Showing posts with label Werner Herzog. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Werner Herzog. Show all posts
Thursday, 26 May 2011
Kunzru on Herzog and Haneke
In two separate pieces for the Guardian (one a couple of years old), one of my favourite novelists, Hari Kunzru, assesses the films of two of my favourite directors: Werner Herzog and Michael Haneke. Enjoy!
Monday, 3 January 2011
Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo
As I've alluded to previously, it was as a result of seeing a documentary about him (Burden of Dreams) and learning of his passion for walking that I first became interested in the German filmmaker Werner Herzog. Only later, after seeing Encounters at the End of the World at a film festival, did I become a fan of his documentaries. Since then I've watched Grizzly Man, Wheel of Time, The White Diamond, and most recently, Little Dieter Needs to Fly. Until a few weeks ago, however, I'd only seen two of his features (Rescue Dawn and The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans), neither of which I really enjoyed. So it was with some trepidation that I sat down the other day to watch one of Herzog's first features, Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), a DVD of which I borrowed from a friend.
The opening sequence alone, shot near Machu Picchu on the side of a mountain with a sheer vertical drop of 600 metres, is, as they say, well worth the price of admission. And Klaus Kinski is anything but dull. Some of the other cast members, however, are not so convincing, perhaps understandably so given they're not professional actors. This amateurishness extends to other aspects of the production. But then Aguirre, the Wrath of God was shot on a budget of just US$370,000, a third of which went to Kinski (apparently he demanded another US$1 million to come into the studio to dub his own dialogue, forcing Herzog to hire another actor to do his dialogue instead). Amazingly, it was all shot on a single 35-mm camera, which, according to Herzog, he stole from what is now the Munich Film School.
A decade after the release of Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Herzog returned to the jungles of Peru to make another feature, Fitzcarraldo, this time with a budget of US$6 million and a number of famous actors. But to say things didn't quite go to plan would be a gross understatement. Both Jason Robards, who was cast in the title role of an obsessed opera fan who dreams of building an opera house in the Amazonian jungle, and Mick Jagger, who was cast as Fitzcarraldo's "retarded actor sidekick", had to pull out midway through filming, Robards due to illness (his doctor in the United States forbade him to return) and Jagger due to Rolling Stones touring commitments. Herzog himself briefly considered playing the part of Fitzcarraldo, but in the end he called on his old "friend", Klaus Kinski.
Central to the story of Fitzcarraldo is the transportation of a 340-ton ship over a mountain between two rivers. Herzog insisted on shooting this part of the film on location using a real ship and old-fashioned technology (pulleys and cables), and the problems this created helped establish his reputation as a megalomaniacal film director with little regard for the safety of his cast and crew. Herzog emphatically denies that anyone was ever at risk while the ship was being pulled over the mountain. And contrary to popular belief, no one was killed on the film set, although one extra drowned after stealing a boat and capsizing it on a river.
In Herzog on Herzog, Herzog explains the decision to use a real boat as follows:
The opening sequence alone, shot near Machu Picchu on the side of a mountain with a sheer vertical drop of 600 metres, is, as they say, well worth the price of admission. And Klaus Kinski is anything but dull. Some of the other cast members, however, are not so convincing, perhaps understandably so given they're not professional actors. This amateurishness extends to other aspects of the production. But then Aguirre, the Wrath of God was shot on a budget of just US$370,000, a third of which went to Kinski (apparently he demanded another US$1 million to come into the studio to dub his own dialogue, forcing Herzog to hire another actor to do his dialogue instead). Amazingly, it was all shot on a single 35-mm camera, which, according to Herzog, he stole from what is now the Munich Film School.
A decade after the release of Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Herzog returned to the jungles of Peru to make another feature, Fitzcarraldo, this time with a budget of US$6 million and a number of famous actors. But to say things didn't quite go to plan would be a gross understatement. Both Jason Robards, who was cast in the title role of an obsessed opera fan who dreams of building an opera house in the Amazonian jungle, and Mick Jagger, who was cast as Fitzcarraldo's "retarded actor sidekick", had to pull out midway through filming, Robards due to illness (his doctor in the United States forbade him to return) and Jagger due to Rolling Stones touring commitments. Herzog himself briefly considered playing the part of Fitzcarraldo, but in the end he called on his old "friend", Klaus Kinski.
Central to the story of Fitzcarraldo is the transportation of a 340-ton ship over a mountain between two rivers. Herzog insisted on shooting this part of the film on location using a real ship and old-fashioned technology (pulleys and cables), and the problems this created helped establish his reputation as a megalomaniacal film director with little regard for the safety of his cast and crew. Herzog emphatically denies that anyone was ever at risk while the ship was being pulled over the mountain. And contrary to popular belief, no one was killed on the film set, although one extra drowned after stealing a boat and capsizing it on a river.
