Lars von Trier, however, is bucking the trend of increasing American provincialism in movie-going culture, despite or perhaps because of his sly anti-Americanism (in _Europa_ [1991] & _Dancer in the Dark_ [1999]). What's interesting about his works is that he is creating an artistic expression of _European_ cinema (beyond _national_ cinemas) befitting the integration & expansion of the European market (for better or worse), a project that Krzysztof Kieslowski failed to accomplish with his sadly mediocre _Three Colors: Blue, White, Red_ (1993-4, the French, Polish, & Swiss co-production). Yoshie
(Groan). That's because Kieslowski succeeded, brilliantly, at creating the first masterpiece of Eurovideo. The Tricoleur is an amazing work of art, but it's 1990s aesthetics, not 1970s. What's mind-boggling is that he created the Decalogue in 1988, another transcendent work which redefined video; like lightning striking twice or something. Possibly he realized how ill he was (he died in 1996, heart failure on the operating table) and put everything he had into the trilogy. Dennis
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I have to agree with Dennis here that at least Red was a masterpiece---because I've only seen Red and not the other two. It was an amazingly subtle, nuanced and complex movie. One thing I liked was that you could not actually explain it, since it had no plot, or rather had a very thin plot. It might have appeared mediocre because it took a long time to figure out what was going on in it and how to enjoy its turns. It exists almost completely in the visual realm which is oddly rare in movies.
But, I have to ask what Dennis means by eurovideo? What is eurovideo and what is its connection to Red? And of course, Yoshie, why do you think Red was mediocre? Mediocre as a movie or mediocre as a project to revitalize euro-cinema as a commercially successful art?
And there is a larger historical-cultural issue working here where virtually every art form of advanced modernity evaporated almost simultaneously, from jazz and painting to film and fiction during a slow motion disappearing act in the 1970s.
In my interior chronology of art, something like Red represents a late work, attempting to re-capture that prior aesthetic movement, and it seemed isolated, remote, lost because of it.
Chuck Grimes