Werner Herzog has published his diaries that he wrote during the filming of Fitzcarraldo, Conquest of the Useless. For those of you who have seen Burden of Dreams, you understand that this is probably some freaky shit definitely worth reading. If you haven’t seen Burden of Dreams but you have seen Fitzcarraldo, you’ll find this history of the filmmaking process nothing short of astonishing. And if you are unfamiliar with all of it, well, I’d start with the movies.

I haven’t read the book yet, but from a new interview with Herzog over at Art Beat by Jeffrey Brown, Herzog admits that even he couldn’t go back to those diaries for many years. An excerpt from the prologue:

“A vision had seized hold of me, like the demented fury of a hound that has sunk its teeth into the leg of a deer carcass and is shaking and tugging at the downed game so frantically that the hunter gives up trying to calm him. It was the vision of a large steamship scaling a hill under its own steam, working its way up a steep slope in the jungle, while above this natural landscape, which shatters the weak and the strong with equal ferocity, soars the voice of Caruso, silencing all the pain and all the voices of the primeval forest and drowning out all birdsong. To be more precise: bird cries, for in this setting, left unfinished and abandoned by God in wrath, the birds do not sing; they shriek in pain, and confused trees tangle with one another like battling Titans, from horizon to horizon, in a steaming creation still being formed. Fog-panting and exhausted they stand in this unreal world, in unreal misery– and I, like a stanza in a poem written in an unknown foreign tongue, am shaken to the core.” Listen/read the interview >>

The interview doesn’t focus on the book specifically, but that’s ok since we all just want more Herzog!

laurent and agnes in the booth
Originally uploaded by dandig.

I love how the lighting looks so moody. Me and Laurant having a chat about the part regional festivals like Woodstock Film Festival can play in film distribution. Laurant is a classy dude!

Hopefully the interview will be up soon!

Nominated for Independent Spirit Awards, Best Documentary, The Road to Guantanamo by Michael Winterbottom & Matt Whitecross is a very challenging movie. It won the Silver Bear at Berlin 2006 but seems to have had little effect in the US, with the exception of the small controversy over the poster art when the movie hit theaters (uncensored version at right). The “Tipton Three” are British-Pakistani young men who went to Pakistan with a fourth for their buddy’s wedding but wound up taking a detour into Afghanistan as the war was breaking out. They were captured by American soldiers and imprisoned for 3 years in Afghanistan and later Guantanamo before being released without charges.

Their story is told through a mix of interviews with the men themselves as they tell their story, from beginning to end, combined with reenactments of those stories. To say that all of the American and British soldiers and officials appear to be not only barbaric but also largely incompetent in those reenactments is not an overstatement, and one of the reasons the movie is frustrating. Winterbottom doesn’t want us to be comfortable; the film is meant to illustrate the many reasons why holding “enemy combatants” without any kind of trial is wrong. It is.