In Herzog on Herzog, Herzog explains the decision to use a real boat as follows:
I want to take cinema audiences back to the earliest days, like when the Lumiere brothers screened their film of a train pulling into a station. Reports say that the audience fled in panic because they believed the train would run them over. I cannot confirm this, maybe it is a legend, but I do very much like this story...
...Nowadays even six-year-olds know when something is a special effect and even how the shot is done. I remember when the film was shown in Germany there was shouting from the audiences at the moment when the boat was hoisted up on to the mountain. Little by little they realized that this was no trick.
Wednesday, 12 May 2010
The Minnesota Declaration: Truth and fact in documentary cinema
LESSONS OF DARKNESS
1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.
2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. "For me," he says, "there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail."
Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.
3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.
4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.
5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.
6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.
7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.
8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: "You can't legislate stupidity."
9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.
10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn't call, doesn't speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don't you listen to the Song of Life.
11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.
12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species - including man - crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota
April 30, 1999
Werner Herzog
1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.
2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. "For me," he says, "there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail."
Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.
3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.
4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.
5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.
6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.
7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.
8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: "You can't legislate stupidity."
9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.
10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn't call, doesn't speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don't you listen to the Song of Life.
11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.
12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species - including man - crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota
April 30, 1999
Werner Herzog
Thursday, 5 November 2009
Yet more Wanderlust
I'm about a third of the way through Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust: A History of Walking. It's an interesting book, extremely readable but at the same time very educational. I'm currently reading about William Wordsworth, whose walking pedigree I was unfamiliar with, yet whose exploits Solnit deem worthy of an entire chapter (she goes as far as describing him as "the figure to whom posterity looks in tracing the history of walking in the landscape").
Among the more interesting things I've learned so far are that there's very strong evidence to suggest that it's not our consciousness that sets us apart from other animals but our ability to walk on two legs, a feat that freed our hands to do things other animals couldn't and encouraged our brains to develop (although I'm not sure where the kangaroos fit into this theory), and that galleries where originally places not for displaying art collections but for walking when the weather was inclement. "The gallery eventually became a place for displaying paintings," writes Solnit, "and though museum galleries are still a place where people stroll, the strolling is no longer the point."
On the negative side, Solnit loses points for misspelling the Tokaido (she refers to Hiroshige's Fifty-three Views on the Tokuida Road, which she describes as "a road movie from when roads were for walkers and movies were woodblock prints"), and for using the term Situationism, which anyone familiar with Situationist thought knows is a no-no (or as Guy Debord put it, "There is no such thing as situationism, which would mean a doctrine for interpreting existing conditions. The notion of situationism is obviously devised by antisituationists."). On the other hand, that Hiroshige and Debord (and yes, Werner Herzog) are mentioned at all is indicative of the scope and flavour of Wanderlust.
Among the more interesting things I've learned so far are that there's very strong evidence to suggest that it's not our consciousness that sets us apart from other animals but our ability to walk on two legs, a feat that freed our hands to do things other animals couldn't and encouraged our brains to develop (although I'm not sure where the kangaroos fit into this theory), and that galleries where originally places not for displaying art collections but for walking when the weather was inclement. "The gallery eventually became a place for displaying paintings," writes Solnit, "and though museum galleries are still a place where people stroll, the strolling is no longer the point."
On the negative side, Solnit loses points for misspelling the Tokaido (she refers to Hiroshige's Fifty-three Views on the Tokuida Road, which she describes as "a road movie from when roads were for walkers and movies were woodblock prints"), and for using the term Situationism, which anyone familiar with Situationist thought knows is a no-no (or as Guy Debord put it, "There is no such thing as situationism, which would mean a doctrine for interpreting existing conditions. The notion of situationism is obviously devised by antisituationists."). On the other hand, that Hiroshige and Debord (and yes, Werner Herzog) are mentioned at all is indicative of the scope and flavour of Wanderlust.
Saturday, 10 October 2009
Four documentaries
Before Monday's medical meltdown I managed to watch all the documentaries I'd borrowed from Alice in Videoland last week. I began with Herzog's Wheel of Time (2003), which was just beautiful. Some people have criticized Herzog for embarking on this project without adequate knowledge of the subject matter (Tibetan Buddhism, and in particular the Kalachakra initiations), but personally I found his approach, which resembled that of an impartial observer, and the quirky questions he directed at the Dalai Lama extremely engaging. Visually the movie was stunning, with lots of lingering close-ups of devotees' faces, fascinating footage of the creation (and destruction) of the Kalachakra sand mandala, and a bonus segment about the pilgrimage at Mount Kailash.
