What am I doing here?
Part grieving process, part curious wandering, I have embarked on a Herzogian quest to watch all of Werner Herzog’s films in six months…
Wheel of Time
This year is the fourth holiday season since my mother died. It’s been an exceedingly solitary holiday, so the sparse connections have been extra meaningful. Today, I was walking in a snowy park, talking to a friend about purpose. With her: in regards to her teaching career. Me: in relation to realized purpose in the…
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To Escape the Act of Killing, We Will Fight One Battle After Another
Watching the most recent iterations of political violence unfold in America has prompted me to turn to history. How did people and groups seeking social transformation respond to and survive counterrevolution via targeted mass political violence? Comparisons have been made of our current moment to several time periods, all with important lessons to draw from.…
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An Essay About The Internet, Containing A Short Open Letter to Werner Herzog as He Joins Instagram
“If the grand promise of the internet was to be whoever you want, in reality it will make of you whatever it wants, and beneath every mask is another mask, mistaken for a face.” – From “Rejection,” Tony Thulathimutte About a month ago, Werner Herzog joined Instagram. A friend sent me the post, showing what…
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Hello again – where do we go from here?
Hello again. Allow me to reintroduce myself. I’m Ash. Years ago I was grieving the death of my mother and I made this site as a digital altar and pathway to express and externalize my grieving process through the language of Werner Herzog’s films. I wanted to feel connected to others in the universality of…
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What am I doing here? Pt 3
Did I learn anything from having watched Herzog’s filmography over the past six months? I had to load up at the end of this month, luckily over these holidays I had a few extra days off work to finish this journey. As an artist myself, it feels nourishing to immerse in the works of an…
Stroszek
My 59th Herzog film, and somehow fitting cap to my Herzog journey. The film is both a look at the fascinating kitsch of amerika and also a comment on the despair of the consumerist pursuit of the amerikan dream bought on credit. We also get a handful of classic Herzogian visuals; After a little whirlwind…
Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds
“The reason the stone fell was exactly for heaven’s sake.” The arrivals of meteorites are messages from the heavens, and yet are totally by chance. The meaning that gets assigned to them are totally human, as they just might as well be walked over if humans did not find meaning in the arrival. Meanings range…
Precautions Against Fanatics
This is the weirdest fucking movie ever. I watched this twice, the only clip I could find on YouTube has Portuguese subtitles. I thought with my elementary Spanish that I could follow along. At first it just seems like a documentary about horse trainers. About halfway/8 minutes in, I was confusedly realizing that I was…
Bells from the Deep
Are the bells the inner song of mystics, ringing out to bless our ears? With scenes reproduced in Pilgrimage and familiar from Wheel of Time, Herzog takes us to see prostrations of pilgrims and rituals of a shaman, and a Russian Jesus, and a glimpse of the whole Russian soul on pilgrimage to a lost…
Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe
In keeping a vow to Errol Morris, Werner Herzog eats his shoe. He takes his boots to Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California and stuffs and seasons them, with Chef Alice Waters adding duck fat and rosemary. Herzog promised to eat his shoe if Morris completed the documentary Gates of Hell. Herzog eats the shoe at…
Family Romance, LLC.
“At Family Romance, we are not allowed to love or be loved.” Are illusions as or more fulfilling, than reality? The illusions of relationships mediated by whatever mechanisms available in modernity, such as commerce and the internet – and how those illusions compose a heartbreaking, alienated reality. As Herzog says in the post-film zoom interview,…
Signs of Life
Werner Herzog’s very first film: of madness in the void, and the beginning of the strange theme of chicken hypnosis. An unpublished, unreleased chicken incident apparently happens in one of Herzog’s earliest films, Game of Sand, where a chicken is buried up to it’s neck.
Werner Herzog Selbstportrait
This is Werner Herzog’s 25th film, made in 1986. From the 9 comments on YouTube, it’s clear that this film is grossly overlooked and is essential viewing for every Herzog enthusiast. This film contains the basis for the philosophical throughlines of his work and life: Free on YouTube:
Ten Thousand Years Older
The indifference of progress. On YouTube, the film running time is just over 10 minutes. Probably the most depressed I have felt watching any of Herzog’s films except “Lessons of Darkness.”
The White Diamond
The White Diamond (free on Youtube) is a unique documentary about the building of a non-flammable airship and it’s first flight in Guyana. Herzog finds the most amazing people and just puts the camera on them, letting them shine in their own way. The two standout characters are the builder of the ship, Dr. Graham…
Ballad of the Little Soldier
This is not an easy subject to witness, and Herzog offers the images and stories with care and generosity and complexity. These children are both adorable but hard, and they leave a deep impression. All of the children here have been through countless horrors. Most have seen their families killed, saying the Sandanistas killed their…
Land of Silence and Darkness
I’ve seen this referred to as Herzog’s best documentary. I can see why – it’s moving, gorgeous, simple, and loving. Also incredibly tactile as one might imagine, most scenes of these women who are deaf and blind, have their hands outstretched with a companion signing and translating letters into their hands. How does one experience…
Wings of Hope, aka “Juliane’s Fall in the Jungle”
Juliane Koepcke survived a plane crash and 11 days walking in the jungle from the wreck to safety. Herzog takes us back to the scene of the original events, a stage for raw emotion and profound feeling. Retracing steps is also in following Dieter Dengler in Little Dieter Needs to Fly, or following Michael Godsmith…
Jag Mandir, or “The Eccentric Private Theatre of the Maharaja of Udaipur”
Herzog manages to point out some contradictions of opulence, consumption of religion. However the best part of this film is in the incredible performances. There are dozens of incredible music, dance, contortionists performances. I can’t say anything about it, just get high and watch. Free on Youtube.
