Lars von Trier's Europa Trilogy, No Longer an Essential Import

Okay, Crime Week was fun, but I did dip into a lot of common, mainstream DVD and blu-ray releases.  And while I do think there's a place for that here, and I'll surely do it more in the future, I also don't want to neglect, yaknow, the DVD exotica: cult, rare and off-the-beaten-path stuff, including lesser known imports that are actually far superior to their common, domestic counterparts.  DVDs that are still essential in the age of blu-rays and UHDs.  And to that end, I have this sweet German boxset of three of Lars von Trier's earliest films, collectively known as his Europa Trilogy.  It beat the pants off everything else that had ever been released in the states or anywhere else in the world at the time.  And despite being DVD-only, it still does.  Well, mostly.

Update 4/15/20 - 8/23/24: It's Day 6 of Update Week 2024, and this trilogy has gone from "Still an Essential Import" to "No Longer an Essential Import" thanks to Criterion's 3-disc blu-ray set from 2023.  And I've also added another DVD edition to our Monty Python's Meaning of Life page.

The Element of Crime is Trier's first feature film, from 1984, that really put him on the map as a celebrated filmmaker to watch.  It won awards at Cannes and various other festivals, but I'll be honest, I'm not its hugest fan.  It's a very visually stylish presentation of what I would call a very soulless police procedural, where a world weary flashes back to the time he was on the hunt for a serial killer who goes after young girls.  His only allies are a prostitute and his grizzled chief who suggests that in order to catch the criminal, he must think like the criminal, and really, it's like Trier took the screenplay out of a dusty old box of used Hollywood scripts just to have something to hang his imagery on.  He shot the film with sodium lights, which gives it an overbearing sepia look, and designs his vague European setting like a dark, industrial fantasy.  I've always gotten the sense that he never had any interest in the story; this is just something he created as a calling card to show he can craft a stylish looking film and find future work.

And while the look is technically impressive, even that starts to feel arbitrary pretty fast.  For me, this is a real throwback to the days when people were excited to see all the wild and kooky foreign films by directors like Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Pitof.  Then they came to Hollywood and applied their stylings to films like Alien 4 and Catwoman and we started to realize that maybe the emperors were wearing some pretty dumb clothes.  Thankfully, Trier went in a different direction, and created intriguing works of psychological substance.  But this one, in both the good and the bad senses, is like his City of Lost Children or Vidoq - interesting to look at in small doses, evincing some actual talent and a lot of care invested by the filmmakers, but still probably best left in the 90s.  A quick taste, like watching the trailer, is promising, but ultimately sitting through the entire feature is just a chore.

Element debuted on DVD right here in the US (with the possible exception of an obscure Spanish DVD, which may or may not've come out first) through the Criterion Collection in 2000.  It's the edition many of you probably still own, since this film has yet to be released on blu anywhere in the world.  But I've happily given it up for the fancy, special edition boxed set released by Zentropa Entertainment itself.  Essentially identical copies of this set were released in various European regions, like Denmark and Finland... I opted for the 2005 German set distributed by Legend Home Entertainment just because it came out first.  Though now, of course, I've got an even newer edition in HD thanks to Criterion's 3-disc Europe Trilogy box set.

1) 2000 US Criterion DVD; 2) 2005 DE Zentropa DVD; 3) 2023 US Criterion BD.

Both discs present the film in roughly 1.85:1.  Criterion's DVD is more like 1.81:1 and trims a little along the edges.  Their BD is 1.90:1 and puts that trimmed stuff back.  But they're all reasonably close.  The DVDs are both also dark and murky DVDs. Criterion's DVD is a little darker and it's colors are a tad deeper, but that often just makes it harder to make out what we're supposed to be looking at.  I will give that Criterion one thing: it hangs onto more information in the bright areas.  Zentropa's edition is generally brighter and more contrasty, which flares out the brightest areas, losing information in the headlights and electric lamps above.  I generally appreciate Zentropa's boost in gamma just because it adds a little extra definition.  But flaring is just the indelicate-type of consequence one usually praises UHDs for, so I have to say, in those select areas of the screen, I do actually prefer Criterion's results.  In the shadowy parts, I prefer Zentropa.  In the end, it was more or less an underwhelming tie.

ltr: 2000 US Criterion DVD, 2005 DE Zentropa DVD, 2023 US Criterion BD.

They're both left in the dust by the new blu.  Look at this close-up; that lettering is so much more accurate now.  Both DVDs are plagued by sloppy smudge that the blu neatly tidies up.  This film was shot on film, and Criterion has gone back to the original camera negatives with a fresh 3k scan that takes the film to a whole new playing field.  And it's brightened up to the point where you can actually make out everything that's going on, though you still lose some info in the highlights, like in those same lamps.  That's an awfully small price to pay for those massive gains.

