Whatever the film "This House I Made", at least in terms of provoking the audience, Russ von Trier can be said to be the pinnacle.
There may be no news at Auschwitz, but Russ von Trier, who can use concentration camp photographs in his own films, is already news himself.
The director, who has been dubbed "Crazy Tyre," never lacks gimmicks or attention. His entanglement with Cannes is no less than a pair of obsessive and entangled couples. At a press conference in Cannes in 2011, Las von Trier recklessly mentioned his history as a Jew who grew up and later discovered that he was of German descent, and even threatened that since he was no longer Jewish, he now "understood" and "sympathized" with Hitler. Although he apologized immediately after the press conference, the result of the incident was that he had more controversy: Cannes issued a one-year "ban" on von Thiel.
This paper "ban" does not include "Depression" that restricts him. For filmmakers, a year is short. In 2018, audiences at Cannes also applauded Ras von Thiel when he returned. However, the rebellious von Trier once again made people love and hate him, and when the new film "This Room Was Made by Me" was screened in Cannes, about a hundred viewers chose to leave the scene because of the film's discomfort.
This has become the label of Ras von Trier: people love him and hate him. He and his films, once darlings of Cannes, are now back in special screenings, but are excluded from the main competition, and even in his films, Las von Trier has to start a self-justification:
"Are you that you hate women?"
Russ von Trier possessed Jack at this moment, and instead of answering, he asked:
"Why is it always the man's fault?"
"Women are always victims, men are always bad people."
The appearance of the eerie and the hollow inside of the "This room is made by me"
"This House I Made" has the same cunning as Las von Trier: in the form of storytelling, Las von Trier has always been willing to provide the audience with a lot of material for discussion. Therefore, the perverted killer played by Matt Dillon has become very charming in the eyes of many viewers.
Through a long conversation with a mysterious Mr. Virgil, Jack speaks like a confession about his years of murder as a serial killer. Vontil again uses dialogue and chapter forms: each chapter is a massacre, which Jack then interprets as an artistic act, and he is also seeking a more artistic way of killing.
In several killing scenes, Ras von Trier shows the audience extreme violence and gore: a murderer who builds a house from the body of a victim, a delicately methodical obsessive-compulsive disorder sufferer. He simply cut off the soles of ducks, then watched the animals struggle in the water, knocking a man's head open with a jack, cutting the female body, killing the child with a rifle, killing his friends who were hunting with him, and at the same time, he regarded his crimes as works of art, fiddling, filming, and recording them.
For the average audience, it's well worth sparking a round of discussion about political correctness and good and evil, after all, Russ von Trier did what many people want to do but can't: confront violence, don't hide it, and focus the camera on naked violence. Uma Thurman begins the film as a beautiful but stupid, offensive woman, an extremely impatient character to win the laughter of the audience when Jack gives her a hammer. In the second murder, the use of a heavy rain to wash away Jack's crime is also the humor deliberately created by the director in the bloody murder.
In addition, "This Room Is Made by Me" is also an intellectual feast, which gives the audience more room for interpretation. Jack not only confesses his sins to Virgil in the film, he also likes to talk about the process of winemaking, Gothic cathedral architecture, Glenn Gould's music, and William Black's poetry.
Russ von Trier discusses the Nazis in these chapters, which is still von Thiel's self-justification of the Nazis: the multitude of Holocaust footage in the form of PPT and the praise of Nazi aesthetics are intertwined, and Jack is wondering if the tyrannical dictators of history will not be artists. The whole film is full of philosophical, artistic, and historical reflections, which makes the narrative of "This Room Is Made by Me" fragmented. In the end, Jack established his own aesthetic standards, believing that the Holocaust was a decaying beauty, decay and nobility coexisting. After breaking his obsession with artistic creation, he became part of the negative film and part of the "beauty" in the way of falling into hell.
