Ten years ago Dogme 95 was heralded as a new cinematic convention, designed to liberate filmmakers through an adherence to a strict set of rules that shunned the trappings of mainstream cinema. It looked not at genre, nor was it interested in marketability, but in the raw roots and process of filmmaking. By embracing its almost masochistic tendencies, filmmakers would achieve true creative liberation by following its hair-shirt principles.
Perhaps not quite earning the revolutionary status it had hoped for, Dogme 95 has become a recognised modern cinema movement, that has achieved notable results in what can only be described as extremely restrictive conditions. That its influence extends beyond independent, European cinema to that of mainstream Hollywood production is debatable; nor is there too much danger of its films elbowing the well oiled blockbuster to one side at the box office. But infiltrating the Hollywood elite has never been on its founders' agenda. That they are now celebrating their tenth anniversary, and have earned themselves a month long season at London 's Curzon Soho cinema, shows they are still making an impact.
Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier devised Dogme 95 with fellow filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg, as a reaction to what they saw as the increasing predictability and superficiality of mainstream cinema. Drawing on von Trier's communist background, Dogme 95 was an attempt to rein filmmaking back to a more realistic, democratic and collective process. Instead of fooling the audience through illusion or trickery, it was to strip story and character bare to present an alternative truth unfettered by a self-important director. Von Trier unleashed his new film theory to an enthusiastic audience, attending a 1995 symposium in Paris to celebrate 100 years of cinema, and handed out red flyers detailing its Manifesto and Vow of Chastity.
Lars von Trier (he inserted the von himself whilst at film school in homage to Josef von Sternberg) has said that he frequently laughed whilst writing the Dogme rules, although through a sense of liberation rather than humour. Whilst strict adherence to the rules must be obeyed to receive the official Dogme 95 certificate, there is a tongue and cheek tone to the manifesto through which von Trier's provocative, mischievous and didactic personality emerges.
Von Trier works from offices in Filmbyen (Film Town) in a Danish suburb, headquarters of his company Zentropa Productions, complete with swimming pool where employees are encouraged to swim naked. He refuses to visit America , instead requesting actors like Nicole Kidman and Lauren Bacall to travel to Denmark for filming. He says he has nothing against the US , he just doesn't want to go there (he's also afraid of flying).
For von Trier, The Dogme rules grew out of his involvement with a Danish TV series called The Kingdom. The low budget production was a huge success with domestic audiences and was filmed on location with minimal lighting and handheld cameras. Von Trier found he produced his best work with these limitations and so decided to lay the foundation of a set of rules that made restriction and abstinence necessary evils to achieve pure filmmaking.
Dogme 95's ten rules that make up the Vow of Chastity are briefly: that the film must be shot on location with all props and sets taken from this location, there can be no additional overlay of music or sound, the camera must be handheld, the film must be in colour with no special lighting or special effects, there must be no superficial action such as fights or murders, the film must take place in the here and now, it cannot be a genre movie, it must be shot in Academy 35mm and the director should not be credited. In addition the director rejects the role of auteur, resisting any attempts at personal artistic influence over character or events, "at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations".
Although admitting itself that these disciplines have arisen from the democratisation of film where "anyone can make movies", Dogme 95 does not necessarily equal low-budget, and was initially aimed at established and experienced professionals who could embrace the freedom of its low-tech, reality driven style to boost their creativity. Which assumes that established film directors see "the heavy load of the modern film production machinery" as a restriction.
Some of the double-edged nature of both the Dogme manifesto and von Trier himself are already becoming clear, and if there is one criticism levelled at them it is of inconsistency. Some of the Dogme vows have already been broken and by the creators themselves. The collective's first two films, Festen (The Celebration, 1998 ) and Idioterne (The Idiots, 1998) were both shot on digital video (not the stipulated Academy 35mm) and von Trier found when he got the actors in Idioterne to improvise off-script it immobilised them, and very little of the improvised scenes appear in the final piece. Also, ironically, the most frequently broken rule is that of the auteur, with Dogme directors unable to resist including themselves in the film's credits.
Dogme 95 is one in a long line of cinema manifestos designed to revolutionise our approach to filmmaking, in a vitriolic outburst at the blandness of popular cinema. It can be traced back to the French nouvelle vague (new wave) movement spearheaded by film intellectuals François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol. Synonymous with French avant-garde cinema between 1959 and 1963, la nouvelle vague encouraged experimental filmmaking with a realistic edge closer to the documentary than fantasy story-telling. It used natural locations, filming outside during both day and night and used small crews, all in direct contrast to the lavish cinemascope epics being made in America . The most famous examples of nouvelle vague are Truffaut's Les Quatre cents coups (1959) and Godard's Á bout de soufflé (1959).
