Hjort, Mette. “A Small Nation's Response to Globalisation” in Purity and Provocation: Dogma 95. Ed. Hjort and MacKenzie. London: British Film Institute. 2003.

“The Danish Film Institute (DFI) now funs some twenty-five feature films a year, and these films are not only widely viewed within the communicative space of the nation but also intensely debated in various civil society contexts, where film increasingly functions as a vehicle for meaningful public debate” (2).

“Von Trier’s willingness to challenge the law and his ability to defend the rationale motivating this provocative gesture helped to bring about the articulation of a new film act in 1989. The result was a canny new disjunctive definition of Danish cinema that essentially untied the hands of those in charge of adjudicating the distribution of state monies to film” (12).

“Von Trier speaks of the need to lift the ‘veils’ of obscurantist talk that surround film in an elitist and exclusionary film culture, of processes of democratization made possible by recent technological developments, and of the transformative potential that a widely accessible institutional site for ‘learning about film’ (in the form, for example of master classes) might entail. ‘Project Open Film Town’ is a clear discursive manifestation of von Trier’s new self-understanding as a kind of avuncular enabler and instigator of projects with an especially collectivist dimension” (19).

“Zentropa Backstage offers tourists, film buffs, corporations, and other institutions various points of entry to the world of film” (19).

“This idea of teamwork resonates with the kind of collectivism that von Trier has put on the agenda by forging sites of synergy (the Film Town), by ingeniously instigating a now globalized film movement (Dogma 95), and by regularly engaging in high-profile collaborative project collaborative projects with a precise experimental intent (e.g. The Five Obstructions)” (20).

“Let me at this stage then, focus on von Trier’s most recent collaborative undertaking, The Five Obstructions, in order to tease out some of the deeper cultural implications of what seems at this point to be a widespread preference for collectivism. The film, we might note in passing, is the official Danish entry in the category of Best Foreign Language Film at the 2005 Academy Awards” (20).

“Von Trier’s message invites his colleague to participate in an experiment that would involve Leth’s remaking his ten-minute film entitled The Perfect Human (D et perfekt menneske, 1967) according to dicta—obstructive rules—laid down by von Trier” (20).

“Four of these are remakes by Leth following specifically articulated obstructive rules, and one is a remake by von Trier, to which Leth is required to lend his name as well as his voice in a voice-over commentary composed by von Trier” (20).

“The experiment is discursively framed, not only by the initial e-mail invitation and its acceptance, but by two manifestos written by the filmmakers in connection with the project. Referred to as a kind of documentary ‘poetics,’ von Trier’s manifesto hinges on the ideas that filmmakers must learn ‘to defocus,’ while Leth’s turns on concepts of flow and time” (20).

“Leth, whose films are often characterized by a distanced quasi-anthropological cinematic gaze, is to confront the ethics of his style, the ethical limits of a distancing stance” (21).

“In the exchanges between Leth and von Trier there is a lot of talk about constraints and their ability to function as ‘gifts.’ The rule limiting Leth (who typically favors long edits) to no more than twelve frames in any single edit in Obstruction #1 is described by von Trier, on seeing the result, as a gift” (22).

“what is needed at this juncture is a series of case studies that attempt to spell out the workings of globalization in particular contexts” (24).

“Yet, as we shall see, a closer look at the Danish case reveals that the ten rules of Dogma filmmakig are, in fact, a response to inequities faced by most filmmaking nations, including Brazil and Denmark. What is interesting is that similar problems or constraints may prompt quite different strategic deliberations about solutions. For in the Brazillian instance, the choice is to make the possible films, whereas in the Danish case the decision is to legitimate such films through a manifesto that is designed to promote global visibility and circulation” (33).

“What we have in Dogma 95 is an ingenious mixture of irony and high seriousness, of cynicism and deep commitment, of self-promotion and self-effacement, of political savvy and simple play” (36).

“The idea that an imposition of constraints can help to enhance creativity was first explored by Elster in ‘Convenstions, Creativity, Originality’” (37).

“An artist’s activities may, for example, be constrained by the particular technology that he or she chooses to work with at a given moment in time—by the immobility of the camera, for example, in the case of the earliest silent films” (37).

“In Ulysses Unbound Studies in Rationality, Precommitment, and Constraints (2000), Elster reconsiders the terms of his discussion, opting to speak of ‘imposed,’ ‘invented,’ and ‘chosen’ constraints” (37).

“This counterpart was further reinforced when the Dogma brethren agreed, with a vote of three to one, that rule number 9 (which specifies that ‘film format must be Academy 35 mm’) should be interpreted as a distribution rather than a production requirement. The resulting emphasis on digital video has clear economic implications, as von Trier points out: ‘Mainly it [the interpretation of rule 9] has made the process much cheaper which of course also pleases me. And it has led to a trend where people around the world have started making these cheap, cheap Dogme films . . . People who used to be limited by a notion of how a proper film should be . . . now feel that they can make films’” (40).

“Such are the workings of public discourses that Lars von Trier, the very filmmaker who pointedly vilified humanistic filmmakers in earlier manifestos, becomes the spokesperson for the sincerities and pieties of humanism” (56).

“I am mainly interested in this connection in making a case for seeing D-Day as an attempt to use metaculture as a means of securing public interest, not only for the experiment itself, but for the efforts of the brethren more generally” (67).

“D-Day foregrounded for viewers the novelty of a certain kind of mass-media interactivity in which roles normally kept separate begin to merge—those of viewer and editor, for example” (76).

