They will discuss their collaboration on Hearsay of the Soul, a five-channel video installation that opens at the Getty Center on July 23, 2013, as well as explore other films and the relationship between images and music.
“It is exciting to be hosting a celebrated filmmaker and an accomplished musician as they discuss their work in a museum setting,” says Arpad Kovacs, assistant curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum. “We look forward to an engaging discussion that sheds light on the complex and valuable relationship between the visual and musical arts.”
Installed in a single gallery in the Museum’s North Pavilion, Hearsay of the Soul dramatically fuses images from the distant past with contemporary experimental music. The screens slowly sweep over magnified details of small landscape etchings by Hercules Segers (about 1589–about 1638), and also features a performance filmed by Herzog of Reijseger playing the cello and musician Harmen Fraanje playing the organ in a Lutheran church in Haarlem, the Netherlands. The video echoes Herzog’s approach in both his documentary work and narrative films, which often employ simple equipment and deceptively basic techniques to achieve powerful visual and emotional effects.
Werner Herzog (born 1942 in Munich) is an internationally renowned filmmaker. He is the director of numerous masterpieces of the New German Cinema, including The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) and Fitzcarraldo (1982), as well as the innovative documentaries Grizzly Man (2005) and Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010). Interested in both documentary and fictional narratives, he has moved seamlessly between the two genres and managed to create a diverse body of work that has become a major influence for many contemporary filmmakers and artists. Herzog is based in Los Angeles.
Ernst Reijseger (born 1954, in Bussum, the Netherlands) is a Dutch cellist and composer specializing in jazz, improvised music, and contemporary classical music. He has worked with a number of noted musicians, including Louis Sclavis, Derek Bailey, Han Bennink, Misha Mengelberg, Gerry Hemingway, and Yo-Yo Ma, among others. Reijseger has also written several film scores, including scores for a number of Werner Herzog films.
Hearsay of the Soul: Images, Music, and Ecstasies
Saturday, August 3, 2013, 5pm
Harold M. Williams Auditorium, Getty Center
Free; reservations required.