The trauma debate: Just looking? Traumatic affect, film form and spectatorship in the work of Lars von Trier

Like a pebble in your shoe: A psychoanalytical reading of Lars von Trier'sBreaking the WavesandAntichrist

“…The universe in von Trier's film has been called sado‐masochistic (Bainbridge, ,b, ; Badley, ) and, while this is, of course, in some sense true, what he depicts is not sado‐masochistic pleasure. In the intrusion of sexual mutilation and dismembered bodies we are far from the level of fantasy and imagination connected to the pleasure of sexual sado‐masochism.…”

“…Commentators and critics have pointed to trauma as the central theme in von Trier films, played out at the narrative as well as at the formal and effective level (Bainbridge, ,b, ; Badley, ). While this term – so familiar to psychoanalysts – does indeed capture the essence of von Trier's cinematic universe, what we meet with cannot be understood within the framework of the trauma models we know from classical psychoanalytic theory, that is, the model of traumatic neuroses or Nachträglichkeit .…”

Dogville, or, the Dirty Birth of Law

“…To suggest some interpretations Dogville seems able to support, we might just think of a Christic parable: a moral excursus into the Bible in the alternative -as seen from the Christians' point of view -between the Old Testament (morality of retribution) and the New Testament (morality of forgiveness: see Ramlow, 2004), and a discourse on psychological perversion (see Abella and Zilkha, 2004) and voyeurism (Bainbridge, 2004). Of course, there is also a political interpretation that sees in Dogville a harsh criticism of American life (for a critical review of these interpretations see Fibiger, 2004).…”