"[T]he uncritical use of this word, so very elusive in meaning, has had fateful consequences." - Roman Jakobson, "On Realism in Art" (1921)(1)

Referring to the use of "realism" as a malleable category of artistic taxonomy, Jakobson here speaks volumes of the relationship between art and reality during the Twentieth Century, echoing the disappearance of Truth in modernity and foreshadowing more than he could possibly have fathomed. What is "realism"? Is it truth? Nature? Is it objective? Subjective? Over the past century it has served all these purposes and more, fulfilling Jakobson's perhaps myopic or narrow-minded criticism of the institutions of art and criticism for "acting as if the term were a bottomless sack into which everything and anything could be conveniently thrown." (2) After all, can we really take such taxonomy seriously, when its designations swell and blur beyond the point of discernment? Shouldn't we hold with Derrida on this point: genre exists only for its own negation, only to set limits that will be breached-that law must exist for it to be subverted. (3) Besides, it is tempting to say: yes, all of that is realism-everything is realism, as everything is in fact a thing, and if it exists then surely it is real….

However, this becomes less flippant and more serious when a "realism," coded into the symbolic as the truth, becomes the mode of Realism, a conventionalized representation of reality that hides the fact that it is representation-this is in fact quite serious, when a mass culture becomes dependent on the dominant mode of "realism" without realizing that it is but a mode, an "ism": when "realism" manages to replace reality, it is revealed not as the harmless byproduct it claims to be, but as one of the most dangerous and effective ideological instruments.

The advent of cinema has proven to be at the core of the modern relationship between art and the real: not only did it swiftly become mass culture's popular entertainment, but its historicized connotations of "realism" have rendered it humankind's most profound symbolic medium, a slippage zone between the real and the imaginary through which we fantasize but, also, through which we propagandize, persuade, and placate (and through which we are, in return, propagandized, persuaded, and placated). The legacy of photography bedecked film with the trust of the collective (un)conscious, and through film history there have been a number of "realisms," each one contrived of certain themes of form and content, each one bearing its own manifesto, its own polemical technology-of-the-real and its own ideological bent for which to use this claim to reality, its own reasons to exploit this fictitious claim to being more than culture. We have witnessed-and continue to witness-the battle between two kinds of "realism": an unannounced and self-hidden realism that was forged in the evolution of film language, and the diachronic attempts to subvert or transcend this illusionary realism, to retrieve nature from the clutches of the symbolic.

Over the past twenty years, with the proliferation of home-video recorders and reality television (and web-casts), and the academic and philosophical evolution toward the demystification of classical styles, there has developed a new code of cinematic "realism." In no way autonomous or ahistorical, the new "realism" is based on certain appropriations and certain rejections of the cinematic tradition, complemented by experimentation with new codes; it has its own manifesto, its own agenda, but it also has its claim to "realism." The agenda is Dogme 95, and the claim to "realism" is established through a number of rules concerning story and technique. By situating this contemporary movement within the genealogy of cinematic realism, we hope to interweave notions of the artistic truth-claim, the relationship between "realism," film theory, and the ontology of film, fleeting sketches through which we hope to essay Dogme 95 and the method by which it binds, through thematic and technological issues of the transcendentally artistic and the specifically cinematic kinds, contemporary culture and the nature of reality. (4)

In order to do this, let us first consider the question "What is Dogme 95?" Originally created by four Danish directors, Dogme 95 and its manifesto-the Vow of Chastity, which stipulates some ten rules demanding the stripping down of the film-making process, the abandonment of plastic and post-production manipulation, and the relinquishment of artistic intention-falls somewhere between avant-garde and publicity stunt. Its tenets and aspirations are very much the anti-tradition, countering dominant tendencies of cinema and designing a basic framework through which to subvert conventional film-making, the desired result of which should be a sort of improvisational process of collective film-making (Vinterberg), increased simplicity and pleasure (von Trier).

However much it was intended to subvert the conventionality of traditional film language, though, Dogme 95 has inescapably proven to be an anti-institution-come-institution, and the liberating thrust of its stipulations have produced an alternate code from which has materialized a canon. In no ways is this meant to devalue these film in any way, and their attempt-to salvage reality from the Baudrillardian evil demons that have dissolved it into a platitudinous plenitude of images, to recover nature in an age of mechanical reproduction-is noble almost to the point of being winsomely tragic. Nonetheless, Dogme 95 has produced-appropriated, evolved, even recapitulated-the latest code of cinematic "realism," a substantially poignant feat that must be considered in all its ramifications, beginning with its position along the genealogy of cinematic realism and the ideology of the photographic code.

