The stated purpose of the Dogme 95 manifesto is to strip the art of filmmaking of its decadent trappings and to return it to the purity that resides behind movie illusion. Theoretically, the Dogme Vow of Chastity should force the filmmaker and, therefore, the viewer, to confront the essentials presented on the screen without intervention or amelioration. Resin, the first American Dogme film is an example of the movement at its best. The work has an explicit political agenda, and if the film is read simply as polemic, it is successful in making clear the tragic absurdities in the California penal code. However, Resin transcends its politics and renders an unforgettable portrait of a human being caught in the dispassionate machinery of a society which first alienates then destroys him. The camera's unrelenting eye, stripped of artifice, binds us to Zeke in his struggle with a system in which he clearly never had a chance and forces us to confront his vulnerability, the inarticulate youthfulness which is helpless against the slick maneuverings of the forces marshaled against him: the public defenders, the narcs, the prosecuting attorneys. In Resin, the Dogme technique of apparent cinematic artlessness, paradoxically, has itself become art, while the practices employed in the destruction of movie illusion have created a far more complex illusion: the sense that we have somehow come to know and to lament as real, a young man who exists only on film.