Originally, Zentropa took a little more of a lead in the audio department.  The Criterion DVD offers us the original English 2.0 track, with optional English subtitles, while Zentropa has the 2.0 and a 5.1 remix, with optional English, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Norwegian, Romanian and Swedish subs.  Now the blu whittles that back down to just the original English track with optional English subs, but now that audio is in lossless LPCM.

Nocturne

And now here's where Zentropa really peels away and leaves Criterion coughing in their dust.  Criterion has one extra besides the trailer: a roughly 50 minute documentary on Trier called Tranceformer.  If that sounds familiar, that's because it's been around the block.  I already wrote about it being included as an extra on The Kingdom, and it's been included as an extra elsewhere, like Umbrella's 3-disc Trier collection.  If you don't already have it, it's a good doc and definitely one you'll want to have in your collection.  But for most of us Trier fans, by then it was likely a duplicate feature.  Still, it's a welcome inclusion, and what's more, the Zentropa set hasn't got it.

But oh boy, what it does have.  How about two audio commentaries, for starters?  One by Trier along with cinematographer Tom Elling and editor Tomas Gislason, and another with two critics.  Then it's got its own, exclusive half-hour doc on Trier, and a nice, 20-minute retrospective on Element itself.  The one problem? The English subtitles are messed up on this featurette (and they're not speaking English), playing German subs even when you select English.  Everything else in this set is English friendly; it's just a glitch on this one featurette.

Anyway, it's also got Nocturne, an early (1980) short film by Trier with optional commentary and commentary outtakes.  Plus the trailer and a 16-page booklet.  And that's just this disc.  Besides discs 2 and 3 for the other two films that are also packed with features, there's a fourth disc full of documentaries and interviews.  I'll be delving into it all below, but I'll just briefly state here that this is a packed special edition, and the only proper special edition Element's ever gotten.

Next up is 1987's Epidemic.  If you've already spent the last couple weeks in lockdown working your way through Contagion, Outbreak, Cassandra's Crossing and every other pandemic-related film, you'll want to be sure you didn't miss this one.  I still wouldn't rank it among Trier's best work, but at least now I care about his characters and the unfolding plot in addition to the director's superficial stylizations.  Here Trier essentially plays himself as a screenwriter, who writes with a partner to make a tight deadline.  The film they write is about a doctor struggling against a modern plague, and we quickly enter that story within a story, where Trier also plays the doctor and Udo Kier appears.  The two "worlds" blend into each other, becoming one bleak overall reality and it's all a heck of a lot more engrossing than Element.

Home Vision released Epidemic on DVD in the states first in 2004.  In fact, Nocturne was also included on this release as a bonus.  And this time around, it really is more of a proper special edition.  Still, Zentropa's edition has even more stuff.  And it's since been bumped up to HD with Criterion's 2023 BD.

1) 2004 US HVE DVD; 2) 2005 DE Zentropa DVD; 3) 2023 US Criterion BD.

Epidemic was shot partly in 16mm and partly in 35mm, so the picture quality jumps around.  It's more noticeable in  HD, since the DVD softens things down to a bit more of an even playing field.  In the shots above, the first set is from 35 and the second is 16.  Both DVDs present the film in a pillarboxed 1.63:1 ratio with mostly very similar framing, except in the case of the 16mm stuff.  You can see in the second set of shots that the Zentropa is zoomed in losing information around all four edges.  Another distinction: the film is entirely in black and white except for a large, red watermark that appears through almost the entire film.  But as you can see above, the hue differs between the two discs, at some times looking cooler on the HVE disc, and other times looking warmer.

The new is truer black and white throughout and framed 1.78:1 for the 35 stuff, revealing more on the sides and making the mattes just slightly tighter.  And it's back 1.66 for the 16mm footage, restore the info Zentropa had cropped out.  It's also true black and white, as opposed to HVE's alternating tints.  Most importantly, it's another new 3k scan of the original negatives.  Now their booklet just says "the original 16mm camera negatives," but the 35 footage doesn't look like it was blown down (so to speak) to 16, so that might just be an over simplification on Criterion's part.  At any rate, it's a much clearer image, especially in the 35 areas, with much cleaner lines and fine detail.  In comparison, it looks like the DVDs have light edge enhancement, though that may just be a compression issue.  Anyway, it's all right on the blu.

In terms of audio, it's almost the same story all over again, except in this case, HVE doesn't offer any subtitles at all, while Zentropa has the nine language options.  And again, Zentropa adds the additional 5.1 mix in addition to the 2.0, while Criterion just gives us the original lossless audio and English subs.

