Film Response—Five Obstruction
In the film Five Obstructions by Jorgen Leth & Lars von Trier, they designed five obstructions with rules including 1. no single edit may be longer than 12 frames, 2. shooting the film in a miserable place, 3. having complete freedom, 4. creating a cartoon, and 5. having Lars make the film crediting Jorgen and having him read the narration.
Jorgen copes with each obstruction by embracing the challenge and finding creative ways to overcome the limitations.
For the first obstruction, he used short clips within 12 frames and completed the imitation in the form of a cutout way. He produced the film with “flickering” short clips and combined them into a short film. But as an audience, I felt really wired when I saw the picture changing so quickly. There is a word in China called 鬼畜, which represents the crazy feeling and the short clips repeating.
For the second obstruction of shooting in the miserable place. Jorgan followed the instructions and acted as the man himself. He went to Bombay to shoot the film and had a lot of actors to be included as the background. I have the same feeling that the people are too clear to be seen in the film, which goes against the requirement of people not being seen.
For the third obstruction, he used the producing strategy of cutting the picture into two and having relative contents in the two blocks.
For the fourth obstruction, he found Bob Sabiston and conducted the cartoon from his drawing. I was impressed that they used different colors and conveyed different questions.
For the fifth one, Lars probably intended to create a story about Jorgen and asked him to do the narration reading and the credit. Jorgen followed his instruction an nd
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