Abstract

Lars von Trier is known as an artist searching for new cinematic forms, often mixing “genres” and using given elements or rules in non-conventional ways. In my text I try to reveal and describe particular figures of repetition, operating as an important strategy on different levels of von Trier’s film-work. I am also truing to explain, more generally, the role of these figures in Lars von Trier’s artistic method.My main example is Five Obstructions – one of the most interesting remakes ever done . Five Obstructions, a variation-iteration of Jorgen Leth’s: The Perfect Human , is a piece of art composed of five film-repetitions, each of them submitted to a different set of restrictions.Another figure of repetition – even more important from the analytical point of view, directly concerning the theoretical question I am discussing – refers to the formal construction of a particular film-genre, i.e. the “document”. It consists in extending the very limits of this genre, in modifying both its nature and function. I do not mean a simple repetition of a documentary “scheme”; in this particular document the function of the genre itself becomes a subject of double or even triple repetition. On the one hand, just as every “normal” document, it refers to what has “happened”, and thus in a certain way repeats the “initial” event ). On the other hand, it visualizes , documents the basic technique of Lars von Trier’s way of making movies. It reveals and repeats Lars von Trier’s creative actions’ laboratory on the screen.In my interpretation of von Trier’s Five Obstructions I am using several concepts introduced by Gilles Deleuze in Difference and repetition and How Do We Recognize structuralism? Making explicit the hidden structures and production of difference through repetition – these are definitely the basic artistic strategies of the father of “Dogma”. Most useful for understanding von Trier is the Deleuzian concepts of “bare” and “disguised” repetition, “differential relations”, “singularities” , “object = x”, and the “empty square”. I am truing to explain their philosophical meaning and to make it operational for film-analysis. The Five obstructions then appear as a work of art that “embodies” directly the idea of disguised repetition, as an auto-referential film bringing to light the very mechanisms of artistic creation, the inner organization of von Trier’s laboratory. Creating new ways and forms of expression in cinema, forcing the limits of given genres – all this would never be possible without the “genius” of von Trier, but likewise it would be unattainable without a certain “structuralist” tendency, his capacity to “dig down” to structural, formal relations