ENOUGH WAS ENOUGH!!!

Roskilde University Center (RUC) Department of Communication, Journalism & Computer Science Supervisor: Henrik Juel Fall 2005

Project Group: Benavides Carrera Laura (Spain) Castedo JustinianoTania (Bolivia) Giorgobiani Sopio (Georgia) Santos Mendes Euclides (Brazil) Valor Navarro Marina (Spain)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION...... 3

CHAPTER 2: RESEARCH QUESTION...... 4

CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY ...... 5

CHAPTER 4: CONCEPT OF DOGME 95...... 7

4.1 DOGME 95 - AN OUTCOME OF GLOBALISATION? ...... 7

4.2 THE INFLUENCE OF AVANT-GARDE MOVEMENTS ON DOGME 95 ...... 8

4.3 LARS VON TRIER'S IMPORTANCE FOR THE CREATION OF DOGME 95 ...... 12

4.4 THE INFLUENCE OF DANISH FILM SCHOOL ON THE CREATION OF DOGME 95 ...... 13

4.5 PARADOXICAL ASPECTS OF DOGME 95 ...... 14 4.5.1 Finding freedom and creativeness through restrictions...... 14 4.5.2. Restrictions on the use of aesthetics ...... 15 4.5.3 Rejection of individual cinema ...... 15 4.5.4 "Purity" before "Purity"...... 16 4.5.5. Camera movements...... 16

CHAPTER 5: ANALYSIS OF THE FIRST FOUR DANISH DOGME MOVIES ...... 18

5.1 DOGME # 1: DRAMA AND SUCCESS IN CELEBRATION ...... 18

5.2 DOGME #2: CHALLENGE AND DEVIANCE IN THE IDIOTS...... 27

5.3: DOGME # 3: THE PAST AND THE FUTURE IN MIFUNE:...... 34

5.4. DOGME # 4 - PLAYING AND LIVING IN THE KING IS ALIVE ...... 43

CHAPTER 6: FOCUS GROUP ANALYSIS...... 56

6.1 WHAT AND WHY? ...... 56

6.2 HOW?...... 57

6.3. QUESTIONS AND ANALYSIS ...... 59

6.4 CONCLUSIONS ...... 64

1 CHAPTER 7: WHAT INNOVATIONS DOES DOGME 95 CREATE?...... 65

7.1. DOGME MANIFESTO...... 65

7.2. THE VOW OF CHASTITY ...... 69

CHAPTER 8:MARKETING DOGME 95 8.1.INTRODUCTION ...... 72

8.2. THE NEED OF MARKETING ...... 72

8.3. DEMAND FOR PRODUCT...... 73

8.4. TARGET AUDIENCE ...... 76

8.5. MARKETING ASSETS...... 77

8.6. MARKETING STRATEGY AND TOOLS...... 79 8.6.1 The Need for Branding...... 79 8.6.2 Selecting a Brand Name ...... 81 8.6.3 Branding Dogme 95...... 84 8.6.4 Presenting the Brand...... 86 8.6.5 Managing the Brand through its lifecycle ...... 86

8.7. THE FOUNDER'S PERSPECTIVE...... 90

8.8. EVALUATION OF THE MARKETING STRATEGY: THE OUTCOME OF DOGME 95 ...... 91

CHAPTER 9: CONCLUSION...... 94

BIBLIOGRAFICAL REFERENCES ...... 95

APPENDIX...... 101

A) MANIFESTO...... 101

B) THE VOW OF CHASTITY ...... 102

C) THOMAS VINTERBERG'S CONFESSION...... 103

D) SØREN KRAGH-JACOBSEN'S CONFESSION ...... 104 E) FOCUS GROUP TRANSCRIPT...... 105

2 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

The underlying project is an attempt to analyse and challenge the concept of Dogme 95, a Danish cinematographic movement founded in March 1995 by a collective of Danish filmmakers. As international students at the communication department of Roskilde University, we were eager to take advantage of our stay in Denmark and write about the well-known Danish cinematographic movement that has inspired filmmakers across the whole world.

While undertaking this project we were hoping to look at the subject from the critical perspective and to determine the borders between the artistic and the commercial aspects of movie-making. The major goal of our research was to determine whether Dogme 95 has indeed created innovations in cinematographic world or if it was a successful attempt by a collective of Danish directors to create publicity for their movies through promoting them as groundbreaking innovations in contemporary cinema. After having made the final touches to the project report we still feel that we have chosen a very successful angle for research, which has enabled us to challenge the artistic aspects of Dogme concept and at the same time to remain balanced and keep admiration for the creativeness of Dogme and the feeling of realism that Dogme movies create.

We chose this topic, first of all, for personal reasons. We are studying Communication and some of us are looking forward to a career in cinema industry. This was a perfect opportunity for us to get closer to Dogme movement. Besides, living in a Danish society provides international students with a context, in which they can better understand Dogme movies.

Another important factor was the availability of English language sources about Dogme movement. We were even able to meet with some people, who are closely connected with Dogme 95 and know Dogme directors in person. We would like to thank Mr. Peter Schepelern who has kindly agreed to accept us as guest students in his Dogme classes at the University of Copenhagen and has provided access to the most comprehensive Dogme video-library.

3 CHAPTER 2: RESEARCH QUESTION

From the very beginning we were aware of the fact, that the selected topic was rather broad and in order to study the subject we had first to narrow it down significantly. Initially we wanted to know how successful Dogme 95 was in reality and what the audience perception of this alternative cinematographic movement was. Later on we got more involved in the innovative aspect of Dogme and wanted to analyze what types of innovations it introduced in the cinematographic language. We were constantly asking ourselves what was the idea behind the contradictory character of Dogme 95: on the one hand, it aims to remove the boundaries of artistic freedom for filmmakers and on the other hand, it establishes a new set or restrictions for them. At the same time, we started wondering about the importance of Dogme label. However, it was not until the second or third week of the project work that we suddenly realized the most important issue that equally related to all the questions that we had brought up during the previous discussions:

"Does Dogme 95 Introduce Innovations in the Cinematographic Language or is it simply a Marketing Strategy, Aimed at promoting Dogme movies under the cover of Innovation?"

While posing this research question, we realized that in the end we might not necessarily be provide a yes/no answer to the problem. Before finding the solution for the main problem we had to review the following sub-questions: ¾ What are the most significant aspects of Dogme 95 concept? ¾ What factors influenced the creation of Dogme 95? ¾ What impact did the avant-garde movements of the previous decades have on Dogme 95? ¾ What kind of innovations did Dogme 95 introduce to the cinematographic language? ¾ How did Dogme rules and provisions influence the content? ¾ What were the unique aspects of Dogme, compared to other cinematographic movements? ¾ What was the audience perception of Dogme movies? ¾ What kind of tools did the founders of Dogme 95 concept use to promote their movies? ¾ Can marketing principles be applied to Dogme 95 concept? On the other hand, in order to answer these sub-questions, we had to define and research several key concepts, such as: ¾ Innovation in the cinema context ¾ Audience reception ¾ Strategic marketing/branding ¾ Realism We think that the research question is very relevant as it touches on the two most important aspects of any cinematographic movement: artistic creativeness vs. commercial issues. From this angle we are able to

4 challenge the statements and claims of the founders of Dogme 95 and to reveal any hidden messages behind the artists' desperate cries for the resurrection of cinema.

CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY

Selection of methodology provided to be one of the most difficult aspects of our work. Due to the complex character of the research topic, we had to be very careful in selecting the methodology. At the initial stage of the project we wanted to conduct in-depth interviews and even meet with Lars von Trier in person, but very soon we realised that the project idea was getting rather ambitious and its scale was growing beyond the limits of time and resources available for us. So we decided to cut the project activities, reduce the methodological tools that we were going to apply in the process of research and came down to the following plan: a) Analysis of the genesis and concept of Dogme 95 Through applying the "glocalisation" theory of communication scholar Thomas Hylland Erikssen we argue that Dogme 95 was probably to some extent an outcome of identity politics and trends of globalisation. Further, we review the possible characteristics of an alternative cinema movement, driven by the identity politics and compare these characteristics with Dogme concept to determine how relevant it is to connect the creation of Dogme 95 with the identity politics in the Danish and wider European context.

b) Film analysis

In this section we conduct content analysis of the first four Danish Dogme movies: DOGME #1: The celebration (Festen), 1998, by Thomas Vintenberg DOGME #2: The Idiots (Idioterne), 1998, by Lars Von Trier DOGME #3: Mifune (Mifune sidste sang), 1999, by Søren Kragh-Jacobsen DOGME #4: The king is alive, 2000, by Kristian Levring Why we decided to analyse movies? In fact, the best way to understand a particular cinematographic movement is to analyse movies, made within this movement. It's not possible to get a feeling of cinematographic movement simply by reading books about this movement and studying its Manifesto and rules. Why these particular four movies? The main reason why we chose these four movies is that they were all produced by the founders of Dogme concept (each of the four directors produced only one Dogme movie). So, even though we were aware that the analysis of four movies would take a lot of our time and energy, we still decided not to leave out any of the first four Danish Dogme movies, because we believe that all of them are essential for understanding the Dogme concept. The important issue to keep in mind is that all four movies are different from each other, so if we did the analysis of only one movie it would provide

5 only limited perspective for us and leave out significant parts of the wider picture of the movement. Content analysis of these four movies is also important because it enables us to determine to what extend and in what aspects was the content influenced by the movie format.

c) Focus group

In order to research audience perception of Dogme movies we decided to use focus group discussion. Our choice was determined by several factors: first of all, we could not have used the quantitative research method, because conducting public opinion poll about the reception of Dogme movies would be impossible within the framework of this project. Besides, we were interested more in qualitative data than quantitative. Focus group is a good example of how individual opinions can be shaped by social interaction with other group members: different experiences, contexts, social realities and cultural backgrounds will generate different responses to the same message as it happens in the society. At the same time, we were not hoping to have a very representative sample in the focus group: group discussion for us was more a source of inspiration, rather than a way of extracting qualitative data that could be scientifically processes to come to conclusions, representative of larger society. The detailed methodology of conducting the focus group will be described in the separate sub-chapter below. d) Analysis of innovative aspects of Dogme 95 Through detailed analysis of the Manifesto and the Vow of Chastity we aim to understand exactly what kind of innovations Dogme 95 introduce. At the same time, we are going to compare Dogme 95 with previous avant-garde movements to see which techniques and approaches it borrowed from other movements. e) Application of marketing tools to Dogme concept Through applying marketing principles to Dogme 95 we hoped to determine to what extent these principles were used for promoting Dogme movies in reality. In the chapter about Marketing and Branding we analyse in details each of the aspects of Dogme 95 concept that we believe are branding tools( such as the name, the initial presentation of the concept in Paris, Dogme certificate, etc).

At the beginning of the project work we were also thinking to review the media coverage of Dogme movement. This would help us get a clearer idea about how the society perceived Dogme movies and what where the recurrent themes in the media coverage of this cinematographic movement. However, very soon we realized that media coverage research would not be a feasible tool within our project as it clearly exceeded the scale of our research paper.

6 CHAPTER 4: CONCEPT OF DOGME 95

4.1 DOGME 95 - AN OUTCOME OF GLOBALISATION?

Dogme 95 was a reaction to complex factors both inside and outside of Denmark. One of the possible outside factors was the influence from Hollywood cinema. Statistically, 1995 (when Dogme was founded) was the worst year for Danish cinema in terms of national sales. In this year national film secured only 8 % of the total market in Denmark, while the American film share the same year almost exceeded 81%. Making a Danish movie was not very attractive. In this situation a few of the Danish directors opted to go to Hollywood and make movies there, but others preferred to stay in Denmark and start a new alternative movement. The result was the creation of Dogme 95 as a reaction against mainstream American cinema. The strong anti-Hollywood spirit is very obvious in the whole concept of Dogme 95: after comparing Hollywood and Dogme movies, one does not have to be a film critic to notice that Dogme 95 is exactly what Hollywood is not.

In one sense creation of a new cinematographic language in 1995 was very logical and expectable, because whenever there is a mainstream, there is also a reaction against it. And this is true not only for cinema: the similar trend can be observed e.g. in any sphere of public life, not least the politics, which is always about the majority and the opposition. Moreover, we can say that creation of Dogme was a direct outcome of the wider globalisation process. As Thomas Hylland Eriksson describes in his article “How can the global be local? Islam, the West and the Globalisation of Identity Politics,” rapid globalisation trends of the part two decades have resulted in the emergence of identity politics worldwide. According to Thomas Erikssen, “the more similar we become, the more different we try to be. Paradoxically, however, the more different we try to be, the more similar we become – since most of us try to be different in roughly the same ways worldwide1.” As Erikssen describes it, globalisation has created localisation, a process that he calls “glocalisation.” It means that in the era of globalisation, when time and space boundaries are becoming irrelevant, those, who have more resources, are put in a position to exert cultural hegemony on the others. In this situation those, who are at the receiving end of the communication line, “fight back” with the identity politics. Therefore, Identity politics is the conscious mobilisation of identity traits in response to globalisation. So, globalisation results in the opposite, when individuals feel more pressure to emphasize and pursue their identity traits, a way that makes them feel unique in the situation when everybody/everything else is becoming similar.

We believe that to some extent, Dogme 95 can be described as identity politics, as an attempt of Danish movie-makers to “fight back” against the influence of globalization, to Hollywood mainstream and to make their country famous by creating a new movement that would at the same time bring out the national

1 Thomas Hylland Eriksen; “How can the global be local? Islam, the West and the Globalisation of Identity Politics;”

7 identity. Interestingly, emphasis on bringing out the national traits is not mentioned anywhere in the Manifesto or the Vow of Chastity and officially, Dogme 95 is a rescue for international movie, not just for Danish movie. But if we take a closer look at Danish Dogme movies and read the Dogme brothers’ interview about the movement and about their films, it becomes obvious that the national identity is present in all Dogme movies, made in Denmark and the whole concept of Dogme 95 is as much about making Denmark famous and attracting attention to the “cinematographic revolution” in this small European country, as it is about rescuing the cinema, which was “dead and called for resurrection.2” In his article “Dogme 95: A Small Nation’s Response to Globalization,” Mette Hjort also claims that Dogme 95 is an outcome of globalization: “What commentators have systematically overlooked, I argue, is the connection between Dogme 95 and small nationhood, which is where the politics of Dogme lie. My claim, in brief, is that the rules imposed by Dogme 95 amount to a novel and insightful response to the inequities of globalizing process. Dogme 95, then, is best thought of as a form of cinematic expression that comes to us from, and as a defense of, the margins of cinematic production that small nations and minor cinemas inevitably are3.” Finally, this idea is confirmed by the director of the first Dogme movie, Thomas Vinterberg, who mentions in one of the interviews that: "My collaboration with Lars von Trier has taught me that he is able to make Denmark big without leaving Denmark and this for me is the ultimate ideal. The idea is not to go international to become famous, but to think oneself beyond certain typically Danish mentalities.”

4.2 THE INFLUENCE OF AVANT-GARDE MOVEMENTS ON DOGME 95

During the last four decades avant-garde movements in the United States and Europe have renewed the classical film language. These movements have influenced each another and at the same time have inspired other film movements around the world, such as, for example, "Cinema Novo" in Brazil in the 60s. While young filmmakers in Europe founded the French New Wave, the New German Cinema and various Danish film movements, in the United States the New American Cinema or the American Underground adopted alternative ways for moviemaking (e.g. hand-held camera, long shots and improvised acting).

Dogme 95 was significantly influenced by the previous avant-garde movements (this idea will be further developed in the subchapter which analyses the Manifesto and Vow of Chastity in order to determine the innovative aspects of Dogme 95). The current avant-garde movements had considerable impact on Lars von Trier's artistic formation in the 70's. While studying cinema first at the Copenhagen University and then at the Danish Film School, he was also a member of the Film Group 16, a small Danish cinematographic movement founded in 1964 in the town of Hvidovre, near Copenhagen. The major aspects of the movement were the use of 16 mm format and the non-commercial concept of cinema. During his membership of this group von Trier made his amateur short films Orchidégartneren (1977) and Menthe - La Bienheureuse (1979).

2 The Dogme 95 Manifesto 3 Mette Hjort, “Dogme 95: A Small Nation’s Response to Globalization;”

8

The Danish film movements of 60's and 70's were inspired by other European and non-European avant- garde movements. Besides Film Group 16, another Danish underground film movement, "ABC Cinema" was founded in May 1968. One of its leading filmmakers, Jørgen Leth, later became a guest lecturer at the Danish Film School and had significant impact on the new generation Danish directors, including von Trier. In 2002, Jørgen Leth became one of the authors of the "Dogumentary" manifesto and, in 2003, together with Lars von Trier directed an experimental Dogme film entitled The Five Obstructions. Stevenson4 believes that, "while Leth was not officially in on the formulation of Dogme, he was in every sense a 'fellow traveller'. His experiments in film structure and the language of cinema and his refusal to rely on the technical wizardry of the medium clearly had an influence on von Trier."

Below we are going to compare Dogme concept with the other avant-garde movements and determine in what way Dogme was influenced by the previous cinematographic movements.

4.2.1-Manifesto and Rules: certain similarities can be observed between Dogme manifesto and the manifestos of other avant-garde movements. For instance, the American Underground manifesto5 written in 1961 by a group of young American filmmakers headed by John Cassavetes states that:

"The official cinema all over the world is running out of breath. It is morally corrupt, aesthetically obsolete, thematically superficial, temperamentally boring. Even the seemingly worthwhile films, those that lay claim to high moral and aesthetic standards and have been accepted as such by critics and the public alike, reveal the decay of the Product film. The very slickness of their execution has become a perversion covering the falsity of their themes."

34 years later Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg make almost the same statements in their manifesto:

"The 'supreme' task of the decadent filmmaker is to fool the audience. Is that what we are so proud of? Is that what the '100 years' have brought us? Illusions via which emotions can be communicated? By the individual artist's free choice of trickery? Predictability (dramaturgy) has become the golden calf around which we dance. Having the characters' inner lives justify the plot is too complicated, and not 'high art'. As never before, the superficial action and the superficial movie are receiving all the praise. The result is barren. An illusion of pathos and an illusion of love. To Dogme 95 the movie is not illusion!"

4 2003, p. 203-204. 5 in Stevenson, 2003, p. 25.

9 A new documentary film movement "Direct Cinema" evolved from the American Underground. The rules and technical approached of Direct Cinema had an influence of their own on Dogme 95. In 2002 a new documentary movement - "Dogumentary" originated from the Dogme concept (the "Dogumentary" manifesto was signed on May 6, 2002 by Lars von Trier, the editor of the Danish daily newspaper Politiken, Tøger Seidenfaden, and the filmmakers Jørgen Leth and Børge Høst), just like Direct Cinema was created on the basis of the American Underground.

According to Stevenson6, the most important similarity between Dogme 95 and the American Underground is the special role of the cameraman. But, at the same time we need to consider that: - Compared to American Underground, the new technologies, such as digital camera, enabled the Dogme cameraman to be more flexible and allowed for more mobility. - In the Underground cinema the camera was used more like an observer, interested in capturing spontaneous situations through a passive camera.

However, the avant-garde movement with the biggest influence on Dogme was still the French New Wave. The Dogme manifesto in fact starts with the critique of the Nouvelle Vague: "In 1960 enough was enough! The movie was dead and called for resurrection. The goal was correct but the means were not! The New Wave proved to be a ripple that washed ashore and turned to muck. Slogans of individualism and freedom created works for a while, but no changes. The Wave was up for grabs, like the directors themselves. The Wave was never stronger than the men behind it. The anti-bourgeois cinema itself became bourgeois, because the foundations upon which its theories were based were the bourgeois perception of art. The auteur concept was bourgeois romanticism from the very start and thereby...false!"

Anne Jerslev7 compares the styles of the most important directors of these two movements, Lars von Trier and Jean-Luc Godard, concludes that: "like von Trier, Godard has been occupied with the balance between artistic freedom and aesthetics rules and regulations as a creative force in film making. (...) Furthermore, Godard was also interested in reintroducing a kind of back to basics cinematic aesthetics norm. Besides nouvelle vague there are obvious references to Italian neo-realism in Dogme 95 and von Trier mentions neo-realism in his diary as well".

While Roy Armes8 emphases the fact that like Dogme, the French New Wave movies had to be produced in "a particular time and place, filmed on location, not constructed in a studio".

6 2003, p.29. 7 2002, p. 46-47. 8 apud Stevenson, 2003, p. 45.

10 We can also compare the Dogme manifesto with the declaration of the New German Cinema - "The Oberhausen Manifesto"9 - which in its turn, was inspired by the American Underground. The manifesto, issued on February 28th, 1962 by 26 German film makers, proclaimed:

"We declare our intention to create the new German feature film. This new film needs new freedoms. Freedoms from the conventions of the established industry. Freedom from the outside influence of commercial partners. Freedom from the control of special groups. We have concrete intellectual, formal and economic conceptions about the production of the new German film. We are as a collective prepared to take economic risks. The old film is dead. We believe in the new one." Those who have read the Dogme manifesto can probably recognize the call for a new cinema, when the "old film is dead." 4.2.2 - The influence of Avant-garde movements on Lars von Trier's artistic formation: the New German Cinema in general and the German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, in particular, had a significant influence on young von Trier. According to Stevenson10 "years later he [von Tier] would pay Fassbinder something of a tribute by casting one of his actresses, Barbara Sukowa, in Europa11".

Another director with a significant impact on Lars von Trier's art was John Cassavetes, who is considered the father of the "New American Cinema." This impact is particularly significant in the context that "Cassavetes virtually pioneered the technique of the shaky hand-held camera in combination with improvised acting, a kind of style that would become a signature of Dogme."12

4.2.3 - Rebels without cause: another interesting aspect which surfaces as we compare Dogme with other film movements is their different concepts of a "rebel". If three or four decades ago rebel meant "enemy of the system, of the official culture, the 'official cinema'"13, today this word acquires a new meaning in Dogme context:

"The four original Dogme brothers - today's rebels - are by contrast very much products of the system as it exists in Denmark. The System is thrilled with them, the State is thrilled them. Politicians are thrilled with them and love to be photographed with them. They are the products of everything that is institutional about filmmaking in Denmark. They were no drop-puts, they went to school. Six of the first seven Dogme films were made by graduates of the Danish Film

9 in Stevenson, 2003, p. 36-37. 10 2003, p. 37-38. 11 The von Trier's third film, Europa was produced in 1991and, according to Stevenson (2003, p. 60), this movie is "the culmination of the visual style he had first employed in The Element of Crime and the acting style he had experimental within the fictional line of Epidemic", the two first movies of the Europe trilogy. 12 Stevenson (2003, p. 27. 13 Stevenson, 2003, p. 35-36.

11 School. Many of them then went on to make good money shooting commercials. Commercials! Others cut their teeth on the TV series work. All have received grants from the Danish Film Institute and expect to receive more, and they complain loudly when the grants are not big enough. They enter their films like mad in film festivals and win prestigious awards right and left and bask endlessly in the glory". 14 By contrast "the young Americans were not products of film schools, which by and large didn't even exist in the '60s. They received, with very few exceptions, no grant money and they considered film festival competitions to be a travesty and a joke. A corporate ruse..."15

4.2.4 - Commercial Vs non-commercial cinema: on the one hand, Dogme concept was influenced by other avant-garde movements, on the other hand, these other movements had a different understanding of the commercial aspects of cinema. As Stevenson16 mentions, the New American cinema filmmakers "were overwhelmingly engaged in the making of short (hence non commercial) films while Dogme is exclusively concerned with the production of commercial feature films, however experimental some of them might appear".

4.3 LARS VON TRIER'S IMPORTANCE FOR THE CREATION OF DOGME 95

The influence of Lars von Trier’s prior experience on Dogme 95 should not be underestimated. Moreover, it can be said that Dogme 95 is to a great extent creation of Lars von Trier. His whole career has been a sequence of cinematographic experiments. He has been constantly setting rules and then breaking them in order to set new rules. And all his experiments were followed or preceded by manifestos. So, establishment of Dogme 95 by Lars von Trier was anything but unexpected. Even though the original Manifesto and the Vow of Chastity was also signed by the young graduate of the Danish Film School - Thomas Vinterberg, who made the first and probably the best and the most famous Dogme movie - Celebration, Dogme 95 is still the creation of Lars von Trier. This is not to say that without Lars von Trier there would have been no alternative cinema in Denmark at that period. In that situation, under the influence of Hollywood and other factor, some kind of alternative cinema would probably have been created by somebody else, but it certainly would not be Dogme 95. The elements of Dogme could be noticed as early as in the second part of Trier’s first trilogy - Epidemic. A year before writing the Dogme 95 manifesto, Lars von Trier was invited to work on the television project called The Kingdom. Because the format of the movie was rather long, Lars von Trier understood that if he wanted to make this movie he had to change his style. With all his devotion to perfectionism and sophisticated, technically complex movies, he would not be able to do anything with the Kingdom - there

14 Stevenson, 2003, p. 35-36. 15 Stevenson, 2003, p. 36. 16 2003, p. 36.

12 was not enough time. “Dictated by outside conditions- a long script which could not be realised in the normal way within the time frame available to the Kingdom- he decided to abandon his usual time-consuming professional care and instead leave such delaying factors as lighting, point of view, composition and picture quality to chance.17 ” The result was not yet Dogme, but many aspects of Dogme were present in this movie. The Kingdom was a big success, which probably proved to Lars von Trier that the audience is not very concerned with the technical perfection of the film as far as the story and the characters are engaging and interesting. One year after the Kingdom came out, Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg wrote the Dogme 95 Manifesto and signed the Vow of Chastity. Why should Lars von Trier be given big credit for creating the Dogme 95 manifesto? - Because after having made such a technically sophisticated movie as Europa, he gave up the tools which were most important to him- if before he would spend tens of hours on lights, colours, effects, now he rejected all of it and launched a new experiment.

