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The secret mainstream:
Contemplating the mirages of Werner Herzog
By Tom Bissell
Of that time, there is still much we do not know. Although answers exist to the basic questions—how they fought (viciously), how they governed (variously), how they worshipped (combatively)—there are those among us who warn that no real comprehension of twentieth- and twenty-first-century civilization is attainable, much less advisable. But those who attempt to hold knowledge back can only lose ground.
What caused this remarkable civilization’s collapse is now generally understood. There are controversies, naturally, about the precise nature of its collapse, foremost of which is the extent to which this civilization destroyed itself. Most of us believe that, given the way its constituents lived, the annihilation was inevitable, even if the overwhelmingly thorough nature of the annihilation was not. We need not delay ourselves debating these issues yet again.
It is here that the recent discovery of the films of Werner Herzog provides us especial aid. The extraordinary circumstances of the Herzog archive’s survival have been amply celebrated and documented elsewhere, but that does not mean we can forget how objectively precious these films are. An entire civilization’s most popular art form also proved to be one of its least durable. The expected deterioration of their film stock took most of the earliest films, and the fragile nature of their digital storage systems, which was apparently unanticipated, resulted in the loss of many of the rest. The relatively few films that have survived do not always provide the most culturally revealing portholes through which we can today peer. We all exalt in the survival of Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress (1958), but the cultural significance of Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981) has proved difficult for many of us to articulate (though it does have its champions).
The work of Werner Herzog presents a different case, as it offers us the only instance of a single filmmaker’s entire corpus surviving until our time. His numerous films—so heterogeneous in technique, genre, and breadth—scarcely seem the work of one man. Indeed, some of us have doubted that they are the work of one man. Thankfully, we have been able to put such fanciful conjecture to rest. Unfortunately, that is where our agreement concerning Herzog’s work ends.
[W]hen you think about people 400 years from now trying to understand civilization today, I think they will probably get more out of a Tarzan film than out of the State of the Union address by the President that same year. —Werner Herzog
What, indeed, would future historians make of our civilization if the frustrating, beautiful, always mesmerizingly strange films of Werner Herzog were their primary cinematic witnesses? Would they be seen as damage inspections of a civilization at horrifying odds with nature and itself? as documents so fiercely visionary they often come within millimeters of insanity? Would they be seen as mirrors or warnings? symptoms or cures? Herzog himself has explored this question, using a similar science-fictional conceit to frame several of his ostensible documentaries, the genre in which he has done his most singular and protean work. Fata Morgana (1970) is nominally a film about mirages in the Sahara Desert, and its narration, read by the German film historian Lotte Eisner, offers long recitations from a Mayan creation myth: “Therefore the creatress and the creator essayed once more to build living beings, to make moving creatures.” Early in the film, a long tracking shot offers some windblown orange dunes, across which sail tiny whirlwinds of sand—a bizarre, almost Martian vision. This, in fact, is part of the point. The film has been called “a cosmic pun on cinéma vérité,” and Herzog has said that his “plan was to go out to the southern Sahara to shoot a kind of science-fiction story about aliens from the planet Andromeda, a star outside of our own galaxy, who arrive on a very strange planet. . . . The idea was that after they film a report about the place, we human filmmakers discover their footage and edit it into a kind of investigative film.” 11. This Herzog quote, like many others throughout this essay, comes from the invaluable Herzog on Herzog, edited by Paul Cronin. This conceit, barely evident in Fata Morgana itself, announces itself more clearly in Herzog’s other “science fiction” films, namely Lessons of Darkness (1992), which features putatively “alien” narration over apocalyptic footage of the oil fires in Kuwait ignited by retreating Iraqi forces at the end of the first Gulf War; and Wild Blue Yonder (2005), which stars Brad Dourif as an embittered alien narrating the story of an unwelcome Earthling mission to his home planet over actual—and hilariously mundane—footage of NASA astronauts floating around their space-shuttle living quarters.
