Dogme 25: media primitivism and new auteurism in the age of artificial intelligence

The promulgation of the Dogme 25 Manifesto during the 2025 Cannes Film Festival precipitated significant discourse within the global cinematic community, positioning itself as both an heir to and transcendence of the Dogme 95 movement. Both manifestos serve as critical defenses of cinema’s ontological essence and creative autonomy in their respective technological epochs: digital technology for Dogme 95, and artificial intelligence for Dogme 25. Through the implementation of stringent creative protocols, Dogme 25 presents a formidable resistance to technological alienation in the era of artificial intelligence, while simultaneously reaffirming cinema’s ontological value through the praxis of media primitivism. Moreover, Dogme 25 engenders a reconfigured notion of auteurism within the AI-dominated landscape, emphasizing the resurgence of human subjectivity within a post-human paradigm. Ultimately, this movement elucidates its theoretical contributions and practical implications for preserving and enhancing the ontological and humanistic value of cinema in the age of artificial intelligence.

1 Introduction

In May 2025, coinciding with the 78th Cannes Film Festival, the cinematic manifesto “Dogme 25” was promulgated. This new declaration, collaboratively authored by a quintet of Danish and Swedish filmmakers, rapidly garnered attention within the global cinematic community. Its ideological proximity to Dogme 95 and its self-proclaimed position as “A Rescue Mission and a Cultural Uprising”¹ led to its characterization as “a new revolutionary film movement,”² suggesting its potential paradigm-shifting impact on contemporary cinema.

Dogme 95 (1995), initiated by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, proposed a ten-rule “Vow of Chastity” to strip filmmaking to its essentials in response to the early rise of digital video. Dogme 25 (2025), announced at Cannes by a group of Scandinavian filmmakers, adapts that format to the AI-dominated present. Our comparison is not merely chronological: it juxtaposes two distinct media regimes—early consumer digital video and today’s algorithmic/AI infrastructures—under which similar ascetic programs are articulated for different ontological and industrial reasons.

Significantly, the year 2025 marks the 30th anniversary of the original Dogme 95 Manifesto, creating a compelling historical parallel. While Dogme 25 pays homage to its predecessor’s ideological legacy, notably through the adoption of the “Vow of Chastity” format, the two manifestos emerge from distinctly different technological milieus. Dogme 95 was conceived during the incipient stages of digital cinema in the 1990s, whereas Dogme 25 arises in an era characterized by the ubiquity of artificial intelligence and algorithmic data processing in the digital domain.

This historical juxtaposition positions Dogme 25 as both a continuation and a reimagining of the 1995 Dogme movement. More critically, it raises a fundamental epistemological question for cinematic art in the age of artificial intelligence: How do evolving technological contexts engender diverse forms of cinematic manifestos and aesthetic movements? Specifically, in the era of AI, what ontological and aesthetic challenges will cinema encounter with the emergence of AIGC (Artificial Intelligence Generated Content) technology, particularly in the realm of text-to-video generation?

The advent of Dogme 25 represents an aesthetic and philosophical response to this new paradigm, embodying both resistance to technological determinism and a forward-looking exploration of cinema’s ontological future. It serves as a critical examination of film’s essence and the evolving nature of auteurism in an increasingly AI-mediated creative landscape, thus contributing to the ongoing discourse on the intersection of technology, art, and human creativity in the field of cinema studies.

2 Dogme 95: redefining cinematic authenticity in the digital age

Launched in 1995 by Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, the Dogme 95 movement marked the birth of a radical movement in film aesthetics. Its core program, the “Dogme 95 Manifesto,” explicitly proposed to cleanse all falsehoods and pretensions in film-making, and return to simple and truthful narratives. To this end, the Manifesto formulated the famous “Vow of Chastity”—ten near-harsh rules of filmmaking to determine whether a film could be categorized as a “Dogme 95 film.”

Dogme 95 can be read as a self-reflexive response to the digital turn. In the mid-1990s, consumer DV camcorders entered the market; by 1998 Cannes screened its first DV-shot feature, and The Last Broadcast became the first feature shot and distributed digitally.³ Since then, digital video cameras have been the dominant video editing tool in conjunction with computers and the corresponding editing, special effects, and dubbing and soundtrack software, “a new private (rather than institutional) system of video production has been conceived,” and “the technology of video production has made a leapfrog from the analog era into the digital era” (Qilin, 2022). The process of leapfrogging from analog to digital technology initiated the democratization of video production, shifting image creation from an elite monopoly to a mass act.

Against this background, the digital revolution has given rise to two distinct film forms: one is the “Super cinema” created by digital technology in the field of special effects cinema, which is the high-class cinema of the digital era; the other is the low grade digital images represented by Dogme 95 (Brown, 2016). The latter, by deliberately presenting an imperfect image texture to counter the visual splendor of mainstream cinema, embodies “non-cinema asks for a politicized, or an ethical, engagement with digital cinema” (Brown, 2016). This aesthetic choice not only promotes the civilianization of the film medium, but also provides a unique interpretation of the aesthetic consequences of digital technology.

