Lars' Dogmas

Dogma 95 is nothing if not enigmatic. Among its contradictory elements are Dogma 95’s simultaneous rejection and embodiment of auteurism and its inconsistent and confusing attitude towards democracy and the public.

On the one hand, Dogma 95’s manifesto is an explicit challenge to New Wave and auteurism: “The anti-bourgeois cinema itself became bourgeois, because of the foundations upon which its theories were based was the bourgeois perception of art. The auteur concept was bourgeois romanticism from the very start and thereby . . . false! To DOGME 95 cinema is not individual!” This philosophy found its way into the Dogma Vow of Chastity’s tenth and final rule, which announced that “The director must not be credited.” In other words, Dogma films would renounce the possessory credit by banishing the director’s name from the credits.

According to Peter Schepelern, von Trier’s motivation for the denial of authorial credit was rooted in his desire to tame his own intense egomania. For von Trier, who, in non-Dogma films such as Europa and Breaking the Waves, “had his name presented in letters of megalomaniac size,” taking away the director’s credit was the ultimate form of self-inflicted torture. The problem with rejecting authorship in this manner is that it had nothing short of the reverse effect: Lars von Trier became arguably the world’s leading auteur. The reason for this is that the absence of a director’s credit does not magically erase the enormous amount of press and festival-circuit attention paid to the director of the films. This fact is acknowledged in a parody of the Dogma manifesto, which stipulates in its own set of rules that “Nobody in the room may mention the director’s name, but he can be referred to as ‘that person whose name has been all over the press during the last month and who won the Special Prize at Cannes’!”

Furthermore, von Trier’s battle between his tyrannical and democratic selves often results in less collaboration during his films’ productions than he advertises. Berys Gaut analyzes the production of The Idiots:

"There were three cameramen, of which von Trier was one, employed in shooting the film; but in the final cut, 80 to 90 per cent of the footage was shot by von Trier himself. Though he did encourage the cast to improvise, he usually selected one of the earlier takes, which were closely modeled on the script (which he wrote), rather than later takes, which were more improvisational; and the most important scene, Karen’s spassing in front of her family, was not improvised, being very closely modeled on the script, and was accorded more time to shoot than any other scene. Where it mattered most, von Trier kept control. Indeed, he even inserts himself into his film, conducting interviews with his cast from behind the camera in the interview scenes."

While von Trier may be sincerely interested in containing his auteurist impulses, he does not seem to be doing the greatest job. In terms of production, the Dogma films of von Trier and others are fairly strictly auteur films.

Where Dogma 95 becomes significantly more democratic is in the field of aesthetics. Mette Hjort argues that the Dogma project is, above all, a method for creating more authors, particularly in areas of the Third World.

"In the case of Dogma, the invented self-imposed constraints are indeed meant to stimulate creativity, but they are also intended to redefine film aesthetics in such a way as to somehow level the playing field. The point . . . is to create the conditions that enable citizens from small nations to participate in the game of cinematic art."

In other words, the rules of Dogma’s manifesto, which emphasize location shooting, diegetic sound, handheld camera, and natural lighting, are convenient for potential filmmakers who have little means to do much else. The ninth rule of the manifesto originally stipulated that all Dogma films must use the format of Academy 35mm. Since the manifesto’s inception, the Dogma brethren have loosened this rule to accommodate digital production. Von Trier comments that the reinterpretation of rule nine

"...has made the process much cheaper which of course also pleases me. And it has led to a trend where people around the world have started making these cheap, cheap Dogme films. . . . [P]eople who used to be limited by a notion of how a proper film should be . . . now feel that they can make films."

In this way similar to New Wave films and American indie films from the 1980s, Dogma films employ an aesthetic that is adaptable for those without the typical means of production. Those who have adopted the Dogma aesthetic include filmmakers from “small nations,” as Hjort suggests, but also American filmmakers who are alienated by the Hollywood mainstream, like Harmony Korine, Richard Martini, James Merendino, Mark Poggi, Leif Tilden, and Shaun Monson. Dogma has transcended its Danish origins and has become a truly international phenomenon, appearing in Belgium, Italy, Norway, Korea, Argentina, Switzerland, and Sweden, among other nations. It is easy to imagine, with a set of genre principles that simply require a digital camera, some actors, and a story, the most marginalized components of America, and the world, becoming empowered with author-status.