I was slightly underwhelmed by the three Wim Wenders documentaries. The first, Tokyo-Ga (1985), was my favourite, mainly because it was shot in Tokyo just a year before I first went to Japan and so felt extremely nostalgic. Much of the footage (of pachinko parlors, of golf driving ranges, of driving along neon-lit streets at night, for example), I found a bit clichéd, although I must admit I did enjoy the scenes inside the factory making wax food samples for use in restaurant display windows. The scene with Werner Herzog atop Tokyo Tower was unsubtitled, so I'm none the wiser as to what he was on about. The film included an interview with Atsuta Yuharu, who spent practically his entire career working as the cinematographer for Japanese film director Ozu Yasujiro (a hero of Wenders'). Atsuta explained how Ozu stuck to just one lens and eventually dispensed with tracking and panning altogether, preferring to film from a fixed position less than a metre off the ground. Normal tripods wouldn’t go this low, so a special tripod had to be built. Atsuta became quite emotional as he reminisced about his career with Ozu, and eventually had to ask Wenders to stop filming.
One final comment on Tokyo-Ga. At one point in the movie I think Wenders comments that Tokyo is a city best captured on video as opposed to film (the relationship between these two is a theme that crops up in all three Wenders docos), but looking at the footage of early-1980s Tokyo it struck me as still a very analogue city. There was neon, but none of the huge video screens you see on the sides of buildings throughout Tokyo now, and even the pachinko machines seemed very mechanical compared to the ones you see today (not that I'm an expert or anything). I was reminded of how much Tokyo has changed over the 25 or so years I've known it.
Fashion designer Yamamato Yohji, the subject of the second Wenders documentary, Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989), came across as a very nice chap, but apart from the nice shots of Paris from the top of the Pompidou Centre, that's about all I remember about this rather uninspiring biopic. Perhaps it would have been more inspiring if the entire cast (designer, assistants, models) weren't dressed in black all the time.
The premise behind the third and final Wenders doco, Room 666 (1982), was certainly interesting. Wenders was concerned about the future of cinema, and so he went to Cannes during the 1982 Film Festival, hired a hotel room (room 666 was the only one available!), set up a camera and a piece of paper with a list of questions, and invited some of the world's leading film directors to go in and film their responses. In an earlier post I noted how to me movie directors often come across as extremely articulate and knowledgeable in a wide range of subjects when interviewed, so I was looking forward to the results of Wenders' experiment.
First up was Jean-Luc Godard, who certainly didn’t disappoint. According to Wenders' commentary on the DVD, Godard first asked how much film was in the camera (about 11 minutes' worth), and then proceeded to talk for exactly the amount of time required, attacking television and Hollywood among other things. The funny thing is, while his name is familiar to me, I don’t think I've ever seen any of Godard's films, although I did spot a DVD of La Chinoise on sale the other day (along with a couple of Michael Haneke movies) and briefly considered buying it.
After that it was pretty much downhill all the way, with few of the other directors having much of interest to say. At least Werner Herzog did something a bit different by taking off his shoes and socks. He was also the only interviewee to switch off the TV in the hotel room, which Wenders had left switched on before the start of each interview.
Well, whadya know. Here's the entire Jean-Luc Godard segment on YouTube. Love the music at the end!
I was slightly underwhelmed by the three Wim Wenders documentaries. The first, Tokyo-Ga (1985), was my favourite, mainly because it was shot in Tokyo just a year before I first went to Japan and so felt extremely nostalgic. Much of the footage (of pachinko parlors, of golf driving ranges, of driving along neon-lit streets at night, for example), I found a bit clichéd, although I must admit I did enjoy the scenes inside the factory making wax food samples for use in restaurant display windows. The scene with Werner Herzog atop Tokyo Tower was unsubtitled, so I'm none the wiser as to what he was on about. The film included an interview with Atsuta Yuharu, who spent practically his entire career working as the cinematographer for Japanese film director Ozu Yasujiro (a hero of Wenders'). Atsuta explained how Ozu stuck to just one lens and eventually dispensed with tracking and panning altogether, preferring to film from a fixed position less than a metre off the ground. Normal tripods wouldn’t go this low, so a special tripod had to be built. Atsuta became quite emotional as he reminisced about his career with Ozu, and eventually had to ask Wenders to stop filming.
One final comment on Tokyo-Ga. At one point in the movie I think Wenders comments that Tokyo is a city best captured on video as opposed to film (the relationship between these two is a theme that crops up in all three Wenders docos), but looking at the footage of early-1980s Tokyo it struck me as still a very analogue city. There was neon, but none of the huge video screens you see on the sides of buildings throughout Tokyo now, and even the pachinko machines seemed very mechanical compared to the ones you see today (not that I'm an expert or anything). I was reminded of how much Tokyo has changed over the 25 or so years I've known it.
Fashion designer Yamamato Yohji, the subject of the second Wenders documentary, Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989), came across as a very nice chap, but apart from the nice shots of Paris from the top of the Pompidou Centre, that's about all I remember about this rather uninspiring biopic. Perhaps it would have been more inspiring if the entire cast (designer, assistants, models) weren't dressed in black all the time.
