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Smith interviews Lars von Trier, director of the new film "Dancer in the Dark," which is a genuinely tragic musical that makes a connection between the dream or the musical and real life through the main character, played by Bjork.

Lrs von Trier has always made for good copy. A precocious enfant terrible, he quickly developed a cult following with The Element of Crime (84) and Zentropa (91), constructing a kind of pastiche authoritarian aesthetic out of his oppressive mastery of stylistic artifice and defiant art cinema rhetoric. When he hit a creative wall, he repudiated the idea of cinema-as-giant-train-set and embraced a more direct, personal form of expression with his half-parodic, half-serious Dogma 95 manifesto. In 1996s Breaking the Waves, von Trier seemed to have discovered "real life," and re-directed his energy into an intensive collaboration with his actors. With The Idiots in 1998, he took another step towards self-liberation by trading in 35mm for the chaotic immediacy of handheld video. Five years on, the one-time enfant is no longer quite so terrible: a figurehead of the impending "digital revolution," von Trier now has the demeanor of a humble, bemused visionary.

His new film, the already infamous Dancer in the Dark, is some kind of a first: a genuinely tragic musical. An unfashionably earnest celebration of spiritual fortitude, Dancer is rendered in a subdued, death-rowdrab palette. Though it has a period setting (Washington state, ca. 1962), there are few period markers to speak of, and the digital video images add a certain tonal dissonance: the film is technically state of the art, yet opts for a sketch-like, almost primitive cinematic articulation, pushing the wavering handheld camera and jumpy, discontinuous cutting that von Trier began with Breaking the Waves to new extremes. Though epic in emotional terms, and initially promising grandeur with its lush musical overture, the action is so scaled-down in scope the film basically consists of six locations) as to be miniaturist. There's a painstaking modesty and economy to Dancer's dimensions and gestures: this is a profoundly interiorized reworking of the most exhibitionistic of movie genres.

And at the film's center, there's the enigma of Bjork, the world-famous Icelandic rock star, in a triumphant performance whose greatness is equaled by its artlessness. An introverted, pixie-like, yet formidable and emotionally volcanic presence, she plays a Czech immigrant factory worker and single mother who's slowly going blind. In the course of just over two hours, she endures one emotionally agonizing ordeal after another, ending with an excruciating trip to the gallows. Singin' in the Rain it ain't.

It's all too easy to find yourself not getting along with von Trier's films, and Dancer in, the Dark might seem like an especially tough pill to swallow. But if you're prepared to make a leap of faith and get past the story's willful naivety and the deliberately flat, neutral images, you might just have a transcendent experience.

Selma (Bjork) toils in a rural wash-basin factory, saving every penny for an operation on her son's eyes to ensure that he doesn't inherit her failing sight. She rents a house from the local sheriff (David Morse) and his wife (Cara Seymour). Although Selma is a loner, sweetly rebuffing the romantic advances of Jeff (Peter Stormare), she finds release through musicals: she goes to see them at the movies with her friend Kathy (Catherine Deneuve) and takes the part of Maria in a local amateur production of The Sound of Music. When her hard-won savings are stolen, she is forced to commit a murder to recover them. After visiting a nearby eye clinic and paying in advance for her son's treatment, she is arrested and put on trial, after which her devotion to her son is put to the ultimate test.

As with Breaking the Waves, Dancer's contrived, oldfashioned melodramatic scenario packs quite an emotional punch. The new film takes its place alongside Waves and The Idiots in what von Trier has dubbed his Gold Heart trilogy, named after a children's story that made a strong impression on him as a boy: a little girl goes on a journey and gives away all her possessions to the needy people she encounters along the way until she's finally left destitute, yet she carries on undaunted. It makes sense - all three films are marked by emotional regression, fear of abandonment and deliberately simplified personal and moral dilemmas. Each one features a pure, childlike, selflessly giving heroine who comes into conflict with the social order: her uncompromising emotional absolutism and freedom from self consciousness are sufficiently disconcerting to raise questions about her mental state. And at the center of each film is the harrowing spectacle of this childwoman sacrificing herself body and soul for love, as represented respectively by a husband, an adoptive community and a child. In the process she achieves a kind of sanctification and transcendence through martyrdom.

