Yesterday I looked at the first obstruction from the Lars Von Trier doco The Five Obstruction so lets pick up from there by looking at the second obstruction,

2

Leth must remake the film in the worst place in the world but not show that place onscreen; additionally, Leth must himself play the role of “the man”. The meal must be included, but the woman is not to be included. Leth remakes the film in the red light district of Bombay, only partially hiding it behind a translucent screen.

again the obstruction is actually a set, all seemingly with arbitrary motivations.There are no formal constraints for this obstruction, however it is difficult to analyse the final result as Lars judges Leth to have failed the task as Lars judged the translucent screen to not properly hide the setting.

Personally I think the translucent screen is the most interesting part of this version, however it impossible to tell if a version which hid the setting would have been more interesting or not.

Even though the result did not meet Lars’ criteria, the mistake was unintentional and still produced a creative result. Leth had a different interpretation of the rules, perhaps it was this interpretive error that produced an interesting result as it pushed Leth to use an unconventional/unexpected device.