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Essay on Dogma Films
Like his fellow rebels in the Dogma 95 movement, Lars von Trier, director of the controversial Dancer in the Dark, prefers his movies raw. Handheld cameras. Natural light. Improvised dialogue. No studio sets, makeup, costumes, theme music, or special effects. This might be as boring as it sounds, were it not for the emotional and visual power Von Trier brings to his turbulent tales of innocents stumbling through an evil universe.
He's like a purist of the silent screen risen from the dead to shoot porn--a Griffith gone gonzo.
In Breaking the Waves--the stunning drama that put the Danish writer-director on the international movie map in 1996--a woman (played by Emily Watson) achieves kinky sainthood by obeying the command of her macho but paralyzed husband to copulate with strangers and then confide to him the intimate details of her lewd encounters.
Next, in 1998's The Idiots, Von Trier thrilled some and repulsed others with his depiction of a band of depraved pranksters who-when they are not amusing themselves in restaurants and on street corners by pretending to be dribbling, dangerous retards--can be found back at their comfy commune, exploiting a woman whose son has recently died or indulging in carefree gang bangs.
Survival does not come easily for the heroines of von Trier's Golden Heart Trilogy-- Breaking the Waves and The Idiots. (Lutticken, 2004).
Lars von Trier's was raised nonreligious, but he does know that Catholics say if you are a martyr, you have a say in what happens to you. It is your choice. And this makes martyrs not be victims. That also goes for the women von Trier is portraying in is films; they have a choice. That is what makes them strong. It is not because they are women or men--that does....
