Jørgen Leth

“I take notes because I want to remember what I have seen”, claims Jørgen Leth in his film Note Book from China (1987), which is a long journey by train across the country. His travel films, presented at this year’s festival, have at least one thing in common: they are all based on Leth’s personal observations and on the artist’s curiosity. It is his personal interest and the will to learn that defines them. Leth looks at rhythm as something crucial in his films. “Everything is repetition, but nothing repeats itself”, he says in Moments of Play (1986). It shows different aspects of the playing human (rather children) through scenes of games and traditions while travelling through eight countries on three continents. The key is to find new things in the repeating scenes.

Leth is a poet and film director who is considered to be a leading figure in the development of Danish experimental documentary filmmaking. His first short film The Perfect Human was his breakthrough in 1967 (also cited in Lars von Trier’s The Five Obstructions). Its lyrical presentations are echoed in Leth’s first travel film 66 Scenes from America (1981). This film is a photo essay, or nearly a photo album, in a poetic and sometimes romantic style with music by Eric Satie and sequences of sunset on the American road. Andy Warhol appears in the middle of the film, eating one of his own symbols, a hamburger. He comments the scene later on: “I just finished eating a hamburger”, though he left the last pieces in the paper bag. Is he hiding away the remains of pop culture? Also shown in Tehran is the ’second part’ of this movie: New Scenes from America (2002). Leth seems unaffected by the changes the influences of September 11th, even though he shows the towers fell. The taxi drivers of New York’s streets are still there, most of them are still immigrants; just the country of origin may be different.

But let’s jump in space and a bit in time as well: Haiti. Untitled (1996) is according to Leth’s own words an ’ultimate’ film, by wanting to cover all aspects of Haitian life. This is shown by the fluidity of time, as it was made over a long period of time. Leth had lived on the island for a while and later on even became the Danish consul in Haiti. The ultimate is also underlined by the mixture of materials, as he was shooting both on High 8 and 35 mm depending on the situation. The film has footage from the time of a left wing military regime on the island from 1991 until 1994, after the president was forced into exile. But politics runs beside private life. American soldiers are shown in action, but also when they are calling home with tears in their eyes. The complexity of life on the island is marked by how the poorness of everyday life and the tragedy of death run parallel with the colours of the voodoo ceremonies and the beauty of the Haitian women. The two naked women portraits in the film (one of them is a Naivist poet reading her own poem) remind us of Gauguin: the European image artist lost in the beauty of exotic rotundity. The inspiration of painting is inevitable: no coincidence that Leth later dedicated a whole film to Haitian artists (Dreamers, 2002).

At last, but not at least we can also watch as part of this tribute Leth’s latest travel film Aarhus (2005). This is not a journey in space, but in time, in Leth’s good old poetic style. As his own tribute to his Danish hometown, the director returns and talks about his child and boyhood’s memories connected to the city. Now we understand better; you can be worldly filmmaker and citizen only if you are also able to travel in your own neighbourhood. On the wings of the pictures’ and the words’ poetry, that is what Jørgen Leth has been doing all his life.

Réka Szalkai