Images Of a Relief

Like I said, though, this time HVE's disc is more of a proper special edition.  Besides Nocturne, it includes an Epidemic commentary by Trier and his co-writer and co-star Niels Vørsel.  Oh and they have the Nocturne commentary, too.  And it also includes the 2000 documentary about Trier, FreeDogme.  As you can guess from the title, it's about his dogme project(s) rather than Epidemic, and while this Zentropa set doesn't include it, it can be found on their Dogme '95 boxed set where it's a little more fitting.  Zentropa has the same commentary, plus another exclusive retrospective featurette about Epidemic, where they interview the cast and crew.  And this time it has another early Trier film as a bonus: 1982's Images Of a Relief.  Oh, and both discs have the trailer.  So while HVE's release is a little more competitive in the features department than Criterion's, once again, Zentropa is the one to own.  Especially considering the whole fourth disc we haven't gotten to yet.

The final film is 1991's Europa, a.k.a. Zentropa.  Yes, Trier's company was named after this film, which I'll keep referring to as strictly Europa, just so things don't get confusing.  With it's fascinating use of rear projection blending color and black & white footage, it's as stylish and experimental as any of the films in this trilogy.  But it's also the most conventional, in the sense that its tense thriller plotting means it's the only one of the three that can even win over general audiences who don't typically care for "art" films.   An American soldier versus evil Nazis on a train!  What more can you want?  An all-star cast?  Okay, this time around, Trier's brought in Eddie Constantine, narrator Max von Sydow, The Kingdom's Ernst-Hugo Järegård and another perfect turn by Udo Kier.

Now, it used to be that the only way to own Europa was a barebones Tartan disc from the UK.  I no longer have it for this review since I got rid of it long ago, because it's been easily bettered both by Zentropa's boxed set and a 2008 Criterion 2-DVD set, then of course again by Criterion's 2023 BD.

1) 2005 DE Zentropa DVD; 2) 2009 US Criterion DVD; 3) 2023 US Criterion BD.

In terms of the DVDs' PQ, again, there are differences, but overall, it's a pretty close call.  Zentropa mattes the picture a little tighter at 2.38:1, as opposed to Criterion's 2.33, which also has more on the left.  And as you can see, there are clear differences in the colors... during the portions where there are colors.  Zentropa's also a little more contrast heavy in the black and white sections.  It's another no-strong-preference situation, made utterly academic by the new blu.  It essentially has the Zentropa framing at 2.39:1, with colors and contrast that feel like the happy medium between the two previous DVDs.  And the HD image is just decidedly sharper and clearer.  Just look at those sideburns in the second set of shots; they tell you need to know.

Audio?  Yeah, you know the story by know, with Zentropa adding the extra 5.1 and all the subtitles, though Criterion's DVD does have English subs again.  And while the original audio track has a mix of languages spoken in it, and it's the same on both discs, Zentropa also has an additional all-German dub if you want to give that a whirl.  But only the new blu has lossless audio.

The Making of Europa

There's no bonus film from Trier's early works this time around, but both releases include more about Europa itself.  Zentropa has an audio commentary by Trier and producer Peter Aalbaek Jensen, plus a second, partial (one of those ones where it's only over select scenes) by Trier with actor Jean-Marc Barr and Udo Kier.  There's another retrospective featurette and a longer 'making of' documentary.  Plus there's the trailer.

Criterion has most of the same stuff, including the main commentary, the featurette, the trailer, and the 'making of' doc.  It doesn't have the second partial commentary with Barr and Kier, though.  But it has some more stuff, specifically a 45-minute documentary called Trier’s Element, a featurette on Trier as observed by his friends and collaborators, and a unique one on Europa's locations.  Then there are on-camera interviews with cinematographer Henning Bendtsen, composer Joachim Holbek and a lengthy one (43 minutes!) with Trier himself.

Emily Watson in Im Laboratorium Deas Doktors Von Trier

But if that sounds like Criterion has scored a bunch of exclusives, we must remember that fourth disc!  That Trier's Element documentary?  That's on there, as are both featurettes and the Bendtsen, Holbek  and Trier interviews.  In short, everything.  And the Zentropa disc has still more!  There's another half hour doc called Portrait of Lars Von Trier, which seems to have been made for Danish television and the short One Day with Peter, about producer Peter Jensen, which is actually from the Filmbyen DVD, and a hour+ doc titled Im Laboratorium Deas Doktors Von Trier, which takes us from his early short films through The Idiots.  And finally there's an on-camera interview with Tom Elling about Element of Crime.  Oh, and there's a trailer reel for every Trier film that had been made up to that point.