One of the more pressing questions in (especially classical) film theory and history has been that of film's origins, whence it derives its aesthetic and ontological position. For many, the answer to this lay in the most obvious place: photography, and much of cinematic criticism has involved the fact that film is film, that it derives its mechanical and representational praxis from photography. Siegfried Kracauer, in "Basic Concepts," proposes that the spirit of photography survives in film, perpetuating the classical purposes of photography: to record, to reveal, and to reproduce. (5) This becomes central to cinematic realism, as Kracauer and others believed that this inherently produced a 'realistic tendency,' toward which the fictitious aspects of mise-en-scene, plastics, and post-production were arranged. In "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," (6) André Bazin, harbinger of cinematic realism, idealistically notes that, in the camera, there exists for the first time a non-living agent between the object and its representation, a conjecture with dangerous ramifications for the ideological manipulation of "ontology" and the creation of an invisible code.

These ontological notions reflect the early development of film language, especially that of Classical Hollywood which, congealed by D.W. Griffith, posited certain codes for the authenticity of narrative reality. From eye-line matches to cross-cutting, these compose the method through which cinema learned to suture itself into its final product, how to mask its own presence beneath certain conventions of denotation based on spatial-temporal verisimilitude to nature. Though this forged still-dominant conventions of cinematic language, the development of film technology and theory would challenge this code with alternate "realisms" and, eventually, reveal the ideological ramifications of any such code. From the grim socialist stages of Soviet Realism, to the kitchen-sink grittiness of John Grierson's Depression-era documentaries, to the portable-camera realisms of Italian Neo-Realism and Cinéma-Vérité, to the works of Dogme 95, these codes of realism were each embedded with unique ideological thrusts, and their fate would be the paradox existing between film and reality. Even Bazin acknowledges this as the aesthetic paradox of 'realism' (7) : the faithful reproduction of reality is not art, thus setting the conflict between art and truth (or, film-as-story vs. film-as-history) as the crux of cinematic realism. Bazin's championing of Italian Neo-Realism in the 1950s thus poses a decisive shift in the notion of film from one of art to one of phenomenological discourse, more ontological than aesthetic, in which case cinematic history is one of resemblance, of realism. (8)

Bazin's paradox became a fundamental aspect of post-structuralism, refracting itself over the entire discourse of film's ontological and ideological ramifications. The deflowering of film's truth-claim resulted primarily from the advent of structuralism, and was co-dependent on the development of Althusserian Marxism and theories of ideology, the combination of which produced a radical re-evaluation of cultural "realism." Perhaps the apotheosis of this trend was Roland Barthes' S/Z (1974), a detailed analysis of the structural codes of literary realism, which reveals the realist text as but an interweaving of different codes, in no way afforded some privileged relationship with the natural world. This demystification with the conventions of "realism," one of Barthes' greatest legacies, is integral in the development of the psycho-semiotics of film theory, especially film language and spectator- and apparatus-theories.

Central to the (post-)structuralist reconsideration of the cinematic apparatus is the analysis of the semiotic process of filmic discourse, expounded upon in depth by Christian Metz; at the same time, critics had to completely renovate theories of the photographic image in its ideological context in the history of Western post-Renaissance visual codes, especially in relation to Renaissance painting, which established the rules of perspective upon which is based the photographic lens. What emerges from these approaches is the subject-in-relation-to-apparatus that accounts for the technical and psychoanalytic ramifications of the invisibility of cinematic "realism."

In Film Language, Metz proposes an analysis of film as it was developed from the beginning, not as some inherently natural or ontological characteristic, but as an industrial technology; as early cinematic history was primarily narrative, its language was forged as a denotative system of narration. Whereas connotative study of film presupposed film as an art form, its early narrative evolution secreted the codes of diegesis, or language. Metz draws on the Barthesian idea, moreover, that film is pure visual transfer, uncodified in its denotative reproduction from reality to medium. While Metz would later expand this theory to consider the connotative coding of cinema, he proposes important implications of the denotative function: since denotation is motivated by analogy, its ontological claim is one to similarity between signifier and signified. Realism, unannounced and unrealized, tucked within the classical spectator's naïve division of fiction and fact. Classical Hollywood and its adherents managed to code fiction into reality and succeeded, by production and post-production means, to remove any trace of the code; this success had a profound impact on the primitive evolution of cinematic language, for it was a connotative and coded discourse that had successfully managed to erase its codes and to render the illusion of pure denotation.