This in turn led to a similar movement in Britain , also by a group of disaffected intellectuals, beginning in the late fifties with British Social Realism and Free Cinema. Co-founders of Free Cinema Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz rejected what they saw as over-stylisation in films like On the Waterfront (1954) and called for films to be made that included a personal observation of everyday reality and a core set of basic values that the filmmaker believed in. Hollywood films were seen as 'bad' because they were controlled by business, whereas art cinema produced 'good' films because it was independent from the capitalist process. Free Cinema published its manifesto which was summarised with the statement: "Implicit in our attitude is a belief in freedom, in the importance of people and the significance of the everyday". Examples are Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and Tony Richardson's A Taste of Honey (1961).
Dogme 95 is therefore an extension of these movements by being a rejection of mainstream aesthetics, a rallying cry against materialistic bourgeois conceits, an embracing of the democratisation of filmmaking and the dismissal of the director as auteur, a sympathy with the avant-garde, and the depiction of a new realism achieved through a set of carefully crafted rules.
Perhaps the most controversial of the Dogme films was the second one to be made, von Trier's Idioterne which tells the story of a group of young Danes who pretend to be physically and mentally handicapped. The cult-like group is led by the Aryan-looking Stoffer who uses their bouts of what they call spazzing to upset what he sees as the prejudiced sensitivities of the middle class. The group misbehave in restaurants, the swimming baths and in front of a local council worker, which often results in both offensive and pitiable behaviour. The film is set on location, mainly in an empty house and the finished product is one that adhered to the Dogme manifesto in terms of technique and present-time storytelling with realistic scenarios. Von Trier got around the no music rule by having a musician on a horse and carriage playing a toy instrument at the beginning of the film, showing how the Dogme manifesto tries to encourage resourcefulness through limitations.
More recently Forbrydelser (In Your Hands, 2004) directed by Annette K Olesen uses a Danish women's prison as a backdrop to discuss religion, women priests, women's sexuality, abortion and infanticide. Like Idioterne , it's a powerful study of human emotion whose adherence to the Dogme rules seems only to have made the performances and film environment more potent. Also like Idioterne , it examines our notions of what a perfect, desirable human form is, both physically and mentally. Olesen has described her Dogme experience as "limiting as well as liberating".
Although still going strong as a movement within the independent sector, Dogme 95 could be said to have made some inroads into other areas of filmmaking. Von Trier himself made the much acclaimed Dogville (2003). Whilst not essentially a Dogme film it pushed the boundaries of filmmaking with regard to no set, props or location; actors worked within white chalked lines and mimed opening doors. Most notable for attracting Nicole Kidman in the lead role, von Trier showed that his subversive ideas could play out what was essentially a Brechtian stage play successfully on the screen. Whilst calling the film, "ludicrous, arrogant, pretentious and naive", film critic Phillip French said it was also "boldly conceived, genuinely risky and disturbing". Again, an example of how von Trier's conflicting ideas of freedom through restriction also creates reactions that fly in opposing directions.
The movement could also have said to have influenced the faux-documentary, pretend real-life stories of films like The Blair Witch Project (1999), which director Dan Myrick says only unintentionally followed the Dogme rules, and perhaps have given a higher profile to the likes of Nick Broomfield's documentary Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003), which as a documentary would have automatically employed many of the Dogme rules like original sound, no restaging, little if any extra lighting and no cutaways.
Maverick director John Waters does, however, have to be given special mention for his witty take on Dogme 95 in Cecil B Demented (2000). A group of guerrilla filmmakers kidnap and kill to get the right location shots, abstain from sex whilst making the film (their vow of chastity), wage war on bad film and infiltrate mainstream cinemas like celluloid terrorists. Whilst definitely not to be taken seriously, its protagonists provide a good example of the Dogme method taken to extreme.
Fortunately the manifesto is not to everyone's liking. It rejects fantasy, flash-back, dream sequences, special effects, additional props, sets and passion projects on behalf of auteur directors, everything that has given us the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Star Wars franchise, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and many other ground-breaking and inspirational Hollywood films. At the other end of the scale it also wouldn't have given us recent experimental indies like Tarnation (2003), Elephant (2003) or Palindromes (2004). It has reduced filmmaking to a dogma or doctrine to be accepted without question, that is as much a political statement as a reaction to middle-class entertainment ideals.
But so what if Dogme 95 is reactionary and contradictory? It has succeeded in showing that this communist-like rulebook has been able to produce a group of more than 40 films as far from uniform in content and style as could be; that limitations have indeed resulted in well crafted, provocative cinema. At least someone is spearheading stylised and intellectual moviemaking. It should also be commended for introducing a benchmark to the handheld, verité genre of filmmaking in light of the complete democratisation that low-budget technology has spurred. Even better for von Trier, he has demonstrated that he can attract mainstream Hollywood actors and critical acclaim, whilst keeping his films out of that bastion of creative impotence: the shopping mall multiplex and thus his integrity intact.
Rebecca Kemp
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