The premise behind the third and final Wenders doco, Room 666 (1982), was certainly interesting. Wenders was concerned about the future of cinema, and so he went to Cannes during the 1982 Film Festival, hired a hotel room (room 666 was the only one available!), set up a camera and a piece of paper with a list of questions, and invited some of the world's leading film directors to go in and film their responses. In an earlier post I noted how to me movie directors often come across as extremely articulate and knowledgeable in a wide range of subjects when interviewed, so I was looking forward to the results of Wenders' experiment.
First up was Jean-Luc Godard, who certainly didn’t disappoint. According to Wenders' commentary on the DVD, Godard first asked how much film was in the camera (about 11 minutes' worth), and then proceeded to talk for exactly the amount of time required, attacking television and Hollywood among other things. The funny thing is, while his name is familiar to me, I don’t think I've ever seen any of Godard's films, although I did spot a DVD of La Chinoise on sale the other day (along with a couple of Michael Haneke movies) and briefly considered buying it.
After that it was pretty much downhill all the way, with few of the other directors having much of interest to say. At least Werner Herzog did something a bit different by taking off his shoes and socks. He was also the only interviewee to switch off the TV in the hotel room, which Wenders had left switched on before the start of each interview.
Well, whadya know. Here's the entire Jean-Luc Godard segment on YouTube. Love the music at the end!
Wednesday, 30 September 2009
The Sea at L'Estaque
Drizzle. Got up at around six thirty and watched the final hour or so of the cricket. Surprisingly considering our poor form of late and the injuries to three of our key players we beat England. We even ended up top of our pool. Better still, two of our nemeses, Sri Lanka and South Africa, are out of the tournament.
Checked my email. The work I was expecting to arrive over night hadn't come in, so I decided to go for a walk. Toyed with the idea of going to Riccarton, but eventually decided to head into town. Lovely flowers along the way. Sale at Country Road. Tried on some jackets, but nothing fit. Stopped at Alice in Videoland where I hired a Werner Herzog documentary, Wheel of Time, and a set of three Wim Wenders documentaries, including Tokyo-Ga (1985). The latter includes a scene with Werner Herzog atop Tokyo Tower. Here it is on YouTube without any subtitles. I have no idea what he's on about but it sounds important.
Went to a Japanese supermarket and bought some umeboshi for Mrs Fool, who's feeling poorly. Thinks she's coming down with a cold. Also went to the library. Surprised to find they had a copy of Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust, which I was about to order from Amazon. Unfortunately it was on loan.
On the way home I noticed how green the Port Hills looked. Green and brown. I tried to paint a copy of Paul Cézanne's The Sea at L'Estaque, but I couldn’t reproduce the colors. For years the painting (in acrylics on a large piece of cardboard) remained unfinished, hidden behind the sofa in the living room. Another project abandoned. Another dream unrealised.
Monday, 28 September 2009
Of reading and watching DVDs
The three books I ordered from Amazon at the start of August arrived early (they weren't supposed to get here until September, but they turned up in mid-August), so for a while I found myself in the highly unusual (for me) position of reading three things at the same time; two of the Amazon arrivals and Nelson deMille's The Charm School, an old favourite I was in the middle of rereading when the Amazon parcel arrived.
I've since polished off the DeMille and Werner Herzog's Of Walking in Ice. The latter, an account of the film director's 1974 journey on foot from Munich to Paris, was a little disappointing. At first I found the unusual writing style refreshing. Some of Herzog's antics also brought a smile to my face. For example, at night he usually sought shelter in barns or broke into abandoned houses or deserted holiday homes, always careful to cause as little damage as possible. In one of these homes he found a partially solved crossword puzzle on a table, which he completed before leaving the next morning. Many of the descriptions (of encounters with people he met or observed along the way, and in particular of the sense of separation that often accompanied such encounters; of aspects of the slowly passing countryside; of the state of his feet and groin) I could identify with. Some, like the following, verged on the poetic.
Rescue Dawn I didn’t really enjoy. I've been a fan of Christian Bale ever since I saw him in American Psycho, but he seemed miscast in the role of Dieter Dengler, and the acting in general (or maybe it was the script) I found less than convincing. There was a so-so "making of" documentary on the DVD, which showed that Herzog (now in his mid-60s) is still a very "hands on" director who doesn't like making his actors do things he himself isn’t prepared to do, whether it be eating live insects or swimming in rapids.
Along with these Herzog movies I also rented Ed Sullivan Presents The Beatles, a two-DVD set featuring the four episodes of the Ed Sullivan Show on which The Beatles appeared in 1964 and 1965. You may recall that one of the other Amazon books I ordered was Revolution in the Head, a song-by-song analysis of all The Beatles' songs, so with this by my side I was able to read about each song as it was played on the show. Although I don’t remember ever seeing The Beatles "live" on TV as a youngster, some of the other acts they performed with on these shows definitely brought back childhood memories. There was Soupy Sales, familiar to me as a panelist on What's My Line, singing a corny song called "The Mouse". And there was Cilla Black. When I was a young boy, our whole family (perhaps with the exception of my rebellious eldest brother) would gather around the TV to watch her show, Cilla.