Fata Morgana marked Herzog’s first overt confounding of the feature film/documentary boundary. Like Lessons of Darkness and Wild Blue Yonder, it is not a narrative film, but neither is it strictly factual. Rather, it uses factual images to tell a fictional story the images do virtually nothing to suggest. Like his late countryman W. G. Sebald—who admired Herzog’s work and referred to it in his equally fact-blendered fiction—Herzog makes stylized use of the factual and, through its valence with the invented, pours “the facts” from their test tube of the verifiable. This is what gives these films their grandeur and brilliance as well as an occasional undertow of unease. At the German premiere of Lessons of Darkness, Herzog claims to have been spat upon for its contextless, highly aestheticized images of an entire ecology dying in a fiery, petroleum-fueled Revelation. A brief but notably grisly sequence, furthermore, presents us with a deranged Kuwaiti woman whose sons were tortured and killed in front of her, and an unforgettable pan of the still-bloody implements within a Republican Guard torture chamber. The matter is quickly dropped, and although Herzog later introduces us to a young boy who was left mute after a beating by Iraqi soldiers, he is clearly more interested in beautiful images of flaming oil wells than in testaments of human suffering. Thus there arises, in some viewers at least, the sense that Herzog has made these “documentary” films under false pretenses. The rulers of Kuwait agreed, and when they realized Herzog was not making a film about the heroic men and women fighting Kuwait’s oil fires, as he had initially claimed, but rather something of his own devising, they expelled him from their kingdom.
Herzog, however, is an artist, not a journalist. An artist can respect the backfield of fact before which every human being stands and choose not to address those facts. We know, after all, that the tortured Kuwaitis are not actually aliens. Herzog’s conceit does not undermine their suffering, for what conceit, short of outright denial, could? Any art form that incorporates the experience of real people will inevitably result in accusations of distortion. The question is not whether Herzog has shaped his subject matter but why.
Despite Herzog’s notoriety (this is a man who publicly cooked and ate his shoe after losing a bet with the director Errol Morris), his formal accomplishments (more than fifty films, fourteen of which are features), and his acclaim (François Truffaut has deemed him the world’s greatest living filmmaker), he is relatively obscure when compared with directors of equal stature. Herzog’s films were most widely discussed during the 1970s and early 1980s, when the antipodes of film criticism, with Film Quarterly in one hemisphere and Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris in the other, had less ocean between them than do their rough equivalents today. At that time, Herzog was typically linked to the New German Cinema, which grew out of the poisoned artistic lacunae of Nazism, or to some greater notion of European cinema as a whole. In many ways, Herzog has outgrown, and even outlasted, such categorizations. This is to say nothing of his films themselves, which, however difficult to classify, tend to be fairly straightforward. Which is not to say they are easily apprehended. Indeed, Herzog often hurls into the last few minutes of his films some wizardly curveball. Stroszek (1976), for instance, ends with a several-minute-long sequence of a dancing chicken. A favorite Herzog gambit is to give his characters lengthy concluding speeches that have little apparent connection to anything else in the film. Herzog refers to such devices as “moments of special intensity when suddenly you hear something that rails against the most basic rules you are accustomed to.”
Born Werner Stipeti´c in Munich in 1942, Herzog grew up in a lonely mountain village in Bavaria with a doting Croatian mother and an absent father. He assumed the name Herzog, or “duke,” as a totemistic way of protecting himself from what he has called “the overwhelming evil of the universe.” Herzog has claimed that his solitary wanderings in the mountains on the Albanian border at age fourteen made him into a filmmaker. A fifteen-page encyclopedia entry on filmmaking gave him “everything I needed to get myself started,” and a pilfered 35-mm camera from the Munich Film School gave him the tools, a theft he has since justified on Nietzschean grounds: “I know it was not theft. I had a natural right to take it.” He would make his first seven films with that camera.
