier also borrows many things from Tarkovsky, amongst them the ref‑ erence to Brueghel’s picture Hunters in the Snow, which also appears in Solaris (1972). Cf. also C. Claire Thomson’s article on Solaris and Vinterberg’s It’s All About Love (Thomson 2007). 255 Cf. Trier’s appearance at the Cannes film festival in spring 2011 (https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=stjM2q3D8I4 (last viewed 4 April 2015)). This public appearance took its starting point in a ques‑ tion about Trier’s thoughts on the Nazi aesthetic, in relation to his own remarks in an interview with Per Juul Carlsen, in which he discusses Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde as inspiration, diverted by Marcel Proust’s homage to the opera. In extension of this he declares a soft spot for the Nazi aesthetic, which amongst other things showed itself in an interest in the design of their planes (Carlsen 2011).

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mental expression is intensified by digital high‑speed recording, making it possible to slow down the filmic time.256 The film’s introductory images together with the Tristan chord indicate the atmosphere. Melancholia is the affective register, and remains the dominant filter throughout the film. With regard to the film’s theme, there are (aside from the reference to Tarko‑ vsky’s Solaris and maybe especially to Khari and her recurring ghost) a number of similarities with the Danish silent film The End of the World, directed by August Blom and produced by Nordisk Films Kompagni in 1916.257 Blom’s film has a fair‑haired sister and dark‑haired sister in the leading roles and depicts the eternal struggle between faith and knowledge, which is won by the fairer, believing sister. She and her fiancée survive, in contrast to the dark‑haired sister who dies in the mine with her husband, the film’s villain. In several scenes an enormous telescope appears showing the comet’s disruptive trajectory. The telescope is to a large extent a ›scientific fetish‹ in the film, which, however, allows the religious faith a kind of ›victory‹ beyond the catastrophe. This is not the case in Melancholia, where there are neither metaphysical nor scientific ways out of the Schopenhauerian wretchedness. The fairer sister is dark of mind and waves away all rational outlooks on life, while the darker sister and her husband 256 Initially it is all seen from a mental, symbolic level: 1) birds fall from the sky; 2) a baroque garden, à la the garden in Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe Grillet’s co‑production Last Year at Marienbad (1961), with thuja trees and a sundial projecting two shadows; 3) Brueghel’s painting Hunters in the Snow, which slowly transforms into soot; 4) the planet Melancholia, which blots out the light from the other planets as it approaches Earth. It is then registered from a more physical level as to how the planet’s orbit affects Earth and its inhabitants: 1) Claire, with her son in her arms on a golf course, sinks down into the ground with each step as if it were snow; 2) a horse, which collapses under its own weight; 3) Justine with arms spread out stands still amongst the swarming insects in the dusk; 4) Justine, Leo and Claire, who, with the main building in the background as a gothic backdrop, are seen walking in the baroque garden with Melancholia, the moon and sun hovering above their heads; 5) the Earth, which from outer space circles clockwise around Melancholia; 6) Justine, whose hands ›attract‹ the electric power streams to her; 7) Justine in a wedding dress being hindered in her steps by some black material, which sticks to her feet like wool; 8) the planet Melancholia, which ›swallows‹ the Earth – as seen from outer space; 9) a mosaic window in the mansion, which is lit up in an obscure manner by a golden sphere containing a burning flame, reminiscent of Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melancholia (1514), but also the numerous representations of the annunci‑ ation of the Virgin Mary, where the angel is guided by a dove and a beam of light from heaven, which falls on Mary; 10) Justine, who appears as Ophelia painted by John Everett Millais (1851); 11) Leo and Justine, who whittle branches in the forest with a penknife; 12) the Earth, which penetrates Melancholia’s mem‑ brane. 257 The film was made during the First World War and inspired by the fear that Halley’s comet, which was close to the earth’s orbit in April 1910, might collide with the Earth. In 2006, in connection with 100 years of Nordisk Film, it was re‑released by the DFI (Danish Film Institute) in a digitally restored version.

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believe in the rationality of science beyond what is observable through the senses. This is illustrated primarily by the telescope that John, in the film’s second part, sets up on the veranda so the whole family can be assured of the superiority of science. However, during the course of the film he must acknowledge that science has miscalculated the orbit of the planet Melancholia,258 and his world falls apart. His line of escape is suicide – with the pills that Claire had intended to use herself. John dies a cowardly death, lying under the hooves of Justine’s fiery stallion.259 After this, Leo’s homemade measuring instrument becomes Claire’s bearing. Its metal loop is adjustable so it can indicate the diameter of the planet, as the person who is carrying out the measurement holds it in the middle of their breast. Next one must wait, and thereafter a measurement is again made in the same way. The subject is, in other words, included in what is measured. Scien‑ tific objectification is not possible (no ›Ding an Sich‹), because everything forms part of the same world. The two methods of measurement correspond to an optic and a haptic view, which Deleuze rather appropriately depicts as ›lookouts‹ with short‑distance and long‑distance vision respec‑ tively in A Thousand Plateaus. They refer to the novella »Histoire du gouffre et de la lunette« (»The Story of the Abyss and the Spyglass«) by Pierrette Fleutiaux (1976). The near‑seers »have a simple spyglass«, which »in the abyss […] see[s] the outline of gigantic cells, great binary divisions, dichotomies, well‑defined segments«, but if something appears unclear, »they bring out the terrible Ray Telescope. It is used not to see with but to cut with, to cut out shapes.« This instrument »acts on flesh and blood, but itself is nothing but pure geometry, as a State affair« (Deleuze and Guattari 2013, 235). The far‑seers, who see in a haptic manner, and have telescopes that are »complex and refined« and »see a whole microsegmentarity, details of details, ›a rollercoaster of possibilities,‹ tiny movements that have not reached the edge, lines or vibrations that start to form long before there are outlined 258 Several diagrams show (as in The End of the World) Melancholia’s peculiar trajectory. 259 This is most likely an intertextual reference to Bernardo Bertolucci’s film 1900 (1976), in which Kiefer Sutherland’s father, Donald Sutherland, plays the sadistic fascist Attila, who is murdered in a barn in retribution for the gruesome acts he perpetrated during the war.

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A smiling Justine with Melancholia’s first physical manifestation.

shapes« (op. cit.). They »can divine the future, but always in the form of a becoming of something that has already happened in a molecular matter; unfindable particles« (ibid.). John clearly belongs to the first category and Justine the latter. The two types cannot communicate because one »sees, speaks, and thinks on a given scale, and according to a given line that may or may not conjugate with the other’s line, even if the other is still oneself«, and one ought not to insist because »you first have to change telescopes, mouths, and teeth, all of the segments« (op. cit., 236). Justine is a far-seer and registers the tiniest changes, but she does not attempt to master them. A fine example is when Claire and Justine are picking berries, and something white drifts down from the sky; both register it, but Claire becomes anxious while Justine smiles, and that same evening she has her abovementioned tryst with Melancholia. Affect and event

Justine does not fear the affective register; on the contrary, she follows the music’s tonalities, the landscape’s modulations and the trajectory of catastrophe. According to Brian Massumi, the 276

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affective register accounts for our current global media reality, which like the film of Walter Benjamin’s time creates tactile forms of shock.260 The affective cannot be understood in relation to classic analyses of ideology and political power, in that it also ac‑ tualises virtual possibilities for events and conditions the senses‹ synaesthesia and embedment of emotions in a subjective register: Affects are virtual synesthetic perspectives anchored in (functionally limited by) the actually existing, particular things that embody them. The autonomy of affect is its participation in the virtual. Its autonomy is its openness. Affect is autonomous to the degree to which it escapes confinement in the particular body whose vitality, or potential for in‑ teraction, it is. Formed, qualified, situated perception and cognitions fulfilling functions of actual connection or blockage are the capture and closure of affect. Emotion is the most intense (most contracted) expression of that capture – and of the fact that something has always and again escaped. Something remains unactualized, inseparable from the unassimilable to any particular, functionally anchored perspective. That is why all emotion is more or less disorienting, and why it is clas‑ sically described as being outside of oneself, at the very point at which one is most intimately and unshareably in contact with oneself and one’s vitality. If there were no escape, no excess or remainder, no fade‑out to infinity, the universe would be without potential, pure entropy, death. (Massumi 2002a, 35; author’s italics)

Justine is like a melancholic‑Dionysian person in contact with cha‑ os. She belongs to the far‑seer type, who microperceptively ›see through things‹ and sense the arrival of an event before the ma‑ jority does. In the first part of the film she is facing the abyss after affectively sensing that the planet’s trajectory will cross the Earth’s and she turns away from the doings of the world – marriage, suc‑ cess, future. Because she melancholically distances herself from the will to live, she follows Schopenhauer’s recipe for the philosophical position, so to speak. In the film’s second part, Justine has yielded 260 Cf. also the conversation »Affective attunement in the field of catastrophe« between Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, Jonas Fritsch and myself in Massumi 2015 (112‑146), first published in Danish in Peripeti no. 17 (2012), as well as in the English full version: http://www.peripeti.dk/2012/06/06/affective‑attune‑ ment‑in‑a‑field‑of‑catastrophe/ (last viewed 5 April 2015).

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to the event and she manoeuvres like another Zarathustra in chaos, allowing other values to occur.261 The Earth we have created is evil, she says, with melancholy, but the event allows something new to happen. It is the film’s assertion that chaos is creative, and that art can unfold intensive and affective intermediaries that can reinvig‑ orate the world. The world that is torn asunder in Melancholia is a limited world, controlled by the horizon of the near‑seer, who chooses to be blind to the fact that the affective, immanent world’s constant exchanges create new transindividual relations. The affective collision and the transindividual affective accord are shown positively in the form of Leo’s instrument of measure‑ ment and negatively in the limousine’s impossible passage down the windy road. In the double layer of berry‑picking, where we see as if through a membrane,262 two different forms of affective response become equally obvious. The haptic level, which in the latter example lies closest to the viewer, describes an affective sensing of intensity, while the furthest layer describes the relation between the two sisters. The image’s haptic level diagrammati‑ cally disturbs the recounted story in the form of a kind of ›snow‹ or ›ash‹ that strengthens and disturbs the two forms of opening towards the world respectively. In the introduction’s high-speed visualisation scenes one might say that we sense the nearing of the events as much as see them, as if in a microsensory becoming – through a haptic layer of deep colours and play with shadows and nuances. We sense how the earth gives way, how the stride is hindered, how the knife cuts the wood, and how the horse falls gently to the ground. In this sequence of tableau images the represented story and the sensorimotor agents are handled directly through the medium; what is being shown is how the body’s actions can modulate in the signaletic material. The body appears to be subsumed by the destruction of the film’s signaletic material, and as such those portrayed are too – as they belong to the affective autonomous register. 261 Trier perhaps also had Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) in mind. This film opens with a shot of two planets and Richard Strauss‹ music Also sprach Zarathustra (1896). 262 Cf. Schopenhauer’s veil or skin, the representations linked to the blind driving force of the will, are torn apart in Nietzsche in order to gain access to another interpretation of the will in the form of the Dio‑ nysian primordial force and creation.

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Schopenhauer’s melancholia, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, and Arendt’s thinker

Julia Kristeva employs Hannah Arendt’s rhetorical question about philosophers being heralds or therapists for the despair and lone‑ liness that drives totalitarianism. She answers that philosophers have always been notoriously melancholic types of men (Kristeva 2001, 196), and that from the time of Plato they have made hu‑ mans into demigods and transformed the gods themselves into reason/thought. From Parmenides to Descartes, being has been ascribed to thought, and the world is thus redoubled in thought – and therefore each event is reduced to ›the same‹/›the different‹. Therefore we never feel alone in thought: we hold ourselves in company. But the problem is that the philosopher never reaches the central point – the person as an acting and political creature. What is lacking, according to Arendt, is reflection over the dis‑ tance (and the abyss) between the common world and the world of thought. Arendt challenges the depths of the abyss with her dictum: »[t]o think and to be fully alive are the same« (Kristeva op. cit., 42). With this she affiliates Nietzsche with the notion that life and thought and the relations in between are collated in order for the world to be populated.263 It is the old, near‑sighted world and its lookouts that perish in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. The world that appears when the old one perishes is attributed to the Dionysian renewal of natural forces, which in Nietzsche also involves a celebration of the eter‑ nal recurrence of the same.264 It is a world that begs comparison with Zarathustra’s speech: They hate the creator most: him who breaks the law‑tables and the old values, the breaker – they call him the law‑breaker. For the good – cannot create: they are always the beginning of the end: ‑ they crucify him who writes new values on new law‑tables, they sacrifice the future to themselves – they crucify the whole human future!

263 This viewpoint is also shared by Massumi who, in Semblance and Event, develops this link in chapter 2, »The Thinking‑Feeling of What Happens: Putting the Radical Back in Empirism« (Massumi 2011). 264 A detailed exposition of the eternal recurrence can be found in Keith Ansell Pearson 2002, chap‑ ter 7.

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Justine symbolised with Melancholia, Leo with the half‑moon, and Claire with the sun.

The good – have always been the beginning of the end. (Nietzsche 1969, 229‑230)

It makes sense to view the film’s two parts as a depiction of Jus‑ tine’s (in the beginning all too open) affective concordance with the catastrophe and Claire’s (and John’s) attempts to control the fear (and the catastrophe) respectively. This is the case if one takes Schopenhauer and Nietzsche’s treatment of the melancholic position ad notam and relates it to Trier’s use of the ordering of chaos by the depressive.265 Justine goes from melancholia to creation, while Claire only unwillingly lets go of her attempt to control the fear. The closer Melancholia approaches to the earth’s biosphere, the clearer Justine becomes. At no point does she lean on objectifying methods, but remains faithful to her own senses

265 Cf. Per Juul Carlsen’s interview: »He does not consider Melancholia to be about the end of the world and the human race but about humans acting and reacting under pressure. The idea for the film emerged while he was in treatment for the depression that has haunted him in recent years. A therapist told him a theory that depressives and melancholics act more calmly in violent situations, while ›ordinary, happy‹ people are more apt to panic. Melancholics are ready for it. They already know everything is going to hell« (Carlsen 2011).

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and the affective consensus of opinion. Claire goes from (rays) in the sights of the telescope to Leo’s inclusive instrument. Leo con‑ nects the two sisters, and their various strategies agree in the child, who is already described symbolically in the intro images where the three walk in the gardens, each with ›their planet‹ hanging over their heads: Claire with the sun, Leo with the half moon and Justine with Melancholia. The catastrophic trajectory the planet Melancholia outlines in the beginning of the film diminishes over the course of the film as haptic‑affective microperception takes over. Its incorporation of the, according to Justine, »evil« Earth is similarly – viewed from the planetary level – not described as a catastrophe. On the contrary, the ending can be seen as a fecun‑ dation, where Melancholia’s ›egg‹ subsumes the earth’s ›sperm cell‹. All in all, the entire film can be regarded as creating an ar‑ tistic fusion or opening towards the field of the event, captured in Massumi’s description of affective agreement, which each time involves an encounter with the world’s qualitative order: Each new event retraces the world’s qualitative order, even as it ad‑ vances by a step the world’s objective ordering. Each time we experi‑ ence an event, we are nonconsciously returning to our own and the world’s emergence. We are in re‑worlding. We are reattuning, and reindividualizing. The ontogenesis of forms of life continues. New attunements are added to the diversity of events that can be yoked across distances in space and time. With each event, we are perceptu‑ ally feeling the expansion of that universe of qualitative order, as we simultaneously advance along a world‑line. (Massumi 2011, 115‑116)

In extension of this it is clear that in Melancholia Trier raises the question of whether a philosophy of art, of Nietzschean‑Wagneri‑ an dimensions, is possible today, when we are facing the threat of climatic catastrophes, which could destroy our foundations of life, the Earth and its ecosystem. Melancholia answers this question clearly. Through a cultivation of the grandiose Romantic aesthetic in traces from the previous centuries, an affective and inclusive artistic practice is heralded, where unanimity of opinion with the world is necessary in order for new ideas, events and forms of practice to occur at all. But this is achieved through a filmic affective figures of depression, melancholia and mania

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aesthetic, which in certain ways is realised by and distances itself from the Wagnerian idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk. Considering the signaletic material in Melancholia, the continuously growing plan‑ et Melancholia can be understood as a fluctuating, virtual event level, which is capable of incorporating diverse segmentations and representations (such as humankind’s limited sensorimotor view from the Earth) to create non‑subjectifying forms of affect. The ›will‹ of Melancholia’s trajectory to enable it to fertilise itself with the Earth’s seed forces the viewer to direct his/her attention in humorous ways – especially through the many repetitions of this scene – towards affectively oriented differences where the idea of distinguishing subject and object is shown as futile (sperm and egg become one in a conception). One can also see the film, as Steven Shaviro does, as a de‑ scription of the Romantic anti‑sublime, in that the condition – the world already being in danger of annihilation – calls on an anti‑diegetic, with Schopenhauer’s melancholy and Raymond Brassier’s (Brassier 2007) non‑human counterplay, which we, notably, can neither experience nor narrate: von Trier underlines the literalness of annihilation – the way that it has in the deepest sense already happened – by making it imminent, bringing it into our present moment as what is about to happen. In Melancholia, the prospect of extinction has to be faced here and now. We no longer need to wait five billion years for the Sun to burn out, or trillions of years for the final disintegration of all matter. There is no portrayal of widespread destruction in Melancholia, because the film ends the moment that the world does. Catastrophe goes unrepresented, because it literally, actually happens, in the diegetic world of the film, and in that way marks the absolute limit of diegetic representation. (Shaviro 2012, 42; author’s italics)

Melancholia’s ending makes such a reading obvious, and Shaviro consolidates it with one of the film’s final haptic micro‑adjust‑ ments, where we see worms and insects working their way out of the earth: »We are exposed to the beauty, and the ›evil‹ of a Nature that does not belong to us, and that is not to our own measure. What, we may wonder, do the denizens of this Nature 282

