Movies are invariably associated in the popular imagination with excess and extravagance, but film-making has always had its fair share of puritans. Many were driven by ideological opposition to the political establishment, claiming a greater authenticity and authority for themselves, usually expressed through some form of minimalist aesthetic; a "true" cinema in opposition to all the fakery. It might reasonably be argued that all filmmaking is fakery, but some of the greatest directors, from Vertov to Bresson to Godard, have mined this seam with great success.
Dogma 95 is different. These are no Young Turks, starting to find their voices and forced to rely on a pared-down, low-budget aesthetic. Lars von Trier, widely regarded as the leader of the group, is one of Europe's most successful directors, and would have little difficulty raising finance for a big-budget film (by European standards). Nor is Dogma 95, whose members range in age from their late 20s to middle 50s, driven by any particular sense of political fervour, as so many of its predecessors were.
There is nothing in the archly-titled Vow of Chastity about "bringing cinema to the people", or representing parts of society hitherto unseen on screen. The fact that most people have laid responsibility for Dogma 95 at the door of arch-provocateur von Trier, director of Breaking The Waves and the surreal television mini-series The Kingdom (both of which anticipate many of Dogma 95's precepts) has tempted many critics to dismiss the Vow of Chastity as some sort of heavy-handed Scandinavian post-modernist joke.
If that were the case, the joke would soon be forgotten, but there's the small matter of the films which are beginning to appear, with the Dogma logo fluttering at the start where the director's credit would usually be (the Vow of Chastity forbids directors' credits, among many other things). Thomas Vinterberg's Festen, currently showing at the IFC, is a bleak, bitter, brilliant comedy of bourgeois bad manners which harks back to Renoir and Bunuel, yet seems utterly modern. Shot on digital video (a breach, surely of the Vow's commitment to 35 mm film), its long, unbroken shots, shuddering hand-held camera movement and fuzzy lighting actually concentrate our attention on the remarkable performances at its core.
Von Triers's own film, The Idiots, which divided opinion at last year's Cannes Film Festival, breaks many taboos of 1990s society with its portrait of a group of middle-class friends who pretend to be mentally handicapped, and features some of the frankest portrayals of sexual activity seen outside hardcore pornography. A third Dogma film, Mifune, directed by Soren Kragh-Jacobsen, recently won a prize at the Berlin Film Festival.
"We wrote the Vow of Chastity together, but it was very much Lars's idea," Vinterberg confirmed in a recent interview. "He always works like that - trying to tease the grown-ups . . . But that wasn't the attraction for me - this provocative, arrogant attitude he likes so much. For me it was more that I felt trapped by the old conventions and could see that a lot of other film-makers were facing the same problem."
The vow refers disparagingly to "the cinema of illusion", which it sets out to counter. The target, one guesses, is not so much the big-budget, effects-driven Hollywood blockbuster, but the medium-priced, run-of-the-mill European film, shot for the most part according to a conservative aesthetic dictated by ideas of "production values" and "broadcast standards", using film stocks which minimise grain, ensuring that focus remains sharp at all times, carefully lighting each frame, and ending up flat and unconvincing (we've seen plenty of such films produced in Ireland in the last few years).
In refusing to engage with genre film-making, and in rejecting "superficial action", Dogma also seems to reject one of the defining characteristics of European cinema in the 1990s: its attempt to compete with Hollywood by appropriating its methods - or at least the methods of American independent movies.
Having thus painted themselves into a corner, what will directors like Vinterberg and von Trier actually make films about? So far, they seem to share an interest in the transgressive. Festen, with its themes of incest, child abuse, violence and racism, certainly fits that bill, as does The Idiots. In this regard, they can be seen as part of a broader trend within European cinema of the last couple of years, in films like Gaspar Noe's Seul Contre Tous or Francois Ozon's Sitcom.
A recent article in Sight And Sound magazine argues persuasively that "Dogma 95 mimics a revolutionary stance that pretends to want to revive a modernist transgressive cinema within a sceptical post-modern climate. The game is given away, though, when it talks about doing this `at the cost of any good taste'. This is, after all, a cultural climate that has mainstreamed John Waters with Serial Mom, while no one has accused There's Something About Mary of good taste."
The writer misses the point. American cinema, or American culture, is not the target here. The "good taste" referred to in the Vow is that of the European cultural elite, not the Hollywood studio system. Both Vinterberg and von Trier come from liberal, intellectual backgrounds (Vinterberg was raised in a journalists' commune in Copenhagen), and it's clear that there is an element of generational revolt in Dogma's parodic appropriation of the kind of language one might find on a Maoist manifesto circa 1968.
Finally, you have to come back to the films. One element they share is a greater emphasis on character and performance. With such a stripped-down aesthetic, the actors carry much more of the responsibility for telling and developing the story. There is no forceful editing or manipulative music to do their work. In Festen, the effect is striking - the moment when the son turns his after-dinner speech into a public revelation of his father's abuse is superbly handled.
One might reasonably speculate that for actors, a film set shorn of tracks, dollies, cranes, lamps, props and other clutter might prove a more rewarding space in which to work. Certainly, for an audience, watching a film with untreated sound, no music and highly unpredictable camera movements (the Vow, interestingly, says nothing about editing), allows us to believe that this is a less mediated experience, while simultaneously drawing our attention even more strongly to the "aesthetic considerations" which Dogma 95 proclaims so shrilly to ignore.
Festen is currently showing at the Irish Film Centre
