EXPERIMENTS IN CINEMATIC MATERIALISM: TRAUMA AND

THE HAPTIC IMAGE IN LARS VON TRIER’S ANTICHRIST

Smooth space is filled by events or haecceities, far more than by formed and perceived
things. It is a space of affects, more than one of properties. It is haptic rather than optical
perception.
-Deleuze & Guattari, 1980

Released in 2009, Lars von Trier’s experimental-horror film Antichrist has been subject to persistent
journalistic and critical reproval. Accusations of the film’s misogynistic character and abrasive imagery
have overwhelmed its public reception: Cannes Film Festival awarding it an ‘anti-prize’ for being ‘the
most misogynist movie from the self-proclaimed biggest director in the world.’ Yet, as has been noted
by some, the vigorous criticisms held by those – of the film’s patriarchal, sexist and misogynistic nature,
as well as its distressing visceral imagery – are in fact misleading. Championed by many as a ‘feminist
film’ that reverts the male gaze – affording the female protagonist the capacity to construct her own
meaning – Antichrist has been argued to hold beneath its veneer of misogynistic sheen, a subversive
and critical edge. Indeed, as will be touched upon, there are provocative gestures within the film relating
to issues of gender and patriarchal society, in particular ideas of biopolitics and Enlightenment
economies of the masculine and of rationality. However, I would like to argue that as well as
conceptually provocative, Antichrist deploys varying formal cinematic techniques to produce a
‘cinematic materialism’ that implicates a specific type of aesthetic experience, itself lending to the
former critiques of patriarchal and rationalist society. In this sense, Antichrist’s use of fictioning in both
conceptual and formal registers becomes a form of politico-aesthetic provocation; a provocation that is
aligned with recent moves in contemporary philosophical debate.
In their work A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Deleuze and Guattari outline what they describe as ‘haptic
imagery.’ They comment, “Smooth space is filled by events or haecceities, far more than by formed
and perceived things. It is a space of affects, more than one of properties. It is haptic rather than optical
perception.”1 Taken up by Laura Marks in her famous work, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema,
Embodiment, and the Senses (2000), this mode of aesthetic consumption, with regard to film theory, is
one where the eyes themselves function like organs of touch.”2 With reference to Deleuze’s work on
cinema, Cinema 1 (1986), we can see this as a movement both aesthetically and compositionally from
what he would describe as ‘solid perception’ – or the formal instigation of a body as subjective image
in classical film narratives (through the creation of their subject via optical perception) – to a ‘gaseous
perception’, exemplified in the original works of Dziga Vertov that attempt to create a machinic-vision;
the camera becoming de-anthropocized and reflecting the vision of matter – or objective vision – that
reflects a materialist contingency of a world beyond anthropocentric rationalist models. This
compositional strategy of ‘camera consciousness’ is typically manifest in anonymous camera
perspectives; close-up camera work panning the surface textures of bodies/objects; sensuous
provocation, i.e. imagery that evokes memories of the senses; characters engaged in acute sensory
activity; obscure, oblique or grainy imagery; changing from over- to underexposure; “The haptic image

1
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2005): 479.
2 Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham and

London: Duke University Press, 2000): 162.

