Thomas Vinterberg's Festen (The Celebration)

C. Claire Thomson

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780295804927
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg's searing film Festen ("The Celebration") was the first film from the Dogme 95 stable. Adhering to Dogme's cinematic purity — no artificial lighting, no superficial action, no credit for the director, and only handheld cameras for equipment — Festen was a commercial and critical success, winning the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1998 and garnering worldwide attention. The film is set at the sixtieth birthday party of Helge, the wealthy patriarch of a large Danish family. The birthday festivities take a turn when Helge's son Christian raises a toast and denounces Helge for having raped and abused him as a child, along with his twin sister, who recently committed suicide. The film explores the escalating consequences of Christian's announcement, from the stunned dinner party's collective denial, to violence, to an unexpected catharsis.

PART ONE

Festen and Film History

1

Dogma 95 and Danish Cinema

In September 2005, the leading British film critic, Philip French, declared in the Sunday newspaper the Observer: “At the moment, Denmark is producing the most thoughtful and interesting films not only in Scandinavia but in western Europe.”¹ French was looking back at the extraordinary renaissance of Danish cinema since Lars von Trier's intervention in Paris a decade earlier. Other critics conducting similar retrospectives around the same time were equally complimentary: David Bordwell, for example, judged that Danish film was exceptionally successful in showing “creative vibrancy” in the spheres of mass-consumption genre films, prestige cinema, and avant-garde film and that its success could be credited in part to its “strong sense of narrative desire.”² Mette Hjort has given us the term “New Danish Cinema” as a cooler-headed alternative to the epithet of a “new golden age” for film in Denmark, dating roughly from the late 1980s.³ Hjort demonstrates how the conditions of possibility for New Danish Cinema began to unfurl during the decade before 1995. It is striking, nonetheless, that many of the key developments in the renaissance of Danish cinema—including the premiere of Festen—take place in or around 1998. We must, then, observe from the beginning that Festen's role in reinvigorating the Danish film scene and the status of Danish cinema worldwide can best be understood not as cause, or as symptom, but as a productive symbiosis of circumstance.

The Transformation of the Danish Cinema Industry

To appreciate the significance of the growth in the prestige of Danish film from the late 1980s on, and the role that Festen played in it, we need to outline how Danish preeminence in cinema had ebbed and flowed during the twentieth century.

Denmark's first “golden age” produced some of the treasures of early and silent cinema. For a decade after the birth of cinema, Danish film production was dominated by one man, the entrepreneur and photographer Peter Elfelt, who specialized in actualités, especially featuring the royal family. In 1906, the founding of the Nordisk Film company by Ole Olsen marked the start of that first “golden” decade of extraordinary creativity and productivity in Danish film. During the 1910s, Nordisk Film made Denmark a leading film nation; directors such as August Blom, Holger-Madsen, and Benjamin Christensen exported spectacular productions all over the world. Asta Nielsen, or “Die Asta,” emerged from Denmark as the world's first woman film star, although her career unfolded largely in Germany, while Olsen, Nordisk Film's CEO, pontificated on the role of cinema as a disseminator of cultural values.⁴ By 1920, however, the Danish studios were eclipsed as a preeminent source of films that would sate popular tastes, and with the coming of sound film (and thus the end of the inherent translatability of intertitles) from the late 1920s, Danish actors and writers had to contend with the relative obscurity of their native language. Danish cinema continued to produce examples of outstanding native talent—director Carl Th. Dreyer enjoyed a half century of no little international and critical renown from 1918 to 1964—and state support kept, notably, documentaries, educational films, children's films, and popular cinema buoyant. However, by the 1980s, the industry was considered domestically to be somewhat sclerotic, and Danish film went largely unregarded on the international scene.⁵

