Specters of Brecht in Dogme 95: Are Brecht and Realism Necessarily Antithetical?

One of the aims of this article is to rethink the 1970s distinction between Brechtian and realist cinema by means of an analysis of the Dogme 95 Manifesto and a case study of Lars von Trier's Dogme film The Idiots (1998). Primarily, the article discusses Dogme's combination of a Brechtiai1/ political modernist rhetoric with a realist one and sets out to offer a historical interpretation of Dogme's return to the cinematic debates of the past. Then I discuss the ways von Trier's film merges a long-take realist tradition with a "gestic" /investigative attitude that generates tensions between the scripted referents and the filmmaking process.