Nobody Talks About: The Five Obstructions

A film school prank disguised as psychological warfare, or psychological warfare disguised as a film school prank. Either way it's a masterclass.

Lars von Trier loves Jørgen Leth’s short film The Perfect Human so much he wants to destroy it.

He sets a challenge: Leth must remake the film five times with increasingly impossible constraints. As Leth transforms every constraint into an advantage, von Trier can’t help but undermine morality, cinema, and himself.

Or is that the plan?

”Nobody Talks About” is a series on the obscure or overlooked; a quirky recommendation for the weekend... but half the fun of this stuff is in discussion. Am I crazy? Or is this old news to you? Let me know in the comments!

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The Five Obstructions (2003) 

Written and Directed by Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth

I think this is one of von Triers best films - certainly one of his most unequivocally successful. It’s educational, inspirational and a strangely edge of seat experience. It drives headlong into big cinematic themes such as the morality of production, artistic freedom, and the nature of cinematic authorship.

I remember walking in one random Sunday to the Landmark Sunshine Cinema (sadly gone) not expecting much and walking out 90 minutes later being blown away with the thrill of an altered perspective on film. You will learn more about film making from this 90 minutes than most classes in film school. Of course, in the hard sell, I’m probably setting you up for disappointment.

The film follows perennial provocateur Lars von¹ Trier challenging his friend and mentor Jørgen Leth to remake his influential (certainly to von Trier - I’d never come across it before) 1967 short The Perfect Human five times under increasingly diabolical and offensive constraints. (This is von Trier - so you will no doubt be - darkly - amused by his hierarchy of offenses.) Watching it, in the back of my mind, I have the vision of that scene in The DaVinci Code where naked Paul Bettany keeps whipping himself.

First, remake the film with no shot longer than twelve frames. Then film it in the most miserable place in the world, but without the misery. Make an animated version, when both men hate animation. The stated intent is to destroy, but the result is to create.

The joke is that Leth keeps beating von Trier at his own game, taunting him with fantastic short film after fantastic short film, each more inventive than the 1967 original. The tone is set from the beginning when Leth returns with his film, thrilled that the constraint was a “gift” that freed him. Each time Von Trier tries to break him, Leth  brilliantly re-invents himself under pressure. It’s psychological judo, and you start to wonder who is torturing who.

And while we are watching Leth’s work, this is also von Trier’s work. You can see the same concerns that von Trier had in his Dogme95 manifesto; the semi-arbitrary rules that attempt to strip cinema to its essence through constraint. It also starts to become reminiscent of Matthew Barney’s work, most obviously Drawing Restraint where Barney was physically constrained as he draws.

However, The Five Obstructions has most in common with Cremaster Cycle’s elaborate formal constraints and concerns - narrative structure, genre limits and the boundaries of the medium itself. The central thesis for both is the same: constraint is a precondition of freedom.

The brilliant irony is that one of von Trier’s best films is mostly made by Jørgen Leth. Something I think von Trier would simultaneously hate and love.

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Digital

The film is available on Apple in the UK and (possibly) on Amazon in the USA.

However, the whole film is on Vimeo here. I have no idea about whether this is official or not.

For reference, here is the original short which is not shown in the film, but is worth watching first:

Physical

You can also purchase DVDs on Amazon UK and KinoLorber in the US for those that like things physical. Alas, those are SD not HD.

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1. I assume you know he added “von” because it makes him sound more upper class and is a nod to director Erich von Stroheim