Dogma and Celebration

While the aims of Dogma 95 may be multiple, an all important ambition is to unsettle an increasingly dominant film-making reality characterized by (mostly America’s) astronomical budgets and marketing and distribution strategy’s, among other things, stardom and technological special effects. The Celebration is a film made under the Dogma manifesto that presented ten strict aesthetic commandments by which Dogma directors swore to abide. The rules are similar to that of Cinema Virte movement in the 1960’s, the use of a handheld camera, the search for truth, and authenticity through a character driven plot, an almost documentary style of filmmaking.
What is interesting in The Celebration is the direct parallel between the idea of the Dogma movement in response to extravagant cinema and the story of Helge’s sixtieth birthday party. Where there was a set order of speeches of praise speeches over dinner, reenactments of family traditions, and so on. The rules are those of an overtly well-heeled family, rules designed to keep in place a happy, extended family. The eldest son, Christian, administers a project throughout the movie in which to expose the buried reality. It is not an anarchic rule revolt: rather he employs each occasion for the following of a family rule to substitute his own rule, in effect to bring out the truth. As the eldest son, his is the first speech over dinner, and he uses it to drop almost casually the revelation of his father’s sexual abuse of him and his sister, as children. His mother later requests that he makes a speech in the form of an apology: Again, he follows the rule, the rule of reply- and accuses her of having known about the sexual abuse., and willfully ignored it.
The manifesto is a call to overturn the bourgeois cinema; the family in the celebration is clearly upper-class, they live in a house fit to be a hotel, they are dressed in black-tie, but apparently not affluent enough: the women are still subservient to the men, an the there is a fair amount of racism that amounts in song. The result is a class revolt by the servants, who help Christian out at every turn, for instance the maids hide the guest keys so that everyone is force to listen to Christian. And just as the manifesto attacks the individual in film, thus demoting the director from his position, so does the celebration topple Helge from his autocratic command of the family, and exile him. The collective replaces the individual in manifesto and in film.

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