DVD Talk review of 'Hotel'
 

I read Scott Weinberg's DVD review of Hotel at http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=17079 and...

You seem unable to resolve beyond superficial knocks against the Dogme 95 movement. By enveloping the audience in the "here and now" while immersing them in a cinéma-vérité approach, Dogme 95 films potentially heighten the mundane realism and disparity between participant and environment, likewise necessitating a more extreme and profound transcendence of both the medium and the bond between characters in the film's moments of insight and stasis.

Humanist transcendence can potentially be all the more moving in a Dogme film; a leap in faith is all the more stirring because of its contradistinction to the fairly banal, stifling limits from which an extraordinary moment can soar, often led up to by the various flourishes of acting and sparks of innovative camerawork that mark an accomplished work such as The Celebration.

The typically stark, unchaste Dogme films are extremely austere, potential launching pads for transcendent humanism – for showing a striving beyond the physical and sexual, and the realization of a quasi-spiritual epiphany by a character or a near-mystical connection with another person.

Cool.

Flick still sucks. ;)

Hotel does indeed suck. but so does a broad dismissal of the Dogme 95 "vow of chastity"; a dismissal based on superficial discernment, if not total ignorance.

What if it's total discernment and superficial ignorance? Or perhaps I just see the "Dogme" movement as, for the most part, cinematic masturbation?

I'm with Scott on this one. For as much as Dogme preaches the total absence of formalist style, it is itself a formalist style that is more likely to distance the viewing audience from emotional connection to the material. This is of course the complete opposite of its stated goal.

The Dogme movement is pure hypocrisy.

With all due respect your statement is pure hypocrisy!!

How could you dismiss an entire movement of films when you have not seen them all. And I am fairly certain you haven't. Together with Vinterberg's Festen Susanne Bier's Elsker dig for evigt a.k.a Open Hearts is one of the finest films I have seen in the last fifteen years. If anything the formalist style you so vehemently disregard Bier uses so well... that it creates an emotional impact very few films manage to achieve.

And what goals are you talking about? The technical requirements that Dogme has set forth are anything but dogmatic. The Danish Film Institute also had a very interesting study showcasing that many of the Dogme films actually break a number of the rules they aspire to follow...yet maintain a level of cinematic veracity not many contemporary films have.

With this said, Dogme as a film form, or movement if you will, has invigorated the Scandinavian film industry precisely due to its technical limitations and judging by the enormous success the predominant amount of them have achieved I would say that they have had quite an emotional connection with audiences around the world (including some of the top juries at international film festivals)...something you partially claim the movement failed to accomplish.


I am sorry but your statement above makes very little sense...if at all.

Regards,
Pro-B

I'm not saying that individual films can't succeed within the format, but the tenets of the Dogme doctrine as they are spelled out in the official rules are a gigantic load of B.S.

The fact that even Lars von Trier, the man who created them, can't stick to many of the rules in any of his own movies is proof enough that the whole movement is a joke against the filmmaking community.

It is still possible for a filmmaker to make a good movie using the Dogme rules, as it will always be possible for art to triumph under any absurd limitation, but the point and purpose of the rules themselves is pretentious nonsense.

IMO, of course.

Lars Von Trier only made one film under the Dogme 95 "vow of chastity" -- The Idiots. and failure to adhere to all the rules was expected; by incorporating it into the process as a written "confessional" following production.

and i must ask, where is the pretention in a film where the filmmaker pledges to set aside ego in favor of truth, beauty, character and story; an act symbolized by eliminating an on-screen credit for directing it?

condemning a movement based on uninformed presumptions makes for a weak critical analysis.

Ah, but the very act of saying, "I, Lars von Trier, am making a work of art so beautiful and perfect I don't even need to put my name on it. That's right, you heard it from me, Lars von Trier, the artist. That's spelled v-o-n...." is ego-stroking of the most vain variety.

Don't kid yourself, the Dogme vows of chastity are all about grabbing attention and glory for the directors who use them. They just hide behind false modesty.

you presume to know the filmmakers behind Dogme 95? you have Von Trier referring to himself as an "artist" which flies in the face of his own words. you most likely picture Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg as a cliché -- a pair of snobby european pseudo-intellectuals. The reality is that the Dogme 95 manifesto is as earnest and serious as it is ironic and playful. these are interlinked and inseparable. even its genesis shares this duality; the restrictions were seriously meant, but written in only 25 minutes between bouts of cheerful laughter. perhaps you have been unable to reconcile making a game of high-brow cinematic ideals and concluded it must be absolutely duplicitous and deceitful.

No, I just think it's a load of crap.

that's okay. :) but knowing (what you're talking about) is half the battle. YO JOE!!!