Dogma '95
Dogma: Fad or Trendsetter?
One of the features in Art Film Theater in Greenbelt 1 this month is The King is Alive. Ordinary viewers' first impression is it's not a product of Hollywood big studios that are shown in most of the local theaters but film buffs won't certainly miss it because it's the fourth picture produced under the Danish Dogma 95 pact. My images about Denmark are the statue of the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen and the popular, kids' toy blocks called Lego while in the realm of motion pictures, the most memorable Danish pictures are the ones that won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar: Babette's Feast and Pelle the Conqueror. However, the last few years saw the birth and formative period of the Dogma cinema that caught many people's attention.
Four Danish filmmakers - namely Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg, Soren Kragh-Jacobsen and Kristian Levring - sign the Dogma '95 manifesto where their aim is to make films completely devoid of artifice, whether that be make-up, props, music or any degree of technical manipulation. The result is cinema in the raw, stories empowered by a rare spontaneity and naturalism.
Prior to the signing, von Trier has done a couple of projects that show what Dogma would be all about. The Kingdom, a TV miniseries where the first part is shown in 1994 and the second one three years later, is a E.R.-inspired hospital drama that features doctors, nurses and patients who are both eerie and eccentric as David Lynch's characters in Twin Peaks. However, it's the “science versus superstition” angle that keeps the viewers glued to their seats and the suspense that stems from it is made possible through a close-up of the various members of the cast, the grainy texture of most scenes and water-colored hues that von Trier effectively used to distinguish the distinctive mood of every part of the hospital.
But it's in Breaking the Waves (1996) where the close-up shot is use to the utmost and in this case, let the viewers be dazzled and touched over Emily Watson's performance as a simple-minded, pious woman who had to defy her village's conventions in able to release her comatose husband from the clutches of death. Both The Kingdom and Breaking the Waves are critically acclaimed, which paved the way for the entry of Dogma cinema into the world scene.
The year 1998 saw the release of the first two Dogma movies, The Celebration and The Idiots, but what attracted many viewers is the controversial material woven into both films instead of how the rules of the manifesto were applied. In The Celebration, Vinterberg takes the audience into an intimate family reunion where the patriarch celebrates his 60th birthday but the merry mood is jolted when the eldest son reveals that his father sexually abused him when he was a child while in The Idiots, von Trier attempts to amuse and provoke us with a bunch of educated, professional young friends who left their loved ones and stable careers in able to roam around Copenhagen as a bunch of mentally-handicapped imbeciles.
Both movies initially show that Dogma offers everything except cheerful stuff, which is the kind that alienated and angst-baggage folks would easily connect to. Publicly revealing family skeletons isn't new to many of us but a handheld camera that peeks closely into a dysfunctional family can make not a few uncomfortable while watching The Celebration. In the case of The Idiots, von Trier sort of pays homage to the late Spanish director Luis Bunuel, whose works is most remembered for its Surrealist images and unflinching attacks on the Roman Catholic Church and bourgeois values. In these yuppies, playing “idiots” to cause disorder in the public swimming baths or on the streets is their attempt to break free from bourgeois comfort and complacency, which rewards them with a bond that is supposedly stronger than what family or friends provide. However, there is one scene where the group is involved in an explicit orgy and a lot of viewers might wonder what good purpose serves them.
The third Dogma feature is Mifune, which is the Danish entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar two years ago. There are traces of tragedy in Soren Kragh-Jacobsen's work but he mainly presents a screwball comedy about a successful banker whose redneck background is revealed when he receives news about his father's death. A trip to the country farm where he grew up finds him with new responsibilities of taking care of the family house and his retarded brother. The first part is a shade of the 1988 Best Picture Oscar winner Rainman but the similarity is dispelled when a prostitute-on-the-lam answers the young man's ad of looking for a housekeeper. Just like any of those tickling, old Hollywood romantic comedies, it's not remote to expect a relationship between the two and the troubles that arise from it.
The fourth feature, The King is Alive, is the bleakest among the four where a small group of bus passengers are stranded in an isolated and abandoned village somewhere in the Sahara Desert. To kill the time and beat the piercing heat of the sun, the group staged King Lear, which some may find odd but Levring perfectly chose Shakespeare's tragic play whether he intended it or not. As King Lear gradually descent into madness as the play progresses, so does the effect of the vast, unwelcome desert to the passengers, as the passing of the days slowly brings them despair. And just like in the case of Lord of the Flies where the base instincts of a group of schoolboys surfaced when they were trapped in a remote island, the desert releases whatever negative feelings the commuters have been keeping, causing tension, friction and tragedy in the end.
There would be some people who would welcome the Dogma's fresh approach but majority of the viewers are accustomed to the Hollywood-kind of viewing entertainment, thus finding these films both irritating and pretentious. It could be the case with The King is Alive, where the more sophisticated viewers see Levring's work as the intellectual man's idea of a horror film but to those not used to watching foreign movies, the King Lear approach would backfire, making them bored after the first hour of screening time has lapsed.
More Dogma-inspired works were made after the quartet released theirs. Lars von Trier used the same techniques in creating an unusual musical, Dancer in the Dark, which captured the Palm d'Or at Cannes a couple of years ago. The Danish entry to the Oscars this year is Italian for Beginners, a recent Dogma feature that one American reviewer described as “an episode of 'Friends' directed by Ingmar Bergman”. Finally, anyone who attended the Swiss Film Week at UP Film Institute last February would found out that the opening film, Joyride, is the 14th feature, which is to show that the Dogma disciples is steadily increasing. Dogma's breakthrough and impact isn't very different from what the New Wave Cinema created decades ago but it remains to be seen if it would create more than a dent in world cinema or be another chapter in the history annals.
