Subsequently, Dancer in the Dark has become a bridge between two disparate forms of filmmaking; a hybrid that combines the organic verisimilitude of European Dogma95 with Hollywood’s conventions and hyper-realism. It is on these terms that Dancer in the Dark can be considered as a contemporary European film that meets Hollywood ‘face-to-face’. Furthermore, this meeting has also permitted von Trier to proficiently address two filmic-political issues; the first is Hollywood’s global hegemonic deliberation of cultural-political values, and the second pertains to the meaning of stereotypes in transnational cinemas. Accordingly, this essay will first delve into the rules of Dogma95 and examine the extent to which Dancer in the Dark still conforms to this contemporary European method of filmmaking. This will then be followed by an analysis of the film’s Hollywood conventions. The essay will conclude with a discussion of the two aforementioned filmic-political issues.
Dogma’s restricted means of filmmaking meant that its stylistics centred on “an instability and obscurity of the image,”[10] this assertion is often interpreted as an honouring of realist aesthetics. As follows, Dogma films are expected to generate an impression of authenticity and present their audiences with the ‘truth’ through a stylised form that appears to be an ‘untampered’ record of events.[11] 
Moreover, the early Dogma works also had a distinctively masculinist bent to its provocations which was highlighted through the films’ stark treatment of gender and sexuality; this is pertinent within von Trier’s repertoire as he explores female martyrdom in Dancer in the Dark, debasement in Breaking the Waves, servitude in Dogville and maternal guilt/grief in Antichrist.[12] [13]
By the same token, Shohini Chaudhuri considers the Dogma rules to be carefully framed in opposition to Hollywood’s for the purpose of challenging the ever-narrowing conception of what constitutes viable or legitimate filmmaking; whereby, just as the manifesto states, “for the first time, anyone can make movies.”[16] [17]
Dancer in the Dark is a post-Dogma design and can be essentially interpreted as von Trier flirting with the enemy, however though, the film still largely adheres to and draws on Dogma’s ‘Vow of Chastity’ – for the possible and expected purpose of ‘forcing the truth out of its characters and setting;’[18] constructing ‘realism’ from contrived verisimilitude. 
Thus, in this sense of utilising the Dogma rules and also being the product of a Danish director, Dancer in the Dark is a contemporary European film. Dancer was predominately filmed with a Sony VX-1000 Digital Handycam and through this doing von Trier persistently blurs the boundaries of documentation and fiction-creation.[19]
The film’s opening illustrates this point as the audience abruptly enters into the action without a typical Hollywood establishing long-shot to buffer their expectations (that is, if they disregard the abstract paintings of the overture). The documentary-feel of The Sound of Music rehearsal presents the characters in a very ordinary light and induces the impression that they are just as; real people existing in their own worlds who happen to be captured on film. 
Of course as the story progresses, this initial ‘real’ impression collapses against the film’s generic, narrative and other textual constructed elements (principally the musical genre). Nevertheless, von Trier’s Dogma-abiding decision to use hand-held cameras sustains an initial impression of verisimilitudinous realism.
Another directorial stylistic that is also the result of the Dogma rule of hand-held cameras is what I consider to be as von Trier’s signature aesthetic. This ‘fragmented reality’ aesthetic effect is created from the astute manipulation and combination of cinematographic direction (the camera lens’ focus, depth of field, framing, lighting and movement) and editing. This stylistic first presents a scene in the hand-held format, and then continuously cuts back and forth among its focal subjects; with each cut, the camera instantaneously switches between that of a close-up, medium and long shot, as well as modifying the shot’s perspective – a kind of organic montage, but one which doesn’t leave the scene. This stylistic often disjoins the flow of action but not so immensely that it disorientates the viewer’s sense of cause and effect. The stylistic provides new perspectives on the action as often the immediate transition into a new camera shot and angle forces the viewer to re-evaluate what they see on screen. In addition, this stylistic is also used to move the action into the future – sometimes by a few seconds, others by minutes or hours – and allows von Trier to heighten the crucial moments of a scene. Likewise, he frequently places awkward silences into these sequences as they often speak volumes about character relations.
