De Udstillede
Encyclopedia
De Udstillede is a 2000
Danish
documentary film
directed by Jesper Jargil. It documents a theatrical experiment
devised by Lars von Trier
.
, New Mexico
, pointed at a piece of ground. The images recorded by this camera were fed into a digital apparatus.
At the same time, the Art Society Building in Copenhagen
had been converted into a theatrical space consisting of 19 rooms. These rooms formed the stage to be used for three hours per day for 50 days by a group of 53 actors. Each room had a viewing space for the audience, who could wander from room to room to see the interactions of the actors. The actors were not given a script, but rather an explanation of their characters, each of which had four different sets of traits. The actors were instructed to improvise based on these four character phases.
Each room had a siren and a set of four coloured lights, and each phase of each character was linked to one of the four lights. Whatever light was illuminated in a particular room meant that any actors in that room had to act according to the character traits which corresponded to that light. When the siren in a particular room sounded, this signaled a change in which light was illuminated, and the actors had to adjust their performance accordingly.
The change of light was triggered by a certain number of ants crossing a certain part of the image being recorded in New Mexico. The frequency with which the changes occurred was thus determined by whether very few or a great many ants happened to be crossing the area of desert watched by the video camera.
2000 in film
The year 2000 in film involved some significant events.The top grosser worldwide was Mission: Impossible II. Domestically in North America, Gladiator won the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Actor ....
Danish
Denmark
Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...
documentary film
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
directed by Jesper Jargil. It documents a theatrical experiment
Experimental theatre
Experimental theatre is a general term for various movements in Western theatre that began in the late 19th century as a retraction against the dominant vent governing the writing and production of dramatical menstrophy, and age in particular. The term has shifted over time as the mainstream...
devised by Lars von Trier
Lars von Trier
Lars von Trier is a Danish film director and screenwriter. He is closely associated with the Dogme 95 collective, although his own films have taken a variety of different approaches, and have frequently received strongly divided critical opinion....
.
The mechanism
Lars von Trier's experiment, conducted in 1996, was called Psychomobile 1 – The World Clock. Von Trier set up a video camera in the desert near Los AlamosLos Alamos, New Mexico
Los Alamos is a townsite and census-designated place in Los Alamos County, New Mexico, United States, built upon four mesas of the Pajarito Plateau and the adjoining White Rock Canyon. The population of the CDP was 12,019 at the 2010 Census. The townsite or "the hill" is one part of town while...
, New Mexico
New Mexico
New Mexico is a state located in the southwest and western regions of the United States. New Mexico is also usually considered one of the Mountain States. With a population density of 16 per square mile, New Mexico is the sixth-most sparsely inhabited U.S...
, pointed at a piece of ground. The images recorded by this camera were fed into a digital apparatus.
At the same time, the Art Society Building in Copenhagen
Copenhagen
Copenhagen is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with an urban population of 1,199,224 and a metropolitan population of 1,930,260 . With the completion of the transnational Øresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region...
had been converted into a theatrical space consisting of 19 rooms. These rooms formed the stage to be used for three hours per day for 50 days by a group of 53 actors. Each room had a viewing space for the audience, who could wander from room to room to see the interactions of the actors. The actors were not given a script, but rather an explanation of their characters, each of which had four different sets of traits. The actors were instructed to improvise based on these four character phases.
Each room had a siren and a set of four coloured lights, and each phase of each character was linked to one of the four lights. Whatever light was illuminated in a particular room meant that any actors in that room had to act according to the character traits which corresponded to that light. When the siren in a particular room sounded, this signaled a change in which light was illuminated, and the actors had to adjust their performance accordingly.
The change of light was triggered by a certain number of ants crossing a certain part of the image being recorded in New Mexico. The frequency with which the changes occurred was thus determined by whether very few or a great many ants happened to be crossing the area of desert watched by the video camera.