Gods and cretins: Werner Herzog on the literature competition

A wholesome delusion of grandeur, like that cultivated by Werner Herzog, kinds the folks of this world into gods and cretins. Among the many former he counts the thinker Blaise Pascal, whom he quotes at the start of “Classes in Darkness”, his movie poem in regards to the flaming inferno of the second Gulf Warfare, with the phrases: “The collapse of the star worlds will – like creation – be extra grandiose “Carry out magnificence.” It doesn’t matter that Herzog merely invented it. Pascal himself, he says in an interview with Jan Brandt on the Worldwide Literature Pageant, couldn’t have formulated it higher.

Martin Scorsese apparently belongs to the latter. In keeping with Herzog, he’s actually not a terrific movie director, however at greatest an excellent one. You instantly know the place the hammer is. Self-aggrandizement and patronizing humiliation drive a cheerful interaction with him, and there may be additionally some condemnation of the underground remnant who needs to do his bidding: “Wherever you go among the many critics, there may be an fool crunching.” Silent cheers and loud jeering within the virtually sold-out Nice Home of the Berlin Pageant.

The person who can do every part and do what he can’t do higher than anybody else if he wished to, fingers it out with out anybody holding it in opposition to him. Why shouldn’t Pascal’s razor-sharp grace be achieved immediately? And isn’t Scorsese actually only a virtuoso craftsman with no actual imaginative and prescient?

A Bavarian anarch

Nonetheless, Herzog’s boundless self-confidence doesn’t thrive on being proper alone; it’s characterised by the truth that it has no conceit in anyway. This Bavarian anarch, with whom no state or society could be made as a result of he’s his personal cosmos, is aware of many issues, maybe all too many issues higher, however he doesn’t comprehend it prematurely. “A deep amazement is the start of all poetry, all movies, all prose,” he says in a number of variations. He speaks of insatiable curiosity and, in English, a way of awe: “There’s all the time a way of awe!”

This seventh sense of the violence of the universe, which explodes each human dimension, shapes his cinema a minimum of his writing, which he sees as his true legacy: “My movies are nothing however a distraction.” In his most direct voice, says Herzog, whose archaic Apocalyptic pictures usually tremble in his personal voice-over feedback, he finds in entrance of the clean sheet of paper, all the time asking: “What’s the theater by which we’re trapped? What’s the ghostly high quality of our reminiscence?”

A deep sense of surprise is the start of all poetry, all movies, all prose

The movie directoractor and writer Werner Herzog in Berlin

Herzog, who has all the time preached studying to his movie college students, is on a first-name foundation with Vergil, Hölderlin and Robert Walser and is alleged to be utterly blind to writing inhibitions, can be the perfect visitor at a literature competition if he himself had written extra over the course of his now 81-year-old life. His touring prose “Vom Strolling within the Ice” (1978), which alone would have justified speaking about “Panorama in Trance,” remained the one impartial publication till the brand new millennium. “You higher not throw that in my face,” he says to Jan Brandt, “I do know that I’m responsible.”

However he tries to catch up, with a story that places the literary mimicry of “I Am Code,” a quantity of AI poetry to which he has simply lent his voice within the audio guide, as a replacement. “The Way forward for Reality” will probably be revealed by Hanser within the spring. Solely scoundrels, Goethe says, are modest. How might he of all folks contradict that?