Lars von Trier

Lars von Trier (born Lars Trier, April 30, 1956 in Copenhagen, Denmark) is a Danish film director closely associated with the Dogme95 collective calling for a return to plausible stories in filmmaking and a move away from artifice and towards technical minimalism.

Filming Techniques

Lars von Trier has said that ?a film should be like a rock in the shoe?. In order to create original art he feels that filmmakers must impose restrictions distinct from conventional film techniques. These restrictions are quite clear in von Trier's movies. The most famous is the cinematic "vow of chastity" of the Dogme movement with which he is associated (though only one of his films, Idioterne, is an actual Dogme film). In Dogville (2003) everything was filmed on a sound stage with no set where the walls of the buildings in the fictional town were marked as a line on the floor.

Related Topics:
Dogme - Idioterne - Dogville - 2003

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There usually are two uses of these restrictions in von Trier?s world:

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• The first use is the most common in his films. He wishes to give the actors the artistic freedom that they can?t have on a typical Hollywood film. Von Trier shoots his scenes for longer periods than most directors to encourage actors to stay in character. In Dogville (2003) he let actors stay in character for hours, method-style. The rules and restrictions are a break from the traditional Hollywood production, though directors such as Robert Altman have long been using such techniques of working with actors.
• The second use is to underline a certain mood to the story. This can be seen in his film Dancer in the Dark (2000) that shifts between two styles, where each style relates to Selma?s point of view. When we follow Selma in her everyday life it is shot on handheld digital video, digitally filtered to mute the colors. Selma's dream sequences/musical numbers, however, are shot using color-amplified digital video, with fixed (or smoothly moving) cameras.