Robert Sinnerbrink

he enigmatic films of David Lynch have been interpreted from a variety of perspectives. Among these we can find Lynch the postmodernist ironist, Lynch the transgressive neoconservative, and Lynch the visionary explorer of the unconscious. Martha P. Nochimson's recent study, for example, presents an eloquent case for regarding Lynch as a Jungian 'surfer of the waves of the collective unconscious', whose films combine the intuitive embracing of subconscious Life Energy with a celebration of the creative power of Hollywood mythology. [1] For Nochimson, Lynch's transformation of the masculine action hero into intuitive 'boundary crosser' shows the redemptive quality of his cinematic vision, which we experience sensuously rather than comprehend rationally

:This article analyses some of the aesthetic and philosophical strands of Lars von Trier's Melancholia, focusing in particular on the film's remarkable Prelude, arguing that it performs a complex ethical critique of rationalist optimism in the guise of a neo-italictic allegory of world-destruction. At the same time, I suggest that Melancholia seeks to “work through” the loss of worlds – cinematic but also cultural and natural – that characterises our historical mood, one that might be described as a deflationary apocalypticism or melancholy modernity. From this perspective, Melancholia belongs to a genealogical lineage that links it with two earlier films important for von Trier: Ingmar Bergman's Shame [Skammen] and Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice . All three films share a concern with apocalypticism, world-sacrifice, and historical melancholia; but they also explore different responses to the imagined experience of a catastrophic loss of world. By examining these films in relation t..