The Pervert's Guide To Cinema Page #9

the possibility or impossibility to make a film.

This is the sad tale

of the township of Dogville.

Dogville was in the Rocky Mountains

in the US of A,

up here where the road came to its definitive end

near the entrance to the old,

abandoned silver mine.

The residents of Dogville were good,

honest folks and they liked their township.

With Von Trier, it's not only the problem of belief

in the sense of,

do people generally still believe today

the place of religion today, and so on.

It's also reflectively or allegorically

the question of believing in cinema itself.

How to make today people still believe

in the magic of cinema?

In Dogville, all of it is staged on a set.

Okay, this is often the case in cinema,

but here the set is seen as the set.

The action takes place in Dogville, a small town,

but there are no houses.

There are just lines on the floor,

signalling that this is the house,

this is the street.

The mysterious thing is

that this does not prevent our identification.

If anything, it makes us even more thrown

into the tensions of the inner life.

Have you seen Grace?

She's at my place.

- Is she busy?

- Not any more. Go right in.

It's not that naive belief is undermined,

deconstructed through irony.

Von Trier wants to be serious with the magic.

Irony is put into service to make us believe.

Yet again, Grace had made

a miraculous escape from her pursuers

with the aid of the people of Dogville.

Everyone had covered up for her,

including Chuck, who had to admit

that it was probably Tom's hat

he'd mistakenly considered so suspicious.

The mystery is that even if we know

that it's only staged, that it's a fiction,

it still fascinates us.

That's the fundamental magic of it.

You witness a certain seductive scene,

then you are shown that it's just a fake,

stage machinery behind,

but you are still fascinated by it. Illusion persists.

There is something real in the illusion,

more real than in the reality behind it.

Do not arouse the wrath

of the great and powerful Oz!

I said come back tomorrow!

If you were really great and powerful,

you'd keep your promises.

Do you presume to criticise the great Oz?

You ungrateful creatures!

Think yourselves lucky

that I'm giving you audience tomorrow

instead of 20 years from now!

The great Oz has spoken.

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

The great and... Oz has spoken.

- Who are you?

- Well, I...

I am the great and powerful Wizard of Oz.

What we can learn from a film like Wizard of Oz

is how the logic of de-mystification

is not enough.

It's not enough to say, "Okay, it's just

a big show spectacle to impress the people.

"What is behind is just a modest old guy,"

and so on and so on.

It is that rather, in a way,

there is more truth in this appearance.

Appearance has an effectivity, a truth of its own.

What about the heart that you promised Tin Man?

Well...

And the courage

that you promised Cowardly Lion?

- And Scarecrow's brain?

- And Scarecrow's brain?

Why, anybody can have a brain.

That's a very mediocre commodity.

Every pusillanimous creature

that crawls on the earth

or slinks through slimy seas has a brain.

Back where I come from,

we have universities, seats of great learning

where men go to become great thinkers.

And when they come out,

they think deep thoughts

and with no more brains than you have.

But they have one thing you haven't got.

A diploma!

Therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me

by the Universitatus Committeeatum

e plurbis unum,

I hereby confer upon you

the honorary degree of Th.D.

- Th.D.?

- That's Doctor of Thinkology.

The sum of the square roots

of any two sides of an isosceles triangle

is equal to the square root of the remaining side.

Oh, joy, rapture! I've got a brain!

And that's the paradox of cinema,

the paradox of belief.

We don't simply believe or do not believe.

We always believe

in a kind of a conditional mode.

I know very well it's a fake but, nonetheless,

I let myself be emotionally affected.

How do you do?

Mr Carl Laemmle feels it would be

a little unkind to present this picture

without just a word of friendly warning.

We are about to unfold the story of Frankenstein,

a man of science, who sought to create

a man after his own image

without reckoning upon God.

Somebody tells us

you have to experience horror, we do it.

So if any of you feel that you do not care

to subject your nerves to such a strain,

now is your chance to... Well, we've warned you.

Ladies and gentlemen, young and old,

this may seem an unusual procedure,

speaking to you before the picture begins.

But we have an unusual subject.

Behind, not red, this is Hollywood,

but black curtain,

Cecil DeMille himself appears,

giving us a lesson of how

the story of ten commandments and Moses

has great relevance today where we are fighting

communist, totalitarian danger

and so on, giving us all the clues.

Are men the property of the state?

Or are they free souls under God?

This same battle continues

throughout the world today.

This hidden master who controls the events

can also be defined as ideology embodied,

in the sense of the space

which organises our desires.

And your name? What the f*** is your name?

In David Lynch's Lost Highway,

we have the Mystery Man,

who stands for the very cinematographer,

even director.

Imagine somebody who has

a direct access to your inner life,

to your innermost fantasies,

to what even you don't want to know

about yourself.

We've met before, haven't we?

I don't think so.

Where was it that you think we met?

At your house, don't you remember?

The best way to imagine what Mystery Man is,

is to imagine somebody

who doesn't want anything from us.

What do you mean? You're where right now?

At your house.

That's f***ing crazy, man.

Call me.

That's the true horror of this Mystery Man.

Not any evil, demoniac intentions and so on.

Just the fact that when he is in front of you,

he, as it were, sees through you.

I told you I was here.

How'd you do that?

Ask me.

- How'd you get inside my house?

- You invited me.

It is not my custom to go where I'm not wanted.

It's like the court in Kafka's novels,

where the court, or the Law,

only comes when you ask for it.

Oh! Now, why would he do that?

Most peculiar. What on Earth?

Hitchcock was obsessed

with this topic of manipulating emotions.

His dream was even that once in the future,

we would no longer have to shoot narratives,

our brains will be directly connected

to some machine

and the director would only have to press

different buttons there

and the appropriate emotions

will be awakened in our mind.

They're coming. They're coming!

What do directors like Hitchcock,

Tarkovsky, Kieslowski, Lynch

have in common?

A certain autonomy of cinematic form.

Form is not here simply

to express, articulate content.

It has a message of its own.

In Hitchcock, we have

the motif of a person hanging from an abyss

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