I have been making my way through Lars von Trier’s movies. I love Melancholia, and I have always heard he is an auteur. One of my favorite things about a certain subset of movies is when directors go for it, most likely knowing they’ll turn off a serious chunk of their audience. Here are some I can think of in no particular order:
And it strikes me that von Trier would make movies in this category.
Related, I have never listened to Bjork. Not because I listened to her and decided I didn’t enjoy her music; like, literally, I’ve never heard a Bjork song. It just passed me by. From the looks of it, her most famous work is probably Post (?), which was released in 1995.
In 1995, I was had Green Day on repeat. I was patiently waiting for The Offspring to come on the radio so I could record it to a cassette tape. I was fascinated by Primus’s music video for Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver.
Which means last night, when I watched Dancer in the Dark, it was the first time I had ever heard a Bjork song. Given the movie is about a woman who uses musicals to mentally escape from her life, I am assuming the music — the movie has musical numbers — isn’t entirely in her strike zone.
So the thing that sticks out to me the most about the songs in Dancer in the Dark (which were primarily composed by Bjork for the movie) is how atonal her melodies are. She dances between half-steps and full-steps consistently, which creates a very unsettling feeling for American ears. Western music doesn’t have a lot of these tonal shifts; it’s more common to Europe (Austria, Germany) and west Asia.
Obviously, she’s not from the West, so it is a perfect pairing for the movie. There is never quite a moment in the movie where there is any resolve; the music rarely resolves, even if you can’t put your finger on it. I’ll have to listen to more of her work. My wife definitely banged Bjork in the early ’90s, so I have an in-house guide.
As an aside, it would appear Bjork is quite the performance artist. She was fantastic as Selma in the movie, which is interesting considering it looks like she never did it again outside of a single other credit. Maybe she didn’t want to?