"Europa" (1991)

von Trier's cinematic trajectory, at its incipience, parallels the careers of those early modernist poets who labored to rinse themselves of the fin-de-siecle hyperaestheticism that unduly aroused in them an urge to adorn each expression - already in its verbal powers commensurate to the purpose - with an overly precious & overcooked component; as the poets of taste worked dutifully to remove themselves from the sweltering jungle of embellishment, their exfoliation - much like a mineral growth exposed to the air after years of concentrated suppression underneath - intensified in lyricism & volubility upon contact with the outer elements: the overread scholars, the pasty skinned cinephiles, indulged in the remains of their scalping.

To rid himself of what he considered his worst tendency (to ape the nonpareil motions of his superiors, i.e. Welles, Tarkovsky, etc.) von Trier set out to:

1) Direct a film so eloquent, panegyrical, superfluous, that he would develop nausea for it,

And

2) Direct a film that would be a thorough antithesis to the former.

That von Trier managed to accomplish both acts with a workman's sincere & unmitigated faith, demonstrates how sacredly he had felt for film, its fragility & potentiality. Terrorized by the infidelity that film's sporadic vanity could inspire in a director's ambition, von Trier prepared himself for a complete reversal; before the whiplash of chastity & abstinence, in his search for cinematic purity he would surrender his will to one last confession of his 'weakness'; an indulgence which would take the form of a prolonged & exuberant idolatry.

To carry out the 1st objective, von Trier chose a locus for the root of film's supposed stagnation & rebirth: Europe. He invented a city named 'Zentropa', which would stand for a realm that could be reached only through hypnosis, through the film act itself. Europe would appear as a spectre of itself, post-1945 - when filmic art grew conscious of itself as a realm existent beyond mere entertainment - renamed 'Europa'. From its war scars, its ruins and ruined nationalist idealism, a newer and more portentous factory kulchur would emerge: a life after death, a metaphysical reawakening to the limitless eye of the camera - founded on the belief that when civilization & its discontents pass away, the camera would be there to capture the deathstroke of a cameraless past, to preserve it in a future made omniscient by the camera's endless tracking shot.

(To carry out the 2nd objective, which would be realised in the Dogme 95 council 4 years later, von Trier would author - supposedly for his & his compatriots' sake alone - 10 vows of chastity to perfect one's sincerity in filmic art.)

Zentropa could be reached only through a hypnosis, as I have stated; but it was a particular hypnosis, quite unlike those of the conventional folklore: this hypnosis would be one begun in meditation on traintracks (the tracks of 'history'; of 'interpretation'; of 'time-out-of-joint'; etc.) in motion, toward an unforeseeable futurism - the movement of which would be the cinematic medium at play, in actuality. This hypnosis would be incomplete, inauthentic, if it were not narrated - with imperturbable deliberation - by Max von Sydow's booming voice:

You will now listen to my voice. My voice will help you and guide you still deeper into Europa. Every time you hear my voice, with every word and every number, you will enter into a still deeper layer, open, relaxed and receptive. I shall now count from one to ten. On the count of ten, you will be in Europa. I say: one. And as your focus and attention are entirely on my voice, you will slowly begin to relax. Two, your hands and your fingers are getting warmer and heavier. Three, the warmth is spreading through your arms, to your shoulders and your neck. Four, your feet and your legs get heavier. Five, the warmth is spreading to the whole of your body. On six, I want you to go deeper. I say: six. And the whole of your relaxed body is slowly beginning to sink. Seven, you go deeper and deeper and deeper. Eight, on every breath you take, you go deeper. Nine, you are floating. On the mental count of ten, you will be in Europa. Be there at ten. I say: ten.

The chant causes you to lose consciousness - you trade it for another awareness, which may approximate to the dreamlife but is more readily compatible with death & its holocausts - or so von Trier will remind us later. The inner subject of Europa may be the transformative power of film, but its surface aspect - its necessity as a counteraction to the viral dispossession of a Europe raped by its own fallacious belief in - & a failed nostalgia for - an enclosed goldenaged Old World (a spectral society built not on the dream of the Other - an entity so effortlessly identifiable through the filmic act, which would take place in the modernist future we presently live in - but on the nightmare of its purity threatened by barbarian invasions - to which fascism, communism, etc. were reactions rather than responses), emerges as well.

