Copyright Film Society of Lincoln Center May/Jun 2004THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS
Jorgen Leth and Lars von Trier, Denmark, 2003
This is a film about other films, a discussion around filmmaking, an attempt to reach through a 1967 black-and-white short and live new variations produced under special restrictive conditions to arrive at-what? A truth, a revelation about the filmmaker-a joint persona, really, of the one who sets the obstructions and the one who has to shoot around them-that will somehow emerge when certain cinematic qualities are held in check, pummeled into submission. A truth that will emerge in defiance of cinema itself. This is an impossibility, of course, which is why The Five Obstructions is also a portrait of frustration. But it explains why the film can't be understood, or even discussed meaningfully, just in terms of what it contains. The five obstructions lead logically to the real, sixth, obstruction, which is The Five Obstructions itself.
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If there's apocalypse in the air by the end, its origins might fittingly lie in the most trivial of slights. Jorgen Leth is a veteran Danish filmmaker, poet, novelist, sports commentator, and now his country's honorary consul in Haiti. It's his 1967 short The Perfect Human, with a beguilingly limber actor gyrating through the human condition, that Trier admired so much that he had to crack it, dissolve its perfection by getting Leth to make five other versions that couldn't be as good as the first and might even, he hoped, turn out to be "crap." Leth was also for a lime an instructor at the Copenhagen film school where Trier was a student, and the latter has claimed he was once snubbed in the hallway by his teacher. "So maybe this film is his revenge on me," Leth remarks. "It's him killing his father. It's all very Oedipal."
It's more than that, because Trier can't assault the cinema du papa without assaulting the filmmaker he has become. The men are seen discussing the various restrictions (no shot lasting longer than 12 frames; filming in the most miserable location imaginable; a cartoon version) and then watching how Leth tackles them. But in one beguiling shot, Trier, standing in front of a bright yellow wall, says to the camera, "In my filmic upbringing, what Jorgen calls the rules of the game have always been vital. They are something he introduced to my universe. They are limits of sell-flagellation, if you like. I wanted to impose this self-flagellation on Jorgen."
It's a double, and eventually all-consuming, game. The mastermind of the Dogme rules wants Leth to operate under strictures that will leave him defenseless, without the distance his own parameters usually supply. This, Trier expected, would expose Leth's true self, let "the scream" out, flagellate him down to "the nerves and most delicate vessels" (does this ultimate cinema sound eerily akin to MeI Gibson's?). It's a trashing and wearing away of cinema to get to inner truthwhich is dismissed by Leth, an elegantly formal filmmaker, as "pure romanticism."
It is also, like Dogme, a game. If Leth had been defeated instead of inspired by Trier's obstructions, and had produced "crap," would we be seeing it? Could the film have been initiated with that actual expectation? But Trier is a fanatic of a kind of cinema that wants to efface cinema-which has its own European tradition. he is just a more compacted version of it. he has collapsed the lyrical destructions of early Godard with the longing for the void of late Godard (by way ofthat middle-period yellow wall, a la Pierrot le fou?). In the current cinema of cruelty, games, and provocation, he is also joined by Michael Haneke and Caspar Noe, though Trier goes further. he has recognized that he will have to travel beyond Europe, and he has recently declared- that he might set all his films in America now-where the real wearing away and trashing of cinema will have to be done.-RlCHARD COMBS
The Five Obstructions opens on May 26 at New York's Film Forum.
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