Herzog came of age among West German artists and intellectuals who were discouraged from calculating the extent of their parents’ capitulations to Nazism and disgusted with their divided nation’s unfamiliar servitude to outside powers. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Herzog did not become a political radical. Instead he became an aesthetic radical. His first feature-length film, Signs of Life (1968), tells the story of an injured German soldier recuperating in Greece during World War II—a conflict to which the film, rather curiously, makes no reference. Herzog’s German soldiers are barefoot existentialists who rarely salute and go shirtless for much of the film, which, as Herzog acknowledges, “certainly has nothing to do with the Third Reich.” After receiving considerable accolades for creating the first Third Reich layabouts in film history, Herzog noticed his fellow West German artists discerning the brighter side of Maoism and equating the American misadventure in Indochina to Hitler’s revanchism. Herzog responded to such revolutionary bromides with Even Dwarves Started Small (1970), a nearly unwatchable film about the revolt of a platoon of little people against their institutional masters. Parabolic, nasty-minded, and thoroughly ugly in its evocation of rebellion, the film leaned hard into the prevailing winds of the late 1960s. Jean-Luc Godard, whom Herzog has condemned as “intellectual counterfeit money,” had famously declared that “Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.” Herzog spurned such sentiment, believing that photography created its own kind of truth, the idea that Fata Morgana strove so powerfully to explore. Many critics, particularly German critics, were unmoved.
Herzog, undaunted, kept making films, becoming something like the Updike of contemporary cinema. Only eight of the last thirty-eight years have gone by without a new Herzog film, and in a few years there have been as many as three. Some of these films have been commercially successful (for instance, his moody and terrifying 1979 remake of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu), but most have gained their audiences long after the fact. This time-lapse appreciation suits his work, for to become interested in Herzog is akin to initiation into some rite-filled cult. The mark of most cult leaders is a wide range of interests coupled with a circular series of obsessions, and no filmmaker is more greatly afflicted with this syndrome than Herzog. Although his films take place everywhere (Germany, the United States, South America, Africa, Southeast Asia, Australia, the Middle East) and are about everything (adventure, courage, madness, failure, death, time, space travel, nature’s indifference), his imagistic obsessions (auctioneers, flight, monkeys, chickens, 22. Chickens (and roosters and hens) are Herzog’s objective correlative and play some role in dozens of his films. A film as early as Even Dwarves Started Small contains a disquieting sequence in which a chicken eats a dead mouse. “Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity,” Herzog has said. “It is a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity. They are the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creatures in the world.” ski jumpers, dwarves, bears, boats, wind, roosters, 33. Herzog: “Years ago I was searching for the biggest rooster I could find and heard about a guy in Petaluma, California. . . . I went out there and found Ralph . . . who weighed an amazing thirty-two pounds! Then I found Frank, a special breed of horse that stood less than two feet high. I told Frank’s owner I wanted to film Ralph chasing Frank—with a midget riding him—around the biggest sequoia tree in the world. . . . But unfortunately, Frank’s owner refused. He said it would make Frank, the horse, look stupid.” midgets, mountains, windmills, hens) reappear again and again. Herzog’s work is marinated in cross-reference: more than one of his films features an enchanted waterfall, others turn upon ghostly visions of jellyfish, several characters wear nearly identical aviator goggles, other characters’ names recur, dialogue is often resuscitated from film to film. In Grizzly Man (2004), Herzog’s documentary about a well-meaning amateur filmmaker named Timothy Treadwell, who met his end at the hands of the very grizzlies he sought to photograph and protect, Herzog pauses to admire one of Treadwell’s most beautiful shots: an empty windblown field in the Alaskan outback. The longtime Herzog viewer can only smile. The shot is nearly identical to one of the opening images of his 1974 film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.
