Trying retroactively to account for my steadfast refusal to see the film, arrived at eight years ago, I can only take the blatantly ahistorical, illogical, and quintessentially Trieresque tack of citing a remark of his quoted in the Guardian only six months ago. Trump is simply and ineluctably a fact of nature, the clenching proof that the cosmos is innately soulless and evil regardless of what we might say or do about it or about him. Skipping a couple of other scenes, he then provides us with an opening of his own invention.
Seeing the immediate effect of Dogme 95 as a sales pitch and buzz word on a prominent Variety reviewer, who suddenly became interested in Danish cinema for the first and possibly last time, I quickly realized how well von Trier had absorbed the lessons of the New German Cinema, in which the cult of personality and the thrill of sado-masochism could almost take the place of and thus eliminate the need for aesthetics and politics, even while it pretended to brandish both of the latter proudly on its sleeve.
If only these defenders had anything of interest to say about this supposedly groundbreaking vow of technical chastity, quickly abandoned by von Trier himself, I might have taken it more seriously. On the other hand, I was mainly bored by The Idiots , Dogville , and Melancholia , apart from a few pretty shots in the latter.
As for Dogvill e, those who have called this blend of Brecht and Our Town anti-American may be overrating its ideological coherence. Italics mine. A sheepish postscript: Curiosity combined with a certain laxity and the coronavirus pandemic eventually conspired to persuade me to watch Antichrist and, months later, to sample a few bits of The House That Jack Built —but not at least so far to broach Part 2 of Nymphomaniac.
Fox ;. Brief reflection on The House That Lars Jerrybuilt : Apparently not enough chaos to rule out the English language market for Antichrist , where all the foxes can be counted on to have read the script in both Yank-talk and Danish, but presumably just enough chaos to entice the Disney people with a remake option.
