ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions lecture
“Women Who Take the Ideal All the Way: The Hagiography of Lars von Trier”, Eileen A. Joy, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

Date: Friday 16 November 2012
Time: 1-2pm
Where: Woolley Common Room, John Woolley Building, University of Sydney
Cost: Free – All welcome

This seminar will explore the medievalism of Lars von Trier’s trilogy of films — Breaking the Waves (1996), The Idiots (1998), and Dancer in the Dark (2000) — in which he sought to pay homage to the role of the female martyr “in its most extreme form” and to women “who take the ideal all the way.” The three films are often referred to as the ‘Gold-Heart’ trilogy because they are partly based on a ‘lost’ Danish fairy-tale book (Guld Hjerte) from von Trier’s childhood about a little girl of the same name who embarks on a journey through the woods with pieces of bread and other things in her pockets. Along the way, she gives away everything she has, including her clothing, and whenever the animals of the forest question her risky behavior and impending destitution, at every bleak turn of the narrative, including one moment when she stands naked at the edge of the woods, she proclaims, ‘I’ll be fine, anyway,’ or, in another translation, ‘But at least I’m okay.’

Although decidedly not a person or artist who supports organized religion, von Trier has often remarked in interviews that, having been raised by parents who were atheists, he often feels as if he lacked a proper spiritual education, and these three films are partly his exploration of what that spiritual education might have given him in the way of philosophies of faith, devotion, goodness, love, selflessness, poverty, and sacrifice. These three films have been highly controversial and have also been extremely difficult to recuperate especially from feminist perspectives, partly because of the radical forms of feminine sublimity or the Real or Levinasian holiness or love’s extreme unconditionality (or pathology?) as exemplified in these films’ “martyr-heroines,” and in ways that should productively trouble our commonly held assumptions about (or stakes in) the feminine, religion, sacrifice, faith, love, goodness, violence, the law, and the symbolic order (and any combination thereof). This seminar will explore these ethical and other problematics in von Trier’s ‘Gold-Heart’ trilogy in relation to queer work on late antique and medieval hagiography and also Michel Foucault’s late writings on ascesis [self-discipline] and “improbable manners of being.”

Eileen Joy’s webpage is: http://www.siue.edu/~ejoy/
She is co-editor of the journal postmedieval