QUOTES

"I swear as a director to refrain from personal taste! I am no longer an artist. I swear to refrain from creating a "work", as I regard the instant as more important than the whole. My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations.

Thus I make my VOW OF CHASTITY.

Copenhagen, Monday 13 March 1995

On behalf of DOGMA 95
Lars von Trier Thomas Vinterberg"

- POV.COM


Dogme is also against the auteur status of the director, destroying the romantic myth of the unique artistic personality; for an eccentric artist like Trier, this is a rather masochist rule. It is also part of the anti-aesthetic tendency of the movement, ignoring “any good taste and any aesthetics.

The Dogme project is not without its paradoxes: Why demand technical primitiveness from a medium so much based on technology? How is it possible to avoid “aesthetics” when you work in an aesthetic medium?

There are no simple answers to this, except that Dogme isn’t an academic approach, but an artistic one, in a field where there are no holds barred."

The video cameras gave new freedom but a less perfect image (corresponding well with Dogme’s disregard of aesthetic matters). The digital technique was behind “the ultimate democratization of the cinema” that resulted in millions of YouTube videos in the next decade.

The manifesto was written very fast, “on the basis of some notes I had made, We sat there and composed those rules in half an hour. It was enormously fast. For me the incentive was the anarchistic, the collective and the totally insane side of it all.”

- Kosmorama.com


Dogme’s biggest failing is that it looked to impose a kind of retardation on cinema without offering any innovations.

But most ridiculous of all, in order to adhere to the rule about the avoidance of non-diegetic sound in a scene where he wanted music, he got someone to play a harmonica behind the camera. Sure, that’s technically within the rules, but hardly in the spirit of them. And how exactly did that trickery improve the film or derive a greater “truth” over using non-diegetic, pre-recorded sound?

The Dogme movement wanted to create a set of parameters that would encourage the revelation of truth in films, but with their tricksy rule bending, they actually perpetrated a hoodwinking of the audience, perhaps one even more disingenuous than Hollywood.

- Gorillafilmonline.com


These restrictions may indeed provoke a kind of purity, but they also evoke a kind of animal cunning in the director of Festen. No music? Get the actors to sing a lot. Only local props to be used? Find a big house with lots of them in. No director credit? Get yourself a walk-on role.

- independentonline.co.uk