80, 454, 1168 Lars von Trier's Europe Trilogy

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Forrest Taft
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Re: 454 Europa

#76 Post by Forrest Taft » Tue Aug 17, 2010 2:41 pm

colinr0380 wrote:Trier's Element is a great addition - the latter sections focus on the initial stages of Dimension, von Trier's film he proposes to be shot in stages over 30 years. I've no idea whether he's still keeping up with it, but it's interesting seeing them filming with Barr, Kier and Eddie Constantine, who handles a request to incorporate footage from his funeral when he dies into the film with remarkable grace!
Apparently Von Trier got fed up with Dimension after seven years, and stopped shooting in 1997. He has turned the existing footage into a 30-minute short though, which will be released on a dvd accompanying the august issue of the Norwegian film magazine Rushprint. The dvd will also include shorts by Roy Andersson and Aki Kaurismäki, among others. Don't know if it will be receiving a commercial dvd release, but I'll be receiving it shortly... \:D/

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ola t
They call us neo-cinephiles
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Re: 454 Europa

#77 Post by ola t » Wed Aug 18, 2010 5:02 am

RobertAltman wrote:Apparently Von Trier got fed up with Dimension after seven years, and stopped shooting in 1997. He has turned the existing footage into a 30-minute short though
That's interesting! Hopefully it will appear elsewhere eventually. Another "missing" project is the multi-director live-on-TV D-Day which was once slated to be released on DVD but never surfaced (to my knowledge).

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DignanSWE
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Re: 454 Europa

#78 Post by DignanSWE » Wed Dec 22, 2010 6:39 am

I recommend anyone interested in watching Dimension to order the "Nr 9/10 2010" issue of the Swedish magazine FLM. The included DVD cointains the "short" with optional commentary by Peter Schepelern.

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The Fanciful Norwegian
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Re: 454 Europa

#79 Post by The Fanciful Norwegian » Thu Jan 06, 2011 10:50 pm

Seems like as good a place as any to put this: The AV Club interviews Udo Kier
Okay, now you force me to tell the whole story of how I met Lars von Trier. Because Medea was the beginning of a friendship—and people never understand what a friendship is. I'll tell you what a friendship is to me. Friendship to me is, if my friends need my little finger to live, I'm going to have it cut off. I’m going to the hospital, they cut off my finger, and maybe I have a gold finger instead, and I become famous. But I still give it to my friend.
I'll have to stop here because otherwise I'll just end up quoting the entire interview, it's that good. He talks about Mala Noche, My Own Private Idaho and the Morrissey films if you need more of a Criterion connection. But not Berlin Alexanderplatz -- he wanted to talk about Barb Wire instead.

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zedz
Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm

Re: 454 Europa

#80 Post by zedz » Thu Jan 06, 2011 11:03 pm

I was going to link to that interview as well, but couldn't figure out the best place to post the link. It's a riot, with Kier every bit as demented and quotable as you could wish.

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Murdoch
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Re: 454 Europa

#81 Post by Murdoch » Thu Jan 06, 2011 11:27 pm

I love how Kier just refers to Paul Morrissey as "a man in a beard."

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colinr0380
Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
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Re: 454 Europa

#82 Post by colinr0380 » Fri Jan 07, 2011 10:14 am

zedz wrote:I was going to link to that interview as well, but couldn't figure out the best place to post the link. It's a riot, with Kier every bit as demented and quotable as you could wish.
Absolutely, there are about fifteen relevant places, and yet none of them are! Bizarrely I'm left with a much deeper appreciation for Pamela Anderson as well! It is a shame though that there is no mention of one of his other best roles for von Trier, having that breakdown while relating a personal (or is it?) story in Epidemic. Though it does fit in with his 'tired king' acting style! And it is interesting that he apparently got the role in that "My Son, My Son" Werner Herzog film as a swap for a Jodorowsky one.

Even though it's January this gives about fifteen different contenders for quotes of the year. My favourite is this:
AVC: Okay, we must skip ahead…

UK: Yes, please do. Let’s talk about Pamela Anderson please, now. I want to talk about Pamela Anderson!

AVC: I was going to ask about Berlin Alexanderplatz next.

UK: No, I want to talk about Pamela!

Barb Wire (1996)—“Curly”

UK: So I got a call, and they said, “Would you be interested in making a movie with Pamela Anderson?” I said, “Of cou-u-urse! Any time!” So the first day of shooting I knocked at her trailer—which was enormous, as big as her breasts...