The Dogme 95 movement also confronts the ontological crisis of cinema in the age of digital images and redefines the “authenticity” of digital images. By “ontological crisis” we refer to the weakening of photography’s indexical bond to the profilmic world under digital manipulation. Building on Bazin’s account of photographic indexicality and Prince’s notion of perceptual realism, we argue that Dogme 95 reconfigured “authenticity” by privileging unadorned, low-grade digital images whose perceptual cues sustain a credible relation to reality despite postproduction malleability. The transformation of the film medium from analog film to digital image triggered a discussion on the digital ontology of cinema, i.e., the nature of digital image and its authenticity. Traditional photography, based on physical light-sensitive materials, has been given the ontological status of “indexicality”⁴ by theorists such as Andre Bazin. “Assumptions about realism in the cinema are frequently tied to concepts of indexicality prevailing between the photographic image and its referent” (Princ, 1996, p. 28). “This approach to film realism-and it is, perhaps, the most basic theoretical understanding of film realism-is rooted in the view that photographic images, unlike paintings or line drawings, are indexical signs: they are causally or existentially connected to their referents” (Princ, 1996, p. 28). Thus establishing the ontology of cinema as “Cinema is the art of the index” (Manovich, 2002). The digital image, which can be manipulated arbitrarily at a later stage, challenges the notion of photorealism based on indexicality, and it cuts off the indexical connection between the image and the external reality, and its connection with reality becomes more uncertain, which triggers a crisis in the ontology of cinema. “Perhaps more so, in that the new technology wasn’t an embellishment so much as an ontological shift in the nature of the medium” (see text footnote 3). “The most prominent concern is that new digital technologies have fundamentally supplanted film as a medium—replacing its physical dimensions with immaterial binary codes” (McDonald, 2016).

However, the low grade digital aesthetics of Dogme 95 redefined the concept of “authenticity” in the digital era by emphasizing the truth and rejecting the illusion of audiovisual technology. Even though digital images do not have the physical indexicality of film, the low grade digital aesthetics represented by Dogme 95 can point to reality and evoke the audience’s empathy through its unadorned style, thus redefining the relationship between digital images and reality from “indexicality” at the photographic level to “perception” at the level of cinematic presentation and audience response, as described by Stephen Prince. This redefines the relationship between digital images and reality from “indexicality” at the photographic level to “perceptual realism” at the level of cinematic presentation and audience response, as Stephen Prince puts it—“a perceptually realistic image is one which structurally corresponds to the viewer’s audiovisual experience of three-dimensional space” (Princ, 1996, p. 32). At the same time, from the perspective of media archaeology and media history, dogme95’s definition of authenticity of digital images reflects what Jameson calls “antagonistic realism.” Jameson introduces Deleuze’s concept of “minor” arguing that “minor” works within the dominant in a somewhat different way, undermining it by adapting it, by appropriating part-structures or hegemonic language. It is precisely in the era of the digital revolution in cinema that Dogme 95 as “minor” aesthetics, uses low grad digital images—restricted codes—to appropriate and transform the standard language of mainstream digital cinema, which is characterized by elaborated codes, thereby resisting the digital cinema era and forming the new “oppositional” (Jameson, 2016) realisms of the digital cinema era.

Dogme 95 did not last long as an organized movement, but its significance extends far beyond its actual survival, and it is seen as a key part of the aesthetic and technological evolution of contemporary cinema. “It was with the Dogme 95 films that digital cinematography got its big bang moment” (see text footnote 3). Dogme 95 represented a forward-looking exploration of the creative possibilities of cinema in the digital age, and opened the way for independent cinema in the digital age, and its influence spread from Europe to low-budget cinematic practices across the globe, and has been hailed as “Europe’s last cinematic wave of the 20th century.”

3 Dogme 25 and the age of artificial intelligence

In May 2025, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Dogme 95 movement, five Danish and Swedish directors—Milad Alami, Annika Berg, Isabella Eklöf, Mayel-Toukhy and Jesper Just—launched a new “Dogme 25” manifesto during the Cannes Film Festival. This manifesto was also supported by Lars von Trier and Thomas Winterberg, the founders of “Dogme 95” called “the New Vows of Chastity,” the new manifesto inherits the purity of cinematic art from Dogme 95, but updates it for contemporary video medium. The ten rules of the Dogme 25 Manifesto include: (1) The script must be original and handwritten by the director. (2) At least half the film must be without dialogue. (3) The internet is off limits in all creative processes. (4) We’ll only accept funding with no content-altering conditions attached. (5) No more than 10 people behind the camera. (6) The film must be shot where the narrative takes place. (7) We’re not allowed to use make-up or manipulate faces and bodies unless it’s part of the narrative. (8) Everything relating to the film’s production must be rented, borrowed, found or used. (9) The film must be made in no more than 1 year. (10) Create the film as if it were your last (Raup, n.d.).

Of the ten new codes in Dogme 25, only number 6 (field filming) follows directly from the original Dogme 95, a fact that in itself highlights the significant differences between the old and new declarations. Overall, the Dogme 25 Manifesto displays a much starker anti-industrial tendency than its predecessor, and a strong critique of contemporary algorithmic culture. The rules of this new manifesto cover every aspect of film production, from script-writing methods, funding sources, team size, to creative time and production materials, all reflecting a deep reflection on the ills of today’s cinema and an intention to rectify them. The core philosophy of Dogme 25 can be summarized as “small scale, low intervention, high autonomy.” This approach aims to reshape the nature of film creation, freeing it from the control of big data algorithms and the powerful involvement of artificial intelligence, and returning it to a purer and freer form of artistic expression. This pursuit is not only an inheritance and development of the spirit of the early Dogme 95, but also a direct response to the current state of filmmaking in the era of artificial intelligence in the 2020s.

