A brief introduction to Dogme 95

How Did Dogme 95 influence the cinema industry?

Lars Von Trier

Thomas Vinterberg

Kristian Levring

Søren Kragh-Jacobsen

Dogme 95 Certificate for 'Festen', aka 'The Celebration'

Dogme 95 was an influential period in cinema. In 1995, Lars Von Trier, a Danish Film-maker teamed up with Thomas Vinterberg to create "The Manifesto, or "The Vow of Chastity", a list of 10 'commandments' a film-maker has to abide by to create a Dogme 95 film, a set of rules composed in order to break away from the things that Von Trier and Vinterberg hated about modern cinema. These rules are:
1- Shooting MUST be done on location, no props or sets can be brought in.
2- All sound MUST be Diegetic.
3- The camera MUST be hand-held.
4- The film MUST be in colour. No special lighting is permitted.
5- Optical filters and effects are forbidden.
6- The film MUST not contain superficial action.
7- Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden (The film MUST take place in the here and now)
8- Genre movies are NOT acceptable.
9- The film format MUST be 35mm
10- The Director MUST not be credited.

Dogme 95 regards this as false, saying that no Dogme film is personal.

The creators of this manifest believed that in order to break away from mainstream cinema, they had to give up their identities as 'Auteurs' calling the entire theory of Auteurism 'a bourgeois romanticism from the very start', as in Dogme 95, film is not individual . They also believe that mainstream films are an illusion to convey emotions to an audience through trickery, so they wanted to create a way for the film to feel real, so to Dogme 95, film is not an illusion. I am going to study the social and contextual impact of these rules, and how the production of these films have affected producers and audiences all over the world.
An interesting subject that I discovered when watching 'The Name of This Film is Dogme 95', a documentary detailing the origins of the New Wave by Richard Kelly, is that Von Trier and Vinterberg never actually intended for Dogme to become a 'New Wave', they intended to make a couple of films as a group of friends as a way of breaking away from the mainstream, however after they produced Festen and The Idiots, every Danish commercial maker wanted their commercials to be 'Dogme like', so it became the mainstream in Danish cinema, also many other countries decided to jump on the bandwagon, so the brotherhood decided to just let film-makers classify their films as Dogme if they believed they had followed the 'Vow of Chastity'.