brad brace contemporary culture scrapbook

Whale Rider • Bladerunner • Bicycle Thief • Until the End of the World • Wings of Desire • Blue Velvet • Pulp Fiction • Rear Window •
L-Avventura • The Machinist • Shadow Magic • American Splendor • Lolita • Vertigo • A Story of Floating Weeds • La Strada: Special
Edition • Fitzcarraldo • Umberto D. • Aquirre: The Wrath of God • Open City • Gummo • Even Dwarfs Started Small • Ossessione • Rocco
& His Brothers • La Terra Trema • Crazed Fruit • Tony Takitani • Lessons of Darkness • Wheel of Time • Grizzly Man • The Flowers of St
Francis • Knife in the Water • Le Notti Bianche • Why Does Herr R. Run Amok • Chinese Roulette • Favela Rising • Cobra Verde • Control
Room • The Trial • Heart of Glass • Rollerball • The Pornographers • The Thomas Crown Affair • In the Heat of the Night • NIghts of
Cabiria • Touch of Evil • Derrida • Basquiat • Pollock • Ali: Fears Eats the Soul • Bombay • Mother India • Voices of Iraq • Andrei
Rublev • The Third Man • The Killers • Red Beard • Chinatown • On the Waterfront • Sholay • Ran • Pyaasa • The Life of Birds • Dev •
Miss India • Twin Peaks • Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas • Naach • Sarkar • Maya • The Motorcycle Diaries • Bold • Born into Brothels
• Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi • Anand • A Passage to India • Taxi Driver • The Terrorist • India: Kingdom of the Tiger • Yasujiro Ozu’s Good
Morning • How to Draw a Bunny • Salaam Bombay • Nayagan: Tamil • Veer-Zaara • Gandhi • Foxy Brown • Visions of LIght • Arakimentari • Rashomon • Blood of a Poet • Inch’ Allah Dimanche • A Soul Haunted by Painting • I Dreamed of Africa • A Panther in Africa: POV • Mama
Africa • Africa: The Serengeti • Out of Africa • Africa Blood and Guts • The American Friend • National Geographic: Africa • Run Lola
Run • Hidden Fortress • Breathless • La Dolce Vita • The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams’ Appalachia • Children of Paradise
• Lost Boys of Sudan • La Notte • Tokyo Story • L’Eclisse • Lolita • Citizen Kane • Battleship Potemkin • Man with the Movie Camera •
Legend of 1900 • L’Avventura • La Belle Noiseuse • Nowhere in Africa • 8-1/2 • The Battle of Algiers • The Idiot • The Bad Sleep Well •
Pi: Faith in Chaos • Ikiru • Eraserhead • M • City of God • Hotel Rwanda •

“LESSONS OF DARKNESS”

1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.

2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. “For me,” he says, “there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail.” Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.

3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.

4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.

5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.

6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.

7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.

8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: “You can´t legislate stupidity.”

9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.

10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn´t call, doesn´t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don´t you listen to the Song of Life.

11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.

12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species – including man – crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.

Minneapolis, Minnesota April 30, 1999
Werner Herzog