Trier on Von Trier

The mercurial Danish director of Dogville, Dancer in the Dark and Breaking the Waves offers his inimitable views on life and art in this fascinating, opinionated and witty addition to Faber''s ''Directors on Directors'' series.

Lars Trier affected the lordly ''von'' in his name while still a film student, in homage to such great movie-makers of the past as von Sternberg and von Stroheim. His own brilliant directing career has been marked by similarly grand ambitions, and he is unique in having premiered all of his features - from the highly styled The Element of Crime to the digital-video-originated The Idiots - at the Cannes Film Festival. Trier is a rare item in contemporary cinema, a restless innovator and polemicist, as his participation in the back-to-basics Dogme95 movement attests; and these conversations with Stig Bjorkman, author of Bergman on Bergman and Woody Allen on Woody Allen, trace the evolution of his career and thought in a manner that is both astonishingly detailed and engagingly humorous.