Dogma 95

Back in march 1995 a conference was held in Paris to celebrate cinema’s centenary. Throughout the celebration talks were being held to discuss the future of cinema. During that conference at the Odeon theatre, Lar von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg handed out 500 pamphlets. Outlining the principles of dogma 95.

Dogma was to act as counter to the extreme of Hollywood at the time. With its dependents on CGI and never-ending film budgets. Dogma wanted to strip down filmmaking to do what they called to purify filmmaking. They believe that these guidelines will make filmmakers want to work on the story and the actor’s performances. Instead of relying on technical tricks layer on in post production. With this Lar von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg created the rules of Dogma referring to them as the “Vow of chastity”

The first dogma film was made by vinterberg in 1998 called Festen or the celebration as in was called in it UK release. Also known as Dogma #1 as it was planned that Dogma film would not have titles just numbers. This film won critically acclaimed at the Cannes film festival that year. Lars von Trier’s Dogma film The Idiots also premiered at Cannes along with Festen. Since these films released other director became interested in trying to make film under the Dogma code.  

The ten commandments of dogma is as follows

1.             Shooting must be done on location, filming on a set is not aloud. Also no props can be brought in all items used must alreally be at the location.
2.              The sound must never be produced. No soundtrack
3.              The camera has to be hand held at all times
4.             The film must be in colour. No black or white or any special lighting is acceptable
5.      No filters                            
6.        The film can not contain any superficial action (no strange to outlandish things can happen to the characters like meeting aliens or falling down a flit of stairs only to have a supermodel giant rack break there fall.
7.              Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden.
8.               No genre can be applied to a dogma film
9.              The film format has to be Academy 35mm
10.              The director must never be credited.