Lars von Trier, the filmmaker who made the camera shake long before his hands did

The Dogme 95 manifesto that Lars von Trier co-wrote with Thomas Vinterberg in 1995 demanded that directors strip cinema of every comfort: no artificial lighting, no non-diegetic sound, no props brought to the set, handheld cameras only. That a filmmaker with severe OCD, clinical depression, social phobia, and a profound fear of flying would design a ruleset as a method of liberation makes a certain kind of sense. Von Trier had been doing this for a decade already — turning his own psychological weather into a cinematographic system.

He was born Lars Trier on April 30, 1956, in Kongens Lyngby, outside Copenhagen. The “von” came later, self-invented in the 1980s in homage to Erich von Stroheim and Josef von Sternberg, a joke about aristocracy and directorial authority that has since become inseparable from the name. He was shooting short films as a teenager, won best school film at the Munich International Festival twice before twenty-five, and graduated from the Danish Film School with The Element of Crime — a neo-noir bathed in amber and murk that won the Technical Grand Prize at Cannes in 1984. The festival would become the recurring site of his most important confrontations, including the ones he started himself.

The career divides roughly into four pressure zones. The first is the Europe Trilogy of the 1980s and early 1990s — The Element of Crime, Epidemic, Europa — formally ambitious, politically oblique, fixated on trauma embedded in landscape. Europa ended with the founding of Zentropa, the production company he built with Peter Aalbæk Jensen that grew into the largest film studio in Scandinavia. The second zone is the one that put him in a different category: Breaking the Waves (1996), the first film of the Golden Heart Trilogy, won the Grand Prix at Cannes and announced Emily Watson to the world. The Idiots followed in 1998, his own Dogme 95 feature. Then Dancer in the Dark, with Björk as a Czech immigrant in an American factory town, won the Palme d’Or in 2000 and Björk the Best Actress prize — the peak of his Cannes arc, also the last time the two would work together without acrimony.

The third zone is the USA Trilogy, which never required him to visit the United States. Dogville (2003) is a town drawn in chalk on a soundstage; Nicole Kidman moves through it in a meditation on grace and vengeance that uses theatrical absence as a formal argument. Manderlay followed. Then, after a depressive episode that temporarily halted everything, Antichrist (2009) and Melancholia (2011) — both shot in the raw, handheld style he had never really abandoned, both featuring Charlotte Gainsbourg in roles that require more exposure than comfort. Melancholia brought Kirsten Dunst a Best Actress prize at Cannes in 2011 and briefly returned him to festival favor. Then he stood at a press conference, said he understood Hitler, and was declared persona non grata by the festival he had spent his career courting. He has issued apologies since, but the episode has never quite sealed over.

The fourth zone begins with Nymphomaniac in 2013 — two volumes, an erotic narrative structured like a theological argument — and continues through The House That Jack Built (2018), in which Matt Dillon plays a serial killer who regards each murder as an architectural project. Von Trier returned to Cannes for that one, to a partly walkout audience and press-conference chaos that felt, by then, structural. The final leg of the Kingdom television trilogy, The Kingdom Exodus, arrived in 2022 and showed that he could still hold the long form — five episodes closing a narrative left open since 1997, selected at Venice and Toronto, received with the kind of relief audiences feel when they discover a director hasn’t used up all their strangeness.

There is a criticism lodged frequently against his work — that the women in his films suffer in ways that serve an aesthetic project the director controls from a comfortable distance. Emily Watson drowning, Björk executed, Gainsbourg mutilated, Dunst watching a planet fall. It is not an unserious charge. Von Trier has acknowledged that he is drawn to female suffering in ways he does not entirely understand, which is itself an unusual thing for a director to say. Whether that acknowledgment constitutes a reckoning or a sophisticated form of deflection is a question his films raise and do not answer. The Björk allegations of harassment on set, which emerged publicly in 2017, sharpened the charge further and have not been resolved.

He has not traveled by plane in decades. Almost all his films have been made in Denmark or neighboring countries. His inability to fly has shaped his casting, his locations, and the peculiar quality of enclosure that runs through even his most expansive work — Dogville is a chalk floor; Melancholia is a manor house; The House That Jack Built is a dungeon. The geography is always small, the stakes cosmological.

In February 2025, von Trier disclosed that he had entered a care facility for Parkinson’s disease treatment. He is seventy years old in 2026. The film he is working on, titled After, casts Stellan Skarsgård — who has appeared in his work since Breaking the Waves — and is described as dealing with death and the afterlife. Whether this is his last film depends on how seriously you take a director who has announced his retirement several times, beginning with the depression of 2007. But the Parkinson’s changes the terms. The camera was always shaking. That was the method. Now the method is fighting the body for one more take.

Tags: Björk, Kirsten Dunst