Playing the waves : Lars Von Trier's game cinema

Dogma 95, the avant-garde filmmaking movement founded by the Danish director Lars von Trier and three of his fellow directors, was launched in 1995 at an elite cinema conference in Paris€”when von Trier was called upon to speak about the future of film but instead showered the audience with pamphlets announcing the new movement and its manifesto. A refreshingly original critical commentary on the director and his practice, Playing the Waves is a paramount addition to one of new media€™s most provocative genres: games and gaming. Playing the Waves cleverly puns on the title of one of von Trier€™s most famous features and argues that Dogma 95, like much of the director€™s low-budget realist productions, is a game that takes cinema beyond the traditional confines of film aesthetics and dramatic rules. Simons articulates the ways in which von Trier redefines the practice of filmmaking as a rule-bound activ