LARS VON TRIER Soundtrack: Burning Down the House

The choice of music in the films of Lars Von Trier has always been diligently curated, bordering on an obsessive attention to detail. Common themes and styles recur, raising questions of their significance and the meaning behind them. In addition, a fervent reverence for the musician Bowie permeates his filmography. In a way, a lot of his creative vision and style can be explained as an attempt to emulate his idol, not in the music industry, but rather through his own unique medium of film.

While Bowie explored the avant-garde and distilled these ideals for the mainstream, Von Trier does something similar, but rather in a more twisted and dark manner. He takes some of the most harrowing and controversial of subject matters: depression, the apocalypse, rape, murder and deviant sexuality and crafts them into a deceitful set of hors d’oeuvre that we line up to consume.

The term auteur is thrown around a lot in cinema, but in the work of Von Trier, we see an artist who has a clear and defined vision of what he wants to accomplish. Music serves as the seasoning for his art, sprinkled on top to deliver a stylistic stamp; the final piece in an uncompromising artistic statement.

This technique is no better exemplified than in the final credits of his 2003 film Dogville. Dogville is a barren film, shot entirely on a single set; the locations of buildings drawn in chalk upon the stage floor and it is this deconstruction of artifice, that in fact intensifies the content of the story. The film tells the tale of a young woman on the run, who seeks refuge in a sleepy town deep in the Rocky Mountains. However, her naivety and good nature is abused by this puritan town until she is forced into a truly horrific state of affairs.

The film ends with Bowie’s song “Young Americans” echoing over the end credits, accompanied by real images of homeless people, starving children and victims of discrimination and inequality in the US. A group of people abandoned and forgotten by their own country. It’s shocking and so far detached from the film that preceded it.

It’s this juxtaposition and aggressively anti-American sentiment that reminds us that Von Trier is first and foremost a provocateur. He’s a child at heart, a prankster and enfant terrible, whose sole mission lies in disrupting the establishment of Hollywood Cinema.

While Bowie is a constant in his body of work, opera and classical composers is another element that continues to find space in his films. His 2011 film Melancholia contains no less than eleven excerpts from opera Tristan und Isolde by Richard Wagner. Von Trier claims that this choice of music stems from his fascination with the writer Marcel Proust, in particular the work In Search of Lost Time, in which the author outlines his idea that Tristan und Isolde is the greatest piece of art ever created.

What makes this rather amusing, is that in his infamously self-deprecating manner, Von Trier views Melancholia to be one of his weakest creations, going so far as to liken it to a “wrongly transplanted organ” in a number of his interviews. He believed that an over fixation with this piece of music by both his visual effects and sound teams resulted in an aesthetic that was overly emotional and too much like the Hollywood films that he was attempting to rebel against.

While Melancholia was deemed as a flop in the eyes of Von Trier, his next film Nymphomaniac is like a version of his own greatest hits. The ideas and music that he uses draw from his entire filmography/ “Waltz No. 2” from Shostakovich’s Suite for Variety Orchestra, which he had used in an earlier advertisement that he directed in the 90s appears multiple times, in particular it is used to display the naivety of the main character when she discovers her sexuality.

Pop music ranging from the Talking Head’s “Burning Down the House”, Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild”and Rammstein’s “Fuhre Mich” are used to great effect, infusing the films with an injection of energy that can alleviate some of the darker and heavy ideas that the film explores.

Von Trier often borrows from other artists’ work that he admires, from the paintings of Brueghel the Elder or the nihilistic writings of Nietzsche and it is this respect for those that came before him, that is clearly highlighted in the manner in which he chooses the music for his films.

Von Trier has long said that “a film should be like a stone in your shoe.” Something that is uncomfortable, that makes you think inwardly about your own existence, a shocking and provocative creation. The music of his films is just that, disjointed and contradictory, but it all seems to come together into a cohesive form. I mean who else could combine themes of deviancy and moral degradation with the sublime beauty of classical music?

Words by SAMO

Art, CinemaJames Elliott21 February 2021