Skip to main content

Werner Herzog Discovers the Ecstasy of Skateboarding: “That’s Kind of My People”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQLInlnfWUc

If Werner Herzog has ever stood atop a skateboard, cinema seems not to have recorded it. But when asked by online skateboarding magazine Jenkem to discuss the sport and/or lifestyle, he did so with characteristically little reservation. “I’m not familiar with the scene of skateboarding,” he admits in the video interview above. “At the same time, I had the feeling, yes, that’s kind of my people.” Fans will make the connection between skateboarding videos and the Bavarian filmmaker’s early documentary The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, on champion ski jumper Walter Steiner, even before a clip of it appears.

In fact Herzog himself, as revealed in the autobiographical short Portrait Werner Herzog, only turned filmmaker after shelving his own dreams of ski-jumping. The experience must have taught him viscerally, through those parts of the body that don’t forget, what it means to make countless attempts resulting in countless failures — with a better failure here and there, and at some distant, ecstatic moment, perhaps a success.

Viewed at great enough length, the kind of skateboarder who attempts a trick on video dozens, even hundreds of times, before landing it could well be a character from one of Herzog’s own films, especially his documentaries about men unable to stop putting themselves in harm’s way in the name of their fixations.

“So many failures,” marvels Herzog as he watches one such video. “That’s astonishing.” It certainly “doesn’t do good to his pelvis, nor to his elbows,” Herzog adds, but such is the price of ecstasy. For him, the obscurity of the vast majority of skateboarders only compounds the sacredness of their practice. This as opposed to the David Blaines of the world, whose physical feats “are meant only for his own publicity, and for shining out in the media. Skateboard kids are not out for the media. They do it for the joy of it, and for the fun of it.” If Herzog were to pay cinematic tribute to these kids, surely he would make similar observations though voiceover narration. As for his instinct of how to fill out the rest of the soundtrack, “What comes to mind first and foremost would be Russian Orthodox church choirs.”

Related Content:

Werner Herzog Offers 24 Pieces of Filmmaking and Life Advice

Tony Hawk & Architectural Historian Iain Borden Tell the Story of How Skateboarding Found a New Use for Cities & Architecture

“Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better”: How Samuel Beckett Created the Unlikely Mantra That Inspires Entrepreneurs Today

Portrait Werner Herzog: The Director’s Autobiographical Short Film from 1986

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Werner Herzog Discovers the Ecstasy of Skateboarding: “That’s Kind of My People” is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3tfEJW4
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Voltaire Meant When He Said That “We Must Cultivate Our Garden”: An Animated Introduction

“Voltaire’s goal in writing [his 1759 satire Candide ] was to destroy the optimism of his times,” says Alain de Botton in the School of Life video above, “an optimism that centered around science, love, technical progress, and a faith in reason.” These beliefs were folly, Voltaire thought: the transfer of faith from a providential God to a perfect, clockwork universe. Candide satirizes this happy rationalism in Doctor Pangloss, whose belief that ours is the best of possible worlds comes directly from the philosophical optimism of Gottfried Leibniz . The preponderance of the evidence, Voltaire made abundantly clear in the novel’s series of increasingly horrific episodes, points toward a blind, indifferent universe full of needless cruelty and chaos. “Hope was, he felt, a disease,” de Botton says, and “it was Voltaire’s generous goal to try and cure us of it.” But as everyone who has read Candide (or read a summary or brief notes on Candide ) knows, the novel does not end with ...
Post a Comment
Read more

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

An Interactive Map of Odysseus’ 10-Year Journey in Homer’s Odyssey

The Odyssey , one of Homer's two great epics, narrates Odysseus' long, strange trip home after the Trojan war . During their ten-year journey, Odysseus and his men had to overcome divine and natural forces, from battering storms and winds to difficult encounters with the Cyclops Polyphemus, the cannibalistic Laestrygones, the witch-goddess Circe and the rest. And they took a most circuitous route, bouncing all over the Mediterranean, moving first down to Crete and Tunisia. Next over to Sicily, then off toward Spain, and back to Greece again. If you're looking for an easy way to visualize all of the twists and turns in  The Odyssey , then we'd recommend spending some time with the  interactive map created by Gisèle Mounzer .  "Odysseus' Journey"  breaks down Odysseus' voyage into 14 key scenes and locates them on a modern map designed by Esri, a company that creates GIS mapping software. Meanwhile, if you're interested in the whole concept of ...
Post a Comment
Read more