Europa would take place as a Europe preserved at its phoenix heart - found in no other place more median, more fit & bold, than the Rhineland - on a background projection. It would be the Europe of Orson Welles, of Renoir, of film noir, the Europe projected onto a white screen and swathed in a ghostly light. In the foreground would take place the characters & circumstances of Zentropa, mirroring the historical veracity of the 2nd World War - as a camera would mirror the objectivity of the landscape in a direct mimesis, its only flamboyance the existence of its selective framing. von Trier similarly imitates not merely the gestures of his superiors, but inhabits their eye with a stark fidelity - a black-and-white stock that aspires to denote film once and for all; a cinematography that imbibes directly from archival footage (footage made to look archival but is in fact produced for the film, with actors from the film); soft focus closeups that hearken to von Sternberg; sudden splashes of color to relate what tender violence a shattered palette brought to the 1st color films; olympian tracking shots that attempt the unthinkable: pay homage to while surpassing the Wellesian standards; these and many more audacities expected of a director as goodhumored & mockingly overtalented as von Trier.

But he is not, as it is supposed, completely - or even halfwittedly - insincere in his endeavors to rubbish the eloquence he was gifted with since youth; Europa's mastery of technique, and specifically its neoromantic maneuvers, & the indubitably lyrical conclusion that so enraptures the theme at the end, point toward an introspection in the director (& in his collaborator Niels Vorsel, who wrote it.) The sheer difficulty & passion at play in the film belie a terrific intoxication with the potential of film to reconcile with its earlier cruder yet no less hypnotic incarnations. The film is unique precisely because it is hardly an antiquarian's approach to dogmatism; Europa weaves a network of allusions (signified by the train's map of intersections) made so natural through precision that its technical devices manage to harmonise with its narrative, as only a skilled & truly involved director would succeed in carrying out.

The ending of Europa is one as lyrical as anything ever put on film - it is von Trier's lasting testament to his erudition, and the brightest glimmer of his much unheralded optimism (for a director too easily pigeonholed in cynicism) - it stands forth as the moonlight of a Nocturne - and declares that when the death-of-the-subject finally arrives, the camera's realm will preserve our astral body, the extension of our consciousness which we call the movie theatre. It is probable that by the end of the film we realise that we had - as the film's protagonist had - given ourselves over to an awareness beyond our immediate comprehension: the camera's supernatural prescience to witness our death despite the termination of our sight, our mind, our vitality; an exterior awareness that conserves our volition & meaningfulness in the ghostwash of the projection screen... If history outlives our corporeal existence, it will be film that will outdo and transcend even history's bitterest victory on our corpse.

Moreover, it does not fail to dawn on von Trier that by 'Europa', it is also meant the moon of Jupiter which Galileo had uncovered - at a great distance in the futurism which only cinema understands - through the use of a telescope lens (i.e. a camera). Hence, the overpowering sight of the moon in the final frame, as a prelude to the Aria.
...
von Trier's confession comes across as a kind of purgation, but it is also more than just a precocious exercise in aesthetic refinement, or a simple release from the 'anxiety of influence': Europa would free von Trier from his wellknown anxieties by prompting him to excel at what he had for so long adored in others - namely the aspects of control & anticipatory lyricism - while returning him to the seed of his peculiar humour (manifest in Europa to a much greater degree than in The Element of Crime) which would blossom after Europa, in the subsequent works that would establish for good von Trier's essential ironic spirit: The Kingdom series, Breaking the Waves, The Idiots, etc.

For reason alone of its hypnosis - Zentropa will have to be revisited a few more times, preferably by rail transport.
...
Cf. Spielberg's Schindler's List, which unsurprisingly came to completion 2 years later; its black-and-white look, the use of color to highlight certain emotive sections, up to its very choice of subject, owe everything to the Dane's expansion of a much fatigued thematic. It was Spielberg who offered von Trier a job in the factory, and it was von Trier who had enough sense to obey his longheld fear of traveling outside of Denmark for too long a period.