Festen

15/01/2025

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The real is not quite the same thing as realism, and we will later distinguish the two all the better to understand an important aspect of Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen. Realism is often contrasted with formalism, with the latter concerned with making cinema distinguish itself from the reality it extracts as a recording device, and realism proposing that cinema should take full advantage of the simple fact that, unlike the other arts, it can minimise the artifice and maximise the use of locale. As Sigfried Kracauer proposed: “all this does not imply that camera-realism and art are exclusive to each other. But if films which really show what they picture are art, they are art with a difference. Indeed, along with photography, film is the only art which exhibits its raw material.” (Theory of Film) But if realist film theory often saw cinema relying on the opposite of formalist strategies — on longer takes, capturing the location’s sounds and showing working-class life — then this was complicated for example by formalism’s absorption of these elements. Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Bela Tarr’s Damnation are not conventionally realist works but the takes are long, the astuteness to sound as readily as soundtrack often evident, and the main characters are poor. In contrast,  Festen, a film that wished to help generate a revolution in realist film, constantly cuts within the action, has the muddiest of soundtracks and its leading characters come from the Danish upper classes. Depending on perspective, Stalker and Damnation can seem realist and Festen formalist.

             Yet rather than getting too lost in definitional categories, we can try and understand the sort of realism Festen insists upon. One of the first two Dogme films (the other Lars von Trier’s The Idiots), it came out of a cooked-up manifesto by Von Trier and Vinterberg. If its ten commandments look like they could have been hastily put together on envelopes or fag packets rather than on Moses’ tablet, this may have been part of the intention. It was as though the two Danes wanted to create a provocation as readily as a thesis. They offered a new, ad hoc theory of film, and among its principles were that there should be no extra-diegetic sound, the camera must be handheld, shooting must be done on location and the film must contain no superficial action. If the manifesto was realist it was contrarily so, seeing too many films reliant on big-budget, cross-cutting action, full of guns and elaborate plotting. It proposed films could be made cheaply and specifically: stories needn’t exaggerate their plots to find drama in local circumstances. As fellow Dogme filmmaker Lone Scherfig proposed: “usually directors accept a low-budget without taking the consequence, and try to shoehorn a big film into a small frame, which is suicidal….Whereas Dogme enables us all to see a way of fighting the usual low-budgets — you can turn them into an advantage.” (The   Name of This Book is Dogme 95) The theory might have seemed knocked off but it was serving a clear purpose: to allow filmmakers not to compete with Hollywood but to bypass it with a different style. Realism had become pragmatic. 

            It also allows Festen a nice irony. While the subject matter focuses on the wealthy; the means are impoverished, as though Vinterberg wished to comment on so many ostensibly realist films of the past (from Umberto D to the contemporaneous La haine) that would use elaborate camera set-ups to capture the poor. Now digital video cameras could capture the rich without the film itself having vast sums of money, as Vintererg shows us a family, and its friends and colleagues, gathering for a father’s 60th birthday party at the patriarch’s hotel. But a tragedy lurks in the recent past and a confession awaits that will illuminate that tragedy and turn the patriarch’s world deservedly upside down. Two months before the event, his daughter took her life in one of the hotel rooms, with the film hinting at revelation when the younger brother Michael tells his older sibling Christian in a jokey manner, “I could fuck you right here”, and later when the sister Helene tells Michael after he grabs her breast  “…don’t do that, I’m your sister”.       

        The real meets realism when Christian decides in front of the numerous guests to give a speech. He proposes his father choose between two envelopes: a green one and yellow one. The father chooses the green one and it contains details of the man sexually abusing Christian and his late sister. The gathered guests don’t know how to react and assume it is a joke even if nothing in Christian’s demeanour or expression indicates he is anything other than serious when he says: “he raped us. Had sex with his little ones.” Why doesn’t everybody get up and leave, rather than staying and continuing to enjoy the host’s hospitality? This is where the real as Real comes in. Mark Fisher puts it well, quoting the psychoanalytic philosopher Jacques Lacan. “For Lacan, the Real is what any ‘reality’ must suppress; indeed reality constitutes itself through just this repression. The real is an unrepresentable X, a traumatic void that can only be glimpsed in the fractures and inconsistencies in the field of apparent reality.” (Capitalist Realism) In Festen, the apparent reality is that the patriarch is a generous, caring man, with many friends and this needn’t be contrary to another truth that he is also a paedophile. But when you have an established reality confronted with a new reality, people have difficulty comprehending this shift and often need further adjustments before accepting it. 