But the question is: why did Lars von Trier need to invent Dogme? In fact, as already mentioned before, he only made one pure Dogme movie - Idiots. Movies made before and after the Idiots were not created as Dogme movies, even though they followed some of the rules from the Vow of Chastity (mostly the rule concerning the hand-held camera). So, if Lars von Trier had an artistic need to find a new way of creating films, then why did not he follow it to the end? If he wanted to experiment, why did he have to create a whole movement for that? If he wanted to get funding for making commercial movies, then we should not forget two aspects: 1) if anybody could get funding from Danish Film Institute for his movies, then Lars von Trier was one of the most likely ones, it was usually not a problem for him to get funding from Danish Film Institute; 2) it's probable that he wanted to create commercially viable and attractive movies and “market” them through attaching Dogme label. But hoping for Idiots to become a relatively commercial movie would be rather unreasonable and that should have been very clear for Lars von Trier even before he started working on that movie. So, having said that Dogme 95 to a great extend was the child of Lars von Trier, the following question still remains unanswered: what did he need it for? Why did he have to invent Dogme 95?

4.4 THE INFLUENCE OF DANISH FILM SCHOOL ON THE CREATION OF DOGME 95

One more factor that must have had at least some indirect influence on Dogme 95 was the Danish Film School. Almost all Danish directors, who made Dogme movies, (with the exception of Søren Kragh Jacobsen) are the graduates of Danish Film School. The school, established in 1966, gained new energy in 1975 when Henning Camre was appointed headmaster. In Henning Camre’s vision the Danish Film School had to be committed to educating a new generation of Danish filmmakers, which would not just follow the mainstream and would look for new ways: "we wanted to remake the world and educate a generation of people who would go out and renew things...create a new industry, because at that time there wasn't so much happening on the

17 Jack Stevenson, "Dogme Uncut"

13 film front…it was not just about being absorbed into the existing film milieu, it was more that you should have the gust to go out and do something new…We did not want to educate a bunch of functionaries.18” This vision has clearly been put in practice as almost all the Danish directors, who made Dogme movies, including Lars von Trier himself, were the graduates of Danish Film School. The group/team spirit, encouraged by the Danish Film Institute is also apparent in Dogme movement: Dogme 95 is a “collective of directors.” This is not a mere word on paper, Dogme brothers, even though they are so different from each other, worked together, supported each other, gave feedback on each other’s films and even got involved in a common project D- Day, which was a television experiment broadcast on the first day of the new millennium. While speaking of the Danish Film School, we should also mention the influence of the famous Danish script writer and professor at Danish Film School- Mogens Rukov on his students. According to Rukov, who later supervised writing of scripts for several Dogme movies, the director should "free himself from the script19" in order to take advantage of the opportunities of showing the reality through improvisation. The influence of this philosophy can be noticed in Dogme movement, which highly encourages improvisation: in almost every Dogme movie, improvisation is an important part of the “search for truth.” (Interestingly enough, Idiots is the very Dogme movie, which has followed script very closely and the final version of the movie almost does not divert from the script at all. However, the movie making process involved a lot of improvisation and it helped the actors to better understand their parts).

4.5 PARADOXICAL ASPECTS OF DOGME 95

4.5.1 Finding freedom and creativeness through restrictions

According to Dogme brothers, the major idea behind the Dogme concept is giving a way to artistic creativeness through certain self-imposed restrictions: when an artist is forced to comply to certain rules which do not allow him to use many techniques and effects he is accustomed to, he starts thinking in a different way and somehow these restrictions help to bring out his creativeness. For the founders and followers of Dogme 95 it was a run-away from heavy machinery, from the complicated film-making process, a way of "dusting off", finding artistic freedom, "undressing the movie", going back to "primitive cinema", giving extreme freedom to artist, so that the movie making process was no longer a hard and stressful process, but a source of joy and happiness. But, is not it paradoxical that in order to free yourself and turn the movie-making into an enjoyable process, you have to set certain restrictions for yourself? Does the Vow of Chastity really give freedom to the director? Take for example, rule #2: “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).” Does this rule really give

18 Jack Stevenson, " Dogme Uncut," p.161 19 Jack Stevenson, "Dogme Uncut," p. 200

14 artistic freedom to the director? On the one hand it means that there can be no added sound to the film, which we can say was meant to keep out all the artificial elements, but it also meant problems during post- production, because the director is unable to edit the audio and on many occasions it results in jump-cuts either in video or in audio. Is that a way of showing the reality? Rule #1 states: “Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found).” Yes, we understand that the goal of this rule is to make sure that the Dogme movie only shows reality and bringing in props is artificial, but does fiction film really show reality? If you can make up a story and bring in the actors to play it, it is no longer reality, it’s a fictional story. So to some degree it’s a paradox that the director, making a feature film, is not allowed to bring in the props.

4.5.2. Restrictions on the use of aesthetics

At the end of the Vow of Chastity the Dogme brothers make the following pledge: “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 available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations.20” We find that this statement, as many other things about Dogme 95 is rather paradoxical: is it possible to make a film without aesthetics? Even the choice of the subject depends on the director’s aesthetics and taste, not to say anything about the way he shows the story, the shots he chooses, the sequence in which he edits, etc. So, considering all this, it is rather paradoxical to pledge, especially for a director with such an individual and outstanding style as Lars von Trier, not to follow any kind of aesthetics.

4.5.3 Rejection of individual cinema

The Dogme brothers are revolting against “certain tendencies” in cinema, the most important tendency being individualism: “Slogans of individualism and freedom created works for a while, but no changes. The wave was up for grabs, like the directors themselves. The wave was never stronger than the men behind it. The anti-bourgeois cinema itself became bourgeois, because 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!21” Before explaining why the last statement is paradoxical, let's have a look at the definition of the word "individual" - a) marked by or expressing individuality; distinctive or individualistic;

20 The Vow of Chastity; www.dogme95.dk 21 The Manifesto; www.dogme95.dk

15 b) Special; particular; c) Serving to identify or set apart; Therefore, individual movie could be understood as a movie that is made by a director with individualistic viewpoint, with his own aesthetics, somebody who stands out of the mainstream by his style. So, on the one hand Dogme concept is against individualism, and on the other hand, Lars von Trier’s movies are a perfect example of individualistic movie, e.g. a movie like Idiots could only be made by a director with extremely individual style and viewpoint. The Manifesto further claims that: “Today a technological storm is raging, the result of which will be the ultimate democratisation of the cinema. For the first time, anyone can make movies. But the more accessible the media becomes, the more important the avant-garde, It is no accident that the phrase “avant-garde” has military connotations. Discipline is the answer ... we must put our films into uniform, because the individual film will be decadent by definition!22” Two paradoxes here: 1) according to the manifesto due to the "technological storm" any person, no matter whether he has enough talent or no, can make a movie now and this is interpreted as a negative development. But in purely technical and practical terms, is not it easier for somebody just to get a camera and make a Dogme movie than make a mainstream movie?! 2) At the end of the manifesto the Dogme brothers declare that "Predictability (dramaturgy) has become the golden calf around which we dance23." But is it possible to make a movie without dramaturgy? In fact, the narration in the first Dogme movie, Celebration, (which is often considered the best Dogme movie), closely follows the narration style and principles of classical drama.

4.5.4 "Purity" before "Purity"

"Finally the purity and clarity is obtained! Here there is nothing to hide the reality under a suffocating layer of "art" ...no trick is too unfair, no mode of conveyance to cheap, no effect too tasteless,24"- this is an abstract from the third manifesto by Lars von Trier, published on December 29, 1990 before the release of his new movie "Europa." 5 years after this manifesto he created Dogme 95, aimed at finding purity in film again. So this is another paradox: if by 1990 Lars von Trier had already made a "pure" movie, in which there was "nothing to hide the reality under a suffocating layer of "art"25, then why did he have to create another movement in five years, aimed at searching purity in cinema? And another question: if Dogme 95 was the purity of cinema, then why did Lars von Trier make only one Dogme movie (Idiots)?

4.5.5. Camera movements

22 The Manifesto; www.dogme95.dk 23 The Vow of Chastity; www.dogme95.dk 24 Jack Stevenson, "Dogme Uncut," p.283 25 Jack Stevenson, "Dogme Uncut" p.284

16

Shaky hand-held camera with fast movements has become a Dogme trademark to such an extent, that many people do not consider e.g. "Mifune" or "Italian for Beginners" to be real Dogme movies, because they have more steady shots and relaxed camera movements. According to the Vow of Chastity Dogme movies should be made with hand-held camera, and “any movement or mobility attainable in the hand is permitted26.” But it’s one thing to say that unsteady movements are acceptable and it's a totally different thing to perceive these movements as an essential characteristic of Dogme movies. Does this mean that the real nature of Dogme movies is not fully explained in the manifesto and the Vow of Chastity?

26 The Vow of Chastity, www.dogme95.dk

17 CHAPTER 5: ANALYSIS OF THE FIRST FOUR DANISH DOGME MOVIES

5.1 DOGME # 1: DRAMA AND SUCCESS IN CELEBRATION

PLOT

The first Dogme film by Thomas Vinterberg's, The Celebration (Festen), was produced in 1998 and is about a patriarch's 60th birthday celebration. The film focuses on the great celebration of the 60’s anniversary of Helge Klingenfeldt-Hansen, patriarch of a high class family, which is composed of him, his wife Else, and four grown-up children: Christian, Linda, Helene and Michael. After the first sequences we learn about the family tragedy: Linda, the twin sister of Christian, has recently committed a suicide. Soon terrible family secrets are revealed.

NARRATION

The movie follows the style of classical Greek drama27 due to the fact that the action takes place at a single location, during a short period of time (less than 24 hours). Therefore, The Celebration can be defined as a genre movie and it can be concluded that this movie breaks the Dogme rule number eight, which determines that genre movies are not allowed in Dogme concept. As Stevenson states, 28"the film works as pure melodrama."

Development of the Narration

The Celebration has a classical narrative in the sense that the story presents a problem that needs to be solved. The problem is exposed unexpectedly at the beginning and it means the confrontation between Christian and his father to find out who is the one who is saying the truth. As a classical narration, the story can have two endings: a "happy" one (the father gets the punishment and the Christian is believed by everyone) and a "sad" one (Christian is considered as a liar and mad person while the father gets everyone's confidence). What makes us consider it as a happy or a sad ending is given by the point of view suggested by the director and we'll talk about that in the point of view chapter at the end of the analysis. Continuing with the narration and, as it happens with the classical one, all the movie keeps the viewer wondering: What will happen in the end? As the story evolves, the problem seems to become bigger and bigger due to the appearance of new sources of tension such as the arrival of a black man at a house, full of racist and

27 LAURIDSEN, Palle Schantz. "The Celebration: classical drama and docu soap style," p. 64. 28 Jack Stevenson, "Dogme Uncut," p. 86

18 hypocrite people, reading out Linda's suicide letter, the incapacity of the guess to leave the place.... After that, the story reaches the climax, also called the turning point, when the problem will finally be solved or not. We place this moment when the father is being hit by Michael. That's when he finally admits having abused his kids and shows them how dirty and regretful he feels. SETS

Environmental Space: technical resources to introduce the audience to the story

The movie is developed in the present although some of the scenes intend to relate the past. As we know, the rule number 7 forbids Temporal and geographical alienation. What the director does here so that he does not break this rule and to keep this feeling of something that happened in the past is reconstruct these past scenes with present scenes always being coherent with the present context. For instance:

ƒ The scene when Helge is playing with his grandchildren; it could be a record of Christian’s childhood or one of his brothers. ƒ The suicide of Linda: it is represented at the beginning of the film. Before the party starts, the following actions go on simultaneously in different rooms: Pia is taking a bath and she is lying inside the bath tube, all covered with water. At one moment it could even see that she is drown herself, because her face is covered with water and then she suddenly submerges from the water. At this moment Christian is holding a glass with water and is looking at it. While at the same time Michael is also taking shower and slips down on the soap. Finally, Helene and the receptionist are in her room, Helene is finding the signs that her sister left and she asks Lars (the receptionist) to lie inside the bath. By this way, the suicide of Linda, which occurred in the past, is presented with different images in the present. By this mixture of images happening at the same time but in different rooms we, not only understand how all it happened without needing an oral explanation or a flashback, but also we are communicated how Linda's brothers and sister experience on subconscious level and from different angles the suicide of their sister. The way they experience is also telling us about the way of being and the way of reacting of these characters due to the fact that each character experience it in a different way: Michael shouts loud and complains blaming his wife after he slips down on the soap, Christian looks carefully and quietly the glass of water without saying a word and Helene explodes emotionally when she finds the letter.

Referential Space: time and space where the film is developed

19

The story is located apparently in a hotel somewhere in the countryside near Copenhagen. The entire movie is developed in less than 24 hours: the day of the party, since the guests arrive to the house, the whole night until the next morning. The hotel is big and is full of dormitories as the family is full of lies and secrets. The luxury of the hotel symbolizes that even the things that look so brilliant from outside can hide terrible things when

you get inside them. No matter the money you have or the appearance you have if you are not satisfied with yourself and with your acts. You will not be happy because of the money you have. These enormous rooms with high ceilings made possible for the director to show the family and the guests from a high point of view (as it is shown in the picture above) and showing them little and insignificant stressing their lack of values and morality as hypocrites. We also found a symbolic meaning of the kitchen after reading the article of Zik Staav29 that says: "The kitchen serves as the nerve centre from which the controversy is orchestrated". His father goes down to the kitchen and ironically asks him: "Are you ok? Are there any problems? Is there a criminal here? Is it necessary to call the police?" Afterwards and with the idea of sorry his father, Christian comes back to the dinning room and starts to talk again. But he changes his mind right on the moment and instead, he accuses his father as the murderer of his sister and he talks about the sexual abuse which Helge made with him and his sister in his childhood.

THEMES

The main themes in this movie are:

ƒ Incest: The Celebration's script was based in a anonymous confession on a radio program about incest, when a "man, Allan (a pseudonym), told of the sexual abuse he and his twin sister, Pernille, had suffered as children at the hands of their father - traumatic events that eventually drove Pernille to suicide" 30 In seven weeks, Vinterberg wrote the script: "Allan becomes Christian, who returns from success abroad - he owns several restaurants in Paris - to attend the family reunion, and, on behalf of his dead sister, to confront the evil secret that left the family fractured and dysfunctional"31. ƒ Family relationship: for instance, the conflict between son and father. This theme is very common in mythologies; for example in Greek mythology there are so many stories on sons revolting against their fathers. Thus, this is one more parallel to the Greek tragedy and the classical narration/story.

29 Zik Staav: "The Semiotics of Camera Movement in Dogme95, as exemplified by Festen," 2005. 30 Jack Stevenson, "Dogme Uncut," p. 83 31 ibid , p. 84

20 ƒ Humiliation and revenge: this theme appears as a consequence of these bad family relationships. ƒ Hypocrisy: not only from the behavior of the guests, but also from Else (the mother), who shows a false faith towards her husband. She seems to be supporting him until the end of the days but, when she sees that the guests get distanced of him, she does it too. She always does what the people expects her to do and fights in order to keep up the appearance .We perceive this behavior in the last scene, when everybody is having breakfast and the guilty father is asked to leave the table. He looks at her begging her to go with him in that difficult moment but she stays and smiles towards the guests. ƒ Racism: racist behavior among the high class society. Everybody despises the boyfriend of Helene because he is black and American, and they demonstrate it with a racist song they sing during the dinner without caring about his presence. All of these guests, including some members of the family, are always looking for their own benefit. ƒ Infidelity and sex discrimination inside the family (Michael is unfaith and male chauvinist with his wife) ƒ Suicide: as a consequence of a rich full of lies life. ƒ Heavy drinking: soft and common in society drugs that citizens use to forget about the problems in their daily life. It can be taken as an ironic way of give a bad image of the life style of the high society. ƒ The superiority feeling of the family towards the servants: Michael hits and humiliates one of the maids and talk to the receptionist disrespectfully.

ANALYSIS OF THE REPRESENTATION In this section we will analyse the visual elements and discuss how the content is presented by the form.

Enumeration of the different types of shots

ANGLE OF VISION

Introductory shots: This shot is used when Helge opens the door towards the dinning room; the camera starts from the back of Helge, and then the shot is opened to show a wider view. Here this shot acts as a warming one. It symbolizes that the doors of the family secrets are going to be opened soon and the “skeletons are let out of the closet!".

Establishing shots: we find this kind of shots when the hotel where the birthday party takes place is presented. It is also used to show the gardens of the house. It has descriptive and locating meanings.

21 Long shot: it is possible to find this kind of shot in the first scene of the movie, when Christian is walking towards his father’s celebration; he is coming back to the past, to the old records that he has in his mind. Medium shot: these shots are used to emphasize the actions of the actors, especially in tension moments where the characters are moving. Close-up: those are used to identify certain movements or important places in the movie, for example showing Christian’s hands during the first conversation with his father in the movie. From the movements of his hands, it is possible to notice how nervous he is: something is going to happen. We also find these close shots of the mouth of Helene when she is reading her sister's letter. That emphasizes the meaning and the forcefulness of the words. In addiction, they are also frequently used for guests or main characters. These illustrate the feelings of people in a very deep and intimate way. Extreme close-up: they are used to point up the facial expressions of the actors. It is also used to give a special meaning to simple things: for example when Helene and one of the servants are in Linda’s room, looking for any signal which can help to clarify the reason of her death. They find different signals and draws with the shape of a fish, arrows and, finally, a letter written by Linda.

PLASTIC CHARACTERISTICS

Ghost shot: several times in the movie, it is noticeable a slow movement of the curtain; this might mean the presence of Linda’s spirit, who has come back to seek revenge on her father’s 60’s anniversary.

Composite shots: Two actions are shown in the same shot. For instance, when Helge faces for first time the guests, he is looking at the people who are singing the birthday song, and behind his head is Christian (it seems natural that he is standing close to his father). Afterwards, Pia goes to Christian and asks for the keys of his room. Therefore, two actions and two sub-stories are shown at the same time.

Slow motion: there is a shot in slow motion. It belongs to the scene where Linda's letter is found by Helene. This slow motion shot empowers the sad feeling of the moment and the dramatic sense of the scene. It also adds aesthetics to the scene. Regarding the Vow of Chastity which says: "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 considerations32" and, considering that no temporal alienation is allowed we could say that the movie breaks the rule number 7. On the other hand, the shot is quite short and it is not only aesthetics what it creates but it also fits perfectly with the feelings the actors are suffering, so we could consider it as a way of forcing the truth of the characters through an artificial tool: editing. That still goes against Dogme concept of cinema; it is a way of enlarging a short close: it is temporal alienation. MONTAGE AND SOUND

32 The Vow of Chastity, www.dogme95.dk

22

The editing style adds a lot to the dynamics of the movie, especially at the beginning, when we constantly jump from one situation to another. There are three different actions happening at the same time and we can see what everybody is doing. Although the happenings are taking place at the same time, they are presented consecutively. We must remember that not many editing tools are allows as, for example, splitting up the screen to show actions that are happening at the same time together. This is a very dynamic montage that makes us get the feeling that we are there and we are witnessing everything. Respecting the rule about the temporal alienation, the movie is edited in order chronological.

SOUND

ƒ Conversations: It is characterized by the dialogues of the different actors. They could be real or unreal; for example, when Linda appears in Christian’s dreams although she is dead. ƒ The music: There is music from a piano located in one of the rooms of the hostel. It is, therefore, diagetic music because it belongs to the action that is being presented. It is used two times. In the first one it is used as a tool to calm the people after the father has been discovered and the guests are indigenized. Is a weapon to entertain them and not let them think about the information they have been provided with. "Just play a nice song"- orders one of the characters from the family to the musician. The second time the piano is used is when some of the "good characters" (Helene, Pia, Christian, and Helene's boyfriend) are together in the living room, awake in the night trying to forget about the circumstances. Once again, the music coming from the piano is used to calm and make the characters not to think. There is also music that comes from a source in the shot when the guests are dancing in the celebration. ƒ The silence: It tries to illustrate poetically and reflexively the exposition of the actors, mainly in moments of sadness or supposed happiness.

CAMERA MOVEMENTS

We want to stress that the camera movements in this movie are especially original and suggestive. They are many of them and they are very different. Some of them are especially interesting in the form and, although they are meaningful, they contribute strongly in the creation of aesthetics:

Following pan: there is a very interesting pan in the beginning of the film that follows one of the cars entering the hostel estate from a low point of view. The camera is located behind the house's entrance railing and focuses the car, which is situated in the right side of the screen. The car goes from the right side to the left side and the camera follows it wit a very fast movement. The horizontal pan comes together with a

23 vertical pan and ends up in the same static way it started with but, in this case, in the other side of the railing. The camera movements are sharp and violent, as it is the movement of the car. We interpret it as a warning: "these people don't know what they are going to find inside, they are going to be badly surprised". Although the camera moves extremely fast, the car is all the time in focus and perfectly visible, that is why the eye of the viewer does not get lost and follows the car without problems.

Traveling: It is used to follow continued actions; for example, when Christian proposes a drink in honor of his father, and the camera runs fast to shot the face expressions of Helge, who is nervous, waiting for Christian speech. It is also relevant the shot where the guests are dancing and the dancing of the couple made by Helene and her boyfriend is followed by the camera. In this scene, there is no discordance between the movement of the camera and the movement of the couple. This soft sensation was actually achieved by making Helene's boyfriend hold the camera and shoot themselves with the arm extended. Aesthetically is a very beautiful scene and it makes the action to focuses on their good relation instead of on the rest of the guests.

RHYTHM

In this movie the rhythm is provided mostly by the intense of the story, the camera movements, the different angles and the montage. The presentation of different situations at the same time, the composite shots where more that one action are shown, the diagetic scenes related with the past, many original and coherent movements of camera and angles of view make the rhythm be coherent with each lived situation In that way, the rhythm is action- packed when the situation is full of anxiety and stress. Nevertheless, the tension is kept during the entire movie, even if the situation is not stressful.

POINT OF VIEW

The Celebration could be seen from different points of view. One of them, and perhaps the most important, is the omniscient point of view; basically the way how the movie is told by the director (he is like an observer, who shows to the audience a family conflict using documentary aesthetics, taking into account that Dogme films try to resemble reality. Sometimes, the actions can also be seen from Linda's perspective. When the curtain moves closer to the camera it seems like she is present viewing everything that is happening. But in the end, the director makes the viewer to be in one side of the two parts: Christians. That is what makes the audience believe that is Christian who is saying the truth and make the audience hate the father. It

24 is clearly a subjective point of view and that is finally what make us consider which one is the happy end and which one is not.

CHARACTERS

In this movie the main characters could represent, according to Stevenson33 archetypes of the society, as, for example: the father is the "establishment", Christian is the "expatriate", the mother is the "silent majority", and Helene represents the "politically correct intellectual" and Michael the "lower classes".

MAIN CHARACTERS

Christian: he was very close to his twin sister, Linda, who killed herself in one of the room of the hotel a couple of months before her father's sixties anniversary. Christian has always had a vivid imagination and his mental state has always been fragile. He has been committed to various asylums on several occasions. He is a qualified chef, and now he has a restaurant in France, where he is enormously successful. As a consequence of the problems in his childhood, Christian

is a lonely person, introversive and insecure. But the night of the great celebration, he will have the courage to confront his father. Helge: he is the head of the family, a respected pride strict and dominant man, whom has always the control of the power. He has invited his family and friends to his 60 years old birthday celebration. He has no idea that the evening his life will change that way. He goes from being the host of the celebration, a person who everyone admires, to be the spotlight of all the bad critics.

Else: she is Helge’s wife. She has a non-confrontational personality. Therefore, she covers up even the most painful events made by her husband. For Helge, she is the perfect wife, docile, affective, and over all faithful. She has always defended him, even against her own children but with diplomacy, trying not to give a bad image. She wants to be seen as a calm, intelligent,

sweet, strong and nice woman. She would never abandon Helge unless her appearance is at risk. In that case, she will act as the rest of the high class people expect her to act. Helene: she is the wild girl, the sister who does everything as she pleases. She lives a full of pleasure life, traveling a lot, and switching boyfriends at brief intervals. The death of Linda affected her seriously, and now she decides to spend the night in her dead sister's old room. She is an emotive person, and when she found out the reason of the death of her sister, she got

completely confused and did not know how to act. At the end of the celebration night and, after

33 Jack Stevenson, "Dogme Uncut," p.84-85

25 an emotional strong crisis, she decided to unveil her father's acts. Michael: he is the youngest brother, the trouble-maker who never really made anything of himself. He was trained very young as chef but he dropped out. Later, he was sent away to a boarding school and some years after, he boarded a training ship, which he did not finish either. He is married and he has three children. He is used to be unfaithful to his wife. He had a relationship with one of the hotel’s maid. It is remarkable to mention these sun glasses that

Michael wears at the beginning of the movie. In a symbolical meaning, he is hiding from the reality behind them when he can no longer keep his family's name clear and when he does not want to recognize who they are and what they do.

SUPPORTING CHARACTERS

Pia: she is one of the maids of the hotel. She has been in love with Christian since she was in the high school, but she’s been always unlucky. She is on scene whenever Christian needs something, without asking. At the end, she will be rewarded. Mette: she is Michael’s wife. Her marriage is full of conflicts. Even though she does not like the attitudes of her husband, she remains always faith along with. Her life is a mixture of feelings, hatred and love, sort of masochism and resignation. Master of ceremonies: He is an old friend of the family; Helge asked him to play as the Master of ceremonies for the celebration. This character tries to keep the calm when the conflict starts. Stevenson34 believes that this character "represents the EU archetype" because "he is smooth, friendly and efficient; he wants to take over the family, to act as spokesman for the family". Gbartokai: he is the American black Helene's boyfriend and he doesn't speak Danish. Therefore, he represents the "outsider", the "immigrant".35

34 2003, p. 86. 35 Stevenson, 2003, p. 86.

