16 – 18 September 2005, at the Goethe-Institut, London
Organised by the University of Kent and the Goethe-Institut
This conference considers the films of Werner Herzog in the light of his more recent documentary output. It will provide a forum for the discussion of this work and Herzog’s documentary manifesto _The Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema_ (1999) with its polemic against observational documentary. Whereas his fiction films have frequently been described as having a ‘documentary quality’, his documentaries seem to want to contest the category of documentary filmmaking. In fact, the filmmaker himself has emphasized that the latter are not documentaries, due to the stagings they contain. From _Land of Silence and Darkness_ (1971) to _Wheel of Time_ (2003) his documentaries have explored the gap between documentary objectivity and spiritual or embodied experience, problematising the notion of documentary subjectivity. We invite contributions on the documentary in Herzog’s films, and the questions for documentary practice and theory that his films raise. Topics might include but need not be confined to:
- The relationship between creation or authorship and documentation
- Herzog’s treatment of the traditional subject/object division in documentary
- A reassessment of the notions of fiction and non-fiction
- Issues of staging and ‘truth’
- Uses of re-enactment and stylization
- Herzog’s concept of ‘athletic cinema’
- Aspects of the spiritual and the meta-physical
- Aesthetic concepts such as the sublime and Romanticism in the interpretation of Herzog’s documentaries
- The reception of Herzog and his work inside and outside of Germany
- Re-evaluations and re-contextualizations of the ideological connotations in Herzog’s films
Keynote Speakers are:
Timothy Corrigan (University of Pennsylvania)
Alan Singer (Temple University)
Erica Carter (Warwick University)
Thomas Elsaesser (University of Amsterdam)
The conference will be accompanied by screenings of Herzog’s documentary work. Please send proposals of no more than 300 words for papers of 20 minutes to the e-mail address shown below. Deadline for abstracts is 30 March 2005.
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