“Not surprisingly, then, Dogma 95 insists that ‘cinema is not individual.’ To underscores this point, dictum number 10 rules out crediting a director for his or her work” (78).

“‘Furthermore I swear as a director to refrain from personal taste! I am no longer an artist. I swear to refrain from creating a ‘work,’ as I regard the instant as more important than the whole. My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic consideration’’ (78). From the manifesto. Does the obvious irony of this statement parallel the irony of the modern constitution? What about the instant being more important than the whole? How does this relate to the panoramic vision?

“In practice, then, creativity under constraint hardly looks like a break with auteurism. Must we conclude, then, that these Dogmatic directors are ultimately engaged in a series of performative self-contradictions, as certain critics have suggested?” (79).

“What is being rejected is not the idea of distinctive expression as such, but rather the notion that cinematic authorship in the final analysis is an individual mode of expression. The reconceptualization that is aimed at, and has relevance for ongoing discussions of cinematic authorship, turns, in interesting ways, on concepts of collaboration, equality, and coordination” (79).

“The present increased awareness of ‘meta’ levels of discourse and experience is partly a consequence of an increased social and cultural self-consciousness” (81).

“In this connection we may note that contemporary film viewers have far greater access than they had even a decade ago to information detailing filmmakers’ deliberations and decisions during preproduction, production, and postproduction. The emergence of digital culture and especially the development of the Internet have been key factors here” (81). Like STS

“In Metafiction, a volume of more or less classic pieces edited by Mark Currie, we are told that the contributors systematically converge on the view that metafiction is a ‘borderline discourse’ involving a kind of ‘writing on the border between fiction and criticism’ (1995, 1).” (82).

“Waugh, for example, claims that metafiction is a matter of exploring ‘a theory of fiction through the practice of writing fiction” (82).

“D-Day is indeed metacinematic if that term is understood in a very general sense to involve works that somehow express statements about their making” (83).

“The theory of cinema that emerges as a result is not explicitly stated in the work but is strongly suggested by the nature and combination of its fictional and nonfictional elements. Metacinema in this case is very much an issue of viewers responding to certain inferential promptings” (83).

“One question that arises, for example, is whether the two metacinematic moments identified above warrant attributions of the more restricted sense of metafiction that Prince, for example, has in mind. The short answer is no” (83-84).

“Part of the interst of the work is precisely the swerve away from the kind of quasi-didactic and more literal-minded theoretical explication in favor of a far more performative and experiential process. At the same time it is important to note that Prince’s definition becomes relevant once we expand our discussion to the phenomenon of paratexts—to those liminal expressions that hover on the borders of works in a mode of paradoxical inclusion and exclusion” (84).

“In the sense D-Day genuinely helps to advance our thinking about how best to conceptualize the nature of cinematic coauthorship once the descriptive and normative force of purely individualistic models has been rejected” (84).

“The ‘restriction strategy (1997, 155-56), which he discusses in connection with Peter Wollen and V.F. Perkins, is predicated on the idea that a cinematic author’s collaborators affect only the work’s ‘non-artistic features,’ those elements that are left over as mere ‘noise’ once the film’s fundamental structure and constitutive relations have been identified” (85).

“A rejoinder pointing out that Wollen and Perkins should be read as emphasizing the elements that actually are artistically or structurally significant in a given instance still has to account for how a rather diverse range of relevant qualities can all be traced to a single figure” (85).

“Proponents of what Gaut calls the ‘construction strategy’ accept the reality of multiple artists collaborating on a given work but assume that appropriate modes of reception require viewers to postulate the existence of a single author on the basis of the work’s features and what they imply about a certain underlying creative vision” (86). Because people are so resolutely modern?

“The various strategies that have been used to support the individual authorshiop thesis do not survive close scrutiny; thus, a rather more interesting task is warranted—that of trying to devise new models based on concepts of collaboration, coordination, conflict, and chance” (86).

“D-Day stages, or prompts us to envisage, three collectivist conceptions of cinematic authorship, each of which emphasizes a number of quite different elements . . . the emergenist model . . . the coauthorship model . . . the restricted collectivism models” (87).
Hjort, Mette. “A Small Nations Response to Globalisation” Purity and Provocation: Dogma 95. Ed. Hjort and MacKenzie. London: British Film Institute, 2003. 31-47

“Let us begin with the emergenist model. A striking aspect of D-Day is that it revealed to viewers the very techniques underlying cinematic art that normative aesthetic theories typically require high art to conceal successfully. This laying bare of the basic apparatus of filmmaking through a foregrounding of coordination schemes and specialized contributions had the effect of encouraging viewers to scrutinize any commitments they might have had to notions of single authorship in film. For the point is that, although D-Day was framed as a unique millennial experiment, it supported a number of very general inferences about the nature of filmmaking under more mainstream circumstances” (87).

“error, or a sudden whim on the part of an actor, for instance, could thwart the realization of a given individual’s overarching, controlling intentions (87).

“When Sachs Bostrup (playing Lise) is instructed at a certain point to look out the window of the bank, some cameraman attempts to provide a point-of-view shot. The viewer recognizes the intention but also notices the absence of proper alignment due, among other things, to shooting in real time. On numerous occasions the viewer witnesses shots of cameras and the general paraphernalia of filmmaking” (88).

“and in this sense D-Day is genuinely a carnivalesque undermining of the kinds of hierarchies that place the crown of achievement and prestige on a single auteurist head (88).