Repositorium für die Medienwissenschaft Jan Simons Playing the Waves: The Name of the Game is Dogme95 2005 https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/12000 Veröffentlichungsversion / published version Sammelbandbeitrag / collection article Empfohlene Zitierung / Suggested Citation: Simons, Jan: Playing the Waves: The Name of the Game is Dogme95. In: Marijke de Valck, Malte Hagener (Hg.): Cinephilia. Movies, Love and Memory. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2005, S. 181– 196. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/12000. Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Dieser Text wird unter einer Creative Commons - This document is made available under a creative commons - Namensnennung - Nicht kommerziell 3.0 Lizenz zur Verfügung Attribution - Non Commercial 3.0 License. For more information gestellt. Nähere Auskünfte zu dieser Lizenz finden Sie hier: see: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0 Playing the Waves TheNameoftheGameisDogme95 Jan Simons Dogme95: Movement or Mimicry? In hindsight, Dogme has been a spectacular but short-lived experience. The Danish film movement was launched in March at the conference “Cinema in its second century” in the Odeon Theater in Paris where Lars von Trier pre- sented the Dogme Manifesto. The closure of the Dogme secretariat was officially announced in June . If one takes into account that the first official Dogme films Festen (Denmark: Thomas Vinterberg, ) and Idioterne (Denmark: Lars von Trier, ) were premiered at the edition of the Cannes Film Festival, one could argue that Dogme lasted for only four years. Considering that each of the four founding brethren, Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg, Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, and Kristian Levring, made only one official Dogme film, the movement starts to resemble an ephemeral hype. Some critics indeed saw the Dogme movement as nothing but a publicity stunt with the aim “to advertise one and only one item: Von Trier himself as a directorial value on the cultural stock market.” If so, one can only say that this PR stunt has been astonishingly successful. It raised Lars von Trier to international celebrity sta- tus, and between and some films submitted by mainly young film- makers from all over the world were awarded an official Dogme certificate. Dogme also achieved considerable critical success, though more because of its manifesto than its films. One may even wonder if films like Festen and Idio- terne would have become international hits if they had not been preceded by the manifesto. After all, Von Trier’s earlier films The Element of Crime (Denmark: ) and Europa (Denmark/Sweden/France/Germany/Switzerland: ) were not very successful even in Denmark and abroad they drew mainly the attention of a few Parisian cinephiles, while Mifune’s Sidste Sang (Den- mark/Sweden: Anders Thomas Jensen, Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, ) and The King is Alive (Sweden/Denmark/USA: Kristian Levring, ) scarcely re- ceived any distribution at all outside the international festival circuit. Neverthe- less, books were published that celebrated the Dogme Brotherhood as “the gang that took on Hollywood,” and in which the Dogme movement was held up as an example of “a small nation’s response to globalization.” Essays were 182 Cinephilia written that attributed no less than “film purity,”“a neo-Bazinian ideal” and “humanism” to Dogme. Lars von Trier’s newly acquired international repu- tation was authorized by the publication of a monograph in the series “World Directors” of the British Film Institute. Dogme was perceived as an alternative to mainstream cinema that was dominated by the star and special effects-driven blockbusters of Hollywood. And this was, in- deed, how it had presented itself. The Dogme Manifesto rejects the “illusions” the contemporary cinema produces with “trickery” and by “using new technology” which enables “anyone at any time (to) wash the last grains of truth away in the deadly embrace of sensation.” Dogme was either vehemently rejected as a mere publicity stunt, or enthu- siastically embraced as a viable alternative to the commercial blockbuster. Those who endorsed the Dogme program welcomed it as a call to arms for a new realism in cinema. They perceived Dogme as a replay of the oppositional stance of the movements of post-war modern European cinema, like Italian neo-realism (championed by André Bazin), the French Nouvelle Vague and other “waves” that followed in its wake. Richard Kelly, author of the first book on Dogme, not only called the rules of the Vow of Chastity “surely the most audacious and conspicuous attempt to reinvent the cinema since, well, Godard”, but even went so far as to write that “[l]acing between every line was a red thread, linking these Rules to Godard’s pronouncements and actions, across four decades.” From Bazinian (neo-)realism to Godard, Dogme looked to many a critic and practitioner