Women’s Role in the Quest for Male Fulfilment:
an analysis of gender in Jørgen Leth and Lars von Trier’s The Five Obstructions
INTRODUCTION
The Five Obstructions (2003) is a documentary film about film-making. It follows Danish film-maker Jørgen Leth as he attempts to re-make his 1967 short film, The Perfect Human, within a changing set of boundaries, or “obstructions”, as assigned to him by fellow Danish film-maker Lars von Trier. What results are five individual short film remakes: four made by Leth, and the fifth made by Trier. This essay will discuss the original film, The Perfect Human, as well as Obstructions no. 1, 2, and 3. Obstruction no. 4, a cartoon film, will not be discussed, as it is an amalgamation of each of the existing films and contains similar thematic elements. Obstruction no. 5 will be mentioned to a lesser extent. Outside of practical terms, The Five Obstructions could be analyzed as a film about guilt, particularly the guilt of the wealthy, white Westerner who can no longer hide from the gruesome realities of global inequalities. Further, it can be interpreted as a film about the quest for self-actualization in wake of these existential anxieties, discovering what it means to be human. The documentary follows a paradoxical mentor-pupil format with Lars von Trier tutoring Jørgen Leth, while simultaneously seeking to uncover truths about himself. While all of these elements make for interesting analyses, this essay is concerned with a much subtler, more insidious element to the film: gender, and how it is represented in regards to race, nationality, ethnicity and disenfranchisement.
It is also interested in the premise of an intellectual game between Trier and Leth, and how this game facilitates a quest to answer difficult questions about one’s self. Where do women fit into this quest between two men? In addition to examining how intersectionality affects the representation of gender in The Five Obstructions, this essay will also investigate how women factor into Trier and Leth’s world of masculine self-discovery.
VOYEURISM & THE MALE GAZE
The entirety of The Five Obstructions could be analyzed through the presence of the male gaze, a pervasive cinematic phenomenon which informs each of the “perfect human” short films in a different way. Before I break down the gendered differences between these films and within the context of the documentary itself, I will briefly define what the male gaze refers to in relation to film history. Feminist film theorist E. Ann Kaplan underscores cinema’s “reliance on voyeurism — the male gaze at the woman deprived of agency” when discussing gendered power dynamics in film (Kaplan, 2008:18 in Gabbard and Luhr, 2008). The cinematic male gaze will consistently box female characters into a variety of gendered sub-categories, such as the sexual vixen, or the doting mother. The concept of voyeurism is an interesting starting point, because it immediately creates a dynamic in which the male characters are the makers of meaning, and female characters are the bearers of meaning (Kaplan, 2008:18 in Gabbard and Luhr, 2008). In other words, it is up to men to observe women and extract whatever substance they can from them, be that sexual pleasure, a life lesson, or “an obstacle to be surmounted” (Lynes, 2010:603). Herein lies the existence of a quest, a masculine journey towards self-actualization. This masculine-feminine binary only becomes more complicated when race, ethnicity, and global power dynamics are added in, which we will discover is highly evident in The Five Obstructions.
The fifth and final obstruction in the two auteurs’ game is that Leth read out a fictional letter written by Trier, under the guise of it being a letter from himself to Trier. In this text, Trier proclaims that his intense connection to The Perfect Human stems from how much he has been able to personally identify with it, calling it “the film [I] felt more akin to than any other…So I must be from the same family as Jørgen.” This statement suggests that self-illumination is a vital — if not the most vital — aspect to a film’s memorability and ability to connect with the individual audience member. It is no surprise that recognizing himself in the film has inspired Trier to such a high degree — decades of film scholarship theorize that a male-centric cinematic gaze leads to a sense of solidarity between the male viewer and the on-screen lead. Summarized from feminist film scholar Laura Mulvey’s defining work on the subject: “Cinema was set up so that men could identify with the idealized male hero within the symbolic order imaged in the narrative, while women were left to identify with figures relegated to inferior status or silenced” (Kaplan, 2008:18 in Gabbard and Luhr, 2008). In The Perfect Human, the idealized male hero could be defined as an anti-hero, a man awkwardly trying to figure out what it means to be human. The self-recognition between Trier and actor Claus Nissen’s character in The Perfect Human, and how this relationship interplays with Leth, influences women’s role as a gendered plot tool.
WHO CAN BE THE PERFECT HUMAN?
