| Abstract: | The cinema of Lars von Trier can be characterised in diverse ways, but one of the most striking and memorable aspects of his work in the “Europa trilogy” (Element of Crime 1984; Epidemic 1987; Europa 1991) and the more recent “Goldheart trilogy” (Breaking the Waves 1996; The Idiots 1998; Dancer in the Dark 2000) is the centrality of trauma in both narrative and form and the corresponding emphasis on ethics. Each of these trilogies sets out to scrutinise ambiguities and ambivalences around binaries such as good/evil and guilt/innocence through the exploration of socio‐cultural trauma such as war and plague in the earlier trilogy, and through more individually‐inflected trauma in the latter one. Interestingly, von Trier flags the inter‐relation between the success of the ideals that are central to his narrative forays and the gender of his protagonists (Smith , p. 24). How, then, might it be possible to make sense of the slippages and confusions implicit in von Trier’s film‐making in order to discern his ethical concerns, and how might these concerns be articulated through cultural assumptions about gender and ethical identities? This essay explores the ethical assumptions and imperatives that mark out von Trier’s work, signalling the role of the spectator in the formation of the ethics of his cinematic project. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory and feminist notions of ethics, the paper asks whether von Trier’s work is merely to be framed in terms of postmodern provocation or whether his manipulations of cinema and all its accoutrements ought rather to be understood in terms of a radical artistic endeavour designed to foreground the importance and potential of cinema as a site of scrutiny of the inter‐relation between ethics, trauma and gender. |
