Melancolia e anticristo: sensibilidades contemporâneas e representação da loucura no cinema de Lars Von Trier

Abstract

This work carried out within the field of historiography, in its multidisciplinary approach, which borrows concepts from psychoanalysis, philosophy and cinema, aims to address the relations between history and cinema, questioning if there is a filmic writing of history and in what dimension this study may contribute to historiography when one thinks of a film not only as a source of visual data exploitable by the historian, but also situates the film as a transforming agent of history, loaded with a visual representation of the sensitive, and a discourse that can whether attributed to a cultural industry or, more precisely, to a problem-maker. Investigating Lars Von Trier's filmography, using the method of film analysis, we will explore the peculiarities of contemporary sensitivities and the socio-historical conditioning they suffer, and how they are represented in their work. We will deal with the question of the polysemy of the term madness - whether that which passes through the riddle of moralizing discourse, or that framed by the terms of psychoanalysis - and the different representations it acquired over time until it became an object of medicine. We will point out the specificity of Lars Von Trier's cinema in relation to the mainstream, his attempt to purify the cinema with the Dogma 95movement and, as part of an artistic movement, this is highlighted, both by the themes addressed and by the author's own controversial personality. Finally, we will investigate the contemporary feeling, situated in what Bauman called Liquid Modernity, and how this feeling can be understood in the works of Lars Von Trier, guided by the knowledge of a tragic time.