1
is in a sense, ‘less complete’, requiring the viewer to contemplate the image as a material presence
rather than an easily identifiable representational cog in a narrative wheel”.3
Elaborated upon by Steven Shaviro in his conception of ‘post-continuity’ – the non-diegetic camera
perspective that is amidst the action of the scene, blurring the distinction between the action of the story
and the action of the camera per se, or the actions within the frame and the frame itself; a move from
Newtonian to Leibnizian or Einsteinian space; from a static and fixed perspective to a dynamic and
relativistic space: “we feel it as something in ferment, its shape continually inflected by the camera that
presents it, as well as by the bodies, forces, and events that unfold within it. There are no fixed points
in this space, but only vectors: moving lines of ever-varying speeds and directions.”4 Antichrist utilises
this compositional form to invoke a ‘cinematic materialism’ – to borrow a term from Žižek used in
reference to the work of Tarkovsky, who was similarly to Trier influenced by the work of German
expressionism (Trier in fact dedicating the film to him on the opening page of his script5) – its emphasis
on affective mise-en-scene distortion, dark themes of horror, the powers of nature, chiaroscuro lighting
etc. – that provokes an aesthetico-materialist affective experience for the viewer. As Steven Shaviro
exalts:
In affirming raw sensation, in communicating the violent contents of visual excitation apart
from its pacifying forms, and in provoking visceral excitation, film hyperbolically
aggravates vision, pushing it to an extreme point of implosion and self-annihilation.6
Take as an example Antichrist’s opening scene, which periodically resurfaces throughout the film. We
are confronted with the acute, sensuous, close-up-black-and-white imagery of intercourse and varying
sensuous provocations – water dripping off of and rippling flesh – juxtaposed with the equally traumatic
experience of seeing a child fall to their death (Fig, 1 & 2). It is an extremely haptic scene; the notion
of art as a bloc of sensations.7 Yet even further, as Bodil Thomsen sees it, it is an instance of what
Deleuze would refer to as the ‘virtual’. She comments:
This picture of the time of the intercourse, where past, present and future co-exist in a virtual,
simultaneous time-space, could with Deleuze be called “pure” or “virtual” […] Here, the
actual, passing present is de-actualised, and “the chronological-successive temporality is
replaced by an “inner time of the event”, as the virtual event frees itself from given spatio-
temporal coordinates8

To return to Žižek and his conception of cinematic materialism, this ‘virtual’ time of Antichrist’s
recurring scenes could be re-written through a Lacanian lexicon: “This time of the Real is neither the
symbolic time of the diegetic space nor the time of the reality of our (the spectator's) viewing the film,
but an intermediate domain […] what Schelling called “geistige Koerperlichkeit”, spiritual

3
Donato Totaro,’ Deleuzian Film Analysis: The Skin of the Film,’ Off Screen: The Experience of Cinema.
Accessed February 29, 2016, http://offscreen.com/view/skin_of_film
4 Steven Shaviro, ‘MELANCHOLIA, or, The Romantic Anti-Sublime,’ Sequence 1.1, (eBook, 2012), 16-

17.
5 Lars von Trier, Antichrist: Final Script (2008) Accessed March 3, 2016, https://repositorio.bc.ufg.br/
6 Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993): 54-55.
7 In their work, What is Philosophy? (1994), Deleuze and Guattari explain that, “[T]he work of art is … a

bloc of sensations, that is to say, a compound of percepts and affects. Percepts are no longer perceptions;
they are independent of a state of those who experience them. Affects are no longer feelings or affections;
they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them. Sensations, percepts, and affects are beings whose
validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived.” See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is
Philosophy? (London: Verso, 1994), 164.
8 Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen, ‘Antichrist – Chaos Reigns: The Event of Violence and the Haptic Image

in Lars von Trier’s film,’ Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 1 (2009): 7.

