Virgin with a Memory

Posted by S A-M on April 18, 2010 · 4 Comments 

This post takes it’s cue from my ipod shuffle’s algorithm.

I hear this song almost everyday on my drive to work lately. It’s burned into my speakers.

There’s a Destroyer song that goes, “Was it the Movie or the Making of Fitzcarraldo?”

Anyway, my answer to Dan Bejar’s question is:

With Werner, it really doesn’t matter.

The making of is always as good if not better.

My Best Fiend is a case in point.

The layers of preposterousness behind his scenes are as thick and wonderful and illuminating as the outrageousness being dragged through the camera.

Last Wednesday night I was coaxing myself into a state viewing Fata Morgana alone in the dark.

Some lessons learned from the prequel to 1992’s Lessons of Darkness: when in the Sahara, wear a straw hat and goggles, always hold a wild animal firmly by it’s throat and when you come upon an unsuspecting subject: shove your camera (dick-like) into their faces and make them recite from a stranger’s letters.

Is FM an asshole of a film? Prolly.

But I heart wernerherzog.

If nothing else for his big huge balls.

The enthralling thing about Werner is secreted somewhere between the brutally bad Vangelis-lite soundtracks, the “documentary” style and the elemental subjects he teases out them.

Most commonly this element is a madman’s delusions of grandeur.

It mesmerizes me that he can come off a reasonable, mild-mannered, shoe-eating humbleton but that the force which magnetizes his work is a pure, vicious drive against nature and it’s order.

Let’s just call it method directing:

When actor goes method it’s masochistic. He empties his body into a naggy sack of bones or beefs-out to a swollen bloat to fit a role.

But a Werner’s method directing: i.e. having tribesmen haul a ricketsome 19^th century river-boat up from a river and through some woods using only a primitive pully-system of vine-ropes is..dubious. Especially when done with his quiet, sadistic glee.

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