This codification of film language has had severe implications-oh, Jakobson!-for the relationship between film and reality (both the reality of what is being filmed, and those who are watching it), as film is in fact not a denotative medium bereft of ideological agency, nor is analogy itself without selection and rhetoric. As Jean-Louis Comolli notes in "Machines of the Visible," all analogical representation is false representation, and not reduplication. (9) The camera, Comolli acknowledges, is at the intersection of two discourses: ideology and science. The phenomenological position of this intersection results in the repression of the invisible (the mode of production) by the visible (final product), thus tying photography and cinema to the Western tradition of seeing and vision, (10) the hierarchy of Arts. According to Baudry, this process of hiding promotes an ideological effect (as opposed to a knowledge effect) bound to the tradition of Western painting, which structures representation around the humanist, centralized and unified subject. Masking the ideology of analogy behind the claim of denotation, Classical cinematic language "produces effects of repetition and analogy which imply the disavowal of difference and which make the self the driving force for analogical configuration." (11)

Baudry asserts this relation to painting through cinema's adaptation of Italian Renaissance perspective and frame ratio, which portray a fullness and homogeneity of "being." (12) This mode of representation claims verisimilitude to the subject-position of classical humanist identity, thus posing an ideological code as a denotation of reality. The optical apparatus of the camera obscura (and, thus, its heirs), having adopted this perspectiva artificalis, renders itself, the eye (or "I") of a humanist subject, as the center or origin of meaning. While this could conceivably discredit the truth-claim of such representation (after all, the necessity of a subject seems in conflict with the autonomous permanence of objects), it is so carefully sutured into the code of cinematic realism that it dissolves all aspects of its being mechanical reproduction and, through subject-identification, convinces the spectator that it is in fact natural, or even nature. (13)

In his essay on the suturing of the cinematic process, "The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema," (14) Daniel Dayan considers the relevant relation between Lacan's three levels of reality: nature, culture, and the symbolic (through which nature is transferred into culture). In cinema, the camera ultimately performs the symbolic function, thus transferring nature into culture via the field-of-vision organized by perspective to render the perception of the subject. Especially narrative cinema, which through its link to analogical fiction requires spectatorial disavowal (Comolli), posits itself as a subjective cinema, via the use of the frame to dissolve the code and to secure the ideology behind it, ultimately fooling the spectator by tying him/her to the fictional level instead of the filmic level. (15)

In his seminal text on realism, Colin MacCabe suggests that this status of a subjective cinema is achieved at the fairly heavy cost of actual reality. (16) Not only do the conventions of classical cinema, based along the lines of the classic realist text instituted in nineteenth-century literature, employ various techniques and stages of manipulation in order to supply the spectator with a real subject-position; but, the manner in which this is projected as realism says something fundamental about realism as we know it (and how we know it). The classic realist text, MacCabe asserts, cannot deal with the real as contradictory, and thus must neutralize any difference by creating a hierarchy of discourses based on an empirical notion of truth; realism, as a code of the Western post-Renaissance symbolic, requires the monologic negation of difference in order to ensure for the subject the position of (pseudo-)dominant specularity. Baudry, considering the movement of the camera as producer of the "transcendental subject," embalmed with the panaceas of formal and narrative continuity, suggests that the dependence on the negation of difference creates a coded écriture as a system of material base and countersystem (ideology) which uses and conceals the system. (17)

In light of these developments in the study of cinematic codes, the history of "realism" has suffered almost three decades of dormancy, during which cinema was exposed for the illusion it is and television and video modes assumed the truth-claim of visual culture. Until now. The Dogme 95 manifesto and its adherents, by appropriating numerous conventions of classical cinema and alternate codes of cinematic "realism," and by transforming them to meet the cultural standards of Realism posited by our technological praxis, have placed themselves in the contextual history of cinematic realism and in rejection of cinematic aesthetics. This results in many ways from the rejection of film-as-art, a debate throughout film's history that has been integrally tied into its claim to truth and its ontological function, and one which the Vow of Chastity severely reprimands (for its glorification of both the autonomous work of art and the lone genius of the auteur). However, as we will henceforth discuss, the principles and practices of Dogme 95 confront and ultimately realize the paradox of "realism" in methods that subvert and deny the ideological effects and nature of classical cinema and its illusionary claim to truth, while at the same time producing films that are as artistic as modernist art-house cinema.

