Pixel Visions: Dogme 95 and the Emergence of Digital Cinema

Many of the group’s proscriptions—like its insistence that the director “refrain from personal taste”—stand out for their absurdity and impracticality. Never mind that every Dogme film breaks at least one, if not several, of the group’s rules. The use of non-diegetic music, inclusion of a credit for the director, and the use of artificial lighting were all regarded by Dogme’s dictates as “sins,” which the directors would self-report in obligatory “confessions.” The general tone, however tongue-in-cheek, has a distinctly religious air about it, as its language of “chastity” makes clear. (Von Trier himself, while raised an atheist, converted to Catholicism around 1989, later renouncing the faith.) There’s also more than a little hint of masochism. But like all forms of masochism, these supposedly external constraints suggest a neurotic obsession with control.

One element that distinguishes Dogme from the avant-gardes of the 1920s and 1960s is its relative disinterest in formal innovation. Despite its aesthetics of negation—its foregrounding of technical limitations and production no-no’s—its more positive interventions lie in its emphasis on writing and performance as the principal drivers of an essentially narrative medium. Several of these films are clearly indebted to John Cassavetes and his demands for a genuine investment, even total commitment, from his actors. All of the Dogme films are essentially narrative works that, in many cases, could be adapted to more conventional production models with very few changes. (Indeed, The Celebration, with its Ibsenesque chamber-drama script by Vinterberg and Rukov, and its roster of meaty supporting roles, has been frequently adapted for the stage, most recently as an opera by composer Mark-Anthony Turnage, which premiered in London last month.) The movement seems less interested in formal play than in rejecting the popular tastes of European cinema and the cultural norms of bourgeois neoliberalism that undergird them.

The characters in the majority of Dogme’s films are nearly all educated, upper-middle-class intellectuals and professionals. It’s surprising—at least from a twenty-first-century American perspective—how many of these films are about fairly affluent people attempting to free themselves from the trappings of a corporate job, real-estate quandaries, or a midlife-crisis Maserati. Where Dogme intervenes is in its use of an unpolished aesthetic to depict these characters’ destabilizing encounters with “the real”—that is, the sorts of conditions and behaviors that bourgeois society tends to ignore or suppress: sexual abuse, racism, disability, sex work, and addiction. The ideologies of these films are often, explicitly and literally, antipatriarchal: The Celebration and Julien Donkey-Boy both depict the rapid dissolution of a toxic family unit. Similarly, many of the films portray attempts by the characters to forge new kinds of families, chosen and non-nuclear, which themselves often implode: The Idiots, Kragh-Jacobsen’s Mifune (1999), Levring’s The King Is Alive (2000), and Scherfig’s Italian for Beginners (2000) are all about the process of building new social formations—with wildly different results.

That the journeys of personal and social transformation depicted in these films frequently fail or fall back on themselves may hold a clue to the quixotic nature of Dogme 95’s own mission. But was self-defeat part of the point? The Idiots offers something like a readymade critique of the movement and its contradictions. Its story follows a group of people who feign mental disability in order to break with society’s norms and discover their “inner idiots.” As the film proceeds and the group’s actions become more extreme, they come to resemble a cult in the Viennese Actionist tradition, with a charismatic, single-minded leader, Stoffer, pulling the strings. It’s difficult to watch the film and not compare Stoffer to von Trier himself—perhaps by design. Stoffer is as much a manipulator of reality (and of people) as any overbearing film director, and the performance of disability he spearheads finds an unsavory parallel in the Dogme directors’ own pretense of unprofessionalism or even incompetence. The Idiots almost begs to be read as auto-critique, a hint that their gesture of “self-disabling” may ultimately be more cynical and self-serving than a sincere search for freedom and self-discovery.

For all its aggressive emphasis on the real, Dogme’s sense of realism is actually complex, contradictory, and deceptive. Digital video’s “raw” aesthetic seems to offer an unmediated window onto the world, but one that is itself, quite paradoxically, a technological artifact. One of the group’s most poetic films—and also perhaps its most flagrant rule-breaker—Korine’s Julien Donkey-Boy is emblematic of Dogme’s deft manipulation of digital video’s reality effect. This is most evident in the film’s climax, when the schizophrenic Julien (Ewen Bremner) kidnaps his sister’s (and possibly his own) stillborn baby from the hospital. A visibly distraught Julien takes the lifeless bundle onto an actual MTA bus in Queens, where the other passengers, captured on hidden camera, become unaware nonactors reacting in real time.

In moments like this, Dogme seems to have forecast a radical destabilization of reality that social media and unscripted television have now made commonplace: not so much that video would allow us a clearer view of reality, but that reality itself would become infected by performance, illusion, and the surreal. Korine’s approach is less devoted to cinema verité than to the notion of “ecstatic truth” espoused by the director Werner Herzog. “Only in this state of sublimity,” Herzog has stated, “does something deeper become possible, a kind of truth that is the enemy of the merely factual.” Not coincidentally, Herzog appears in Julien Donkey-Boy as the family patriarch, drinking cough syrup out of his slipper, intoning about the Spanish conquest of Peru, and training his younger son Chris to be a wrestler by insulting him and challenging him to absurd and humiliating tasks. Like many of Dogme’s more abrasive entries, Korine’s film deploys DV’s immediacy to erode the barriers between truth and fiction.

Dogme’s central provocation reignites one of the foundational debates around cinema as a medium: its ability to capture a direct imprint of reality versus its capacity to create a reality of its own. Von Trier explores this in even more ambivalent terms in his first post-Dogme film, Dancer in the Dark (2000), which features first-time actor Björk and art-house veteran Catherine Deneuve as a pair of highly unlikely factory workers. The film deploys two related but distinct species of DV realism: scenes of the two on the factory floor are shot in a familiar handheld style, while the film’s bravura musical sequences—such as the dazzling train number “I’ve Seen It All,” itself a nod to a similar scene in Mani Ratnam’s 1998 Hindi musical Dil se..—were filmed using one hundred simultaneously running cameras. This latter technique lends these scenes an unnerving and discordant surveillance-cam aesthetic to which Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023) owes a considerable debt. The overall effect is fascinating, if jarring: the musical numbers’ euphoria and fantasy are offset by the claustrophobic sense that Björk’s ill-fated Selma is trapped under the gaze of destiny, the law, or perhaps just the film’s director. (This latter impression was reinforced in 2017 by the singer’s accusations of sexual harassment and psychological abuse by von Trier.)

At the far end of the spectrum from von Trier and Korine’s experiments, a number of Dogme films are surprisingly conventional—even occasionally winsome—romantic comedies with some commercial appeal. Only the third Dogme-certified work, Kragh-Jacobsen’s Mifune tells the story of a young corporate type who, the morning after his wedding to the boss’s daughter, is summoned back to his family’s farm to care for his mentally disabled brother. Despite a few provocations, the film most resembles the kind of neo-screwball comedy common in the 1980s and ’90s—something like a mash-up of Pretty Woman, Rain Man, and Funny Farm—complete with a “hooker with a heart of gold” character, a comically infantilizing depiction of mental disability, and a tidy resolution for all. (Mifune is also, anomalously, shot on 35 mm film, in a widescreen format that breaks one of Dogme’s “vows,” letting regular Dogme DP Anthony Dod Mantle show off his deft handling of color in low-light conditions on celluloid.)