Jørgen Leth's fiction films — fourth DVD

For five decades, Jørgen Leth has been one of the most distinctive artists in Danish cinema. Throughout his production of more than 40 films, Leth's singular passion for exploring film as language and his sensuous delight in images have left their mark.

Interference and Traberg

Though fiction films make up only a small part of Leth's collected works, they hold many telltale signs of Leth's singular approach to documentary cinema. Both "Interference" (1983) and "Traberg" (1992) are set in Haiti and both revolve around the island and a lost, searching male protagonist, who disappears or is pushed from the centre of the fiction. In their place, Haitian reality steps in with a rawness and invasive force that makes the island the central element in the two stories.

The director adopts a characteristically hesitant, wait-and-see attitude to his two characters and their actions, even as he unflinchingly explores both their turmoil and the chaos of Haitian reality at hand. The director says: "My whole project and experiment was to have a kind of collapsible fiction that I could take with me, and then have my foreign correspondent's story unfold in a series of real, concrete situations, where reality would be not just a setting but a living co-actor".

A Midsummer Night's Play

The third film in the box set is Jørgen Leth and Per Kirkeby's television adaptation of "A Midsummer Night's Play" (1979), the 1803 Danish Golden Age classic by Romantic poet Adam Oehlenschläger. Staying entirely faithful to the original text, Leth and Kirkeby present the play in tableau form, featuring the finest Danish actors of the day in a spirited romp through Oehlenschläger's elaborate verse and metrics.

The Jørgen Leth Collection, generously supported by Møllehegnet Holding A/S, is composed of six box sets, four of these are published: Anthropological Films (01-05), Sports Films (06-11), Travel Films (12-18), and Fiction Films (19-21). All films are with English subtitles, and included in each box is a booklet and extra material. Yet to be published are Portraits and Early Experiments.

The box sets can be purchased at the DFI Video & Bookstore. Please note that watching the DVDs outside Europe (PAL, region 0) requires a multi-region DVD player.

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