this film is credited to jorgen leth as a director, but if you watch it you’ll be hard pressed not to think it is in fact directed by lars von trier. this is, of course, on the assumption that the two men are not acting, and the documentary-like parts of the film where they are talking to each other are bone fide, unscripted recordings of their frank conversations. this is definitely how they are presented, and the aesthetic of dogma supports the belief that there shouldn’t be any manipulations there, any plays on the viewer.
this is a super meta-meta-film. a film about filming and refilming the same film (itself?). very inbred but very interesting, too. basically, lars von trier sits down with his very dear friend jorgen leth and tells him how to remake his (leth’s) 1967 short the perfect human. what transpires as the film evolves is that leth has been in a bit of a creative slump — or maybe it’s not that, i’m not sure now, maybe it’s some other kind of slump, more existential. but it is clear that von trier thinks these remakes will help leth in some deep psychological/creative way. he tells us all this in a moment towards the end in which leth is not present, as if confiding in us. but of course this is bizarre, because isn’t leth directing the whole thing anyway?
anyway. they sit around, filmed by a hand-held camera, and talk about how to remake the short in a way that pushes boundaries. von trier, who acts as the challenger, gives leth five “obstructions,” or five obstacles leth has to overcome in remaking the short. the overcoming of such obstacles will result in five remakes.
besides the conversations between von trier and leth, we have a) the scenes in which leth is scouting for and then shooting the film (heavily edited, not in real time, unlike the conversations with von trier) and b) the shorts themselves.
of the whole film, i found the shorts (which are very beautiful) to be the least interesting part. what really mesmerized me and also made me intensely uncomfortable were the conversations between von trier and leth. their relation borders on the absurd. they are clearly very close friends who share an intense bond of affection. von trier is young and casual, leth is more polished (he changes his glasses frames two or three times in the course of the movie, while von trier always appears to be a bit sloppy, with a silly bandana around his neck). the most absurd, and disturbing, bit is the sadomasochistic relationship between the two. it’s actually hard to watch without squirming. and von trier is so, well, so cute, you know, so adorable and captivating and charming. whereas leth looks a bit like a bumbling fool, so eager to be punished it’s not even funny. this is a film allegedly about pushing the boundaries of cinema, but really not pushing many boundaries at all as far as the filmmaking of the shorts is concerned. the shorts are interesting, but, as it emerges from the conversations between von trier and leth, the boundary-pushing attempt is ultimately a failure. as i said, though, at the end von trier doesn’t care. the whole idea was always a way of getting his friend out of a slump of sorts. and, on his part, leth is entirely pleased with his shorts — to a somewhat embarrassing degree. it is clear, in fact, that the boundary-pushing idea is all von trier’s, that leth is much more interested in doing aesthetically sophisticated, avant-guardish but really polished films.
as i said, the most interesting bits are when von trier and leth sit around, drink wine (rigorously red), and talk about films. leth is very much like a nervous schoolboy, while von trier inhabits his mentoring — but it’s more than that, this is all very bossy and manipulative and controlling– role with great comfort and ease. he serves the most expensive wine, gives leth his orders, comments very frankly on his films, uses with great skill and in equal measure the carrot and the stick.
i don’t know what to think about this film. as y’all know, i’m a bit tired of the glamorization of the exploration of heterosexual masculinity, including the power relations heterosexual males feel compelled to instaure with one another. and the shorts, ultimately, seem to me secondary. this is all about supposedly great artists pushing each other (except von trier does all the pushing). this is about an intense creative relationship. but at the end one is left with an uncomfortable sense of voyeurism, as if one had been forced to watch two men pet each other’s, and their own, egos.
Yeah, I saw this a couple of years ago. Von Trier comes across as a masochist and the supreme egoist, but I didn’t think that about Leth, who continually raises the stakes with his clever responses to Von Trier’s challenges are always successful. From what I’ve read, Von Trier appears to act like this with everyone. Bjork didn’t seem to be too happy with him and Nicole Kidman backed out of Manderlay.