The rapid development of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) technology in recent years is profoundly changing the traditional paradigm of movie creation. From script writing to film editing, visual effects to soundtracks, AIGC technology has permeated every aspect of movie production. “Generative AI art is completely different from previous computer art in terms of ontology, and we have to admit that the AIGC revolution, even in the whole history of art, is a revolutionary invention no less than 19th-century photography or 16th-century perspective” (Xiaoqiang, 2024). It has had a profound impact on the ontological foundations of video art and traditional auteurism theory, and has sparked a series of fundamental crises concerning the nature of cinema, creative subjectivity and audience experience.

The generation mechanism of AIGC images is a cross-media translation process, which goes beyond the simulation of a single medium, but transforms and reconstructs between multiple media such as text, image, sound, etc. This mechanism further loosens or even breaks the connection between AIGC images and the real world, which is closer to a kind of “database movie”,⁵ based on database and algorithm rather than reality. As a result, AIGC images are no longer a direct reproduction or simulation of physical reality, but generates the whole World(AIGW), implies that the world is a dynamic process, equivalent to “worlding.” As a result, AIGC images no longer directly simulate physical reality; instead, they generate an entire algorithmic “world,” implying that the world is treated as a dynamic, data-driven process. Its generation logic can completely follow the algorithmic rules rather than the laws of reality, so AIGC images, compared with the digital images in the mid-1990s, not only disappeared the “indexicality” between the image and the reality, but also the “anchor” of the index, i.e., the reality itself, loses its authenticity and disappears.

At the same time, AIGC technology subverts the traditional concept of subjectivity in image creation. The generation of images no longer relies on the conception and execution of a human director, but is autonomously accomplished by a complex algorithmic system. Many aspects of traditional image production that define the ontology of film, such as director conception, field shooting, and post-production editing, are internalized into the internal computing process of AI algorithms. This “‘algorithmic species’ spawned by planetary-scale computing” (Xiaoqiang, 2024) completely transcends the limits of human cognition and creativity. “AI art is type of art that we humans are not able to create because of the limitations of our bodies, brains, and other constraints” (Manovich, n.d.), which makes AIGC films able to design, iterate and evolve themselves independently of human subjectivity, thus generating artistic creativity that human beings cannot reach. AIGC’s transformation of cinematic form has led to the emergence of “film without cinematography.”⁶ However, film without cinematography has always been regarded as the essence of cinema, as the famous director Alfonso Cuaron once said, “In the history of cinema, masterpieces have existed without sound, without color, without a story, without actors and without music. No one single film has ever existed without cinematography and without editing” (Mcclusky, n.d.), but the emergence and evolution of AIGC has made “Man with a Movie Camera”⁷ completely relegated to the past tense of cinema, and completely changed the infrastructure and human subjects on which the creation and production of films depend. “Although digitization at the end of the twentieth century has been seen as an ontological rupture. But from an infrastructural point of view, cinema has not fundamentally changed its shape; it has merely altered the carriers and forms of dissemination of its information, and it has always remained a creative industry sitting on a diverse range of human and material resources. It is only in the transition from ‘making’ to ‘generating’ that the infrastructure of the movie faces an absolute change” (Xiaoqiang, 2024). Eventually the image creation in the AIGC era is completely free from the infrastructure dependence on physical entities and the dependence on traditional cinematic technologies, which is further manifested in the algorithmic transfer of the creative subject and the loss of the identity of the human subject, and the role of the human author is marginalized under this new technological paradigm. It can be said that AIGC not only blurs the traditional concept of auteurism, but also fundamentally challenges the long-standing notion of human beings as the sole subject of artistic creation.

From an industrial perspective, the dominance of algorithmic control over content production in the era of big data is giving rise to a patterned tendency in film and television creation. Market analysis shows that over-reliance on data and algorithmic recommendations can lead to “The echo chamber effect” where originality is suppressed and replaced by mechanical replication of existing successful models. This echoes the concerns of many contemporary filmmakers, such as renowned director Martin Scorsese, who has sharply criticized the algorithms of streaming platforms for “the art of cinema is being systematically devalued, sidelined, demeaned, and reduced to its lowest common denominator, ‘content’” (Scorsese, 2021), thus eliminating the value of cinematic art.

In short, the rise of AIGC has triggered a revolution in the ontological level of film, forcing us to re-examine the ontology of film art and to redefine and rethink the core concepts of subjectivity and originality in film art creation, and the era of AIGC marks the entry of film art into a brand-new stage of the post-human era. In the current post-human era—characterized by the integration of human and machine in creative practices—traditional notions of the individual human subject are being redefined.

4 Response of Dogme 25 to the age of artificial intelligence

In the face of these problems and challenges that threaten the survival of the art of cinema, the Dogme 25 Manifesto, which inherits the pioneering spirit of Dogme 95, was born to face the impact of digital technologies on the art of cinema in the age of artificial intelligence. The Dogme 25 Manifesto attempts to respond to a central proposition: in the face of the unprecedented invasion and transformation of the art of cinema by AIGC and algorithms, how should the ontological value of cinema and the subjectivity of the author be defended? The manifesto pointedly states that “in a world where film is based on algorithms and artificial visual expressions are gaining traction, it’s our mission to stand up for the flawed, distinct and human imprint” and “we fight against the forces working to reduce cinematic art to an ultra-processed consumer product” (Mouriquand, n.d.). In this regard, the art of cinema urgently needs to rebuild its autonomy and originality through the uncompromising spirit of artificially established “rules and regulations,” and thus the Dogme 25 Manifesto continues the form of the Dogme 95 “the Vow of Chastity” by adopting ten new and rigorous rules.

