Obtrusive personal illustrations

THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS (Lars Von Trier and Jorgen Leth, Denmark, 2004, 10)

Lars Von Trier is an asshole. Or rather, he knows how to be one better than any human being alive. But watching Puck being an asshole is a lot of fun. And being a puckish asshole is a lot of fun. Especially if you don’t mean it.

The basic premise of THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS is simple but utterly loony. Von Trier idolizes fellow Dane Jorgen Leth and his 1960s experimental short called THE PERFECT HUMAN, which he has seen 20 times. Now one of the world’s most famous auteurs, Von Trier invites Leth over to his studio to discuss remaking THE PERFECT HUMAN, only five times and under film-making restrictions that Von Trier himself will name. THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS consists of excerpts of the resulting films and intercalary segments of Von Trier and Leth discussing the previous film and the next one.

I have to say that the first time I saw THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS, I laughed harder than I ever have at any movie that you wouldn’t really call a comedy. In fact, it’s hard to say exactly what you would call THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS in terms of a movie. It isn’t exactly a documentary (it certainly doesn’t offer the informational rewards of even the most-rote one-hour PBS special or “60 Minutes” segment); it certainly isn’t a narrative film. What do I think it is? — it’s an exercise in film criticism and Von Trier’s apologia pro vita sua. In fact, the only real complaint I would make against it is that, like with THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST and non-Christians, I have no idea what appeal it could possibly hold for people with no interest in film criticism as such and in Von Trier’s career. Even more than his great DOGVILLE, THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS is not a film for everyone.

Obtrusive personal illustration #1: When I saw the film a second time, the man sitting behind me at the AFI turned to a woman-I-took-to-be-his-date and said: “that was pretentious tedium and I apologize for bringing you to it.” I wanted to chuckle again.

Von Trier has a sense of humor that rubs many people the wrong way, because it both is and isn’t consistent with the movies he makes. He’s a bit like Alfred Hitchcock in that he’s built this enormous ironic persona that dominates his movies and through which we see all his movies. And the smirking-wolf, biggest-asshole-in-the-world tone that dominates his public pronouncements on just about anything is hard to square with the on-the-knees, irony-free Lives of the Saints movies like DANCER IN THE DARK and BREAKING THE WAVES. How THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS functions as an apologia and unites his two sides is by adding the element of confessional self-awareness to that public persona.

Von Trier is putting himself on the line more here than in any of his other films, and he knows it and shows it. A very negative review in the Washington City Paper basically lays out the indictment against Lars Von Trier, Asshole of the World, and correctly points out that Leth is as much the victim of Von Trier’s manipulative designs as any of his long-suffering actresses. Indeed Leth sinks into an off-to-Haiti-for-therapy bout with depression.

However, the film’s overall schema and the Obstruction #5 indicate that Von Trier is as aware as anyone of this rap. Leth says at one point that there’s something “Faust-like” about this game, and Von Trier smirks as the video camera catches in an unnatural kind of orange light when he bends forward. The effect is literally devil-like, and Leth says of one of the obstructions: “how diabolical.”

The European trailer for DOGVILLE plays up this side of Von Trier’s public persona, saying that matters got so hot on the set that a confession booth was set up for the cast. Several of the actors, in close-up to a black background, say what an insane control freak Von Trier is. Cut to Von Trier, as if to start his confession, but all he does is look at the camera with a puckish smile. Cut to the film’s title. While filming BREAKING THE WAVES, Von Trier refused to tell Emily Watson whether Bess’s conversations with God were meant to be real or all in her head, and this was the source of much onset quarreling until Von Trier relented. He also had several on-shoot fallings-out with Bjork (the personality clash is amply alluded to in generalities on the DVD of DANCER IN THE DARK) and Bjork swore afterwards that she’d never act again. When accepting the Palme D’Or at Cannes for DANCER, Von Trier thanked Bjork and said he loved working with her, though “I know she doesn’t believe me.” Sadistic manipulator of actors and directors Von Trier may be (my two all-time favorite directors, Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick, had a similar rep — actors are cattle and all). But look at the results Von Trier gets … some of the greatest lead female performances you’ll ever see and a string of masterpieces … and that is all that will matter to viewers 100 years from now.

