Under the charges, Burge could have been subject to 40 years in prison for the two obstruction counts and five years on the perjury count.
'Five Obstructions' is Lars's revenge".
So, if "The Five Obstructions" was a game, who, in Mr. Leth's opinion, was the winner?
As perverse and playful as Mr. von Trier's features ("Dancer in the Dark," "Dogville"), "The Five Obstructions" is only superficially a formal exercise.
The results of this intricate and perverse game are on display in "The Five Obstructions," a feature-length film that opens Wednesday at Film Forum in New York.
Mr. Leth said that "The Five Obstructions" helped Mr. von Trier too: "He's famous for being arrogant and rejecting people, and there are a lot of myths about him.
In The Five Obstructions he challenges one of his heroes, Danish documentarian Jørgen Leth, to remake his 12-minute 1967 anthropological study The Perfect Human five times, under certain restrictions.
It was used on Linklater's hallucinatory fantasy Waking Life and in one section of The Five Obstructions by Lars von Trier and Jorgen Leth, but the effects here are much more subdued: less freaky, less spacey - in keeping with the downbeat mood.
"The Five Obstructions" has an element of modernist literary experiment, like Georges Perec's 1969 "La Disparition" (a French novel written without the use of the letter "e") or Raymond Queneau's 1947 "Exercises in Style," in which a trivial anecdote is related in 99 different rhetorical fashions.
R. 'The Five Obstructions' In April 2001 the Danish director Lars von Trier asked one of his teachers, the documentarist Jorgen Leth, to participate in a formal experiment: Mr. Leth would take his wryly misanthropic 1967 short "The Perfect Human" and remake it under various absurd conditions imposed by Mr. von Trier.
