Lars von Trier

Lars von Trier (born April 30, 1956, Copenhagen, Denmark) is a Danish film director and cofounder of the Dogme 95 movement, whose films are known for their bleak worldview and controversial subject matter.

Von Trier attended the National Film School of Denmark, graduating in 1983. He was born Lars Trier, but while in school he added the prefix von—traditionally an indicator of membership in the aristocracy—to his surname in an attempt to be provocative.

Von Trier began his career with the crime film Forbrydelsens element (1984; The Element of Crime), the first in an eventual series known as the Europa trilogy, which stylishly explores chaos and alienation in modern Europe. The other films in the trilogy are Epidemic (1987), a metafictional allegory about a plague, and Europa (1991; released in the U.S. as Zentropa), an examination of life in post-World War II Germany. In 1994 von Trier wrote and directed a Danish television miniseries called Riget (The Kingdom), which was set in a hospital and focused on the supernatural and macabre. It proved so popular that it was followed by a sequel, Riget II (1997), and later inspired an American version, adapted by American horror novelist Stephen King, for which von Trier served as executive producer.

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In 1995 von Trier and Danish director Thomas Vinterberg wrote a manifesto for a purist film movement called Dogme 95. Participating directors took what the group dubbed the Vow of Chastity, which bound them to a list of tenets that, among other things, forbade the use of any props or effects not natural to the film’s setting in order to achieve a straightforward form of narrative-based realism. Von Trier’s next film was Breaking the Waves (1996), a grim tale about a pious Scottish woman subjected to brutality that was anchored by a bravura Oscar-nominated performance by Emily Watson. It embodies much of the spirit of Dogme 95, though it was not technically certified as such. In the end, the only official Dogme 95 film that von Trier directed was Idioterne (1998; The Idiots), a highly controversial work that centres on a group of people who publicly pretend to be developmentally disabled.

In 2000 von Trier released Dancer in the Dark, a melodrama that features Icelandic pop singer Björk as a nearly blind factory worker who finds relief from her constant travails in fantasy-fueled musical numbers. Von Trier attracted further attention for Dogville (2003), a cynical and dramatically austere parable about the United States, starring Nicole Kidman. Though it was criticized for its lack of subtlety and for its gender politics, the film was followed two years later by a sequel, Manderlay. Later films included Antichrist (2009), which agitated audiences with its graphic depiction of sexual violence within a grieving couple’s relationship, and the haunting Melancholia (2011), in which a chaotic wedding and attendant familial discord are set against a planet’s impending collision with Earth. His next film, Nymphomaniac, was released in two volumes (2013). It chronicled the carnal activities of a single woman—played by several actresses at different ages—from her first experiences to her later assignations. The film was highly controversial because of its depiction of unsimulated sex acts. He next directed The House That Jack Built (2018), a deliberately provocative film that follows a serial killer through a succession of murders.