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The primal terrain of family is at the emotional core of Dancer in the Dark, specifically a parent's unquestioning devotion to her child. Von Trier treats this devotion as a given and expends little effort to flesh it out: the mere invocation of the mother/son bond is sufficient to unleash powerful emotions. You could call this the filmmaker's opportunistic" side: there's a sneaking suspicion that von Trier is capitalizing on a deep-seated cultural yearning for simple and palpably "moral" narratives. Moreover, it must be said that there's a troubling correspondence between von Trier's quest for a purer form of cinema and the emotional endurance tests to which he puts his actresses and the characters they play - it's hard not to see a measure of misogyny in the films' idealized yet masochistic conception of femininity.

Von Trier is nothing if not ambitious, and the scope of his ambitions is global. Like Luc Besson, who stood as president of the Cannes jury that gave Dancer the Palme d'Or, this "Danish" director has wholeheartedly embraced the phenomenon of the English Language Foreign Film, of which his tragic musical is a surpassingly strange example. Von Trier presents us with an entirely simulated America, in which Washington state is patched together from Swedish locations and Danish sets. The cast is also a patchwork: of the 13 leading actors, only five are American, and the rest are Icelandic, French, Swedish, English, French-Canadian and German. This is less a question of melting-pot realism than pastiche, and the main ingredient in this pastiche is the musical genre itself. In terms of form and style, aside from the device of the roadshow overture, Dancer in the Dark seems to have little in common with Hollywood musicals - if anything, the movie's decidedly proletarian milieu is more suggestive of Eastern European Communist musicals from the Fifties and Sixties. But in another very important sense. Dancer isolates and amplifies a central component of the Hollywood movie musical.

To be reductive, let's say the classic musical consists of song and dance numbers that expand on the emotional and expressive epiphanies of the characters, and that these numbers are typically linked together by expositional filler that makes up the action. Dancer in the Dark redistributes the balance of emotional emphasis - the privileged moments of expressive release aren't reserved for the musical numbers, but can also be found in the dramatic scenes. Because the numbers themselves convey something quite specific: Selma's intermittent mental dissociation in the face of crisis or malaise. Von Trier accentuates this sense of dissociation through both the texture of the image the color suddenly changes to a more vibrant register - and the montage, in which the performances are dissected and fragmented by his 100 stationary cameras into a hallucinatory swirl, an alternate happy reality in the process of being imagined. The songs and dances exist strictly in Selma's mind, and they're her way of coping with an unbearable reality, which she converts into an imaginatively empathetic form. In essence, the musical numbers are a form of refuge for Selma, and they allow her to carry on as a functional individual. Von Trier imbues the imagination itself with divine properties.

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When it comes down to it, the director's ongoing project is a spiritual one: the reduction of human experience, and its representation through cinema, to its essence. And on the eve of the cinema's imminent digital transformation, von Trier has taken it upon himself to purge it of impurity. Dancer in the Dark's premise and raison d'etre is vision itself - a nearly blind mother's struggle to preserve her son's sight. The allegoric dimension is irresistible - as darkness descends on film's old magic of chemistry and optics, its offspring, video, is coming into the light. From a more circumspect angle, you might say that it's von Trier's good fortune to have his own creative evolution coincide with a pivotal moment of technological change. Come to think of it, that's a fairly serviceable definition of the visionary.

What inspired Dancer in the Dark?

