Purity
And Provocation: Dogma 95
by Mette Hjort and Scott McKenzie, Editors
British Film Institute, London, 2003
288 pp., illus. Trade, £49.99; Paper,
£15.99
ISBN: 0-85170-951-6; ISBN: 0-85170-952-4.
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University
mosher@svsu.edu
The time of stirring artists' manifestoes
is not restricted to the salad days of
the Futurists, Dadaists, and Surrealists
in the early decades of the twentieth
century. The painter George Braque maintained,
over a productive career that began a
hundred years ago, that the liberation
in art came from establishing and working
within one's limitations. The Dogma 95
manifesto of 1995 challenged contemporary
filmmakers to adopt self-imposed aesthetic
limits in order to achieve a truthfulness
that was seen as sorely lacking in the
world of contemporary movies.
Lars von Trier (the aristocratic "von"
adopted much in the manner of earlier
director Josef von Sternberg) called for
contemporary directors to accept a "Vow
of Chastity" restricting themselves to
hand held cameras, color film stock, ambient
single-source light, and several other
limitations that he and his colleagues
felt would liberate and invigorate a cinema
of truth and integrity. They allowed no
music that was not inherent to the scenea
character could turn on the car radio
or walk across a living room and put on
a CD, but there would be no swelling strings
as lovers approached on a beach. Seeking
an industrial anonymity, the movie director's
name could not appear in the credits.
The movement resulted in some memorable
films by directors not only in Denmark,
but also Norway, Belgium, France, Spain,
Italy, Argentina and the United States.
Italian for Beginners (2000) has
believable characters that reveal themselves
in a series of interactions prompted by
death in their families. In The Idiots
(1998) the actors "spass"or
act like they are mentally impaired, even
having sex onscreen. They carry on to
the point of confusing one fellow actor
about their real conditions and mental
capabilities, much to her on-screen irritation.
In 1999 the state television network in
Denmark grew curious and commissioned
four Dogma filmmakers to make four interlocking
stories to be simultaneously broadcast
on four separate stations on New Year's
Day, 2000. The viewer would then switch
between channels to construct their own
unique narrative experience. This event
impresses this reviewer as one of the
only works to make use of how people really
watch television in order to create an
interactive fictional experience.
Purity And Provocation's 13 essays
and three appendices make a valuable reference
work on these filmmakers' motivations
and resulting movies. In their own perceptive
essays, editors Mette Hjort and Scott
MacKenzie locate Dogma 95 in the era of
globalization, as a strategy that filmmakers
from small countries like Denmark could
use to renounce the rigged and capital-intensive
game that Hollywood played with its expensive
blockbusters that grab theaters and mindshare
around the globe. The movement was also
driven by the availability of inexpensive,
digital camcorders. Its directors privilege
working cheap and fast, and feel no reason
to conceal the technical artifacts their
camcorders might record.
In its appendices the anthology collects
the many late-90s spinoffs inspired by
the Dogma 95 filmmakers, artistic manifestoes
to purify documentary filmmaking, Web
cinema, fiction ("The New Puritans"),
role-playing and video games design. The
book lists over 30 "certified" Dogma films,
each numbered as if in a library collection.
May many readers of this collectionor
even this humble reviewbe
inspired to grab their camcorders, realizing
that it is fully in their power and miniscule
budgets to go out and make a Dogma-certifiable
film.