March 16, 2006
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417
AMHERST, Mass.—Werner Herzog, the director of Grizzly Man (2005), will show some of his new work and discuss “Seeking Images—Making Movies” at 4 p.m. on Sunday, April 9, in Stirn Auditorium at Amherst College. Sponsored by the Georges Lurcy Lecture Series Fund and the Department of German at Amherst College, this event is free and open to the public. Grizzly Man will be shown at 4 and 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 6, in Stirn Auditorium as part of the Department of German film series. The film is also free and open to the public.
One of the leaders—with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders and Volker Schlöndorff—of the influential postwar New German Cinema in the 1970s in the Federal Republic of Germany, Herzog studied history, literature and music in Munich and at the University of Pittsburgh. Herzog’s films—whether dramas, or, as most of his recent work, documentaries—are noted for both their deeply felt mystical foundations and their surreal exoticism. His exacting techniques—the casting of dwarves or mentally ill actors, hypnosis for the entire cast and asking his actors to haul a 300-ton ship over a mountain for Fitzcarraldo (1982)—are sometimes controversial.
Lebenszeichen (1967, Signs of Life) was Herzog’s first feature. Herzog’s further documentaries and films include Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen (1970, Even Dwarfs Started Small), Fata Morgana (1971), Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (1972, Aguirre, the Wrath of God), Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (1975, Every Man for Himself and God Against All or The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser), Stroszek (1977), Herz aus Glas (1977, Heart of Glass), Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979, Nosferatu the Vampyre), Woyzeck (1979), Schrei aus Stein (1991, Scream of Stone) and Invincible (2000).
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