Article 1 stipulates that the script must be original and handwritten by the director. Scriptwriting is essentially an important aspect that reflects the subjectivity and creativity of the creator. However, when script production increasingly relies on artificial intelligence and algorithms to generate scripts automatically, it is difficult for human creators to effectively coalesce their accumulated experience and memories into the text. In the long run, this over-reliance on technology will lead to the gradual loss of creators’ creative skills and subjectivity, and they will become subordinate to the logic of technology. The Dogme 25 Manifesto, which requires directors to complete the script themselves, aims to counteract the trend of artificial intelligence and algorithms becoming more and more deeply involved in the process of film creation, and to restore human intuition and creativity as the core of the storytelling process. In addition, the return to the medium of pen and paper in the form of handwriting, compared to the convenience and programmability of digital tools, retains the unique imprint and emotional temperature of the creator’s mind, and re-recognizes the importance of the creator’s bodily writing and intuitive expression, embodying a strategy to counter the intervention of machine logic in the creative process, and to re-establish the mechanism of cultural production in the presence of human beings through embodiment.

The second requires that at least half of the film be dialogue-free, with the narrative function being carried out purely by images. This requirement emphasizes the centrality of visual narrative in the medium of cinema, and brings cinema closer to its true attributes as an extension of cinematography—that is, advancing the plot by presenting reality itself rather than relying on dramatic dialogue, and reawakening the audience’s perception and imagination in a digital culture of fragmented attention spans and information overload. In a digital culture of fragmented attention and information overload, the audience’s perception and imagination are reawakened, giving them the space to interpret on their own. This aesthetic strategy of redefining the ontology of film images and the audience’s “perceptual realism” resists the blunting of narrative imagination by algorithm-driven content production, reaffirms the ontological value of film as a video art and audiovisual medium, and is a counterattack to the “film without cinematography” of the AIGC era.

The third article explicitly prohibits the use of the Internet in the creative process, requiring total reliance on real characters and situations in the real world rather than on digital environments filled with algorithms. This principle embodies a distinct posture of “digital minimalism” or even “digital detox,” i.e., by reducing or even eliminating the reliance on digital media, it rejects the “data colonization” imposed by Internet platforms, and attempts to rebuild the organic pre-digital era in creative practice. In other words, by reducing or even eliminating the dependence on digital media, creators try to rebuild the organic cultural life experience of the pre-digital era in our creative practice. Against the backdrop of the increasing dominance of artificial intelligence algorithms in creative production, such a move would help to isolate the intrusion of machine logic into human imagination and preserve creators’ autonomy and originality.

Article 4 stipulates that only sources of funding that do not impose conditions of content intervention will be accepted, and that a streamlined budget will ensure that the creative team has the final say in artistic decisions. This provision aims to counteract the manipulation of film and television creation by commercial capital and streaming platforms, and to prevent big data algorithm-driven market preferences from infiltrating the artistic production process. In the current context of “techno-capitalism,” content production is often subject to the algorithmic recommendations and genre formulas of streaming media platforms, while financial independence guarantees the autonomy and integrity of movie narratives. By giving up the high investment with strings attached, creators are able to free themselves from the shackles of the logic of capital, and to insist on the autonomy of artistic creation in media practice.

Article 5 requires that the behind-the-scenes crew of a film crew not exceed ten people in order to maintain a lean and tightly collaborative team. A small creative team helps to build trust and reinforce a common vision, avoiding the creative alienation that can result from large-scale industrialized productions with too many people. Compared to Hollywood’s large-scale assembly-line productions, this “small and lean” model allows for greater flexibility in adapting to the needs of the creative process, and reduces the constraints on artistic expression caused by excessive division of labor, hierarchical management, and data management. Streamlining the team also means that each member is directly involved in the creative process, which strengthens interpersonal interaction and creative subjectivity, and counteracts the instrumentalization of human beings that can occur in large-scale production.

Article 6 stipulates that the film must be shot on location in the place where the story takes place. This emphasizes the organic fit between the narrative space and the real place. In contemporary film and television production, AIGC can create scenes at will, but this kind of “generation” out of the context of reality can easily lead to a lack of presence. By adhering to the aesthetic strategy of reality-based scenography, the Dogme 25 Manifesto resists the erosion of narrative authenticity by algorithmically-generated virtual scenes and globally homogenized productions, and reaffirms the close connection between presence and video narrative.

Article 7 prohibits the use of make-up or digital means to modify the face and body, unless required by the plot. Following the insistence on realistic scenes in Article 6, this article further extends the principle of authenticity to characterization, advocating a truthful rendering of the unfiltered human body. In an era of algorithmic shaping of aesthetic homogenization and the proliferation of technologies such as AI face-swapping and beauty enhancement, this rule embraces physical authenticity with an appreciation of the full range of natural imperfections. The rejection of over-interference in the actor’s image not only counters the over-processing of digital aesthetics, but also reaffirms at the level of the medium the unique value of the human bodily experience as not amenable to the standardization of data algorithms and the beautification of AI.

Article 8 stipulates that all items required for film production must be rented, acquired or reused, explicitly rejecting the culture of consumerism in the filmmaking process. This requirement reflects a critique of the tendency of over-consumption in contemporary film and television production against the backdrop of the rapid updating of digital technology and the constant introduction of new equipment and tools, and advocates a creative approach of resource recycling and moderation. And by digging into the historical texture and traces of the use of old objects, the aesthetics of the film acquires a media archaeological depth, forming a gesture of resistance in stark contrast to the high-speed consumer culture.

