Dogme 95

In 1995 two Danish directors published a set of vows that banned almost everything movies had learned: no sets, no brought-in props, no music, no tripod, no credit for the director.

They called it a Vow of Chastity, printed certificates, and dared the world to shoot film as bare as testimony. The first certificate went to Festen in 1998, a family gathering that detonates over dinner, shot on a camera that shakes because hands do. Von Trier’s The Idiots took certificate number two, and the numbers climbed as directors abroad took the vow. The founders broke their own rules within a few years and said so; the certificates stopped, but the cheap handheld honesty they legalized is now everywhere, uncredited, exactly as the vow required.