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January 1997, Week 3

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Subject:
From:
"Edward R. O'Neill" <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Wed, 15 Jan 1997 23:02:50 -0800
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        On the technical level, there was quite a bit of publicity about the
film when it came out, specifically about its cinematography.  (In Los
Angeles, the *LA Weekly*--our "equivalent" of the now rather moribund
*Village Voice*--took it upon itself to promote the film rather heavily.)
        Not having the material on hand, I can't say much in detail, but I
do remember that the film was pushed to an incredibly high speed and all
shot in natural lighting conditions.  (I believe it was mostly hand-held and
shot on actual locations rather than sets.)  The resulting images were then
digitized and the colors were systematically altered.
        (Von Trier likes to set himself this kind of technical hurdle.
Judging by the  my experience of *Zentropa* and his realization of an
unproduced Dreyer script, I would say that the results are inversely
proportional in quality to the amount of effort involved, but I am
apparently virtually alone in this estimation.)
        As for the idea of a woman suffering in order to somehow redeem a
man, I believe that most of the references so far have been to films which
have been canonized as works of art.  But surely this is hardly a structure
which is limited to "works of art."  Didn't French work on "textual
analysis" and on the western genre emphasize, for example, the split between
the 'good' and 'bad' woman in the western and the way the 'bad' woman
suffers and thus redeems herself in her death?  (I'm thinking, for starters,
of Bellour's article on *The Westerner*, but *My Darling Clementine* also
fits the bill.)
        And hasn't the very extensive feminist work on the melodrama focused
quite heavily on the way films make women suffer in ways that are supposed
to be enobling?  (I'm picturing Bette Davis in *Jezebel* riding off,
gloriously lit by torches, to tend to a lot of plague victims.)  Do we
really have to frame Von Trier in the context of 'works of art'?  Doesn't
the story have the rather sleazily familiarity of  a clever and rather
literate and highbrow porn novel--a sort of *Story of O* for our time?
        Here the *New Yorker* review of *Breaking the Waves* was refreshing
in its refusal to hew to the critical mainline of acclaim for the film.
Rather, the critic (Terence Rafferty, I believe) pointed out that European
art films became popular in the U.S. in part because a very thin veneer of
theology provided an alibi for viewers who wanted to see franker depictions
of nudity and sex than Hollywood was producing at the time.  Rafferty put
Von Trier in this context, which I thought was more illuminating than taking
him seriously either in terms of theology or in terms of art.
Sincerely,
Edward R. O'Neill
 
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