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feel?« (op. cit., 42). To this one can object that the non‑humane or more than humane (Manning 2013) also makes up a consid‑ erable part of the sublime aesthetic of undepictability – and the celebration of it. I would advocate that the ending of Melancholia should be regarded together with the endings of Antichrist and Nymphomaniac. Where Antichrist presents the Dionysian force of creation as a force of nature as interpreted by Nietzsche, with its eternal recurrence of the same (including violence and death), the Earth’s ruin in Melancholia becomes a reflection on the no‑ tion that thought must necessarily let in affective tonalities and events that cannot be premeditated (Grusin 2010) or calculated beforehand. Claire (and John), in extension of Kristeva (cf. Kris‑ teva 2001, 196), redoubles the world in thought and reduces all events to the same, so that the end of the world and the wedding can be equated with ritualised markings (candlelight and crystal glass), and Justine’s melancholia awakens, because thought and action fuses in capitulation to the event; in Nymphomaniac, the firing of the deadly shot ends the film, the Apollinian diegetic de‑ sire definitively ends, and the trilogy’s expressive force is revealed. The outcome of this constant exchange between Apollinian and Dionysian (as in the trilogy’s two first films) is to the advantage of the Dionysian force, but this happens at the expense of the subject’s controlled, voyeuristically formed mastering. This does not necessarily refer to a non‑human register, but rather to the more‑than‑human, which Brian Massumi develops on the basis of Erin Manning’s work with what she calls »autistic perception«, and which can best be thought of in extension of Nietzsche’s no‑ tion of the eternal recurrence of the same as an affirmation of life: What Manning calls »autistic perception« is not an inherent property of a subclass of the human category. It is a mode of perception that is a necessary factor in all human experience, but is lived in different ways to different degrees. It is the field perception no one can live without, precisely because it brings the more than human into experience. (Mas‑ sumi, in Manning 2013, xxii)

This notion of a more‑than‑human autistic perception, which develops perception towards the event and the affective field, also affective figures of depression, melancholia and mania

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brings Deleuze and Guattari’s analytical term ›schizoanalysis‹ to the surface. This term will be used in the following analysis of Nymphomaniac. But before this analysis develops, it should be clarified how the musical field also contributes to the establishing of an affective and microperceptive modelling of the narrative, so that the film’s signaletic material and the events come to the fore in the viewer’s sensations and thoughts. Affective diagrams: a haptic, signaletic material in Antichrist and Melancholia

As a concluding reading of both Antichrist and Melancholia and a prelude to my reading of Nymphomaniac, I will return briefly to the role of music in the films: that is, in Antichrist the recur‑ ring aria »Lascia ch’io pianga« from Händel’s Rinaldo, and in Melancholia the repetition of the Tristan chord from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. These musical pieces are not only found on an atmosphere‑creating, extradiegetic level, which conveys sym‑ pathetic insight; they appear in connection with the visuals in specific ways, which I will call diagrammatic because they radically invoke haptic image compositions, the so‑called visualisations, filmed with a high-speed camera, and from the beginning of the film they initiate a symbolic (in the abstract meaning) – and at the same time affective – disseminated experience. In Antichrist it is the prologue’s black and white grainy sequence (the adults‹ bath‑ ing and copulation scenes, ending with the son’s fall into the white snow), together with the epilogue’s similar aesthetic (the man’s ›rebirth‹ as a demon in the forest’s harvest landscape of flying seeds and feathers). In Melancholia it is the prologue’s symbolic colour‑saturated and Kodachrome‑granulated images, which invoke the reoccurring Tristan chord. This musical interjection plays ten times throughout the film, for varying durations.266 266 It concerns the following scenes: 1) the prologue; 2) Justine visits the golf course alone during the wedding and urinates, staring at the sky; 3) Justine tells Claire her nightmare of dragging her feet through yarn, which sticks to her legs like a quagmire; 4) Justine swaps the motifs in the library art books; 5) the wedding guests walk out onto the golf course in order to light paper lanterns and release them into the night sky; 6) Claire and Justine ride horses the morning after the wedding night; 7) Justine notices Melan‑ cholia for the first time at close quarters, at the same time as she whips the horse Abraham, which will not cross the small bridge; 8) Claire watches Justine as she bathes in the light from Melancholia; 9) Claire flees

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In Antichrist the aria »Lascia ch’io pianga« was, as mentioned, recorded specially for the film at a slightly slower tempo than usual, and the vocals give a particular pathos to the film’s hapti‑ cally descriptive prologue. The first verse (in Italian) reads: »Lascia ch’io pianga la cruda sorte,/ E che sospiri la liberta!/ E che sospiri, e che sospiri la liberta!/ Lascia ch’io pianga la cruda sorte,/ E che sospiri la liberta!« In Rinaldo the aria is sung by Almirena, who has become bewitched and banished from the narrative by magical means, while another person plays her character. She is thus trapped outside what is being told, and it is sorrow for her loss of liberty that she tearfully sings about. The sentences, which are repeated with several variations, translate as follows: »Let me weep over my cruel fate« and »I may sigh for freedom«. In Melancholia the Tristan chord is clearly linked to the growing affective influence of the planet Melancholia on the characters. From the point of view of the filmic narrative, the chord is played every time the symbolic level gains the upper hand and slowly undermines the action level as a navigable narrative line of escape. As with Almirena’s aria, Tristan’s chord speaks to us from a place outside the film’s diegetic level. But at the same time the music in both films delivers an acoustic expression, a signaletic materiality that underlines the image surface’s fluctuating, sensuous material‑ ity. The music and the song’s tonality thus set the frame in the scene the images describe, and at the same time set an ›outside‹ to the diegetic. The music’s interpretive‑like ›before‹, its being an intensifying part of the statement and its signaletic ›now‹ give it both a symbolic as well as an affective meaning. The music in Melancholia and Antichrist is thus not identical with the visual level, and in Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche it is precisely this which provides »a very discontinuous, or rarefied, presence« (Deleuze 1989, 240). Deleuze in fact refers directly to the young Schopenhauer‑inspired Nietzsche and his delibera‑ tions in The Birth of Tragedy on visual images (in lyrical poetry and drama) being an indirect Apollinian representation, while

with Leo in the golf cart and then drags him across the golf course in a hailstorm, while Justine watches; 10) Leo, Justine and Claire place themselves in ›the magic cave‹ of slender tree trunks, and Melancholia swallows the Earth.

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music’s more immediate presentation, which stands in contact with the Dionysian will, can create a more direct effect (op. cit., 239). In the same place Deleuze differentiates between tragedy, where the music’s direct, figurative force is designated as central (a ball of fire surrounded by Apollinian processing images), and film, where the images are central but the music attaches a direct sound image (op. cit.). The music thus constitutes an independ‑ ent Dionysian force, different from the indirect form of the film images, but the two also enter into relations, notably without the music losing its independent power: In fact, all the sound elements, including music, including silence, form a continuum as something which belongs to the visual image. Which does not prevent this continuum from being continually dif‑ ferentiated in accordance with the two aspects of the out‑of‑field which also belong to the visual image, one relative, and the other absolute. It is in so far as it presents or fills the absolute that music interacts as a foreign body. But the absolute, or the changing whole, does not merge with its direct presentation: this is why it continually reconstitutes the sound continuum, off and in, and relates it to the visual images which indirectly express it. Now the second movement does not cancel out the other, and preserves for music its autonomous, special power. (Deleuze 1989, 241)

The music’s specific power is described elsewhere as a direct time‑ image that (in modern film) results in the images and sound being constantly separated and connected together in new »›irrational‹ relations« (Deleuze op. cit., 256). In the case of Marguerite Duras, it is precisely these edits and irrational juxtapositions of images and soundtrack that, in India Song, for example, create »a free indirect or incommensurable relation« between an interior (the event) and an exterior (the story of it). These two never meet, but nonetheless make up a new relation in and with the film (op. cit., 279). In extension of the power of the direct acoustic image, which Deleuze also describes as tactile (op. cit., 236), I would describe Lars von Trier’s use of the aria »Lascia ch’io pianga« in Antichrist and the Tristan chord in Melancholia as direct acoustic images, 286

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demonstrating the autonomous power of music, and affectively placing the viewer in connection with the power of will, which lies outside it but also intensifies fabula and gives strength to the characters that act intuitively. In a broader sense I believe that the music’s strong compositional role, which shifts the viewer’s atten‑ tion from the narrative plane and towards the affective forces in the film’s signaletic material, can be called diagrammatic. Thus it is first on the basis of the Tristan chord’s diagrammatically direct sound‑image, which fuses the image’s sign (Melancholia’s hapti‑ cally modulating surface) with another (the body of the melan‑ cholic Justine), that an affective mode of acting can be conceived. This time‑image can be seen, in Trier’s words, as the symbolic manifestation, while one might also be able to understand it, along with Deleuze, as the actualisation of the virtual. The direct sound‑ image, which in Melancholia is synonymous with the dissonance of the chord, links to a Dionysian power of will, which in a number of ways (most clearly in the first part of the film) tries in vain to be stratified in the register of the Apollinian image symbol. Massumi (as mentioned previously) exemplifies this diagram‑ matic function in art with Proust’s introductione of the madeleine episode in In Search of Lost Time.267 In the fiction’s representa‑ tion, the taste of the madeleine activates the direct sense effect (smell and taste) of a lost time and thus establishes a diagram, depicting affective, transverse tracks in the fabula’s stratification. The diagram is experienced in the reading as a sense relation between the present and the past, which is brought virtually in correspondence with the idea that the cake’s taste sensation, so to speak, fills the melancholic loss with (new) meaning (Massumi 2011, 25). The diagram is drawn virtually, irrespective of whether the reader knows about the sense effect that is described or not. In this context it is interesting that Proust was in fact inspired by Wagner’s operas, and in particular by Tristan und Isolde. Accord‑ ing to Margaret Mein, Proust’s lengthy description of Vinteuil’s small sonata, which links to Swann’s melancholic infatuation with Odette (or maybe rather in the melancholia), ought to be read as 267 Proust published the first volume in 1913, but it was only after his death in 1922 that the remainder was published in an edited version.

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an attempt to describe Wagner’s Tristan chord (Mein 1989).268 The description (in part) reads: Even when he was not thinking of the little phrase, it existed latent in his mind on the same footing as certain other notions without material equivalent, such as our notions of light, of sound, of perspective, of physical pleasure, the rich possessions wherewith our inner temple is diversified and adorned. Perhaps we shall lose them, perhaps they will be obliterated, if we return to nothingness. But so long as we are alive, we can no more bring ourselves to a state in which we shall not have known them than we can with regard to any material object, than we can, for example, doubt the luminosity of a lamp that has just been lit, in view of the changed aspect of everything in the room, from which even the memory of the darkness has vanished. In that way Vinteuil’s phrase, like some theme, say, in Tristan, which represents to us also a certain emotional accretion, had espoused our mortal state, had en‑ dued a vesture of humanity that was peculiarly affecting. Its destiny was linked to the future, to the reality of the human soul, of which it was one of the most special and distinctive ornaments. Perhaps it is not‑being that is the true state, and all our dream of life is inexistent; but, if so, we feel that these phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, must be nothing either. We shall per‑ ish, but we have as hostages these divine captives who will follow and share our fate. And death in their company is somehow less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less probable. (Proust 2003, vol. 1, 497‑498)

In this passage the melodic phrase becomes linked to the future, to the soul’s reality or to the dream. As a result, there is in Proust a clear consciousness that art (and its diagrams) belong to a virtual domain, which can only fleetingly grasp and influence the real, including death, but which nonetheless can seem less plausible in these moments. These virtual interjections, however, in no way have the character of flight and utopian improvisation. On the

268 Others have pointed to Saint‑Saëns (for example, Le cygne (The Swan)), and judging by the music soundtrack to the menu on the DVD for Nymphomaniac, Lars von Trier interprets the piece for violin and piano as belonging to César Franck’s Sonata for Violin and Piano in A Major.

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contrary – the affective intensities in the music’s phrases speak directly to Swann: How beautiful the dialogue which Swann now heard between piano and violin, at the beginning of the last passage! The suppression of human speech, so far from letting fancy reign there uncontrolled (as one might have thought), had eliminated it altogether; never was spo‑ ken language so inexorably determined, never had it known questions so pertinent, such irrefutable replies. At first the piano complained alone, like a bird deserted by its mate; the violin heard and answered it, as from a neighbouring tree. It was as at the beginning of the world, as if there were as yet only the two of them on the earth, or rather in this world closed to all the rest, so fashioned by the logic of its creator that in it there should never be any but themselves: the world of this sonata. Was it a bird, was it the soul, as yet not fully formed, of the little phrase, was it a fairy – that being invisibly lamenting, whose plaint the piano heard and tenderly repeated? Its cries were so sudden that the violinist must snatch up his bow and race to catch them as they came. (Op. cit., 499‑500)

Finally, in this developed description it becomes clear that it is the diagram that illustrates the intensities. The diagram is drawn in the language – here in synaesthetic relation to the play of colours: It reappeared, but this time to remain poised in the air, and to sport there for a moment only, as though immobile, and shortly to expire. And so Swann lost nothing of the precious time for which it lingered. It was still there, like an iridescent bubble that floats for a while unbroken. As a rainbow whose brightness is fading seems to subside, then soars again and, before it is extinguished, shines forth with greater splendour than it has ever shown; so to the two colours which the little phrase had hitherto allowed to appear it added others now, chords shot with every hue in the prism, and made them sing. (Op. cit. 500‑501)

Proust here seems to utilise the phrase (or the dissonance of the Tristan chord) as a diagram, causing Swann to realise that his love for Odette perhaps has the character of a melancholic longing affective figures of depression, melancholia and mania

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that cannot be satisfied by any individual. Proust turns the phrase into a diagrammatic concept, with which the music transforms the surroundings (to which the others belong) into symbols and vice versa, so the music is given a concrete and immediate effect on Swann, and he comes to realise his own folly. However, it is also the little phrase Swann coincidentally hears that enables his entire love story to unfold. The phrase appears as a Baudelaire‑ like infatuation with a woman passing by: he was like a man into whose life a woman he has seen for a moment passing by has brought the image of a new form of beauty which deep‑ ens his own sensibility, although he does not even know her name or whether he will ever see her again. (Proust op. cit., 296)

It is significant that the music in the first part of the chapter causes Apollinian image formations that accompany the mel‑ ancholia, and which are experienced partly by Odette. In the quoted sequence that creates self‑insight in Swann, it is revealed that the music describes melancholia, but also that it is precisely the melancholia that is the music’s creative force and will, and is also valid in Proust’s own creative stimulus. He writes of the rainbow’s fading brightness, which is at its clearest precisely when it is about to disappear. In Trier’s Antichrist the prologue with Händel’s aria from Rinaldo reflects the gruesome, Dionysian ending of the story. Similarly, the Tristan chord from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde indicates the Earth’s ruin at the end of Melancholia. In both in‑ stances viewers are tuned in affectively to orient themselves in an aesthetically sensitive manner towards a virtual level, which is found both inside and outside the narrative. This level is found developed in the final scenes of the two films, which simultane‑ ously function as an intoxicating celebration of the virtual actu‑ alisation in the narrative. Here the signaletic material takes over, just as the phrase’s effect on Swann is the abandonment of his infatuation with Odette, which in turn gives him an insight into the power of melancholia. The Dionysian creativity and simul‑ taneous melancholic insight, which characterise Antichrist and 290

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Melancholia respectively, are revisited in Nymphomaniac, blend‑ ing the two forms in a dialogue between two characters, Joe and Seligman. Here literature (and especially Proust’s digressive and diagrammatic approach)269 has the central role in a contrast of Apollinian and Dionysian voices, but it is in these first two films in the trilogy, and first and foremost in the making independ‑ ent of the sound continuum (cf. Deleuze 1989, 242) and in the encouragement of the tactile level, that the diagram creates space for thought and for a symbolic level. Nymphomaniac – mania’s (self)destructive force

The third film in the depression trilogy, Nymphomaniac, had its cinematic premiere in Denmark in December 2013, in an edited two‑part version with a combined running time of 231 minutes.270 At the Berlinale in February 2014, the film was shown in a direc‑ tor’s cut version with the two parts having a combined running time of 312 minutes. The following is based on the DVD version of the director’s cut, distributed in autumn 2014 in Denmark. In short, the film constitutes an illustrated dialogue, which Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stacy Martin, Ananya Berg, Maja Ar‑ sovic, Ronja Rissmann), a woman of about fifty, has with the older Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård). In his humble apartment Seligman serves her with tea and cakes, while she tells stories of her nymphomania, or sexual addiction.271 Her narrative, like the classic literary models one could mention (The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron and One Thousand and One Nights), is serialised. The episodes are interpreted consecutively by Seligman, but as the reason for his interpretations becomes clear, she begins to 269 Vinca Wiedemann, who collaborated with Lars von Trier on the manuscript for Nymphomaniac, has made it clear, in an interview with Per Juul Carlsen, that Proust’s main work was a great source of inspira‑ tion in the writing phase (http://www.dfi‑film.dk/mornings‑with‑von‑trier (last viewed 14 May 2015)). 270 The two parts of this edited version of Nymphomaniac, Vols. I and II, are prefaced with the follow‑ ing ›Disclaimer‹: »This film is an abridged and censored version of Lars von Trier’s original film ›Nympho‑ maniac‹. It was realized with Lars von Trier’s permission, but without his involvement otherwise«. 271 The word ›nymphomaniac‹ is used only in connection with women who have a greatly increased compulsion for sex. This behaviour in a man is known as satyriasis (http://www.denstoredanske.dk; last viewed 14 May 2015). Today both words are used unassumingly, as the idea of a normal area of sexual desire is diminishing. In Vol. 1 Joe easily attracts lovers, but in Vol. II she loses her desire to do so and must use violence in order to be stimulated (in the DVD version this is illustrated with a so‑called fly, as used in fly fishing, decorating the disc of Vol. 1, while a whip decorates the disc of Vol. II).

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object more and more. Her voice and his voice also quarrel, so to speak, about which of them is the most reliable as the film’s intra‑diegetic narrator. The various episodes make up the film’s chapter divisions, and they will in the following be regarded as nodal points in a diagram that depicts various intensities accord‑ ing to various roles taken on by Joe. Vol. I contains the following chapter divisions: 1) The Compleat Angler, 2) Jerôme, 3) Mrs. H., 4) Delirium and 5) The Little Organ School. And Vol. II contains: 5) The Little Organ School (continued), 6) The Eastern and The Western Church, 7) The Mirror and 8) The Gun. The film begins with a prologue scene where Seligman finds the battered Joe in his backyard and takes her to his apartment.272 The diagrammatic trace is already established in the title, spelled Nymph()maniac. The two parts of the parenthesis can be seen as an intertextual reference to Anne Cécile Desclos‹ (alias Réage) Story of O ([1954] 2011), which was inspired by Leopold von Sacher‑Masoch’s Venus in Furs (Sacher‑Masoch 1869).273 In this context one might see the film as a reinterpretation of Sacher‑Masoch’s trichotomy of the three forms of the maso‑ chist’s woman. According to Deleuze they can be characterised as 1) the sensual hetaera or Aphroditean hermaphrodite, who recognises neither the norms nor other cultural products of marriage, the church or the state, and who acts in a revolution‑ ary manner;274 2) the other extremity, the female sadist, who creates passion and sacrifices, but who risks becoming a victim herself as she is in collusion with her male co‑conspirator; or 3) Sacher‑Masoch’s ideal, in between these two extremities, who

272 The film shows, in episodic form, Joe’s love life and sexual encounters, which she recounts to Selig‑ man. In the film’s first part, sexuality is depicted as a lust‑filled search for novel erotic experiences, which in a Freudian sense could be described as a life drive. The film’s second part describes the hunt for a miss‑ ing lust, which gives space for the longings Freud describes as a death drive. Joe and Seligman have vastly different opinions of how Joe’s nymphomania ought to be interpreted, and he attempts to save her from the notion that she is wicked and guilty. Although Seligman finally wins the reconciliatory argument and enables Joe to get on with her life, he shows through his actions another side of himself, in that he attempts to have intercourse with her while she sleeps. This becomes Joe’s line of flight back to the hunting grounds of sexuality, as she shoots him and leaves his apartment. 273 A feministic interpretive trace – in agreement with Luce Irigaray – could also be followed. Irigaray points out that the two female labia can never be reduced to one, and that women in a patriarchal society are reduced to things which are exchanged between men, in the roles of mother (utility value), virgin (ex‑ change value) or prostitute (both utility and exchange value; Irigaray 1977). 274 It is this which in the film Joe explains as »I was an addict out of lust, not out of need«.

