Filmwell » Werner Herzog http://www.filmwell.org Is This a Film Blog? Sun, 25 Jul 2010 21:09:08 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School http://www.filmwell.org/2009/10/15/werner-herzogs-rogue-film-school/ http://www.filmwell.org/2009/10/15/werner-herzogs-rogue-film-school/#comments Fri, 16 Oct 2009 02:34:23 +0000 Alissa Wilkinson http://www.filmwell.org/?p=4368 Anne Thompson of Thompson on Hollywood (formerly at Variety, now Indiewire) has long been one of my favorite film bloggers – one of the few who have never dropped off my Google Reader. She also maintains a very useful Twitter stream, and today she pointed to Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School. From the website’s “About” page:

The Rogue Film School will be in the form of weekend seminars held by Werner Herzog in person at varying locations and at infrequent intervals.

And:

The Rogue Film School will not teach anything technical related to film-making. For this purpose, please enroll at your local film school.

My favorite bits are points #8 and #9:

8. Related, but more practical subjects, will be the art of lockpicking. Traveling on foot. The exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully. The athletic side of filmmaking. The creation of your own shooting permits. The neutralization of bureaucracy. Guerrilla tactics. Self reliance.

9. Censorship will be enforced. There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your Boundaries, and Inner Growth.

It actually sounds a lot like grad school, and to be honest, my husband (who did in fact go to film school) might argue that this would be far more useful.

]]> http://www.filmwell.org/2009/10/15/werner-herzogs-rogue-film-school/feed/ 0 Putting Herzog in a Box http://www.filmwell.org/2009/04/22/putting-herzog-in-a-box/ http://www.filmwell.org/2009/04/22/putting-herzog-in-a-box/#comments Wed, 22 Apr 2009 17:08:03 +0000 M. Leary http://www.filmwell.org/?p=1533 herzog-werner Film Studies For Free has been a favorite blog for a while precisely because of announcements like this. Starzmedia, one of Herzog’s key distributors, has posted eight of Herzog’s early and mid-career films on YouTube. These include the well seen Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre, Little Deiter Needs to Fly, Woyzeck, and My Best Fiend – but also a few that have been off the beaten track for a while.

It will be nice have this handy way to proselytize more Herzog fans by sneaking in these links where I can. And these have appeared right on the heels of the new Herzog material in The Paris Review and his forthcoming book on the making of Fitzcarraldo, forebodingly titled: Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo.

But I am split on the use of YouTube as a marketing ploy. Herzog’s natural cinematography in Fitzcarraldo and Lessons in Darkness will lose the entirety of its controlled chaos in the flat frame of a YouTube bracket. But then I can see Even Dwarves Started Small or Wozeck gaining additional frantic traction in the hot-house frames of streaming video. This representational axis can tilt either way. (Though I am a bit terrified by the idea that Kinski will be the ghost in my machine for any extended period of time.)

Favorite comment on Little Dieter from YouTube user chug11649: “when are they going to get some good movies on here?!?! instead of these crappy old movies”

Well played, chug11649. Well played.

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