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Dancer in the Dark
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1.
(Newspaper film review, 2000)
As
with Breaking the Waves (1996), Lars von Trier’s Dancer
in the Dark is more an event or a case than a mere movie. Once again, von
Trier offers us a work that is, by turns, provocative, maddening, seductive and
perverse – as well as emotionally draining.
No
filmmaker working today invites as much ad
hominem attack as von Trier. His motives are regularly questioned by
critics, journalists and filmgoers. Paul Willemen targeted the filmmaker’s
“relentless inflation of advertising techniques, here mostly deployed to
advertise one and only one item: von Trier himself as directorial value on the
cultural stock market”. (1) Others
routinely decry his talent for self-publicity (such as, according to a cretian
interpretation, the Dogme manifesto proclamation), portraying him as a
distasteful combination of showman and con artist.
So
is von Trier just a trickster, out to shock? Is he really serious about
anything? Why his growing penchant for cheap, digitally-shot quickies? He
stands accused of cynicism, artistic bankruptcy and gross manipulation of his
audience. And his response to all of this is to make Dancer in the Dark, in many ways his most extreme and disarming
film to date.
Having
rarely been an admirer of von Trier’s work since The Element of Crime (1984), I too
have sometimes been willing to think the worst of his intentions. But Dancer in the Dark seems to me
self-evidently a serious, carefully thought-out film, and by the far his best.
It only half works, but that successful half is enought to elevate it to the
rank of an essential movie experience.
Dancer in the Dark is a
full-out melodrama, based on a classic Hollywood premise: the suffering woman.
Von Trier regards it as the third entry in his Golden Heart trilogy, after Breaking the Waves and The Idiots (1998). This time around, the
golden heart belongs to Selma (Björk). Like most von Trier heroines, Selma is a
child-woman whose capacity for voluptuous suffering is indistinguishable from a
very Christian form of masochism.
Selma
stoically traverses her Stations of the Cross from word go. She’s a Czech
immigrant working in an American factory, a single mother who is poor and going
blind; her only concern in life is securing an operation for her son, Gene
(Vladica Kostic). She is essentially alone in her suffering, despite some
giggly moments with her co-worker, Kathy (Catherine Deneuve). The only other
person who offers compassionate understanding, Bill (David Morse), turns out to
be the source of her life’s greatest tragedy.
If
one were to string together the supposedly normal scenes of Dancer in the Dark – filmed with the
director’s standard, hand-held, semi-improvised, hit-and-miss technique – one
might well recoil from this often unconvincing and ham-fisted drama.
(Nonetheless, one reviewer advised punters to wait for the DVD to do precisely
this!) Its social conscience agenda is still-born. And Björk is not so much
directed as simply let go in front
the camera: as in Carl Dreyer’s The
Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), the suffering of the character seems to
merge with the arguably sadistic element of psychodrama forced upon the
performer. The result, on this level, is uncomfortable but riveting.
But Dancer in the Dark is also an
elaborate musical. Like the protagonist of a Dennis Potter TV series, Selma
regularly bursts into song (as the revealing saying goes), enchanting and
energising the miserable spaces of her daily world: work, home, train, and
eventually prison.
The
explicit analysis of musicals made by the characters – as they go to movies,
sit around talking, or attend rehearsals of a local production of The Sound of Music (a counterpoint idea
von Trier may have got from the little-known and remarkable Handgun [1983]) – is pretty banal: musicals are escapist, Utopian, magical, full of
feeling. But the actual song and dance numbers (composed by Björk and
choreographed by Vincent Paterson) are breathtaking achievements, offering a truly
radical approach to the musical genre.
Many
commentators have complained about von Trier’s treatment of these numbers,
rapidly cutting between one hundred video cameras. Is this merely MTV-style
flashiness, a facile gag played on the classic Hollywood-Broadway mode of
musical spectacle? These sequences in fact possess an admirably coherent logic,
and they grow in emotional power over the course of the film.
Most
songs in musicals provide for their characters what the real world cruelly
deprives them of: physical grace, emotional warmth and material abundance. Von Trier manages an
intriguing two-step here. While the songs do not literally take Selma into a Brigadoon (1954)-style Other World – indeed, they are saturated with poignant signs of
ordinariness – they enact, in their style, the heightened release that musicals
traditionally offer.
