Werner Herzog says "Go for it, losers"

posted by Jett Loe

Oh sure, I’ve always been entertained by Werner Herzog’s films.  They’re always interesting. But as the years roll on and on I realise more firmly, more concretely that the man himself, as an artist, is a man of actual…god, what’s the word…what is it that is so lacking today…oh yeah: courage.

Artistic courage.

But of course there’s the art and then the man – and the man himself is always interesting…and entertaining. To wit, here’s an excerpt from Werner’s latest press release, regarding his new film Bad Lieutenant – Port of Call New Orleans:

It does not bespeak great wisdom to call the film The Bad Lieutenant, and I only agreed to make the film after William (Billy) Finkelstein, the screenwriter, who had seen a film of the same name from the early nineties, had given me a solemn oath that this was not a remake at all. But the film industry has its own rationale, which in this case was the speculation of some sort of franchise. I have no problem with this. Nevertheless, the pedantic branch of academia, the so called “film-studies,” in its attempt to do damage to cinema, will be ecstatic to find a small reference to that earlier film here and there, though it will fail to do the same damage that academia — in the name of literary theory — has done to poetry, which it has pushed to the brink of extinction. Cinema, so far, is more robust. I call upon the theoreticians of cinema to go after this one. Go for it, losers.

Here’s some more Herzog goodness for you:

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 17th, 2009 at 10:16 am. It is filed under Blog, Jett Loe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.