This subversion stems from a primary contradiction of the conventions of the cinematic apparatus: instead of hiding the invisible behind the visible, instead of suturing the ideological aspects of cinema into the airtight conventions of classical narrative, through which method is hidden behind the illusion of a different meaning, Dogme 95 is based upon the coincidence of method and meaning, a fundamental ethos that is realized through a unified embrace of technological, formal, thematic and narrative modes that, through revealing the nature of their own representational forms, establish a claim to purity, honesty, and insanity (that is, the madness of schizophrenia inherent in any object or essence forced through conventions of the superego to claim fixed homogeneity where there is perpetually fluxing heterogeneity).

Purity is achieved through the principle of unadulterated representation, expressed through the logistic limits of filming on location; the denial of artificial props, sound or lighting (including camera filters); and the narrative rejection of artificial action. This purity of being "on location" is complemented by the honesty of being "in location," the rigid unity of space and time achieved not through the invisible post-production tricks of montage, but through the visible method by which cinema maintains a single spatial-temporal locus in its ontological ability to record sight and sound together, to capture the motion of life in the moment (and not in an editing room). This unity is finally completed by the supplementary union of method and meaning, in which the actual cinematography of Dogme 95-including the adoption of previous "realist" technical trends, and especially the numerous implications of digital film (gritty frame, shaky transportable frame, lack of depth-of-field)-binds the apparatus to the characters in front of the camera.

Digitalization-the only cinematic method for rejecting the ideological pratfalls of analogy-constitutes a new code of visual realism, and more than anything symbolizes the coherent evolution of Dogmatic realism, which stems not from a locus of pedantry, but from innovation, freshness and revolution (the anti-mainstream-cinema theoretical bent is made explicit, and the spirit of the manifesto intended to return film to the improvisational edge that came with film-production's first wave of technological mobilization, such as the Nouvelle Vague and the early Beatles' films ). (18)

The first and most simply arranged of these theses is the effect of "on location," which has been a staple of cinematic realism for decades and which Dogme 95 takes to yet a more authentic and complete level. Meant to detract from plastic manipulation, the notion of stripping everything down not only devalues much of the artistic license involved in mise-en-scene, in many ways referring to the realist codes of cinema-vérité and, especially, Italian neo-realism (recall Bazin's assertion of the aesthetic paradox: the faithful reproduction of reality is not art ). (19) The latter, which Bazin praised as the quintessence of cinematic realism, was structured in many ways on stripping expressionism from the plastic side of film; (20) Bazin posits it as a phenomenology, more an ontological position than an aesthetic one, thus collaborating with Dogme 95's depreciation of film-as-art-as-claim-to-truth.

This effect, based primarily on rejecting the illusionary nature of production, functions on certain stipulations-no props are allowed to be brought into the location, lighting is only that of natural light or on-location lamps, and the use of only diegetic music is required-that are meant to detract from the adulterated postulation of mood and to produce a heightened pathos based entirely on the characters (as Vinterberg notes, the amplification of subtle emotions by silencing the noise of artificiality ), (21) and that have a certain bearing guidance on what is actually feasible in the text, from which limitations is meant to create the possibilities for cinematic realization without conventional limitations. Moreover, combined with the refusal of artificial action (i.e. action, such as murder, that is as commonplace to cinematic tradition as it is detached from actual life), this "on location" effect is meant to "remove all other than the vital ingredients: the story, the actors, and the moment as a moment-not as an amalgamation of five hundred layers of several years." (22) Asserting the presence of the instantaneous reality of cinema, this notion is realized by the supplemental effect of being "in location."

Just as being "on location" provides the plastic sense of authenticity (i.e. the place and everything that is in it [and, implicitly, everything that happens in it] are real, without the aid of a production designer or lighting technician), or the effect of material unity, being "in location"-a certain coherence of space time, unified in the here and now-produces the effect of existential unity, unperturbed by the conventions of film-making by which the profoundly unreal is passed off as honoring unfettered codes of symbolic transfer. This effect results from two of the vows which are serenely co-dependent, which render each other possible and the circle of which creates a subversive existential unity: the forbidding of spatial and temporal alienation, and the insistence that sound and image be recorded together. The latter being very much the technical enforcement of the former, they each-and their combination-carry dynamic implications for the ideology of cinematic "realism" as well as the practice of film-making.

