Danish Film Classics

Im zweiten DVD-Set sind die Sportfilme von Jørgen Leth versammelt, insbesondere seine Klassiker über den Radrennsport Stars and Wasserträger (1974), Die unmögliche Stunde(1975), und Ein Sonntag in der Hölle (1976). Leth wollte die ausgetretenen Pfade des Sportjournalismus verlassen und konzentrierte sich auf "das innere psychologische Drama der Kämpfe zwischen den großen Radfahrern". Ergänzt werden die Filme von einem Film über das baskischen Ballspiel Pelota (1983) und von zwei Experimentalfilmen über Geschindigkeit und Bewegung Motion Picture (1970) und Chinesisches Pingpong (1972), ein Gespräch mit Jørgen Leth und ein 40seitiges Booklet.

In his travel films, the director is again an anthropologist observing the world with detached intensity and refraining from analysis. 66 Scenes from America (1981), the earliest film in the box set, shows snapshots of archetypical American locations motels, diners, highways, a lone cactus iconographic images of a mythological country presented in bright postcard colours, sanitized, like the myth of America. In the latest film, Aarhus (2005), Leth travels back to the city of his childhood, whose familiar locales are likewise captured in the director's trademark tableau style. In between, we find his films about Haiti and China. His film about Homo ludens, Moments of Play (1986), documents people at play around the globe, including the filmmaker's own game with reality.

Though the element of fiction is far from dominant in Jørgen Leth's oeuvre, he has made two "fiction features," Interference (1983) and Traberg (1992). Both are set in Haïti and both revolve around a lost, searching male character. The protagonists vanish or are gradually ousted from the centre of the fiction, as the real world moves in with a violence and obsessive power that makes Haïti itself the true subject of both films. As an added bonus, this box set also contains Jørgen Leth and Per Kirkeby's 1979 TV-production of A Midsummer Night's Play (1979), an 1803 Danish Golden-Age classic by the Romantic poet Adam Oehlenschläger. Leth and Kirkeby present the play in tableau form, featuring the finest Danish actors of the day in a festive romp through Oehlenschläger's elaborate verse and metrics.

In this box set, we find Leth's ballet films about the dancer Peter Martins and the Bournonville steps and tradition alongside literary portraits of the Danish authors Klaus Rifbjerg and Søren Ulrik Thomsen, plus a many-headed portrait of illustrious Danish writers from H.A. Brorson to Michael Strunge, and, finally, his films about sports icons, the footballer Michael Laudrup and the boxer Ayub Kalule. Ballet, Danish literature and sports: In all three areas, the filmmaker strives to portray people and situations by zeroing in on the creative process itself. In the way he shapes his fascination through objective detachment and a formalist approach, we recognise the method of anthropological observation that is such a strong thread in Leth's works.

The sixth and final box set in the Jørgen Leth Collection comprises his early experiments. Here we find Leth's first films from the 1960s and early 1970s, when the poet and director moved into the world of film, playing around with images and sound. His very first film, from 1963, is about the jazz pianist Bud Powell. Like so many of these films, it is the product of a close collaboration with the cinematographer Ole John. Leth and John continued their tight partnership over the following years, exploring and challenging cinematic language. Eventually, they expanded their collaborative form into the ABCinema movement, a film collective of artists from many different scenes, including among others Bjørn Nørgaard, Per Kirkeby, Ursula Reuter, Lene Adler Petersen and Erik Thygesen. The box set offers a portrait of "the artist as a young puppy," and supplements the early experiments with an array of bonus materials almost a full five hours chronicling the rise of ABCinema, describing the director's life in Haiti today and pointing ahead to two brand new films about Leth.

Valdemar Psilander (1884-1917) war der größte Star der dänischen Stummfilms. Obwohl er schon 1917 im Alter von nur 32 Jahren starb, hinterließ er 83 Filme, in denen er während seiner sechsjährigen Engagements bei der Nordisk Films Kompagni mitwirkte. Die drei Stummfilme auf dieser DVD zeigen nicht nur Valdemar Psilanders Qualitäten als Schauspieler, sie sind auch repräsentativ für die Produktionen der Nordisk Films Kompagni in der produktivsten und erfolgreichsten Zeit des dänischen Kinos.