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Another new year, and just about time for another of Lars von Trier’s antinomian gifts to the world–which in the case of the recent Palm Springs International Film Festival (January 4-15) happened to be The Boss of It All, a feature von Trier shot (or that shot itself) in something called “Automavision,” a computer-driven technology that purports to eliminate the need for a human cinematographer at all. As von Trier explains it, the director (in the present case, himself) decides on the “best possible” setup for the camera, then lets the computer zoom, jump, and/or whip around as it haphazardly chooses. “For a long time, my films have been handheld,” he told Geoffrey Mcnab in a September 2006 interview in the Guardian. “That has to do with the fact that I am a control freak. With Automavision, the technique was that I would frame the picture first and then push a button on the computer. I was not in control–the computer was in control.”
