The poetry of idiots: Siegrid Alnoy, Lars von Trier, and Bruno Dumont

Abstract

Lars von Trier's The Idiots (1998), Bruno Dumont's L'Humanité (1999), and Siegrid Alnoy's Elle est des nôtres (2003) all feature a protagonist who is both simple-minded and spiritual – an ‘idiot’, in the Dostoevskyan sense of the term. The present paper examines these ‘idiotic’ protagonists from three perspectives: the sociological – how is the idiot situated in relation to society? – the phenomenological – what characterizes the idiotic way of being in the world? – and the stylistic – what does this way of being in the world allow the director to do? Through integrating the three perspectives, the paper argues that the idiot serves to unframe social and cinematic conventions, offering spectators a phenomenological experience that opens them to a poetry which struggles to find a place in the contemporary world.

Keywords::

• recognition
• idiots
• Siegrid Alnoy
• Lars von Trier
• Bruno Dumont
• ‘Cinema of Poetry’

Notes

^1. Alnoy's film has received two English titles: She's One of Us and (in reference to the song the French title refers to) For She's a Jolly Good Fellow.

^2. The murder happens in the local swimming pool. Christine has been persuaded by Patricia to come along on a girls' outing, and Patricia has bought her a bikini that matches her own swimming costume. Christine does not know how to swim and feels uncomfortable in the mint-green bikini. Shortly after having accidentally been pushed into the pool, Christine explodes, and kills Patricia with a fire extinguisher. The murder is presented as an instinctual reaction originating in an attempt to live up to expectations.

^3. Later we encounter another example of Pharaon attempting catharsis by engaging in physical activity as he goes on a very long bike ride.

^4. This is not a contradiction, since when we say ‘grounded’ we generally mean precisely ‘self-conscious’; the presupposition is that we are separate from the universe.

^5. It can be noted that in the film, Domino says Pharaon has lost his wife and baby; in the screenplay, Dumont writes that Pharaon has lost his pregnant girlfriend (cf. www.brunodumont.com).

^6. This reading brings us close to the first of Deleuze's (1983, 104–111) cinema books, where Pasolini's essay is integrated into an argument about the production of a form of camera-consciousness that has internalized its own self-difference. In the second of his cinema books, Deleuze briefly returns to Pasolini's text in a discussion of various forms of documentary and ethnographic film; here he uses Pasolini's essay to tease out a subject position summed up in Rimbaud's famous ‘je est un autre’ (cf. Deleuze 1985, 192–202). I am not, however, trying to argue that the idiots in von Trier, Dumont, and Alnoy are Deleuzian (or Rimbaldian).