Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth





Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth made The Five Obstructions (2003) together as a visual record of the therapeutic value of movie-making. Lars von Trier challenges Leth (middle and bottom stills) to create new versions of Leth's arty 1967 film The Perfect Human (Det perfekte menneske, top still). Von Trier hurls insults and provocation at Leth in an attempt to rouse him out of depression; the audience is a reluctant witness to the two men interacting in a sometimes-creepy set of one-on-one conversations. Leth's gorgeous new versions of The Perfect Human don't deserve the put-downs that von Trier tosses off, but the fun of the movie is waiting for what von Trier will say next.
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Documentary Starts Here by Nancy Kalow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.