As the short film that inspired the documentary and the five later films, I believe it is apt to begin this essay’s filmic analysis with Jørgen Leth’s The Perfect Human (1967). This film lays the groundwork for how gender relations will be portrayed in the film re-creations and, to a less obvious extent, throughout the interactions between Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth. The Perfect Human follows a man and a woman — actors Claus Nissen and Maiken Algren — performing mundane tasks. It plainly documents and narrates the quotidian acts of dressing and undressing, dancing, making love, eating, jumping; all unfolding in a white room, sometimes in silence and other times to calming non-diegetic music. It soon becomes clear that these individuals are not given equal weight. The man is the titular “perfect human,” complete with philosophical musings and a monologue, while the woman is viewed through a gendered gaze, an accessory to the man’s life. Algren’s character is at times described as “the perfect human,” but her descriptions are limited to physical and sexualized actions: laying down, sensuously caressing her legs, removing her nylon tights. In studies of cinematography, it is generally believed that “the closer the camera is to the subject, the more emotional weight the subject gains” (Sikov, 2010:10). If one were to apply this theory to The Perfect Human, it becomes evident that Nissen is the intended emotional subject, the one with whom we, the audience, are meant to align our sympathies. The majority of Algren’s close up and medium close up shots are directed at her body. There are some close ups featuring her hands delicately brushing hair behind her ears, or extreme close ups of her lips, eyes, and ears. These shots, despite the intimate camera distance, do not open up an emotional door between Algren and the audience. Instead, the only access the audience is granted to Algren is through a lens of either scientific fascination, or sexual desire. In contrast, Nissen receives ample mid shots and medium close up shots which feature him speaking while shaving, or musing to himself at the dinner table. The audience is granted access to his face and body as a whole, performing various functions, and as a result will be more inclined to identify with him. This entry is only exacerbated by the film’s non-diegetic commentary. Repetitions of the question “What is he thinking?” carry the audience throughout the film, inviting us to enter Nissen’s mental and emotional space. Next to Algren’s sexuality, silence is her most defining trait, and it is one that will attach itself to the women in each of the following re-creations.
A scene from The Perfect Human left out of the documentary features Algren and Nissen in bed, Nissen in the fetal position, and Algren lovingly stroking his head. While it could be argued that this scene is not integral to the gendered analysis of The Five Obstructions (as it is not actually featured in the documentary), I believe it is worthy of analysis given how women are portrayed in the re-creations it has inspired. Later in this essay, I will further assess the role of women as stepping stones for men as they become “the perfect human.” When Algren coddles Nissen she is momentarily allowed exit from her role as a sexual being, but only to take on the equally gendered role of the nurturing mother figure. Again, her existence is highlighted only in relation to the male main character. Outside of the context of the short film itself, Leth raves about Nissen’s performance. He regards him as an eminent actor, stating that “what he does is ingenious,” but Algren is never mentioned (in fact, she is only referred to by Leth and Trier as “the woman”). Despite how it asserts itself, The Perfect Human could more accurately be titled “The Perfect Man.” The conflation of these terms offers insight into grasping how gender is understood by Leth, and subsequently by Trier, throughout the documentary.
MORALITY & THE “GENTLEMAN WITNESS”
Trier: There is a degree of perversion in…
Leth: In maintaining a distance?
Trier: In the way you do things. How far are you prepared to go if you’re not describing something? It’d be worth a laboratory experiment. Would anything rub off? I want you to go close to a few really harrowing things. Dramas from real life that you refrain from filming.
So far, I have introduced the topics of voyeurism and the male gaze, and applied them to an analysis of The Perfect Human. That being said, it is important to note that not all women are subject to the same gaze. Algren’s character in the original short film is only granted this gaze by her status as a white, supposedly upper-class Danish woman, the gendered parallel to Nissen’s white, supposedly upper-class Danish man. In her paper on The Five Obstructions, film scholar Krista Geneviève Lynes focuses on the documentary and its films in relation to modesty. Trier wants to break down the wall between Leth and his filmic subjects. His second obstruction, then, is that the film must take place in “the most miserable place on Earth,” that the place cannot be shown, that Leth is the man in the film, and that the meal must be included. While the terms “gentlemanly witnessing” and “modest witnessing” have historically been used to grant white, upper-class European men authority in scientific experiments, Lynes employs these terms in relation to Leth’s position in Obstruction no. 2. In Trier’s own words, the second film will be a “laboratory experiment” where the goal is to find the moral line between what can and cannot be filmed and aestheticized. Here, the act of witnessing is three-fold: first, Leth is a witness to the miseries of the location, secondly Trier is a witness to Leth’s reaction to the scene, and finally the documentary’s audience are witnesses to it all. This witness role as encompassed by Leth and Trier is inherently gendered, and fits in splendidly with the history of the male gaze in film as discussed earlier. The status of Leth and Trier as witnesses rely on their status as men, in particular white European men. The location of choice, which Leth considers to be the “most miserable place on Earth,” is Falkland Road, the red-light district in Mumbai. From the start, we are presented with Leth’s phobic reaction to this place, which “slides in snugly to a larger history of racism, fear of contagion, or threat to the dominant social order” (Lynes, 2010:603). In comparison to the original The Perfect Human, this film’s context is instantly more complex. We are no longer in a white room with two Danes, but rather in a bustling, postcolonial reality. This scene immediately bolsters Leth’s role as a “gentleman witness” because of his ability to carry himself with austere modesty, even in the wake of threats to said modesty. The peril of Falkland Road, which threatens to taint his vow of modesty, lies in the scene’s women: brown sex-workers who aren’t afforded the modest voyeurism that Leth receives almost as birth-right. As described by Lynes, “Leth’s own withstanding the lure of Falkland Road reconfirms the hero narrative of the story” (Lynes, 2010:603). Just as the film’s audience were invited to identify with Nissen’s character in The Perfect Human, they are now invited to identify with Leth as a Western man in the impoverished global South. The amoral absurdity of the scene — Leth in a tuxedo eating an expensive meal before the back drop of brown sex workers and their children — levies this position; we do not want to identify with Leth, and are forced to confront our own guilt by doing so. However, the film’s “a ha” moment is reliant on the further exploitation of silent, disenfranchised women of color, and I would argue that this fact alone outweighs any point Leth or Trier are trying to make. It further amplifies my assertion that women are consistently used as self-help tools for male heroes, gateways to help them reach difficult realizations.
