Using the Camera for Interpretation - Ekin Erkan

The resurgence of narrative experience via stylistic approach has been most deeply exposed via the Dogme 95 movement. As John S. Douglass and Glann Harnden mention in Using the Camera for Intepretation, cameras with larger focal lengths (35 mm still and motion picture film with a focal length of 50 mm for example) render a seemingly real theatrical depiction - there is no vast and extreme depth of field, with the subject's background much blurred. This is similar to what the human eye sees, with longer focal lengths accentuating small portions of the screen - punctuating and isolating small details much like the gazing observer. This narrative style, close to traditional storytelling, is what inspired filmmaking's roots - the emulation of reality (consider the strikingly real Lumiere brothers' L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat).
The Dogme 95 film movement is essentially a step to that of classical filmmaking in a narrative sense -
in an era where production and editing had wholly consumed modern film/Hollywood at the expense of aesthetic transportation, Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg established a manifesto in which filmmaking freedoms were restrained to those essential of bare storytelling:

1. Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in.
2. The sound must never be produced apart from the image or vice-versa.
3. The camera must be handheld. Any movement or mobility attainable in the hand is permitted.
4. The film must be in colour. Special lighting is not acceptable.
5. Optical work and filters are forbidden.
6. The film must not contain superficial action.
7. Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden.
8. Genre movies are not acceptable.
9. The film format must be Academy 35mm.
10. The director must not be credited.

Lars Von Trier's Menthe is a classical depiction of this bare filmmaking style, avant-garde in influence but minimalist in aesthetic. The starkly monochromatic film emphasizes incorporation of motif, threading storytelling through symbolism (it being ascension here, a motif Lars Von Trier would continue to implore in his later works). Rather than glamorous sound and editing, the grainy cassette-like narrative is hauntingly real and unadorned. Inspired by the novel Story of O, the film attempts to recreate the pain of human experience - entirely an emotional and unfiltered revulsion from the audience - with whitewashed scenes of chains and violent torturing. This is an ode to the deeply lost emotional core that can cause an audience to throb and rivet via aesthetic experimentation, not Hollywood kitsch bullshit. This is human art through storytelling, not Los Angeles soap opera.