On the verge: Lars von Trier’s art of filmmaking
The St Petersburg University Representative Office in Spain sincerely invites you to attend an online lecture "On the verge: Lars von Trier’s art of filmmaking", dedicated to film director, screenwriter, producer and operator, international awards winner, including Palme d’Or — the highest prize awarded at the Cannes Film Festival. The lecture will be given by Nina Scherbak, candidate of philology.
Movies of famous Danish film director Lars von Trier often cause a huge stir and controversy in movie industry. His works are distinguished by original style and unconventional approach. Lars von Trier does not hesitate to bring up taboo topics and contradictory questions, thus destroying boundaries between norms and extremity, causing annoyance in critics and delight among fans.
Lars von Trier’s movies are often a provocation or a game «beyond reality», his filmworks almost impossible to explain without mechanism of psychoanalysis. To try to find a distinctive feature of the aesthetics of his movies we should refer to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze with his concepts of "rhizome", "repetition" and "schizoanalysis".
"Breaking the Waves" breaks the usual pattern of ethical behavior, demonstrating true love through "separation" of husband and wife. This violation, which in real life often turns into a tragedy, in aesthetic terms is the usual practice of "gesture". In other words, it’s the separation of the usual chain of interaction between the performer and the artwork.
"Melancholia" is another Lars von Trier’s masterpiece, where Wagner works, the idea of dystopia and the disjunction of usual cause-and-effect relations make it possible to create a vivid picture that unconventionally focuses on "feminine power" as more mighty and stronger than masculine one.
"Dogville" and "The House That Jack Built" are diverse movies about violence, sexuality and abuse , which deal with unusual patterns of behavior and different "threshold points" of psychological comfort.
Why Lars von Trier’s works are so incredibly popular and have received many awards? How does his originality and experimental approach to cinematography became a source of inspiration for other artists and filmmakers?
Lecturer
Nina Scherbak, Associate Professor in the Department of English Philology and Cultural Linguistics at St Petersburg University, Master of Arts (the United Kingdom), a writer and screenwriter. She is also a scriptwriter for science television shows, author of fifteen monographs, and books on linguistics, literature, language philosophy, and English literature.
The lecture will be streamed online in Russian with simultaneous translation into Spanish as part of the celebration of the 300th anniversary of SPbU — Russia’s first university.