Rupert Read on Lars von Trier's 'Melancholia'

thinkingfilm co-founder Rupert Read has written a fabulous article on Lars von Trier's philosophical sci-fi masterpiece, Melancholia.

Melancholia, dir. Lars von Trier, 2011

'An allegory of the 'therapeutic' reading of a film: on Melancholia' in Sequence 1:2 is a response to Steven Shaviro's 'Melancholia: or the Romantic Anti-Sublime' which appeared in the inaugural issue of Sequence.

In his response, Read draws on both Wittgenstein and Heidegger to offer a moving personal and philosophical account of melancholia, emphasising the ways in which von Trier's film raises important questions about the experience of depression and the end of our planet. He argues that Melancholia 'functions as philosophy as therapy in the best sense of that word, in forcing upon its viewer the responsibility to grow its truth beyond the point that it itself manifests. It offers us some conditions of possibility for what we might risk calling a 'political sublime': through offering us a vision of communion.'    

The full article - which is well worth reading, along with Shaviro's - can be found here.