Five Obstructions

The Five Obstuctions is a theatre documentary which was directed by Lars Von Trier and Jorgen Leth. Lars Von Trier is a Danish filmmaker who is probably the most ambitions and visually distinctive filmmaker in Denmark. In 1991 he directed a film called Europa, In 1994 he directed another film called The Kingdom with Morton Arnfred and in 1996 he directed breaking the waves on his own. Jorgen Leth is also a Danish film director who is well known in the field of experimenting documentary films. He is also a poet and writer and has published volumes of poetry and four non-fiction books.

To create The Five Obstructions Lars Von Trier convinced his teacher Jorgen to create the remake of his 1967 short film The Perfect Human calling himself the obstructor, Von Trier decided to convince Leth to shoot his films in different parts of the world with extremely specific demands. For instance the first film was shot in Cuba with no set with only twelve frames per shot. They did second film in the worst place in the world which was in the red light district of Bombay. The third part they used split-screen effects which was shot in brussels. They also created an animation version of the film which is more of a rotoscoping animation which is a technique used by animators to trace over live action film movement, frame by frame. The fifth obstruction is that Von Trier has created the fifth part alredy, but it must be credited as Leth’s , and Leth must read a voiceover narration ostensibly from his own perspective but in fact written by Von Trier.