I set out to make a musical. This is more or less the same story as Breaking the Waves [laughs], only as a musical. At my age you try to go back and think, Where did it all start, what did the first film I saw look like, what was so fascinating about it? I always come back to some Christmas when they showed Gene Kelly musicals like Singin' in the Rain, and I thought I must cherish this. Then I thought, What would I like to do to a musical? I'm at a point in my life where I'm quite fond of melodrama, so I thought, why not try to put this together and get something that is more like the emotion of an opera? That is, melodrama with music. The musical has a tendency to be something in between, where you can't really go all the way with the feelings. I'm not sure it is a musical, but it has musical elements in it.

How do you reconcile the search for realism that has become one of your goals with the artificiality and contrivance of the genre material in Dancer in the Dark?

The task of this film was to make a connection between the dream or the musical and real life, and we do that through the main character. The story is extremely simple, about poor, simple people, and I like the collision between the monumental and the small and between the artificial and the real, or less artificial.

Why did you resurrect the device of the musical overture before the film begins?

Well, I love it when West Side Story starts with the overture. The first moment when you sit down to see a film is very powerful, you kind of make a statement - with any film that always makes a statement. Other films I've done prepare the soil for the seed, so to speak. I like to prepare the audience. There's a sense of ritual about it, too, like the hypnotism that begins Zentropa and Epidemic.

Music and suggestion are closely related, and I think the connection between the hypnotism of Max von Sydow's voiceover in Zentropa, and the overture here, are the same things as the chapter headings in Breaking the Waves, which represented an artificial or God's point of view.

It's interesting that you went back to your earliest cinematic experiences for inspiration. Your recent films concern childlike, fragile characters - are they vehicles for exploration of your own childlike aspect?

I haven't thought about that. I think my wife would be very sorry if I became much more childlike. She thinks fm enough of a child. Bess in Breaking the Waves and Selma in Dancer in the Dark are supposed to be strong, even though it's a fragility they themselves refuse to accept. The films that I have made have all had to do with a clash between an ideal and reality. Whenever there's been a man in the lead role, at a certain point this man finds out that the ideal doesn't hold. And whenever it was a woman, they take the ideal all the way. So in a sense you see women as stronger.

My mother was strong. I think maybe that's why. I can see that it's a pattern, and fm sorry, but that's how it came out. Also, I think it would be more difficult for a man because he tries to find a logical solution to things. And if he sees that an ideal doesn't fit, then he has a tendency to do something to it so it works. I think that a woman, and this might be-terrible to say, would tend to find an emotional solution. That's what they say, and that is what I think, to some degree. But let's not talk in terms of men and women. I feel kind of female, myself, to some degree.

What was your conception for the musical numbers in terms of what we experience?

It would be too easy to say that it's escapism every time Selma goes into a musical number - it's actually just her seeing another side to the characters and reality around her. She can understand that the DA in the courtroom has to be tough on her because it's his job, so in the musical number he's still a Dry, but he's not tough when he dances around. She just changes everything a little bit because there is always another side to things.

Why is it that the dramatic scenes are filmed with tremendous visual freedom, whereas the musical numbers are more mechanically and rigidly constructed?

I wanted to mark the difference between these two levels of reality. When I thought about making a musical, when I was younger, I always thought that I should track and crane because that is what I'd done a lot of in my earlier films. But then I thought, No, it's too easy, and it takes too long. It would take me half a year to make the movie. The reason why I laid down the Dogma rules or put a camera on my shoulder was to get away from all this perfectionism and concentrate on something else. After I made Zentropa I'd had it with craning shots. It was so technical that I'd come to the end of my rope. If I went back to the earlier style, it would drain the life away. I was thinking, What kind of musical would Selma do in her head? And I thought it would not be this perfect kind. So we had a lot of theories and they don't hold water, but the idea was that we took the hundred non-professional video cameras that we could afford, and we placed them all around, and the idea was to cover the dance in one go, so that the singing could be live, and we would only do the whole thing once, accepting all the mistakes. The dancers could go almost anywhere; the dance didn't have a front to it, and we found out that this might be a good idea. You can see little pieces of it here and there. You can really feel the difference between a transition done by cutting between two cameras filming the same movement, from one to the other, and one where it's two different takes. That's a world of a difference. Especially in the intensity. But a hundred cameras isn't nearly enough, we found out. The result unfortunately is something in between. Far too fast editing, because the images didn't last long enough. We should have had a couple of thousand cameras, but as the price is dropping that's also possible. But with all these good intentions, we didn't have the finance to do it. The good thing I can say about it is that for our budget we got quite a lot out of it. A dance like the one we had on the train would normally have taken two weeks to shoot. We did that in two days. First we had the hundred cameras on the train, then we moved them to the ground. But I still think there's a future to this way of thinking, that we want the live performance. I'm very sure.

