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London Review of Books

Tiny Little Lars subscriber-only content

Joanna Kavenna

  • Trier on von Trier edited by Stig Björkman, translated by Neil Smith
  • Dogville directed by Lars von Trier (2003)

The provocation begins with the name. Lars Trier, a boy from Denmark, went to film school and changed his name to the more aristocratic Lars von Trier. In Trier on von Trier the question of the name opens the account of the director’s life. ‘I started using the name again at film school, because it seemed the most provocative thing I could do,’ von Trier explains. ‘No one really cared how my films looked or how well they did. But this “von” business, on the other hand, really upset people.’ ‘Provocation’s purpose is to get people to think,’ he has said. ‘If you provoke people you give them the credit for interpreting things themselves.’

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Joanna Kavenna’s The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule is published by Viking. She currently holds a writing fellowship at St John’s College, Cambridge.