Posts Tagged ‘Werner Herzog’
Bad Lieutenant
Always with the half-truths. I, perhaps like Werner Herzog, have not yet seen Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, a movie from 1992 starring Harvey Keitel as the eponymous bad cop facing his demons. What follows is a clip of Herzog speaking about his forthcoming re-envisioning of Bad Lieutenant, with the novel appellation “Port of Call New Orleans”. Note his insistence on mispronouncing Ferrara’s name. What a card.
Encounters at the End of the World ****
The documentaries of Werner Herzog are good, but they could be great. I admire his philosophical position and his work – though am often respectfully suspicious of its veracity. He can work almost found footage with tremendous aesthetic and metaphorical flair. But he could invest pictures like Encounters at the End of the World with more unambiguous substance, execute with greater elegance, and offer a more universal or accessible experience.
It seems reasonably well known and self-acknowledged that Herzog often places more truth content in his fictional works than the documentary pieces. He probably stages and creatively reconstructs his encounters with people (come on, were the polar researchers really watching that apocalyptic b-movie with the cameraman in front of the screen?). His distrust of specious philosophical claims is palpable, and his acute awareness of what is wrong with people’s positions leads him to criticize (rather than give precious time to) those who fall foul, and eulogize those who embody the ideal. There are those who find all of this abrasive, such as Peter Geyer, who revealed (in conversation at EIFF 2008) some frustration with Herzog’s liberal disregard for factual accuracy and implicit duplicity. I, for one, find it playful yet maddening by turns.
