Abstract
Personal style, the image of the author in the work, originates neither in deliberate self-portraiture nor in unconscious signatures. In the 2003 film The Five Obstructions, the director Lars von Trier tries, and fails, to compel his collaborator Jørgen Leth to ruin the style of his 1967 film The Perfect Human. In doing so, von Trier inadvertently succeeds in distinguishing style from form. This essay proposes three explanations for the resilience of Leth’s style: the energy of artistry, the currently unfashionable energy of modernism and the particular release of energy that occurs when elements of style are reduced to formal features.
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Notes
On this difference, see Ferguson (2000).
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Kunin, A. The riddle of style. Postmedieval 6, 491–499 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2015.36
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2015.36