There are many stories about Werner Herzog, the
64-year-old enfant terrible of German and Independent cinema. He jumped
into a cactus patch when Even Dwarfs Started Small wrapped because he was so happy everyone survived. On the set of Aguirre he held Klaus Kinski at gunpoint to keep him from leaving the set. He hypnotized the entire cast of Heart of Glass
to authenticate the atmosphere of hallucination. He promised to eat his
shoe if Errol Morris actually made a film and ate it when Morris
finished Gates of Heaven. He
walked 500 miles from Munich to Paris to visit a dying friend. Many of
his early films were shot on a 35mm camera he stole from film school.
All of these stories, and more, are true.
Werner Herzog may very well be a madman. Some claim he is a mystic.
He is certainly an eccentric, genius director, and one of our favorites
here at Cornell Cinema. Now, with a new film on the way after strong
showings at the Toronto Film Festival (Rescue Dawn, a fictional version of his 1997 doc Little Deiter Needs to Fly),
we look back to Herzog’s 70s and early 80s days, when he burst
onto the scene with wild, strange, unforgettable works about madness
and the breakdown of civilization.
We present beautiful new prints of three of his collaborations with
Klaus Kinski (“Herzog found his own creative self in
Kinski,” David Thomson writes in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, “and the actor found a frame that contained his unique frenzy.”): Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972), where Kinski plays a conquistador searching for the mystical city of El Dorado; Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), featuring a heavily made-up Kinski as the original bloodsucker; and the magnificent, epic Fitzcarraldo
(1982),
about a rubber baron whose mad idea was to bring the opera to
Iquitos, Peru (it famously involved moving a 340-ton steam ship over
the mountains without any special effects).
We will also show a clean 16mm print of The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser
(1974), Herzog’s tale of a man raised without human contact for
17 years who is then found in Nuremberg’s center square. Three
additional titles will be videoprojected, since there are no decent
film prints in existence: Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970), a fable about an island of dwarfs and midgets who revolt against the powers that be; Heart of Glass (1976), about a town turning to magic and murder to replace its symbolic center; and Stroszek (1977), a bleak look at the American Dream through the eyes of three German losers who move to Wisconsin.
The series is cosponsored with the Dept. of German Studies.
Images from (top to bottom): Werner Herzog (l),
Nosferatu (r), Stroszek, Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, Kasper Hauser
