Discussing Skateboarding with Filmmaker Werner Herzog. Skateboard magazine Jenkem decided to approach the director and ask him about their discipline and he's predictably extremely eloquent on a subject he has little or no connection to. But by the end, you'll want him to make a film on the subject even if it's just a collection of found footage and his voiceover, although that's sort of what we have here.

Werner Herzog's 'don't text and drive' public safety advert.

"and I refused to do it."

Film There's a typically great interview with Werner Herzog in The Guardian today:

"Some years ago, Werner Herzog was on an internal flight somewhere in Colorado and the plane's landing gear wouldn't come down. They would have to make an emergency landing. The runway was covered in foam and flanked by scores of fire engines. "We were ordered to crouch down with our faces on our knees and hold our legs," says Herzog, "and I refused to do it." The stewardess was very upset, the co-pilot came out from the cabin and ordered him to do as he was told. "I said, 'If we perish I want to see what's coming at me, and if we survive, I want to see it as well. I'm not posing a danger to anyone by not being in this shitty, undignified position.'" In the end, the plane landed normally. Herzog was banned from the airline for life but, he laughs, it went bust two years later anyway."

If such incidents were ever included in a biopic of the director the screenwriter would either be accused of being outrageously fictional, or might just be tempted to otherwise make some stuff up because most of us would believe it anyway.

The Titlebar Archive: Mark Kermode's Signiature

Books Having missed his personal appearances, I was quite pleased to find this half-priced signed copy of Mark Kermode’s The Good, The Bad and the Multiplex in Waterstones on Bold Street just after Christmas. It’s a surprising squiggle, not least because he merges his initials together then runs his pen on hoping the reach a D and seemed like a perfectly reasonable alternative to having his face looking out at you for a week. Plus since my primary typing finger’s been out of action thanks to a papercut, such a tiny injury, so strangely debilitating, it was a nice way to note what had become again my primary way of storing information that wasn’t my brain.

Taking a break from the Oxfords, I spent last week reading through this and his earlier semi-autobiography It’s Only A Movie.  They run perfectly into one another. The first offers a ramshackle account of his life and career from sneaking into horror films to working at City Life Magazine in Manchester, Time Out London, the Radio and thence famously being shot at in LA while interviewing Werner Herzog. The second offers a ramshackle account of his frustrations with modern cinema, the multiplex experience, 3D, the British coming even though they’re already here andthe  film criticism discipline in general.

For someone’s who’s an avid listener of these radio slots and video blog there aren’t many surprises since his reviewing style already demands a fair amount of biography submerged with opinion and even as he apparently extemporises into film criticism whole sections feel like transcripts of his greatest hits, especially the section on Sex and the City 2 or Transformers. This is the Kermodian version of comedy books released before dvd, where Jasper Carrot or Woody Allen’s sets would be repeated in prose, albeit with a far more discursive style that meanders from the point like a Ronnie Corbett monologue and just as funny.

Nevertheless, the tone of the second book is almost entirely pessimistic. Kermode fears that the advent of digital projectors, the way films are delivered, is irrecoverably spoiling those elements which brought him to the medium in the first place, the sense of history inherent within a piece of celluloid, that it has a transportative capacity irretrievably obscured as the screens its presented on become ever smaller. As he’s said in the past, it used to be that films as they were run through the projector were effectively performed to the audience or viewer and there was a collective excitement akin to theatre or music which can’t be replicated on television.

Having spent the best part of a couple of years watching films on television, usually alone, my worship of the medium has shifted from being an experience akin to a church service to something more like private prayer. The screen is smaller, true, but there are other benefits. The seats are comfier. You can pause the film if you need the loo, follow your own schedule and there are fewer random distractions. Also even with a Lovefilm account it’s far, far, cheaper and selection of films huge. But I know that just as I’ve killed the high street through internet shopping, if I’m not careful I’ll kill the cinema too.  Perhaps I need to expand my displays of devotion again.

the difficulties of flying into Antarctica

Nature You will have heard about the penguin that washed up on the shores of New Zealand and that their Department of Conservation has decided to just let nature take its course rather than give it a lift home even though its resorting to eating sand (somewhat because of the difficulties of flying into Antarctica at this time of year).

But anyone who's seen Werner Herzog's film Encounters at the End of the World (or this clip) will know that it's not unusual for penguins to lose their way both geographically and psychologically and the rule is to always to leave them be:



Update! 24/06/2011 Steeloctopus in the comments points us to the news that the penguin has been moved and is being taken care of, the sand being flushed from its system. There's a suggestion that it'll be transported to a facility in the US that's expert in caring for emperor penguins.

"subtle, yet perhaps very revealing"

Film Louise Hamway investigates the two versions of Werner Herzog's remake of Nosferatu. Yes, that's two.

