2004, "The Perfect Human: Lars Von Trier or Jørgen Leth?," EGS

"From perfect to human," these are the words of Lars Von Trier to his former professor Jørgen Leth. Leth was a precise, high modernist filmmaker whose masterpiece is Det Perfekte Menneske (The Perfect Human,1967), a film set in a white room with a man and a woman portraying the actions of daily life. The man wears a tuxedo and the girl is in a white a-line dress. The couple is the perfect couple, each perfect samples of their gender, attractive and anonymous. And to demonstrate that they are perfectly controlled modern human units, the film has an instructional voice. The voice is Leth who explains how the man participates in fine dining and dancing. The woman shows how to lay down on a bed. The film - black and white and only 13 minutes - is the message of modern living. There is potential to consider the film a statement about 20th century standardization. But one cannot help but fall for the man and woman who carry out relatively timeless acts with sincerity and show a childlike joy in modernism that is somehow inaccessible to us today.

Leth was no doubt influential for Von Trier. Von Trier's Zentropa empolys a voice over almost identical to that in The Perfect Human. In 2003, Von Trier invited Leth to work with him to create The 5 Obstructions. For the film, Von Trier requires Leth to re-make The Perfect Human five different times, each with a different obstacle. Leth is prevented from making an object of perfection, a controlled project, and must interact with reality.

The 5 Obstructions is shot like a reality television show with shots of Leth and Von Trier discussing the projects. Leth is smoking a cigar and Von Trier asks him where it is from. "Cuba," he answers. Well the first obstacle is determined and Leth must travel to Cuba to shoot without a set. Leth was next instructed to film under duress, which becomes the dining scene of The Perfect Human surrounded by hundreds of starving people in India. In another obstruction, Leth is forced to choose his own obstruction and he re-shoots with the original actors now aged, old and imperfect. The 5 Obstructions is about the transformation of cinema - from new media to familiar, from dreamlike object to participant in reality. Film still offers invented fanatasies, but Von Trier asks Leth to learn from the next generation. Von Trier does not ask Leth to exploit reality but to contend with it. He forces Leth, to let go and discover the scene in the real world.

Leth is not sincerely pleased with any of the resulting films. Leth's original is the most exquisite, ideal work. There is nothing that Von Trier has made, not even The 5 Obstructions, that compares to the precision of The Perfect Human. But Von Trier continually addresses that the goal of the creator is to go "from perfect to human," implying that to make something perfect is only part of the project. Modernism revealed that perfection was not the final answer or the ultimate future. To allow the perfection to become weathered, occupied, aged, transformed or destroyed is to allow it to interact with reality, to be in dialogue with the human and to go beyond the perfect vision. Post-modernism is a moment of letting the perfect go. From perfect to human locates the next step already in progress.