The movie Lars Von Trier calls a “masterpiece”
Widely recognised as one of the most provocative modern filmmakers, the Danish mastermind Lars von Trier has created some of the most emotionally painful and violently disturbing movies of all time. An admirer of some of the most divisive directors of European cinema, including Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roberto Rossellini and Jørgen Leth, von Trier has curated a filmography that boasts constant innovation and experimentation.
His emergence onto the international scene came in the late 1990s with the release of the Palme d’Or and Oscar nominee Breaking the Waves, starring Emily Watson, a film he quickly followed up with the Dogme 95 flick The Idiots. The latter stirred up much controversy for the idiosyncratic Dane, who was quickly establishing himself as a divisive filmmaker, releasing the dark drama Dancer in the Dark in 2000, the experimental escapade Dogville in 2003, and the slave story Manderlay in 2005.
Then, from 2009, the director chose to take on a number of directly provocative features, making the jet-black psychological horror movie Antichrist with Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe before helming the ensemble sex drama Nymphomaniac in 2013. Five years later, he would fully embrace the limits of his ego with the violent serial killer drama The House that Jack Built, a film that proved to be a little bit too self-indulgent for most audiences.
Still, many call some of von Trier’s most recent films masterpieces, a term that the director reserves only for some of his own all-time favourites.
During conversation with The Independent about movies that most mattered to him, von Trier exclaimed his love for a certain Stanley Kubrick, calling his 1975 film Barry Lyndon “a pleasure, like eating a very good soup”. Continuing, he adds: “It is very stylised and then suddenly comes some emotion [when the child falls off the horse]. There is not a lot of emotion. There are a lot of moods and some fantastic photography, really like these old paintings”.
Set in 18th-century England and telling the story of an Irish rogue who takes the position of an important aristocrat, Barry Lyndon is one of the most underrated movies in Kubrick’s glittering filmography. Celebrated for its revolutionary approach to cinematography, in which the director found a way to shoot under mere candlelight, the film was also praised for its cast, which includes the likes of Ryan O’Neal, Marisa Berenson and the late Murray Melvin.
Continuing in his praise of the movie, von Trier adds: “The good thing is that Kubrick always sets his standards. Barry Lyndon to me is a masterpiece. He casts in a very strange way, Kubrick. It is a very strange cast. But that is how the film should be, of course. This thing that he liked short films was very surprising. And he liked Krzysztof Kieslowski very much. He was crazy about Kieslowski”.
Concluding, the Danish filmmaker reveals just how much of his filmography has been influenced by Kubrick, stating, “The narration in my films Manderlay and Dogville is definitely inspired by Barry Lyndon, and the narration there is this ironical voice, this whole chapter thing, the feeling there are chapters. I have done that in Dogville and Manderlay and to some extent in Breaking the Waves. It is all Kubrick!”.
