Werner Herzog
1991
85 minutes
This is a very colorful Werner Herzog documentary that documents elaborate theatrical performances for a festival in India. It's accompanied by one of Herzog's notorious fake backstories to give "context" to the proceedings, of course. It includes performances of various musicians and magicians and contortionists and dancers.
It always makes you a little uneasy watching stuff like this without any real cultural context for what the performers are doing and why. On one hand, you find it healthy to seek out other cultures and appreciate what they have to give. On the other hand you don't want to be the square white person standing there bobbing your head and doing a lame little dance in place as though you were at a party in an animated Peanuts cartoon, tunelessly humming along with a big smile on your face and congratulating yourself at how "world-y" the experience feels. You don't want to pretend you're the main character and everyone else is just there as quaint background entertainment for you personally.
When you were flying back from Paris, there was a man on your flight from New York to Baltimore who had just been to a notorious Thai New Year festival in Thailand where everyone in the streets squirts each other with water guns. He was loudly bragging about attending this festival to anyone else on the plane who would listen to him. Apparently he got quite a thrill out of it. From the timing of your flight compared to the date of the festival, you gathered that he had scheduled his stay in Thailand for a good week after that, and his further lurid comments indicated that he was delighted to spend several days in a place where everything is so cheap and available for purchase. You have known and worked with more than one person who would take similar cheap trips to Thailand so that they could freely spray fluids around at bargain prices. You found this to be quite a depressing welcome back to the United States.
Time to choose something different: