Tag Archives: Fitzcarraldo

Werner Herzog’s Reflections on the Natural World

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I had an encounter with a big boa constrictor, which poked its head through the chicken wire surrounding its wooden cage and looked at me fearlessly in the eye for a long time. Stubbornly confronting each other. we were pondering the relatedness of the species. Both of us, since the relatedness was slight, felt sad and turned away from each other.

A drunk spat at a beautiful monkey, black, with limbs that go on forever. He looks very intelligent. He is sitting with his tail wrapped around his buttocks, his knees under his chin and his arms around his knees. I realized I was sitting the same way. Does the monkey dream my dreams in the branches above me?

Next to a surfboard, a cormorant popped up from the water, looking so out of place and artificial that for a moment I thought it was plastic, like the fake ducks that hunters put out on ponds as decoys, but then it suddenly dived so elegantly that I gained confidence in cormorants.

Flesh-eating flowers oozing oily invitations lure insects to their death. On rotting wood, slimy fungi brood poison. The jungle, existing exclusively in the present, is certainly subject to time, but remains forever ageless. Any concept of justice would be antithetical to all this.

Why do these animal dramas preoccupy me so? Because i do not want to look inside myself…and would prefer to observe the jungle revel in its debauched lewdness.

Excerpts from Werner Herzog’s Conquest of the Useless.

Werner Herzog: The Myth of the Man

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20140905_072700“There are 50,000 spectators,” Werner Herzog explained to the rapt audience at BAM, the final image of his documentary The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Stein on display.Screenshot (293) “But we see only the man alone against the snow.”

In his interview at BAM’s Harvey Theater in Brooklyn on Thursday night, Herzog admitted to creating myths in his documentaries; he has often stated that “all filmmakers are liars”.

Herzog does not believe in documenting facts, offering data to support a thesis, but instead creates a nebulous thing from which a greater truth may be derived.

He uses whatever he has – everything from archival images of starving people gazing longingly at a sausage (Little Dieter Needs to Fly) to an albino alligator (Cave of Forgotten Dreams) – to make his film work; it doesn’t matter if the material is factually accurate. He has gone so far (in Lessons of Darkness) as to write down his ideas and attribute them to Blaise Pascal, just for effect:

The collapse of the stellar universe will occur - like creation - in grandiose splendor.

The collapse of the stellar universe will occur – like creation – in grandiose splendor.                – –  Werner Herzog

At the end of the talk, Herzog read from his book, Conquest of the Useless, a journal he kept while filming Fitzcarraldo:

fitz02I did not even feel my bleeding foot. There was no pain, no joy, no excitement, no relief, no happiness, no sound, not even a deep breath. All I grasped was a profound uselessness, or to be more precise, I had merely penetrated deeper into its mysterious realm.