The City Paper called this fifth obstruction the ultimate act of self-aggrandizement on Von Trier’s part — “But in his attempts to provide some kind of avant-garde film therapy for his directorial hero, von Trier reveals his own vanity and pride. He can criticize, even direct a fellow director, because he’s Lars von Trier, master of the cinema.” Well, yeah, kinda. But what should a world famous filmmaker do with his notoriety? I, a pretty hard-core film buff, had never heard of THE PERFECT HUMAN or of Jorgen Leth before seeing THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS. While I can’t exactly say that THE PERFECT HUMAN looks to be to my tastes, if an opportunity comes up to see it sometime, I’ll almost certainly take it now and maybe I’ll be inspired to hunt out his other work. So Von Trier has done Leth the greatest service possible to one’s idol — made a new generation aware that he exists.

Obtrusive personal illustration #2: One year, my parents gave me for Christmas a gorgeously illustrated coffee-table book called “Silent Movies” by Neil Sinyard, which I devoured that day. Two of the first five pictures in it are of NAPOLEON by French master Abel Gance. Siskel & Ebert said on an episode I saw not long afterward that Gance was reduced to burning his furniture to keep warm before the 1980 Francis Coppola-led reconstruction and restoration of NAPOLEON. The Sinyard book also recounts the following anecdote: Sam Goldwyn was dining in a Hollywood restaurant with Billy Wilder in the 1930s when he was accosted by a drunk demanding work. The man became so obstreperous that Goldwyn, with the aid of some of the restaurant staff, had to escort him out of the building. ‘Who was that?’ Wilder asked when Goldwyn resumed his seat. ‘DW Griffith,’ replied Goldwyn.

The critical background to this film is the Dogme 95 manifesto and its “vow of chastity,” which was cooked up between Von Trier and three fellow Danish directors over some … ahem … adult beverages. It was as much a joke as anything else and some critics (including … ahem … moi) reacted to it by looking at the films for violations of the vow of chastity. Yet the manifesto prompted the making of several good (MIFUNE) or great (THE CELEBRATION, THE IDIOTS) films, which is ultimately all that matters sub specie aeternitis. Billions of words have been spilled over the “movement,” which has certified 35 films, and some of them are still fine in the estimate of sane people (like the first film in this roundup here).

The key to this part of the film is how offhandedly Von Trier tosses off the restrictions. While talking about the rules for Obstruction #1, Leth mentions at one point that he loves cigars, but has never been to Cuba. “So then, you’ll have to shoot this in Cuba,” Von Trier says, like some adolescent just looking to mess with Leth’s mind. He also mandates the apparently inhuman restriction of no shot longer than 12 frames (that’s half-a-second of screen time). And yet Leth produces something of interest — having the new Perfect Human apparently dance and shake in place throughout (think of the Wang Chung video for “Everybody Have Fun Tonight”). I’m not going to say much more about the progression through the five obstructions themselves because so much of the humor is of the one-thing-leads-to-another variety.

It’s as if it doesn’t matter what restrictions Von Trier tosses off to Leth (or Von Trier and Vinterberg came up with upon the 7th round of vodka shots), Leth will always struggle against them and make the best film he can (ditto the Dogmetists). Carpenters and sculptors call it working with the grain of the wood. “You’re so clever that whatever I do inspires you,” Von Trier says to Leth and that’s the whole critical point of this film. That, in aesthetic terms, restrictions are liberating. A blank slate is a slight riff off the philosophical Paradox of Buridan’s Ass — that without a given, external reason to do something at the start, you have no particular reason to do any thing at all. Leth gets some impossible and very funny assignments, but makes the best out of them because … well, just because. Obstruction #4 prompts Leth to admit, while making it, that he’s way out of his league in making a kind of film that he hates and has no expertise in. “It ought to be stupid, but I can’t do that. I won’t allow myself to,” he says. Leth effectively hands the project off to someone else, and one might think that constitutes defeat for Leth, but no. Even then, he takes the trouble to fly thousands of miles to review stills. “We can’t help but get involved and look for a solution,” Leth says. “So I’m afraid it won’t be a load of crap,” he says, getting involved in the spirit of the enterprise.

Obtrusive personal illustration #3: I once penetrated the office of a leftwing group that I will not name beyond saying that I despised it in real life. I pretended to be an “idealistic” liberal volunteer who just “wanted to do his or her part,” got assigned to do some office work, kept my ears peeled and leaked what I learned to the other side for about two months. But even though I was essentially a saboteur, I just couldn’t bring myself to mess up my job and turn what I was doing into a load of crap. While I was there, I was the best office clerk I could be and even won a couple of compliments about how hardworking I was from one of the Big Shots there.

