"Actor: Lars Von Trier"

• The Story of Film: An Odyssey | DVD | (07/05/2012) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £49.99

  The Story of Film: An Odyssey, written and directed by award-winning film-maker Mark Cousins, is the story of international cinema told through the history of cinematic innovation.Five years in the making, The Story of Film: An Odyssey covers six continents and 12 decades, showing how film-makers are influenced both by the historical events of their times, and by each other. It provides a worldwide guided tour of the greatest movies ever made; an epic tale that starts in nickelodeons and ends as a multi-billion-dollar globalised digital industry.Described as a love letter to the movies, Cousins visits the key sites in the history of cinema; from Hollywood to Mumbai; from Hitchcock s London to the village where Pather Panchali was shot, and features interviews with legendary filmmakers and actors including Stanley Donen, Kyoko Kagawa, Gus van Sant, Lars Von Trier, Claire Denis, Bernardo Bertolucci, Robert Towne, Jane Campion and Claudia Cardinale.

• The Kingdom I & II - Original Broadcast Edition | DVD | (04/07/2011) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £40.99

  Within the walls and labyrinthine corridors of a Danish hospital otherworldly events are unfolding. The tormented ghost of a young girl haunts the elevator a phantom ambulance appears each evening and the eccentric staff are preoccupied with secret societies malpractice cases and a pregnancy that has taken a frighteningly bizarre turn. Amidst the unfolding drama spirits and demons have awakened. Welcome to The Kingdom. Lars Von Trier's acclaimed series quickly achieved cult status and its reputation continues to grow. The Kingdom series 1 and 2 are presented here in their original full length broadcast format.

• Five Obstructions | DVD | (20/09/2004) from £8.45   |  Saving you £12.80 (178.03%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Once upon a time--1967, to be precise--Danish director Jørgen Leth released The Perfect Human. In The Five Obstructions, fellow countryman Lars von Trier (Breaking the Waves) challenges his "hero" to remake the short five times and provides a different set of "obstructions" for each. Because Leth likes cigars, von Trier suggests the first be made in Cuba. For the second, however, he sends Leth to "the worst place on earth"--Bombay's red light district. The obstructions keep coming, interspersed with conversation and clips from the original film, in which actors engage in a variety of activities, like eating and dancing, while the narrator posits oblique questions like "Why is joy so whimsical?" (Von Trier claims to have watched it "at least 20 times.") In the end, the two Danes have whipped up an unclassifiable concoction that plays less like documentary and more like a duel between friendly adversaries. --Kathleen C. Fennessy

• The Story of Film: An Odyssey | DVD | (30/04/2012) from £68.83   |  Saving you £-18.84 (-37.70%)   |  RRP £49.99

  This exhilarating documentary sees critically acclaimed director, film critic and curator Mark Cousins embark on an epic journey, in which he chronicles the birth and evolution of the great and popular art form- cinema.

• Five Obstructions | DVD | (26/04/2010) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Five Obstructions

• The Element Of Crime | DVD | (29/07/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Way, way before he dreamt up his famous Dogme manifesto, Lars von Trier launched his feature-film career with The Element of Crime and proved that, 400 years after Hamlet, the Danes can still do melancholy like nobody else. Less a film noir than a film jaune sale, this ultra-enigmatic thriller is shot entirely in tones of grimy sepia in a world where nightfall seems to be an unceasing condition. A police detective, Fisher (Michael Elphick), is summoned from Cairo to "Europe" (the location never gets any more specific than that) to investigate a series of gory child-murders. He comes to suspect that the killer may be a mysterious character called Harry Grey and sets out to retrace Grey's movements. The film takes its title from a treatise written by Fisher's old mentor Osborne (Welsh actor Esmond Knight, a veteran of Powell and Pressburger's films), but it might as well refer to water. Von Trier conjures up a world not only permanently benighted, but dank, sodden and dripping both indoors and out, cluttered with mouldy, antiquated industrial machinery. There are echoes (or pre-echoes) here of half-a-dozen other movies--Blade Runner, City of Lost Children, Tarkovsky's Stalker, Welles' The Trial--and at times it feels as though von Trier has just set out to show he can do art house as well as anybody and possibly better. The plot makes no sense whatever and clearly isn't meant to, and Elphick's bemused expression, one suspects, derives from the actor as much as from the character he's playing. As always with von Trier you can't help wondering if whole thing isn't an elaborate put-on, especially since the director himself shows up, epicene and shaven-headed, playing a personage called "Schmuck of Ages". But what it lacks in coherence (either narrative or visual) Element of Crime makes up for in atmosphere, which it has, literally, by the bucketful. This release, incidentally, is the English-language version. --Philip Kemp