The film’s opening scene capably demonstrates the effect of this ‘fragmented reality’ stylistic. The montage sequence begins with Björk’s Selma and Catherine Deneuve’s Cathy rehearsing ‘My Favourite Things,’ this is then followed by the producer whispering to the choreographer that “she sings funny and her dancing is not all that great either,” next the choreographer teaches Selma how to move her head, then a sudden cut to the second singing of ‘My Favourite Things,’ followed by Cathy commanding Selma to not call her ‘Cvalda,’ and finally with the director’s congratulatory de-briefing. 
This scene, which plays out in less than 3 minutes, opens up, in an unceremonious manner, the film’s dynamic characterisation and overarching thematic concerns; the audience senses Selma and Cathy’s comradeship, their immigrant status and the inherent racial discrimination that they face – in essence, the space that they hold in the society that the film depicts.
Von Trier employs this stylistic technique again to document the private endearing relationship between Selma and her son Gene. This is portrayed through the evening dinner ritual where Selma disciplines Gene and compels him to help with her play. The two discursively converse on banal subjects that often lead to dead ends – such is demonstrated by Selma’s question “Are you tired?” and Gene, in response, pointing out the awkwardness of their bantering “Why should you always ask me so stupid questions?” There are moments of the scene which typically present Selma in a low shot to connote her status as mother and Gene with a high shot to denote his childishness, but often the mobile nature of the hand-held camera and the cut-editing distorts these conventional cinematic signifiers. This distortion is appropriately used when considering the generalisation that for most immigrants their children hold more cultural capital than the parents, as the children have been properly socialised to the culture and customs of their adopted country; this is directly illustrated through Selma’s smirking but helpless facial response to Gene’s “It’s your damn musical” comment. In effect, this stylised manipulation of the hand-held efficiently presents the film’s melodrama in a documentary-like ‘realistic’ light.
Apart from the fervent use of the hand-held, Dancer also conforms to the Dogma 95 rules of using colour film stock and available lighting. Von Trier’s use of naturalistic available lighting has resulted in the film’s drab washed-out tones; so much that the film’s stock seems to have been filtered. Filters and optical work are forbidden under the Dogma means of production, but here von Trier adopts it tastefully for the purpose of establishing two distinctive spaces that Björk occupies within the film. The first space belongs to Selma and is of the melodrama genre; the second is that of the musical where Björk’s extra-textual persona seeps through seamlessly. Dancer in the Dark, however, is primarily a drama and the musical aspect, although crucial to its meaning, is secondary. On the film’s website, von Trier even personally explains the necessity of creating “little tricks” so that the musical numbers were able to fit textually into the film; the musical aspects exist in 
Dancer on the premise that Selma has musical fantasies and the ability to hear music in everyday sounds.[20] Von Trier didn’t want “the music to suddenly pour down from the sky” because he thought that would take some of the pain and danger away from the overarching melodramatic aspect of the film.[21] This split between the two genres seems to be in part inspired by Bob Fosse’s Cabaret.[22] In Cabaret, Fosse distinctively places the musical numbers on the Kit Kat Club stage and away from the narrative’s drama. The musical numbers were created with one hundred static cameras and similar to the hand-held provide some interesting shots and angles (“gifts” as von Trier calls them).[23] This camera technique with its inclusive editing induces the impression of a ‘live’ Broadway performance, while the film stock, drenched in bright colour, generates the musical sequences’ ethereal, almost Hollywood hyper-real atmospherics. The most surreal example of this is the song that occurs after Selma shoots Bill.