    Subsequently, it isn’t the father who is dismissed but Christian, who is seen to be sick and troubled as everybody continues to enjoy the party and the host’s hospitality. Christian has been inhospitable; ruining the occasion instead of augmenting it. Yet before the end of the film, even if only hours have passed, the guests begin to adjust to the new reality, to the imposition of the Real, and all the more so after Helene reads a letter she finds written by the dead sister before she died. The dead sister speaks of her father and the guests begin to realise that the children were abused, and as the father's power is weakened he tries to reassert it. He violently loses his temper as he insists the port must be passed and nobody will do so. 

        What makes the film interesting isn’t that power is impregnable but that it is structural: the reason people are initially reluctant to accept Christian’s version of events isn’t because they might believe he is lying, or joking, but that he doesn’t have power. He doesn’t own the hotel, he hasn’t invited all the guests, and he isn’t the friend to everyone that the patriarch is seen to be. If it has often been a fashionable post-modern notion that reality is a construct and that a realist theorist like Andre Bazin was naive next to the developments in structuralism and post-structuralism that proposed you couldn’t arrive at realism just by looking carefully at the world. Yet that doesn’t mean it is especially flexible either. One reason why Christian offers it as a semi-joke in the first place as he gives his father the green and yellow options, is because he knows that it isn’t enough that the truth is casually disclosed; it is often incrementally received. Truths, whether personal or universal, whether concerning one person’s life or a nation’s fate, often can’t just be delivered — they have to be absorbed. We all know this from any film or TV show announcing a loved one has died in an accident or been murdered: they start by saying they have something to tell them, continue by stating there has been an accident; that the person should go with them to the hospital, and then announce their loved one has passed away. 

      Equally, revolutions often fail before they succeed, and there are great films from Battleship Potemkin to The Battle of Algiers dealing with pre-revolutionary failures that can be seen retrospectively to have helped create the circumstances for radical change. Sometimes it needs a peppering of dissent, a steady accumulation of radical material to make people see the changes that need to come. Historians Asa Briggs and Patricia Clavin note, in the context of the French Revolution, that “no fewer than 752 pamphlets and other printed papers were published between September and December 1788, and 2639 during the first four months of 1789.” (Modern Europe: 1789-Present). If reality isn’t given, neither is a change of perspective easily achieved. 

           Festen is a very fine film as it recognises both in form and content that showing reality and transforming it are part of the same problematic, and this indicates a difference from the sort of realism Bazin proposed. Bazin was not the simple-minded realist some structuralists and semioticians wished to present him as, but he could say, of Germany Year Zero, Roberto “Rossellini is perhaps the only filmmaker in the world who knows how to get us interested in an action while leaving it in its objective context.” (Bazin at Work) Colin McCabe’s problem with such realism was that “for the facts presented by the camera, if they are not ordered in fixed and final fashion amongst themselves, are ordered in themselves. The camera, in Rossellini’s film is not articulated as part of the productive process of the film.” (Screen) Vinterberg’s digital delirium robs us of such apparent Bazinian certitudes as the camera can find itself at the wheel of the car (the front wheel and not the steering wheel as we would expect), looking down from the ceiling, hurtling through a corridor, and appearing as if it has fallen out of the cameraman’s hands. While 70s documentaries were often called fly on the wall, Festen’s camera is more a fly in the ointment, an irritation insisting its presence be constant. Vinterberg and his cameraman Anthony Dod Mantle wanted, too, an image that would be in a state of fragmentation. “You’re talking serious decomposition here. You’re talking words like ‘disintegration’ and ‘destruction’.” (The Name of this Book is Dogme 95)

