University of Cape Town – FAM2004F

Sixth Précis: Hjort & Mackenzie get rigidly spontaneous

‘The Usual New Intensity’:

Or, why I’m pretty encouraged to read that I’m not the only young Hollywood foreigner to see the Cinema in church-going, theological terms…

“[Lars] Von Trier notes that Dogma is not just about following rules, but about setting limits, and through that process, liberating oneself from another set of rules (the conventionalized practices of Hollywood). The idea is to come up with new rules that, by virtue of their novelty, can play a role quite different from that of the established conventions.”

Formal Precis:

In their Introduction to Purity and Provocation: Dogma 95 (2003), a volume of ‘scholarly’ critical essays concerning the influence and influences of the eponymous Danish “film collective”, the editors Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie seek to encapsulate the present history of the ‘Dogma’ Film movement, from its “flamboyant institutionali[sation]” at Cannes 1995 to its viral infestation of Independent World Cinema by early 2003.

Instead of enumerating the rules of Dogma, the editors explain their historical motivations and consequences. Firstly they note that Dogma was an “instigation” for a kind of still-forthcoming cinematic egalitarianism in an age of bourgeois atomism, instead of an imposed philosophy on pre-existing personal and national oeuvres. Secondly they make explicit the self-consciousness of the endeavor as a ‘pragmatic avant-garde’ movement in Cinema, a means of consistently producing films without them simply becoming products. Ironically, Dogma’s major effects have manifested in its interpretive flexibility: producing five “partially overlapping” Film ‘Waves’ since 1998, infusing the careers of many established Danish filmmakers with a new artfulness and critical esteem, and inspiring national indie cinemas worldwide to embrace its (low-budget) ascetic aesthetic, though only to very rare success. It has also become a kind of catchword term for opposition to Hollywood artifice, even though almost all its films have been easily institutionalized by the art-house wings of the major Studios. Its conventions are not “arbitrary”, but they are as replaceable as Hollywood’s, and this insight endows the movement with an all-purpose radical aura.1

By then also touching, in their overview, on all the aspects of Dogma to be subsequently discussed in Purity and Provocation, the editors showcase their intention to earmark their book as the first to properly “tease out the various conceptual bases and more general implications of Dogma as a cinematic programme, a corpus of works and a network of interconnected discourses with global effects.” They seek to be the first scholars to take Dogma as seriously in Film Studies as Dogma takes itself in Cinema. The scope of just their thumbnail historical analysis attests to their partial success.

And they pursue this Herculean task because they deem that “the Dogma phenomenon warrants critical attention, at least from film scholars, but arguably also from the many thinkers in various disciplines who have an interest in understanding the realities of globalization.” Therefore, their hoped-for audience quite matches the one which Dogma also implicitly addresses itself to by way of its reactive concerns. The Dogme 95 manifesto can in this sense be viewed as a loud rebuke in the overarching discourses of Cinema History and World Politics that had governed the careers and the limits of success Danish filmmakers like Von Trier and his “brethren” had so far enjoyed. Hjort and Mackenzie convened their book to show they, and their writers, were listening.

Application to Italian for Beginners:

If, to employ a flattering ‘revolutionary’ metaphor, the launch of Dogme 95 was the cinematic equivalent of the publication of the Communist Manifesto, the release of Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration and Von Trier’s The Idiots (both 1998) would be the Russian Revolution and that of Lone Scherfig’s Italian for Beginners (2000)

1. The editors use the rest of their text to discuss more informal preceding Dogma analyses and to list, by country or continent, the international examples of recognized Dogma films as a supplement to their descriptions of the fate and content of the movement’s more frontline creations, such as Lone Scherfig’s Italian for Beginners.

the enforcement of Lenin’s New Economic Policy. In other words, Scherfig’s film is a necessary revision, not a betrayal, of the practical results of a world-affecting counter- hegemonic (and counter-industrial) doctrine. On its own terms, it’s a Dogma film that’s also quite enjoyable.

There wasn’t a rule, of course, in the Dogma manifesto that prescribed a mandatory pessimism or unwatchability for its creations’ content, but Hjort and Mackenzie are quite right in claiming that the success of Dogma XII2 marked the arrival of a distinct ‘Second Wave’ of Danish Dogma that both departed from the brethren’s initial cinematic temperament and greatly popularized the anti-aesthetic they had spent the preceding few years promulgating. It apparently breaks Rule #8 by self-consciously belonging to the ‘artificial’ genre of Romantic Comedy, however I would argue that this deviation is more a case of Scherfig attempting, in her small but substantial way, to build on the materialistic foundations of the movement so as to simultaneously reconstitute and reinvent Film Genre itself, rather than just her and the production team’s indulgence in a lazy recourse to Hollywood tropes.

We can see the film’s essential achievement as being the obverse of that of the oeuvre of Jacques Demy, the flamboyantly 60’s French New Wave auteur.3 In film after film, Demy infused the environs and characters of his nation’s working class with the insanely kitsch and somewhat touching music and colours of big studio Hollywood musicals, finding a strange glamour and romance in the lives of ‘people who don’t belong in movies’. In a similar vein, Scherfig here introduces a set of excessively ordinary Danish villagers, as naturalistically depicted as Dogma dictates, and allows them to conspire the interlocking serendipities of a Commedia dell Amore. Every character is seen both working and failing at their work, and the reason for most of them taking the eponymous council-sponsored Italian course is its inspirational exoticism, the inkling that learning a romance language might, even by osmosis, spice up their perpetually beige lives. The beauty of the film is that it does. And because the

2. According to Wikipedia, Italian for Beginners, due to its unsurprisingly low budget and lovable universality, is the most profitable Scandinavian film made to date and also still holds a world-beating 88 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
3. And doting husband to the director Agnes Varda, who played basically the same independent-woman-in-a-boys’-club role for the New Wave as Scherfig does here for Dogme 95.

formation of the lovers’ pairings – Karen with Hal-Finn, Andreas with Olympia, Giulia with Jorgen Mortensen – occurs through their own joint instigations, it stays true to the humanist core of Dogma. The ending is happy, for once, because, like so many real people, the characters have a greater collective propensity for compassion than selfishness. When they reach it, Venice does not appear as a fantasy city. It can be just as realistically shot as Denmark but the fact of its still evident splendor only reinforces Dogma’s central doctrine that Cinema does not require any artifice for the creation of its magic. It only needs a good eye and subjects willing to reveal themselves for the camera.