 

So yeah, the Zentropa set was downright overloaded with exclusives, plus all the extras featured on any other edition.  The only exceptions are the Tranceformer and FreeDogme documentaries, which are otherwise available on other Trier releases.  In 2020 I wrote, "one wonders why there aren't blu-ray alternatives that've come to take this set's crown."  Well, Criterion has, and they've included almost all the extras from these Zentropa sets in their Europe Trilogy box set, including Tranceformer.  But, disappointingly, they didn't seem to have room for Im Laboratorium Deas Doktors Von Trier or Nocturne.  But on the other hand, they fixed the missing subtitles issue on that Element of Crime featurette, which is a nice win.  They didn't create any new extras, but the ones from their 2009 Europa DVD are still here, and they've included an attractive, 26-page booklet.  Anyway, with the boost to HD it's the obvious win, but if you've got to the Zentropa, hang onto it for those remaining three exclusive extras.  For everything else, watch the blus.

Lars von Trier's Kingdom: A Complicated History

Oh, boy. If you weren't collecting DVDs back in the early 2000s, you missed a lot of headache and over complication. Lars von Trier's The Kingdom (or Riget, originally) was and is one of the greatest, craziest television mini-series ever produced. It was released on a ton of different DVD editions in a ton of different countries, and they all had different things wrong with them, with each release fixing one or two issues, sometimes introducing another, and slowly inching our way to a respectable home edition. Forget double-dipping, we were quintuple-dipping! But we finally got there in the end.

Update 5/1/24: It's a big update for The Kingdom.  Trier has finally completed the trilogy, and now all three series have been compiled on blu from Mubi in one comprehensive set.

Until recently, there have really been two Kingdoms, Kingdom I and Kingdom II, a trilogy that went unfinished... due in large part to the passing of lead actor Ernst-Hugo Jaregard. The Kingdom was full of wild and wonderful characterizations, but Jaregard still managed to stand out as the greatest performance. But even without a perfectly satisfactory conclusion, The Kingdom is a hell of a ride. The "kingdom" of this story is a high-end Denmark hospital, which is not only haunted but staffed with such a colorful cast of characters, they manage to make the ghosts look pale by comparison. Captivating and endlessly entertaining, each Kingdom consisted of four, hour-long episodes... mostly.

Occasionally, the series was broken up into five episodes, depending on what country you ordered this from. And that's just one of the many screwy quirks that made the various DVD editions as almost as eccentric as the show itself. Unfortunately, I sold off a lot of my older copies as I upgraded them, so I can't present the ultimate library screenshot comparison. But it's really not that important, because so many of the older discs were so flawed and without lasting, redeeming qualities (meaning unique extras or something), there's really no reason to go back to them. Still, I did own them at one point, so I can briefly run down the deals for some of the important .

The first set of DVDs came from China. They were NTSC and had English subtitles, so they were the original go-to DVDs. Unfortunately, the subtitles were terrible. They had constant spelling errors, mis-translations, and would sometimes just go away, leaving entire monologues untranslated. They also cut two of Trier's closing monologues, where he would speak directly to the audience during the closing credits.

Then the PAL DVD came out from ICA Projects in the UK. That one I've actually still got, so we'll take a second look at it a little further down. But the basic story with this one is that it had better picture quality and subtitled Trier's monologues, plus it included Tranceformer, an excellent, hour-long documentary on Trier. BUT - and this is a big but - it's cut. Some sites report it as missing only a few seconds of graphic violence, but that's not true. It's missing a bunch of stuff, often completely innocuous material, which was probably just shaved for more commercial time. It's also the first release to edit the series into five episodes instead of four. And they only released The first Kingdom, so it left you hanging for Kingdom II anyway.

Seville released it next, in Canada. They still broke the show up into five episodes, but weren't missing all the footage the ICA Projects disc was. For a while, this was the best release. It had forced subtitles, no extras, and never got to Kingdom II. But at the time, you couldn't do better. Oh, and are you wondering how the show could have special monologues at the end of every episode, then be re-cut to include an extra episode and still somehow have a monologue for the end of each episode? They just repeated the closing from episode three on episode four and hoped nobody would notice it was the same thing twice. :/

Then, in 2003, Triers' own company, Zentropa Films, did it right. And that's the main DVD edition we're going to focus on here. There have been subsequent releases: Koch in the USA and Madman in Australia, which essentially mirror the Zentropa release. And in 2011, Second Sight reissued it in the UK, with all of the features and qualities of the Zentropa disc, plus Tranceformer.

And finally, Mubi has brought the series to HD, with a brand new, 7-disc set (four discs for The Kingdom I & II, and three for Kingdom: Exodus, which I'll swing back to later), in both the US and UK.  For years, I've known to be Mubi just a streaming platform that held a couple of interesting titles, like the new Kingdom, hostage behind their paywall.  But lately they've branched into physical media, and I'm excited to welcome them to the fold.  They've got all the episodes, uncut, with improved translations, and all the extras from the Zentropa set (except the music video).  One potentially controversial detail, though, they're re-framed everything to widescreen.

