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Through its mixture of similarities to and differences from typical slow cinema practices, Roy Andersson's Songs from the Second Floor (2000) offers a unique perspective on what slow cinema can be. This is apparent in the film's mise en scène and cinematography. While the use of long takes, minimalist performances and deep focus fit comfortably within slow cinema tradition, Songs from the Second Floor differentiates itself with its expansive mise en scène, vast set designs and stationary camera. The film further expands on slow cinema with its inclusion of tragicomic humour, which complements slow cinema's modernist re-appropriation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Danish director Lars von Trier has throughout his work explored the aesthetic possibility of the film medium by pushing its technology to the limit and foregrounding its materiality. Transferring filmed material between analogue video and film, he exaggerates deterioration and decay of the moving image in Medea (1988), Riget ( The Kingdom) (1994-97) and Breaking the Waves (1996). Turning to digital technology in the late 1990s, von Trier explored the new means of generating data in Idioterne ( The Idiots) (1998) and Dancer in the Dark (2000). In 1994, Jacques Derrida theorized the concept of Archive Fever, a feverish desire for origins, which ultimately leads to destruction of the archival object. Applying Derrida's concept to von Trier's filmmaking shows how his films reveal the inherent anarchivic nature of the medium of the moving image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses Ingmar Bergman?s Smiles of a Summer Night and Lars von Trier?s The Kingdom. By means of evolution-and neurology-based humour theory it shows how the two directors ? who ordinarily make dark and tragic films ? use humour mechanisms from mainstream entertainment to transform tragic and painful situations into a social ritual of mirth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the aesthetics of two Trier prologues using cognitive psychology. It focuses on how the films evoke anxiety and panic, and how the panic is contained by means of providing visual and musical aesthetic order to the dynamic emotional forces; by providing ambiguous reality indicators; and by cueing sublime submission to fate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]