Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg

The Dogme 95 rules

1 Filming done on location. No Props
brought in.
2 No Music unless occurs within scene
3 Camera to be hand-held; filming takes
place where the action takes place
4 The film must be in colour. No special
lighting
5 Optical work and filters are forbidden
6 No superficial action (No murders, 20th May 1995, the Odeon theatre in Paris
weapons, etc.) at the celebration of one hundred years of
7 No temporal or geographical cinema. Lars von Trier, presented Dogma 95
alienation. which was signed by 4 directors (Thomas
8 No genre movies Vinterberg, Kristian Levring, Soeren Kragh-
9 The aspect ratio must be 4:3 Jacobsen and himslef)
10 The director must not be credited
 But why?
• Introduced as a liberation for cinema. A call to go back to a natural way of
filming. Turned out to be convenient for small filmmakers with small
budgets.
• Lars von Trier, explains the movement forces the filmmaker to
use imagination and work around the rules. He criticizes, in Europe people
have the idea that part of being an artist is to be completely free. To some
extent it is also an experiment to him – he wants to see what happens!
 The Idiots (1998)
• This comedy/drama focuses on a group of people who
gather at a house in Copenhagen to bring out the
“inner idiot” in themselves.

• What we noticed throughout the film is that when

they cut away from the person talking at the time, the
reaction on the receiver. Quick cut editing. It felt like
the narrative was broken up and I wanted to avoid that
within our 1 Minute edit.

• This movie also added music to it as well, and from

how it sounded it was added in during post-
production. However, the filmmaker did put it in
during the title sequence, so the filmmaker didn’t
break a rule, instead he bent the rule.
 How did we apply it?
We applied the Aspect Ratio rule
All of our camera work was handheld, we didn’t
even have a tripod on set.
 We used no artificial lighting or filters and cut
away to the see reaction instead of following the
speaking character