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can enter into a playful seductive game, precisely because sexual affection is lacking. The ideal masochist’s woman is imposing and combines aloofness, solicitude and severity: »The trinity of the masochistic dream is summed up in the words: cold – ma‑ ternal – severe, icy – sentimental – cruel« (Deleuze [1967] 1989, 51). The masochist’s aloofness should be understood as a protec‑ tive layer, »[t]he coldness is both protective milieu and medium, cocoon and vehicle: it protects supersensual sentimentality as inner life, and expresses it as external order, as wrath and sever‑ ity« (op. cit., 52). Deleuze adds that this type also includes the oral mother, the breastfeeder, who rules over life and death and, though silent, has the last word.275 The masochistic ideal is to be found between the Freudian principles of life and death drive, Eros (libido) and Thanatos.276 The masochist, together with the masochist’s woman, performs a game with life and death, where choice is deferred in favour of stimulation. In Deleuze this gives rise to a description of a masochistic aesthetic, which notably is not the complementary opposite of the sadistic, voyeuristic aes‑ thetic; the masochistic aesthetic resides in fetish, repetition and deferral, and thus undermines any form of narrative drive.277 I will argue that the first type in Deleuze’s Sacher‑Masoch read‑ ing is depicted to a certain extent in chapters 1‑4 in Vol. I. The second extreme is portrayed especially in chapters 6‑8 in Vol. II. The middle position is developed in chapter 5, which stretches across both Vol. I and Vol. II and thus inserts itself between the film’s first part, dedicated to Eros, and the latter part, dedicated to Thanatos. The reason for this displacement of desire in Nymphomaniac is that Joe’s sexual lust suddenly disappears. Aside from the reference to Deleuze’s Proust and Signs ([1964] 2000) and Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty ([1967] 1989), the following reading draws especially on Deleuze and Guattari’s 275 It is important here to add that the types of masochism are seen from the perspective of the mas‑ ochistic male. 276 Deleuze uses an analogous figure in Proust and Signs, divided thus: »machines of partial objects (impulses), machines of resonance (Eros), machines of forced movements (Thanatos)« (Deleuze 2000, 160; author’s italics). 277 For more on the masochistic aesthetic, see the analysis of Dietrich’s film in Filmdivaer. Stjernens figur i Hollywoods melodrama 1920-40 / Film Divas: The Star Figures in Hollywood Melodramas 1920-40 (Thomsen 1997).

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Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia ([1972] 1990), where schizoanalysis is presented as a critique of the Freudian, neuroti‑ cally coded Oedipus complex. In a positive sense schizoanalysis can be seen as a way of confirming desire as a deterritorialising stream which can dissolve state creations, capitalistic systems and patriarchal families in favour of equivocal and still new molecular relations. With this reading of Nymphomaniac, the masochistic aesthetic is interpreted in conjunction with schizoanalysis, but, more importantly, the diagram is added as an extra layer on top of the interpretation of the affective streams in order to render the filmic, signaletic material apparent. Two kinds of diagram: material signs and signaletic material

The prologue scene begins in darkness; for 100 seconds we hear the sound of water running and beating down, along with a squeaking metallic sound. The sound stops and we see a back‑ yard, lit by a yellowish lamp. The sound continues and reveals it‑ self to be real, in ultra‑close haptic images of rainwater running down weather‑worn, reddish‑brown walls and a rusted iron ring with bolts. The rain beats on a large metal rubbish bin; snowflakes fall, landing on a pent roof, and continue as water through an old drainpipe. This sequence of close‑ups of hard materials, which in the haptic depiction can almost be seen as soft, ends with the hard concrete, where a bloody female hand pokes out of the sleeve of a tweed jacket. Thereafter the camera slowly zooms in on a ven‑ tilation grid in the wall, and the squeaking sound of a draught is heard. The zoom in on the grid is slow, like David Lynch’s study of holes which the camera perforates, creating a portent of horror. As was the case with the hole in the wall from The Kingdom, which Mrs. Drusse made in order to exorcise the devilry, this passage also implies that something unwanted can come in. This element of meaning is not unveiled until the film’s final minutes. The in‑ troduction’s long panning shot is reminiscent of the comparable introduction sequences in Antichrist and Melancholia, but here high‑speed recording has not been used in order to accentuate the film as a haptic, signaletic material. Instead, the film begins with 294

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a haptic description of a violent, claustrophobic space seemingly bereft of hope. Aside from its introduction and ending, Nympho‑ maniac does not contain anywhere near as many haptic images as the first two films in the trilogy. But the haptic is still very present throughout the film, not least due to the fact that the introduction is abruptly interrupted by the refrain from Rammstein’s »Führe mich«: »Führe mich, halte mich/ Ich fühle dich, Ich verlass dich nicht – Nymphomaniac«.278 While this is playing, the viewer sees in the backyard the body of the woman to whom the hand belongs (Joe’s). She is lying with bent legs and, wearing a beige tweed jacket and polka‑dot scarf, blue jeans, a black shirt and long black boots. The music continues, while the camera follows an elderly man (Seligman) leaving his book‑filled apartment. He buys something in a Jewish shop, which he meticulously places in his net shopping bag. On his way back he sees Joe’s beaten body out of the corner of his eye. He moves slowly through the labyrinthine backyard and revives her. He offers to call an ambulance or the police, because he assumes she has been involved in an accident, but she declines. In reply to the question of whether he can do anything for her, she answers that she would like a cup of tea with milk. He helps her up and shortly afterwards she is seen wearing his pyjamas and drinking tea in his bedroom.279 He offers to wash her jacket, which smells bad, but she declines the offer. A dull sound is heard when he drops the jacket on the floor. He questions her about what has happened because he assumes that she has been robbed, to which she answers that she is merely a bad person. Seligman refuses to accept that and asks to hear her story.280 Joe is reluctant to tell as she does not believe he will understand, and, furthermore, does not know where to begin, but this soon changes when Joe enquires about the fishing hook hanging on the wall. Seligman answers the question by introducing her to the fly‑fisherman’s weapon, the 278 Lukas Moodysson also used Rammstein in his film Lilya-4ever (2002). With or without the knowl‑ edge of this intertextual reference, the viewer can be in no doubt that the theme here is sex and violence. Rammstein’s sound can in itself be described as haptic‑violent. 279 Proust’s reminiscences of Combray are also alluded to here: he drinks tea and eats a madeleine while sitting in his bed one winter’s day, after being urged to do so by his caring mother. 280 The figure of Seligman could very well refer to the American psychologist Martin Seligman, who in 1998 gave his name to so‑called positive psychology, which, with a humanistic starting point, focuses on how people can succeed and become happy. This school has paved the way for many forms of therapy and ideas of self‑realisation.

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so‑called ›nymph‹, which consists of a fish hook decorated with colourful feathers, giving a convincing representation of an insect larva. He also mentions his fondness for Izaak Walton’s book The Compleat Angler (1653). The close‑up of how a nymph is made, together with how the line should be cast in order to get a bite, is the first of a number of beautiful images – in a classic sense – we are presented with in the film. Joe is inspired by this to tell her story anyway, but she warns him (and the viewer) that it will be a long story. This warn‑ ing only seems to increase his interest. She adds that it will also be moralistic, which does not deter him at all. The introduction chapter thus creates a literary, imaginary zone inside, screened from the haptic‑violent, realistically represented backyard outside. The nymph’s literally described fishing hook thus becomes, in a figurative sense, the hook with which the viewer will imaginatively surrender to the story.281 The various methods of capture and forms of baiting that are described in the first chapter correspond to the narrative terms which will be utilised to hook the viewer. In this first chapter, The Compleat Angler, where Joe and her childhood friend B. compete over how many men they can hook (that is, have sex with) on an unspecified train journey, one can register a small but significant detail in the title.282 ›Compleat‹ is an antiquated form of ›complete‹, but additionally the word ›pleat‹ means a fold or plissé. With these alternative spellings (in Izaak Walton’s book and in the chapter’s title), a diagrammatic strategy is implied, a metaphoric addition, which places itself almost indiscernibly in the metaphoric interpretations Seligman gives for the girls‹ manhunt. In this context it is noteworthy that in Proust and Signs Deleuze mentions Proust’s strategy as both metaphorically and machinically producing, in that random, often sensory encounters with signs force meanings out almost violently in the material that cannot be anticipated. In the conclusion he characterises Proust’s strategy as Jewish humour, as opposed to Greek, Socratic irony (Deleuze [1964] 2000, 101). It is this form

281 As mentioned earlier, Glauce, the name of the king’s daughter whom Jason was to marry in Medea, also means nymph. 282 On the DVD this spelling is also found in the menu.

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of humour that reoccurs in Trier’s small additions, interpreta‑ tion of words and intertextual references. The Proustian as well as the Trieresque folding of the material can, in Anna Munster’s reading of Deleuze’s concept of the fold, be expounded as: a strategy for dealing with history or time from the point of view of the present: a way to read events not as historical inevitabilities but as pliable possibilities for the present. The question becomes not what is the fold, but rather how does the baroque unfold, how does the present enfold, and so on. (Munster 2006, 41)

To this principle of folding the word ›angler‹ is added, which as a noun means both a fisherman and also a type of fish, but it also implies the verb sense of ›to go angling for something‹. The film shows how Seligman continually compares Joe’s ac‑ count of how she discovers her own lust and entices her lovers with the angler’s various methods of capture. Fly‑fishing, for example, decodes the waterway’s winding flow, and involves copying insects‹ movements across the water and their colour‑ ing, while the Finnish weapon, the so‑called Rapala lure, directly seduces the fish into believing that an insect is struggling. From the very beginning Seligman is shown to be angling for her story. Like a teacher instructing a pupil, he takes it on himself to put forward the Apollinian voice across from her Dionysian. His primary literary interpretations enfold and surround the film’s descriptions of her experiences to such a degree that he could be said to provoke his own murder in the narrative’s end‑ ing. In contrast, she constructs her stories literally, within the framework he has set,283 so he is able to listen as she angles and fishes for his interpretation of her ›sin‹. She lays out the bait in order to reel in his trusting interpretations, because despite Joe’s attachment to the word ›sin‹, she in no way appeals to Chris‑ tian absolution. Seligman nonetheless insists on interpreting her sexual career as a cause‑effect relation, because this allows him to explain, in a deconstructive manner, the advancement 283 Similarly, Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey) creates his story with diverse props in the police detective’s office in The Usual Suspects (1995).

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of ideas such as ›sin‹ and wickedness in her autobiographical narrative. Joe inclines towards natural science and energetic or mechanical interpretations of her lust, while Seligman, who refers to himself as a non‑practising Jew with anti‑Zionist per‑ suasions,284 finds humanistic explanations. Though neither Joe nor Seligman adhere to Christianity, words such as ›guilt‹, ›sin‹ and ›punishment‹ pop up constantly in their dialogue, which all belong to the Christian‑cultural register. In this sense the film clarifies how difficult it is to break out of Christian values. And just as Nietzsche ends Ecce Homo with the antithetical signature »Dionysos against the Crucified«, the Apollinian Seligman and the Dionysian Joe at the end of the film are so enfolded in one another’s angles that violence must occur for the principles to be separated once again, and torn from their Christian inter‑ pretation. So although the film offers neither Dionysian orgies nor the end of the world, this last part of the trilogy also points to the fact that there must be an inversion of all values in order for the world to be able to change itself. The film’s first chapter clearly values Dionysian principles over Apollinian ones, as is also the case in Antichrist and Melancholia. But for Nymphomaniac it seems that the two are inseparable. The dialogical principle folds speaking and hearing into one another as plot and reason, body and language, which are not identical with – but do relate to – the film’s investigation of the masochis‑ tic, as opposed to the voyeuristic, form of pleasure.285 One must not forget that the film is also an unveiling of the pornographic genre, which in its classic form fulfils the voyeuristic urge to such a degree that physical satisfaction can be achieved. The porno film, which might be called realism par excellence on the basis of its indexical ›proof‹ that masculine ejaculation is reached,286 has 284 This description could very well be a description of Trier’s own point of view, which can thus also be read as a twisted commentary on the interpretation of Trier’s ironic‑literal comment, »I understand Hit‑ ler«, during the press conference for Melancholia. 285 In her article »Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema« ([1975] 1989), Laura Mulvey advances a much discussed relation – based on Freud – between the sadistic, male voyeur and the masochistic, female exhi‑ bitionist. Many writers (amongst others, Gaylyn Studlar 1993) have since contested the validity of this rela‑ tion, for example, taking their starting point in Deleuze’s point that masochism ought not be understood as a complementary form to sadism. Therefore, in the following a more complex and non‑congruent contrast between a voyeuristic and a masochistic aesthetic is considered. 286 Cf. Rune Gade 1997.

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been marginalised – perhaps with the exception of the popular Bedside films of the 1970s – in the Danish film industry. Trier, who makes the genre into a paratext of the serial narrative in Nymphomaniac, has often expressed to the press the idea of mak‑ ing a porno film.287 Where one can say that the intro to Antichrist referenced such a project, Nymphomaniac represents a tour de force through the genre’s preferred physiological positions and methods for the achievement of sexual satisfaction, together with various constellations: children’s sexual games, heterosexuality, incest, homosexuality, masochism, sadism and paedophilia. The episodic, serial parts are brought together in what becomes the course of the narrative, namely Joe’s hunt for novel forms of stimulation and the satisfaction of her nymphomaniac drive. Meanwhile it is worth noting that the film does not seem sexu‑ ally stimulating in the same way as a pornographic film. This might first of all be due to the masochistic mode of expression being made visible as a widely extensive delta which, basically, can never be hemmed in by narrative (and voyeuristic) desire (Brooks 1984). Secondly, the diagrammatic additions contribute to a large extent to the empathy being impeded. As in Godard, the diagrams give cause for a Verfremdung, an amputation of the voyeuristic desire regarding the sexual scenes. In addition, they create awareness of the filmic, signaletic material as something which in haptic ways involves the body in a treat for the visual senses. In other words, what is created is an interface, where the diagrams, which are extradiegetically supplemented fabula, con‑ stantly create other perspectives in the material than those which in a Dionysian‑Apollinian sense meld body and word together. The images that illustrate Joe’s narrative reside in corporeal sensations and conditions, while Seligman’s words create cultural and aesthetic threads in the material; for although Joe recounts her sexual passions, it is Seligman who creates the narrative, and ›learned‹ points in her descriptions. Nymphomaniac is an accom‑ plished diagrammatic story: his educated drawings, which are noted down as diagrams on the surface of the screen, settle as a 287 Cf. also Zentropa’s gamble on Pussy Power Aps [Inc.] (http://www.puzzypower.dk), which amongst other things produced Constance (1998), Pink Prison (1999) and HotMen CoolBoys (2000).

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layer over her sexual escapades, while the concrete things in his ascetically ordered bedroom generate new visual signs in her nar‑ rative display of nymphomania. There is a continuous exchange between his Apollinian fundamental narrative where things have a reason, and her Dionysian narrative where everything copu‑ lates. Joe is an exhibitionistic image projector, while Seligman’s words order the material narratively for the voyeuristic viewer, who craves depth of content. The Dionysian body’s perception material is, in other words, laid out by the forming of the Apol‑ linian language. The two – as previously mentioned – are linked. This relationship is described by Deleuze in relation to the words‹ always‑already being sexual: This reference [that language refers to erogenous zones] must not be in‑ terpreted as a denotation (phonemes do not »denote« erogenous zones), as a manifestation, nor even as a signification. It is rather a question of a »conditioning‑conditioned« structure, of a surface effect, under its double sonorous and sexual aspect or, if one prefers, under the aspects of resonance and mirror. At his level, speech begins: it begins when the formative elements of language are extracted at the surface, from the current of voice which comes from above. This is the paradox of speech. On the one hand, it refers to language as to something withdrawn which pre‑exists in the voice from above; on the other hand, it refers to language as to something which must result, but which shall come to pass only with formed units. Speech is never equal to language. It still awaits the result. That is, the event which will make the formation effective. It masters the formative elements but without purpose, and the history which it relates, the sexual history, is nothing other than itself, or its own double. (Deleuze [1969] 1990, 232; author’s italics)

It is this interwoven relation between body and language that the filmic diagrams appear to challenge – similar to Marcel Proust’s specific style in In Search of Lost Time, which Nymphomaniac ex‑ plicitly refers to both in its images and its language. In Deleuze’s reading of Proust, he stresses that it is the machinic production of transversal relations that makes up Proust’s style. In Massumi’s words, these can be described as diagrams which make it possible 300

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for the author to stylistically produce signs in the form of abstrac‑ tions in the material (crystals of pure time). According to Deleuze, this can only be done »in the act of thinking within thought«, so to remember is a thinking creation: »not to create memory, but to create the spiritual equivalent of the still too material memory, to create the viewpoint valid for all associations, the style valid for all images« (Deleuze 2000, 111). Elsewhere Deleuze mentions this formal work as Proust’s production of »transversal dimensions« in the material (Deleuze op. cit., 168): This additional dimension is added to those that are occupied by char‑ acters, events, and parts of the Search – it is a dimension in time without common measure with the dimensions they occupy in space. (Deleuze op. cit., 169)

