Jørgen Leth

Corona Film Club

Documentary about filmmaker and film lover Stig Björkman during the pandemic year of 2020 when he stay in touch with his friends over his laptop.

The Erotic Man

The film has been ten years in the making, and over time it has grown to become what the director himself has called an artistic testament. It is simultaneously his most personal and most provocative film. A film about growing older, about losing, about the special moments one remembers, and about the director's own circling around the essence of eroticism.

Notes on Love

Poet-filmmaker Jørgen Leth taps his own earliest inspirational veins by free-floating through a camera/microscope-enhanced set of poems with love as their first and final subject. For example, how a tropical island woman prepares for a meeting with her lover. The film was shot partly in the South Pacific with more than a nod to social anthropoliogist B. Malinowski's historical work The Sexual Life of Savages.

Komeda: A Soundtrack for a Life

Krzysztof Komeda was a jazz pianist and film composer. With compositions like the lullaby for Rosemary's Baby (1968) by Roman Polanski, Komeda succeeded in writing his own chapter in the history of soundtracks. This documentary follows the life story of the composer by the means of his melodic sounds. It is a reflection on his soundtracks, which changed the common film scores forever. It is a contemporary document about the attitude to life in a time of social, political and cultural change after war, about work and exodus of Polish artists in the 50s and 60s. A story about how film music is created and how it affects people. Directors who worked with Komeda and who are also friends talk about him: Roman Polanski, Jerzy Skolimowski, Henning Carlsen and Andrzej Wajda. His wife, Zofia Komeda, and his sister, Irena Orlowska, recollect him.

The Five Obstructions

In 1967, experimental filmmaker Jorgen Leth created a striking short film, The Perfect Human, starring a man and women sitting in a box while a narrator poses questions about their relationship and humanity. Years later, Danish director Lars von Trier made a deal with Leth to remake his film five times, each under a different set of circumstances and with von Trier's strictly prescribed rules. As Leth completes each challenge, von Trier creates increasingly further elaborate stipulations.

I Walk

Documentary about Danish filmmaker, sports journalist and poet Jørgen Leth who struggles after surviving a major earthquake in Haiti.

Født til Filmen

What are the consequences of a young person to be famous at an early age, being a public person? "Født til Filmen" is about the Danish actress Stine Bierlich's (1967 - 2007) life and career. Through interviews with herself, with her family - Ann Bierlich (mother), Asger Leth (brother), Jørgen Leth (stepfather), friends and people from the film industry it tells us about Stine's life from being a child actress to becoming a celebrated young star of the 80's. The film is a comment on today's worshipping of stars, and how fame has almost become a drug in itself. It’s as if here’s every answer to any doubt. But as Stine's story shows, reality can actually be the opposite.

Music for Black Pigeons

Music for Black Pigeons is the first collaboration between Jørgen Leth and Andreas Koefoed. The film poses existential questions to influential jazz players such as Bill Frisell, Lee Konitz, Midori Takada and many others: How does it feel to play, and what does it mean to listen? What is it like to be a human being and spending your whole life trying to express something through sounds? The characters wake up, rehearse, record, perform and talk about music. In some moments they are on the edge, the edge of existence, constantly challenging themselves. They listen. They devote themselves to finding a space to create a connection to something bigger than themselves. Something that will outlast all of us.

Corona Film Club

Documentary about filmmaker and film lover Stig Björkman during the pandemic year of 2020 when he stay in touch with his friends over his laptop.

The Erotic Man

The film has been ten years in the making, and over time it has grown to become what the director himself has called an artistic testament. It is simultaneously his most personal and most provocative film. A film about growing older, about losing, about the special moments one remembers, and about the director's own circling around the essence of eroticism.

Notes on Love

Poet-filmmaker Jørgen Leth taps his own earliest inspirational veins by free-floating through a camera/microscope-enhanced set of poems with love as their first and final subject. For example, how a tropical island woman prepares for a meeting with her lover. The film was shot partly in the South Pacific with more than a nod to social anthropoliogist B. Malinowski's historical work The Sexual Life of Savages.

Komeda: A Soundtrack for a Life

Krzysztof Komeda was a jazz pianist and film composer. With compositions like the lullaby for Rosemary's Baby (1968) by Roman Polanski, Komeda succeeded in writing his own chapter in the history of soundtracks. This documentary follows the life story of the composer by the means of his melodic sounds. It is a reflection on his soundtracks, which changed the common film scores forever. It is a contemporary document about the attitude to life in a time of social, political and cultural change after war, about work and exodus of Polish artists in the 50s and 60s. A story about how film music is created and how it affects people. Directors who worked with Komeda and who are also friends talk about him: Roman Polanski, Jerzy Skolimowski, Henning Carlsen and Andrzej Wajda. His wife, Zofia Komeda, and his sister, Irena Orlowska, recollect him.