26

5.2 DOGME #2: CHALLENGE AND DEVIANCE IN THE IDIOTS

PLOT

In spring 1997 Lars von Trier started his Dogme movie, the Dogme#2: The Idiots (Idioterne). This is the second film of the trilogy called "Gold Hearted", which was inspired by a story which von Trier had read in his childhood. The story tells about a little girl, who is ready to sacrifice herself to help the others. But the main narrative in Lars von Trier's film is about a group of eleven people who live in Holte, a suburban town north of Copenhagen, and pretend to be retarded through spassing behaviour in public and private places.

NARRATION

The narrative in The Idiots does not follow the classical Hollywood style and the movie does not have a clearly identified conflict. Because three different storylines are incorporated in the narration, it is difficult to say exactly what the movie is about.

Development of the Narration

Karen's storyline: In the first scenes the movie presents Karen, a lonely woman walking in Copenhagen. After the first shots we see her go a restaurant, where she meets Stoffer (one of the members of the "idiot" group). Until this moment, the spectator doesn't know much about who Karen is and what her story is. During her brief encounter with Stoffer we realize that she is shy and emotionally fragile. Throughout the whole movie Karen's character stays enigmatic and the viewer still does not know what has happened to her before meeting the group. In fact, Karen's storyline is brought out only at the end of the movie, when the viewer finally understands why Karen followed the "idiot" group: she lost her new-born baby and left her family the day before the baby's funeral. In the end, when Karen temporarily returns home, we see that the relations inside her family are rather repressive.

Group storyline: The deviant group is presented to the spectator in the first sequences at the restaurant, where we see several members of the "idiot" group behave provocatively with the other customers in the restaurant. But at first the viewer does not exactly understand whether or not they are really idiots. In the following sequence, in the taxi, it becomes clear that they are only pretending to be idiots. When they arrive in a large house in Holte, and more members of the group are introduced to us, we start realising that there

27 is a specific reason behind their spassing behaviour. It is a kind of provocation, a challenge to the outside world, a protest against social conventions. However, it is not explicitly stated what he group aims to achieve with this kind of behaviour.

Interview storyline: Throughout the movie the director randomly inserts interviews with the characters. Lars von Trier is questioning the actors himself, but he stays behind the camera all the time, so we can only hear his voice. He interviews only the members of the "idiot" group; Karen is left outside of the interview storyline. To some degree, this storyline is connected with the second storyline and serves as a kind of documentary about the "idiot" project. But, the question is, why did the director have to insert this storyline in the movie? Are the interviews adding anything to the feeling of reality in the movie?

SETS

The main set in the Idiots is a large house, where the group lives. The action in the house demonstrates that the "spassing" behaviour takes place in two different contexts: in private and public spheres. Private places: What does it mean for the group members to "spass" in a private place? On the one hand Christensen36 believes that the group spasses in the large house "to prevent reality's intrusion on the spasser project and to maintain the collective's benefits." A remarkable spassing scene takes place during the "idiot" party in the house, when the group members take off clothes and start an orgy. The only character, which does not participate in the scene, is Karen. On the other hand, Karen's "spassing" behaviour in the apartment of her family appears as an intrusive action: as Karen decides to spass at the table as the whole family is having coffee, her husband slaps her in the face. Public places: The "idiot" group members also "spass" in public places, such as a restaurant, factory, bar, streets, park, etc. The action in these places represents an ideological critique against the established social system and conventions. The swimming pool scene is a good example of such behaviour: after the group "spasses" in the pool, Stoffer goes to the lady's shower room and has an erection there.

PHOTOGRAPHY, LIGHT AND COLOUR

- The quality of image in Idiots makes it look like a home-video. - The photography in Idiots does not strive to bring out and emphasize the beauty. There is no aesthetics to attract the viewer.

36 2000, p. 45.

28 - In the final scenes that take place in the apartment of Karen's family, we can see the consequence of the Dogme rule which forbids the use of extra light: there is a clear contrast between the natural light coming from the window and the artificial light indoors. The apartment acquires a dark ambiance, which once again emphasizes the repressive character of Karen's family relationships (that we are about to witness in the next sequences, culminating in Karen's "spassing" behaviour).

THEMES

The Idiots explores the themes of social deviance and repressive values represented in the bourgeois society. In this sense, it has connections with films like Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966), François Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 (1966) and Marco Ferreri's La Grand Bouffe (1973). These movies explore similar themes about deviant groups within the society. At the same time, the Idiots was inspired by a Danish movie "Weekend" (Palle Kjærulff-Schmidt, 1962). The story of Weekend is set in a Danish summer house. Just like idiots, it was sot on the location. The film is about a group of friends (three married couples and a bachelor) who are spending the weekend together. According to Stevenson37, Weekend "came as a shock to viewers; its narrative structure was episodic and unorthodox and its treatment of sex was frank and 'adult.' Moreover, Weekend was one of the first examples of the French New Wave's influence on the Danish cinema.

Another theme that Idiots explores is the film-making process itself. To some degree, this is a documentary within fiction, or fiction within documentary, as the director is interviewing the characters and the interviews are inserted throughout the movie. Idiots is a highly experimental movie, an attempt to test new approach and to see how far the director can go in his experiment. To some extent, it is also an attempt to present reality (not represent).

ANALYSIS OF THE REPRESENTATION

Enumeration of the different types of shots The most important technical elements in Idiots are the following: close-ups, out of focus shots and camera movements. Hand-held camera is constantly moving; the images are shaky and therefore create an intrusive atmosphere.

ANGLE OF VISION

- Low and High angle: the scene of Jeppe's spassing on the top of a ramp starts with a high angle shot. He is preparing to slide down the ramp in order to prove his spassing ability to the group. In the next sequence,

37 2003, p. 47.

29 the camera is already behind him and we see Jeppe in a low-angle shot as he descends down the hill. Due to the cuts in the editing, the viewer can not see the whole movement. With the use of jump-cuts the director gives priority to showing the importance of the action, rather than the realistic representation of the action. The jump-cuts are probably used to emphasize the changing feelings, characteristic of the spassing behaviour.

DEPTH

Close-up shots: After Karen tries to talk with her husband on the telephone, she starts crying and Susanne consoles her. The close-up shows Karen's suffering and desperateness and Susane's efforts to comfort her. This shot is a perfect example of a close-up used in expressive function.

PLASTIC CHARACTERISTICS

- Out of focus shots: Out of focus shots is a recurrent tool in Dogme movies, but Idiots uses these kinds of shots more frequently than other Dogme movies do. It also uses this technique with a different meaning. e.g. in the King is Alive out of focus shots are used to imply the unreal, dreamy world of the ghost who is observing the tourists, trapped in the desert; In Idiots out of focus shots have no such function, rather, they emphasize and enhance camera movements: the camera is constantly moving, shaking, following the characters, trying to be where the action is, and finding the focus after the shot is established only seems very natural in this context: in many cases the cameraman, who is always following the action, has to adjust the focus on its way, while it is already showing the object or action, without having any time to do the preparations in advance. In fact, this reminds us of newsreel footage of an event that unfolds unexpectedly and therefore cameramen do not have time or possibility to think about the quality, so the shots are out of focus, poorly framed, shaky, etc. But due to the significance of the event, the quality of the footage does not matter: all TV stations will readily use the footage due to its importance. So out of focus shots in Idiots are part of the general concept in the movie, they are part of the search for truth, or rather, an attempt to show the reality, to create a feeling that the camera is just observing or witnessing the real story.

- Other aspects: Several times throughout the movie the cameraman, camera or the boom microphone "accidentally" get into the shot. This aspect emphasized the boundaries between fiction and documentary, one of the main themes of the Idiots. In the interview sections we hear the interviewer's voice and even see the characters wearing clip microphones; this once again reinforces the documentary tone in the film.

30

MONTAGE

Three storylines are edited in a single narrative to create a feeling of realism. However, Christensen38 believes that the story in the Idiots is far from the viewer, because Idiots is an "unbearable" film to watch: "Simultaneously and contradictorily, The Idiots draws the spectator into the film’s universe, making it a very intense (and warm) film to watch. The use of the home video style minimizes the distance between the story and the telling of the story in that the position of enunciation becomes, if not equivalent to, then very close to that of the spectator."

Even though the chronological line of events is not broken in scenes, the editing style is not concerned with continuity. This is demonstrated through the use of jump-cuts, changes in the action line and other techniques, making the editing style harsh in many cases lacking smooth transitions.

Reverse angle shot: In the conversation scenes instead of using the classical reverse angle shots, the director uses fast pan to move from one speaker to another. This technique reinforces the naturalistic tone and tries to establish proximity between the viewer and the story.

Sound: following the second Dogme rule,39 sound in Idiots is diagetic. In the initial scene of Karen riding in a coach, the spectator can hear an instrumental sound: it comes from the musician who is placed behind the cameraman. The same technique is used in other sequences: any time the director wants to use music, he brings in musicians who are playing at the same time as the story develops.

CAMERA MOVEMENTS

In some cases the film's style tries to be emotional - for example, when it is exploring Karen's character and showing her vulnerability. The camera establishes close and intimate relationship with the characters mostly by constantly following them. This technique produces complicity between the camera and the viewer's eyes.

Camera movements following the characters: In this movie the camera acts as a guide for viewers. Camera movements are needed to follow the action, but most of the times we find that excessive use of camera movements can be exhausting for the viewers.

38 2000, p. 35. 39 The sound must never be produced apart from the images, or vice versa.

31 Static shots: In the interview storyline we see more static and focused shots than in other storylines. These shots are so different from the rest of the movie that we even get a feeling that Lars von Trier didn't use hand-held camera while shooting the interviews. TEMPO / RHYTHM

The camera movements contribute to the creation of particularly dynamic rhythm within the movie. The dynamics is further enhanced by the interaction of three different storylines within the same narrative: Karen's story, group's "spassing" behaviour and interviews. Tempo acquires a special importance for the perception of Idiots.

POINT OF VIEW

The movie is presented from the observer's point of view. The filmmaker assumes the role of the narrator who is shooting about a "spassing" group. But the narrator is not just an observer. He becomes also an omniscient character who interviews the characters.

CHARACTERS

Lars von Trier cast only Danish actors in this movie. Following the Dogme rule number six, which forbids any kind of superficial action in the movie, he wanted to achieve intense performance (even real sex scenes). In this sense, the film was a challenge for the cast, as well as for von Trier himself.

Karen

She is calm, and, at the same time, vulnerable. Her personal story is not clear to the spectator until the end of the movie. In the movie Karen's character assumes the role of Guld Hjerte40. During the narration development Karen has a linear behaviour without deep changes. Only at the end of the movie we can see the dramatic turning point in Karen's behaviour, when, faced with the repressive family situation she decides to spass and to leave her family.

Stoffer

40 However, is not clear the Karen's sacrifice as is clear the Bess's sacrifices in Breaking the Waves or Selma's sacrifices in Dancer in the Dark (the other two movies of the "Gold Hearted trilogy")

32 He is the leader of the "idiot" group. He is also the one who invites Karen to the group. In the beginning Stoffer is more provocative and aggressive, but after his violent outburst, when the group members had to literarily tie him to the table, he calms down and his character looses the previous charisma and aggression.

Susanne She is one of the group members who don't spass, because she only wants to take care of the "spassers" when they go outside. So, her behaviour is maternal.

Nana

She doesn't have an idiot behaviour, rather she is acting more in an eccentric way (e.g. when she puts mayonnaise in her naked body instead of the sun-screen lotion).

Jeppe and Josephine

Jeppe and Josephine develop a close relationship and after Josephine's father arrives to take back his daughter, Jeppe feels very affected and desperate.

Other members of the "idiot" group

Most of the times they follow Stoffer´s instructions. We don't get a clear idea about what each of them hopes to achieve with spassing behaviour.

People with Down's syndrome

These characters are retarded in reality. Their encounter with the "idiot" group brings a crisis to the "spassing" identity.

The interviewer

He is a kind of omniscient character, an observer who is filming the "idiot" project. The spectator can only hear his voice, when he is questioning the members of the "idiot" group.

33 5.3: DOGME # 3: THE PAST AND THE FUTURE IN MIFUNE:

PLOT

Kresten lives in Copenhagen, in the yuppie world of the city. His future looks brilliant until he receives an unexpected phone call on his wedding night and is informed about the death of his father. Because no one knew he had any relatives, Kresten needs to give explanations to everyone and leaves for his home village to take care of his retarded brother, who had been living with his father all this time. Kresten is embarrassed when his peasant past is discovered and tries to keep his wife away with lies. NARRATION

Just like in the king is Alive, the story in Mifune follows the style of Classical Hollywood narration: after the initial problem presentation the conflict slowly escalates and its culmination is followed by the final outcome. Exposition (Presentation of initial conflict): on the night of his marriage with Claire, Kresten finds out that his father has died and he must take care of his retarded brother Rud. Rising Action (Problem escalation): After a series of difficulties Kresten understands that he is unable to manage all the tasks and decides to hire a housekeeper to help them. This is how a young lady, Liva, enters their lives. Liva tries to use the new job as a chance to change her life. In this part of the story we also learn who Mifune is, and what this imaginary character symbolizes. At the same time, Kresten, Rud and Liva are joined by Liva’s brother, Bjarke, a troublesome adolescent with rather difficult character, which is the direct outcome of the way he was brought up. Resolution: the film ends with a classical happy-end, a situation from which every character benefits and finds what he/she had been searching for during the entire movie. Kresten and Liva are in love and Rud and Bjarke are also “infected” with their happiness.

SETS

Lolland is the physical habitat where the whole story evolves. Another important place is Copenhagen, but it only appears at the beginning of the movie and is later referred to through phone conversations from the countryside.

Therefore, we get the juxtaposition of two opposite places, which becomes essential aspect of the narration in the film. On the one hand, we see the world of a big city, where apparently there are no problems. But gradually we start realising that this is a place where people have to survive with lies. They get so trapped in

34 the daily routines that they never stop to think about the meaning of their lives and resemble automatic machines. Contrary to that, in the world of the countryside, people have more time to reflect on their lives. They can appreciate the hidden value of little things and can carry a simple and honest life. The characters can open up themselves to others more easily in rural context, while, in the urban context they are lost and trapped in their secrets and lies…

We can observe the same dichotomy in the comparison of Liva's workplace with Kresten's farm. Liva's workplace is like a prison, while the childhood house of Kresten and Rud represents the shelter, protection. Also, the immense landscape outside the farm is a clear symbol of freedom, peace and stability.

PHOTOGRAPHY, LIGHT AND COLOUR

The Dogme rule about light is respected in this movie: the director is not using extra lights. Because of this there is usually a big contrast between the indoor and outdoor scenes. A good example is the transition between the scene where Claire and Kresten are making love and the episode where Kresten is dressed up in samurai cloths. The first scene has warm colours, cast by home lamps, which is coherent with the passionate context of the scene. On the contrary, the samurai scene has grey and blue colours of a cloudy morning. It also suggests that Kresten remembers his previous life as cold and gloomy. At the same time, we can also interpret this scene as a sign that very soon Kresten will have to encounter his life again.

SOUND

The sound is not an essential feature of this movie. Below we will try to review some of the aspects, relevant to Dogme's approach to sound and music in the movie: • Car scene: in this scene Rud is inside the car listening to music on the radio. The music is diagetic, as it belongs to the set where the scene is being shot. Therefore, rule number two is nor broken41. • Last scene: when Kresten and Liva are dancing in the living room we notice that there is an orchestra behind them. There is no narrative explanation for this fact and the only reason for the orchestra to be there could be the rule number 2: the director definitely wanted to have music in the scene and they could not edit it in the post production because that is forbidden by Dogme rules. So, they just decided to bring in musicians.

41 Rule 2: 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).

35 According to Jack Stevenson, in Mifune "the rhythms are not provided by music, but by the sounds and feels of the countryside in high summer, the wind, for example, blowing through fields of grain. Here was the healing refuge in which the two wounded souls from the city found solace. And yet when music is present, as it is in a couple of spots- a silent visitor suddenly flailing away at a guitar with passion and skill, or the small combo which serenades Kresten and Liva as they dance slowly at the end- it is all the more effective. Less is more.42

THEMES

The major themes in the movie are the following: secrets, lies, envy, respect for the other, tenderness, hate and rage which are universal human feelings. The most important theme for the development of the story is still the secret which Kresten is hiding. This secret becomes the starting point from which the consecutive actions take place. To sum up, just as Søren Kragh Jacobsen states, the film is about the classical story of love.43

SYMBOLISM

Phone

Phones and phone conversations have an important symbolic meaning in the story. Phone conversations are used to link two different worlds: the city and the countryside. It symbolises the connection of the urban, cold, yuppie and bourgeois world with the warm, honest and pure countryside. Phone also acquires special function when main characters interact with others to express their emotions, anxieties, fears… It is the most distinctive symbol in the film, especially because it is the most recurrent leitmotiv, used throughout the movie.

Rud's Red Hat

Rud always puts on red hat when he wants to hide from something or somebody. Therefore, the red hat symbolises the protection from the outside world. Rud uses his hat to hide from strangers and unknown things. So, every time a new guest arrives in the house he feels vulnerable and puts on his hat (e. g, when Liva or Bjarke first appear on the farm,). Bjarke's Digital Camera

42 STEVENSON, JACK. Dogme Uncut. Lars Von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg and the gang that took on Hollywood. Santa Monica Press. 2003 43 Richard Kelly, "The Name of this Book is Dogme 95,"p.155

36 The camera represents the medium through which Bjarke’s character is discovering the real life. In a way, he becomes viewer inside his own story. At the same time, camera marks the different stages of Bjarke's development: the camera first appears when Bjarke arrives at the farm and he is aggressive and troublesome; the second time the camera appears in the movie Bjarke is going through immense emotional changes and by the third time when we see the camera, Bjarke has made peace with the world and most importantly with the people who care about him.

ANALYSIS OF THE REPRESENTAITON

Enumeration of the different types of shots Below we will describe some relevant shots according to the angle of vision, the distance from the camera to the subject, the plastic characteristics of the shots and the montage:

ANGLE OF VISION

Low and High angles: In the shot were the father-in-law is talking to Kresten, who has already got married with his daughter, the characters are located strategically to suggest the roles and the social status of each of them. Claire's parents are standing on the upper floor and the father talks down to Kresten who is standing on the ground floor. He is allowing Kresten to take his daughter away from his power and his domination. Both women (Claire and her mother) are standing on their husbands' right side and are not taking part in the conversation (this makes us think about the woman's traditional status as subordinate to man).

Conversation: in conversation scenes the director frames both characters together (like in the King is Alive). This technique is mostly used in those circumstances, when the characters have a close and intimate relationship (e.g. during Kresten's conversations with Rud or Liva). This way the characters are brought closer not only due to the fact that they are seen on the screen together, but also because the shot is filmed from a single angle and this shortens the distance between the characters. When conversation takes place between the characters that are not so closely related to each other, the director mostly uses reverse angle shots and shows each character at a time.

Subjective shots: there are not too many subjective shots in Mifune, but we want to emphasize some of them because they are used intentionally. As we know, subjective shots present to us the character's point of view; the viewer can see all that is happening from characters viewpoint. There is one subjective shot in the scene when Kresten is going into the wedding celebration; the camera acts as Kresten eyes. Another subjective shot is used in the scene of Kresten's arrival to his childhood house. In both cases, the subjective shots have

37 establishing function, but in the second case the shot also communicates the strong feelings that the character is experiencing, so it also has an expressive function.

Alignment with skyline: normally shots have the intention of being the eyes of the audience. That is why, traditionally, shots are aligned with skyline, to simulate the human perception of settings in real situation. The frame gets bent only in the scenes where the director wants to emphasize the confusion and frustration of characters or to show that something is going wrong; the non-aligned shots are also frequently used in independent movies, which try to be different from traditional films. We find this kind of "atypical frames" in Mifune as well: when Kresten helps Rud to take the shower and the latter becomes aggressive and violent because he does not want to take the shower. The most extremely inclined frame appears in the climax of the scene; it comes back to the normal aligned position when Kresten finally succeeds in calming down his brother, reminding him about Mifune, the imaginative character from their childhood.

DEPTH

Lens: In the scene of Kresten entering the house, the use of special lens is remarkable. The director wanted to make visible the whole interior of the house to show how untidy and dirty it was and he had to resort to the wide angle lens to capture the whole space. Similar use of lens can be observed in Festen, but this technique is not very common in other Dogme movies.

PLASTIC CHARACTERISTICS

Mirrors: the mirror is an important element for the aesthetics of the movie. The first time we see the mirror in the scene which introduces Liva and her friends. They are in an amusement park, standing in front of the deformed mirror that distorts their images. The prostitutes are talking about men and sexual issues. Maybe the director uses the distorted images in the mirror as a metaphor to say that the image of prostitutes is equally distorted in the real life and they are seen by the society as persons who do not deserve respect. The second time we see the mirror in the scene when Rud meets Liva. It is the first time they see each other and in the mirror we can see the face of Rud, who is fascinated by her. Later in the movie a conversation is held between Liva and her brother through the mirror. Liva has an argument with her brother after she finds out that it was him who had been harassing her by phone all this time. Liva feels extremely hurt and tells her brother off without looking at him directly but through the reflection in the mirror. When she finally forgives him, she goes towards him and the camera frames them together in the same shot. Once again, the shot and the frame composition go together with the feelings of the characters and the narrative context.

38 In general, we can say that the shots in this film search for aesthetics.

MONTAGE

Mifune is an example of relaxed and slow montage, except for several scenes. The fast editing is used only in the scenes which are particularly stressful: the scene of Kresten's return to the rundown farm of his childhood and Claire's outrageous acting after she arrives at the farm and finds Liva there;

In the first scene Kresten has already received the notice about the death of his father and he runs into an exasperating situation when he finds his retarded brother dirty and abandoned. He feels frustrated and somehow responsible and that makes him behave impatiently and almost violently as he goes to fetch an egg for his brother.

In the second scene, Claire arrives at the farm in spite of her husband's warning and finds Liva with him. She interprets it as unfaithfulness on Kresten's side and gets mad at him. They have a quarrel and finally break up.

In both situations, feelings are the driving force of the action and the scenes are edited with rather short cuts, without any smooth transitions. At the same time, the camera movements are also violent and sharp.

However, fast editing and frequent cuts is not used in all stressful scenes (examples of stressful scene with slow editing: sex scenes with Claire and Kresten, Rud drowning in the lake).

CAMERA MOVEMENTS

We did not find many camera movements in Mifune. The camera is static in sex scenes: the motion in these scenes is completely internal. The camera movements become sharp, fast and violent only in a few particularly stressful scenes (the scenes described above).

We'll mention two more scenes with camera movements:

Following the object: in these shots the camera is following the moving object. We find a good example of this kind of shot when Kresten arrives at the farm. The camera captures his car from the interior of the farm and follows its movement around the farm.

39 Samurai scene: This is a non-diagetic image that shows Kresten as the samurai Mifune. It is the first time he appears in the role of Mifune and the camera moves around Kresten as if to describe him.

TEMPO/ RHYTHM

As we know, rhythm and tempo are provided by camera movements, montage, internal movements of the characters and the soundtrack.

In comparison with the other three movies, analysed in this paper, the rhythm here is much slower. We do not feel the same constant tension that is present in the Celebration (through plot) or in Idiots (through shaky camera movements). In Mifune, shaky camera is not a recurrent resort. The director explains why he did not want to use this technique: "I asked Tony many times to stop moving the camera, because I don't believe intensity and energy are in the restless camera. I think they are between the actors.44" Shots in Mifune are longer and more relaxed than the shots in other three movies. Due to this, the viewer also feels calmer.

POINT OF VIEW

The point of view in Mifune is objective. In this aspect we can clearly see the difference between Mifune and the King is Alive, in which the story is told from the point of view of a desert ghost, who takes the function of a mysterious narrator.

CHARACTERS Most of the characters in Mifune (for instance the main characters) are recluses, loners of society or lost in the context where their daily life revolves. They need each other in order to be able to find their true identities. Kresten At the first glance, everything is going smoothly in his life: he has recently got married, has a prestigious job and his circle includes people with relatively high social standing... However, very soon we learn that he has a secret: Kresten has been hiding from everybody that he has close relatives; he has kept this fact in secret even from his wife. Because of this, we get a feeling that he is embarrassed of his past life, which is completely different from his current life. At the very beginning of the film- in the scene where the couple is making love after wedding - Kresten's behaviour clearly shows that his does not love his wife. Before his father's death and arrival to his childhood's house, Kresten emerges as a cold character, who is not really

44 STEVENSON, JACK. Dogme Uncut. Lars Von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg and the gang that took on Hollywood. Ed. Santa Monica Press. 2003

40 interested in establishing warm and effective relationships with his family members. But during the story development we start to realise that he is a good man. His character undergoes radical change as he faces the main problem in the most critical moment of his life: when he becomes responsible for taking care of his brother Rud. It is rather impressive to observe how Kresten turns into a sensitive character through close interaction with his brother and other supportive characters in the movie. So, due to this, Kresten evolves as a dynamic character. We can trace the dynamism both in his behaviour and physical appearance, e.g. his dress code changes radically throughout the movie, at the beginning, when he is still distant from his family (Rud), Kresten wears fashionable clothes which correspond to this current life and social standing; however, in the end, he dresses as a farmer, in simple and dirty cloths. Rud Rud is a lovely and warm character who attracts the viewer's attention from the very beginning. Despite being mentally retarded, he is the most honest and clever character who always stays sincere, acting according to instincts and being always coherent, specially in the scene where Bjarke (Liva’s brother) disturbs and insults him. In our opinion, Kresten develops as a dynamic character partially due to his interaction with Rud. Finally, we can say that Rud is a kind of bridge between the other characters, as he helps them understand each other, even if they can not consciously realize this. Liva She plays a difficult and admirable role in the story. Liva is a strong woman who has learned to survive alone. She has never been helped by anybody else and that is why her behaviour with strangers is rather cold and reserved. She needs somebody to teach her how to trust people and make her believe in love again. She can’t feel affection for anything or anybody, except for her brother, because she does not know what it feels like to be loved and cared about. These circumstances lead her to becoming a high level prostitute. Although she has good friends inside among other prostitutes, she has in fact never had a real friend to support her. She finally finds hope and solitude with Kresten and Rud at their farm. Bjarke Bjarke is a typical rebellious adolescent who suffers the consequences of an unhappy family. His character is deeply affected by the lack of parental love and caring. His sister is the one in charge of his education but she can hardly manage her own life and Bjarke ends up dropping from one school after another. After he moves to live together with his sister at Kresten's farm, Bjarke's character undergoes significant changes. In fact, he is the most dynamic character in the film: from a stubborn and rude character he involves into docile and respectful, mostly due to his relationship with Rud. This change becomes most obvious in the scene where he saves Rud´s life while the latter is drowning in the lake. Finally, Bjarke evolves into a character which is able to love and be loved.

