Quotes of the Day

Ten years ago, Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg decided to forget everything they knew about filmmaking. Looking for a way to break what they considered bad habits behind the camera — like using music to set a mood or relying on clever editing to boost a weak scene — they drafted The Vow of Chastity, a manifesto with 10 rules to strip cinema down to its barest essentials. The imperatives included that films should be shot in color, with hand-held cameras, on location with no additional props, no soundtrack and no extra lighting. They should be set in the present — no genre films allowed — and the director should not be credited. In March 1995, when Von Trier was invited to Paris' Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe to speak at a celebration of 100 years of cinema, he took to the stage, read out the manifesto, tossed red pamphlets printed with The Vow of Chastity into the audience, and walked off. The Dogme 95 movement was born.

A decade later, around 40 Dogme films have been made, including the American schizophrenia drama Julien Donkey-Boy (1999) and 2000's Danish romantic comedy Italian for Beginners. And Denmark's movie industry is still riding high on a wave that turned its films into festival staples. Von Trier and Vinterberg may have moved on to bigger, brighter things, but the aesthetic they devised and inspired has gone mainstream, turning up in everything from Danish television shows to bare-bones thrillers like Open Water. As Hollywood players scramble to blow our minds (and blow up their budgets), the dictates of Dogme remind us that cinema isn't just about thrills, spills and special effects — it's about telling a story and telling it well.

"We thought it would be fun to forbid everything we normally do in film — music, makeup, effects — everything that comes between the actor, the pure product and audience," says Vinterberg. "That was maybe the highest creative moment in my life." Von Trier and Vinterberg only made one Dogme film each, but they extended the invitation to other Danish directors they thought could follow the rules and make movie magic. The 10th Danish Dogme film, In Your Hands (which opens in Britain this week), is set in a women's prison and examines what happens when a chaplain who's losing her faith meets an inmate who can heal with her touch.

Like most Dogme directors, In Your Hands' Annette K. Olesen — who had only made one other feature before taking the Vow — found that working within the confines actually gave her more freedom. "You have to play games with yourself as an artist to keep developing," she says. "I found it really refreshing to come to work and be able to shoot from the very first moment. For me, that was the essence of liberation." Two more Danish directors will get their own taste of freedom when they start shooting their Dogme films later this year.

What accounts for Dogme's staying power? After all, it wasn't the first wave of cinematic minimalism: the Italian neorealists in the 1940s, like Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini, insisted on shooting on location, often using nonprofessional actors and live sound; so, too, did the auteurs of the French New Wave in the 1960s (from which Dogme borrows some ideas).

And at first, nobody but its creators took Dogme seriously — it took three years for a Dogme film to actually hit screens. But when one finally did (Vinterberg's The Celebration), it went off to Cannes and came back a hit. The tale of a 60th birthday party that collapses under the weight of a family's disturbing secrets, The Celebration won the festival's Jury Prize award. "My film was not meant to be a success," says a bemused Vinterberg. "That wasn't part of the plan." Even so, established directors adopted Dogme as a way to get their creative juices flowing again (with the risk of failure adding a little thrill), while struggling filmmakers saw it as vindication: a hit could be made on a shoestring. As for audiences, there are always those hungry for more substance, less Star Wars.

Since then, filmmakers across Europe, Asia and the U.S. have stepped up to the challenge. "We jumped on it and exploited it," says Jean-Marc Barr, the French actor and director behind the fifth Dogme film, 1999's Lovers, which explores the romance between a Parisian woman and an illegal immigrant from former Yugoslavia. "It demystified the filmmaking process. All of a sudden, directors had complete creative control and the technology made it accessible." Dogme even caught Hollywood's eye: Von Trier made 2003's Dogville, which had Nicole Kidman on a scaled-back set made mainly of chalk outlines. And it has seeped onto TV, too: the popular Danish sitcom Clown is doing it Dogme-style (shooting improvised sketches on location with no makeup crew or costume department), and has Von Trier writing an episode to air next year.

The Dogme look — intense, immediate, documentary-like — was exactly what British director Danny Boyle wanted for his 2002 zombie film28 Days Later, which imagines what would happen if people were infected with a biological form of rage and then left to tear each other apart. "There was a very organic reason," he says. "I felt that if you survived a viral apocalypse, you could pick up a digital camera, which would probably still be working, and you could use it to record what was going on." Boyle's zombies went on to devour audiences, bringing in over $84 million worldwide.

And Dogme also gave filmmaking couple Chris Kentis and Laura Lau the biggest sleeper hit of last year. Kentis and Lau wanted something exciting, different — and cheap. "Anybody who's trying to make a low-budget independent film is naturally presented with plenty of challenges and obstacles," says Kentis. "Hollywood tends to solve its problems by throwing money at them. But Dogme is about setting up obstacles that would force a director to come up with creative solutions."

Looking for a story that fit the aesthetic, Kentis and Lau remembered hearing about a diving couple who were left stranded at sea, floating in shark-infested waters. With a minimal crew they traveled to the Bahamas and plopped their two lead actors, both unknowns, 30 km out in the middle of the ocean. Much of the equipment they needed was either too expensive or didn't exist, so they built their own, like the underwater housing for their cameras. "I bought a plastic file storage box, cut a hole in it and put the camera inside," says Kentis. "I did a lot of tests in my bathtub." They shot on location, using natural lighting, no makeup, very little music. And no special effects, not even for the sharks. "I think it's amazing what people can do with computer-generated effects," he says. "But if we wanted to embrace the sense of realism and immediacy, the best way was to work with real sharks. It only made sense." The result was Open Water, a white-knuckle horror with a palpable sense of danger and real fear in the actors' eyes. The film, which cost around $130,000 to make, started a feeding frenzy at the Sundance Film Festival, sold for a reported $2.5 million and eventually brought in more than $38 million at the box office.

With more and more unpolished, low-budget films rubbing up against the blockbusters in theaters, the motives behind Dogme may not be as relevant now as they were 10 years ago. But Dogme's influence is irreversible. "Dogme was a reaction against something and now Dogme can be something for people to react against," says Vinterberg. "So, for now, it's still alive."

• JUMANA FAROUKY
• A decade after its debut, the Danish cinema movement is influencing mainstream films