Description

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The Danish director Lars von Trier is undoubtedly one of the world's most important and controversial filmmakers, and arguably so because of the depiction of women in his films. He has been criticized for subjecting his female characters to unacceptable levels of violence or reducing them to masochistic self-abnegation, as with Bess in Breaking the Waves, 'She' in Antichrist and Joe in Nymphomaniac. At other times, it is the women in his films who are dominant or break out in violence, as in his adaptation of Euripides' Medea, the conclusion of Dogville and perhaps throughout Nymphomaniac. Lars von Trier's Women confronts these dichotomies head on. Editors Rex Butler and David Denny do not take a position either for or against von Trier, but rather consider how both attitudes fall short of the real difficulty of his films, which may simply not conform to any kind of feminist or indeed anti-feminist politics as they are currently configured. Using Lacanian psychoanalysis and acknowledging the work of prior scholars on the films, Lars von Trier's Women reveals hidden resources for a renewed 'feminist' politics and social practice.

About the Author

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Rex Butler is Professor of Art History at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is the author of Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (1999), Slavoj Zizek: Live Theory (2005), Borges' Short Stories (2010), The Zizek Dictionary (2014), and Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy? (2015). He has written for Film-Philosophy, contributed essays to a number of collections on cinema, and edited two volumes of Zizek's writings (Interrogating the Real, 2005; The Universal Exception, 2006). David Denny is Associate Professor and current Chair of the Department of Culture and Media at Marylhurst University, USA. He teaches and does research on the intersection of critical theory, psychoanalysis, film and politics. He has published "Signifying Grace: On Dogville in The International Journal of Zizek Studies, "The Politics of Enjoyment: On The Hurt Locker" in Theory and Event, and "Melancholia: An Alternative to the End of the World" in the collected volume Cinematic Cuts (2016).