1) 2002 ICA Projects DVD; 2) 2003 Zentropa DVD; 3) 2024 Mubi BD.

So starting with the DVDs, the first thing you might notice is that even though ICA fixed the horrendous subtitles of the old Chinese discs, Zentropa still wound up producing still alternate translations. Both discs are slightly windowboxed, non-anamorphic 1.41:1 transfers (specifically, they're non-anamorphic full-frame 3:4 with slight letterboxing to matting them further down). The Kingdom II, which is only available in the Zentropa set, is given a slightly taller 1:34.1 frame. The Kingdom was intentionally given a funky, grainy look, so it's never going to look anywhere near pristine, but improved picture of the ICA disc has been pretty well duplicated on the Zentropa disc. Image quality-wise, they're about the same, except ICA's has a lower contrast, less saturated and more washed out look.

So, I had the opportunity to ask the head of remastering the first two seasons about the new framing on blu-ray.com, and he had this to say, "The original seasons were shot on super 16mm celluloid film which is closer to the 16:9 AR with 1.66:1. It was then cropped to fit the 4:3 AR of TVs. The remastered has more footage on the sides and a slight crop in top and bottom." And yup, that bears out.  In the shots above, we can see a bit more on the sides, with a little less along the top in the first set, and less along the bottom in the second.  It's nice that they took time to carefully re-frame things.  I still wish they hadn't taken the liberty to get all revisionist and change the AR, but I can't honestly say it bothers me that much.  And it's worth noting that the restoration was done by Zentropa, not Mubi themselves, which at least adds a little legitimacy to any creative adjustments made for these new transfers.

What will jump out at you much more distinctly than the aspect ratio when you first fire up one of the blu-rays is the grain.  Wow, is this grainy!  Makes sense for 16mm, and it's safe to assume the DVDs smoothed it all away just by virtue of being unable to render it all.  But when you zoom in close, there is a very pixelated look to the grain, suggesting some sharpening or other tinkering, which could be the result of the new remastering or something Trier did to the footage in the 90s.  I don't know, but it's not just natural film grain.  Looks like some edge enhancement, too, or the unsharpen tool; like they worked a lot to "fix" this footage.  But they also appear to have recovered actual, additional detail (look way down the hall), so for the most part you could call it a success.

Apart from that, the saturation looks more like the Zentropa than the faded ICA, with some of the original colors popping back up (i.e. the garbage bag in the second set of shots appearing the most visibly blue).  A welcome fix is to the video tape-y color separation.  Note the green haloing in the lights (and other spots) in the second set of shots.  That's been cleaned up.  In brief, I think most viewers will find it a much less soft, frustrating viewing on their modern sets, but they'll be saying, "WOW, is this grainy!"

And now, 25 years after The Kingdom II ended, we have the final chapter: Kingdom: Exodus - a move likely inspired at least somewhat by Twin Peaks: The Return.  Fans will be happy that this gives a satisfying conclusion, presumably close to what we would've gotten in the 90s, but with some accommodations for the leap forward in time.  Sadly, of course, some actors couldn't return, but many do, and we get some newer, younger doctors added to the mix.  Alexander Skarsgård drops by to play the son of his father's character, while the most exciting new cast member is surely Willem Dafoe.  I don't want to spoil any of the many surprises, so I'll just quickly say that this really is the third and final chapter, not just some new material tacked on.  And aside from Trier taking a few grumpy/ easy jabs at wokeism and a couple corny little comic misfires, it's great and everything fans have been hoping for.

2024 Mubi BD.

Exodus maintains the color-drained sepia look of the original series, as well as 1.78:1 aspect ratio if you're going with the blu-rays all the way through the run.  In fact, the new episodes start with the same bleach pit opening as the 90s episodes.  That's probably part of why they re-framed the old series to 1.78, to make all the Kingdoms feel of a piece.  Still, you'll immediately notice that Exodus isn't nearly as grainy as the previous series, and what grain is here looks like actual film grain.  Detail is now much clearer, so the new shows still have a distinct look.  You can tell they're starting with a much higher def image.

The audio situation is the same across all three Kingdoms.  ICA's subtitles are burnt in, but Zentropa's are optional, and they offer a plethora of language choice, including: Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian, Swedish and the English.  Mubi has the original audio in both 2.0 and 5.1 DTS-HD, with removable English subtitles.

Extras-wise, the ICA disc just has the Tranceformer documentary, but it's pretty darn good, and it's not on the Zentropa disc. That's actually the reason I've held on my ICA DVDs while I sold my other old sets. The doc was also included on Criterion's DVD of Elements of Crime, however; so if you've got that there's no reason to bother with the ICA anymore. And, as I said, Second Sight included it on their 2011 release.