Another one of von Trier’s subversions of the Dogma conventions is the inclusion of his full name at the film’s beginning. Dogma 95 discourages this self-crediting as it claims to be anti-auteur (“The auteur concept was bourgeois romanticism from the very start and thereby …false![24]), however this rule is ironic as ideologically Dogma very much follows the auteur theory of promoting the director’s vision beyond the point of Hollywood. Moreover, Dancer was also not shot on location in the sense that the narrative is set in Washington, USA but filmed and produced in Denmark (von Trier has a phobia of flying); this aspect contributes to film’s simulated Gothic America. Likewise, Breaking the Waves although set in Scotland was filmed in one of the largest studios in Copenhagen.[25] This involuntary subversion against location-shooting is transparently made voluntary in 
Dogville whereby von Trier abandons the entire notion of naturalistic location, be it simulated or authentic, for a black studio stage with white chalk lines drawn to indicate relevant brinks and boundaries. These two subversions, although undermining the Dogma ‘Vow of Chastity,’ do not yield the work towards the aesthetics and ideology of Hollywood films either.
Dancer in the Dark’s inclusion of the musical genre, irrevocably, represents its ‘face-to-face’ meeting with Hollywood on an aesthetic and generic level. Together with the film’s other Hollywood attachments of character simplification and celebrity appearances, they help to complement and sustain the emotional poignancy of the maternal melodrama. In her essay Mum’s the Word, Brenda Austin-Smith explains that the musical and the melodrama are staples of classical Hollywood production, and how their unorthodox mixture in Dancer in the Dark interrogates the meaning and intent of each genre.[26] She sees this to climax in the Trial scene and refers to the notion of an actor’s celebrity status in shaping the audience’s perception of his character to elucidate this argument. Austin-Smith recognises how Selma’s idiosyncrasies are transparently linked to Björk’s inelastic extra-textual identity as alternative-pop diva and Joel Grey’s representative role as an ambassador of the musical genre is formed through his inter-textual identity as the master of ceremonies in Cabaret. [27] She realises a symbolic significance to this connection: Grey, who portrays Oldrich Novy, is Selma’s supposed father and his public genealogical rejection of her in court allegorically signifies Dancer as a rejected child of the musical film tradition; whereby Selma’s death sentence comes to represent not only her court-perceived wrongdoings but also the film’s violation of the ‘law of genre’.[28] Von Trier seems to be punishing his protagonist for his own flaw of kowtowing to not only one but two Hollywood genres and transgressing against the Dogma vow of no genre movies. Additionally, this punishment is made all the more tragically frustrating by the character simplification of Selma as the heroic, yet naïve, maternal martyr and Bill as the self-absorbed traitor. Thus, even with these three face-to-face meetings with Hollywood conventions – the musical genre, the celebrity appearances and the character simplification – Dancer in the Dark still does not convey the impression of being ‘Hollywood’. Rather, these conventions are subverted, and contribute to a European sense of the maternal melodrama – one where the tragedy is heightened. This ‘European’ sense of the maternal melodrama is affected through the film’s anti-Hollywood ending where the main character is hanged; this ending fulfils the expectation of ‘realistic’ realism typically present within Dogma films and, in effect, takes away from the impact, tone and ideology of the film’s Hollywood conventions.
Nevertheless, von Trier’s sheer adoption of Hollywood conventions and his ambition of working, in part, within that framework better allows his work to address certain filmic-political issues regarding transnational cinemas. Dancer in the Dark illustrates von Trier’s willingness to experiment with, and artistically validate, the aesthetics of Hollywood filmmaking, and subsequently through this process transforms it into a Hollywood production – one that happens to have Dogma95 elements. If we take the logic behind the Essentialist approach to National Cinema whereby it is assumed that films produced in a particular country ‘reflect’ something essential about the country as a ‘nation’;[29] then, one can borrow this logical and equally surmise that a film created with particular conventions can ‘reflect’ something essential about the school where these conventions come from. In this case, it is von Trier using Dancer to examine Hollywood’s global hegemonic deliberation of cultural-political values and the concept of stereotyping in transnational cinemas.
