circumstantial review film "Broken Waves" and the Dogme95 movement
DOGME95 are a revolution in the way of film creation on a global scale after the New Wave. Lars von Trier became a stylized film author on par with Dreyer in the history of Danish cinema. His status will be continuously evaluated and strengthened in future film studies. This article puts his work "Broken Waves" in the context of the DOGME movement and analyzes from three dimensions to determine the significance of its own existence for film creation and film history research.
Technocratic apostas
The tremendous development of film production technology brought about by the development of technology, the proportion of digital technology used in the film production industry is increasing, especially the film industry production represented by Hollywood of the United States. Tend to play to the extreme. The technological storm has brewed an explosion of reality and illusion, and people have new technologies that can clean the reality and create illusions at any time and any place. The movie has become a creation mechanism composed of technology, hidden behind the reality. If the significance of sound films to silent films and color films to black-and-white films lies in starting from nothing, restoring reality, and restoring material reality, then the significance of digital technology brought about by technological development to film reality lies in creation In reality, technology has become a new creator and a new god.
"Broken Waves" is not a DOGME movie in the full sense of the word. ("Golden Heart Trilogy" "Broken Waves", "Idiot" and "Dancer in the Darkness" is the only DOGME numbered "Idiot".) However, the significance of "Broken Waves" is that this is Lars Von An inflection point in Trier's creation. He abandoned the previous aesthetic tendency of excessively pursuing technical exquisiteness and turned to the creative practice of DOGME principles. When "Breaking the Waves" was born in 1996, it won the Cannes Film Festival Jury Award, and also won the European Film Festival's Best Picture and Jury Awards. The DOGME Manifesto, as a film production specification, is a restriction on a certain level. It is an irony to the increasingly sophisticated film production process. The direct slogan of the directors of DOGME is to oppose Hollywood. They believe that Hollywood's technocracy is directly a misunderstanding of the authenticity of the film. The pursuit of external forms is overblown, and the true inner emotions are placed in additional positions. "Story" and "role" are the most glamorous essential attributes of movies. They declared: "I swear in the name of the director to restrain my personal tastes. I am no longer an artist. My biggest goal is to find the truth in the character and the environment. I swear that I will use all means including sacrificing my own. Personal taste and aesthetic considerations meet this requirement.”
The rules of the DOGME declaration are similar to the Ten Commandments in the Bible, and the group members play the role of pastors. Their duty is to judge each application for inclusion in the film, and if it is found to meet The rules will give this film a DOGME number. So far, a total of 240 films have received certificates. Hong Kong director Cui Yunxin’s "Gone Sadly", Korean Dogme # 7: Interview (Directed by Daniel H. Byun) and Singapore Dogme #128: Tales from the Void Deck (Directed by Joseph Chiang) are also among them.
The rules are as follows: the
film must be shot on-site, and no scenes or props
are allowed ; no sound can be made out of the picture, and no picture out of the sound can be made (music is prohibited unless there is sound source music on the scene);
Shall handheld cameras, the film's story does not have to occur in the case of the presence of the camera, but the film's shooting to be carried out (any mobile or fixed lens only allowed in hand-held photography is completed, may not use a tripod) in place of the occurrence of the story;
the film must It is colored and does not accept special lighting (if the scene light is too weak to be exposed, the scene must be deleted, and only a single light attached to the camera can be used at most);
optical processing or the use of filters is prohibited; the
film must not contain surfaces Acts (such as the
prohibition of murder, weapons, etc.); it is forbidden to deviate from the time and scene (that is, the film must take place at the time and local);
genre movies are not accepted; the
movie specification must be in the college standard 35mm format (Note: Academy 35mm, United States The 35mm film technical specifications of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences); the
director’s name cannot appear in the staff list.
All DOGME's rules and dogma are about the language of movies, what is allowed and what is forbidden.
DOGME put the focus of the film completely on the human level. Lars von Trier completely abandoned the traditional film skills during the shooting process. Hand-held photography and no-tech editing. All exquisite and external forms were abandoned. Instead, it is the emotional flow of the characters themselves. The direct perception of "Broken Waves" makes people feel that this is a home video-style movie, a complete workshop-style handicraft movie. Just like the first thing an ordinary person without professional training has to do when picking up a DV is to aim it at the character's face, a large number of close-up shots of the film focus on the character's face. The human face is the most externalized organ in the human body. We can guess the mental state of the character through the changes in facial expressions. We can even say that "Breaking the Waves" is a film composed of close-up shots of the face. The most shocking scenes in the film are the credit of the close-up shots.