By forbidding spatial and temporal alienation, Dogme 95 both refutes one of cinema's most fervent claims to specificity and discursive practice, and throws a wrench in the spokes of classical narrative conventions. Rejecting the artistic potential and tendency inherent in the use of montage, the syntagmatic importance of film (i.e. the centrality of the relationship between connected shots and scenes) is undermined in order to re-introduce the importance of the individual scene; using jagged editing returns the role of the camera to one no longer meant to cross-reference images, but only to capture them as they occur-not to fold them upon themselves, but to observe as they unfold. Thus spatial-temporal unity, in the sense that there is no longer the focus on what is beyond the frame (what is happening at the same time but somewhere else), alters the code of cinematic realism as it was developed by Griffith (and the dominant mode to this day): no longer is spatial-temporal coherence alluded to through cross-cutting-now it is insisted by the lack thereof. Not only does this eliminate the illusion of spatial-temporal unity as formed through montage, but it also destroys the omniscient narrator that supplied this position and the transcendental spectator that this illusion had been for (or had created), thus disillusioning the two most seamlessly constructed and ideologically embedded truth-claims of narrative cinema.

Within the actual technological production, this configuration of time and space (and its implied rejection of post-production methods) realizes itself in the vow of unity between sound and image. Contradicting the tenets of classical cinema and appropriating certain previous codes of non-mainstream realism (such as cinéma-vérité), the stipulation of recording sound and image together has profound impact on both the process of production and for the thematic and theoretical response to such technical limitations: to supply the most genuine claim to denotation (rendered by recording image and sound together), Dogme 95 alters further the process of montage and threatens the tyrannical hierarchy of image and sound.

As both von Trier and Søren Kragh-Jacobsen (Mifune) have noted, this stipulation creates an entirely different process of editing, as now it is not possible to alter either image (such as a dissolve) or sound (such as a bridge) in order to make the transition smooth and transparent; instead, there is left a certain imperfection: cutting on image may render the audio cut to sound like glass breaking, and cutting on sound may render the juxtaposed images as a provocative unsettlement. This evokes perhaps the most interesting theoretical aspect of this vow: the destruction of the classical cinematic hierarchy wherein sound merely complements the dominant signifier (image), the ramifications of which are perhaps best developed by Mary Ann Doane. Doane suggests that the combination of sound and image present the possibility of exposing the ideological fissure pointing to two irreconcilable truths of bourgeois society (emotion and intellection), a fissure that is masked by the illusionary cohesive of editing. (23) In cinematic tradition, the rhetoric of sound is the result of a technique whose ideological aim is to conceal the tremendous amount of work necessary to convey an effect of spontaneity and naturalness (in other words, sound is the glue that binds the illusionary fabric of the classical truth-claim). According to Boudrillard, this notion of the prevalence of imagery over actual reality resentfully acknowledges and laments the triumph of the (adulterated) symbolic over nature itself, a triumph that Dogme 95 attempts to reverse, to remove the ideological effects of mechanical production and to return the symbolic to its non-hierarchical position between nature and culture, and to return nature to its non-hierarchical heterogeneity.

The destruction of the sound-image hierarchy modifies the effect of being "in location," and the vow of simultaneous recording accentuates the greater trend of presence, of instantaneous unity, that lies at the heart of Dogme 95, and can be best described and analyzed in the role and rules of the camera itself. The usage of digital film-stock and the stipulation of hand-held cameras give Dogme 95 certain values of denotation, depth-of-field, and framing that have been central to the tradition of cinematic realism, ultimately creating the tremble of truth that is the manifesto's most convincing cultural claim to being a contemporary code of realism.

