Not 'remembered,' I don't care about being remembered.

February 18, 2016 11:24 PM

We are the killers. We stink of death. We carry it with us. It sticks to us like frost. We cannot tear it away. [...]

The Aztecs in the shock of the conquest, of utter destruction, tried to regain their speech, and they tried to describe simple things. A cave. A cave is a place of darkness. It is full of fear. It is dark, yes, very dark. And fear looms there. And do we dare to enter? Because the cave is big and it is dark.

A 70-minute conversation with Werner Herzog, loosely structured by one of his favorite books, J. A. Baker's The Peregrine.

It took a while to get rolling, perhaps, but at its height it was like watching a live performance of a Werner Herzog film -- strange and haunting. [2m version(??)]
(I would have quoted the part where he reads the names of 40 Icelandic dwarves but I can't spell them.

posted by grobstein (3 comments total)

Such a great book. He talks about it a little more here:

In a way, it’s almost like a transubstantiation, like in religion, where the observer becomes almost the object—in this case the falcon—he observes. He writes, for example, about the falcon soaring high up, and then higher and higher until the falcon is only a dot. Then he writes, “and then we swoop down,” as if he had become a falcon himself. And there’s a variety of moments where you can tell that he has completely entered into the existence of a falcon. And this is what I do when I make a film, I step outside of myself into an ekstasis in Greek, to step outside of your own body, a point outside. Baker steps into the fog and in an ecstasy of observing the world it is unprecedented.
posted by inire at 1:14 AM on February 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

"The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot." -- Werner Herzog
"My feet are my only carriage." -- Bob Marley
posted by sneebler at 8:43 AM on February 19, 2016 [2 favorites]

I love The Peregrine!, and I love Herzog. I am very excited by this. Thank you!
posted by OmieWise at 11:07 AM on February 21, 2016 [2 favorites]