I don’t think that the importance of the Dogma-95 movement can be overstated, even if, almost thirty years on from its conception, it has not had as far reaching or invasive an impact on the cinema as it should have. With its ‘Vow of Chastity’ detailing a set of strict rules which a film must abide by in order to become a part of the movement – such as that it must: be shot on location; use only hand-held cameras; and use only natural lighting – Lars von Trier’s and Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogma-95 movement set out to change the future of cinema by taking back creative control from the large studios, and disproving the apparent belief that expensive equipment and large budgets are requirements of quality filmmaking. In essence, what their movement showed people was that to make a piece of art all you need is a camcorder. This is important since, with its ever-increasing budgets and technological advancements which are constantly making everything seem ‘outdated’ just moments after they were the best you could get, the film industry is scaring off potential filmmakers by presenting filmmaking as an impossibly expensive and illusive ambition. If you look at what the cinema has had to offer for the past several years it becomes easy to believe that films can be made only by large commercial studios with millions of pounds to fund their movies. The films of Dogma-95 remain an important reminder that this isn’t the case, and thus the message behind this movement was, when it first breathed life in 1995, and still is, thirty years later, sorely needed in the world of cinema.

As an aspiring filmmaker, Dogma-95’s message has perhaps been of greater importance to me than any other film movement or motivational speech or singular film. And that’s because it enabled me to just get out there and make something. It’s because the movement – despite seeming extremely limiting due to its strict rules – is exceptionally liberating. Its revolt against the studio system, against the common glossy aesthetic of films today, against the over-reliance on technology to make movies (I’m thinking of Steadicams, CGI, a surplus of lenses) reopened a vast field of opportunity for filmmakers by showing them that they can – they are allowed – to make films that don’t look like what their local cinema and what Netflix and Amazon Prime have been showing to them. In other words, it tells individual filmmakers that filmmaking can be within their budget. It also tells the world of cinema that there are more ways a film can look than just the cut and paste glossy stencil of large studio productions. It’s this vast array of potential that Dogma-95 shone a light on that should offer filmmakers a surplus of inspiration in an otherwise pretty crushing industry, even without one seeing a Dogma-95 film, for the message of the movement spreads far beyond the ‘Vow of Chastity.’ That said, I felt it important to actually see the movement in action, as well as reading about it. I wanted to see what can be achieved within such a seemingly restrictive set of rules – to see, I suppose, if the message that I love is actually as good as it sounds when put into action. Thus, I finally watched my first Dogma-95, beginning with the second film of the movement, ‘Dogme #2,’ Lars von Trier’s Idioterne (The Idiots).

I always go into a von Trier film a little scared, a little apprehensive – and I think justifiably so – and I always leave thankful that I braved it, for without fail each of von Trier’s films that I’ve seen has expanded for me the horizons of what cinema can be. The Idiots, of course, was no different. It shares with his other pictures tropes we’ve come to associate with the polarising director, namely an overbearing pessimism and misanthropy, explicit images, repugnant characters, and an overall desire to provoke. As a result, like much of his other work, the film is often dismissed as mindless provocation – provoking for provoking’s sake. But whereas works like Nymphomaniac receive this criticism mostly on account of the explicit imagery which von Trier never shies away from, criticism of The Idiots appears to lie mostly with its subject matter, rather than with the actual footage. This is interesting given that stylistically The Idiots is far uglier than his other films, as it is recorded on a handheld camcorder, the boom mic is often caught in the frame, and the reliance on only natural light creates many jarring moments visually due to the inconsistency in colour and lighting. And on top of that there is sex just as explicit asthat which we’re presented with in Nymphomaniac. But it is the subject matter of the film, rather than its experimental style, that is deemed mindless provocation or dismissed as offensive, immoral, unnecessary. It’s as though von Trier’s first Dogma-95 film chose a topic of focus so controversial that it distracted the audience from the fact that they were watching a Dogma-95 film in the first place.