The
dramatic scenes and the song sequences exist in a point-for-point relationship.
Von Trier renders Selma’s real life in a choppy, discontinuous, seasick, murky
way, while the songs are gloriously smooth, colourful and continuous. The drama
is filmed stingily with one, meandering camera; the songs are captured in an
overflowing manner from a hundred, static positions. The soundtrack, meanwhile,
transforms itself as well: from a thin mono-effect in dramatic scenes to full
Dolby-surround for the songs.
As
the story progresses, Selma’s musical world is subject to rigorous
disintegration. A fragment of “My Favourite Things” is sung by Selma in her
cell over a faint, reverberant, sampled loop of a choir. And ultimately, what
previously seemed like corny, sentimental advice to “listen to your heart”
provides the basis for Selma’s swansong, set to the only music she has left:
her heartbeat.
Von
Trier uses the Dennis Potter trick of ending most songs abruptly, in order to
mark the absolute divide between fantasy and reality. But, at the beginning and
for the duration of each song, his inspired collaboration with Björk produces a
remarkable blending of sounds sampled from reality with musical structures.
There
is much in Dancer in the Dark that
some viewers will resist as unreal – beginning with the American setting (it
was not shot in America) and the supposed identities of most of the characters
(such as Joel Grey’s cameo as a beloved star of Czech musicals). But, here
again, the drama’s force gains from the bleed-over effect of the musical
fantasy: the film as a whole appears to be as much a dream in von Trier’s head
as the songs are in Selma’s. And it’s a dream with a subversive bite.
It
is hard to determine yet whether Dancer
in the Dark marks a backward or forward step in von Trier’s career. His
obsession with suffering women on show is undoubtedly lazy, and his retreat
from the risky spiritual themes of Breaking
the Waves is palpable – as Canadian critic Mark Peranson has remarked, here
“musicals take the place of God”, (2) to no clear effect. However, as a film
that stretches the expectations and receptors of its audience every which way, Dancer in the Dark is sometimes
magnificent.
2.
(Extract from book chapter: “The Dark”, 2003)
At
the turn of the millennium, Lars von Trier’s controversial Dancer in the Dark exploded through global film culture. Here is an
example of a musical mutation so bold and brazen that, virtually overnight, it
galvanised critical discourse everywhere – disturbing casual, cosy assumptions,
and forcing people to ask themselves the question: just what is a musical, anyway? (3)
Dancer in the Dark has
enjoyed the paradoxical honour of being hailed as a work in the tradition of Dennis
Potter – for David Jays, von Trier seeks to “accentuate the contradictions, to
slip spanners into Busby Berkeley’s gleaming works” (4) – while being
publicised by its Australian distributor as a “part-homage to the Euro-musicals
of Jacques Demy”! In a sense, both claims are true. On the one hand, the film
insists on the bleak separation of escapist musical fantasies from the grimy,
murky realities of the quotidian, via the standard Potter stylistic device: the
shock cut before the song is fully over, dropping us back into the everyday,
framing scenes in which these fantasies have arisen. But, on the other hand,
the musical numbers themselves have an intensity and virtuosity missing from
the Potter legacy.
The
real interpenetration of the songs and the drama in Dancer in the Dark occurs at the level of an ingenious and
carefully wrought formal logic of complementarity. It is easy to take the
non-musical scenes as the usual, non-rigorous free-forming beloved of von Trier
in his Dogme phase: hand-held camera, incessant jump cuts, muddy digital
images, loosely improvised performances, open (even outrightly sloppy) mise en scène. But – for once in his
career – this mode exists only in a strict counterpoint to another mode that
reverses it in almost every detail.
Like
Tsai Ming-liang’s The Hole (1998), Dancer in the Dark opposes a fantasy of
abundance to a reality of miserable, economic and material scarcity. But its
most brilliant step is to locate that abundance on a formal and stylistic
plane. As was widely publicised, the musical sequences were filmed in single
takes by a hundred digital cameras, these views then edited in rapid
succession. This is not mere capriciousness, exhibitionism or perversity on von
Trier’s part; the mode of filming chosen has three powerful pay-offs.