The Five Obstructions

In 1967, experimental filmmaker Jorgen Leth created a striking short film, The Perfect Human, starring a man and women sitting in a box while a narrator poses questions about their relationship and humanity. Years later, Danish director Lars von Trier made a deal with Leth to remake his film five times, each under a different set of circumstances and with von Trier's strictly prescribed rules. As Leth completes each challenge, von Trier creates increasingly further elaborate stipulations.

I Walk

Documentary about Danish filmmaker, sports journalist and poet Jørgen Leth who struggles after surviving a major earthquake in Haiti.

Født til Filmen

What are the consequences of a young person to be famous at an early age, being a public person? "Født til Filmen" is about the Danish actress Stine Bierlich's (1967 - 2007) life and career. Through interviews with herself, with her family - Ann Bierlich (mother), Asger Leth (brother), Jørgen Leth (stepfather), friends and people from the film industry it tells us about Stine's life from being a child actress to becoming a celebrated young star of the 80's. The film is a comment on today's worshipping of stars, and how fame has almost become a drug in itself. It’s as if here’s every answer to any doubt. But as Stine's story shows, reality can actually be the opposite.

Music for Black Pigeons

Music for Black Pigeons is the first collaboration between Jørgen Leth and Andreas Koefoed. The film poses existential questions to influential jazz players such as Bill Frisell, Lee Konitz, Midori Takada and many others: How does it feel to play, and what does it mean to listen? What is it like to be a human being and spending your whole life trying to express something through sounds? The characters wake up, rehearse, record, perform and talk about music. In some moments they are on the edge, the edge of existence, constantly challenging themselves. They listen. They devote themselves to finding a space to create a connection to something bigger than themselves. Something that will outlast all of us.

Frændeløs

Anthology of six experimental films. 1) Allan de Waal: Investigation of an abandoned hippie house. 2) Bjørn Nørgaard and Lene Adler Petersen: The female Christ. Five subsections. a) The female Christ crucified by Roskilde Fjord. b) The female Christ on the Stock Exchange. c) The female Christ exposes herself in front of a cross in a backyard in Nørrebro. d) Female body with breasts and shot bare on a lawn. e) Exhibition of Bjørn Nørgaard's "fucking machines". The female Christ is hung naked in it and eventually has intercourse with Nørgaard. 3) Per Kirkeby: The primitive life in the forest. 4) Jørgen Leth: Interview with a hippie girl. 5) Vagn Lundbye: Paraphrase of spaghetti western. 6) Peter Louis-Jensen: Revolver section of picture and sound noise.

Stars and the Water Carriers

The images from the Tour de France in the television production Eddy Merckx in the Vincinity of a Cup of Coffee may be seen as a small sketch for the fully unfurled epic cycling drama Stars and Watercarriers. The film follows the 1973 Giro d'Italia and in his commentary Leth explains the fascination exerted by the great cycle races: "The most beautiful, most pathetic images cycling can give us involve extreme performances in classic terrain."

I Am Alive

With films like Det perfekte menneske and Det gode og det onde in mind the consistent black and white portrait film Jeg er levende gives the impression that Søren Ulrik Thomsen has been invited into Leth's filmic universe, which conversely allows room for the poet's words. Thomsen gives an account of brief memories of childhood in a deliberately "staged" fashion, but more particularly of his experience of writing and on the art of reading aloud, and likewise describing poetry in general as a balance between emotion and cognition.

The Search

The Search is the ultimate happening film created by a group of ABCinema members during a camp on the Juttish heath. The film consists of loosely composed sequences. The landscape is the setting for a series of peculiar occurrences in which individual members were free to realize personal ideas, fantasies and themes: a man runs across the heath, shouting, a Molotov cocktail flares on a beach, a man repeatedly falls over, an angel-like woman makes a solitary procession, a burning pine, a man breaking a tree with a shovel, etc.

Klown

Frank is left with the responsibility for his nephew Bo on an already planned canoe trip. Frank's mate Casper is also coming along. Weighed down a with their obligation, Frank and Casper nevertheless look forward to ending the trip at Skanderborg Festival where there's plenty there for the guys, a spree of drinking and women. Not the best example to set for young Bo. And how do their partners see it all?

Chinese Ping-Pong

An experimental sports film made partly during the Scandinavian Open Championships in Halmstad in 1970, partly during the Chinese players' exhibition tour in Denmark immediately after the SOC. First of all, it is a film about their style, about the artistic culmination that is ping-pong at its best, it records China's comeback into the international sports world.

