SHORT FILMS BY JORGEN LETH

Motion Picture
1970, Denmark, 20 mins. 16 mm print source: Danish Film Institute
Directed by Jørgen Leth. Written, produced and edited by Ole John and Jørgen Leth. Photographed by Ole John. Original Music by James Brown. With Torben Ulrich.

I'm Alive. Søren Ulrik Thomsen: A Danish Poet
1999, Denmark, 40 mins. 35 mm print source: Danish Film Institute
Written and directed by Jørgen Leth. Produced by Annette Norregaard-Jensen. Photographed by Dan Holmberg. Edited by Camilla Skousen. Original Music by Krzysztof Komeda (Tomasz Stanko Septet) and Randall Meyers. With Søren Ulrik Thomsen.

New Scenes From America
2002, Denmark, 43 mins. 35 mm print source: Danish Film Institute
Written and directed by Jørgen Leth. Produced by Marianne Christensen and Mette Heide. Photographed by Dan Holmberg. Edited by Camilla Skousen. Original Music by John Cale. With John Ashbery, John Cale, Robert Frank, Roy Haynes, Dennis Hopper, Mark Kurlansky, Albert Maysles, Patrick Slavin.



MOTION PICTURE
From Film# Special Issue / Leth (2002, Danish Film Institute):

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 emphasizing the role of framing.

The complex nature of film is indicated by Jørgen Leth's short appearances as a living clapperboard for synchronizing sound and image. Jørgen Leth and Ole John ran the film through the camera several times to create a couple of doubly-exposed scenes, and the result is the mysterious perception of several of Torben Ulrich's servings 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 was shown prior to Francois Truffaut's L'enfant sauvage.

I'M ALIVE. SOREN ULRIK THOMSEN: A DANISH POET
From an interview with Jørgen Leth by Mette Hjort and Ib Bondeberg, The Danish Directors-Dialogues on a Contemporary National Cinema, 2001, reproduced in Film# Special Issue/Leth:

I hate it when poems are illustrated with images. Film simply cannot compete with the suggestive power of poetry's imagery. I don't like it when a film intrudes on a poem and appropriates its language. What is required is a much more controlled strategy. Søren Ulrik Thomsen had himself expressed a desire to see me make the film about him. I was nervous in the beginning, because I didn't know whether our chemistry would be right, but everything worked out very nicely. I'm very pleased with that film. It's as though I was offered that project at exactly the right moment. Søren Ulrik's poetry and personality have inspired me, and my collaborators, to make something very powerful and pure. Dan Holmberg, my photographer, has produced some of the most beautiful work he's ever done, and the same is true of Camilla Skousen, my editor.

I dare say that the poems inspired us to make a film that itself is a kind of a poem. Søren Ulrik came to Haiti so that we could talk about the project, and the first thing he said was that it was important to him to know that I would make a film that I would be pleased with from an artistic point of view. I presented a potential problem to him, the fact that I refuse to illustrate poems, although I did want to be able to make use of a lot of decontextualized images from his poetry. He solved this by simply giving me carte blanche to cannibalize his poems as I saw fit. He repeatedly said that he was sure that my cool aesthetic distance in relation to what he called his "overheated" poetry would lead to something good. I think he was right.

The stories he tells in the film, about his childhood and his method, he had those in his head right from the start. He outlined several of them for me in Haiti a year before we started. Those were things he wanted to give to the film, I clearly understood that, and I also regard them as a gift. The fact that the stories in question were so polished and complete also helped to establish the film's style. Søren Ulrik Thomsen as a person and poet was fully present and at the same time at a comfortable distance. I felt like making a film with emblematically clear images. So I asked myself: What do I have? I have the poet's poetry, I have him as a physical person, I have what he wants to say and I have his concrete environments, his tools and immediate milieu. Those are the elements. No mediating, connective tissue, just the pure goods. I think the film reveals Søren Ulrik Thomsen's stature as a poet and his generosity as a person. That's not nothing.

NEW SCENES FROM AMERICA
From Jørgen Leth's correspondence with Allan Berg Nielsen before and after 9/11, reproduced in Film# Special Issue/Leth:

We would like to make a film that would go well with the original [66 Scenes from America, 1981] in an international context, an observation anew that will put the era in perspective, an update, toying with the idea of describing the West.

We want to gather and organize new film material from the America that continues to inspire us visually. We are interested in immersion, filmic iconography, economy of structure. We aim to make our methods more sophisticated by using the minimum of means. Our method of production will be mobile and extremely simplified. In 66 Scenes from America we conducted ourselves playfully with the iconographic wealth available on the spot; we toyed with the way the West frames life.

We want to go further, with the experience and sensitivity we possess, the age we are at, and the tenderness combined with sobriety we feel we are able to bring to bear on the inexhaustible material we know still awaits us.

We envisage a playful, elegant film. One shouldn't be afraid of repeating oneself. On the contrary; great artists return to the same themes. Without wishing to compare ourselves to them, we will adopt the same working model. Simple means. Black and white film. highways, motels, [Robert] Frank, Edward Hopper, and then Leth and Holmberg. Today at around the turn of the century. What does America look like when we seek out the visual templates that are so expressive? Observations. Notes.


We are doing the final takes for New Scenes from America. The title has certainly assumed a profounder significance. […] We had just finished shooting in New York three days before hell broke loose. […] But I have given a lot of thought to the fact that it will be necessary to shoot one more vital scene. It is odd to think of the scenes we shot two weeks ago from Jersey City with the Lower Manhattan skyline as a fantastic backdrop, sparkling with the reflected sundown across the River Hudson. That profile has now changed, just as the world changed on that day.

Now for the vital idea that I believe must be realized in order to put everything into perspective. We'll have to go back to New York in November when the dust has settled and shoot a new picture of the Lower Manhattan skyline from Jersey as a possible closing image.

I have given it a great deal of thought. At first I thought it would be too hard hitting. Today I am convinced it must be done. The reasons are simple. I don't think I'd ever forgive myself if we didn't do it. I think the film will acquire decisive value through the addition of such a scene.

The film has been made the way it was conceived from the start. We never refer to what took place. Nobody mentions it with a single word in the film. But we have made a film about America within a specific time frame. We can't get round that. And that is how it will be perceived. It will of course have a profound effect that there is a scene with a New York fire fighter who introduces himself thus: "I'm a New York fire fighter. I live and put out fires in New York City". But we shot it four days before the terrorist attack.

We can shoot the proposed scene very tastefully without compromising the poker-faced attitude of the film. We've got to have that image. We've made a film in a time frame in which Lower Manhattan looks resplendent at first and then suddenly loses its teeth. In the sundown reflected from New Jersey.

Life is our subject matter, after all. We are making images of the way things look in America. I don't think I could live with just leaving the first image to stand alone.