ABSTRACT
Lars von Trier's cinema deals with religious themes such as sacrifice, faith, transfiguration, conversion and evil, most notably in Breaking the Waves (1996) and Antichrist (2009). However, Trier's relation to religion is puzzling. His public persona is a moving target echoing different religious figures. Pendulating between deep depression and clownery, extreme vulnerability and haughtiness, Trier has constructed his persona as a trickster 1 and a holy fool 2 —as a jester-like figure often dealing, tragically and farcically, with unsettling images and ideas. Born in a Protestant country, Trier was, in his youth, proud of what he believed to be his Jewish heritage. 3 In a dramatic switch, Trier's mother revealed, on her deathbed, that his real father was a different man and not Jewish at all. As a result, l’enfant terrible of the Danish cinema went through a religious crisis and raised eyebrows by converting, at 33, to Catholicism. 4 To further complicate matters, while the three main forms of Christianity share with Judaism the belief in the goodness of creation—“God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31)—in a variety of his most representative movies (Dogville, Dancer in the Dark, Antichrist and Melancholia), Trier intimates quite the opposite. This has led commentators to uphold that Trier celebrates a perverse satanic theology. 5 In Dogville, the inhabitants of the little American village are so evil that they are deemed “lower than dogs” and then exterminated; as if this weren’t drastic enough, in Antichrist, creation itself becomes—in the words of the female protagonist—nothing less than “Satan's Church.” Disconcertingly though, Antichrist is dedicated to Tarkovsky, a director who, as Trier claims, deeply influenced him and whose cinema was decisively shaped by faith in God and Christian Orthodoxy. 6
