Director Lars von Trier at Cannes: Playing with social dynamite

[Hannah Bell]

Von Trier’s latest outburst took place at the Cannes Film Festival, which came to an end at the weekend. In response to a question at a press conference following the showing of his new film, Melancholia, he commented that he had discovered he was not a Jew, but “that I was really a Nazi, which also gave me some pleasure”. Von Trier then went on to declare a degree of sympathy for Hitler sitting in his bunker. Following a barrage of criticism for his remarks, including from the directors of the Cannes Film Festival, who declared him persona non grata at the event, von Trier made an attempt to apologise...

He told reporters, “even if I was Hitler, what does that have to do with my film being here? It’s a festival for films, not for directors.… Albert Speer was for me a great artist, and we must accept that there can be big artists, like Riefenstahl, that suddenly get their room to work because of a dictatorship. There are people who want me to take that back, but for the sake of truth I can’t do that”.

This is not the first time von Trier has made the statement “I am a Nazi”. In an interview he gave in 2005, von Trier referred to an apocryphal account of his mother’s death in which he she told him with her last words that his real father was not a Jew, but rather a German. Glibly and indefensibly associating all Germans with Nazism, von Trier then went on to declare in 2005 that he himself was a Nazi.

There is no evidence that von Trier is associated in any way with organised Nazi groups. In the course of one recent Danish general election, he took out newspaper space to oppose the candidacy of a radical right-wing party. Nevertheless, there is logic to political positions and statements—even if von Trier is not prepared to admit it. A closer look at von Trier’s political background—as opposed to his ethnic origins—indicates he is moving, as a man and an artist, in a deeply disoriented and reactionary direction....Under conditions of rapidly developing social polarisation, this layer feels impatient with the limits prescribed by democracy—even traditional bourgeois democracy—and is increasing amenable to the temptations of a form of dictatorship, in order, like the Nazi icon Riefenstahl, to “get back the room they need to work”.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/may2011/trie-m24.shtml