In my absence, here is a game for everyone to play:
Below are fifteen quotes. 10 of these quotes are attributed to famed insane German film director Werner Herzog. Five of them I invented. Your task: correctly identify the five fakes. The answers are at the bottom, behind the spoiler bar.
A. “You should look straight at a film; that’s the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates”.
B. “In comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle… we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel.”
C. “The vulgarity of language does not bother me as much as the vulgarity of images. People will always… as a culture we needlessly protect our children from violence and sexuality, but we then force them to watch these antiseptic, pedestrian images.”
D. “I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder.”
E. “Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film.”
F. “So we have to declare holy war against what we see every single day on television. Commercials and… I think there should be real war against commercials, real war against talk shows, real war against Bonanza and Rawhide, or all these things.”
G. “The early Mickey Mouse cartoons, where he is a spritely figure, he is a figure of chaos and invention. I enjoy those cartoons very much. The moment Mickey Mouse became a corporate mascot is when Walt Disney ceased to be anything but a peddler of obscenities.”
H. On Klaus Kinski: “Actually his ideas about nature were rather insipid. Mosquitoes were not allowed in his jungle, nor was rain.”
I. “I have spent most of my career trying to undo the damage that was done by my teachers in film school.”
J. “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 chickens, but they frighten me more than any other animal.”
K. “Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.”
L. “I do not like birds. I do not understand people who listen to birds chirping and hear anything other than mindless insipidity.”
M. “Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger.”
O. “If you truly love film, I think the healthiest thing to do is not read books on the subject. I prefer the glossy film magazines with their big colour photos and gossip columns, or the National Enquirer. Such vulgarity is healthy and safe.”
N. “Sometimes I think it would have been better if I had been a lion tamer in a circus, or another thing more useful than a film director.”
Answers: C, G, I, L, N