Monday, December 26, 2011

Werner Herzog will eat his shoe

It is hard to tell when genius assumes the mantle of madness. In the world of films, the kind is exemplified by the Kubricks and the Herzogs - genius madmen in the wake of whose creative destruction we all cower spellbound. 

Welcome the new (and may we suggest 'the looniest') example - Ilya Khrzhanovsky.

NF has been a fan of Ilya for a couple of years now. His scorchingly original film - 4 - was mindfuckingly brilliant. (For the uninitiated NF sometimes describes the film as Linklater-meets-Tarkovsky-meets-György Pálfi-meets-Lynch. Though this should not let you think he's a linear combination - instead, his vision is as unique as these directors' when they were coming of age.)

Witness the fabulous article in GQ on his latest film that he's been working on since '06 - Dau - based on the life of the genius physicist Lev Landau. It's an account of genius, madness, obsession, pedantry; and a social experiment on such a grand scale that it relegates Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo to small time tinkerers of the human psyche. 

Personally for Nanga Fakir, this is the most anticipated film of all time. All hail Ilya!

1 comment:

rohan.choukkar said...

Classic Nanga Fakir article - with the name-throwing! (wink wink)