The director must not be credited (227)

Dogme was intended to function as a means of cinematic and cultural liberation and revolution: the manifesto is a critique of auteur theory, the guiding principle of film criticism since the French New Wave of the 1950s and 1960s, and currently used by Hollywood to make marketable "stars" out of its better-known directors. Von Trier writes that "the auteur concept was bourgeois romanticism from the very start and thereby false!" (qtd. in Kelly 226), pointing out the inherent fallacy in assigning authorship of a film—a massively collaborative effort involving writers, a director, producers, actors, and a crew—to one person. It is not coincidental that Lars von Trier, as well as his business partner Peter Aalbaek Jensen, were members of the Communist party in the 1970's; in fact, at one point, Trier and Jensen claimed to have organized their Dogme production company, Zentropa, into a system of communistic cells. Both men clearly view Dogme 95 as a revolutionary act in keeping with their Leftist views. By their refusal to credit the director, and their emphasis on community filmmaking and "truth," the Dogme collective presents itself as a radical, and even militant, group within the international filmmaking community. Von Trier writes that this is because, "the phrase 'avant-garde' has military connections… we must put our films into uniform, because the individual film will be decadent by definition" (qtd. in Kelly 226). In the following section I will use the first American Dogme film, Harmony Korine's julien donkey-boy, as a means of exploring aspects of modern posthuman cinema to determine

140

Academy 35 mm is an outdated European format dating from the silent film era, but it dimensions are also those of a standard television screen (1:1.33), making it easy to film on digital video and then transfer the footage to film without altering the aspect ratio.

what features might allow a film to be categorized as "posthuman," and what can be gained by doing so.

American Dogma: julien donkey-boy

While David Lynch's works involve themes that can clearly be categorized as posthuman, they remain remarkably conservative in their actual construction on a technical level. Other than INLAND EMPIRE, Lynch has utilized the conventional technology and devices of mainstream Hollywood films to produce his radical visions. Yet a new school of filmmakers in the late-1990s took the posthuman project in an entirely new direction, one contingent upon new filmmaking techniques. The actor- director-filmmaker-musician Harmony Korine deserves special analysis for the unique posthuman style of directing evident in his second film, julien donkey-boy (1999). Perhaps best known for writing the screenplay of Larry Clark's 1995 film Kids while still in his teens, Korine has subsequently directed two obscure yet ultimately fascinating feature films. The first, Gummo (1998), is set in Xenia, Ohio during the aftermath of a tornado. It is essentially postmodern pastiche, pieced together out of wildly disparate elements such as stock footage, photographic stills, video images, and 35mm sequences. Korine employs professional actors as well as non-actors to create a hybrid: a quasi- documentary style that is also a parody of the documentary and docudrama forms.

Gummo failed commercially and critically, and was "by critical consensus… the most reviled film ever associated with the post-1990 American independent film movement"

(Sklar 261).141 However, the film attracted a sizable cult audience, including a number of Hollywood celebrities, which ensured its notoriety and allowed Korine to make a second film.

julien donkey-boy has no narrative in the traditional sense of the word. Julien is a murderous schizophrenic who works at a home for the blind and believes he is having an incestuous relationship with his pregnant sister. Their father, played by Werner Herzog himself—suggestive of a direct link to Herzog's own posthuman projects Fata Morgana

and Lessons of Darkness—abuses them and often sits alone in his room, wearing a gas mask and/or drinking cough syrup from a shoe.142 The film ends when Julien kidnaps his sister's dead baby from a hospital and leaps on a bus, watched by quietly horrified

passengers filmed secretly by Korine, not aware that they are in a movie. julien donkey- boy did not find as many champions as Gummo and received a limited release in America before being relegated to video and DVD. However, julien is actually a much more significant work in terms of posthuman theory. Korine filmed it according to the tenets of Dogme 95 after Lars von Trier contacted him and asked him to make the first

American Dogme film. Korine reveals that he was inspired by the offer, and conceived of a wholly different style of directing and editing for julien, one that would exist within the Dogme ideology and aesthetic:

Originally I'd had this idea of blanketing a huge wall with small camcorders, each one just a little bit skewed from the next in its point of view. So you'd have a set of views, maybe One through Fifty, all trained on the same subject. And I was interested in the idea of having to edit that footage, because you could approach it

141

Sklar does point out however that critic's polls frequently listed Gummo as one of the "best films, or most significant, or most underrated" (261), suggesting that time allowed for a reevaluation of the film's significance.

