Nocturne (1980)

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Director: Lars von Trier

Screenplay: Tom Elling and Lars von Trier

Cast: Yvette as The Woman; Solbjørg Højfeldt as The Telephone Voice

A little review, for a ten minute student project of the notorious Danish director I do love even if von Trier can be his own worst enemy. Most people reading this, if not all, will know Lars von Trier and at least a film of his, even one of his infamous non-cinematic events especially at Cannes Film Festivals. Nocturne, if the audio commentary from von Trier and Nocturne's editor Tomas Gislason for Tartan Video is right¹, was where "von" even comes from, not his actual name but apparently added when asked by those as the film school to obscure his name.

Nocturne is a curious and imaginative experiment, non-narrative based but you can create a semblance of a plot. Of a woman who now lives at night and as a result finds the sunlight painful, going to fly on an airplane in an act with someone else's involvement that might change her life. The opening, where a masked man leaps through a glass window at her, an ambitious moment executed perfectly, suggests a trauma which has left her psychologically scared, and as we see her nocturnal apartment, she lives in an isolated and claustrophobic place. Her weakened and nervous mood, played by "Yvette", suggests a shell-shocked and emotionally damaged woman.

In knowledge of its roots, it's a credible sight of von Trier's ambitions, creating atmosphere heavily indebted to the likes of Andrei Tarkovsky. Von Trier also wanted to make Nocturne with the idea of extreme symmetry with lines in the images onscreen drawing the viewer's eyes. The slates of windows, straight lines of the bed and objects on furniture, an extreme symmetry even where the actress had to contort herself to his request to follow the layout of the world around her, a clear picture of that even when he co-created the Dogma 95 movement to remove his artifice, von Trier has always been obsessed with rules and constructing his films' forms as much as the content. This short not surprisingly fits the world that his E Trilogy had - Elements of a Crime (1985) and Europa (1991) rather than Epidemic (1987) - of incredible, precise artistic production which came after this short film.

It's as a result felt like an actual nocturnal dream, a haze of recollection arguably helped by the stuttering of the images as, whilst preserved, a cleaned up negative of the film never existed, only one where lines occasionally appear on the images or they themselves stutter as pictures rather than moving sequences. The flaws of the production as much as the deliberate ones, be it matching a watch being matched to a church dome to a superimposed background image of birds behind the actress, all creation a lucid potent creation.

And undeniably, early on in his career Lars von Trier shows he is a great director even though he can dig himself into holes in the content he has in his later years. He takes risks, always has admirably but I am aware with the likes of Nymphomaniac (2013) (the split two halves, not the five hour plus director's cut) that he's taken to shock value and unintentional silly ideas in the desire to prod human behaviour, a factor that whilst he's capable of incredible dramas and genre films is something that could always undermine him. Its why explicitly a work like The Kingdom series (1994-7) is one of his best productions, needing to be remembered as his intelligence is match by more emphasis on his incredible style then stumbling into poor arguments. And the thing is, despite his notoriety he can be self critical and humble, so he might not be that offended by this review if he ever learnt of it; he'd probably have a few more things about this short that anyone would've like to heard about.

Abstract Spectrum: Atmospheric/Psychodrama

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

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1) Nocturne was an Easter Egg for Tartan Video's release of the E Trilogy, one of two I only learnt of in 2019 and is something I'm blessed to have learnt as, alongside Images of Liberation (1982), they're additional films and worthwhile discoveries.