Art has always been the site of struggle: it’s forms obscure, it’s freedoms pure fiction. And the territory is currently being resurveyed. While identities blur, the terrain is being fractured. Old and new forces are intervening, speculating for various interests, claiming their share in the visible and invisible—the accursed share. What some ignore, others must delete. What mustn’t be shown can be read in a deeper darkness under a stronger light. Blinded, baited, ensnared in finely woven nets, our eyes are like those of tamed animals, first wild, then sore, often dulled: overstimulated, tired, and yet very desirable beasts. But who ...

Dogma 95 has been heralded as the European alternative to the Hollywood Blockbuster. For many critics and film lovers, Dogma 95 and Von Trier’s films have become synonymous with the notions usually associated with independent filmmaking: low budgets and realism. Von Trier’s approach to filmmaking, however, takes cinema beyond the traditional confines of film aesthetics and radically transposes the practice of filmmaking and film itself right into what has become the paramount genre of new media: games and gaming. Dogma 95, this book argues, is not an exceptional phase in Von Trier’s career—as it was for his cofounders—but the most ...

Riget / The Kingdom – First Episode – Day 1: “Den hvide flok” / “The Unheavenly Host”(1994) By Lars von Trier Denmark (60mins) Moartea domnului Lazarescu / The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005) By Cristi Puiu and Razvan Radulescu Romania (150min) The process by which Mr Dante Remus Lazarescu becomes neglected, is also that by which the film connects him to a dying potentiality which could only be realised through him. This flickering potential, a shadow in his shape, a shadow that is the image-object to which the care of others might be attached, and which has hitherto only appeared within a set of relations defined ...