like a reincarnation of the European modernist cinema. This is not surprising since the Dogme Manifesto itself reiterated much of the rhetoric of modernist artistic and political manifestos. Its opening sentence, “Dogme has the expressed goal of countering ‘certain tendencies’ in the cine- ma today” is an explicit reference to François Truffaut’s article “Une certaine tendence du cinéma français” published in the Cahiers du Cinéma of January , which came to be considered the “manifesto” of the Nouvelle Vague. Phrases like “In enough was enough! The cinema was dead and called for resurrection!” echoed the rhetoric of the Futurist Manifesto, whereas the phrase “Today a technological storm is raging” also brings to mind the first sentence of the Communist Manifesto, “A spectre is haunting Europe.” The very rejection of “illusionism” is itself a recurrent trope in the rhetoric of the movements of modernist European cinema, which raises the question whether the “anti-illusionism” of the Manifesto should not be seen on a par with the references to other modernist manifestos: as a postmodern pastiche? Von Trier’s presentation of the Manifesto, which he read aloud and then threw into his audience printed on red leaflets, was a performance that echoed Playing the Waves 183 the actions of the Internationale Situationiste. Von Trier’s gesture not only echoed a Situationist performance formally, but also in spirit. By summoning and summarizing the history of political and artistic modernism, Von Trier also accomplished a Situationist détournement of this history, including the Situation- ist gesture itself. As Karl Marx once remarked, history only repeats itself as a farce and this seems to be exactly the point Von Trier was making when he launched the Dogme Manifesto. According to its authors themselves, the Manifesto and the Vow of Chastity, had been “actually written in only min- utes and under continuous bursts of merry laughter…”. If then, as Von Trier and Vinterberg themselves claim, the Dogme Manifesto is at the same time deeply ironic and “most serious meant [sic],” it is not be taken seriously at the level of its literal content or the substance of its rules, but at the level of its form. The form of the Manifesto and Von Trier’s performance were a simulation, a playing out of a model of modernist avant-gardism which no longer existed. It turned modernism into a play of mimicry and the foundation of a film move- ment itself into “a kind of play, a game called ‘rule-making’.” That is, if Dogme is to be taken seriously as an alternative to Hollywood, it should not be interpreted from the perspective of the modernist movements of half a cen- tury ago but from the point of view of mimicry and mocking. Dogme, I will argue, turns filmmaking itself into a game. Isn’t Hollywood after all increas- ingly becoming a part of the games industry? Realism or Rules The rules laid down in the Vow of Chastity are a call for a rigorous “back to basics.” As the Manifesto puts it, “DOGME counters the film of illusion by the presentation of an indisputable set of rules known as THE VOW OF CHAS- TITY [sic].” The rules forbid the filmmaker from bringing props onto the set, using “special lighting,” recording sound separately from the images, staging a scene for the camera (“The film must not take place where the camera is stand- ing; shooting must take place where the film takes place”) or to film “superficial action” (“Murders, weapons, etc. must not occur”). On a more positive note, they prescribe the use of mobile, handheld cameras (that must follow actions of the actors) and that the film “must take place here and now.” Since the rules forbid any embellishment or any transformation of a film set, any manipulation of images and sound in post-production (“Optical work and filters are forbid- den”), any conventional plot (“Genre movies are not acceptable”)orwhatis somewhat mysteriously called “temporal and geographical alienation,” they have been largely interpreted as a recipe for an unadorned, raw realism. 184 Cinephilia Words like “real,”“reality,” or “realism,” however, do not occur in the Mani- festo and in the Vow of Chastity. The “chastity” the rules require from the film- maker is an abstinence from “trickery,” but the Manifesto and the Vow of Chas- tity are silent on matters of representation, subject matter, themes, and content. The rules are not concerned with the film as it will appear on the screen, but the manner in which the film will be produced: they are production rules. The rules are not concerned with the film spectator but with the filmmaker. The Dogme rules do not prescribe certain film aesthetics but a therapy for professionals who, through Dogme, could forget the heavy load of the modern film produc- tion machinery for a while and instead develop and exercise their creativity. Abiding by the rules of the Manifesto, the “professional” filmmaker forces himself to go “back to basics” and to re-invent the practice of filmmaking.