The film focuses on a group of young adults who, bored of their conventional lives and disillusioned by the lack of individual freedom available in society, create their own mini-society in which they attempt to bring out their ‘inner idiot’ – which they see as the pinnacle of freedom from modern civilisation – by pretending to have intellectual disabilities. Von Trier’s camera follows this group as they take their charade into various scenarios, from eating at a restaurant, to swimming in a public pool, to going to the pub, and simply observes their behaviour and the reactions it gets out of the people they meet along the way. And I think that’s why the film is so troubling to watch. It’s because von Trier’s camera refuses to pass judgement on what it sees. It observes, and only observes. It’s like a documentary, only more objective. For documentaries typically have an angle they’re trying to push, and they usually don’t do the pushing particularly subtly. In The Idiots, on the other hand, you’re not quite sure what the angle is. You leave the film unclear on what its purpose was, or you believe it has no purpose other than to provoke and upset. Von Trier could have filmed this story in a way that clearly showed he was opposed to what the characters were doing, say by heightening the drama in places, or using a more subjective camera instead of the emotionally detached neutral camera he opts for, or he could have replaced the only (marginally) sympathetic character of Karen with someone who uses ‘the idiots’ out of spite and to express bigoted views instead of out of refuge from a cruel world (which is Karen’s motive for joining the group). So why doesn’t von Trier do this? Is it because he simply wishes to infuriate and offend his audience? I don’t think so. I think he’s proven himself to be far more than that, and that’s why, although I’m nervous to watch his films because I know I’m going to be challenged and provoked visually, I continually ensure that I do watch them because I always end up being simultaneously challenged intellectually, and taught something about cinema that I was previously unaware of.

I believe that for von Trier these two types of challenge – visual and intellectual – are interconnected in a way that one can’t exist effectively without the other’s presence. It’s like a symbiotic relationship, the presence of one helping to increase the power of the other, and vice versa. To make a good-looking film about nasty people would be effective on one level, but to make a nasty-looking film about nasty people works on several. That’s how I believe The Idiots operates. And within ‘nasty-looking’ I include the lack of a clear moral stance from the camera, for that does impact our viewing experience. Afterall, we witness only what the camera witnesses, and we witness it how the camera witnesses it. So, if the camera witnesses an event from a perspective that we don’t agree with or condone, then the way we see that event becomes uglier, more unacceptable, more anger-inducing. In short, it becomes more provocative – Lars von Trier’s trademark. The effect of this within the context of The Idiots is that the group’s actions seem all the more detestable by the fact we aren’t shown them from a purely unsympathetic viewpoint. Instead, time is spent by the camera in trying to learn and understand why they do what they do, where this idea stems from – the group claiming it is a reaction to the bigoted, capitalist world around them – and even on showing how their charade offers comfort, happiness, a much-needed safe space for a grieving member of the group. I don’t think von Trier adopts this stylistic approach because he is trying to get us to sympathise with the characters. I think he does it to anger and to upset us, to make us ask why he is not condoning their actions more, and as a result to increase our dislike of the whole charade that we are shown again and again and again. Each aspect of the film works by provoking us into further dislike of the characters, rather than merely affirming to us something we already know. Lars refuses to simply show us something that we deem morally wrong and pat us on the backs for recognising it as such. He always wants more from his audience – and from his films – than that.

His use of visual provocation works at first to startle and to shock the audience. Instances such as the first time we realise that the group does not genuinely have intellectual disabilities but are pretending to; or when we see one of the male members of the group – mid-charade – being washed in the women’s shower room, erection on full display; or when the group engage in a ‘gang-bang’ (as one member refers to it as). Each of these visually provoking and challenging scenes shocks the audience out of any comfort they might expect to find in a film. When paired with von Trier’s objective (neither sympathetic nor unsympathetic) camera and the elements of a Dogma-95 film, which make each of these scenarios play out like found footage instead of rehearsed drama, the provocation goes beyond being merely a means to shock as the film replaces escapism with realism. The effect of this is that rather than witnessing characters doing shocking things, we feel as though we’re watching real people doing shocking things, and thus the shock value goes beyond a simple thrill or jump-scare-esque experience, and instead penetrates us more deeply as we are forced to reflect on the events of the film as though they were real. Hence, the infuriation by some viewers at von Trier’s seeming lack of interference or moral objection at what we are shown. Were the film to look like a typical studio production – artificial lighting, studio sets, Steadicam, less graphic sex – I believe the outrage at the film’s subject matter would be lessened. It would be clearer that what we were watching is fiction, pretence, and consequently we could view it – and any moral message it attempts or doesn’t attempt to put forward – as of less significance. In contrast, by choosing to present this story as a Dogma-95 film, the film seems to be viewed as more than just make-believe. It inherits a different sort of life and a different sort of reception as a result. People aren’t satisfied to watch it as a movie, per say, but demand a reason for its existence – if it isn’t simply here to entertain as a film should (and it’s safe to say that The Idiots isn’t typical entertainment), then what is it here for? I believe the first thing we reach for to answer this question about art is that it must be here for some dogmatic purpose, it must contain something from which we can learn about the world. But von Trier doesn’t give us such a simple nor clear message. In doing so, he ensures that his first Dogma-95 film breaks not only from commonly accepted methods of making a film and from commonly accepted film aesthetics, but also from commonly accepted purposes for a film’s existence. The result is like an intensification of the Dogma-95 movement’s underlying message that what a film is isn’t limited just to what the big studios are churning out. It also appears to me to be a statement from von Trier that a film shouldn’t need some dogmatic moral element to it to justify its existence. Just like how we don’t search a painting for a lesson on life and deem it pointless – and even ‘not art’ – if we cannot find one, von Trier tells us that a film needn’t need a strong moral teaching to be art. In fact, the art within The Idiots is almost exclusively found within its rejections – of traditional storytelling, traditional characters, and, most importantly, traditional methods of making films.

