When I want to freak myself out, “I” think about “me” thinking about having an “I” The only thing stupider than puppets talking to puppets is a puppet talking to itself.
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Werner Herzog
Posts about Werner Herzog
READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
I watched Land of Silence and Darkness for the second time last night -- the first time I watched it was near the very beginning of my getting into Herzog's œuvre, and I did not get much out of it at all; now it is seeming to me like possibly the greatest of his documentaries, and on a par with Stroszek as an utterly captivating movie.
The first time I saw it I was laboring under some misconceptions, which I believe it would be useful to examine. I had just seen Even Dwarfs Started Small, and then seen the YouTube clip of Vladimir Kokol making lip-noises and playing with his ball, and I went into the movie sort of thinking, This is a crazy Herzog film about crazy people. But that is an exceedingly poor rubrik for understanding Land of Silence and Darkness. The Kokol clip is only meaningful in the context of the film as a whole, and it kind of sucks it is the top hit when you search YouTube for clips from the film -- I think the clip of Straubinger which I posted below is a much better introduction to the movie. Straubinger and the people she visits are not (in general) "crazy people" or deranged, they are deaf and/or blind, and listening to them talk/sign about their experience is enlightening and touching.
(Also possible: when I watched Even Dwarfs Started Small I was listening to Herzog's commentary track, which as I recall consisted essentially of him saying to his interviewer, "heh -- look at these crazy midgets" -- I probably had that in mind going into this movie, and was thinking of Herzog as taking his camera to the zoo/asylum to film the animals/crazy people... I have no idea whether that was his intention, but in any case the movie he made is much more valuable than that suggests. Possibly I should watch Even Dwarfs again and see if there is more to it than I got on my first viewing. A key thing to remember with Land of Silence and Darkness is that Herzog is not the only person making the movie -- the deaf and blind people are not actors, they are people with their own agendas in speaking to Herzog.)
The primary thing I am taking away from last night's viewing of the film -- and I am planning to watch it many more times -- is how the chain of conversation flowed between the different people. When a person is speaking words as he or she signs the words onto the listener's palm, and the listener speaks or mouths the words being signed, the communication that is going on is astounding to watch -- and as a viewer I felt able to get inside that act of communication in a distinctly different way than I do watching what I think of as "normal", spoken conversation. Then in the next scene, a deaf person would be signing to another without speaking/mouthing words, and I would be completely outside their conversation...
There is a tricky bit of translation at the beginning of Woyzeck:
HAUPTMANN: Langsam, Woyzeck, langsam; eins nach dem andern! Er macht
mir ganz schwindlig. Was soll ich dann mit den 10 Minuten anfangen,
die Er heut zu früh fertig wird? Woyzeck, bedenk Er, Er hat noch seine
schönen dreißig Jahr zu leben, dreißig Jahr! Macht dreihundertsechzig
Monate! und Tage! Stunden! Minuten! Was will Er denn mit der
ungeheuren Zeit all anfangen? Teil Er sich ein, Woyzeck!
WOYZECK: Jawohl, Herr Hauptmann.
H: Es wird mir ganz angst um die Welt, wenn ich an die
Ewigkeit denke. Beschäftigung, Woyzeck, Beschäftigung! Ewig: das ist
ewig, das ist ewig - das siehst du ein; nur ist es aber wieder nicht
ewig, und das ist ein Augenblick, ja ein Augenblick - Woyzeck, es
schaudert mich, wenn ich denke, daß sich die Welt in einem Tag
herumdreht. Was 'n Zeitverschwendung! Wo soll das hinaus? Woyzeck, ich
kann kein Mühlrad mehr sehen, oder ich werd melancholisch.
W: Jawohl, Herr Hauptmann.
H: Woyzeck, Er sieht immer so verhetzt aus! Ein guter Mensch
tut das nicht, ein guter Mensch, der sein gutes Gewissen hat. - Red er
doch was Woyzeck! Was ist heut für Wetter?
W: Schlimm, Herr Hauptmann, schlimm: Wind!
H: Ich spür's schon. 's ist so was Geschwindes draußen: so ein
Wind macht mir den Effekt wie eine Maus. - [Pfiffig:] Ich glaub', wir
haben so was aus Süd-Nord?
W: Jawohl, Herr Hauptmann.
H: Ha, ha ha! Süd-Nord! Ha, ha, ha! Oh, Er ist dumm, ganz
abscheulich dumm! - [Gerührt:] Woyzeck, Er ist ein guter Mensch
--aber-- [Mit Würde:] Woyzeck, Er hat keine Moral! Moral, das ist,
wenn man moralisch ist, versteht Er. Es ist ein gutes Wort. Er hat ein
Kind ohne den Segen der Kirche, wie unser hocherwürdiger Herr
Garnisionsprediger sagt - ohne den Segen der Kirche, es ist ist nicht
von mir.
W: Herr Hauptmann, der liebe Gott wird den armen Wurm nicht drum
ansehen, ob das Amen drüber gesagt ist, eh er gemacht wurde. Der Herr
sprach: Lasset die Kleinen zu mir kommen.
H: Was sagt Er da? Was ist das für eine kuriose Antwort? Er
macht mich ganz konfus mit seiner Antwort. Wenn ich sag': Er, so mein'
ich Ihn, Ihn -
CAPTAIN: Slowly, Woyzeck, slowly; one thing at a time! You make me dizzy. What am I going to do with the 10 minutes that you'll save by the time you're done? Woyzeck, think of it, you've been alive a good thirty years already, thirty years! That's three hundred sixty Months! and Days! Hours! Minutes! What are you going to do with all that monstrous time? Pace yourself, Woyzeck!
