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1-7 of 7
- An extension of The Perfect Human, Good and Evil is a longer, more expansive pseudo-documentary portrayal of life, no less. Using capacious titles or chapter headings that Leth's narrator's voice dwells upon and impresses upon us as he toys with the cliché "Faces", "Bodies", "Things", "Necessary actions", "Unnecessary actions", Good thoughts", "Bad thoughts", "Pleasant feelings", "Unpleasant feelings", and "Words" - the film consist of aesthetically titillating and contentually almost schematic scenes shot in the void of the film studio: faces, bodies and things. A man with a shoe. Another man with a hardboiled egg which he talks about and eats. A woman gives her husband a shirt. A couple who argue. A desperate woman. And so forth. There is no psychological shading of the characters, merely a series of sketches or examples that are as if plucked out of different everyday contexts. The thread leading back to Life in Denmark is thus also clear. The dialogue is sparse and phrases or fragments of phrases recur, spoken by different actors and in different roles, which may be viewed as an accentuation of the ordinariness of these little utterances and as an awareness of language as such. Besides the professional cast work the film uses several photographic models, the circus artiste Diana Benneweis, and the cyclist ole Ritter, who all pose in front of the camera in small tableaux. In addition to the craziness of the project the film also contains a series of zany comic acts with Claus Nissen to carry them. He bursts into song while washing his hands, dances in an empty room, plays rhythmic games with the statement "Bossa nova rhythms I have nothing against" and repeats his mysterious closing line from The Perfect Human: "Today, too, I had an experience ..." The framework for the scenes is made up of a couple of visual leitmotifs by way of house fronts and landscapes. In addition a beautiful travelling shot from an avenue at dramatically appropriate moments is accompanied by one of the two tunes by Gunner Møller Pedersen from the film, sung in a girlish voice by Sanne Salomonsen. In 1999 Lars von Trier chose the film to represent Danish cinema at a number of European film festivals over a period of three years ("15 x 15: European Cinema Heritage").
- A personal essay about how children and adults play. The film is split in 9 chapters.
- Jørgen Leth made Notater om kærligheden during a crisis in his life and it is a sombre, perhaps very personal film. The tone is struck by Leth's voice, which accompanies a shot of him shaving at the start of the film with the word "Repugnance". The actors are used as properties in the loosely conjoined, sketch-like scenes, and a series of simple themes reappear from Det gode og det onde, of which this film lies clearly in continuation: house fronts behind which people live, smoking a cigarette, and perhaps the most important theme of the film, touch. Other important moods or emotions include restlessness, indecisiveness, and more tangibly, writer's block, with which Leth's alter ego in the film, Claus Nissen, struggles in a brick set by Per Kirkeby. Nissen also takes up his character from Det perfekte menneske and Det gode og det onde in several scenes. In a loose structure kept together by several recurrent motifs such as a large tree lit at night, a canoe gliding along a river in the twilight, and its music, the film also contains other blocks of material, including ballet scenes shot in the studio and a number of affectionate images of a woman and her daughter in Nicaragua. The documentary material from the Trobriand Islands makes the most marked impression: a staged layer mimicking the anthropologist Malinowski's photographs from the islands in black and white and the story of the Danish film unit following in Malinowski's footsteps, again seeking tangible documentation of the nature of love.
- Traberg, like Udenrigskorrespondenten, is an experiment in fiction consisting of placing a character or a fictional sketch into a set of surroundings and seeing what happens. For most of the film, the surroundings are the same, namely the chaotic reality of Haiti. Ebbe Traberg plays Traberg, a mystical character who cannot be explained psychologically and whose seemingly covert activities care only hinted at in pictures. We follow him from a could of locations in Northern Spain (which the genuine Traberg was attached to, including the pelotafrontóns of the Pays Basques) to Haiti, where the film changes character. A narrator comes clean right from the start: "I didn't know where it would lead me. It was this thing about my old friend Traberg. I wanted to tell a simple story. But it was harder than I thought". The difficulty with the fictional story is that the genuine events (a military coup and the inauguration of Jean-Bertrand Aristide as president in 1991) are so intrusive that the narrator pretty much loses interest in Traberg and works in a hectic documentary style instead, although in the closing shots a resolution of the Traberg story is hinted at. The film also contains several detached scenes from Haiti, including sensual, dark dance shots, a series of adages pronounced by an elderly gentleman, conveyed by fading up and down, a girl bringing cocktails for the film crew at the Hotel Oloffsen, etc. This material points clearly forward in time to Haiti. Uden title, in which Leth gives up the fictional framework entirely and devotes himself to his fascination for Haiti.
- Almost 100 Danes - including a cyclist, a minister of finances, a popular actress, and 13 single women from province - try to convey a realistic impression of Denmark, different from the usual view as a little, exotic, and strange country.
- Motion Picture is an experimental film with and not about the Danish tennis player Torben Ulrich, who is merely credited as "Example". The film may be viewed as a study of the nature of the medium and more specifically of the phenomena of framing, movement, and synchronicity of sound and picture. The material consists of Ulrich training strokes against a wall, volleys at the net and serves, but also of strange enactments in which Ulrich runs towards the camera, arms and legs twitching, dances a crazy racket dance or fakes slow motion as he sits down at a table and pours a cup of tea. These are all studies of movement. At the same time, the framing is absolute: Ulrich moves in and out of the picture without any attempt by the camera to follow him, thus constantly emphasising the role of framing. The complex nature of film is indicated by Jørgen Leth's little appearances as a living clapperboard for synchronizing sound and image. Jørgen Leth and Ole John ran the film through the camera several takes to create a couple of doubly-exposed scenes, and the result is the mysterious perception of several Torben Ulrichs serving on top of one another almost as if in a choreographed dance. One last narrative element introduced several places in the film is very sparse subtitles, such as "table chair tea". At the premiere at the Carlton cinema Motion picture as shown before Francois Truffaut's L'enfant Savage.
- In 1984 Jørgen Leth, cinematographer Dan Holmberg and sound recordist Niels Torp travelled some 6,000 kilometres by train through China. The result is a very calm, beautifully perceived travelogue borne by unprejudiced curiosity and observational ability. A riverboat in a landscape of sugar-top mountains in Southern China and the many shots from the train journey are the visual leitmotifs of the film, in which we meet an acrobat, a painter in inks, some opera students from the Beijing conservatory, and a group of female racing cyclists. The camera falls in love with exquisite tai chi movements and the dexterity of the train kitchen staff, and the soundtrack gives a vivid sense of the noisy life on board, with music blaring from scratchy loudspeakers. The fact that the film should be viewed as a collection of notes on film, i.e. a kind of travel journal, is emphasised by the title and by Leth's only words on the soundtrack: "I take notes because I want to remember what I have seen. I am smoking a Chinese cigarette and I am travelling on board a train in China". (In an English version of the film, which is nineteen minutes shorter, a further three notes appear on the soundtrack).