Mifune

41

Mifune is an imaginary character invented by Kresten in his childhood to play with his brother Rud. It is represented as a samurai. Mifune is the leitmotif of the film: on the one hand it gives the name of the film, and on the other hand, it symbolizes the talisman which links the two brothers. It appears in the film in outstanding moments, at the beginning, when Kresten is reflecting on his previous life and the second time before Liva first comes to their house. In these scenes the audience discovers who Mifune is and realizes the importance of this character for the whole movie. Mifune symbolizes Rud´s best friend: when Kresten plays this role, Rud feels happy and relaxed. On the other hand, the director chose this name for the character and for the movie based on Toshiro Mifune's samurai, a character created for the film The Seven Samurai (directed by Akira Kurosawa). But, why did the director choose this character? The answer is simple: because Kresten and Kurosawa's samurai share the same characteristics: "Kresten has the same destiny as Mifune in "The Seven Samurai." He is a peasant boy who went to town to become a modern-day samurai. Now, he’s coming back to defend his village. It’s the same story45." Claire She is the typical example of a capricious daughter who gets everything in her life thanks to her father's wealth and status. Because her family is rich, they have always solved all the problems for her and Claire never had to face any serious problems and difficulties in her life. She is jealous, hysteric and superficial. After she looses her trust in Kresten she immediately decides to divorce. Perhaps she is the only character that we can not regard as an outsider. Gerner

He is the paradigm of envy and jealousy. He has always felt deep envy to Kresten and that is why he constantly interferes in Kresten’s life. Consequently he is spiteful and acts violently.

45 KELLY, RICHARD. The name of this book is Dogme 95. Faber and Faber, 2000.

42 5.4. DOGME # 4 - PLAYING AND LIVING IN THE KING IS ALIVE

PLOT

A group of eleven tourists finds itself trapped in the middle of a remote desert after their bus runs out of petrol. The group is left without any means of communication. All they can do is to send one of the group members to search for help across the desert. The rest of the group stays in an abandoned little village with little food and water to survive. But the worst thing is not running out of supplies, necessary for survival. As the story develops, human emotions like envy, rage, lust and anxiety for power come emerge in the group and very soon life becomes a nightmare for everyone.

NARRATION

Development of the Narration

The story follows the classical Hollywood narration style. All the events in the classical narration take place due to the initial conflict, presented at the very beginning of the film. The initial problem is essential for the narration, because it triggers a whole chain of developments. Each event in the movie is the result of causality and happens as a consequence of a previous connected one. After the initial problem is presented, the conflict starts to escalate. As the main conflict aggravates, the characters try to find solution to the initial problem, which they encountered at the beginning of the movie. However, while trying to find this solution they have to face even more problems. Finally, after the climax we have the outcome, when the solution of the problem is happily found or sadly not.

In our opinion, the King is Alive is a tragedy. As we know, Dogme forbids genre movies but, as Kristian Levring says, this [the King is Alive] is an "ensemble film, as is Festen, as is The Idiots, and you can say that’s a genre. In a way, all the Dogme films are genre films: Festen is a family tragedy46." But at the same time he points that it was very important to him that his Dogme film "wasn’t like Lars’s or Thomas’s or Søren’s. Otherwise there’s a danger that Dogme becomes a genre in itself. That would be the end of it, to me. 47

As we can see, the director himself confesses that his movie has a genre element and the same is true for the other three movies we have analysed: Festen is a family tragedy; Mifune, according to Søren Kragh-Jacobsen's

46 KELLY, RICHARD. The name of this Book is Dogme 95, p. 210 47 ibid, p.54

43 words (what can you say about this classic kind of love?48), is clearly a love story; The Idiots is considered to be "the purest Dogme film," but we strongly believe that it is a drama presented in a very ironic and harsh way.

SETS

In this section we are going to describe the different sets in which the action takes place. This description will be conducted from two aspects: physical and symbolic meanings, that is, what you directly see on the screen and the suggested symbolic meaning that the settings communicate to the viewer. In the film we can distinguish three main sets: the bus, the desert and the abandoned houses in the small village:

Bus We recognize this place as the one where the initial problem starts. On one hand, in physically terms, the bus is the factor that triggers the initial conflict, the cause of the problem and the starting point. Everything begins there, and the characters will be affected by it during the entire movie. However, if we go deeper in our analysis, it is possible to identify hidden symbolical meanings. These meanings are rather subjective and depend on each viewer's interpretation. According to our understanding, the bus has a connotation of not only a vehicle that carries the passengers from one physical place to another, but of a subject which brings the eleven tourists to the tragedy. As tourists, they are supposed to find a relaxed, peaceful and comfortable place, where they can spend their money. But this vehicle drives them to their own destruction. They come to a dead end, where they can not buy solutions with their money.

Desert During the analysis of this location we came up with the following questions: why is the dessert a place where the characters get trapped? Would the story change if the action took place in another context? Why a desert? Just like the bus, this set holds several connotations. As we perceive it, the dessert illustrates the existential emptiness, into which the characters are plunged and the weakness of the human being faced with the nature. At first sight, it may look harmless, but it turns to be terribly wild and destructive. It communicates feelings of immenseness, desolation, nihilism, alienation and hostility, which goes perfectly with the loneliness and the desperation the characters feel. This hostile environment brings out the worst

48 ibid, p.155

44 personal features of each character and they start acting in a more instinctive way. The desert acts also as a symbol of the confused and messy minds of the characters.

Abandoned houses They are the places where the characters can hide and find a refuge from the immensity of the dessert. Inside the houses they can find calmness and confidence and a place to know each other more closely. The most important human interactions take place inside the houses (break ups, sex scenes, discussions...). The most instinctive and sincere sensations of the movie characters are communicated there. This also reflects the reality: we share our deepest personal and intimate feelings in the places where we feel most secure and comfortable.

PHOTOGRAPHY, LIGHT AND COLOUR

One of the most distinctive features of Dogme films is the use of light. This feature is mentioned in the rule number four of the Vow of Chastity, which explains that bringing in extra light is forbidden. In this movie the use of light is quite interesting.

The outdoor scenes, due to the daylight in the desert, there is fascinating, hot orange colour and even excessive light. The viewer's perception of the environment is very close to the reality. As a consequence of the bright light in the desert, colours are strong and intense. Sometimes this might be excessive, making the contrast between the desert colours and the characters dresses so noticeable. Anyway, Dogme rule about the light is not broken since these colours are not given by any filter or colour retouching but by other technical features of the camera. The director states himself that you are not allowed to do any optical work, but you can work with the white balance on the camera as much as you like49. As a result, very realistic texture is achieved just

49 KELLY, RICHARD. The name of this book is Dogme 95. Faber and Faber, 2000, p.216.

45 with the sunlight. In this way, the viewer is able to get the same feelings that the characters have (they are under the sun, with no water and no shadows for more than 24 hours...)

The number of scenes that are filmed inside the buildings is significantly less, compared to the outside scenes. Most of the story takes place either in the desert or in the abandoned houses where the light is coming from outside. The only inside location, where the light is really bad, is the bus. But a spotlight placed on top of the camera is enough to film the scene. The same happens in the night sequences inside the shanties, where an oil lamp is enough to light the set. That’s the way in which the ambiance of the moment is caught, when Ray and his wife Liz are in a critical point in their relationship, and at the same time they are listening to Gina and the old man in the other room while they are making love.

SOUND

The sound in this movie comes from the action that is being presented. There is only one scene with music and it is the one where the characters have already arrived at the abandoned village and are having a party there. The music is diagetic, but we start wondering how the director managed to keep the sound flowing even over the cuts in the video. We found the explanation in an interview with Kristian Levring. It appears that they used three cameras to shoot the scene so that they could always have the right video cut, but still, "it was a nightmare to edit." He also states that "if you listen to the song, it’s completely cut into pieces. When it became too unmusical, it was too distracting, so we had to find the compromise on where to cut sound and picture50."

The most important fact about the sound is the presence of expressive silences. There are shots with diagetic sound (i.e.: strong wind in the desert) combined with shots without sound (only the images of the desert). Clearly, the use of this technique is intentional. In our understanding, it was done on purpose to give a feeling of desolation. Working with the sound was the most difficult thing for the director due to the fact that it was very windy in the desert. Every day, when the film crew woke up, they thought "Oh, it’s calm, we can do an outdoors scene," or "It’s windy. Interiors today.51

THEMES

The film deals with primitive themes, such as instincts arising in the people in the extreme situations. Most of these instincts belong to the 7 deadly sins: lust, envy, greed, avarice, anger, pride, laziness. There are also

50 ibid. p.215

51 Ibid. p. 53

46 signs of ambition, self-destruction, compassion, keenness for overcoming, selfishness … all these emotions arise from the interpersonal and intrapersonal relations between the characters inside the hostile and unknown context. In this context, their destiny is presented as a consequence of time and it no longer matters how rich you are, because money will not help you in those circumstances.

The time seems to be immaterial due to the way the characters perceive it. This is how it is presented to the viewer through the local man, who acts as an observer and the time marker. All of the adversities that take place in the movie make the characters lose their perception of identity and they have to construct new identities in order to survive. In fact, this new identity is the real one, the identity that they have been hiding in the real and cosmopolitan world in which they have been living until now. It is reinforced by the role each character plays in King Lear: they feel the drama of the play as their own story. This new identity also supports the director's main message, the eternal question: "Are we those we are in reality or those we think we are?"

ANALYSIS OF THE REPRESENTATION

In this section we will analyse the visual elements and discuss how the content is presented by the form. This includes the use of technical elements like frame composition, camera movements (internal and external), shots (angle, depth, plastic characteristics...).

Enumeration of the different types of shots Below we list the most meaningful types of shots we have found in the movie according to the angle of vision, the distance from the camera to the subject, the plastic characteristics of the shots and the montage: ANGLE OF VISION

As we know, the relationship between the camera and the object being photographed (i.e. the ANGLE) gives emotional information to the audience, and guides their judgment about the object in the shot. The more extreme an angle, the more symbolic and heavily-loaded the shot:

Shots at ground level: the film has many shots of this type, where the camera is, if not on the floor, at least close to it. These kinds of shots only occur when a character is sitting on the floor. We think that the director uses these shots because he wants us to view the characters from the same height. It brings us closer to the character and allows us to understand him/her in a better way.

Low angle shot: in this kind of shots, the subject is recorded from a lower angle than our normal point of view. In this way, we see him/her bigger than we are normally used to. The added height of the object may

47 arouse fear and insecurity in the viewer, who is psychologically dominated by the figure on the screen. We find this kind of shot in the scene where Amanda is about to break up with Paul. The woman, who was submissive and spiritless until then, is empowered with this shot. It brings her out and gives her the authority she did not have before. In this scene, the roles are changed and she becomes the dominant instead of the dominated. Here she has the power to decide what she wants. This shot goes perfectly with the action that is being presented and with the meaning we extract from it.

Bird's eye view: the shots from up in the air are mainly descriptive and establishing. They are usually used to show us where the action takes place. At the same time, considering that the action in the movie takes place in the middle of the desert, this kind of shot also has an expressive function, since it lets us see the immensity, the loneliness and solitude of the desert.

Subjective shots: this is a shot from the point of view of the character. It allows us to see the same things that the character is looking at. This way we are put in his/her shoes and get deeper involved in the action. We find a good example of this kind of shot in the scene where Ray is running away across the desert. The camera makes violent and quick turns, mimicking Ray's clumsy, awkward and tired movements and showing his confusion. We found subjective shots in all four Dogme movies we have analysed. This makes us think that it is a characteristic feature of Dogme movies and is used to emphasize the sensation of reality that Dogme movies strive to convey.

Close shots: with the term "close shots" we are referring to the distance between the camera and the object. Because the sets are not allowed in Dogme movies (rule number 1),52 the distance is limited and this is reflected in the shots as well. We find a very good example of a shot, limited by the set, in the first part of the movie, when the characters are travelling in the bus. All the shots in the scene are close-ups and short ones. Clearly, the limitation with the space did not let the cameraman take wider shots. In any way, the shots are coherent with the surrounding space - the bus, where the lack of space makes the environment more intimate and close.

PLASTIC CHARACTERISTICS

Out of Focus Shots: every time the local man starts speaking, the images get out of focus. At the same time, the characters continue their normal activities in the desert, like talking with each other, eating.... but the images are blurred and unclear. We connect this to the idea of the man talking about something oniric that has to do with dreams and unreal situations. We also think that it is a perfect way of emphasizing the

52 Rule1: Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found)

48 internal anxiety, suffocation, claustrophobia, madness, confusion and alienation that the characters are suffering in the hostile environment.

Shots with the same disposition of elements: There is a shot that is repeated several times: the character is located in the bottom left corner of the scene and is looking towards the left side out of the frame. This gives the character considerable air in the top right corner. This kind of shot is not usual in the Hollywood classic cinema and it breaks all the traditional provisions of the visual language in cinema (centred subject, more empty space in the direction where the character is looking...). We also have to mention that in general, throughout the movie the director has a tendency not to frame up the subject in the centre. Instead, we see subjects located off the centre, in one side of the frame or in the corner. The director also tries to have in the frame only those elements that contribute something to the meaning of the scene.

Shots with very defined terms: ´ In these kinds of shots we can perfectly differentiate between more than one action taking place in different depths of the image (first aside, second aside...) It creates perspective and depth and serves mainly the aesthetic aspect. The director himself has admitted not having been able to set aside his personal taste, when he made the King is Alive: "From the moment you write a manuscript, choose your actors and place a camera, you have made an aesthetic choice. You are not depicting reality but creating an artistic work.53 " MONTAGE

Non diagetic shots: those are the shots belonging to another action but are inserted between the shots of the action that is being presented. This new action can be happening in the same moment but in different spaces or in different moments and spaces. If it happens in a different moment, then we are talking about flash- backs (if the time is past) or flash-forward (in the future). In the film we distinguish some "flash-time" cases, and that goes against the seventh rule54.

In the scene before the rescue the characters are sitting around the campfire. They have to bury two of their mates and look hopeless and affected. In this moment the characters are not themselves, they are playing their roles from King Lear. After the rescuers arrive and see the people around the campfire, the shots of the characters in the bus are inserted. There is one extra bus shot for each character. Both the campfire scene and the bus scene are shown with close-up shots. This draws the viewer's attention to the extremely intense emotions of the characters. In the bus shots, the characters look relaxed and thoughtful. At first, we thought these shots were flash-backs where individuals were remembering the bus trip-time when they did not have

53 RUNDLE, PETER. An aesthetic Choice. www.dogme95.dk. November, 3rd 2005. 54 Rule 7: Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden. (That is to say that the film takes place here and now.)

49 an idea of the tragedy that was going to happen to them. Later we considered that these inserts could be flash-forward which augured the rescue. Finally, considering the oniric touch of the movie, we perceived these shots to be representing the thoughts of the characters as they saw the rescuers, normal people and not characters of a theatre play. At this moment they realized that all this time they were playing a role and remembered what they were before all this happened. At the moment when they finally get in contact with the real world, represented by the rescuers, the characters around the fire switch back from the identities of the characters in King Lear to their real identities.

Reverse angle shot: the traditional technique of showing scenes with conversations is switching from the shot of one person to another from the same camera position. If the scene is shot and edited this way, the visual language of the movie respects the "action line." "Action line" is a term for the imaginative line which connects the characters with each other. Respecting the action line means not to trespass it so that you do not confuse the spectator with very different points of view. It also establishes a relationship of proximity and continuity. In the King is Alive, the action line is respected (unlike Idiots, which breaks this rule).

CAMERA MOVEMENTS

The camera movements are not essential elements of the visual language of this movie. Because it is a Dogme movie, we know the camera has to be hand held and so it is. Nevertheless, apart from the following two situations there are no cases where the camera movements attract viewer's attention:

Argument around the campfire and the discussion in the bus: medium shots are used in these scenes. The camera movements are now quite important since they show the tension of the moment. These movements are brusque and violent, sometimes only from the perspective of one of the characters. In the case of the argument around the fire, shots of the fire are inserted to stress the anger the protagonists are feeling. This also adds beauty to the scene.

Conversation shots: fast pan is often used in Dogme films to link characters during conversations. This motion brings a sense of restlessness and dizziness. However, unlike other Dogme movies, Levring chooses not to use fast pans in conversation scenes. Instead, he composes the frame so that both characters are on the screen at the same time (e.g.: Gina and Henry talking in the desert), which brings the characters together, and or he uses the traditional reverse angle shots, respecting the eye line match as we mentioned before.

Paradoxically, no camera movements are used in sex scenes. In this kind of scenes, where maybe passion and ardour could be stressed by suggestive and tender camera movements, the camera stays steady. The movement is internal. We also found this feature in Mifune and Celebration and it emphasizes the desire of

50 the Dogme directors of representing the action by actors' performance, reflecting the fact that for them the two most important aspects of movie are the plot and the performance. On the contrary, we see the director rely heavily on camera movements in the sex scene in Idiots. One explanation for us is that generally, in Idiots camera movements are more important than in the other three movies. And anyway, the Idiots is always an exception.

TEMPO/ RHYTHM

The sense of rhythm is created with the technical language used by the director. Camera movements here are smoother than in Thomas Vinterberg's or Lars von Trier's movies. Instead of the fast pans that Dogme usually uses to link a conversation (this is used to avoid cutting and editing of images), in the King is Alive both characters are usually presented framed together. Conversation scene is also presented by inserting one image of each character every time they speak, and these shots are linked by cut.

We found that on many occasions wide shots of the dessert are inserted with a grammatical function as a transition and many times they mark the changes in the tone and intensity of the different scenes.

We also want to mention a character as a Rhythm setter: the local man. He appears constantly as a testimonial narrator of the story. He marks the passing of the time as well as the evolution of the characters. The montage of wide, blurred and long shots slows down the rhythm, depending on the situation. The quick montage of different angle shots, short shots and close ups intensifies the rhythm in especially stressful situations, but generally, the movie does not create a disturbing feeling of fast rhythm. POINT OF VIEW

Unlike other three movies (The Celebration, The Idiots and Mifune), the King is Alive is told by the narrator, a local man in the desert. We witness the story from his point of view. The peculiar thing is that he acts as an observer who watches the happenings around him without interfering. He does not even have a human character and does not belong to the same time-space dimension. He is a ghost, a being without existence, a body who belongs to another narrative level but someone who has the role of the story teller. Consequently, we can say that the point of view in the King is Alive is omniscient; we experience the story from the viewpoint of a witness. It is important to explain how he is presented since he is the one who marks the changes of tone between the reality and the oniric. He belongs to this imaginary and drowsy world that Kristian Levring suggests. He appears through the voiceover and uses its own mother tongue to relate the story. Every time we hear his

51 voice, the images are also blurred. Expressive silences between his images are also remarkable, as they the viewer to distinguish between the real and unreal dimensions of the movie.

CHARACTERS

As we have already mentioned above in the director's quote, the King is Alive is an ensemble Film, where there is no main character, rather, the narration evolves around a group of characters. At the same time, extra layer of meaning is constructed through the characters' performance of the famous play by William Shakespeare- King Lear. Due to the extremely tense and claustrophobic situation, in which the group finds itself, the boundaries between the real characters and the ones in the play slowly disappear. No matter whether the characters in the movie can identify with their parts in the play or not, they stop realising if they are still performing or just living their own lives (this is a representation within another representation; a theatre inside a movie). Below we will try to provide the psychological portrait of each character and at the same time analyse the role they are assigned in the group.

Gina This character is full of spontaneity, innocence, tenderness, happiness, irresponsibility... These characteristics make her to feel attraction to the wise member of the group - Henry and, at the same time, feel betrayed by the cruel behaviour of Charles. Gina is a dynamic character since she evolves herself by interacting with the rest of the group. Her behaviour changes throughout the film due to the influence of characters like Henry, Charles (by being a threat for her he somehow triggers changes in her character) and Catherine. She goes from being immature, fanciful and happy woman to a serious and sick person who is deeply affected by the situation. It is important to keep in mind the role that she plays in King Lear: Cordelia. Both Cordelia and Gina have seduction and sweetness as healthy natural skills. In fact, after Gina realises that Catherine feels attracted to Henry, she chooses not to get in competition with Carherine. But gradually Henry himself shows more interest towards Gina. Nevertheless, the relationship between Henry and Gina comes down to filial love, as between the characters in Shakespeare's play: Cordelia and her father, the king Lear.

52 This brings us to the idea of identity formation in the movie: the identities of real characters intertwine with the identities of the characters in the King Lear. Throughout the whole movie the director plays with this double interpretation of confusing identities.

Henry

At the beginning he seems to be quite ahead of the rest of the group due to his intelligence level, coldness and the distance he keeps from other characters. This is shown in his first interventions, for example, when he sits next to the local man (this dreamy ghost figure) and makes contemptuous and critical comments about his group mates. If we compare him with his role in the play (he is playing King Lear), we can discover another parallelism, because they both share the same characteristics. For example, Henry values words more than facts and enjoys whenever he is smoothed with attention (in the case of the movie he is "smoothed" by Gina and Catherine, who both feel attracted to him).

The relation he keeps with Gina makes him a dynamic character: he goes from being pedantic and arrogant to being a modest and even tender man, who is very capable of loving. We find a representation of this new behaviour in the scene where Gina dies and Henry sits down exposing himself destroyed, regretful, vulnerable and harmless.

Catherine She is a quiet, docile, reserved and a cold observer. At the beginning she prefers to distance herself from the rest of the group. But later on, when in critical situation Ray's wife starts behaving nervously and irrationally, Catherine explodes and shows her strong character. This makes us say that Catherine has a dynamic character, because through these kinds of "explosions" she undergoes an evolution during the story. She was trying to pass unnoticed (even mysterious), but little by little she can not avoid showing her true nature. During the initial conversations about the King Lear she felt attracted to Cordelia's role, but she couldn't dare to take this part, so in the end the role was played by Gina. As a result, Catherine is left out of the play and becomes an observer. This gradually makes her feel jealous to such an extent that she poisons Gina, who dies just like her character Cordelia in the King Lear. So Catherine's character evolves from harmless at the beginning to destructive and full of guilt in the end.

Charles From the very beginning Charles emerges as unpleasant and careless character, who is not satisfied with life. His actions are based on the most primitive instincts. He acts in a visceral way and doesn’t care about other people's opinions and feelings. He is hypocritical, selfish, impertinent and has no scruples. The worst moment comes when through his conversations he makes Gina go to bed with him and in turn he agrees to

53 play one of the characters in the King Lear. Gina accepts the offer, since another actor is needed for the play to be performed, and she needs the play to keep her from thinking about the reality.

He is one of the few static characters in the film, who doesn’t evolve throughout the story. He behaves in the same way from the very beginning, until he dies. He dies showing his pride through committing suicide after he becomes the reason of Gina's death. But he hanged himself dressed in a formal outfit, a gesture that again points to his cynicism.

Moses (The driver) He seems not to be undergoing any evolution and remains invulnerable. Therefore, we are talking about a static character, with no changes in his behaviour: through his only interaction with the group (the story with Ray's wife) he demonstrates the way of behaviour, already known from the very beginning. He is the most coherent character in the film. He is also docile, patient and listens to the others, as he suffers all the insults from the group. He lets the others to act and doesn’t get involved in their lives. That’s why he doesn’t follow the “games” of Ray’s wife.

Amanda She has never had enough courage to face her husband and to give him her sincere opinion. She is completely destroyed by him. But one day she makes up her mind and feels strong enough to end up with her relationship. She decides not to depend on her husband anymore and start living by herself. She realises what she really wants and to what extend she has been used by her husband and, therefore, she acquires personality in a lucidity moment. That happens at the same time when Henry gives her an important role in King Lear. The new role is a clear metaphor of the new circumstances in her real life (it reflects her emotional and physical state). As a result, she evolves in the film as another dynamic character. Paul At first he is violent and possessive, but when he loses the woman he is in love with, he turns into a harmless person, who is unable to deal with the difficulties in his life. This is metaphorically represented by the loss of hair- a dysfunction he suffers due to a haircut he had made himself. This fact shows how "naked" he feels, the change in his attitude and his evolution. The man he turns to be has nothing to do with the man he was. Consequently, we can say that he is also a dynamic character.

Ray and Liz At the beginning Ray seems to be a puppet man who always obeys his wife's orders (when the problem is about to arrive). He feels betrayed by her dominant behaviour although both of them nibble each other constantly. Definitely, their marriage is worn out and goes through a crisis. As Ray is more reserved of the two, he looks like the victim in the relation. His wife is more impulsive, shameless and visceral (she tries to

54 make him think she has a sexual affair with one of the male characters in the movie) and she excuses herself by blaming her role in the play. She plays the role of one of Cordelia´s sisters, who acts without scruples so that she can reach what she wants. Both Ray and his wife are dynamic characters as a consequence of the relation they keep with each other.

