Dogme 95 and disabled identity on film

ABSTRACT

Dogme 95 was a film and video movement that energized Danish film production and provoked reams of publicity and criticism. The conceit of the movement was to rail against aesthetic considerations and to make films in a uniform fashion; to move beyond tired formalism and find freedom within a rigid set of self-imposed rules. Two works produced during the initial years of the movement—Lars von Trier's Idioterne (1998) and Harmony Korine's Julien Donkey-Boy (1999)—remain significant for cannily linking the movement's anti-aesthetic aims with a concern for and/or fascination with representations of mental and physical disability. Both films use that kinship between form and content as a starting point and then up the ante by having actors encounter actual disability within fictional contexts. A comparison of these two works calls attention to divergent methods of representing disabled identity in fiction film and the ethical quandaries therein. In my analysis of the films' narrative and aesthetic approaches to disability, I argue that Idioterne and Julien Donkey-Boy challenge both the general illusory tendencies of Hollywood-style cinema as well as Hollywood cinema's specific shortcomings concerning accurate, nuanced representations and the prevalence of depictions of disability. Though Dogme's relationship with disability is ambivalent and leaves a corpus of contradictions, these films utilize a ‘disabled aesthetic’. They are formally dis-abled when judged in the context of professional standards of production and are valuable for the ways in which they disrupt conventional cultural and filmic depictions of disability.

KEYWORDS:

• disability
• film
• Dogme 95
• Dogme
• Lars von Trier
• Harmony Korine
• Idioterne
• Julien Donkey-Boy
• ethics