Resisting global Hollywood : how metacultural strategies create audiences for a small nation’s minor cinema
Organizer
Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, Lingnan University
Event Title
Cultural Magazine Series, 2003-04
Document Type
Public Seminar
Date
2-2-2004
Time
5:30 p.m. -- 7:00 p.m.
Venue
G06, General Education Building, Lingnan University
Description
"Dogma 95", a manifesto-based film movement, was announced in Paris in 1995 by the Danish film-maker, Lars von Trier. As a result of an ingenious combination of meta-culture, performativity, and counter-publicity, "Dogma 95" has gone on to become a globalized cinematic movement, with extensions to other areas (dance, computer game design, literature, politics, and city planning). The focus in this talk is on the Dogma collective’s millennium project, D-Day, which is known primarily to Danish audiences and critics. This intensely collaborative, experimental project involved shooting in real time in downtown Copenhagen on New Year’s Eve, the distance directing of actors from a central control room in the Copenhagen amusement park called “Tivoli”, and zapping amongst TV stations by viewers who were instructed to “edit their own film” using what was essentially a database of images of actors and ordinary Danes interacting in the capital at the turn of the century. The aim was playfully to document the state of the capital and thereby the nation, and to consolidate the nation into a single effervescent whole by involving the entire country in an interactive game with its leading film-makers.
The suggestion will be that D-Day continues the Dogma brethren’s experimentation with meta-culture and its audience building potential, a potential that is particularly important in contexts of small nationhood and minor cinema. Inasmuch as meta-culture takes the form in this instance of three distinct approaches to cinematic authorship, D-Day not only contributes to discussions of cinematic authorship, but also helps to clarify the Dogma brethren’s polemics against the nouvelle vague in the Dogma manifesto.
Language
English
Recommended Citation
Hjort, M. (2004, February 2). Resisting global Hollywood: How metacultural strategies create audiences for a small nation’s minor cinema [Video podcast]. Retrieved from http://commons.ln.edu.hk/videos/225
Additional Information
Speaker
Mette Hjort is Head of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong and Senior Lecturer at the University of Aalborg, Denmark. She is the author, editor or co-editor of The Strategy of Letters, Rules and Conventions, Emotion and the Arts, Cinema and Nation, The Postnational Self, The Danish Directors: Dialogues on a Contemporary National Cinema, and Purity and Provocation: Dogma 95.