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The Boss of It All
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The office
comedy is an underexplored genre in cinema – or at least in cinema/media
studies. Yet there are many fine exemplars: Luc Moullet’s The Comedy of Work (1987), Mike Judge’s Office Space (1999), Gary Burns’ Waydowntown (2000), Nigel Buesst’s little-known Australian gem Compo (1987), even Michael Snow’s ultra-conceptual *Corpus Callosum (2002) … And then there are documentaries (Brian McKenzie’s The Last Day’s Work [1986]), and quite a
lot of TV in the vein of The Office (original UK version 2001-2003), Parks
and Recreation (2009-2015) and no doubt many others around the world …
When Lars von Trier made his frequently
hilarious office comedy The Boss of It
All – comprised mainly of people sitting in bland work rooms, talking at
each other in absurd, circular, bureaucratic terms – he knew he could not take
his usual, wilfully chaotic route of sloppy, hand-held, semi-improvised scene
rambling. Something spectacularly counter-intuitive was called for to raise
this item above even new generic conventions.
So von Trier invented (as is his wont) a
game with rules, a dispositif that he
called Automavision, to generate an
automatic way of framing. He would set up and block out the scene with the
actors in a conventional way, but the final choice of camera angle would be
dictated, according to randomly generated parameters, by an on-set computer –
no matter what was going on inside the frame.
What results, from shot to shot of even
the blandest dialogue sequence, is indeed spectacular, a veritable catalogue of
cinematographic taboos: heads cut off; ungainly placement of foreground
objects; too much empty headroom in the shot; truncated, unbalanced, badly-lit
compositions; a blank spot at the centre of the frame; and, last but not least,
no reframing to catch even the simplest mise
en scène of the actors’ movements!
The office comedy – with its usually
strict code of everyday banality – is thus given an especially incongruous and
infectious twist.
Note: this piece adapts a passage from my essay
“Frame” in the book edited by Elena Gorfinkel and Tami Williams, Global Cinema Networks (Rutgers University Press, 2018).
MORE von Trier: Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, The Five Obstructions, The House That Jack Built, Zentropa, The Kingdom © Adrian Martin April 2012 |
