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| Somehow, always imagined that mermaid would be bigger... |
'Never pass up the opportunity to have sex or appear on television’ was
one of Gore Vidal’s many quotable frivolities. Approving at least the second half of the
sentiment, last month I was filmed in interview for Swedish television, as a small
contribution to a forthcoming series entitled Scenes That Changed Cinema. The scene
I was asked to talk about was ‘Christian’s speech’ from Thomas Vinterberg’s
Festen (1998.)
It's a terrible thing to watch, still, which is why it's so good; and all shot, of course, on a Sony PC-7 consumer camera no bigger than a man's fist, such that the effect is to make you wonder who on earth is operating while all these awful things are being said. The actors are all totally 'on', for sure, and it's amusing to recall that Vinterberg didn't tell his extras anything in advance about what Christian was going to say, hence the rather 'true' reactions he gets.
But anyhow, look at it again for yourself:
My credentials in Danish cinema come from having
written
a book about the Dogme 95 movement a full fifteen years ago now:
The Name of this Book is Dogme 95. It was
commissioned by Walter Donohue at Faber, and that commission led me to collaborate
with director Saul Metzstein and producer Paula Jalfon (also the starry
cinematographer Seamus McGarvey) on
a companion-piece Channel 4 documentary. That doc -
The Name of this Film is Dogme 95, natch - is scarcely seen nowadays but I was pleased to see
a complete transcript with stills online here.
Dogme already seems a long time ago but I still get
asked about it, and according to my friend Louise Anderson who teaches film the
book still gets taught in schools and colleges. It’s out of print, inevitably,
but available electronically. The titles of both the book and the doc are, of course, nods to
the title of Talking Heads' 1982 live album, itself derived from David Byrne's on-stage introduction to Heads gigs back in the day.
I’m not sure I gave of my absolute best to the
Swedish documentary crew. We shot outdoors on a London street-corner at a
chilly hour of a March morning, and over time I became preoccupied less by the conversational
matters at hand than by the stone-cold coming up through the soles of my boots.
However it was fun to look back on a good bunch of films and some happy times spent
in wonderful Copenhagen –
I learned so much. I wrote
this piece for the Guardian in 2000 and it's probably still true or true-ish.
Festen was a low-budget Danish film that went around
the world, so we have to say its dramatic punch proved to be universal. Nonetheless
it’s a very “Danish” production, as Thomas Vinterberg admitted in his charming
manner when I met with him back in 1999. He spoke of having ‘touched something
Danish’, also, amusedly, of having ‘spat in the eye of Danish tradition.’ The
rape of children is a powerful, indeed unbearable subject for a drama and that,
too – to the shame of humanity – is, perforce, a universal theme. But Vinterberg
made use of it intelligently to fashion a little dramatic microcosm of a consensus
society, suspicious of difference, permitting of hypocrisy.
(Let me just say that, personally, everything I saw and experienced in Denmark in the course of this project was right up my alley. I thought the place was great. I'd go live there like a shot, anytime. But then I'm a Lutheran kind of guy.)
Applying the austere rules of Dogme 95 tended to make for films that looked a lot messier than audiences were accustomed to, and even
though 'shaky-cam' and natural light and so forth enjoyed a stylistic resurgence
thereafter there are moviegoers, still, who can’t be doing with any of that. But Festen
will always stand up as a piece of cinema because of its strong, indeed
classical lines as a piece of drama, a Scandinavian chamber piece that obeys
the Aristotelian unities and has shades of Hamlet (‘something rotten'!) and
Ibsen in its tale of a family, a grand occasion, a secret, and a war between father
and son.
Festen put Dogme 95 and a 'Danish wave' onto the map, but these waves, of course, break and roll back. Still, 1998 was a moment when the idea of what a
movie was or should be underwent a useful change. It's not the fault of Lars von Trier and his comrades that, in retrospect, the influence of Dogme looks most apparent in 'found footage' horror movies, cheaply made rom-coms, and an unsatisfactory little sub-genre of 'films about film' from such luminaries as Steven Soderbergh and Mike Figgis.
The Dogme manifesto - with its reviling of the commercial bourgeois
cinema of spectacle and its vaunting of movies with a moral outlook
meant to ‘force the truth’ out of fiction - was up my street, too, in its day and I'm fond of it still. Roberto Rossellini, who knew all about this stuff, was right when he said 'There doesn't exist a technique for capturing truth. Only a moral position can do it.' In the end it's not about rules, it's about the artist and artistry. But all artists have rules of sorts - cf. Bresson: 'To forge for oneself iron laws, if only in order to obey or disobey them with difficulty.'
