Talk:The Celebration

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The Celebration is not birthday celebration, at least this is not essential, the essential celebration is the celebration of the listening to the avoided truth.

I propose a new plot summary which focuses on Christian's character, not Helge's. Because without Christian's character (and his confrontation with the long-avoided truth that nobody - including himself - did not want to listen to) the Festen would be just yet another boring birthday party on movie.

Despite aversive ignoring of basic obligations that any human society obliges any father with (not to abuse his own children), the Helge's character would keep enjoying the society's respect, as indeed many perpetrators of these kinds of crimes do in reality. But not in the Festen.

Christian's character's determination to confront the genetically programmed psychological responses such as self-victimizing loyalty of victims to their perpetrators (see Stockholm syndrome), such as denial, such as memory-avoidance (inappropriately called memory-repression, although it is avoidance), by confronting both his father, his wife (who happens to be Christian's mother) and the whole world, who never wanted to see the truth (Christian's mother once saw her husband sodomizing him as little boy, but did not protect him, she closed the door and pretended she saw nothing), nor wanted to listen to his painful story.

(I wander how many of the victims of the childhood sexual abuse by their parental figures even try to talk about it, even to a psychotherapists if they look for a therapeutic help for some reason, and for how many of them it is too hard to bring it up to anybody at all and walk around emotionally dead until they die (emotionally they are already partly dead)...?).

Therefore I don't think "The story centers on Helge"! No! Maybe in real life everything revolves around perpetrators who are protected by the shield of truth-avoidance by the society and themselves, but in this movie this is happly not the case.

The perpetrator, "Helge is the subject of a family reunion..." and enjoys society's respect, only until his victim is not determined to tell the truth. In this movie Helge's character happens to be subjected to long-avoided truth.

Festen is the celebration of truth, that all of them - including Christian - wanted to go away, but it did not go. His sister even committed suicide in order to kill her memories, and her story - because nobody in society wanted to listen.

I disagree, too, that this celebration "is marred by the recent suicide of Helge's daughter and by ... Christian". Without Christian's determination to stop running from the truth, there would be no celebration of the truth at all, just yet another birthday party.

SloContributorSince2005 14:50, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

I don't I agree with the line "The Celebration's use of the dogme rules makes the film look like a home video." This movie is shot on film, not video, and there are not many scenes where the camera shakes excessively. The scenes are framed very well, and the film has several strikingly artistic shots. It's true that the film feels very "real", but the 'home video' comparison is, in my opinion, misleading.

Statolith 23:39, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

Technical Correction

This was shot on video, but was then subsequently blown up to film for distribution. It is an irony of the rules of Dogme, since people now associate DV with Dogme. In fact one of the rules of Dogme was that films should be shot in Academy 35mm format.

With regards to the assertion that it looks like a home video, I believe this to be true and that this is an asset to the film. In Richard Kelly's book 'The Name of this Book is Dogme 95' he refers to the film as having a disturbing home video feel and I must agree that it certainly makes the film feel that much more real or true.