Break the Wave
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We transferred the film to video and worked on the color, before transferring it back to film again. No, that was a much more basic process, where we filmed direct from the television monitor. In The Kingdom, the transfer process was a bit more advanced. And here it was even more refined. Maybe it makes it a bit too attractive.
Dan Schultz Super Reviewer. The fact that the couple by the hospital bed ended up in the shot was a complete coincidence, and not particularly important. Emily had no previous film experience, which meant that she was more reliant on me as director. I see it as positive. Who was with her the night she died? Emily Watson is a wonderful actress, her performance is the only thing this ugly thing has going for it. We chose a style that contradicts the story, giving it the least possible emphasis.
In between, there are some completely digitally produced panoramic shots that introduce the different sections in the film. I collaborated on these images with a Danish artist, Per Kirkeby, who has developed a form based on romantic painting. There are so many ways of expressing romantic painting. Our pictures might have become a bit more abstract than I planned at the start. Yes, which was fortunate, really. But the manifesto goes a step further, which was important to me personally when I planned to make a film according to the rules.
But I felt a need to restrict myself, and that was the spirit in which the manifesto was created. You also break the rule about the film being uncredited. Do you see this as positive or negative? I see it as positive. When I was younger, I was fascinated by David Bowie, for instance. It was as important as his music. The important thing here is the process in which the work is created. The manifesto is purely theoretical.
But, at the same time, the theory is more important than the individual. Somehow or other, the identity of the director will always get out. It will be obvious who has directed each Dogme film. Of course, I think that most serious filmmakers will be recognizable whether or not their signature is there in black and white. What do you think is unique about your signature? This will probably sound pretentious, but somehow I hope people will be able to see that every image contains a thought.
It probably sounds arrogant, and it might not be true.
But I think that every image and every edit is thought through. Breaking the Waves has a strong religious background. What made you include that in the film? I flirted with religion a lot as a young man. Either you disappear to Tibet or you seek out the strictest faith available, with total abstinence and so on. He also tackles religion in all his films.
Religion is attacked, but not God. In the film, religion is described as a power structure. My intention was never to criticize any particular faith, like the one in this Scottish setting. In many ways, I can understand people who are obsessed by spiritual issues, often in a very extreme way. And religion struck me as being a suitable obstacle.
Bess is also an expression of that religion. Religion is her foundation, and she accepts its conditions without question. In the funeral scene at the beginning of the film, the priest condemns the deceased to eternal damnation in hell, which is something Bess finds completely natural. She has no scruples about that. But we, on the other hand, do. Bess is confronted with a lot of other power structures, like the power exerted by the hospital and the doctors.
And she has to adopt a position using the inherent goodness that she possesses. To a great extent, the film takes the actors as its starting point. Do you think your attitude toward actors changed and developed in Breaking the Waves? You could probably say that it did. But I also used a different technique in Breaking the Waves, a technique based upon a relationship of trust between director and actors, a classic technique really.
I probably got closer to the actors in this film. In my earlier films, it was more a conscious matter of not getting too close to the actors. How did you come to cast Emily Watson in the role of Bess? They were scared of the character of the film. It was probably the story as a whole. So it felt important to find actors who really wanted to be involved.
And I think it shows, that the actors we chose in the end are wholeheartedly committed to the film. We auditioned several actresses for the role of Bess. I remember that Emily was also the only one who came to the audition without any makeup and barefoot!
There was something Jesus-like about her that attracted me. Emily had no previous film experience, which meant that she was more reliant on me as director.
- Breaking the Waves | Kanopy.
- Lars von Trier on Breaking the Waves | The Current | The Criterion Collection;
- Evidence;
- Jean Genet, le poète travesti (essai français) (French Edition).
- Рассекая волны () - IMDb.
- Debates in the Digital Humanities.
Our work together was extremely relaxed. Whereas with Katrin Cartlidge, I almost always went for the first take. The difference was in their individual styles of acting. We improvised a lot, forgot all about continuity, and gave the actors more freedom in their performances. As far as Katrin, a more experienced actress, was concerned, the intensity of her performance diminished for every new take. I met him in Paris, but he was far too overwhelmed with work and not particularly interested in the role.
