{"id":3997,"date":"2011-05-18T16:22:23","date_gmt":"2011-05-18T21:22:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=3997"},"modified":"2021-06-10T10:05:41","modified_gmt":"2021-06-10T15:05:41","slug":"malick-vs-von-trier-cannes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/05\/18\/malick-vs-von-trier-cannes\/","title":{"rendered":"Malick vs. von Trier @ Cannes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The artist of sublime <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/12\/21\/the-tree-of-life-in-pieces\/\">faith<\/a> (of the pantheistic, immanent kind) versus the artist of sublime <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/03\/08\/the-horror\/\">cynicism<\/a>. &#8220;Earth is heaven (and purgatory)&#8221; versus &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.indiewire.com\/theplaylist\/archives\/kirsten_dunst_declares_the_earth_is_evil_in_first_clip_from_lars_von_triers\/#\">Earth is evil<\/a>.&#8221; With catastrophe and Kubrick&#8217;s <em>2001<\/em> lurking in the background of both&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"500\" height=\"282\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/fLPe0fHuZsc?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/mubi.com\/\"><!--more-->MUBI<\/a> has a good run-down of the reviews from Cannes of these two filmmakers&#8217; just debuted films, von Trier&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/mubi.com\/notebook\/posts\/3311\">Melancholia<\/a> and Malick&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/mubi.com\/notebook\/posts\/3297\">The Tree of Life<\/a>. With the films playing\u00a0 two days apart, it seems the thing to do has been to compare them. Snippets of these comparisons follow.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Melancholia\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/22072654?dnt=1&amp;app_id=122963\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture; clipboard-write\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><em>Screen<\/em>&#8216;s Lee Marshall:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">[<em>Melancholia<\/em>&#8216;s] opening pre-title section is a standalone tone-poem\u2026 For  eight minutes we are presented with a series of captivating symbolic  tableaux shot with dreamlike clarity: birds falling dead from the sky  around an expressionless Kirsten Dunst; Charlotte Gainsbourg trudging  with a young boy in her arms through grass on a golf course that seems  to have turned to quicksand, and other doom-laden augurs, which  culminate in a magnificently visualized planetary collision\u2026. <em>Melancholia<\/em>&#8216;s  imagining of a lonely, internalised apocalypse, experienced, in the  end, only by Justine, Claire, Claire&#8217;s young son and the horses in the  stables, in a big old country house isolated from the rest of the world,  does build a weirdly memorable dreamscape, for all its faults of story,  script and character.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><em>AV Club<\/em>&#8216;s Mike D&#8217;Angelo:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">[<em>Melancholia<\/em>] plays as if Lars von Trier saw <a href=\"http:\/\/mubi.com\/films\/36141\"><em>The Tree of Life<\/em><\/a> on Monday morning and then somehow shot a feature-length rebuttal in  less than 48 hours. Conflating the personal and the cosmic with equal  bravado, but focusing on the opposite end of the universal timeline,  it&#8217;s clearly every bit as autobiographical as Malick&#8217;s film, though in  this case the details have been shrouded in allegory\u2026.<\/p>\n<p>The <em>Village Voice<\/em>&#8216;s J. Hoberman:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">&#8220;On Monday I characterized <em>The Tree of Life<\/em> as a train wreck \u2014 I was wrong. It&#8217;s Von Trier who has contrived the  spectacle impossible to turn away from\u2026. [W]hen Von Trier obliterates  the world in <em>Melancholia<\/em> he also destroys Malick&#8217;s worldview,  or at least puts it in perspective\u2026. The comparison is not a matter of  filmmaking (although the first five minutes of <em>Melancholia<\/em> are more innovative, accomplished, and visionary than anything in <em>The Tree of Life<\/em>);  it&#8217;s a matter of sensibility. (For some, Von Trier&#8217;s appalling  skepticism might make Malick&#8217;s faith all the more touching.) But for me  the most important difference is the distinction between art and kitsch.  Von Trier has made a movie about the end of world \u2014 when I left the  theater and exited out into Cannes, I felt light, rejuvenated and  unconscionably happy.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><em><a href=\"http:\/\/specials.blogs.time.com\/2011\/05\/18\/melancholia-lars-von-triers-tree-of-death\/\">Time<\/a><\/em>&#8216;s Richard Corliss<a href=\"http:\/\/specials.blogs.time.com\/2011\/05\/18\/melancholia-lars-von-triers-tree-of-death\/\"><\/a>:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">Every Cannes Festival needs a Wow! moment, and the opening few minutes of Lars von Trier&#8217;s <em>Melancholia<\/em> provided the artistic sensation of Cannes 2011. Even as Terrence Malick&#8217;s <em>The Tree of Life<\/em>,  this Festival&#8217;s other big event, re-created the beginning of the  cosmos, so, with similarly spectacular imagery but with a greater  emotional resonance, <em>Melancholia<\/em> begins with the end of the  world. It&#8217;s as if these two highly esteemed, blithely quirky filmmakers  had been assigned the complementary subjects of ontogeny and  eschatology, and responded with their grand, distilled visions.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">The rest of <em>Melancholia<\/em>, like the long middle section of <em>The Tree of Life<\/em>,  is devoted to the little people in this hurtling universe, the ants  under a microscope. Justine (Dunst) and Claire (Gainsbourg) are sisters:  the first a depressive, or in von Trier&#8217;s preferred designation a  melancholiac, and the second &#8220;normal&#8221; \u2014 though the view of this  world-class eccentric is so skewed that he sees normality as a disease,  perhaps an epidemic infecting the majority of the population.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">[. . .]<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">Justine&#8217;s premonition of the planetary catastrophe at first seems a  wishful extension of her world view: &#8220;The Earth is evil. We don&#8217;t need  to grieve for it.&#8221; But the runaway planet looms closer; the stuffy  rationalizations of Claire&#8217;s husband Jack (Kiefer Sutherland) ring  false; and Justine&#8217;s fatalism begins to seem the only sensible response  to the end of days. She must agree with in the old Ukrainian proverb,  &#8220;Expect the worst and you&#8217;ll never be disappointed,&#8221; and with the John  Maynard Keynes aphorism, &#8220;In the long run we are all dead.&#8221; Justine&#8217;s  neurosis has well prepared her for the arrival of the all-dead times  that surprises everyone else.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">Again as with the Malick film, <em>Melancholia<\/em> is a spiritual autobiography. No question, Justine is von Trier. Nils Thorsen, author of the book <em>The Genius: Lars von Trier&#8217;s Life, Films and Phobias<\/em>,  writes that the director &#8220;has been haunted by anxieties all through his  life, and believed that World War III was breaking out every time he  heard an airplane as a boy.