The Europa Trilogy
eye Weekly magazine
April 23, 1992
Director Lars von Trier knows just how worried we should be: Roll over, Bobby McFerrin By Noah Cowan
Lars von Trier is 35. He is from Denmark. Trier made his first feature film, The Element of Crime, when he was 27. It is a sordid, deeply ugly tale of a police officer who returns to a collapsed and unrecognizable Europe to solve a murder case. It is shot completely through a yellow filter, jaundicing his protagonists and making his industrial furnace settings seem all the scarier. The thriller plot holds good for most of the movie, then falls apart with one of the most spectacularly gratuitous scenes of masochistic violence I have ever seen. Last year, Trier completed Europa, which is now playing at the Carlton. Harrowing and beautiful, it follows the sad case of an American in post-war Germany working as a train conductor and getting caught up with anti-American German nationalists. It is shot largely with “back screens,” a technique in which an actor can be superimposed over layers of archival footage. The result is a technically chilling and brilliant barrage of imagery. In between, he made Epidemic, a sloppy 16mm black-and-white look at two guys—Trier and his screenwriter friend—trying to develop a script idea for a film about a horrible plague. Intermittently, we cut to scenes from the film (which is still in their heads) played out on screen. The cutesy point-counterpoint hums along until the two worlds merge in a brutal, grotesque finale. Trier has his finger on the pulse of humanity’s decay—120 over brutal violence, unchecked power over 80. This is our ugly world in a mirror, played out to its logical conclusion: our colour-coded funeral, laugh track included. Trier has a profoundly cynical and intelligent view of the world. Many will find his ideology dangerous: many will find it inspiring and truthful.
The Lars von Trier world view:
The end of Europe: European civilization has come to a close. The wine bottles are empty, industry is just a nameless polluter, history has been (literally) drowned in the flooded cellars of capital cities in their twilight. Why identify yourself with a pathetic nation? Speak English—the language that conquered you. Everywhere looks the same on this dead continent anyway, and the weather is always bad.
The moral and physical collapse of humanity: We are incapable of interacting in the ways our society once demanded. Respect, tolerance, responsibility and duty are archaic terms, meaningless words for use by those in power. Justice is the province of the strong; virtue means not dying. Our corporeal selves are no less corrupt. We are susceptible to infection, suggestion, plague, hypnosis, sexual betrayal. Our bodies are weak.
The utter corruption of societal institutions: The state is a joke. The police are an authoritarian goon squad. Any employee of these organs must conform to their amoral standards or die.
The dystopic present: All this is happening now. And in the past. And in the future. There is no static present. The hell of the world to come is the hell of now, and was the hell of the past. Thus The Element of Crime is set in an unspecified future, which could be now. Epidemic is set now, but looks to the future and might have happened in the past. Europa is set in the past, but a past that more resembles our present and probable future than any fabled past.
What does this have to do with me? All this makes Trier a prophet of sorts. And a pundit. And a historian. But, most of all, it makes him an extremely important dissenting voice in a sea of smarmy idealists. Worry. Be unhappy. It’s as bad as you think.