Democracy of exhibition is another story. Hjort proclaims that Dogma 95 is not only about “stimulating creativity and finding a voice,” but also about “building . . . a network of audiences with a genuinely global reach.” At first glance, this sounds like a kind of democracy of exhibition. What Hjort means by “a network of audiences,” what she calls “diverse cinematic publics,” however, essentially boils down to audiences for “art films, film festivals, various national cinemas and independent film.” In short, Dogma films are aimed at the film elite. This view is supported precisely by Dogma’s democratic aesthetics, which, paradoxically, affects Dogma’s level of democratic exhibition inversely. In other words, the aesthetics that are easy for marginalized filmmakers to imitate are also aesthetics that easily alienate mass audiences.

In the Vow of Chastity, von Trier and Vinterberg outlawed “mainstream genre films” and “prime manifestations . . . of nefarious illusionist practices.” Genre and illusionist style are both difficult for amateur filmmakers to satisfyingly realize (since they do not have access to the means of production that are necessary), and simultaneously exactly those elements of cinema that amateur film viewers (as well as many cinephiles and critics) love. Therefore, the Dogma project is at once democratic, in its attempt to “level the playing field” by reducing the traditional standards of what we perceive cinema to be, and elitist, in its tendency to produce works that only the most elite and educated portions of the population are likely to want to see. Hjort describes the opening of Korine’s Julien Donkey-Boy:

"There are no establishing shots to orient the viewer. There are no close-ups of what focuses the characters’ attention. The images are wobbly, blurred and at times filled with apparently irrelevant visual input. It is indeed appropriate, with reference to these opening sequences, to talk, not only of a “decomposition” of images, but of a dissolution of the most basic narrative principles allowing viewers to make sense of stories."

This passage describes a film that is unlikely to be seen in any wide capacity because it borders on anti-viewership, as though Korine’s point is to prevent viewers from grasping anything at all about his film, except those who have the patience or academic inclination to understand the auteur’s unique inscriptions.

Furthermore, while trained filmmakers like von Trier and Vinterberg have been able to use anti-aesthetics in interesting ways that make for good films, like The Idiots and The Celebration, the Dogma films that have emerged around the globe are almost always of negligible quality, which suggests something else: that maybe what we need is not a proliferation of authors who can make movies on their hi-8 digi-cam, but a better understanding between filmmakers and the various audiences they are supposed to represent.

Though Dogma ultimately fails to achieve a democracy of exhibition, it is important to note that Dogma is one of the only strands of contemporary cinema that is in any way committed to a betterment of cinematic democracy. Like The Simpsons, Dogma 95 has emerged as a kind of ongoing serial, wherein von Trier and Vinterberg serve as the Groening figure whose original conception has become a collaborative, international discourse. If Simpsons episodes can be said to share a common language and a coherent voice, despite the large number of contributors giving input, Dogma films have created a language through the imposition of potentially arbitrary rules. These rules serve as an example of how to organize a new genre of films, and the exact content of the rules ceases to matter as long as they exist in some capacity. The key is precisely the kind of self-imposition on which von Trier thrives, and which, incidentally, prevailed over classical Hollywood in the form of the Hays Code.

Today’s common wisdom dictates that limitations are obstacles to creativity. Despite the fact that the Hays Code had dangerous implications for ethnic groups, women, the Left, and secularism, classical Hollywood filmmakers danced around the Code in creative ways that often made their films stronger. Lars von Trier seems to agree that limitations can aid the artistic process, rather than stand in its way. Throughout his career, with Dogma films as well as non-Dogma films, von Trier has set technical or aesthetic rules for his productions, a process that is dramatized in The Five Obstructions. Von Trier’s rules emanate not out of a conservative Protestant ethic like the Hays Code, but out of various philosophical-artistic traditions – realist, modernist, postmodern – that, when combined, verge on arbitrary, well, dogma. As a result, von Trier’s films, and some of the Dogma films, have proven just as creative as those of classical Hollywood, only without the dangerous social implications.

(This article is the latest in an ongoing column dedicated to uncovering recent strands of cinema that challenge the "auteur theory." To see earlier entries in this column, click here.)