The Element of Crime · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Everything in this film is the colour of a streetlamp at three in the morning. Not a filter laid over the picture later: von Trier and his cinematographer Tom Elling lit the world with high-pressure sodium, which throws almost a single wavelength, so the amber happens at the moment of exposure. In 1984 there was no digital intermediate. If you wanted a picture to look like this you built it out of lamps, stock, filtration, exposure and a lab timer's patience, and that labour stays visible on screen. Which means that when a cold blue arrives, it isn't a flourish. It's a physical law breaking in front of you.

Start with the light, because the light is doing the detective work the plot refuses to do. Amber flattens texture. Wet stone, skin, rust and standing water all come back the same colour, so you can't read the space by material. You read it by brightness: where the glow sits, how fast it falls off. Deleuze has a name for an image that stops being obvious to the body and starts asking to be construed. He calls it a lectosign, the readable image. Most cinema hands your eye a room your legs already know how to cross. Elling's corridors and flooded halls have to be deciphered luminance by luminance, which is one reason this Europe never resolves into a country. It is an any-space-whatever: tunnels, sewers, waterlogged industrial rooms, all found around Copenhagen, spliced into a geography with no map.

Then the method. Fisher works the Lotto murders using his old mentor Osborne's discredited book, whose technique is to reconstruct the killer from the inside — trace his routes, repeat his acts, take on his appetites. Watch what that does to evidence. A detective film normally runs on what Deleuze calls the small form of the action-image, where a small act discloses a large hidden situation. The cigarette end tells you who was in the room. Here every act Fisher performs belongs to two situations at once. Retracing Harry Grey's route is the investigation and it is also the route. The index has gone equivocal, and an equivocal index cannot point. That is the crisis of the action-image staged inside the one genre built entirely on the certainty that clues lead somewhere.

The genre borrows its authority from photography's oldest promise, the one Bazin turned into philosophy: the lens registers what stood in front of it, so the image is evidence. A procedural is that promise converted into plot. Von Trier takes the promise away and puts Deleuze's powers of the false in its place. Once you stop measuring images against a model of truth, falsity stops being a defect and becomes productive, and the forger, the one who fabricates rather than finds, moves to the centre. Fisher is a forger. Osborne is a worse one, because his book composes a criminal so completely that the film never settles whether Harry Grey exists outside it. Deleuze would call that a crystalline description: an account that builds its object thoroughly enough to stand in for it, then to replace it. There is no real Europe under the amber one. There may be no killer under the profile.

An easier reading is available: Fisher goes mad. But madness is a fact about a character, and it leaves the photography as decoration. The false is a fact about the whole apparatus, the map and the dossier and the hypnotist's voice and the lamps. Lang had already found the shape in M, cross-cutting a hunting apparatus that comes to mirror the child-killer it hunts. Welles supplied the endpoint: Quinlan, whose technique has already made him the criminal, filmed in Russell Metty's crane-and-track long takes. Von Trier inverts Quinlan and keeps Metty's camera, and from Krasker's The Third Man he takes the canted wide angle and the wet cobbles of a ruined European city, relit to a single register.

Underneath the derived setting, a rained-on bureaucratic Europe, something older keeps surfacing: appetite, compulsion, water with no source that never drains. Deleuze calls this an originary world showing through its milieu, and its signature is a direction. The film's grammar is verticality. Falling water, downward pans, bodies descending, a geography that feels like continuous sinking. That irreversible pull is the line of slope, entropy given a camera movement. The amber belongs to it, working as what Deleuze calls an absorbent colour-image, a colour that takes in the scene and its feeling rather than illustrating them. You don't watch this film's mood. You watch its temperature.

Time is handled by the frame device, lifted structurally from Caligari and rebuilt on a hypnotist's couch in Cairo. Caligari made warped space legal by making the narrator a symptom of his own derangement. Von Trier keeps the machine and changes the licence: not warped angles, warped duration. Tómas Gislason cuts by association, by a matched movement, by an object or a sound recurring, dropping you into scenes already underway and out again before the consequence. Deleuze calls these irrational cuts, joins made across a gap instead of by continuity. What they open is not flashback; nothing here is dated. It is a sheet of past, a whole region of time Fisher moves around inside, and it is why the Europa trilogy coheres: the continent is doing the same thing, hypnotized, circling its own history, unable to wake. The Marienbad debt is exact, tempo included — incantatory post-synchronized narration over somnambulist playing. Add English spoken by actors of several nationalities, some plainly not native, and the voices come loose from the bodies. Speech becomes its own stratum, drifting above the image.

What it did: it proved a genre could be dissolved photochemically. Alphaville had shown that a future city could be found rather than built, Coutard shooting real Paris nights on fast stock. Von Trier goes further and makes the look a law of physics inside the fiction, which is why the blue hurts. Everything after this in his career answers it. Dogme 95's bans on optical work, added light and non-diegetic sound read as a repudiation of his own first feature, and they only register as violent once you know how total the control here was. Today a colourist reaches this world with a slider. What the film still teaches is the restriction, not the tint.

Watch it again for the blue. Each time, ask whether it is a light in the world or a crack in Fisher's account. The film will not tell you, and that refusal is the method.