But Zentropa introduced a bevy of Kingdom-specific extras. First, Trier provides an audio commentary, along with co-writer Niels Vorsel and editor Molly Stensgard. They don't tackle the entire 8+ hours, but they do sections of each episode, which can be directly accessed from the Special Features menu. It's not in English, but there are English subtitles for the commentary audio. There's also a 25 minute Behind the Scenes featurette, a second 40 minute one entitled In Lars von Trier's Kingdom, a collection of "outrageous" television commercials directed by Trier and starring Jaregard, a music video for the show's main theme, bloopers from that music video, and a collection of trailers for Trier's other films.

Mubi basically retains all the Zentropa extras, except for the music video and its bloopers, without adding anything new.  It's disappointing they couldn't have gotten any interviews or anything for Exodus.  But at least they include a full-color 24-page booklet with a new Trier interview talking about the new series.  You should definitely read it; as it answers a lot of questions (not in-story but about the thinking behind everything), and it's as satisfying as you could hope for outside of a proper video piece on disc.  They also throw in six art cards of Exodus images, and the whole thing is packaged in an impressive, fold-out digipack and outer slipbox.

The Kingdom is a fantastic series, and fortunately, the horrible state it was in on DVD has been corrected. The missing footage, broken subtitles, screwy-five episode format, etc were cleaned up in Zentropa's 4-disc set, and all subsequent DVDs have used their improved set-up, down to the extras. And then Mubi gave us HD remasters and, of course, Exodus, which is of course absolutely essential. You might, if you're a real stickler, want to hang onto one of the DVD sets (but nothing from before 2002!) for the sake of the original 4:3 aspect ratio.  But I'm completely happy with the new set and think the upsides more than make up for the arguable downsides.

The Original and Definitive Dogme '95: Celebration, The Idiots, Mifune and The King Is Alive

Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinternerg's Dogme '95 was a film movement we may need even more now in the age of "superhero fatigue" than we did in 1995, but thankfully it's legacy can still live on; and even though the officiators are no longer judging and certifying Dogme films, there's no reason why anyone can't make a film adhering to the rules today.  The idea essentially was to strip away the artifice and the spectacle of modern filmmaking, and push filmmakers to again focus on the story and heart of a movie.  Shooting must be done on location, the sound must never be produced apart from the images, the film must contain no artificial action (such as murders and weapons), etc.  The suggestion was never that all films should become Dogme films; and the stripped down aesthetic perhaps lured too many amateur and aspiring filmmakers as opposed to the sort of industry veterans it was intended to inspire.  But the movement persisted for nearly a decade and saw the creation of several dozen films from all around the world.  And these are the first four, released individually (mostly in the US) and as a fancy boxed set called the Dogme Kollektion in Denmark.

Update 3/17/17 - 1/11/22: Well, here's an unexpected development: Criterion has issued as a 2-disc special edition blu-ray.  Is there any point to releasing a film, not just shot on DV, but on cheap, little personal camcorders in the 90s? Well, let's find out.

Dogme #1: Vinterberg's Celebration (originally Festen) is still my favorite of all the Dogme films (though admittedly I missed a lot of the later ones).  There's a massive family reunion for Helge, but no one can understand why his eldest son Christian is acting completely out of control... except his sister or who shares his dark secret.  It becomes a dark, brutal struggle between the rest of the extended family to stay together and Christian to reveal the truth.  It's based on an original screenplay, but has since been adapted to stage on Broadway and around the world, where it's fame, particularly in London, may have since eclipsed the original film.  But The Celebration is powerful, and still holds up as a fascinating, low-fi watch you can't tear your eyes away from.

Universal/ Focus Features released this Stateside in 2004, with a straight-forward barebones edition that I immediately replaced with 2005's Danish box set from Zentropa Films.  And now in 2022, I've triple-dipped to check out Criterion's 2-disc blu-ray set.

2004 Universal DVD top; 2005 Zentropa DVD mid; 2022 Criterion BD bottom.

So this was shot on standard definition, old DV tape camcorders, and shakily handheld at that.  So it's a bit absurd to fuss over image quality.  Still, the Zentropa disc does have a sliver or two of extra picture and slightly warmer colors.  For those curious, which certainly includes me, the 2018 Danish 2k restoration that Criterion's using an 35mm answer print (the film was shot on DigiBeta tapes, then blown up to film) doesn't really add any fresh detail, but it does sharpen up the noise of the transfer, and the color timing hints at a little extra depth with a little less bleeding.  But it sheds a few pixels of that additional picture in the process (still handily trumping Universal in that regard).  Overall, it is a slight upgrade, but perhaps not one you'd recognize as such without zooming into screenshots for a direct comparison like this, and on its own, hardly worth replacing discs over.

