The film that walked off with the Palme D’Or at Cannes last year almost didn’t get made.

Dancer In the Dark, from filmmaker Lars Von Trier, starring Icelandic pop goddess Bjork, came to a screeching halt midway through production when the lead talent suddenly walked off the set for a week – and no one knew if she would return.

This real-life drama is captured in the documentary Von Trier’s 100 Eyes from Danish documentarian Katia Forbert Petersen, presented as part of Hot Docs 2001 National Spotlight on the Nordic nations of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Iceland.

The title is both a reference to the technique Von Trier employed for Dancer in the Dark’s musical sequences and a homage to Fritz Lang’s seminal German talkie The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse. In Lang’s film, the 1,000 eyes were a gangster’s spy cameras. In Von Trier’s film, the 100 eyes are unmanned digital cameras ranged about the sets of Dancer in the Dark’s elaborate song-and-dance numbers to capture the action from all angles, including from the ceiling and up Bjork’s skirt.

The musical numbers stand in contrast to the rest of the film, which is done with a single hand-held, point-of-view camera. As Petersen explains, the musical numbers are ‘like spying. Normally [musical numbers] use three or four cameras. It’s very esthetic. The rest of the film is like a documentary, very rough, very natural.’

The first part of the documentary, says Petersen, ‘is about Lars making the film. He explains [his technique, his approach], he’s very energetic and he works very hard.

‘Lars always makes experiments, he is fascinated by possibilities. He never makes two films the same way, he never duplicates his ideas. He has the fascination of the possibilities of the film camera, and I have too. Filmmakers are always fascinated with cameras. Film is like a piece of my life. It is not only my job it is my hobby.’

Petersen was invited to direct the film by Lars’ manager, who was looking for a filmmaker who would produce a doc a step above the standard Making of…. ‘They wanted a better film, they wanted documentary, not just backstage. Not ‘how great it was, how fun it was.’ They wanted a real documentary. It’s about his masterpiece.’

Petersen, a documentary director and DOP of 20 years, spent two-and-a-half months on set filming with a small digital camera in the name of unobtrusiveness.

‘I just hang around and film and look and film and not make a lot of noise about it. [The bulk of my time was spent] just hanging around, because sometimes nothing happens, but you must always be ready. Time goes slowly [on a feature film set] and people work and nothing much happens.’

Things eventually did start happening ‘because the relationship between Bjork and Lars became very complicated.’

Only Von Trier addresses the camera in the documentary, leaving Bjork’s motives open to interpretation. She left the set and was gone for more than a week.

‘She was very frustrated working with the film and blamed him for it. She’s not a professional actor. After some weeks [in the role of lead character Selma] she played [the part well]. She was Selma. It was too heavy for her. She felt like it was a nightmare for her, playing Selma was too much. Lars felt very guilty that he must push people,’ explains Petersen.

‘Making a film is like a marriage. You have this common tie with the film. It’s like you are in love with the film and each other. But it’s not true. They have a very intense relationship to make this big film and it was a little too much for her.’

During Bjork’s absence, the film itself ‘was hanging on very thin rope’ and almost ceased production. Artists on the set worked on masks of Bjork’s face, while body doubles were discussed as a means of salvaging the film shot thus far.

The film closes with the ceremony at Cannes a year later with Von Trier and Bjork holding their respective prizes.

Lars won the Palme D’Or in Cannes, but Petersen says he ‘paid for it with his personal pain. And the question of this film is the price you pay for the prize. ‘You see how much this man worked in this film and all this pain and guilt he felt. So ask yourself, he suffered so terribly to make this film, why do this? Why do people make feature films? [It’s about the] pain behind the creation.’

How can you mend

a frozen heart?

The pain and struggle behind great achievement is viewed from a different angle in Frozen Heart, another film in the Nordic program.

The doc chronicles Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen’s attempts to reach the North Pole by various means, including his testing of a new theory on polar currents that results in his being iced in for three years.

The documentary owes its extensive historical footage to Amundsen’s thorough documenting of his travels. Raising much of his funding from lecture tours after each expedition, Amundsen recognized the need for proof and footage and took a camera with him on all his journeys, filming in all conditions, including those when death seemed imminent.

Telling Amundsen’s story involved gathering the footage, recovered from locations around the world, over two years.

‘We were making and researching the film simultaneously and finding this stuff all the way up to the last minute,’ says Kenny Saunders, codirector (with Stig Andersen) of Frozen Heart.

‘He was very aware of the power of pictures and images; that was how he supported himself,’ says Saunders of Amundsen. ‘He understood that coming back, he had to have something to show to support future expeditions. He took a 35mm camera with him to all sorts of crazy places and took footage when he thought they would never get back. He was probably the most photographed Norwegian of his time.’

Despite his mastery of PR, Amundsen is not remembered as well as his contemporaries, such as R.F. Scott, the British explorer whom he beat to the South Pole, which Sanders puts down to ‘Anglo-American imperialism. And [Earnest Henry] Shackleton is more remembered too, because of the fact that Amundsen comes from a little Nordic country. If he were English, he would be the greatest hero of all time.’

Similarly, Amundsen’s conquering of the Northwest Passage was overshadowed by the hero’s death of the English explorer John Franklin, who had attempted exploration of the region almost a century before. ‘Although it was his first taste of fame, Amundsen felt snubbed by the English after the Northwest Passage. They kind of ignored him because he was not good at speaking English. And he had a way of putting down the human side and telling the technical side, and he was not very good at storytelling.’

Amundsen was not very good at conducting a personal life either. Despite various attempts to construct families around him, the explorer eventually drives away any woman interested in him, alienates his brother and abandons his two adopted Eskimo daughters. ‘It was only an experiment anyway,’ he says in his journal, and he sends the children back to Siberia.

The manner in which he died – on a mission into the Arctic Circle to rescue a man he despised – might have been a species of suicide.

‘Amundsen had a lot of personality traits that were stunted,’ Saunders says. ‘His relationship to his family, his relationship to women, to the world in general – it was those same stunted aspects of his personality that made him a great explorer. I believe he did some terrible things. On the other hand, if I was going to go to the South Pole, he is the one I’d want with me. He never gave up.

‘I think what drove him was his desire to be a great explorer and to be loved and admired by the world. He wanted to be the best.’ *