"In 1979, Werner Herzog adapted Murnau’s film into “Nosferatu the Vampyre,” a.k.a. “Nosferatu, Phantom der Nacht,” a beautiful interpretation of the landmark film that works as homage while bringing its own touch of New German Cinema to it. Unlike the original, Herzog made two versions of the film: one in English and one in German. Not merely dubbed over voices as one would expect; Herzog shot the two simultaneously, shooting a scene in German then the same scene over in English. The differences are subtle, yet perhaps very revealing about the differences in German and American cinema."

[obvious]The extra car chases were probably a bit unnecessary, though.[/obvious]

rally to restore sanity, antarctica

rally to restore sanity, antarctica, originally uploaded by sandwichgirl.

Looks like the entire cast of Werner Herzog's documentary, Encounters at the End of the World. Apart from the penguin.

As Werner says: "The rules for the humans are do not disturb or hold up the penguin. Stand still and let him go on his way. He's heading towards certain death."

just let events play themselves out.

Web At the end of June, Everything Is Terrible appeared on Chicago's local television breakfast show and judging by their clips, it's an example of the web literally going viral and infecting mainstream broadcasting, especially in relation to the Jerry Maguire tapes. See if you can spot the moment when the anchors stop trying to understand and just let events play themselves out.

If our local equivalent, North West Tonight, was like this every night, I'd be more likely to make an appointment. As it stands, 6:30 each evening the potential audience stands witness to half an hour which seems designed to prove Werner Herzog's theory (in Grizzly Man) that "the common character of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder."

Last night the whole programme was broadcast from the edge of a reservoir because of the water shortage, which largely consisted of shots of Ranvir Singh and Diane Oxberry precariously looking like they could fall into the blue at any moment. At no point would that not have been improved if an expert had been on hand dressed as an alien.

Roland Gift from The Fine Young Cannibals

Film Ten Minutes Older is a dyptic of portmaneau films with the subheadings The Cello and The Trumpet, in which a group of directors offer a visual meditation on the subject of time. As you would expect, it's a bit hit and miss. Some of the work is horrifyingly pretentious, and in terms of sheer entertainment, The Trumpet wins because of some short documentaries about a lost tribe and the 2000 US election by Werner Herzog and Spike Lee respectively. I've put all of the segments I can find on YouTube into this playlist, though mainly it's fragments or dubbed into another language. As ever the best way to experience the adventure is on film or dvd.

Arguably the best of the films is this sci-fi offering from Michael Radford. It's too short for me to spoil by offering a plot synopsis, but it is well worth ten minutes of your life, even if only to see Roland Gift from The Fine Young Cannibals and Daniel Craig playing astronauts:



Sometimes the most epic of dramas can fit snuggly into ten minutes.

links for 2009-06-27

• Topless Robot - Bonus! Rob's Transformers 2 F.A.Q.s!
  Lo the Transformers fans looked at their Trekker cousins with envious eyes and wonder how the screenwriters who created the act of love that was Star Trek could also piss all over their childhoods. Sample of this amazing FAQ: "Can you explain Megan Fox's appeal? Yes. She looks like a porn star and has the same acting talent as one, yet for some reason she makes mainstream movies. This tonal disconnect is what's so appealing about her."
  
  
• Mt. Kilimanjaro - to the Roof of Africa: Kili 09 Trailer
  Many congratulations Neil and Palma. Makes my arduous walk to Anne Hathaway's Cottage look a bit puny. Incidentally, is that really Werner Herzog?
  
  
• BrokenTV: The End of Setanta Sports: Live Blog
  Reminds me of the closing moments of ITV Digital and watching Carlton Cinema going dark. Except that simply consisted of the picture going off in the middle of a film.
  
  
• Buffy vs Edward (Twilight Remixed)
  Which you have of course already seen in my absence. Just wanted to note how shonky the Twilight material looks in comparison to the Buffy footage.
  
  
• soyf*ckers anonymous
  It's not just about the gesture, it's also the picture they chose ...

"It's not a significant bullet."

Film Mark Kermode interviews Werner Herzog at the BFI and it's as comprehensive as you'd expect:

"I've never been out for the Guinness Book of World Records for doing something wild here and something even wilder after that. But I always had the feeling that this was going to be a film which had to do with gravity, something that burdens us. Not only physical gravity – I do not like gravity, I would love to fly, and many of my films have to do with flying. So I would like to have a certain levity, and I would like to defy the laws of nature, of gravity."

Inevitably also mentions "It's not a significant bullet" which I never grow tired of hearing about. Herzog recollects in this shakey camera phone footage:



And here's the incident itself. Note that Herzog's actually describing how people don't care about his films any more just before the bullet hits:

shot

Elsewhere At Metafilter: Werner Herzog shot at during interview. Spot the moments when it becomes abundantly clear that I haven't watched the whole clip and have a faulty memory at to what Kermode said on the radio, as people post screenshots of the bullet hole and a transcript.