The Pagan Agenda

Rating:

“This is how the perfect human falls” – from ‘The Perfect Human’

I finally got around to watching the Lars Von Trier ‘experiment’ known as ‘The Five Obstructions’. In this documentary quite unlike any documentary, Lars challenges his creative mentor, Jorgen Leth, to a sadistic game: Jorgen must direct his classic short film ‘The Perfect Human’ five different times, each with a different set of obstructions devised by Lars. Lars is relentless in his obstructions, each time undermining Jorgen’s expectations with ever more outlandish requests as the game goes along. The game holds together by, and in the end comes to exemplify, the depth of mutual respect Lars and Jorgen have for one another. From the trailer one gets the sense that this is a diabolical battle of egos, when in actuality the game becomes humbling and therapeutic for both.

As always, Lars demonstrates his insatiable enthusiasm for dismantling conventions. As he mentions at one point in the film: the most exciting performance an actor can give a director is almost always accidental, that which comes from mistake, from being destabilized in a moment and while the camera is rolling that moment is captured in all its sincerity. Through the process of the five obstructions, it is Lars’ intention to do just that to the director Jorgen Leth, to destabilize his comfort zone in order to witness the transcendent in his craft.

I had not heard of Jorgen Leth prior to this film (and perhaps it was an additional goal of this film to make his talents more widely known) but I must say I thoroughly enjoyed his original short film ‘The Perfect Human’ and could see why Lars was so taken with it. It runs twelve minutes long and presents the perfect man (and woman) to the viewer in minimal black and white imagery. The figures strike various poses and engage in mundane activities as a voice-over whimsically taunts us to look at the subject, look at what he does, what he is thinking, to look always, as if the subject was a specimen of creature we had never met before, as if we were aliens who came upon a man in tuxedo dancing, to look with new eyes. The effect is intoxicating. I felt myself relishing every small moment, the lived existence being photographed without the distraction of scenery and narrative. The tacit experience was definitely heightened in this film, in fact it was almost all there was to it.

‘The Five Obstructions’ had me thinking about the power of obstruction in the creative process. It is far more difficult to create something without obstructions, either external or self-enforced, and the greater the obstruction the more one has to displace one’s attention from the realm of the comfortable. So often is it the case that the most imaginative films come with such restricted budgets. One example is George Lucas and his first ‘Star Wars’ film, which quite literally invented the department of special effects in cinema, where the shoestring budget at every turn forced Lucas to conceive of new ways to express it. Recent films like ‘Primer’ and ‘Blair Witch Project’ also benefit from this enforced monetary obstruction and reinvented genres in ways that probably would not have been conceived of had the obstruction not existed. In a similar way I find the activity of philosophy a creative process which works best from imposed obstructions, most often by another person who has formed limited ways in which concepts can be formed, and the limitations open up potentially new ways of seeing things.

Of course the philosophical investigations of Wittgenstein are all about this kind of displacement from the conventional modes of thinking, in his case using primitive language games to show ways in which our modern complex use of language may be reinterpreted. Would Stephen Hawking have come to the same novel interpretations of the universe he did if the obstruction of his car accident had not limited his abilities to manually work out equations? Perhaps I will expand on this idea at another time, for right now I am just pondering the implications of it. Technorati Tags: Jorgen Leth