The most-provocative working European director. Co-founder of Dogme 95. Banned from Cannes for seven years after a 2011 press-conference incident.
Lars von Trier has, since 1984, directed roughly a dozen feature films. He has been one of the most-controversial figures in European art cinema for the past four decades. He is also one of the most-formally-inventive directors of the period. Both statements are true. Any serious discussion of his work has to hold them together.
His major works include The Element of Crime (1984), Breaking the Waves (1996), The Idiots (1998), Dancer in the Dark (2000, Palme d'Or winner), Dogville (2003), Manderlay (2005), Antichrist (2009), Melancholia (2011), Nymphomaniac (2013), and The House That Jack Built (2018). He co-founded the Dogme 95 movement with Thomas Vinterberg in 1995 — a filmmaking manifesto that demanded the elimination of most cinematic apparatus (no music, no sets, no post-production manipulation, hand-held cameras only). The movement's most-respected entries (including von Trier's own The Idiots and Vinterberg's Festen) are among the most-influential European films of the late 1990s.
Von Trier's reputation includes significant controversies. The 2003 production of Dogville was reportedly difficult; Nicole Kidman's lead performance was widely admired but the working relationship between her and von Trier was openly tense. Björk has stated in multiple subsequent interviews that her experience filming Dancer in the Dark was traumatic and that von Trier's treatment of her was abusive. In 2011, von Trier was banned from the Cannes Film Festival after press-conference comments that made jokes about Nazism that he subsequently apologised for; the ban was lifted in 2017.
Almost every von Trier film is structured around the systematic moral or physical destruction of its female protagonist. Bess in Breaking the Waves. Selma in Dancer in the Dark. Grace in Dogville. The unnamed woman in Antichrist. Justine in Melancholia. Joe in Nymphomaniac. The films track a woman's progressive collapse under conditions that von Trier has constructed for the explicit purpose of producing the collapse.
The pattern has been argued about across decades. Defenders argue that the films are structurally critiques of the conditions producing the suffering rather than endorsements of it — that Dogville is, for instance, an indictment of the moral hypocrisy of small-town America rather than a celebration of Grace's abuse. Critics argue that the pattern, repeated across so many films and combined with von Trier's own behaviour toward his lead actresses during production, reveals something less defensible about the director's own relationship to female suffering as material.
Both readings have substantial textual support. The films exist; the working conditions they were produced under are increasingly documented; the audience has to make its own determination about what to make of them.
Across the cruelty argument, von Trier's films are, by general critical consensus, formally among the most-inventive in contemporary European cinema. Dogville is shot on a stage with chalk-outlined sets in lieu of physical buildings — the audience can see characters in adjacent houses through walls that exist only as floor markings. Melancholia opens with eight minutes of slow-motion tableaux set to Wagner's Tristan and Isolde Prelude before the conventional narrative begins. Nymphomaniac is structured as eight chapters of confession, told by Joe to the man who has rescued her from a beating. The House That Jack Built is structured as the killer's own retrospective five-act autobiography.
Each formal innovation is, on close inspection, doing structural work that the conventional narrative grammar would not have achieved. Dogville's chalk-outlined sets force the audience to see the village as a moral diagram rather than as a physical place. Melancholia's tableau opening establishes the cosmic-scale apocalypse the rest of the film will dramatise at human scale. The formal choices are not gimmicks. They are arguments.
Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg co-authored the Dogme 95 manifesto in 1995. The manifesto's working rules included: location shooting only; sound and image recorded together; handheld camera only; colour film only, with no special lighting; no superficial action (no murders, weapons, etc.); no genre filmmaking; no music not heard within the scene; no temporal or geographical alienation; no credit to the individual director.
Only the first wave of Dogme 95 films fully respected the rules (von Trier's The Idiots, Vinterberg's Festen, Søren Kragh-Jacobsen's Mifune's Last Song, Kristian Levring's The King Is Alive). Subsequent Dogme-certified films progressively diluted the manifesto's requirements. The movement is now historically significant rather than operationally active. Its influence on subsequent low-budget and independent filmmaking is, however, substantial. The Dogma-inspired filmmaking practices — handheld camera, location shooting, available light — have become standard for low-budget production in ways that would not have been culturally normalised without the 1990s manifesto.
If you've never watched a Trier film:
Carl Theodor Dreyer (the Danish silent-era and early-sound director whose The Passion of Joan of Arc von Trier has cited as foundational), Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman, the German Expressionist tradition, and the Polish theatrical avant-garde.