Danish cinema needed a dramatic change of fortune. And in a twist of fate worthy of one of Hans Christian Andersen's fairytales, the late 1980s brought a little bit of magic. Danish directors won Oscars for best foreign film two years running: Gabriel Axel in 1988 for Babettes gæstebud (Babette's Feast) and Bille August in 1989 for Pelle Erobreren (Pelle the Conqueror). Mette Hjort describes the transformative effect of these Oscars on Danish cinema as “the kind of statistically unimaginable and thus quasi-prophetic event that could truly galvanize an entire milieu and make it an irresistible magnet for new talent.”⁶ While these two Oscar-winning films were traditional fare—costume dramas and literary adaptations to boot—von Trier was also emerging, in that same period, as a key filmmaker. His feature-film debut The Element of Crime had won the Prix Technique at Cannes in 1984, heralding the beginning of the sea change von Trier would unleash in Danish cinema. That von Trier's film was in English galvanized the debate in Denmark on the definition of a “Danish” film worthy of state support. A new film act in 1989 decoupled the use of the Danish language and Danish actors from the definition of a film as “Danish” and also reduced the power of the academic “consultants” who had controlled filmmakers' access to state funds.⁷ In the wake of these developments, Hjort also discusses in detail the reemergence of a “popular cinephilia” in Denmark and a new generation of passionate, creative filmmaking talent, professionally educated at the well-run national Film School and carefully nurtured by a set of institutions that were reconfigured in the late 1990s.⁸

Two key developments coincided with the filming and launch of Festen. The Danish government enacted another new film act in 1997, merging three existing institutions under one roof: the Danish Film Institute, the Film Museum, and the National Film Board. Hjort gives an account of the objectives and the impact of the revamped Danish Film Institute. Its strategic priorities, briefly summarized, were as follows: to preserve national film heritage, to promote film culture and an inclusive cinephilia at home, to consolidate and improve the breadth and quality of Danish film production, and to promote Danish film abroad as a cinema characterized by artistic merit, a spirit of innovation, and high production values.⁹

The journey of Dogma 95 from concept to body of films spans this crucial period of institutional reconfiguration and can serve to illustrate the lack of agility of the Danish film establishment prior to the reforms discussed above.¹⁰ It is important to emphasize that Dogma 95 does not seem to have been conceived as a protest against the state of the Danish film industry per se. For von Trier, frustrated at endless delays over the funding of what would become his pre-Dogma offering, Breaking the Waves (1996), Danish film was simply not worth protesting against in 1995. “If you want to protest about something then the thing you're protesting against has to have a certain amount of authority,” he told one interviewer resignedly.¹¹ Nevertheless, the movement had a catalytic effect.

When von Trier first mooted the idea of a series of Dogma 95 films made by Danish directors, an initial promise of investment from the then Danish minister of culture, Jytte Hilden, was waylaid by the Danish Film Institute's insistence on parity of access to state funding for all filmmakers, affiliated to Dogma 95 or not. Logically, this undermined the influence of the Dogma 95 Vow of Chastity, for the film projects would be evaluated not on the basis of their adherence to the vow but according to the criteria laid down by the institute's board. With the issue of funding for Danish cinema a hot potato in the Danish press, a deal to finance the first Dogma films was struck with the Danish Broadcasting Company, Danmarks Radio.¹² One film directed by each of the four members of the Dogma brethren—von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg, Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, and Kristian Levring—would be financed by Danmarks Radio, on the condition that the films would be available for broadcasting on national television within three months of their theatrical release.¹³ Peter Schepelern remarks that this unusual arrangement freed the directors from the normal round of approvals of scripts and from consultations with producers, investors, and so on.¹⁴ Nevertheless, it is an exquisite irony that the timing—and ultimately the success—of the Dogma 95 project helped pique public interest in, and thus shape, subsequent reformulations of the revamped Danish Film Institute's funding policy, without, however, having benefited from it.

A second catalytic development to coincide with Festen was the foundation of Filmbyen, or Film Town, by Lars von Trier and Peter Aalbæk Jensen. This new center for film production was converted from a disused army barracks in Avedøre, strategically located close to Copenhagen and the nearby Kastrup international airport. Its location, however, is not merely commercially strategic but is also an ideological matter: Film Town is intended to demystify and democratize filmmaking, to be a place where knowledge and expertise is handed down from one generation to the next. The Film Town neighborhood comprises “the entire range of companies, artists and artisans from all aspects of audio-visual activity in a concerted effort aimed at opening the doors wide.”¹⁵

The project description for Open Film Town, dated 1999, envisages that master classes and research material from events held at Avedøre would be made available on the Internet; tellingly, it is proposed that events be made available in the form of transcripts and images, the possibilities afforded by video streaming and widespread broadband connections still being half a decade away. Nonetheless, the justification for making Film Town “the central site for the discussion of film theory and practice” centers on the catalytic role of Dogma 95 in reconfiguring the relations between media theory and practice: “It is acknowledged internationally that Dogme has resulted in the first interest in and discussion of media theory (a discipline that one would otherwise be inclined to call ‘extinct’) among artists and professionals for decades…. If an up-to-date forum for discussing the medium belongs anywhere in the world at present, it is surely in the home country of Dogme 95!”¹⁶

While this claim is a little bombastic—chapter 3 considers the broader contemporary context of critical and popular rumination on the nature of the film medium—it drives home how quickly and thoroughly the catalytic effect of Festen's pioneering work with digital video was grasped and exploited. More than a decade on, these transformative ideals and ambitions are still the lingua franca of Film Town. One Film Town tenant whose web presence illustrates how the founding principles persist in the project's DNA is the Zentropa Post Production Hotel, whose suites can be booked on a short-term basis while a film is in postproduction. The language of the hotel's website engages interest.¹⁷ In parallel to the expertise and equipment the hotel is able to offer, the Danish blurb lays emphasis on the word hygge, a term generally acknowledged as an untranslatable amalgam of coziness, well-being, and good company. The peculiarly Danish concept of hygge is integral to the philosophy and functioning of the hotel. The doors of the editing suites usually stay open, to facilitate conversation and collaboration. More concretely, the Post Production Hotel was founded on Zentropa's unrivaled expertise in the application of digital video and high-definition (HD) technologies. It is unrivaled, the website was still claiming in 2011, precisely because it dates all the way back to the Dogma 95 films: “We know how to create the appropriate visual experience with HD. We've worked with it so much and for so long that we can see both the goldmines and the pitfalls in it better than most others in the branch. Our vision is keener because of experience.” This is a succinct illustration of the protean and transformative impact of Festen and the Dogma films within the Danish film industry, both in terms of practice and in terms of self-definition. Conversely, the hotel's account of its own origins alongside Dogma 95 and its hard-won experience of getting good results on a shoestring budget reiterates that the success of Dogma 95 was predicated on “the right people” getting to grips with the right equipment at the right time.

The excitement of new media should not blind us to the craft of the “right people” working with tools that are more traditional but no less seductive. The branch of the Danish film industry whose transformation since the 1980s is perhaps most closely linked to the success of Festen is screenwriting. Here, too, we see the characteristic high-wire balancing act between creative chaos and professionalization. Interviewed in 2000, Vinterberg reflected on the rapid and comprehensive change in conditions for Danish scriptwriters since the early 1990s:

There are far better opportunities now for telling a wide range of stories and for focusing intensely on script-related work. The National Film School's script-writing stream is at this point one of the institution's most important and best-supported programs. It's thriving, and the interest in script-writing is enormous. A new subculture of script-writers has emerged, and the people involved really know how to tell stories, and they're being remunerated for their work. People are also telling stories that have a broader appeal, so I think the situation has improved quite a lot.¹⁸

The Danish Film School's contemporary emphasis on the craft of storytelling is in no small way due to the influence of Mogens Rukov, a long-serving member of the faculty and Vinterberg's cowriter on Festen and other projects. The recent publication of a biography of Rukov indicates his cultural influence and affords an opportunity not only to recapitulate his contribution to Danish film over four decades but also to reassess the impact of Festen on the careers of most of those involved and on Danish film more generally.¹⁹ From the perspective of an industry insider, Rukov perceives an increasingly influential role for the scriptwriter in Danish film and, as a corollary, television. Writers have more clout, but also more responsibility. He dates this slow transformation to the beginning of the 1990s, but he also recognizes the pivotal role of his own internationally successful collaboration with Vinterberg on Festen.²⁰ Paradoxically, observes Rukov, increasing professionalization of screenwriting has also entailed what he sees as increasing “industrialization,” or the privileging of certain genres and styles in Danish film and television that generate guaranteed box office or viewing figures: “There are so many checkpoints involved in making a film, so much bureaucracy. ‘Such and such sells, so it has to look like that,’ can be the consequence. The manuscripts have to be approved and authorized so many times by so many people along the way, and decent ticket sales and industry awards are almost always expected.”²¹ The collaboration between Rukov and Vinterberg that resulted in the Festen screenplay will be discussed in depth in chapter 7. Suffice it to say that Rukov's impressions provide a useful counterpoint to more unequivocally positive takes on the professionalization of the Danish film industry since the 1990s. We now turn to look at the Dogma 95 movement in more detail.

Dogma 95: The Manifesto and Vow of Chastity

Has a film movement ever been dissected more thoroughly than Dogma 95? The more one reads about Dogma 95 or the films it spawned, the more one realizes that it is both deadly serious and playfully ironic, that its rules are both devasta...