Lars von Trier’s The Idiots is my first encounter with a
Dogme 95 film. Dogme 95 was an avant-garde filmmaking movement, begun in 1995
that saw a group of Danish directors release a manifesto of rules by which
their films would be produced. The basis of the rules were to strip filmmaking back
to its traditional values of story, acting and theme and forbade the likes of
artificial lighting, music, additional props and special effects and had
specific rules based around how and where a film was shot. The minimalist and
realist films which were created saw their director go uncredited and often
their cast and crew unpaid. The Idiots
was von Trier’s first Dogme film and the second overall.
Perhaps somewhat predictably for
Lars von Trier, The Idiots is a film
that was marred in controversy. The controversy came from two aspects of the
film. The first was the plot which revolves around a group of anti-bourgeois
Danes who sometimes pretend to have mental disabilities in public. They refer
to this as ‘spassing’ and are often both convincing and cruel in their depictions.
The second controversial aspect of the movie is the graphic sex and nudity. For
a director whose next film is to be called Nymphomaniac,
this might not be surprising but The
Idiots contains scenes of both male arousal and full vaginal intercourse, the
likes of which I’ve never seen in a narrative film.
