Dogma-tist

Lars von Trier's cameraman tells all

Breaking the Waves filmmaker Lars von Trier is the theorist/architect behind the Dogma '95 oath, the filmmaker responsible for swearing allegiance to an anti-special-effects cinema of handheld camera, available lighting, diegetic music and synch sound, and actors costumed in their own clothes on sets that are real, untampered-with locales. Of course, when in 1998 Trier actually made a Dogma film, it was a dog of a film, the still unreleased-in-America inanity (I suffered through it at Cannes) called The Idiots.

Yet the Dogma principals have worked splendidly in the right hands. Give all credit to Anthony Dod Mantle, the formidably talented British cinematographer who has photographed all three of the essential Dogma-driven films: Harmony Korine's julien donkey-boy, which shows March 10 through 12 at the Harvard Film Archive; Søren Kragh-Jacobsen's Mifune, which opens March 17 at the Coolidge Corner; and Thomas Vintenberg's The Celebration, the Dogma movement's one indisputable classic.

At the Nortel Palm Springs Film Festival in January, Mantle sat through The Celebration with the audience, and he confessed that he had been moved anew, seeing the 1998 film for the first time in several years. Mantle shot it handheld with a digital camera, and he adhered to Trier's Dogma tenets.

"There are 10 rules, to be precise," Mantle said when we talked, in his first American interview. "It was written by Lars on impulse, an explosion out of his heart, a retaliation against an elaborate kind of cinema. Dogma is about naked storytelling. What he asked for is interesting but not easy for a cinematographer. I have a traditional camera training, and it was like taking my palette away from me. But it was fun. I wouldn't have said yes if it weren't a kind of game.

"For The Celebration, I let my conventional lighting go and thought instead about emotional movement. I wanted to become one of the witnesses, to react as if I were an actor in the drama. One of the characters, Christian, tries to find truth in the middle of lies and deceptions. I wanted to commemorate his search: mine was an agile Darwinian camera. As the family slowly disintegrates, I wanted my emulsion to organically decompose."

A Darwinist? "It sounds snobbish, but I mean it: The Celebration was one of the most aggressive films I've ever been on. I wanted to let off steam with my cinematography. I'm a camera caveman at heart."

Trained as a still photographer in England, Mantle went to the National Film School in Copenhagen in cinematography. "I had a very strange but short-lived relationship with a Danish woman, and a year and a half of learning the Danish language. There must have been a reason for it." It's allowed him to make fiction films and also documentaries with top-line Danish directors, including Trier. He spent New Year's Eve 2000 shooting for Trier a live interactive 70-minute TV program, actors and fireworks over Copenhagen, that was broadcast simultaneously on seven Danish TV channels.

Mantle also operated the camera for the dance sequences in Trier's non-Dogma new movie, Dancer in the Dark, which pairs Björk and Catherine Deneuve. "It's an amazing digital film that will destroy Cannes," he predicted. Recently he shot the Gus Van Sant section of an in-progress three-part movie scripted by Harmony Korine. "Gus told me when we met he'd seen The Celebration and it changed his life. He'd been smelling it. And when we were in Poland, Mike Leigh gave me a handshake and said he was a great admirer of Dogma.

"The filmmakers and projects I'm drawn to are where I suspect cinema can come to its full force. I do believe cinema is potentially the greatest art form, that the frame line is metaphysical. Though when the lights come down, how disappointing on screen when it's the same old fucking shot."

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Never be too proud. There's a geek inside all of us waiting to drag us into the pit, where, rum-soaked and diseased, we crawl about chewing the heads off screaming chickens. That's the cautionary message of William Lindsay Greshem's 1946 novel Nightmare Alley, the tale of an ambitious heel, Stan Carlisle, who goes from carnival down-and-out status to show-business glory as a mind-reading "mentalist" to alcoholic degradation as a sideshow freak. The 1947 movie version of Nightmare Alley, which is being revived March 10 and 11 at the Brattle, has been tidied a bit with some uncomfortable Hollywood redemption, but Tyrone Power in a too-tight undershirt is a dandy Stan, a plump Joan Blondell and a dyed-blond Mike Mazurski are swell carnie types, and the little-known starlet Colleen Gray is scrumptious as Stan's oft-suffering girlfriend.

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Two RIPs. Otello Martelli, 98, Roberto Rossellini's cinematographer (Paisan, Stromboli), who enjoyed an extraordinary career with Federico Fellini, shooting I vitelloni, La strada, and, most impressive of all, La dolce vita.

Tod Karnes, 79, a journeyman actor whose juiciest role was as Jimmy Stewart's sibling in It's a Wonderful Life. As Harry Bailey, Karnes offered the tear-inducing Christmas toast: "To my big brother George. The richest man in town!"

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com