Werner Herzog: screenings

Thursday 11 April

17:00
"Bells from the Deep: Faith and Superstition in Russia"
Documentary feature, Germany | 1993 | 60’ | Greek and English subtitles

19:00
"Into the Inferno"
Documentary feature, United Kingdom – Austria | 2016 | 104’ | Greek subtitles

21:00
"Last Words"
Fiction short, West Germany | 1968 | 13' | English subtitles

"Signs of Life"
Fiction feature, West Germany | 1968 | 87' | Greek and English subtitles

Saturday 13 April

17:00
"Land of Silence and Darkness"
Documentary feature, West Germany | 1971 | 85’ | Greek subtitles

19:00
"Stroszek"
Fiction feature, West Germany | 1976 | 116’ | Greek subtitles

21:30
"The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser"
Fiction feature, West Germany | 1974 | 109’ | Greek subtitles

"Bells from the Deep: Faith and Superstition in Russia"

On this mystical journey taking in everything from shamanistic rituals to Orthodox baptisms and exorcisms, from mortals calling themselves Christ reincarnate and individuals healed by miraculous waters to incredibly tall women and orphaned bell ringers, Werner Herzog – in one of his most experimental and narratively liberated moments – maps out the spirituality of the Russian people in all their intensity, from faith through to hysteria. By encompassing legends, superstitions, strange human tales, desperate acts of devotion to a higher power, and an atmosphere of surreality that soon gives way to harsh reality, this documentary shot in Siberia in 1993 is something of a meditative ritual in and of itself. When the narrative of its second part focuses on the story of the lost city of Kitezh which, according to legend, God submerged under a lake in answer to its citizens’ prayers for salvation in the face of constant attacks from marauding Huns and Tatars, nothing more than the image of the faithful pressing their ears to the ice to hear bells from the deep is needed for us to realize that this is – above all else – an exquisite encapsulation of the human need to believe in something beyond the human.

Written, directed and produced by Werner Herzog
Cinematography: Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein
Edited by Rainer Standke
Language: English, German, Russian

"Into the Inferno"

With volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer as his guide, Werner Herzog completely gives himself over to the charm that volcanoes have exerted over him since the start of his career (he shot La Soufrière, a documentary short on Guadeloupe’s La Grande Soufrière volcano, in 1977). Together, they visit active volcanoes across the world – from Ethiopia to North Korea and from Iceland to Indonesia. Their explorations go far beyond the paradoxical contradistinction between their extreme photogenic beauty and their extreme destructive power to reach a place where one realizes the ephemeral nature of human life in the face of the proven prehistoric power volcanoes have to extinguish all life on Earth. Speaking with experts, inhabitants of volcanic areas, and admirers of volcanoes around the world, Herzog manages once again to blur – in his characteristic way (and in this case providing an entertaining voice-over too) – the boundaries between documentary and fiction filmmaking. As he muses out loud over visuals that take the breath away, he maps out the points where lava leaves its searing mark as an abiding warning to humankind, and takes audiences by the hand on an unforgettable experience of a journey through a hellishly captivating “inferno”.

Written and directed by Werner Herzog
Produced by André Singker & Lucki Stipetić
Cinematography: Peter Zeitlinger
Edited by Joe Bini
Language: English

"Last Words"

The last person to leave (in fact, to be forcibly removed from) the remote island of Spinalonga, off Crete – an official leper colony of the Greek state that operated from 1903 until 1957 – now lives in the Cretan town of Elounda. He stays at home all day, plays the lyre in coffee shops at night, and incessantly says he won’t ever say a word, over and over again. This short – shot over two days (mainly at night, according to Herzog) and edited in one, all during the filming of his first feature Signs of Life – is, in reality, fiction passing itself off as pseudo-documentary.

It was Herzog who came up with the idea of the last inhabitant of Spinalonga (played by a real and well-known lyre player) who refuses to speak, while the inhabitants of the island repeat rumors and truths concerning his past and present so many times over that they eventually lose all meaning. Captivated by the local people of Crete, the other-worldly landscape of the abandoned Spinalonga, the traditional music of the Cretan lyre, and the theatricality of prose brought into harmonious contrast with the unaffected manner of non-professional actors, Herzog created Last Words, a short-form triumph of the absurd that also manages to function as a timely piece of commentary on the power of the spoken word – on screen, in life, and as part of history itself. Winner of the Main Prize at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen.

Written, directed and produced by Werner Herzog
Cinematography: Thomas Mauch
Edited by Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
Language: Greek

"Signs of Life"

A German paratrooper named Stroszek, wounded during the Second World War, is sent to a Greek island to recuperate. He stays at a fortress, also used as a munitions depot, together with his wife, Nora, and two fellow soldiers – the boorish Meinhart, and the introverted Becker, who claims to be fascinated by ancient Greek culture. But the completely idle ways in which they spend their days leads to a loosening of their grip on reality.

