Session 9: Cinematic Evil II

Session 9: Cinematic Evil II
Chair: Belinda Morrissey

Lars von Trier and the Evil Cinema
Anders Johansson
University of Gothenburg, Sweden

The paper is an attempt to convince that the films of Lars von Trier (at least from The Idiots (1998) and on) may be understood as a decided effort to break down the pact of goodness between the viewer and the film. Every film, or virtually every work of art, implies a silent contract between subject and object, the viewer and the film (or if one wants: the director, artist etc.): ”you bring me into existence, and I verify your excellence; we’re both on the good side”. This contract is so basic that it is extremely hard even to perceive. Every time we start watching a film, expecting an end, we assume that there will be certain catharsis involved. We assume that meaning will defeat meaninglessness, form chaos, and that we, in principle, will leave the movie as better human beings than we were before. In that sense, art is good, every film belongs to the good powers. The aesthetically good amounts to the same thing as the ethically good, also when it is not made explicit as in the theories of Wayne Booth or Martha Nussbaum.
When von Trier, for example in Dogville, rips this contract, the result is very confusing: what is really happening? How did the film actually end? What’s the point? What von Trier tells us is, in a way, that we’re all stuck in a rudimentary fiction of goodness, which is kept up by a contrasting narrative of evil. In that sense, the ethics implied in our aesthetical experiences tends to be reactive and secondary, leaning on a primary idea of evil. In the paper I will develop this hypothesis, turning to Alain Badiou and/or Gilles Deleuze.

The Fiendish Cast of Early German Film
Joel Westerdale
Department of German Studies, Smith College, Northampton MA, USA

Popular film in Germany begins with a parade of fiends.  From the Student of Prague and Caligari to Mabuse and Nosferatu, the early years of German film’s “golden age” are populated by an overwhelming number of sinister personae.   In this paper, I argue that the preoccupation with evil figures during the formative years of German cinema reflects a culture contending with the fascination and the threat of this new medium, film.
Having seen this novel apparatus set the still image in motion, early spectators had yet to determine the limits of film’s transgressive potential.  Accordingly, early films such as Wiene’s Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) and Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) self-consciously thematize and explore this potential.  Focussing on these two iconic films, this paper demonstrates how these directors’ efforts to test the limits of their medium lead them to diabolical figures characterized by their moral and formal transgressions.
In overtly metafilmic moments, Caligari reflects upon the thrill of rendering the still image mobile, but Nosferatu takes the anxiety thereby engendered a step further.  Murnau presents his vampire as a figure in a painting, but one that cannot be contained by the frame – and if this vampire can break frames in the film, what is to prevent it from breaking the frame of the film?  Murnau exploits the spectators’ lack of familiarity with the new medium, while testing the limits of that medium; he links film to the tradition of painting, while defining film against that tradition and taking advantage of the difference.  Rather than assuaging the discomfort engendered by the new medium, Murnau and others exploit it, with their diabolical characters thematically agitating what the form has already disturbed.
This paper does more than account for the fiendish cast of early German film.  It reconsiders the relationship between Weimar cinema and Romanticism, while at the same time laying the groundwork for a reconsideration of the connection between not only film and evil, but evil and emerging media.