When the 30th anniversary of the Seattle International Film Festival ended in June, Seattle audiences awarded the Golden Space Needle for Best Film to Ferzan Ozpetek's Facing Window, an Italian telenovela about an older gay man with a secret past and the young Italian couple whose lives intersect with the mysterious stranger. This mild melodrama from the director of Steam: The Turkish Bath is a curious choice for the top festival prize; its predictable narrative and sentimentalist tone hardly sums up the best aspects of contemporary world cinema. And Seattle film festival audiences, once known for enthusiastic appreciation of much stronger works, seems to have settled for the iced frappuccino alternative to the hard stuff.

After all, Seattle festival audiences embraced the early — and best works — by Paul Verhoeven in the late 1970s, and helped launch Dutch actor Rutger Hauer's film career after his appearance in the filmmaker's remarkable film Soldier of Orange in 1977. Compare Ozpetek's Facing Window against previous Golden Space Needle films like Martin Donovon's Apartment Zero (1989), Stephan Elliott's The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert (1994), Lars von Trier's The Kingdom (1995), and Danny Boyle's Trainspotting (1996), and it doesn't add up. Perhaps complacency has set in, and the return to the comfort-food equivalent in film has greater appeal. All the same, some filmmakers working today on the fringes of the mainstream and formulaic standard are producing interesting — and more compelling new works that push the limits of what a film is and can be.

Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, best known for his films Dogville, Dancer in the Dark, and Breaking the Waves and co-founder of the Dogme 95 collective, has been shaking the assumptions of what a film is by redefining its structure. More precisely, he is particularly interested in breaking the rules of film-making and pushing the boundaries of what a filmmaker can do under certain restrictions and guidelines. In The Five Obstructions, his collaborative documentary with filmmaker Jψrgen Leth, von Trier sits down with his colleague and mentor who made the 1967 short black-and-white film The Perfect Human and asks Leth to do what would seem impossible: remake the film adhering to a set of restrictions outlined by von Trier.

The Perfect Human, Leth's jet-set portrait of the ideal man and woman in the modern urban sense, blurs commentary and critique of a lifestyle adorned with material luxury and comfort. Leth's breezy short encapsulates the banal activities of the perfect couple: dancing, grooming, eating, and so forth. The cheeky and stylish mod film featuring actor Claus Nissen as "the perfect man" shows a tuxedoed Nissen sitting down before an elegant fish dinner, clipping his nails, shaving, and enjoying pipe tobacco. The short film, composed and upbeat, is one that von Trier has seen over 40 times, and would like to see Leth recreate, this time extracting the humanity — that is, imperfection — from the film narrative of Leth's celebrated work. The result is a calculated exercise in humiliation, a kind of "friendly fire" directed at the pretentious and coy idea of perfection.

The first obstruction von Trier issues like a missive requires Leth to visit somewhere in the world where he has never been — Cuba — and remake The Perfect Human on location with a local cast and limits each shot to no more than 12 frames (less than a second long). These conditions challenge Leth to completely reconstruct his film as a flickering cut-up of the original. Von Trier approves. The second obstruction requires Leth to visit "the most miserable" place in the world and appear in the lead role formerly played by Nissen. Leth chooses a street in Bombay's red light district, but arranged for a police presence and a clear scrim to separate him from the local and hungry curious as he prepares to sup on an elaborate meal for the shoot. This time, von Trier disapproves; he wanted Leth to reshoot the film without the scrim. For the third obstruction, Leth had more creative control — actually, no obstructions — and used a Belgian hotel to present a moody noir version of the film. The fourth, and perhaps most interesting one, is von Trier's requirement that the short should be made into a cartoon, because, he spits, a cartoon will turn it into "crap." Both filmmakers hate cartoons. Leth enlists the help of Texas animator Bob Sabiston, who collaborated with filmmaker Richard Linklater on Waking Life. Rather than the crap von Trier expected, the short becomes a highly evocative and colorful rework of the original. And finally, von Trier remakes the film as the final obstruction.

Screened at SIFF, The Five Obstructions exemplifies a shift towards approaching film. Lars von Trier's Dogme 95 group in 1995 issued a manifesto outlining the rules of how films should be made, and participating filmmakers — primarily from Denmark — had to swear to a "Vow of Chastity" before production of a Dogme film. The manifesto stipulates a 10-point list of what constitutes a Dogme film: films must be shot on location and without props; films must be shot with a hand-held camera; existing light must be used (special filters or added lighting is forbidden); genre-filmmaking is not allowed (contemporary narratives can only be conveyed); the director's name must not be credited; music has to appear live (it could be a recording, but has to appear live within the context of a shot, rather than adding a soundtrack in post-production); the film must be in color, and other restrictions applied. In the years since, thirty-five Dogme 95 films have been made and certified by the collective.

Dogme 95 and The Five Obstructions — which, by the way, is not a Dogme film, nor does it expand upon this filmmaking manifesto specifically — explores ways in which some filmmakers are reinvigorating cinema with creative impulses. Other filmmakers, like Peter Greenaway feel stronger about the critical condition film is in, and have vocalized a need to reinvent it. Why reinvent cinema, and what is there to be gained from it?

In a lecture Greenaway delivered in September 2003, entitled "Cinema is Dead, Long Live Cinema?," he argues that after 108 years of the history of film, "we have a cinema that is dull, familiar, hopelessly weighed down by old conventions and outworn verities, an archaic and heavily restricted system of distribution, and an out-of-date and cumbersome technology." Consequently, he states that film is burdened by what he calls the "four tyrannies" of cinema: the tyranny of text, the frame, the actor and the camera. In combination, these "tyrannies" have contributed to the stasis of film based on assumptions of what a film is: rectangular, recorded, text- and actor-driven vehicles of aesthetic and passive consumption. For Greenaway, cinema needs to be energized and reinvented with new technologies; to become interactive as a multi-media experience, and to break from these four tyrannies and become truly cinematic.

