Film: Dogme is dead! Long live song and dance

It transformed the cinematic landscape, but now co-founder Lars von Trier says Dogme 95 is finished. So what's next? A musical with a certain Icelandic chanteuse...

Danish director Lars von Trier and his three co-signatories of the Dogme 95 manifesto - Thomas Vinterberg, Sren Kragh-Jacobsen and Kristian Levring - have decided that they will no longer authorise new Dogme films. In the future any film may achieve a Dogme certificate, if the director claims in a sworn statement that it was produced from the Danish 1995 vow of chastity.

"Of course they can cheat, but they are essentially cheating themselves. Dogme was never intended as a shield you could hide behind. The more fashionable it has become, the more boring," said von Trier, as he called off the condition of approval by the four directors. "At some stage I had to get out of it, anyway" he says, (well, "I've got to get out of this shit" is how he actually puts it"). I was never born to participate in collective resolutions."

Von Trier, Vinterberg, Kragh-Jacobsen and Levring will all leave their - somewhat different - interpretations of Dogme 95 on the Internet (www.Dogme 95.dk). If a film-maker feels that his or her work applies to one of them, they are free to demand their certificate from a Dogme secretariat shortly to be established in Copenhagen. The licence will arrive by mail.

"The manifesto was in itself without any value, but it states a couple of limitations which can be useful to work from. I have always thought that the most important rule was that picture and sound should be recorded simultaneously. It excludes manipulation - you cannot cheat afterwards in the editing room. I am still using it as a principle when shooting."

"When we originally discussed the vow of chastity, we had no ambitions to change the world, such as - for instance - the French nouvelle vague. But if in 25 years some film students accidentally excavate the manifesto and find the 10 rules interesting, we will obviously be happy, but it was never our initial purpose," added von Trier.

Meanwhile, von Trier is halfway through editing his $15 million musical, Dancer in the Dark, starring the singer Bjork and Catherine Deneuve ("she sent me a letter that she would like a part, and that has never happened to me before.") After having seen the first 45 completed minutes of the film, Zentropa Entertainments chief executive, Peter Aalbaek Jensen, decided not to make any presales at MIFED, but to wait for its presentation at Cannes 2000 as The Millennium Movie and demand a higher price.

"I have never before refused that much money," said sales director Thomas Mai, of Trust Film Sales, representing the film in Milan. Following von Trier's award-winning Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark has so far sold the US, the UK, Germany and Scandinavia, besides going to France, Italy and the Benelux through co-production agreements.

Originally signed solely to compose the score, former Sugarcube Bjork (Gudmundsdottir) has her feature debut as Selma, a Czech immigrant and single mother working at a factory in rural America. Her salvation is a passion for music, especially classic Hollywood musicals. But she harbours a sad secret: she is losing her eyesight, and her 10-year-old son stands to suffer the same fate.

With a cast including Jean-Marc Barr, David Morse, Stellan Skarsgard, Peter Stormare and Udo Kier, Dancer in the Dark is described by von Trier as "a big film, a musical melodrama colliding with real life," with dance sequences shot simultaneously by 100 fixed Sony dv-cam cameras. In the end Selma makes the ultimate sacrifice - giving her life - to save her son's eyes.

"When shooting I felt a bit like Albert Speer, who was able to control everything. We filmed one special dance routine, moved the cameras once, and ended up with 120 hours of footage from the same scene. It is definitely the most difficult production I have ever undertaken," he said of the film which concludes the trilogy of Breaking the Waves and the Idiots.

"I have always loved film musicals, and looking for a new challenge, Dancer in the Dark came at the right moment. But I am a sort of an ignorant on music - I only listen to ABBA - I had never heard the music of Bjork, before we started looking for a composer. Now I have, and I am very fond of it.

Von Trier is also outlining the Dogme Brothers' last stand - another world's first, to take place by the turn of the millennium. With Vinterberg, Kragh-Jacobsen and Levring, he will stage a television project which will for the first time unite Denmark's national broadcasters (DRTV, TV2/Danmark, TV3 and TvDanmark), while providing audiences with their own DIY film production kits.

During the night of 31 December 1999 and the morning of 1 January 2000, they will each direct a film from a TV studio, controlling cast and crew somewhere in Denmark via intercom. The overall plot has been agreed, so has the relationship between the characters, depicting Danes on the verge of a new era. The four 70-minute features will reflect the state of things, offering a prospect of the near future.

On the first day of 2000, at 19:30 - just after the State Minister's annual address to the nation - the films will be aired simultaneously by the four broadcasters. Supplementary channels will follow the events in the control room, regularly transmitting split-screen signals, so viewers can see what happens in all four films, creating their own personal version by zapping from one station to the other.

In between, von Trier is preparing the grande finale of his DR-TV soap, Riget (The Kingdom), which critics compared to Doctor Kildare meets Twin Peaks. Different from the previous instalments, it will unspool as one long 110-minute episode. Some of the cast have passed away since the first series was produced in 1993, including Swedish actor Ernst-Hugo Jaeregard, but they have signed contracts that posthumously they are willing to appear as ghosts. Von Trier actually rang me to ask whether I thought he should show the latest instalment at the Venice Film Festival, given that it was made for TV. Having reminded him that Heimat and Kieslowski's Dekalog series were shown at the festival I told him yes.

"How stupid can you be?" he barked, and put down the phone. Oh Lars!