Landscapes and Aporias in Lars von Trier’s Dogville

Abstract

Dogville is unlike any of the other pieces analysed in this book in that it is not a live performance or a piece of theatre, but a film. Thus the balance between the dimension of the theatrical live performance and the cinematic becomes wholly contained within the film medium. There are no aisthetic effects in Dogville as such and the post-cinematic is more of an aesthetic within the theatricalised film. Nonetheless Dogville shares many of the traits and concepts discussed in the context of the earlier pieces which relate to the foregrounding and reflexivity of the ‘politics of perception’. Dogville can be said to exemplify MacCabe’s category of a Brechtian film by drawing attention to the process of filmmaking, the use of distancing effects and by employing dialectics to engage the audience in its morally ambiguous themes. The striking feature of Dogville is that it is effectively a stage play filmed in a Dogme style cinematic fashion and montaged as a film. It is not a filmed play, however, nor is it a realist film. It is something in between, a theatrical film perhaps. Arguably the fact of the whole action taking place on a giant soundstage, with chalk lines demarcating invisible walls, props and furniture hanging on strings and actors miming actions that fill in for physical detail also creates a notion of an incomplete, deconstructed realist film.