Histoire générique et clichés de l’histoire : la Farm Security Administration revue et corrigée par Lars von Trier

In 2003 and 2005, Danish director Lars Von Trier raised controversy with the first two instalments of his planned “USA – Land of Opportunities” trilogy. Although shot on nearly empty sound stages, Dogville and Manderlay were meant to conjure up Great Depression America, and followed a young woman’s attempts to nurture kindness, dignity and fellowship in two secluded communities she happened to stumble on while crossing the country. In both cases, her idealistic visions failed the test of reality twice. This paper looks specifically at the intrusion of “reality” at the end of Von Trier’s cruel allegories. The final credit sequences of both movies are montages of classic American documentary photographs, many of them produced by the famous Farm Security Administration. This sudden change of the movies’ visual regime (from fiction to documentary) was the focus of numerous negative comments by critics, who suggested that Von Trier’s use of these images betrayed the deeply misanthropic bend of his work, as portraits of “real” Americans were associated with cruel parables about exploitation and slavery. I offer, however, that the brutal transition from fiction film to documentary pictures is meant to question the status of FSA photographs as emblematic of 1930’s America, and more generally as icons of poverty – not only in the United States but also internationally. Von Trier’s iconoclasm brings to light the construction of the documentary imagination, the posterity of Great Depression clichés and the world-wide circulation of American visual culture