"The Element of Crime" (1984)

From point A to point C the chronology of a crime in repetition. Common conceit: the protagonist, a detective on a systematic 'criminal mind' hunt for a serial killer, finds that he was the killer after all - that the 'element of crime' resides in us all - so that you enter the mind of a killer you come out a killer. But that is not where the film's 'profundity' emanates.

Point B we understand to be a realm washed in nightlit oranges and yellows. This is where von Trier, in his first feature length, announces the superfluity of his knowledge of the medium. The camera pans, the liquid motion of the pacing, the superimpositions, the tracking shots, the stark elliptical lighting, the effortlessly poetic transitions; the camera hardly stays still, and even when it does there are mirror effects and carefully positioned epiphanies. The film is exuberant with technique.

Its exuberance belies the paucity of its core. A dystopian noir, yes, but it is a dream of a film that would perfectly encapsulate that reality once and for all; you watch the film and sense that it is on the way to becoming something definable. What is indefinable about the film is precisely its charm, as evinced in its lurid scapes and absurd dialogues, provoking more or less laughter, passivity, and always a positive awe at the visual imagination on display.

The film is purely a marvel of digestion, an astonishing first film for a director who had been fated for the camera from the time his mother gave him one when he was 10 years old. The director would eventually abscond from eloquence (for this film is powered by sheer eloquence) and reconsider the limitations of the camera. Von Trier is the new Godard, probably more natively endowed than Godard, but insubstantial nonetheless. (v.T. & G. are in their own sly way irredeemably cynical and their humor arises from this cynicism toward the disintegration of kulchur and the tyrannical and inescapable collective pop fetish that has replaced it, which they in turn are helpless to adore; as consequence they each regard the camera and its products as impossibly artificial.)

The film discusses the procedure of tracking down a killer by inhabiting his mind and acting and living out one's life in accordance with the killer's. So too is this film about von Trier inhabiting the mindstate of the idols and films that brought about his early aesthetic formation as a composer of images. His eye brims over with recollections of the substance of other directors; his is a reservoir for the influence of pastmasters.
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NOTE: cf any Tarkovsky, principally "Stalker"