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Politics and open-ended dialectics in Lars von Trier's Dogville : a post-Brechtian critique

2012; Routledge; Volume: 11; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17400309.2012.750537

1740-7923

Angelos Koutsourakis,

Samuel Beckett and Modernism

Dogville is one of the few films by Lars von Trier that has been consistently discussed by the critics in relation to Brecht. Then again, most of the discussions of the film have offered a canonical reading which understands Dogville to be a single-minded 'anti-American' parable. These readings have paralysed any fruitful investigations of the film's form and the historical transitions that have changed the ways in which art attains its political function. This paper reads Dogville under the rubric of the post-Brechtian so as to rethink the political implications of the film's form. I focus on the film's employment of theatricality, performativity, and narrative aperture, arguing that the film generates contradictions that resist epistemological mastery. The paper proposes that Dogville goes beyond the closed form of the Brechtian Fabel, and Brecht's quest for dialectical enlightenment is replaced by open-ended dialectics.