Times Quotidian » wodabee http://www.timesquotidian.com ...an Infinite Amount of Things to Speak Of Fri, 03 Sep 2010 07:01:42 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Werner Herzog, February 20, 2009, Royce Hall, UCLA — Part 1 http://www.timesquotidian.com/2009/03/02/werner-herzog-february-20-2009-royce-hall-ucla-%e2%80%94-part-1/ http://www.timesquotidian.com/2009/03/02/werner-herzog-february-20-2009-royce-hall-ucla-%e2%80%94-part-1/#comments Mon, 02 Mar 2009 13:00:41 +0000 Nancy Cantwell http://www.timesquotidian.com/?p=520 herzog_cropWerner Herzog truly has an infinite amount of things to speak of. I wanted to speak about this lecture sooner, but in attempting to do so I found myself, like Alice, sliding down the proverbial rabbit hole, tracking sown some strange and wondrous knowledge. Here is what I learned:

PART 1

That George Murphy and Fred Astraire danced and sang their hearts out in the Cole Porter “Broadway Melody of 1940“. If you get a chance to see it on the big screen, do it!

That Werner Herzog is a human enthusiast, a champion of the raw psyche, condensed emotionality, “Fever Dreams“, and the “Ecstatic Truth“. Thus being said, he is the prime candidate to direct opera. Documenting the Wodabee tribes of the Sahara provides Herzog with the opportunity to explore a dramatic dialectic. He seizes the moment to pair footage of the tribesmen, highly decorated, dressed in transvestite finery, flashing the whites of their eyes and teeth (regarded as extremely appealing to the opposite sex) with the only recorded castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, his solo ‘Ave Maria’ by Gounod, recorded in 1904 in the Vatican. The synchronicity is arresting and makes for a most memorable operatic moment.


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