From the perspective of feature films, the rich performance of close-ups requires the intensity of the actors' performance. Trier’s approach is based on the complete trust of the actor and the director. The heroine Emily Watson has never been on the camera before this film. The director completely indulges in the performance of the actors. He adopts an improvisational approach and never specifies the actors. What kind of performance is needed, and what kind of position is needed. Axis rules, whether the actors' movements are coherent or not is not a condition for restricting performance, and direct communication between actors and the camera is allowed. The only pursuit is to increase the tension of the actor's own actions, liberate the actor, and liberate the performance. Putting aside technical factors, the freedom of performance is truly achieved. Trier also upholds the principle of freedom and randomness in the selection of editing plans. Different from traditional methods, editing gets rid of the rules of visual continuity, and character emotion is the center of the structured film. Traditional film standard techniques have been ignored and altered. Lars von Trier,
the writer of the prehistory of the DV wave
, graduated from the Danish National Film Academy. He has filmed more than forty commercials. The deviant "Golden Heart Trilogy" that made him famous before was the "European Trilogy". He is a strong supporter of technical supremacy by pursuing exquisite film skills in creative tendency. He once said "I have an almost fetish preference for film technology", and the equipment provided by the film academy can create "endless possibilities". "It is the most exciting thing to be able to use them to show their skills." ". However, to the surprise of the critics, Trier, after the "European Trilogy," reversed his style and put forward the DOGME95 creative manifesto in 1995 with the same Danish director. The subsequent "Family Party" and "Idiot" "", "The Tragedy of Min Lang" and other films provided a new possibility for film creation at that time.
Unstable picture and hesitation in focus are the shortcomings of DV shooting itself, but any technical shortcomings can be the starting point of creation. DOGME not only opposed Hollywood's technological supremacy, but also questioned the spiritual connotation of new wave movies. The new wave of the 1960s has changed the world’s film creation landscape. "Camera fountain pen" and "author theory" are the manifestations of spiritual values, but in the final analysis, New Wave movies are still middle-class romantic films created by the middle class. Perhaps the greatest effect of this movement is to allow a group of fresh post-war directors to enter the audience's attention. The characteristics of DV creation emphasize improvisation, freedom and exaggerated personal touch. The camera bid farewell to the era of fountain pens and ushered in the era of ballpoint pens. The identity of the film as a discourse authority and ideological violence machine has been rewritten. How to overcome the authority of discourse and resist ideological violence has become the starting point of his film creation.
The ultimate result of this is the democratization of images. Images are both movies and different from movies. They are more direct than movies, express more profound connotations, and have a wider range of expressions. Traditionally, there is a distinction between feature films and documentaries, but today’s movies in the era of democratization of images are called images, which blur the boundaries between feature films and documentaries, between fiction and reality, and become real movies and real video works. Godard said that the movie started with Griffith and ended with Abbas. If Godard’s intention simply refers to Abbas’s re-merging of the divisions between feature films and documentaries, then it is possible that DOGME is more thorough, more decisive and determined in this regard than it has done. We might say that the movie started with Griffith and ended with DOGME.
The Everbrighter of the
Nordic Film School The Nordic Film School (also known as the Scandinavian Film School) undoubtedly has an important position on the world film map. The unique geographical environment of Northern Europe nourishes Bergman and Dreyer, the two masters in film history. Denmark and Sweden have also become two countries with significant influence in Nordic cinema. The unique natural scenery of the Nordic region and the long and harsh winter have brought a different style of Nordic movies from other regions.
The Nordic culture has its own characteristics. Ancient Nordic has a mysterious pagan culture worship, and there are Nordic myths that are very different from other regional myths. Norse mythology is different from the tense in other forms of mythology. It has a unique apocalyptic plot, while other myths take the groundbreaking as their starting point. At the same time, the Christian culture from Western Europe also collided with the local culture here, forming a unique cultural temperament. Ibsen, Strindberg and even the fairy tale writer Hans Christian Andersen all have the characteristics of sadness, sternness and coldness. Lars von Trier succeeded Dreyer, and his works also contain similar elements. This is more prominent in "Broken Waves" than the other two parts of "Golden Heart Trilogy".
