Politics and open-ended dialectics in Lars von Trier's Dogville: a post-Brechtian critique

Abstract

Dogville is one of the few films by Lars von Trier that has been consistently discussed by the critics in relation to Brecht. Then again, most of the discussions of the film have offered a canonical reading which understands Dogville to be a single-minded ‘anti-American’ parable. These readings have paralysed any fruitful investigations of the film's form and the historical transitions that have changed the ways in which art attains its political function. This paper reads Dogville under the rubric of the post-Brechtian so as to rethink the political implications of the film's form. I focus on the film's employment of theatricality, performativity, and narrative aperture, arguing that the film generates contradictions that resist epistemological mastery. The paper proposes that Dogville goes beyond the closed form of the Brechtian Fabel, and Brecht's quest for dialectical enlightenment is replaced by open-ended dialectics.

Keywords:

• Lars von Trier
• Brecht
• post-Brechtian
• open-ended dialectics
• theatricality
• performativity

Notes

1. Dogville the film's title is in italics; Dogville the city's name as used in the film in normal font.

2. Sinnerbrink's online article, which I quoted earlier, discusses the film's emphasis on the ethic of exchange. Yet he does not understand this to be a dialectical critique of capitalism. Sinnerbrink argues that the film exposes ‘the libidinal economy of desire’ that characterises liberal democracy.

3. Since Breaking the Waves, von Trier employs a shooting style according to which the characters are not aware whether they are on frame or not. In an interview he gave me, he explained that the reason for this is ‘to capture the actors when they are in and out of character’.

4. Drawing on Jean-Luc Godard's practice, Wollen argues that narrative closure that characterises classical cinema is replaced by ‘narrative aperture’ in ‘counter-cinema’.