It’s a commonplace of film history that creativity in those bad old days of the studio era grew out of the lack of the kind of freedom that has been enjoyed since the collapse of the studios in the 1960s and the turning of basically everybody from a contract employee to a free agent. The directors being studio employees gave a kind of security against failure; the studio’s providing the whole technical crew and a stable of stars meant directors didn’t have to be dealmakers or assemblers; even the genre story lines were, in Andrew Sarris’s words, “a condition of creativity,” giving filmmakers a template to see what they could do, working with it and around it. Believe it or not, you don’t have to be a Sartrean existentialist to see freedom as an abyssal trap. Even though he had full control over his films, Hitchcock still loved to paint himself into aesthetic corners — all those one-set movies like ROPE, REAR WINDOW and DIAL M FOR MURDER — and then see how he could get himself out with no loss of cinematic value.

Other limits that the state of the art or circumstance has imposed on filmmakers just required them to be more creative — the lack of sound meant the silent stars “had faces,” as Norma Desmond says; black-and-white photography became its own art form because color was prohibitively expensive and nonrealistic for so long; the postwar lack of studio sets, lighting, and money pushed the Italian directors of the 40s to develop neorealism; censorship codes, whether Hollywood’s Hays office of the past or the Iranian mullahs today, force writers and directors to portray love and sex in ways other than the easiest and thus cheapest ones.

This critique of freedom was contrary to the conception that Leth was working with in the 1960s. The very first thing we hear from THE PERFECT HUMAN is the invite to see “the Perfect Human in a room without limits.” And THE PERFECT HUMAN is performed on one of those blank, unspecific, all-white sets that rock bands from early in the video era (the 1970s) usually played in front of. But Von Trier sees things the opposite way. His own career has followed the opposite trajectory, beginning with very mannered, stylistically dense films, and now he’s at the point (DOGVILLE) where he’s not even using a set. He says near the end that for his whole creative career, “rules are like a flagellation that define the universe. I want to do that for him,” referring to his idol Leth.

Obtrusive personal illustration #4: The first time I didn’t turn in a school assignment and got a 0 grade, it was an open-ended assignment to describe myself. I told my junior English teacher that I had no idea what I was supposed to do; she repeated the assignment and said an open-ended assignment is a spur to creativity. To this day, the surest way to get me to draw a blank in conversation is to say “tell me about yourself”; as a writer the hardest thing for me to do is write the first sentence (though once I get started … well, the rest of this blog is an evidence of the logorrhea that can result).

Mike downgraded OBSTRUCTIONS, which he generally did love because it illustrates his belief that artistically, freedom=slavery, saying that #3 doesn’t really stink like it should and #5 is more a summation than anything else. Theo likewise complained that only the first two obstructions really follow the rules of the movie’s premise, which is kinda true and also kinda the point. Von Trier makes fun of this method of criticism explicitly when he accuses Leth of violating the rules of Obstruction #2. “It’s marvelous, but it doesn’t follow the rules,” he says with a perfectly straight face. “It’s better than the other film, but the other film is what I asked for.”

In any event, the last three obstructions are really responses to the first two and the war-of-wills dynamic between the two men — Von Trier taking Leth for a ride; Leth determined not to let Von Trier get the better of him. The real heart of the movie isn’t the dicking around Von Trier can do, but (as the creepy Cypriot says) the relationship between the two men. Obstructions #3, #4 and #5 are more attempts to one-up or react to or against the previous obstruction and the result. To insist that the five obstructions themselves all be bona fide is like poring over THE CELEBRATION for violations of the vow of chastity; it misses the larger spirit of the enterprise, that it’s been all along a “help Leth” project, as dear silly Lars says. And that dear silly Lars comes to realize, though he has to say through pomo layering because he’s Lars Von Trier, that Leth wound up obstructing him, by not giving satisfaction.

Obtrusive personal illustration #5: In a moment of bravado after seeing the film in Toronto, I asked some friends to impose five obstructions upon the review I would write. No takers (pansies). Hence this review, which I had to start from an unobstructed blank screen, and hence it is probably crap.

Sincere artifice

DANCER IN THE DARK — Lars Von Trier, Denmark, 2000, 10

This film, the best of 2000, finally won Von Trier the prize he had been craving a bit too openly for the taste of many, the Palme D’Or at Cannes along with a Best Actress prize from Icelandic chanteuse Bjork. And he won over a damn impressive competition field — SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR, YI YI, IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE, CODE UNKNOWN, and FAITHLESS all made my Top 10 for the year they won US release, and CHUNHYANG nearly did. Other people I respect (though not me) loved EUREKA and ESTHER KAHN, and I’ve yet to see the highly-regarded DEVILS ON THE DOORSTEP and GOHATTO.

