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Dogme Uncut: Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg, and the Gang That Took on Hollywood
By Jack Stevenson
Review by MICHAEL ROWIN
a Film Comment online exclusive
Santa Monica Press, $16.95
It has been more than a year since the official closing of the Dogme "Secretariat," and perhaps the time is ripe for an initial assessment of the movement's repercussions. Despite the fact that Dogme 95's validity as a groundbreaking initiative was in question from the start-it stemmed as much from Lars von Trier's mischievous antics as from his experimental vision-there's no denying its importance to the low-budget, DV revolution of the late Nineties. Launched by Trier and Thomas Vinterberg (The Celebration) in the form of a now infamous, half-serious and half-ironic manifesto, Dogme was to serve as a "rescue action" to enable filmmakers to get back to basics. Those who signed on to its "Vow of Chastity" would forgo complex lighting setups, music scores, props, studio sets, and other crutches in order to more fully engage in creating deeply felt narratives. While it may be premature to properly measure Dogme's effects on cinema, a brave writer could start things off by either convincingly arguing for its progressive possibilities, its compromises, or its relative failure.
In Dogme Uncut, however, Jack Stevenson doesn't intend to rock the boat. An upstate New York native now living in Denmark, Stevenson knows the Danish film scene inside-out. His overview of Danish society and culture, as well as the country's important filmmakers, producers, cinematographers, and studios, is invaluable for those interested in Copenhagen's hotbed of creativity. On this account, Dogme Uncut provides terrific contextual background-including the controversial workings and economics of the Danish Film Institute-for understanding the emergence of Dogme.
But Stevenson's take on the manifesto and the launch of Dogme filmmaking-what should be the heart of his study-is sadly muddled. The controversies surrounding Dogme-its stated intention to bring about cinematic "purification," the conservative strain of auteurism underneath its denial of personal taste, the marketing aspect of the brand name-are mentioned, but only because they are impossible to ignore. Stevenson fails to untangle the issues, and fundamentally lacks a central argument. Some interesting ideas float past-Dogme's emphasis on the role of the cameraman, a possibly new relationship between camera and actor-but they are never fully investigated. There's a simplistic section on influential Dogme predecessors (New American Cinema, New German Cinema, the French New Wave) that serves as an introduction for readers unfamiliar with film history, while chapters on individual Dogme entries confusingly and awkwardly leap from the minutiae of production to grand pronouncements of artistic merit and box-office draw. Unsophisticated generalizations abound: "[The Dogme] fellows made the raw, hard-edged films that were transgressive, ground-breaking, and experimental, while the women made, well . . . 'women's pictures.' "
The book's chief flaw is the way Stevenson buries some of his finer points beneath weak and juvenile writing. One would like to give him the benefit of the doubt and chalk it up to an emulation of the most prominent attributes of Dogme filmmaking-energy, improvisation, and unpolished form. Unfortunately, the slapdash structure and informal tone of the book make it feel more like a high school paper (complete with exclamation points).
On the plus side, Dogme Uncut accomplishes a worthwhile task in cataloguing almost every Dogme release and introducing the (often unknown) filmmakers behind them, but it's not enough to redeem Stevenson's somewhat gutless approach. If Dogme Uncut is meant to be a history and survey of Dogme, then the author's subjective style proves intrusive; if the goal is to understand Dogme's importance for contemporary filmmaking, then he fails to form any sort of coherent thesis. The end result is something less in the spirit of Dogme and more in the vein of forgettable criticism.
© 2003 by The Film Society of Lincoln Center
