Author: June Chen, a Media and Communication studies student in Xi'an Jiaotong-liverpool University.
The shot from 01:36:49 to 01:37:15 appears at the end of the sixth chapter of the film. This part uses the Crane Shot with the rotating zoom, mainly showing the scene of Grace after being raped by Chuck and paving the way for the transition to the seventh chapter of the film.
The shot is a Crane Shot with rotating zoom. This shot begins with a close-up of Grace's body in ragged clothes after being raped. Afterwards, the camera is rotated 540 degrees while using dolly zoom, and the things in the image expanded from Grace to Chuck's entire room and then to the entire town. The whole shot is accompanied by a tragic soundtrack played by violin, and a narration explaining the story appears.
The first few seconds are a brief overhead close-up shot of Grace's body. The close-up shot here is distinguished from the close-up of the character's face in general, but the close-up of Grace's body. The reason why it is a close-up shot is to compare with the future frame.
From the perspective of the characters, Grace's body occupies the frame, and we can clearly see her body movements and clothes. At this time, Grace had just been raped, lying on the carpet in Chuck's room and curled up. Her hands close the clothes she had just torn by Chuck to cover her body that was forced to be bare, and then at 01:36:55,Grace embraces her with her hands and stroked her arms, as if comforting herself who had just gone through the ordeal. We can see clearly from her reaction that she is in deep pain. Grace herself is like her expensive clothes that were torn apart. The originally pure and proud Grace was forced to suffer irresistible abuse under the power, and Grace's soul begins to shatter.
Later, the Crane Shot follows rotating zoom to move the camera. The total Rotation angle of the entire shot is 540 degrees. As the camera continues to rise vertically, the depth of field increases. Although the frame is still centered on Grace, it covers the entire town from only Grace to Chuck's home to the end. Rotating zoom, as a special shooting technique, sets off a mysterious atmosphere, implying that the storyline has turned and then the story turns into a mystery. Here, with Grace as the center, continues to rotate and expands the depth offield. The slight dizziness brought by the rotating zoom makes the audience feel a little pain and the anxiety of Grace. As the depth of field increases,Grace in the frame gets smaller and smaller, and it looks like she is constantly falling into the abyss. It suggests that Grace's miserable situation in town is becoming more and more unrecoverable, and her soul is constantly sinking. This part of the plot pave the way for her later attempt to escape from Dogville.
The entire Crane Shot stops after rotating 540 degrees. When it rotates to 360 degrees, the center of the frame begins to shift from Grace to the center of Dogville. The panorama of Dogville became the protagonist of the frame, and Grace's small body becomes an easily overlooked part in the lower left corner. Just like Grace's status in Dogville, she is so small that her dignity is not taken seriously. Although the brutal rape incident just happened, Dogville still lives as usual. The invisible wall implies in the dramatic effect that people are bullying Grace, even if they see and understand the cruel facts, they will pretend to live invisible.
It can also be seen in the frame that above Grace is the position of the dog. She is parallel to the dog and moves similarly, implying that Grace has become a dog-like existence in Dogville. She no longer deserves to have an independent personality in the town, she can only be forced to surrender to power and become people's lackey and tool. This also implies that she will live like a dog in Dogville in the future, and will not be able to live normally when she is tied to her neck inthe future.
The final frame can also be seen as a God’s perspective. Chuck said that Grace is like the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. The image presented from the perspective of God implies that God has felt the occurrence of sin and will punish it. Under such a God's perspective, the audience can objectively see the full frame of the matter, which is conducive to introspection.
The background music of this shot starts when Tom attempts to enter the room to the end of the whole shot. The music intercepted the song of Cum Dederit (Nisi Dominus) Antonio Vivaldi and renamed it Grace Gets Angry. Different from the non-background sound of normal clips, the sound of cello and violin here makes the frame more tragic, highlighting Grace's tragic situation, and implying Grace's angry and humiliated mood. The narration is a clear middle-aged male voice. In the narration, we can know that Grace escaped the search after being insulted. Chuck deceived her, the hat was indeed Tom's.
Regarding the panorama of Dogville in the final panorama, this is a simple idea to streamline the theater. The audience will quickly ignore the fact that there is no any physical building. In this way, the audience can independently carry out imaginative town construction. But more importantly, it can make people focus on people (Lübecker, 2011). The final frame embodies the Alienation effect extended to dogma95. According to Brecht (2014), the effect of Alienation effect can be derived from the stage design to make the audience aware that they are in the theater. This shot can be seen that the panoramic view of Dogville is a studio scene. The Dogville panorama has no houses. The walls and roads are delineated by white lines on the concrete floor. The names and various landscapes are written directly on the ground in English. The director built a small symbolic world in the studio, allowing people to consciously think about all the symbols in the movie. Meanwhile, it promotes people's thinking when watching movies. At the same time, the invisible wall makes people pay more attention to the interaction between people that were originally invisible in the dramatic effect, instead of being completely limited to the screen shown by the director.
Grace's situation will begin to truly turn in this shot. She has become a dog in the town, and when she is enslaved, she also begins to degenerate.
Reference List:
Brecht,B. (2014). Brecht on Theatre. Eds. Silberman, M., Giles, S. & Kuhn, T.London, New Delhi, New York, Sydney: Bloomsbury.
Lübecker,N. (2011). Lars von Trier’s Dogville: A Feel-Bad Film. In Horeck, T. andKendall, T. (Eds.).The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe (pp.157-168).Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Probable portrait of Vivaldi [Image]. (1723). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Vivaldi
Windeløv, V. (Producer), & Trier, L.V. (Screenwriter/ Director). (2003). Dogville [Movie]. Denmark: Trust Film Sales ApS.
