Lars von Trier
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The Celebration (1998)
Directed by Thomas Vinterberg
influenced Melancholia (2011), Dogville (2003)
Themes Plot
The proof was in the plodding: Although there have been a few genuinely absorbing and entertaining Dogme movies ("The Celebration" and "Italian for Beginners" leap to mind), most of them, including von Trier's own tiresome exercise "The Idiots," have been little more than pretentious, self-conscious film-school essays that have received publicity not because of any inherent interest or artistry but because their directors have usually accompanied their releases with tortured mea culpas about the vows that they broke, such as pulling back a curtain to increase a room's light.
It's a micro-treatment of what most sci-fi eschatological tales take a more expansive view of: Think " When Worlds Collide " reconfigured as a Bergman film, or, to be more specific, as " The Celebration ," the 1998 family drama directed by von Trier's Danish sort-of disciple Thomas Vinterberg .
With a first hour that plays like 1998's " The Celebration " crossed with 2008's " Rachel Getting Married ," the film fascinatingly follows Justine around for much of the time without spelling out what it is that is wrong with her.
Shot by Claro in gloriously rich colors, the “Justine” half of “Melancholia” is a rich comedy of manners and buried family secrets, deliberately recalling Bergman’s country-house comedies, like “Wild Strawberries” or “Smiles of a Summer Night,” and also perhaps “The Celebration,” by von Trier’s onetime Dogme 95 collaborator Thomas Vinterberg.
In its lacerating portrait of an unhappy family dynamic, this half of the movie suggests "The Celebration" (1988), by von Trier's fellow Dane and former "Dogme 95" filmmaking compatriot, Thomas Vinterberg.
The first, titled 'Justine,' is all about the doomed wedding party and is very reminiscent of fellow Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg's "The Celebration."
But the film doesn't so much call the playwright's beloved Our Town to mind as it does his screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's SHADOW OF A DOUBT, particularly the moment when murderous Uncle Charlie explains to his wide-eyed niece that if you ripped the fronts from most American houses, you'd find swine.
Many will see this intricately staged drama as a cryptic reworking of Thornton Wilder's Our Town with its focus on the smallest details of daily life among people who are working out their destinies by the choices they make.
The effect of this contained environment is theatrical and calls to mind Thornton Wilder's Our Town -- most of the staging happens in the audience's minds.
In the end, Von Trier's movie feels like a rebuke not just to the myth of American fraternity - the dark flipside of Thornton Wilder's Our Town - but to the very notion of common humanity.
One could be forgiven for momentarily mistaking Dogville for that fourth wall-breaking production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town that aired on HBO last year; as Dogville's narrator, John Hurt is as thorough and intrusive a commentator as Our Town's Stage Manager.
This is realised on screen in a strikingly original cinematic style that draws on Thornton Wilder's Our Town with its knowing narrator (Hurt) and a set made of almost nothing!
Lowery, never shy about wearing influences on his sleeve, borrows a little from both, while nodding also to the controversial revisionism of Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation Of Christ and to the allegorical dread (and talking fox!) of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist .
The Green Knight’s aesthetic is built on a wildly diverse collection of cinematic references: There are touches of everything from sincere 80s fantasies such as Ladyhawke and Willow to the more transgressive work of Andrei Tarkovsky and Lars von Trier (including one CGI-rendered character familiar to viewers of Antichrist).
What we do have is a talking fox, imported from Lars von Trier’s no less arboreal “Antichrist” (2009), plus an introduction to Gawain’s mother (Sarita Choudhury), a sorceress of many charms, and a cameo appearance from a gang of passing giants.
Solaris (1972)
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
influenced Melancholia (2011), Antichrist (2009)
Music Visuals
The original script was written by Fridrikh Gorenshtein (the screenwriter of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris) and it was laughably awful—or maybe just badly translated.
Melancholia is a raw psychodrama with the unnerving drone of Tarkovsky’s Solaris, its angst giving birth to the ultimate cosmic correlative.
