![]() I proposed starting with a detailed outline explaining, scene by scene, how I planned to diverge from the first draft. The original script was written by Fridrikh Gorenshtein (the screenwriter of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris) and it was laughably awful-or maybe just badly translated. ![]() He was involved in preproduction on Breaking the Waves and I was hired by a producer to redo a script von Trier owned about a bizarre historical figure, Baron Ungern von Sternberg, a German-Russian aristocrat and Czarist officer who in 1921 lead anti-Bolshevik forces in Siberia, briefly conquered Mongolia, and dreamed of an Asian Buddhist army that under his command would conquer Europe. Von Trier’s subsequent accomplishments grew from this unfussy vigorous method, as did the concepts that became Dogme95.įull disclosure: though I’ve never met or spoken with him, I worked as a writer for von Trier once. He started to focus intensively on working with actors, on handheld camerawork, and a new, nervously kinetic editing style. Quickly setting up the TV series The Kingdom, a mix of horror, soap, and medical drama, he eliminated all vestiges of art-film glamour from his work. This embarrassing episode turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to von Trier. Von Trier was so indignant at not receiving the Palme d’Or that he denounced the Jury president Roman Polanski as a “midget.” But Europa, which tried to do with post–World War II Europe what Dogville was to do so brilliantly with America in the Thirties-namely, turn a small, historically based crime story into a comprehensive vision of the human condition-was, for all its elegance, opaque and unconvincing. With a prestigious international cast and visuals more elaborate than anything he had previously attempted, especially in terms of production design and optical effects, it was as if von Trier was aspiring to be the European Coppola. In 1991, the 35-year-old von Trier came to Cannes with the Holocaust-themed Europa (released in the U.S. Crisis has been a regular if not predictable feature of von Trier’s career from the start. It is a transitional work made by an artist clearly in crisis, but not necessarily the psychological crisis he discussed at length in the press at Cannes.īut this movie shouldn’t have come as such a shock to the festival’s film journalists. Antichrist is neither disgusting and worthless, nor is it one of the great films. There will be no thumbs up or down in this article. ![]()
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