     But for Mantle this was reflective of the content: “I just wanted to find a cinematic language that could convey that pretty catastrophic, pitiful — also amusing — situation these people were in.” (The Name of this Book is Dogme 95) We could read this is as a metaphor for social breakdown that Mantle seems to propose when he speaks about appropriate metaphors in the same interview, but we could equally say that if film is going to revolutionise realism, to show that realism needs to incorporate the Real, then it isn’t enough to show reality as it is: with film form superseding content and showing a beautiful country hotel in elegant establishing shots, cranes or drones capturing the grounds, and interior tracking shots showing objects of wealth and privilege. Instead, the camera punkishly prods its way into the familial mess and suggests it is on the side of revolt over convention. It was far from alone in doing this stylistically and we can’t pretend that Festen didn’t coincide with a technological shift (in digital cameras) and a formal collapse of mise en scene that we might rue. Between 1998 and 2003 we had Chuck and Buck, TimeCode, The Book of Life, The Blair Witch Project, Eloge de L’amour, Russian Ark, Tadpole, Full Frontal, The Idiots and Tape, with many important works among them. But the form quickly became a mannerism and even films shot on celluloid resembled digital cinema, as though the realist and the gritty could be captured simply by invoking the restlessness of the camera. As David Bordwell said of The Bourne Ultimatum: “could anybody reconstruct any of these stations, streets or apartment blocks  on the strength of what we see?” (Minding Movies) 

     What can seem an innovation that serves a specific purpose becomes a convention that once again hides the Real and doesn’t even let us see vividly the mise en scene or the full nature of an action. Bordwell frets, “sometimes, as in a fight scene, the camera is just too close to the action to show everything” (Minding Movies) That isn’t a problem in Festen, where the camera wants to show a limited purview in a world that needs to change, with a patriarch who cannot confront his past. It reckons that the technique can give to realism an aspect of the Real but as soon as it becomes another convention, the Real closes again and we are left with something worse than before. It is of course potentially a problem in any revolutionary act, which is why Trotsky believed in what he called permanent revolution and why, cinematically at least, we might concur. If realism is a construct, and the Real impossible to access without constructing a world that will reveal it, then the filmic revolution must indeed be ongoing. 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Festen

The real is not quite the same thing as realism, and we will later distinguish the two all the better to understand an important aspect of Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen. Realism is often contrasted with formalism, with the latter concerned with making cinema distinguish itself from the reality it extracts as a recording device, and realism proposing that cinema should take full advantage of the simple fact that, unlike the other arts, it can minimise the artifice and maximise the use of locale. As Sigfried Kracauer proposed: “all this does not imply that camera-realism and art are exclusive to each other. But if films which really show what they picture are art, they are art with a difference. Indeed, along with photography, film is the only art which exhibits its raw material.” (Theory of Film) But if realist film theory often saw cinema relying on the opposite of formalist strategies — on longer takes, capturing the location’s sounds and showing working-class life — then this was complicated for example by formalism’s absorption of these elements. Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Bela Tarr’s Damnation are not conventionally realist works but the takes are long, the astuteness to sound as readily as soundtrack often evident, and the main characters are poor. In contrast,  Festen, a film that wished to help generate a revolution in realist film, constantly cuts within the action, has the muddiest of soundtracks and its leading characters come from the Danish upper classes. Depending on perspective, Stalker and Damnation can seem realist and Festen formalist.

             Yet rather than getting too lost in definitional categories, we can try and understand the sort of realism Festen insists upon. One of the first two Dogme films (the other Lars von Trier’s The Idiots), it came out of a cooked-up manifesto by Von Trier and Vinterberg. If its ten commandments look like they could have been hastily put together on envelopes or fag packets rather than on Moses’ tablet, this may have been part of the intention. It was as though the two Danes wanted to create a provocation as readily as a thesis. They offered a new, ad hoc theory of film, and among its principles were that there should be no extra-diegetic sound, the camera must be handheld, shooting must be done on location and the film must contain no superficial action. If the manifesto was realist it was contrarily so, seeing too many films reliant on big-budget, cross-cutting action, full of guns and elaborate plotting. It proposed films could be made cheaply and specifically: stories needn’t exaggerate their plots to find drama in local circumstances. As fellow Dogme filmmaker Lone Scherfig proposed: “usually directors accept a low-budget without taking the consequence, and try to shoehorn a big film into a small frame, which is suicidal….Whereas Dogme enables us all to see a way of fighting the usual low-budgets — you can turn them into an advantage.” (The   Name of This Book is Dogme 95) The theory might have seemed knocked off but it was serving a clear purpose: to allow filmmakers not to compete with Hollywood but to bypass it with a different style. Realism had become pragmatic. 