One thing I never knew (until reading about it in Revolution in the Head) was that that show's theme song, "Step Inside Love", was a Paul McCartney composition. In fact Cilla's connection with The Beatles was quite deep. According to Wikipedia, she started out as a cloakroom attendant at the Cavern Club in Liverpool where she used to give impromptu performances. John Lennon eventually introduced her to their manager, Brian Epstein, and persuaded him to give her an audition, where she was accompanied by The Beatles!
I still haven’t finished Revolution in the Head. When I took back the Ed Sullivan DVDs to Alice in Videoland I noticed they had The Beatles Anthology on DVD, so what I think I might do when I have some spare time (it's a five-DVD set) is hire that and read the entries for the songs as they're introduced in the documentary. This probably won’t be for a while. I started rewatching The Wire a few weeks ago, and I'm only halfway through season 3.
I've since polished off the DeMille and Werner Herzog's Of Walking in Ice. The latter, an account of the film director's 1974 journey on foot from Munich to Paris, was a little disappointing. At first I found the unusual writing style refreshing. Some of Herzog's antics also brought a smile to my face. For example, at night he usually sought shelter in barns or broke into abandoned houses or deserted holiday homes, always careful to cause as little damage as possible. In one of these homes he found a partially solved crossword puzzle on a table, which he completed before leaving the next morning. Many of the descriptions (of encounters with people he met or observed along the way, and in particular of the sense of separation that often accompanied such encounters; of aspects of the slowly passing countryside; of the state of his feet and groin) I could identify with. Some, like the following, verged on the poetic.
At the market was a boy on crutches, leaning against the wall of a house as my feet refused to cooperate anymore. With a single, brief exchange of glances we measured the degree of our relationship.Once the novelty wore off, however, the writing style (and at times the translation) became a bit off-putting. Often it was difficult to distinguish real-time events from dreams, hallucinations, and memories of past events. Take the following passage, for example, in which Herzog describes reaching the Seine.
I could swim the rest of the way. Why not swim along the Seine? I swam with a group of people who fled from New Zealand to Australia - in fact I swam in front, being the only one who knew the route already. The only chance the refugees had of escape was to swim; the distance, however, was 50 miles. I advised people to take plastic footballs with them as additional swimming aids. For those who drowned, the undertaking became legendary before it even began. After several days we reached a town in Australia; I was the first one to come ashore, and those who followed were preceded by their wristwatches, which drifted half underwater. I grabbed the watches and pulled the swimmers ashore. Great, pathetic scenes of brotherliness ensued on shore. Sylvie le Clezio was the only one among them whom I knew. When it started to rain very hard again, I wanted to seek shelter in a roofed bus stop, but there were already several people there. I hesitated before creeping over to a school for cover.Speaking of Herzog, so impressed was I with his documentary Encounters at the End of the World (which you'll remember I saw at the International Film Festival) that a week or so later I went out and hired two Herzog movies on DVD: Grizzly Man and Rescue Dawn. The former was quite amazing. Full of stunning landscapes, touching encounters with wild animals, one very strange protagonist, and the same heavily-accented, dry narration by the director that I so enjoyed in Encounters. I love it that a conspiracy theory has emerged that this documentary is in fact a fake. You can read a bit about it at IMDB.
Rescue Dawn I didn’t really enjoy. I've been a fan of Christian Bale ever since I saw him in American Psycho, but he seemed miscast in the role of Dieter Dengler, and the acting in general (or maybe it was the script) I found less than convincing. There was a so-so "making of" documentary on the DVD, which showed that Herzog (now in his mid-60s) is still a very "hands on" director who doesn't like making his actors do things he himself isn’t prepared to do, whether it be eating live insects or swimming in rapids.
Along with these Herzog movies I also rented Ed Sullivan Presents The Beatles, a two-DVD set featuring the four episodes of the Ed Sullivan Show on which The Beatles appeared in 1964 and 1965. You may recall that one of the other Amazon books I ordered was Revolution in the Head, a song-by-song analysis of all The Beatles' songs, so with this by my side I was able to read about each song as it was played on the show. Although I don’t remember ever seeing The Beatles "live" on TV as a youngster, some of the other acts they performed with on these shows definitely brought back childhood memories. There was Soupy Sales, familiar to me as a panelist on What's My Line, singing a corny song called "The Mouse". And there was Cilla Black. When I was a young boy, our whole family (perhaps with the exception of my rebellious eldest brother) would gather around the TV to watch her show, Cilla.
One thing I never knew (until reading about it in Revolution in the Head) was that that show's theme song, "Step Inside Love", was a Paul McCartney composition. In fact Cilla's connection with The Beatles was quite deep. According to Wikipedia, she started out as a cloakroom attendant at the Cavern Club in Liverpool where she used to give impromptu performances. John Lennon eventually introduced her to their manager, Brian Epstein, and persuaded him to give her an audition, where she was accompanied by The Beatles!
