Epidemic

Lars von Trier in Epidemic

Lars von Trier's Epidemic, from 1987, is a self-reflexive film about filmmaking. The film stars the director himself as he hastily assembles a screenplay in collaboration with Ole Ernst. These scenes are shot in 16mm black and white and show the pair drinking with gusto, doing research on medieval epidemics, and driving to Germany to visit Udo Kier. In juxtaposition are scenes from the screenplay shot in 35mm black and white. These again feature von Trier as "Dr. Mesmer" in a modern dress rendering of a medieval plague story shot like an UFA film. 

The overbearing Danish director is trying to address the fissure in his work between his commercial and avant-garde impulses. The film is branded with the title trademark emblazoned on the screen through most of the film. Perhaps this doesn't seem as jarring today when corporate logos are ever present on the screen during network broadcasts, but the effect is a cri de coeur concerning the director's ambivalence towards film as a product. This movie is entertaining in fits and starts. It is telling that von Trier opines at one point, "A film ought to be like a pebble in your shoe." No rainbows or butterflies for the audience from Lars, then.

His recent diagnosis of Parkinson's disease threatens to thwart the career of a genuine talent. Epidemic has the usual themes of his work (hospitals and disease, trauma, hypnosis as film and film as hypnosis), but the film lacks the thematic power and narrative drive of his best works, The Element of Crime and Melancholia. James Agee consoled Stanley Kubrick after the premiere of his first film, Fear and Desire, that it "had too many good things in it to be called arty." Epidemic is arty to a fault.