Lars von Trier’s Europa trilogy depicts a continent in total decay, yet turns it into some of the most beautiful cinema ever filmed.
The Element of Crime unfolds in a flooded, rain-soaked landscape full of scrap and the homeless, bathed in a sulphur-yellow light broken by electric blue. Epidemic abandons all stylisation in favour of a bare, grey 16 mm universe. Europa allows black-and-white to blend with colour in dreamlike, meticulously composed images of a Germany where the shadow of the past still hangs over the ruined country.
It is tempting to perceive this beauty as decoration the director has laid on top of dark material, as if the films would have been just as true without it. But the opposite is the case. The beauty is the very point, and that is why it is so disturbing.
The Sublime
Von Trier’s Europa trilogy is not beautiful in the conventional sense of “pretty”, “idyllic” or “harmonious”. The aesthetic category that best captures von Trier’s visual language is rather the sublime: that which both attracts and terrifies, because it exceeds our comprehension and threatens to engulf us.
Von Trier’s Europe is a nightmare that, precisely through its aesthetic vitality, forces the viewer deeper into a world in dissolution. Such a world, if filmed realistically and prettily, would be easy to keep at a distance, for one would perceive the film merely as information about a prosaic reality.
But because it is filmed sublimely, it becomes impossible to shake off. For the same reason, art about the collapse of civilisation often feels far more powerful than political analyses. Analysis explains, but art makes the threat present, emotional and almost physical.
The Meticulously Composed Nightmare World
A key feature of Lars von Trier’s form stems from his control over the visual. The Element of Crime consists of only around 150 shots, an unusually low number for a feature film and testimony to how carefully every single image is planned, often with high-angle or creeping camera movements devised in detailed storyboards.
The film’s nightmarish atmosphere, with a rain-drenched and deserted Europe where people live in a heap of ruins, is therefore not the result of chaotic improvisation, but of the exact opposite logic: extreme artistic discipline applied to a theme that is precisely about the collapse of civilisation.
It is a point in itself that the craftsmanship contradicts the content. While the filmed world loses its order, the director’s gaze maintains consistent control over every detail in the image, as if civilisation can only survive in the form of art, long after it has disappeared from the reality that art depicts.
This can be interpreted as a tacit commentary on the very conservative point that the trilogy makes on the thematic level: Order must be actively maintained, and when it disappears from society, it can at best survive as a memory in art.
The Legacy of Tarkovsky, Dreyer and Hitchcock
Von Trier has said that he borrows Hitchcock’s camera and places it in a Tarkovsky landscape, and that something new emerges in the process. His declared ideal has also been Carl Th. Dreyer, whose regular cinematographer in his later major works, Henning Bendtsen, von Trier brought in for both
Epidemic and Europa.
The connection back to Dreyer gives von Trier’s project a depth in Danish film history that links the Europa trilogy to an aesthetic tradition in which the formal rigour of the image has always been inseparable from its moral seriousness. Dreyer did not film evil to shock, but to force the viewer to take a stand, and the same logic permeates von Trier’s use of the image.
For von Trier, film is above all about mood. This explains why his critique of Europe’s self-deception comes across more powerfully through images than through traditional plot. One may be intellectually convinced by an argument, but one is emotionally seduced through the film’s images. This too points towards von Trier’s great models.
The Artificial Light and Colour as Transgression
What mood-world is it, then, that von Trier paints for us?
In The Element of Crime the entire film is bathed in a toxic, sulphur-yellow glow, interrupted only by sudden flashes of electric blue and red. It is not natural light, and it is not meant to be natural light; on the contrary, it is a deliberately artificial, almost sick glow, which turns the decay into a piece of pictorial art rather than a piece of documentary realism.
The world we see is already permeated by an atmosphere of sickness before a single event has taken place.
In Europa, colour functions in a similar way as a transgression of the norm. The film is mostly shot in a rich, high-contrast black-and-white frame, and when colour finally breaks through, it is rarely an expression of life or joy, but as the red of blood or on the train’s emergency brake. In a world otherwise demythologised into greyscale, only pain and danger are allowed to appear in colour.
Hypnosis as the Trap of Beauty
The overarching device in the trilogy, however, is hypnosis.
In Europa, Max von Sydow’s calm, almost godlike voice leads the viewer straight into the film’s universe from the first image: “You will now listen to my voice…” It is a kind of seduction, sonorous, deep, calm and persuasive. The film’s insight into evil and ideological catastrophe sells itself from the start as a beautiful song to the soul.
The same device was used earlier, but in a more hard-hitting and brutal way in Epidemic. Towards the end of the film, the hypnotist Ali Hamann leads a young woman into the film’s universe under hypnosis. But the hypnosis fails: the woman is overwhelmed by the visions from the script and screams in terror, until it dawns on those present that she has contracted the disease the fiction is about.
Fiction infects the real world, and the beautiful, soothing voice that was supposed to demonstrate control instead becomes the way into catastrophe.
It is this duality that makes Lars von Trier’s visual language something other and more than pure aesthetics. The viewer is hypnotised into beautiful images of a Europe that is literally rotting from within, and the discomfort this experience creates is far more instructive than any moral condemnation.