Germany / England / France,
2005, 78 min
Shown in 2006
CREDITS
- dir
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Werner Herzog
- prod
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Andre Singer
- scr
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Werner Herzog
- cam
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Tanja Koop, Henry Kaiser, Klaus Scheurich
- editor
-
Joe Bini
- mus
-
Ernst Reijseger
- cast
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Brad Dourif, Donald Williams, Ellen Baker, Franklin Chang-Diaz, Shannon Lucid, Michael McCulley
- source
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518 Media Inc., 11684 Ventura Blvd Suite 1300, Studio City, CA 91604. FAX: 818-508-3089. EMAIL: impa@earthlink.net.
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COMMENTS
Werner Herzog was the 2006 Film Society Directing Award Recipient, interviewed on stage by David Sterritt.
OTHER
“I want to use imagery and sound in a way you have never before experienced.” This is how Werner Herzog describes his mesmerizing new science fiction/fantasy, a “space oratorio” (its original subheading) whose haunting music and environmental romanticism seem more attuned to the serene moments of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Earth’s own otherworldly beauty than any ordinary sci-fi flick. A Klaus Kinski-eyed Brad Dourif is a space alien gone to seed, living in an abandoned southern Californian ghost town (“We built a mall here, but nobody shopped”) and stewing over CIA conspiracies, Roswell cover-ups and eons-long interplanetary travel (“Our ancestors were great scientists, but the journey was long and boring and, by the time we finally arrived, we all just sucked.”) His literally down-to-earth ravings are intercut with images from “a secret interstellar NASA mission” to his own home planet, the “Wild Blue Yonder.” This audible fiction, however, is visual science: Herzog appropriates previously unseen footage of a 1989 NASA launch for the “interstellar” mission and uses underwater images from the Arctic ice shelf for the alien world. Herzog accompanies these strange visions with one of cinema’s most hypnotic scores—a blend of Handel opera, jazz cello, Senegalese vocals and a five-man Sardinian shepherd’s choir, it sounds like nothing and everything one has ever heard, simultaneously earthly and unearthly. Unclassifiable, luminous, but at times quite comic, The Wild Blue Yonder is Herzog’s most innovative film yet, skeptically questioning humanity’s wisdom while embracing its habitat’s incandescent beauty—one more otherworldly than outer space.
—Jason Sanders
FACTOID #217
A sporadic SFIFF tradition, fashion shows are lighthearted affairs that help raise funds for the Festival. In 1968, Oakland designer Richard Tam mounted a show at the Fairmont Hotel that attracted high society; the Examiner commented that the show ’combined Tam’s simple daytime elegance with his almost theatrical evening gowns.’
