Dogme 95
..
is a collective of film directors founded in Copenhagen in spring 1995.
DOGME 95 has the expressed goal of countering certain tendencies
in the cinema today.
DOGME 95 is a rescue action!
In 1960 enough was enough! The movie was dead and called for resurrection.
The goal was correct but the means were not! The new wave proved to be
a ripple that washed ashore and turned to muck.
Slogans of individualism and freedom created works for a while, but no
changes. The wave was up for grabs, like the directors themselves. The
wave was never stronger than the men behind it. The anti-bourgeois cinema
itself became bourgeois, because the foundations upon which its theories
were based was the bourgeois perception of art. The auteur concept was
bourgeois romanticism from the very start and thereby ... false!
To DOGME 95 cinema is not individual!
Today a technological storm is raging, the result of which will be the
ultimate democratisation of the cinema. For the first time, anyone can
make movies. But the more accessible the media becomes, the more important
the avant-garde, It is no accident that the phrase avant-garde
has military connotations. Discipline is the answer ... we must put our
films into uniform, because the individual film will be decadent by definition!
DOGME 95 counters the individual film by the principle of presenting an
indisputable set of rules known as THE VOW OF CHASTITY.
In 1960 enough was enough! The movie had been cosmeticised to death, they
said; yet since then the use of cosmetics has exploded.
The supreme task of the decadent film-makers is to fool the
audience. Is that what we are so proud of? Is that what the 100
years have brought us? Illusions via which emotions can be communicated?
... By the individual artists free choice of trickery?
Predictability (dramaturgy) has become the golden calf around which we
dance. Having the characters inner lives justify the plot is too
complicated, and not high art. As never before, the superficial
action and the superficial movie are receiving all the praise.
The result is barren. An illusion of pathos and an illusion of love.
To DOGME 95 the movie is not illusion!
Today a technological storm is raging of which the result is the elevation
of cosmetics to God. By using new technology anyone at any time can wash
the last grains of truth away in the deadly embrace of sensation. The
illusions are everything the movie can hide behind.
DOGME 95 counters the film of illusion by the presentation of an indisputable
set of rules known as THE VOW OF CHASTITY.