Kinoeye: New perspectives on European film

Vol 2
 Issue 5 
4 Mar
2002

 KINOEYE 
home 
this issue 
about us 
contributing 
vacancies 
contact us 
 
 
E-MAIL 
UPDATES 

 
 
more info 

 ARCHIVES 
search 
english title 
original title 
director 
article list 
journal list 
add a link 
 

COUNTRY 
ARCHIVES 


SEARCH 
 
 

 

    Printer-friendly version of this article
Lars von Trier's Forbrydelsens element (The Element of Crime, 1984) HORROR
Child victims and excessive signifiers
Lars von Trier's
Forbrydelsens element
(The Element of Crime, 1984)

Von Trier uses child murders as a means of showing a fundamental aspect of Scandinavian horror—the fear that paganism lurks beneath the surface of modern respectability, as Rebecca A and Samuel J Umland explain.[1]


The themes of vampirism and child victimisation, of the vampire preying on children, clearly haunted Carl Theodor Dreyer's imagination as well as Ingmar Bergman's.[2] In the original screenplay for Vampyr—which, incidentally, appeared in Germany the year before Fritz Lang's M (1933)—Dreyer included a chilling sequence in which David Gray enters an old, cluttered, dirty laundry room. As Gray looks around the junk-filled room, the thing that utterly "astonishes" him "is a collection of children's clogs standing neatly in rows. They are not quite as dusty as the other things in the old laundry room."[3] Backing out of the room, Gray goes "back to the spot where a door leads out to the staircase." He stops there, and hears, "in the quivering stillness of the old house... hounds baying and a child weeping. Then a scream, a half-suppressed child's scream, as if a hand had closed over the mouth of the screamer" (1970: 88).

As S S Prawer notes, in the actual film (at least the most complete version of the film presently available) the image of the children's clogs is absent,

and though the sound-track includes what sounds like barking, baying, and whimpering dogs, a child's weeping cannot be clearly distinguished on it. Instead, we have shots of a tiny skeleton, a cross between an atomized baby and a voodoo doll. David Gray's enquiry after the weeping child is, however, retained (he, obviously, has heard a child, even if the viewer has not) and so are the doctor's negative answers: "There is no child here," and again: "Here there are neither children nor dogs."[4]

In our view, Vampyr is the distant precursor to Lars von Trier's Forbrydelsens element (The Element of Crime, Denmark, 1984) and to certain of the subplots in von Trier's later TV mini-series, Riget (The Kingdom). Both of these films—Forbrydelsens element a hybrid mixture of the genres of horror and post-apocalyptic science fiction, Riget a horror comedy (originally made for Danish television in 1994, with a second series in 1997)—are centrally concerned with children as victims of violent crimes.

Fisher and Grey

Forbrydelsens element, von Trier's feature film debut, centres around detective Fisher (Michael Elphick) who returns to Germany to solve a series of "lotto murders," in which a mysterious figure by the name of "Harry Grey" (an allusion to David Gray of Vampyr, just as is the setting in Germany, where Vampyr was made) is suspected of stalking, killing and horribly disfiguring children who sell lottery tickets.[5] Fisher returns to Europe after 13 years of exile in Cairo, Egypt. He has been contacted by his aged former mentor at the police academy, Osborne (Esmond Knight, the film director in Michael Powell's Peeping Tom [UK, 1960]), author of a controversial book of theoretical criminal psychology entitled The Element of Crime.

Osborne's book details "a series of mental exercises designed to improve our understanding of the behavioural pattern of the criminal." Although it is strongly implied that the investigative method outlined by Osborne in The Element of Crime has since been discredited, Fisher begins to think and act like Harry Grey in order to retrace Grey's route and in so doing anticipate the scene of the next crime. Fisher is befriended by a prostitute, Kim (Meme Lai), whom he takes with him on his journey, urging her to address him as Harry Grey. Soon, Fisher intuits what he believes to be the geometrical pattern that Grey is using to choose his murder sites—not the geometric figure of the square, as Osborne had believed, but the alphabetic glyph "H"—and hastens to Halle, the city where he believes the next murder will occur.

