In 2007, filmmaker Werner Herzog dedicated his documentary Encounters at the End of the Worldto Roger Ebert. At one point during Herzog’s commentary track, he calls Ebert “a warrior of the cinema.” Ebert responded to the compliment in a letter to Herzog.

My favorite part of Ebert’s letter:

I believe you have never made a film depending on sex, violence or chase scenes…You have avoided this content, I suspect, because it lends itself so seductively to formulas, and you want every film to be absolutely original.

You have also avoided all “obligatory scenes,” including artificial happy endings… And you don’t use musical scores that tell us how to feel about the content. Instead, you prefer free-standing music that evokes a mood: You use classical music, opera, oratorios, requiems, aboriginal music, the sounds of the sea, bird cries, and of course Popol Vuh.

All of these decisions proceed from your belief that the audience must be able to believe what it sees. Not its “truth,” but its actuality, its ecstatic truth.

You can read all of Ebert’s letter to Herzog here.

- Heidi

Still from Encounters at the End of the World

(via cinephilearchive)

The dancing chicken, the final scene from Werner Herzog’s Stroszek (1977)

See you Monday, internet.

Fake Werner Herzog reading Curious George. Tomorrow, real Werner Herzog comes on Fresh Air to talk about The Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

(Source: youtube.com)

There is a plan to re-create the cave outside in some sort of what I called the Disneyland version. Since nobody’s going to be allowed in the cave, they will replicate the entire cave. They’ll replicate the paintings on the walls. And there was even a plan to re-create, in our imagination, the scent inside of the cave. Which means maybe some carrion of rotting cave bears, some fire, some … resins. I’ve found a master perfumer who fantasize[s] wildly about how the odor may have been 32,000 years ago. However, when you are entering there, it is slightly humid. There’s no significant traces of any smell of anything significant in there.

— Werner Herzog’s plans to recreate the Chauvet Caves in France…outside of the caves.

Werner Herzog describes seeing 32,000 year old paintings for the first time: “[The first time I saw the drawings], it was just a moment of complete awe. I was not prepared for the fact that the cave was so beautiful. It’s like crystal cathedrals and stalactites and stalagmites and just like a fairy tale universe down there, and I was not prepared. … Facing the paintings, it’s just sheer awe how beautiful and how accomplished they are.”

ardentadversary:

WERNER HERZOG READING MADELINE

Fake Werner Herzog reads Madeline. Enjoy!

Horse heads, Chauvet Cave. (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Werner Herzog Reads Where’s Waldo [may not be safe for work…]

lorcychief:

Ah there he is, Werner Herzog in The Simpsons!

Our guest tomorrow, Werner Herzog, Simpsons-ized.