Lars and his one-cam cult

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The most lucid explanation of the Danish cinematic movement Dogme 95 (remember Festen?) comes halfway through a Channel 4 documentary on the subject, screened this week. It is, says Soren Kragh-Jacobsen, the director of Mifune (third of the original four Dogme movies), "like the unplugged movement at the beginning of the Nineties".

In other words, Dogme movies have a musical equivalent in the lo-fi records made by rock stars like Eric Clapton and Kurt Cobain. Where they stripped music down to the bare essentials of voice and guitar, Dogme similarly stripped film-making to its fundamentals: script, actors and camera.

Actually, Dogme 95 is a highly prescriptive set of rules - the "10 commandments". In order to make a Dogme movie, you have to sign a "vow of chastity" which forbids the use of props, dubbed soundtracks, sets, tracking shots, superficial action, special lighting or effects and, most importantly, proper, Hollywood-style, widescreen film stock.

All Dogme movies must be shot on hand-held cameras - the kind of thing you may have in the loft. The result? A "pure" film which focuses entirely on the actors and often features strong, sometimes anarchic language, emotion and action. And occasionally looks a bit wobbly, like a home video. When it began, Dogme was defiantly Danish and more or less an art-school prank dreamed up by the likeably wacko film director Lars von Trier, a man who has built a career on contradiction and whimsy. Even the von in the middle of his name is, according to his cigar-chomping, plain-speaking business partner Peter Aalbaek Jensen (see how Danish this is?), an affectation designed to make him sound more interesting.

Von Trier has a pathological fear of flying, drives around in a camouflaged golf buggy, and allegedly provoked Björk, the star of his new movie Dancer in the Dark, into a fit of costume-eating. He's the daftest - and at the same time, most intensely serious - European film-maker of his generation.

Ironically, Dogme has now become a small commercial industry, much to the dismay of its original adherents. There are currently half a dozen Dogme movies being made in Denmark (none of them by the original four), and these days the movement is more likely to be called Dogma, in English, since movies made according to its rules appear in festivals and art houses all over the world. Perhaps as a result, and with predictable unpredictability, von Trier has turned his back on it. Dancer in the Dark, which opens this year's Edinburgh Film Festival, smashes each Dogme commandment into a thousand tiny pieces. It's a musical, for a start, featuring dozens of dancers, a lavish Björk soundtrack and a plot so unrealistic that it makes his most successful movie, Breaking the Waves, look like Coronation Street. What's more it was shot using 100 cameras. If von Trier and his three Danish "brothers" have thumbed their noses at Dogme, does this mean the movement is dead?

The man behind the hand-held camera on two of the first Dogme movies - the celebrated Festen and the less successful Mifune - is in fact British. Anthony Dod Mantle comes from Oxford, though he's lived in Denmark for the past 20-odd years. He calls himself a "middle-class gipsy" and is currently talking to Danny "The Beach" Boyle about a future collaboration - but he's not considering another Dogme movie.

"It was a new wave, and every time you have a new wave there's a wash of surf-riders after that," he says, disapprovingly. "I can't tell you how many times I've been approached by people who want me to make a TV commercial Dogme-style. That wasn't the point at all. It was all about inspiring film-makers. Inspiration is great; copying is totally uninteresting." Dogme, says Dod Mantle, arrived at exactly the right moment: "It was all in the timing. Film-making seemed to have got very sophisticated and complicated - it was provocation to the industry as a whole. But I don't adhere to the theory that Dogme is a movement, in any case. It just embodied a particular way of working at a particular time. I think Lars conceived The Idiots (the second Dogme film) before he conceived the rules. Everything comes and goes in waves: now there'll be an epidemic of movies in which the camera doesn't move at all."

The last Dogme movie Dod Mantle shot was called, with self-conscious zaniness, Julien Donkey-Boy - directed by American wunderkind Harmony Korine, author of the film Kids. The movie, released here in October and starring Chlo' Sevigny and Ewen Bremner as the schizophrenic son of the near-psychotic Werner Herzog, is the best non-Danish Dogme film yet - but it's weirdness continually verges on pretentiousness, a trap the second generation Dogme movies seem less and less capable of avoiding.

Elsewhere in America, a loose group of left-field movie-makers have established their own "pure" film collective under the title InDigEnt, citing free-form US director John Cassavetes and Dogme 95 as their influences - though they won't necessarily adhere to the 10 commandments.

So Dogme still exists, but as an industry apart from its original creators. And in any case, as Lars von Trier tells Channel 4, the Dogme manifesto was written in order to be ripped up. Whoever came along next, and was worthy of the description avant-garde, was duty bound to do something different.

"Dogme shouldn't be going anywhere," says Dod Mantle. "It's filmmakers who should be moving."

? The Name of this Film is Dogme 95 is on Channel 4, on Saturday. Dancer in the Dark opens at the Edinburgh International Film Festival on Sunday.

 

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