One can say that the transversal dimensions function on two levels in Nymphomaniac. Firstly, they are found in the same way in Proust – put into fabula – as something that communicates across, inspiring Joe to tell her story and Seligman to interpret it. Secondly, they are found as extradiegetic, purely filmic diagrams that intervene transversally outside the recounted, and which, instead of developing intra‑ and extradiegetic relations and inter‑ textual references, actually involve the viewer, as in an interface. These diagrams, which are described in more detail in the fol‑ lowing, create disjunctive attention on the notion of autonomy, which renders fabula. Fabula thus clearly appears as a stylistically reworked material. This postmodern, diagrammatic rendering of material into signs and signs into material differs from Proust’s transversal diagrams, which create pure time‑images outside in‑ dividuals and bodies in space, but which can still, however, be found enfolded as effects in the literary material. Deleuze describes Proust as modern. Deleuze also considers de Sade and Sacher‑Masoch modern, working with seriality and repetition. Lifting the sexual act to an event through linguistic repetition is validated within modern pornographic literature. Without the linguistic repetition no transgression can take place, and this is the job of pornography. Likewise sexuality transgresses language, which again challenges the language, the voyeur, the affective figures of depression, melancholia and mania

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narrator. The difference and intensity is produced in between the two, and language can in this process achieve a state of pure expression, just as the body can be thought of as one of many, and it is here, then, that the need for a break, in the form of an aggression that creates meaning, occurs in de Sade’s writing: »There is always another breath in my breath, another thought in my thought, another possession in what I possess, a thousand things and a thousand beings implicated in my complications: Every true thought is an aggression« (Deleuze [1969] 1990, 298). Seligman’s literary interpretations in Nymphomaniac also add a new plane of intensity. But his synthesising associations and metaphors simultaneously function as a kind of harmonisation, which Joe opposes, making her deliver more and more excessive image material, and angling for greater aggression in its interpre‑ tation. He does not bite, but instead gets the urge to unite himself with the Dionysian through close bodily contact with her, which happens precisely as she begins to believe that an Apollinian as‑ ceticism outside the Dionysian register is possible. The various ›madeleine cakes‹, which inspire Joe and set the narrative in motion, are intradiegetic and belong, so to speak, to the literary diagram à la Proust. In Vol. I they are constituted by Seligman’s nymph, by the rugelach with a pastry fork which Seligman serves, by an artwork that Seligman has standing with only part of the title visible to Joe: »Mrs. H«, and by a collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s novels from which Seligman chooses to read the beginning of »The Fall of the House of Usher«. These objects, from which Joe’s narrative takes its starting point and which it crystallises itself around, are owned by Seligman. As metaphors they gather meanings in several layers, and Seligman collects these meanings and delivers diverse educated connotations to her denotations. But, as mentioned, the Trieresque extradiegetic diagrams are attached to these diagrams, à la Proust, which, as an interpretive visual layer, from time to time draw attention to the screen in a demonstrative manner. This haptic presentation, mak‑ ing clear the narrative’s constellation of body and language form‑ ing two parts of the same signaletic material, creates the interface which draws in the audience. The Trieresque diagrams appear in the first chapter, »The Compleat Angler«, as the numbers 3+5 302

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(when Joe is taken from in front and behind respectively), as a sketch showing twists in a river bed, as living images of a flowing river and sea grass that add to the girls‹ hunt from compartment to compartment like an extra image layer, as parts of ›wh‑words‹, as calculations of sexual scores and as graphs for ovulation. The diagrams belong to the film’s expression (sjuzet), but they lead in an almost simulacral way to the ›figurative‹ meaning of the film’s content (fabula) – or rather they produce, in literary ways (as in Jean‑Luc Godard), new transversal connections from the narrator’s positioning, so to speak, outside the filmic narra‑ tive relations between sjuzhet and fabula. In the following sec‑ tion it is shown how the Trieresque diagrams in Nymphomaniac are different from Proust’s. Where Proust creates diagrammatic exchanges between sensed affects and written signs, which are actualised as events in the reading’s present and thus create the now of recollection virtually, Trier’s diagrams have the character of direct notations in the signaletic material. They do not merely create intertextual, stylistic references to corresponding diagrams in Godard’s film or to Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994);288 they also activate the filmic, signaletic material’s generic‑rendering side, which reaches further than the borders of the screen. Where Proust’s diagrams create virtual recollections through small shifts and nuances in the linguistic signs, in Nymphomaniac Trier cre‑ ates opulent diagrams that demand attention and disturb the eventual empathy in both Joe’s corporeal memory traces and Seligman’s interpretive traces. These extradiegetic diagrams set‑ tle like abstractions ›on top of‹ the signaletic material, as ›pure information‹ in the form of, for example, mathematical calcula‑ tions, the mapping of a stream, measurements of temperature, sketches of optimal parking, but also as documentary images or metaphorical figurations of a filmic type. They do not attempt to either wrest meaning from or give meaning to the sign, but they create direct – more or less informative or true – appeals to the 288 This alludes to the scene in which Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) describes Vincent Vega (John Tra‑ volta) as old‑fashioned, with the words »don’t be a …«, upon which she sketches a square‑like shape in the air with her fingers. The two characters are seen through a car windscreen, and the viewer thus ›sees‹ her gestured sketch as a diagram drawn as a dotted line on the ›outside‹ of the window, which thus comes to ›belong‹ to the viewer’s experience of the screen.

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viewer. In this way Trier’s diagrams displace both Joe’s Dionysian account and Seligman’s Apollinian interpretation into a material plane of information, which hinders voyeuristic and erotic sur‑ render to the purely narrative aspect of the film. The subversive potential of sexual desire in chapters 1-4

»The Compleat Angler« – on three types of sign The first Trieresque diagram in chapter one shows the numbers 3+5, which are layered over the image when the young moped owner Jerôme (Shia LaBeouf) takes Joe’s virginity at her re‑ quest.289 The numbers 1, 2, 3 enumerate (one at a time) Jerôme’s three thrusts into Joe’s vagina. He turns her over, as she says, »like a sack of potatoes«, which is illustrated in a metaphorically documented way by a workman turning over a sack of potatoes, in that the image is layered over with a +. The numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 then list Jerôme’s five thrusts in Joe’s anus. Even though Joe’s mind inclines toward mechanical thinking and she fixes his machine, the moped, with a simple hand movement, just as he fixes her erotic machine, she explains to Seligman that she has never forgotten the two humiliating numbers, 3 and 5. Selig‑ man is fascinated by the fact that they are Fibonacci numbers, and throughout the film we return to them many times in the form of diagrams. Immediately after Joe talks of a train journey with her friend B. (Sophie Kennedy Clark), who challenges her to a competition of who can score the most men. Seligman is this time fascinated by the idea that the girls read the men in the train compartments in the same way that anglers read fish in a river. The trip through the train, to the sounds of »Born to be Wild«, with Joe dressed in red, shiny shorts and fishnet stockings (just like Bess in Breaking the Waves), is quickly rewound so the 289 In the Marquis de Sade’s work Justine, Jerôme is the name of a monk – one of the most brutal and callous sadists whom Justine meets on her erotic journey of suffering. Joe and Jerôme encounter one anoth‑ er several times in Nymphomaniac and the question is whether the pair, Joe and Jerôme, are chosen because the ›o‹ creates the centre in both names, surrounded by the ›j‹ and ›e‹. The name ›Joe‹, which is normally used for a man, in this sense gains a gender destabilising, queer scope.

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sound is played backwards. This occurs in order for Seligman to develop his point, as a number of male train passengers are shown overlaid with greenish, undulating seaweed, as if viewed from the bottom of a river. His explanation is supported further by two drawings of a river’s course through the landscape, which makes

A man depicted as a possible catch ‑ as seen through the eyes of an angler.

The picture of a river bed illustrates the diagrammatic method of Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård) and the film. affective figures of depression, melancholia and mania

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up the anglers‹/girls‹ topographical challenge. B. then directs Joe on how eye contact can be best achieved through asking a simple ›Wh‑question‹. These two first letters also appear as a diagram, drawn in red on the screen and then white in the following, as she practises the method in a compartment: ›Wh‑at‹ (is the time?), ›Wh‑ere‹ (do you come from?), ›Wh‑o‹ (knows where the toilet is?). Joe gets a bite, but B. does too, and she goes into the lead 1‑0 and then 5‑3, which also appears visibly on the screen in diagrammatic form (like chalk on a blackboard). Before Joe tells of her big catch, she recounts how although it was easy in the beginning, there was suddenly no‑one who bit. This makes the angler Seligman eager, and he draws on his experience that one catches most fish in light rain: That’s a very clear parallel to fishing in a stream. As it happens, either none of the fish are feeding or they all feed at the same time. They go into a feeding frenzy, all bite. And then just as suddenly as it started, it stops. It’s observable, but it’s highly unpredictable. And it has to do with, I don’t know, weather, barometric pressure, maybe some fish psychology if that’s possible. Anyway, the fish most readily bite at the beginning of a light rain, and I think that’s because they feel safe when they swim in the stream. Because they can’t be seen from above, the water surface is disturbed. (DVD: 28:36‑29:23)

This sequence, which interrupts Joe’s narrative, can be seen as a kind of poetics towards the function of the Trieresque diagrams in relation to the viewer. If the water’s surface/screen is too opti‑ cally transparent/stratified, the fish/audience will not bite so easily. The narrative intention of an optically arranged composition is often too obvious, while the viewer is easier hooked or affected if haptic streams and compositions dominate. Here it appears as if the viewer is free to follow his/her own interpretive preferences. The visible diagrams on the screen’s surface in Nymphomaniac produce ripples, so to speak, making the viewer safe, as they open up to several possible interpretive traces. In this first part of »The Compleat Angler«, we see, in other words, a displacement in three parts. Whereas Joe’s metaphors 306

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keep to corporeal sensations (›like a sack of potatoes‹) and lead to fabula, Seligman’s metaphors influence transversally in the film’s sjuzet (which is rewound, so the scene can be replayed). His fishing diagrams, à la Proust, can be seen as added, but also as integrated in the fabula (the audience is offered his figures of interpretation, so to speak). Finally, there are three Trieresque diagrams which settle like an extra, unnecessary layer ›on top of‹ the screen. They are simulacral, in the Deleuzian sense, which here means that they presumably only work towards an over‑ all interpretation of the film, while in reality they merely throw up an endless profusion of true or false meanings. Apropos the film’s struggle between Dionysian and Apollinian forces, in the following citation Deleuze advances the simulacral production as a Nietzschean eternal recurrence of the same in relation to Klossowski’s serial, erotic forms of intensity: There is a difference in nature between what returns »once and for all« and what returns for each and every time, or for an infinite number of times. The eternal return is indeed the Whole, but it is the Whole which is said of disjoint members or divergent series: it does not bring everything back, it does not bring about the return of that which re‑ turns but once, namely, that which aspires to recenter the circle, to render the series convergent, and to restore the self, the world, and God. In the circle of Dionysus, Christ will not return; the order of the Antichrist chases the other order away. All of that which is founded on God and makes a negative or exclusive use of the disjunction is denied and excluded by the eternal return. All of that which comes once and for all is referred back to the order of God. The phantasm of Being (eternal return) brings about the return only of simulacra (will to power as simulation). (Deleuze [1969] 1990, 301; author’s italics)

It can be noted that Seligman’s interpretive diagrams are herme‑ neutically directed towards creating wholeness: he aims to save Joe from Christian ›sin‹, which at the same time is her bait for him. He is hooked and works on recurrences in the material in order to gather its meanings. This form of recurrence, which in the same place is described as a Kierkegaardian figure of repetition (op. cit., 300), aims towards a unique rebirth (as in the story of affective figures of depression, melancholia and mania

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Abraham, who is tested by God and finally forgiven). The eternal recurrence’s simulacral repetition is thus an immanent celebra‑ tion of life in and with the repetition, but it is thus also possible to see each moment as varied and singular, though part of a series. The Trieresque diagrams distribute mathematical nonsense of numbers on the screen’s visible surface, but they are as beautiful as the patterns of the Fibonacci series. Although it is Seligman who suggests the Fibonacci theme and follows up on it throughout the film, he abandons it towards the end, while the Trieresque diagrams remain faithful to it. Shortly after this sequence Seligman refers to another fly fish‑ ing method, whereby one irregularly pulls on the line to simulate a struggling insect, which awakens the interest of the fish. Following on from this is Joe’s account of how she makes herself sexually attractive by appealing to the man’s protectiveness. In this scene, where Joe simulates grief over the serious illness of her dwarf hamster, Betty, her narrative thus confirms Seligman’s diagram. The choice of the hamster as an appealing object is commented on by a male passenger, who reasons it would have been worse if it had been a human, but Joe acts genuinely hurt and maintains that she was incredibly fond of her hamster. This play on appealing to sympathy for a small furry animal pays off, in that another man bites and, in a duelling tone, accuses the first man of cynicism. He allows Joe to talk about the hamster’s enthusiasm (for its cosy cage), after which Joe is able to reel in her prey. Seligman points out along the way the Freudian sense in which the choice of the dwarf hamster could have certain sexual connotations, and Joe’s words, »Would you show me where the lavatory is? I have to blow my nose« (DVD: 32:39), makes it a linguistic sign for action – and makes the point clear to the viewer. In the next scene both self‑consciousness and ambiguity are abandoned, and Joe goes directly to the prey, provoking him into sex. When the ticket inspector catches the two friends aboard the train without tickets, and a friendly man, S. (Jens Albinus), pays for them, the girls offer to repay him. S. turns down their advances, but when B. challenges Joe, who is trailing 10‑6 in the race to win the bet and the prize, she strikes. Seligman approves of what he calls the fly‑fisherman’s third method, which can provoke 308

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a passive fish – for example, one that is on its way to its spawning ground – to bite with the help of the Finnish weapon, the so‑called Rapala. This can look like a ›wobbler‹, preferably red, which is presented to the fish (36:10‑36:27). This description functions as a prelude to Joe challenging S. to answer how embarrassing it is that he, who is travelling in first class, and has just bought train tickets for Joe and B., has only bought a cheap gift for his wife from the station shop. He defends this action by stating that he needs to get home quickly, as he and his wife have decided to have children, and therefore he must be available when she is ovulating and is most fertile – which is this evening in question (demonstrated diagrammatically with a thermometer and a graph of ovulation patterns). He protests that there is no lack of sexual desire. Joe then hurries into action, unzipping his trousers and giving him a blowjob, which ends with her depriving him of de‑ livering his ›package‹. The account of the train journey ends with a hasty edit away from Joe, who is wiping semen from around her mouth, to a large fish being caught in a net, and then Joe eating chocolate buttons. Seligman appears to be enjoying hearing Joe recounting her stories and proposes what he calls a »culturally blasphemous digression«, in that the pornographic description makes him think of how Proust creates a relation between the description of a taste sensation and memories: »In your case it was not the taste of a madeleine cake moistened in a lime‑blossom tea but the combination of chocolate and sperm« (40:41‑40:46). But Joe has no intention of entertaining and would rather have Seligman interpret her youthful manhunt as reprehensible. How‑ ever, he believes that sin and the mention of imprecation due to Pandora’s Box is nonsense, and that she has merely given the men an experience and maybe ensured that a healthy child has been born into the world, because semen can degenerate if it is stored for too long. He concludes: »If you have wings, why not fly?«, and images are shown of a helicopter and a glider taking off.290 This chapter can be summed up by noting that Trier diagram‑ matically inserts Peirce’s signs, the indexical, symbolic and iconic, 290 Here one might have expected an image of a bird, but the point is that it is the airstream that holds the glider up – and that throughout the film Joe is associated with machinic functions.

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in and with the three forms of capture with which Seligman is con‑ notatively associated. The first method utilises the actual (the insect larva’s appearance and movements together with the shyness of puberty and the toilet’s placement on the train) in order to be able to resemble traces and create signs (the nymph hook and its move‑ ment, together with the girls‹ explicit attire and naïve appearance). In the second method Joe creates sexual interest because her vagina alludes to the (dying) animal (insect/hamster), which is attached symbolically to the male/female sex organs. In the third method the prey is paralysed, as the iconic sign (the red colour, an unequivo‑ cal provocation) calls for a reaction or makes escape impossible. Furthermore, Peirce’s diagrammatic signs are presented several times, in that we go from the linguistic description of something (a ›Rapala‹, for example) to the illustration of this in Joe’s story, which is thus made into an ›actual‹ realisation of the sign. The diagrammatic function, which runs through every chapter of the film and creates connections between the leaves of the book, labia and leaves on the tree, is also presented in this first chapter, but it is only in the Director’s Cut version of the film that one is given a clearly linked relation. This relation takes its starting point in the scene where Joe, as a pubescent girl, leafs through the pages of her father’s medical books and finds an anatomical drawing of the female bodily organs. She reads aloud: »Nervus Pudendus, nervus dorsalis clitoridis« (15:27‑15:39), and then no‑ tices her father observing her with a knowing look. She leaves the room, while he closes the book and places it on the shelf. From this incestuous suggestion there is an abrupt edit to the leaves of the aspen tree, rustling in the wind, and the contented faces of both the father and Joe. They stand with eyes closed, listening to the rustling of the leaves, and while caressing Joe’s hair, the father tells his story of the ash tree: When the ash tree was created, it made all the other trees in the forest jealous. It was the most beautiful tree. You couldn’t say anything bad about it. It was the world tree in Norse mythology. Remember, Odin hung from the ash tree in Yggdrasil for nine days in order to gain in‑ sight. [Odin is seen hanging in a tree as ›documentary‹ evidence.] The ash tree had the strongest wood. Then in the winter, when the ash tree

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lost all of its leaves … all the trees noticed its black buds and started laughing. »Oh, look – the ash tree has had its fingers in the ashes.« See, you could always tell the ash tree in the winter by the black buds. (DVD: 16:24‑17:30)291

The father then measures one of the leaves from the ash tree with his sliding gauge, and the leaf is pressed and glued into Joe’s herbarium, which she has with her – throughout her life. With a pencil she notes down his measurements with the sliding gauge in the book. It is not until later that the viewer learns the connec‑ tion. A sliding gauge is seen when Joe is present at an abortion, as one is used to measure the opening of the birth canal. Joe gives up her medicine studies shortly after. Later – in Vol. II, where she carries out an abortion on herself (omitted from the shorter version) – she uses the original sliding gauge, which she has in‑ herited from her father, to measure her own vagina, in order to work out the necessary size of the instrument for the task. In this way the sliding gauge brings various images of the vagina into diagrammatical contact with the various shapes of leaves. This relation is referenced by the herbarium: the book that preserves the various types of leaf or vagina. The book is given a central role in Vol. II, where Joe attempts to end her addiction to sex and packs everything away that leads her to think about it – a handle, mirrors, table edges – she even deprives herself of heat. She lies on her bed shivering and flicks through the herbarium, but because she licks her fingers in order to be able to leaf through the pages better, she is stimulated, and she places her fingers in her mouth and the herbarium between her legs. The leaves in the book and the leaves in the vagina are brought together in masturbation, and with this her father is also brought to mind. 291 Firstly the story alludes to Yggdrasil, the tree of life in Nordic mythology. It contains the eagle, the squirrel, the stag, the goat and the worm. Each of these is in its own way a parasite, but the tree also has connections, via the wells beneath its roots, to the underworld’s dead and wisdom. The god Odin receives his wisdom here. Yggdrasil characterises a cosmological order, closely entwined with the threatening chaos, Ragnarok. Secondly the story refers to Wagner’s use of Yggdrasil in the opera Götterdämmerung in the operatic Ring cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. Here, in short, Siegfried breaks off a branch from Yggdrasil, which initiates Ragnarok, but this destruction in the opera represents liberation from a world ruled by the powers of will – in fitting with Wagner’s inspiration from Schopenhauer. These associations with Yggdra‑ sil’s chaotically infiltrated order and Ragnarok’s cosmological chaos are juxtaposed in simple ways in the story of the ash tree.

