Track premiere: Good Old War “It Hurts Every Time”
Lost Memories: Our 10 favorite amnesia movies
Call-In Commentary: Watch the “Rampart” trailer with writer-director Oren Moverman
The rise of the film critic filmmaker
“We can’t take it off the map.”
The new issue of The Believer is all about film, and there are two unmissable offerings up in full on the web. The first is a transcript of Werner Herzog interviewing Errol Morris (whose "Standard Operating Procedure" premiered at Berlin a few weeks ago), or perhaps the other way round, at Brandeis last year. The conversation roams from truth in documentary film to serial killer Edmund Kemper to a fight they once had: WH: I said that we were going to do a film there in Plainfield, and that really upset Errol a lot. He thought I was a thief without loot. This was his country, his territory, his Plainfield, and I shot in Plainfield. I shot a film, Stroszek, which I think is forgotten and forgiven by now, and we can maintain friendship over this now. EM: I told Werner: For you to steal a character or a story...
The new issue of The Believer is all about film, and there are two unmissable offerings up in full on the web. The first is a transcript of Werner Herzog interviewing Errol Morris (whose “Standard Operating Procedure” premiered at Berlin a few weeks ago), or perhaps the other way round, at Brandeis last year. The conversation roams from truth in documentary film to serial killer Edmund Kemper to a fight they once had:
WH: I said that we were going to do a film there in Plainfield, and that really upset Errol a lot. He thought I was a thief without loot. This was his country, his territory, his Plainfield, and I shot in Plainfield. I shot a film, Stroszek, which I think is forgotten and forgiven by now, and we can maintain friendship over this now.
EM: I told Werner: For you to steal a character or a story isn’t real theft. But to steal a landscape, that is a very, very serious crime.
WH: I understand that. I take it to heart, but there actually is a film out there, and we can’t take it off the map.
EM: It’s a very good film.
WH: It has a beautiful end with a dancing chicken, and I really like it.
EM: Yes.
In the second, Chuck Klosterman dwells, in typically discursive Klosterman fashion, on road movies, the once-discussed movie optioning of a road trip he took and documented for a magazine, Gus Van Sant, “Vanishing Point,” “Old Joy,” and the following equation:
(MAN + MACHINE) – (GOD V. SOCIETY) + NATURE/HIMSELF
Also online in full — Devin McKinney’s argument that Henry Fonda was “the right man, the only man” to play the role of Scottie Ferguson in “Vertigo.” A list of the other goodies available in the print version is here.
[Photo: Werner Herzog's "Stroszek," New Yorker Films, 1977]
Tags: Chuck Klosterman, Errol Morris, Henry Fonda, The Believer, Vertigo, Werner Herzog+ Werner Herzog [FILMMAKER] IN CONVERSATION WITH Errol Morris [DOCUMENTARIAN] (The Believer)
+ ON THE ROAD (The Believer)
+ THE RIGHT MAN (The Believer)
