27th Mar 2004
Dogville, Rhymes With Doggerel
Utterly pretentious Euro crap. I bother to write about this only because I hear that Dogville has come to U.S. theaters this week.
Granted, I watched only the first 20 minutes of this (three months ago in Budapest), switching screening rooms instead to Ken Park, which I thoroughly enjoyed, so I can’t give a proper review of this steaming pile of shit, as I didn’t see it through to the end.
But here’s what I can tell you. It’s from director Lars von Trier, “innovator” of the Dogme 95, a cinematic movement (ugh) with it’s own set of rules, such as “Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in,” “The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa,” “The camera must be hand-held” and so on. The result: pretentious crap.
Seemingly realizing this, von Trier takes Dogville (the name a coincidence with Dogme? doubtful) in the opposite direction: it’s all set on a small theatrical stage. All the action (that I stayed for, anyway) takes place on the small “Main Street” of Dogville, where all the houses are outlined in white lines on the floor of a wood stage. There are, in fact, no houses, and furniture is sparse. Everything in pantomimed. Someone knocks on a door, we hear “knock, knock, knock,” but they’re rapping their fist against empty air. No walls, no background, everything is left to the imagination.
Sounds innovative? Sure, I rented Waiting for Godot, with Burgess Meredith and Zero Mostel, a year or so ago, and thought it was brilliant. Minimalism I can do. But pretentious garbage I can do without. (I mean, Nicole Kidman? Come on.)
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Easy tiger. I just saw it yesterday (the whole movie!). And it happens that Dogville is NOT a Dogma movie. (It is an easy target to criticize Dogma as a film making trend have to admit). They tried something here what you can take or refuse. I enjoyed the movie. the main problem of it is the length. It is f… long. but how dare you blame something without looking at it. … Please don’t act like a snob.
http://www.dogme95.dk/
…damn it!
Miki, you’re not reading closely enough. I said it went in the opposite direction from Dogme, I didn’t say it was a Dogme film. I also linked to that same URL in my post, so I don’t know why you’re giving me that URL.
And, I did note that I did note that I had seen only 20 minutes of it, so people can take my comments with a grain of salt. But I had seen plenty. Three hours of that crap would have made my head explode.
For the record, I almost never walk out on films. I probably would have stayed for all of it, by the person I was there with wanted to leave. I hadn?t wanted to see Dogville in the first place, because I thought it sounded like pretentious crap, and had wanted to see Ken Park, but he wanted to try Dogville. When he offered to switch, I was only too happy to agree.
hiya rick
while i can understand frustration at a lars von trier / dogme film, the movement itself was pretty interesting and produced some wonderful films.
try checking out — if you haven’t already — CELEBRATION or (my favorite) MIFUNE. there’s something wonderful about scandinavian films (is it the lighting? the starkness of the country? the alcohol and cigarettes that permeate every movie?) that isn’t to be missed.
i guess i’d be disappointed if a smarty-pants such as yourself discarded someone’s work because s/he was striving for something interesting and different (cf. jersey girl, say).
erika
It?s certainly not something new or different I object to, it?s the rigidity of the set of rules they came up with. Why not just direct a film and let it inspire other directors to take what they like of it? But the idea that only this kind of movie is legitimate is just pretentious.
Okay, I?m being needlessly cynical, I admit it, because it makes for better blog reading (I presumed). But the artifice of Dogville was so heavy, especially with a Hollywood mainstay like Nicole Kidman in it, I couldn?t begin to divorce myself from the pretensions of it and try to take it seriously. All the acting seemed contrived, the awe-shucks Depression era mood of the thing was hokey, and the lack of sets was a constant distraction. It just annoyed me.
I saw Breaking the Waves, and I did think it was compelling, notably for the fantastic acting Emily Watson, though generally I thought it was long and boring, and the jittery hand-held camera just made me motion sick. I can?t see anything it brought to the film as a benefit. It wasn?t like cinema verite, as if we are supposed to believe one of the characters was in the room documenting the events with a video camera. The jerky single-camera switching back and forth between characters with no steady cam just made us hyper-aware there was a camera person in the room who was not part of the plot. Needless distraction. Just because some Euro film snob thought the rules needed redefining. Fine, do it once for one film, but to codify a whole film manifesto around it? Gimme a break. Not surprising, therefore, that the founder has already moved on. Too bad it?s to something equally as contrived. How about he just try making a movie and stop focusing on the arty gimmicks?
huh. i guess i see it from the opposite perspective. the idea of dogme was originally to take away the artifice from filmmaking, take away the traditional filmmaking structure (master, medium shot, close-up) and was in response to the new technology of digital cameras and their portability.
i don’t think dogme films were as much about pretension as they were about experimentation with some fundamental tenents of filmmaking.
merchant ivory and woody allen are more euro film snob than any dogme film i’ve seen.
dogme films fail a lot, but at least they are interesting, and sometimes beautiful. i don’t think 28 DAYS LATER could have been made without the dogme films paving the way.
erika
shocked, cause i’m usually the cynical one
also, what film is legitimate? it seems a slippery slope, that…
I think more than anything it’s the adherence to a rigid set of rules about Dogme that bothers me. I saw a Hungarian film, Hukkle, a few months ago. Very experimental. Truly original, not like anything I’ve ever seen on film before. No dialog, for example. I was riveted. It was completely successful, in my mind.
