Dogville: Destruction is architectural

Abstract

This article is on the architectural discussion of a four-fold portrayal of Lars von Trier's film Dogville. The film is about a lonely woman's refuge in a middle-of- nowhere American town and how the town community turns her into a slave. The film was shot in a dark hangar and has a single stage that is only decorated with chalk lines. The article contains an introduction, a conclusion, and four chapters: "the lone subject", "the philosopher/architect", "(lack of) Nature" and "Waiting for Destruction". The introduction is about the grotesque character of the film with the stage's unliving dark atmosphere and the plot's unearthly feelings. The first chapter is about the subject- oriented character of the film. All unhuman materialities are clarified only with the clues of human perception through the film. The second chapter is about how the intellectual idea becomes the slave of public opinion through the character Tom's transformation. It is used to understand the transformed role of an architect in a capitalist society. The third one is the vacuum of materiality in the film; the only natural elements are metaphors of the action and reaction in human-nature duality. The fourth chapter is about the metaphorical destruction promise of the film that is actually understood as an architectural element in the context of the text that is not normally used to be handled as a part of the architecture. Destruction not only means the possibility of new beginnings but also an ethical clearance for the regrowth of nature physically and metaphorically. © 2024 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.