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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Wow. Trier strikes again.

It sounds like he was trying to make a joke, but his sense of humour seems to be lacking (he's not a comedic director). Mix that with a little 'lost in translation' and it just sounds horrid. I mean, he's german and jewish, not sure how long his family has been in the country but if they were there during WWII his parents would have seen the sh*t hit the fan firsthand...

...Or maybe I just can't see this NOT being a failed attempt at humour.

As a side-note: I'd be willing to watch a '3 to 4 hour porn film starring Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg'... You know, in the interest of cinema.
 
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Von Trier spins his whole life on shock and discomfort. He needs to get emotional responses from people on and off screen. I remember reading a letter by Edgar Allen Poe and he said he spent entire days meeting people and all he did was lie because the truth is always mundane. Similarly Roland Barthes would 'polarise his views' in conversation, he said it was for entertainment but I get the sense that he wanted to know peoples true opinions. Not saying that Von Trier is akin to either of them but we do know that his a depressive and is mentally 'off-kilter', and likes people to talk about him.
 
Tim Hole said:
Von Trier spins his whole life on shock and discomfort. He needs to get emotional responses from people on and off screen.
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I think you're spot on. It's Trier and people shouldn't put to much into his comments. If you saw the whole press conference, you would now that he also joked about Kirsten Dunst making porno scenes and so on and so forth. Trier is a provocateur, and has an extreme sense of humour.
 
Mike P. said:
It sounds like he was trying to make a joke, but his sense of humour seems to be lacking (he's not a comedic director). Mix that with a little 'lost in translation' and it just sounds horrid. I mean, he's german and jewish, not sure how long his family has been in the country but if they were there during WWII his parents would have seen the sh*t hit the fan firsthand...

...Or maybe I just can't see this NOT being a failed attempt at humour.

As a side-note: I'd be willing to watch a '3 to 4 hour porn film starring Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg'... You know, in the interest of cinema.
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I think Lars von Trier is Danish
 
Jesper Sichlau said:
I think you're spot on. It's Trier and people shouldn't put to much into his comments. If you saw the whole press conference, you would now that he also joked about Kirsten Dunst making porno scenes and so on and so forth. Trier is a provocateur, and has an extreme sense of humour.
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Yes, there's no point in making a big deal about it. It is Von Trier. Laugh with him, laugh at him or move on.
 
Moishe, a friend of mine, also likes to call himself a Nazi and talks of good things about Hitler. I guess he just finds this sort of cool, as a 25 year old young man. Von Trier obviously is liking this as well. I find this very childish and primitive.
 
Whatever Von Trier is, he's brilliant - bordering on genius, I would say, and I don't use that word often. Cannes has banned him from future competition- that might prove to be a bigger loss for Cannes than for Von Trier. But I feel that this is not over yet.
 
Bill Anderson said:
Whatever Von Trier is, he's brilliant - bordering on genius, I would say, and I don't use that word often. Cannes has banned him from future competition- that might prove to be a bigger loss for Cannes than for Von Trier. But I feel that this is not over yet.
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From NYT Arts Beat:

A spokeswoman for the festival said she did not know if any such expulsion had occurred before. She said “Melancholia” would remain in competition, judged by a jury of filmmakers led by Robert De Niro. If Mr. von Trier was to win a prize on Sunday (he won the Palme d’Or in 2000 for his film “Dancer in the Dark”), he would not be allowed on the premises, the festival spokeswoman said. No decision has been made about whether the ban would apply to future festivals. A spokeswoman for Magnolia Pictures, which will distribute the film in the United States, said the Cannes board’s decision will not affect plans to release the film in the fall as scheduled.
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Everyone who has seen the complete interview, who has read previous interviews with Lars Von Trier or knows a thing about him, knows that he is NOT a Nazi, and the way he said it was at one point a reference to a personal traumatic point where he very late found out that his 'father' was not his real father, and he always thought he was Jewish. He has a very sarcastic and sometimes hard sense of humour, but it's one that I can relate too, and he just had a sarcastic funny way of saying that he at one point in his life found out that his father was a German, not a Jew ("First I thought I was Jewish, then I found out I was a Nazi").

All things considered, I think the festival did a very foolish thing, reacting the way they did. They talked about Von Trier saying inhumane statements, while I clearly heard him say in the interview that he does not support WO II, loves Jews - except Israel because they are a pain in the ass - again hard humour, but it definately has a ring of truth in it, considering that Israel is doing some inhumane things now too and doesn't accept any criticiscm. I also heard him say Hitler was obviously not a good guy, but that he had sympathy for Hitler in his bunker alone.
Von Trier is just also making a plea for humanizing Hitler, in his own provocative way.
And yes, I laughed when he said 'And then I was a Nazi'. Yes, I also laughed when he said about Kirsten Dunst and depressions: "I very much like it that you're mentally disturbed". It was a funny way of saying: "Problems you had earlier gave you experience to play this role better, and it made the performance better, and as a director, I'm looking for the best performance".
If I have trouble in life, I often also use that kind of harder, sarcastic humor. No, not everyone gets it, but I did hope that the Cannes Organisers would be the kind of people who had enough intelligence to 'get it'.

