Lars von Trier Beyond Depression

Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen, author of Lars von Trier's Renewal of Film 1984-2014: Signal, Pixel, Diagram:
Lars von Trier Beyond Depression presents new, insightful readings into the director’s latest films, including valuable reflections on the creative processes and sources of inspiration in von Trier’s work based on extensive archival material, notes, statements, and drafts. These are supplemented with new interviews regarding key questions, which generates a fascinating explorative text on the cultural influences and impacts issuing from one of our finest film directors today. With her impressive and meticulous contribution, Linda Badley not only succeeds in giving new perspectives on von Trier’s films, she also manages to substantiate in depth how Danish and European culture and ways of thinking differ from American. Anyone interested in Lars von Trier’s oeuvre should start with reading this book infused with genuine ideas and perspectives.

Mette Hjort, chair professor of humanities and dean of arts, Hong Kong Baptist University:
Based on careful archival research and on highly productive insights from countless practitioner interviews, Lars von Trier Beyond Depression offers a compelling account of Antichrist, Melancholia, Nymphomaniac, and The House That Jack Built. Focusing on the intentions, self-understandings, and personal experiences of von Trier and such theoretical lenses as dark ecology and psychoanalysis/therapy, Linda Badley evokes the contours of an ethical project in the Danish director’s contributions to trauma cinema and extreme cinema.

Andrew Nestingen, author of The Cinema of Aki Kaurismaki:
We should be grateful to Linda Badley for leading us into the darkness of Lars von Trier's cinematic world and illuminating it. Lars von Trier Beyond Depression draws on Badley's extraordinary knowledge of Trier and his cinema to study Antichrist, Melancholia, Nymphomaniac, and The House that Jack Built. Badley uses interviews of Trier and his collaborators, close analysis, genre studies, film-philosophy, ecocriticism, discussions of extreme cinema, and postcritical and postcinematic discussion to unfurl the strata of Trier's films. The book is a tour de force. Any reader interested in Trier or auteur cinema and its afterlife should read it.

Tina Kendall, Anglia Ruskin University:
Lars von Trier Beyond Depression is the first comprehensive account of the recent work of Lars von Trier, offering a lively and compelling critical evaluation of his cycle of ‘post-depression’ films that began with Melancholia (2009). A definitive resource on this period of von Trier’s output, its engagement with primary source material, interviews, and its incisive close readings will be indispensable to anyone interested in the filmmaker and his place within contemporary cinema.

Lori Marso, coeditor of Politics, Theory, and Film: Critical Encounters with Lars von Trier:
Linda Badley’s book is indispensable not only for those drawn, in spite of ourselves, to von Trier’s films, but also to all experiencing our contemporary moment in the register of despair and anxiety. Informed by personal conversations with von Trier, deeply ensconced in the filmmaking process and all its collaborators, and attentive to von Trier’s deliberate bad taste as well as his play with bending genre, Badley’s provocative readings of each film locate them in the director’s psyche while also showing that they offer a deft diagnosis of misogyny, climate disaster, capitalism, and hypocrisy run amok.