The movie industry has evolved a standardised visual strategy for film production and marketing, which promotes a proliferation of clichés, determining the use of the known images and their respective readings. Part of a mass culture that is present in a global scale, these representations are attached to the conventions and illusionism of cinema through technical effects to seduce the viewer s gaze and keep out the dark and mysterious aspects of life. We analyze in this work how the contemporary filmmaker Lars von Trier performs his critical reading of the clichés of contemporary culture in his own films. In the film Dancer in the Dark (2000), von Trier uses the tradition of tragedy, melodrama and musical not as a mere stylistic effect, but as a strategy to make a reflexive game. Promoting in each movie the double movement of continuity and breaking of conventions, we notice how von Trier s film style inherits a tradition of modern cinema and how it demonstrates so many affinities with his fellow Dane Carl Dreyer, in his quest to create life on the screen.