Der Untergang also got so many complaints that it would "humanize Hitler". In Belgium there is a cook who has a really nice program, called Plat Prefere. It just wasn't good cooking, it was good television. He would always search for the favorite dish of famous people, often important in the history of mankind, and then of course make his version of it, but also use that as a point to have interviews, and go into the neighbourghood of that person, get to know local cuisine, etc.
One time he had made an episode about the favorite dish of Hitler. The Jewish community filed a complaint to the public broadcast for them NOT to air the episode (even BEFORE it was seen!) because they said it would humanize Hitler. The public broadcast gave in, the episode was never aired. The cook came in another program to respond to it, and he said that they never gave him the chance to defend his program, because it never aired and nobody saw it. He said the episode itself was his 'ultimate defense' that it did nothing to minimize the cruelties of Hitler.
In that program they just showed a small introfilm of the beginning of the episode, and right away he told about the horrible things that Hitler did, but that he ALSO had a favorite dish etc, and that as a cook, he was also very interested in what kind of favorite dish a person like that would have had.
Small news flash for the Jewish community: Hitler was a HUMAN. He did despicable things, but you only make it much more dangerous for people if you keep saying he was a monster and no-one can talk about him as a human.

To go back to the subject: very sad to see this happening. From what I've heard, everyone during the press conference did pretty much 'get' what Von Trier was saying, and the Danish journalists that interviewed him afterwards did 'normal' interviews. It wasn't even an issue. It seems that it only became an issue afterwards.
Again, you would think that the Organisers of the biggest festival of 'art and intelligent films' as I'm sure they like to put it, could also put more context to a quote if practically all journalists 'get' what Von Trier meant, and know enough history about Von Trier.

BTW: great link Gavin, and sums op much of the way Von Trier was talking.
 
There are some things you don't joke about. Identifying yourself with a man and a movement responsible for the murder of close to 20 million people in an effort for world domination is not funny and can't be explained away as such. I read this morning that he blames his new sobriety for his making the statements (he says he quit drinking after he finished Melancholia) and that if he were still drinking he would have been asleep at the press conference, so he was well aware of what he was doing. I think he also now regrets what he said as he has been backing off the past few days, though he is keeping up the joking front. There are just some lines you don't cross with public statements that are excusable - identifying yourself with mass murderers like Hitler, Idi Amin, Stalin, Bin Laden, etc.is one of those lines. His filmmaking style and content are amazingly good and will always stand as such, but his politics and attitudes have made me lose respect for him.
 
I watched the whole interview, I have not seen him interviewed before; at least up until the moment he dropped his “clanger”, I really laughed my arse off more than I have in a long time. To people that have been immersed in the film business for a long time, the filmsky BS just gets to be too much. I found his attitude to be surprisingly refreshing and VERY unpretentious, and I really understand why very excellent and well seasoned (and unpretentious) “talent” would like to work with him.


The problem was that it was getting late, and the reporter from the Guardian asked a question about his German roots and the Nazi esthetic. In the first few words that came out of his mouth, it would have been an amazingly ironic and insightful premise, that instead suddenly took a massive nose dive in a direction that he really didn’t intend it to go in. Then there’s this awkward pause where you see he’s trying to reach for a more shocking but more funny statement that would have been very funny and sarcastic to essentially cancel out (or repair) his former mis-step; unfortunately he “fumbles’ and then plunges utterly into the abys… (with no hope of rescue)!


It’ s interesting that everyone says that he tries to make a reaction by deliberately making people uncomfortable, and in this case he accidentally “did it to himself” in the same way that a drunk playing with a loaded gun is liable to shoot themselves. He’s definitely not a Nazi, but man it’s gonna take him a long time to dig himself out of that hole. I hope he doesn’t use this as an excuse to pick up the bottle.


His version of an ill conceived post modern Mel Brooks attempt at playing with things is super dangerous, and is always liable to fail dismally and genuinely offend a lot of people. I’m sure in this case he’ll learn from his mistakes.
 
Alan Rosenfeld said:
There are some things you don't joke about. Identifying yourself with a man and a movement responsible for the murder of close to 20 million people in an effort for world domination is not funny and can't be explained away as such. I read this morning that he blames his new sobriety for his making the statements (he says he quit drinking after he finished Melancholia) and that if he were still drinking he would have been asleep at the press conference, so he was well aware of what he was doing. I think he also now regrets what he said as he has been backing off the past few days, though he is keeping up the joking front. There are just some lines you don't cross with public statements that are excusable - identifying yourself with mass murderers like Hitler, Idi Amin, Stalin, Bin Laden, etc.is one of those lines. His filmmaking style and content are amazingly good and will always stand as such, but his politics and attitudes have made me lose respect for him.
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oh my.. you definitely didn't get the premise 1-step posted above :beatdeadhorse5:
 
Does any of this silliness actually matter?

This is why directors should do their talking through their cameras and films, not their mouths.
 
Tom Lowe said:
Does any of this silliness actually matter?

This is why directors should do their talking through their cameras and films, not their mouths.
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Nope. He knows it was a dumb thing to do, has since called himself an "idiot" for saying it and is all round feeling pretty bad about it I think.

He probably sold a whole bunch of tickets to his film with that press conference, this sure has got everyone talking about him.
 
Shit, i got really shocked when the festival threw him out - and felt uncomfortable the last days of the festival because of this. Melancholia was incredible! Maybe his best film in some senses, as it's really respectful to humanity without loosing his dark edge. Especially respectful toward melancholics, unlike his last film.

Most ambitious people who suffer from bi-polar depressions or the likes gets connected with Hitler in the bunker - in some way - a doctor friend told me. So why not joke about it?

He did his best performance at the press conference. Giving details on the alcohol-abuse of his cast and other nice details for the journalists. They should have treated the man better than making serious articles about his "nazism" - after all the good stories he had given them...

But lastly, his little monolog was quite silly and a 55 year old man should have known better. But throwing the man out? Shit. Cannes is an art festival, not G8.
 
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