Okay, One More Thing

The other night, Tits's companion Mr. Pants (I do not make these names up to be cute; they actually call each other by those names) loaned me a DVD of Werner Herzog's short docs. I'd never seen anything by Herzog before.

Well.

Tasty treats, let me tell you. There was a doc about a ski-jumper who jumped such huge jumps that he called himself a "ski-flyer". Great suuuper-slow-mo footage of him leaping into the frame and soaring through the air. He always kept his mouth open because otherwise he said he felt like he would just be "cramping everything up", so you can see his face all wind-tunnelishly distorted, his lips and cheeks just on the verge of flapping. Also lots of footage of ski-flyers wiping out, and I mean wiping out, falling ass over teakettle down these ENORMOUSLY STEEP runs, coming to a sliding halt at the bottom, looking like rag dolls.

Then a documentary covering the 1976 Auctioneer World Championships, held in Pennsylvania. Tons of footage without commentary, just ambient sounds. Tons of Pennsylvania "Dutch" (Germans), in bonnets and throat-beards (not at the same time). And then the auctioneer spiels! Wow.

Finally, this really fucked up project where he visits St. Vincent when it's been evacuated because the huge volcano on the island is coughing clouds of sulfur and looking like its going to erupt. He goes roaming up the mountain with his cameramen. It's definitely his most German project, and he gets in lots of deadpan German-accented exposition about what the apocalypse means to him.

Werner: three thumbs up!