Thomas Elsaesser, in his book European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood, remarks how Hollywood films propagate and advertise very specific tastes and attitudes in their deliberation of national values such as democracy, freedom, and open exchange of people, goods and services.[30] These essentially national and American values are, however, construed as ‘universal’ because of Hollywood’s hegemony and dominance over the global film industry. These values and goals have served America well insofar as have, until the end of the last century, been widely endorsed by peoples who neither share territorial proximity with the United States nor language, faith, customs or a common history.[31] In contrast, the European values of solidarity, pacifism, the welfare state and the preservation of the past commonly conveyed in European cinemas have been less inspirational and have certainly not translated into the same kind of global recognition as in the case of Hollywood.[32] Von Trier is clearly aware of this form of manipulation, and uses Dancer’s Americanism, to undermine these values. Selma comes to represent the typically naïve immigrant with communist tendencies who idealises America for the movies that it produces: “In Czechoslovakia I saw a film and they were eating candy from a tin just like this. I thought to myself how wonderful it must be in the United States.” Meanwhile, Bill, the lawyers and the jury come to depict America’s inherent xenophobia and hypocrisy regarding the aforementioned American values. Conceptually, von Trier seeks to make the viewer aware and conscious of Elsaesser’s thesis – seeing that Hollywood’s values are essentially a construction, be it national or cultural, and thereby should not be construed as being applicable to all.
Furthermore, Elsaesser also observes how set ideas about the national character or cultural stereotyping (of the ‘other’ and the ‘self’) are most likely to thrive within popular culture and the media; he diagnoses these stereotypes as “accurate, if regrettable ‘reflections’ of widely held views.” In Dancer, this works twofold as the film comes to concurrently support and challenge the preconceived notions of both American and European audiences; for example, the film confirms the American stereotype of the seemingly unappreciative communist Eastern-European migrant, while for a European audience, the stereotype of the ‘McCarthy’ anti-foreign prosecutor and judicial system. Moreover, when considering the Essentialist approach to National Cinema it can also be said that Dancer in the Dark reveals how the Danish perceive America; this is made even more blatant as von Trier critiques the film’s theme of capital punishment on its website: “I think that most people in Denmark find the death penalty very foreign. I’m not saying that Danish people are more humane than others; just that it’s a tradition foreign to Scandinavians … The death penalty doesn’t seem like a punishment, however, it’s more like revenge and it’s dangerous to allow the state to have anything to do with revenge. I’m deeply against the death penalty.”[33] With this personal remark, it seems that von Trier chose to employ Hollywood conventions in Dancer for the prime purpose of being able to socially critique America; in other words, using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house.
In this essay, I have argued that Dancer in the Dark can be considered a contemporary European film because of its alliance to certain Dogma95 rules such as the use of hand-held cameras, colour film stock and available lighting. The film also exhibits subversions of the Dogma rules like its crediting of the director, use of filters and non-compliance to filming on location. The Dogma features of the film contribute to Dancer’s verisimilitude, which aims to present the overarching melodrama in a realistic light. Dancer in the Dark also meets Hollywood ‘face-to-face’ through its adoption of certain Hollywood conventions such as the musical genre, the celebrity appearances and the character simplification; these contribute to the film’s partial hyper-real musical sections, but also, as a form of contrast, help to heighten the tragic melodramatic aspect of the film. Moreover, von Trier’s usage of Hollywood conventions facilitates and legitimises him to address the filmic-political issues of Hollywood’s global hegemonic deliberation of cultural-political values and stereotypes in transnational cinemas. In practice, von Trier has demonstrated that a filmmaker can adopt Hollywood conventions without having to succumb to its implicated ideologies.
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Breaking the Waves. Dir. Lars von Trier. October Films (USA). 1996.
Cabaret. Dir: Bob Fosse. ABC Pictures. 1972.
