Breaking the Waves

Breaking the Waves was an engrossing film. It had a way of making the viewer forget about its filmic material and feel genuine emotion towards the characters. I found the mis-en-scene in the film, actually, to be the most engrossing. The helicopter, the oil rig, the hospital—these locales seem like they would be difficult to obtain! There is actual work being done on the rig, and realistic-looking medical procedures in the hospital. Von Trier found such an ascetic church and solemn actors for bess's homeland. He really did create a world.

Physiologically speaking.... I cried! I found it immensely harrowing. Especially as someone who has had experience with love interrupted by long-distance circumstances. I also identify heavily with Bess. I am not a religious person, but I believe in spirits, in auras, in a collective conscious, in dimensions higher than this one and a universal law of love that creates and transmutes us.

I thought that the cinematography was great, especially long takes with flowing camera movement. When Dodo is giving a speech at the wedding and the camera moves in long pan whips between her and Bess and Jan! Also, as we discussed in class, Von Trier has a way of employing a histrionic type of editing. Shots will abruptly switch between radical changes in Bess's emotional states. Bess's glances at the camera, as we discussed in class, demonstrates a kind of awareness to and humorous acceptance of, the omnipresent surveillance of her.

Bess truly is under surveillance. As Makarushka argues, Bess is constrained by multiple institutions, the church, the family, the 'laws of marriage', the medical institution. Institutions are in a certain sense simply groupings of people. Their purpose is to aid individual's with the power of the collective. Bess's love has enormous breadth, and enjoins the church, the family, marriage because they contain, or have the capacity to contain, a wealth of love between persons. However, Bess transgresses the constraints of social constructed institutions when their parameters impede love, when it marginalizes autonomy or encourages judgement. I found Makarushka's that insight that when Bess speaks to God in church, she does so in "an empty church—a place where, owing to her gender, she is ordinarily forbidden to speak." To think of her going to church to talk to God as a transgression! In this way, as Makarushka describes, "speaking with god places Bess both inside and outside of the worshipping community." Here asserted there is a massive hypocrisy of the church. The church fails Bess in her quest to do good on Earth. To clarify, not the kind of 'good' that connotes the "culturally encoded expectations of femininity" of "submission and purity," but a desire to act on love, to honor a natural sense of compassion and mysticism. However, this pure wish is complicated by how law has been enforced institutionally. Makarushka argues that Bess's schizophrenic scenes in conversation with God illustrates her internalized sense of judgement from her environment. I believe that Bess is good, not only in how she perpetuates traditional models of goodness, but how she bravely transgresses social parameters in the name of love and her mystic intuition. These are boundaries that she not only had to break in the external world, but within herself too. Initially, the notion of infidelity as a medical panacea seems impossible to her, but she does it! And she risks excommunication from her community. In the end, I believe that Bess is willing to part from that which does not exercise love towards her. This is a good rule to live by, to use institution or tradition for their positive strengths, and to jettison the inequities, the ligature, the entrapment.

This is shorter than my usual blogging, but I'm completely enervated! Have a lovely break, David! See you in 2016.