142

Korine was initially going to play Herzog's son onscreen, until he ultimately decided to remain behind the camera and cast Ewen Bremner in the role.

in a mathematical way. You could say, without looking, "Camera Fourteen to Camera Twenty-five to Camera Thirty-three." It would be completely random. (Korine qtd. in Kelly 199)

While Korine never actually built or utilized this wall of cameras, the device was later employed by Lars von Trier himself, who used over a hundred digital video cameras to film Bjork's dance routines from multiple angles in his death row musical Dancer in the Dark (2000). In this way, certain scenes in Dancer became merely transmissions of live events rather than scenes molded and recorded under the influence of a human director.143 Korine discarded his wall of cameras in favor of using over twenty small and mobile digital cameras, hidden in objects and in the clothing of the characters so that scenes became spectacles for the omnipresent cameras. Without knowing which camera to play to, actors became destabilized, resulting in some of the most unique, confused

performances in recent American independent film. The destabilization of the actors, the supposed locus of identification, results in the corresponding disorientation of the

audience, and disrupts both identification and voyeurism.

Ewen Bremner, who played Julien, reveals that often Korine was not even present on the set as a director: "Sometimes they left me alone with a camera. There were

occasions when the crew weren't even in the room with me. It would just be me getting on with it. It sharpens your wits, that responsibility" (qtd. in Kelly 186). Bremner also states that Korine's technique as a director involves "twisting the language of cinema into new shapes [which is] quite alienating for people who have grown up with certain

cinematic conventions" (Kelly 188). Yet this "new shape" seems to be one dependent on, or even formed by, the camera itself and not the director. When the actor is left alone

143

Of course scenes still must be assembled from this raw footage, but ceding control of the process of actually filming the footage removes a crucial level of directorial control, in the manner of Warhol ceding control of a to his typists.

with the digital camera, the camera becomes the director and its "choices" involving automatic exposure, focus, and white balance determine the image that viewers see. To interpret or analyze the film is to engage with an interpretation of the mechanical decisions of the camera, and therefore with the nonorganic and the posthuman. Like

Gummo, julien donkey-boy was one of the worst reviewed films of 1999, as Korine's uneasy blend of amateurish digital video footage and haphazard, nonlinear approach to editing created a film most critics deemed unwatchable. The few notable mainstream exceptions such as The New York Times and the Hollywood Reporter pointed out that it was an important film and represented a new kind of filmmaking, but also suggested that few people would appreciate it. However, what they failed to indicate is that the success of the film depends entirely on audience expectations: while it clearly fails as a cohesive narrative, or even as a postmodern "art film" meant to explore non-mainstream themes and characters, it succeeds as an example of what can be expected from posthuman cinema.

The first impression of the film is the ugliness of both the image and the soundtrack, which matches the unsavory nature of the characters. The viewer is made conscious that it is not a film image s/he is watching at all, but rather a blowup of a poor- quality video image. Unlike The Blair Witch Project, which integrated deliberately amateurish nature video footage into the story, by explaining it as "found" footage filmed by a group of students lost in the woods, Korine gives no such easy justification.

Deliberately garish "in camera" special effects are deployed, such as digital double exposures and other alterations of the image. Reviewers who were dismayed to stumble across such a visually unappealing film, especially after Gummo—whose 35mm

sequences had been shot by the famed cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier, best known for the aesthetically beautiful Leos Carax film Les Amants du Pont Neuf—essentially missed the point of both Dogme and Korine's project. In his essay "The Case of Harmony Korine," New York film critic Robert Sklar wrote that the film's use of "superimpositions, gradations of graininess in the image, out-of-focus shots, varying color tones and still frame images… make the film far more adventurous visually than any previous Dogme-certified work" (268). Indeed, the poor quality of the image is certainly intentional; the video was transferred to 16mm reversal film before being blown up to 35mm, merely to make sure that, in Korine's words, it looked "worse."144 In

addition, any attempt at stereotypically beautiful footage, such as an overexposed image of the actress Chloe Sevigny walking through a golden field of corn, is intentionally subverted by the shoddy nature of the video image. The colors are faded, the image is blurred and grainy, and there is no depth of field. Like Warhol's films, especially Poor Little Rich Girl, the image attempts to repulse the viewer. Even Sevigny, who once worked as a model, is made to appear unattractive in conventional terms, a subversion of her role as a "leading lady" in The Last Days of Disco or Boys Don't Cry. She is

costumed in thrift store clothes, pregnant, and sports a ridiculous hair-style. Bremner's Julian is also given a makeover of gold teeth and a greasy perm; Bremner, whose looks are naturally unconventional, is frequently used solely for comic relief in Hollywood films such as Alien Versus Predator and Pearl Harbor, so Korine's casting of him as the lead suggests an additional element of subversion. By destroying our visual pleasure in

144

Korine's 1998 photo book, The Bad Son, which features the grown up child actor Macaulay Culkin frolicking with his wife Rachel Miner on a bed, presents similarly manipulated photographs, in which digital artifacts and film grain merge to create images that resemble photocopies of tabloid newspaper photos.

the image and in the appearances of the actors, as well as any narrative pleasure à la Laura Mulvey, Korine is suggesting that we look elsewhere for meaning. While he is obviously not unique in doing this, he takes it one step further by marrying Warhol-style technique with a Lynchian fascination with the grotesque, and by casting subjects with unusual physical features or defects as his supporting cast.