2
corporeality.”9 A generative effect of temporal anamorphism that goes beyond the narrative scene in
question.
In following with the tropes of German Expressionism, Antichrist equally provokes a cinematic
materialism through not only its form, but its content. The film is one of a steadily-increasing horrific
nature. Throughout the film, the unnamed protagonists, named the impersonal ‘He’ and ‘She’ –
ostensibly generalising their positions to that of the wider gendered cultural-sphere – are progressively
identified with broader gendered associations and signifiers: masculinity with rationality, control and
the Law; femininity with Nature, the unconscious and desire. After the death of their infant child, the
couple – under the authority of His profession as a cognitive-behavioural therapist, and his assertion
that ‘No therapist can know as much about you as I do’ – retreat to their cabin in the woods – named
Eden (the conspicuous reference to the Abrahamic tale of original transgression goes without
mentioning here) – where He subsequently attempts to psychoanalyse and cure Her of her anxieties. As
the film proceeds, the failure of his therapeutic exercises is matched by Her intensifying violent and
sexual aberrations.
As Steen Christiansen comments, the physicality of his bodily control over Her in the early stages of
the film – holding her down forcefully, regulating her breathing and thus denying her bodily expression
– that which gives her emotions “material shape and force”10 – is both a simple allegorical expression
of the institutionalised biopower of Western patriarchy, in that it symbolises biopower’s subjugation of
peoples, particularly women, through a disciplining of social- and self-regulation. But also a succinct
propagation of what – through His understanding of her disease as purely psychological – Christiansen
sees as a further demarcation made by the masculine He between the representational and affective
body.11 His attempts at therapy therefore symbolising the rationalist endeavour to reintegrate her into a
‘proper’ subjectivity, subject to the politics of representation that enforce patriarchal biopower, and
which through her negation externalises in, following the work of Bataille, a necessarily transgressive
form. For Bataille, prohibition and transgression are born simultaneously. Prohibitions call forth what
they control, and therefore their own transgressions. Ultimately, he argues, our existence as human
beings is formed by eroticism: eroticism is the boundary separating us – as discontinuous human beings
– from the continuity of nature; and thus erotic transgression is that which antagonises the demarcations
between human and nature, subject and object.12 He writes, “As soon as human beings give reign to
animal nature in some way we enter the world of transgression […] we enter a sacred world, a world of
holy things.”13 It is in this sense that the transgressive acts of She – her intensifying sexual deviations
and abnormalities – become political, and, I would argue, a manifestation of the irrational contingencies
between subject and object – or to put it differently – between different modes of relationality and
being-in-the-world.
In his work, The Cinematic Body (1993), Shaviro uses the work of Bataille to underscore the material
potentiality of cinema. He writes that cinematic experience “renders vision tactile, short-circuits
reflection and directly stimulates the nervous system, [it] reinstates a materialistic – rather than

9
Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Thing from Inner Space,’ Mainview (1999) Accessed February 19, 2016,
http://www.lacan.com/zizekthing.htm
10 Steen Christiansen, ‘The Suffering Body: Lars von Trier’s Antichrist’ (paper presented at the Approaches

to Lars von Trier Workshop, May 4, 2015): 5.

11 The representational, being that of a genealogy of Western thought inherited from Descartes: that

emotional states are fundamentally mental states and that the mind is in control and therefore distanced from
the body. The affective, whose genealogy is akin to thinkers such as Bergson, Spinoza and Deleuze, argues
that the affective materiality of the body in inseparable to the mind, and thus an inherent formulation of
subjective becoming. Ibid.
12 Georges Bataille, Eroticism (London: Penguin Books, 2012).
13 Ibid., 84.

3
signifying – semiotics.”14 Drawing on Bataille’s notion of expenditure, especially unproductive
expenditure, as the primary desire of human activity – “Men assure their own subsistence or avoid
suffering, not because these functions themselves lead to a sufficient result, but in order to accede to
the insubordinate function of free expenditure”15 – Shaviro argues that the masochism of the cinematic
viewer, here instigated in Antichrist, correlates to an affirmative transgression of Symbolic or normative
models of relation, in favour of a shattering dispossession of Imaginary plenitude. In this vein, the
salacious obscenities of Antichrist are, as Magdalena Zolkos explains, in a very real sense, ‘traumatic.’
These ‘traumatic images’ – the two major examples being when She masturbates a knocked-
unconscious He until he ejaculates blood, and a spine-chilling slow-motion close up of Her own self-
inflicted castration (Fig, 3 & 4 respectively) – are so because of their power to interrogate established
modes of rational and masculine relationality, as she explains:
The film’s ‘traumatic’ quality is a site where the viewer confronts […] her/his desire, shared
with the male character of Antichrist, to relate to the world through economies of
relationality and calculation [or the prohibition]. As Nina Power has aptly suggested,
Antichrist undermines “the unthinking acceptance of modern rationality” and the
(masculine) facades of “caring liberal humanism,” by depicting scenes of “cosmic
misalign[ment]” between its hierarchically ordered categories – man and nature, and woman
and man.16

