BSA 206 S1W4 : Dogme 95

Thomas Vinterburg and Lars Von Trier quickly set up a manifesto of what they wanted to achieve in making their films - the intention to be to keep the film pure and move away from hollywood's globalization.


Lars Von Trier (naked for some reason)



Thomas Vinterburg with fellow Dane Mads Mikkelsen

The two, along with some other practitioners, set up a manifesto of rules to follow, they break all of these extremely quickly. One was to never credit the director, but they do this from the outset, it was in an attempt to fight auteur theory or something, but they very quickly gave into their egos and see themselves as great auteurs of cinema (probably more Von Trier but whatever).

I think it's cool to set up a list of rules to follow, it forces you to be creative and its no surprise some great films were born from this process. Personally I don't even mind the style that much, the editing can feel too much at times but in general it flows well enough where you don't even notice. I like that great movies can be made on shitty equipment.

I did see one of their movies before, Vinterburg's Jagten (2012) which stars Mads Mikkelsen and is about a primary school teacher who gets accused of pedophilia when one of his students makes an innocent lie, this controversy goes on to make his life very hard. I remember it being good, people really rave about it though so I should probably give it another go.



Of their Dogme 95 movies I haven't really seen anything and should give them a look.

We watched the movie Dancer in the Dark (2000) in class, one of Lars Von Trier's most critically accomplished. Unfortunately I feel asleep during this, from what I did see it was quite odd and experimental, maybe not as bad as the consensus in class made it out to be. I might give it a go one day if I'm dying of boredom.



Personally of all their films I'm more interested in Von Trier's later work, I have seen Dogville (2009) as well actually but don't find it that memorable even though it was successful in it's experimentation. Films like Anti-Christ and Melancholia intrigue me more, although they are so far removed from Dogme 95 with their extravagant cinematography and high production values that it almost isn't even worth mentioning here. The one that looks like it fits well into the Dogme 95 mold and one that I am interested in because of the subject matter is The House that Jack Built from last year.

   

We recently did a test thing for Matthew's research question where he wanted to see how improvisation affects how a scene unfolds, biggest difference other than the natural dialogue was the fact that we had a two camera set-up for the improv one. You'll see that this makes the whole thing flow much better and it feels exactly like a Dogme 95 movie with it's naturalistic delivery, editing that's obvious but which all feels like a single unfolding scene and camera movement.



After this and seeing how well it worked, we might be inclined to take a Dogme 95 stylistic approach more in future, the BTS for the group project is already going to be done in a similar fashion.