 Jørgen Leth made Notater om kærligheden during a crisis in his life and it is a sombre, perhaps very personal film. The tone is struck by Leth s voice, which accompanies a shot of him shaving at the start of the film with the word "Repugnance". The actors are used as properties in the loosely conjoined, sketch-like scenes, and a series of simple themes reappear from Det gode og det onde, of which this film lies clearly in continuation: house fronts behind which people live, smoking a cigarette, and perhaps the most important theme of the film, touch. Other important moods or emotions include restlessness, indecisiveness, and more tangibly, writer s block, with which Leth s alter ego in the film, Claus Nissen, struggles in a brick set by Per Kirkeby. Nissen also takes up his character from Det perfekte menneske and Det gode og det onde in several scenes. In a loose structure kept together by several recurrent motifs such as a large tree lit at night, a canoe gliding along a river in the twilight, and its music, the film also contains other blocks of material, including ballet scenes shot in the studio and a number of affectionate images of a woman and her daughter in Nicaragua. The documentary material from the Trobriand Islands makes the most marked impression: a staged layer mimicking the anthropologist Malinowski s photographs from the islands in black and white and the story of the Danish film unit following in Malinowski s footsteps, again seeking tangible documentation of the nature of love.