When I decided to put on a film day (discussed previously) I decided to get hold of a film I viewed when it was released in 2004 called The Five Obstructions. I watched this again the other day and tried to work out what I found so interested about it. Essentially this film is a docu-drama in which Jorgen Leth remakes Lars Von Trier’s film The Perfect Human five times each time with a different obstruction set by Trier himself. It is a program designed to test the elder director and reveal the limitations of his precisionist vision and technique. In my opinion this work had much resonance with our own contemporary situation. We live our lives subconsciously navigating our way through various obstructions. If these obstructions were changed, or did not exist, we would live our lives totally differently. Like Leth, taking the same plot the same substance, then changing the film into an animation, a Havana remake, a twelve frame number. Each become something else under the unifying umbrella of the title, fragmented and split off. Secondly I enjoyed this idea of the game, the controller and the controlled. Through the course of the film the tables seem to turn as Leth performs each task and Trier tries to outwit him each time. The notion of a game of control has somewhat more serious undertones that the two friends sitting around drinking vodka and pontificating over the film industry.

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