Article 9 requires that a film’s production cycle should not exceed 1 year. The purpose of this time limit is to maintain the sharpness and sense of immediacy of image creation, and to prevent the long production process from sapping artistic inspiration. Compared to industrial blockbusters, which often take years to polish and even adjust according to market algorithms, this rule encourages directors to complete their works within a limited period of time, so as to respond to the reality of the situation with immediate expression. The self-restraint of the creative cycle can be seen as a kind of aesthetics of austerity in media practice. By combating delayed polishing and over-optimization, the freshness and original impulse of the work is preserved, and it is prevented from falling into the sophistication and modeling of big-data calculations.

Article 10 requires creators to devote themselves to each movie with the attitude of making the last work of their lives. In contrast to the inertia of commercial film series that rely on assembly-line sequels, Dogme 25 requires creators to give their best, break down their reservations, and use their work as a final expression of humanity. This almost parting creative mindset inspires the utmost honesty and passion, avoiding the tendency to compromise conservative attitudes and safe narratives with preconceived notions of future opportunities. This resolute aesthetic statement is especially meaningful in the era of artificial intelligence and global turmoil. When technology and crisis make the future full of uncertainty, only the determination to fight against the current can resist the numbness and emptiness, and infuse video art with a thickness of life that cannot be calculated by any algorithm.

Through a series of strict purity precepts and institutional initiatives, the Dogme 25 Manifesto systematically responds to the profound crisis of filmmaking in the digital age dominated by artificial intelligence and data algorithms. These rules appear to be “restrained” or even “retrogressive” on the surface, but together they constitute a coherent and rigorous set of strategies of resistance to the digital age of artificial intelligence and data algorithms. From this perspective, the significance of Dogme 25 not only puts forward a media aesthetic strategy, but also forms a conscious resistance to the alienation of AI technology on a broader cultural level, thus completing the self-definition of “a rescue mission and a cultural uprising” (see text footnote 2) in the post-human era. Thus, Dogme 25 extends Dogme 95’s legacy by explicitly confronting AI technologies and contemporary production paradigms. In contrast to Dogme 95’s minimalist focus, Dogme 25 embraces a “small scale, low intervention, high autonomy” philosophy that directly challenges modern, AI-driven film production.

5 Media primitivism and the ontological rehabilitation of cinema

In the contemporary media environment dominated by algorithms and deeply intervened by artificial intelligence, technology has infiltrated cultural production in almost all aspects, and human society is facing the situation of a “Technopoly” society, as Neil Postman puts it. Technopoly is the subjugation of all forms of cultural life to the domination of skill and technology. In the social state of “technopoly,” technology is not only a tool or a part of culture, but it is above culture, dominating the way human beings think, act, and organize themselves in society, and rising to become the central force that dominates values and the functioning of society.

Against this backdrop, a culture of media resistance has emerged around resisting technological domination and defending humanistic subjectivity. “Individualized, idiosyncratic practices of resistance are in fact social responses to living in a media-saturated world that work, through their opposition, to force consideration of normative media practices” (Woodstock, 2014). The term “media resistance” is used as a broad term to “discuss a range of negative actions and attitudes towards media,” as a theory, “it is an argument linking the existence and functions of media in society with social ills and social change to the worse”; and as a practice “media resistance describes a refusal to accept the way media operate and evolve” (Syvertsen, 2017). Movements such as digital minimalism, digital detox, and slow media are specific forms of media resistance that have had a significant impact in the digital age.

Among them, Media primitivism emerges as a cultural orientation of resistance in the post-human era, advocating for the deliberate reversion to and embrace of traditional media forms and creative methodologies. This theoretical approach aims to reestablish human subjectivity within a highly digitalized and intelligent environment. The core tenet of media primitivism posits that in our technology-dominated context, the intentional adoption of “archaic” media forms and creative processes serves to reconstruct the active position of human beings and their perceptual experiences. Furthermore, it seeks to reestablish mechanisms of cultural production centered on human presence, thereby counteracting the alienation effects induced by pervasive digitalization. Essentially, media primitivism can be defined as “a humanistic cultural action that aims to reverse the digital media ecology dominated by artificial intelligence through the revival of traditional media practices and the reconstruction of old media experiences” (Chang, 2025). McLuhan posits that the emergence of a novel medium not only supersedes its predecessor but also recontextualizes and “retrieves” elements of earlier forms, resulting in a dialectical evolution where both the nascent and antiquated media coevolve and inform one another. Media primitivism captures the “retrieval” effect of this media law: by reviving the aesthetics and practices of old media, it counteracts the dominant influence of contemporary digital media. From the perspective of a culture of media resistance, Dogme 25, which aims to succeed the Dogme 95 movement, has also formulated a strict “Vow of Chastity,” rejecting the tendency of contemporary filmmaking to rely excessively on digital-intelligent media technologies through the practice of media primitivism, and realizing the collective defense and re-affirmation of the autonomy and ontological value of the medium of cinema in the age of artificial intelligence. To realize the collective defense and reaffirmation of the autonomy and ontological value of the film medium in the age of artificial intelligence.

Media primitivism, read through media ecology and low-tech art, is a systems-level design stance that retrieves and remediates analogue, repairable, and vernacular techniques to rebalance agency within AI-dense ecologies. Communication scholar Chang Jiang summarizes the practice of media primitivism into three main features: limited connectivity, anti-automation, and analogue aesthetics (Chang, 2025). These constraints are dialectical rather than technophobic: they delimit AI as a contingent co-agent, thereby resisting algorithmic capture while enabling situated authorship and durable, perceptually realist ontological commitments.

The Dogme 25 Manifesto is an attempt at media primitivism in the field of cinema in the age of artificial intelligence, and its specific terms distinctly embody these three characteristics.

