My love affair with Werner Herzog continues. I recently watched My Best Fiend (about his work with Klaus Kinski), Little Dieter Needs to Fly (documentary about Dieter Dengler), and Woyzeck (film of the drama fragment by Büchner, starring Kinski).
Before we begin, let's just get one thing out of the way: Klaus Kinski was brilliant, and also absolutely, monumentally batshit fucking crazy. Exempli gratia: he did "Jesus tours" where he basically went around and did a stage show where he raved semi-coherently at his audience while informing them, and not very politely either, that they ought to be kneeling before him and kissing his dusty feet. "I'm not the official church Jesus," he admits in one clip from My Best Fiend. Which kind of makes me love him, to be honest.
Anyway, back to Werner Herzog. His resemblance to my father prevents my schoolgirl crush from going anywhere beyond the platonic--which is probably a very good thing for Herr Herzog, who'd otherwise be contending with me on his doorstep on a regular basis, or at the very least suffering an aggressive multimedia campaign attempting to persuade him that his true love resides in Northern California and enjoys knitting, the collected works of Bob Dylan, and theoretical linguistics.
I think what I love most about Herzog is his resounding capacity for understatement. For instance, when describing the filming of Fitzcarraldo (in the Amazonian jungle), he mentions that he was staying in the hut of a local woman, a hunchback dwarf with nine children, who kept about 150 guinea pigs. "These were for food," he notes, "But at night they would crawl all over me, and this was uncomfortable." So, you know, he went to stay in some other hut.
Here's a photo of my dad, so you'll see I'm not joking about the similarity. Plus they're both nutty Germans with adorable accents, which doesn't exactly downplay the resemblance.
(I am 18 years old in this photo, in case anyone is wondering.)
6 comments:
You are right about the resemblance.
Have you seen Herzog's Antartica movie, which I can't remember the name of right now? Oh! Encounters at the End of the Earth, I think. Anyway, it is a scream in more ways than one. I developed a beefy crush on one Clive Oppenheimer as a result of that film--but that is only one reason to see it.
Hi, Jenny Jo!
Not only did I see that movie, I wrote a post about it, and you commented on it! (Click through the first link in the current post to get to that older one). It's the movie that reignited my WH love.
-Karen
All of those films are great. Agree on Herzog (brilliant) and Kinski (batshhit crazy). Have you seen Aguirre the Wrath of God? Best of the H-K bunch, I think.
I'm thinking your dad would also not stand for guinea pigs.
He was on Charlie Rose a couple weeks ago talking about a book he just wrote about Fitzcarraldo.
One of my favorite aspects of Werner is what I like to call his "double-metaphors" where he enhances some sort of metaphorical or idiomatic phrase with another metaphorical phrase which means something entirely different but has a word in common. Like in Grizzly man, where he tells the lady with the tape "you must never listen to this. It will be the white elephant in the room for the rest of your life."
Anyhow, the point of all this is in the Charlie Rose interview he explained that Fitzcarraldo was "my version of a jungle fever dream."
I know you posted this approximately one million years ago, but the beautiful blanket post redirected me here. And I had to say two things. One is that I adore Werner Herzog so much. I saw him speak and present two shorts in Austin once and I had him sign something and I about died. And two, I TOTALLY remember that outfit you are wearing in this picture.
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