            It also allows Festen a nice irony. While the subject matter focuses on the wealthy; the means are impoverished, as though Vinterberg wished to comment on so many ostensibly realist films of the past (from Umberto D to the contemporaneous La haine) that would use elaborate camera set-ups to capture the poor. Now digital video cameras could capture the rich without the film itself having vast sums of money, as Vintererg shows us a family, and its friends and colleagues, gathering for a father’s 60th birthday party at the patriarch’s hotel. But a tragedy lurks in the recent past and a confession awaits that will illuminate that tragedy and turn the patriarch’s world deservedly upside down. Two months before the event, his daughter took her life in one of the hotel rooms, with the film hinting at revelation when the younger brother Michael tells his older sibling Christian in a jokey manner, “I could fuck you right here”, and later when the sister Helene tells Michael after he grabs her breast  “…don’t do that, I’m your sister”.       

        The real meets realism when Christian decides in front of the numerous guests to give a speech. He proposes his father choose between two envelopes: a green one and yellow one. The father chooses the green one and it contains details of the man sexually abusing Christian and his late sister. The gathered guests don’t know how to react and assume it is a joke even if nothing in Christian’s demeanour or expression indicates he is anything other than serious when he says: “he raped us. Had sex with his little ones.” Why doesn’t everybody get up and leave, rather than staying and continuing to enjoy the host’s hospitality? This is where the real as Real comes in. Mark Fisher puts it well, quoting the psychoanalytic philosopher Jacques Lacan. “For Lacan, the Real is what any ‘reality’ must suppress; indeed reality constitutes itself through just this repression. The real is an unrepresentable X, a traumatic void that can only be glimpsed in the fractures and inconsistencies in the field of apparent reality.” (Capitalist Realism) In Festen, the apparent reality is that the patriarch is a generous, caring man, with many friends and this needn’t be contrary to another truth that he is also a paedophile. But when you have an established reality confronted with a new reality, people have difficulty comprehending this shift and often need further adjustments before accepting it. 

    Subsequently, it isn’t the father who is dismissed but Christian, who is seen to be sick and troubled as everybody continues to enjoy the party and the host’s hospitality. Christian has been inhospitable; ruining the occasion instead of augmenting it. Yet before the end of the film, even if only hours have passed, the guests begin to adjust to the new reality, to the imposition of the Real, and all the more so after Helene reads a letter she finds written by the dead sister before she died. The dead sister speaks of her father and the guests begin to realise that the children were abused, and as the father's power is weakened he tries to reassert it. He violently loses his temper as he insists the port must be passed and nobody will do so. 

        What makes the film interesting isn’t that power is impregnable but that it is structural: the reason people are initially reluctant to accept Christian’s version of events isn’t because they might believe he is lying, or joking, but that he doesn’t have power. He doesn’t own the hotel, he hasn’t invited all the guests, and he isn’t the friend to everyone that the patriarch is seen to be. If it has often been a fashionable post-modern notion that reality is a construct and that a realist theorist like Andre Bazin was naive next to the developments in structuralism and post-structuralism that proposed you couldn’t arrive at realism just by looking carefully at the world. Yet that doesn’t mean it is especially flexible either. One reason why Christian offers it as a semi-joke in the first place as he gives his father the green and yellow options, is because he knows that it isn’t enough that the truth is casually disclosed; it is often incrementally received. Truths, whether personal or universal, whether concerning one person’s life or a nation’s fate, often can’t just be delivered — they have to be absorbed. We all know this from any film or TV show announcing a loved one has died in an accident or been murdered: they start by saying they have something to tell them, continue by stating there has been an accident; that the person should go with them to the hospital, and then announce their loved one has passed away. 

