Dogma 95 has been hailed as the European renewal of independent and innovative film-making, in the tradition of Italian neo-realism and the French nouvelle vague. SIMONS JAN THE WAVES PLAYING Critics praised the directors’ low budgets and team work, and film fans appreciated the bold look at contemporary FILM FILM life. Lars von Trier – the movement’s founder and guiding spirit – however, also pursued another agenda. His CULTURE CULTURE approach to filmmaking takes cinema well beyond the IN TRANSITION IN TRANSITION traditional confines of film aesthetics and radically trans- poses the practice of film making and film itself right into what has become the paramount genre of new media: games and gaming. Dogma 95, this book argues, is not an exceptional phase in Von Trier’s career – as it was for PLAYINGPLAYING his co-founders – but the most explicit formulation of a cinematic games aesthetics that has guided the concep- tion and production of all of his films. Even the launching of Dogma 95 and the infamous THETHE WAVESWAVES Dogma Manifesto were conceived as a game, and ever since Von Trier has redefined the practice of film making as a rule bound activity, bringing forms and structures of games to bear on his films, and draw- ing some surprising lessons from economic and evolutionary game theory. This groundbreaking study argues that Von Trier’s films can be better understood from the per- spective of games studies and game theory than from the point of view of traditional film theory and film aesthetics. Jan Simons is Associate Professor of New Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. LARSLARS VONVON TRIER’STRIER’S GAMEGAME CINEMACINEMA 9 789053 569917 JANJAN SIMONS SIMONS Amsterdam University Press Amsterdam University Press WWW.AUP.NL Playing the Waves Playing the Waves Lars von Trier’sGameCinema Jan Simons The publication of this book is made possible by a grant from The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Front cover illustration from: the five obstructions / de fem benspænd, Jørgen Leth, Denmark Photo: Dan Holmberg; courtesy of Zentropa Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam Lay-out: japes, Amsterdam Translation: Ralph de Rijke isbn (paperback) isbn (hardcover) nur © Jan Simons / Amsterdam University Press, All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Table of contents Introduction 1 Manifesto and Modernism The Manifesto as a postmodern parody The Manifesto taken seriously The Manifesto and modernism From ‘essence’ to game The Manifesto: Reiteration and difference 2 The Name of this Game is Dogma 95 Filmmaking as a game Film and formalism: The parametric film Aesthetics and dramaturgy Filming: story as reconstruction and as representation Enter the matrix: Game, simulation, rules and art Complex art: Psykomobile #: The World Clock ‘There is something digital in the state of Denmark’ 3FilmingtheGame The rules of the game The game of filming, and films about games Idioterne () Idioterne () 4 Virtual Explorations: Journeys to the End of the Night Rules and Manifestos Virtual explorations: The Europa trilogy Virtual worlds Virtual film 5TheLeaderoftheGame Many films, one game The ‘von Trier’ gameworlds Nuances and subtleties 6 Between Cinema and Computer Filming the virtual Spirituality and virtuality 6 Playing the Waves Registrations of simulations Virtuality Virtual realism The viewer as lurker The ‘von Trier system’ revisited 7 Between Hollywood and Copenhagen Dogma, film and gaming Enter the Matrix: Virtual Hollywood The Matrix unloaded: Virtual realism Dogma : Nouvelle Vague II? Between new Hollywood and old Europe Today’s Hollywood, today’s Europe 8 The Name of the Game: Punish or Perish Cinematic games: Games or movies? Game theory and games studies Narrative and game theory Punish or perish; exploit or be exploited Stories and games reconsidered: Probabilities and tragic endings Endgame Notes Bibliography Index of Names Index of Film Titles Index of Subjects Introduction It took longer to get this book published than it took Lars von Trier to produce and release Manderlay and, by the time this book will be published, The Boss of it All and Wasington (sic). This difference in pace between the two media is, of course, to the disadvantage of the slower medium of print, which can hardly keep pace with the much faster audiovisual media. However, as former soccer player and coach Johan Cruijff always says, ‘With every disadvantage comes an advantage’. The time it took to get the manuscript published provided the opportunity to include a final chapter on Manderlay in this book. Though this film did not raise any new issues since Dogville, it confirmed the major claim of this book that von Trier’s movies are best approached as cinematic games. Whereas the preceding chapters dealt with the stylistic, structural and formal aspects of von Trier’s films, Manderlay offered the opportunity to see whether the claim that von