Cinema of the Body: The Politics of Performativity in Lars Von Trier’s Dogville and Yorgos Lanthimo’s Dogtooth

Abstract

Gilles Deleuze’s distinction between the “cinema of action” and “the cinema of the body” has been quite influential in contemporary studies of film performance. Deleuze analyzes the ways in which certain directors reduce their narratives to the bodies of the actors so as to disturb narrative coherence. The camera’s interaction with the body goes beyond narrative motivation and according to Deleuze, the primary concern of this type of cinema is not dramaturgical consistency, but the production of a performative excess by means of the development of bodily attitudes and gestures which are not subordinated to narrative requirements. Using two films as case studies — Dogville (1998) and Dogtooth (Kynodontas, 2009) —, the article discusses the politics of this shift from representation to performance. I draw attention to the ways Lars von Trier and Yorgos Lanthimos place emphasis on the materiality of film performance and valorize the performative over the representational aspect of the medium, so as to answer a set of questions not posed so far: i) what are the political implications of this aesthetic? ii) Can this stress on performativity be understood under the rubric of minor cinemas? iii) In what ways and why does corporeal cinema defy dramatic realism? In accounting for these questions, the article investigates the filmmakers’ dialogue with the modernist debates of the past, so as to elucidate why form is the key to our understanding of the politics of corporeal cinema.