Following this, we can explore the work of Julia Kristeva in her work Powers of Horror (1982), and
her notion of the abject. For Kristeva, the abject is that which, in common with that of Bataille’s
transgression, displaces the simple demarcations of subject/object. Her grotesque actions reflect what
Kristeva refers to as the “abject or demoniacal potential of the feminine”.17 This she sees as the
congruous yet antagonising sentiments of both repulsion and attraction found towards the body’s insides
and fluids associated with maternal corporeality. Importantly, this separation instigated by the abject
manifests a desire for the pre-Symbolic, continuous relationship with the world – or the Real, in
Lacanian terms – through its rupturing separation.18 This desire, manifest in her sexual aberrations,
poses a threat to identity and masculine forms of relationality, as commented upon by Shaviro, “It is
impossible to reduce sexual passion […] to a desire for self-identity, wholeness, security and
recognition. The masochist seeks not to reach a final consummation, but to hold it off, to prolong the
frenzy”.19Particularly seen in the scene of His unconscious bloody ejaculation, a mixture of sperm and
blood erupting out of him; procreation turns into death (not the least coincidental with Bataille’s theory
of procreation and death, the latter as the erotic moment par excellence20), and the phallus – the object

14
Shaviro, The Cinematic Body, 53.
15
Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota, 1985): 129.
16 Magdalena Zolkos, ‘Violent Affects: Nature and the Feminine in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist,’ Parrhesia

13 (2011): 178.
17 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982),

65.
18 As Henriikka Huunan-Seppälä comments, “the Real cuts into the Symbolic order, manifesting itself

through traumatic gaps and ruptures in it, through the bodily and the materiality of our existence. It is
perceived as traumatic, as it threatens the way we normally perceive ‘reality,’ depriving us of the Symbolic
that structures our meaning making practices.” See Henriikka Huunan-Seppälä, ‘The Lacanian Real in
Lar’s von Trier’s Antichrist,’ SYNNYT / ORIGINS 2 (2014): 11.
19 Shaviro, The Cinematic Body, 56-7.
20 For Bataille, it is our awareness of death that coincides with the birth of humanity and the taboo or

prohibition. It is the separation of our lives from the continuity of experience, as we experience them in a
state of discontinuity. Indeed, the taboos become religious in nature: for example, religious sacrifices entail
the victim’s death, and the spectators’ revelation of the continuity of life via the violent disruption of
discontinuity: death. Death therefore, in a way, proves continuity, and is therefore erotic in nature: a notion
univocally summarised in Bataille’s comment, ‘Eroticism is assenting to life even in death.’ If, then,

4
of paternal authority, cultural order and oppression – is exceeded and violated by the feminine:
instinctual release, abjection and the Real rupturing through symbol of the phallus.21 An allegory
perfectly summarised by Kristeva, between:
the body’s territory where an authority without guilt prevails, a kind of fusion between
mother and nature [or our continuous relationship with nature], and on the other hand, a
totally different universe of socially signifying performances where embarrassment, shame,
guilt, desire, etc. come into play – the order of the phallus [or the prohibitive nature of society
inaugurated by our experience as discontinuous beings].22

Furthermore, however, Alessandro Zir notes that the experience of She in the film – her supposed guilt
for the death of her child and her increasing sexual aberrations – cannot be reduced solely to the
psychoanalytic cliché of “the price of cultural emancipation from animality.” 23 But in fact, in
concordance with Deleuze and Guattari’s chapter of A Thousand Plateaus, ‘The Geology of Morals’,
the suffering and expressions of She are linked to a far wider milieu – to that of the Body without Organs
(BwO). Throughout the film we see the croaking of an immortal raven; a fox that devours his own
entrails whilst pronouncing the malign dictum ‘caos reigns’; a stillborn fawn still half emerging from
its mothers cervix. We see the emaciated and knotted old and dead tree that She sees as embodying an
‘odd personality’ – one that she simultaneously relates to and yet disregards. And the rainfall of acorns
that trembles their roof at night, signalling – in her eyes – the eternal suffering of nature, and its failure
in attempts to express itself, truly.24 We are confronted – in the films ambiguous denouement – with the
collective female body, an anonymous mass of white figures that surpass the individual in a cosmic
landscape of collective history. Even further, at one point in the film She dissolves into the green of the
grass she is lying on completely – becoming literally indiscernible from nature. Magdalena Zolkos
writes:
In Antichrist […] the world of nature includes other-than-human phenomena and living
beings that the female protagonist invokes through a collective metalepsis. […] the
polysemy of nature establishes a set of complex (though non-homologous) semantic
connections between the discourses of gender and the discourses of species. 25

