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.
Jørgen Leth
Jørgen Leth
Casts & Crew
Claus Nissen
Stina Ekblad
Jan Nowicki
Anders Hove
Also Directed by Jørgen Leth
A short sequence through the tropics.
A documentary about the Danish artist John Kørner.
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.
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."
Jørgen Leth's personal, pleasurable distillation of Danish literature covers seven poets alive at the time of production and twenty classical poets. A handful of actors share readings of the classical texts in semi close ups against a dark background; the living poets read their own works.
A late 1970s look at Danish ballet star Peter Martins's art and an assessment of what makes him unique and highly lauded on the international stage of ballet.
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.
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.
Portraying the four seasons of the nature in the famous Danish garden Dyrehaven.
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.