A Public Lecture by Linda Badley

Thursday, March 22 at 4:30 p.m.

Education Auditorium:  Ed 106.2

Marketed as the product and expression of his clinical depression of 2006-2007, Antichrist (2009) proved a fundamental turning point in Lars von Trier’s career. Together with Melancholia (2011) and Nymphomaniac (2013, 2014), it marked a shift from an austere and overtly political agenda toward an exceptionally personal form of trauma cinema. As Dogme95 created a cinematic zeitgeist in the late 1990s, the films of the “Depression Trilogy” (as fans and critics have dubbed it) have been pivotal in the theorization of 21st century “extreme cinema.” Blending psychodrama and an art film aesthetic with “low” genres such as horror, disaster, and pornography, these three films challenge cinema’s expressive limits while thrusting audiences beyond reassuring ideologies and familiar modes of reasoning. Adopting performativity theory (J. L. Austin, Judith Butler) and Gérard Genette’s concept of paratext, this presentation explores how the “performance” of von Trier’s depression – through provocation, scandal, and exile along with the tools mentioned above – has created an interpretive framework conducive to the trilogy’s notoriety and success.

Linda Badley, Professor Emerita at Middle Tennessee State University, has published widely in film studies and popular culture. Her current work is in Scandinavian, women’s independent cinema, and extreme cinema. Her books include Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic (Greenwood, 1995), Writing Horror and the Body (Greenwood, 1996), Lars von Trier (Illinois, 2011), and the co-edited volumes Traditions in World Cinema (Edinburgh, 2006) and Indie Reframed: Women’s Filmmaking and Contemporary American Independent Cinema (Edinburgh, 2016), with two books, Lars von Trier’s Depression Trilogy (Wallflower) and a collection on Nordic noir adaptation, projected for 2019. With R. Barton Palmer, she co-edits the companion series Traditions in World Cinema and Traditions in American Cinema at Edinburgh University Press.