      Equally, revolutions often fail before they succeed, and there are great films from Battleship Potemkin to The Battle of Algiers dealing with pre-revolutionary failures that can be seen retrospectively to have helped create the circumstances for radical change. Sometimes it needs a peppering of dissent, a steady accumulation of radical material to make people see the changes that need to come. Historians Asa Briggs and Patricia Clavin note, in the context of the French Revolution, that “no fewer than 752 pamphlets and other printed papers were published between September and December 1788, and 2639 during the first four months of 1789.” (Modern Europe: 1789-Present). If reality isn’t given, neither is a change of perspective easily achieved. 

           Festen is a very fine film as it recognises both in form and content that showing reality and transforming it are part of the same problematic, and this indicates a difference from the sort of realism Bazin proposed. Bazin was not the simple-minded realist some structuralists and semioticians wished to present him as, but he could say, of Germany Year Zero, Roberto “Rossellini is perhaps the only filmmaker in the world who knows how to get us interested in an action while leaving it in its objective context.” (Bazin at Work) Colin McCabe’s problem with such realism was that “for the facts presented by the camera, if they are not ordered in fixed and final fashion amongst themselves, are ordered in themselves. The camera, in Rossellini’s film is not articulated as part of the productive process of the film.” (Screen) Vinterberg’s digital delirium robs us of such apparent Bazinian certitudes as the camera can find itself at the wheel of the car (the front wheel and not the steering wheel as we would expect), looking down from the ceiling, hurtling through a corridor, and appearing as if it has fallen out of the cameraman’s hands. While 70s documentaries were often called fly on the wall, Festen’s camera is more a fly in the ointment, an irritation insisting its presence be constant. Vinterberg and his cameraman Anthony Dod Mantle wanted, too, an image that would be in a state of fragmentation. “You’re talking serious decomposition here. You’re talking words like ‘disintegration’ and ‘destruction’.” (The Name of this Book is Dogme 95)

     But for Mantle this was reflective of the content: “I just wanted to find a cinematic language that could convey that pretty catastrophic, pitiful — also amusing — situation these people were in.” (The Name of this Book is Dogme 95) We could read this is as a metaphor for social breakdown that Mantle seems to propose when he speaks about appropriate metaphors in the same interview, but we could equally say that if film is going to revolutionise realism, to show that realism needs to incorporate the Real, then it isn’t enough to show reality as it is: with film form superseding content and showing a beautiful country hotel in elegant establishing shots, cranes or drones capturing the grounds, and interior tracking shots showing objects of wealth and privilege. Instead, the camera punkishly prods its way into the familial mess and suggests it is on the side of revolt over convention. It was far from alone in doing this stylistically and we can’t pretend that Festen didn’t coincide with a technological shift (in digital cameras) and a formal collapse of mise en scene that we might rue. Between 1998 and 2003 we had Chuck and Buck, TimeCode, The Book of Life, The Blair Witch Project, Eloge de L’amour, Russian Ark, Tadpole, Full Frontal, The Idiots and Tape, with many important works among them. But the form quickly became a mannerism and even films shot on celluloid resembled digital cinema, as though the realist and the gritty could be captured simply by invoking the restlessness of the camera. As David Bordwell said of The Bourne Ultimatum: “could anybody reconstruct any of these stations, streets or apartment blocks  on the strength of what we see?” (Minding Movies) 

     What can seem an innovation that serves a specific purpose becomes a convention that once again hides the Real and doesn’t even let us see vividly the mise en scene or the full nature of an action. Bordwell frets, “sometimes, as in a fight scene, the camera is just too close to the action to show everything” (Minding Movies) That isn’t a problem in Festen, where the camera wants to show a limited purview in a world that needs to change, with a patriarch who cannot confront his past. It reckons that the technique can give to realism an aspect of the Real but as soon as it becomes another convention, the Real closes again and we are left with something worse than before. It is of course potentially a problem in any revolutionary act, which is why Trotsky believed in what he called permanent revolution and why, cinematically at least, we might concur. If realism is a construct, and the Real impossible to access without constructing a world that will reveal it, then the filmic revolution must indeed be ongoing. 


© Tony McKibbin