Jack He is presented as the leader and the saviour of the group as he is the only one who decides to do something to solve the problem. In the beginning he gives the group rules that are necessary for survival in the desert and every character relies on him. In spite of the courage he shows, he dies very soon and is incapable of doing anything for the rest of the group. We cannot say anything about the evolution of his character, because he disappears from the story after the initial episodes.

The Local Man We believe that he is not a real character. That is, he belongs to the imagination, unreal and drowsy world created by the director by subjective images. These images are constantly making the spectator to draw the tiny barrier between the appearance, imagination and reality. He is a being who marks the passing of the time (according to our understanding, he does not exist, he is a ghost, he could also be a representation of the desert itself) and who omens the resolution of the story.

55 CHAPTER 6: FOCUS GROUP ANALYSIS - FILM THE CELEBRATION

6.1 WHAT AND WHY?

We wanted to find out to what extend the Dogme label affects the perception of Dogme movies by the audience. According to Kim Schrøder55, reception research evaluates the effect and impact of media product on the audience and it is mostly done through focus group discussions. We thought that the interaction with the spectator was crucial to analyse not only its opinions but also its behaviour and the spontaneous speech that it could entail. Opinion polls in paper were then taken out of consideration and we judged the focus group as the best qualitative technique to achieve our goals. But, why should we analyse the perception by observing a social behaviour instead of an individual perception? Because the sense-making process is influenced by the social realities and focus group is a good example of how individual opinions can be shaped by social interaction with other group members: different experiences, contexts, social realities and cultural backgrounds will generate different responses to the same message as it happens in the society.

"Focus groups... are not simply a means of interviewing several people at the same time: rather, they are concerned to explore the formation and negotiation of accounts within a group context, how people define, discuss and contest issues through social interaction. Underlying this approach is an assumption that opinions, attitudes and accounts are socially produces-shaped by interaction with others-rather than being discretely formed at the level of the individual.56 "

Therefore, the interactive quality of the focus group can become crucial in understanding why, to what degree and in what way the sense-making is influenced by different contexts. There is no way that we can be objective in the analysis of the situation due to the fact that we are looking for facts to corroborate the ideas we have. Nevertheless, we will try to consider as many aspects as we appreciate that can be related to our studied issue, even if they are against our theories and opinions.

We understand that such a research will be less representative of the overall public opinion about Dogme 95 movies, because the sample of focus group can not be statistically representative of the whole population. But in some sense the major purpose of our research is not to come up with statistically valid quantitative data. Rather, it aims to produce qualitative date: to find answers to some questions proposed and through observing and inquiring into the sense-making process of the audience to rise new issues on the Dogme 95 agenda. Consequently the conclusions and thoughts we come up with will only be able to be related to our studied group.

55 Kim Schrøder, "Reception Research in Practice: Researching Media Meanings Through Talk" (Chapter 7) in Kim Schrøder, Kirsten Drotner, Stephen Kline and Catherine Murray, "Researching Audiences;" p.107 56 Fran Tonkiss, "using Focus Groups"(Chapter 15) in Clive Seale (ed). Researching Society and Culture. p.194

56 6.2 HOW?

As we already mentioned and, considering our research question57, we wanted to prove how the perception of a Dogme film changes whether audience has been marked Dogme or not. In our understanding, psychology and social procedures play an important role in marketing. Factors like the predisposition of the viewer to accept or reject the stimulus (issue marked), the social and personal contexts and influences, the mood of the viewer or the previous experiences and feelings associated to the message spread with the marketing will set the future behaviour of the consumer/viewer. As a result, we applied the "Experimental method", which is probably the commonest way to design an experiment in psychology. As it is said in one article from internet58, this method consists in dividing the participants in two groups, the experimental group and the control group and then introducing a change for the experimental group and not the for the control group. In that way, we selected eight people and divided them into two sub-groups. Four of them were given information about Dogme (experimental group) and the rest four of them were not (control group).

Experimental group

Some minutes before we showed the movie, we gave them a brief exposition about Dogme. They were told that they were going to watch the first and probably the most famous Dogme movie and were given a brief introduction to the concept of Dogme. We were also told them that in 1998 Festen won the Jury special prize at Cannes and attracted a lot of attention both within and outside Denmark. This group is also named by us as people with background. In this brief exposition, we wrote some “advertising” or "marketing" notes on big pieces of paper. Our goal was to attract them, to make them be interested, to call the attention about Dogme wave and to persuade them that Dogme is a “new” movement of good cinema. To achieve that we inserted the most provocative sentences written in the Vow of Chastity. We absolutely were not giving objective information because we didn’t write the whole Vow of Chastity. We selected the most impact and sensational sentences parts such as Dogme 95, the resurrection of the cinema, Dogme: collective movement, not individual, Dogme: RESCUE ACTION!!...

In short, we were "marketing" Dogme current and trying to persuade them about how different, new and good the movement is, just as we proposed Dogme creators do with our research question.

57 Research question: Did Dogme 95create innovations in cinematographic language, or was it a marketing strategy, aimed at promoting Dogme movies? 58 http://www.holah.karoo.net/experimental_method.htm

57 Following, we inserted the ten rules of Dogme 95 and explained them what they were about. We also provided the group members with a copy of the manifesto and the Vow of Chastity. This group was composed of:

• Ricardo Arias Rodríguez: (Spanish Erasmus student) • Zik Staav: (Canadian interchange student) • Åse Bone: (Norwegian Erasmus student) • Trond Henningsen: (Åse´s boyfriend, Norwegian)

Control Group

They were not given special information about Dogme or about the movie. We only told them that they were going to see a Danish feature film from 1998 called “Festen” by Thomas Vinterberg. The group was not given any particular direction and we also call it people without background. This group was composed of:

• Martina Schlucker (Austrian Erasmus student) • Alena Müller (German Erasmus student) • Paulino Rodríguez Becedas (Spanish Erasmus student) • Cristina Rodríguez Moragas (Spanish Erasmus student)

We expected to have a group with members from very different countries. We also wanted to have Danish participants who could contribute with their point of view as citizens of the country were Dogme was born. We succeeded in having an international group but, unfortunately, we could not get any Danish student for availability reasons.

It’s important to point out that every single person, no mattering the information they were given before the movie, had heard about the movement.

They saw the movie and, after it we had a discussion in concert. Following we are going to describe what we expected to get when we formulate each questions and a brief analysis based on our interpretations of the answers we got. Both groups were asked the same questions:

1. Did you like the movie? What is your first impression of the movie? 2. Did the camera movements help you follow the story, or was it disturbing you? 3. Is this film somehow different from other movies you are used to? And if it is different, then, in which way?

58 4- Does this movie represent reality for you? 5- Do you think the characters develop? 6- Is it artificial in the way it is presented? 7- Do you think that this movie has a signature of an individual director, or is it a uniform movie for you? (This is the question about the auteur concept) 8- Do you think that it is necessary to have the Dogme certificate at the beginning? What does it tell you? Does it make any change? 9- Is Dogme an innovation or a marketing tool? 10- Is Dogme dead?

The major goal of this focus group was not to come up with a statistically valid research data. Instead, we approached the focus group as a kind of experiment and through having two separate groups: one that had the Dogme label in mind while watching the movie and another which did not know anything beyond the title and the director. Our original assumption was that having particular knowledge about the type of movie you are going to watch, affects the way you perceive it. Following, we present each question with the analysis and interpretations of the answers we got from the focus group.

6.3. QUESTIONS AND ANALYSIS

Q 1. Did you like the movie? What is your first impression of the movie?

We needed a YES/NO question to start with, not very depth but relevant enough to give us the very overall opinion our group had about the film. To guess that we couldn’t just take notes of the answers but look carefully at the intensity of the answers and the reaction and likeness to answer. We perceived that, even if the two groups liked the movie, the people with background were more enthusiastic when answering. In the group of people without background, there were two people who thought the movie was strange at the beginning and they did not know what this movie meant, but at the ending I really followed it, the story is not boring. That confirms our theory that Dogme form is disturbing until you get used to it and then, you can enjoy the story easily. So, the form of the movie did not pass unnoticed to them, to the people who did not know very much about Dogme. They noticed it and they remembered their first feelings maybe because they were not expecting that or they are not used to it. One of the girls in this group mentioned that it looked like a home video, what means that the image quality took her attention.

59 One of the members of the background group pointed out that the movie was so emotional and that you can feel the characters feeling. The language of the camera is trying to show you the truth, yourself as the camera. I got the feeling that I was there. Therefore, we perceive that his commentary is a proof of the effectiveness of Dogme techniques or the absence of them. If Vinterberg wanted to make the audience feel like one more in the family and bring them into the movie, then he succeeded with one of our focus group members. With language of the camera, we interpret that this person knew the fact that the director was trying to say or to achieve some goals with the way he shot the movie. Our group member was conscious of the director's intentions, but the director achieved the goal with him anyway.

Q 2. Did the camera movements help you follow the story, or was it disturbing you?

People with background did not complain about the camera movements and technical things. They insisted that they could put themselves into the story due to the fact that "camera and light make you feel inside". We attribute it to the fact that, as they were informed, they were not surprised by technical things and start watching the film expecting these camera movements. On the contrary, people without background got disturbed by them at the beginning of the film and the technical things called their attention because "it looks like a home video" and "it is like everyday life". We ascribe it to the assumption that these people were expecting a steady camera as this is what society is, in general, used to with commercial cinema. They all agreed that, after a while, they got used to camera movements and those even helped them to follow the story. Until then, the form was being more remarkable than the story for them because of the novelty of the technical aspects. With the time and thanks to the characteristics of the eyes that make you to get used to the images you are looking at, the story became more important than the form and they forgot about the camera movements and quality of the images.

It is quite curious one of the "background people's" answer, who stated: When you take away the tripod and make the camera always moving ...viewer's eye reacts to movement"... "It activates different parts in your brain; it makes it more active, caused for the viewer". If we understood the statement, he was trying to explain the reason why we feel the movie so real and so close to us. As we understand it, he attributes it to human eyes and brain reaction when they perceive a moving image: they interpret it as real, but is our experience and consciousness who really tells us that we are watching a movie instead of the reality itself.

Q 3. Is this film somehow different from other movies you are used to? If it is, in which way?

Most of the people agreed that they would not have the same feeling if the story had been told from Hollywood. People with background focused more on the idea that the story itself could not have been told by Hollywood because of "moral reasons" like, for example, Hollywood would never allow the father to fall from

60 so high to so low. It was also mentioned that Hollywood would have treated the guilty characters in a very different way, maybe with the police at the end. According to Åse's commentary, this one was a kind of story you do not tell in Hollywood movies. She also mentioned that the reality impression would not have been so successfully achieved by Hollywood. Apart from the story, they didn't find the narration of the plot so different from Hollywood movies (problem presentation, problem development and outcome)

As we expected, people without background focused more on the plastic characteristics and the development of the story. They thought that Hollywood could have made the same story but it would be different from the camera. They see the difference in the technique used. They also expected another different ending, like an explosion of the feelings and they stated the story was really unpredictable. It was said by them that in some other movies they would know what was going to happen next, and they repeat the sensation of reality.

One of the members of the background group mentioned that when you get rid about the music, lights and all these things, it makes you make a movie where you focus mostly on the acting; so, it could not look like Hollywood actors. The only way that you can really believe a movie like this that it is real is by faces you have never seen before, ordinary people like you" "That's what brings you more in the film, you can put yourself in the story". Here comes the concept of reality again. Regarding the unknown faces of the actors, we must say that some of them were already quite famous in Denmark before the movie was released but our participants didn't know them because they are foreigners. As a result we conclude that the use of local actors in Denmark make Dogme movies seem more real for foreigners and closer to everyday life.

Q 4. Does this movie represent reality for you?

Here we wanted to check to what extend the audience does perceive the movie close to the reality.

In general they put themselves in the shoes of the main character and wondered: What would I do in his situation? Would I act like this? And some of them actually would. Once again we think that this is a consequence of how real the movie seems for them and the involved they got into the movie, despite the camera movements. On the contrary, the thing that was not especially real for people without background was the behaviour of the mother's character. For them, you would expect a different attitude from the mother. So, somehow the characters attitude and performance affect the perception and reliability of the movie and the way they communicate the sense of reality to the viewer. This last opinion makes us think about the typical role of the

61 mother as her children protector and supporter that is usually given in Hollywood type of movies (again with Hollywood comparison).

Q 5. Do you think the characters develop?

As we saw that the evolution of the characters was a very mentioned topic, we asked this question to continue with the conversation we were holding. They talked very much about the development of the characters and not all of them agreed. It is only relevant to mention that the people with background were stating that it was only Christian who evolved and then they changed their minds when one of the non-background girl said that Helena also when she reads the letter. Background people agreed with her and added that She leaves a weight out of her back" (referring to the time when she reads the letter written by her dead sister). Here we have an example of the social influence we talked about in the introduction of the focus group chapter.

Q 6. Is it artificial in the way it is presented?

We realised that we had not achieve what we wanted to with the fourth question and we reformulated it in a different way. We consider this last one was a bit more successful. Most of the people who responded to this question were people from the group without background and the only member from the background group who joined the conversation agreed with them. They noticed by themselves that there were no special sets or emplacements and compared the movie with a theatre play. They mention the fact that every time the movie is in the same location. As a result, we got again the concept of reality: they know the movie is fiction, as well as they know the theatre is, but they get the feeling that they were in a theatre, which is a fiction closer to reality than cinema is (there is no cameras, no screen, the actors and the viewers share the same time and space...). In fact, one of them related the movie with the theatre play Hamlet, saying that they were both very dramatic and powerful and that Christian was having a struggle inside of him and compared the characters of the play and the movie.

Q 7. Do you think that this movie has a signature of an individual director, or is it a uniform movie for you? (this is the question about the auteur concept)

There were no many answers for this question. Only one girl of the group without background mentioned that, in her opinion there are some aesthetics and that the movie is kind of individual because the decision is director's.

62 Q 8. Do you think that it is necessary to have the Dogme certificate at the beginning? What does it tell you? Does it make any change?

This question was made on purpose to ratify our own opinion that the manifesto is totally unnecessary to understand the movie or to have a certain perception. We wanted to know if they got impressed by it.

None of them found the certificate necessary. For them, it was just an attempt to make the movie more special. Some of the people that did not have background pointed that If you do not know about Dogme cinema, you get more interested and that nowadays, it could be trendy to say: oh, I like dogme movies, oh, you have not heard about Dogme movies?, especially among young generation. One of the members of the group without background also said that, in his personal opinion, the director is more important than the movement (just the opposite Dogme says), that there are very good Dogme movies and very bad Dogme movies. Definitely, we should never generalize with anything, and that is also applicable to Dogme. We must remember that, as they say, people are usually interested in the story, no in the label Dogme 95.

In short, maybe the certificate makes you think this is special, is Dogme, but the most important things are the story and the actors for them. People with background do know about the movements but they do not think about it when they see a Dogme movie. For them the certificate doesn't add anything to the understanding of the film and Dogme is not as special as they want to (referring to the inventors).

Q 9. Is Dogme an innovation or a marketing tool?

As the people did not react, we had to reformulate the question:

Don't you think that this movie could have been done without saying it was Dogme?

The fact that the people did not react to the first question can be explained as: they were not thinking about Dogme as a marketing tool but they, somehow, agreed with the dilemma we were suggesting with the question. They had the feeling inside but they did not have the need of saying it before we asked. People with background considered that the marketing is a way of doing it in a LOUD way instead of in a QUIET way and that is not the first time anybody ever made a film in this way, but it is the first time anybody ever sat down to write these rules. They agree the perception would have been the same without saying it was Dogme and that Festen would have had success and would have had audience, because (no matter whether it’s a Dogme movie or not) it’s a good movie in itself. People without background stated that it is a marketing tool to attract people.

63 Q 10. Is Dogme dead?

People without background did not answer this question, maybe because they did not feel enough informed to do so. People with background compared Dogme with an artistic movement. They said that it's been around for ten years already and somebody has to pick up there and continue by doing something else, by doing a new thing. People are interested in an art movement while it's still new. After a while everything gets old. We got the impression that they think Dogme is dying and will not live for so long. 6.4 CONCLUSIONS

Even thou the conclusion seems simple, it shed light on many aspects:

We came up with the conclusion that, viewers in general (our group), no matter if they know about the movement or not, perceive Dogme movies as more real and closer to reality than Hollywood ones. This reality sensation is provided by the reliability of the story but also by the technical aspects. People with background think that is the technique which provides this reality sensation while people without background attribute the feeling to the story itself.

We also realised that they only consider Dogme as a way of promotion only if the idea has been proposed before. When they get this idea as a social input, they get influenced and start thinking about what has been proposed and, finally, they agree. After been induced to think about it, they come up with their own ideas and those are favourable to ours. That means that the feeling is inside them there but they need a little push to take it out. We also found that, for those who knew about Dogme, it was not as impressive as it was for those who didn't know about it. The first ones did not pay attention to the dogme label and do not care about the movement. They just liked the movie itself. The second ones can be said to be more impressed and even some of them that hadn't seen any dogme movie before are feeling curious about other movies. That means that Dogme label attracts the attention of the people without background maybe as a result of a normal human feeling called curiosity. Nevertheless, they recognize that the movie is more important than the movement as well.

So, we conclude that Dogme label attracts people who are not really involved in the dogme concept but, once they know about it, they do not give the movement a special importance considering the director's way of making the film more important than the movement's. Even thou they like Dogme movie, they sated that they do not feel like watching Dogme movies everyday. For them not every day is a Dogme day.

64 CHAPTER 7: WHAT INNOVATIONS DOES DOGME 95 CREATE?

Innovation is often the first thing associated with Dogme 95, but specifically what kinds of new ideas did Dogme introduce in the modern cinematographic language? Has it indeed created innovations, or has it simply recycled, reshaped and revived the ideas from previous avant-garde movements, like American Underground or the French New Wave? In order to provide our perspective on this issue, we are going to embark on detailed analysis of the two essential Dogme documents: the Manifesto and the Vow of Chastity and will further support our standpoint with the findings of the focus group discussions.

But before moving on to the analysis, we need to clarify the definition of innovation and explain how we understand its meaning. The encyclopaedia definition says that: “Innovation is the introduction of new ideas, goods, services, and practices which are intended to be useful (though a number of unsuccessful innovations can be found throughout history). The main driver for innovation is often the courage and energy to better the world. An essential element for innovation is its application in a commercially successful way.59” So, during the discussion of the innovative aspects of Dogme 95 we should keep in mind that innovation is not simply something new: rather, it is an invention that is useful and has a potential of bringing positive change (in whatever sense or regard).

7.1. DOGME MANIFESTO

At the time of its publishing in March 1995 Dogme manifesto was perceived as a revolutionary document, proclaiming the death of cinema and calling for a rescue action:

“To DOGME 95 the movie is not illusion! Today a technological storm is raging of which the result is the elevation of cosmetics to God. By using new technology anyone at any time can wash the last grains of truth away in the deadly embrace of sensation. The illusions are everything the movie can hide behind. DOGME 95 counters the film of illusion by the presentation of an indisputable set of rules known as THE VOW OF CHASTITY.”

Even though the document covers a range of different issues, we consider that the most important message in the Manifesto is the rebellion against illusion and the call for using the cinema as a tool to depict the reality. In suggesting new aesthetics, founded in the notion of realism, Dogme 95 claims to have invented the rescue action for the cinema, which was “dead” and “called for resurrection.” However, realism in cinema was not really invented by the founders of Dogme. This notion has its origins in the post-war Danish cinema, as

59 www.reference.com

65 well as the avant-garde movements of 60’s, especially the French Nouvelle Vague. According to Langkjær60 "in a Danish and Scandinavian context, realism has had a special status and has been considered a kind of mainstream film practice." One of the most prominent post-war Danish directors, Carl Theodor Dreyer, whose films had a significant impact on Lars von Trier’s artistic formation, also used the principles of realism in his movies.

In Dogme context realism can be interpreted "as an effort to reduce the distance between the act of filming and the reality being filmed and thus to contribute to an increased feeling of reality in the cinematic experience".61

But, generally, what does realism mean in cinema?

For the Italian neo-realist director Roberto Rosselini62 "realism is simply the artistic form of truth." But, above all, realism in cinema is reflected in the way the audience perceives and follows the narrative. "Realism might be understood, first and foremost, as a specific relationship between media texts and their viewers. Therefore, realism is today a very wide theoretical category, since the effort to understand what is experienced to be real raises question in relation to the field of aesthetics, the field of cognition and emotion, and, of course, in relation to the whole field of genres, which are, in contemporary genre studies, theorized as more local than global and more disparate than coherent systems 'crossing boundaries' in complicated ways".63

According to Roman Jakobson64 the concept of realism has "extreme relativity", because "realism has often been manifested as an artistic intention among artists in the production of works not normally considered part of any realism". Jakobson describes five "formalistic" aspects of realism:

1- Realism can be an artistic intention; 2- Realism can be something perceived as realistic by the others than the artist; 3- Realism can refer to specific periods in art history defined by critics and art historians; 4- Realism is defined by certain narrative techniques; 5- Realism is defined by the way it motivates style or narrative.

Most of these aspects can be applied to the Dogme concept of realism: the realism in Dogme is an artistic intention,65 Dogme movies are perceived as showing reality,66 they also rely on certain narrative styles and

60 2002, p. 15. 61 Jerslev, 2002, p. 7. 62 apud Jerslev, 2002, p. 41. 63 Jerslev, 2002, p. 9. 64 apud Langkjær, 2002, p. 15-16. 65 This is clearly stated in the Dogme manifesto 66 Most of our focus group participants mentioned that while watching Festen they felt as if they were actually

66 techniques to indulge the viewer in the reality and at the same time these narrative styles and techniques are motivated by the desire to show the reality.

"Dogme 95 suggests an aesthetics of presence and immediacy in time (now) as well as in space (here). (...) Dogme 95 likewise emphasizes that sound and image must be connected. Music should only be used if the source of the sound has physically been present on the set. (...) Dogme rule number two at once expands and narrows cinematic space. It connects organically time with space as well as image and sound. Rule number two thus naturalizes the photographic image".67

Langkjær68, reflecting on the concept of realism, points out its four different levels: 1- Perceptual realism69; 2- Realism of style70; 3- Narrative realism71; 4- Recognition, whether social, psychological, cultural or otherwise72.

These principles can also be applied to the Dogme realism: in the Celebration, for instance, the audience perceived a fictional problem as a real-life situation and the incest story in the movie became an agenda setter for the Danish media. On the second level realism in cinema is often associated with zero style, this fits well in the Dogme notion of zero aesthetics, when the director vows: “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 available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations.” We can also say that at the same time realism has become a narrative style for Dogme and is reflected in several of the rules in the Vow of Chastity (e.g. in the rules, setting restrictions on bringing in props because of the idea that the “shooting must be done on location;” provision that the “action takes place here and now” and that it’s the camera that follows the action, not vice versa; restriction on using extra lights, filters

participating in the events that unfolded in the movie and that they were also part of the action. 67 Jerslev, 2002, p. 48-50. 68 2002, p. 18. 69 "The cognitive notion that perceiving film is very much like perception in everyday environments: both situations suggest the use of similar perceptual skills" (Langkjær, 2002, p. 18). 70 "Realism has often been considered equivalent to a zero degree style (Bondebjerg, 2000), or part of the classical style of Hollywood as described by Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson (1985). (...) We might consider other more excessive styles that have the psychological effect of providing a realistic credibility to a narrative event, like the kind of documentary realism (...) or by many Dogme 95 films" (Langkjær, 2002, p. 19). 71 In this sense we can understand Dogme realism specially as a narrative technique or narrative form. 72 "Social and psychological conflicts and depictions of specific cultural and social environments have often been considered (understandably) a hallmark of realism. But in Scandinavian realism, the lower middle-class might be more commonly depicted than the working class. Even though realism is 'socially extended' it is not specified by one social strata" (Langkjær, 2002, p. 20).

67 etc). So, we can say that the rules laid out in the Dogme Manifesto are essential for the construction of “reality” in Dogme movies. According to Jerslev73 "Dogme 95 may be regarded as a collection of formal and technical strategies implemented in order to accentuate and enhance visual presence and immediacy. (...) Narrative progression is subordinate to construction of intense moments." A close link can also be observed between Dogme 95 and Dziga Vertov's kino-glaz. At the first glance these are two completely different types of cinema: Dogme is a fiction and kino-glaz is a documentary. But the common principle is that both try to show the reality (but at the same time we all know that from the moment you put up a camera in front of you, you are no longer seeing a complete reality). Vertov wanted to show the reality life of proletariat in Russia. He shot his films when nobody was noticing it. "He considered his films to be documentaries, records of actuality, but all his work reflected his very personal, highly poetic vision of Soviet 'reality,' a vision he maintained throughout his life.74 "

Dogme brothers have also tried to make their movies look like reality. To achieve this effect, they decided to reject props, sets, extra lights, optical work, filters, non-diagetic sound, etc. Dziga Vertov also rejected fiction mechanisms such as scripts, actors, studios, sets, illumination and other techniques. In his article "Dziga Vertov," Jonathan Dawson even draws parallels between Dziga Vertov's and Lars von Tier's words:

"The film drama is the Opium of the people…down with Bourgeois fairy-tale scenarios…long live life as it is!" (Dziga Vertov) The anti-bourgeois cinema itself became bourgeois, because 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! Today a technological storm is raging, the result of which will be the ultimate democratisation of the cinema. (Lars von Trier)

Another significant similarity is that for both movements camera was the most important ally in their effort to tell the truth and show the reality. The hand-held camera has become the trademark sign of Dogme and it is widely recognized, that the feeling or reality in Dogme movies is created through the extraordinary work of hand-held camera. Likewise, camera is the most important tool for Vertov: "Vertov proclaimed the primacy of the camera itself (the 'Kino-Eye') over the human eye. He clearly saw it as some kind of innocent machine that could record without bias or superfluous aesthetic considerations (as would say, its human operator) the world as it really was. The camera lens was a machine that could be perfected bit by bit, to seize the world in its entirety and organize visual chaos into a coherent, objective set of pictures75."

