Lars Von Trier's Women

The Danish director Lars von Trier is undoubtedly one of the world's most important and controversial filmmakers, and arguably so because of the depiction of women in his films. He has been criticized for subjecting his female characters to unacceptable levels of violence or reducing them to masochistic self-abnegation (Bess in Breaking the Waves, “She” inAntichrist and Joe in Nymphomaniac). At other times, it is the women in his films who are dominant or break out in violence, such as in his adaptation of Euripides'Medea, the conclusion of Dogville and perhaps throughout Nymphomaniac.

Lars von Trier's Women confronts these dichotomies head on. Rex Butler does not take a position either for or against von Trier, but rather considers how both attitudes fall short of the real difficulty of his films, which may simply not conform to any kind of feminist or indeed anti-feminist politics as they are currently configured. Using Lacanian psychoanalysis and the work of Slavoj Žižek,Lars von Trier's Women reveals hidden resources for a renewed “feminist” politics and social practice.

Rex Butler is Professor of Art History at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is the author of Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (1999),Slavoj ?i?ek: Live Theory (2005), Borges' Short Stories (2010), The ?i?ek Dictionary (2014), andDeleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy? (2015). He has written for Film-Philosophy, contributed essays to a number of collections on cinema, and edited two volumes of ?i?ek's writings (Interrogating the Real, 2005;The Universal Exception, 2006).

David Denny is Associate Professor and current Chair of the Department of Culture and Media at Marylhurst University, USA. He has written and lectured extensively on Lars von Trier's work.