Part of von Trier's inventiveness stems from his refusal to honor conventions consistently, his blithe shifting of moods from the satirically comic to the ironically tragic. He also wreaks clever variation on recurring symbolism in his oeuvre; water imagery, for instance, occurs in the overflowing bathtub and the flooded train of "Zentropa", the submerged police archives in "The Element of Crime" and the rugged emotionalism of the Scottish coastal waters in his strangely epic love story "Breaking the Waves" (1996), the story of a wife urged to by her paralyzed, impotent husband to find sexual satisfaction elsewehere, which brought the director mainstream attention and provided a breakthrough, Oscar-nominated role for Emily Watson.
Von Trier's originality also rests on his appropriations; his endlessly tricky films are some of the most densely referential in the international swell of postmodernism. In that vein, von Trier has made two Danish TV productions: "Medea" in 1988 and "The Kingdom" I & ll in 1994 and 1997, the latter co-directed with Morten Arnfred. His frequently hilarious and very disturbing "The Kingdom," made as a miniseries for Dutch TV but also released theatrically, is only the most obvious example. A sly pastiche of TV medical dramas, it openly borrows from and even parodies David Lynch's cult series "Twin Peaks". It was with "The Kingdom" series that von Trier created a distinct technical style which made it easier to focus on the story and the actors, shot mostly with a hand-held camera, ignoring the usual rules of lighting, continuity and editing, resulting in distorted colours and grainy pictures. The show would later inspire an ABC television drama as reinterpreted by horror novelist Stephen King, "Kingdom Hospital" (2004).
The David Lynch connection is apt, for von Trier is, like Lynch, categorizable, if at all, by the admittedly vague but nonetheless bandied-about term "stylist". Obsessed with obsession; drawn to mystery, fantasy and comical horror; lushly romantic at times but deeply critical of romantic love and romanticism, he is a filmmaker who seems to revel in technique but who actually dissolves splits between form and content with his pointed, cinematically evoked social observation. Von Trier finds his spiritual comrades in fellow "stylists" ranging from George Melies, James Whale, Alfred Hitchcock, Joseph von Sternberg, Andrei Tarkovsky, Max Ophuls and R.W. Fassbinder. Sometimes criticized for seeming to favor style over meaning, von Trier does not distinguish between the two.
Rather, like the mesmeric narration voiced by Max von Sydow in "Zentropa", von Trier is overt about his control as auteur, about institutions of social constraint (government, law, medicine) and about the reserve spectators exhibit in addressing films. The process of interpreting cinema is pointed out and questioned; the spectator is both victim and conspirator. Hypnosis, used both metaphorically and reflexively, recurs in his films, often commenting on the filmgoing experience itself, perhaps most memorably in the voice-overs of "Zentropa". His films at once hypnotize the spectator and yet constantly call attention to the very process of viewer manipulation in which cinema indulges. As von Trier has noted, "Cinema and hypnotism have a lot in common; mainly 'make believe'. Film is a series of fixed shots which give a false impression of movement. Just like hypnosis, film is based on repetition."
Just as viewer and viewed overlap in von Trier's films, so does the image reflexively fold in upon itself. "Epidemic" features films within the film and "Zentropa", mixing black and white with color, piles superimpositions upon back projections, sometimes layering the image seven-fold. In a similar but more thematic vein, von Trier considers other important dichotomies which, in true deconstructionist fashion, he implodes. The law and crime are very close in von Trier's films--in "The Element of Crime" the aging detective who serves as mentor to the protagonist requires that a private eye must merge his identity with that of the criminal he's investigating. A physician within "Epidemic", meanwhile, spreads the disease he's fighting, while in "The Kingdom" another doctor transplants a diseased organ into his own body. A woman in "Breaking the Waves" proves her fidelity by being as promiscuous as possible, while the feckless U.S. hero of "Zentropa", in a collapsing of innocence and duplicity, is manipulated by post-WWII reconstructionists and neo-fascists alike.
"Breaking the Waves" launched "The Golden-Heart Trilogy", von Trier's second filmic trilogy, followed by the digitally shot "The Idiots" (1998), in which a group pf mischievous, attractive Nordics engage in the pursuit of acting like mental deficients in public, and the acclaimed love-it-or-hate-it "Dancer in the Dark" (2000), starring the Icelandic pop star Bjork as a simple-minded Czech immigre to America who is slowly going blind. The trilogy was inspired by a sentimental children's book from von Trier’s childhood about a little girl who is always ready to sacrifice herself to help others.
All of von Trier’s feature films have been officially selected by the Cannes International Film Festival and they have been awarded seven prizes, including the Grand Prix du Jury for "Breaking the Waves" and the Palme d’Or for "Dancer in the Dark." Making a "vow of chastity" with his famous Dogma 95 statement, von Trier has called for films to be made more simply with hand-held cameras and available light, divesting himself of modern fashions in fliming and plotting.
von Trier began his next trilogy, "USA: Land of Opportunities," with "Dogville" (2004), his first film with major American stars, including Nicole Kidman, Paul Bettany, Patricia Clarkson, Lauren Bacall, Ben Gazzara, Chloe Sevigny and James Caan. The film, which was unrepentantly anti-American in plot and tone--despite von Trier having never visited the country due to a fear of flying--focused on the arrival of the mysterious fugitive from gangsters Grace (Kidman) in the small Rocky Mountain community of Dogville during the Depression, where she is giving a two-week sanctuary before eventually being viewed and victimized as the "property" of the citizenry. The film was quite polarizing, with several critics including Roger Ebert decrying von Trier's extreme criticism of American ideology as entering the realm of derangement, even while they praise his boldness and audacity in attempting the film. The second part of the trilogy, "Manderlay," is in pre-production in Filmbyen, Denmark.
As von Trier continues to enjoy international success with the strange, unsettling films he has completed, he has also been working on a lengthy feature whose funding arrangements have inspired him to finish only three minutes worth of the film each year. He plans to finish the film, called "Dimension", in 2024 and doubtless, von Trier will have explored many more of the dimensions of cinema before it is completed.