Note that “The Director’s Cut” is the short version of Nymphomaniac. Please see comments for “The Extended Director’s Cut” for greatly expanded commentary.
Summary: Nature documentary footage of a leopard holding a gazelle by the throat.
Details:
1) A montage sequence in Volume I includes footage of a leopard killing a gazelle by holding it by the throat, 1:46:35-1:46-46. The same footage is used again, 1:52:00-1:52:07.
2) Volume II includes a several-second scene of a cow being killed by bolt gun. I do not have the exact citation, but it is overtly cued as Stellan Skarsgård begins to talk about the meat industry.
Nympho is not the most beautiful of von Trier’s films. It lacks Antichrist’s reconstructions of glowing Tarkovsky visuals and there are no over-saturated Maxfield Parrish views of Kirstin Dunst gazing to the heavens. Instead we get Godard-style color palette violations and overlays of numbers and letters on the screen. But neither is Nympho ugly.