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Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) with her beloved herbarium, in which she notes the sizes and appearance of leaves.

The incestuous theme becomes clear and forms yet another ex‑ planation for Joe’s nymphomania, as the father’s story of the leaves is repeated many times throughout the film, and thus a transverse connection is created between the sexual episodes and the experi‑ ences. Furthermore, one might say that the incestuous connections between the words ›leaf through‹ and ›leaf‹ create diagrammatical links between the sign of the word and the image of the sign, in the same way as Proust creates images in the reader by describing impressions of smell, sight and other senses. In a figurative sense, the film creates diagrams between Seligman’s literary involvement in how an ideogram can capture and trace meaning in Apollinian ways, and the filmic images‹ acting out of Joe’s Dionysian corpo‑ real energy. In this way both the sliding gauge and the herbarium become diagrammatic tools, which can both spread and collect meaning from signs to update action and its converse: the sliding gauge becomes the thing that the father and then Seligman (cf. the film’s final chapter) are able to teach Joe, while the teaching of the vagina is the thing that Joe is interested in.292 292

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The father’s story of the lime tree is described in the same place with a parable about how its round

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»Jerôme« – on fetishising Joe finds inspiration for the second chapter when Seligman serves rugelach with a cake knife to Joe, who finds this feminine, and unmanly. After a brief introduction where we see the young Joe having sex with various lovers, as she simulates each one of them giving her an orgasm for the first time, she recounts the story of how she created a group together with B, a little flock, who worshipped female sexuality with the rhyme: »Mea vulva, mea maxima vulva«. Seligman responds swiftly that the interval be‑ tween B and F on a piano, which is heard in the film’s illustration, is a tritone – also known as the ›devil’s interval‹. Simultaneously, a node diagram is shown over the interval directly on the screen, and Seligman explains that particular interval was forbidden in music in the Middle Ages. Joe, unmoved, continues her story of the group’s defence of a woman’s right to her own sexuality in a society fixated on love. She leaves the group when even B cannot resist, and tells the 3/5 (sic!), that she has had sex with the same person several times. When Joe objects that one is only allowed to have sex with the same person once, B whispers in her ear: »The secret ingredient to sex is love« (55:07), upon which Joe’s engagement in the revolutionary hetaerae vulva group dissolves. But approximately 30 years later she still defends the message to Seligman: »For me love was just lust with jealousy added. Eve‑ rything else was total nonsense. For every hundred crimes com‑ mitted in the name of love, only one is committed in the name of sex« (55:16‑55:29). Seligman smiles when she says that her way forward was to get herself an education. The smile is not due to anything in her story, but his impression of her with pigtails and wearing a school uniform, represented figuratively within the genre of schoolgirl sex. This sequence, in contrast to the first chapter, shows an incongruence between Joe’s story and Selig‑ man’s response. He listens to music, which is for the benefit of the audience only, and his narrative on schoolgirl sex is likewise only visible to the audience. Whereas in the first chapter he conveys leaves became heart‑shaped because a fox with cubs, which lived in a hole under its roots, was shot and died in the hole together with its young: »This made the lime tree so sad, and from then on the lime tree decided to have heart shaped leaves.« (18:47). This story is retold by Joe as a lead‑in to the violence in the film’s final chapter, »The Gun«.

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Joe’s narrative connotatively, here he undermines her narrative voice with his imagination. Joe continues her story of how she again meets Jerôme, who employs her as a secretary without preconditions – only to then initiate a non‑sexual power struggle with her when she protests against his advances. Seligman assumes that she is then dismissed from her job, but Joe answers: »If he had fired me, then he would have lost« (1:03.30). She and Jerôme thus take responsibility for a shared investigation of the games which the battle of the sexes is built on. Her first action is simulated masochism: she tidies up his desk and serves tea and rugelach. He complains that she has forgotten the pastry fork. Although she doesn’t believe that it is right for this type of cake, she accepts Jerôme’s complaint and his feigned authority. Here Seligman interjects and defends, in a joking tone, the pastry fork (and his own habit), in that it is practical and has a function as an absolute detector of (petty) bourgeoisie; for example historically, during the Russian revo‑ lution (this is overlaid by simulated documentary images). Joe ignores Seligman’s parenthetical insert and recounts how she soon has office sex with everyone other than Jerôme. His obvi‑ ous (though feigned) chastisement of her leads, in other words, to her being able to have unsavoury (but real) sex with others. As an underdog she can operate in a concealed way, but Jerôme demands in addition that she should carry his coat when they are out in town. On one of these trips Joe is victorious over him when she, unlike Jerôme, manages to park his large car,293 as she follows the parking diagram which is sketched on the screen. Just like in chapter 1, the diagram shows what ought to happen, but here it is not linked to Seligman’s narration, and thus specifies the Trieresque diagram as compositional. Joe’s triumphant su‑ periority in relation to Jerôme with regard to machinic mastery paradoxically enough releases an infatuation shortly afterwards, as she attempts in masochistic ways to submit to his hands‹ el‑ egant negligence. She wants to be the object handled by him.294 293 This can be regarded as a reference to the sequence in Melancholia where Justine also takes over the wheel from both the chauffeur and then her husband, Michael. 294 This is not dissimilar to O’s infatuation with Sir Stephen in Pauline Réage’s Story of O ([1954] 2013). Dominique Aury, who wrote the novel under the pseudonym and was also an academic and worked as a

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She sees him in a new idealised light, though reverting to reason she knows that: Love distorts things. Or even worse. Love is something you’ve never asked for. The erotic was something I asked for. Or even demanded of men. But this idiotic love. I felt humiliated by it and all of the dishonesty that follows. The erotic is about saying yes. Love appeals to the lowest instincts wrapped up in lies. How do you say yes when you mean no, and vice versa? I’m ashamed of what I became. But it was beyond my control. (1.10.36‑1:11:22)295

Although Seligman believes that she is being defensive here rather than laying herself bare, Joe continues the story of how she, in longing for Jerôme’s careless elegance, goes for long walks in the forest from her childhood, which contains a lady with a dog and an old man on a bench.296 When she finally pulls herself together enough to deliver a love letter to Jerôme, he has left with the secretary Liz, and she fantasises about him now in fragments: by collecting parts of his likeness from random men on the train – as if they were pieces in a puzzle – in order to masturbate. This fetishising is dramatically depicted on the screen as a metonymic grouping of elements that is able (though with difficulty) to sup‑ port the material memory. But this scene is also haptic in its uti‑ lisation of the word, bearing a similarity to Deleuze’s approach in the cinema books in relation to Bresson’s film. The eyes look out in haptic ways and take elements from various bodies on the train – back and forth across the eyesight’s usual coverage of a space. A dialogue follows between Joe and Seligman concerning how we perhaps only remember the essential silhouettes of things, after which follows an edit to Joe’s childhood, where her father explains to her that it is the souls of the trees we see during winter. As a publisher with, amongst others, Gallimard, was a great admirer of Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time. 295 The assertion that love appeals to the lowest instincts wrapped in lies has an affinity with Nietzsche’s general position that the narrative of love also includes the lie and can often hide a real resentment (cf. ressentiment). The film’s strapline, »Forget about love«, which does not feature on the Director’s Cut DVD, likewise supports Joe’s Nietzschean position on the nature of love. 296 The recurrent walks in the forest from her childhood clearly refer to Proust’s long descriptions of the Bois de Boulogne, in which he reminisces about the women who used to be there (Proust in In Search of Lost Time, vol. 1, Swann’s Way 2003, 592).

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result, the ash’s black buds are stigmata. As with her father, Joe seeks out, and towards the end finds, the tree that corresponds with her soul. Whereas the father’s tree is split in two, her tree stands windswept and gnarled, alone on a golden mountain top. The poetics here again relate to Proust. In the beginning of the section on Combray’s notion of how in many cultures animals and plants contain magical souls, he writes how memory should be activated through something. Proust establishes this activa‑ tion through the main character’s combined taste sensation of tea and madeleine cake. The following is the introduction to the description of Marcel’s activation of memory through the tongue’s sensory impression: I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and thus effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised them the spell is broken. Delivered by us, they have overcome death and return to share our life. And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die. (Proust 2009, vol. 1, 59‑60)

Joe’s narrative continues with the loss of Jerôme leading to an ag‑ gressive hunt for men, as she makes her cunt into a kind of sensor which, like a supermarket’s automatic door, opens and closes for customers. As she notes that »[m]y sensitive door opening gave me an opportunity to develop my morphological studies from leaves to genitals« (1:21:25), images from The Kingdom I are shown of the Rigshospital’s sensor‑equipped doors, where the wind al‑ lows leaves to blow in. Leaves now refer to both female and male genitalia. Next follows typography over male genitals – black, 316

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yellow and circumcised penises – each image with a number at‑ tached on a yellow ›post‑it‹. This sequence is as if borrowed from Deleuze’s self‑same summary of Proust’s poetics in the section »Essenses«, which according to Deleuze shows itself best in art (Deleuze 2000, 50): Neither things nor minds exist, there are only bodies: astral bodies, vegetal bodies. The biologists would be right if they knew that bodies in themselves are already a language. The linguists would be right if they knew that language is always the language of bodies. Every symptom is a word, but first of all every word is a symptom. (Deleuze op. cit., 92)

To summarise chapter 2, »Jerôme«, one might say that it works with the partial elements of fetishising and their joining in novel constellations, where Seligman and Joe do not necessarily en‑ ter into a dialogue; rather, the opposite happens. This chapter illustrates how the bodies (Seligman’s and Joe’s, the male and female) are woven together in unpredictable ways through the (love) sign, which springs from conception to projection to ac‑ tion, and so on. The sign’s meaning is enfolded in the bodies and their relations, and the meaning of the narrative (and life) is not unfolded through studies and the creation of semiological typologising but through the meeting of senses, which through memory (virtually) open up and set the essence (the souls) free in new, topical contexts. »Mrs. H« – on random and meaningful signs The theme of the third chapter is the rather obvious language of passion, which can be used, misused or misunderstood. Passion’s fury is expressed in the form of the jealous Mrs. H, who confronts Joe concerning her love escapades not only ruining and destroy‑ ing entire families, but also that one ought to be careful saying »I love you« – no matter what the context. With a starting point in part of the title of a painting, which Seligman has standing in his apartment, Joe says that she must give up keeping account of her relationships and predicting what her various lovers want to hear. She invents a method based on affective figures of depression, melancholia and mania

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casting dice, where a one represents a very loving answer, a two results in a less passionate, but still positive answer; a five rep‑ resents a total rejection, while a six results in no answer. This system merely arouses the men even more in the competition for her favours, and this is the case with H (Hugo Speer), who is described as too clingy. While waiting for a new lover, she at‑ tempts to get rid of him by lying and saying that she loves him too much and that she has realised he will never leave his family for her sake, and this is the reason they can no longer be together (1:25:44‑1:26:25). The scene that follows, in which H returns after having left his wife, illustrates how a person’s love, with unfail‑ ing security, leads to others lying to themselves, and rather than controlling the emotions of ourselves and other people in our declarations of love, we become lost in what Proust also describes in the encounter with Albertine in the volume as »the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower«. Following on the heels of H is the jilted wife, Mrs. H (Uma Thurman), together with the couple’s three young boys. In an elaborate scene of jealousy she dramatises for Joe how her own destiny and that of the three boys will look in the near future. She expresses the feelings that brought her and Mr. H together, and which are still found in relation to the children. Conversely, she persists with the idea that the children need to see the source of where it all happened, »the whoring bed«, and instructs Joe that the »children’s father« usually has two lumps of sugar in his tea. According to Deleuze, jealousy is a search for the truth; that is, an attempt to find a reason for the lies and signs the lover has given (knowingly or unknowingly): If the signs of love and of jealousy carry their own alteration, it is for a simple reason: love unceasingly prepares its own disappearance, acts out its dissolution. The same is true of love as of death, when we imagine we will still be alive enough to see the faces of those who will have lost us. In the same way we imagine that we will still be enough in love to enjoy the regrets of the person we shall have stopped loving. It is quite true that we repeat our past loves; but it is also true that our present love, in all its vivacity, »repeats« the moment of the dissolution or anticipates its own end. Such is the meaning of what we call a scene

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of jealousy. This repetition oriented to the future, this repetition of the outcome, is what we find in Swann’s love of Odette, in the hero’s love of Gilberte, of Albertine. (Deleuze op. cit., 19)

Mrs. H’s performance comes close to Masoch’s ideal for the masochist’s woman, who should be able to combine aloofness, sentimentality and gruesomeness.297 When Joe’s next lover ar‑ rives, Mrs. H erroneously interprets this and believes a three‑ some is planned, which she (and the nuclear family of five) cannot compete with. Mrs. H plays out the scene in a grotesque way and leaves like a wounded animal with her sons, screaming, in‑ articulate and dishing out a stinging slap to Mr. H.298 Following Seligman’s question of how the scene affected Joe back then, she answers unaffectedly that one cannot make an omelette without breaking some eggs. However, she returns to the fact that through her life she has hurt and done harm to others and describes her‑ self as emotionally stunted. The only feeling that has followed her always, through the years of lovers, is loneliness. This is illustrated by an image of a memory from a hospital where she, as a seven‑ year‑old, had an operation: »It was as if I was completely alone in the universe. As if my whole body was filled with loneliness and tears« (1:40:11‑1:40:18). The utterance is illustrated with images of the universe. In this chapter, which does not contain diagrams added directly on the screen, the Fibonacci sequence 1, 1, 2, 3, 5 is played out with people. First there is the 1 + 1 which gives 2 (Joe + H); the 2 + 1 (Mrs. H) gives 3; Mr. H and Mrs. H together with their three boys gives 5. When Joe’s next guest arrives, Joe, H and the guest make up a triangle, while H and his abandoned family make a pentagon. The Fibonacci sequence cannot, however, carry on in a harmonious manner: H cannot under any circumstance participate in both the number 3 and the number 5, and it is im‑ 297 The jealousy scene also anticipates Joe’s own future, which is shown in the film’s final chapter, »The Gun«. In contrast to Mrs. H, however, Joe makes it a short process and does not attempt to recollect and revive the signs of her falling in love (with Jerôme), but nonetheless her unconscious will plays tricks on her when she ›forgets‹ that the gun’s safety catch is on. 298 The fact that Uma Thurman (like some of the other stars) almost has a scene to herself, where she can play out her character, gives an extra dimension to the film and to the film’s poster, where every char‑ acter performs their own orgasm as themselves, so to speak.

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mediately too late for Joe to recall her lies. The damage is done. The Fibonacci sequence’s 8 cannot be realised. »Delirium« – on familial similarities Chapter 4, »Delirium«, is inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic short story »The Fall of the House of Usher«, whose introduction is read aloud for Joe by Seligman. The chapter describes Joe’s in‑ cestuous feelings towards her father (Christian Slater), which are released after his violent death. He dies, just like Poe, of delirium tremens, which Seligman describes thus: It occurs when a long‑term abuse of alcohol is followed by a sudden abstinence. Your body goes into some kind of hypersensitive shock. You could see the most horrifying hallucinations. Rats and snakes and cockroaches coming out of the floor. Worms slithering on the walls. One’s entire nervous system is on high alert, and in constant panic and paranoia. And then the circulatory system fails. But the panic and horror remains until the moment of death. (1:41:48‑1:42:30)

This description is accompanied by Harry Clark’s black and white drawings of Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination ([1923] 2008), and Joe’s story of her father’s death in hospital has additional black and white images throughout. In this way the chapter, from the beginning when Joe arrives at the hospital, strikes a gothic and melancholic atmosphere with bleak pathways wet with rain, reflecting the street lighting. The father, who has said his goodbyes to Joe’s detested moth‑ er, Kay (Connie Nielsen), does not fear the arrival of death, but his violent seizure scares Joe, whom he consoles by telling her yet again how one can recognise the ash tree in winter. Joe breaks up by degrees, as this time the story anticipates her father’s im‑ pending death. He suffers one attack of delirium after another, while Joe observes helplessly. He is strapped down and reacts against this in demonic ways, soiling the bed with his excrement. The doctor who is attending to him explains to Joe that he has brain damage, which causes delirium, and that this cannot be alleviated with morphine. Joe accesses her own tears by having 320

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wild sex with the kitchen staff in the hospital’s basement,299 but when her father finally dies, she has no more tears left. Never‑ theless, she reacts mechanically by ›becoming moist‹ when she sees him as a cadaver, which causes her to feel shame. Even this story does not shock Seligman, who with reference to literary examples says: »It’s extremely common to react sexually in a crisis« (2:00:39). In conclusion, one can regard this chapter as dealing with (unrealised) incestuous love. In and with the father’s demonic look at Joe, there is a basis for a reading of the Uncanny (in line with Freud).300 The chapter thus resembles its source, »The Fall of the House of Usher«, which creates uneasiness rather than safe signs. The father’s delirium is linked in unspecified ways to Joe’s mother, Kay. Joe’s reactions are depicted as non‑conscious and affective, in that she is trapped as a victim in the parents‹ game. It is, for example, at the sight of her father’s body and her mother’s reproachful look that Joe becomes moist. She interprets this her‑ self as shameful. Nevertheless, during her father’s death she learns that impulsive affects are stronger than emotive bonds. One could add that she is ›placed‹ in an interface between seeing and seen, where she is given sole access to her own feelings through her body’s involuntary, mechanical reactions. This chapter does not include direct diagrams either, but there is nonetheless a strong diagrammatical sense in that life (in accordance with the ash tree Yggdrasil) returns in the form of the eternal recurrence of the same – Joe’s affective, corporeal reactions. It is thus significant that the viewer is offered the perspective from Joe’s body, in that the camera captures the father’s dead body framed by her open legs, and we see a fluid glide down her right leg. The viewer’s per‑ spective is from Joe’s body, which affectively ›becomes influenced‹ (cf. Spinoza), so to speak, without her will. Another point of note is the gauge, which is the only thing Joe inherits from her father. This is also presented again – this time on the father’s writing desk, while he sits and reads – and she refers to it as beautiful and worn down with use. Here also, in other words, there is a 299 300

These give clear intertextual references to Trier’s work, The Kingdom. This demonic look resembles closely the look which the child, Nick, gives the viewer in Antichrist.