73 2002, p. 44. 74 Dziga Vertov by Jonathan Dawson; http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/vertov.html 75 ibid

68 At the same time, the two movements have totally different attitudes towards the technology: for Dziga Vertov's Kino-glaz new technologies brought new possibilities, for Dogme and Lars von Trier, on the contrary, technological innovations in cinema only resulted in creating illusions, and Dogme 95 was founded to counter this tendency.

7.2. The Vow of Chastity

In this subchapter we are going to analyse in detail the Vow of Chastity and to determine which of the cinematographic techniques, suggested by each rule of the Vow of Chastity introduced innovations.

Rule 1- Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found).

French New Wave had already used this rule: the directors within this movement usually produced their movies on location, not in the studio (e.g. François Truffaut's Jules at Jim, 1962).

Rule 2- 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).

This is a rare technique in the cinematographic language. Traditionally, classical cinematographic narrative relied heavily on sound editing during the post-production to make the sound match the video. It also used non-diagetic sound (especially music) as a tool, crucial for conveying the messages in the narrative. So in one sense we can say that the restriction on non-diagetic sound in the movie was indeed pioneered by Dogme. But maybe we should not overemphasize the importance of this rule: a new rule can not automatically be classified as an innovation. Rather, we have to think if this rule is contributing to conveying the reality, which, according to the Manifesto is practically the ultimate purpose of Dogme 95.

Rule 3- The camera must be hand-held. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted. (The film must not take place where the camera is standing; shooting must take place where the film takes place).

Hand-held camera is usually considered one of the most important trademarks of Dogme movies, but was it Dogme 95 that introduced the hand-held camera to the cinema for the first time? The answer is “No.” According to Stevenson76 the American Underground director John Cassavetes "virtually pioneered the technique of the shaky hand-held camera" in films like Shadows (1960).

76 2003, p. 27.

69 Rule 4- The film must be in colour. Special lighting is not acceptable. (If there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera).

Dogme has rejected black and white cinema based on the idea that the movie has to show the reality and the real colours can not be manipulated in any way. According to Jerslev77 "Dogme 95 may be regarded a set of semiotic procedures aimed at the toning down of visuality as re-presentation in favour of a kind of visual presentation." Besides, rejection of black and white technique was also rooted in the Dogme principle that the director has to refrain from personal taste and aesthetics: black and white movie, which is traditionally considered aesthetic and artistic, could not be compatible with Dogme principles.

Rule 5- Optical work and filters are forbidden.

Dogme rejected optical work and filters for exactly the same reasons as white and black movie: optical work and filters create illusions, while Dogme strives to show the reality and reject individual aesthetics. We could say that the combination of the forth and fifth rules creates a kind of innovation not because these techniques were invented (or rather rejected) for the first time in the movie history, but because it was the first time that they were rejected by a set of rules, developed specifically for a new cinematographic movement.

Rule 6- The film must not contain superficial action. (Murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.)

Obviously, Dogme founders are not inventing anything new when they are saying that the film should not contain superficial action such as murders, weapons, etc. Throughout the history of cinema generations of directors have tried to oppose the flood of superficiality in cinema through making intellectual, aesthetic, serious movies, emphasizing the human emotions, life situations, deep action, etc. In addition, Dogme principles encourage improvised acting because of the idea that the movie should show the reality, something that is really going on at the place where the cameraman is shooting. However, it's not Dogme 95 that introduced improvised acting to cinema. Other avant-garde movements, such as the American Underground often used improvisation techniques in movies.

Rule 7- Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden. (That is to say that the film takes place here and now.)

This rule basically means that the action in the Dogme films takes place in the present tense, flashbacks are forbidden, and the movie should not contain ruptures in temporal linearity. As most of the previous rules, this one also relates directly to the notion of reality. We can consider this aspect of Dogme an innovation, because by rejecting temporal and geographical alienation Dogme movies become concentrated on the

77 2002, p. 48-49.

70 "reality" or the action that takes place among actors "here and now" and it adds a lot to the feeling of realism. Festen would be a perfect example: the whole movie literarily takes place "here and now"- the feeling is so real that the viewer almost turns into one of the guests, attending the family celebration at a hotel. The whole action takes place at the same location during just a few hours; this undoubtedly enhances the feeling of realism in the movie.

Rule 8- Genre movies are not acceptable.

For the first time in the history of cinema a group of directors officially, in a written form rejects genre movies! Is it an innovation? We doubt so: even the directors, who founded the Dogme concept, admit that it's not possible to reject genre, because every movie is a genre movie to some extent. Thomas Vinterberg mentions: "I thought a lot about this genre Rule. And I found it a bad Rule, actually. Because it's very difficult to avoid genre. And somehow it's not very creative, because it's unspecific... not being able to make a genre, or not being allowed to have 'taste' is, in a way, impossible. "

Rule 9- The film format must be Academy 35 mm.

Although Dogme films must be in 35mm format, some Dogme films, such as the Idiots, were produced in video format. Later on Dogme brothers agreed that this requirement would be applied only to distribution. We consider that it's not relevant to talk about the innovative aspect of this particular rule, taken separately.

Rule 10- The director must not be credited.

This rule also comes from the Dogme principle that aesthetics of individual director is not acceptable. A movie has to show the reality, not the ideas of an individual director, so the director's name should not appear in the credits. However, downplaying the role of director is not a Dogme invention, the same tendency characterized e.g. both the "Direct Cinema" in the United States and the French Cinema Verite." But if the director is not important and his name should not be mentioned, than why do we still have their presence in the movies? e.g. we can hear Lars von Trier's voice during the interviews with actors in Idiots and we can see Thomas Vinterberg in the role of taxi driver in Festen. Again, if the director should not be credited, then why did Thomas Vinterberg go to Cannes Festival to receive the Special Prize for the Celebration? In conclusion, we would like to sum up this chapter by saying that in fact, individual rules of the Vow of Chastity and the Manifesto, as well as the major idea behind the Dogme concept (showing the reality) do not really create innovations in the cinematographic language. Even more, Dogme has borrowed some techniques from the French Nouvelle Vague (at the same time criticizing this movement heavily in the

71 manifesto), as well as other avant-garde movements. However, it was indeed the first time in the history when all these principles were formulated into 10 specific rules and the birth of a new movement was announced by the directors, who wanted to make movies according to these principles.

CHAPTER 8: MARKETING DOGME 95

8.1.INTRODUCTION

In this chapter we are going to analyse how marketing was used to promote a new concept in Danish cinema in the late 90's, what was the market demand for a new cinematographic style at that time, what was the marketing strategy and what kind of tools were used by the founders of the Dogme 95 concept to create a cinematographic brand. In addition, we will try to evaluate the effectiveness of the marketing strategy and its outcomes and also give the founders' perspective about the major question of our research: did Dogme 95 really introduced innovations in the cinematographic language or was simply a marketing strategy aimed at "selling" the concept to the audience as an innovation and therefore, a way to get their attention?

8.2. THE NEED OF MARKETING

In today's society marketing has become part of everyday life: it is used to promote all kinds of products, services, lifestyles, notions etc. In a classical sense, marketing is defined as "a social and managerial process by which individuals and groups obtain what they want and need through creating, offering and exchanging products of value with others."78

Marketing has become such an integral part of our life, that very frequently we don't even notice it; but in fact, we are subjected to marketing of different products, services, ideas and notions on a daily basis; marketing campaigns, developed by the companies or interest groups, influence significantly our decision making process even if we do not consciously realise that.

Cinema world is no exception. In order for a film to be successful, it has to be marketed in an effective way. Each year film studios spend millions of dollars just to market their product and to create publicity for their films. We believe that Dogme 95 also used marketing strategy to "advertise" Dogme films. Some of the

78 Marketing: Principles and Practice, Dennis Adcock, 1993. p. 2

72 marketing tools, utilized by the founders of Dogme are more obvious, while others are less noticeable. The major purpose of this chapter is to study what kind of marketing strategy was used by the Dogme brothers and whether some of the "innovative" aspects of this movement were in fact simply promotional tools, designed to catch the audience attention.

8.3. DEMAND FOR PRODUCT

Before we start analysing the marketing strategy, used by Dogme brothers for promoting their films, we should determine whether there was a market demand for their films at that time. Market demand is a crucial factor for the development of the product, and in fact it is the demand that conditions what kind of product is produced.

According to Leslie de Chernatony and Malcolm McDonald, "a product or a service is a problem solver, in the sense that it solves the customer's problems and is also the means by which the organisation achieves its own objectives.79” The following table describes this relationship between the customer and the provider:

Products ← Customers What we sell MATCHING What customers want →

According to a key concept in marketing, “In order to be successful producers must deliver something very special to the audience, and in that process the main objective must be to provide special values, which really means something of particular interest for the people with whom one is communicating. In other words, you need to know what it is that makes your particular product unique, for failing that, chances are that you will vanish in the mechanisms of the new market economy80. “This concept is highly relevant for the cinema, because cinema is also a kind of business, a marketplace where the audience needs to be convinced to choose (which means devoting their time and resources) a certain movie instead of another.

So, the question follows: was there a market demand for Dogme movies in Denmark (and abroad) in 1995? What did the viewers want? What were the audience's needs and expectations? Here is how Peter Aalbæk Jensen, the co-founder of Zentropa and Lars von Trier's long-term partner describes the conception of Dogme 95 in his biography: 81 "It all started with a lie. We talked ourselves and others into believing that there was a new wave on the way in Danish film. We did it so effectively that we ourselves and later the press began to believe it. That here was

79 Leslie de Chernatony and Malcolm McDonald; "Creating Powerful Brands in Consumer, Service and Industrial Markets," 2002; p.4 80 Hjort, Mette and Mackenzie, Scott (eds). "Purity and Provocation: Dogme 95." 2003, p.192 81 Peter Aalbæk Jensen; "Without Cigar: the Father, the Son and the Film Merchant,"2001,p.31

73 something special. It was a lie but it worked...Then we asked ourselves, what is it that Danes would like to have the rest of the world think about them? The answer came back: "that the whole world thinks that our little crap country is something fantastic.82"

Aalbæk Jensen has played an important part in the Dogme movement through his activities at Zentropa (which was in fact one of the two studios producing Dogme movies). Therefore, his opinion should be regarded as reliable and somehow representative of the Dogme founders. Jensen believes that at that time (mid 90's) Danish public wanted to have cinema that would take Denmark's name far beyond its borders and would make the country famous on international arena: in fact, his commentary echoes very much with our previous discussions about the influence of globalisation and Hollywood mainstream on the creation of Dogme 95. We have argued that globalisation and mainstream Hollywood cinema have most probably played a rather important role in the creation of Dogme 95 concept.

So, supported by Aalbæk Jensen's comment, we once again argue, that by 1995 there was indeed an audience demand for the films that would make Denmark famous and most importantly, films that would bring new vigour and energy to the national cinema. Having said this, we should now try to analyse in what way the Dogme 95 was shaped by the audience demand and in what way the market determined the characteristics of the new cinematographic movement.

Given that Dogme 95 was partially created as a reaction against the Hollywood cinema, it is logical to suppose that an alternative movement had to be the opposite of mainstream American cinema. What were then the alternatives for this new cinema? What new ideas and concepts could it explore? How would it look like? If we were filmmakers, facing the task of creating an alternative movie in that situation, what would we take into consideration? Here are a few points:

# Provision Dogme 95 If Hollywood movies are based on a) The major emphasis in Dogme 95 movies is on I creating illusions, then alternative bringing out the human aspect and this way movie has to pursue the truth, to showing the truth; show the reality, real emotions, real b) stories and real feelings. • In most of the Dogme movies we see uniquely Danish experience, e.g. in Mifune we see the life of a family in a rural area in Lolland, not to be found anywhere outside of Denmark.

82 Jack Stevenson, "Dogme Uncut," p. 295

74 • While in Festen the problem of incest is probably not very common in Danish society, at the same time the movie describes the life of a Danish bourgeois family. This is to say, that by showing a Danish way of life, things and experiences that are only found in Denmark, Dogme movies evoke interest in international community and at the same time enable the Danes to identify with the story, feelings, atmosphere etc. in the movie. Technically most of the Hollywood a) In Dogme movies the emphasis is on acting, not II movies are highly sophisticated on effects, which are used in Hollywood movies and it would be rather unrealistic to "create illusions." Thomas Vinterberg to think that alternative movie mentions in one of his interviews: "...you have could compete with mainstream nothing to tell the story with other than the movie in this regard, especially actors; nothing else to use when you want to considering the budget limitations express feelings. You don't have music, for compared to Hollywood movies. instance, to provide a crescendo. But you still Besides, if you want to oppose e.g. have to keep the audience awake for a hundred a moviemaking style that relies minutes. The story really has to engage them, heavily on special effects you have because if it doesn't then nothing else will. And to come up with something you just have your actors, so you have to make different, instead of trying to them faint, or puke, or fight- something, to express what it is that you want to get out.83" produce a movie with better effects b) The story ideas of the first wave Danish Dogme yourself. movies, made by the four founders of Dogme concept (with the exception of Mifune) and the way these ideas are presented, are very unconventional c) Most of the Dogme movies are low-budget: almost all the first wave Dogme movies were made with the budget under one million euro, which is almost impossible for Hollywood; There is no rule, stating that Dogme movie has to be necessarily low-budgeted, but this is how it works in reality: even with the state funding, the

83 Richard Kelly, "The Name of this Book is Dogme 95," p.114

75 budget of any Danish movie could not even come close to the astronomical figures that Hollywood invested in commercial movies. d) According to Dogme 95 the technical aspects of movie-making process are completely different from the Hollywood practice: all that is left for the director, is a camera: o extra lights, no filters, no props, no non-diagetic sound, no effects, no adding of extra video/audio effects during the post production, in short: "no cheating."

8.4. TARGET AUDIENCE

A well-developed marketing strategy has clearly identified target audience. The universal truth is that if you don't aim well, you will never get desired results. In Dogme context what would have been the most probable target audiences for the founders of the new movement?

Generally, “Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production and the interests of the product ought to be attended to only so far as it may be necessary for promoting those of the customer84." But If Dogme 95 was created as an art-cinema, as a "search for truth," the director could not hope for it to become highly commercial, this means that these films could not be marketed in the same way as traditional commercial movies are. e.g. in our opinion Idiots was not created as a commercial movie, because it is entirely an experimental movie, and such movies don't usually have huge audiences. So, it seems that Dogme 95 would probably not be targeted entirely at commercial income and therefore, at wider audiences.

But even if Dogme was launched as a commercial enterprise, in this case we should not forget that based on European cinema experience, Dogme brothers could not expect their "product" to bring rather high revenues.

In reality, out of the first wave Danish Dogme movies( Festen, Idiots, Mifune and The King is Alive), the 2 films with biggest sales were Festen and Mifune, with approx. 350,000 tickets sold and later Italian for Beginners beat that record by selling over 800 000 tickets. But compared to Hollywood standards, that's not too much. But even with relative box office success, there still remains a problem that limits the commercial income for Danish films: "Danish studios have very little clout outside Denmark, so in most cases they have to settle for very unfavourable distribution deals. The Celebration, for example cost 7.5 million kroner (1 million USD) to

84 Marketing: Principles and Practice, Dennis Adcock, 1993. p. 5

76 make and earned a whopping 90 million kroner (12 million USD) internationally, but when expenses and cuts to foreign distributors were made there was approximately only 9 million kroner (1.2 million USD) left.85 "

So, even for a successful movie the total income from sale is much less than the honorarium paid to a Hollywood start for a single movie. So, in this situation we think that Dogme 95's target audience most probably also included funding institutions, which in Europe are usually the major source for financing movies, Denmark being no exception. In fact, most of the independent movies made in Denmark at that time were funded through a special scheme at Danish Film Institute. But, again, here was have to consider one more factor: Lars von Trier would probably get funding from the Danish Film Institute for his movies, even if he did not invent Dogme 95, because in fact many of his previous movies were funded through the consultant scheme at the Institute very easily86. If it were possible for anybody at all to get funding from this institute, then Lars von Trier would be one of the most privileged, partly due to his personal connections at the film institute.

Having said that it would be relatively easy for Lars von Trier to get funding from Danish Film Institute, we should not at the same time forget that Dogme 95 was not an individual, but rather a group initiative. From the very beginning Dogme was created and promoted as a group initiative, as a collective of filmmakers and when Lars von Trier heard that probably the Danish Ministry of Culture would not be able to provide the promised funding for 5 Dogme directors to make one movie each, von Trier got very disappointed.

In conclusion, we suppose that probably the two most important target groups for marketing the Dogme 95 concept would be the viewers and various funding agencies. With this we can move to the next question: what did the Dogme brothers do in order to convince their target groups and to "promote" their product?

8.5. MARKETING ASSETS

The next step after determining the market demand and target audience for a particular product is the evaluation of company assets. According to marketing basics, effective marketing is always a result of realistic assessment of resources, available to the company: “Textbook definitions of marketing have emphasized the satisfaction of identified customer needs as a fundamental article of faith. Various interpretations exist, but the concept of putting the customer at the centre of the business summarizes these viewpoints. However, it must be recognized that the ability of the business to produce offerings that meet real needs, will generally be limited to very specific areas. More particularly, what we find is that an organization’s skills and resources are the limiting factor determining its ability to

85 Jack Stevenson; "Dogme Uncut;" p.183. 86 e.g. Lar von Trier got funding for his movie "Epidemic" this way: he bet the consultant, who was at the same time a friend of his, that he could make a commercial feature film for the budget of 1 million DKK. The consultant accepted the bet and the project was funded.

77 meet market-place needs…What we are in effect saying is that marketing should really be seen as the process of achieving the most effective deployment of the firm’s assets to achieve overall corporate objectives. 87“ Considering the above mentioned, we will try to address the following questions in this subchapter: a) What assets/resources did Dogme 95 founders possess? b) What were the limitations that had to be considered while planning the marketing strategy for Dogme 95? Here again, we should refer to the comment by Peter Aalbæk Jensen, because it brings into spotlight a crucial aspect of creating the whole Dogme 95 concept and provides insight into the founders’ position: "We had to create a myth that would reach out beyond Denmark's borders. Without any money to market this myth. A myth that we wouldn't have to borrow 2 million DM to launch...We didn't have money to carpet-bomb people like the American companies did, so we had to find something else. Hence we stole some concepts from the religious world, made a bunch of Danish films around that and turned the fact that we had no money to make them into a value. We made a virtue out of necessity and called it art. We disallowed everything that we in any case didn't have the money to buy. We said "It's not because we don't want to use the big heavy equipment but due to religious grounds we are forced to do without it." The Dogme concept was thus invented and launched as a kind of purification, a purity. As if we had any choice. Choices we had none of, not a lick. 88"

So, in Aalbæk Jensen's words Dogme 95 was born entirely out of lack of resources! The founders of concept had an idea, but they had no resources, so they decided to "disallow" everything that they could not afford in any way and turn disadvantages into advantages. We think that this open confession by Aalbæk Jensen, who is often called the "Dogme Mother," 89 sheds some light on the overall mystery of Dogme and the concept of finding freedom through restrictions.

However, despite the above mentioned, we still argue that Dogme 95 founders did not start the concept out of nothing - it did not start simply from a scratch. Certain resources were still available for them and these resources later on contributed significantly to the success (or let's rather use the word "wide publicity") of Dogme 95. Some of the resources that we identified as important are listed below: a) Young generation of talented Danish actors and actresses with a fresh look on cinema ( acting is important in any kind of cinema, but it has particular importance for Dogme, because after rejection of all other aspects acting remains almost the only tool which the Dogme director can use to tell the story with);

87 Leslie de Chernatony and Malcolm McDonald; "Creating Powerful Brands in Consumer, Service and Industrial Markets," 2002; p.7 88 Peter Aalbæk Jensen; "Without Cigar: the Father, the Son and the Film Merchant,"2001,p.31

89 Jack Stevenson; "Dogme Uncut," p. 183

78 b) Film Companies Zentropa and Nimbus. All Danish Dogme movies were produced by these two companies. Zentropa was officially founded on June 15, 1992 by Lars von Trier and Peter Aalbæk Jensen. A year later it was joined by another film company- Nimbus (after tremendous success of Celebration Thomas Vinterberg was made the co-owner of Nimbus). Technically these are two different companies, but they have very close cooperation; c) Danish Film Institute and other agencies, which could provide funding for Dogme films; d) Lars von Trier's reputation: by 1995 Lars von Trier's name was already quite well known in Denmark and abroad. A new cinematographic movement founded by a famous director will clearly get more publicity (at least in the beginning) then the one founded by an underground or less know director; As Jack Stevenson has observed: " In another country and another film milieu, such a concept of primitive, low- budget films shot on video would have been ghettoized, would have been tagged and "underground thing" and relegated to the film festival circuit, but thanks to von Trier's clout in the Danish film world and his financial muscle as co-owner of Zentropa studio, it has become positively mainstream90. " e) Because the Dogme founders were rejecting whatever they could not afford in any way, they had to play a different game with different rules and it's easier to defeat the enemy when you are not fighting on his battleground. In his article Ten Years of Dogme Peter Schepelern discusses the options for alternative cinema to endure the Hollywood pressure. According to him one of the ways to deal with this pressure "has been to "Hollywoodize" European films, that is, copycatting American genre films with their effect-mongering and accessible worlds. The problem with that is that it is almost by definition impossible to beat Hollywood movies at their own game. As is almost always the case, the best Hollywood movies are made, you guessed it, in Hollywood.91" So, the fact that the foundations of Dogme were the direct opposite of mainstream from the very beginning can be interpreted as an asset, an advantage.

In this subchapter we argued that the concept of Dogme 95 was significantly shaped by the availability or lack of relevant resources. This is true not only for the concept, but for the marketing strategy as well. Compared to Hollywood, funds available for the promotion of Dogme movies were rather limited. Therefore, it is interesting to analyse what kind of tools and resources Dogme brothers have used to promote their "product."

8.6. MARKETING STRATEGY AND TOOLS 8.6.1 The Need for Branding

Branding is an important aspect of marketing strategy. A company, individual or interest group that wants to promote a certain product, service or idea, will be less likely to succeed without creating a powerful brand. In a classical understanding branding is a way of communicating with the customer and creating an identity for

90 Jack Stevenson, "Dogme Uncut" 91 Peter Schepelern, "Ten Years of Dogme," 2005

79 the product, which in the end gives the product an added value and makes it more expensive, compared to its real cost: "The difference between a brand and a commodity can be summed up in the phrase "added value," a brand is more than just the sum of its component parts. It embodies, for the purchaser or user, additional attributes which, whilst they might be considered by some to be "intangible" are still very real.92"

The fact that all the movies, made according to the Vow of Chastity are labelled as Dogme movies identifies them as belonging to a particular brand. Mr. Peter Schepelern believes that if the Dogme movies were made as individual movies, without attributing them to any certain style/movement, some of them would certainly have had success in any way, but it is obvious that the interest to Dogme movies is increased by labelling them as Dogme 95. Mr. Peter Schepelern further claims that it is easier to get attention to films if there are several of the same kind, if it is a tendency, a wave, a movement, rather than individual movies standing alone. So, according to this logic, Dogme "label" increased the popularity of each Dogme movie, while if these movies were made as individual movies, they would have attracted less attention. Mr. Schepelern applies the same rule to the French Nouvelle Vague: in his opinion movies made within this movement were rather different from each other, but they were attributed together and due to this received more publicity.

Branding is a complicated process that involves multiple stages from determining the core values to developing the brand communication and evaluation strategy: "Brands are successful when developed with a clear statement of intent about the product’s or service’s purpose, the specific group of customers the brand is targeted at and a commitment to equipping the brand with the right types of resources to achieve the stated purpose." 93

Generally, the brand is composed of three components: the functional component characterises what the product or service does; the psychological component describes which of the user's motivational, situational or role needs the product or service meets and the evaluative component considers how the brand can be judged. 94

Usually, the brand is an integration of these three components and the customers do not normally think separately about each component. But the company, developing the branding strategy needs to give a careful consideration to each of these aspects and construct clear visions about what these three components mean to their particular brand. Leslie de Chernatony and Malcolm McDonald claim that in successful brands the functional and psychological dimensions are bridged together by a single word, which describes the way in which both components satisfy the customers' needs.95

92 Leslie de Chernatony and Malcolm McDonald; "Creating Powerful Brands in Consumer, Service and Industrial Markets," 2002; p.11 93 ibid, p.21 94 ibid, p.369 95 ibid, p.369

80

What are the functional and psychological components of Dogme 95 and what is its evaluative side? or to put it more simply, what aspects of Dogme are functional (functionality is described as the rational evaluation of brands' abilities to satisfy utilitarian needs96) and what aspects are representational (the representational dimension is the emotional evaluation of brands' abilities to help consumers express something about themselves, for example, their personality, their mood, their membership of a particular social group, or their status97)? Finally, how does the word Dogme link those two aspects together?

It can be said that the functional aspect of Dogme is the same as for any other movie: it is a piece of art that has to entertain and educate the audience through storytelling. But at the same time, watching a particular kind of movie can give the viewer a feeling of belonging to a certain "club," having a certain status or trigger a whole range of other feelings. In our context watching a Dogme movie would give the audience a feeling of following the avant-garde through watching a movie belonging to the new cinematographic movement, a feeling of being special, maybe the feeling of dignity for some Danes who are proud to realize that they are watching a Danish movie, that has become so famous and has caused so much controversy around the world.

