Werner Herzog
1974
45 minutes
You're not a fan of ski-flying or ski-jumping or ski-running or any outdoor winter sports, to be perfectly honest. This is probably a perfectly fine Werner Herzog documentary. You're surprised the concentration on wood-carving isn't greater. It's almost a blink-and-you-miss-it sort of thing. From then on it seems a straight up over-directed German sports documentary which was apparently shot for television. There are some dramatic mid-air shots of a guy on skis and a lot of fussing over how many inches or seconds or whatever he made it versus the existing record, the safety of the course, et cetera. Your eyes glaze over a bit as thee minutiae are discussed.
Your strongest association with seeing someone on skis repeatedly is the "agony of defeat" section on the opening credits of the television show Wide World of Sports in which a ski jumper crashes out in a dramatic manner. You had to watch this show repeatedly on Saturday afternoons when you were a kid and were dragged around to you mother's boyfriend's house. It marked the End of Cartoons and the point at which you lost any control of the television and were banished to "go play outside" or whatever, well out of earshot of grown-ups since children were not to be seen or heard.
You were just young enough still to be enjoying cartoons but not so young that you would find going outdoors by yourself in the middle of the woods very stimulating. You were at just the right age to find going out in the woods by yourself frightening and unpleasant. There was plenty to look at, of course. You could stare at trees. You could stand on a rusty pontoon and stare at a scum-covered lake allegedly full of water moccasins. You could try to untangle fishing line from the half-broken fishing poles on the pontoon. You could check one of the outdoor dogs running around for ticks and fleas. You could pick up sticks and break them against other sticks. You could walk around getting muddy. There weren't any other children around to play games with or anything. Sometimes your mom's boyfriend's son, who was several years older than you, might amuse himself by bullying you. He seemed to like picking you up by the throat and choking you and calling you a little faggot, but you enjoyed this much less than he did.
At night the woods were dark and full of terrors. They looked like a photo-negative version of what they looked like during the day. In the year of the cicadas they were full of deafening and ominous creaking sounds, louder than the frogs and the crickets, and at the height you found yourself walking ankle deep amongst a bunch of discarded cicada exoskeletons. Your entire world was crawling with dead insects. You'd scurry inside and listen to your walkman with your three rotating cassette tapes and try to be neither seen nor heard.
Time to choose something different: