Black Suns and a Bright Planet: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia as Thought Experiment

This essay takes Lars von Trier’s Melancholia as a case study for two related issues: it aligns a typically European ‘sense of an ending’ – about the sustainability of a certain way of life – with epochal shifts also in the cinema’s self-understanding as a realist medium, now ‘in collision’ with the cold and lunar images of digital cinema. In a second move, the essay tries to show how this crisis nonetheless gives rise to a sense of hope, insofar as an altered status is proposed for European cinema, namely that of a “thought experiment”. At once speculative and self-reflexive, von Trier’s cinema as thought experiment invited and accommodates a variety of hermeneutic approaches, permitting to ‘think the unthinkable’ while adhering to systemic constraints and setting up rules that redefine what we understand by ‘realism’ and ‘reference’.