I. Beauty
In 1935, 32-year-old Leni Riefenstahl created one of the most beautiful films of her generation—a motion picture that remains a standard reference for film studies. Exquisite attention to stylistic detail, superb editing, and a masterful control of the camera produced a classic film, Triumph of the Will. Adolf Hitler called the film an “incomparable glorification of the power and beauty of our Movement.” Triumph was a documentary of the Nazi Party’s Nuremberg rally in 1934.
Like Riefenstahl’s Triumph, Lars von Trier’s Antichrist is a beautiful film. Ultra slow-motion flashbacks and intercuts reminiscent of a Bill Viola video; high-contrast, black-and-white lovemaking; textured, hypnotic, surrealistic scenes of humans intertwined with nature; and extreme close-ups of human eyes, bamboo in a glass vase, and unkempt hair (the camera sporadically zooms in on the backs of heads a la Hitchcock’s Vertigo) all make for a film that is impossible to get out of one’s sensual body. Antichrist’s images and sounds have infiltrated my dreamscape for the two weeks now since I saw it at the New York Film Festival, along with about 700 other attendees. I wish I had their phone numbers; even the disgusted dozens who walked out halfway through. I’d like to call them at 3:00 a.m. and ask what they are thinking about, what they are dreaming, if indeed they are sleeping. I need some therapy. This is one messed-up film.
The beauty of Antichrist is in distinct contrast to many of von Trier’s previous films. From the early 1990s until now, his films have conveyed an anti-beautiful sentiment. Critics have been quick to liken von Trier’s filmmaking to Bertolt Brecht’s theatrical mode of “alienation” (or, “distanciation”) in which audiences are prevented from empathizing with characters through formal, stylistic means. This is in contrast to most Hollywood films and Broadway plays that strongly encourage identification with one or more characters in order to “draw in” the audience. To keep viewers from being too engrossed in the unfolding world of the film, von Trier has typically employed handheld cameras, rough edits that jar the viewers’ visual sensibilities, microphone booms that become visible in shots, and a precedence of minimalist staging, especially in Dogville and Manderlay—though both were striking in their lighting and set design. Antichrist alludes to these anti-beauty sentiments: There are a number of handheld shots, and some curious breaks with the 180-degree rule, but those are early on in the film and it becomes the content, not the form, that is so disturbing in the latter half of the film.
The ancients, as well as many moderns, have concerned themselves with beauty and its attendant formal dimensions of symmetry, wholism, and proper ratios. In the third century CE, Plotinus suggested that all beautiful things produce “awe and a shock of delight, passionate longing, love and a shudder of rapture.” These words could easily be applied to many parts of Antichrist, just as modern day renditions of “shock” and “awe,” and “shudder” are far beyond what the ancients were imagining. Even so, the ancient Greeks, and groups like the National Socialists who pretended to be unearthing an ancient tradition, saw beauty as a property that prompts holiness and ultimately salvation, purifies its recipients, and promotes social harmony and prosperity. Which is why Riefenstahl employed it and Hitler enjoyed it. Beauty, it has been thought, leads to goodness and truth.
II. Nature
Throughout Western philosophical and theological history, one of the key sources for the encounter with beauty has been found in nature. The father of modern philosophy, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), was big on it, as are many in the Germanic and English philosophical traditions: nature is awe-inspiring, overwhelming even, leading to an encounter with the sublime, something uncontrollable, something that makes us realize the tremendous (making us tremble) forces that are beyond our human grasp, leading us to believe there might be gods and goddesses behind it all.
Von Trier seems to know this and in Antichrist we get nature in a big, bad way: leeches sucking blood off a hand, dead and dying animals, falling trees, falling acorns, and falling birds from nests (mimicking falling children, the “Fall” from original grace), and, finally, animals who prey on their young. Nature here isn’t the pristine, verdant world revered by eco-warriors. Von Trier and his production designers make sure that trees and grass may be “green,” but they are simultaneously rotting, decaying, and falling.
The film’s natural world is not unlike that described by Annie Dillard in her marvelous Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Early on in her reflections, Dillard describes her experience walking along a shoreline in a beautiful environment and coming across a frog that was moving very slowly:
And just as I looked at him, he slowly crumpled and began to sag... his skin emptied and drooped. He was shrinking before my eyes like a deflating football... I gaped bewildered, appalled. An oval shadow hung in the water behind the drained frog; then the shadow glided away. The frog skin bag started to sink.
Dillard goes on to realize that this “shadow” was a giant water bug that bites its victim, piercing its skin, and then proceeds to suck its prey dry. The image given is gruesome, and Dillard goes on to think of the theological implications: “Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac. But at the same time we are also created.” In the end, Dillard affirms a creation theology that appalls von Trier. For the latter, God is the malicious water bug. (See my previous piece on related topics.)
Ultimately, there is nothing inherently nurturing about nature, and nothing maternal/paternal about caring for one’s young. The images conjured within Antichrist are those from the myths of Saturn (Roman) and Kronos (Greek), of divine beings devouring their own young. Birds do it, bees do it, deities do it; let’s do it. Kronos in particular stands behind the film with its dealings in family struggles and castration. Peter Paul Rubens’ great 1636 painting, Saturn/Kronos Devouring his Son [below left], is replicated in Antichrist as an adult bird ripping open a hatchling.
Tags: annie dillard, antichrist, art, beauty, bertolt brecht, bill viola, cannes, charlotte gainsbourg, hitler, horror movies, kant, lars von trier, leni reifenstahl, misogyny, triumph of the will, willem dafoe
"Nature here isn’t the pristine, verdant world revered by eco-warriors."
Perhaps the Hollywood starlet who knows little beyond the superficialities of environmentalism thinks that ecosystems are pristine, verdant, and generally "nice to babies", but "eco-warriors" who have done it for decades know how necessary "rotting" and "decaying" are to all ecosystems.
No doubt there is much to shock and awe in "Antichrist", but don't assume that all environmentalists are shallow naive individuals, who do not understand the whole picture of an ecosystem, especially the rotting decay underneath, so necessary to feed the "pristine, verdant" parts at the top.
Thanks for this article, Brent. I saw the film last weekend when it opened here in Berkeley. I felt the same way in needing/wanting to talk about it with others who have seen it. If you have a minute maybe we can chat about it at AAR. I posted a short review of it @ www.poptheology.com.
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