The use of digital film has numerous results, perhaps the most pressing of which being the actual technical process of reproduction and the cultural status of the visual reception of digital film stock. As opposed to analogue film, which makes a mirror reflection of what is before the camera, digital film forges itself in a pure denotation bereft of the ideological factors of analogical reproduction. Since the aesthetic of this method is best associated with home videos and reality television, its visual expression (lower resolution, gritty, jagged movements) has become the contemporary visual code of realism. (24) Moreover, as Peter Wollen notes in "Cinema and Technology: a Historical Overview," this development of visual codes of realism, from cinéma-vérité to home videos, proposes the expressiveness of enunciation, the profound potential for meaning inherent in pure denotation. (25)

Directly resultant from this choice of camera and film-stock come the cinematographic characteristics of Dogmatic realism, including first and foremost a war on the focal-length of classical realism. In "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema," Bazin evokes the challenge to classical illusionary editing by the shot in depth fashioned by Jean Renoir and immortalized by Orson Welles. By incorporating a large depth-of-field, entire scenes can be shot in one take, with a stationary camera, thus realizing an actual "unity of image in space and time" made possible by the potential for recording sound and image together. (26) Comolli recognizes this development, however, as being part of a shift in the photographic code: once shaped by the social codes of analogy and reason that were symbolically manifested in the pictorial and theatrical codes of classical Western representation, the evolution of cinema required the introduction of deep focus in order both to reactivate the 'ambiguity' that sets the viewer free and "re-inscribes in the image the (at least psychological) conditions of an increase in realism." (27) Moreover, the evolution from the early codification of depth-of-field to the contemporary emergence of short-focal-length realist codes produced by video formats has flattened the visual code of ambient realism.

Avoiding the ambiguity of deep focus by using flat-focus digital cameras, the original films of Dogme 95 revolve primarily around the grid of medium shots and a subversive obsession with the close-up. Shifting the focus of Bela Belasz' accurate maxim ("close-ups are lyrical, it is the heart, not the eye, that has perceived them" ) (28) from the artistic director to the camera-as-vehicle-of-actor/character, Dogme 95 reconfigures the close-up: overturning the classical use of the close-up (the iconic use of which would be Ingrid Bergman's teary-eyes at the end of Casblanca [Curtiz, 1942]) as the crystallized ethereal image of archetypal beauty, Dogmatic characters are revealed in shaky shots that focus on the facial blemishes behind their lack of make-up, the pores and errant hairs on their faces. (29) Bound to all of these cinematographic effects (and their ideological functions) is the style of the Dogmatic camera, which is that of a tremble through the body of classical cinema. As if shuddering with the passage of film's life-blood, the Dogmatic camera-in-motion provokes fear, excitement, and anxiety in its spectator, just as these very same effects render the despair and bliss of the characters.

That this effect reflects the narrative events and themes of the story (Festen, Idioten, Mifune all revolve around the ambiguous demarcation between sanity and madness, and destruction) may in fact sew the seam through which the Dogmatic code is secured, dissolved and forgotten during (and by) the process of watching. Incorporating the (post-)modernist dominants of uncertainty, instability, fragmentation, Dogme 95 is the latest evolution of the hand-held method originally codified as character-focused psychological realism and distorted by the truth-claim of providing a spectatorial psychological realism (in other words, the trembling camera no longer means that the classical subject-position has for a moment aligned with the position of a diegetic character; it now represents the camera itself, as it lingers before reality). Moreover, this corrupts the divinity of the frame, in the illusionary limitations of which, ultimately, the classical code effectively disappears and the ideological effect of the film is secured, (30) thus effectively destroying the classical code in order to replace it.

Securely self-reflexive in both its disillusionment with the process of film production and its unity between method and meaning, Dogme 95 rejects a mainstream cinema that is still dominated by the codes established by classical Hollywood, while at the same time supporting its symbolic notion of the codification of fiction as fact; as von Trier acknowledges, Dogme 95 exists within the paradox of realism, "a contradiction in terms, because no matter what choice you make, it's dramaturgy." (31) Through its self-imposed limitations, the movement has created a heavily influential trend in film-making as well as in the evolution cinematic realism, one that introduces new concerns between the role of the camera at the intersection of science and ideology, concerns that will probably dominate the immediate future of the digitalization of film.

Dogme 95 itself, the manifesto and movement, can be nothing more than it is: an ephemeral movement, a fleeting political statement that provided the artistic atmosphere for the creation of the films that combine ensemble methodology into the scope of auteurism, that plead anti-genre even in from the cesspool of agreed-upon rules. Discussing the title of his interview concerning Dogme 95, Vinterberg sums it up perfectly: "maybe you should write "Dogme is Dead!" The explanation is simple: That Dogme is turning into convention exactly like the conventions we tried to avoid, and is the end initiatives like this must come to." (32) The quest for renewal succeeded, only to be conventionalized, to be no longer new-Dogme, by necessity of being a code, became a dogma.