Further, the brand name of Dogme movement is a good link between the functional and representational components: it describes the way of movie-making (through setting new rules, or Dogmeta) and at the same time refers to the charismatic and innovative aspect of the movement that can appeal to the psychological needs of the audience.

8.6.2 Selecting a Brand Name In this subchapter we are going to analyse the "brand name" of Dogme 95 and to give our observations about its expressive functions, symbolism, semiotics and how it adds more to the overall concept (if it does).

The name is usually the brand's most visible aspect for the customer. It tells a lot about the brand and is directly associated with the product. A brand can be denoted with a logo, a name, an abbreviation, a word, etc. The brand name (or the organisation's name) personifies relationship with the customer, which is at the core of the branding concept. 98 The wrong name selection can ruin the whole branding process, no matter how well the rest of the planning is conducted. "A brand name is a very important piece of information and is often the key piece. It is, therefore, essential that an appropriate brand name is chosen which will reinforce the brand’s desired positioning by associating it with the relevant attributes that influence buying behaviour. "99

96 ibid, p373 97 ibid, p.373 98 ibid, p. 9 99 ibid, p.94

81 The name of Dogme 95 concept/movement has proved to be a very powerful branding tool, which alone has spurred many discussions not only across Denmark, but also throughout Europe and later on internationally as well.

The brand name of Dogme 95 is a combination of two types of brand names: it consists of a meaningful word, having certain implications in regard to what this particular brand is about and the time when the brand was created. The choice of the brand name for a new movement in the Danish cinema is rather unusual, but at the same time it conveys perfectly the meaning of the whole concept.

According to Leslie de Chernatony and Malcolm McDonald100 in order for a brand name to be effective, it has to satisfy the following criteria: 1. The brand name should be simple 2. The brand name should be distinctive 3. The brand name should be meaningful (but at the same time it should not be cliché, otherwise the consumer will not get interested) 4. The brand name should be compatible with the product (but at the same time firms should be aware of the danger of becoming too much focused) 5. The brand name should be internationally valid.

If we compare the brand name of Dogme 95 against these principles, we will discover that Dogme 95 is in line with most of the above mentioned "requirements": Dogme 95 is a simple name, but at the same time it is very distinctive: Dogme brothers could have called their movement: the new Danish Cinema, the New Movement, the new cinema, or anything in this mood; But rather than following traditional way of reasoning, they selected a name that is very distinctive and easily catches attention. However, even though the brand name of Dogme 95 is distinctive and extravagant, it is still meaningful: it implies the most important notion behind the Dogme concept: a director has to set certain rules, restrictions, and through limiting himself he has to find freedom and give a new way to his artistic creativeness. This could be compared to the religious Dogme, which means something that can not be questioned, an axiom that any follower of the religion has to believe and take for truth.

The semiotic analysis of the brand name enables us to make interesting conclusions and speculations about the meaning of Dogme 95. In the direct sense a Dogme means: a) An authoritative principle, belief, or statement of ideas or opinion, especially one considered to be absolutely true; b) A principle or belief or a group of them; 101

100 ibid, p101-103 101 www.dictionary.com

82 But besides the denotative meaning, the word Dogme also has a strong connotative meaning - it means strict religious rules/beliefs, which can not be questioned by the followers of the religion and have to be accepted without doubts: “Dogmeta are found in many religions such as Christianity and Islam, where they are considered core principles that must be upheld by all followers of that religion. As a fundamental element of religion, the term Dogme is assigned to those theological tenets which are considered to be well demonstrated, such that their proposed disputation or revision effectively means that a person no longer accepts the given religion as his or her own, or has entered into a period of personal doubt…Dogmeta may be clarified and elaborated but not contradicted in novel teachings. Rejection of Dogme is considered heresy and may lead to expulsion from the religious group.102” Outside of religious teachings “The term Dogmetism carries the implication that people are upholding their beliefs in an unthinking and conformist fashion. Dogmeta are thought to be anathema to science and scientific analysis.103”

This double character of the brand name fits well into the overall polar oppositional character of the movement and ample allusions to religion. It is not only the name that suggests religious allusions, but other aspects of the movement as well: a) The Vow of Chastity consists of 10 rules (compare: 10 commandments); b) The language of the Vow of Chastity also resembles the language of religious commandments: must not… must never be…is not acceptable…are forbidden… c) The directors, who founded the movement or joined it at a later stage, are called Dogme Brothers. Even from the beginning, when the group included 4 male directors and one female director,104 it was still called a “brethren,” or “brotherhood.” This of course, resembles the structure of most Christian denominations, where only males can serve as priests. In a way we can say that this is one more allusion to religion: as if Dogme directors are like apostles or priests (the Dogme directors serve as intermediaries between the reality and the viewer, just like the priest acts as a bridge between the God and the believers). Of course, this is a rather bold statement, and it might not have been on the minds of the founders of Dogme movement at all. But given the controversy surrounding the whole concept and particularly its double-polar-oppositional character, there might be some grounds to speculate about this. In fact, in his interview with Richard Kelly Thomas Vinterberg uses the term "Dogme church" 105 and calls himself "a missionary for the Dogme church.106" d) Referring to the initial presentation of Dogme 95 concept at Odeon Theater in Paris on March 22, 1995, Mike Hertenstein mentions: “Given what was printed on the pamphlets, one might think he [Lars

102 www.reference.com 103 www.reference.com 104 Anne Wivel 105 Richard Kelly, "The name of this book is Dogme 95," p. 114 106 Richard Kelly, "The name of this book is Dogme 95," p. 113.

83 von Trier] saw himself as Moses bringing down new commandments from the mountain... DOGME 95 is a rescue action!107; " e) One of the important aspects of Dogme concept is regaining the purity of the cinema. Here again we can notice religious implications, both in the notion of the purity and in the wording used by the Dogme brothers. In religious terms, purity means "freedom from sin or guilt; innocence; chastity.108" In religion purity is associated with an attempt to return to haven; in Dogme terms it means removing the cover of illusion from the cinema (according to Dogme manifesto illusion is the greatest sin in cinema: cinema needs a rescue from illusion), "disillusionment" of cinema, showing only the "reality." The notion of purity is again suggested in the title of 10 rules, which is called the Vow of Chastity. f) Finally, Alejandro Diaz draws attention to Lars von Trier's special desire for being in control (in Idiots Lars von Trier gave up control as a director, but giving up a control voluntarily means that you are still in control. Plus, he was in fact acting as a cameramen, scriptwriter, even interviewer, so we can say he had more control than in other cases): "In fact, Lars Von Trier's cinema is full of religious allusions, most of them imposed by him from his position of the creator due to the fact that many times he gets the role of the manipulator of his creature's fate." 109 ("El cine de von Trier está plagado de implicaciones religiosas, casi siempre impostadas por él desde su posición de demiurgo absoluto de sus films, pues a menudo asume el papel de sumo hacedor y manipulador del destino de sus criaturas").

How can we explain these religious allusions in Dogme movement? What did the Dogme founders mean by it? Was it deliberate? Was it an attempt to create sensation and attract more attention, to intrigue and make everybody wonder what it was about? Or did Dogme brothers really mean that they were the "church of cinema", authorised to set new rules and new Dogmeta?

8.6.3 Branding Dogme 95

Branding is a complex process, involving multiple steps. The process starts with development of a clear statement of the brand's core values and continues throughout the whole lifetime of the brand. After close analysis of Dogme 95 we were able to identify various tools and devices that have been clearly used to promote the Dogme "product."

Declaration of Values: Dogme manifesto and the Vow of Chastity

107 http://www.flickerings.com/2003/films/Dogme.html 108 Jonathan Dawson, "Dziga Vertov"; http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/vertov.html 109 Los Idiotas (Idioterne, 1998), Alejandro Diaz, http://www.miradas.net/2005/n39/estudio/losidiotas.html

84 The concept of Dogme 95 is described in manifesto and the Vow of Chastity, published by the Dogme brothers. In our understanding both documents are marketing tools. Here are some of the arguments to support this statement: a) If we look at the history of cinema and at the history of avant-garde movements, we'll see that almost every movement got its name from critics. Opposite to this, the founders of Dogme 95 published the Manifesto and the Vow of Chastity and gave a name and identity to the new movement ever before any movies were made. Directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder (New German Cinema) or Jean-Luc Goddard (French New Wave) "made the films they had to make, and if afterwards somebody said they were part of this or that wave, fine..110" Of course, there were other cases in the history of cinema, when a group of directors started a new cinematographic movement with publishing a manifesto (for example, the New American Cinema, or the American underground cinema, started with a manifesto in 1961). But likewise, these directors were concerned with promoting the new concept and attracting attention to their undertaking. Finally, it should also be mentioned that manifesto is clearly handwriting of Lars von Trier: even before the creation of Dogme most of his experiments were accompanied by manifestos. Writing manifestos is Lars von Trier's style and it is difficult to say whether these manifestos serve a purely artistic purpose or whether they are a marketing device. b) Who is the target audience of the manifesto and the Vow of Chastity? The style and wording of both the Manifesto and the Vow of Chastity suggest that the target audience is the viewer. If this is true, then it becomes unclear why the viewer needs to know all the technical aspects and details of the movie-making process (e.g. why does the viewer have to be informed that in Dogme movies extra light is not allowed, will not that be visible from the movie?) Is this knowledge essential for purifying the cinema and showing the reality (for "forcing truth out of the characters and settings")? We believe that the visibility of the 10 rules is a differentiating device. Differentiating is a tool that is used to distinguish one product from another and therefore it is essentially a branding device. While saying the Vow of Chastity is a differentiating device we mean that it is used to distinguish Dogme movies from the mainstream: every requirement set in the Vow of Chastity aims at making the Dogme movies different from the mainstream cinema: special effects, filters, superficial action, extra lighting, machine-operated camera, genres, giving a big credit to the director, all these features of mainstream cinema are forbidden in Dogme movies. Therefore, the Vow of Chastity is used to once again emphasize that Dogme is different from the mainstream, it's a new way, it's an innovation, and hence deserves the audience attention.

"Marketing Collateral:" certificate serves as some kind of business card for Dogme 95. It is presented at the beginning of each Dogme movie. It serves as a visual branding technique: even if the adherence to the Vow

110 Jack Stevenson, "Dogme Uncut," 2003, p. 46

85 of Chastity if not strictly checked for each new movie, certificate serves to position all the movies as part of the same movement, part of the same brand (see above about the importance of branding movies as part of the same movement).

Website is another branding technique. But Dogme website is not very comprehensive and elegant. It barely satisfies the basic functional needs and can not be reviewed as a significant marketing tool in Dogme context. 8.6.4 Presenting the Brand

After the development of brand it needs to be launched and the first presentation is usually crucial to the success of the brand. Lars von Trier was probably well aware of this fact, because he chose the best moment for presenting the new movement.

March 22, 1995...Paris, Odeon Theatre...100th anniversary of Cinema...In front of the audience, invited to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first movie screening by Lumiere brothers, the Danish movie-maker, Lars von Trier, much renown for his eccentricity, announces the birth of a new cinema concept called Dogme 95. After reading the Dogme 95 manifesto aloud he tosses around red leaflets with the manifesto and the Vow of Chastity and leaves the Odeon Theatre without comment. When asked by journalists afterwards to answer some questions regarding the new movement, he says that he has been entrusted by the group (the "group" in reality included only him and Thomas Vinterberg) to present the idea, but he has not been given a permission to discuss it. And he leaves everybody wondering what the Dogme 95 is about...

Lars von Trier uses the 100th anniversary of cinema as a venue for his announcement because he knows that all the cinema world is there and the message will easily reach its target. We get an impression that the manifesto was finished hastily before the celebration and was published in Denmark just 4 days before the event in Paris. It is obvious, that Lars von Trier wanted to make the announcement at this specific event, because it was a good occasion to get maximum attention to the new movement.

All the efforts were made to attract as much attention at the presentation as possible: The fliers were printed on red paper; Lars von Trier's dress code was rather informal and not relevant for the occasion where everybody else was wearing formal attire. He supported the intrigue of the presentation by refusing to make comments afterwards. He wanted everybody to start wondering what Dogme 95 was all about. From every single detail it is obvious that Lars von Trier went down to Paris to get the floor and to attract attention to the new concept that he had just created together with Thomas Vinterberg.

8.6.5 Managing the Brand through its lifecycle

86 The brands have different stages of life cycle: if a brand is successfully launched it gets established on the market and begins to grow. After the growth phase comes the maturity phase, which is followed by the decline phase. Very often the cycle of phases can be like a spiral, and different phases will be repeated several times over the brand's lifespan. However, in order to keep the brand "up and running" it needs to be continuously rejuvenated and revitalized throughout the lifecycle. Cinematographic movements, due to their specific nature, have even a shorter lifespan as a brand. In Morgens Rukov's opinion "no film "wave" ever lasts longer than eight years." 111

This subchapter aims to analyse how Dogme brothers have managed Dogme movement throughout its lifecycle, how they have tried to revitalize their invention and at what stages they have failed to support the Dogme brand. In the end, the subchapter describes the "exit strategy" that we think Dogme brothers have used to let the Dogme 95 get detached from the founders and take a life of its own.

In the previous subchapters we have discussed in detail how the Dogme movement was launched, what were the possible implications of the brand name, how it was presented and what kind of tools were used for promoting the brand. However, here we are going to pose a question about a particular aspect of the brand management, which we have not discussed before: generally, any kind of trademark or invention is registered, especially to protect it from counterfeit. However, founders of Dogme 95 never thought of registering their "brand" or invention. On the contrary, they declared that Dogme 95 clubs was open for anybody who would like to join it. The only prerequisite for labelling a movie as Dogme was that it had to be seen and approved by Dogme brothers, who in case the movie followed all the rules of the Vow of Chastity, would grant it a Dogme certificate. In 2002, when the Dogme secretariat was closed, Dogme brothers cancelled even this requirement and declared that from now on directors all over the world no longer needed to apply for a Dogme certificate: they could just pledge that they had followed all the rules and their movie would be considered Dogme.

Why did not Dogme brothers patent their invention and put it on display so that anybody could use it the way they wanted?

The following comment by Thomas Vinterberg can be helpful in understanding this point: "For me it's a rescue [refers to the closure of Dogme secretariat and the change in certification policy], in a way, because I was ready to close this whole Dogme thing down. I mean, we invented this in 1995: we've 'done' Dogme, kind of. But Lars has a very generous mind and he said, 'Well, other people could have a nice experience with this.' To me, that suddenly opened up this Dogme movement. I realized that people can experience this in Brazil without the tired old faces of the Dogme Danes, right? And I would be very happy if other film-makers could experience the same

111 Jack Stevenson, "Dogme Uncut," p. 15

87 kind of relief we did a couple of years ago. Also we found it more true to the original concept that it should be up to people themselves. I'm curious to see if people will understand the set of Rules better, now that they have to be their own judges instead of just trying to get a certificate. Because Dogme is a challenge to the conformity of film-making. Cinema is, at the end of the day, the most conservative art-form so far. And this is an obvious way of provoking it, of creating some kind of life. People have a lot of difficulties understanding this. Maybe they'll understand it better if it's their own responsibility.112 "

After the initial presentation of the movement, there was a 3 year gap before the first movie was made. With this Dogme entered in the growth phase. Due to its specific character of the brand, it's rather difficult to mark the borders of different phases, but we dare to say that the growth phase can be considered to include the first four Danish movies (Celebration, Idiots, Mifune and the King is Alive).

What is really surprising, however, is that after having inaugurated this new concept with all the pomp and publicity, the founders of Dogme 95 only made one Dogme movie each. If Dogme was purifying and if it was a way to find artistic freedom and a breakaway to creativeness, why did not they continue to make Dogme movies? Thomas Vinterberg has the following answer to this question: "Doing Festen was by far the most uplifting thing I've tried, so far, in this industry. I can't do that again. In order to avoid repetition, I have to do something contrary the net time. But, yes, I'm looking forward to that day when I can go back to the Dogme church and do another film.113 "

As Dogme slowly turned into a genre itself, it probably entered the maturity phase. In the maturity part of the life cycle, the brand will be under considerable pressure. Where the brand primarily satisfies consumers' functional needs, these functional requirements should be identified and any further brand extensions evaluated against this list to see if there is any similarity between the needs that the new brands will meet and those being satisfied by an existing brand. By contrast, when the brand primarily satisfies representational needs, these should be assessed and taken as essential criteria for future brand extensions.

114

If we consider the innovative character to be Dogme brand's main representational component, then, with Dogme turning into a genre, it obviously looses the innovative and avant-garde character and consequently, its representational appeal is decreased. Probably Kristian Levring had the same in mind when he said that if Dogme turns into a genre, it will be the end. 115 If the Dogme brothers continued to make Dogme movies, would that save the concept from turning into genre? Would that feed new energy into the movement? The

112 Richard Kelly, "The name of this book is Dogme 95," p.122 113 Richard Kelly, "The name of this book is Dogme 95," p.114 114 Leslie de Chernatony and Malcolm McDonald, "Creating Powerful Brands in Consumer, Service and Industrial Markets," 2002. p. .383 115 Richard Kelly, "The Name of this book is Dogme 95," p.54

88 answer depends again on the definition of Dogme: if it is perceived as an innovation, an avant-garde, then it's obvious that sooner or later it would stop being an innovation and turn into a genre of its kind, but if we describe Dogme as a way to show the reality, then the discussion about turning into a genre becomes less relevant (after all, even Thomas Vinterberg, who was one of the founders of Dogme 95, once complained that the restriction on making the genre movies was the most unfair rule and probably impossible to follow: " I thought a lot about this genre Rule. And I found it a bad Rule, actually. Because it's very difficult to avoid genre. And somehow it's not very creative, because it's unspecific...not being able to make a genre, or not being allowed to have 'taste' is, in a way, impossible116.")

According to the marketing basics, as brand sales begin to decline, firms need to evaluate carefully the two main strategic options of recycling their brand or coping with decline. When the brand is recycled the marketer needs to find new uses for the brand, either through the functional dimensions, or the representational dimension. Should the firm feel there is little scope for functional or representational brand changes, it still needs to manage its brands in the decline stage. A decision needs to be taken about whether the brand should be quickly withdrawn or whether it should be allowed to die.117

Italian for Beginners (2000) turned out to be the last most profitable and popular Dogme movie. We could speculate that this factor, combined with Dogme's slow slide into mainstream, made the Dogme brothers take the decision to close the Dogme secretariat in June 2002.

"In 1995 the Dogme brothers launched the groundbreaking manifesto “The Vow of Chastity”, and made 4 films that were both critically and commercially acknowledged world-wide. They encouraged filmmakers all over the world to reconsider the conventions of moviemaking. The challenge was taken and by now 31 different Dogme films have been made in Korea, Argentina, Spain, USA, France, Switzerland, Norway, Italy and of course Denmark. These films show the very diverse interpretations of the ten Dogme rules, and perhaps the need of them.

The manifesto of Dogme 95 has almost grown into a genre formula, which was never the intention. As a consequence we will stop our part off mediation and interpretation on how to make Dogme films and are therefore closing the Dogme secretariat. The original founders have moved on with new experimental film projects, as we have moved on. In addition to that we do not have any economic foundation to continue our work, which have indeed been a broadening journey...118"

116 Richard Kelly, "The name of this book is Dogme 95," p.117 117 Leslie de Chernatony and Malcolm McDonald, "Creating Powerful Brands in Consumer, Service and Industrial Markets, 2002." p 384 118 "The Dogmesecretariat is closing," www.dogme95.dk

89 It is probably fair enough to say that with the closure of Dogme secretariat in June 2002 an important phase was finished and Dogme 95 embarked on a different life. We get a feeling that Dogme brothers decided to abandon their invention, because they did not need it any longer. Obviously, the withdrawal of the founders who were closely associated with Dogme 95, would have a significant impact on the future development of the movement. In conclusion, we would say that Dogme brothers used the exit strategy to cope with the decline of the Dogme "brand" and decided to change the representational component by giving out Dogme as a gift to the artists around the world, so that now they could play around with the concept and discover their own Dogme.

8.7. THE FOUNDER'S PERSPECTIVE

In this subchapter we are going to present the founder's standpoint about the cardinal research question: Does Dogme 95 create an innovation in cinematographic language or is it rather a marketing strategy?

The founders of Dogme 95 concept (except for Aalbæk Jensen)119 disagree with the idea that Dogme 95 has to do anything with branding. In their words it's only an idea about making a movie in a new way and the whole concept has nothing to do with the marketing. Below follow two excerpts from Richard Kelly's interviews with Kristian Levring and Thomas Vinterberg. We decided to include these extracts in the subchapter because they clearly show the Dogme directors' standpoint about the new concept and its relation with the concept of marketing:

Question 1 (Richard Kelly): Some critics say Dogme is primarily a marketing tactic: a label is stamped on the movies; they go round the world, which is very fortunate for Danish cinema. But cynics do think that the films get made for that reason, that the Dogme stamp legitimizes them. Your script120 is so bizarre in its conception; do you think it could have got made without the Dogme stamp? Answer 1 (Kristian Levring): Well, I do also believe that one reason why Dogme has been such a success is because the films are actually good. If they’d been bad, it would just have been this little Danish thing that nobody ever heard about. But I think it was easier to make this film because of Dogme, no doubt about this. And I agree with the critics, I can understand their point of view. I think all four of us agree that Dogme has got too commercial. But Dogme is democratic, it’s not some fascist control thing. So people can do with it what they want; it’s really out of our hands.121

119 Peter Aalbæk Jensen, who is often reffered to as the Godfather of Dogme movement, has a different opinion. See more about this in the subchapter "Marketing Assets". 120 The question referes to the script of Kristian Levring's movie: The King is Alive 121 Richard Kelly, "The Name of this book is Dogme 95," p.54

90 Question 2 (Richard Kelly): What do you make of the fear that some people will just use Dogme as a brand name, for marketing purposes? Answer 2 (Thomas Vinterberg): You know what? That's happening right now, here. I mean, Zentropa has arranged this 'package' of Dogme films, they've signed up for sixteen films. Which is not the idea. Now, all of a sudden, a director comes to a production company and is offered a Dogme film. But Dogme 95 is a set of rules for a director, not for a production company. It's not Coca-cola we're doing here. And I've said this to Zentropa and to Nimbus film, but...I mean, the ball is rolling now. And I'm sad about that, because Dogme is not meant to be just another low-budget package. It's meant to awaken some directors, and challenge them. It was not the idea to make cheap films- it's a Dogme film, it's cheap, and it'll sell. That's nothing."122

Moreover, in the press-release about the closure of secretariat the Dogme brothers declare that Dogme is not a brand, it's only an artistic device and therefore they don't see a specific need for issuing Dogme certificates any more.

"In case you do desire to make a Dogme film, you are free to do so; you do not need to apply for a certificate anymore. “The Vow of Chastity” is an artistic way of expressing a certain cinematic point of view, it is meant to inspire filmmakers all over the world. It is an idea and not a brand, and therefore it does not imply copyrights of any kind.123"

In conclusion, the Dogme brothers deny any connection between Dogme and marketing, for them Dogme is only an artistic device, a way of movie-making. Only Peter Aalbæk Jensen, the Dogme "businessman" admits (as we already discussed above) that in reality the founders of Dogme 95 wanted to create a myth "that would reach out beyond Denmark's borders. Without any money to market this myth. A myth that we wouldn't have to borrow 2 million DM to launch..." 124 So, hey disallowed everything that they did not have, borrowed some religious concepts, turned the lack of resources into virtue and launched the new movement.

8.8. EVALUATION OF THE MARKETING STRATEGY: THE OUTCOME OF DOGME 95

The following subchapter will in fact have two areas of emphasis, as it will try to answer two separate questions:

1) Was Dogme 95 successful? 2) Was the marketing strategy, deployed for the promotion of Dogme concept, successful?

122 Richard Kelly, "The Name of this book is Dogme 95," p.122 123 "The Dogmesecretariat is closing," www.dogme95.dk 124 Jack Stevenson, "Dogme Uncut," p. 295

91

The answer to the first question depends on the way we look at the issue, because there are different aspects of the question: on the one hand, we can differentiate between success in Denmark and internationally. On the other hand, the answer depends on what criteria we use to measure the success of Dogme 95.

We can say that Dogme was quite successful in Denmark. Several of the Danish Dogme movies became very popular both in and outside of Denmark; they were also presented at different festivals and competitions and won numerous prizes. If we look at the Dogme movies made outside of Denmark, we can say that Dogme was less successful internationally, as most of the foreign Dogme movies are of rather low quality.

One of the original goals of Dogme was to attract famous directors and convince them to make Dogme movies. As Mr. Peter Schepelern describes it, Dogme definitely failed in this aspect and despite the brotherhood's efforts none of the internationally acclaimed directors were tempted to indulge themselves into the Dogme movement. Most of the Dogme movies were made by directors who were just beginning their movie-making career.

Judging according to the financial criterion, it's rather difficult to decide whether Dogme 95 was successful or not: as we have already mentioned, the real income from the most commercial Dogme movie- Italian for Beginners, was 1.2 million USD, which is far less then the honorarium of a Hollywood star for a single movie. Several other Dogme movies had relatively high box office sales, but their commercial success is still relative and can not compare to the commercial success of mainstream movies.

From the founders' viewpoint, Dogme 95 lost some of its original features after the birth, because it was not perceived by the audience the way it was planned. Besides, as we also discussed in the previous chapters, Dogme slightly began to turn into mainstream, which was not the Dogme brother's expectation and plan and that's probably why they withdrew from the movement several years after they made their first the only Dogme movies. As Thomas Vinterberg concludes:

"People don't seem to have picked up the idea in the way I hoped. I was hoping it would create a polemical atmosphere and provoke people to do something of consequence, maybe even contrary to Dogme-to make huge films, say, just to show you can do them another way too. But that doesn't seem to have happened here. In fact, Dogme has become almost a convention in itself, within Danish culture: now they talk about 'Dogme architecture', 'Dogme commercials.´ In the commercials industry, you get this very expensive bad lighting, ' to look like Dogme.' I mean, that is not the

92 point. The point is to get angry and so something different. The point is to reflect the movie business as it is - not just give it another colour. But in some people's minds, Dogme just means 'hand-held films,' you know?" 125

But if the major goal of Dogme was to create a new cinematographic language that would show the reality and remove the cover of illusion from the film, then we could probably say that it did succeed in this aspect. As it is illustrated from the results of the focus group that was conducted for this research, while watching Dogme movies most of the viewers get a feeling that it's very "real" and that if it was made in another technique, like mainstream movie, it would not have had the same effect.

