Dogma 95: reflexão sobre unidade estilística e a recepção da crítica cinematográfica estadunidense (1998-2001)

Abstract

Dogma 95 was a Danish movement created in 1995, the year of the centenary of cinema. For its purpose, the movement aimed to carry out a critique of the status of the filmic media of its time, having as its main target (although not the only one) Hollywood industrial cinema, in order to defend an ideal of cinema that, for the movement's co-religionists, would respect a pure cinematographic truth. To do so, the founders of the movement publish a manifesto in which they stipulate a series of 10 rules – parodying the 10 commandments – that filmmakers must follow to produce a dogmatic film. In this sense, the objective of this work is to discuss how a specific stylistic unity was built in the movement in the first four films of the so-called Danish Era (1998-2000), namely, Dogma #1: The Celebration (Thomas Vinterberg, 1998) , Dogma #2: The Idiots (Lars von Trier, 1998), Dogma #3: Mifune (Soren Kragh-Jacobsen, 1999) and Dogma #4: The King Is Alive (Kristian Levring, 2000), as well as understanding how this style produces effects on the spectator and a commentary on the status of the media, as well as rescues and resignifications in relation to previous aesthetics, both from the Danish national cinema itself and from other works of international cinema. Then, we also seek to understand how these films were received in the midst of the movement's main object of criticism, that is, American cinema, based on the survey of criticisms published in newspapers and magazines in the United States of America, in order to understand the power dynamics that exist between the instances of film production and reception. With this, we consider that the filling of an important historiographical gap around the aesthetic and receptive discussion of the movement can be glimpsed.