"This room is made by me" this film has not received very friendly reviews since its birth. IMDB 7.1, Metascore 41, Rotten Tomatoes 58% freshness rating, such a rating means that the audience may be recognized for the director's formal innovation, but it is by no means for the spiritual core he has built.
In the final analysis, leaving aside the gimmicks of brutal murder and some knowledge of the history of art philosophy that consciously leads people to appreciate and interpret, under these complicated and thick cloaks, vonTil's argument on violence still seems a little shallow: he is too biased towards the defense position, defending his past, defending the aesthetics with which he identifies.
As a result, it is difficult to agree that a film defending itself can be a "masterpiece" in the history of The creation of Las von Trier. He's like Jack, the killer who can't breathe life into his work and can only call himself a living killer, and he can't inject a soul of thinking into this film, just like his previous films.
Feng Tier, who is always on the side of the sword
Although "This House I Made" is not the pinnacle of Russ von Trier's creation, it is not as some critics say that Russ von Trier is a worthless director. His and Dogma's 95 Manifesto, as well as long-standing reflections on nature, violence, sexuality, racism, and existentialism, deserve careful reading.
Russ von Trier studied film theory at the University of Copenhagen and continued his studies at the Danish National Film Academy. At the age of 25, Russ von Thiel won two best film awards at the International Film Academy in Munich.
In 1984, Lass von Trier's debut film Elements of Crime won 12 awards at seven international film festivals, including the Cannes Technical Award. At the same time, he received his first Palme d'Or nomination, and from the three films "Crime Elements", "Plague" and "European Express", he gradually established his own style.
In 1995, von Trier and three other directors signed the famous "Dougmar 95" declaration, which stipulated: insist on live shooting; sound and picture synchronization, can not use silent source music; must use a portable camera to shoot, etc. This is von Trier's rebellion against modern cinema. Under the influence of the manifesto, von Trier became an internationally renowned director with his golden heart trilogy. "Breaking The Waves", "Idiot", and "Dancer in the Dark" all tell the story of the naïve heroine, who still maintains a "golden heart" after experiencing tragedy.
Ironically, while all three films are products of the Dougmar Manifesto, only "The Idiot" is the one that truly meets the requirements. After making a demand for form, von Trier soon abandoned the manifesto.
His subsequent American trilogy has a strong personal style. The actors performed on an empty stage, with few chalk marks on the floor to represent the set, and when "Dogtown" was shortlisted for Cannes, Jiang Wen believed that the charm of the film did not come from the movie, but from the drama. This also shows the film industry's doubts about von Trier's artistic direction. Subsequently, due to depression, he shot three films for himself, "The Antichrist", "Depression", and "Female Addict", which explored religion, depression and sex respectively.
Vontil's work has always been clearly directed. He is a director who knows very well in which direction he is going, and although Feng Tier's creation has all kinds of problems with being too avant-garde and too flattering, he is by no means a creator who is confused about the past and defends himself.
In his past works, he also used the intentions that appeared in "This House Is Made by Me", and he was happy to depict the victims and martyrs on the big screen, describing their suffering, thereby expressing pessimism and humanism. However, it is somewhat regrettable that in "This Room Is Made by Me", he focuses too much on himself, so that the whole film is filled with self, and the real deep thinking and exploration are squeezed into the corner.
This narcissistic expression further exaggerates his lack of affection for the subject of his creation. Russ von Trier once mentioned in an interview that he thought working with actors was like how a chef would use potatoes or a piece of meat. "As a chef, you have to look at potatoes or pieces of meat to see what the ingredients might be. I know I may have used the wrong metaphor, but my job is to see what the potatoes are there. ”
Obviously, von Trier never lacked attention, praise and scolding. His relationship with the audience, the actors, and even the whole world is like treating a potato, or a piece of meat. People can scold him for the scale of his shots, and they can applaud him for his return to Cannes. However, when von Trier truly indulges in his own architecture and hell, he may be like Jack.
No one walked with him.
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