Love unto Death: The Motif of Christian Self-Sacrifice in the Films of Lars Von Trier

Sacrifice is apparently a universal element of all religious rituals. In Christian thought, self-sacrifice is a central notion, ultimately exemplified in Christ's agony and death on the cross. Christ sacrificed himself to make amends for the sins of mankind; his self-offering epitomizes boundless love, compassion, atonement and salvation. Jesus set forth the example of God as self-sacrificial love. This view of self-sacrifice informs the films of tars von Trier, Breaking the Waves (1996), Dancer in the Dark (2000), and Dogville (2003). In all three films, the Christ figure is feminine. But if in the earliest film the heroine's self-sacrifice, growing out of romantic and erotic love, culminates in a vision of salvation, and in the second film, the mother's boundless love ultimately saves her son, Dogville projects a skeptical and subversive version of the Christian self-sacrificial ideal.