Listening at the Limit: Nonhuman Noise in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist

This chapter asks whether we can ever hear the nonhuman on its own terms and why the auditory is such a pervasive register for imagining access to an ‘outside’ or exteriority, beyond human perception. It draws on Deleuze’s concept of the ‘impossible ear’, while remaining critical of the potential instrumentalisation of the auditory within this model. Throughout, the chapter tests the extent to which cinema might constitute a site that allows for the amplification of and attunement to non-human bodies through its placement of sound. This is done through an analysis of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009), which is approached as an eco-film. The chapter analyses the film’s distribution of sound between the diegetic and the non-diegetic and demonstrates how the film constructs an ‘impossible ear’ through its sound design that disturbs anthropocentrism by having sound move across species boundaries. Gainsbourg’s character displays a cinephilic subjectivity, one that allows us to understand cinephilia as a form of resonance, a mode of listening that might be sensitive to nonhuman bodies.