More importantly, though, the English subtitles aren't just forced but burnt into the picture on Universal's DVD, whereas they are optional/ removable on the Criterion and Zentropa discs, the latter of which also offers the alternate language options of Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish.  A point for Criterion, though: they present the original mono track in lossless PCM.  So Criterion's in the lead, but they're fairly neck & neck, and far ahead of the Universal, a distance that will only stretch further as we look at the special features.

The US DVD has the trailer on it.  The Zentropa has the trailer, several deleted scenes including an alternate ending, audio commentary by the director (and yes, all the extras are English friendly, by the way), an hour-long documentary on screenwriter Mogens Rukov, an on-camera interview with Vinterberg where he explains that this is all based on a supposedly true story told over the radio by a mental patient, a half-hour retrospective documentary with the cast and crew and the trailer.  And that's just on the main Celebration DVD.  The Zentropa bonus disc includes a 25-minute behind-the-scenes documentary made during the filming of The Celebration, and a whole bunch of additional deleted scenes (one of which is over 15 minutes long), with optional commentary by the director.  I mean, just the deleted scenes alone would have made this an essential upgrade for me, but this is a packed special edition.

And Criterion's release is a packed special edition, too, carrying over most of the Zentropa extras: the commentary, the behind-the-scenes doc, the retrospective, the Vinterberg interview, the trailer and the deleted scenes. When I read the specs for this release, I was a little worried they would just have one of the two sets of deleted scenes featured on the Zentropa disc, but no, they're all here, with the optional commentary.  They also have the ADP: DOP featurette from Zentropa's bonus disc.  They lose the documentary on Rukov, however, and the docs about Dogme '95 in general, that are also on the bonus disc, have been replaced with a 2003 documentary about Dogme '95 called The Purified.  As you can imagine, it covers much the same ground, but for those of us who already have the set, it's nice to get something different this time around.

And that's not all that's new.  They've also conducted their own, brand new interview with Vinterberg, and included two of his early short (and they're not so short) films: Last Round (this one stars the brother from The Celebration rather than Mads Mikkelsen, and is a surprisingly arresting drama for an early short) and The Boy Who Walked Backwards.  It also includes a 20-page booklet with notes by Michael Koresky.  All told, it's a very satisfying collection of extras to rival Zentropa's.

Dogme #2: Everyone associates Dogme '95 with Lars von Trier, naturally; but he's actually only made one Dogme film, The Idiots.  I wouldn't hold it up as one of his better films or one of the best Dogme films, but it's certainly worth seeing once, at least.  It certainly doesn't have the most likeable characters, as a collective of young adults perform a sort of communal social experiment where they pretend to be mentally handicapped to reap any benefit society will bestow upon them while reveling in the discomfort they 'cause the local community.  Still, one woman is taken in by the strangely therapeutic side of their "spassing" and "channeling their inner idiot" and decides to join them.  But how long can they really maintain the lifestyle?

The Idiots garnered a lot of controversy, not only for the many offensive things you can imagine would pop up reading the above description, but also for frank sex and lots of full frontal nudity.  As such, it's the only early Dogme film not to have been released in the US.  So us film fans naturally imported the 2000 UK disc by Tartan.  But again, I was all too happy to replace it in 2005.

2000 Tartan DVD on top; 2005 Zentropa DVD below.

The Tartan disc is frankly puzzling.  Not only are the colors quite different (possibly the result of the filters used on the film behind Trier's back and against Dogme rules that they later had stripped off) and the subtitles once again burnt onto the picture, but Tartan letterboxed it.  Another one of the Dogme rules is that the film be in traditional Academy ratio and film-stock (yes, most Dogme films were shot digitally, but they all had to be transferred to final 35mm prints... despite appearances, Dogme '95 was really not a game for aspiring, amateur filmmakers).  So this is clearly the wrong aspect ratio, and in this case, a particular violation.  And all it does is lose picture information, cropping it to a very unusual 1.63:1.  On top of that, the DVD's non-anamorphic.  So yeah, I can't imagine what the folks at Tartan were thinking, with the Zentropa disc being a serious upgrade in just about every way.

And of course, that includes extras.  The Tartan disc just had an interlaced trailer and a stills gallery.  Yeah, it claims an interview with Trier on the back of the case, but that's just a short text-only thing.  The Zentropa disc, of course, comes through for real.  We get the trailer, audio commentary by Trier and several deleted scenes including an alternate credits sequence.  And most compellingly, we get the feature-length documentary, The Humiliated, about the creation of The Idiots, which might actually be more a more important film than The Idiots itself.  And again, that's just the main Idiots DVD.  The bonus disc has a bunch more: a half-hour retrospective documentary, a featurette on the color filters controversy I mentioned earlier, a 20-minute interview with Trier, and an "Idiots All Stars" music video.