So it’s not like I’m arguing that experimentation is objectionable, far from it. It was the drawing attention to the film making itself, both in the Dogme and in this new Dogville, that is annoying. You can’t ignore the distractions of the film making to enjoy the film.
That said, I guess I do have a low tollerance for what I deem Euro film snobbery. Sure, I find big Hollywood formulaic stuff as tiresome as anything thinking person, but Euro art films can be just as formulaic in their way — namely, slow, minimal of plot, lots of talking, lots of waxing philosophical, obsession on death, little happening, etc.
The Barbarian Invasions, for example — a bunch of university professors drinking red wine talking about Kierkegaard and Marx while the main character dies of cancer for three hours. I mean, who really talks about Kierkegaard and Marx while drinking red wine with old friends? It’s just a stereotype itself. (Not to mention that the hero of the film is the vulgar capitalist millionaire son who spends hundreds of thousands taking his father out of the dreadful Canadan socialized medical system so he can die in comfort, unlike the unwashed masses.)
If I want to feel like an intellectual, I’ll read Kierkegaard myself. Watching a movie where people talk about Kierkegaard is just pretentious, meant for me to feel intellectually superior for three (long) hours because I’m not watching an awful American film where things blow up, but honestly, it’s just as predictable bullshit as an action-packed Hollywood film, just less fun to watch. (They talk non stop about blowjobs in Barbarian Invasions, but no one even gets naked, for Christ sake. Why even bother sitting through a subtitled film if no one gets naked?)
I am not a friend of boring, pretentious art films, but calling a film a “steaming pile of shit” and “pretentious crap” after seeing a fraction of it? That’s pretentious too. It’s perfectly fine to hate bad, plotless movies in which cardboard people philosophize over red wine, but I think it’s more dubious to generalize that to any movie where anyone talks about anything “intellectual” you could go and read yourself. (Like you reading Kierkegaard, if you want to be intellectual.) That makes it sound as if you thought you were *always* better off intellectually if you didn’t listen to what anyone else thought. Of course, this may be true, given your brilliance… but you could still be modest
All this is to say that perhaps you could be a bit less heavy on the generalizing in a post that is supposedly against stereotypical crap. I personally have a big problem with the closing credits of Dogville, which turn the otherwise interesting experiment into provincial clich?s of America and anti-Americanism, but whatever. At least you didn’t have to see that.
Yes, you’re right. I did’t read carefuly. After your noted note of note you haven’t seen the whole film made me furious. But hey, now you can sense how unlovely thing to write about something what you have not comprehend 100%. So, I take back 1/500 of what I said.
Ikrek, veled meginn?k egy s?rt egyszer. M?r ha szeretn?m a s?rt v. ha tudn?m ki ?s hol?!
I really don’t want to milk this debate indefinitely, but just to clarify, Ikrek, to put my comment in context, I wrote “I can’t give a proper review of this steaming pile of shit, as I didn’t see it through to the end.”
I think there’s a certain amount of intended irony in my “review” that’s being lost. Anyway, do you really need to watch a Schwarzenegger film past the first 20 minutes to render an opinion about it? It wasn’t the plot of Doggerel that I had problems with, it was the glaring artifice of it, which wasn’t going to change if I’d stayed with it for another two hours.
Any comments you had, regardless how derogatory, could not begin to describe just how fucked up and insulting this movie is. The director has replaced cinematography and acting with narration and out of focus camera work, and even more importantly, he replaced vision and talent with himself (which is tantamount to eliminating it). My instincts told me to leave after twenty seconds, but I stuck it out for twenty minutes, then left like a handful of others in an almost empty theatre in Austin. Later I learned that it was no more than three hours of anti-American bullshit. Drop your guard for one minute and the movie industry will stick it to you.
Dogville should have been released this week, just in time for Leash Gal photos from Abu Ghraib! Life imitates art! The part where that movie crossed over into fable NOW ends up being point for point just like the images from Abu Ghriab! I’m sure the CIA “tightened their leash” on that movie now. Are you gonna apologize to Von Trier now?
cool
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Ikrek, veled meginn?k egy s?rt egyszer. M?r ha szeretn?m a s?rt v. ha tudn?m ki ?s hol?!
I thoroughly enjoyed reading everyones opinion on these matters.
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where the hell am i?
dogma 95 is a joke right?
i see life in steady cam and it looks clear.
perspective gives the illusion of a grainy shaky reality to eyes used to seeing “real” events in documentory form.
what is not contrived about any artistic expression. and why do so many talented artists debase their abilities by insisting on “saying something” or using art as personal catharsis. what the fuck ever happened to art for arts sake?
jesus weeps.
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