Lars von Trier has used the Verfremdung approach repeatedly in his work, most prominently in Dogville where realism is abandoned altogether. We are prevented, in Brecht, from taking the enactment for the action: the action is not performed, no longer there on stage, but referred to by the performance. As Gilberto Perez discusses in his book “The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium,”: The play is not a realistic representation of the events, but rather an allegoric one. The unrealism of the story distances the audience from it, and they can now examine it from a critical point of view, rather than simply relate to it on an emotional level. Through this estrangement, the audience can no longer predict what will happen or relate to the characters in a believable way. The goal is to distance the audience from the characters and the story, to distance the reality of the audience from the illusion of the stage. Rather, it emphasizes certain aspects of the play by augmentation, hyperbole, and unrealistic portrayal. Verfremdung does not aim to realistically portray events and characters. The German playwright Bertolt Brecht describes the concept of Verfremdungseffekt (commonly translated as “illusion effect”) as the approach of estrangement/alienation of the audience from the play and its realism. Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac Analysis: Brechtian Alienation Trier’s intentional break of illusion and use of Bertolt Brecht’s alienation effect is the main focus of this article. The movie is intentionally unrealistic, augmented, fairy-tale-like, and Brechtian. Basically, we are all waiting for permission to die.Īnd if you think that’s bleak, don’t worry because Nymphomaniac is just as equally hilarious as it is poignant. Yes, precisely like the movements of a caged animal. These repeated walks became a kind of metaphor for my life: monotonous and pointless. Much like the nihilism Noam Chomsky expressed in Michel Gondry’s documentary, “You go from dust to dust and there is no meaning to life,” Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character Joe in Nymphomaniac says at one point about her walks in the park: More spectacular colors when the sun hit the horizon. Perhaps the only difference between me and other people is that I’ve always demanded more from the sunset. I remember this word very distinctly: sensation. The sunset is a metaphor for the human’s desire for beauty and pleasure, while the first shot stands for the confinements of the human existence and the inability to achieve sensation. The Nymphomaniac captures its central theme, the inability to fulfill the human desire, with a simple dissolve: from an indoor school gym where people are cleaning the floor to a beautiful sunset. The human condition in a single dissove in Nymphomaniac: the desire for pleasure and the confinements of existence (“precisely like the movements of a caged animal”) The physical presence in the gym and the longing for the beauty of the sunset. But aside from that, Nymphomaniac may be no less than an excruciatingly humorous mockery of modern society’s nymphomania for more of everything, or an equally accurate allegory for the vain quest for happiness, meaning, and pleasure in the human condition.
Yes, the film contains sex and nudity, and yes, it was banned in Turkey. The reason is probably as much Trier’s and Labeouf’s personalities as it is film marketing. From LaBeouf’s paper bag on his head saying “I am not famous anymore” to Trier’s T-shirt saying “Persona non grata” at Berlinale 2014, the buzz around Nymphomaniac seems to prevail over the film’s analysis and artistic considerations. N o doubt, Trier and actor Shia LaBeouf (playing Jerome in Nymphomaniac) love to cause media uproar. Sex is not news for Trier’s films, whose Zentropa film company, aside from producing Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt, has also produced female-targeted porn films such as All About Anna, and of course Trier’s Antichrist, in which Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character cut her clitoris with scissors. Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac is more than the media controversy surrounding it. It is one of the techniques Trier uses that are similar to the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect) The split screen in Nymphomaniac distorts the film’s diegesis and draws attention to the fiction and the film’s presence.