This is the story of how the failure of the French New Wave led to director Thomas Vinterberg starring as “Young Taxi Driver” in his own movie, Festen. Of how an anti-bourgeois movement can be spearheaded by film-makers who take tea with the Queen. Of how “a great laugh” between four Danes generated three of Europe’s most interesting films last year.
This is the story of Dogme 95, a putative wave which crashes on South African shores this week with the art-house release of Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen (Celebration). Vinterberg – who, before the Cannes Jury Prize-winning Festen had made only one minor feature – has since its release become European cinema’s golden boy, winning the Best Newcomer gong at 1998’s European Film Awards. Which is ironic, given that one of the Dogme charter’s golden rules is that The Director Must Not Be Credited.
“That rule is of course an effort to create some kind of distance from the auteur tradition,” begins the improbably charming 30-year-old, one of a quartet of directors – including Lars von Trier, whose Dogme movie The Idiots will not be released in South Africa, no doubt due to its full penetrative group sex scenes – who conceived the movement five years ago. Excusing his new-found celebrity, Vinterberg explains that “we discussed it a lot, and to Lars and me it was clear these rules were about the making of the film, not what happens afterwards”.
It’s the kind of evasion that has persuaded many to see Dogme 95 as a matter of playfulness and personal aggrandisement rather than principle. Vinterberg maintains the movement is a mixture of both, citing the fact that “these films became by far the most personal things that I did, and that Lars did”. The Vow of Chastity “was written in 30 minutes in a great laugh,” but with Lars, “you never know if it’s a gimmick or not”.
With reference to Von Trier’s Dogme manifesto, I’ve got a pretty good idea. “The new wave,” Von Trier writes, “proved to be a ripple that washed ashore and turned to muck. The anti-bourgeois cinema became bourgeois, because the foundations upon which its theories were based was the bourgeois perception of art … Discipline is the answer … we must put our films into uniform, because the individual film will be decadent by definition!”
There is much to raise the eyebrows in the Dogme declaration. The 10 commandments that constitute Dogme’s Vow of Chastity include the forswearing of extraneous sound and lighting, “superficial action” and “geographical and temporal alienation”; a commitment to hand-held camerawork; and censure of all genres and any explicit “taste”.
Vinterberg finds the interface between gimmick and principle inspiring: “It’s like when, as a kid, you play cowboys and Indians. It’s fun to stay on the ground for 30 seconds when you get shot. It’s fun to stick by the rules.” Dogme is played like a game: you can circumvent the rules, as Vinterberg did by casting himself as a cabbie in lieu of his missing director’s credit, but when you break them – the director fixed his camera to a boom to film one scene in Festen – you formally apologise. It’s more important to observe the spirit than the letter of Dogme’s laws. In Von Trier’s words: “We all know the 10 commandments, but we can’t keep them. You try to live them in the sense that you can sympathise with them. In that sense I think it’s okay to have rules.”
“Lars and I were drowning in the mediocrity of film-making,” says Vinterberg. “There was this feeling that we just did what everyone else did; there was no risk connected to it, in terms or art, of cinema.”
Unlike the call-to-arms phrasing of Von Trier’s “manifesto”, this makes Dogme 95 seem personal rather than political; the director claims it is both. Sure enough, while the third Dogme director, Soren Jacobsen, has described how his “sadness” at the sameness of international films prompted his participation in Dogme 95, the movement’s regulations coincidentally inspired his best film: Mifune’s Last Song was the subject of a fierce bidding war at the Berlin Festival last year.
Given this success, it’s no wonder the Dogme directors are impatient with the criticism that Dogme plays safe, that – as some have commented – its “10 commandments” comprise little more than a blueprint for a traditional realist film. “There’s this Catholic thing behind it,” Vinterberg contends. “When we reached the point of 10, we simply stopped. This is it, and it’s not to be discussed whether the rules are good or bad for film-making or whether there should be other rules.” With scarcely a hint of irony he adds: “I mean, you do not rewrite the Bible.”
Festen is a stunning tragi-comedy, as morally transgressive in content as it is technically transgressive in form. Vinterberg worried he’d never persuade Henning Moritzen, one of Denmark’s acting greats, to get involved: “We’re doing this Dogme thing, with a small video camera. You have to rape your kids – you wanna do it?”
And yet Vinterberg argues that, rather than being meticulously plotted, “90% of the scenes came out of playing against the limitations”. While the film’s story is conventional, he’s sure that “it could never have been created without this set of rules. We had to find a place where there was access to a kitchen, because we couldn’t bring our own food. We found this house which had animals in the fridge and food for the extras, so the script became a story about a rich bourgeois family because that’s what fitted into this house. So everything was created out of this game, out of playing with the rules.”
This fast-and-loose approach to the subject matter – “that’s how things appear sometimes in films, out of banality and stupidity” – saw Vinterberg broach fascism in his film purely because he needed an excuse to incorporate communal singing (instead of a music track) and because he wanted his friend from New York, a black actor called Gbatokai Dakinah, to take part. While many see Festen as an attack on the bourgeoisie, Vinterberg is “not very interested in that side of it”.
He admits the film is aggressive, but “towards what I don’t know; ask my therapist”, and argues that “it’s a prejudice to say that the working-class are heroes in our society. The chef in this film could easily be a child abuser”. I’ll assume that his ambivalence isn’t conditioned by the irony whereby Festen has elevated its director to “the bourgeoisie of Danish cultural affairs. Suddenly I’m invited to dinner with the queen. Which I’m proud of; I like the queen. But it kills the feeling of being a rebel.”
Dogme may be more easily regarded as a technical than a political crusade. “By taking all the lamps away,” Vinterberg explains, “you begin to understand the value of putting artificial light in a film.” Small consolation for the technicians now fearing for their livelihoods in Denmark, maybe, but for Vinterberg the revelation represented “a kind of cleansing of one’s visual language”.
Certainly, Dogme’s technical strictures are responsible in huge part for Festen’s success. The film feels like a home video and capitalises on the intimacy which a hand-held camera affords. The aesthetic clash between country house splendour and grunge production – “the bow tie meets the video-cam”, in Vinterberg’s words – threatens the characters’ complacency even as it relieves the cast.
Moritzen, who plays the patriarch, described how the replacement of heavy-duty technology by an unobtrusive, mobile camcorder freed him from self-consciousness; that subtlety of performance, applied to Festen’s highly sensitive subject matter, is devastating.
In Festen’s case, the Dogme restrictions have resulted in a highly theatrical film. Other features common to the movement’s early output include an interest in secrets, in sex, and in family and community.
The movement goes from strength to strength: the Dogme coterie has been joined by Harmony Korine, director of Gummo, who founded the American arm of the order and has made the movie Julien Donkey-Boy according to its principles. Vinterberg wants “to make a wave out of this” and he and Von Trier have high-profile talents in mind. “It’d be most interesting to invite directors who make very well-dressed productions, where there are layers and layers over the truth and huge mechanisms around it. It would be interesting when they take off their clothes. I don’t know what James Cameron looks like naked, if you understand what I mean.”