The Impossible Hour

The Impossible Hour is a concentrated study of Ole Ritter's attempt in Mexico City in 1974 to set a new record for the hour - described in the film as "the noblest, most difficult record that can be set on a bicycle". A brief retrospective in black and white sets the historical framework, with shots of Ritter and Eddy Merckx' successful record attempts in 1968 and 1972 respectively, and a few words about former record holders such as Fausto Coppi.The film follows Ritter's three record attempts chronologically, which, accompanied by a Mexican marching band on the bandstand, all fail.

Stop for Bud

Stop for Bud is Jørgen Leth's first film and the first in his long collaboration with Ole John. […] they wanted to "blow up cinematic conventions and invent cinematic language from scratch". The jazz pianist Bud Powell moves around Copenhagen -- through King's Garden, along the quay at Kalkbrænderihavnen, across a waste dump. […] Bud is alone, accompanied only by his music. […] Image and sound are two different things -- that's Leth's and John's principle. Dexter Gordon, the narrator, tells stories about Powell's famous left hand. In an obituary for Powell, dated 3 August 1966, Leth wrote: "He quite willingly, or better still, unresistingly, mechanically, let himself be directed. The film attempts to depict his strange duality about his surroundings. His touch on the keys was like he was burning his fingers -- that's what it looked like, and that's how it sounded. But outside his playing, and often right in the middle of it, too, he was simply gone, not there."

66 Scenes from America

As a visual narrative it is reminiscent of a pile of postcards from a journey, which indeed is what the film is. It consists of a series of lengthy shots of a tableau nature, each appearing to be a more or less random cross section of American reality, but which in total invoke a highly emblematic picture of the USA.

The Perfect Human

An elegant and humorous film—in the guise of a serious anthropological treatise—spotlights "The Perfect Human," a model of the modern Dane created by our wishful thinking.

Good and Evil

Jørgen Leth can squeeze poetry from a stone and wit from dust, and he can find love where the milk of human kindness runs dry. In a series of tableaux of Life in Denmark, he carries absurdism to a happy extreme. To act out his minuscule non-dramas, he uses a motley crew of professional actors like Ghita Nørby and Claus Nissen, writer Dan Turéll plus a snake charmer, a bicycle racer and a circus queen.

Rødovrefilmen

Artist group ABCinema's footage from Rødovrecentret, Denmark's first large shopping center in Rødovre, a suburb of Copenhagen. A collage of super 8 footage, shot with multiple cameras. (DFI)

Laamb

The rules are simple in Senegalese wrestling: First man down, loses. The sport derives from ritual manhood trials and has developed into a national sport with packed stadiums and huge prizes. Today, the fight is supplemented with bare knuckle boxing but without any protection. The 22­-year-­old cattle herder Ndoff has been chosen to compete in an annual talent event in Dakar, and faces a possible breakthrough as a pro wrestler. LAAMB is the story of a sport filled with myths and extreme voodoo rituals, and a modern tale about fighting one’s way out of poverty.

A Sunday in Hell

A chronology of the 1976 Paris-Roubaix bicycle race from the perspective of participants, organizers and spectators.

Life in Denmark

The intention of the film is to give an impression of what small exotic Denmark looks like, what the strange Danes look like and how they are. Nearly 100 Danes are presented in the film, amongst them a racing cyclist, a Minister of Finance, a popular actor and 13 unmarried women from a provincial town. "There is too much fogginess and rain and melancholy in most of the pictures of Denmark," says Jørgen Leth. "But not in my film. I would like to show you some authentic, clear and beautiful pictures from this strange country."

Eddy Merckx in the Vicinity of a Cup of Coffee

With a slow introductory zoom onto Leth in a TV studio and a corresponding zoom out at the end Eddy Merckx in the Vicinity of a Cup of Coffee may be structured in the classical style but an extremely unusual TV production is involved: in the studio Leth reads from his poetry while a subtitle - like in Life in Denmark - pedantically but ambiguously presents observations and describes what is going on.

Spise med Price

The artistically streaked brothers James and Adam Price learned early on to LOVE food and both are right at home in the kitchen. In this series they alternate between working together and competing against each other as they take on each episode's theme of food. Some dishes are done the old fashioned way, some get a twist but all is done in a humorous atmosphere of good-natured bantering, teasing and story telling.

Mit Spanien

Mit Frankrig

Hos Hans

Det sidste ord

Ronnie Rosé si'r helt go'nat

In the first of three programmes, hosts Ronnie and Ronnie Michael Wikke and Steen Rasmussen restore viewers' zest for life and faith in life after a tough evening in front of the screen.

Leth og Pilgaard indtager Danmark