I still haven’t finished Revolution in the Head. When I took back the Ed Sullivan DVDs to Alice in Videoland I noticed they had The Beatles Anthology on DVD, so what I think I might do when I have some spare time (it's a five-DVD set) is hire that and read the entries for the songs as they're introduced in the documentary. This probably won’t be for a while. I started rewatching The Wire a few weeks ago, and I'm only halfway through season 3.
Wednesday, 19 August 2009
Mid-winter treats
Christchurch winters can be pretty miserable. Among the few things to look forward to at this time of year are the Christchurch Arts Festival and the International Film Festival. I eagerly await the publication of the programs for these festivals each year (or every two years in the case of the former, which is biennial) and love going through and circling the various events I want to attend. I then add up how much it's all going to cost, and go through the programs again, re-circling the events I really don't want to miss.
This year I ended up going to two arts festival events and three movies. First up was the Sydney Dance Company's presentation of Rafael Bonachela's 360° at the Theatre Royal. Dance is something I haven’t seen a lot of in the past, so the novelty of the experience made the evening all the more enjoyable. The music was great, and I particularly liked the way video was incorporated into the various routines.
Next up was the Iiro Rantala New Trio, a jazz outfit from Finland, who performed in a tent-like structure in the middle of Cathedral Square. I was intrigued by the line-up for this show, which featured a pianist, a guitarist, and a beatboxer, but I was also a bit apprehensive, given that it's not the sort of jazz I normally listen to. It turned out to be a thoroughly entertaining evening. Rantala talked quite a bit between numbers, but thankfully he's a pretty funny guy (his dry humour reminded me of another Finnish jazz artist we saw at the same festival several years ago, Jukka Perko, so it may be a Nordic thing) so mostly these musings were a bonus. The notable exception was a joke about Susan Boyle and the moon landing, which quite rightly went down like the proverbial lead balloon.
The three movies I saw at the International Film Festival were Departures, North Face, and Encounters at the End of the World. I enjoyed them all, but Encounters made by far the greatest impression on me. Ostensibly a documentary about Antarctica and the people who work there, this movie is actually an exploration of our relationship with the planet and the universe. It's hard to avoid concluding that the famous scene with the disoriented penguin who wanders off alone in the direction of a distant mountain range (and certain death) is a metaphor for the human species.
Despite Herzog's at times hilarious narration, there's no escaping the fact that this is a dark movie (what movie that deals with the reality of global warming, among other things, wouldn't be). Having said that, its message isn’t entirely negative. There's something noble about the efforts of the scientists Herzog interviews to find answers to all manner of questions about the natural world around us, efforts the director contrasts with those of the early explorers who set out to "conquer" Antarctica and of people like the idiot who plans to pogo-stick to the South Pole.
The movie ends with one of the interviewees (not a scientist, but in fact a forklift operator at McMurdo Station) paraphrasing a quote by Alan Watts: "We are the witness through which the universe becomes conscious of its own glory." Watts is religious, but similar sentiments have also been expressed by non-religious figures, including Carl Sagan ("We are a way for the universe to know itself") and Murray Bookchin, who in The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy, my copy of which remains missing, describes humankind as "nature rendered self-conscious".
Although I've seen two documentaries about Werner Herzog (Burden of Dreams and Werner Herzog Eats his Shoe), this was the first documentary by him that I've seen. I'm now eager to see more. I'll probably start with Grizzly Man.
This year I ended up going to two arts festival events and three movies. First up was the Sydney Dance Company's presentation of Rafael Bonachela's 360° at the Theatre Royal. Dance is something I haven’t seen a lot of in the past, so the novelty of the experience made the evening all the more enjoyable. The music was great, and I particularly liked the way video was incorporated into the various routines.
Next up was the Iiro Rantala New Trio, a jazz outfit from Finland, who performed in a tent-like structure in the middle of Cathedral Square. I was intrigued by the line-up for this show, which featured a pianist, a guitarist, and a beatboxer, but I was also a bit apprehensive, given that it's not the sort of jazz I normally listen to. It turned out to be a thoroughly entertaining evening. Rantala talked quite a bit between numbers, but thankfully he's a pretty funny guy (his dry humour reminded me of another Finnish jazz artist we saw at the same festival several years ago, Jukka Perko, so it may be a Nordic thing) so mostly these musings were a bonus. The notable exception was a joke about Susan Boyle and the moon landing, which quite rightly went down like the proverbial lead balloon.
The three movies I saw at the International Film Festival were Departures, North Face, and Encounters at the End of the World. I enjoyed them all, but Encounters made by far the greatest impression on me. Ostensibly a documentary about Antarctica and the people who work there, this movie is actually an exploration of our relationship with the planet and the universe. It's hard to avoid concluding that the famous scene with the disoriented penguin who wanders off alone in the direction of a distant mountain range (and certain death) is a metaphor for the human species.
