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Movement · 14 of 14 in time
Two Danish directors swear off sets, music and tricks, and make fiction as plain and direct as a document.
Where it sits
Italian Neorealism · Direct cinema and cinéma véritéDogme 95Romanian New Wave · Mumblecore
Context
Cinema turned one hundred in 1995. Its biggest films were expensive and polished, built from special effects, scored music and constructed illusion. In Denmark, a small country with a small film industry, two directors felt that all this finish had pushed the actors and the truth of a scene out of view.
Digital video was only beginning to arrive, promising light cameras and a feature made by a small crew. Lars von Trier was already known in European cinema. With Thomas Vinterberg he wrote a vow that attacked the polished film and the cult of the director, though both men were directors themselves.
The signature
The people
The films
Its constellation
Legacy
You see Dogme in any fiction film that trusts a shaky handheld camera, available light and live sound over polish. It fed the austere realism of the Romanian New Wave and the cheap, improvised habits of mumblecore. In Denmark, its founders and their generation moved toward warmer, more polished drama, but kept the direct attention to faces and behaviour that Dogme had made famous.
To start with: The Celebration · The Idiots · Italian for Beginners. Then the rest, in the order they came out.