The Documentary Films of Jørgen Leth (Unfinished)

(This was supposed to be a project but due to a mixture of health issues and a complete lack of faith in my writing skills/writer's block, I just could not finish this.)

Jørgen Leth is a Danish film documentarian, sports commentator and poet. He has made over 45 films since the 1960s with the vast majority of them being documentaries. The most famous of these are his cycling films: Stars and The Watercarriers, dealing with Eddy Merckx’ victory of the 1973 Giro D’Italia, The Impossible Hour, documenting Ole Ritter’s attempt at taking back his timed record from Eddy Merckx and A Sunday in Hell, the famous Paris-Roubaix one day race known for its test of endurance on the cobblestones of Northern Paris.

These 3 documentaries on cycling are largely poetic but also observational. They focus on the feelings and experiences that make up a professional cyclists routine in extensive detail. For example, in Stars and Watercarriers it goes from the utter dejection a cyclist feels when he finds out he can no longer be the teams leader to the daily tasks that the “watercarriers” do which is that they are used as part of a strategy for their more illustrious team mates plus they take on the food and drinks in a bag (or stored in the back of their cycling shirts).

The pattern is somewhat extended in A Sunday in Hell with it documenting again in similar style the hellish terrain that they must face when cycling from the unstable cobblestones in Northern Paris into Belgium in a day. In The Impossible Hour, there is also a touch of participatory element in the film when the director himself acts as a translator for a French journalist to Danish compatriot Ole Ritter (who can only speak in Danish and Italian).

As well as his documentaries in cycling, Leth has also made travel films,