Despite Herzog's at times hilarious narration, there's no escaping the fact that this is a dark movie (what movie that deals with the reality of global warming, among other things, wouldn't be). Having said that, its message isn’t entirely negative. There's something noble about the efforts of the scientists Herzog interviews to find answers to all manner of questions about the natural world around us, efforts the director contrasts with those of the early explorers who set out to "conquer" Antarctica and of people like the idiot who plans to pogo-stick to the South Pole.
The movie ends with one of the interviewees (not a scientist, but in fact a forklift operator at McMurdo Station) paraphrasing a quote by Alan Watts: "We are the witness through which the universe becomes conscious of its own glory." Watts is religious, but similar sentiments have also been expressed by non-religious figures, including Carl Sagan ("We are a way for the universe to know itself") and Murray Bookchin, who in The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy, my copy of which remains missing, describes humankind as "nature rendered self-conscious".
Although I've seen two documentaries about Werner Herzog (Burden of Dreams and Werner Herzog Eats his Shoe), this was the first documentary by him that I've seen. I'm now eager to see more. I'll probably start with Grizzly Man.
Thursday, 6 August 2009
Off topic
One of the dilemmas I created for myself when I started this blog and gave it the title The Walking Fool was what to do during those extended periods when I was not only not walking, but also not thinking much about walking. Back when I'd completed the Nakasendo walk and was really into running, I even considered starting up a completely new blog called…The Running Fool.
As you can see from the list of labels at left, I have written on quite a few different topics over the years. However, many of these topics are either directly or indirectly related to walking, and as I've mentioned previously, a lot of my posts (including this one) are composed at least partly in my head while I'm out walking (in this case to the supermarket and back). In the end, it just doesn’t feel right to write in this blog about things not related to walking in some form or another.
Which is all a roundabout way of saying that since I got back from walking the Tokaido nearly two months ago, I've hardly done any walking at all. So what have I been up to?
One thing I've been doing is refining my cooking skills. I'm working on perfecting recipes for a couple of things I've always wanted to have in my culinary repertoire: one a good vegetarian curry, and the other a good dahl. Judging by Mrs Fool's reaction, I'm definitely making progress on both.
I've also been reading quite a lot. I finally got around to reading Edmund White's The Flâneur, which is one of the books I bought in Wellington when I was up there for the Wellington Jazz Festival. It's a quirky and well-written volume, more a personal guide to and history of Paris than a book about walking per se. The Paris Commune was mentioned a couple of times, but there was no mention of the Situationists, surprising given the similarities (superficial though they may be) between the "drifting" of the Situationists and the favourite activity of the flaneur, described on the back cover as "someone who ambles without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned to the history of the street he walks - and is in covert search of adventure, aesthetic or erotic."
I've also read a couple more John Rain thrillers (including one I bought in Tokyo at the end of the Tokaido walk), which means I've now read all but one in the series. Incidentally, on my last day in Tokyo I'd intended to have lunch at one of the real-life restaurants frequented by John Rain, Las Chicas. I spent ages roaming the backstreets of Aoyama searching for it (I'd checked its location on the restaurant's website before leaving New Zealand and was pretty sure I knew where it was) but to no avail. Next time I'll take a map.
With my pile of unread books severely depleted and the New Zealand dollar the strongest it's been for many months, yesterday I logged onto Amazon and ordered three items from my Wish List. The first is Werner Herzog's Of Walking in Ice, the account of the film director's journey on foot from Munich to Paris to which I've previously referred. The second is Rain Storm by Barry Eisler (yes, it's the one John Rain novel I haven't read). And the third is Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties by Ian MacDonald.
That third item probably demands some explanation. Well, I was a serious Beatles fan in my teens, and I've recently started listening to their music again and watching some of their live performances on YouTube, a medium that wasn't around when I was at high school (this was back in the days of vinyl). I read about this book, which is a song-by-song analysis of every song ever released by the group, in a discussion in the comments section of Russell Brown's blog, Hard News, and thought it sounded really interesting. Coincidentally, another post on the same blog made just a few days earlier led to an equally fascinating discussion about food, with dahl featuring prominently.
As you can see from the list of labels at left, I have written on quite a few different topics over the years. However, many of these topics are either directly or indirectly related to walking, and as I've mentioned previously, a lot of my posts (including this one) are composed at least partly in my head while I'm out walking (in this case to the supermarket and back). In the end, it just doesn’t feel right to write in this blog about things not related to walking in some form or another.
Which is all a roundabout way of saying that since I got back from walking the Tokaido nearly two months ago, I've hardly done any walking at all. So what have I been up to?
One thing I've been doing is refining my cooking skills. I'm working on perfecting recipes for a couple of things I've always wanted to have in my culinary repertoire: one a good vegetarian curry, and the other a good dahl. Judging by Mrs Fool's reaction, I'm definitely making progress on both.
