FESTEN (The Celebration). An experience (almost) unlike anything I’ve ever had before. Knowing the Dogme DNA from Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg’s more recent pictures and seeing how it all began and then developed is something special.
It seems to me that both of them took the best of what Dogme is and liberated it from the strict manifesto over the years - culminating in (not only visual) masterworks like “Melancholia”, “Jagten” and “Druk”. My feeling though is that without the rigorous rules they’ve set up in 1995 that Dogme would have never become what it is - by making bold, quite arrogant choices against the grain of the “art” of cinema and in favor of (fictional, artificial) “life” on screen. By not filming “Festen” on DigiBeta tapes it would have still been a strong picture but the look and feel undoubtedly is what makes it “special”.
Only thereafter these filmmakers could liberate themselves and use “traditional” filmmaking technique to “correct” the roughness but retain the idea and essence behind it.
The result is that “Festen” works on many levels yet fails for me to be one of the great masterpieces due to the occasional, yet not always alienating cinematography and the exuberant youthful boldness and arrogance sometimes standing in the way for “more” but these are necessary evils I can easily forgive when just thinking about one $200 million blockbuster.
The aim of Dogme was to fortify performances and plot at all costs and it worked phenomenally. The actors are superb - Thomas Bo Larsen, Ulrich Thomsen and Henning Moritzen. The strength in the details of their work often gets lost visually but the unspoken power in their movements conquers that.
The “plot” feels as if it is improvised on the set and just “accidentally” captured with a camcorder but is obviously planned out. The script is a mixture of excess and radical economy - cutting away when we “expect” more (therefore constantly surprising us) and staying on scenes that feel as if they don’t belong but in retrospect achieve much greater strength because of what we get to know later in the picture.
TBC IN THE COMMENTS. ⬇️
#festen #thomasvinterberg #ulrichthomsen #thomasbolarsen