As I first saw the ten tenets of dogma95, I didn't immediately react to how it was about making movies. It seems to me that a movie can have a second person camera, a hand-held camera, no soundtrack, or even the director's name on the credits, but that doesn't mean it's dogma95.
Lars von · Trier, the leader of the Danish dogma95. In 1995, he drafted dogma95's film campaign program. Perhaps he felt that the film should be a pure display of the director's personal subjective will, or the actor's personal interpretation and expression of the script. But such a move from freedom to complete rigidity in movies is undoubtedly contrary to the development trend of all industries around the world. No filters, no music and sound effects, no lighting, no setting, and no special props. At first glance, it looks like another Italian neorealism. But if you taste it carefully, there is a huge difference between the two.
The background of Neorealism is World War II, and the reason for its rise is mainly because it requires a focus on "people" and "life". And the ambitions of the dogma campaigner seem to go beyond that. What they want to achieve is the so-called "real movie", they want to completely separate the "creator" from the "worker", and create a film and film culture that only expresses the director's own ideas without any modification. But one of the biggest failures is that directors don't want to just use a camera to express their views, they need edits, they need scenes, they need special effects, which are strictly forbidden in the dogma creed. Relying solely on parallel montages and long takes is totally insufficient for today's films. The film needs to progress, what needs is a wider space, rather than shackled to everything about the film. Moreover, what dogma wants to pursue is to "make the purest movie", but the meaning of "pure movie" itself is already extremely vague, not to mention the return to the essence of the movie, what needs to be changed in the director's personal subjective will, rather than the use of similar The precepts of the church bound the director's visual expressiveness and personal imagination.
In addition, the more important point is that one of the greatest meanings of movies for human beings is to satisfy human’s own desire for “dreamland” and “voyeuristic desire”. If it is true as dogma95 said, then many film directors are in today’s world. , it is impossible to show one "dream" and "secret" to the audience, which can be said to be the biggest regret of the filmmaker.
As a result, the former true believers of dogma also became a little embarrassed: on the one hand, their own creation can be said to be the most difficult and purest creation since the film, and there is almost no means of post-processing except editing. But on the other hand, such creations seem to be unable to satisfy their own boundless imagination. As a result, dogma95 has changed from the original serious school to a joke used by the mainstream film industry. In "District 9" and "The Cloverfield File", dogma, which seems to be an extremely high-standard film creation mode, has also been transformed into an innovation in image narrative for science fiction films.
In "Wrestler", the gimmick component has become less, but it is a "successful failure" that can hit the creator of dogma the most. The film is really telling a story with dogma, except for the occasional soundtrack. Except for the final upgraded shot, almost everything in the film is dogma-style, and the photography is entirely in the second-person perspective of handheld photography, and even the faint sense of compassion and vicissitudes is touching. But after watching the film, we found that what we remember is not the theme or style of the film (strictly speaking, it is difficult for the audience to even clearly say what the theme of the film is), but just a Mickey Rourke, An old wrestling king, a real person who has moved us for a long time with his own life, both in front of the screen and behind the screen. A character that could become an absolute classic in cinematic history (actually, I think this Mickey Rourke performance in The Wrestling King is one of the two greatest performances in cinema of the 21st century, the other being Heath Ledger's Joker in Batman: The Dark Knight). And all the rest of the film technique is just to let Mickey Rourke interpret himself in front of the screen without any interruptions. This does not make the audience remember the director's personal style, let alone understand what dogma95 is. The director of this film, Aronofsky, also used a different style of inner narrative when shooting the companion piece "Black Swan" of "The Wrestling King", and abandoned dogma95.
Today, dogma95 has drifted away from us. Former believers are also trying to modify the dogma's creed for wider application. However, no matter how it changes, dogma95's film concept has gradually disappeared in the many movie thoughts. In fact, the creation based entirely on the director's own imagination does not conflict with the theory of realistic films, but what dogma95 does is to turn the film into a puppet that moves rigidly in a small space. Such superficial purity cannot really be "Returning film to film" is also very different from the true meaning of "pure film" - the free expression of film creators.
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