http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vrkjbmUPF0

closing credits sequence of Dogville

Yesterday, I watched Dogville (2003) on DVD with my daughter, who had to watch it for her final year in high school. Her assignment: searching for Brechtian alienation elements. That wasn’t hard: the whole film is an attack on the suspension of disbelief.

I’d previously seen the von Trier film in the cinema and that time I had missed the importance of the closing credits sequence [above] with images of poverty-stricken Americans taken from Jacob Holdt’s social documentary photography book American Pictures (1977) and accompanied by David Bowie’s song “Young Americans.”

The film is an indictment of the hypocrisy of small town morality. Its most dislikable character is Tom Edison Jr., the wannabe writer, would be philosopher and cowardly lover who abuses Grace’s trust time after time.

Von Trier’s tale reminded me both of Thomas Hardy and the misery of Jude the Obscure and of the festering perversion in the small town of Samuel Fuller’s The Naked Kiss.

The film is a masterpiece. But bleak.

I’ve added it to my film canon: the World Cinema Classics list where it sits next to District 9 and Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde.