Dogville Fear and Loathing on the Set

The Danish maverick has once again put his cast and his crew— and himself—through Hell in the name of art, this time for a film that not only polarizes critics but pricks and prods their patriotism. Does Dogville mark a plunge into political filmmaking for the Danish director or is it all just politics as unusual? The film’s long road from conception to opening is littered with the usual von Trieresque incitements, but this time whose provoking whom?

The filming of DOGVILLE, for its part, took place under the most secretive of conditions, and while utterances from the actors afterwards were by-and-large professionally circumspect (“It was exciting to be involved in such an unpredictable project”—Nicole Kidman), the dramatic ups and downs of the shoot were soon revealed in minute detail via a behind-the-scenes documentary film by Sammy Saif, DOGVILLE CONFESSIONS, and a tell-all book by former tabloid journalist, Kirsten Jacobsen. Perhaps not surprisingly to veteran von Trier observers, the chemistry between the director and his 16 actors proved volatile, making for a set that was every bit as tumultuous as DANCER IN THE DARK.
Leads Nicole Kidman and Paul Bettany had the toughest time. Bettany was ever frustrated and in deep disagreement with von Trier and seriously considered leaving the production. Kidman, for her part, struggled to breathe life into a character fated to suffer constant humiliation and betrayal, and it took a toll on her.
After one of the scenes she sat down on the floor and wept.
“I don’t feel good. I’m tired. I am just very, very tired” she said, sobbing quietly before getting a hug from von Trier and continuing.

Von Trier was himself sorely tested, and all irony aside for once seemed to be telling the truth when he described himself as a “poor, poor man caught in his own web.” It seemed that a von Trier film couldn’t come to fruition until everybody had reached the point of a collective nervous breakdown, before every last hand and galley rat became convinced it was a doomed ship. And then it would sail on and somehow a movie would come out of it—a movie inevitably hailed as genius. The line often invoked about some films that “at least it looks like they fun making it,” could never be uttered about a Lars von Trier film. The process wasn’t joyful, rather it seemed to confirm the wisdom that all true art is born of suffering—or perhaps that all true artists are insufferable.
The shooting was hard on all the actors, they being compelled to frequently remain in-character and on stage even when not involved in the scene being filmed. Ben Gazarra, for one, confessed quite dryly in Saif’s film that he would never again work with an insane director.
Sammy Saif himself made a number of very candid observations on the subject to the Danish press.

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Nicole Kidman stars in Dogville

“I observed all these people who attempted to be a part of a bizarre idea that one man had gotten. An impossible idea for he explained almost nothing. The actors didn’t know what they should do. They didn’t know where their characters came from or where they were going. And that was enormously frustrating and made it difficult to meet the challenge. They became insecure and that also made them lonesome. … I don’t believe any of them really understood anything about the film before they sat themselves down to watch the first rough edit. At a certain point people accepted the premise and chose to go along with him.”
Strapped and harnessed into a specially designed vest that allowed him to wield his hand-held 35mm camera with relative mobility, von Trier, looking like Robo-cop, employed the same free-ranging shooting technique that he had used to torment Björk with, stalking the actors, pushing and pressing them and talking to them as he tried to force the ugly truth out of these characters he had created, to get the honest ferocity and cruelty out of them.

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Lauern Bacall [far left] as Ma
was not very pleased with von Trier

Nobody knew how some of Hollywood’s legendary and pampered stars would fare for 4-plus weeks in a filthy, oil-smelling factory building in the middle of the Swedish winter. Star treatment there was none of here.
For Lauren Bacall, who had worked with some of the most urbane and witty men in the film business—and been married to one—it had to be a humbling experience. She had been assigned living quarters underneath von Trier’s, and quipped one evening at dinner that she hoped he was a quiet upstairs neighbor.
“Yes”, he replied, “except when I masturbate.”
“But how long can that take?” she gamely fired back.
“I guess about half an hour…”
He wasn’t always so straight-forward with her, though. When it became at one point necessary to tell her that she wouldn’t be needed on the set that day after she’d spent three hours getting make-up, he sent someone else to tell her—and get screamed at. Von Trier was completely absorbed by Kidman, and that bothered the others, not least Bacall.

Others were also obsessed with Kidman, like Russell Crowe who at one point flew over to visit her, arriving at meal time surrounded by a 20-man contingent of camp followers. “This demands an explanation!” he told von Trier in a deep and threatening tone, angered about something or other. But he never got one, von Trier being too intimidated by the confrontation to reply.
When shooting ended in mid-February, the actors scattered.