Taken in congruence with the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Antichrist is not only a subversive account
of gendered power-structures and their semantic relationship with modes of relationality in the world.

reproduction entails discontinuous beings – a separateness that is lost at the moment of birth (a moment that
is quintessentially abject), or arguably through ones movement in the Symbolic order, then its converse –
death – is the acme of eroticism and the ultimate rupture of the masculine, rationalist and oppressive cultural
order. And the act of eroticism, transgression, therefore creates a fusion between separate, discontinuous
objects: a pre-Symbolic state. Ultimately, the symbolic manipulation of reproduction into death in this image
of his enforced ejaculation, becomes a sharp metaphor for the rupturing of masculine relationality by the
feminine – or the chaotic, contingent, and unstable world of nature per se.
21 Huunan-Seppälä, ‘The Lacanian Real’.
22 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 74.
23 Alessandro Zir, ‘Nature’s Horror and Grand Style in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist,’ PANOPTIKUM 12

(2013): 274.
24 “She: It was then I heard…the cry! […] The woods! / He: It was nature you thought you heard

screaming…nature…you thought you heard nature screaming? […] She: Oak trees grow to be hundreds of
years old. They only have to produce one single tree every hundred years in order to propagate…it may
sound banal to you, but it was a big thing for me to realize that when I was up here with Nic! The acorns fell
on the roof then, too…and kept falling and falling…and dying and dying… […] He: Acorns don’t cry…you
know that as well as I do. Your thoughts distort reality, not the other way around…and that’s exactly what
fear is…thoughts that will never do you any good…which is why I’m here to restore sense and control…”
Taken from von Trier, Antichrist, 43-45. Also quite probably a reference to the male reproductive system
(the film is consistent with semantic connotations between gender, nature and species).
25 Zolkos, ‘Violent Affects,’ 177-8.

5
But it is in fact a ‘post-humanist’ film: it configures an inter-coalescence of entities in their mutual
attempts of expression and existence, albeit with its focus on the darker side of their suffering and
anguish. In a renowned scene, the couple copulate at the roots of a large tree during the night and the
roots and branches of the tree transfigure into human limbs, serpentine and pale skinned, writhing
around them (Fig, 5 & 6.). The hybrid human-dendrological entity evokes a “mutual permeability”26
between the human and the non-human. Both this symbiotic hybrid form and the act sexual intercourse
confer an intimate permeability and connectivity between the ostensibly distinct organisms; bodily
boundaries are infiltrated and perfused, suggesting an “experience of nature as something ‘within’, and
not only as something situated beyond our own corporeality.”27 Equally, this relationship is expressed
as one of mutual alienation and abandonment. This ‘zone of indiscernibility’ between human and non-
human developed by Deleuze is fundamental to what he calls ‘becoming-animal’, and in a sense what
we see throughout the film is an overlapping or indiscernibility between the affects, intensities and
expressions of human and non-human entities (most notably from She); that “unlike the
phenomenological approach, sensation is not immanent to the subject but to the twitches of a non-
human vitalism.”28
As we have seen, both the formal and conceptual frameworks of von Trier’s Antichrist foreground what
I have characterised as a ‘cinematic materialism’. Through a use of tactile, haptic imagery, von Trier
establishes a mode of perception that is pushed to an ‘extreme point of implosion and self-annihilation.’
The affective materiality of this cinematic formalism, inherited to some extent from the genealogy
German Expressionism, produces and works on the spectator’s masochistic desires – it “literally
anchor[s] desire and perception in the agitated and fragmented body. These ‘tactile convergences’ are
at once the formal means of expression and the thematic content”29 of a film like Antichrist. Side by
side with this ‘formal expression’ is a thematic content that mirrors its provocations and incitement of
the Real. Through the traumatic image, and equally an inter-connectivity between human and non-
human entities, Antichrist exposes the destabilising and excessive intensities of affect that rupture our
Symbolic, patriarchal, and normative modes of relationality and subjectivity. What we see in the film
Antichrist, in the words of Shaviro, is “a Bataillean ecstasy of expenditure, of automutiliation and self-
abandonment – neither Imaginary plenitude nor Symbolic articulation, but the blinding intoxication of
contact with the Real.”30 Ultimately what Shaviro contends, is that the trauma and hapticity of films
like Antichrist, indeed I would argue, any film that engages in a cinematic materialism, suggests that
“film’s radical potential to subvert social hierarchies and decompose relations of power lies in its
extreme capacity for seduction and violence […] as a technology for intensifying and renewing
experiences of passivity and abjection.”31

