Part I  Dogme in Film

I have long been a huge fan of the so-called Dogme style of film-making, which emerged in Denmark in the 1990s. I like its clearly outlined set of principles and the way that the best Dogme-influenced films tend, nevertheless, to be those that infringe these self-imposed regulations.

The original idea of Dogme was to produce films that are as close to real life as possible but without concealing the essential artificiality of the process. Shorn of all stylization and special effects, the aim was not gritty social realism in the British mode—that would still be stylized—but a sort of post-modern TV realism, in which the artificiality of the medium is exposed by the very lack of artifice, hence, ironically exposing the ‘real life’ that lies behind it. It is similar, in some respects to Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt and the way this was taken up by new-wave film-makers in the 1960s. Godard’s masterpiece Weekend springs to mind.

Dogme films, however, are far more ‘puritanical’ than these antecedents. There is no incidental music; there are no tracking or long shots; nothing occurs on screen that the actors are not actually doing in the studio; the camera is always hand-held (home-movie style), focusing primarily on the actors’ talking heads and eschewing painterly cinematography.

One of my favorite early dogme films is Italian for Beginners—a tender funny tale with an ensemble cast and unusual for an early dogme film in that it is a romantic comedy rather than a dour psychological tragedy. The film follows a group of night-school language students, whose teacher dies suddenly and who decide to continue the course without a teacher, working it out for themselves. The film has a pleasing lightness of touch and and quirky clunky beauty, and its theme has given rise to a whole ‘dogme-style’ movement in English language teaching.

It is almost impossible to make a pure Dogme film and even the earliest efforts that received a Dogme certificate deviate substantially from the rules. Dogme has since filtered down into the mainstream and is a stock-in-trade of modern-day TV series.

The Night Manager, directed by Susanne Bier—once a stern dogme advocate, now tipped to direct the next James Bond movie—uses dogme-style features to produce a delicately layered and very female-gaze take on a classic spy novel.

The restaurant scene, in which the arms dealer’s son is the target of a faked kidnapping attempt, employs the dogme rules to masterful dramatic effect and, since the kidnapping is fake in the story, doesn’t actually break any of the original dogme rules in this regard. Take a bow Ms. Bier.

There is also a fantastic scene, in the fifth episode, if I remember rightly, in which the arms dealer and a dubious client watch a pyrotechnic display of military hardware in the Syrian desert. This is obviously far from the dogme ethos but there is a sort of added thrill to the prolonged scene in that you are aware that Bier is getting as much of a kick out of transgressing the sometimes stifling dogme protocol as the characters are from their violent criminal activities. Again, Bier is careful to craft the scene in such a way as to reveal, at the end, that all the acts of extreme violence displayed were ‘merely’ fake, for demonstration purposes only, thus, by a pinch, not entirely breaking dogme rules.

The best TV series to have aired recently in my view—although The Night Manager and the first season of True Detective run it a close second and third—is The Leftovers. This essentially science-fiction genre series is clearly not dogme in nature but draws on the style in interesting ways.

I must admit that I was a little disappointed by the long-awaited third season of this series. It was good but not as good as it was billed up to be, principally because it recycled so much of the highly successful material from previous seasons. The final episode, however, was an astounding tour-de-force that redeemed and tied up the whole series for me.

The writers and directors of The Leftovers were left with a dilemma at the end of the second season. They had agreed that the series would come to an end in the third season but were faced with various mysteries that needed to be explained (or not). They decided (I think highly courageously) to go for fully explaining the main mystery of the mass disappearances in the last episode. It would have been so temptingly easy and yet cowardly to leave everything open and ambiguous, without risking ridicule or bathos. They chose, thankfully, not to do this, but rather to reveal the truth behind the mystery in a very specific, very touchingly dogme way.

The basic premise of The Leftovers is that 2% of the world’s population has suddenly disappeared in a rapture-like event. This has left the ‘leftovers’ traumatized and directionless and they seek out various forms of cult and self-help to overcome the trauma.

In the final episode Nora Durst (the Sprecher of the series, played with admirable understatement and self-restraint by Carrie Coon) is convinced by a cult that she can be reunited with her departed children and husband if she undergoes a sort of death by radiation on earth. Nora eventually agrees to the procedure, but it is clear from her demeanor throughout the lengthy processing scene, that she has her doubts, but doesn’t care, because death and being reunited with her lost children are all the same to her.

The second half of the final episode skips forward a decade or so. Nora is living as an eccentric in rural Australia. It is clear that she has survived the process of transition to the place the departed disappeared to, but seems not to want to talk about it. In the final scene of the series, she opens up to the new boyfriend she acquired in the course of the first two seasons, who has now come looking for her.

She tells him how she did indeed cross over to the ‘other side’ and how that there things are much worse: 98% of the population have disappeared, her children are the lucky ones because they have each other. This is all filmed entirely through talking head dialogue. No attempt is made (wisely) to visually depict this bizarre experience and the camera focuses in instead on the signs of ageing on the actors’ faces. It was moving, technically brilliant, totally in the tradition of the ancient Greek dramatists’ strategy for presenting difficult-to-stage implausible episodes by way of an (ob scena) verbal report, and, of course, very dogme-based.

The final episode of The Leftovers reminded me of Solaris (both the Soviet and the more recent US version). I re-watched the original Tarkovsky version recently, having spent many years watching and re-watching the George Clooney American remake. The films are in fact more similar than I had remembered. Both depend on the conceit that a crew of space-travelers have been driven to madness by the mysterious effect of an alien planet they are surveying. A psychologist is duly dispatched to sort out the problem and is then himself sucked into the same kind of psychological problem that the other crew-members are experiencing—namely extremely enticing delusions. In the case of the psychologist, the delusion takes the form of his beautiful deceased wife and he finds himself powerless to resist.

There is a scene in which the crew decide to kill off this very physical apparition by ejecting her into space. In the original, it kitschily involves putting her in a nuclear weapon in skimpy Sixties-style attire—James Bond villain style—in stark contrast to the otherwise dour tone and slow pace of the film. In the US version, it involves a lot of high-tech McGuffin about quantum physics, with a sweet side-dish of good old-fashioned American sentimentality. In both films, the actress seems unperturbed by the elaborate execution process and, of course, simply returns to haunt them nicely moments later, in the manner of one of the friendly yet infuriating ghosts of ex-wives in David Lean’s film version of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit.

What all of these films show is how the pared-down dogme-style technique, even when avant-la-lettre, is capable of producing a powerful work of art, even (or perhaps especially) within genres (science fiction, spy thrillers, ghost stories etc.) that traditionally tend to be outlandish and sensationalist. Furthermore, the more disciplined dogme approach enables more extravagant scenes to be introduced (the pyrotechnics in The Night Manager, the execution/exorcism scene in the two versions of Solaris) to much more powerful dramatic effect than is achievable within the conventional high-adrenalin special effects driven action movie.