THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS (Jørgen Leth, Lars von Trier, 2003)

Jørgen Leth, Lars von Trier’s former mentor, made in 1967 a documentary short entitled Det perfekte menneske. Now Trier uses it for his own documentary—well, “his own,” except that Leth does most of the work again. Instructing his instructor, Trier challenges Leth to redo The Perfect Human in five different ways, observing rules—“obstructions”—that Trier commands as though he were Instructor-in-Chief-in-the-Heavenly-Skies. But artists are always restricted by rules, even impossible ones, as indeed we all are every day. The black-and-white original appears in snippets throughout the color film.
     Leth’s first challenge is to remake the film in Cuba with no set. The principal obstacle is that each shot must be 12 or fewer frames—that is, a half-second or less. (“Satanic,” Trier later calls this restriction of his!) After each revision, the two men reunite so that we can see the result and Trier can tell Leth how well he has done and give him the next assignment. Leth is sent to an impoverished section of Bombay, where he dines lavishly in public. The object is to have Leth “empathize” rather than observe at a distance. Liberating him from the Cuba challenge, a long tracking shot follows Leth down a teeming street. “Not a mark has been left on you,” Trier says, referring to the first three filmlets.
     Trier proves a charming, impish bully. We love impudent Lars—and so must Leth, to put up with all this.
     Another obstruction has Leth making (with technical help) an animated film in Texas. “I hate cartoons!” both men agree. The result, Trier rightly opines, is beautiful.
     Trier will make the last revision, with Leth reading from Trier’s script. The entire project has aimed at helping Leth, Trier claims. We half-believe him.

CASSHERN (Kazuaki Kiriya, 2004)

Based on a 35-episode 1973-74 Japanese television animé series, Shinzô ningen Kyashân, the live-action version makes a powerful impression early on. There is a terrible grandeur to its futuristic depiction of the Fifty Year War. Kazuaki Kiriya’s science-fiction epic, like Kerry Conran’s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), consists of computer-generated backdrops. Some foreground action is also computer-generated.
     But the fractured plot is incoherent, and the visual flair dims. Numerous images are clichés. Kiriya is fond of having things floating down—flower petals; pieces of paper.
     Kiriya wrote the diffuse script, which at least makes sense during its bouts of speechifying antiwar dialogue, and he served as his own director of photography. Nearly 25 minutes has been deleted from the film for its U.S. release, thus extending Kiriya’s reduction of the original story. It is almost impossible to sit through this film, and indeed I did not make it all the way through.

A.B.C. AFRICA (Abbas Kiarostami, 2001)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Asian Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

As joyous as it is heartrending, as hallucinatory as it is real, A.B.C. Africa is by Abbas Kiarostami. The Iranian film was shot in Uganda, using two digital cameras, over the course of ten days. It documents both children who have been orphaned by the AIDS epidemic and the Ugandan women who have assumed their care. In addition to its struggle with HIV-AIDS, Uganda has been beset with civil war for two decades now. The AIDS crisis has left 1.6 million children without one or both parents. (While wreaking havoc in Iraq, the United States joined Russia and China in keeping the Ugandan crisis off the United Nations Security Council agenda.)
     The film opens with the sound of the arrival of a fax, followed by the fax itself, to Kiarostami, from the International Fund for Agricultural Development, thanking him in advance for the attention that his trip will bring to the Ugandan crisis. This “outgoing fax” is being received: a symbolical reciprocation between Kiarostami’s familiar world and the unfamiliar one he enters, which the film documents.
     The first caregiver we meet is an elderly woman who works to support herself and the 35 children under her care, most of them relations. All eleven of her own offspring are dead from AIDS.
     Much of the film, however, simply observes the children. The younger boys interrupt their play to mug for the camera; they shout, dance and gesticulate. Teenagers, though, seem to penetrate the camera with a sullen gaze. Later, all dressed in yellow, kids clap and sing.
     A brilliant shot traverses a wire fence on which colorful clothes hang, drying. The camera stops. Through the fence, we see a woman folding laundry on the lawn. The camera’s approach is stopped by the fence. So close; so far away.

KANDAHAR (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 2001)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Asian Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

To convey its insider/outsider’s view, Iranian Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Safar e Ghandehar starts with a tortuous contrivance: Nafas, an Afghan-born Canadian journalist, returns to war-torn Afghanistan in order to find her sister, whose letter states her intention to commit suicide before the 21st century begins. This sister has lost both legs to a landmine. We see—by way of handheld camera—what Nafas sees: the misery wrought by Taliban rule.
     One of the first instructions Nafas is given is to watch out for landmines. A man counsels an immense gathering of young girls to stay hopeful: “When walls are high, the sky is higher still.” Ironically, it is the sky that limits Nafas’s hope, because her sister has written that the final solar eclipse of the twentieth century will signal her death. Hope is also limited by what we see on the ground—for instance, a school session of furious Islamic prayer in which the participants, young boys, pose with knives and semi-automatic weapons. We alternately see the Quran and weapons in their small hands.
     Nafas had planned on smuggling herself in from Iran, masquerading (in a burqa) as an itinerant merchant’s wife; but when the man turns back with his family, Nafas must find other guides, including a boy who offers to sell her a ring off a skeleton, causing her to flee in terror across the dunes.
     It is a region of landmines—and of legions who have lost their legs. In one extraordinary passage, artificial limbs are dropped from airplanes as the legless hobble on crutches toward this bounty from the sky. Makhmalbaf’s application of slow motion underscores both agony and anticipation. The symbolical store of the mines and lost limbs—the lingering effects of war—accumulates from human suffering in the present.
     Abstraction isn’t Makhmalbaf’s motive.