In its portrayal of a pseudo-political commune who ?ter le bourgeois by pretending to be mentally disabled, his Dogme film The Idiots satirised melancholically ineffective modern radicals.Von Trier himself is an advocate of collectivisation, yet recoils from the herd, shielding his auteur status to retain total creative control "It's the same as the problem of democracy," he protests. "I would love to work in a community," he sighs, "but I haven't found others that would be stupid enough to do what I think is right. Sadly not yet included on a Von Trier DVD release as an extra, it is, as expected, a naive if promising student film, pretentious but surprisingly unpornographic.Von Trier likes to expose the processes and politics of film-making, most notably with the playfully nostalgic avant-garde movement Dogme 95 and, more recently, with The Five Obstructions, a documentary about the ethics of film art. In 1979, a young Von Trier and the film co-op Film Groupe 16 shot his own short black-and-white version called Menthe - la bienheureuse. "Many years ago, I made this little something before I went to the Danish Film School," he says. This story about the freed slaves - that was the inspiration for Manderlay."Published under the pseudonym Pauline R?e, Dominique Aury's S&M classic has been filmed by avant-garde luminaries such as Kenneth Anger, and Von Trier regular Udo Kier starred in Just Jaeckin's film adaptation. I'm sure that masochism, as well as sadism, is at the heart of all our psychologies.
The owner said, 'No, I can't do that or I will go to jail.' And so they killed him I thought this quite an interesting story. "Pauline R?e's lover, Jean Paulhan, was a member of the French Academy of writers or whatever, and he wrote a preface to The Story of 'O' about slavery; the human lust for slavery. The story he told was about slaves who were freed by law in the Caribbean. Because they had no food or anything, they went back to the slave owner and wanted to be slaves again. Yet his fixation with pain and suffering persists."Manderlay is actually based on the prologue to The Story of 'O'," he says.
Something like a compromise between these extremes is reached in the neo-Brechtian sparseness of the USA trilogy. "All I can say is that my technique is to go where it hurts, somehow," he says, "and, of course, that goes for memories and history. I see things through my upbringing as a left-wing, cultural-radical humanist. What I have tried in all my films, also the old ones, is to challenge myself and my beliefs. That's the technique."No one could accuse Von Trier of being antisentimental - the emotional wreckage of Breaking the Waves, The Idiots and Dancer in the Dark devastated most audiences. "Why does he have to do that while we sit here!" scowls Von Trier "This is my producer He keeps in the background, as you can see.
