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December 01, 2006
Even Herzog started small: Rosefelt recollects
Another feat of recall at Zoom-In from vet publicist-now-indie-consultant Reid Rosefelt, who remembers the 1970s apparition of Werner Herzog and the New German Cinema in NYC: "
"When I started... in the late 70s, it was hard to get people to go to German movies. At that time, going to a foreign film mainly meant French and Italian movies.... Remember Cousin, Cousine? Films like that played forever at the Paris Theatre... But there was a resistance to German films... Fassbinder made a lot of films and they were very forbidding aesthetically. It took a long campaign from Vincent Canby in the New York Times to get people to pay attention... I saw Herzog's Even Dwarfs Started Small at college and then The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser when I got to New York. So I was a huge fan when Werner brought his films to New Yorker Films... I had to write some stuff for the catalog! On movies that hadn't come out in the U.S. yet! ... [A]ll the journalism was really weird. One piece said that Werner tried to start his own country in Africa. I was just off the boat from Wisconsin, so I figured that if he said it, it must be true... When I finally met Werner, I asked him how he had done it. Did he run for office? Did he form an army? ... Did he make Bruno S. king? Werner just stared at me blankly. It didn't appear like the question bothered him. It wasn't like, "Why did you ask me such a stupid thing?" It was just sort of....nothing... Over the years... I was very fortunate to be around him for Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, Stroszek, and other great films. Kinski too. I'm one of the few people who thinks Kinski was saner than Werner, but I guess, to paraphrase Bill Clinton, "It depends on how you define sanity." [Photo: Herzog in Rosefelt's New Yorker Films cubicle.]
Posted by Ray Pride at December 1, 2006 09:08 AM
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