Tuesday November 8, 7:30pm Seattle Art Museum
An evening with Werner Herzog featured the North American Premier of his latest, "The Wild Blue Yonder", a strange, fictitious, quasi-documentary starring Brad Dourif as an alien and self described failure. Herzog uses a combination of vintage newsreel, NASA and exotic Antarctic Ocean footage along with bizarre narration from Dourif shot in the California Ghost town of Niland to tell a story of human travel to a far off planet and convince the viewer that interstellar space travel is utterly absurd. "My firm belief is that there will be no space travel of any significance. There is nothing out there for us. There is nothing out there period!" Running over the montage of otherworldly images is a musical score of Sardinian and Senegalese folk music, including "Shepherd's songs that date back to pre-history." The combination is at times tedious but at other times beautiful and hypnotic. The post-show discussion revealed Herzog to be thoughtful and engaging. He described Dourif as "My face, my appearance, my voice and my thought." Dourif chimed in with his own anecdotes, "I remember Werner calling me and saying, Brad, aliens suck!" A big shout out to Scarecrow Video and SAM for this memorable evening!
An evening with Werner Herzog featured the North American Premier of his latest, "The Wild Blue Yonder", a strange, fictitious, quasi-documentary starring Brad Dourif as an alien and self described failure. Herzog uses a combination of vintage newsreel, NASA and exotic Antarctic Ocean footage along with bizarre narration from Dourif shot in the California Ghost town of Niland to tell a story of human travel to a far off planet and convince the viewer that interstellar space travel is utterly absurd. "My firm belief is that there will be no space travel of any significance. There is nothing out there for us. There is nothing out there period!" Running over the montage of otherworldly images is a musical score of Sardinian and Senegalese folk music, including "Shepherd's songs that date back to pre-history." The combination is at times tedious but at other times beautiful and hypnotic. The post-show discussion revealed Herzog to be thoughtful and engaging. He described Dourif as "My face, my appearance, my voice and my thought." Dourif chimed in with his own anecdotes, "I remember Werner calling me and saying, Brad, aliens suck!" A big shout out to Scarecrow Video and SAM for this memorable evening!