Jorgen Leth Collection 01-05: De Antropologiske Film / Anthropological Films, download for free

Jun06

Jorgen Leth Collection 01-05: De Antropologiske Film / Anthropological Films

by movieworld on June 6th, 2016 at 06:23

Over five decades, Jorgen Leth has created a cinematic oeuvre that is unique in all respects. In more than 40 films, Leth has maintained his experimental approach to the medium, exploring film as language, testing film's possibilities and limitations. Coming from a starting point in language-conscious modernist poetry, Leth has examined the world not only through language but through the film camera's lens, showing images combined with a singularly detached, descriptive tone all the while carried by an aesthetic and sensuous delight in images.
Now, the Danish Film Institute is issuing Jorgen Leth’s complete works on DVD in a six-volume box set.

The first box embraces Leth's so-called anthropological films – five films in all shaped around an anthropological approach to selected slices of life. Leth briefly studied ethnography in the early 1960s; as a filmmaker, he has employed anthropological methods and stratagems, whether portraying people and customs in rainforest settings (Notes on Love) or training his lens on miscellaneous Danes (Life in Denmark). In 'The Perfect Human', he sets out to study the human species – as biological creature and as phenomenon.

In the director’s own words, "My basic idea is: I know nothing, but I would like to know something. Curiosity is an engine. Searching, fascination, framing. Discovering, seeking to understand. Not knowing in advance, not proving, not illustrating, certainly not arguing, but showing". This was a necessary starting point for the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) when he visited the Trobiand Islands in the 1920s to study local sexual customs. Recently, Lars von Trier, taking off from The Perfect Human, put the method to the test in 'The Five Obstructions'.

3 x DVD9 | PAL | 311 min. | 6.13 Gb + 5.63 Gb + 5.50 Gb + 3% rec
Language: Dansk
Subtitles: English
Genre: Documentary, Short

The first volume of a DVD edition which covers all his films contains the anthropological films:

DVD 1
01. Livet i Danmark / Leben in Danemark / Life in Denmark (1972), 37'
02. Det gode og det onde / Das Gute und das Bose / Good and Evil (1975), 77'

DVD 2
03. Det perfekte menneske / Der perfekte Mensch / The Perfect Human (1968), 13'
04. De fem benspaend / Die funf Anweisungen / The Five Obstructions (2003), 87'

DVD 3
05. Notater om kaerligheden / Notizen uber Liebe / Notes on Love (1989), 90'
Extras: Tropical Mix (2007), 7'