Lars Von Trier has made a career out of stunts: explicit
material, crass juxtapositions between the high and low, casting of unexpected
actors, and outlandish statements. This makes Von Trier at once a nuisance in
contemporary cinema—someone who thinks he is telling the Real Truth when it’s
just a satirized form of regular ideology—and perhaps a necessity. It'd be
great if the American vision of contemporary Euro-Art cinema was, say, more
Alain Guiaurdie or Thomas Arslan, but instead we have Von Trier and Herr
Haneke, mostly because the way they directly invoke and challenge the expectations
of Hollywood cinema. In a way, they urge us to balance our diet of Hollywood
cinema with their “cultural vegetables.” Von Trier’s cinema wouldn’t exist
without someone to gasp at it.
This is all to say, the easy reading of Nymphomaniac, his five and a half hour opus, would be as a
self-critical examination of the director’s own career. One could even place
each of the chapter's into the various sections of his filmography: plot points
from Breaking The Waves, a direct
quotation of a scene and the music from Antichrist;
is the scene of Joe and the African men is a play on Manderlay? Even Joe's discussion of Hitler and the way Seligman
misinterprets her point of evokes Von Tirer’s indiscretion at the 2011 Cannes Film
Festival.