Clearly inspired by the silent suggestive power of Andrei Tarkovsky’s films (in this case, perhaps “Solaris” more than others), von Trier marries his perceptive efforts with subtle nods to a variety of other sources – in particular, the painting “Ophelia” by John Everett Millais, which inspires the image of Justine in a wedding dress being carried along a river current.
Adam and Anthony's status as reflections of one another, for example, seems to cry out for some visual differentiation between their opposing worlds, but both are drenched in the same sickly yellow glare, at times reminiscent of Lars von Trier's The Element of Crime.
Von Trier's imagery recalls the great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky's The Mirror and Sacrifice, especially with the cabin and woods that pulse with earthy tones of green and brown.
David Cronenberg explored a similar theme in The Brood, in which a male psychiatrist’s est-like exhortation to a woman to ?go all the way through?
It’s as if Waugh wants to channel popcorn tear-jerkers like “Deep Impact” with arthouse meditations like Lars Von Trier’s “Melancholia,” while hanging on to a small budget.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Greenland exists in a slightly uneasy space among Emmerichian dreck 2012 , Bayish dreck Armageddon , halfway-decent dreck Deep Impact , artsy dreck Melancholia and, somewhat possibly interestingly, Spielberg’s War of the Worlds , but, somewhat possibly disappointingly, minus the aliens.
Yet for all its fiery action elements (exploding planes, torched cities etc), Greenland arguably has more in common with the character-driven traits of Lorene Scafaria’s end-of-days romcom Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (or even Lars von Trier’s Melancholia ?) than with the 1998 double-whammy of Deep Impact and Armageddon , the latter featuring Bruce Willis as a deep-sea digger enlisted to ‘“drill some holes” in space.
The only sliver of hope — the only thing that stops “Greenland” from essentially becoming a Barstool-friendly “Melancholia” remake — is the special alert that John gets on his phone.
In returning to sources (Tarkovsky is referenced multiple times throughout, one chapter title included), examining the self (a particularly on-the-nose Antichrist callback emerges; maybe as a joke, maybe not) and making convergences (yet another image of a Gainsbourg character lying in a field makes way for a pronounced Stalker homage), a genuine softness and delicacy — melancholy, one might say — runs through the current of sex and recklessness.
Naturally for a film this steeped in its own construction, there are oodles of film references, from Lars von Trier's "Europa" to "Harold and Maude" to, most bizarrely, "A Woman Under the Influence," in a squirm-inducing scene in which Polley's depressed housewife joins their daughter's birthday party and proceeds to make herself into an embarrassing dancing child.
Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012)
Directed by Lorene Scafaria
influenced by Melancholia (2011)
Plot Themes Music
While the film’s website helpfully points out the many movies with a similar premise that inspired this story, they also bring to mind so many other recent apocalypses that have approached the familiar set-up with far more creativity and insight into human behavior, let alone entertainment value—Jeff Nichols’s Take Shelter , Brit Marling and Mike Cahill’s Another Earth, or Lars von Trier’s Melancholia .
Lars von Trier's Melancholia , for example, cared little about the science of an extinction event (to the point where his utter lack of any kind of realistic touchstone became a distraction) and instead explored how a small group of individuals would react to their imminent demise.
The obvious movie referent is Lars von Trier's "Melancholia," a much nastier film in a much lovelier wrapping: This one lacks an eight-minute Wagner montage.
Right from the first scene in Scafaria’s film, the world is going to go boom a la “Melancholia” or “Armageddon” (one of the few times you’ll hear those two movies compared in a sentence).
Last year alone brought us Lars von Trier's "Melancholia," Brit Marling's "Another Earth" and such television shows as 'Falling Skies' and 'The Walking Dead' among others.
The themes, cinematic devices and underlying darkness of this extraordinary work reflect the best films from the likes of David Lynch and David Cronenberg (whose films Crash, 1996, and Dead Ringers, 1988, share a blood-soaked vision of sexuality-by-way-of-pain with Antichrist).
When the surface of the moon literally scrapes the Colorado Rockies – a nod to Melancholia – you get the sense Emmerich won’t mind if you’re laughing.