Werner Herzog’s first fiction feature (shooting at the age of 24 a screenplay he wrote when he was 19) was initially based on a true story that he later discovered also inspired Ludwig Achim von Arnim’s Romantic novella The Mad Veteran of Fort Ratonneau, published in 1818. The film was shot – on a stolen 35mm camera and with a budget of 20,000 dollars that Herzog had won through a screenwriting competition in Germany – on location at Elounda on Crete, and on Cos, the island in the Dodecanese where his grandfather, the renowned archeologist Rudolf Herzog, worked for many years. While more academic than the increasingly unconventional narrative films he would go on to make, it is nevertheless an early and exceptional example of his almost obsessive interrogative exploration of people pitted against logic at the heart of history. The contradistinction of the contemporary (music composed by Stavros Xarchakos plays over the titles) with the classical (Chopin), his use of the natural landscape as a major character (just as complex as the characters of the soldiers, who are themselves nothing like the one-dimensional portrayals that were standard in films of the day), and the overarching sense of a small human story reflecting a universal anti-war cry all make Signs of Life one of the most iconic films in Werner Herzog’s oeuvre, awarded the Special Jury Prize in honor of a first-time director at the 1968 Berlin International Film Festival.

Written, directed and produced by Werner Herzog
Cinematography: Thomas Mauch
Edited by Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
Music by Stavros Xarchakos
Starring: Peter Brogle, Wolfgang Reichmann, Athina Zacharopoulou & Wolfgang von Ungern-Sternberg
Language: German

"Land of Silence and Darkness"

The 56-year-old Fini Straubinger – left deaf and blind at 18 by an accident that also confined her to her bed for 30 years – has now dedicated her life to relieving the pain of those she calls “comrades in fate”. Travelling from town to town across Germany, she makes house calls and visits institutions in order to communicate with other deaf-blind people by means of a kind of visual alphabet that traces letters on the palm of the hand. Werner Herzog follows her on a revelatory odyssey that begins as a documentation of the margins in which people deprived of basic tools for communication and survival are forced to live, and ends up as an emotional rollercoaster that reaches its climax at precisely the point where human contact finds a way in which to triumph. Deeply moving, and with a power that one encounters in experiences that can only be absorbed through the use of all the senses, this journey into a “land of silence and darkness” is resoundingly and dazzlingly brilliant. A superlative example of the visual aspect of Werner Herzog’s gaze, always focused as it is on the most inconspicuous and spiritual – and yet at the same time corporeal – facets of human existence.

Written, directed and produced by Werner Herzog
Cinematography: Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein
Edited by Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
Language: German, German Sign Language

"Stroszek"

Bruno Stroszek, a traveling busker, is released yet again from prison. He returns to his apartment to find all his things: his accordion, grand piano and talking black bird. One night, Bruno meets a prostitute named Eva in a bar and decides to take her home, in order to save her from the pimps who are exploiting her. But the girl’s minders threaten them, and so the couple accepts an offer made by Bruno’s elderly neighbor, named Scheitz, to travel together to America in pursuit of the dream of a better life.

The film was one of the last things Joy Division’s Ian Curtis saw before taking his own life, and a rich source of inspiration for the cinematic work of Jim Jarmusch. It is as idiosyncratic as a cheerful ballad on human despair, and as timely as an unpredictable road movie charting the “American dream”, with all the paranoia and melancholy that goes along with it. Written in three and a half days, and inspired in large part by the real life experiences of its haunting lead, Bruno S., Stroszek was filmed in Plainfield, Wisconsin – home town of serial killer Ed Gein (who inspired the story of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho). It is also David Lynch’s favorite Herzog film (clearly inspiring the dancing chickens in Eraserhead). And, through its innate charms, it is the film that best highlights the characteristically unfettered, uncompromising and realistic signature style of its maker.

Written, directed and produced by Werner Herzog
Cinematography: Thomas Mauch
Edited by Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
Music by Chet Atkins & Sonny Terry
Starring: Bruno S., Eva Mattes & Clemens Scheitz
Language: German, English

"The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser"

Kaspar Hauser lives chained up inside a kind of animal-pen prison, unable to see or speak with anyone, cut off from the outside world. He passes his time in darkness, sleeping, eating and living more or less like an animal. One day, a stranger drags him outside, tries quickly to teach him how to speak, stand upright and walk, and then abandons him in a town square, having pressed a letter into his hand asking the local authorities to look after him. After a initial period of confusion among the locals, who don’t quite know how to behave around this strange man, he is taken in by one Professor Daumer, who teaches him how to speak, read and write, and also gives him lessons in music, logic and ethics – and who is stunned by his great aptitude for learning.

Werner Herzog was inspired by the true story of a feral youth, aged 16, found in a German catacomb during the nineteenth century to create what many consider to be his greatest masterpiece: a revelatory study of (covert) human nature, a denunciation of (overt) human cruelty, and a fairy tale forged out of a most frightful reality. Lyrical, poetic, brutal and humane exactly where you least expect it, and with Bruno S.’s devastating anti-performance at its heart, this film – whose original German title (Everyone for Themselves and God Against All) could be seen to capture not only its individual essence, but also that of Werner Herzog’s entire filmography – brought its maker the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury at the Cannes Film Festival, and has since taken its place as one of the most important and influential moments in contemporary European cinema.

Written, directed and produced by Werner Herzog
Cinematography: Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein
Edited by Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
Music by Florian Fricke
Starring: Bruno S. & Walter Ladengast
Language: Germany