German filmmaker spends week at IU campus

The Indiana Memorial Union’s Whittenberger Auditorium can seat about 400 people.
 
But Tuesday evening, about 200 people were turned away to hear German filmmaker Werner Herzog deliver his first Patten lecture of the week.

Herzog, one of a few German directors who emerged during the New German Cinema movement from the 1960s to the 1980s, is one of three Patten lecturers conducted by the William T. Patten Foundation for 2012-13.

The second lecture, “The Transformative Role of Music in Film,” was originally scheduled for 7:30 p.m. today at the Whittenberger Auditorium but was moved to the IU Auditorium to accommodate a potentially larger audience.

During his lecture Tuesday evening, “The Search for Ecstatic Truth,” Herzog explored the topic of how truth is represented in cinema. He incorporated humor, literature, film clips and anecdotal information from his filmmaking experiences.

“His whole career he’s been crossing back and forth between documentary and fiction film,” said Gregory Waller, who has taught courses in American and Japanese cinema at the Department of Communication and Culture. “And most directors don’t do that. They do it pretty rarely. ... He’s very much present in most of them as a kind of subject or a presence.”

In addition to giving the two Patten lectures, attending classes and meeting faculty, Herzog will participate in a public interview with Waller at 3 p.m. Friday at the IU Cinema.

Waller, editor of the academic journal Film History, will transcribe the interview and ask Herzog his own questions. The transcription will be used for an article in the journal’s next issue.

Herzog’s appearance at the cinema is endowed in part by the Ove W Jorgensen
Foundation.

Some of Herzog’s most popular films, including “Fitzcarraldo,” have been added to IU Cinema’s film schedule.

Indermohan Virk, executive director of the Patten Foundation, said an emeritus faculty member told her the lecture attendance Tuesday was the largest he’s seen in 50 years.

“This opportunity is exactly what the foundation was established for,” Virk said. “To bring folks who have made some achievements and left a mark in their field.”

Herzog is the second filmmaker chosen for a Patten lecture. In 1977-78, documentary filmmaker Marcel Ophuls was a Patten lecturer.

After a few years of correspondence with Herzog, IU Cinema Director Jon Vickers nominated the director for a lectureship.

Before the Tuesday night lecture, Vickers called Herzog a poet, craftsman, tamer of wild actors, surveyor of landscapes and seeker of truth.

“I just returned from the Toronto Film Festival and spoke with many colleagues that are programmers, and everyone is jealous of Indiana University for having Werner Herzog for five days,” Vickers said. “I mean, truly, so many people have tried to get him to come to their cinetech, and to have him for five days is pretty unprecedented.”

Faculty members from communications and culture, the Germanic studies department and the film and media studies department wrote letters of recommendation to the Patten Foundation.

“We feel that we put together a really fantastic nomination, which I think was enthusiastically and unanimously approved,” Vickers said.