Thursday, November 10, 2005

Looking back on Weekend #1

Posted by Wendy

This blog had been my idea to begin with, and as such I’d really meant to post more--and more intelligently--than I did during the festival this past weekend. But of course, the SLFF is an endurance event, and I quickly got caught up in the rigors of trying to keep my eyes open during the long, extremely lush silent takes in films like Hearts of Glass and Nosferatu. Also? The couch isn’t always nice to one’s back.

I regretted missing the more moving scenes in Land of Slience and Darkness, but goddamn, those dwarfs wore me out and I had to retreat to my own land of silence and darkness in Chris’s room. I also wish I’d caught Aguirre and Kaspar Hauser. But what I did see has stayed with me all week. Stroszek was one I’d expected to enjoy and it didn’t disappoint. Like Stroszek and his fellow sad szacks, I, too, believed that Wisconsin would be kinder than a Munich pimp’s kick, but it WASN’T. Remind me to read up on the film to find out where the final scenes were shot (Stroszek on the ski lift, the circling truck), though I’m sure that chicken is dead by now. Seriously, though, that whole landscape sticks with me, even more so now when I think about what it has in common with Herzog’s South American backdrops--though of course perverted in a very North American way, with the Indian tourist kitsch and so on. I’d better stop there before I make any other goofy parallels and start insisting that steamboat in Fitzcarraldo is just like a very big, slow, savage ski lift. Obviously it’s not, though. And Klaus Kinski would never be caught dead on the ski lift at the HerzogLand Amusement park (TM Mike). Or maybe he would if it involved having someone fuck his corpse. BUT I DIGRESS.

I like Herzog’s Europe, too, as seen in Hearts of Glass and Nosferatu and Woyzeck. He has a knack for making most his civilized-world settings (i.e., not the fornicating dank green wilderness) look as breathtakingly weird as opera sets—the angles are odd; the architecture is precious. Fucking awesome.

Anyway, that’s all for now.

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