The Pervert's Guide To Cinema Page #20

finds the neighbour dead,

his eyes picked out by the birds,

she shouts, but the shout

literally remains stuck in her throat.

To return from cinema to so-called real life,

the ultimate lesson of psychoanalysis

is that exactly the same

goes for our real life experience,

that emotions as such are deceiving.

There are no specifically fake emotions

because, as Freud puts it literally,

the only emotion which doesn't deceive

is anxiety.

All other emotions are fake.

So, of course, the problem here is, are we able to

encounter in cinema the emotion of anxiety,

or is cinema as such a fake?

Cinema, as the art of appearances,

tells us something about reality itself.

It tells us something

about how reality constitutes itself.

Not that way!

Ripley.

Ripley, come on.

Ripley, we've got no time for sightseeing here.

Ripley, don't.

There is an old Gnostic theory

that our world was not perfectly created,

that the god who created our world

was an idiot who bungled the job,

so that our world is a half-finished creation.

There are voids, openings, gaps.

It's not fully real, fully constituted.

In the wonderful scene

in the last instalment of the Alien saga,

Alien Resurrection, when Ripley,

the cloned Ripley, enters a mysterious room,

she encounters

the previous failed version of herself,

of cloning herself.

Just a horrified creature,

a small foetus-like entity,

then more developed forms.

Finally, a creature which almost looks like her,

but her limbs are like that of the monster.

Kill me.

This means that all the time

our previous alternate embodiments,

what we might have been but are not,

that these alternate versions of ourselves

are haunting us.

That's the ontological view of reality

that we get here,

as if it's an unfinished universe.

This is, I think, a very modern feeling.

It is through such ontology of unfinished reality

that cinema became a truly modern art.

All modern films are ultimately films about

the possibility or impossibility to make a film.

This is the sad tale

of the township of Dogville.

Dogville was in the Rocky Mountains

in the US of A,

up here where the road came to its definitive end

near the entrance to the old,

abandoned silver mine.

The residents of Dogville were good,

honest folks and they liked their township.

With Von Trier, it's not only the problem of belief

in the sense of,

do people generally still believe today

the place of religion today, and so on.

It's also reflectively or allegorically

the question of believing in cinema itself.

How to make today people still believe

in the magic of cinema?

In Dogville, all of it is staged on a set.

Okay, this is often the case in cinema,

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