VARIATIONS IN THE MALE GAZE
Leth: I am not afraid of prostitutes in general…
Leth says this to Trier when describing why he considers Falkland Road to be the most miserable place on Earth, and this statement inspires the analysis in this portion of the essay. The phrase is odd, because the presence of the “prostitutes” is something Leth immediately brushes off as a non-issue for him, without being prompted to do so. In tandem with the above analysis, his role as a modest gentleman witness is confirmed. Despite Leth’s attempts to dismiss them, however, the presence of sex workers is significant when we examine the second re-make within the context of the rest of the re-makes. In both Obstruction no. 1, The Perfect Human: Cuba, and Obstruction no. 3, The Perfect Human: Brussels, the role of the racialized sex worker re-appears, albeit subtly.
- Obstruction no. 1
The rules are straightforward: shoot a film with no set in Cuba, no shot can last more than twelve frames, and the questions posed in The Perfect Human must be answered. What directly sets this film apart from Leth’s original film is that the conflation between “the perfect human” and “the perfect man” is blatantly recognized. At forty seconds in, we see the words “hombre perfecto” (perfect man) written on the screen. There is no debate here — this film is about the perfect man, more specifically the perfect Cuban man, as flashes of Cuban stereotypes litter the film: newspaper clippings referencing Fidel Castro, a cigar, the music and style of dance. This perfect man “radiates machismo and virility; he is suave, immaculately groomed, an effervescent dancer, a smoker of fine Cuban cigars” (Ogden, 2009:61). It is unexpected, then, that Leth himself makes an on-screen appearance, three times, at the beginning of the film. He is not the “hombre perfecto” featured in the film; in fact his presence could almost go unnoticed. One must ask — why is he there? He is shown standing behind the first woman in the film, a woman of color, whom we know he has chosen specifically because we’ve been told so in the documentary portion. During the filming of the second obstruction, Leth is shown leafing through images of actresses with a casting agent and chooses this woman because she “looks great” and, according to his casting agent, “has great tits.” In a medium close up shot he is depicted standing closely behind her, appearing paternal with a tight-lipped, content grin, as the woman stares at the camera, mouth wide with a somewhat awkward smile. She is shown again a few seconds later, alone this time, smoking a cigarette with her breasts exposed. These scenes featuring Leth and the Cuban woman take place rapidly in the first minute of the film, then neither of them appear again. Instead, the first woman is replaced by a second one who dominates the woman’s role for the remaining four minutes. She too is a Cuban woman, this film’s Maiken Algren parallel, but she appears European with light skin, a precise bob, and wearing a sleek dress and high heeled shoes. In fact, the male gaze affects her and Algren in essentially the same way. They both preen in front of the camera, have the same body parts analyzed through the same camera shots. The non-diegetic narration asks and answers, about the perfect man: “Why does he move like that? Because women like when he moves like that,” and “What is he thinking about?….Maybe about the woman, how it is to touch her skin? Maybe he’s thinking about her eyes, her legs, her mouth?” This commentary offers possible answers to the same questions posed in the original film. If the erotic portrayal of the woman was not enough to hint at the man’s thoughts, Obstruction no. 2 confirms them verbally.
The decision by Leth to include the first woman, then, is a declaration of divide. While she is not addressed as a sex worker, and I have no grounds to assert that she is one, there are certain implications of a white, European man expressing ownership over a brown, native woman in a country exotic to him. This scene depicts the classic trope of “sexualized, racialized desire” in the age-old colonial fantasy sense, and it points out a schism in the male gaze (Lynes, 2010:608).
