Dogme95: Movement or Mimicry?

In hindsight, Dogme95 has been a spectacular but short-lived experience. The Danish film movement was launched in March 1995 at the conference “Cinema in its second century” in the Odeon Theater in Paris where Lars von Trier presented the Dogme95 Manifesto. The closure of the Dogme95 secretariat was officially announced in June 2002. If one takes into account that the first official Dogme films Festen (Denmark: Thomas Vinterberg, 1998) and Idioterne (Denmark: Lars von Trier, 1998) were premiered at the 1998edition of the Cannes Film Festival, one could argue that Dogme95 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 Dogme95 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 status, and between 1999 and 2000 some 35 films submitted by mainly young filmmakers from all over the world were awarded an official Dogme certificate.

Dogme95 also achieved considerable critical success, though more because of its manifesto than its films. One may even wonder if films like FESTEN and IDIOTERNE 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: 1984) and EUROPA (Denmark/Sweden/France/Germany/Switzerland: 1991) were not very successful even in Denmark and abroad they drew mainly the attention of a few Parisian cinephiles, while MIFUNE's SIDSTE SANG (Denmark/ Sweden: Anders Thomas Jensen, Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, 1999) and THE KING IS ALIVE (Sweden/Denmark/USA: Kristian Levring, 2000) scarcely received any distribution at all outside the international festival circuit.

Introduction

There is an inherent difficulty in defining love. Douglas Hofstadter's ironic definition lies more in demonstrating the impracticalities of general recursion than in a genuine attempt for perspicuity. Love simply seems too mystical a force to be registered compactly by facile explanation; it is lamely compared – love “like a red, red rose,” or love that “resembles the eternal rocks beneath” – or else shrugged off as inexplicable phenomena: “love without reason… No wisdom, no judgement / No caution, no blame…” It is presumably too complicated an emotion to analyse, too multifaceted for deconstruction, too profound for definitive scrutiny.

The love of cinema suffers from a similar ambiguity. Cast more or less in the word “cinephilia,” the concept of “the love of cinema” has taken on a state of amorphousness that stretches from the vehement “we cannot live without Rossellini” 1960s film culture to, borne on the growth of the home video, obsessive film collection and solitary, mole-like viewings in dark bedrooms to, simply, a love of the cinema “sous forme de passion exclusive.” Paul Willemen's baffled exclamation sums it up: “What is this thing that keeps cropping up in all these different forms and keeps being called cinephilia?”

The complication of defining cinephilia is compounded by an element of dogged historicity that writes cinephilia as a past phenomenon and roots nostalgia as the core of its enterprise. Articulated most resoundingly in Susan Sontag's much-discussed article, “The Decay of Cinema,” Sontag refers to cinephilia as the “special” love that cinema “inspired,” “born of a conviction that cinema was an art unlike any other,” love which evoked a sense of wonder, whereby “people took movies into themselves” and felt liberated by “the experience of surrender to, of being transported by, what was on the screen.” “You fell in love not just with actors but with cinema itself.” More significantly, Sontag specifically locates the epitome of cinephilia in a targeted historical period, namely, the early 1950s to late 60s.

During the 1986 International Rotterdam Film Festival I attended the Dutch premiere of A ZED AND TWO NOUGHTS (UK/Netherlands: Peter Greenaway, 1985). As history records it, the film left behind a bewildered and amazed audience. The opening credit scene gives so much visual and auditory information that the spectator is unable to “enter” the film. That may explain why many spectators talk about the film in spatial metaphors: the film was “beyond” them, or they felt “left out.” Often mentioned in reviews of the film – and something Peter Greenaway seems to be proud of – is that watching the film is like seeing three films at once. But that is not the only peculiarity of the film I noticed upon seeing the work. What really struck me was that the film resembled the Dutch film DEWITTEWAAN / THEWHITE MADNESS / THEWHITE DELUSION (Netherlands: Adriaan Ditvoorst, 1984). Noticing this resemblance kept my attention focused on the screen.

In this article I intend to describe this film experience as a key to understanding the secret passion of the cinephile. It is not my intention to prove that Peter Greenaway was really influenced by DE WITTE WAAN. Actually I think it is, for reasons to be revealed later, even better that this remains ambiguous. The only “fact” this chapter takes as a starting point, is that the films share similarities, for everyone to notice. In both films an older woman is involved in a car accident, partly recovers, lives on but is fully committed to dying anyway. Without any apparent reason, both women almost seem to welcome death. The woman in DE WITTE WAAN (played by Pim Lambeau) confuses her own life with that of the roles she played as an actress in Tsjechow's plays (The Cherry Orchard in particular). Alba Bewick (Andréa Ferréol) in A ZOO confuses her own life with that of a woman in a Vermeer painting, and is even persuaded to have her legs amputated, so she looks more like her.

There are striking resemblances with the other characters as well. In DE WITTE WAAN, two brother actors, Jules and Hans Croiset, play the father, the friend, and the driver of the car that caused the accident.

On Leaving the Century of Cinema

In his brief essay “Painting and Cinema,” André Bazin, after sharing the general dissatisfaction with films about artists and paintings, nonetheless remarks that, “the cinema, not only far from compromising or destroying the true nature of another art, is, on the contrary, in the process of saving it.” About half a century later, and a full century after the first presentation of the Cinématographe Lumière, it is tempting to read in Bazin's phrase a question that reverses the terms: is another art in the process of saving the cinema? This question makes sense, I believe, but only if one concedes that what prompts it is the very success of cinema, an “art” now so ubiquitous as to be all but invisible. Here I am posing it as a possible vanishing point for looking at a series of strategic steps – sideways steps, as they must seem – that Peter Greenaway has taken in recent years in his career as a filmmaker, by curating exhibitions and directing operas. As it happens, the steps fit into a project he has called The Stairs:

Needless to say, the film was never made. But as “architectural motif” and “general metaphor,” the stairs have a symptomatic role, not only in the Greenaway shows, mounted in Geneva and Munich under that title. They point in the direction of what Greenaway has had in mind for some time, namely “taking the cinema out of the cinema.” It turns out that the period of his greatest triumphs as an established, indeed sustaining pillar of the European art cinema, from THE DRAUGHTSMAN's CONTRACT (1982) to THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE AND HER LOVER (1991), has coincided with his greatest restlessness and dissatis faction about this medium and its history: