Dogville

Started by Weak2ndAct, July 12, 2003, 04:39:50 AM

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Pwaybloe

Hmmm...

Edited for time or content?

mogwai

Quote from: PawbloeHmmm...

Edited for time or content?
i guess it has do something with this:

"To fit the needs of some local distributors, in Italy among others, assistant director Anders Refn cut a version of Dogville which is about 45 minutes shorter than the original. The version was accepted and approved by director Lars von Trier."

The Perineum Falcon

Quote from: mogwai
i guess it has do something with this:

"To fit the needs of some local distributors, in Italy among others, assistant director Anders Refn cut a version of Dogville which is about 45 minutes shorter than the original. The version was accepted and approved by director Lars von Trier."
Fuck me, I can't imagine anyone accepting, or approving, 45 mins of their film being snipped. I'm hoping the DVD will have the missing footage....
We often went to the cinema, the screen would light up and we would tremble, but also, increasingly often, Madeleine and I were disappointed. The images had dated, they jittered, and Marilyn Monroe had gotten terribly old. We were sad, this wasn't the film we had dreamed of, this wasn't the total film that we all carried around inside us, this film that we would have wanted to make, or, more secretly, no doubt, that we would have wanted to live.

Ghostboy

This is upsetting; I can maybe see cutting about 20 minutes out of the first hour, if anything, but that's it. Oh well, thank goodness for DVDs. I'm thinking about ordering the Region 0 set, since Lions Gate will be releasing this in the US and they have a tendency to ignore the bonus materials on import DVDs (a la Irreversible).

rustinglass

Quote from: PawbloeHmmm...

Edited for time or content?

An interview for a portuguese magazine (I hope I write to english good)

question: It is surprising that you made two versions of "dogville", one is about three hours, that was shown in cannes, the other is much shorter.
LVT: I didn't make two versions. What happened is that, when I made the film financing contract, I compromised it not to have more than two hours time. I signed it thinking it would be a problem to solve later...and, in fact, it was a problem... So I made a near three hour long film- that is my film. And there is a shorter version, that is not edited by me, that is destined to satisfy the financial compromises.
Q: It's a kind of "dogville"'s "reader's digest"?
LVT: Exactly. It's a very good version, but it's not my film.
"In Serbia a lot of people hate me because they want to westernise, not understanding that the western world is bipolar, with very good things and very bad things. Since they don't have experience of the west, they even believe that western shit is pie."
-Emir Kusturica

mogwai

am i the only one who feels that von trier is more forthcoming in his interviews than before?

rustinglass

Quote from: mogwaiam i the only one who feels that von trier is more forthcoming in his interviews than before?

Question: Do you like being spanked?
LVT: Well, if it's Nicole Kidman doing the spanking, of course I do.
"In Serbia a lot of people hate me because they want to westernise, not understanding that the western world is bipolar, with very good things and very bad things. Since they don't have experience of the west, they even believe that western shit is pie."
-Emir Kusturica

Weak2ndAct

Quote from: GhostboyI'm thinking about ordering the Region 0 set, since Lions Gate will be releasing this in the US and they have a tendency to ignore the bonus materials on import DVDs (a la Irreversible).
To paraphrase what I wrote before in another thread:

The reason while Irreversible had jack on it was b/c that Noe didn't deliver any of the bonus materials that he promised until waaaaay too late (and he flat out refused to put 'Carne' on there).

Weak2ndAct

Psst...

Dogville WILL NOT be cut down for american release.  I know this for a fact.

godardian

Quote from: rustinglass
Quote from: mogwaiam i the only one who feels that von trier is more forthcoming in his interviews than before?

Question: Do you like being spanked?
LVT: Well, if it's Nicole Kidman doing the spanking, of course I do.

Is it wrong that that turns me on??  :)

So glad that we'll be getting the full Dogville. Any time a movie is edited for anything by anyone other than the filmmakers, I get real suspicious. This was not lessened in any way by reading Down and Dirty Pictures and getting the lowdown on Harvey Scissorhands.
""Money doesn't come into it. It never has. I do what I do because it's all that I am." - Morrissey

"Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, and linguistic, into which a child is born. These precede the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals, and histories of the parents. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child's existence."

Stay informed on protecting your freedom of speech and civil rights.

rustinglass

Quote from: Weak2ndActPsst...

Dogville WILL NOT be cut down for american release.  I know this for a fact.

What I said, I saw on imdb, but I never said it would be cut down for american release, I said that the film that will be released in america is the already cut (by the producer)  117min version.

Anyway, I really want that they distribute the full version. That's what everybody wants. great news
"In Serbia a lot of people hate me because they want to westernise, not understanding that the western world is bipolar, with very good things and very bad things. Since they don't have experience of the west, they even believe that western shit is pie."
-Emir Kusturica

MacGuffin

A stranger's take on a strange land
In 'Dogville,' director Lars von Trier opens his dark American trilogy. So what if he's never set foot here?
Source: Los Angeles Times

"My goal was to go back to basics and find the joy of believing in a story no matter what," says Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier about his latest project, "Dogville." "If someone tells you a story, you have to make an effort to believe in it.

"And when you do, it can really be good."

That the experience can also be perverse, exhilarating, explosively un-P.C. and unforgettable, it goes without saying. "The sad tale of the township of Dogville," told in nine chapters and a prologue, is the handiwork of possibly the most controversial European anti-auteur.

Von Trier is on the phone from picturesque Trollhättan, Sweden, where he just started shooting his next film, "Manderlay." He likes to make movies in sets of three, and "Dogville" is the first in what he has referred to as his American trilogy.

The director is reluctant to make interpretation easy, either. "I like films to raise questions that people will then have to answer themselves. Even I am not really sure what particular theme connects them. Why make films if you're sure?"

"Dogville," opening in Los Angeles theaters this week, can be read as a Depression-era allegory about the shabby back side of a purported American Utopia. The credits sequence juxtaposes, with cheerful rudeness, David Bowie's buoyantly ironic anthem "Young Americans" against Dorothea Lange's iconic photographs of poverty, for instance. Later, "Dogville's" omniscient narrator observes that a character "made up for his lack of preparation by lashing out haphazardly in all directions." In such moments, Von Trier makes it impossible not to see which country he's skewering.

It shows considerable cheek on the part of an artist who has famously never set foot in the United States. (He suffers from a fear of flying, as well as other phobias that appear as recurring themes in his work.) "You can criticize me for this, but I have a tendency to be inspired by things that I'm not really familiar with and that are quite remote," the filmmaker says. "It's much easier that way. You don't have to work so much doing research — I already had a remote idea about how America could be — but of course, you can make a lot of people angry."

And for some, nothing will be more offensive than the sight of Grace, the film's protagonist, played with hair-raising abandon by Hollywood megastar Nicole Kidman, spending a fair stretch of the story shackled to a diabolical leash-like contraption and being repeatedly raped.

Even so, there is elegant rhythm and plenty of method to Von Trier's provocative ways.

At first, fictional Dogville appears to both audience and Grace (a beautiful fugitive pursued by gangsters who is granted sanctuary in the village) to be nothing but a friendly hamlet nestled into a nook of the Rockies, populated by upright people who live winsome lives. It is a place of utilitarian assets — a verdant apple orchard, an abandoned silver mine, a church with a bell, a watchdog — many merely outlined on the ground in chalk.

The film's only discernable lesson is that exploring with any depth this charming slice of Americana is highly dangerous for everybody involved. By the end, the morality of Dogville's citizens, that of Grace and that of the audience all will have been called into question.

In his next film, "Manderlay," Grace (played this time around by newcomer Bryce Dallas Howard) stumbles upon another Depression-era small town in Alabama where slavery has yet to be abolished. She sets out to help straighten things, but then "everything, of course, goes awry," Von Trier says in his cordial, mellow phone manner.

Like the amiable devil from Sartre's play "No Exit," he likes to taunt with the possibility that no hell dreamed up by gods could ever measure up to the unspeakable evil that humans readily inflict upon one another.

Because his work has stubbornly, and often in an unexpectedly brilliant manner, probed ethical and moral quandaries, the United Nations recognized Von Trier with a Cinema for Peace prize in 2000. His compulsion to needle the establishment characteristically subverted the awards ceremony.

"I probably offended them because I gave an acceptance speech that was a little cheeky," he says. "I told them that an apolitical peace prize doesn't make sense to me. And that first we have to treat each other fairly and divide the world in a just way; I think that's more important than peace.

"Also, if you are dying of hunger, then you want food more than peace."

Spoken like a true Marxist.

Né Lars Trier, the filmmaker picked up the aristocratic article in homage to German directors Erich von Stroheim and Josef von Sternberg. Two other German artists, the agit-lit team of composer Kurt Weill and playwright Bertolt Brecht, are also partly responsible for the highly stylized look and feel of "Dogville." Von Trier was inspired by musical numbers featured in Brecht's 1930s plays, paradigm-shifting examples that paired Marxist ideology with cabaret-style decadence.

For "Dogville," shot entirely with a hand-held camera on a gigantic sound stage, Von Trier says he was obsessed with capturing the stylized miens and the slightly alienating experience of watching theater on television: "I can't explain why. It's a feeling I have, like when you need a specific vitamin or mineral. Then again, I always set different kinds of rules and limitations for myself."

Going back to basics is a journey that the 47-year-old Von Trier has been mapping since the mid-'90s, when he abruptly abandoned the gorgeously baroque expressionism that had characterized his early work. He coauthored the Dogme 95 manifesto — a public oath he took along with a collective of his Danish peers to banish artifice, decorum and personal taste from filmmaking.

The austere approach yielded harsh new virtues that quickly shoved one of the world's most backward filmmaking nations to the vanguard of European cinema.

Von Trier visibly rode the crest of the new wave. Using direct storytelling, grainy, realistic photography captured by hand-held cameras and quick-cut editing, he reaped acclaim and infamy with each film.

With the psych-horror hospital soap "The Kingdom," the subversively and violently anti-bourgeois fantasy "Idiots" and the contrived and heartbreaking melodramas of female crucifixion "Breaking the Waves" and "Dancer in the Dark," Von Trier proved himself a poet of varied cinematic moods, a sardonic humorist and a filmmaker of stunning visual awareness.

Or, depending on whom you ask, a misanthrope, an impertinent hack — even a "degenerate" artist, as a furious Time magazine critic labeled him in 2000.

His fiercely independent manner — he funds his work through a filmmaking enterprise he co-owns, Zentropa Film, which produces the work of fellow filmmakers through an adjacent distribution company — as well as the intense commitment he requires of his casts are well documented.

Despite past adversarial working relationships with collaborators, Von Trier has many notable admirers. His "Dogville" cast runs the gamut from icon Lauren Bacall to indie luminaries Paul Bettany, Chloë Sevigny and Jeremy Davies, as well as Kidman.

Horror author Stephen King loved Von Trier's "Kingdom" miniseries so much he decided to write a remake himself for U.S. television. (Von Trier says he finds the idea itself "very funny," although he hasn't seen the series, currently running on ABC as "Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital.") "I like to be popular with the people I like to be popular with, and I like to be unpopular with the people I like to be unpopular with," he notes.

When pressed about specifics, he keeps the references to the former vague ("they're difficult to define, but I know who they are") but happily names names among the latter.

"I would like to be unpopular with Harvey Weinstein," he says. "And I think I've succeeded."
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

MacGuffin

Quote from: rustinglasssad news: I heard that the american release will be the butchered 117min version :(

Quote from: Weak2ndActPsst...

Dogville WILL NOT be cut down for american release.  I know this for a fact.

Yep. According to today's Los Angeles Times review, the running time is 2 hrs. 57 mins.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

matt35mm

Good news.  If it even opens out here...

(Also, on the Irreversible official website, they have a special feature meant for the DVD about the special effects used in it.  Sorta interesting.)

meatball

It opens out here in Los Angeles.