This is funny. [The formatting at New Yorker page is terrible. I've made things clearer]
"WERNER HERZOG INSULTS HIS BETTERS"
On the occasion of a complete retrospective of Werner Herzog’s films at the Pompidou Center, in Paris, Le Monde published, today, an interview with the director, which contains the following unpleasant response to a question from the critic Jacques Mandelbaum:
You’re usually counted, alongside Werner Schroeter or Rainer Werner Fassbinder, among the directors who launched the new German cinema in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Do you agree with this?[WH] It’s a factual and technical coincidence. In reality, I never participated in any of their collective projects, I never shared their ideas, which I found mediocre, and I wasn’t friends with them. I grew up poor and worked in a factory, and considered them petits-bourgeois who played with the idea of world revolution and whose political analyses seemed absurd to me. At the time, I was considered a fascist for this. So I’ve always been solitary and isolated in my work.
It’s true that there was a lot of casual talk of revolution at that time; but nobody who loves the cinema remembers Fassbinder for his political views or cares very much about them. Fassbinder is an artist of enduring significance, and his “Berlin Alexanderplatz”—and not only that series—is greater than anything Herzog has done.
And Schroeter, a true visionary who has worked more or less under the radar for forty years, knows the real meaning of professional solitude and isolation. His 1991 film “Malina” has an ecstatic ferocity that is in a different league from Herzog’s self-righteous sarcasms."...nobody who loves the cinema remembers Fassbinder for his political views or cares very much about them."
If you can't feel the reactionary sensibilities in Fassbinder, the taste of fascist shit, you miss the point.
Richard Brody is an idiot fop.
All art is "political". Politics has nothing to do with "intent".
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