26
Ibid.
27
Thomsen, ‘Antichrist – Chaos Reigns,’ 9.
28 Deleuze quoted in _____, ‘Sensations of a Non-organic Life. An analysis of Gilles Deleuze ‘Francis

Bacon: The Logic of Sensation’,’ abstractgeology (2012) Accessed, April 14, 2016,
https://abstractgeology.wordpress.com/2012/04/16/sensations-of-a-non-organic-life-an-analysis-of-gilles-
deleuze-francis-bacon-the-logic-of-sensation/
29 Shaviro, The Cinematic Body, 55.
30 Ibid., 54.
31 Ibid., 65.

6
ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig, 1. Still taken from Antichrist, 00:01:17.

Fig, 2. Still taken from Antichrist, 00:02:34.

Fig, 3. Still taken from Antichrist, 01:13:05.

Fig, 4. Still taken from Antichrist, 01:29:05.

7
Fig, 5. Still taken from Antichrist, 01:07:37.

Fig, 6. Still taken from Antichrist, 01:07:42.

8
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bataille, Georges. Eroticism. London: Penguin Books, 2012.

Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota, 1985.

Christiansen, Steen. ‘The Suffering Body: Lars von Trier’s Antichrist’ (paper presented at the
Approaches to Lars von Trier Workshop, May 4, 2015).

Deleuze, Gilles., and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

Deleuze, Gilles., and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? London: Verso, 1994.

Huunan-Seppälä, Henriikka. ‘The Lacanian Real in Lar’s von Trier’s Antichrist.’ SYNNYT / ORIGINS
2 (2014).

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 2000.

Thomsen, Bodil Marie Stavning. ‘Antichrist – Chaos Reigns: The Event of Violence and the Haptic
Image in Lars von Trier’s film.’ Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 1 (2009).

Totaro, Donato. ‘Deleuzian Film Analysis: The Skin of the Film.’ Off Screen: The Experience of
Cinema. Accessed February 29, 2016, http://offscreen.com/view/skin_of_film

Trier, Lars von. Antichrist: Final Script (2008) Accessed March 3, 2016, https://repositorio.bc.ufg.br/

Shaviro, Steven. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Shaviro, Steven. ‘MELANCHOLIA, or, The Romantic Anti-Sublime.’ Sequence 1.1 (eBook, 2012).

Zir, Alessandro. ‘Nature’s Horror and Grand Style in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist.’ PANOPTIKUM 12
(2013).

Žižek, Slavoj. ‘The Thing from Inner Space.’ Mainview (1999) Accessed February 19, 2016,
http://www.lacan.com/zizekthing.htm

Zolkos, Magdalena. ‘Violent Affects: Nature and the Feminine in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist.’
Parrhesia 13 (2011).