Dogme 95
On March 13, 1995, at a conference marking cinema's hundredth birthday, Lars von Trier threw red pamphlets into the audience from the stage. The venue was the Odéon Theatre in Paris (the date printed on the document lists Copenhagen, so this map also started off with the wrong location before it was corrected). Inside were ten rules, titled 'The Vow of Chastity.' Shoot on location only. Don't add music unless it's actually playing on set. Handheld camera only. No special lighting, no optical effects. No superficial action — no murders, no weapons. Don't move the story out of the here and now. No genre films. And last, no director's credit. A hundred years that began with the auteur's signature ended with a vow to erase it. This manifesto is said to have been modeled on the form of a paper Truffaut wrote in 1954 — the shape borrowed, the content turned inside out. The first film to carry the badge was 'The Celebration' (1998). Several lines on this map trace how constraint produces invention: neorealism working without a studio, a shark that wouldn't work, effects that weren't finished in time, a USB drive hidden inside a cake. Dogme 95 stands apart from all of them. Nobody forced these rules on anyone. It's the one case here of people binding themselves.