I’m planning on writing about Melancholia in the near future, and a short fact-finding mission to get a lay of the land of the scholarship on the film turned into something quite different (and much larger) than I imagined. What follows is a sketch of a bibliography of work that is directly about Melancholia. Inclusion in this list isn’t necessarily an endorsement of the work (I have read, charitably, about a third of these pieces), but I thought that if I was going to do this kind of targeted scraping that I should at least make it available for other people to make use of.

If you have suggestions of pieces that should go here, whether that is your work, the work of colleagues, or just something that I flat-out missed, please contact me by email or on Twitter with your recommendations.

Melancholia Official Website
Amazon link to buy the film

Bibliography

Anselmi, William and Lise Hogan. “Time is Money – The Acceleration of Time and the Vanquishing of Space in Melancholia, Another Earth and In Time.” Film International 62 (2013): 44-53.

Apter, Emily. “Planetary Dysphoria.” Third Text 27, no. 1 (2013): 131-140.

Connolly, William E. “Melancholia and Us.” In Politics, Theory, and Film: Critical Encounters with Lars von Trier, edited by Bonnie Honig and Lori J. Marso, 413-421. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

DeFazio, Kimberly. “Melancholia and Posthumanist Metaphysics.” In Stories in Post-Human Cultures, edited by Adam L. Brackin and Natacha Guyot. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2013.

del Río, Elena. The Grace of Destruction: A Vital Ethology of Extreme Cinemas. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.

Dienstag, Joshua Foa. “Evils of Representation in Europa and Melancholia.” In Politics, Theory, and Film: Critical Encounters with Lars von Trier, edited by Bonnie Honig and Lori J. Marso, 285-304. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Elbeshlawy, Ahmed. Woman in Lars von Trier’s Cinema, 1996-2014. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2016.

Elsaesser, Thomas. “Black Suns and a Bright Planet: Melancholia as Thought Experiment.” In Politics, Theory, and Film: Critical Encounters with Lars von Trier, edited by Bonnie Honig and Lori J. Marso, 305-335. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Figlerowicz, Marta. “Comedy of Abandon: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia.” Film Quarterly 65, no. 4 (2012): 21-26.

Floquet, Pierre. “Melancholia and the Apocalypse Within.” In The Apocalypse in Film: Dystopias, Disasters, and Other Visions About the End of the World, edited by Karen A. Ritzenhoff and Angela Krewani, 91-104. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.

French, Sarah and Zoë Shacklock. “The Affective Sublime in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life.” New Review of Film and Television Studies 12, no. 4 (2014): 339-356.

Friedlander, Jennifer. “How to Face Nothing: Melancholia and the Feminine.” In Lars von Trier’s Women, edited by Rex Butler and David Denny, 201-214. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.

Grodal, Torben. “Frozen Style and Strong Emotions of Panic and Separation: Trier’s Prologues to Antichrist and Melancholia.” Journal of Scandinavian Cinema 2, no. 1 (2012): 47-53.

Grusin, Richard. “Post-Cinematic Atavism.” Sequence 1, no. 3 (2014).

Honig, Bonnie. “Public Things: Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, and the Democratic Need.” Political Research Quarterly 68, no. 3 (2015): 623 – 636. [See also the end of James Martel’s response essay “Against Thinning and Teleology” in the same issue.]

Honig, Bonnie. “‘Out Like A Lion’: Melancholia with Euripedes and Winnicott.” In Politics, Theory, and Film: Critical Encounters with Lars von Trier, edited by Bonnie Honig and Lori J. Marso, 356-388. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Kirchner, Andreas. “Painting in Time: On the Use of Digital Visual Effects in Melancholia.” In The Apocalypse in Film: Dystopias, Disasters, and Other Visions About the End of the World, edited by Karen A. Ritzenhoff and Angela Krewani, 191-202. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.

Kollig, Danielle Verena. “Filming the World’s End: Images of the Apocalypse in Lars Von Trier’s Epidemic and Melancholia.” Amaltea: Revista de Mitocrítica 5 (2013): 85-102.

Koutsourakis, Angelos. Politics as Form in Lars von Trier: A Post-Brechtian Reading. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. [The interview in the appendix contains the most information on Melancholia.]

