Epidemic (film)

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Movie
Original title Epidemic
Country of production Denmark
original language Danish
Publishing year 1987
length 106 minutes
Rod
Director Lars from Trier
script Lars von Trier
Niels Vørsel
production Per Årman
music Peter Bach
Richard Wagner
camera Kristoffer Nyholm (main story)
Henning Bendtsen (film within a film)
cut Lars von Trier
Thomas Krag
occupation
chronology

←  Predecessor
The Element of Crime

Successor  →
Europe

Epidemic from 1987 is a Danish feature film by Lars von Trier and the only feature film in which von Trier himself plays a larger role. It is the second part of vontrier's "Europe" trilogy. The film is characterized less by a dramatic plot than by associative motifs, in a gloomy mood and with hard light-dark contrasts. The main plot is shot on coarse-grained, black and white 16 mm material, the shorter insertions with scenes from a film-within-a-film on 35 mm.

action

Lars and Niels want to make a film and have received an advance payment from the Danish Film Institute. Soon they are supposed to deliver the script and start writing. Research leads her to a library, because the film is supposed to be about an epidemic that is affecting the country. The main character of her film is a doctor who, contrary to the warnings of his colleagues who want to form the country's new government, leaves the protective hospital to wander through the fields.

In order to find further ideas for their film, Lars and Niels tour Germany and visit Udo Kier in Cologne . The actor reports that his mother, who had just passed away, told him about the suffering of the British bombing raids during the war before she died. Then he cries. Back in Denmark, Niels talks about his pen pals with underage girls. Lars attends the dissection of a corpse to study for the film. Finally, the two filmmakers invite Claes from the Film Institute to dinner. Claes is disappointed that the script is only twelve pages long. Two other guests join in: a man who puts a woman into a kind of hypnosis. She "climbs" into the planned film and tells of the horrors of the medieval plague until she screams hysterically. The evening party is taken.

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