Korine's approach to casting suggests that he is interested in actors—or rather "performers," to use his term—who are physically different from typical humans, as a way to explore the limits of the human form. His parade of deformed, mentally ill, and crippled people, along with a smattering of dwarves and albinos, indicates his interest in subverting audience expectations about what "movie stars" or even actors should look like. Among the more riveting performers in julien donkey-boy are an armless jazz drummer who plays drums with his legs, and a blind albino rapper who unspools a hypnotic rhyme. Of course Korine complicates the issue by claiming that he casts them for personal reasons, and a Lynchian (and Witkin-esque) fascination:

When people accuse me of being interested in things that are "grotesque," there are so many arguments in there that I don't understand. I'm attracted to girls with scars on their faces. I like girls with missing limbs. I always have. I'm sexually attracted to that. So a lot of times, what people

consider to be grotesque, I'm really aroused by. (Korine qtd. in Kelly 204)

Whether Korine's decision to make these people his "stars" comes from a desire to exploit them—as in the case of Pink Flamingoes' director John Waters encouraging his "star" Divine to eat dog excrement and Todd Browning of Freaks infamy casting real life circus "freaks" in his film—or a genuine attempt to display empathy, is uncertain. Either way, this kind of casting is a trait Korine shares with Lynch who has dealt both

exploited it in Twin Peaks and Lost Highway, suggesting an ambiguous attitude towards difference.145 Of course many of Korine's own comments about his film and its cast cannot be taken too seriously as he seems to enjoy subverting the interview process as well. When asked why he chose the Danish editor Valdis Oskarsdottir to edit julien, he replied "She wears mittens. And I like her fingers" (Kelly 197). When asked what he thinks will be the legacy of the Dogme movement, he answered "I just hope it can breathe underwater" (203). In fact, one of Korine's more notorious moments was a brief

appearance on the David Letterman show to promote Gummo in 1998, in which Korine seemed unable to answer Letterman's questions, and delivered a stream of consciousness ramble that prompted derisive laughter from the studio audience. Therefore, it is

sometimes hard to give much credence to Korine's comments in relation to his work. Yet Korine's statements about his "wall of cameras" and his "attraction" to unusual bodies have resonance, and I situate his work as posthuman due to several

factors. The first is his emphasis on exploring the possibilities of both technology and the human form. He was a pioneer working at the forefront of digital video to harness a potentially explosive form, long before mainstream Hollywood turned to digital cameras to create its images. Coupled with this focus on technique is his exploration of

posthuman bodies: bodies that function to produce the same fascination and anxiety as Michael Jackson's auto-cyborgian face, or the Eraserhead baby. Korine uses these as starting points for a diegesis on human identity, and I maintain that posthuman cinema

145

Lynch's use of midgets in Twin Peaks (both the film and the series) became so infamous it was parodied in Tom DiCillo's Living in Oblivion (1994). And Lynch's exploitation in Lost Highway of Richard Pryor, afflicted with multiple sclerosis and confined to a wheelchair, was noted by David Foster Wallace who wrote in "David Lynch Keeps His Head," that "Lynch is exploiting Pryor… letting the actor think he's been hired to act when he's really been hired to be a spectacle, an arch joke for the audience to congratulate themselves on getting" (189).

must involve a welding, or hybridization, of posthuman themes, like those Lynch expresses in Eraserhead, with the posthuman style and technology embraced by the Dogme movement. In fact, taking a cue from Dogme's Vow of Chastity, and these posthuman elements explored in julien donkey-boy, it seems possible to assemble a list of qualities that would constitute the definitive elements of posthuman cinema for the 21st century. As in the case of Dogme, not every element would need to be present in order to categorize a film as posthuman, although most would need to be inherent in the work. The following list, finding inspiration in the Dogme 95 manifesto, delineates ten aspects that appear to constitute the core elements of modern posthuman cinema in terms of posthuman bodies.

A Pseudo-Manifesto of Posthuman Cinema

1. The characters in posthuman films must have attributes beyond those of human