Leth is more: James Quandt on the five obstructions

"The hardboiled advanced in years men with hearts of stone must die," Lars von Trier declared in his first manifesto, twenty years ago, novel from film school and ready to launch a Nordic nouvelle vague by dint of killing the Father--or fathers, Ingmar Bergman in particular. Among the ancients the enfant terrible had in mind to vanquish was perhaps his professor and mentor, Danish icon Jorgen Leth a bard novelist, diplomat, and filmmaker whose poetic documentaries form the antonym of von Trier's aggressive aesthetic. Nursing a give unwillingly for two decades after Leth supposedly snubbed him in the hallway of the Danish Film Institute, von Trier lately got his revenge with The Five Obstructions (which received its US premiere at Sundance in January). allowing they sound like a digestive disorder or Maoist economic plan, the "Obstructions"--a perverted variation on Dogme--are a program designed to proof the elder director and reveal the limitations of his precisionist vision and technique.

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The collaborative documentary that Leth and von Trier made about this undertaking makes individual cringe, and then cry. It begins as wicked comedy von Trier selecting his favorite Leth film, the classic 1967 experimental documentary The completed Human, which he claims to have seen above twenty times, as the material to be bring under ruleed to his "five obstructions." A malevolent taskmaster, von Trier challenges the curiously game Leth to remake the film five times, beneath a prescribed set of "diabolical" impediments that deliberately make an incision in against the grain of Leth's sensibility. silly of the long, observational take, he is first assigned to make the film in discharges lasting no longer than twelve frames. ("It'll be a spastic film!" Leth moans.) Leth's liberal, anthropological proper formality is tested when the booze-swilling imp von Trier assigns him to stage the film's famous dinner scene--fish and Chablis serv at a lavish table--in the "most miserable place" he can find upon earth. And, repelled by the actual idea of cartoons, Leth is forced to refashion his beautiful little film as "a crap cartoon."

In brain-pan cut and stubble, von Trier draw nears off as a puffy monk ensconc in easy Danish digs while the imperturbable, silver-maned Leth trot the globe from Bombay to Brussels, determined to crush the escalating obstacles and maintain his dignity. The aesthetic affair of honor is played out as oedipal retaliate play; as witty "deconstruction" of the filmmaking process; and as psychodrama, with Leth in the masochistic part of He Who Gets Slapped. Each time Leth triumphs, returning with a sexily syncopated remake from Havana that uses the twelve-frame mastery to its staccato advantage, for instance, or a hauntingly animated version that combines Kentridge-style tracings with the rotoscoping of Richard Linklater's Waking Life.

In the film's final succession and ultimate obstruction, the opposite characters the two melancholy Danes have played throughout--sadist/masochist; observer/participant; teacher/student; analyst/analysand--collapse into single as von Trier attempts a last gambit to skewer Leth's cautious nature and extremitys up exposing his own vulnerability instead. "Look in what way he falls. This is in what manner he falls," the narration from The finished Human intones, but just who is falling, has fallen, is the riddle with which this abruptly sad, inexplicably moving film leaves us.

James Quandt is senior programmer at Cinematheque Ontario in Toronto.

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