Old Dogme, New Tricks

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.