The director Lars Von Trier called a “pig” and why he “admired that tremendously”
There’s something so captivating about the work of a filmmaker who truly doesn’t give a fuck about ruffling a few feathers. You might not agree with every artistic choice or even like every film that they make, but sometimes, it’s hard not to sit back and admire their gall and their dedication to disrupting the mainstream, which is always a good thing.
Whether it’s the frank sexual politics of a filmmaker like Catherine Breillat or the grotesque, stomach-turning vision of someone like John Waters or Pier Paolo Pasolini, a controversial director is always going to polarise, and like them or not, we need them. It’s these filmmakers who bring our awareness to ideas that Hollywood is just too scared to show so explicitly, even though there are enough big actors out there willing to bring these darker, more violent and transgressive themes to the big screen.
Look at Lars von Trier, with whom, despite his consistent love for making controversial movies which feature explicit sex and violence, including sexual abuse and even the murder of children, many popular Hollywood actors have lined up to work, from Kirsten Dunst and Uma Thurman to Nicole Kidman and Willem Dafoe.
He has his fair share of controversies under his belt that we can’t ignore, but looking strictly at his films, we see an artist who likes to push the medium as far as it will go, in turn interrogating what it means to exist in a world ruled by sex, violence, and an innate understanding of life’s futility, and thus he has always been attracted to filmmakers who similarly look at life, with Alfred Hitchcock being one of them.
The British director changed cinema with his suspense-laden films, and he often worked within the realm of voyeurism, casting a watchful eye on the way humans operate as obsessive individuals with a predilection for uncovering truth in a world that so often masks it, which is what intrigues Trier.
He finds Hitchcock’s interest in the eroticism of violence, paranoia, and voyeurism fascinating, even if he talks about him in a rather unconventional way. “He was such a pig. I admired that tremendously,” he once said, elucidating, “The ugly is a great source of beauty. And much more interesting than the beautiful. You start out with the un-pretty, and then you work your way out of that in order to create something pretty. But the un-pretty was there first.”
Clearly, von Trier can recognise the innate filthiness of a man attracted to life’s darker side, but he identifies with it. From there, you can build something beautiful out of the rubble of destruction and corruption, but that ugliness will always linger underneath a film’s very surface.
That ugliness is very much present in von Trier and Hitchcock’s approaches to filmmaking, too, with both of the directors notorious for their questionable treatment of their female stars, pushing them to their limits without any respect for them as individuals.
Neither has been without controversy, and it seems like their practice as filmmakers and the kinds of movies they make can’t be separated after all. When asked if he feels related to Hitchcock, von Trier replied, “I guess I do, yes”.