There, an elderly man, "grandfather" (Preben Lerdorff-Rye, who had played leading roles in Dreyer's Vredens Dag [Day of Wrath, 1943] and Ordet [The Word, 1955]), allows his granddaughter to serve as bait in a trap Fisher has set to capture Grey. A mysterious figure appears, casting a shadow; when Fisher draws his handkerchief to hand to the small girl to dry her tears of fright, a talisman falls out of his pocket identical to those left at the murder scenes by the killer. The girl panics, thinking Fisher is Harry Grey, and begins to scream as she breaks the glass out of a window in an attempt to escape.

Overreacting, Fisher grabs the girl and in attempting to stifle her screams, he suffocates her. (Recall the passage from Dreyer's script to Vampyr: "...[I]n the quivering stillness of the old house…a child weeping. Then a scream, a half-suppressed child's scream, as if a hand had closed over the mouth of the screamer" [1970: 88].)

Von Trier has said that at the beginning of his career he typically used "people who're very sure of what's right and what action to take," adding, "You can be sure that when they've done the right thing, it's gone wrong and they also did it badly."[6] This is certainly applicable to the protagonist of Forbrydelsens element, Detective Fisher. Although the frame narrative suggests that Fisher is urged by the therapist (Ahmed El Shenawi) to recount his story out of expiation of guilt (the allusion to Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, "Water, water everywhere...," that begins Fisher's narration is highly suggestive), at times there are the contradictory suggestions that he himself is Harry Grey's doppelgänger, as emphasised by the repeated references to Fisher's severe headaches.

At one point, during a boat ride down a mysterious tunnel that is referred to as "the tunnel of love," prior to performing oral sex, Kim gives him a bottle of pills which are designed to intensify his sexual pleasure; although after the effect of the pill wears off Fisher is subjected to an excruciating headache.

A splitting headache

As Fisher claims to be closing in on Harry Grey, he acknowledges that the headaches have become more frequent. When he and Kim check in to the Elite Hotel after leaving Halberstadt, the desk clerk claims to remember Harry Grey (Fisher?) because he had asked for the anti-psychotic medicine, Thorazine. Does the desk clerk remember Fisher or Grey? Is Fisher following his own tracks, assuming that they belong to someone else, like Winnie the Pooh following his own tracks around the big oak tree? And when he is waiting with the little girl for Grey to arrive, Fisher is shown wincing in pain and rubbing his forehead, a sign that he is suffering a severe headache, as if he is "splitting" or morphing into Harry Grey—which, in some sense, he does, during his act of "silencing" the screaming girl.[7]

Excessive signifiers

Yet, like the Congo River in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, or the Mopu Palace in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's Black Narcissus (1947), for instance, the dark, eerie, rain-drenched (Blade Runner-ish) Europe to which Fisher returns functions as an "excessive signifier." In The Melodramatic Imagination, Peter Brooks theorises that the melodramatic form creates an asymmetrical relationship between the signifier and the signified, specifically, a signified in excess of the signifier. This asymmetry "in turn produces an excessive signifier, making large and insubstantial claims on meaning."[8]

As Priya Jaikumar observes, settings such as the Congo River and Mopu Palace are "places where things happen far in excess of explicable causes. The incommensurabilities among word, intention, and their meanings or consequences are inexplicable and therefore attributed to the place."[9] The haunting, mysterious imagery of the location—the vague, ill-defined sense of menace, of some unspecified ecological and economic collapse (the buses stopped running three years earlier), the oppressive effect of perpetual rain and darkness (as Kim says to Fisher, "it's always three o'clock in the morning"), the child murders—all contribute to Fisher's psychic and emotional disintegration.

In Riget (The Kingdom, 1994), von Trier's horror comedy that was originally a four-part Danish television series, the Kingdom Hospital likewise functions as an excessive signifier, as the hospital's very location promises effects over and above that which can be attributed to (rational) explicable causes. The Kingdom Hospital, although it had been dedicated to the belief that superstition and ignorance would never again "shake the bastions of science", in fact rests upon ancient, primordial marshland, enigmatically alluded to by a voice-over at the beginning of the film.

Thus, the Kingdom's literal foundations on ancient marshland reflects a figurative truth, that its principles of Enlightened reason and science have replaced, but not in fact eradicated, earlier systems of belief. In the words of Lao-Tze, "High rests on low". This layering, or stratification, is a sort of figurative restatement of our thesis that Scandinavian horror films dramatise a deep-seated cultural fear that paganism, which was driven underground but never vanquished, threatens to (re-)surface and (re-)assert itself at any time.

