Short of the Week: Jørgen Leth’s avant-garde comedy
Danish artist Jørgen Leth has made fascinating contributions to the landscape of experimental cinema, most notably through his innovative use of the structures of documentary filmmaking. For this edition of our Short of the Week section, we have decided to highlight one of the most important works from Leth’s extensive filmography. Titled The Perfect Human, the 1968 project had a seminal impact on European avant-garde cinema and has gained a considerable cult following over the years.
Jokingly designed as a serious anthropological study, The Perfect Human attempts to uncover what the pinnacle of our species looks like. Satirising the visual language used by advertising agencies, it presents the daily life of a middle-class Danish couple as a detached voice-over repeatedly tries to convince us that this is what perfection looks like. Existing in a strange and unsettling empty space, it almost feels like they were abducted by aliens and put on show for other extraterrestrial species.
During an interview, Leth explained his thought process behind the project. He said: “So when I do a film about Denmark, I try to avoid to do a social, what I wanted to do, what I really wanted to avoid when I did that in 1971, I don’t know if you saw it? I wanted to do a film about Denmark, but I wanted to avoid a social realistic kind of… you know, I thought, it was so boring that most documentary films at that time in the ’70s, they were dealing with an objective truth, or something like that, by telling stories about social situations – about the misery of people etcetera, in social settings.”
The director added: “You know, I found it very boring, so I wanted to avoid that totally. That is why I began The Perfect Human, to construct scenes, and isolate people from the environment, isolate people from the social context. And show people just in an empty room. And, of course, that is a very playful method. And out of this method, I think there is certainly a… the sense of humour has to be a part of that. Otherwise, it becomes too dull and too…. But you can’t plan that. That is something you either have, or you don’t have.”
There is a refreshing subtlety in The Perfect Human’s sense of humour as it probes societal perceptions of perfection, looking past the veneer of bourgeois sensibilities. Through Leth’s vision, our entire existence takes on a proportion of absurdity; even our own body parts seem like they have been pasted on as afterthoughts. The monotonous rituals we engage in on a daily basis are not normalised in the vacuum created by the Danish director.
Interestingly, Lars von Trier has often included The Perfect Human in lists of his favourite films. He likes it so much that he famously challenged Leth to recreate it under various conditions, ranging from filming in Cuba to animating the short. Following this experiment which was later called The Five Obstructions, von Trier tried to pose the same challenges to Martin Scorsese about The Taxi Driver, but that idea never saw the light of day.
Watch the film below.