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connection between the vagina, the gauge and leaves (the book’s and the tree’s). In these first four chapters of the film the young Joe’s sexual desire and its revolutionary potential is described. In the middle five chapters, which stretch across and thus bind together Vol. I and Vol. II, the ideal of the masochist’s woman is unfolded. The asexual, super sensual woman in chapter 5

»The Little Organ School« – on polyphony The thing that sets the fifth chapter in motion is Seligman’s re‑ cording of »Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ«, from Bach’s organ work Das Orgelbüchlein (The Little Organ Book).301 The recording is unfinished. It is likewise depicted in the chapter where Joe’s sexual abilities are abruptly interrupted. The two meanings of the word ›organ‹, a human body part and a specific musical instru‑ ment, are correlated very directly in this chapter, as her organ is forced in a new direction – towards Thanatos – in that her erotic desire dries up. Seligman’s introductory speech does not deviate from the musical meaning of ›organ‹, in that he combines the trichotomy of polyphony and the Fibonacci sequence in a description of how the fugue achieves its harmony: Polyphony is from the Middle Ages. It is an entirely European phenom‑ enon. It’s distinguished by the idea that every voice is its own melody but together in harmony. Bach’s forerunner, Palestrina, he wrote many works for several choirs at the same time, wallowing in polyphony. But in my eyes, Bach perfected the melodic expression and the harmony. Also mixed up with some rather incomprehensible mystique regarding numbers – most likely based on the Fibonacci sequence. You know the one that starts with 0, then comes the 1. The sequence is created by adding the two previous numbers to create the new one, so it’s 0 + 1 makes 1, and 2 + 1 makes 3, and 3 + 2 makes 5, and 5 + 3 makes 8, and 8 + 5 makes 13. The sequence has an interesting connection to Pythagoras‹ theorem, the Golden Section. It was all about finding 301

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The organ piece was written during the period 1708‑1717 and consists of 46 choral preludes.

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Seligman explains the Fibonacci sequence to Joe, and the numbers appear diagrammatically to the audience.

a divine methodology in art and architecture. A bit like the way the Tritone you played on the piano in your little club was supposed to be a satanic interval. (2:02:05‑2:03:35)

The Fibonacci sequence, Pythagoras’s theorem and the Golden Section are illustrated diagrammatically with numbers, calcu‑ lations and sketched diagrams of the Golden Section. He then presents the musical piece consisting of the bass voice played with the feet, the second voice played with the left hand and finally the decisive voice, called cantus firmus, played with the right hand. Joe takes over immediately and gives her more Dionysian interpretation of the organ, referring to how the nymphoma‑ niac’s intercourse consists of several voices which create a whole. It is thus a question not merely of the nymphomaniac ›getting enough‹, but of how the sum of their various sexual experiences also makes up a qualitative aspect: »So in that way I have only one lover« (2:06:49). It is made clear, here, how the Apollinian Seligman seeks the wholeness of polyphony in the harmony’s complexity, which in the Fibonacci sequence takes the form and can represent, for example, the Golden Section or the Devil’s affective figures of depression, melancholia and mania

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Fibonacci numbers, employed as explanation of harmony and beauty.

Interval, while the Dionysian Joe experiences various methods of sensation in the body’s organ and the sensibilities of the erog‑ enous zones. The Apollinian‑tuned organ collects voices for a polyphonic, harmonic whole, while the Dionysian‑tuned organ collects (erotic) sensations in order to spread their meaning (in orgasms). With this prelude, Joe then tells of her three lovers: firstly 1) the bass voice, F., who with his monotone, predictable and ritual way of making love, creates the foundation; and 2) the second voice, G., who is erotically dominant like a leopard when it kills its prey. The two organ voices supplement the descriptions of these two erotic voices, each ascribed a third of the split screen. One third, the middle section, remains empty. It is soon filled, however, by Jerôme, whom Joe finds again on one of her many lonely, mono‑ tone and meaningless walks. She feels like an animal in a cage when she finds various piles of torn photos spread out over the plants. It is the abandoned puzzle, representing Jerôme, which gathers together again, and he becomes the primary voice or pri‑

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mary lover, the cantus firmus.302 With this a threefold harmony of split screens is also created in the visuals, literally a triptych, which links the various sexual voices or impetuses in the bodily instrument. The dialogue between Seligman’s Apollinian and Joe’s Dionysian voice is likewise complete through the music. But suddenly the music stops: Seligman’s tape is incomplete. Joe synchronously loses her erotic desire, and there is nothing Jerôme can do about it. He must relinquish answering her demand, »Fill all my holes«. And Vol. I ends – to the sound of Rammstein’s »Führe mich«. The continuation (in Vol. II) denotes Joe’s introduction to the death drive’s form of lust. But first one follows Joe’s futile attempt to achieve orgasm; Seligman believes it is Zenon’s mathematical paradox, where Joe is Achilles hunting the tortoise (the orgasm) in vain. His story is illustrated by a children’s drawing of Achilles standing at a point and the tortoise at another point, 100 metres ahead. Joes is irritated with all the cultural‑historical and math‑ ematical associations Seligman serves up, and she realises that he cannot relate to her story because he is a virgin and has not had any sexual experiences. He believes himself to be asexual, and his interest in sex is only literary. He believes, on the other hand, that it is precisely this chastity which makes him a better listener and judge of her character. In summary, this chapter is concerned with the various ways in which one can enter into relations with one’s own body and with the bodies of others. While the chapter’s first part depicts the affective range and potential of the various voices, the second and third parts (on the spontaneous orgasm and its cessation) show respectively how affect can occur unprovoked by an event, and how the non‑occurrence of an expected affect can also be an event. In the case of Joe, the absence develops her libido for new forms of sensation. It is made clear in the chapter that the Apollinian Seligman’s asexual existence is not the same as the 302 When Jerôme is again introduced into the story here, Seligman protests over the unrealistic manner in which he appears so many times – and apparently randomly. Joe corrects him and asks how he believes he can get the most out of her story – by believing in it or by not believing in it. He has to admit she is right, and thus he gives in to her affective descriptions of coincidence and improbable meetings, with which Proust’s narratives are also filled.

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The threefold harmony between Joe’s three lovers is presented via split screen: the blasphemous triptych.

Dionysian Joe’s loss of sexual desire. Seligman’s dream of the Fibonacci sequence’s Golden Section and perfect harmony cannot be realised in practice in Joe’s actual world. Deleuze and Guat‑ tari sum up the relationship between the parts and the whole in Anti-Oedipus in a manner that corresponds with Joe’s part of the narrative in chapter 5: We believe only in totalities that are peripheral. And if we discover such a totality alongside various separate parts, it is a whole of these particular parts but does not totalize them; it is a unity of all of these particular parts but does not unify them; rather, it is added to them as a new part fabricated separately. (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1990, 42)

This method relates in the same place to Proust’s writing style: In the literary machine that Proust’s In Search of Lost Time constitutes, we are struck by the fact that all the parts are produced as asymmetri‑ cal sections, paths that suddenly come to an end, hermetically sealed boxes, noncommunicating vessels, watertight compartments, in which there are gaps even between things that are contiguous, gaps that are

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affirmations, pieces of a puzzle belonging not to any one puzzle but to many, pieces assembled by forcing them into a certain place where they may or may not belong, their unmatched edges violently bent out of shape, forcibly made to fit together, to interlock, with a number of pieces always left over. It is a schizoid work par excellence: it is almost as though the author’s guilt, his confessions of guilt are merely a sort of joke. (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1990, 42‑43)

This could also be applicable to the narrative methods in Nymphomaniac. It becomes clear in chapter 5 that Joe’s Dionysian experiences are quite disparate from Seligman’s Apollinian ones. She nonetheless attempts to bend her story according to the vari‑ ous classic informative diagrams he produces. In the following chapter, where the life drive of Eros slowly yields to the death drive of Thanatos, her complaisance becomes reduced. The sadistic woman’s unfolding in chapters 6-8

»The Eastern and the Western Church« – on the worship and dissemination of signs The prelude to chapter 6 occurs when Joe notices a small Rus‑ sian icon, which Seligman believes may have been painted in the style of Rublev.303 He explains that the Russian Orthodox Church predominantly praises light and joy (Maria with child), in contrast to the Roman Catholic Church, which idolises suffering (Christ on the cross). On this basis, Joe tells of her journey from the light to suffering with a small addition, »The Silent Duck«, at the end. The chapter begins with a flashback of the vision/ orgasm, which Joe, at the age of 12, had on a school trip. She is seen lying in the grass, taking in all of the sounds, smells and sensory impressions of nature.304 Her body raises itself,305 and she quivers at the sight of two female figures appearing in the sky.

303 304 305

This is without doubt a reference to Tarkovsky’s film on the icon painter, Andrei Rublev (1969). This is a clear reference to Trier’s Antichrist, where the woman lies in the grass near Eden. This reference is to Tarkovsky’s use of the same trick.

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Joe is convinced that she has had a spontaneous orgasm, but not convinced about what she has seen. Seligman identifies one of the women as Valeria Messalina, wife of Emperor Claudius, who is characterised as the most notorious nymphomaniac of antiquity, and the other as a Babylonian whore, riding on Nimrod in the form of a bull. Seligman sees her vision as a blasphemous version of Jesus’s transfiguration, an important passage in the tradition of the Eastern Church. But as she is equally as innocent in relation to religion as he is in relation to sex, he calls the cheerful vision »the transfiguration on the Venus mountain« (vol. II 15:14). Nev‑ ertheless, he links the transfiguration from human to divine with the demon’s transfiguration of Joe’s (child’s) body into the lust of the nymphomaniac, who later in her adult life becomes lost. In continuation of this loss of lust, the sounds of Wagner’s opera Das Rheingold are heard, and Seligman asks half‑teasingly: »Was it that bad?« (vol. II 15:33), while a naked Joe is seen falling down in the Nibelung. She answers in a serious manner: »Try to imagine that in one fell swoop you lost all desire to read. All your love and passion for books and letters« (vol. II 15:34‑15:45), which he cannot imagine at all. At the same time, a dressed Seligman is shown falling down into a mound of books. Through this dialogue and the illustrated tableaux, two things are thematised – that the Christian and the anti‑Christian are parts of the same, which is why the respective banishment and adoration of the body has always caused difficulties; and that linguistic and corporeal desire are interwoven. The chapter then dwells on the description of Joe’s lack of sexual drive, which again entails wandering alone in the forest. Here she sees three dead leaves, which perform a kind of ballet in the breeze, giving her hope of regaining her sexuality. She decides to take the initiative with regard to Jerôme in order to force her‑ self to find her sexual desire again. Their changing roles provide humour, illustrated by a scene at a restaurant where Jerôme bets Joe that she cannot fit a spoon into her vagina.306 She goes along with the joke and a number of spoons disappear from their table, 306 This is a pun in Danish, as the pronunciation of ›skede‹ (vagina) can bring with it the meaning ›ske‹ (spoon), as well as the expression ›to lie in a spoon‹ (spooning).

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causing the waiter (Udo Kier) to bring them new cutlery.307 When they leave the restaurant, the spoons fall rattling to the floor, to the indignation of the other patrons. This humorous section ends with Joe reading, sprawled on a sofa naked from the waist down. Her leafing through the book is watched by a naked, kneeling Jerôme, who ›leafs‹ in her labia. Both are wearing glasses. As in the ballet of dead leaves, one sees the labia and leaves linked together with the meaning of sexual desire. Joe becomes pregnant in this period, though without sexual desire. During the Caesarean section she believes that she sees the child’s smiling face reflected obscurely, and Seligman quickly associates this with Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann, which re‑ counts the story of Noah’s son, Ham, being born into the world grinning, and how this was interpreted as yet another Satanic sign.308 With an indifferent air, Joe tells of the child, Marcel,309 and how she felt as if he saw through her; and that he did not return her love.310 Meanwhile Jerôme has to give up satisfying her alone, and she goes out on the streets dressed as a piano teacher, where she pretends to have no understanding of cars. This trick, which causes men to wish to impress her with their knowledge of both cars and Beethoven’s fugues, proves effective. Joe removes the spark plug cables and exploits the time spent trying to fix the car. Seligman again becomes eager to compete with the men in Joe’s narrative (with his knowledge of Beethoven’s revival of the fugue), whereas Jerôme’s reaction to the extra‑marital arrange‑ ment is jealousy and absence from home. A particular section in the hunt for Joe’s satisfaction is given its own chapter, »The dangerous men«. Here we see Charlotte Gainsbourg in the role as Joe for the first time. She seeks out black men in her neighbourhood, and also a sadistic man. The first description ends in a disagreement between two black men 307 This is a clear reference to Melancholia, where at the wedding Justine’s father reprimands the waiter because there is a lack of spoons for the dinner guests. Their spoons are, however, visibly placed in the breast pocket of his jacket. Here also the waiter is played by Udo Kier. 308 Ham was the father of Nimrod, who built the Tower of Babel. Filmically, there are references to Polanski’s horror film Rosemary’s Baby (1968). 309 The reference to Marcel Proust is evident. 310 This reference to the woman’s relationship to her child, Nick, in Antichrist is followed up through the remainder of the film, in that she abandons her child at night, as he is about to jump from the balcony.

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about how her holes should be approached. An angle framing Joe sitting lost between two erect black penises is a funny pastiche on mainstream porn in film, and at the same time a more serious comment on ›dangerous sex‹ in which black people participate, often portraying only their bodies.311 In her description Joe uses the word ›negro‹ and is immediately corrected by Seligman for her politically incorrect expression. Joe replies that new words ought to protect minorities in a democracy: Each time a word becomes prohibited you remove a stone from the democratic foundation. Society demonstrates its impotence in the face of a concrete problem by removing words from the language. The book burners have nothing on modern society. […] and I say that society is as cowardly as the people in it, who in my opinion also are too stupid for democracy. […] The human qualities can be expressed in one word: hypocrisy. We elevate those who say right but mean wrong and mock those who say wrong but mean right. (Vol. II 35:46‑36:37)

Joe reveals – maybe for the first time in the film – that the Diony‑ sian way of life is dangerous for an Apollinian‑humanistic outlook. Her nomadic position does not recognise principles and polity of equal rights. She thinks and acts just like Deleuze and Guat‑ tari’s description of the nomadic outsider or deterritorialised type, who with death instinct energy can crave their own sup‑ pression in society and also express themselves in a reactionary way. This form of gesture is an expression for the revolutionary unconscious, which now and again can take a short‑cut, allowing for new connections and, for example, creating new discursive streams, which can change the ways in which minorities or the suppressed are kept in their place: The nomadic and polyvocal use of the conjunctive syntheses is in opposi‑ tion to the segregative and biunivocal use. Delirium has something like two poles, racist and radial, paranoiac‑segregative and schizonomadic. And between the two, ever so many subtle, uncertain shiftings where

311 This is also a reference to Manderlay, where Timothy covers Bess’ face with a scarf before inter‑ course.

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the unconscious itself oscillates between its reactionary charge and its revolutionary potential. (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1990, 105; author’s italics)

Minorities are namely of such a nature that they cannot be in‑ corporated into the ruling order, or gain new status by means of a different, politically correct designation. They can, on the other hand, mark out the limits of the ruling axiom: It is always astounding to see the same story repeated: the modesty of the minorities‹ initial demands, coupled with the impotence of the axiomatic to resolve the slightest corresponding problem. In short, the struggle around axioms is most important when it manifests, it‑ self opens, the gap between two types of propositions, propositions of flow and propositions of axioms. (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2013, 547‑548)

Joe’s words following the discussion of the politically incorrect word ›negro‹ are regarded by Seligman as both wild and reac‑ tionary, but he engages in using them and recognises that her experience with the two black men made her realise that she must investigate a world far from her own in order to seek out satisfaction and reclaim her lust and her life energy. This search for a new way to access her sexuality becomes the direct transition to the description of the consultations that she, after several attempts, is given by the sadist K (Jamie Bell).312 In an attempt to explain Seligman’s puzzled questions, Joe tells how she sought out the systematic violence recognised from Christ’s story of suffering before the Crucifixion. Seligman adds: »Via Dolorosa, the nine stations of the cross and 39 lashes« (vol. II 42:26). Joe submits to K’s rules that there will be no talk of sex, that she does not have the power to stop him, and that she must wait between the hours of two to six each morning without knowing when she would be called in. The last rule becomes 312 Kafka’s Josef K, who in The Trial struggles in vain against a judicial system’s impenetrable bureau‑ cracy, is an obvious reference but it can also be noted that the name of Joe’s mother, Kay, is articulated in the same way, which indicates that this route has been open for Joe from the beginning. In the film’s final chapter, »The Gun«, she takes up her mother’s habit of playing solitaire.

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the most difficult for Joe to keep, as her babysitter is unreliable. Hereafter follows in detail how she, under the pet name Fido, submits to lashes, with a whip she herself has bound (with so‑ called ›blood knots‹). She insists that the atmosphere was sexual, though a sexual exchange never took place. After having mentioned Freud’s con‑ cept of the polymorphous perverse young child as an explanation for Joe’s submission to the whip, Seligman gets involved in a long explanation of Prusik’s well‑known knot, which saved him from death while climbing a mountain. His interruption is interpreted by Joe as an angle for attention, and she comments on it in the same belittling way K would have done: »I think this was one of your weakest digressions. May I continue?« (vol. II 59:54).313 The continuation shows the consequence of having left Marcel alone. It is Jerôme, upon returning home, who saves their son from falling off the balcony.314 The consequences are logical and grue‑ some. Jerôme challenges Joe: if she leaves the house on Christmas Night, she will never see Marcel or him again. Joe cannot keep away from K, and as a result the death drive intensifies, but also the passion. Through the 40 lashes315 K gives her that same night with the whip she herself has prepared, she achieves orgasm with self‑stimulation. When Seligman asks whether Jerôme and Marcel were gone when she came back, she answers dispiritedly that she has not seen Marcel since, upon which she throws her teacup against the wall, while screaming: »This sentimentality … I hate it!« (vol. II 1:16:08). The cup shatters and leaves a stain on the wallpa‑ per. Seligman gathers together the pieces and is told the story of »The Silent Duck«, which recounts how K uses his hand, formed in the shape of a duck’s head, to stimulate Joe. The scene is then repeated without sound, and Seligman comments humorously that »one hardly dare imagine the quacking duck«

313 This is a good example of how the rhetorical strategies and their interwoven relations produce hu‑ mour in the film. There are many such places where the audience can relax and laugh. 314 The reference to Antichrist’s intro is emphasised by the aria to Händel’s Rinaldo playing as the boy stands by the bars of the balcony. 315 K announces pompously: »on account of the holidays and your behaviour today I’m going to give you the original roman maximum of 40 lashes« (1:14:14).