As a side note before I draw these thoughts to a conclusion, I wanted to touch on something I found interesting in The Idiots but that doesn’t quite tie in with the focus of the rest of this essay. While this entry into von Trier’s canon does showcase his common theme of misanthropy, something I noted – and that reviews dismissing or berating the film seemed to miss – was that it in fact appears to me to be von Trier’s least misanthropic film out of those I have seen so far (a list to which The House that Jack Built has been added while completing this essay). As I argued, the Dogma-95 style of the film increases our dislike of the central group and so also increases the misanthropic undertones of the films. But outside of the group, von Trier offers a tender sympathy and warmth to the people the group interacts with and fools into believing their act. Oftentimes the group appears to want those they interact with while pretending to have intellectual disabilities to respond to them with a negative or rude or mocking attitude, because this will support the ideological view they hold of society – that it is bigoted, unaccepting of otherness, oppressive – that has prompted them to start this group in the first place. But the people they approach and play their charade to almost always act with kindness. In one notable scene, the member of the group acting as ‘carer’ this time around leaves another member with a group of biker-looking guys in a pub while he pretends he needs to use an ATM. There is a tension throughout the scene as we wonder how these people will interact with and react to this stranger, and we make assumptions – like ‘the idiots’ – that they might act hostile. What happens instead is that the guys look after the stranger who they believe to have an intellectual disability, to such an extent that they even help him use the toilet when they mistake his attempt to leave the pub out of embarrassment as a desire to use the loo. I’ve read a review that saw this moment as the biker group mocking the person with a ‘disability’. But I believe this to be a misinterpretation. While their actions are perhaps misguided and questionable – they help undo his trousers, and one holds his penis for him while he urinates – I believe their intentions are meant to be seen as good. After all, they have no idea how serious this stranger’s disability is, and so when they see him stood at the urinal doing nothing, they assume it is because he can’t go to the loo on his own. In having the two men not simply give up and leave the stranger, but offer him the help you might only expect to be given by a carer or by a close loved one, I believe von Trier is wanting to paint the society outside of the central group as a sympathetic and kind one – the opposite to what the group claims it to be. The group seem to want to provoke people with their act. They seem to desire a disparaging reaction from society, but whenever they seek this out they are instead met with understanding and acts of kindness, which, I believe, is the main driving force behind the group’s eventual demise – their neat, tidy, and safe ideological view of the world is challenged to the point where it eventually cracks.

I think von Trier’s decision to present society in this way, as distinctly not what ‘the idiots’ believe it to be (at least, a lot of the time anyway. There are of course moments of ugliness in the scenes of the outside world) goes a way in further contradicting claims that the film does not condone the behaviour of ‘the idiots’ and therefore is merely an offensive piece of work, a piece of provocation for provocation’s sake. While a clear moral message remains murky, and despite a certain level of sympathy existing towards ‘the idiots’ through the camera’s refusal to condone or censor them, several elements work subtly throughout the film to imply that we are not meant to read it as a positive appraisal, either. The ideology that leads and binds ‘the idiots’ is shown to be at best limited and misguiding, and worse, maybe just an excuse to attempt a justification of their offensive charade. I suppose it could equally be argued that von Trier’s decision to film The Idiots in the style of a Dogma-95 film is, similarly, merely an excuse to film said offensive charade. But I don’t believe so. I think the themes of this film – Dogma-95’s second installation – and the themes of the Dogma-95 movement at large compliment each other and intensify one another in the same symbiotic way as the film’s provocative visual style and its provocative subject matter. While the film’s themes highlight the limiting effect and destructive consequences on the individual and on society of being led too much by a single ideology, the underlying themes that are present as a result of it being a Dogma-95 film imply the limiting and destructive effect on cinema and filmmaking that is taking place as a result of film’s being channelled further and further into a single aesthetic. The Idiots, and Dogma-95 in general, are important reminders that the definition of ‘film’ that we are fed by large studio productions is but one definition of many.

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