WOYZECK: Yes sir, Captain sir.
C: I get scared for the world when I think about eternity. Pay attention, Woyzeck! Forever: that's forever, that's forever -- you understand; but it's also not forever at all, it's just the blink of an eye -- Woyzeck, it frightens me, when I think of how the world goes around in a day. What a waste of time! What's going to come of that? Woyzeck, I can't even look at a mill-wheel any longer, without becoming melancholy.
W: Yes indeed, Captain.
C: Woyzeck, you always have such a hunted look! A good man wouldn't look that way, a good man with a clean conscience. -- But speak up, Woyzeck! How is the weather today?
W: Bad, sir, bad: wind!
C: I can feel it already. There's something blowing out there, such a wind sounds like a mouse to me. -- [whistles] I believe it's a South-North wind we have?
W: Yes sir, Captain sir.
C: Ha, ha, ha! South-North! Ha, ha, ha! Oh, you're a dummy, such a shameful dummy! - [turns] Woyzeck, you're a good man -- but -- [grandiose] Woyzeck, you have no morality! Morality, I mean like when somebody is moral, you understand. It's a good word. You have a child without the blessing of the Church, as our estimable chaplain says -- without the blessing of the Church, it's not just me saying that.
W: Captain sir, blessed God won't hold it against the little thing, whether somebody said Amen over it before it was made... The good lord said: Let the little children come unto me.
C: What are you saying there? What kind of a weird answer is that? You're confusing me with your answers. When I say "You", I'm talking about you, you...
(From the script of Büchner's play, but the screenplay for Herzog's film seems to adhere pretty closely, at least in this portion of the film.) Two things: I did not know that capitalized Er could be used for formal address in the way that Sie is -- I reckon that must be an archaic or regional usage or Frau Rose would have told us in German class. (grin) It makes sense... The Captain's final line sounds much better in German than in (my) English, I think. And also, I can't communicate (or really, quite understand) the captain's slip into informal "du" in the middle of his second speech.
The captain's soliloquies here are very clearly staged -- Dan Schneider presents that as a shortcoming of the movie; but it seems pretty charming to me.
posted evening of March 25th, 2010: Respond ➳ More posts about Woyzeck
And that's when I first learned about the Vortex. They had chained themselves here on purpose, in order to preach about the Vortex. It was a world in the Pacific Ocean where a hundred million tons of us had gathered... They said there was no Maker; they said we were the Maker. They said in the Vortex, we were free. It was Paradise.
In Ramin Bahrani's magnificent documentary Plastic Bag, Werner Herzog appears in what is perhaps his first non-bio-degradable role, as a discarded plastic bag longing for the nirvana of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Plastic Bag is one in a series of 11 short speculative films from the first season of FUTURESTATES -- you can watch the others at their web site.
Werner Herzog's next film will be a documentary about the cave paintings at Chauvet-Pont-D'Arc. The Guardian's Film Blog has more information, plus some videos of him talking about the project. Also check out Roger Ebert's journal (IIUC Ebert is the videographer here), where he writes up a recent screening of Aguirre, the Wrath of God with Herzog and Bahrani, and mentions Plastic Bag.
The blind man had categorically stated that he could see, if you'll excuse that verb again, a thick, uniform white color, as if he had plunged his eyes into a milky sea. A white amaurosis, apart from being etymologically a contradiction, would also be a neurological possibility, since the brain, which would be unable to perceive the images, forms, and colors of reality, would likewise be incapable, in a manner of speaking, of being covered in white, a continuous white, like a white painting without tonalities, the colors, forms and images which reality itself might present to someone with normal vision, however difficult it may be to speak, with any accuracy, of normal vision.
Borges (and guess how excited I am to find the Seven Nights lectures online! At least one of them...):
...People picture the blind man enclosed in a world of black. There is a verse of Shakespeare's which would justify this impression: Looking on darkness which the blind do see; if we understand "darkness" to mean "black," this verse of Shakespeare's is mistaken.
One of the colors which the blind (in any case this blind man) are strangers to is black; another is red. "Le rouge et le noir" are colors we miss. For me, who was used to sleeping in total darkness, it was a great deal of trouble trying to sleep in this world of fog, a greenish fog or blue, vaguely luminous, which is the world of blindness.
Alas! It looks like Sylvia and I are not going to make it in to the city to see Cave of Forgotten Dreams before the end of next week, when its run will be ending. I am hoping against hope that it gets a broader distribution, either now or at Oscars time -- how could something like this not get nominated? If not, well, I guess we'll watch it at home, without 3D... Julian Bell's review in the current NY Review of Books makes it sound unmissable.
posted evening of May 4th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Sylvia
Nearly everyone in this town of fewer than 2,000 people some 95-miles east of San Francisco has a story about the two men, who were known as wild partiers and methamphetamine users.
“It’s freaky when you realize you knew someone like that,†said Jennifer Brown, 57, a bartender from nearby Clements.
Mr. Shermantine and Mr. Herzog were regulars at several of the local bars, including the Linden Inn, owned by John Vanderheiden.
“I heard him boasting about how he killed a guy just to kill him,†said Mr. Vanderheiden, who said he shrugged off Mr. Herzog’s stories as barroom bragging until 1998, when his 25-year-old daughter, Cyndi, disappeared after a night out with the men.
It is difficult to picture reading this story without wondering whether Herzog has started working on his documentary. Only icing on the cake that one of the murderers is named Herzog.
posted evening of February 18th, 2012: 2 responses
And that's when I first learned about the 