Greenaway's lecture invoked Godard's declaration that cinema is dead. After Jean-Luc Godard eulogized the end of cinema and his first period of filmmaking in the 1960s following his 1967 film Week-end, he determined to change course with shorter and smaller works meant for more limited audiences with politicized zeal. These films, whether embraced or dismissed by critics, had limited distribution but sought to be conceptual and essayist and dismantle the rigors of film narrative. Although Godard's post-1968 work failed to achieve a social revolution with film, some filmmakers in the time since have revisited the notion of reinventing cinema and creating an alternative, distinct from the standard Hollywood paradigm.

In recent years, filmmakers across the globe have considered the problem of cinema in the context of Hollywood's industry saturation and penetration in domestic film markets, and have responded with producing original works that challenge the status quo. Artists and filmmakers, such as Duncan Roy (AKA), Matthew Barney (Cremaster), Bιla Tarr (The Werckmeister Harmonies), and Mikhail Brashinsky (Black Ice) among others, are creating films that push the envelope and the boundaries of cinema in different directions. Collectively, these films may find a theatrical audience, but that audience tends to be one at a film festival, gallery or museum — venues that can sate the appetite of cinephiles rather than a mass audience at a larger house.

This year's film festival, with its promise to deliver "different new things" according to the fest's tepidly enthusiastic campaign, quietly shoe-horned a handful of rousing new works in its broad spectrum of international cinema on the schedule. These included Lars von Trier and Jψrgen Leth's The Five Obstructions, Guy Maddin's The Saddest Music in the World and Cowards Bend the Knee, Tsai Ming-Liang's Goodbye, Dragon Inn, Catherine Breillat's Anatomy of Hell, and Greenaway's Tulse Luper Suitcases.

Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin's new work, like his previous films, do not exactly reinvent cinema per se as much as leverage cinematic style. Both The Saddest Music in the World and Cowards Bend the Knee borrow heavily from the look and feel of classic silent films, unspooling with sputtering double exposures and ghosting effects, optically contrasting black and white, and even texturized with dust and scratch marks of film decay. Comedic, yet refined, Maddin's work is at once an homage to the golden age of cinema as it is a study of celluloid deterioration, cinematic memory and nostalgia.

In contrast to Maddin's visually impressive confections, English filmmaker Peter Greenaway, whose recent film and project The Tulse Luper Suitcases: a personal history of Uranium, has had little patience for the contemporary cinema, and has summoned an epic roar of a work meant to reinvent cinema and break with the past completely. Tulse Luper Suitcases, his tenth feature-length film, exposes a richly impenetrable narrative with densely layered visuals about a Welsh-born writer, Tulse Henry Purcell Luper, and his 92 suitcases scattered around the globle and filled with 92 objects to represent the world. The number is a significant motif in the film: "-92" represents the atomic number of Uranium and is threaded throughout the narrative in Greenaway's signature obsession with counting as a form of game-playing with his viewers. Tulse Luper promises to become a large-scale work much like Matthew Barney's Cremaster.

Last year, Barney stirred New York's art community with a large-scale exhibition at the Guggenheim and the five-part Cremaster film cycle. The Cremaster films, totaling nearly 7 hours, offered, among other things, a renewed cinematic vision propelled by a Herculean desire to reimagine the creative drive as a force of Freudian and mystical will. The film cycle's staggering length and conceptual intricacies inverted film convention and elevated Barney's grandiose importance as an artist among art patrons into a beguiling cult of personality.

Not to be outdone, Greenaway's Tulse Luper Suitcases is a large-scale project, too, spanning a 3-year period with a four-part film cycle, an accompanying book, 52 television programs, web sites, several CD-Roms and DVDs, and plans for a touring post-film exhibition. The first two parts of the Tulse Luper made their Seattle debut at the Cinerama during SIFF. This film cycle and project is perhaps his most ambitious effort to date, but runs the risk of cannibalizing his entire canon and contribution to film. Many ideas offered on screen in the work reference previous efforts, particularly The Pillow Book and 8½ Women, and draw from his rich tableaux, inserting multiple images in his compositionally dense presentation. Despite this, Greenaway's audacious effort manifests an eagerness to reinvent film and capitulate cinema into the 21st Century, which he dismisses as atrophied and merely "illustrated text."

At least two other films screened at the fest attempt to rely visually on fresh approaches to cinema, rather than a reinvention of it. French director Catherine Breillat — best known for injecting feminist and sexual politics in such works as Fat Girl and Romance — ignites controversy with her new film Anatomy of Hell. Her to efforts to shock and provoke backfire, and amounts to little more than radical polemic on sex. The film's improbable nightclub encounter between a suicidal young woman and a muscle-chiseled gay man becomes a 4-day exercise in sexual exploration of her body. Breillat's unrated and explicit film leaves little to the imagination, and is ultimately a 77-minute indictment that, regardless of gender, men fuck at the expense of their partner's pleasure, and, moreover, women are sexually savaged by men.

And finally, Tsai Ming-Liang's Goodbye, Dragon Inn, a nostalgic eulogy for the end of cinema — both literal and cultural — dispenses with dialogue altogether and frames a cinematic and fictionalized portrait of the last night at Taipei's Fu-Ho Theater, a decaying martial arts film house. Ming-Liang's atmospheric film conjures up memories, old ghosts and late-night trysts, and marks the end of an era for the theater, the cinephile passion to haunt movie houses, and for cinema itself. Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a kind of last picture show that patiently laments change, but cannot resist it.