ABSTRACT
In 1995, a group of four Danish directors, Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg, S0ren Kragh-Jacobsen, and Kristian Levring, collectively known as the Dogme brethren, published a group statement against the Hollywood esthetic. “As never before,” they claimed, “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. 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.” 1 The Dogme95 manifesto calls for a rejection of the spectacle and excess of the industry film. In the preface to their manifesto, the Dogme brethren ask, “[if] the ‘supreme’ task of the decadent filmmakers is to fool the audience … [i]s 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?” The manifesto advocates the purging of cinema, the eradication of screen tricks, a movement away from “the film of illusion,” and a return to films that tell the truth. Endorsing what I would call a retrolutionary approach, a backward-looking movement in which the filmmakers attempt to improve the present state of cinema by a return to the technology of the past, the Dogme brothers swear their adherence to a “Vow of Chastity,” a set of rules that restricts them from using, for example, special effects, camera filters, any unnatural lighting, or any added music.