I've also been reading quite a lot. I finally got around to reading Edmund White's The Flâneur, which is one of the books I bought in Wellington when I was up there for the Wellington Jazz Festival. It's a quirky and well-written volume, more a personal guide to and history of Paris than a book about walking per se. The Paris Commune was mentioned a couple of times, but there was no mention of the Situationists, surprising given the similarities (superficial though they may be) between the "drifting" of the Situationists and the favourite activity of the flaneur, described on the back cover as "someone who ambles without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned to the history of the street he walks - and is in covert search of adventure, aesthetic or erotic."
I've also read a couple more John Rain thrillers (including one I bought in Tokyo at the end of the Tokaido walk), which means I've now read all but one in the series. Incidentally, on my last day in Tokyo I'd intended to have lunch at one of the real-life restaurants frequented by John Rain, Las Chicas. I spent ages roaming the backstreets of Aoyama searching for it (I'd checked its location on the restaurant's website before leaving New Zealand and was pretty sure I knew where it was) but to no avail. Next time I'll take a map.
With my pile of unread books severely depleted and the New Zealand dollar the strongest it's been for many months, yesterday I logged onto Amazon and ordered three items from my Wish List. The first is Werner Herzog's Of Walking in Ice, the account of the film director's journey on foot from Munich to Paris to which I've previously referred. The second is Rain Storm by Barry Eisler (yes, it's the one John Rain novel I haven't read). And the third is Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties by Ian MacDonald.
That third item probably demands some explanation. Well, I was a serious Beatles fan in my teens, and I've recently started listening to their music again and watching some of their live performances on YouTube, a medium that wasn't around when I was at high school (this was back in the days of vinyl). I read about this book, which is a song-by-song analysis of every song ever released by the group, in a discussion in the comments section of Russell Brown's blog, Hard News, and thought it sounded really interesting. Coincidentally, another post on the same blog made just a few days earlier led to an equally fascinating discussion about food, with dahl featuring prominently.
Wednesday, 28 January 2009
Fellow travelers
One of the greatest contemporary proponents of walking (although he prefers the term "traveling on foot") is film director Werner Herzog. In the winter of 1974, after learning that his close friend, film historian Lotte Eisner, was seriously ill, Herzog embarked on an epic walk from Munich to her apartment in Paris. He believed his walking to be with her was the only way Eisner would survive the illness. He walked in a straight line, sleeping under bridges and in abandoned houses. "When you travel on foot with this intensity," Herzog later said of this journey, "it is not a matter of covering actual ground, rather it is a question of moving through your own inner landscapes."
It was with a walking-related quote from Herzog that I marked the end of the Nakasendo phase of this blog. The same book (Herzog on Herzog) from which I harvested that quote also contains the following response by Herzog to an interviewer's question.
Being an amateur filmmaker myself, I've occasionally considered taking my video camera along on my epic walks. But for the same reasons that I was initially reluctant to incorporate an art project into the Nakasendo walk in 2007, I've always rejected the idea. Not only would shooting video take up a lot of time, but also it would change the nature of my relationship with the environment and with the people I meet along the way. I will be taking a still camera again when I walk the Tokaido, but I believe the most appropriate way of recording such a journey is to write a diary. I think Herzog would agree. He kept a diary during his 1974 journey. It was later published under the title Of Walking in Ice and won its author a literary award.
It was with a walking-related quote from Herzog that I marked the end of the Nakasendo phase of this blog. The same book (Herzog on Herzog) from which I harvested that quote also contains the following response by Herzog to an interviewer's question.
"Actually, for some time now I have given some thought to opening a film school. But if I did start one up you would only be allowed to fill out an application form after you had traveled alone on foot, let’s say from Madrid to Kiev, a distance of about 5,000 kilometers… During your voyage you will learn more about filmmaking than if you were in a classroom."Such is the esteem in which some members of the film community hold Herzog that at least two budding filmmakers have been inspired by this pronouncement to make epic journeys which they later turned into documentary films. "Long-distance Herzog stalker" Linas Phillips (Walking to Werner, 2006) walked from Seattle, Washington to Herzog's Los Angeles home in the hope of meeting his favourite director (who happened to be in Thailand filming Rescue Dawn at the time). Lee Kazimir (More Shoes, 2008) took the German director's advice quite literally, setting off from Madrid and walking across most of continental Europe on his way to Kiev.
Being an amateur filmmaker myself, I've occasionally considered taking my video camera along on my epic walks. But for the same reasons that I was initially reluctant to incorporate an art project into the Nakasendo walk in 2007, I've always rejected the idea. Not only would shooting video take up a lot of time, but also it would change the nature of my relationship with the environment and with the people I meet along the way. I will be taking a still camera again when I walk the Tokaido, but I believe the most appropriate way of recording such a journey is to write a diary. I think Herzog would agree. He kept a diary during his 1974 journey. It was later published under the title Of Walking in Ice and won its author a literary award.
Sunday, 31 August 2008
The importance of travelling on foot
"If you live in England and your girlfriend is in Sicily, and it is clear that you want to marry her, then you should walk to Sicily to propose."- Werner Herzog
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