The Mumpsimus

Over at Press Play, there's a new video essay by Nelson Carvajal accompanied by a new text essay by me, all about Werner Herzog, under the general title "The Mystery of Werner Herzog" .

You might have seen the trailer for Baz Luhrman's upcoming adaptation of The Great Gatsby . I liked it, since I don't much care for the novel and I think Luhrman's stylistic excess probably matches the prose of the book pretty well. Also, Leonardo DiCaprio's greatest talent (?) is his general aura of blankness and vapidity, which fits the character. But it did seem to me the trailer was missing something. What could it be? I wondered. And then, like a bolt of ecstatic truth straight out of the abyss of the past, it hit me! Werner Herzog! Because everything is better with Herzog . And so I present to the world, "Herzog's Gatsby":

Plastic Bag written & directed by Ramin Bahrani narrated by Werner Herzog

While listening to this interview with the great and glorious Werner Herzog, I learned of Herzog's Rogue Film School . It has some guidelines I thought more workshops might want to emulate: The Rogue Film School is about a way of life. It is about a climate, the excitement that makes film possible. It will be about poetry, films, music, images, literature. Excerpts of films will be discussed, which could include your submitted films; they may be shown and discussed as well. Depending on the materials, the attention will revolve around essential questions: how does music function in film? How do you narrate a story? (This will certainly depart from the brainless teachings of three-act-screenplays). How do you sensitize an audience? How is space created and understood by an audience? How do you produce and edit a film? How do you create illumination and an ecstasy of truth? Related, but more practical subjects, will be the art of lockpicking. Traveling on foot. The exhilara...

After reading Tom Bissell's appreciation of the films of Werner Herzog in the December Harper's , I decided to use the wonders of Netflix to catch up with Herzog's documentaries, because though I revere many of his feature films, of the documentaries I had only seen Grizzly Man and My Best Fiend: Klaus Kinski . Now I have added The White Diamond to that list. It is an astounding film, strange and powerful, filled with rich imagery and immense, subtle depths of emotion and philosophy. It presents many of Herzog's favorite themes and character types, making it feel like a cousin to Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo , but it is a gentler film, more hopeful and less corruscating in tone, but no less powerful in its portrayal of obsession, vision, and nature. The White Diamond tells the story of Dr. Graham Dorrington , a British aerospace engineer who created an airship to fly over the canopy of the rainforest in Guyana -- rainforest canopies have been mostly unexplored terr...