The obscenity of the jungle...
Friday, August 6, 2010 at 10:59AM I don't think I've seen any of his films but I really want to now. Though I don't entirely relate to his words, they really spoke to me about things I felt growing up on a farm and witnessing the cruel, pungent, life, death and decay of the natural world. It spoke to me about the cold, large, ancient virgin forests of my home country, New Zealand. It spoke to me of the somehow more subdued and calming forests I saw in Japan. It especially spoke of the humid, dangerous, intense jungle I felt and saw in Papua New Guinea.
It spoke to something erotic, ancient, dark, damp, frightening and enticing in my mind. It spoke to me of the way we repress these things in ourselves and attempt to create order, inside and out. It spoke of the way we turn jungles into gardens and erotic desires into bad porn.
Yeah, um, wow. Gonna have to let this sit in my brain for awhile and see if anything comes of it.
Reader Comments (9)
Calling stars messy makes me feel weirded out. There is something deeply stirring about raw wildness like that, but I don't think stamping it as simply messy and miserable sits comfortably. It's raw, vicious and the very essence of life and death...it's beautiful and I guess we're still just villagers afraid of the woods but death and sex doesn't make things unappealing, it is the very definition of life - it is woven, it endures and then it ends...no matter how we define things, how we structure our lives...and I think it's this raw and very beautiful reflection of life that brings things to primative awe and a feeling of immediacy and adrenalin though 'living in the moment' and squirmy feelings of unsettling which is sexy.
IMH(and unlearned)O
And thank-you- this movie is going to be bookmarked as anything that gets me thinking about wildness needs to be watched again and again as it's definately one of my favorite topics.
But the stars ARE messy! The universe is not made out of order and safety but chaos, struggle, death! And it's humbling, horrifying, and awe inspiring!
I think "miserable" works perfectly, but I guess it's how you take the word... I perceive life as very similar, miserable, cruel.. we all struggle and kill other life to sustain our own. That is horrible but that is reality and reality is beautiful in its horror and misery. I love his perspective on nature because I think we have a tendency to romanticise nature as something apart from us, tame, Walt Disney... but WE are nature and WE are messy and miserable. But it's beautiful because it's a misery coming from struggle against all odds.
Hmmm, I feel as if him, you are I are all saying things that are pretty similar but speaking slightly different languages. But then, I only just got up and my brain isn't entirely functional yet!
P.S. I love you!
I think as a species we've been so successful at dominating the earth that in the parts we don't dominate it comes as a real shock to see in the unfamiliar the same aspects of life we take for granted as normalised in the context of our own culture and home. So murder in the the jungle is a sunday roast in suburbia, it's still interspecies murder. I think this shock has made him a bit glum about it all actually. The people who live in the jungle just get on with it because it's their normality. They'd probably be well shocked if they explored a big city.
Wow! no spelling mistakes, now I'm shocked myself! :)
I think messy weirded me out not because I claim they have order but because what the fuck did he expect?
To boil the ballet of exsistance down with human morality and saying that living through death is miserable seems an ill fit to me, but I think we do have not only different definitions of miserable, but different ways of viewing life.
Jessie I have two box sets of Herzog's films that I'd be happy to lend you.
Ohhh yes please Kate!
Hi, darling, I have a lot of Hertzog's films he's on my top list of the directors. Should lend you some as well:)
he is so hilarious. hyperbolic and german - what better combination?