Lars von Trier reveals his favourite musical: “I was always very fascinated by musicals”
Danish mastermind Lars von Trier is either revered as a risk-taking visionary or dismissed as a pointless provocateur. Regardless of your stance on the graphic nature of his films, it’s undeniable that he has crafted some of the most moving, vivid depictions of human suffering and violence in cinema.
Von Trier rose to international prominence in the late 1990s with Breaking the Waves and a Palme d’Or win. This was followed in quick succession by The Idiots, around which time he established the Dogme 95 movement with Thomas Vinterberg.
The goal of Dogme was to purify filmmaking, taking away its predilection for expensive special effects and various technical post-production gimmicks. The focus was entirely on a well-crafted narrative, which rested largely on the actors’ performances.
After clearly establishing his vision with Dogme, a series of increasingly provocative features followed, including The Antichrist, starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsborough, and the sex-based drama, Nymphomaniac, starring Mia Goth alongside an ensemble cast.
Von Tier is an admirer of some of European cinemas’ most incisive directors, including Jørgen Leth and Pier Paolo Pasolini, and, as it turns out: Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, the directors of Singin’ in the Rain.
Despite championing dark themes of depression, existentialism and violence, the Danish filmmaker told The New York Times he was a big fan of musicals.
“I was always very fascinated by musicals – they say security to me,” he said. “It was good as a child to sit down and see a musical because you knew that no harm would come to you or anybody in the film. I remember particularly Singin’ in the Rain, that was my favourite musical for many years.”
His love for musicals was evident in his own film, Dancer In The Dark, a deeply moving fusion of musical melodrama starring Björk, who performed many of the film’s musical interludes, which begin with a song from The Sound of Music. The inclusion of ‘My Favourite Things’ and ‘So Long, Farwell’ was an artistic choice of von Trier’s, who said he wanted to establish contact and connection with the older musicals – “to humanise the musicals, in the sense that they are done in a very sloppy and amateur way”.
Despite his love for the typically upbeat genre, naturally, his take on them was fairly cut-throat, with the director saying they were simply a “system” in filmmaking.
“A musical is very systematic, much more systematic than normal film,” he added. “So it’s much easier to, well, read patterns. At this point, there comes a song, then this happens, blah, blah, blah. It became almost mathematics to me. And I think that was part of why it felt so secure: there were no surprises.”