DOGVILLE was selected in-competition for Cannes and in May of 2003 von Trier once again packed his bags and drove down in his camper van.
In the weeks leading up to the festival, his film had been pegged as the favorite, owing in part to the dearth of big names that year.
Shown to the press on May 19^th, DOGVILLE received hearty and sustained applause as the end-credits rolled—credits accompanied by a montage of photographs taken in America that depicted gritty scenes of poverty and despair, and set to David Bowie’s hit, “Young Americans.”

The packed DOGVILLE press conference that evening almost turned into a riot as cameramen jostled each other for choice shots of Kidman who was naturally the focal point. Von Trier, his usual introverted self, did surprise the assembled multitude by prodding her to then and there publicly commit to playing Grace in his second installment of this “American Trilogy” of his, MANDERLAY. And so she did.
Finally unveiled, DOGVILLE was both totally new and yet standard von Trier: audacious, arcane, demanding and difficult, yet gripping. A film that once again threw a twist at the audience with several gritty, realistic performances encased inside something so determinedly artificial that it resembled a museum exhibit come to life. It exuded a nostalgic kitsch derived from 2^nd and 3^rd hand sources but once set in motion it began to work on its own terms. With the help of John Hurt’s rich narration, von Trier managed to bring this unlikely staged town to life.

   Whether he succeeded in conveying his message, or more broadly, what that message was, was another matter entirely.
   This message was encapsulated in a single concluding scene—a scene that completely disrupts the flow of the action. Here the much abused Grace has a philosophical heart-to-heart with her all-powerful mobster boss Dad about what kind of punishment this town deserves. She chooses to be merciful but he argues it is arrogant for her to forgive others for what she would never forgive herself. She relents, the word is given and Dogville is slaughtered.
   What von Trier intended to convey with DOGVILLE quickly became a point of heated debate around the festival as reviews started coming out the next day, and opinion split into two camps.
   Many perceived the film as a “critical indictment of the mercilessness of the American system…an apocalyptic vision of American society,” as one Danish critic put it. This view was most famously articulated by the American critic, Todd McCarthy who wrote in Variety that “Von Trier indicts as being unfit to inhabit the earth a country that has surely attracted and given opportunity to more people on to its shores than any other in the history of the world.” Others saw it as a more metaphorical tale about the xenophobia that flourishes in small isolated communities (or countries) when outsiders appear, a story of human duplicity that just happened to be set in America.

   The popular wisdom at Cannes soon had it that European critics liked the film and American critics hated it.
   The recent War in Iraq and the resultant political fallout hung like a cloud over the festival that year and DOGVILLE was fated to be seen through the prism of partisan politics. But exactly what was the film saying? It was so vehemently anti-American that Bush would never watch it, claimed some. But Roger Ebert, cornered by a Danish reporter took the opposite tack. “I’m totally surprised to find a film at Cannes that’s fascist. It tells us that liberal values are hypocritical and therefore it is acceptable to exterminate goodness. (He lets) the gangster’s weapon’s talk. Von Trier is almost pro-Bush…”
Pro-Bush or anti-Bush? The film was being held hostage to the super-charged political atmosphere of the moment and von Trier’s supposed Anti-Americanism was becoming the main issue. In press materials for the film he had maintained that American journalists had driven him to make DOGVILLE after they’d criticized him so harshly for making DANCER IN THE DARK without ever having stepped foot in America. It seemed to be a case of everybody taking the bait: The critics provoked von Trier and von Trier provokes critics who are in turn provoked.
   In calmer moments at a Q & A he offered some revealing insight:
“This film doesn’t deal exclusively with America, but I have my opinions about the U.S. because 80% of what I see on Danish TV is either about or made in America … I am just a mirror.”

True enough—American critics can’t imagine how all-dominating America’s cultural and social agenda is in the world. A Danish film journalist once speculated that Danes should be able to vote in the American elections since the actions of their politicians effects them as much as they effect the American people. By the same token von Trier was demanding the right to convey his ideas about a country that bombarded him with its news, messages and trivialities 24 hours a day. Irrespective of whatever politics he was or wasn’t imparting in the film, he was demanding the right to deal subjectively with his idea of America.
That he knew nothing about America because he had never been there—a favorite charge of his detractors—seems knee-jerk. So what if he attended a few gala premieres in New York or met with Studio execs in Hollywood? What over-arching truth about America would he come away with? Charges that he had no right to set his films in American locales because he had never been there had the smell of politics about them, and yet it was certainly fair to wonder if he was getting the local feel right. His small Rocky Mountain town was in fact a hopeless construct of ill-fitting stereotypes. How many Aunt Jemima maids would one find in a isolated, impoverished Colorado mountain town? And would big-city mobsters, clad in Italian-cut suits and tooling around in limos, really be wasting their time in this area? Was the setting just tongue-in-cheek on his part or was he just missing the beat by a mile?

