Dogme 95 founded by Lars von Trier
Dogma 95 (Danish: Dogme 95) is a 1995 avant-garde filmmaking movement founded by the Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, who created the "Dogme 95 Manifesto" and the "Vows of Chastity" (Danish: kyskhedsløfter). These were rules to create films based on the traditional values of story, acting, and theme, and excluding the use of elaborate special effects or technology. It was supposedly created as an attempt to "take back power for the directors as artists", as opposed to the studio. They were later joined by fellow Danish directors Kristian Levring and Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, forming the Dogme 95 Collective or the Dogme Brethren. Dogme (pronounced [ˈtʌwmə]) is the Danish word for dogma.
The movement took Von Trier's first film under Zentropa-production Breaking the Waves as the main inspiration by ethos as it avoids to use for the film not only break the movement's rules, but the whole movement itself.History
Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg wrote and co-signed the manifesto and its companion "vows". Vinterberg said that they wrote the pieces in 45 minutes. The manifesto initially mimics the wording of François Truffaut's 1954 essay "Une certaine tendance du cinéma français" in Cahiers du cinéma.
They announced the Dogme movement on March 13, 1995, in Paris, at Le cinéma vers son deuxième siècle conference. The cinema world had gathered to celebrate the first century of motion pictures and contemplate the uncertain future of commercial cinema. Called upon to speak about the future of film, Lars von Trier showered a bemused audience with red pamphlets announcing "Dogme 95".
In response to criticism, von Trier and Vinterberg have both stated that they just wanted to establish a new extreme: "In a business of extremely high budgets, we figured we should balance the dynamic as much as possible."In 1996, the movement took Breaking the Waves as the main inspiration by ethos, although the film breaks many of the movement's "rules", including built sets, post-dubbed music, violence, and computer graphics in the end of the film.Like the No Wave Cinema creative movement, Dogme 95 has been described as a defining period in low budget film production.Since 2002 and the 31st film, Spanish director Juan Pinzás no longer needs to have his work verified by the original board to identify it as a Dogme 95 work after finishing up his own trilogy. The founding "brothers" have begun working on new experimental projects and have been skeptical about the later common interpretation of the Manifesto as a brand or a genre. The movement broke up in 2005.Since the late 2000s, the emergence of video technology in DSLR photography cameras, such as the Canon EOS 550D, has resulted in a tremendous surge of both feature and short films shot with most, if not all, of the rules pertaining to the Dogme 95 manifesto. However, because of advancements in technology and quality, the aesthetic of these productions typically appears drastically different from that of the Dogme films shot on Tape or DVD-R Camcorders. Largely erasing the primitive and problematic features of past technologies, newer technologies have helped Dogme 95 filmmakers achieve an aesthetic of higher resolution, as well as of lower contrast, film grain, and saturation.Concepts and influences
In Von Trier's first film of "Golden Heart" trilogy, Breaking the Waves, after founding the Dogme 95 movement with Vinterberg in 1995, heavily influenced by the movement's style and ethos, despite it breaks many of the movement's "rules", including a directorial credit, background sets, non-diegetic music, and use of CGI.The 2001 experimental film Hotel, directed by Mike Figgis, makes several mentions of the Dogme 95 style of filmmaking, and has been described as a "Dogme film-within-a-film".Keyboard player and music producer Money Mark used principles inspired by Dogme 95 to record his Mark's Keyboard Repair album.