Abstract
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Both fans and critics of Lars von Trier’s work would likely agree with
his capacity to make his audience suffer. This essay canvasses the devices through
which the suffering of women in von Trier’s melodramas is rendered excruciating
to watch. Drawing on Deleuze’s influential account of masochism, the first part of
the essay discusses how von Trier’s film Dogville foregrounds the complicated
relationship that suffering has with pleasure and power. The second part of the
essay focuses on the temporal dynamics of melodrama and the creative ways in
which Lars von Trier disturbs the rhythms of suffering on screen. In particular
I argue that von Trier introduces intervals of ‘dead time’ that make the passage
of time itself painful to the audience and that open up a larger cultural history
of temporal disorder. This part of the essay looks back to von Trier’s early experiments
with time in Psychomobile 1: The World Clock (2000) and forward to
more recent innovative play with time and movement in Melancholia (2011) to
make the case for rethinking the temporal dimensions of mediated suffering and
the significance of time in the work of Lars von Trier.