Putting on the Dogme

By RICHARD CORLISS

In his conference room on the Universal lot, Steven Spielberg showed a couple of guests a printed card. On the card was "The Vow of Chastity"--Ten Commandments of simplified filmmaking, as proclaimed in the Dogme '95 manifesto by directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. Spielberg spoke enthusiastically about Dogme and said he'd like to make a film under its rules.

Wait a minute. Why should the most successful filmmaker in history subject himself to these dicta, jotted down in half an hour by a couple of daffy Danes? Why would any director toss away the tools of power and sorcery that the movies have spent a century developing? No 150-person crew, no wide screen, no post-synchronizing of dialogue, no flashbacks, no E.T. or dinosaurs. No tripod for the camera. And no director's credit.

Yet Dogme is the hot word in serious film circles. Its precepts were first used in Vinterberg's The Celebration, the family-in-tatters drama that was a worldwide success. Dogme 2 was Von Trier's The Idiots, an aggressive comedy with porno elements. Now come Soren Kragh-Jacobsen's easy-to-take Mifune, about a young businessman who goes home to settle his late father's estate; Kristian Levring's The King Is Alive, set in Namibia and starring Jennifer Jason Leigh; and, opening next week, the first American Dogme film, julien donkey-boy, by genius nasty boy Harmony Korine.

If Dogme spreads beyond art houses, it will be not because it suggests a vital new way to make pictures, but because today's directors feel crushed by technological gimmickry. The camerabatics of the French New Wave, the anti-dramatic films of Bresson and Antonioni, the nonlinear experiments of the American avant garde--each of these was a revolutionary call to arms. Dogme is a call to disarm, to strip away the veneer, to walk without crutches supplied by Industrial Light & Magic. Unabashedly reactionary, Dogme loves innocence; it aims for a primitive purity. "Filmmakers and filmgoers are yearning for something else," says cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, who shot The Celebration, Mifune and julien donkey-boy. "But not necessarily something new. A revival. A renaissance. A refocusing on the story. The nakedness and simplicity of Dogme has put us back in touch with the essentials of filmmaking."

Korine, who wrote the scabrous Kids, then made on his own the widely praised and reviled Gummo, had already planned his new film--the largely improvised story of a schizophrenic (Scottish actor Ewen Bremner), his bullying dad (Werner Herzog) and pregnant sister (Chloe Sevigny)--when Von Trier & Co. suggested he make it under Dogme strictures. "I liked the idea of it being a rescue action from the elevation of cosmetics," he says, "the idea of not hiding behind the trickery." Bremner found that the stripped-down system let him focus on his craft: "I don't have to reserve a portion of my brain to monitor the on-set mechanics--lighting rigs, camera tracks, field of focus. I can dedicate myself fully to realize what I want to do."

Dogme might seem way too, well, dogmatic; a director who has filmed under its rules must sign a "confession" of any deviations. (Korine: "I confess that in the turkey-dinner scene, I made my grandmother go to the grocery store and buy a batch of raw cranberries ...") But Dogme is as much a game as it is a cult. Indeed, Korine broke nearly every commandment; like Rasputin, he wants to sin so he can repent. At the beginning he stages a violent death (Rule 6). At the end he credits himself (Rule 10). In between he uses slow motion, stop motion, superimposition, all kinds of optical tricks (Rule 5). And the vaunted Dogme "simplicity"? This is 1999's most mannered film. And, though smartly shot with digital video equipment, the most fakey: three actors mingling with the disabled and dispossessed. Nothing screams artifice so much as the collision of the reel and the real.

The danger of any innovation is that it quickly becomes calcified. But that may not happen with Dogme. The Danes who made the first four films under it are planning a millennial blast. Each will film part of a script written by the four, and each director's scenes will be shown live on a different TV channel on Dec. 31, with viewers doing their own editing by flicking the remote. And as U.S. auteurs, locked in stasis, consider the next century, the Danish challenge might look appealing. Who better than Spielberg to teach an old Dogme new tricks?

--Reported by Georgia Harbison/New York and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles