Movies made under the regimen of the Dogme 95 group intend to counteract “the film illusion”. The group, founded in Copenhagen six years ago, supposedly lives by 10 rules (which most of the Dogme directors, such as Lars von Trier, broke immediately). They include location shooting, no additional props or sets, live sound, hand-held camera, no artificial lighting and so forth. Two results seem to emerge from this: one, Dogme films are more realistic than Hollywood films and, two, they are more aware of their status as artefacts. But are they making movies less artful or more artful?
This kind of manifesto has echoes of what Jean-Luc Godard and others were doing in the Sixties in France, deliberately disturbing the seamless language of Hollywood film with a series of disjunctive manoeuvres such as jump-cuts, intertitles, blurry sound — and often incoherent storylines. There is something particularly European (and quintessentially modernist) in this kind of didactic impulse, insisting that the comfortable dream-world of escapism must be replaced by the intellectual challenge of difficulty — it’s for your own good!
Which goes to the heart of opposing conceptions of culture, an opposition you might see as consumerism versus the avant-garde conception of art that makes of it a kind of religious experience. I would sum up the two polar positions by saying that one is the hamburger notion of culture (just tell me what I will enjoy most) and the other is the deep-and-meaningful sense of culture as something that shakes up one’s world a little (or a lot), that poses questions you may not be able to answer.
There’s no doubt that hamburger-type cultural artefacts are easier to consume, but they can also leave one feeling undernourished — many people do still want art to go places nothing else goes, to provide some form of enlightenment over and above mere pleasure.
In reality, we know, there is a vast grey or at least chequered area between these poles. Filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese and, recently, Darren Aronofsky, to name two Americans, have found ways to mediate between the entertainment and intellectual values of the stories they tell in cinematic form. Quentin Tarantino, to give another example, learnt a lot from the French new wave, but put it at the service of storytelling in a very American way. Perhaps it’s simply a matter of the overarching, hegemonic culture, part of the great capitalist juggernaut, absorbing ideas and modes from its margins, co-opting them, as it were. Or do these subversive effects enter the mainstream and in some interesting way destabilise it?
The whole debate may seem old hat in this post-modern age, but a movie such as The King Is Alive leads one to ask these questions again. It is a powerful but gruelling film, one willing to make considerable demands of the viewer, and not just because of the Dogme style, though that is in itself demanding. Shot on digital camera and then blown up to 35mm, it can be strenuous to watch.
Written and directed by Kristian Levring (though the Dogme rules say the director shouldn’t be credited), The King Is Alive tells the story of a group of European and American tourists stuck in the Namibian desert when their bus goes off course and runs out of fuel. Stranded in a ghost town in the middle of nowhere, sweltering in the heat o’ the sun, facing death in the wasteland, the tourists and their lives are exposed to the elements. The stresses and tensions between them come into the open — marriages splinter, racism flares and so on. We certainly get the general picture of, as King Lear would have it, “unaccommodated man” as “a poor, bare, forked animal”. For this desperate situation is partly ameliorated and partly exacerbated by the fact that, to keep themselves busy, the tourists end up rehearsing a half-remembered version of Shakespeare’s play.
Don’t worry — you’re not going to get great bleeding chunks of King Lear intoned against the dunes. There is relatively little of the play in the film, and what there is is used very effectively to highlight the interactions between the characters. The connections between the Namibian reality and the imagined world of the play are subtle, though the theme of betrayal is an obvious link. The process of rehearsing King Lear is more important than the product, but the very words of the play do, in fact, have something of a redemptive effect, or at least find an important place in how the characters handle what happens to them — which is in itself an argument for the more challenging notion of what culture can do for us.
The cast is cosmopolitan, making The King Is Alive a truly international film, which is in itself a point of interest — the American movies we see so many of often seem trapped in a specific ghetto of narrative clichés. Among the actors, all of whom do stirring work, are Americans Janet McTeer, Bruce Davison, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Brion James, Frenchwoman Romane Bohringer, Brits David Bradley, Miles Anderson and David Calder, and South Africans Peter Kubheka and Vusi Kunene. This is very much an ensemble piece, and the way these characters are portrayed and interact with each other is entirely convincing. Even their sweat is real. I would have stayed out of the sun, though.