Dogme #3: Mifune.  Admittedly, when I first saw Mifune (a.k.a. Mifine's Last Song), I didn't like it.  It felt really pandering, like some Hollywood schmaltz, and it kind of is.  It's about two brothers, one of whom is mentally handicapped, who are left to run a farm when their father dies.  And the one brother keeps the other brother's spirits up by pretending to be a samurai named Mifune (named after Toshiro Mifune, from all the Kurosawa films), who he convinces lives on the farm with them.  But on later viewings, I have to say the story of the prostitute and her young brother, who move in with them, is actually fairly affecting.  If it's Hollywood-style schmaltz, it's at least good schmaltz.  The film is well acted and the director makes things work more than they should, which is especially impressive given the strict Dogme limitations.  He couldn't exactly lather on a sentimental soundtrack, for example.

Columbia Tri-Star released this one in the US, but again, this Zentropa set crushes it.

2000 Columbia Tri-Star DVD top; 2005 Zentropa DVD below.

We gain some ground and we lose some.  The subtitles are happily not burnt onto the Columbia Tri-Star DVD, but the colors are as off as ever (overly green this time) and now we've got a serious interlacing problem.  Admittedly, the digital nature of these Dogme film gives a little interlacing to each of them; but the US DVD clearly has a problem, which the Zentropa disc fixes. It also reveals a little more picture along the sides.  And the Zentropa image has more detail, which is awkwardly smoothed away from the Columbia effort.

On the other hand, this is the first Dogme DVD that had some solid special features the first time around.  Or at least one big one: audio commentary by the director.  It also has the trailer and some bonus trailers.  Well, the Zentropa disc carries the commentary and trailer over, but also adds a lot more.  There's also a bunch of deleted scenes, with optional commentary, a 45-minute documentary called On the Road With Mifune, about promoting the film, taking it to film festivals, etc, a half-hour 'making of' doc and a 20-minute retrospective.

Dogme #4: The first three Dogme films got bigger commercial receptions, but you can feel that The King Is Alive is in some ways a bigger movie, with higher picture quality and American stars including David Bradley, Brion James and Jennifer Jason Leigh near the peak of her fame.  It's the story of a busload of international tourists who break down in the heart of an African dessert, and with little hope of rescue or escape, keep their sanity by putting on a performance of King Lear while they await the inevitable.  This is the darkest, most nihilistic Dogme yet, which is saying something considering Lars von Trier had already made one.

MGM released this DVD in 2002, but does it stand up to the Zentropa re-release?  Guess.

2002 MGM DVD top; 2005 Zentropa DVD below.

Picture quality-wise, it may be the closest approximation yet, but MGM's DVD has an interlacing problem that Zentropa fixes.  Zentropa also finds a sliver more picture along all four sides.  They also might have a smidgen more detail, but it's very close.  Really, the interlacing is the only significant distinction.  ...Until you get to the extras, of course.  The MGM DVD only has the trailer, but Zentropa has the trailer, commentary by the director and a 23-minute retrospective.

So the Dogme box-set blows all other international releases of the first four films away.  But wait, that's not even all!  Discs #4 and 5 also have a wealth of documentaries and shorts about the Dogme movement itself.  The King Is Alive's disc also includes three featurettes called The Birth of Dogma 95, Marketing Dogma and The Inheritance After Dogma (yes, all spelled with a's instead of e's), which range from 15-35 minutes each.  They consist of on-camera interviews with all the directors and producers looking back on their experiences.  Then the bonus disc has more documentaries on Dogme, this time collected from other countries.  There's a silly one called Wag the Dogma, where the director chases after Trier and other Dogme heads for interviews and turns the rules into a country song.  There's a more serious, hour-long doc called Freedogme, the aforementioned featurette about Trier's DoP, Anthony Dod Mantle, and a short featurette about Dogme films playing at the Cannes and Berlin film festivals.

And finally, the short documentary Lars From 1-10, which Warner Bros had released on a few short film compilations previously, is included here as well.  I was happy to be able to sell my Shorts 07: Utopia DVD when I got this set.  🙂  Oh, and there's a 16-page booklet with notes by Peter Schepelern, which yes, is in English, too.

So the set is easily the definitive release for at least three of these four films, and it's still a fair rival for Criterion's new Celebration blu.  It's a must-have box for fans of Trier and co. or anyone interested in the Dogme '95 movement in general.  Of course, back in 2005, I was able to order this set new from a number of sources.  Now, in 2017, I was googling around and the Dogme Kollektion seems pretty scarce.  But I only spent a minute or two on it; if you put in a little more effort you might find a better deal.  For my part, I can tell you that it'll be worth it.  After that, if you still feel you want more, Criterion's Celebration will give you an extra boost.