Errata is a web journal written by Robert Davis who has neither spent a night in a ghost town nor pulled a turnip from the earth. He doesn't even know if turnips grow in the ground. Perhaps on trees, like candy corn. Therefore, Errata is a non-commercial project.

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Observation #2: It may be appropriate, when leaving a movie theater, to say "mysterious" at the top of your lungs. Bring your eyebrows together before you say it. Effective!

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29 September 2003

Views of America Through Its Movies

The PRI radio program Studio 360 had an interesting discussion this week of how foreign artists view America. Forget for a moment that Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage without having fought in the civil war: the radio show takes Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier to task for making movies like Dancer in the Dark and Dogville, which comment on an abstract America even though von Trier has never been to the U.S.

Some of von Trier's comments:

Well the films I do show my American mythology, but of course it's based on all the films that I have seen, all the American films that I have seen, and their mythology.
But I think that the quality of somebody making a film about a place where this person has not been is that he somehow acts like a mirror. But certainly there have been a few films about Denmark, one about Hans Christian Anderson, I remember, where, you know, everything was wrong, and you can say, Who cares, it's a film about Hans Christian Anderson. But somehow that's interesting for me to see, also, because if that is the way my country is seen then it's, well, it's educational.

I'm raised to always question the power, you know, and for everybody in the world right now or maybe always, America is the Big Brother and the power, and so I thought it was logical to kind of go into the subject.

Then Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, responded to his comments:

When we were in Iran, actually, we also connected to America through its films. We [my students and children] were watching, constantly, the Marx brothers and Harold Lloyd and Casablanca alongside of Jim Jarmusch and Woody Allen, you know. If a work of art is a great work of art, with a great artistic vision, it definitely represents the reality it comes from in a way that you might never— I mean you might live in America for 50 years and never get the experience that Johnny Guitar or Casablanca gives you.

Posted by davis | Link

Reader Comments

October 1, 2003, 10:00 AM

Scott T.

I think Von Trier's films about America, especially Dogville, are deliberately (and smartly) abstracted enough to forgive the fact that he's never come ashore. These films contend with the *idea* of America-- as filtered through other films, headlines, policies, et al.-- not necessarily the reality of it. I think Von Trier acknowledges his obvious limitations by setting Dogville on an empty stage: His subversion of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" (that most American of plays) doesn't portend any knowledge of what the country looks like, but you don't have to know these things in order to examine American values. It's a pretty brilliant solution to the problem, if you ask me, and I suspect the other two entries in Von Trier's planned America trilogy will be similarly abstract in nature.

Cool site, BTW.

October 1, 2003, 10:49 AM

davis

I agree. Certainly most of the people in the world are outside the US but still feel America's presence strongly. Their opinions about the US are valuable, but they don't have much of a voice within its borders. It's pretty sneaky of von Trier to make his movies in English and use international or even American (in the case of Dogville) actors. How else would his movies be seen by a wide audience here?

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