Notes

1. From Language and Literature, p.20
2. p.27
3. "The Law of Genre," reprinted in Acts of Literature. p.240
4. Using the first works of Dogme 95, and especially Thomas Vinterberg's Festen (The Celebration, 1999) and Lars von Trier's Idioten (The Idiots, 1999).
5. Originally in Theory of Film, reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism, Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen ed., 1999. p.171
6. 1945, from What is Cinema? Reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism.
7. "De Sica: Metteur-en-scene," 1953. Reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism, p.203-4
8. "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," p.196
9. In The Cinematic Apparatus, Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath, eds. p.136
10. p.124-6
11. Comolli, "Machines of the Visible," p.138
12. Dayan, "The Ideological Effects of the Cinematic Apparatus," 1968, reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism.
13. Barthes writes somewhere of the this-was ontological position of photography, as opposed to the this-is ontological position of film.
14. Reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism.
15. p.125-9
16. "Realism and the Cinema: notes on some Brechtian theses," 1974. Screen 15 (2), summer.
17. While we acknowledge more Bakhtinian approaches to film narrative, such theses acknowledge the text as a cite of battle between discourses, between ideologies, which essentially does not reject or deny the fact that the classic realist text or Classical Hollywood cinema bears the brand of a particularly dominant ideology; in fact, it is mainly due to this monologic dominance that the classical code was capable of such apparent totality.
18. von Trier, p.1
19. "De Sica: Metteur-en-scène," p.203.
20. "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema," in Film Theory and Criticism.
21. "Interview with Thomas Vinterberg," Bo Green Jensen, p.2
22. Vinterberg, "It's Too Late," p.1
23. "Ideology and the Practice of Sound Editing and Mixing," in The Cinematic Apparatus, p.49-50. Doane interestingly calls sound the "silent support of the image." (47)
24. This new code of realism, dating about a decade, incorporates numerous realist codes (such as the hand-held camera realism and low-resolution stock of the 1950s, as well as the proliferation of VHS home-videos in the '70s and '80s) and has crystallized in the form of Fox television and The Blair Witch Project (1999).
25. In The Cinematic Apparatus, p.24.
26. p.51
27. "Machines of the Visible," p.136
28. "The Close-Up," from Theory of the Film, reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism, p.305
29. Moreover, this complements Siegfried Kracauer's subversion of Soviet formalist claims; responding to Eisenstein's claim that the close-up is "not so much to show or to present as to signify, to give meaning, to designate," Kracauer writes: "To designate what? Evidently something of importance to the narrative." ("The Establishment of Physical Existence", from Theory of Film, reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism, p.297)
30. Dayan, p.127
31. In Peter Øvig Knudsen, "The Man Who Would Give Up Control," p.2
32. Rundle, "It's Too Late," p.4

Works Cited

Arnheim, Rudolf. "Film and Reality," from Film as Art (1933). Reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism, Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen eds. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. pp.312-16

Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Richard Miller, trans. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974.

Baudry, Jean-Louis. "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,"
(1970). Reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism, pp.345-55

Bazin, André. "The Ontology of the Photographic Image" (1945), from What is Cinema?
Reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism, pp.195-99

"The Evolution of the Language of Cinema," (1950-55) from What is Cinema? Reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism, pp.43-56

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Dayan, Daniel. "The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema" (1974), reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism, pp.118-29

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Knudsen, Peter Øvig Knudsen. "The Man Who Would Give Up Control,"
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Kracauer, Siegfried. "The Establishment of Physical Existence," from Theory of Film
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Metz, Christian. "Some Points in the Semiotics of the Cinema," from Film Language (1968). Reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism, pp.68-75

"Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film," reprinted in Film Theory and
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Rundle, Peter. "We are all sinners," excerpts from interview with Lars von Trier,
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"It's too late," excerpts from interview with Thomas Vinterberg, www.tvropa.com, 1999.

"Why cheat yourself?" excerpts from interview with Søren Kragh-Jacobsen,
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Wollen, Peter. "Cinema and Technology: a Historical Overview." The Cinematic
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