Werner Herzog: Conquest of the Useless

Werner Herzog: Conquest of the Useless

03 Oct 2009

Was the 20th century a mistake?
What is the climate of excitement which makes film possible?
How were the colossal prehistoric menhirs of Brittany erected?
How do you move a steamship in similar fashion over a mountain?
Why is tourism a sin?
Why is travel on foot a virtue?

These are some of the questions the legendary film director Werner Herzog will be discussing with Paul Holdengräber, Director of Public Programs at the New York Public Library - assisted by copious images, music and film clips 'curated' by Herzog himself.

London will learn of Herzog's passion for Fred Astaire, football and opera, why cinéma vérité is actually devoid of vérité ("The director must be the hornet who stings, not the fly on the wall"), why film schools should teach how to pick locks and forge documents. Herzog will prove that he is a better writer than a filmmaker, discuss and declaim Virgil's Georgics and perform a dramatic reading of the catalogue of the fifty dwarfs in the Icelandic Poetic Edda, consider the phantasmic landscapes in the paintings of Altdorfer and Leonardo, with some luck show us his recently re-discovered first film, a western, help us think through the algebrization of unthinkable curves and spaces, tell of almost killing Klaus Kinski, review relationships and friendships with Lotte Eisner, Bruce Chatwin, Ryszard Kapuscinski and Mick Jagger, explain why a real man should know how to milk a cow, and why chickens are such hateful animals. He might also talk about some of the more than fifty films he has written and directed, and the books he has penned, from Of Walking in Ice to Conquest of the Useless.

Digressions should be expected as well as a wild evening of phantasies and excitements, a night saturated with life and ideas, movies and enthusiasms, everything we admire about art and culture - which in Herzog's definition is quite simply and nothing less than "the collective agitation of the mind".

The discussion took place at: Royal Festival Hall.

Speakers:

Werner Herzog: Academy Award-nominated film and opera director, screenwriter and author. He made his first film in 1961 at the age of 19 and has gained notoriety not only for creating some of the most fantastic narratives in the history of the medium, but for pushing himself and his crew to unprecedented lengths, again and again, in order to achieve the effects he demands. His films include Aguirre, The Wrath of God; Nosferatu; Fitzcarraldo; Even Dwarfs Started Small and Grizzly Man.

Paul Holdengräber: Director of Public Programs at the New York Public Library and grand exponent of what he calls 'cognitive theater'. With his 'LIVE from the NYPL' series, he has turned the library into one of the hot spots of New York cultural life, hosting on stage President Bill Clinton, Margaret Atwood, Günter Grass and Norman Mailer, and interviewing Jan Morris, Orhan Pamuk, Daniel Barenboim, Alfred Brendel, John Updike, Spike Lee, Umberto Eco and Clive James.