Dogme95: Movement or Mimicry?

In hindsight, Dogme95 has been a spectacular but short-lived experience. The Danish film movement was launched in March 1995 at the conference “Cinema in its second century” in the Odeon Theater in Paris where Lars von Trier presented the Dogme95 Manifesto. The closure of the Dogme95 secretariat was officially announced in June 2002. If one takes into account that the first official Dogme films Festen (Denmark: Thomas Vinterberg, 1998) and Idioterne (Denmark: Lars von Trier, 1998) were premiered at the 1998edition of the Cannes Film Festival, one could argue that Dogme95 lasted for only four years. Considering that each of the four founding brethren, Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg, Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, and Kristian Levring, made only one official Dogme film, the movement starts to resemble an ephemeral hype. Some critics indeed saw the Dogme95 movement as nothing but a publicity stunt with the aim “to advertise one and only one item: Von Trier himself as a directorial value on the cultural stock market.” If so, one can only say that this PR stunt has been astonishingly successful. It raised Lars von Trier to international celebrity status, and between 1999 and 2000 some 35 films submitted by mainly young filmmakers from all over the world were awarded an official Dogme certificate.

Dogme95 also achieved considerable critical success, though more because of its manifesto than its films. One may even wonder if films like FESTEN and IDIOTERNE would have become international hits if they had not been preceded by the manifesto. After all, Von Trier's earlier films THE ELEMENT OF CRIME (Denmark: 1984) and EUROPA (Denmark/Sweden/France/Germany/Switzerland: 1991) were not very successful even in Denmark and abroad they drew mainly the attention of a few Parisian cinephiles, while MIFUNE's SIDSTE SANG (Denmark/ Sweden: Anders Thomas Jensen, Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, 1999) and THE KING IS ALIVE (Sweden/Denmark/USA: Kristian Levring, 2000) scarcely received any distribution at all outside the international festival circuit.