Playing The Waves

And now for a bit of self-promotion: here is my latest book and it is about the director who is staring you in the face.

The approach taken in this book is a game theoretical and game studies perspective. In the book I argue that Dogme95 is first and for all a game, and that the Dogme95 Manifesto should be read as an attempt to redefine the practice of filmmaking as a playful, game in which the filmmaker sets himself a number or largely arbitrary rules.

Von Trier has done so in all of his productions. Moreover, the narrational patterns and the remarkably consistent, if not repetitious structures of his stories can be very well explained by an (in)famous case from game theory.

Moreover, the book draws attention to the particular use of a much overlooked device in Von Trier's films: the editing. Through a particular kind of discontinous editing, Von Trier breaks away from classical and modern notions of 'representations' and brings cinema into the realm of simulation and the virtual. His style might be more aptly called 'virtual realism'.

Order at Amsterdam University Press or at Amazon