&#8221; But von Trier finds solace in his  affliction. As he said to Thorsen: &#8220;My analyst told me that  melancholiacs will usually be more level-headed than ordinary people in a  disastrous situation, because they can say, &#8216;What did I tell you?'&#8221;&#8230;  But also because they have nothing to lose. And that was the germ of <em>Melancholia<\/em>.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">Another von Trier <em>mot<\/em>: &#8220;God may have had fun at creation, but he didn&#8217;t really think things through.&#8221; The same may be said of <em>Melancholia<\/em>.  It&#8217;s a big idea, the end of the world, but not particularly well  realized here. In this aspect of his work, von Trier is the anti-Malick.  Whereas the characters in <em>The Tree of Life<\/em> are acutely  observed and allowed to reveal their souls by longing glances and their  specific location in the natural world \u2014 ornery life in every corner of  the frame, if you only look for it \u2014 the people in <em>Melancholia<\/em> seem stick figures for the author&#8217;s views: that logic is crippling, and  disability a special gift. Don&#8217;t look up to the stars for signs of life,  he says. &#8220;Forget it! Look inward.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/specials.blogs.time.com\/2011\/05\/18\/melancholia-lars-von-triers-tree-of-death\/#ixzz1Mjeo8JNi\"><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The artist of sublime faith (of the pantheistic, immanent kind) versus the artist of sublime cynicism. &#8220;Earth is heaven (and purgatory)&#8221; versus &#8220;Earth is evil.&#8221; With catastrophe and Kubrick&#8217;s 2001 lurking in the background of both&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[688745,689354],"tags":[352,22616,22617],"class_list":["post-3997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cinema_zone","category-image_nation","tag-film","tag-malick","tag-von-trier"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-12t","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":5470,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2012\/02\/17\/toward-an-ecophilosophical-cinema\/","url_meta":{"origin":3997,"position":0},"title":"Toward an ecophilosophical cinema","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 17, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"My paper for this year's Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, coming up next month in Boston, will focus on the two films that got a lot of side-by-side attention at last year's Cannes festival, Lars von Trier's Melancholia and Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. Since a few\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Cinema&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2012\/02\/39-275x116.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":6185,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2012\/10\/22\/2-or-3-things-about-the-cinema-book\/","url_meta":{"origin":3997,"position":1},"title":"2 or 3 things about the cinema book","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"October 22, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Ecologies of the Moving Image is a book of ecophilosophy that happens to be about cinema, and about the 12-decade history of cinema at that. What makes it ecophilosophy? It is philosophy that is deeply informed both by an understanding of ecological science and an interdisciplinary appreciation for today's ecological\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Cinema&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/_EWY1PJsPzBA\/Sy7A-os24mI\/AAAAAAAAAyI\/71YlZjgAk8M\/s400\/stalker26.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1895,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/12\/21\/the-tree-of-life-in-pieces\/","url_meta":{"origin":3997,"position":2},"title":"The tree of life, in pieces","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 21, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"If you haven't seen the trailer for Terence Malick's forthcoming film The Tree of Life, you're just not a real cineaste, are you? What's better than burrowing analytically into the Heideggerian ecophilosophical themes of Malick's films (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World -- before making\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Cinema&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2010\/12\/5-275x145.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":4969,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/07\/11\/nature-vs-grace\/","url_meta":{"origin":3997,"position":3},"title":"Nature vs. Grace?","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"July 11, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"The latest issue of Precipitate: Journal of the New Environmental Imagination -- which looks like an excellent issue -- includes a review of Terrence Malick's \"The Tree of Life\" that reminds me how important it is to pay attention to the dialogical and heteroglossic texture of Malick's films, and how\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Cinema&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2011\/07\/jessica-chastain-tree-of-life-275x148.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7016,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2013\/11\/08\/society-space-interview\/","url_meta":{"origin":3997,"position":4},"title":"Society &amp; Space interview","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"November 8, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Society and Space has posted a conversation\/interview that Harlan Morehouse carried out with me in early October. While it's focused on Ecologies of the Moving Image, we talk about plenty of other things -- nature and culture, the eco-humanities, the Anthropocene, ontology, critical geography, Buddhism, Zizek, Peirce, nationalism, withdrawn objects,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Cinema&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1211,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/03\/08\/the-horror\/","url_meta":{"origin":3997,"position":5},"title":"the horror&#8230;","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"March 8, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"I went to see Lars von Trier's Antichrist a few days ago. Of the reviews I've read, Brent Plate's captures the way in which the film's images persist in haunting one's consciousness. Plate, aptly I think, compares the film to Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, the film that Adolf\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Cinema&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Antichrist2.jpg","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2010\/03\/Antichrist2.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3997"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3997\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11890,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3997\/revisions\/11890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}