Dogma 95 has been heralded as the European alternative to the Hollywood Blockbuster. For many critics and film lovers, Dogma 95 and Von Trier’s films have become synonymous with the notions usually associated with independent filmmaking: low budgets and realism. Von Trier’s approach to filmmaking, however, takes cinema beyond the traditional confines of film aesthetics and radically transposes the practice of filmmaking and film itself right into what has become the paramount genre of new media: games and gaming. Dogma 95, this book argues, is not an exceptional phase in Von Trier’s career—as it was for his cofounders—but the most ...

README.first is a bilingual collection of mini-essays, published in the run up to the Plokta film festival. We’ve asked writers, researchers, theorists, artists, programmers, and others to pick an online video that functions as a stepping stone for their thought and practice and to comment shortly on why they find the video so significant, funny, or outright disturbing. The resulting reflections speak about Silicon Valley obsessions, our mediated social lives, the impact of technology on centuries old games, and more.