Originally published in Arthur No. 11 (July 2004)

The Rules of the Game
A “Camera Obscura” column by Paul Cullum

CAMERA OBSCURA is a regular column examining the world and its lesser trafficked tributaries, recesses and psychic fallout through the filters of film, video and DVD.

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DVDs/videos discussed here:
The Kingdom of Credibility Trilogy:
o The Humiliated (De Ydmygede) (1998), directed by Jesper Jargil
o The Exhibited (De Udstillede) (2000), directed by Jesper Jargil
o The Purified (De Lutrede) (2002), directed by Jesper Jargil
[Contact the filmmaker at Jesper Jargil Films, jesper.jargil@mail.dk, Fax: +45 3314 2655; PAL tapes only available]
o The Five Obstructions (2004), directed by Jørgen Leth and Lars von Trier (currently in general release)
o Tranceformer: A Portrait of Lars von Trier (1997), directed by Stig Björkman (available on the Criterion DVD release of von Trier’s The Element of Crime)

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“In the rain forest of the Cameroon in West Central Africa lives a floor-dwelling ant known as Megaloponera foetens, or more commonly, the stink ant. On occasion, one of these ants while looking for food is infected by inhaling a microscopic spore from a fungus of the genus Tomentella. After being inhaled, the spore seats in the ant’s tiny brain and begins to grow, causing changes in the ant’s patterns of behavior. The ant appears troubled and confused; for the first time in its life, it leaves the forest floor and begins to climb. Completely spent and having reached a prescribed height, the ant impales the plant with its mandibles. The fungus continues to consume first the nerve cells and finally all the soft tissue that remains of the ant. After approximately two weeks, a spike appears from what had been the head of the ant. This spike is about an inch and a half in length and has a bright orange tip, heavy with spores, which rain down onto the rain forest floor for other unsuspecting ants to inhale.” —The Museum of Jurassic Technology

Were he not already so ubiquitous, this might seem like the season of Lars von Trier. Dogville, the first part of his “USA Trilogy” (to be differentiated from his “Europa Trilogy”—The Element of Crime, Epidemic and Europa/Zentropa; and his “Golden Heart Trilogy”—Breaking the Waves, The Idiots and Dancer in the Dark) appeared earlier this year to begin the excoriation of the American character by European cinema, a process just put to decisive referendum by the awarding of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Stephen King’s The Kingdom Hospital, an adaptation of The Kingdom I and II, von Trier’s successive miniseries on Danish television, appeared as a much-touted ABC series and suffered mightily by comparison. And The Five Obstructions, co-directed by von Trier and his mentor Jørgen Leth, equal parts documentary, experiment and intervention, currently scuttles its way around the arthouse circuit.

The latter presents von Trier at his comical best. Resembling Fassbinder refashioned as a Muppet (Fassy Bear?), he is at once imperious and cuddly, using his private empire to force Leth, his former film instructor at the Danish Film Institute, into repeatedly remaking The Perfect Human, the film von Trier rates closest to perfect. “This little gem,” as he calls it, is a 12-minute 1967 black-and-white short that marries an insouciant formal abandon to a faux anthropological take on upscale hipsters, in the manner of Peter Sellers’ The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film (which handed Richard Lester his directing style on a platter) or, more pointedly, title designer Saul Bass’s Why Man Creates. Leth is the one who famously introduced “the rules of the game” into von Trier’s way of thinking, the intense penchant for order which, as we know from Tranceformer, a 1997 documentary by Stig Björkman, implicitly appealed to this son of radical academics who was raised free of restraints of any kind. (Tranceformer also informs us that at age 12, “Lars Trier” was the child star of Clandestine Summer, a winsome Swedish-Danish TV series, and that he added the “von” in film school—as in “Erich von Stroheim,” Teutonic tyrant and classical sadist—in much the same way Francis Ford Coppola appended his signature to exchange the quotidian for the epic.) The Five Obstructions is justified as homage and a form of therapy, von Trier’s magnanimous gesture to force his mentor out of his “provocative perverse perfection.” Yet it ultimately borders on autobiography, as von Trier judges and rejects not only his patriarch, but his own aesthetic foundations, subjecting them to outsize pressures as if to test their structural worthiness—like Steven Soderbergh did in interviewing his mentor, Richard Lester, in Getting Away With It.