‘Nocturne’: Lars von Trier’s moody nightmare
Routinely cited as one of the most controversial filmmakers of our time, Danish auteur Lars von Trier is a highly polarising figure in the contemporary cinematic landscape. While he has earned widespread acclaim for seminal works like Breaking the Waves and Dogville, von Trier has also garnered an equal amount of criticism for a wide variety of reasons: ranging from his strange comments on Nazism to his mistreatment of actresses like Nicole Kidman and Björk.
Before the feature films that brought von Trier wider recognition from the global film community, he started his filmmaking journey with short films. Like many other directors, von Trier had been interested in cinema from an early age and had begun experimenting with 8mm film when he was just a teenager. Due to his intense passion for film technology, he would spend a lot of time trying to learn about the equipment used on set.
In an interview, von Trier recalled that he learnt a lot by asking other people in the industry: “I was 14 years old, I worked with 8mm film, and I had a very strong fascination for film technology. During a whole year after the shootings of the series [Hemmelig sommer], I used to skip school and run down to the studios and pester the crews with questions and comments about the cameras and the lightning until I was thrown out.”
One of the short films that launched von Trier’s career was the 1980 work Nocturne, which ended up winning the ‘Best School Film Award’ at the Munich International Festival of Film Schools. Featuring a moody setting in which a woman who is afraid of light contemplates catching her flight early in the morning, Nocturne functions like an endless night in a nightmare. Inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror, von Trier attempts to tap into the specific aesthetic frameworks of decay and psychological damage.
In the same interview, von Trier said: “Nocturne was the most important of them and also won a prize at the film festival in Munich. I got the inspiration for that one while watching the Swedish film review program by chance. There they showed a long extract from Mirror by Andrei Tarkovsky. What I saw was a long unbroken take, a camera tracking along a road. It was simply unbelievable – like a revelation to me! At the time, I’d, of course, seen a lot of films with different aesthetics, and I was always interested in the divergent – and in the special – but the images from this Tarkovsky film seemed to me to come from another planet.”
Although it’s definitely nowhere close to the sublime images Tarkovsky conjured up in Mirror, Nocturne is still noteworthy due to one particular shot. The final scene of Nocturne is a shot of birds flying across a dirt-coloured sky, contrary to the cramped apartment scenes shown earlier in the film. While such an image normally evokes associations with liberation, von Trier makes it look as if the birds are organisms scuttling under a microscope or insects crawling around in a chaotically organised frenzy. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the pessimism that would dominate his major features, proving that he has always been a grumpy old man at heart.
Watch the film below.