Finally, in regard to the second question of the subchapter: the marketing strategy aimed at promoting the Dogme movement was definitely very successful. Dogme brothers managed to create significant publicity around the concept both inside and outside of Denmark, from the very first day Dogme was part of media discussions, after the release of each Dogme movie viewers would start discussing how much the movie complied with the rules of the Vow of Chastity etc. The founders of Dogme concept have definitely managed to create a strong brand that spurred a lot of controversy and public discussion nationwide, as well as around the world.

125 Richard Kelly; "The name of this book is Dogme 95," p.112

93 CHAPTER 9: CONCLUSION

During the whole project work we were continuously asking ourselves: “now, that we have seen so many Dogme movies and have read so much about the principles and ideas behind the concept of Dogme, including the founders’ perspectives, what do we think? Do we think it is an innovation in the cinematographic language or do we believe that Dogme 95 was a well-planned marketing strategy under the cover of innovation? The more we studied the subject, the more difficult it became for us to try to take a step back and come up with a relatively objective and balanced answer. On the one hand, we analysed the manifesto and the Vow of Chastity, compared the Dogme concepts and movies to the previous avant-garde movements and tried to determine to what extent Dogme movement had borrowed and incorporated the innovations and ideas of the previous movements, we did the content analysis of the first four Dogme movies to determine what innovations they introduced and finally, we conducted a focus group, hoping that the participant reflections and discussions would further guide us in our research. We did not intend the focus group to be a scientific research, rather, we thought that we could get inspired by the impressions and findings of the participants. Throughout the research we got so influenced with the information and arguments of different parties, that we really needed the fresh impressions of our focus group participants to take a step back and approach the problem from a new angle. In fact, we ended up using one of the participant's remarks as a key to our final conclusion:

Dogme 95 did not really create innovations, many techniques which are essential trademarks of Dogme movement (particularly the hand-held camera), were invented before Dogme. However, it was indeed the first time in the history of cinematography that these specific rules were arranged in a set and formed into a new movement. So, on the one hand, Dogme is a collection of concepts that had already been invented by other cinematographic movements. On the other hand, it was still an innovation in the sense that it succeeded in creating a new cinematographic concept based on the previously invented techniques.

Finally, we assumed that Dogme was a commercial brand, and tried to apply marketing principles to it. Through the detailed analysis in the chapter about the marketing we managed to show that the founders of Dogme concept have used many conventional and non-conventional branding tools to promote their "product." Of course, Dogme 95 was an artistic concept, conceived in the minds of highly eccentric Danish directors, but at the same time, it is obvious that the founders of the concept relied extensively on marketing strategies and principles in order to promote their invention successfully both in Denmark and internationally.

94 BIBLIOGRAFICAL REFERENCES

1- BOOKS:

ADCOCK, Dennis. Marketing: Principles and Practice, 1993.

DE CHERNATONY, Leslie and MCDONALD, Malcolm. Creating Powerful Brands in Consumer, Service and Industrial Markets. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann., 2002.

HJORT, Mette and MACKENZIE, Scott (eds). Purity and Provocation: Dogme 95. London: British Film Institute Publishing, 2003.

JENSEN, Peter Aalbæk. Without Cigar: the Father, the son and the Film merchant. Høst & Søn, 2001.

KELLY, Richard. The name of this book is Dogme 95. London: Faber and Faber, 2000.

LUSCH, Robert F. LUSCH, Virginia N. Principles of marketing, 1987.

PALEY, Norton. How to develop a strategic marketing plan? 2000.

ROCKWELL, John. The Idiots. London: British Film Institute, 2003.

RODRIGUEZ, Hilario J. Lars von Trier - el cine sin Dogmes. Madrid: Ediciones JC, 2003.

ROGERS, Everett M. Diffusion of Innovations. New York: The Free Press / London: Collier-MacMillan Limited, 1962.

SCHEPELERN, Peter. Lars von Trier - tvang og brefielse. København: Rosinante, 2000.

STEVENSON, Jack. Lars Von Trier. London: British Film Institute: 2002.

STEVENSON, Jack. Dogme uncut: Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg and the gang that took on Hollywood. Santa Monica, California: Santa Monica Press, 2003.

95 2- ARTICLES:

BONDEBJERG, Ib. "Dogme 95 and the New Danish Cinema" in the compendium Lars von Trier, Dogme 95 and New Danish Cinema, Copenhagen University, Department of Film and Media Studies, 2005, p. 48-55.

BORDWELL, David. "Classical Hollywood Cinema: narrational principles and procedures" in Philip Rosen (ed.). Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology - A Film Theory Reader. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, p. 17- 34.

BORDWELL, David. "A Decade of Danish Film" in the compendium Lars von Trier, Dogme 95 and New Danish Cinema, Copenhagen University, Department of Film and Media Studies, 2005, p. 66-69.

CHRISTENSEN, Ove. "Spastic Aesthetics - The Idiots", in P.O.V. - A Danish Journal of Film Studies. Aarhus: Department of Information and Media Studies, University of Aarhus, number 10, December 2000, p. 35-45.

ERIKSEN, Thomas Hylland. "How can global be local? Islam, the west and the globalisation of identity politics". In: Oscar Hemer and Thomas Tufte (eds). "Media and Glocal Change - Rethinking communication for development. CLACSO, Buenos Aires, and NORDICOM: University of Göteborg, 2005.

HJORT, Mette and BONDEBJERG, Ib. "Danish Cinema: A Small Nation in Global Culture" in the compendium Lars von Trier, Dogme 95 and New Danish Cinema, Copenhagen University, Department of Film and Media Studies, 2005, p. 14-16.

JERSLEV, Anne. "Introduction" in Realism and 'Reality' in Film and Media. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press - University of Copenhagen, 2002, p. 7-13.

JERSLEV, Anne. "Dogme 95, Lars von Trier's The Idiots and 'Idiot Project'" in Realism and 'Reality' in Film and Media. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press - University of Copenhagen, 2002, p. 41-65.

LANGKJÆR, Birger. "Realism and Danish Cinema" in Realism and 'Reality' in Film and Media. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press - University of Copenhagen, 2002, p. 15-40.

LAURIDSEN, Palle Schantz. "The Celebration: classical drama and docu soap style", in P.O.V. - A Danish Journal of Film Studies. Aarhus: Department of Information and Media Studies, University of Aarhus, number 10, December 2000, p. 63-75.

96

MICHELSEN, Liselotte and PIIL, Morten. "Danish Dogme Actors" in the compendium Lars von Trier, Dogme 95 and New Danish Cinema, Copenhagen University, Department of Film and Media Studies, 2005, p. 20-29.

PIIL, Morten. "The Heart-Warming Spark" in the compendium Lars von Trier, Dogme 95 and New Danish Cinema, Copenhagen University, Department of Film and Media Studies, 2005, p. 17-19.

SCHEPELERN, Peter. "Ten Years of Dogme", in the compendium Lars von Trier, Dogme 95 and New Danish Cinema, Copenhagen University, Department of Film and Media Studies, 2005, p. 11-13.

SCHEPELERN, Peter. "The King of Dogme" in the compendium Lars von Trier, Dogme 95 and New Danish Cinema, Copenhagen University, Department of Film and Media Studies, 2005, p. 14-16.

SCHEPELERN, Peter. "Ten plus three" in the compendium Lars von Trier, Dogme 95 and New Danish Cinema, Copenhagen University, Department of Film and Media Studies, 2005, p. 25-31.

SCHEPELERN, Peter. "'Kill your darlings': Lars von Trier and the origin of Dogme 95" in the compendium Lars von Trier, Dogme 95 and New Danish Cinema, Copenhagen University, Department of Film and Media Studies, 2005, p. 42-47.

SCHEPELERN, Peter. "The Europe Trilogy: An Introduction" in the compendium Lars von Trier, Dogme 95 and New Danish Cinema, Copenhagen University, Department of Film and Media Studies, 2005, p. 56-57.

SCHEPELERN, Peter. "According to Dogme film: restrictions, obstructions and liberations", in the official Dogme 95 website: www.dogme95.dk, accessed in December 7, 2005.

SCHRØDER, Kim. "Reception research in practice: researching media meanings through talk" (Chapter 1) in Kim Schrøder, Kirsten Drotner, Stephen Kline and Catherine Murray. Researching Audiences, p. 107.

STAAV, Zik. "The Semiotics of Camera Movement in Dogme 95, as exemplified by Festen (The Celebration) (Dogme #1) (1998)". Academic paper written for the course "Visual Semiotics of the Media", Roskilde University, Department of Communication Studies, Journalism and Computer Science, Module 2, 2005.

THOMSEN, Christian Braad. "Control and Chaos" in the compendium Lars von Trier, Dogme 95 and New Danish Cinema, Copenhagen University, Department of Film and Media Studies, 2005, p. 32-36.

97

THOMPSON, Kristin and BORDWELL, David. "Back to Basics" in the compendium Lars von Trier, Dogme 95 and New Danish Cinema, Copenhagen University, Department of Film and Media Studies, 2005, p. 70-71.

TONKISS, Fran. "Using Focus Groups" (Chapter 15) in Clive Seale (ed.). Researching Society and Culture. Second Edition. London: Sage, 2004, p. 193-206.

WATSON, James. "Narrative: the media as storytellers" in Media Communications - an introduction to theory and practice. 1998, p. 130- 151.

WINDAHL, Sven, SIGNITZER, Benno. "Multi-step flow approaches" (Chapter 6) in Using Communication Theory: An introduction to planned communication. London: Sage, 1992, p. 51-70.

3- INTERVIEWS:

HJORT, Mette and BONDEBJERG, Ib. "Thomas Vinterberg" in the compendium Lars von Trier, Dogme 95 and New Danish Cinema, Copenhagen University, Department of Film and Media Studies, 2005, p. 58-65.

KNUDSEN, Peter Øvig. "The man who would give up control" (interview with Lars von Trier), in the official Dogme 95 website: www.dogme95.dk, accessed in November 20, 2005.

RUNDLE, Peter. "An Aesthetic Choice" (interview with Kristian Levring), in the official Dogme 95 website: www.dogme95.dk, accessed in December 7, 2005.

4 - FILMS AND DOCUMENTARIES:

Breaking the Waves (1996), by Lars von Trier.

Dancer in the Dark (2000), by Lars von Trier.

D-Dag (2000), co-directed by Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg, Søren Kragh-Jacobsen and Kristian Levring.

98

Dogville (2003), by Lars von Trier.

Epidemic (1987), by Lars von Trier.

Europa (1991), by Lars von Trier.

Images of a Relief (1982), by Lars von Trier (This film was his project graduation in the Danish Film School).

Italian for beginners (2000) by Lone Scherfig

Jules et Jim (1962), by François Truffaut.

Manderlay (2005), by Lars von Trier.

Menthe - la bienheureuse (1979), by Lars von Trier (This film was made in the "Film Group 16").

Mifune (1999), by Søren Kragh-Jacobsen

Nocturne (1980), by Lars von Trier (This film was made in the Danish Film School).

Orchidegartneren (1977), by Lars von Trier (This film was made in the "Film Group 16").

The Celebration (1998), by Thomas Vinterberg

The Element of Crime (1984), by Lars von Trier.

The Humiliated (1998), by Jesper Jargil.

The Idiots (1998), by Lars von Trier.

The Kingdom (1994), co-directed by Lars von Trier and Morten Arnfred.

The King is Alive (2000), by Kristian Levring.

The Purified (2002), by Jesper Jargil.

99

5- WEB PAGES:

- www.reference.com - www.dictionary.com - www.thesaurus.com - www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/movements.shtml - http://www.holah.karoo.net/experimental_method.htm - www.dogme95.dk - http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/vertov.html - http://www.flickerings.com/2003/films/Dogme.html - http://www.learner.org/exhibits/cinema/ - http://www.mediaknowall.com/camangles.html

100 Appendix

A) Manifesto

Dogme 95 .. is a collective of film directors founded in Copenhagen in spring 1995.

DOGME 95 has the expressed goal of countering “certain tendencies” in the cinema today.

DOGME 95 is a rescue action!

In 1960 enough was enough! The movie was dead and called for resurrection. The goal was correct but the means were not! The new wave proved to be a ripple that washed ashore and turned to muck.

Slogans of individualism and freedom created works for a while, but no changes. The wave was up for grabs, like the directors themselves. The wave was never stronger than the men behind it. The anti-bourgeois cinema itself became bourgeois, because 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!

Today a technological storm is raging, the result of which will be the ultimate democratisation of the cinema. For the first time, anyone can make movies. But the more accessible the media becomes, the more important the avant-garde, It is no accident that the phrase “avant-garde” has military connotations. Discipline is the answer ... we must put our films into uniform, because the individual film will be decadent by definition!

DOGME 95 counters the individual film by the principle of presenting an indisputable set of rules known as THE VOW OF CHASTITY.

101 B) The Vow of Chastity

"I swear to submit 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 (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found). 2. 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). 3. The camera must be hand-held. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted. (The film must not take place where the camera is standing; shooting must take place where the film takes place). 4. The film must be in colour. Special lighting is not acceptable. (If there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera). 5. Optical work and filters are forbidden. 6. The film must not contain superficial action. (Murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.) 7. Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden. (That is to say that the film takes place here and now.) 8. Genre movies are not acceptable. 9. The film format must be Academy 35 mm. 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 available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations.

Thus I make my VOW OF CHASTITY." Copenhagen, Monday 13 March 1995

On behalf of DOGME 95

Lars von Trier Thomas Vinterberg

102 C) Thomas Vinterberg's Confession

As one of the DOGME 95 brethren and co-signatory of the Vow of Chastity I feel moved to confess to the following transgressions of the aforesaid Vow during the production of Dogme #1-The Celebration. Please note that the film has been approved as a Dogme work, as only one genuine breach of the rules has actually taken place. The rest may be regarded as moral breaches.

I confess to having made one take with a black drape covering a window. This is not only the addition of a property, but must also be regarded as a kind of lighting arrangement. I confess to having knowledge of a pay rise that served as cover for the purchase of Thomas Bo Larsen's suit for use in the film.

Similarly I confess to having knowledge of purchases by Trine Dyrholm and Therese Glahn of the same nature. I confess to having set in train the construction of a non-existent hotel reception desk for use in The Celebration. It should be noted that the structure consisted solely of components already present at the location. I confess that Christian's mobile or cellular telephone was not his own. But it was present at the location. I confess that in one take, the camera was attached to a microphone boom, and thus only partially hand-held. I hereby declare that the rest of Dogme #1-The Celebration was produced in accordance with the Vow of Chastity.

Pleading for absolution, I remain

Thomas Vinterberg

103 D) Søren Kragh-Jacobsen's Confession

As one of the Dogme 95 Brethren and cosignatory of the Vow of Chastity, I feel moved to confess to the following transgressions of the aforesaid vow during the production of Dogme3—"Mifune." Please note that the film has been approved as a Dogme work, as only one genuine breach of the rules has taken place, the rest may be regarded as moral breaches. I confess to having made one take with a black drape covering a window. This is not only the addition of a property, but must also be regarded as a kind of lighting arrangement. I confess to moving furniture and fittings around the house. I confess to having taken with me a number of albums of my favorite cartoon series as a youth, Lindsey and Valentin. I confess to helping chase the neighbor's free range hens across our location and including them in the film. I confess that I bought a photographic image from an old lady from the area and hung it in a prominent position in one scene: not as part of the plot, but more as a selfish, spontaneous, pleasurable whim. I confess to borrowing a hydraulic platform from a painter, which we used for the only two birds-eye overview shots in the film. I do solemnly declare that in my presence the remainder of Dogme 3—"Mifune" was produced in accordance with the Vow of Chastity. I also point out that the film has been approved by DOGME 95 as a Dogme film, as in real terms no more than a single breach of the rules has been committed. The rest may be regarded as moral transgressions.

Copenhagen, 20 January 1999

Søren Kragh-Jacobsen

104 E) Focus Group Transcript

Q 1- Did you like the movie? What is your first impression of the movie?

Q 2- Did the camera movements help you to follow and understand the story, or was it disturbing you?

Åse: "Actors do not look like actors, they seem natural". "Camera and light make you feel inside. You are not watching at a distance. It is not so smooth as Hollywood movies" Ricardo?: I agree. And I don't have problems with this kind of camera movements. "I like absence of the music in the movie" Zik: You can put yourself into the story. Also the viewer's eyes react according to the camera movements. Zik: The focus is more in the acting. Faces you have never seen before help you to put your face in the story. It is not like beautiful colors... Martina: [Disturbing me] first the camera language, and also the actors didn't seems like a Hollywood actors. "It looks like a home video" She did not notice that there was non diegetic music in the movie until later, when someone who knew it said it. She expected a different ending: that Christian was ill. Alena: I agree with Martina. At the beginning, the hand-held camera was disturbing me, but it is an advantage in this movie. Paulino: "The story here is more important than technical things" Paulino: The most importance is the camera movements.?? Cristina: In this movie, you can expected more. And the movie have a very unusual way to present the story. It is like a everyday life.

Q 3- Is this film somehow different from other movies you are used to?(Hollywood movies) And if it is different, then in which way? (Do you think it would be different?)

Cristina: "How the story is built up is very interesting" "The story is really unpredictable" "In some other movies you really know what is going to happen next" "This is a very unusual way of presenting it, it is so natural, like everydaylife". Zik: "When you get rid about the music, lights and all these things, it makes you make a movie where you focuses mostly in the acting, so, it could not look like Hollywood actors, I think. The only way that you can really believe a movie like this that it is real is by faces you have never seen before, ordinary people like you" "That´s what brings you more in the film, you can put yourself in the story" Zik: "When you take away the tripod and make the camera always moving...viewer's eye reacts to movement"... "It activates different parts in your brain, it makes it more active, caused for the viewer"

105 Åse: "You will not have the same feeling if the story had been told from Hollywood. It is a kind of story you do not tell in Hollywood movies. You will not have that kind of reality impression" She would not call it "happy end". Martina: Hollywood could make the same story. Maybe it would be different from the camera" I was a little bit surprised with the happy end. I expected a different end. Åse maybe the story, but I don't think we could have the same feeling": "You will not have the same feeling if the story had been told from Hollywood. It is a kind of story you do not tell in Hollywood movies. You will not have that kind of reality impression" Martina: "Yeah" (example of influence) Åse wouln´t call it "happy end" Ricardo can not find this difference in the narration of the plot (Hollywood-Dogma). Zik: "Films like this could never be done in Hollywood, because, first of all...the subject matter...They would never allow the father to fall from so high to so low and...even characters did not get enough punishment for a Hollywood movie, there would be police at the end or sth like that". The biggest difference for him: characters like Michel, he looks like a hero for the family for having hit the father. He does not get anything out of it; he does not get any punishment for what he does during the film". Ricardo: "Christian and Michael: different way of punishment, physical and verbal punishment"

So, can we say it is a natural ending? (from Hollywood stories, the plot)

Alena: I am a little agree with Martina, about the happy end. I was waiting something different in the end. I was waiting more explosion of the feelings.

Q 4- Does this movie represent reality for you?

Paulino: It seems real because the story is very strong. For him, personal opinion: Technical things is not so important than the story" Ricardo: The dramaturgy in this movie is like in Hollywood. Martina likes the IRONIC in the film. Alena: "While you are watching the movie, you think "I would act like this"" I would forget all the important things, like the amount of children dying in the world..." Cristina: For me is confuse the role of the mother, because she was in a dilemma." You would expect a different attitude from the mother" Alena: "she always acts as everybody expects her to act".

106 Q 5- Do you think the characters develope?

Zik: everybody else are the same except Christian. Martina: Helena also when she reads the letter" Zik and Åse: Yeah (influenced) Zik: "Helene (Paprika) changes too. She leaves a weight out of her back" (when she reads the letter) They talk very much about the development of the characters. Not all of them agree.

Q 6- Is it artificial in the way it is presented?

Cristina Every time the movie is in the same location. In other movies, you have sceneries...here is like the same stage, like a theatre play. Zik Seems like a theatre, is like the characters is in front of us, because is always in the same location. Martina :Michael's character is so evil! Alena The movie has also artificiality, when, for example, the dead sister talk with Christian. Alena The most dramatic moment is when the sister read the letter in front of the whole family. Zik: When the main character, Christian, asks Pia if she would like to go to Paris with him seems, for me, like a Hollywood movie.

Q 7. Do you get a feeling that the movie shows the reality of Danish life? is there something very danish about this movie?

Alena I asked myself if Danish families celebrate together like in this movie. Åse: "This family is a big one with traditions." Alena: she asks herself if the Danish behave like this (the celebration, songs, food, meeting...) She imagines that is typical but does not know. The movie creates an image. Cristina "It reminds me Hamlet: very dramatic and powerful. Christian is having a struggle inside of him. It is also the same set all the time(theatre)" Cristina compares the movie with Hamlet, Christian is like Hamlet, the father is like Hamlet's uncle, King Claudius, and the mother is like Queen Gertrude

Q 8- Is it dramatic? Genres. Does it respond to the typical develope, climax...?

Alena: "You can see the develop of the plot" Now they talk about the evolution of the characters again

107 Q 9- Do you think that this movie has a signature of an individual director, or is it a uniform movie for you? ( this is the question about the auteur concept, but I did not know how to formulate the question.) Alena:" There are some aesthetics. Kind of individual, the decision is director's."

Q 10- Do you think that it is necessary to have the Dogme certificate at the beginning? What does it tell you? Does it make any change?

Ricardo:" It isn't necessary, it is only, I think, to make the movie more special. "Good story and good actors= the most important thing" Paulino: Ok, Dogme 95 is new, but isn't very innovative. Cristina: "If you do not know about Dogma cinema, you get more interested" (With the certificate). Martina: it makes you think "This is special, is Dogma"

What does it add to your understanding? Cristina: somehow is more a feeling and you say: Ok, I am gone watch a Dogma movie" Åse: "I know about it but I do not think about it when I see a Dogma movie". Paulino: Is not necessary to classify this type of films. It is not so special that they try to make it" "The content is more important". Paulino: "The director is more important than the movement (Dogma)" Cristina: with the movie she gets the message that you have to do what is fair. Alena, Cristina, Martina: young people would use like this: "I like Dogma, I am cool" Ricardo: "Dogma is not as special as they want to"

Q 11. What is the feeling you get from the movie?

Cristina: she puts herself in the shoes of Christian and thinks: "What would I do if I was him? It is a hard situation" with the movie she gets the message that you have to do what is fair. Zik: does not agree with Cristina and he gets the message that you have to think how what you are going to do is going to affect the world around you.

Q 12- Would you like to see this movie for the second time? Now?

Martina: not now!! Zik: Yes.

Q 13- Was is disgusting because of the story?

108 General: NO Zik: he compares the film with other uncomfortable movies because of the plot, like Happyness, but he gets impressed.

Q 14- Do you want to see more Dogme movies?/ if yes, contact us. ( we will see how many of them approach us.)

YES in general, not very enthusiastic maybe because of the time and because it was the end of the conversation. Cristina: Yes, I am. Martina: In this movie, I am interest in the story, no in the label Dogme 95.

... or would you prefer just classical way of making movies?

NO ANSWER

14- Does the form of Dogme movies affect the content? I mean, the way of making the film affects the impression you have from it?

YES, OF COURSE (GENERAL APPROVATION) Ricardo: of course YEAH Alena: this plot, this story could have not been told by another movement but Dogma???? (I didn't get it very well, I supposed she said that from some words I heard) Alena: Festen could also be made with Hollywood techniques, but in that case it would be a different movie and it would not make us feel as if we were part of the story. Paulino: There can be very good dogma movies and very bad dogma movies ( it means we should not generalize?)

15- Would you pay for this movie at the cinema?

PEOPLE LAUGH. WE MAKE JOKES ABOUT THE PRICE. Cristina: is the first time for me that I have seen a Dogma movie and I am feeling curious about other movies.

16- But if you had and option to see a very famous Hollywood comedy that everybody says it is great...?

109

Alena (interrupting): I would prefer the Dogma movie Cristina: it depends on the mood I am that day. (Laughs) Åse: "It depends on who you are watching it with and..." " Not every day is a Dogma day" (Laughs)

17- Is Dogma an innovation or a marketing tool? (people don´t react) Don´t you think that this movie could have been done without saying it was Dogma?

Zik: yes, of course, but is the number 1 (referring to the first Dogma movie).Is a way of doing it in a LOUD way instead of in a QUIET way. Is more in the personality who were doing it, but I don't think it's marketing???(I did not get this very well, I am not sure) He agrees the perception would have been the same without saying it was Dogma. Alena thinks it is a marketing tool to attract people, young people. It’s trendy to say: oh, I like dogme movies, oh, you have not heard about dogme movies? Especially among young generation Zik: it is not the first time anybody ever made a film in this way, but it is the first time anybody ever sat down to write these rules… but in any way, Festen would have had success and would have had audience, because (no matter whether it’s a dogme movie or not) it’s a good movie in itself.

18- Is Dogma dead? Åse: well, it´s been around for ten years already and somebody has to pick up there and continue by doing sth else, by doing a new thing. She thinks people is not talking so much about Dogma now. Zik: It´s like an artistic movement: People are interested in avant-gard art while its still new. After a while everything gets old.

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