Manderlay

Von Trier's Brechtian Gamble On Manderlay This time "liberal" is a dirty word By Jayson Harsin

"The movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society . . . America must be born again!" — Martin Luther King Jr. 1967

"Dear (American) liberals, You're Idiots! Love, Lars."

In a nutshell, that is the message of Manderlay, controversial Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier's latest effort. Yet Manderlay is a complicated film that will produce multiple interpretations. Some will walk away calling it racist and anti-American. Others will find it a condemnation of Bush's war in Iraq. Yet, as I say, it is mostly a critique of American liberal politics. A condemnation of conservative racial politics is its point of departure. The film's complicated style and extreme plot produce intentional uneasiness.

Von Trier has cited German playwright Bertolt Brecht (right) as an artistic inspiration; yet one may wonder if he is reinventing the Brechtian wheel, one that Brecht himself admitted did not turn for others as he had wished.

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On one level, the film is set in 1930s Alabama, on a plantation called Manderlay, where 70 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, slavery is apparently still being practiced. Continuing the narrative of Dogville, Grace (now Bryce Howard), after touring with her gangster father (now Willem Dafoe) and his thugs since her departure from Dogville, stumbles upon Manderlay with her father's entourage. She is alerted to the anachronistic existence of slavery by a slave who asks her for help. Her father asserts that this is a "local matter," echoing a common Southern response to Federal intervention in race problems that was often coded through "states' rights." It specifically recalls the language of Martin Luther King's powerful "Letter from Birmingham Jail," in which he responded to Southern clergymen who had accused him of, among other things, being a meddling outsider.

White liberal American intellectuals will no doubt have a hard time resisting identification with the white do-gooder Grace, who, like the North, the Federal government, and the social worker, believes that race relations at Manderlay are in moral terms not a local matter. "We have a moral obligation," Grace says to her father, as she persuades him to loan her gangster firepower to oversee her reform initiative.

But King was African-American and Grace is white. Should that matter? It matters in terms of Von Trier's audience (mostly American art cinema liberals and European intellectuals). It also matters for the history of white social and policy reactions to "the race problem," liberal and conservative responses, from segregation to integration, welfare to workfare, white flight to affirmative action. Grace's color is extremely significant. Resonances with Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust and Absalom, Absalom can also be found in the simplicity of the white liberal Northerner's analysis and solution to race problems. In this sense, Von Trier's provocative film is perhaps above all else an indictment of American liberalism (or liberal individualism), domestically and globally. All of these aspects should be considered through the lens of his Brechtian alienation techniques. Otherwise, this turns out to be one of the most ignominiously racist films since Birth of a Nation.

First, domestically: the historical debate about freedmen and resistance to them is important. While one could go back further, the contradictions of the modern liberal-race problem invoked by Von Trier date from the end of the Civil War. From 1865-1867, white southerners made very little effort to welcome African-Americans into a reborn American society (symbolized by the historically altered Constitution). The Ku Klux Klan together with the Black Codes terrorized African-Americans physically and deprived them of education and the legal franchise. While some American historians have noted the important changes of freedmen and -women marrying; establishing households, schools, and churches; owning 20 percent more land during the Reconstruction years — others emphasize that even so, the country did not solve the problem of race. And the South in particular, in terms of land reforms, enfranchisement, and education, was not ready to change of its own accord. Many African-Americans exercised agency and made valiant efforts to become self-sufficient, yet they faced no little opposition from the planter class and some poor whites (even though evidence exists of some alliances between African-Americans and poor whites).

While Von Trier's film does little to emphasize the efforts made by African-Americans to exercise their freedom in the ways I've noted, it is virtuosic at portraying the structures many faced when they set foot off the plantation (symbolized by a shortlived character who, venturing off the plantation, waits for a sympathetic woman, a white reformer like Grace, but finds bloodthirsty white men instead). The role of a traveling salesman huckster also portrays the white mediation of emancipation through debt peonage and sharecropping. The failure of Reconstruction with the Compromise of 1877 brought a more precarious period of civil and economic life to African-Americans in the South.