(First published in Daily Tribune on July 16, 2002)
One of the features in Art Film Theater in Greenbelt 1 this month is The King is Alive. Ordinary viewers' first impression is it's not a product of Hollywood big studios that are shown in most of the local theaters but film buffs won't certainly miss it because it's the fourth picture produced under the Danish Dogma 95 pact. My images about Denmark are the statue of the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen and the popular, kids' toy blocks called Lego while in the realm of motion pictures, the most memorable Danish pictures are the ones that won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar: Babette's Feast and Pelle the Conqueror. However, the last few years saw the birth and formative period of the Dogma cinema that caught many people's attention.
Four Danish filmmakers - namely Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg, Soren Kragh-Jacobsen and Kristian Levring - sign the Dogma '95 manifesto where their aim is to make films completely devoid of artifice, whether that be make-up, props, music or any degree of technical manipulation. The result is cinema in the raw, stories empowered by a rare spontaneity and naturalism.
Prior to the signing, von Trier has done a couple of projects that show what Dogma would be all about. The Kingdom, a TV miniseries where the first part is shown in 1994 and the second one three years later, is a E.R.-inspired hospital drama that features doctors, nurses and patients who are both eerie and eccentric as David Lynch's characters in Twin Peaks. However, it's the “science versus superstition” angle that keeps the viewers glued to their seats and the suspense that stems from it is made possible through a close-up of the various members of the cast, the grainy texture of most scenes and water-colored hues that von Trier effectively used to distinguish the distinctive mood of every part of the hospital.
But it's in Breaking the Waves (1996) where the close-up shot is use to the utmost and in this case, let the viewers be dazzled and touched over Emily Watson's performance as a simple-minded, pious woman who had to defy her village's conventions in able to release her comatose husband from the clutches of death. Both The Kingdom and Breaking the Waves are critically acclaimed, which paved the way for the entry of Dogma cinema into the world scene.
The year 1998 saw the release of the first two Dogma movies, The Celebration and The Idiots, but what attracted many viewers is the controversial material woven into both films instead of how the rules of the manifesto were applied. In The Celebration, Vinterberg takes the audience into an intimate family reunion where the patriarch celebrates his 60th birthday but the merry mood is jolted when the eldest son reveals that his father sexually abused him when he was a child while in The Idiots, von Trier attempts to amuse and provoke us with a bunch of educated, professional young friends who left their loved ones and stable careers in able to roam around Copenhagen as a bunch of mentally-handicapped imbeciles.
Both movies initially show that Dogma offers everything except cheerful stuff, which is the kind that alienated and angst-baggage folks would easily connect to. Publicly revealing family skeletons isn't new to many of us but a handheld camera that peeks closely into a dysfunctional family can make not a few uncomfortable while watching The Celebration. In the case of The Idiots, von Trier sort of pays homage to the late Spanish director Luis Bunuel, whose works is most remembered for its Surrealist images and unflinching attacks on the Roman Catholic Church and bourgeois values. In these yuppies, playing “idiots” to cause disorder in the public swimming baths or on the streets is their attempt to break free from bourgeois comfort and complacency, which rewards them with a bond that is supposedly stronger than what family or friends provide. However, there is one scene where the group is involved in an explicit orgy and a lot of viewers might wonder what good purpose serves them.
The third Dogma feature is Mifune, which is the Danish entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar two years ago. There are traces of tragedy in Soren Kragh-Jacobsen's work but he mainly presents a screwball comedy about a successful banker whose redneck background is revealed when he receives news about his father's death. A trip to the country farm where he grew up finds him with new responsibilities of taking care of the family house and his retarded brother. The first part is a shade of the 1988 Best Picture Oscar winner Rainman but the similarity is dispelled when a prostitute-on-the-lam answers the young man's ad of looking for a housekeeper. Just like any of those tickling, old Hollywood romantic comedies, it's not remote to expect a relationship between the two and the troubles that arise from it.
The fourth feature, The King is Alive, is the bleakest among the four where a small group of bus passengers are stranded in an isolated and abandoned village somewhere in the Sahara Desert. To kill the time and beat the piercing heat of the sun, the group staged King Lear, which some may find odd but Levring perfectly chose Shakespeare's tragic play whether he intended it or not. As King Lear gradually descent into madness as the play progresses, so does the effect of the vast, unwelcome desert to the passengers, as the passing of the days slowly brings them despair. And just like in the case of Lord of the Flies where the base instincts of a group of schoolboys surfaced when they were trapped in a remote island, the desert releases whatever negative feelings the commuters have been keeping, causing tension, friction and tragedy in the end.
There would be some people who would welcome the Dogma's fresh approach but majority of the viewers are accustomed to the Hollywood-kind of viewing entertainment, thus finding these films both irritating and pretentious. It could be the case with The King is Alive, where the more sophisticated viewers see Levring's work as the intellectual man's idea of a horror film but to those not used to watching foreign movies, the King Lear approach would backfire, making them bored after the first hour of screening time has lapsed.
More Dogma-inspired works were made after the quartet released theirs. Lars von Trier used the same techniques in creating an unusual musical, Dancer in the Dark, which captured the Palm d'Or at Cannes a couple of years ago. The Danish entry to the Oscars this year is Italian for Beginners, a recent Dogma feature that one American reviewer described as “an episode of 'Friends' directed by Ingmar Bergman”. Finally, anyone who attended the Swiss Film Week at UP Film Institute last February would found out that the opening film, Joyride, is the 14th feature, which is to show that the Dogma disciples is steadily increasing. Dogma's breakthrough and impact isn't very different from what the New Wave Cinema created decades ago but it remains to be seen if it would create more than a dent in world cinema or be another chapter in the history annals.
(First published in Daily Tribune on July 16, 2002)
posted by Francis Rex Alger @ 5:15 PM
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