Trier’s films are a cinematic version of contempo- rary computer games can be substantiated by a theoretical game analysis of the content of the stories of his films. This book grew out of a certain dissatisfaction with the reception and inter- pretation of the Dogme movement as either a call to realism or as a resuscita- tion of the modernist film movements from the s. It seems hard to believe that in , in the midst of postmodernism and at a point in history when cin- ema was already rapidly moving into the digital age, a filmmaker as sophisti- cated, knowledgeable and provocative as Lars von Trier could seriously pro- pose returning to the aesthetics and politics of Italian neo-realism and Nouvelle Vague modernism. After all, the exhaustion of the European auteur and art cin- ema was generally considered to be a major cause for the decline of European cinema. The labels Dogme found itself adorned with, ‘neo-Bazinian realism’, ‘DVD-realism’,or‘prescription for low-budget filmmaking’ did not seem very appropriate for a manifesto that shunned every reference to content and subject matter, and filmmakers who produced movies like The Celebration (Festen) and The Idiots, which were neither realist nor low budget. These labels seemed to reflect the limits of classical film theory and what is nowadays called ‘critical theory’ as well as a certain ignorance of von Trier’s earlier movies and production practices. The Dogme Manifesto is only one of the many manifestos that accompanied von Trier’s films. Most of these man- ifestos did not address the themes or problems the films dealt with, but defined 8 Playing the Waves the constraints von Trier set for himself with each film production. As the author of these manifestos and ‘production notes’ von Trier took on the same role with regard to himself as the filmmaker von Trier as he did with regard to the filmmaker Jørgen Leth in the film The Five Obstructions: he acted as the master and the arbiter of the game. As this book argues, in von Trier’s earlier films, in his Dogme film The Idiots and in the films he made after Dogme , von Trier plays with a new cinematic concept that is too radically innovative for classical, contemporary or critical film theory to grasp. Rather than being a continuation or resuscitation of the political, stylistic and thematic concerns of earlier film movements, von Trier’s cinema is firmly based in an emergent new media culture of virtual rea- lities and, even more importantly, games. The book consequently takes a per- spective from the aesthetics of new media, games studies, and game theory to come to terms with von Trier’s cinematic games appropriately. This might come as a surprise since von Trier has repeatedly stated his aversion to the use of computer-generated images and digital special effects in cinema. As this book will try to show, this does not mean that von Trier believes that cinema should capture and represent a ‘pure’ and non-manipulated real. Instead, if von Trier can be called a ‘neo-Bazinian’ filmmaker at all, it is because, in his view, the virtual is not a ‘special effect’ or a technological artefact, but because the virtual and the real include and presuppose each other, and cinema is the medium most suited for capturing the virtual in the real or the real as part of the virtual. Without the religious undertones of an André Bazin, and as a filmmaker of ‘Cinema in its Second Century’ (as the conference was called where he first an- nounced the Dogme Manifesto), von Trier is closer to Deleuze than to the ‘godfather’ of twentieth century film realism. Von Trier was already experimenting with aspects of the aesthetics of new media and video games before ‘the digital revolution’ actually took place and new media genres and formats were still in their infancy. Von Trier’s cinema represents an interesting example of what one might call ‘synchronous remedia- tion’, or, in a shortcut neologism, ‘symmediation’, a process in which one med- ium incorporates and develops features of another new medium at the same time the latter is coming into being and still looking for its own distinguishing characteristics, genres, and formats. These features are virtual realities in his pre-Dogme films, modelling and simulation in his Dogme film, virtual realism and distributed representation in his post-Dogme films (some of which, surpris- ingly enough, share techniques with Hollywood blockbusters like The Matrix, but use them for opposite ends). The overarching principle and common ground in all of his films is gaming: Von Trier defines the practice of filmmak- ing as a game, he performs the founding of a film movement as a game, he builds the story worlds of his films as game environments, he models film Introduction 9 scenes like simulation plays, and he treats stories as reiterations of always the same game (which went unnoticed by film theorists and critics, but which is quite familiar to game theorists).