Invincible
“The truth here is always what is not seen.” In 2001, Herzog returned to fiction feature films after a decade of documentary, with Invincible. Eric Hanussen was a clairvoyant and astrology who practiced in Berlin in the 1930s, and stirred up support for the Nazis. He was also Jewish. He’s written about extensively on New…
Queen of the Desert
I didn’t expect to like this movie so much. On one hand, it’s a colonizer’s eye view. On the other hand, it’s just Herzog herzogging out in the desert, and taking us from Tehran to Damascus to Cairo, and letting a unique lost love from history come back to life. As Queen of the Desert,…
Pilgrimage
A quintessential Herzogian experience: A manufactured quote sets the stage, (but no less profound) a gripping score, narrationless. Set to the anguished, ethereal faces of pilgrims in the throes of the agony of devotion. Herzog is committed to this divine kernel of what makes us devoted.
Heart of Glass
A totally hypnotic experience, with a sexiest poetic preambles set to dreamy guitar. And lotsa *homie losin his shit in a furnace room.* There’s a great review of Herzog’s 1976 Heart of Glass on this here website devoted to cults. I see no need to reinvent the wheel about this film on my own blogspace…
Kinski-fest
Our best fiend. Over the past few months, I’ve watched all the remaining Herzog films with Klaus Kinski as lead, ending in My Best Fiend. I was lucky to see Aguirre, the Wrath of God over boozy brunch at the Nitehawk in Brooklyn. I had the pleasure of seeing Fitzcarraldo several months ago, as a…
God’s Angry Man + Huie’s Sermon
East coast vs. West coast Christianity. I like to think of the impressions of Americans to a German audience in the early 80s, when watching these films. In Germany, a country divided into an east and west themselves. It was a time of burgeoning social change, with both uprisings and peace movements especially in anti-nuclear…
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
Kaspar Hauser was a real feral child who arrived as a teenager in Nuremburg in 1828. He was taken into various custodies of church and state in 1828. Over the next few years, Kaspar is prodded, displayed, and ridiculed, then educated and introduced to society. Everywhere he goes he is treated as a curiosity. Kaspar,…
Happy People: A Year in the Taiga
Plus 5 books about cold places. It’s starting to get cold in my part of the world. Happy People: A Year in the Taiga, co-directed by Werner Herzog and Dmitry Vasyukov in 2010, is free on Tubi, and to prepare myself for winter I watched it. I have no review to share; enough about the…
Fitzcarraldo + Burden of Dreams
Most Herzog fans will have seen his jungle rant already, because it is utterly priceless. Whatever happens in the jungle doesn’t stay in the jungle, it stays with you! Burden of Dreams by Les Blank can be agonizing to watch, because of the immensity of the problems encountered deep in the jungle – one feels…
What am I doing here? Pt. 2
I am not a writer. (if you’ve read any other post on this blog, you may have noticed). I like to express myself, and I have a lot of interests, but putting it all down and arranging it so it’s coherent and legible is not a personal strength. One of my friends described the way…
Where the Green Ants Dream
Successful social realism feels like a rare treat these days. Some contemporary mainstream films might contain interesting commentary on a government or culture, but class-consciousness slips away in favor of a stock hero’s quest or feel-good twists. It’s often a question of access and representation – who gets to tell the story about who? One…
Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin
Today, for the 5th time this year, I’m putting on Nomad. Less than 3 minutes in, while the camera sweeps over gorgeous Patagonian glaciers, piano pinging, Bruce Chatwin’s voice is reading about a piece of brontosaurus skin in his grandmother’s cabinet: I’m already bawling. Today is a day I’ve dreaded for nearly a year: this…
La Soufrière + Into the Inferno
In 1976, 75,000 people fled the whole southern region of the island nation of Guadaloupe, and Werner Herzog showed up with a film crew to find the one man who refused to be evacuated. The island may have been their gravestone, with the man’s words as their epitaph: “Like life, death is forever. I haven’t…
The Wild Blue Yonder
A Brad Dourif Appreciation Post. I think people could use the words underrated and underappreciated to describe Brad Dourif, but I think I’d like to get that out of the way and just say that he’s a fuckin’ genius. Who else can boast such accolades as: Yet I’m guessing he can probably go get groceries…
Goodbye, Gorby.
In 2019, Werner Herzog took us along to Meeting Gorbachev. The interview has the spirit of a respectful and at times jovial chat with an elder with a fascinating former job, rather than an interrogation of a world leader whose architecture of one of the world’s largest and most formidable power structures contributed to its…
Lessons of Darkness + Fata Morgana
Lessons of Darkness is hellish. It opens with a quote by Blaise Pascal: “The collapse of the stellar universe will occur like creation – in grandiose splendor.” We are walked among ruins, and the abandoned machinery of torture. We meet woman who cannot speak, her sad eyes tell her story that parts of her spirit…
The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner
Free on Vimeo, YouTube and Tubi! Woodcarver Steiner looks like Beck and Charlotte Gainsbourg had a child. Herzog, in sort of a sports reporter fashion, speaks directly to the camera while holding a microphone and relating his belief that Walter Steiner is the World’s Best Ski-Flier. We see Herzog fanboy a little bit. As dramatically…
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