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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 scene——a 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 collection——or even this humble review——be 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.

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Updated 1st August 2004


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