Framing Lars von Trier’s Medea

Abstract

AbstractLars von Trier’s Medea renders on the silver screen Carl Th. Dreyer’s unrealized script from Euripides’ play. Von Trier considers Dreyer one of his greatest cinematic influences and fashions his film as a ‘personal interpretation and homage to the master’. Two prominent narrative features of Dreyer’s cinematic oeuvre are a cause/effect logic and parallelism, which create formally rigid and closed worlds governed by an abstract, impersonal order. Von Trier applies these features especially to the frame of Medea in order to enhance the theodicy of Euripides’ tragedy and Dreyer’s adaptation of it. He also plays games of cinematic reflexivity in conscious or unconscious competition with Dreyer. Finally, his directorial virtuosity manifests itself most spectacularly in the editing of the film’s frame, which arranges the segments of the prologue and the epilogue so as to engage reception as a temporal activity rooted in the past, undertaken in the present, and directed to the future.