First,
where the dramatic scenes are relentlessly discontinuous in their formal
rendering, the songs are almost magically continuous – match-cutting (editing
on movement) has rarely carried such a palpable thrill. Second, where the
dramatic scenes have a cramped, heavy feel, due to the single, hand-held camera
shuttling back and forth monotonously between the actors – as if the actors are
insects shoved under glass for morbid or sadistic inspection – the musical
scenes are seemingly limitless in their spatial extension. As the singers and dancers cover ground
(especially in the train number), it is as if their movements, in any direction
whatsoever, trigger a static camera to capture a specific segment of the
choreography (it’s an inspired appropriation of TV-style “vision switching”
rather than cinematic mise en scène as such). Thirdly, there is the exhilarating, plastic effect guaranteed by
those one hundred cameras, many set at extremely odd, non-classical angles: in
a veritable orgy of formal abundance, this multiplicity of views ensures (or so
it very much seems) that no angle is ever used twice.
In
all these ways, von Trier has taken literally and made explicit the subtle
aesthetic at work in Hollywood musicals such as Singin’ in the Rain (1952) in which, as Alain Masson has
demonstrated, “[t]he space is transparent, the filmic area unlimited (...)
inaugurat[ing] an abstract vision of space defined only according to its own
rule, as if it were independent of any position”. (5) More integrally, these
formal devices work in concert to build an expressive world-picture: Selma
(Björk) never sings to us, never
liberates herself from the diegesis to that extent, like Gene Kelly did in The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967);
rather, her musical fantasies constitute fragile, desperate attempts to weave
around her an intersubjective community of harmonious, compassionate souls –
and the hundred cameras enclose the bubble of this dream.
This
is, in fact, a radical approach to musical mise
en scène – one that belies the complaints of those who find the numbers in
the film lazily or half-heartedly staged, as if merely mounted in the spirit of
an ironic, postmodern, quotational joke, or simply recycling an “MTV aesthetic”
(whatever that is). Too much evident work has gone into the conceptualising and
planning of these scenes and into the tight intermeshing of all their elements
(staging, song production and choreography) for this to be so. It is true to
say that von Trier experiments with what could be called an aggressive approach
to the rendering of Selma’s songs – as Paul Willemen accurately complains, “camera
positions are consistently divorced from narrative logic” and “cinematic space
and time are destroyed” (6) – but are we so far here from the sort of
scenographic fracturings explored by Jean-Luc Godard in La femme est une femme (1961) and Pierrot le fou (1965)?
Robert
Altman performed a similar experiment in Popeye (1980), in which the typical elements of his style – extensive use of long
shots, a floating babble of voices and sounds, incessant and disconcerting
cross-cutting between scenes in separate spaces, and what Leonard Maltin regarded
as “cluttered staging” – were used upon the “alleged songs by Harry Nilsson” (7)
as much as on the normal scenes, with some incredible and exciting
disorientations resulting.
Another
formal difference between the dramatic and musical scenes in Dancer in the Dark occurs on the level
of the sound design. The former use a thin, sonically restricted range; the
latter explode in multi-speaker Dolby. This is an index of von Trier’s
attention to sound and its formal logic throughout. Each song is composed and
produced around a specific kind of audio
dissolve (as Tom Gunning has called this device): a real sound (such as
that of the factory machinery) that provides a rhythm leads into the start of
the number proper. Björk’s music, however, pushes the envelope of the audio
dissolve, since sampled treatments make up so much of the texture of each piece.
Von Trier, for his part, stages the dances, in their spatial extension, so as to
allow the incessant filtering-in of non-musical sounds that instantly become
musical within the mix, such as the bike wheel spun by Gene (Vladica Kostic) or
the metallic ring of the wind-blown flagpole in the resurrection number
following the murder of Bill (David Morse).