Lars Von Trier AS a character is always entertaining. Moreso often than he is as director of his films. I don’t recall if Von Trier played his own character in Epidemic, or if someone played him, but certainly the character’s personality was close to Von Trier, and it was quite funny as such.
Also at the end of every episode of The Kingdom he’d show up and give a little closing speech – dressed in a tux I think – which alwways played up his excitement over the chaos and evildoings in the show.
He is playful in a very rough way, and in the film it’s clear he wants to hurt Jorgen Leth in order to snap him out of his depression in Haiti. He also wants, I think, to show Leth just how good of a director he is. And he is.
The 12 minute version of The Perfect Human, which is a bonus feature on the DVD is really instersting and quite wonderful, as are Leth’s four remakes. (The fifth, by Von Trier, is mostly lazy and uninteresting, relying on text that Von Trier wrote for Leth to read for its effect, such as it is)
While I agree with Gio that the conversations between the two men are interesting, I would have liked to have seen more of the films that Leth made, including the first one in the context of the film. The true version of The Perfect Human is only shown in little snippets interspersed through the film. The original is 12 minutes long, and I doubt any of the remakes were longer than that.
It’s a very interesting movie about movies, and the devilishness of Von Trier is fun to see here acted out on a real person, as opposed to the over-the-top hells he frequently visits onto his characters in his features.
(I am trying to work while writing this; sorry in advance for poor construction of sentences)
in the second remake, von trier, who, to use a sentence from fire, is nothing more (or less) than a pompous fool, pushes leth to aestheticize poverty by setting up a banquet in the middle of the poorest neighborhood in culcutta (i think — it may be another of those indian cities). leth finds this incredibly objectionable and puts up quite a lot of resistance. but von trier is too much of a manipulative sadist, and leth too much of a masochist, for things not to go von trier’s way. at the end, leth sort of cheats because he thematizes the poverty, instead simply of exploiting and teasing it, by making the screen behind the gourmet transparent, so one can see the faces of the poor children behind him. their presence makes of the gourmet’s performance a self-satirizing farce. it is the children, not the gourmet, who are real. the gourmet is a piece of western fluff, or, more simply, an idiot. von trier is, of course, displeased with leth’s cheating, even as leth is childishly pleased with his own great short.
i bring this up at this point in the history of this blog, i.e. at a point when we are talking about politics, film, and text, because this short is a good example of the ways in which text can dissociate itself from politics, or, instead, choose to address (do) politics. if he had agreed to film the scene with an opaque screen, leth would have allowed text to dispose of politics (context). the film would have been a commentary on indulgent, even callous, aestheticism, without confronting the actual, real conditions of its being filmed when it was filmed, in the location where it was filmed, in full day time and in full view of a lot of people who couldn’t have afforded the cheapest lightbulb on the set. it would have been text without context.
leth refused to accept von trier’s challenge in full (maybe because he lives in haiti instead of denmark), and allowed context to intrude on text. this seems to me political in a significant, active, even (mildly) militant way.
i’m not sure how this relates to the great dictator, which i saw only many, many years ago, or to the other films mike and michael mention, none of which i have seen. as for silence of the lambs, your discussion is extremely well taken, john. i’m going to have to think about it.
(cross posted in political text thread)
Your scene reading is fascinating, Gio. Let me push on it, because I can see an almost exactly counter reading of the film’s politics. And I bet there’s something more complicated in the middle, which you’ve opened up across different postings.
As I recall the film, Leth actually keeps pushing on what it means to be human–all of his shorts are attempts to capture something ineffable and authentic about human life. His thesis–or the implicit objective of each of his films–is to show a text without mediation, a text which captures something about the human animal in motion, being itself.
