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Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier has earned a reputation for being one of the world’s most daring and certainly most controversial directors - as well as being one of the most arrogant, having claimed at last year’s Cannes film festival to be the best director in the world. However, he does have good reason to be proud of his work, having created some truly bizarre, original and brilliant films ranging from his masterpiece Breaking the Waves to his Palme d’Or winning musical turned tragedy Dancer in the Dark, to nightmarish horror. Indeed, his desire to create unique and original films has even lead him to attempt to co-create (alongside fellow Danish director Thomas Vinterberg) the Dogme 95 cinematic manifesto, a "vow of chastity" as von Trier put it, designed to create a new purer and more original form of cinema.
Lars von Trier believes that a filmmaker should try and deliberately make their films as unique and different as possible from other people's work. This may well explain why he is always experimenting with new techniques such as in Dogville, a film shot entirely on a stage with only a few props and the outlines of houses, creating a brilliant and truly memorable movie. However, his ideas are best shown in the Dogme 95 manifesto that encouraged directors to restrict their work so that they could create original films, as well as an attempt to create cinematic purity. Yet it is worth noting that despite co-founding the movement, Lars Von Trier has only made one Dogme film The Idiots, and even in this he’s been criticised for breaking and bending some of his rules. So although it is true he uses many features of Dogme in his films (such as the use of handheld cameras and often grainy film) he has never really followed his own rules.
One major constraint von Trier never breaks is simply that he refuses to fly due to having extreme aerophobia and as such cannot film outside of Europe. However he has always found ways around these constraints such as when necessary creating his own rather European version of America for films like Dancer in the Dark or Manderlay.
In 1998 Lars von Trier was met with a hail of criticism for his film The Idiots due to his inclusion of real sex in the film, a decision which sparked this off in several other films most notably Nine Songs. However this was practically nothing compared to the storm created last year when he released his gruesome and highly disturbing horror film Antichrist. As well as featuring actual sex, it was criticised for its sexual violence and even misogyny. After its release at Cannes, he was not only challenged to justify why he made the film in a press conference, but was also presented with a special anti-award at Cannes due to the hatred it stirred up, while other critics argued that it was a work of true genius.
At present Lars von Trier is currently working on a planned science fiction film entitled Melancholia starring Penelope Cruz. Little else is known about this project other than the fact that, according to von Trier, it will be different to his previous films in that he now intends his films to contain "no more happy endings", which should be particularly interesting considering this is the man who made both Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark.
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