Samuel J Umland Rebecca A Umland

    Printer-friendly version of this article

Also of interest
About the authors

Rebecca A Umland is Professor of English and Graduate Faculty Fellow at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. She has published widely on the Arthurian tradition in Victorian literature, focusing primarily on Tennsyon, Morris and Swinburne. With Samuel J. Umland, she authored The Use of Arthurian Legend in Hollywood Film: From Connecticut Yankees to Fisher Kings (Greenwood Press) and several articles on the films of David Lynch. Together, they are completing a book on Scottish film director Donald Cammell, forthcoming in 2002 by FAB Press. She is currently writing a book on the romantic idea of the artist as a work of art, focusing on icons such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Oscar Wilde.

Samuel J Umland holds the BA, MA and PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is Professor of English and Film Studies and Graduate Faculty Fellow at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. He edited and contributed to a collection of essays on science fiction writer Philip K Dick, titled Philip K Dick: Contemporary Critical Interpretations (Greenwood Press). He has a book accepted by Temple University Press as part of its "Sound Masters" series, Suspicious Minds, a study of the mass media representation of Rock ‘N' Roll from the late 60s through the 90s.


return to the Kinoeye home page
return to the main page for this issue

Footnotes

1. Excerpt from "Burn, witch, burn: a first look at the Scandinavian horror film," by Rebecca A and Samuel J Umland. Forthcoming in Fear Without Frontiers: Horror Cinema Across the Globe, ed Steven Jay Schneider (Guildford: FAB Press, forthcoming 2002). Prepublished here by permission of the authors. Visit the Fear Without Frontiers website for more details.return to text

2.Bergman's Tystnaden (The Silence, 1963) also includes issues that connect it with our discussion of horror in Bergman's art, and especially with vampirism and art. It probes the troubled, tortured relationship between two sisters, the moribund Ester (Ingrid Thulin) and her sibling, Anna (Gunnel Lindblom). The former, a tubercular, cerebral quasi-artist/scholar (she is a famous translator) clashes with her narcissistic, promiscuous sister as they stop over at a hotel where Ester will die. There is little affection and almost unbearable tension between Ester and Anna. At first we are encouraged to be sympathetic towards Ester; Anna is so self-absorbed that she treats her young son, Johan (Jörgen Lindström) like a servant, ordering him to scrub her back while she takes a bath, and then to remove his clothes to nap with her. Sensuous and torpid, Anna alternately neglects the boy and then showers him with kisses— both indications of a dysfunctional mother. By contrast, when Anna goes out in search of a sexual encounter, Ester is kind to her nephew, offering him supper, asking him to read to her, and teaching him foreign words, at his request.return to text

3.Carl Theodor Dreyer, Four Screenplays, trans Oliver Stallybrass (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), 88.return to text

4.S.S. Prawer, Caligari's Children: The Film as Tale of Terror (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 148.return to text

5.In Stig Björkman's highly informative documentary about von Trier, Tranceformer: A Portrait of Lars von Trier (1997)—thus preceding the release of the highly feted Dancer in the Dark (2000)—Ernst Hugo Järegård recounts an anecdote that is highly revealing about von Trier's relation to his artistic precursor, Dreyer. Järegård tells of being with von Trier at the Cannes Film Festival. Von Trier was late for an engagement. When he finally arrived, he was, according to Järegård, wearing the tuxedo Dreyer had worn in 1928, which von Trier had previously purchased at an auction.return to text

6.Quoted from Björkman's documentary, Tranceformer, included on the Criterion DVD The Element of Crime (Criterion #ELE090, 2000).return to text

7.Recall that in Lost Highway (1997), director David Lynch signals Fred Madison (Bill Pullman)'s morphing into Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty) by the horrible headache Fred gets prior to becoming Pete. Pete's subsequent amnesia is coded by the terrible bruise he has on his forehead.return to text

8.Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Myth of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 199.return to text

9.Priya Jaikumar, "'Place' and the Modernist Redemption of Empire in Black Narcissus (1947)," Cinema Journal 40.2 (Winter 2001): 62. The West Texas setting of Victor Sjöstrom's Hollywood film The Wind (1928), for instance, also functions as an excessive signifier.return to text

  Copyright © Kinoeye 2001-2024