In the mudslide-plagued, brushfire-prone, yet somehow still exceedingly desirable hills above Sunset Boulevard, where Herzog has lived for six years, sidewalkless roads turn and twist beneath a canopy of copiously weeping willows and improbably tall palm trees. Many of the pale, pastel homes seem 80 percent garage, the remainder of their mishmash architecture largely hidden behind parapets of shrubbery, curtains of vine, and thick walls of fructiferous trees. It was here that I thought of Herzog’s famous soliloquy about the Peruvian jungle in Les Blank’s documentary Burden of Dreams: “Nature here is violent, base. I wouldn’t see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away. . . . The trees here are in misery. The birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing; they just screech in pain. . . . Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess.” Occasionally the foliage broke enough to allow me to spy some copper-skinned human presence shearing away at a property-marking topiary wall. Dusty Jaguars and Mercedes Benzes were parallel-parked adjacent to bespoke little mailboxes and actual picket fences, and the films of David Lynch (an admirer of Herzog) made sudden, visceral sense to me in a way they had not when I woke up that morning.
Herzog greeted me in a white soft-collar shirt and biscuit-colored slacks. He led me into his white-carpeted living room, which was as sun-drenched as a greenhouse and filled with oversized photography books and various relics from his travels. For much of his career, Herzog sported a thick neo-Prussian mustache and the shaggy brown hair of a Seventies-era Munich soccer player, resulting in the type of face that looked famous even if one did not know who Herzog was. A few years ago, Herzog shaved off the mustache; his shaggy hair, which had abandoned him of its own accord, survived only in smooth gray recession, revealing a prodigal forehead as well as a remarkable resemblance to the philosopher Thomas Hobbes. As we began to talk, Herzog seemed somewhat exhausted—I would later learn he was experiencing severe appendix pain that day—and his overall mien was akin to that of a dissident from a nation whose regime refused to fall. Herzog’s voice—raspily forceful and marked by a slight tendency toward sibilance—was his most distinctive feature. Coming in at a close second were his eyes, which Herzog has claimed not to know the color of, and which sat unknowably deep in cavernous sockets. But when he laughed or smiled his eyes glowed with fallout, and there they brightly were: grayish blue, like fog over the ocean.
It was suddenly very hard to imagine this calm, quiet man, around whom more legends had accrued than Excalibur, directing his actors at gunpoint (a false legend), being shot during a televised BBC interview (true), depriving Peruvian Indians of their civil rights (false), rescuing Joaquin Phoenix from a car crash (true), faking a supposedly pro-Sandinista documentary (false), or voluntarily swan-diving into a cactus field to prove a rather ineffable point (true).
“It’s a natural phenomenon in the media that things like this happen,” Herzog told me when I brought up the legends. “Partly it’s just sloppiness. I have a very good example. As a young man I learned of a producer in Cleveland who was planning a series of NASA films on advanced rocket-propelled systems. So I went to Ohio, but since there was a high-security atomic reactor there as well, I found out that I was not allowed to enter. Now, a lot of reports say that I made films for NASA, or abandoned a promising career as a NASA scientist in order to become a filmmaker. So it’s sprouting. It’s okay. I let it sprout.”
I hoped—in retrospect, stupidly—to impress Herzog by pointing out a continuity error I had noticed in one of his films. I had believed this would impress him because of his many pronouncements unfavorably comparing how a “bureaucrat” made films with his own more instinctual method. These pronouncements ranged from cinematography (“I hate perfectionists behind the camera, those people who spend hours setting up a single shot”) to storyboards (“storyboards remain the instruments of cowards who do not trust in their own imagination”) to continuity itself (“The continuity girl kept bothering me by asking over and over, ‘How many shots are we going to do now?’ I kept saying to her, ‘How would I know?’”). Herzog, however, leaned back and looked at me in horror. “In the thirty years that this film exists, you are the first one to mention something like this. I would have to check into it.” While he fretted, I stammered something about how I had assumed such trivial matters meant little to him. But Herzog shook his head. “It does matter, because it has to do with the flow of storytelling. It has to do with the inner structure and inner emotion of narration; it has to do with the inner movement of an audience.”
