Over at the Filmmaker Magazine blog, Scott Macaulay has posted an excerpt from the Lumiere Manifesto, a project inviting video bloggers and web filmmakers to create one-minute works inspired by early-film pioneers the Lumiere Brothers. The Manifesto is quite Dogme 95-esque in its call for aesthetic and technical restraint. There are six basic rules: no audio, no editing, no effects, no zooms, all cameras must be fixed and all Lumiere films must be 60 seconds or shorter. Calling these guidelines “arguably the natural limits of the original Lumieres,” Manifesto authors Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen & Brittany Shoot elaborate:

Online video has now for years allowed the advancement of personal narratives and showcased the world through the eyes of other video producers. At best, we display an edited view of our worlds. At worst, we destroy important viewpoints through unnecessary editing. [...] We believe it is imperative that the filmmaker meets the world at eye-level and not from above. That is to say, life should be filmed as it happens on its own premise without any additional intervention. Only by opening the self to our surroundings can we be at the right place at the right time.

The quest for filmed truth is a noble goal, perhaps, but the manifesto itself is just so stiff and humorless. And is it even necessary? More thoughts after the jump.

It seems kind of like a waste of energy to ask the average YouTube producer to be *more* rudimentary in their methods and/or *less* concerned with artifice. Has the world of dramatic hamsters and toilet paper mummies really become so bloated that we’re in need of a rescue action, or is this just a delayed reaction to the LonelyGirl “scandal”, wherein what appeared to be an unfiltered “personal narrative” turned out to be the work of a production company, and the audience who thought they were consuming the clips for their integrity discovered that they didn’t really care?

So if you’re rolling your eyes, you’re not the only one. Thankfully, a “competing manifesto” has popped up on the aptly named SnottyDouche.info [via BoingBoing]. “We followed the Dogme95 conventions until we realized that Dogme film #188 was Big Booty Hoes,” quoth The Luxidogmeimerde Manifesto–and yes, according to Dogme 95’s official website, that’s actually accurate. Here’s *their* representative excerpt:

Now think of your second favorite movie. It sucks a hundred times worse then your first movie and as you move down the list each movie is exponentially worse. Not worse in a simple linear fashion, but mathemagically worse by orders of magnitude. And the movies your Mom likes are much worse. You have the artistic pallette of Vince McMahon. Your Netflix Queue is a war crime.

But we are here to save you from yourself. We believe that the only way to be free as an artist is to follow a bunch of rules that we’re going to tell you.

Their prescriptive rules include leaving the lens cap on the camera, abstention from any kind of “soundtrack, audio, music, sound effects except for a high pitched whine,” and, in my favorite stipulation, “No Fatties!” Bottom line: the main attraction of web video for, I would wager, the bulk of both its producers and its audience, is a sense of play and spontaneity that can’t be legislated. The Lumiere project may yet produce a masterpiece, but in terms of sheer entertainment value, it’s already been bettered by its parody.