Werner Penzel In Memoriam

Filmmaker Werner Penzel has died in Italy. He was 75 and had lived in Japan for many years. His feature documentary Zen for Nothing premiered in the USA as an International Buddhist Film Festival (IBFF) 2018 Official Selection, and he was the cinematographer for an IBFF favorite, Doris Dörrie’s 1999 Enlightenment Guaranteed.

Werner Penzel was born in Germany in 1950 and led an eclectic life. In the 1960s he played in rock bands and wrote poetry, first published in R. D. Brinkmann’s underground magazine Der Froehliche Tarzan. In the 1970s he worked and lived with the Brazilian theater company Oficina in Rio De Janeiro, accompanied the Living Theatre in Europe, studied at Munich Film Academy, and traveled through South and Central America, North Africa, India, the USA, and Japan, where he spent time practicing in Eiheiji and Antaiji Zen monasteries. After making Vagabunden Karawane, Pirates of Silence, Adios al Odio, and other films, in 1987 he established the production company CineNomad with Nicolas Humbert, a collaboration which resulted in: Step Across the Border and Middle of the Moment, both featuring the musician Fred Frith and involving lots of travel among circus people and other nomads; the film triptych and book Three Windows, and the chamber-film Why should I buy a bed when all that I want is sleep?, both featuring American poet/visual artist (and close friend of Thomas Merton) Robert Lax at his long-term home on the island of Patmos, Greece; and the jazz portrait of Yusef Lateef, Brother Yusef.

He also gave lectures, workshops, and seminars at film, media, and art academies in Munich, Berlin, Zurich, Genever, Lausanne, and Lugano. In 2006 he established jourparjour company in Estavayer-Le-Lac, Switzerland—together with his wife, Ayako Mogi, Res Balzli, Marion Neumann, and Christoph Balmer—to start Laboratoire Village Nomade. In 2009 he moved to the island of Awaji-shima in Japan, founding nomadomura together with Ayako Mogi and Misa Shimomura to continue filmmaking, music, and art, and kept working on cultural exchange and human research projects. His wife and their two daughters, Lina and Sayo, survive him.

Penzel often went beyond the call of duty as a filmmaker. For Robert Lax, who needed to get home from Europe but wouldn’t fly, he participated in a caravan of several people to accompany Lax from a clinic in Brussels where he had been taken for treatment, to a ship in Southampton, England that sailed to New York, where he was picked up and driven to a family house in Olean, NY. Royalties from the Three Windows project helped pay for the journey, and Lax lived out his last days at home with his family. Penzel once quoted a Lax query with appreciation, “Is there no way of giving to our waking lives the relative fluidity of dreams?”

Photographs of Werner Penzel copyright Gaetano Kazuo Maida.