On the one hand, “limited connectivity” is reflected in the total banning of the Internet in Dogme 25—creators are not allowed to connect to the Internet during conceptualization, filming and editing. This deliberate practice of “abstinence” is in line with the media primitivism’s advocacy of limited connectivity, and is a resistance to the “pan-connectivity” of the media-over-saturated digital age, whereby only a minimal level of digital communication is maintained in order to avoid over-dependence on information and distraction. In the context of Dogme 25, the director and team are forced to focus on offline resources and face-to-face interactions to create a more focused production.

Secondly, Dogme 25 upholds the principle of “anti-automation,” resisting the growing trend towards intelligence in the film production process. The requirement that scripts be handwritten symbolizes a rejection of the automation and intelligence of the creative process: instead of relying on the convenience of automated screenwriting software, AI plot generation, or even simple word processors, it resorts to handwriting and intuitive stimulation. In addition, not using the Internet also means eliminating intelligent support such as algorithmic recommendations and online data retrieval, forcing the director to rely on his or her own memory, individual experience and unique creativity to complete the conception. Even in post-production, the one-year timeframe for completing the film limits the intelligent process of endless polishing of digital special effects, making the creation of the film more inclined to a one-time on-site completion. In this way, Dogme 25 seeks to return filmmaking from a highly programmed and intelligent process to a state of highly manual intervention and improvisational exploration.

Finally, Dogme 25 demonstrates a preference for “analog aesthetics,” that is, the texture and realism of the traditional analog medium. Analog was a characteristic of the pre-digital era’s technical transmission standards for cameras and television. The requirement to shoot in real locations, the use of real-life readymade objects as props, and the prohibition of distorted digital embellishments give dogme’s films a simplicity close to that of analog or pre-digital cinema. Without post-production digital embellishments, the images retain the original look of the scene’s light and texture; without excessive makeup and digital beautification, the characters show the true texture of life; and the dialogue is heavily omitted to bring the audiovisual narrative closer to the silent era’s tradition of relying solely on the screen. In terms of aesthetic effect, this is a revival of the realist style of pre-digital film, allowing the audience to re-examine the “coarse” images that have not been overly technically processed.

The ultimate goal of dogme, as a media primitivism, is to reaffirm the independence, materiality, and reality of film as a medium of art. This insistence on ontological aesthetics can be seen as a realist video strategy to resist what Jean Baudrillard called the state of “hyperreality.”⁸ At a time when AI technology is highly developed, images can be infinitely copied, tampered with, and even completely generated, and the correspondence between image and reality has become more fragile than ever before, with the “real” caught in the predicament of being symbolized and mediated. However, by strictly limiting the various practices that may weaken the authenticity of the image, Dogme 25 has pushed cinema to return to its role as a simulation of reality.

Classical film theory has always emphasized that the ontology of cinema lies in its ability to record reality-the camera captures fragments of the world carrying traces of the subject’s former existence, which constitutes the unique sense of authenticity in the art of cinema. It is this cinematic ontology that is echoed in dogme25’s emphasis on real-life scene shooting, real-life physical presentations, and the cutting down of dialogue. This style of authenticity allows the audience to regain the viewing experience of facing reality directly, and to a large extent counteracts the tendency of virtualization, dematerialization, and de-realization of contemporary images. It is important to note that Dogme 25 is not simply a retrogression to the past, but a deliberate choice for the “post-digital era.” On the premise of fully recognizing the power of digital technology, it consciously builds up a technical buffer for the art of cinema, in order to guard the independent character and material texture of the film medium.

In short, from the perspective of media resistance culture, the Dogme 25 Manifesto realizes a return to the ontology of cinema through the practice of media primitivism. In the age of Artificial Intelligence, where artificial intelligence technology is highly pervasive, this manifesto proves that cinema as a media art still possesses an irreplaceable and independent value—it carries and expresses reality in a material way, and human beings can still arrive at the perception and resonance of the real world through cinema.

6 New auteurism practices and the reinstatement of subjectivity in the age of artificial intelligence

From the perspective of film auteurism, Dogme 25 can be regarded as a practice of “new auteurism,” which provides a path for the return of the director’s subjectivity in the AI era. The traditional author theory originated from the French film theory in the middle of the 20th century. French film critic François Truffaut and others advocated the “Auteur theory” in the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, arguing that the director should be regarded as the creative subject of the film, and that the style and value of the film originated from the director’s personal artistic expression. In the authorial perspective, the director is regarded as the soul of the movie, and his control over the form and content of the movie constitutes the unique stylistic imprint of the work.

However, in the contemporary image production environment highly penetrated by artificial intelligence, the creative subjectivity of the director faces unprecedented challenges, and the fear of “the death of the author” has emerged in contemporary film creation. French philosopher Bernard Stiegler emphasized that the excessive involvement of technology in the process of memory and creation would seriously threaten the subjectivity and creativity of individual human beings. He argues that modern technology provides a form of memory externalization known as “tertiary retention,” in which individuals externally store and extend their memories through the use of technological means such as text, images, and digital media. However, this excessive technological externalization of memory may lead to the loss of the individual’s direct participation in the process of memory and creation, and thus weaken the human subjective consciousness, resulting in the “Proletarianization of Sensibility” (Stiegler, 2017). In the post-human context where technology is highly involved in or even partially replaces human creation, in order to avoid the subjectivity of film directors being swallowed up by AI, it is necessary to re-examine the boundaries and division of labor between human beings and technology in creation, and take the initiative to set up a new principle of creation, in order to reaffirm one’s own subjective position in film creation. Dogme 25 is precisely a kind of auteurism exploration that emerges in this context, boasting that its mission is to “stand up for the flawed, distinct and human imprint” resisting the erosion of the director’s subjectivity by AI through an anti-technological alienation path, and becoming a new auteurism practice in the post-human context of the AI era.

