Is The Meaning Of Jorgen Leth's Short Film The Five Obstruction
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The concept of the remake becomes the core of Jorgen Leth’s and Lars von Trier’s film The Five Obstruction’s (2003). Jorgen Leth’s short film The Perfect Human (1967) is recreated five times, each time with a new set of obstructions set by fellow filmmaker Lars Von Trier. One must explore what new meanings are created with every re-make of The Perfect Human and whether it is those meanings that are the definitive purpose of film or if it is the way in which the creative process is challenged as the film progresses.
Jorgen Leth’s original short film The Perfect Human was created in 1967 and depicts two humans against a white backdrop doing typical functional things, such as eating, sleeping, getting dressed, however as Dywer (2008) suggests “It is as if they are mindless” p.6, she continues by addressing the notion that The Perfect Human has been described as a “pseudo-scientific examination of human behavior” pg. 6, this idea is reflected in the clinical set and lighting. Raffnsøe (2011) suggests that “to its extremity, The…show more content… Five different interpretations were produced from the same original in differing contexts. Through being forced to repeatedly remake his film The Perfect Human with different constraints, Jorgen Leth ended up changing his original view of The Perfect Human, implementing new meanings on every remake. The film ultimately demonstrated how a remake could refabricate a meaning instead of simply reproducing a meaning into a different cultural context. This concluded in five very different films that shown in isolation could not be connected to one another but all resonated in some way the original. After the analysis of the different meanings created we are still left with the question of the definitive purpose of these