One Dane who was surely reading the America pulse correctly was Jacob Holdt. Son of a preacher man, he had hitch-hiked the back roads and byways of America through the 60’s and 70’s, documenting his travels with a pawnshop camera in the best tradition of adventuring “vagabond cameramen” like Roland C. Price of the 30’s. For many years Holdt had traveled in the most dangerous American milieus, from inner-city ghettos to the bayou outback of Louisiana. He lived with his subjects, making friends and capturing images that reeked of poverty, despair, racism and violence and which encapsulated the gritty realistic extremes Europeans have come to associate with the “other” America. The photo-displays and slide shows that Holdt toured around back home figured as eye-opening exotica to Danes brought up in the bosom of the social welfare state.

Von Trier was familiar with Holdt’s work of course, and his photos figured as the bulk of the images that accompanied the end credits of the film. Maybe he was just trying to counter-balance the staged quality of the movie with some gritty authenticity, but the photos offended a number of American critics, confirming to them von Trier’s anti-American prejudice. And yet if one can avoid being provoked (or unduly mystified) by the brief image of Nixon in the midst of it, the main impression one gets of the images in whole—if one sits to the very end—is their scatter-shot nature. They range over decades, from what appears to be the 30’s to the 70’s, and are hardly all negative. Objectively considered, they can hardly be seen as any kind of political coup de grace. They testify, rather, to von Trier’s collective impression of America, which he shares with most Danes; a land of hard-scrabble realism and vivid local color. He was just regurgitating the images he was conditioned to regurgitate, being the mirror that he naturally was. Holdt’s photos confirm, and went some way toward creating, this stereotype of America as the great freak show, the land of extremes, the mother of all social realism. And as for scoring Holdt’s images with Bowie’s Young Americans, von Trier later admitted later he hadn’t even remembered the lyrics correctly. So it didn’t mean what it was suppose to mean, whatever that was.

As the May 25^th awards ceremony approached, von Trier found himself in an unusual position. He had made a film that in light of current politics was being seen as topical, relevant and boldly political. He was being hailed as a political filmmaker, and he was buying into it too, despite the fact that during the filming, when asked by a Danish scribe if the brutal treatment afforded Grace could be construed as a comment on Denmark’s own xenophobic immigration policies, he’d flatly stated that he’d never make a political film. Now here he was in France, calling America’s bluff. It seemed that Lars von Trier was not only suddenly political but politically correct!

Much to almost everyone’s surprise, the Palme d’Or went to Gust van Sant’s ELEPHANT and DOGVILLE won nothing. Never the game sport, von Trier was back in his camper and on the way to Denmark before the awards ceremony began.
The jury wanted to give the Palme d’Or to DOGVILLE, went conspiracy theories in the Danish camp, but the French were now eager to win points with the Americans after splitting with them over the war in Iraq, and thus they couldn’t let the top prize go to a film that was perceived as anti-American.
He denied he was disappointed but clearly felt cheated. “Now I will give them ‘provocation!’ he declared.
Kidman later backed out of her promise to appear in MANDERLAY. A scheduling conflict was given as the reason but in these ultra-patriotic times some predicted that continued participation in von Trier’s “American” trilogy could be injurious to her career. It was okay for von Trier to be seen as “anti-American”, but…

Back in Denmark the political fall-out continued as the far-right Danish Peoples Party (DF), staunchly pro-American, pro-Israeli and pro Iraqi-War, accused the film of being pure political propaganda, of being “left-wing in the extreme,” even “sectarian.” They objected to the fact that it had been granted public support from the DFI (which had constituted 10% of its total budget) and proposed the creation of a (far smaller) separate pool of funds to make movies of a purely political nature.
For all its supposed anti-Americanism, a number of Danish writers had pointed out that the film could easily be construed as a critique of Denmark’s current xenophobic anti-immigrant, “anti-outsider” policies which DF championed. In any case DF had never been fans of von Trier who (implicitly) attacked them in his public utterances and in his political actions. DF’s position was articulated by spokeswoman Louise Frevert, ex-belly dancer and political chameleon who had just been down to Cannes to see the film and had even attended Zentropa’s lavish closing party (although she made it clear before hand that she wouldn’t be jumping naked into the pool with Aalbæk Jensen.)
Danish critics lavished praise on the film and for the most part commiserated with von Trier for the underhanded turn dealt him at Cannes, but the Danish public showed only modest interest and at the Robert awards in early 2004 the film was virtually shut out by THE INHERITENCE, a purely Danish film which sold 380,000 tickets—well over three times as many as DOGVILLE.
When DOGVILLE opened abroad many critics hailed it’s unique achievements while at the same time underscoring the schizophrenic nature of the experience; “Alternately exalted and excruciating”, wrote J. Hoberman in Sight and Sound … “A masterpiece that is nearly unwatchable” judged Peter Brunette for the Boston Globe.