ABSTRACT
L ars von Trier is a director renowned for histreatment of sacrifice. Many of his films feature female characters who sacrifice them-
selves, their social standing, their dignity, or
even their lives, for others, whether husbands,
children, community, or cinema itself.1 As a
number of critics have observed, his films are
also pervaded by theological motifs and a sacri-
ficial logic of exchange.2 Sacrifice, however, is
not only a thematic concern in his work; it is
cinema itself that von Trier attempts to sacri-
fice, most explicitly in his recent film,Melanch-
olia (2011), the second in what one might call
von Trier’s “trauma trilogy” (bookended by
Antichrist (2009) and Nymphomaniac: Vol. I
and Vol. II (2013).3 Melancholia is a remark-
able fusion of Dogme-style melodrama, apoca-
lyptic disaster movie, and mock-Wagnerian
Gesamtkunstwerk. Combining Bergmanesque
psychodrama and Tarkovskian melancholia,
Schopenhauerian pessimism and German
romanticism, von Trier creates an enchanted
cinematic world consecrated to the disenchant-
ing idea of “world-sacrifice.” The film presents
a devastating portrait of depressive melancholia,
dramatising the main character Justine’s
(Kirsten Dunst’s) harrowing experience of a
“loss of world” that finds its objective
correlative in a cinematic fantasy of world-
annihilation. In what follows I shall analyse
some of the aesthetic and philosophical strands
of Melancholia, focusing in particular on the
film’s remarkable Prelude, arguing that it per-
forms a complex ethical critique of rationalist
optimism in the guise of a neo-romantic allegory
of world-destruction. At the same time, I want
to suggest that Melancholia seeks to “work
through” the loss of worlds – cinematic but
also cultural and natural – that characterises
our historical mood, one that might be
described as a deflationary apocalypticism, or a
melancholy modernity. Indeed, a number of
critics have noted the aesthetic and theological
aspects of Melancholia along with its environ-
mental and ethico-political resonances.4 From
this perspective, Melancholia belongs to a
genealogical lineage that links it with two
earlier films important for von Trier: Ingmar
T hey say that eve y year on Christmas Eve,Eugenio d’Ors, one of the finest inds Spain ever had, performed a special ritual: he
would identify the best page he had written
over the course of the year about to end, and
then give it to the flames. Not some random
fragment, or something of whose quality he
wasn’t certain, but the best thing he wrote
that year. If you are writer, parting like this
from something you’ve written is painful
enough, but destroying the best thing you’ve
come up with must be unbearable. Yet that’s
precisely the meaning of sacrifice: what d’Ors
was doing was a sacrificial ritual. For whatever
reasons, he took the performance of such an
act to be an important part of his life as a
writer. Even though the story may not be accu-
rate in every detail, it is exemplary. Se non e ̀ vero, e ̀ ben trovato.
