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WERNER HERZOG
LESSONS OF DARKNESS: THE NONFICTION OF WERNER HERZOG
herzog

“We have become aware of certain dangers that surround us. We have understood for example nuclear power is a certain danger for mankind, we have understood that overcrowding of this planet is a very grave danger, maybe even the biggest. We have understood that all the destruction of environment is an enormous danger that we face, and I truly believe that the lack of adequate images is a danger of the same magnitude. I have said that before and I repeat it again and again as long as I can speak I will speak out for that. If we do not develop adequate images we will die out like dinosaurs.” --Werner Herzog, 1983

One of the most original voices working in cinema today, Werner Herzog came to prominence as a member of the German New Wave of the 1970s, which included filmmakers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders, and is best known for fiction films such as Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo. In truth he has made over 40 films since 1962, and has from the beginning produced nearly as many documentaries as fiction features. During the decade between Cobra Verde (1987), his last film with Klaus Kinski, and Invincible (being released in the US this month), he produced 13 documentaries and directed over 10 opera productions. Herzog’s approach to documentary is as unique as that of his fiction films, where he is well known for having used techniques such as hypnotizing the entire cast of Heart of Glass (1976). His documentaries frequently fly in the face of a cinema verité recording of facts, and may include staged scenes and scripted dialogue.

We are very pleased that Mr. Herzog will join us on September 21 and 22 for a mini-retrospective of four of his rarely seen nonfiction works.

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program one:
(lecture and screening by herzog)
Texas Union Theater | sept. 21 | 7pm

LESSONS OF DARKNESS
1992 | 52min | 35mm
Centered around unforgettable images of the Kuwait oil fires and the devastation left behind after the Gulf War, Herzog creates a masterpiece of modern science fiction, and one of the strongest anti-war films ever made.


BELLS FROM THE DEEP
1993 | 60min | 35mm
A film about faith and superstition in Russia, Bells presents the lost city of Kitezh (located beneath a frozen lake), an orphaned bell-ringer and Yuri Tarassov, a Christ-like figure known as 'The Redeemer.'




program two:
(lecture and screening by herzog)
Alamo Drafthouse | sept. 22 | 1:30pm


HOW MUCH WOOD WOULD A WOODCHUCK CHUCK
1976 | 45min | 16mm
Herzog approaches the high speed incantations of livestock auctioneers as the last authentic form of poetry, in this film covering the Pennsylvania World Championship.


THE GREAT ECSTASY OF WOODCARVER STEINER
1973 | 47min | 16mm
This film about the perilous world of ski jumping follows Walter Steiner, a Swiss wood carver who was also the world’s top ski jumper, as he pushes the human limits of the sport. The slow motion images of Steiner in flight are among the most startling and powerful of all Herzog’s work.


THE LIMITED ADVANCE TICKETS FOR THE WERNER HERZOG SCREENINGS HAVE SOLD OUT.

But, there are many more seats available to Film and Everything Pass holders. Tickets for the Herzog screenings will be given out free to badge and pass holders on a first come, first serve basis at the Hideout starting at 11:00 am on 9/21 and 9/22,. These tickets guarantee entrance until ten minutes before the start time. After that any empty seats will be given to those in the standby line.


LESSONS OF DARKNESS

 Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema

 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.