Epidemic (1987)

Director: Lars von Trier

Screenplay: Lars von Trier and Niels Vørsel

Cast: Lars von Trier, Niels Vørsel, Allan De Waal, Ole Ernst, Michael Gelting, Colin Gilder, Svend Ali Hamann, Claes Kastholm Hansen, Udo Kier

After his debut The Element of Crime (1984), Lars von Trier made a film in Epidemic that's a drastic shift in production. Far from a glib result, Epidemic is an important work even though it's held as a minor creation - it didn't even get a UK premiere on home media until Tartan Video released the whole E Trilogy (alongside Europa (1991)) in the 2000s. It is a moment where Lars von Trier first embraced his obsession with self set restrictions, upon himself and even filmmaker Jorgen Leth in The Five Obstructions (2003). The restriction is in budget, rawer in appearance and as a meta film starring Lars von Trier and co-writer Niels Vørsel as themselves, and proved he could leap into new genres and ballparks very quickly into his career.

Interestingly, if The Element of Crime was subconsciously a post-apocalypse film, in a future Europe where everything's collapsed and struggling along in the aftermath in the midst of a detective story, than Epidemic is a prologue to one. Von Trier and Vørsel, when their original script is lost due to the issues one always has with new technology and need to still provide a story to sell to a producer, hastily begin researching a tale about a disease epidemic which leaves humankind obliterated, with recreations of their script staring von Trier himself as a noble doctor who however is an unwitting Typhoid Mary, taking the disease with him when he leaves the quarantined remaining city into the wasteland. A narrator also explicitly states that, far from a comedic and mainly improvised drama, this is all a prelude before an actual epidemic wipes everything in civilised society away.

The film drastically changes in aesthetic away from The Element of Crime, von Trier's debut indebted to his love of Andrei Tarkovsky. The production is far less precise - abrupt editing cuts, a heavier grain to the images, monochrome and with a bit of stolen footage of environments, especially when there's a brief jaunt to Germany. Whether it's largely improvised or not I cannot fully tell, but Epidemic does feel well thought out baring the Germany segment which feels like a separate section in itself. Much of the film becomes a documentary on the life of filmmakers if fictionalised, going about trying to organise and research their subject in such a short space of time. One segment I cannot help but wonder about mind, and whether he was okay to have it in, is the small cameo of actor Udo Kier as himself in the Germany segment. His segment, where he describes a memory passed on by his dying mother about his birth and his subsequent break into tears, is uncomfortable in whether it should be in Epidemic, as it stands out considerably in tone, but is nonetheless a moment that startles.

The fictional scenes in vast contrast are significantly more stylised, a sense even on this lower budget the director can compose very eye catching scenes, taking locations as they are and using them to his advantage. He doesn't hide the artificial either and uses it to affect, a scene of a person in a coffin from the side, underground probably one of the most striking and evocative of the whole film. These scenes do however have the one sour point of Epidemic - a really crass piece of dialogue for a black character, an interesting figure who (with the actor initially introduced as a taxi driver in one scene in the real world) is in the apocalyptic world foisted into becoming a Catholic priest with only a few days training and unable to read Latin, in his death throes due to the epidemic speaking the really cringe worthy piece in question. It's sadly the sign of one of Lars von Trier's greatest vices appearing this early in his career, really misguided attempts at provocative which can lead sometimes to convoluted defences of free speech, where his least rewarding work appears from, and how he kept sticking his foot in his mouth especially at Q&As decades from this film.

You could also argue the eighties pop song at the end credits with heavy handed lyrics co written by von Trier is also a sour note, but it comes off as strangely endearing in a curious film. Epidemic is, despite its few flaws, actually a really unique gem which defies genres in its structure. Part of it is a lo-fi drama; some of it is a post-apocalyptic film in a minimalist style. Aspects like Udo Kier's scenes blur fiction and reality, and I haven't even mentioned the film's title is permanently etched on the top left corner of shots like a watermark, a curious creative choice some might find distracting but has a personality to it as a creative decision. The film, if it has a theme, is the power of creativity as ultimately the fake epidemic becomes real. Whilst over-the-top, the finale involves a woman brought into a hypnotic state to see the world of Epidemic with her own eyes, turning the film into a horror film as a result which gets hysterical in tone and certainly ends the story in a memorable way at a dinner party.

In terms of idiosyncratic filmmaking, it is an achievement in how unconventional it is. Lars von Trier, for his flaws, has thankfully never had a film which he made just for money or is truly dreadful, even a lesser known work like The Boss of It All (2006), a comedy, being a lo-fi production where the camera was programmed to hot how it liked in a form of controlled visual indeterminacy. Epidemic, from the challenge of its own low budget, became a story of two creators (played by the actual figures) trying to hastily create a work. A question to how accurate it is to themselves is to debate - I hope so for Niels Vørsel its exaggerated for this version as, whilst it has a sick humour to it, the tangent where he posed as a teen pen writer to American teen girls, whilst never played for sexual connotations but Vørsel having to play a teen in his thirties, has aged in a way where such scenes might not be funny to many anymore.

But, hey, if there ever was a director who was a critic of himself before there was a line for his detractors, it's Lars von Trier. There's a sense, credible, when Epidemic does become a horror film that its narrative is how these two men, von Trier and Vørsel, are complacent to the horrifying power of their craft. Its telling, probably in the most poignant scene in the film that even though he eventually accepts the offer, when von Trier has the chance to see an autopsy at a hospital for "research", he looks on at a male human body without excitement. Not distressed, but distant. Blurring genres, the film's narrator warned us the world here would end in an epidemic. Befittingly von Trier made his self referential film about film making one where that means little when a super disease takes central stage, growing boils and all, naturally becoming a greater concern that a movie deal with a Danish film producer.

Abstract Spectrum: Lo-Fi/Meta

Abstract Spectrum (High/Medium/Low/None): None