Cinematic Chasity

I swear to the following set of rules drawn up and confirmed by Dogme 95:

1.Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in.
2.The sound must never be produced apart from the image or vice-versa.
3.The camera must be handheld. Any movement or mobility attainable in the hand is permitted.
4.The film must be in color. Special lighting is not acceptable.
5.Optical work and filters are forbidden.
6.The film must not contain superficial action.
7.Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden.
8.Genre movies are not acceptable.
9. The film format must be Academy 35mm.
10.The director must not be credited.

Furthermore I swear as a director to refrain from personal taste. I am no longer an artist. I swear to refrain from creating a 'work', as I regard the instant as more important than the whole. My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations.

-- Dogme 95: The Vow of Chastity (abridged)

With Dancer in the Dark now gracing selected theatre marquees in the States, Lars von Trier (The Idiots, Breaking the Waves) has become the latest face of film's avant-garde. Linked to his name is the unconventional cinematic approach to filmmaking known as Dogme 95, a set of 10 rules implemented as a "rescue operation to counter certain tendencies" of today's film industry.

Dogme 95's "Vow of Chastity," written during March of 1995 by four Danish film directors -- preeminently von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg -- was created to challenge filmmakers by governing the manner in which feature-length fiction-film format movies were to be shot. The Vow's 10 rules were be kept in order to qualify for the Dogme certificate, although they do not prevent signatories to the Vow from making other non-Dogme films. (Steven Spielberg has signed the oath, though has yet to make a Dogme film.)

The main aim of the group is to make filmmakers more aware of what they are doing. By eschewing many of the tricks of the filmmaking trade, they plan to bring filmmaking back to its irreducible core: good storytelling. Action must take place in the here and now and everything seen on screen must actually take place, stripping away the superfluous and the superficial elements typical of Hollywood.

"Dogme is about focusing on the story and the acting," says Soren Kragh-Jacobsen, director of Dogme 3, Mifune's Last Song. "In every musician's life there comes a time and place where you want to go back to basics, where you want to play unplugged. That's what Dogme 95 is about."

"There is an implicit duplicity in the Dogme 95 Manifesto," describes Vinterberg. "On one hand it contains a deep irony and on the other it is most serious[ly] meant. Irony and seriousness [are] interlinked [and] inseparable. What we have concerned ourselves with is the making of a set of rules. In this sense it is a kind of play, a game called 'rule-making.' Seriousness and play goes hand in hand... It is both liberating, merry and almost fun to work under such a strict set of rules. It is this duplicity which is the magic of 'dogme.'"

Still a term mainly used in European art-house cinema, Dogme (from the French word for "dogma") is nevertheless becoming more recognized through feature films made under these rules. The first Dogme-certificated film, Vinterberg's Festen (The Celebration) won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1998. An intense, tragic drama of suppressed secrets, professed upon a family reunion dinner when a young man "toasts" his father's birthday by outing the old man as a child molester, Festen was shot with a digital camera and blown up to 35 mm. While the images appeared very grainy on the big screen, the movie was hailed by some as a skillfully devised method for a maximizing a sense of "realism."

Known for its association of cinematic martyrdom, Dogme 95 is a concept that has been gently derided by many critics, some of whom are confused as to why anybody would chain himself to such rules, degenerate into such primitivism for its own sake, or purposely produce a nearly unmarketable film.

For more information on Dogme 95, go to www.dogme95.dk.

© Copyright 2002 Holidayness.com All rights reserved