Dogville-4

I can honestly say watching Dogville was tough, very tough, but as written by Walter Benjamin, the camera assumes a  “Messianic-prophetic power” thus making the cinema a “technical apparatus which permits one to forget anthropological lack”. I guess the power of Dogville was the articulation of space which helped to create a basic but dramatic and choreographic rhythm of  the whole film.

“Film is one medium capable of overcoming the physiological, historical, and ideological limitations of the human body by acting as a prosthetic extension of our perception, providing us with a complete vision of ourselves through variable framing and editing.” For Dogville, the entire setting… … it is very seldom that film has a movie set that does not involve buildings, city, nature parks etc unless it is like broadway, but even then it has props and backdrops and stuff, I think Dogville was really difficult to stomach when you are watching and even after that it takes a lot out of you…

In an interview with Von Trier, it was written that “by the end of this long long film, the director wants us to believe that the human species is just naturally incline to evil and that like a dog who cannot help but behave in a dog-like fashion, humans simply can’t be expected to live up to their owh high ideals”

Also, looking at Grace based on Kant, her sexual and physical abuse is a kind of cannablism and that she becomes a consumable thing.

It is scary… on a micro scale, looking at office politics for example, the way people will sacrifice others to get what they want or macro scale, the politics bigger countries with the power, the things they do and how people suffer…its hard not to ponder what is the value of human life today…

Somehow strangely when watching 4 i found myself thinking of Dogville.
Maybe i was dwelling on the human relation aspects…

To express what i got out of 4, i have to quote from the 2nd article in the reader

“We live with agency, perhaps but not really identity”
“We create elaborate alter egos for ourselves”

Unlike Dogville, i was confused by the message that 4 was sending out at the end,
it was realistic depiction of the way people behave but then it was at times bleak yet somehow at the ending you walked out feeling that not all was lost? (get it?) hmmm