The demand for handwritten scripts can be understood in terms of the reconfiguration of subjectivity through the lens of body philosophies such as embodiment. Embodiment theorizes that our cognitive and thought processes are deeply rooted in bodily experience and sensory interaction. By writing by hand, the director transfers the creative process from the abstract digital realm to the concrete physical space, bringing thought and bodily movement into close proximity. This kind of bodily participation is not just mechanical writing, but a kind of whole-body embodied practice, in which the director nurtures the plot and characters through multi-sensory experiences such as hand movement, tactile feedback and visual perception. From the perspective of the philosophy of the body, the act of handwriting becomes an embodied way of thinking. This embodied creative practice breaks the subject-object dichotomy, and the script is no longer an external product of the director’s thinking, but an extension of the director’s unity of mind and body. Through this embodied creation, playwriting is no longer limited to pure rational thinking or digital information processing, but expanded to a holistic existence that includes the body, emotions and intuition, and the director’s subjectivity is thus reconstructed. In the end, handwritten script is not only a creative method, but also a philosophical practice to redefine the relationship between the director and the work, the body and the mind, and the subject and the object, thus challenging the technology-dominated creative mode, re-emphasizing the body’s central position in the process of cognition and creativity, and injecting a deeper humanistic and philosophical concern into the creation of the film.

The use of the Internet is eliminated during the entire process of creation and filming. From the perspective of auteurism, this is intended to create a purely creative field, allowing the director to rely only on his or her own memory reserves, life experiences and imagination to complete the creation. This “information vacuum” is precisely a strategy to counter the externalization of memory technology—instead of letting artificial intelligence provide inspiration, the director should return to his own internal material pool. Stiegler points out that the total externalization of memory will lead to a loss of subjective participation, and that the principle of cessation of the net of Dogme 25 is intended to prevent the director from handing over his creative memory to the technological cloud, thus preserving the subject’s active participation.

The rules for small-scale creative teams reflect a unique consideration of the modes of collaboration of the creative subject, realizing the ideal of communication based on intersubjectivity advocated by Habermas. Although this restriction ostensibly continues the dogme movement’s stance against large-scale industrialized production, its focus is not on fighting industrialized production perse, but rather on exploring how small-scale teams can regain the culture of collaboration and the ideal of communication in the face of the increasing popularity of AI collaboration and AIGC. In the age of AI, the practice of movie making is showing a trend of “the disappearance of collaborative culture” and “the decline of communicative ideals” (Chang and Luo, 2024). Dogme 25 goes against this trend by strictly limiting the size of the team to maintain the centrality of human creative interaction. Creative groups of less than 10 people not only help to strengthen direct communication and trust among members, but also re-establish the atmosphere of mutual trust and collective participation based on intersubjectivity in a highly automated technological context, thus reaffirming the irreplaceable value of intersubjective-based communication in the age of AI, which implies a firm adherence to the subjectivity of human beings.

Other rules, such as the emphasis on the independence of the film’s funding sources and the restrained use of technology, are a continuation of the classical theory of auteurism espoused by dogme95 in the context of the film industry and the digital age, and are a way of clarifying the boundaries of power between auteurism and commerciality, and between the author of the film and the machine, through economic and technological autonomy, respectively, in order to achieve creative autonomy.

To summarize, through the above institutional precepts, Dogme 25 has carried the demand for the restitution of subjectivity through all dimensions of creative practice. From pre-script planning to filming, to post-production and distribution, the technological self-restriction in each step of the process is to resist the over-involvement of AI in the creative process and the erosion of the director’s subjectivity, to provide a guarantee for the director’s initiative in constructing the subjectivity of creation, and to reaffirm the value and irreplaceability of the “human being” in the creation of art, in a way that is counter to the alienation of the technology. In an anti-technological alienation way, it reaffirms the value and irreplaceability of “human” in artistic creation. Therefore, the rule system of Dogme 25 can be regarded as a strategic strategy for the restoration of the director’s subjectivity in the age of artificial intelligence.

However, unlike the classical auteurism developed in the context of industrialized and genre cinema in the mid-twentieth century, Dogme 25 embodies a “new auteurism” embedded in a post-human context. Traditional auteurism originated in the studio-dominated industrialized film production system, which emphasized the director’s ability to affirm his or her subjectivity by leaving a distinctive mark on his or her personal style in a highly collaborative industrial process. In the post-human context, the traditional film collaboration model based on human division of labor is being reconstructed by non-human factors such as big data algorithms and artificial intelligence systems, and the director is no longer confronted with the opinions or control of his human collaborators only, but also by the powerful intervention of artificial intelligence and other “non-humans” in the film’s narrative.

