The Best Five Werner Herzog Quotes (That I Could Find Today)
The Best Five Werner Herzog Quotes
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| Consider this a bonus introductory quote. |
It's a cliché by now to call Werner Herzog a controversial film maker, or a renegade, or crazy, or cruel, or any number of other macho-sounding things. Still, he seems to fit those roles at times. Just as importantly, he's made some great movies.
I personally haven't seen all of them -- including some of his most influential ones -- but I've seen a decent number of them that I enjoy.
In any case, I want to present this list of 5 of the best Werner Herzog quotes (that I could find today). Each one serves as a snapshot, not only into his life and way of thinking but, strangely, into a very broad and almost objective reality greater than his own understanding. This is perhaps the most interesting thing about Werner: He has opinions, but they're almost not the most important aspect of what he's saying. It's how he says things. He seems to offer a minimal filter in his observations. If you read enough of his quotes and interviews, you will probably get used to his tone, and probably absorb it and easily see what he's getting at. Not everyone has that ability to communicate ideas so clearly and to make so many things seem significant, or so easily dismissed. Even in an interview where he was shot by an air rifle, he paused to study the bullet wound but shrugged it off, saying,
"It was not a significant bullet. I am not afraid." Also, after losing a bet that Errol Morris would never finish his documentary about pet cemeteries, Herzog lived up to his end of the bargain by eating his shoe. This is all the stuff of legend, and also very real.
THE QUOTES
5. On Chickens:
"Well, they are very frightening for me because their stupidity is so flat. You look into the eyes of a chicken and you lose yourself in a completely flat, frightening stupidity. They are like a great metaphor for me... I kind of love chicken, but they frighten me more than any other animal."
from the Signs of Life (1968) DVD audio commentary (2005).
4. "The Universe is not harmonious; you know that from looking outside."
"There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization."
from Minnesota declaration (1999)
2. On Ocean Life
"Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species—including man—crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue."
from Minnesota declaration (1999)
5. On Not Averting Your Eyes From Pop Culture
"I was always fascinated by the Anna Nicole Smith show. I mean, the most vulgar blonde with installations of breasts...and only after she died of an overdose of medications...all of a sudden what I have preached: This is important, there is something big going on. The big thing going on, of course, was the vulgarity on one side, but...there was some sort of a new image, a new prototype of so-called 'beauty' out there. A comic strip beauty in utter vulgarity and complete deformities. And it's very strange how the collective mind creates these fantasies....and today we are seeing the body building...which creates bodies that are completely and utterly gross and deformed. And all of a sudden the deformity itself becomes the chosen ideal....It's interesting because I do live in Los Angeles...60, 70 to 80 percent of the women are surgically redesigned. I mean, they are masks -- frozen masks -- in a frozen rictus, and it's completely, completely strange and for me bizarre, but you do not avert your eyes. That's what's coming at us."
from Youtube interview on Intelligence Squared.
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