New Realism in Scandinavian Film and Television: A Response to New Digital Media and 3-D Spatiality

In 1995, Danish director Lars von Trier initiated the Dogma-95 manifesto along with Thomas Vinterberg, Søren Kragh Jacobsen and Kristian Levring. The four directors each made a film following the Ten Commandments of Dogma’s “Vow of Chastity,” which proscribes artificial light and sound, postproduction image alteration, as well as many other devices used to “mask” or alter reality and strengthen film’s illusion. Since 1995, thirty-five films have been produced around the world according to the Dogma program. The international press has interpreted Dogma as a protest against the digital mega-productions of Hollywood. What is rarely noted about Dogma’s aspirations towards a new realism is that it also includes an ambition to influence the senses of the audience, rather than to present only a “hand-held” version of everydayness, a phenomenological reading of the world in the style of Italian Neorealism or the French New Wave.

The films of Dogma-95, and especially von Trier’s contribution, as well as his other 1990s films, present a realist expressionism that seems to attack the audience. Aesthetic values are pushed towards the realm of ethics. This lecture proposes a new reading of this new realism, focusing on von Trier’s creation of a perceptible space between screen and audience in The Idiots (1998), spatial multiplicity in Breaking the Waves (1996) and Dancer in the Dark (2000), and a mix of theatre space and computer-simulated space in Dogville (2003).