EPIDEMIC

1987, Denmark, 106 mins. 35 mm print source: Vitagraph Films.
Directed by Lars von Trier. Written by Lars von Trier and Niels Vørsel. Produced by Jacob Eriksen. Photographed by Henning Bendtsen. Edited by Lars von Trier and Thomas Krag. Costume Design by Manon Rasmussen. Original Music by Peter Bach. Principal cast: Susanne Ottesen, Allan de Wall, Ole Ernst, Michael Getting, Colin Gilder, Svend Ali Haman, Claes Kastholm Hansen, Gitte Lind.


From Lars von Trier by Jack Stevenson (British Film Institute: London, 2002):

In the autumn of 1985, Lars von Trier visited Claes and they talked about his predicament. This led to a wager that would enshrine itself in Danish film lore: Lars bet Claes he could make a commercial feature film for just 1 million kroner [approximately $150,000] if only Claes could come up with the money. It would be a true poverty-row production since a normal feature film cost seven or eight times as much to make. Claes took him up on the bet and actually found it easy to secure financing from the DFI since it was such a bargain. Nonetheless, the sum was so small that it aroused suspicion, and according to von Trier, 'I had to put up all sorts of absurd guarantees to prove I wouldn't abscond to South America with the money.'

Together with Vørsel he created Element Film to raise 200,000 kroner more in private funding, and in June of 1987 they got an additional 181,000 in completion funds.

With his newfound poverty, von Trier claimed he had also found freedom; freedom from the oppressive apparatus of commercial filmmaking, freedom to improvise, experiment and find spontaneity. While some claimed he was simply making a virtue out of necessity, he was by any measure now forced to tell and to make his film in a different way. As he expressed it, it was more important to challenge himself and grow and develop as an artist than to just give people what they expected. Up to this point, though, nobody had accused him of pandering to the audience. The question rather seemed to be did he care anything at all about his audience?

Originally, Epidemic was to be another collaboration between von Trier, Elling and Gislason, but they dropped out when it became apparent that this was no collective effort but would be very much a Lars von Trier film. Indeed, it would be the 'purest' Lars von Trier film. He was writing, directing, producing and partially filming a story that was about himself as he attempts to make a movie, and in which he plays two of the leading roles.

It opens with a filmmaking duo (played by the filmmaking duo of von Trier and Vørsel) in the process of completing a manuscript to a film entitled The Cop and the Whore. They are scheduled to present it to a DFI consultant, played by none other than DFI consultant, Claes Kastholm, in five days.

Suddenly their diskette accidentally gets erased and everything is gone-a year and a half work! (Parallels to The Grand Mal here-a film simply abandoned.)

Rather than attempt to re-create that film from memory, they decide to write a manuscript to a completely new movie and hand that in to Claes instead. The new film will be about a plague and it will be called Epidemic.

[…] This carefully staged, enacted and scored fictional narrative, filmed in 35mm mono-color stock by Henning Brendtsen, proceeds to interweave with the everyday reality of the two filmmakers as they cast about for ideas. In this way the film's creative genesis becomes part of the piece itself. At von Trier's behest, Vørsel lays out the film's plotline on a wall with a paintbrush. Put 'drama' two-thirds of the way through, Lars instructs him, because without any of that people will be about ready to walk out at that point. It is not only a film that reflects itself but also a film that mocks itself.

The fictional line, in English, is heavily stylized and the acting is underplayed (a foreshadowing of the style he would employ in his next film, Zentropa). And the dialogue feels dubbed, magnifying the sense we get that we are watching a movie. Reality, on the other hand, transpires in Danish and in unstaged locations. It is shot in grainy black-and-white 16mm in a deadpan documentary style complete with plenty of non sequiturs and what at least feels like a total absence of editing. In these 16mm sequences von Trier wears his hair (relatively) long and swept back and seems to be enjoying himself, while as an actor in the fictional line his head is shaven and he wears glasses, and says almost nothing.

The film functions as both a playful reflection on the filmmaking process itself and a somber exploration of the psychology of plagues and the mythology they give birth to. On a kind of third level it gives viewers an opportunity to personally get to know von Trier in a way that none of his other films, before or since, have come close to permitting. The 'real' von Trier has a genuine presence, a sly, soft-spoken affability. He's relaxed yet mischievously conspiratorial. Niels Vørsel, on the other hand, appears edgy, as one might tend to be when placed in front of a camera without knowing what was about to happen. He's prone to inexplicable bursts of nervous laughter that can be a bit grating. His wife, Susanne Ottesen, who rounds out the central threesome, shares this tendency.

By intertwining disparate visual styles and technical and aesthetic approaches, Epidemic inevitably confuses and annoys many of those unprepared for what is very much an experimental film. On the other hand, many of those who can accept it on its own terms find it an audacious and entertaining venture that, at least some of the time, is right on the mark.

From a review in Variety, April 29, 1987:

Lars von Trier, undoubtedly Scandinavia's most experimentally daring and technically most dazzling filmmaker, now at work (His The Element of Crime was a Prix Technique winner at Cannes in 1984), has done Epidemic on a dare at a subminimal budget and sees it as an intermission Part 2 of a trilogy begun with Crime.

Epidemic, filmed mostly in black & white, features primarily the director himself, his screenwriter and their private cohorts, while a handful of professional actors are seen in sharply etched cameos. A story of a kind is told about helper and writer devoting 18 months to thinking about a horror film, which has been promised a government production grant, and coming up at the end with only a few visualized sequences and a 12-page plot outline.

This may sound like self-indulgence-and it is. Outside of highly specialized situations, Epidemic will find the going tough. Still, such is von Trier's cinematic wizardry that his once-acknowledged mastery of technique and dramatics should have at least the international fest circuit clamoring to see what he has been doing as an encore after his previous opus, which was an English-language futuristic shocker.

The greater part of Epidemic is filmed in 16mm and constitutes a tongue-in-cheek rendition of von Trier's and writer Niels Vørsel's kicking ideas around during researching and side trips to secret library vaults; hospital pathology departments; labs specializing in rat behavior; sessions with an oenologist describing the "noble rot" that precedes the harvesting of great white grapes; and to Germany to travel among atomic energy plant towers and to listen actor Udo Kier telling about his pre-natal experiences during a World War II bombing raid on Cologne.

Bits of Wagnerian music and allusions to Wagnerian ore are dropped along this grainy, but always beautifully framed and moving excursion into non-action, and there is plenty of sly wit and farcical sleight-of-hand to go with it. In between, we get the 35mm parts (color film, but subdued to match the b&w sequences). Here, we have the late Carl Dreyer's favorite cinematographer Henning Bendtsen gloriously at work again after years of retirement.

The 35mm bits come as jolts of astonishing, slightly surrealistic imagery combining to indicate what the two young filmmakers really had in mind if only they might get a right angle on things. It would be the story for an idealist epidemiologist (played by von Trier in a neatly non-committing performance) who, with his doctor's bag of needles and antidotes, ventures outside the big city that has been sealed off in anticipation of the arrival of a rumored plague. […] Scenes of classical horror follow, but they are all restricted to fantasy flashes with suitably obscure dialog to go with them.

There is really some great horror stuff budding here, and audiences may well wish that von Trier had scrapped the filmmaker-at-work parts in favor of going all out on the real McGhoul. They will have to wait until von Trier scares up the international financing he needs for his trilogy's Part 3, existing already in screenplay form under the title The Grand Mal. However, just as the mood and immediacy of the toils, troubles and fun of the two auteurs tend to flag, von Trier comes up with a surprise ending that is, in any sense of the word, a true scream.