Do you feel you've been trying to find a way to make films that are less authoritarian and cold in form?

I have become more interested in other people. It's as simple as that. When we improvise, it's because I want to take some of the qualities that are there already and use them, instead of making an actor stand in a corner, count to four, take one step to the left, etc., which was the way I started. I think that when you mature as a person, you attempt to dare to let go of some of your technique - I'm talking about style and surface in a sense. You allow technique to stay in the background. I have to navigate on my curiosity. Whatever I'm fascinated by, whatever film is deep in my head, I follow it to the end. If I'm anything, then I'm very stubborn, and I don't stop until my vision of the film is reached.

Why at the same time have the stories become so simplified?

It comes very much from the work of Carl Dreyer, which I admire very much. He worked for years and years on his scripts and started with 500 pages and ended up with 20. So for me this search for the essence is found in working closely with the actors. When you improvise, you have to know exactly what you're doing - it can't be one way or the other, you have to be very clear where you're going, so you start with a very simple setup. That's the part of the process that I think is interesting. The storyline is almost reduced to mathematics, and then my job is to pour my essence into it.

Your use of handheld camera suggests a kind of struggle to find the subject of the shot or the scene - as if you re con.stantly trying to capture the moment.

On this film and the last one I operated the camera myself, and when you use a handheld camera, the search for the object becomes part of the story. I have tried to be very precise but I also like it to be a little bit sloppy. So when I hear someone say something, I pan to a reaction, or not, and this is .part of storytelling with a handheld camera.

So in a sense you become a participant in the performance of the scene.

Exactly. Before I'd be sitting by a monitor somewhere else. But the moment when the actors deliver is the moment you really want to be close to them. The perfect place is right next to the camera lens. My technique is to film every scene for a full hour, so if a scene is two minutes long we film over and over, and talk in between and let the camera roll and suggest different things and play around. We don't rehearse, we just start off with the actors standing where they want to stand, doing exactly what they think is right for the character, and then we shoot. From that first take I know where we should go with it or what the potential is and I usually talk about what different colors I need on the palette, so that I can paint the scene. After that I might make some suggestions about how to stage things or give a different weight to the scene, and then the emotional peak of the scene from my point of view usually comes after two or three takes. After that, we would talk, and then I'd go for different things that I need for the scene. I like it very much when the emotional development of a scene isn't completely logical and not one-to-one in real time. I like to make time cuts where we jump and cut out maybe a psychological transformation of some kind - we work a lot with time cuts. So when I'm shooting I'm planning all the time and taking risks, trying weird angles - you could say I'm sampling.

Is this why there's such a sense of suspended time in your films?

I think it comes from my technique of getting the actors to act the scenes much slower than they will be shown. A scene that should be 90 seconds in the film may take twelve minutes to act - don't ask me why, but I've often told the actors, Take your time, don't say the line until you're ready. When it's compressed and cut together, you have the scene.

Will you continue to shoot on video or do you foresee shooting on film again?

I hope that I will change. I feel like a scientist searching for new things all the time, but I don't think I'll go back. Video is a revolution because everybody can make films for very little money and that means a lot of films can be made that we otherwise would not have seen. But I'll say one thing: everybody says, We'll use video when video looks like film. But this is not really logical, because the techniques of film were there before. I'm sure that we will see films that don't look like either film or video today, but something completely different, and I will try to go there if I live that long.