The Cinematheque

35mm Print

“Dancer in the Dark is not like any other movie out this week, or this year. It smashes down the walls of habit that surround so many movies. It returns to the wellsprings. It is a bold, reckless gesture.”

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Between her masterpieces Homogenic and Vespertine, Björk wrote, produced, and performed the songs for Dancer in the Dark, a menace of a musical that at turns embodies and collapses all the strengths of the genre. Björk plays Selma, a Czech factory worker pulling double shifts and dealing with macular degeneration in a small Pacific Northwest town circa the mid-20th century. Lars Von Trier’s post-Dogme approach, led by cinematographer Robby Müller (Paris, Texas), is to fragment space and collapse time between shots, meaning we’re stuck anywhere (or nowhere) in an ersatz USA, populated by a cop, a boss, and a crowd ready to be swayed as in an Ibsen play. ​“The guy has no heart,” wrote Dennis Cooper of Von Trier, but Björk’s escapist numbers, captured by dozens of DV cameras in synchronicity, push matters—of life and death and musical intertextuality—to the extreme.

In English

Palme d’or, Best Actress
Cannes Film Festival 2000

“Von Trier lovingly extracts elements from the musical tradition and refigures them into a decidedly anti-American narrative performed by an international cast … This marriage of a scrutinizing documentary approach to the joyous excesses of Rodgers and Hammerstein is unlikely, brilliant and almost certainly a landmark in recent cinema.”

Rhys Graham, Senses of Cinema