Europa

Europa (1991), released in the United States as Zentropa, concluded Lars von Trier's "Europa trilogy". It won the Jury Prize and a prize for artistic contribution at Cannes, where the young Danish director famously bristled at not winning more. It is a dazzling technical experiment, and among the most visually audacious films of its decade.

Jean-Marc Barr plays the naïve American conductor pulled into postwar intrigue, with Barbara Sukowa as the femme fatale and Max von Sydow as the unseen narrator whose hypnotic voice addresses the protagonist, and the viewer, directly, counting down as a hypnotist would. Von Trier shoots in a delirious mix of black and white and colour, front and rear projection and elaborate superimpositions, and his ruined Europe feels more like a fever dream than a place. The film is pitched somewhere between trance and thriller, and its nightmare of history is built almost entirely out of cinematic technique.

Critics were split between dazzlement and resistance. Some found the technique smothering and the characters hard to reach; others saw a director using every tool he had to show a continent sleepwalking through its own ruins. Its influence on stylised, dreamlike film-making has lasted. Hypnotic, cold and formally extravagant, Europa announced von Trier as a provocateur of formidable technical gifts well before his Dogme 95 turn toward deliberate starkness, and it is still one of the boldest visual statements in modern European cinema.