Emily Watson in Breaking the Waves () Jean-Marc Barr and Stellan Skarsgård in Breaking the Waves () Stellan Skarsgård in Breaking the Waves. Breaking the Waves is a film directed by Lars von Trier and starring Emily Watson. Set in the Scottish Highlands in the early s, it is about an unusual.
The character was more like Depardieu when I began writing the script. But it developed in a different direction, and Depardieu would have been too old for the part. He also had the physique that was right for the part. And he was excellent. I know that the role of Dodo was originally intended for Barbara Sukowa. She was an incredibly talented actress, and extremely intelligent. But I offered her the role of Dodo, and she wanted to do it.
They were a fantastic trio, Emily, Stellan, and Katrin. The way you edited the film is fairly unorthodox and breaks all the rules.
Did it take long to do? The church refuses to give a funeral for her and damns her soul to hell. Unbeknownst to the church elders, Jan and his friends have substituted bags of sand for Bess's body inside the sealed coffin.
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Jan is later shown, substantially restored to health despite the doctors not having thought it possible, burying her in the ocean, deep in grief. The film ends in magical realism as Bess's body is nowhere to be seen on the sonar, and church bells ring from on high in the sky. Breaking the Waves was von Trier's first film after founding the Dogma 95 movement with fellow Danish director Thomas Vinterberg.
However the film breaks many of the movement's "rules", including built sets, post-dubbed music and computer graphics. He wanted to make a naturalistic film that was also a religious film without any miracles. Von Trier claimed that it took him five years to write the film and get financial backing, and he began to lose enthusiasm for it right after filming began. It had a budget of 42 million kroner. Helena Bonham Carter was von Trier's first choice to play the role of Bess, but she dropped out just before shooting was to start, reportedly due to the large amount of nudity and sexuality required by the role.
Von Trier was eventually won over by Emily Watson's audition, even though she was a complete unknown in the film industry at the time. Von Trier initially wanted to film it on the west coast of Jutland, then in Norway, then in Ostende, Belgium, then Ireland before finally settling with Scotland.
The film is divided into seven different chapters. Each chapter begins with a different impressionistically filmed panorama title frame featuring early s rock music interludes. Each of these chapters is filmed with a motionless camera, but features movement in the panorama. The overall style is heavily influenced by the realist Dogme 95 movement, of which von Trier was a founding member, and its grainy images and hand-held photography give it the superficial aesthetic of a Dogme film.
However, the Dogme rules demand the use of real locations, whereas many of the locations in Breaking the Waves were constructed in a studio.
Some saw Breaking the Waves as mainstream cinema. Others saw it as a high budget experimental film due to its elaborate chapter shots and handheld camera in a sketchy raw style that followed the actors closely. Breaking the Waves marked an important change in focus for Lars von Trier. In von Trier's early films, the protagonist is a man, typically a disillusioned idealist whose downfall is furthered by a deceitful, fatal woman. In this film, for the first time the protagonist is a woman, emotional and naive. This motif continues in his later films, except for the comedy The Boss of It All.
Breaking the Waves controversially connects religion with eroticism.
Breaking the Waves
The film focuses on sexual perversity and female martyrdom, issues that continue in Trier's later work. Some critics see the self-sacrificing submissive heroine as a misogynist cliche. The film was made using Panavision equipment. But this love had to be absolutely pure. That is the key, his longing for pure emotions.
The Danish provocateur had a well-earned reputation for being too controlling with actors.
Breaking the Waves - Wikipedia
He's just really quite odd. By the time he made Breaking the Waves , von Trier was comfortable enough with the process to stop moving the actors around like chess pieces and let them make their own acting choices. The speech that Bess's sister-in-law gives at the wedding was written by the actress, Katrin Cartlidge, but von Trier's script otherwise remained pretty much intact.
The trend over the last couple of decades has been to turn popular movies into Broadway musicals, but of course von Trier fans would have different ideas. It got good reviews.