Dancer in the Dark. Dir. Lars von Trier. Fine Line Features (USA). 2000.
Dogville. Dir: Lars von Trier. Columbia Tristar. 2003.
The Idiots. Dir: Lars von Trier. Umbrella Entertainment Pty. Ltd. (Australia). 1998.
Tranceformer: A Portrait of Lars von Trier. Dir: Stig Björkman. Umbrella
Entertainment Pty. Ltd. (Australia). 1997.
Austin-Smith, Brenda. ‘“Mum’s the Word”: The Trial of Genre in Dancer in the Dark’.
Post Script. 26/1. Fall 2006.
Chaudhuri, Shohini. ‘Dogma Brothers: Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg’. New
Punk Cinema. Ed: Rhombes, Nicholas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
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http://www.dogme95.dk/menu/menuset.htm. Last accessed: 11/06/08.
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http://www.dogme95.dk/the_vow/vow.html. Last accessed: 11/06/08.
[1] Dancer in the Dark, dir. Lars von Trier, Fine Line Features (USA), 2000.
[2] Breaking the Waves, dir. Lars von Trier, October Films (USA), 1996.
[3] The Idiots, dir: Lars von Trier, Umbrella Entertainment Pty. Ltd. (Australia), 1998.
[4] Shohini Chaudhuri, ‘Dogma Brothers: Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg’, New Punk Cinema, Ed: Rhombes, Nicholas, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006, p. 164.
[5] Op. cit., p. 155.
[6] Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, Dogme 95 Manifesto, http://www.dogme95.dk/menu/menuset.htm, last accessed: 11/06/08.
[7] Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, Dogme 95 Vow of Chastity, http://www.dogme95.dk/the_vow/vow.html, last accessed: 11/06/08.
[8] Chaudhuri, Op. cit., p. 153.
[9] Chaudhuri, Op. cit., p. 155.
[10] Chaudhuri, Op. cit., p. 157.
[11] Chaudhuri, Ibid.
[12] Dogville, dir: Lars von Trier, Columbia Tristar, 2003.
[13] Chaudhuri, Op. Cit., p. 158.
[14] Chaudhuri, Op. Cit., p. 154.
[15] Chaudhuri, Ibid.
[16] Chaudhuri, Ibid.
[17] von Trier and Vinterberg, Dogme 95 Manifesto, http://www.dogme95.dk/menu/menuset.htm, last accessed: 11/06/08.
[18] von Trier and Vinterberg, Ibid.
[19] Chaudhuri, Op. Cit., p. 163.
[20] Lars von Trier, ‘Lars von Trier on Making Dancer in the Dark’, Dancer in the Dark website, http://www.dancerinthedarkmovie.com/lars_int.html, last accessed: 11/06/08.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Cabaret, dir: Bob Fosse, ABC Pictures, 1972.
[23] von Trier, Ibid.
[24] von Trier and Vinterberg, Dogme 95 Manifesto, http://www.dogme95.dk/menu/menuset.htm, last accessed: 11/06/08.
[25] Tranceformer: A Portrait of Lars von Trier, dir: Stig Björkman, Umbrella Entertainment Pty. Ltd. (Australia), 1997.
[26] Brenda Austin-Smith, ‘“Mum’s the Word”: The Trial of Genre in Dancer in the Dark’, Post Script, 26/1 (Fall 2006).
[27] Austin-Smith, Ibid.
[28] Austin-Smith, Ibid.
[29] Thomas Elsaesser, ‘ImpersoNations: National Cinema, Historical Imaginaries’, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005, p 64.
[30] Elsaesser, Ibid., p. 60.
[31] Elsaesser, Op. cit.
[32] Elsaesser, Op. cit.
[33] Lars von Trier, ‘Lars von Trier on Making Dancer in the Dark’, Dancer in the Dark website, http://www.dancerinthedarkmovie.com/lars_int.html, last accessed: 11/06/08.
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