- Obstruction no. 3
Here, the only obstruction is that there are none — Leth is left completely to his own devices. This film’s narration no longer addresses a perfect human, beginning by declaring: “Here is the man. Here he is. What’s he want?” Any remaining illusion of a gender non-distinct subject disappears. The question of “What does he want?” is not answered verbally like in Obstruction no. 1, but rather by appearing visually in a split screen, as a white man undressing a white woman in the backseat of a car. This is the perfect man, a man whose thoughts the film is interested in investigating. The perfect woman is also described in this film, but she is no mystery. She is presented to us in a close up, cigarette in hand, as another gendered character through the male gaze: the femme fatale. She recites a monologue to the audience (and to the perfect man) in which she proclaims:
“Me, I am a woman. One of the best. One of the richest in love. One of the most experienced. Me, who is always loyal. Me, who is always friendly. Me, who is always sensitive. Me, who is very much in love. Me, who is very elegant. I am one of the most beautiful women. I have lots of affection for other people. I have a lot of feeling. I am a woman with great strength of spirit.”
This is her proclamation of self to the man, a laundry list of idealized feminine attributes. Whereas the man is the “perfect” man because he is imperfect, the woman is “perfect” because she encompasses all aspects of femininity as viewed through the male gaze at once.
In a cinematic world where the man is imperfectly perfect, striving to understand life and himself, “the fulfilment of male desire rests on a female identification with the feminine position, and thus requires women to be seduced into consenting femininity” (Lynes, 2010:607). The perfect woman bears a finite meaning, and the man must utilize his morals and intelligence in order to make sense of it. The perfect woman’s monologue is more than just a declaration, however; it is also a proposition. The implication is that the man is looking to pay a sex worker — in the previous scene he was counting money, and asked by the narrator if he thought about fucking. Nevertheless, her proposal is denied, and the next scene shows the man having sex with a black woman in his hotel room. Just as in Obstruction no. 1, the most sexualized female figure is racially marked, and it is not out of coincidence. Again, Leth has chosen to make a distinction between the perfect women — white, seductive, but not attained by the man — and the “other” women — racially fetishized and sexualized, and successfully attained by the man. After examining Obstructions no. 1, 2 and 3, Leth’s depiction of sex workers or fetishized women of color swiftly negates his verbal dismissal of their relevance to him.
CONCLUSION
Prior to the filming of Obstruction no. 2, as the two film-makers sit comfortably in Trier’s Zentropa studios, Trier announces that in Leth’s next film “the meal will be there, but not the woman.” This flippant, spontaneous decision tells us in brevity what this essay has spent several pages arguing. On the surface, the statement proves that for these two film-makers, women have more in common with the mise-en-scѐne than with actual characters. Beneath this attitude of ambivalence, however, lies the constant presence of women in each of the films, and how the nature of their inclusion or exclusion informs the male character’s quest for fulfilment. While it may not initially appear as such, The Five Obstructions is a subtle exercise in re-creating age-old gendered and racialized tropes, but presented under the guise of some newfound depth. By placing themselves at the very top of a transnational, globalized power hierarchy, Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth are recycling archaic lenses for understanding the world and classifying its inhabitants. One of the answers Trier, as the documentary’s main god figure, wants to find is “where exactly Leth draws the line between ethics and aesthetics” (Oxfeldt, 2016:60). Here, both men acknowledge the problematic nature of aestheticizing a real image of global suffering. The men do not, however, apply this moral line to the role of women in their films. A more complex question would be at which point the re-creation of these power dynamics ceases to be helpful in proving a point, and when the reliance on them becomes lazy. A film in which a man’s journey towards self-discovery is not reliant on the exploitation of women would be a far more impressive feat.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kaplan, E. A. (2008). A History of Gender Theory in Cinema Studies. In K. Gabbard and W. Luhr, Screening Genders. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 15–28.
Lynes, K. G. (2010). Perversions of Modesty: Lars von Trier’s The Five Obstructions and ‘The Most Miserable Place on Earth’. Third Text, 24:5, pp. 597–610.
Ogden, B. (2009). How Lars von Trier Sees the World: Postmodernism and Globalization in The Five Obstructions. Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 27:1, pp. 54–68.
Oxfeldt, E. (2016). The Privileged Human: Global Inequality in Jørgen Leth and Lars von Trier’s De fem benspænd. In B. Larsen and J. Lothe, Perspectives on the Nordic, pp. 55–71.
Sikov, E. (2010). Film Studies. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, pp. 5–23.
The Five Obstructions [Danish: De Fem Benspænd], 2003 [film] Directed by Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth, Zentropa Real ApS.
