A Conversation with Werner Herzog
A Conversation with Werner Herzog
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER
PH: / Werner Herzog and Fred Astaire? Who would have thought of the connection? Is there one?WH: / Yes, there are quite a few connections. I love Fred Astaire movies. Some of his movies are the best Hollywood has produced. Most of what Hollywood does is not my cup of tea.
PH: / Really?
WH: / Broadway Melody of 1940 gives such a strange, completely invented aspect of New York City. You cannot get further away from the realities of this city when you see “Please Don’t Monkey with Broadway.” This is the wonder, the miracle of cinema—that you live through ecstasies,that you live through the images that are only the images of collective dreams. And here in this Fred Astaire movie, you have this kind of lightness of vision which I like, and you have something very cinematic: movie movies.
PH: / Can you talk about “movie movies”? I know you’ve said that Fred Astaire for you is essential filmmaking, as well as kung fu movies and porno movies.
WH: / Don’t misunderstand me, but there’s something very essential about pornographic films because they have moved technology to quite a degree. The driving force, I believe, for videos was pornography, so we should not underrate it completely and dismiss it as something which shouldn’t be on the screen. Of course, pornography is a more private thing and people watch it in seedy motels, a sort of motel-room ugliness.
PH: / But sometimes they’re much better than movies, other movies.
WH: / Much better than pretentious movies, these artsy-fartsy films that I just can’t take any longer, so I—
PH: / You switch to pornography.
WH: / I switch to Anna Nicole Smith, I switch to Wrestlemania. [laughter] Yes, because, I believe, Paul, that that’s one of my dictums. The poet must not avert his eyes.
PH: / That sounds like something Hölderlin might have written.
WH: / Well, yes, I adore Hölderlin, and he is probably the greatest of all German poets. But he was so deeply involved in the world in a dangerous way that he lost his mind over it. His language goes to the very, very borderlines of the German language, my own language. I believe he became insane after he travelled on foot from Bordeaux to Frankfurt. He arrived in Germany raving mad and unfortunately spent his last thirty-five years or so locked up in a tower and living with the family of a carpenter, in the city of Tübingen. I also love the Baroque poet Quirin Kuhlmann, a lot. Nobody knows him, not even the experts in German literature. But Kuhlmann was also someone who explored the borderlines, the very, very edges and the deepest of roots in our language. Strangely enough, I feel like him because I’m not capable of irony; and he took things literally, everything literally. For example, he dug in the ground with a spade with some other strange man and tried to find the stone of wisdom. He probably staged the very last Crusade. He set off for Constantinople with two hysterical women, a mother and a daughter, and tried to set up a Jesus Kingdom in Constantinople. The women abandoned him in Venice and took off with some sailors. The ship left without him, and he jumped into the water and almost drowned trying to reach the ship. But they hoisted him on board and took him to Constantinople, where he was immediately imprisoned and spent quite some time there. He actually died while he was travelling on foot, criss-crossing Europe with all these strange sects and wild fantasts in religion, philosophy, language. He arrived in Moscow and incited some sort of a religious riot, which was misunderstood by the authorities as a political riot, and he was burned at the stake together with his books.
PH: / This sounds like a Herzog script.
WH: / It would be wonderful. Kinski could have been the right one to play Quirin Kuhlmann. But what I mean to say is that Quirin Kuhlmann was deeply into the very essence of life, dangerously far into it, and perished in it. There’s nothing wrong perishing in the travails and tribulations of life. I have no problem with that, personally.
(Quoted from Brick 82)