And yet Manderlay makes claims to a historical context in the 1930s. Here von Trier's dramatic vehicle of slavery existing in the 1930s is again more metaphorical than realist. The point is that while the furniture of racism was rearranged, it was still the same racist edifice. In addition, the role of an African-American leader is played by Wilhelm (Danny Glover), a house slave entrusted with knowledge of the entire Manderlay plantation rules and governance. Echoing views of nineteenth-century African-American leader Booker T. Washington, Wilhelm's analysis is that under the conditions at Manderlay, his people will meet a better life by consenting to the old social structures. The fact that armed gangsters must enforce the redistribution of social roles on one piece of property, which disappears when they disappear, is not a little reminiscent of Reconstruction military occupation of the South and its aftermath. To read on, see the full review at http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/51/manderlay.htm

Indeed one of this years best films. I have just returned from the cinema, and i'm still thinking about Manderlay. The story continues where Dogville ended. Grace and her father makes a short brake their travel, and discovers that a slave is getting punished near by in a plantation named Manderlay. Grace's father continues his travel and Grace stays in Manderlay to set the slaves free, as they should have been 70 years ago, when the slavery was made illegal. And of course this is not easy.

Manderlay isn't as shocking and far out as Dogville was. Not that it was a bad thing of course. But this is just a very much stronger film, because you get personally involved in the characters in a way that i don't think you did in Dogville. The only thing missing is a little bit of action. Nothing really happens. People just walk around and talk. The biggest scenes in the film has no direct influence on the following physical action and development in the story. well of course they does, but the development lies in the head of the characters. These developments are more interesting to analyze after you have seen the movie that during the movie. But instead of a lot of physical action we are given as i remember three truly terrifying and terrific scenes that are as strong as scenes in Dancer in the Dark and Breaking the Waves, and they does in my opinion make up for the lack of action.

Manderlay is also a lot stronger i it's message than Dogville was. Yes, the message is pointed against USA, but as in Dogville, it is so much more than just a criticism of that country... it's a criticism of the human kind. The reason for Lars von Trier to place the story in USA is that he likes to tease the big ones. He said that in an interview on TV not so long ago. He also said that the screenplay was written before the incidents in Iraq, so it's a coincidence that there are so many parallels between the events in Manderlay and in Iraq.

Lars von Trier is in my opinion one of the biggest directors of our time. It takes a courage, that i see in no other directors than him, to make a film like this. Manderlay is one of the bravest movies i have seen.

I have already several years ago decided that Lars von Trier's movies can neither be called good or bad, they are always different and thought provoking but most certainly also irritating and annoying. Manderlay is no exception.

Our heroin spots a dictator on the axis of evil, storms in with light sabers and an ever-optimistic smile, brushes away the dictator and her regime, and is proud of having brought freedom and democracy to yet another place (any similarities with other persons - living or dead - are fully intentional and of course debatable).

But how do you make democracy work when people have not learned it through practice and the collective memory of democracy's fallacies since the ancient Greek city states. How do you make people value their freedom and be responsible for their own fortune, when it is much more comfortable to blame someone else for their fate.

Von Trier brilliantly and ironically discusses these issues with surprising twists in the plot. But he will most definitely offend all kinds of Americans who will be too rash to judge this movie as anything between a misunderstanding and an insult of the American people of whatever color.

Bryce Dallas Howard (Grace) delivers a great performance.

To make a movie on an almost naked stage with imaginary doors etc. is very different from anything else and it actually could contribute to focus more on the actors performance (as on a theater stage). But I think that the hasty cutting of scenes and the annoyingly shaky hand-held camera actually diminish the actors chances of delivering a forceful performance. I don't mind the hand-held camera of the Dogma movies, but this is no Dogma movie. It has "artificial" music, sound effects, lightning, requisites, etc. So why bother to have a hand-held camera.

Manderlay is an excellent movie for anybody who enjoys being provoked or how wants to confirm her/his prejudice about von Trier as a weird director with tendencies to be proud-to-be-old-Europe.

Manderlay 9/10 Introducing this 'Part 2' of the von Trier American Trilogy, actor Danny Glover said, ¨The process of storytelling is an enormous responsibility and opportunity.¨ It is one that director Lars von Trier takes very seriously, constantly seeming to question his role and duty as an artist – and whether the duty is to the audience or to art itself.

Both with his Dogme movement films and now with later works such as Dancer in the Dark, Dogville and Manderlay, his answer seems to be firmly towards art as a worthy end in itself – or at least as a serious medium by which to raise (though not answer) questions of social conscience. He makes little or no concessions towards audiences who are not interested in what he has to say.

