The Five Obstructions
The Five Obstructions (2003). Jorgen Leth and Lars Von Trier. Now available on DVD. French language website.
This past week I finally saw Lars Von Trier’s “The Five Obstructions”. The film was immediately of interest to me when I heard about it earlier in the year: Von Trier gets filmmaker Leth to remake Leth’s short “The Perfect Human” (1967) five times using “obstructions” named by Von Trier. Obstructions is Von Trier’s word (or perhaps the translation of his word) for what I would call constraint.
What the film actually entails are scenes of Von Trier and Leth talking, scenes of Leth as he works on the films, the films themselves, and clips from the original short (thankfully provided in full as a DVD extra). I’ve heard vague stories about Von Trier and his cruelty to his actors, and this film made that all the more real. While Von Trier seems to revere Leth and particularly “The Perfect Human” (he says he’s watched it more than twenty times), he is obviously out to break him down. Von Trier jokes about his cruelty with Leth and comes off as a rather creepy, controlling man, a son trying to slay the father.
Von Trier assigns the obstructions for each film in an attempt to make it as difficult for Leth as he can, with an eye that the films not necessarily be successful or even good. Leth, for his part, takes the obstructions in stride a creates three interesting and beautiful shorts, and one rather boring one. You may notice that that only makes four films. The obstruction on the fifth film is that Leth do nothing but read a narration written by Von Trier, so one can’t consider it Leth’s film at all.
“The Perfect Human”, the original, mostly involves “the perfect man” and observes him as he does different things all with a voiceover. We see the “perfect man” jump and fall and eat and lay down. We also see the “perfect woman”, though less often. When the “perfect man” himself speaks it seems that he is mourning the loss of the “perfect woman”. The “perfect man” and the “perfect woman” are not together and even in his perfection the “perfect man” is sad. In the end it felt to me like a irony filled rather mournful film (which perhaps points towards Von Trier’s love of the film, if the few I’ve seen of his are indicative).
Stupidly, I neglected to take note of the actual obstructions on all the films, though a few I remember well enough. The first film is filmed in Cuba without sets and consists of only twelve frame cuts. Twelve frames is not a long time at all (about half a second). The film that is made in this way is very jerky in movement, yet Leth makes an extraordinary work with it using rhythm and repetition in conjunction with the short cuts. The fourth film had to be an animation (Von Trier and Leth seem to both hate cartoons/animations which in their language (Dutch?) sounds like “tiny film” pushed together into one word) and the resulting work is beautifully done in a realistic (probably based on the original film as a model) flatly colored style, quite reminiscent of Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life”.
I enjoyed the third film but cannot at all recall what the obstruction was. It took place in a hotel and felt vaguely mystery/noirish. The second film is a real disappointment. The obstruction somehow involves Leth going to a place he considers really horrible and filming himself in the main role. He goes to a red light district in Bombay (Leth alludes to some experience there while filming a previous film), but any feeling of the place as really painful is absent and the film itself is quite sterile.
The fifth film, put together by Von Trier, consists of scenes shot during the rest of the film as Leth was at work on the previous four obstructions. It puts Leth into the role of the “perfect human,” not prettily. Leth reads a voice over, written by Von Trier, which is a letter from Leth to Von Trier, a rather disturbing case of Von Trier speaking for Leth to himself. We’ll leave that to the psychoanalysts.
What the film does really well is show the use that constraints can be put for creating works of art. The constrained films that Leth makes (well at least three of them) are beautiful short films that could hold their own regardless of their connection to the original short or the film within which they are shown. The constraints force Leth to stretch his normal impulses outside their boundaries and the results are encouraging.
Tags: Constraint
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