Von Trier’s challenges are surely sadistic in the ways you note, although I also read them as quite a bit more playful (and a lot more collaborative) than you do, but they are also political, I think. Von Trier rejects–rather viscerally, in his own work–the notion that films capture anything real. Instead, they are elaborate mechanisms for hiding reality, for hiding the human. Even the Dogme dogma was an attempt not to be more authentic but to shred the elaborate baggage of filmmaking tricks which hide the inauthenticity of film. (At least, that’s how I’ve understood it.) Ironically, then, this allows him to push–in each of his own flicks, and in each of his challenges to Leth–to film something explicitly (ridiculously agit-proppishly) constructed and yet so explicitly, brutally objectionable that the contradictions of mediation evident in *every* film become painfully visible to the audience.
I.e., you could make the case that Leth is the aesthete. Von Trier’s challenge in Calcutta is a spit in the face of the aesthetic, that sense of the unmediated pure text–by forcing such a stark dissonant collision (of the brutal poverty and the elaborate artifice of gourmandrie) that Leth’s project cannot succeed.
So in some some sense I’m suggesting that–at least in some ways–you could read that scene in a manner exactly opposed to your interpretation, with Leth as callous artiste and Von Trier as agitating politico. Leth thinks he can show the human? Well, then, fuck you–go to Calcutta and show me “the human.”
But I suspect–as is the case with Obstructions and with every film (or at least all the good films) Von Trier himself makes–what we get instead of the either/or is a greater, more complicated awareness of the in-betweenness of texts. I find Leth’s films, as you note above, pretty damn engaging in large part; despite Von Trier’s attempts to make them merely artificial technique, Leth manages to make something more engaging, something which pushes past artifice, that neither hides nor escapes constructedness, thus keeping alive the possibility of both beauty and politics. And–here’s another gauntlet thrown–I think Leth and Von Trier are exactly alike in this regard. Like every good s&m pairing, they are colluding and collaborating on a shared vision, not quidding then pro quo-ing. And their project is to revivify the formal politics and the politics of form in cinema.
Insofar as the scene “works,” it illustrates that texts will always mediate context. The poverty would not be as *visible* to the audience without the screen, without the obstruction.
Buy that?
–Insofar as the scene “works,†it illustrates that texts will always mediate context. The poverty would not be as *visible* to the audience without the screen, without the obstruction.–
I don’t buy that for a reason that I brought up earlier, and was one of my primary disappointments with The Five Obstructions. The audience never watches the shorts that Leth makes. We watch his set-up and shooting of them, and we watch Von Trier’s reactions as he watches the short. In between we catch a small piece of the short film, but in my opinion that’s not enough. I would not claim to be able to fully understand a short story from reading a couple pages of it. Every paragraph is essential, and why try to pass judgment from reading a synopsis? Same with Leth’s films: I can’t imagine that any shot is superfluous – especially after watching the full original short after wathcing The Five Obstructions – and I can’t imagine that one can efectively argue Leth’s intent without seeing the full piece.
However, getting back to that translucent screen in the context of the larger film The Five Obstructions, I’d say this: We see so much of the set-up of this shoot – We see the poverty, the puzzled and curious onlookers, we know that the poverty encompasses Leth at his table in his ridiculous tuxedo and obscene spread of fish and wine and cutlery. What if Leth had adhered to Von Trier’s whim and not shown the poverty? It would not be any less real – and not at all hidden to us, who are watching the The Five Obstructions. What if we could still sense the people back behind an opaque screen, possibly seen their movement against the back of the screen, and heard the city sounds in the soundtrack? Von Trier was right: The film as Leth shot it was too easy. It might have had more impact for us if, after watching 15 minutes of absurd set-up in this ghetto, we had seen the totally clean table and opaque background; knowing that he was completely immersed in his “Worst place on earth” but only sensing it in a more abstract way.
I’ll admit that it was Mike’s last comment that set me off here. I am not arguing either Mike or Gio’s larger, and probably more important, points.