So German!

Film Series at Cinéma du Musée
August 29, 2024 – December 5, 2024

“I am a filmmaker, and I must never be a fly on the wall, unobtrusive and just registering. As filmmakers we should be the hornets that go out and sting”.
Werner Herzog

A leading voice in international cinema for over 50 years, German director Werner Herzog continues to make a profound mark on the seventh art with his provocative, often brutal vision of the world he seeks to capture. An uncompromising filmmaker, Herzog refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed into any particular genre, claiming only and always the search for truth.

In his work, this truth is largely expressed through two types of project: documentary and historical films. In the former, Herzog allows himself a dose of fiction, a stylization capable of shaping the viewer’s emotions. In the latter, it’s the obsession with nature, and certainly the use of many non-professional actors, that instills the movie with a convincing verisimilitude. Cinema, he argues, requires us to modify facts to such a degree that they come closer to truth than to reality. Not to describe, but to capture nature, the nature of the world and the humanity it contains, in all its physicality.

The five films chosen for this cycle vividly express this conception of history as chaos. Each of the works presented here is traversed by two axis. The first, and most important, is the landscape: Herzog’s landscape is not a setting, it is the very subject of the film, both testimony to and allegory of the story being told. The second axis is the body, the flesh that expresses and exults in the pain, fragility and madness that make lies impossible. The torn body, the insane body, can only be honest and true: it becomes a space of contact between director and viewer, united by emotion, vertigo and dismay. For Herzog, truth is written at the end of hell.

The films:

Aug 29, 2024 at 6.30 PM

Aguirre, the Wrath of God

Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes
Genre: Adventure
Year: 1972
Running time: 94 minutes
Country: West Germany / Mexico / Peru

Synopsis: South America, 1560. A Spanish expedition leaves the Peruvian highlands for the Amazon rainforest in search of the mythical Eldorado.

Sep 19, 2024 at 6.30 PM

The enigma of Kaspar Hauser

Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle
Genre: Biographical drama
Year: 1974
Running time: 110 minutes
Country: West Germany

Synopsis: Nuremberg, 1828. A mysterious young man is discovered in the city’s central square, unknown to anyone and barely able to pronounce his own name. This silent man, uneducated and out of touch with society, is not without intelligence.

Oct 3, 2024 at 6.30 PM

FITZCARRALDO

Genre: Adventure
Year: 1982
Running time: 157 minutes
Country: West Germany / Peru

Synopsis: Brazil, 1910. Brian Sweene Fitzgerald, better known as Fitzcarraldo, dreams of building the world’s greatest opera house in Iquitos, in the heart of the Amazon.

Oct 31, 2024 at 6.30 PM

Nosferatu, Phantom of the Night

Genre: Fantasy / Horror
Year: 1979
Running time: 107 minutes
Country: West Germany / France

Synopsis: Wismar, 1890. Solicitor Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania to sell a mano house to Count Dracula.

Dec 5, 2024 at 6.30 PM

Cobra Verde

Genre: War drama
Year: 1987
Running time: 111 minutes
Country: West Germany / Guinea

Synopsis: Brazil, circa 1830. Francisco Manoel da Silva, alias Cobra Verde (« Green Snake »), is a ruined rancher turned outlaw, exiled to West Africa, and charged with opening a slave network in partnership with the King of Dahomey (Benin).