Cynematik • Cyndi Greening

Two films we saw at Sundance this year included Lar von Trier’s Dogville and the brilliant The Five Obstructions. While von Trier has become the whipping boy of late, the filmmaker everyone loves to hate — I still love his work. Dark, moody, cynical, pyrrhic — what’s not to love?

The greatest thing about The Five Obstructions is that it’s a tremendous teaching/learning tool AND an homage to teaching. Given that I’m a teacher and love filmmaking, this film becomes a small slice of heaven for me. The NYTimes describes the film thusly:

In 1967, a fledgling Danish filmmaker, Jorgen Leth, made a 13-minute short called “The Perfect Human.” Shot in cool, high-contrast black and white, the film was a mysterious mock-anthropological study of two supposedly perfect human specimens — one male, one female — who perform everyday acts like eating, sleeping and falling down while a stern narrator (Mr. Leth) describes their perfectly banal activities in the patient tone of a college lecturer. Four years ago Mr. von Trier invited Mr. Leth to participate in the desecration of his own film. The notion was to take “The Perfect Human” and remake it five times, each time under a different set of arbitrarily imposed restrictions. One version, for example, would be made in Cuba, a country that Mr. Leth had never visited, and would contain no shots longer than 12 frames — about half a second. Another version had to be an animation. It’s an amazing film that I strongly recommend!

This is what makes Sundance so wonderful for me!

The films that are gathered at the festival in January roll out across the United States over the next year or two. As a festival attendee, you know the films you watch WILL BE important and WILL MAKE their mark in the future … a future you get to watch unfold!