Lars von Trier repeatedly mentioned Dreyer's influence on him in interviews on various occasions. He himself had filmed the film "Media" written by Dreyer. Religion and women are two important themes in Delaire's films. "When I was young, I was instilled a lot of religious concepts. As a young man, you can seek a more extreme religion. As far as this matter is concerned, I think I am more inclined to Dreyer's point of view. Because The essence of Dreyer’s religious views is humanism. He also condemns religion in all his films. Religion is blamed, not God. The same is true of religious views in "Breaking the Waves." The story takes place in an elder. The village is strictly controlled by the church. One of the details of the arrangement is that the church in the village does not have a bell. During the Renaissance, clock-making required very complicated craftsmanship to complete, so God is called the clock-maker, because only God can complete this work. The bell represents the sound of heaven, and the people rang the bell to pray for it. After the death of the heroine Beth, the priest in the village judged her to go to hell. At the end of the film, a bird’s eye view from the sky, the bells in heaven played loudly for Beth, and the final judge is not the elders of the church on earth. It's God. It can be seen that for Trier, what he wants to oppose is not the spiritual essence of religion. The church adopts various norms to suppress human nature. What Trier opposes is this kind of secularization, the suppression of the external form and the harsh rule of the church.
Dreyer used to put women at the center of his story, and so did Trier. Like a classic novel, "Broken Waves" is divided into eight chapters, including Beth's marriage, life with Jane, lonely life, Jane's illness, doubt, belief, Beth's sacrifice, and funeral. It can be seen from the plot that Trier put the focus of the film's description on this suffering woman. The name of the "Golden Heart Trilogy" is derived from a picture book novel read by Trier when she was a child. It tells a naive and kind little girl traveling in the forest, carrying only bread and fruit belly, and encountering various needs on the way. Helping people. The little girl is happy to share everything about herself with these people. Eventually the little girl became impoverished and naked. Even so, the little girl is still full of faith and said, "I can handle all of this." The women in "Golden Heart Trilogy" have the shadow of the heroine in the picture book novel, or this kind of little girl is these. Archetypes of female characters. Bergman once said, "There is love between people, and God exists because of this." The character of Beth is full of deep religious belief and self-sacrifice spirit. The whole film arranges Beth to have eight conversations with God. She has faith and always prays to God. At the last moment of her life, she still believes that what she has to face is God's punishment. She needs to be punished, and the punishment is done with brave martyrdom.
The DOGME movement's own exploration of the film's own formal level is far at the forefront of contemporary film. The artistic spirit it advocated far surpassed the native Danish and blossomed on the world film map, which greatly changed the tendency of film creation at that time. Although this vigorous movie movement quietly fell silent after that. Its main representative directors have also turned to other forms of film creation. However, as another film movement after the new wave, it has deeply affected the style of contemporary film creation. Its film language style appears in a large number of commercial films and personal DV video works. In 2007, Michael Winterbottom told the story of "The Washington Post" war correspondent Daniel Pearl's film "A Mighty Heart" (A Mighty Heart), which was deeply influenced by the DOGME style in terms of external form. In the DV era, a large number of creative groups have either explicitly or implicitly used their rules as their own creative yardsticks, accomplishing more possibilities alone. The movie "Broken Waves" can be regarded as the initiator of the DOGME95 movement. Regardless of form or content, it is not only a return to the original moment of the film, but also a guide to the future direction of the film. If the entire history of the movie can be seen as a straight line, then "Broken Waves" is the intersection where the straight line is bent into a circle.
References:
[United Kingdom] Steig Borgmann "A Conversation with Lars Vontelier", "Pictures and Sounds" 1996
[Denmark] Peter Lundel Dogme official website
Edvin Vestergaard Kau Auteurs in Style The Heresy or Indulgence of the Dogma Brothers pov A Danish Journal of Film Studies
Trier, Lars von and Thomas Vinterberg. "The Vow of Chastity." http://
www.dogme95.dk
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