Acclaimed filmmaker Werner Herzog is best known for his obsessions with the monumental issues of human existence: technology, art, beauty, death, the unforgiving brutality of nature, and the exploration of the unknown. But he also considers—and complains about—the banality of everyday life and the minutia of current events. Here is the German artist’s take* on being stuck on an interminable corporate conference call:
Am I in the wrong place here, or in the wrong life? Did I not recognize, as I sat in a train that raced past a station and did not stop, that I was on the wrong train, and did I not learn from the conductor that the train would not stop at the next station, either, a hundred kilometers away, and did he not also admit to me, whispering with his hand shielding his mouth, that the train would not stop again at all?
This has been Werner Herzog’s Hot Take of the Day.
*Technically a quote about the making of his 1982 film, Fitzcarraldo.