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(vol. II 1:19:01), after which one sees a flock of quacking ducks. The scene allows the viewer to smile – partly because the relation between the single, silent duck and the quacking flock dissolves the chapter’s sadomasochistic seriousness; and partly because the universally recognisable drawing of a duck’s head, which one can also view as a rabbit, here comes to life and even gains a function. It is well‑known that Wittgenstein utilises the figure to describe the difference between merely seeing this and seeing as. In extension of this, the viewer can see the hand as a duck, or as a hand that takes on the function of a penis. If one sees the latter, the noisy ducks become an unmanage‑ ably funny image of machinic desire and the body without organs (BwO), which according to Deleuze and Guattari is non‑repre‑ sentative and cannot be contained in either sadistic or masochistic desire – and is certainly not compatible with the Freudian Oedi‑ pus complex, which is depicted as anal‑neurotic. BwO relates to the flock and the intensities and streams of desire that function relationally on a molecular level. And though, for example, desire goes through the body and through the organs, BwO does not direct itself towards the organism. BwO remains on the level of the part‑organ, for example erogenous zones (cf. Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1990, 326). It is clearly the intensities in the BwO that attract Joe in the sessions she experiences with K. There is nothing she can do about emotions, whether they are expres‑ sions of love, sorrow or guilt. In the final chapter, »The Gun«, it is revealed that she has learned to follow these microintensities, even though they take place in the criminal register. Seligman, on the contrary, certainly does not have access to these microintensities, as he has never allowed the part objects to interfere with his Apollinian whole interpretations. His only affirmative access to Joe’s corporeal plane of intensity is through mathematical sequences and diagrams, which make it possible for him to hook on to her stories – as is the case here. He notes that K was wrong with regard to the 40 lashes, for these should be administered in series of three, and therefore Jesus received only 39 lashes. The numbers and their endless sequences, pat‑ terns and diagrams make it possible for him to understand the nomadic‑Dionysian order Joe experiences. affective figures of depression, melancholia and mania

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»The Mirror« – on renunciation and the discharge of signs Chapter 7, The Mirror, which takes its starting point in Selig‑ man’s mirror, refers directly to Tarkovsky’s partially autobio‑ graphical film of the same name from 1975.316 In Tarkovsky’s film it is dreams and memories which create the representation of the child and the man, Alexei – and not the other way around. In this chapter it is, likewise, the reflection of the child Joe that has a crucial bearing on the adult Joe’s final choice: to remain in the Dionysian, schizoid stream of desire. The chapter begins with Joe’s nymphomania becoming both visibly corporeal (Joe’s clitoris bleeds) and socially unacceptable, as her boss demands that she enters therapy. Joe mentions to Selig‑ man her aversion to psychologists. When he presses her, she de‑ scribes a previous experience with a psychologist in relation to her request to be given an abortion. Joe’s aversion towards giving either rational or emotional reasons for this request ended then with the psychologist not wanting to help her. The result was that Joe had to carry out an abortion on herself, for which she, amongst other things, used her father’s measuring gauge. The film shows in detail how she anaesthetises herself with both pills and vodka and carries out the abortion as professionally as she can, using whatever knowledge she gleaned from her medical studies. The sight of how she gradually widens her cervix with knitting needles of various thicknesses and then, with her homemade forceps, pulls the baby out of her bleeding vagina, wakes memories of the clitoridectomy in Antichrist. In Joe’s case, however, it is not her desire which is cut away, but the child.317 Joe’s next discussion with Seligman turns on how we can take the life of an embryo, or for that matter any animal’s life, for our own sake. Joe accuses Seligman of closing his eyes to what he does not want to see – for example, the woman’s 316 By the same token it is evident how one might interpret this chapter as an autobiographical refer‑ ence to Trier’s own experiences in therapy. When Joe is made aware of the mirror in Seligman’s room, it reflects a person with a camera, who is filming. This postmodernist move is immediately followed by an image showing Joe reflected in the mirror/camera. So in the chapter »The Mirror«, the person in the mir‑ ror could well be Trier himself, who thus mirrors himself in his lead character and her therapeutic sessions in an autobiographical way. 317 Haptic scanned images of the foetus in the womb, of the foetus being ripped from the vagina and the lifeless foetus outside allow for further recollections of The Kingdom I, where the abortion of Lillebror must be abandoned when Judith goes into labour. The nurse’s definition here mentions how it is an abor‑ tion if the foetus is in the womb, but murder if it is outside.

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feelings about abortion, which is thus made into a construction that he, as a man, would not be able to understand, let alone relate to emotionally. She accuses him of not showing empathy, which otherwise is the foundation of humanism, and that he does not want to discuss the techniques of foeticide. But he does not believe that macabre details will make him more knowledgeable. She then accuses him in corresponding ways of closing his eyes to the fact that animals die for our sake, and how they die, saying that taboos are destructive. He responds by stating that her abortion is a luxury problem. He believes that her principle on openness, »of showing all the gory details« (vol. II 1:38:08), could be calamitous for those who really are in need, and for whom an abortion can mean some‑ thing extremely positive. But Joe persists and shows the abortion method, as it is used in hospitals: the so‑called nutcracker, which crushes the foetus‹ head in the womb, in order for it to be removed. This shocks Seligman, and Joe mocks a clearly emotionally af‑ fected Seligman for not wanting to allow people to make their own choices on a well‑informed basis. After this we see how Joe, despite her animosity, attends group therapy, where she is pressured to recognise that her addiction resembles everyone else’s. She also learns from the therapist that it is only one person in a million who can live without sexuality, but that she can help the process by removing everything which instigates a sexual stimulus. Joe attempts to abstain for three weeks and five days.318 As she reads aloud to the group her confession of how she has moved on from her sexual addiction, she looks up for a moment from her paper, and in the reflection in front of her sees an im‑ age of herself as a young girl. When she turns around, however, the girl is nowhere to be found. But the vision in the mirror of her own earlier self does not disappear, and this causes her to rip up the statement and profess to nymphomania and to diversity, which ends with a bombastic speech aimed at the therapist: That empathy you claim is a lie. Because all you are is society’s morality police whose duty it is to erase my obscenity from the surface of the 318

Again the Fibonacci numbers 3+5 are used.

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earth so that the bourgeoisie won’t feel sick. I’m not like you. I am a nymphomaniac, and I love myself for being one. But above all I love my cunt and my filthy, dirty lust. (Vol. II 1:49:16‑1:50:48)

Following this, Joe leaves the group and sets a car on fire to the sounds of Talking Heads‹ »Burning down the house« (1983). Seligman does not understand this metaphor for desire, and this is why Joe sums up how she does not have a place for society, as there has never been a place for her in society. In addition, she apologises that, in his monastic cell of a bed‑ room, she can no longer find anything to connect to her story. He asks her to change direction. This is illustrated with the female sexual organ, viewed from below, being turned over and the oval creating a closed eye, which opens. This leap from the one part element to another is known from Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye (Bataille [1967] 1986). In the introduction, »Metaphor of the Eye«,319 Roland Barthes describes Bataille’s style thus: For Bataille, what matters is to traverse the vacillation of several objects (an entirely modern notion, unknown to Sade), so that they exchange the functions of the obscene and those of substance (the consistency of the soft‑boiled egg, the bloody and nacreous tinge of the bull’s testicles, the vitreous quality of the eye). (Barthes [1964] 1992, 246)

Barthes is here clearly speaking of that which Deleuze and Guat‑ tari call objects or bodies without organs, which clash together and create fields of intensity – as what is characteristic in Bataille is, according to Barthes, that he exhausts the metaphor of the eye, so the meaning is transgressed (op. cit., 142). Joe takes up the challenge and turns her head so that the mark made by the teacup on the wall resembles a gun. Seligman believes that it is a revolver but Joe chides him, because it does not have a revolving drum and therefore is not a pistol, according to Ian Fleming’s books, which Seligman is not acquainted with. She 319 Barthes‹ text is included in the Danish version of Bataille’s Story of the Eye (Bataille 1986); the quo‑ tation underneath is from the latest printed version of Barthes‹ Critical Essays in English (Barthes 1992).

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teases him: »If you haven’t read that you haven’t read anything at all« (vol. II 1:54:31), and then without difficulty she characterises the stain as an imaginary Walther PPK automatic, well‑known as the pistol used by James Bond. In summary, Joe openly admits her desire in public for the first time, in that she simultaneously goes from a masochistic to a sadistic position. Through therapy she realises that desire has a reason and should be sought in part objects. It is also the first time that the Trieresque diagrams follow her and not Seligman’s interpretation, which has already been clarified in the discussion of the pistol and its characteristics. »The Gun« – on the cycle of signs and death The eighth and final chapter is entitled »The Gun« and not »The Pistol« or »The Revolver«, which there is a reason for, as will be shown. This section begins with Joe taking up the thread of leav‑ ing society: she becomes a criminal and enters into the unsavoury world of debt collection, guided by L (Willem Dafoe), with whom she enters into a kind of sadistic alliance. She utilises her sexual experience and knowledge of a broad spectrum of men and be‑ comes successful. Amongst other things, she persuades a man (Jean‑Marc Barr) to pay by telling erotic stories. His member becomes a kind of truth‑detector, becoming erect at the point of a paedophiliac twist in her story. She performs a blowjob on him, in order to comfort him and because, as she explains to Selig‑ man, she felt sorry for him after living his entire life suppressing his desire, and living in self‑denial without ever harming anyone. Seligman cannot see anything commendable in paedophilia, but Joe persists: That’s because you think of the perhaps 5% who actually hurt children. The remaining 95% never live out their fantasies. Think about their suffering. Sexuality is the strongest force in human beings. To be born with a forbidden sexuality must be agonizing. The paedophile who manages to get through life with the shame of his desire while never acting on it deserves a bloody medal. (2:03:13‑2:03:46)

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Another reason for fellating him, she explains, was that she saw a man who, much like herself, had become a lonely sexual outcast. Joe’s long defence, which to a large extent follows up on the question of political incorrectness (around the word ›negro‹ and the purpose of therapy), is an important contribution to her re‑ volt and defence of the rhizomatic, nomadic multiplicity, inter‑ mezzo and assemblage, which Foucault in the introduction to Anti-Oedipus describes as »ars erotica, ars theoretica, ars politica« (Foucault [1972] 1990, xii), and which Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus describe as follows: The nomads invented a war machine in opposition to the State appa‑ ratus. History has never comprehended nomadism, the book has never comprehended the outside. The State as the model for the book and for thought has a long history: logos, the philosopher‑king, the transcend‑ ence of the idea, the interiority of the concept, the republic of minds, the court of reason, the functionaries of thought, man as legislator and subject. The State’s pretension to be a world order, and to root man. The war machine’s relation to an outside is not another »model«; it is an assemblage that makes thought itself nomadic, and the book a working part in every mobile machine, a stem for a rhizome (Kleist and Kafka against Goethe).320 (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2013, 26)

When Joe is encouraged to find a successor in the debt collection branch, it occurs anti‑genealogically. She is instructed by L to become a mentor for a young person whose parents (because of criminality or abuse) were not able to fulfil their role as parents. He explains how taking on the role of a mentor entails show‑ ing interest and empathy and thus effectively being a parent. In this way one gains a loyal helper, who perhaps would even serve time in prison out of loyalty. Although Joe is against the idea, she enters into a kind of mentorship for a 15‑year‑old girl, P (Mia Goth), whose father is in prison and whose mother has died from an overdose. Joe is not enamoured at the thought but takes an interest in P, especially because of her misshapen ear that the 320 Interestingly, in connection with Nymphomaniac, just before this passage mathematics is character‑ ised positively: »it’s not a science, it’s a monster slang, it’s« (op. cit., 26).

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girl constantly attempts to hide. The meeting with P fills Joe with sympathy and she turns up every weekend to her basketball games in order to cheer her on, even though she is extremely bad at it – a team sport she has chosen because she feels lonely. Joe gives her a birthday present – a book about trees – and takes her along to the forest from her childhood, where she is reminded of the dialogue about the souls of the trees resembling human souls, and her father saying: »Twisted souls, regular souls, crazy souls. All depending of the kind of lives human beings lead« (vol. II 2:10:13‑20:10.20). In contrast to him, Joe has not yet found her tree, though she does later in the chapter. Joe’s tree is, as mentioned, lonely, windswept and wizened, growing against all the odds on a barren mountain top. When P comes of age, she moves in with Joe and becomes a great comfort (also sexually) to Joe, who has withdrawal symptoms and a sore on her clitoris that will not heal. P finds her in the bathroom suffering from cramps, after hearing her drop a glass on the floor.321 They begin a relationship on the basis of their two congenital deformities, the part objects, the sore and the ear. P becomes involved in Joe’s business, and it does not bother her that Joe’s work is illegal; on the contrary, P is so eager that Joe needs to reprimand her when she suddenly threatens a man with a gun. Joe takes the weapon into safe keeping and P calls her evil. Shortly afterwards, when Joe and P need to recover a debt from none other than (an older version of) Jêrome (Michael Pas), who lives in a rich neighbourhood, Joe asks P to carry out the job on her own. She is, however, emotionally affected by the sight of Jerôme and walks home through the alleyway where Seligman later finds her. Joe comments on how the poor quarter borders the rich, as she makes her shortcut through the city centre.322 P is in fine spirits when she returns home but Joe soon becomes jeal‑ ous. She seeks out Jerôme’s house and, much like a peeping tom, sees Jerôme kiss P, who is naked and drinking wine from a bottle. Joe’s response is to escape the city and go up into the mountains, 321 A clear reference to the images in Antichrist, where the woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg) has with‑ drawal symptoms after throwing out her pills. 322 The smooth and striated space often border one another and constitute a variable boundary surface (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2013, chapter 14).

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where she finds her soul tree. She stands for a long while looking at it, just as the tree ›examines‹ her, after which there is a zoom out to reveal Joe and the tree, each on their peaks. The final shot quite clearly marks the juxtaposition of human and tree in the same landscape, which can be seen as a critical comment on the Romantic centring of the human figure in relation to the sub‑ lime landscape.323 Joe’s body and the tree’s body are depicted in this scene as equal parts of nature. This creates a run‑up to Joe’s reflections on how obvious and natural it is for a human to kill. In the following scene we see Joe take out the gun from its concealed place in the cupboard, and pass through the alleyway on her way to Jerôme’s house, before hearing a sound and hiding. She sees Jerôme and P giddily flirting, and he offers P his hand, his ›fireman’s grip‹, which he often extended to Joe. This is the final straw: Joe aims the gun at Jerôme’s head and squeezes the trigger twice, but nothing happens. She then awkwardly places the gun back in her pocket, after which the signs of dominance run amok. Jerôme hits her in the head with his fist, and she falls. He kicks her and hits her again in the face five times, which stimulates him as well as P, and they have sex on a bin in the garden in Joe’s line of sight. The well‑known numbers 3 + 5 appear, and the meaning is just as hard‑hitting as the first time Joe experienced the effect of their objectification, domestication and destruction. After this follows contempt and degradation as P straddles Joe, who is lying on the ground, and urinates on her. After the couple have left the scene, Joe utters the same words as at the end of Vol. I: »Fill all my holes, please«, while her eyes follow in the direction of the couple who have walked away. This can be seen as a totally masochistic acceptance of how Jerôme’s desire and rule dominates hers, but also as Joe having the last word: he (still) cannot satisfy her desire or satisfy her. Speaking to Seligman, Joe wonders still why the gun, which had a full magazine, did not work. Seligman reasons logically and says that even though it was loaded and the safety was off, she should probably have gone through the loading motions: »You pull and release the sliding mechanism« (vol. II 2:36:34). On the screen 323

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The sun shining on the wall across from Seligman’s apartment is described by Joe as »beautiful«, and in this way she accepts her own direction.

one sees the movements carried out with three different guns,324 and Joe realises he is right. In this way her story as well as their shared learning process and dialogue is brought to a close, and likewise the night. The sun sketches a rectangle on the opposite wall, as the camera looks out of the bedroom windows. Joe says how beautiful it is, and this becomes the cue for Seligman, who sums up his interpretation in the form of a kind of absolution in relation to her story, while images from the film’s two parts file past: In the beginning you said that your only sin was that you asked more of the sunset, meaning I suppose that you wanted more from life than was good for you. You were a human being demanding your right. And more than that. You were a woman demanding her right. […] Do you think that if two men would have walked down the train looking for women, do you think anybody would have raised an eyebrow? Or if a 324 He continues: »You have to wreck an automatic pistol.« Wreck means ›destroy‹, but the correct trans‑ lation for ›tage ladegreb‹ according to the dictionary is to cock. Under any circumstances the mechanical conformity with the pistol and the male member’s ›physiognomy‹ is not coincidental here. There is thus a reference to the fact that Joe (as yet) cannot quite command that which is attributed to the male physique.