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Alan Smithee
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Re: 454 Europa

#83 Post by Alan Smithee » Fri Jan 07, 2011 2:39 pm

The Bible is wonderful. It’s only one book, but you can put two grams of coke on top of the Bible, and you first take a line of coke and then you open the Bible. Because then you understand.

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zedz
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Re: 454 Europa

#84 Post by zedz » Fri Jan 07, 2011 3:02 pm

Okay, okay, I'll tackle the elephant in the room.

Coming soon to this and every other internet forum near you:
'Tommy' Udo Kier wrote:I cannot answer you, because it’s totally unknown to me what you just asked me, and also very boring.

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colinr0380
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Re: 80 The Element of Crime

#85 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Mar 21, 2016 12:58 pm

I'm going to have another go at writing about this film, having re-watched it again recently: It is a difficult to grasp but stunning looking film that is influenced by Tarkovsky (this is why all the fuss over Lars von Trier's Tarkovsky dedication in Antichrist was so strange, as its not as if this had been a new thing!), Welles (The Third Man and Touch of Evil in particular) and early Bertolucci (The Conformist) to create a highly controlled tale of an investigation into child murders that have been taking place in a waterlogged and crumbling dystopian future Europe.

It is the first in Lars von Trier's "Europe trilogy" (the others being the contemporary set Epidemic and World War II era Europa) that uses visual imagery to sort of loom over, overwhelm and eventually hem in and destroy its vaguely motivated characters, all of whom are flawed, fallible and at the mercy of wider deadly forces, even if that force is just the guiding hand of the director (or the person who wrote the book on the subject that everyone is following). This film is perhaps made harder to follow (or at least to stay awake for, rather than being lulled to sleep by the voiceover!) as it is told in flashback by the main character whilst mumbling half asleep under hypnosis, something which adds its own ironic pseudo-psychiatric angle on the decaying state of Europe to the mix (and this angle is used again in Epidemic and Europa), especially in its final shot of the main character looking into the deepest recesses of their own consciousness and only finding his cautious and wary 'spirit animal' looking straight back!

When combined with the waterlogged visuals that exist as much for their own visual impact as to support a narrative and so many literary quotes that the film eventually resorts to just panning over opened books littering the landscape as their unread pages flutter in the breeze as the characters twist and turn restlessly in fitful and tormented sleep, this becomes a difficult to access but strangely haunting film.

Everyone sort of follows the film noir tropes (because they've been written that way!) of ambiguous investigator, duplicitous femme fatale, a shadowy and maybe illusory nemesis, all operating within an arbitrary, corrupt and crumbling system that is less interested in finding out 'who did it' than by apportioning blame at least somewhere. Or maybe it is about how the crime has spread so infectiously wide by the end of the film (anticipating Epidemic), especially for the investigator taking on characteristics of the villain in order to be in the same mindset to catch them, that any sense of responsibility for the crimes has become nebulous and all-corrupting at that point. Maybe everyone is responsible for the world in which such events have happened, or at least have the potential of happening (anticipating Europa). It ends up feeling about a society that only exists in a constantly fraught moment of unexamined existence so that any introspection at all ends up taking the form of someone regressing from a foreign country back in their mind to an abstract version of 'Europe', and yet still ending up lost in a tangled mess of inexplicable behaviours and impossible spaces.

Anyway, I'm finding it to be a film that grows over numerous re-watchings, and there is always some new element to see or nuance to pick up on every time. Its not a comforting one to watch if you are considering whether the UK should stay in the EU though! At the very least the EU should sort out those numerous and ongoing problems with the design of disposable coffee cups that the film highlights as the one precondition of the UK staying in!

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swo17
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1168 Lars von Trier's Europe Trilogy

#86 Post by swo17 » Mon Oct 17, 2022 12:57 pm


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colinr0380
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Re: 1168 Lars von Trier's Europe Trilogy

#87 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Oct 17, 2022 1:06 pm

Very interesting! I'm very excited to upgrade the 2005 Electric Parc produced Zentropa/Tartan boxset. This appears to be pretty much a straight upgrade of that set which was unavailable in the US until now. On that set there are two (subtitled in English) commentaries for The Element of Crime: the second critics commentary by Peter Schepelern and Stig Bjørkman is one of my absolute favourite and an essential listen even if the film itself may leave you befuddled. Epidemic and Europa get a commentary each.

