ARTTALK
Werner Herzog et Avital Ronell |
Written 30 January |
Thursday 11 December, 00:00Centre Pompidou, 75004 [map]
This complete and unabridged retrospective (55 films) of
Werner Herzog is an opportunity to rediscover and discover the modernity of a body of work which continues to break new ground; situated beyond cinematographic genres and geographical boundaries. Herzog will be present for part of the festival and says of his work: "I've filmed a lot of documentaries these last few years, mainly because I haven't had the financial means for my fiction work. My documentaries are deliberately stylized and inventive because I hate “true cinema”, all those films that claim to record the reality of things in a calculated way. The reality I look for at the cinema is a poetic and exalted order."
From his native Germany (he was brought up in the isolated mountains of Bavaria before travelling to Egypt then the Sudan where he directed his first short film at the age of 19) to the Amazonian jungle and the immensity of desert and the icy Antarctic, Herzog the tireless traveller, searches for that epic dimension which has become very much a part of his films as pioneer of expressionist film and the birth of New German Cinema in the 1970s. He is a filmmaker who refuses to pigeonhole himself and is forever in quest of a « truth beyond facts and much deeper than the facts ». In Herzog’s work he often uses locals as actors in his quest for “ecstatic truth”.
Herzog once promised to eat his shoe if
Errol Morris completed the movie project on pet cemeteries that he had been working on, in order to challenge and motivate Morris, whom Herzog perceived as incapable of following up on the projects he conceived. In 1978 when the film
Gates of Heaven premiered, Werner Herzog cooked and publicly ate his shoe, an event later incorporated into a short documentary Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe by Les Blank. At the public shoe-eating, Herzog suggested that he hoped the act would serve to encourage anyone having difficulty bringing a project to fruition.
Showing tonight is "The White Diamond", followed by a discussion between Werner Herzog and Avital Ronell.
| What: | Werner Herzog et Avital Ronell |
| When: | Thursday 11 December, 00:00 |
| Where: | Centre Pompidou, Place Georges Pompidou 75004 [map] |
| Transport: | Rambuteau, Hôtel de Ville, Châtelet-Les Halles |
| Cost: | 6EUR |
| Phone: | 01 44 78 12 33 |
| Web: | www.centrepompidou.fr |
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