Jørgen Leth, Poet of the Ordinary, 1937–2025

Jørgen Leth, the Danish filmmaker, poet, and cultural omnivore whose quiet, incisive images revealed the beauty—and strangeness—of the everyday, has died at 88.

For more than six decades, Leth moved between poetry, film, and journalism with an almost anthropological detachment. Yet his work was never cold. It shimmered with curiosity, whether trained on the rituals of professional cycling in A Sunday in Hell (1977), the clinical poise of The Perfect Human (1968), or the elusive rhythms of daily life in 66 Scenes from America (1982). In that latter film, Leth captured what would become one of cinema’s most indelible portraits of pop culture: Andy Warhol, alone, unwrapping and slowly eating a Whopper hamburger. The scene—spare, hypnotic, absurd—transformed fast food into performance art and Warhol into an enigmatic oracle of consumption.

Leth was drawn to surfaces and gestures: a hand gripping a glass, the cadence of a voice, the choreography of athletes in motion. His films were never documentaries in the conventional sense; they were essays, meditations, poems made visible. He described himself as a “collector of fragments,” and in those fragments audiences discovered entire worlds.

To the Danish public, he was also a beloved, if eccentric, voice of the Tour de France—bringing lyrical digressions and painterly metaphors to televised sport. Abroad, he was the mentor whose Perfect Human so fascinated Lars von Trier that it sparked their audacious collaboration The Five Obstructions (2003).

Leth spent much of his later life in Haiti, where he served as Denmark’s honorary consul and where the textures of Caribbean life seeped into his work. Even after losing his home in the 2010 earthquake, he continued to write and film, undeterred by exile or loss.

His career was not without controversy, but his legacy is far larger than scandal. It rests in the way he taught us to look again: at a race, at a gesture, at a pop icon biting into a burger. Few artists have so insistently argued that meaning resides not in spectacle but in the ordinary.

Jørgen Leth is survived by his children, among them the filmmaker Asger Leth, and by a body of work that remains, in its cool intensity, unmistakably his own.

He leaves us with the reminder that life, in all its imperfect gestures, is worth watching—carefully, patiently, even reverently.