It is good to see that the important shorts from the DVD set have been retained including Nocturne (which turned up as an easter egg on the mid-2000s DVD boxset, along with a commentary and outtakes from the commentary) which is an extreme version of the editing techniques of cutting imagery-associated shots together through eyelines that prepare for the overwhelming focus on visuals in The Element of Crime (it may be an interesting sign of the philosophical shift by that later stage that Von Trier's later kinda-Dogme feature film about oncoming blindness, Dancer In The Dark, takes a much more sound based approach to its subject). And the tribute to Bertolucci's Conformist in the fantastic 52 minute Images of a Relief (which appeared as an easter egg on Epidemic)
Last edited by colinr0380 on Mon Oct 31, 2022 12:17 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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Kracker
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Re: 1168 Lars von Trier's Europe Trilogy

#88 Post by Kracker » Mon Oct 17, 2022 1:25 pm

Is it odd that Epidemic doesn't get a spine number?

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swo17
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Re: 1168 Lars von Trier's Europe Trilogy

#89 Post by swo17 » Mon Oct 17, 2022 1:31 pm

Last month's boxes only got one spine

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willoneill
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Re: 1168 Lars von Trier's Europe Trilogy

#90 Post by willoneill » Mon Oct 17, 2022 2:23 pm

Kracker wrote:
Mon Oct 17, 2022 1:25 pm
Is it odd that Epidemic doesn't get a spine number?
I thought so too. I get that the last two triple sets only had one spine number each, but this one is more awkward; the set has a spine, and two of the films have their original spine numbers, but the third doesn't. It's all very haphazard.

black&huge
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Re: 1168 Lars von Trier's Europe Trilogy

#91 Post by black&huge » Mon Oct 17, 2022 2:31 pm

my wild theory is that they don't consider Epidemic to be spine number worthy but couldn't exactly relegate it as a bonus feature since they couldn't market it as the trilogy without having all three films being presented as mains so...

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Saturnome
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Re: 1168 Lars von Trier's Europe Trilogy

#92 Post by Saturnome » Mon Oct 17, 2022 2:38 pm

Makes me think about how 15 years ago as a teenager I used to order my small criterion collection by spine number, and how meaningless they are to me now.

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dwk
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Re: 1168 Lars von Trier's Europe Trilogy

#93 Post by dwk » Mon Oct 17, 2022 2:38 pm

They did the same thing with the Godzilla films, a previously released title included in a boxset that has a spine for the boxset but not any of the additional titles. I assume they have no intention of breaking up the set, so no reason to spine the new to the collection title. Also, I doubt if the two previously released titles have spine numbers on this set.

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furbicide
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Re: 1168 Lars von Trier's Europe Trilogy

#94 Post by furbicide » Mon Oct 17, 2022 9:34 pm

black&huge wrote:
Mon Oct 17, 2022 2:31 pm
my wild theory is that they don't consider Epidemic to be spine number worthy but couldn't exactly relegate it as a bonus feature since they couldn't market it as the trilogy without having all three films being presented as mains so...
That's odd if so! For me, it's the best film of the "trilogy", and von Trier's most interesting early work besides Medea.

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yoloswegmaster
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Re: 80, 454, 1168 Lars von Trier's Europe Trilogy

#95 Post by yoloswegmaster » Mon Oct 17, 2022 9:42 pm

I'm curious to know why they aren't advertising the restorations as being "New" when I'm certain that this is the first release to being using the restorations.

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criterionsnob
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Re: 80, 454, 1168 Lars von Trier's Europe Trilogy

#96 Post by criterionsnob » Tue Jan 10, 2023 1:22 pm


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dekadetia
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Re: 80, 454, 1168 Lars von Trier's Europe Trilogy

#97 Post by dekadetia » Tue Jan 10, 2023 4:09 pm

criterionsnob wrote:
Tue Jan 10, 2023 1:22 pm
Beaver.
More like The Yellow-ment of Crime. :oops:

Seriously, though, this may be truer to form but definitely seems to represent a change from the old CC disc, no small thing when a film is this reliant on a single hue.

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MichaelB
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Re: 80, 454, 1168 Lars von Trier's Europe Trilogy

#98 Post by MichaelB » Tue Jan 10, 2023 4:40 pm

The old Tartan and new Criterion grabs are much, much closer to the bilious yellows I remember vividly from two 35mm screenings. It looks as though Criterion previously tried to fix colours that shouldn't have been fixed, and have thankfully got it right this time round.

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omegadirective
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Re: 80, 454, 1168 Lars von Trier's Europe Trilogy

#99 Post by omegadirective » Wed Feb 01, 2023 8:42 pm

Why a 3K transfer?
That’s so bizarre.

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omegadirective
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Re: 80, 454, 1168 Lars von Trier's Europe Trilogy

#100 Post by omegadirective » Wed Feb 01, 2023 9:56 pm

Why the hell is the word “EPIDEMIC” in the corner of my screen the whole time?

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