Great Danes?

Looking for that special point of view

by Chris Fujiwara

"DK/USA: DANISH FILMMAKERS LOOK AT OUR AMERICA," At the Harvard Film Archive February 4 and 5.

I hear Denmark is a clean country. Beautiful Copenhagen was home to a lot of American jazz musicians during the '60s. Denmark subsidizes artists. Denmark saved its Jews from the Nazis. Isak Dinesen, wasn't she Danish? Carl Dreyer was. So were Hamlet, Hans Christian Andersen, and Søren Kierkegaard.

Not knowing much about Denmark, as you see, I find it hard to concur with the program notes for the Harvard Film Archive's two-day program "DK/USA: Danish Filmmakers Look at Our America" when they assert that "the films in this series look at our American landscapes and communities from a distinctly Danish point of view." One of the films, Under New York (1996; February 4 at 7 p.m.), was shot on video and transferred to 35mm, just like Lars von Trier's Kingdom; it was directed by Jacob Thuesen, who edited Kingdom, and the two films are similar in their gimmicky editing and irritating use of music. Trier is Danish too; therefore does the video-to-35 look, with its hard, sapless light quality and those aseptic quick dissolves, reflect a Danish point of view? I'm not sure.

Under New York, a study of the war between homeless denizens of Manhattan subway tunnels and the Transit Police, has some good moments that get away from the editing to follow people in space. In the best part of the film, Gerry, a homeless man, takes the filmmaker to his original home turf in Queens. Over the course of a well-judged long take, Gerry proceeds from feeling that it's good to be back among old friends to realizing that it's not worth crossing the street to see them since they have nothing to talk about -- except, for example, the news that one of their number has died.

Does Jørgen Leth's 66 Scenes from America (1982; February 5 at 7 p.m.) propose a Danish point of view or just a European one? It starts with a shot of Monument Valley, which in the context of an early-'80s European art film is as much of a reference to Wim Wenders's attitude toward John Ford as it is to Ford himself. Filmed mostly in New York City and in the West, 66 Scenes is a series of cinematic snapshots of people, objects, and landscapes. At the end of each perfectly composed vignette, a deadpan male voice with what I assume is a Danish accent stamps the shot by giving its location ("Fourteenth Street"; "Westhampton, Long Island") and, often, a laconic title ("Dusk"; "Motel"; "Wild Turkey"; "The American Flag"). An eerie, detached collection of atmospheres, the movie lightly draws together its themes (eating, drinking, temporariness, transportation) to evoke a haunted America full of loneliness. The only part that doesn't ring true is a long scene in which Andy Warhol, in dark jacket and tie, sits down at a table with a Burger King bag, unwraps and eats a Whopper, and then, about a minute after finishing, says, "Uh, my name is Andy Warhol and, uh, I just finished eating, uh, a hamburger." The conspicuous length of the shot and Warhol's acting (and, more to the point, the very use of Warhol) come off as coy and overstated in a way that the rest of the film avoids. 66 Scenes would still make an excellent second feature for Chantal Akerman's News from Home, the ultimate European-looks-at-America film.

Leth also brings a clearly European sensibility to the ruminative, shocking Haiti Untitled (1996), which will be shown on the same program as 66 Scenes. The film was shot in Haiti in 1994, when US troops occupied the country to help reinstate overthrown president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and end a three-year period of military dictatorship. We see slaughtered bodies in the streets, a funeral procession, poor people picking through a sea of garbage among little fires, female nudes posed sybaritically in elegant settings. A white woman photographer talks of her attachment to the country, where she has come to escape the "death by nightmare" of her troubled personal life. Prominent in the film is Emmanuel "Toto" Constant, leader of Haiti's far-right FRAPH death squads and seen here pontificating, taking a phone call, and participating in a voodoo ritual. Former CIA employee Constant, by the way, now lives a free man in Queens -- probably not in the same neighborhood that Gerry of Under New York came from.

The other feature film in the series is Knud Vesterkov's By the Dawn's Early Light (1993; February 4 at 7 p.m.), which has something to do with New York writer/painter David Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in 1991. What, finally, is the Danish point of view on America? Maybe it will become clearer after we've seen the next Lars von Trier film -- which is reported to be a musical set in America and starring Björk.