A character who is always on the GO [sic] for World Productivity Day

“I am the great traitor. There must be no other. Anyone who even thinks about deserting this mission will be cut up into 198 pieces. Those pieces will be stamped on until what is left can be used only to paint walls. Whoever takes one grain of corn or one drop of water… more than his ration, will be locked up for 155 years. If I, Aguirre, want the birds to drop dead from the trees… then the birds will drop dead from the trees. I am the wrath of God. The earth I pass will see me and tremble. But whoever follows me and the river, will win untold riches. But whoever deserts…””

– Don Lope de Aguirre

Conquistador Don Lope de Aguirre drives his men deep into the Peruvian jungle, to El Dorado

“Ich sollte eigentlich ganz allein auf der Welt sein, ich, Steiner, und sonst kein anderes lebendes Wesen. Keine Sonne, keine Kultur, ich nackt auf einem hohen Fels, kein Sturm, kein Schnee, keine Straßen, keine Banken, kein Geld, keine Zeit und kein Atem. Ich würde dann jedenfalls keine Angst mehr haben.”

– Walter Steiner

Winter sports in celebration of the Chamonix 1924 Winter Olympics.

“Ich sollte eigentlich ganz allein auf der Welt sein, ich, Steiner, und sonst kein anderes lebendes Wesen. Keine Sonne, keine Kultur, ich nackt auf einem hohen Fels, kein Sturm, kein Schnee, keine Straßen, keine Banken, kein Geld, keine Zeit und kein Atem. Ich würde dann jedenfalls keine Angst mehr haben.”

– Walter Steiner

In a film that is as much about Herzog as it is about Steiner, we follow the soft-spoken woodcarver in preparation of his definitive ski flight in Planica, Yugoslavia.

A short main character for National Short Person Day (USA).

“When we behave nobody cares. But when we are bad nobody forgets.”

– Hombré

“I look into the distance to the end of the world. Before the day is over, the end will come. First, time will tumble, and then the earth. The clouds will begin to race… the earth boils over; this is the sign. This is the beginning of the end. The world's edge begins to crumble… everything starts to collapse… tumbles, fall, crumbles and collapses. I look into the cataract. I feel an undertow, it draws me, it sucks me down. I began to fal, a vertigo seizes upon me.”

– Hias

Someone has bad breath on National 12-hour Fresh Breath Day (USA)

 

“When he shows the 1978 film Always for Pleasure, about the food, music and indigenous culture of New Orleans, [Les Blank] has been known to whip up a pot of red beans and rice in the back of the theatre. [cont. below]

“Can you smell the garlic?”

– Alice Waters. During screenings, the audience would reply with “YES!”

“At presentations […] Blank can occasionally be spied tossing several heads of garlic into a toaster oven so that the aroma wafts over the audience at just the right mouth-watering moment.” (via)

After boiling for five hours in a concoction of #garlic, herbs, and stock, the shoe was ready to eat and #Herzog could keep his promise to fellow director Errol Morris.

“More shoes, more boots, more garlic.”

– Werner Herzog

Bruno Stroszek (Bruno S.), his friends Eva (Eva Mattes) and Scheitz (Clemens Scheitz, responsible for the fairy-tale music you hear in this film) decide to leave dreary #Berlin behind and move to #Wisconsin where the latter's nephew lives. A new life, with dreams of music and animal magnetism, awaits them there.

“Was ist loos? Der Hund is loose.”

– Clayton

As so oft with #Herzog, the story behind Stroszek is as engrossing as the resulting film. Documentary maker Errol Morris and Herzog were fascinated by Wisconsin's own Ed Gein and wondered if Gein had dug up his own mother, as was rumoured at the time. As they would, they decided to open the poor woman's grave. Morris never showed up, and neither did Herzog but only because his car broke down en route to Plainfield, Wisconsin. Trying to get the vehicle fixed, Herzog entered the workshop of a Clayton Szalpinski.

 

A character in his own right, and a non-actor to boot, Clayton ended up in Stroszek as Scheitz's nephew; a MacGuffin odder than a dancing chicken.

“We're in America now.”

– Bruno S.

#Herzog travels to New Holland, Pennsylvania to witness the 1976 World Livestock Auctioneer Championship. Cattle is weighed and paraded in front of the buyers, and the 53 contestants have a few minutes to auction the animals off to the highest bidder.

 

We see glimpses of the audience. New Holland is the land of the money-eschewing #Amish, descendants of German-speaking Swiss, whose dress, ways and speech found an ideal state in an increasingly convoluted world. While money rolls, the Amish hand out their home-baked pies free of charge to the Championship onlookers.

 

To German-as-Apfeltorte Herzog, the auction is bewildering, the “last #poetry possible, the poetry of #capitalism”. In keeping with Herzog's poetic, ecstatic truth, Bruno S. too travels to America and encounters the auctioneers in Stroszek (1977).