‘Cinematic Screaming’ or ‘All About My Mother’: Lars von Trier’s Cinematic Extremism as Therapeutic Encounter

Abstract

Lars von Trier is an expert in making a name for himself. His role as an arch provocateur is very much allied to his orchestration of artifice as a means of using artistic endeavour in pursuit of an authentic sense of self. As he has stated, When life gets too threatening, you have to create some sort of fantasy existence, a life where you can control the things you can’t control in real life’ (Björkman, 2003, p. 19). The relationship of von Trier and his oeuvre to the process of therapeutic ‘working through’ (Freud, 1914) becomes interesting in this regard, and this chapter explores the question of whether filmmaking can function as a form of emotional work that may potentially have therapeutic value for those involved and, subsequently, whether this entails any opportunity for substantive emotional engagement on the part of viewers in the audience, evoking an experience that might be indicative of the kind of therapeutic insights afforded by the experience of clinical encounters. Of course, it is important to emphasise that the specificity of the clinical domain is unique to the psychotherapeutic setting and I am not suggesting here that the cinematic experience is remotely akin to this. Nevertheless, the specificity of the cinematic viewing context provides for modes of emotional experience that often go beyond the cathartic and this chapter sets out to explore whether the emotional work entailed can have a potentially ‘therapeutic’ effect of some kind in that it opens up spaces for self-re flection.