“Dogma 95 has attracted and divided critical opinion” (1).
“Arguably, the Dogma code has been a source of greater discussion than the films with which it has become associated. What Dogma 95 has provoked is an exciting re-examination of questions of film realism, truth and purity, and precisely at a time when Hollywood appears to be enraptured by a cinema of attractions, driven by post-production effects, and new media technologies such as computer generated images” (1).
“The questions of film purity that Dogma 95 raises will be considered in this article in connection with the development of an ideal that we suggest is neo-Bazinian, and the relationship between the underlying ideological values of the Dogma manifesto and the cultural context in which it has appeared” (1).
“This raises one of a number of contradictions in the Dogma manifesto. It claims to oppose manufactured conformity in today's filmmaking, but at the same time it devises its own "rules", to which filmmakers must ‘swear to submit’ (2).
“The guiding principles of the Vow, which leads to the awarding of a certificate of authentication (exhibited prior to the screened opening credits) for finished films operating within the rules of the code, establishes an ideal of realism that proclaims productions to be virtuous and pure. An ideal that is neo-Bazinian” (2).
“Bazin regards a film to be truthful if unaltered by human intervention or manipulation. The film spectator's relationship to the image should be faithful to the experience of the image observed by the spectator in reality” (2).
“Bazin wrote that the Egyptians, by mummifying their dead, were able to preserve the appearance of the deceased, thereby preserving a representation of life. He argued that the photographic image should perform a similar function and not simply offer the survival of an image, but the creation of a resemblance of the real: an "impression", "tracing", or "fingerprint"” (2).
“The use of cinema technology was approved by Bazin if it enhanced the spectator's relationship with the image's realist effect. He therefore liked deep focus photography, widescreen, and mobile and unpunctuated camera movements. He expressly disliked anything that treated film as an art of manipulation” (2).
“Dogma, too, rejects such distortions of the real, declaring that "[p]rops and sets must not be brought in. (If a particular prop is necessary to the story, a location must be chosen where the prop is to be found)", and that "[s]pecial lighting is not acceptable". The Dogma manifesto displays a Bazinian belief in the likeness between a recorded vision and an individual's experience, and in the movement of the camera as opposed to its static positioning. Vinterberg and Lars von Trier have both opted for digital video technology allowing for the camera to be hand-held (rule 3 of the manifesto), but they do not embrace technology that can aid, through illusion, the spectator's acceptance of a reality-like experience” (2).
“Bazin saw that the introduction of new formats, such as VistaVision and Cinerama in the 1950s, would enable the viewer to no longer be confined to cinema's "small box". Cinema has since undergone a dramatic technological revolution, but in the direction of what often appears to be an emphasis on excess and audience seduction through maximum illusion, as opposed to anything that may be regarded as common and natural” (3).
“Such a fascination with illusion was present in von Trier's earlier films – as he admits, he had "an almost fetishistic attraction to film technology", and then he "reached a point [where he]...couldn't get any further".[7]
“The video aesthetic that has emerged is (often) deliberately ‘amateurish’ and anti-productivist, appears to have minimal need for a scripted performance, and favours the long take. This has facilitated a move away from the conventions of continuity editing, which offered one highly constructed form of representation, to a style of filmmaking in which editing is produced in situ or not at all” (3).
“Just as the technical perfection, obsession with electronic sounds, and bland musicality of pop in the eighties produced the radical response of unplugged performance, Hollywood’s excesses (apparently) led to the Dogma manifesto. Similarly, the over-determination of the figure of the auteur/director as star (Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino) is countered by the Dogma model of not crediting the director” (4).
“Dogma’s commitment to the idea of purity surpasses the desire to strip away such excesses of film, producing a further contradiction. Dogma is overtly (and theatrically) ‘political’ in its intent, as the writing of a film ‘manifesto’ signifies. For the Dogma project seems to be about the recovery of ideological as well as film purity” (4).
“There is a gap, however, between Dogma’s rhetoric of radical intervention – and Lars von Trier’s semi-serious invocation of the revolutionary ‘moment’ of 1968[9] – and the filmmakers’ own apparent commitment to humanism” (4).
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