Ophelia s Flowers

Ophelia’s Suicide soliloquy is staged by a forest pond against the backdrop of a stretched piece of blue fabric gently quivering in the accidental breeze. A few years earlier, Jørgen Leth and Per Kirkeby had put on a highly stylized production of “Hamlet” at the Svalegangen theatre in Aarhus and from there comes the idea of Ophelia’s soliloquy literally “going to pieces” according to this principle: when Leth in the wings, strikes two wooden blocks together, the actress halts her reading and starts over. As the actress is halted again and again, the soliloquy breaks up according to the accidental principle, which is unpredictable and enervating. Controlled like a marionette, her lines are reduced almost to pure sound. The focus shifts from the text to her face and movements – she is sensually alive, standing there in her airy garments, yet she is completely lost. The camerawork is designed according to a complex system of two cameras moving on two parallel tracks. A zoom-in and a zoom-out bracket the soliloquy. When Ophelia finally vanishes into the pond, the unpitying camera has already abandoned her. We are at a distance again and she is no more. Storyline In Per Kirkeby s set with a blue backdrop beside a woodland lake Lene Adler Petersen pronounces Ophelia s madness monologue from Hamlet, but she is constantly interrupted by the sound of two wooden blocks and has to start again: There s rosemary, that s for remembrance ... The words thereby rapidly lose their meaning and our interest turns to the specific sounds emerging from Adler Petersen s lips and the choreographed ways she touches her face. The film starts and ends classically with a zoom in from an establishing shot and a zoom out onto a concluding tableau in which Ophelia throws herself into the lake, but in between the film is experimental, with two cameras on tracks abiding by a carefully conceived but highly impenetrable system. The frame thus changes apparently according to signals from Leth, and occasionally the camera seems to track right off the set into the sylvan wilderness. At its premiere at the Carlton it was shown before Roman Polanski s Dance of the vampires. Written by Anonymous