Larkin, David. “‘Indulging in Romance with Wagner’: Tristan in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia.” Music and the Moving Image 9, no.1 (2016): 38-58.

Latour, Bruno. “Waiting for Gaia. Composing the Common World Through Arts and Politics.” Lecture given to French Institute in London in 2011. [The film is mentioned briefly, but is crucial to the cultural affect Latour is critiquing.]

Ling, Alex. “Lars von Trier and the End of Cinema: Melancholia.” The Pleasures of the Spectacle: The London Film and Media Reader 3, edited by Phillip Drummond, 122-132. London: The London Symposium, 2015.

Lord, Catherine. “Her Green Materials: Mourning, Melancholia, and Not-So-Vital Materialisms.” NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies 2, no. 1 (2013): 179-196.

Lyons, Siobhan. “The Dialectics of Crisis: The Romanticised Apocalypse in J.G. Ballard´s The Drowned World and Lars von Trier´s Melancholia.” Diffractions: Graduate Journal for the Study of Culture 1 (2013).

McFadden, Dan. “The End of the World: A Heideggerian Interpretation of Apocalyptic Cinema.” Cineaction 95 (2015): 40-47.

McGowan, Todd. “Not Melancholic Enough: Triumph of the Feminine in Melancholia.” In Lars von Trier’s Women, edited by Rex Butler and David Denny, 181-200. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.

Matts, Tim and Aidan Tynan. “The Melancholy of Extinction: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia as an Environmental Film.” M/C Journal 15, no. 3 (2012).

Merola, Nicole. “Mediating Anthropocene Planetary Attachments: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia.” In Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman, edited by Dennis M. Weiss, Amy D. Propen, and Colbey Emmerson Reid, 249-268. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2014.

Mitchell, Sian. “Deleuzian Affect and the Transformative Film Experience: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia.” The Pleasures of the Spectacle: The London Film and Media Reader 3, edited by Phillip Drummond, 301-312. London: The London Symposium, 2015.

Peterson, Christopher. “The Magic Cave of Allegory: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia.” Discourse 35, no. 3 (2013): 400-422.

Peterson, Christopher. “The Gravity of Melancholia: A Critique of Speculative Realism.” In Politics, Theory, and Film: Critical Encounters with Lars von Trier, edited by Bonnie Honig and Lori J. Marso, 389-412. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Read, Rupert. “An Allegory of a ‘Therapeutic’ Reading of a Film: Of Melancholia.” Sequence 1, no. 2 (2014).

Robertson, Eric. “Volcanoes, Guts and Cosmic Collisions: The Queer Sublime in Frankenstein and Melancholia.” Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 18, no.1 (2014): 63-77.

Sandberg, Mark B. “Apocalypse Then and Now: Verdens Undergang (1916) and Melancholia (2011).” European Journal of Scandinavian Studies 46, no.1 (2016).

Shaviro, Steven. “Melancholia or, The Romantic Anti-Sublime.” Sequence 1, no. 1 (2012).

Shields, Matthew. “From the Sublime to the Romantic: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia.” Bright Lights (2012).

Sinnerbrink, Robert. “Anatomy of Melancholia.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 19, no. 4 (2014): 111-126.

Sinnerbrink, Robert. “Provocation and Perversity: Lars von Trier’s Cinematic Anti-Philosophy.” The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema, Edited by Seung-Hoon Jeaong and Jeremi Szaniawski. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.

Sweedler, Milo. “The End of the World of the End: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia and Political Theory.” A Critical Approach to the Apocalypse, Edited by Alexandra Simon-López and Heidi Yeandle, 175-84. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2013.

Sweedler, Milo. “From One End to Another: Allegorizing Apocalypse Now and Melancholia.” Framing the Apocalypse: Visions of the End-of-times,  Edited by Sheila C. Bibb and Alexandra Simon-López, 167-82. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2015.

Szendy, Peter. Apocalypse-Cinema: 2012 and Other Ends of the World. Translated by Will Bishop. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015.

Wenaus, Andrew. “Mechanized Bodies, Human and Heavenly: Melancholia and Thinking Extinction.”  ESC: English Studies in Canada 42, no. 1-2 (2016): 133-153.