MISCmedia for 10/29/99
The Dogme 95 Project

AESTHETIC DISCIPLINE, as the Oulipo guys keep proclaiming, is the real key to creativity.

Four filmmakers in Denmark took this notion to heart when they came up with the Dogme 95 movement.

Among the points of the movement's "Vow of Chastity":

• Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in.
• The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. (Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is being shot).
• The camera must be hand-held.
• The film must be in color. Special lighting is not acceptable.
• The film must not contain superficial action. (Murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.)
• The film takes place here and now.
• Genre movies are not acceptable.
• The film format must be Academy 35 mm. [I.e., not widescreen.]
• The director must not be credited.
• I swear as a director to refrain from personal taste! I am no longer an artist. My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations.

Just about all of these disciplines had appeared in many indie and art films over the years (though not all in the same film), from Godard's Weekend to Cassavetes's Husbands. What the Dogme instigators did was codify a particular set of disciplines devised for a maximum sense of "realism."

Three "officially certified" Dogme films have been made thus far. The first to get a U.S. release is The Celebration, by Thomas Vinterberg. Far from the spare "kitchen-sink" movie the above Dogme disciplines might make you imagine, it's a vast, intense, tragic drama of suppressed secrets, predicated upon a family reunion dinner in which a young man "toasts" his father's birthday by outing the old man as a child molester.

The Celebration sports just-beneath-the-top performances by a huge cast, colorful locations and costumes, tautly-framed shots, and flashy editing and sound mixing. It's not a filmed play; it's a real movie.

And it's a good point-O-comparison with a more popular handheld-camera-shot movie, The Blair Witch Project.

You who have seen Blair Witch can see where it conforms to and differs from the Dogme format. It's partly in black-and-white and it has a "genre" (horror) premise, two things Dogme disallows.

But it has no background music or special effects. It covers a specific set of characters through a specific sequence of actions in a specific time and place. It's filmed on real locations (no studio sets). The protagonists' violent fate is not overtly shown. It's not a spectacle of gore but a character study (albeit with sometimes borderline-insuffrable characters).

The Celebration shows how filmmaking techniques can be pared away to make "realistic" stories more intimate. Blair Witch shows how a similar minimalism can make a "genre" story seem more real.

Both films point the way toward a possible post-blockbuster future for the cinema.

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