Manderlay a story about emancipation from slavery (and on a deeper level, of the more topical problems of introducing democracy), continues the Dogville tradition of using Brechtian acting and a semi-bare stage. The immediate dissociation this brings from any semblance of everyday reality, focuses our attention on the issues, in a similar way that Greek tragedy or grand opera is able to do – by insisting that ordinary details are secondary or even irrelevant to the main theme.

Grace (played by Bryce Dallas Howard, who takes over seamlessly from Dogville's Nicole Kidman) travels across America with her father and comes across an isolated town where slavery has not been abolished. With a pure heart, god intentions, and the power of her father's lawyer and henchmen behind her, Grace makes well-meaning but unfortunate, ill-informed attempts to put things right. She never stops to question the fact that she knows best, or whether her high moral values are appropriate or whether they will win the day. Not unexpectedly, there is much trouble in store for her.

Manderlay's high points are that it is deeply philosophical but at the same time highly coherent and accessible. It asks important and necessary questions about the nature of freedom and democracy. Such questions, and the discussion which this film makes possible, are urgently needed in the light of such unsolved dilemmas as Iraq, the philosophical basis for the removal of Saddam Hussein, the introduction of western-style democracy to countries like Iraq (or even Afghanistan). The broader practical problems (also tackled by Manderlay) of how to restore power to those who have been disenfranchised, whether by slavery, colonialism, dictatorships or market forces, is one that applies to many countries, irrespective of the morality involved.

The weakness of Manderlay is that the USA (and its internal and foreign policy) is an ideal example for any artist tackling such issues – as it's visibility provides a common focus throughout the world. Sensitive American citizens (and politicians) however will mistakenly see the film as simply anti-American (which is not too difficult) and avoid it. This means the people in power who most need to see it (as they need such fora to find answers) will probably avoid it.

But von Trier has discharged his duty as one of the most intelligent artists of our time. He has discarded sensational entertainment, using art as a tool to help us think outside the square – and his thinking is both profoundly stimulating and fully accessible to those with the patience and inclination. Does art need to tantalize our senses? If so we would miss out on some of the finest literature, the greatest plays, anything that did not provide immediate sensory satisfaction. Works such as Manderlay help to firmly position cinema as one of the great intellectual arenas of art – one that has the power to inform, enrich and enlighten.

Anti-American or not? This seems to be the most important question for many American viewers when deciding whether to like von Triers trilogy of films about America. Uninteresting as the discussion may be i must still say that i don't think it's anti-American, rather it just shows a very bleak view of humanity in general.

In my opinion Dogville was an amazing film. Even though it was artificial to the core with it's theatrical style i still felt it all the way to the bone. Seldom have i seen such an arty movie that still worked so well. Amazing actors, a story that is brutal and inhuman and an amazing ending. Doing a follow-up to such a movie is not easy, and yet von Trier has promised to make two. Today i saw Manderlay and the question is if it lived up to the expectations given by Dogville.

Right from the beginning Manderlay is at a disadvantage compared to Dogville. The theatrical style with it's stage-like setup and minimum of props has already been done and is not as unique as it was when Dogville was released. Also the lead actress Nicole Kidman is missing, replaced by the (at least to me) quite unknown Bryce Dallas Howard. Also James Caan as her father is replaced by Willem Dafoe. So how did they do? Willem Dafoe is in my opinion one of the most talented actors today in Hollywood and he does excellent here as usual, Bryce Dallas Howard on the other hand is rather pale as a replacement for Kidman. Don't get me wrong, Howard does a decent job of tackling the lead and she fits rather nicely in the movie. However she lacks the width and depth in her acting that Kidman has honed through the years and Howards version of Grace feels more shallow and a lot less haunted.

Otherwise the actors are, like in Dogville, the main attraction. One of von Triers main skills must definitely be bringing out the best in his actors. Everyone performs well despite the demanding format of the movie. The minimalist style demands it's actors to perform well at all times as there is no room for mistakes and nothing to cover them up.

Dogville is in my opinion a better movie than Manderlay. The story is more multi-layered, the actors (especially Kidman) are better and the moral points are presented in a much more powerful way. Yet Manderlay is undoubtedly also a good movie, as well as a good continuation of the story about Grace. If you enjoyed Dogville and accepted the format in which it was presented my guess is that you'll enjoy Manderlay. Part of the point of watching Dogville for me was that it was food for thought and Manderlay also gives you reason to think. So even though this was not as good as Dogville i'm still not disappointed.