Spring Break
Cineasts speak at Shapiro Campus Center (Pt. 2)
Herzog, Morris talk
by Elizabeth Pauker
News | 10/23/07
Posted online at 2:01 AM EST on 10/30/07
Of all the conversations I imagined having with Werner Herzog, the acclaimed German director, producer and writer, never would I have guessed that he would end up explaining why he told Roger Ebert that he had to watch the Anna Nicole Smith Show, and how she relates to Muslim Fundamentalists. Looking back, I should have expected that a man who once had a 340-ton steam ship moved over a mountain with a bulldozer during the making of his film Fitzcarraldo would be someone whose ideas are anything but ordinary.
A filmmaker for over 40 years, Herzog visited Brandeis last Monday to screen his new documentary, Encounters at the End of the World, followed by an open-ended conversation Tuesday between him and director Errol Morris. Known for illustrating unusual individuals and finding untapped beauty in nature, Herzog's Encounters seems to be the culmination of this theme.
Narrated by Herzog, Encounters follows his journey through Antarctica; however, he swears it isn't another penguin movie but rather a look at the eccentric people he finds gathered "at the end of the world." While at McMurdo Station, the largest community in Antarctica, he finds an eccentric range of residents, from the journeyman plumber who tries to prove that he's a descendent of the royal family of the Aztecs to the linguist who found himself on a continent that has no language.
While the human encounters provide for comic relief, it's the natural surroundings, whether prolonged underwater footage of jellyfish or icicles hanging from natural ice-caves, that really make the film memorable. In fact, more than once does he describe his journey as something close to a religious experience and refers to the ocean beneath the frozen ground as the "cathedral." In Werner's own words after the film's screening, "It's a very simple film... that somehow makes it clearer than any of my other films that I have fallen in love with the world."
This love is one that has kept him searching for an "ecstatic truth" in filmmaking, an idea with which his longtime friend and celebrated director, Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, Fog of War) couldn't help but disagree with during their conversation the next day. Instead, Morris felt that "If everything were planned, it would be dreadful, and if everything were unplanned, it would be equally dreadful. Cinema exists because there are elements of both." Watching the two discuss and debate everything from cinema vérité (literally meaning truth cinema) to Morris's dislike for "cookie-cutter movies made on satanic assembly lines for public consumption" was like watching the continuation of an ongoing conversation.
A filmmaker for over 40 years, Herzog visited Brandeis last Monday to screen his new documentary, Encounters at the End of the World, followed by an open-ended conversation Tuesday between him and director Errol Morris. Known for illustrating unusual individuals and finding untapped beauty in nature, Herzog's Encounters seems to be the culmination of this theme.
Narrated by Herzog, Encounters follows his journey through Antarctica; however, he swears it isn't another penguin movie but rather a look at the eccentric people he finds gathered "at the end of the world." While at McMurdo Station, the largest community in Antarctica, he finds an eccentric range of residents, from the journeyman plumber who tries to prove that he's a descendent of the royal family of the Aztecs to the linguist who found himself on a continent that has no language.
While the human encounters provide for comic relief, it's the natural surroundings, whether prolonged underwater footage of jellyfish or icicles hanging from natural ice-caves, that really make the film memorable. In fact, more than once does he describe his journey as something close to a religious experience and refers to the ocean beneath the frozen ground as the "cathedral." In Werner's own words after the film's screening, "It's a very simple film... that somehow makes it clearer than any of my other films that I have fallen in love with the world."
This love is one that has kept him searching for an "ecstatic truth" in filmmaking, an idea with which his longtime friend and celebrated director, Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, Fog of War) couldn't help but disagree with during their conversation the next day. Instead, Morris felt that "If everything were planned, it would be dreadful, and if everything were unplanned, it would be equally dreadful. Cinema exists because there are elements of both." Watching the two discuss and debate everything from cinema vérité (literally meaning truth cinema) to Morris's dislike for "cookie-cutter movies made on satanic assembly lines for public consumption" was like watching the continuation of an ongoing conversation.
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