The plot is pure 30s Hollywood melodrama — mother works multiple jobs to save enough money for an operation to save her son from the same Movie Disease that is causing her to lose her own sight. She fantasizes music to relieve the misery, until she loses her job and then all her money is stolen. And then things start to go bad. DANCER is very similar to BREAKING THE WAVES in style (the same washed-out look and dizzying handheld camera for the drama scenes) and in its general “Lives of the Saints book” story arc (although worship of God is replaced by worship of Hollywood musicals, and love for a crippled husband is replaced with love for a son going blind). The musical scenes themselves are shot in a quite different style from the drama scenes, all on static digital cameras, with an oversaturated color scheme and heavier editing.

Von Trier, whose public persona is so puckish and ironic, aims here for a deeply felt, all-out appeal to the emotions — an old-fashioned melodramatic “weepie” with no concessions to po-mo sensibilities (possibly excepting the particulars of Bjork’s music). And it works best by being embraced in a straight-ahead, irony-free, face-value manner and avoiding games about genre deconstruction or meta-distanciation. A naivete as utter as Selma’s; one that ties you to her. DANCER should not have worked on me — I generally wouldn’t call myself a fan of Three-Hankie weepies, and Von Trier took away all the theology that I found so fascinating in BREAKING THE WAVES. And he still made a deeply unfashionable masterpiece.

DANCER uses the plot and some of the conventions of a melodrama, but uses the the particularly contemporary genius of Bjork and Von Trier to produce identification with its heroine as thorough as I ever recall getting from a motion picture. In the normal tear-jerker, things are just a little too pretty … what Roger Ebert calls Ali McGraw’s Disease being one example, weeping violin strings on the score being another. Here what Von Trier does is use the same outlandish plots but treat them with deadpan seriousness, exactly the opposite of today’s fashionably Coenesque smirking. The hand-held, washed-out camera gives these ludicrous events immediacy and reality in the way that 30s studio sets and star lighting and makeup schemes just emphasize the phoniness. As for score, I don’t recall a single snatch of nondiegetic music except in the sequences that are explicitly palyed as fantasies. That music itself is Bjorkish — which is say deliberately nonpretty (which is not to say not-moving or in some sense beautiful).

In altering the melodramatic formula in these ways, so many critics tried to justify it by arguing that Von Trier was playing genre games or subverting this or foregrounding that (and in that sense my reaction is somewhat anti-intellectual). If you don’t resist this movie’s mere existence and formula, it’s unbelievably simple. In my favorite sequence in the movie, when Selma and Bill share their secrets, Von Trier uses the most old-fashioned but still effective camera strategy, he just gets really close to the actors’ faces. I mean REALLY REALLY close — at one point there’s nothing in the widescreen frame but Selma’s face from the eyebrow ridge to the nose — exactly how one acts and feels when sharing deep, dark intimacies (in several senses).

As for Bjork, I’ll cite Catherine Deneuve’s statement that “she can’t act. She can only be.” There is never an actorish mannerism in her, never a moment when we see Bjork sense that she’s got a great bit of Palme bait in her hands. When she’s singing “A Few of My Favorite Things” to herself in her jail cell or “The Next to Last Song” on the gallows, there’s absolutely no way to question the guttural despair, the depth of agony in that voice. I mean, if Bjork’s performance doesn’t strike one as a brilliant example of naturalistic acting, all I can do is shake my head and wonder what one thinks such a thing is.

To quote a Pauline Kaelism some seem to think is damning, DANCER is the sort of movie that makes you feel protective — toward Selma, toward her son, toward Bjork as Selma, even in an odd way toward the sheriff, and ultimately toward the movie itself. It tweaks your operatic responses until, dammit, you’re Selma up there on the gallows at the end. DANCER exists wholly on the level of this sort of emotional involvement or identification, which is the best of all possible worlds for a tearjerker like this because you then look past the implausibilities and lack of “serious, constructive” social criticism as mere cavilling … “can’t you see what matters here” is the rough thought process.

This IS, as I say, an uncritical or anti-intellectual response, but very few films can achieve these heights of pathos. It’s not so much that just blustering operatic emotion is so *easy* (I think picking at continuity errors or dissecting sociopolitical allegories is every bit as *easy*) as that such blubbering is the right response to DANCER, if the film works at all. But maybe this is not the last song, as Bjork sings a song “New World” over the credits, which doesn’t appear in the rest of the movie and seems to be from the POV of a dead woman. So the movie can just go on forever …