Lars von Trier

Of his ten planets, four sit in air signs, three in fire, two in earth and one in water. Air takes a thing apart to see how it works, and the element that would register how it feels before deciding is nearly absent. Von Trier is a Danish director and one of the founders of Dogme 95, which was a set of rules a group of filmmakers imposed on themselves and then had to work inside.

The Sun sits at ten degrees of Taurus and the Moon at eleven of Capricorn, two earth signs in easy contact, which is the most settled thing in the chart. Taurus will not be moved and Capricorn expects to pay for what it builds. A manifesto that strips every convenience out of the job and insists the work is better for it is those two placements written as a method rather than as a temperament.

Mercury sits directly opposite Saturn at a third of a degree, speech against the planet of limit, and the two are held in a T-square with Pluto, which leaves the figure no outlet. The Moon stands at a strained angle to Pluto eight hundredths of a degree short of exact, the tightest contact here. The Sun sits square Mars at just over a quarter. Saturn, Neptune and Pluto were all moving backwards at his birth. In a director who writes the rules before he shoots anything, speech held against limit with no outlet is the working condition rather than a complaint about it.

Saturn arrived back on its Sagittarius birth degree on 30 September 2015, at fifty nine, three months after Jupiter closed its own lap. That is a second Saturn return, and Sagittarius says the thing rather than weighing first whether to. For a director whose method was to announce a rule and then be bound by it, the planet of consequence coming home to the sign that speaks first is the marker the chart offers. Mercury opposite Saturn is the aspect doing the most work here: speech and restriction permanently across the table from each other, in a filmmaker whose best known contribution to his trade is a list of prohibitions. Three planets facing backwards, all of them slow, keeps the heavy end turned inward while the Taurus Sun holds its position.