Dancer in the Dark moves
toward the magisterial point at which the corny injunction from Kathy
(Catherine Deneuve) to “Listen to your heart!” assumes its full formal logic:
at that moment, in direct sound, Selma will sing to the beat (amplified for us)
of her own heart, the only music left to her once all external audio-dissolve
prompts have been cruelly taken away (prison, we are told, is a hellishly quiet
place). A course of musical disintegration, leading to this moment, has been
charted: its key phase is the disquieting rendition of “My Favourite Things”
from The Sound of Music, sung by
Selma (the first of two songs recorded in direct sound) over a sampled loop of
the choral singing emanating down the pipes and through the grill into her
cell.
Prior
to this disintegration, all Selma’s music has been like an inner music writ
large, projected onto the external world– this is the conjured sensorium of her
sightless world, akin to Juliette Binoche’s condition in Les Amants du Pont-neuf (1991); now she is reduced to the merest
scrap of sound, like the steps taken that lead her to the gallows. Dancer in the Dark thus takes apart not
only the inside and outside of its songs, but even the inside and outside of
its heroine (for once, the popularly misused word deconstruction would not be out of place): her experience of
psycho-acoustic plenitude embodied, then stripped bare, and finally suspended
in the moment of non-closure heralded (casually at first) by the film in its
dream of the eternal “second last song” (or in Siegfried Kracauer’s resonant
final book title: last things before the last …).
Among
the reasons that von Trier’s film wields such cultural force is because of the
severe way it denaturalises the American provenance of the musical genre. In
this American story, no locations and few actors are authentically American;
instead, the film gives the impression of (as John Caughie once put it) “playing
at being American” for our troubled and fascinated amusement. (8) And it is a
grim game, because, on the dramatic plane, the film evolves into an unstinting
critique of the American system of capital punishment – a bold extension of
conventional generic content that, once again, acknowledges a debt to the true legacy of Jacques Demy – the Demy of Une chambre en ville (1982) rather than
his earlier, better-known musicals.
Definitions
and depictions of nationality inform another major, beguiling element of Dancer in the Dark. Much is made of the
existence of a character who is a star of Czech musicals that are beloved in
his nation’s popular memory – so beloved that, in Selma’s fantasy, he is cast
as her imaginary father. In a final, dizzying twist of anti-verisimilitude,
this Czech star is ultimately incarnated by Joel Grey from Cabaret (1972).
Von
Trier’s perversity here is inspired. What makes this surreally foreign
character at once so bizarre and so magical is the utter alienness of his conception:
only within such a completely fantasticated, desperately wishful world would a
non-Hollywood musical star hold such enormous sway over sentimental and social
destinies. But maybe that is, after all, a real world for many spectators in
far-flung lands and subterranean pockets of world culture – or a musical Utopia
actually worth having in the future.
NOTE:
The second text presented here, adapted from material in my “Musical Mutations”
project, was prepared at the invitation of the Austrian Film Museum in 2003 for
a book on film musicals. That piece did not appear in the publication because
the editors did not spot my email sending it to them! So I hereby resurrect it.
MORE von Trier: The Boss of It All, The Five Obstructions, The House That Jack Built, Zentropa, The Kingdom 1.
Paul Willemen, “Note on Dancer in the
Dark”, Framework, no. 42 (Summer 2000). back
2. Mark Peranson, “The
Lady Shanghaied”, Cinema Scope, no. 4
(Summer 2000), p. 40; part of a dossier of pieces on the film, including also
Quintín and Geoff Pevere. back
3.
See José Arroyo, “How Do You Solve a Problem like von Trier?”, Sight and Sound, Vol. 10 No. 9 (September
2000), pp. 14-16; and the Cinema Scope dossier, pp. 38-41. back
4.
David Jays, “Blues in the Night”, Sight
and Sound, Vol. 10 no. 9, September 2000, p. 19. back
5. Alain Masson, “An Architectural Promenade”, Rouge (2004). back
6. Paul Willemen, “Note on Dancer in the Dark”. back
7. Leonard Maltin, Movie and Video Guide (New York: Signet, 2000), p. 1091. One of Popeye’s best songs (“He Needs Me”) was redeemed, at length, by Paul Thomas Anderson in Punch-Drunk Love (2003). back
8.
John Caughie, “Playing at Being American: Games and Tactics”, in Patricia
Mellencamp (ed.), Logics of Television:
Essays in Cultural Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990),
pp. 44-58. back © Adrian Martin December 2000 / May 2003 |