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man had led the life you have? And the story about Mrs. H would have been extremely banal if you’d been a man and your conquest would have been a woman. When a man leaves his children because of desire, we accept it with a shrug. But you as a woman, you had to take on a burden of guilt that could never be eliminated. Your abortion was legal, but more than anything else it was a punishment you afflicted upon yourself. And all and all, all the blame and guilt that piled up over the years became too much for you and you reacted aggressively. Almost like a man, I have to say. And you fought back. You fought back against the gender that had been oppressing and mutilating and killing you and billions of women. In the name of religion or ethics or god knows what. (1:46:56‑1:48:24)

Joe objects that she in fact was about to kill another human being, but Seligman responds that she didn’t in fact kill anyone. She calls this a fluke, while he calls it unconscious resistance, stating that it was only on the surface that she wanted to kill, but that deep inside she recognised the human value, which made her forget how to cock the weapon (1:48:47‑1:48:57). Joe becomes too tired to argue, though she believes he is only speaking in clichés. She lies down and, just before falling asleep, says that she, like a de‑ formed tree on a mountain top, would like to work on being the one in a million who, according to her therapist, succeeded in ridding themselves of their sexuality, both mentally and physically, as well as emotionally. She also thanks Seligman, believing him to be possibly her only friend who might be happy (cf. his name). And finally she says that she is happy that, in spite of everything, she never became a murderer – and lays down to sleep. Later Seligman enters, crawls into the bed and attempts to have sex with the sleeping Joe. She wakes, sees what he is doing and cries out: »No!«, grabbing the gun from her jacket pocket and cocking the mechanism. Before the screen turns black, he says un‑ comprehendingly: »But you, you fucked thousands of men« (vol. II 2:45:47). Only the sound of the shot remains, then something falls, and there is the sound of Joe zipping up her long boots, her footsteps, which we follow out of the room, down the staircase – and finally the cat flap’s creaking motion as she opens the door and the wind blows in. 342

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With this final chapter it becomes clear that the two princi‑ ples, the Apollinian and the Dionysian, will never be reconciled. In accordance with theatre tradition, the last shot releases the expectation that if one is shown a gun it will be fired.325 The story thus comes to an end, and all its elements weave together in Seligman’s summary that everything she has done, and which she herself considers sinful, would not have been perceived in the same way if it were a man who acted as she did. But the ending becomes something else, if one relates the umbrella description of »the gun« to the diagram. According to this method of seeing, the mark on the wall is transformed into a sign, which first (in Seligman’s representation) becomes a re‑ volver, and then (in Joe’s representation) into a gun, and which Joe (in the real plane) learns to handle – and it is only then that »the gun« becomes a real, conspicuous and tangible gun, giving Joe a line of escape out of the enveloping movement or confine‑ ment of the interpretation. The diagrammatic exchange goes from sign to reality.326 Seligman’s reasoning – that she has had sex with thousands of men – does not legitimise his actions, but it keenly explains how he thinks. He believes that Dionysian unruliness can and ought to be ordered and interpreted in an Apollinian way, and that this entitles him to a specific access to it. He, on the other hand, does not recognise the contrary – that the Dionysian can at any time break into the Apollinian order. This could perhaps be the reason that he does not gain access to his own sexuality as power. As Joe fires the weapon, and the screen turns black, it is not merely Seligman’s desire for knowledge and form‑giving which is destroyed; the viewer’s voyeuristic (and fundamentally pornographic) visual appetite also stands in the line of fire in the film’s final images. They are completely blacked out. It is the diagrammatical, in Trier’s sense, which creates the al‑ ternative readings that are put forward. As mentioned previously, Trier’s diagrams are different from Proust’s in that they settle like an extra layer over the diagrams that create the story.327 Trier’s 325 Seligman’s gun, however, does not ›go off‹, which one perhaps might have expected after Joe showed compassion in the scene with the paedophile. On the contrary, it is ›her gun‹ which shoots. 326 The same happens in the final scene of Dogville, where the sketched dog, Moses, is brought to life. 327 Cf, that it is the smashed teacup (à la Proust), which causes the final, exemplary diagram.

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The stain on the wallpaper left by the teacup becomes a sign of a revolver and then a pistol.

diagrams collect affects in themselves, and the most important thing is that they produce affects directly in the viewer. As with the Brechtian Verfremdung, they hinder the abandonment and immersion in the erotic images, and also communicate directly with the viewer in a way that is not merely Apollinian machina‑ tions, but which also, in haptic ways, interpellate vision as being allied corporeally. The machinic and mathematical diagrams point to endless combinations and create a fertile breeding ground for many kinds of relations. In light of these diagrams, Trier gives the viewer access to a molecular plane, which is alien to the narrative, and thus displays the film’s signaletic material and the compositional elementary forms, such as the relation between the measuring gauge, leaves and genitalia. The Trieresque diagrams cause the viewer to be kept occupied by the modulations of the surface, the haptic, the skin – the signaletic. Seligman searches in the abyss and creates confusion with all his attempts at interpretation and intertextual references. This is bait for the viewer’s narrative desire. The dia‑ grams are thus superficial. Like Proust’s memories of a lost time, Trier’s diagrams pay homage to the surface and draw attention 344

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to the film’s signaletic material, which has a direct questioning effect on the viewer. Where Proust’s diagrams give perspective on the material and bring it to life in the orchestration of a vir‑ tual space of resonance between the present time and the past, Trier’s diagrams additionally involve the viewer affectively, and this makes the signaletic material sensuous, perceptible like a stream, a micropolitical desire of sexuality. In other words, Trier involves the viewer as a part object, as a body without organs – so when Seligman is shot, the viewer is also shot, because: the BwO is never yours or mine. It is always a body. It is no more projec‑ tive than it is regressive. It is an involution, but always a contemporary, creative involution. The organs distribute themselves on the BwO, but they distribute themselves independently of the form of the organism; forms become contingent, organs are no longer anything more than intensities that are produced, flows, thresholds, and gradients. »A« stomach, »an« eye, »a« mouth: the indefinite article does not lack any‑ thing; it is not indeterminate or undifferentiated, but expresses the pure determination of intensity, intensive differences. The indefinite article is the conductor of desire. It is not at all a question of a fragmented, splintered body, of organs without the body (OwB). The BwO is exactly the opposite. There are not organs in the sense of fragments in relation to a lost unity, nor is there a return to the undifferentiated in relation to a differentiable totality. There is a distribution of intensive principles of organs, with their positive indefinite articles, within a collectivity or multiplicity, inside an assemblage, and according to machinic connec‑ tions operating on a BwO. Logos spermaticos. (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2013, 191, 182, 209; authors’ italics)

Nymphomaniac is thus haptic both in the sense that composi‑ tions modulate the surface, and in the sense that the viewer as a BwO is included affectively and becomes part of the diagram’s assemblages, through which microperceptive displacements in what is viewed can occur. Nymphomaniac creates the signaletic material from all the signs we recognise from pornographic nar‑ ratives in literature and film. When these signs are included in the signaletic material and create diagrammatic relations with affective figures of depression, melancholia and mania

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the viewer’s BwO, the film can be understood as an interface: our eyes, mouths, bodies and other part objects have become part of the image. Sexual arousal, which against expectations does not make an appearance, despite lots of nudity, copulating situations and movements, has shifted itself to the diagrammatic interface’s multiple assemblages of BwO, which the viewer becomes a part of. The film thus also involves the culture and the cultural ques‑ tions which are ours. If we now return to the relationship between the Dionysian and the Apollinian, one can perhaps say that Joe administers a Nietzschean critique of a Schopenhauerian philosophy. The mel‑ ancholic withdrawn denial of life forces, which is philosophy’s (and religion’s) condition in Schopenhauer, is challenged by Ni‑ etzsche with a gamble on the eternal recurrence of the same, which is the Dionysian motif. The eternal recurrence is qualified in Deleuze, who in the diagram of the time‑image points to the fact that, compositionally, other stylistic figurations can be created in the material rather than the narrative. With this the virtual and its actualisation can be covered as compositions in the signaletic material. But in Nymphomaniac Lars von Trier succeeds – as in the majority of his films, each in their own imaginative ways – in creating affect diagrams, which involve the viewer affectively, sensuously and corporeally.

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CHAPTER 9

Concluding remarks on Lars von Trier’s filmic affect diagrams

As mentioned in the introduction, the various readings of Trier’s films presented in this book will conclude in some determinations of what I will call ›affect diagrams‹. This term is intended as an extension of Gilles Deleuze’s categories of the filmic movement‑ image and time‑image. The need to develop a term for filmic affect diagrams has shown itself through the book’s analyses, in that the readings have clarified how Trier’s films involve the viewer affectively in various ways. This affective level is not found in the forms of affect which, for example, Steven Shaviro brings to light through analysis in Post Cinematic Affect (2010), or which Eug‑ enie Brinkema seeks to clarify through the contexts of history of ideas and filmically in The Forms of the Affects (2014). The post‑ cinegraphic, which is linked to neoliberal forms of production and control by Shaviro, and the trans‑historical view, which Brinke‑ ma’s analyses develop, do not reflect on how viewers become an interface’s ›third level‹ – as they do with Trier – expanding a classic receiver position towards the affective, which is essential to any reading of these films. Ideas about the film’s ›meaning‹ slip into the background here, in favour of an affective activation of the viewer’s entire perception apparatus with the use of haptic images and affective diagrams. The affect diagrammatic level can appear affectively activating and inciting, but this simultaneously allows for an experience of a diagrammatical, compositional level. Though one cannot in the strictest sense understand films as interface‑creation between viewers‹ bodies and the screen, this book’s readings show how these films turn physical sensations into co‑composers. The pos‑ concluding remarks on lars von trier’s filmic affect diagrams

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sibilities of haptic images creating delineations other than the representational, which Deleuze described in relation to Bres‑ son’s use of the work of the hands rather than the exchange of looks (Deleuze 1986, 22), can, with Trier’s different forms of composition, be said to expand diagrammatically. The result is that Trier’s affect diagrams can create alternative forms of deline‑ ations (rather than the representational and narratological) in the filmic, signaletic material. His dialogical reworking of haptically‑ oriented compositions from the films of Dreyer and Tarkovsky, which Deleuze also has a strong interest in, have functioned in my readings as some points of reference for analytically sharpening attention on further innovations in haptic compositions, towards an affective involvement of the viewer. As has been shown, this happens primarily in the Golden Heart trilogy, where the pathos of melodrama is drawn towards the direction of both the passion of the Christian sacrificial figure, and the tragic suffering. In and with the affective excesses of the hand‑held camera, jump‑cut editing and several layers of dub‑ bing, which heighten the haptic noise in both Breaking the Waves and The Idiots, as well as Dancer in the Dark, it is made clear that irony and pathos are two sides of the same coin. These films turn the critical position inside out, always entailing a subject positioning from a distance and in control over the events. This development of the haptic towards the affective in Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark effectively creates an antithesis to the Romantic landscape painting and the musical respectively. In Breaking the Waves, haptic descriptions of the face are brought in diagrammatically close contact with the landscape to such an extent that foreground and background meld together and disturb the faciality prevalent in Christian culture. In Dancer in the Dark, it is the 100 cameras which make it possible, in a diagrammati‑ cally‑rhythmic manner, to break with the dominance of the gaze over the visual. In the same way that Breaking the Waves ends with Bess’s body being swallowed up by the landscape, giving a ›divine resonance‹, Dancer in the Dark ends with both vision and hearing being lost. What is left is the viewer’s own feeling of their own body in the darkness. In its attempts to fuse digital sound and digital recordings, the film emphasises both how Selma 348

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can make ›outer‹ noise into rhythms, which enter into the body, and how affective sensations ›from within‹ Selma can make the outer world implode, so events can be remade, touched up and rewound. Both films show how affect diagrams can function as correctives to ›outer‹ narrative actions. The Idiots demonstrates the Dogme rules functioning as diagrams in their pure form, both including the viewer affectively and giving space for a new realisation of how visual events are created interactively. The viewer is enabled to feel the act of viewing through the corporeal affects which the film gives rise to. At the same time, the lack of conventional aesthetics and narrative criteria most often utilised by entertainment films make it clear for the viewer that the clas‑ sic subject position is something that is constructed and selected. With The Idiots‹ projection of its compositional diagram, Lars von Trier draws attention to the idea that the body forms part of visual perception and that affective, physical sensing is an important part of the interface event, enabling a folding between sensing from ›within‹ and ›without‹ simultaneously. As the diagram is depicted here and in the following films, Trier permits the viewer to experience the intervention of other forms of affect diagrams. In The Five Obstructions and The Boss of It All, other forms of losing control are allowed, which encourage carnivalesque slapstick laughter and an absurd comedy respec‑ tively. In the first film, the body and its positioning are very much central – in Jørgen Leth’s The Perfect Human (1967) as well as in the documentary film showing Leth ›behind the films‹. As in The Idiots, the demands placed on Leth’s filmic obstructions make up clear diagrams, with the intention of bringing the controlled subject’s position on to unstable ground. In The Boss of It All, the specially developed Automavision® takes control of the function of the diagram. Trier’s voice‑over frames the film, and he is shown sitting (like a personal puppeteer of Automavision®) on a dolly with the camera: ›outside‹, so to speak. With Automavison’s® depersonalised take, Trier presents the viewer with a diagram‑ matical position, where the affective storm of ›inner disturbances‹ can be pinpointed as being absurd. With Dogville and Manderlay, the laughter ceases at the ex‑ pense of a politically involved seriousness, which borrows traits concluding remarks on lars von trier’s filmic affect diagrams

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from Euripides‹ Medea and Pirate Jenny’s song from Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. Both of these inspirations have uncon‑ ventional endings, where the female main character manages to quite miraculously – and contrary to filmic conventions – carry out her violent revenge and simultaneously avoid punishment. With the cameras suspended from the ceiling, the lines on the floor and the barely sketched houses are made to function, so that the viewer – as in a Brechtian Verfremdung – must relate to a digitally composed depiction of a total overview perspective. This, together with the unconventional, violent endings followed by Jacob Holt’s images, which actualise a ›then‹ to a ›now‹, simulta‑ neously creates an affect‑diagrammatical interface. For example, one can both follow the rape of Grace close up and see it from a distance – as if through the eyes of the other inhabitants. The diagram’s surveillance perspective in Dogville and Manderlay is visible as something which can, in fact, also be politically activat‑ ing, and which one can choose to break with by involving oneself affectively‑diagrammatically in other types of perspectives. In Dogville, where Grace changes her state of mind, this possibility is shown by a cloud gliding away and the moonlight revealing Dogville’s murky side, while the same can be said to happen in Manderlay when the white handkerchief obscures Grace’s vision. Both are instances of an affect‑diagrammatical transformation from sign to action. In Antichrist, Melancholia and Nymphomaniac, the sketching of the affect diagram as an extra aid to the visual investment in the film is even clearer, in that the middle ground between the two sexes, the woman and the man, is described as demonic through an extraordinary activation of haptic images in high‑speed re‑ cordings, intensified musically by Händel’s aria in the intro to Antichrist, which helps establish the film’s affective level. In addi‑ tion, it shows diagrammatically how both current therapy and the historical judgement of the witch trials is based on transferences between I and you. The haptic field functions here as a diagram wherein the affective field – to influence and be influenced – becomes uncontrollable and destructive. No matter whether one follows the man’s or the woman’s track, the question of guilt remains central. With the help of a false flashback, which makes 350

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the Nietzschean interpretive tracks more than mere formal tools, Trier enables the viewer – in diagrammatical ways – to sense how we are always already woven in interpretation due to our positioning. In Melancholia the affective diagram includes human relations not only to one another, but also to the universe. Here, as in Nymphomaniac, the diagrams are drawn as mathematical calculations and reckonings, which lay like an extra interpre‑ tive layer on the screen. These diagrams can be seen as forms of Verfremdung, making it possible to create a distance to the film’s fabula, but also as haptic forms of hypermediacy, which enable the viewer to reside on the screen’s surface and concentrate on the its affective plane of intensity. Justine’s melancholic and Claire’s angst‑filled tracks are described most expressively, but it is in the high‑speed recordings, where the melancholic beauty inspires a Schopenhauerian step back from the stream of the events, that the film’s affect diagram becomes clearest. In Nymphomaniac, the relationship between the Dionysian and the Apollinian approach to existence, which is characteristic of the Depression trilogy, is described in a more literary manner. But the affect diagrams, which partly weave Joe’s stories together with Seligman’s inter‑ pretations, and partly link the actual (filmic) narrative level with the virtual (literary) interpretive level in line with Proust’s method, also gain an obvious third function: they involve the viewer directly in the work of interpretation, which often contains digressions and false interpretive tracks. In this way the screen becomes rhi‑ zomatic, and the film’s signaletic material is rendered visible to such a degree that a voyeuristic (and pornographic) way of viewing can be abandoned. This film succeeds to a great extent in creat‑ ing an affect‑diagrammatic interface with the viewer, making an affirmative, Dionysian approach to life tangible. The film’s affect diagrams succeed so well because the viewer does not merely (like Seligman) seek to understand Joe’s motives, but is also influenced affectively by the signaletic material, constituted by the account of her sexual lines of flight‑ and this to such an extent that the desire for images gives rise to afterthoughts in searching for the diagrammatic event in the material, which might yet be revealed. In the final part of Cinema 2: The Time-Image (with a reference to the films of Tony Conrad and George Landow respectively), concluding remarks on lars von trier’s filmic affect diagrams

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Deleuze touches on how future films ought to be closely linked to the work of the mind: »A flickering brain, which relinks or creates loops – this is cinema« (Deleuze 1989, 215). He continues in an inquisitive manner, anticipating Trier’s use of haptic images and affective compositions – in short, what one might call the affect‑ diagrammatic method: Everything can be used as a screen, the body of a protagonist or even the bodies of the spectators; everything can replace the film stock, in a virtual film which now only goes on in the head, behind the pupils, with sound sources taken as required from the auditorium. A disturbed brain‑death or a new brain which would be at once the screen, the film stock and the camera, each time membrane of the outside and the inside. (Deleuze ibid.)

Although this was written long before the interface became a real‑ ity, it is interesting that Deleuze, in this chapter, which concerns the film’s body‑mind relation to reasoning, in fact anticipates current digital interfaces involving body and mind in much more than the decoding of classic filmic forms of representation. As has been shown in Lars von Trier’s films, today’s post‑cinematic reality, where multiple screens are on offer, actually makes it possible to revisit the mind‑body relation. Those affect diagrams, which through Trier’s film work have become ever clearer, show how the film strip can be orchestrated as an interfacial mem‑ brane, connecting the inner and outer in a continuous exchange. The diagram involves an extradiegetic level which no longer has the forming of a whole of the film’s fabula as its aim, but which transversally involves the bodies of the viewers affectively. In that interface, which can thus exist, the virtual contact between an outer gaze and an inner affect or sensation becomes crucial in allowing thought to abandon the expected. It is my hope that with the analyses in this book, I have been able to show that Trier’s affect diagrams can provoke transversal relations.

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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.

AARHUS UNIVERSITY PRESS

Lars von Trier’s Renewal of Film1984 -2014

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 his experiments with narrative forms, genre, camera usage, light, and colour tones, she shows how Trier’s unique and 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 a.o. on the haptic image, the diagram, affect, and the signaletic material.

Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen

Lars von Trier’s Renewal of Film 1984-2014

SIGNAL PIXEL DIAGRAM

“Lars von Trier’s Renewal of Film is a masterful study of the full breadth of von Trier’s work. The book presents a chronicle of the work, expertly situated in the history of the medium of film, in its relation to video and digital media. More than that – and this is what puts the book in a league of its own – Thomsen develops an original theory of the image unique enough to merit a new name: “signaletic materialism” might do. But don’t be misled by the weightiness of the term. It signposts an approach uniquely equipped to make felt immediacy of the image, accounting for its embodied nature and affective force with both evocative power and analytical precision. Thomsen’s in-depth, often scene-by-scene, analyses of von Trier’s compositional techniques go beyond formal analysis to convey how the logic of the medium is one with an event of perception, ever renewed and endlessly varied.” Brian Massumi author of Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts

Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen

“An inspiring and insightful work of passion and scholarly dedication, Bodil Thomsen’s thorough analysis of Lars von Trier’s oeuvre is an aesthetic revelation of haptic quality and potentialities. While the DeleuzeGuattarian inspired concept of the ‘affect diagram’ is the guiding method to navigate Trier’s audio-visual style across pixels, colors and digital signals, one can almost feel and touch the images on every page that disclose always new senses and sensations beyond the film’s stories and representations.” Patricia Pisters University of Amsterdam