Word: leth
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Dates: during 2004-2004
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...next time you hear a director complain about the studio or his stars or the weather or whatever, think of what Jorgen Leth achieved with Lars von Trier as his boss--when five obstructions became five splendid opportunities. --By Richard Corliss
...Trier professes to idolize Leth's 1967 short The Perfect Human, an elegant, mock-anthropological treatise on man's imperfectability. But to Von Trier, a hero is still a potential patsy. He dares Leth to remake The Perfect Human five different times, each under bizarre conditions imposed by his sponsor. Whatever humiliation Von Trier imagined, Leth makes the results (and the film that documents them) fascinating. The Five Obstructions is a kind of reality-TV show for art-movie lovers--an up-market Fear Factor--and, finally, proof that art is created not despite but because of the impediments surrounding...
...Perfect Human had been a novel, Von Trier might have demanded that Leth rewrite it as a comic book, a haiku, a recipe, an ad slogan and an epic poem--and that the letter e never be used. But it is a movie. So remake No. 1 must be filmed in Cuba and have no shot longer than 12 frames, or half a second. The location of remake No. 2 must be "the most wretched place in the world" (some might have said a Von Trier movie set, but Leth chooses Mumbai, formerly Bombay). When the filmmakers have a chat...
...Leth, a genial gent who serves as Denmark's honorary consul in Haiti, finds each of the obstructions "satanic" and "ruinous." He's like the well-behaved weekend guest of a dotty lord who has refurbished the bedrooms in his country house as torture chambers. But Leth is also a game fellow who realizes, perhaps more quickly than Von Trier, that all art has its rules and that the stranger the rules, the more fun in following and subverting them. Leth's Cuban segment is a suave and colorful abstraction; the cartoon (made in collaboration with Waking Life co-director...
...only bad film Leth makes is remake No. 3, in which the obstruction is no obstruction and Leth has the freedom to do as he wishes. Without the arbitrary guidelines, Leth delivers an unfocused mess. But even that botch has instructive value. It shows why a director's most personal work often fails and why masterpieces are made within the confines of genre: film noir, western, Cuban movie in half-second shots...