More importantly, the concept of subjectivity in the post-human context has also undergone a profound transformation, giving rise to the idea of post-subjectivity. This idea presents a dual orientation in contemporary philosophy: on the one hand, it criticizes the techno-optimism of post-human thought, proposing that the subject is not a self-contained and stable entity, but a structure that is constantly generated in a dynamic process of negativity, fissure and parallax. This view emphasizes the incompleteness and divisiveness of the subject, which precisely highlights the unique value of the human subject in comparison with the machine; on the other hand, post-subjectivity redefines the relationship between the subject and the object, shifting it from epistemological antagonism to mutual communication in the sense of ontology, blurring the boundaries between the human being and the object to form a relationship of ontological communication. This dual perspective not only reveals the dynamic character of the subject itself, but also reshapes the subject’s relationship with the world, transforming the object from an inanimate object to a quasi-subject full of vitality, thus providing a more profound and comprehensive philosophical insight into the understanding of subjectivity in the post-human era. Based on the idea of post-subjectivity, in the post-human era, Dogme 25 has carried out embodied practices through technological self-limitation and digital withdrawal, realized the ideal of intersubjectivity-based communication through small-scale collaboration, obtained low-level images with traces of reality through technological restraint, and achieved the goal of “stand up for the flawed, distinct and human imprint” and reconfigured a post-subjectivity that is ontologically meaningful and dynamic. Therefore, starting from the idea of post-subjectivity in the post-human context, Dogme 25 emphasizes the re-establishment of the central position of the director’s subjectivity in creation in the context of the AI era, which theoretically responds to the challenge of auteurism posed by contemporary digital technologies such as AI, and is a new auteurism practice in the era of AI, marking the expansion of the auteurism discourse in the post-human context.

7 Conclusion

In the contemporary media context of accelerated evolution of artificial intelligence and increasingly automated and templatized cultural production mechanisms, the heterogeneous expression and generation of subjectivity in film art are facing a trend of systematic weakening. The emergence of Dogme 25 is of far-reaching significance. It is not only an aesthetic strategy, but also represents the conscious resistance of contemporary film creators to the context of the AI era, in the form of retreating in order to advance. Just as Andre Bazin insisted on the ontological realism of images, and Siegfried Kracauer called for the reversion to visible reality, Dogme 25 continues this pursuit of realism, countering the mimetic illusion of artificial intelligence and the trend of aesthetic homogenization with the direct anchoring of the creative process of media primitivism in the real world, thus re-establishing the ontology of the cinema; and then, by re-establishing the subjectivity of the creators and the autonomy of the art, Dogme 25 fights against the erosion of human subjectivity by technological alienation, and defends and reaffirms the humanistic spirit of cinema. Therefore, Dogme 25 is a continuation and upgrade of the technical critical stance of Dogme 95 in the era of artificial intelligence. Despite the fundamental shift in the media context and the object of critique, their common core demand remains unchanged, that is, to defend the original spirit, authenticity and humanistic value of cinema amidst the torrent of technocracy. These two “dogme” movements, separated by 30 years, not only constitute a rare collective aesthetic practice in the history of cinema, but also clearly reflect the reflexive thinking and subjective self-awareness of cinematic art in the face of technological alienation.

By articulating Dogme 25’s principles, this study provides a theoretical framework for understanding contemporary resistance in cinema. Future research could test these ideas by analyzing Dogme 25–style films as they emerge in practice.

Data availability statement

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Author contributions

ZS: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. SW: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.

Funding

The author(s) declare that financial support was received for the research and/or publication of this article. Interim Findings of the 2023 Shandong Provincial Social Science Planning Research General Project: ‘Research on the Development of a Film and Television Education Consortium Across Primary, Secondary and Higher Education Institutions in Shandong Province from an Integrated Ideological and Political Education Perspective’ (Project Number: 23CKSJ14).

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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The authors declare that no Gen AI was used in the creation of this manuscript.

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Footnotes

1. ^Dogme 25 Explodes at Cannes: ‘A Rescue Mission and a Cultural Uprising’, available online at: https://www.imdb.com/news/ni65288924/.

2. ^Dogme 25: Finally, A New Revolutionary Film Movement, available online at: https://framebyframecritic.com/2025/05/22/dogme-25-a-new-film-movement/.

3. ^Sam Wigley, Attack of the zero sandones: the early years of digital cinema, as told by David Lynch, Miranda July, Michael Mannandmore, Sight and Sound (November 2022): 26, available online at: https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/attack-zeros-ones-early-years-digital-cinema-told-david-lynch-miranda-july-michael-mann-more.

4. ^The term “indexicality” (indexicality) was first proposed by the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce, who described the relationship between sign and referent as follows “Icon,” “Symbol” and “Index,” of which “Indexical symbols” are those that have an existential association with the indicia. Theorists such as Peter Warren and André Bazin have talked about the relationship between the “indexicality” of film and reality, using “indexicality” to emphasize the inevitable physical connection between the photographic image and the object it represents.

5. ^The concept of database cinema was first proposed by Russian media studies scholar Lev Manovich in his book The Language of New Media. According to Manovich, database cinema is the combination of digitized image material stored in a database and images assembled through algorithms or interactive logic, focusing on the ontological shift brought about by media transformation.

6. ^“Film without cinematography” is the production of movies that are completely independent of the traditional means of photography and camera. This concept has become more and more prominent with the rise of digital cinema, especially AIGC technology. Because AIGC movies are made by using neural networks or algorithms to generate visual images directly from textual or conceptual instructions without the need for actual photography, they have become “film without cinematography.”

7. ^Man with a Movie Camera is an experimental 1929 Soviet silent documentary film, directed by Dziga Vertov.

8. ^What Baudrillard calls “hyperreal” is a state of “simulation,” which implies that reality has been reproduced, symbolized, and mediatized to such an extreme degree that the border between the real and the false disappears, and “simulacra” replace and override the real itself. The AI-generated video work (AIGC) embodies the essence of “hyperreal,” because it does not “analogizes” but “generates” reality, becoming a more real reality.

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