It isn’t a soul-searching drama about planetary collision as a metaphor for clinical depression, like Lars von Trier’s 2011 art film Melancholia .
This was meant to be the big popcorn cousin of those existential films like Lars Von Trier’s “Melancholia,” where planets will collide but it’s all about the characters processing fate down here on the surface.
Don’t be confused, this movie has more worth as a comparison to Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia,” about a massive planet crashing into Earth, than a decent piece of entertainment.
That slight yet pivotal distinction epitomizes the sheer joylessness of Emmerich’s latest mega-slog, which betrays the dumb fun promised by its marketing campaign in favor of a po-faced interplanetary pileup that unfolds less like a B-movie spectacle with a NASA-worthy budget than it does a blockbuster remake of “Melancholia” as directed by Elon Musk.
Two sequences, one involving the catastrophic pull of the moon’s gravity on the oceans at a critical moment, the other a Melancholia-type moment of lunar approach, are positively spine-tingling and instantly memorable.
The actors deliver a visceral and bughouse-intense variation on Ingmar Bergman marriage-is-hell psychodramas, even as von Trier evokes the haunted quality of Bergman’s medieval allegories (throwing in a shot of Dafoe’s head against a charcoal horizon that echoes Max Von Sydow in The Seventh Seal).
Today it’s almost impossible to look at Sirk’s films without turning to Brecht, whose innovative theories on distancing and alienation are all over films like Fassbinder’s In a Year of 13 Moons , Sirk’s Imitation of Life and Lars von Trier’s upcoming Dogville , a film inspired in part by a song from Kurt Weill and Brecht’s famous Threepenny Opera , which Sirk had staged in Bremen in 1929.
Porn and horror film violence have always shadowed art cinema, and in films as varied as Un chien andalou, Meshes of the Afternoon, Saló, Hiroshima mon amour, Persona, and Prénom Carmen, art cinema claims the power to depict the most extreme human behavior in a coherent, mediated way, incorporating but going beyond the capacity of marginal sensationalist genres.
This cinematic tradition can be traced back at least as far as 1929, when Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí began their surrealist classic Un Chien Andalou with a depiction of a man slicing a woman's eyeball open.
Her despair promptly ferments into a passionate hatred for her husband, who she subjects to prolonged torture after mutilating herself in a scene so shocking it makes the eye-slicing scene from Luis Bunuel's Un chien andalou (1929) look like a Hi-5 dance routine.
Still, the philosophical feminist precedent to beat is still Agnès Varda’s chilling, scorchingly defiant Vagabond (1985), which limns an antisocial odyssey to the edge of extinction without resorting to semi-porn.
In a full color handout given to press and potential buyers at some Cannes screenings, opposite a few uniquely blank excerpts from a Danish Film Institute interview with the director thereâs a photo of Von Trier that seems to directly reference, down to the three-quarter profile with the smug facial expression, the famous publicity shot of Alfred Hitchcock turned to face a live crow perched on his shoulder that was distributed to promote the film of his that most directly drew lines between female sexuality and the unpredictable horrors of nature, The Birds.
He even throws in a few references to Tarkovsky’s most austere film, Andrei Rublev (about a medieval Russian icon painter), to underline his seriousness.
The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer
influenced Dogville (2003), Antichrist (2009)
Themes Visuals
After all, the big influence here, as always, is Carl Theodor Dreyer, that other tyrannical Dane whose tuxedo von Trier once wore to the Cannes Film Festival. 1 Nearly all of Dreyer’s films from The Passion of Joan of Arc onwards involve the disjunction between men and women played out – sometimes violently – as a struggle of reason against nature, mind against body, language and intellectual order against gesture and emotional chaos.
Von Trier/Jekyll is a serious artist who, much of the time, at least, aspires to be Carl Dreyer, his great Dane antecedent whose most celebrated film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, is arguably the most galvanic testament to female martyrdom ever seen on the screen.
What counted was getting the spectator absorbed in the past; the means were multifarious and new"--for The Passion of Joan of Arc, von Trier, an Americana buff, intermixes motifs in Dogville, arriving at a sort of Cubist period piece.