In an interview given during the filming of Nosferatu, Herzog had spoken of a wish to make a film in the vein of Akira Kurosawa, a director whose calibrated sensibility and operatic visuals seemed rather distant from Herzog’s more chaotic aesthetic. When I wondered if he still had that ambition, Herzog smiled. “I’ve never made a film of complete balance like Kurosawa. I’ve never gotten close to it. But so be it. May Kurosawa rest in paradise. But The White Diamond has something close to a real balance.”
The documentary subject of The White Diamond (2004) is Dr. Graham Dorrington, a British researcher who wants to photograph the wildlife in the jungle canopy of Guyana from an experimental low-flying zeppelin of his own design. An archetypal Herzogian figure—the dreamer plagued with bad luck—Dorrington is haunted by the death of a cinematographer friend, killed a decade ago in one of his earlier zeppelins. Although the death was an accident, Dorrington cannot forgive himself. When Dorrington finally gets up into the canopy, a scene most filmmakers would have chosen to shoot as a moment of glorious transfiguration, Herzog uses the occasion to create a monster-movie fresco: tree frogs with huge paddle-sized suckers on their long fingertips; millipedes covered in seemingly weaponized spikes; an evil-looking, empty-eyed, sea-green lizard. The White Diamond becomes truly remarkable, however, with the introduction of Mark Anthony Yhap, a diamond-mining roughneck whose bizarrely moving predicament all but hijacks the film midway through. (There is also a long sequence involving a rooster.) Released shortly before the publicity-hoarding Grizzly Man, The White Diamond is among the most beautiful and unusual documentaries ever made, and it is something akin to a crime that it is not at least as well known. On this point Herzog agreed, saying, “The White Diamond simply has more depth than Grizzly Man.”
Given that Herzog had made a film about the first Gulf War, I asked whether he had any interest in making a film about the current Iraq war.
“No,” he said quickly. “That is something Americans are doing. And there are very, very good films emerging.” In 2006, Herzog was honored with an Outstanding Achievement Award at a documentary film festival known as Hot Docs. Eight years ago, he said, only six films were submitted to the festival. “All were shown and all got an award. This year sixteen hundred films were submitted, and one hundred were selected. And there are formidable films there. They are coming from all over the place. I am not alone anymore.”
I asked if that was a good feeling.
“Oh, sure. Thank God! But it’s not because I raised my battle cry. It’s because there is now such an incredibly momentous assault on our perception of reality. The answers to our problems are coming instantly, in the form of all these new films, and I don’t have to be around anymore.” This challenge to our perceptions of the world is something that has preoccupied Herzog in many of his films. It is, he says, “as immense and of the same magnitude as firearms confronting the medieval knight. But all this is not that interesting. Neither facts are that interesting nor is reality that interesting. Somehow in all of this we are still capable of finding some illumination, some truth, some place where we step out of ourselves, where we are ecstatic, where we have an ecstatic, visionary realization.”
When I wondered if Herzog had plans for another documentary, he shrugged and said it was impossible for him to anticipate what his next documentary would be. By way of illustration he brought up Grizzly Man. “When I came across Treadwell’s story, I knew, simply knew, that it was big, really big, and I had to tackle it and I had to do it no matter what. I started to watch Treadwell’s footage, and that resulted in nine days of editing. And then I shot my half of the film. And while I was editing that, I wrote the commentary, recorded the commentary, and did the pre-mix. But we didn’t have music yet, so I had to wait until I had the musicians together and record the music and then mix that into the film. But in principle, from the day I received Treadwell’s footage until the delivery of the film took twenty-nine days.”
Although Herzog has spent years making certain films, he rarely takes more than a few days to write a script; Woyzeck (1979) was shot in eighteen days and edited in four. “That’s how films should be made,” Herzog told Roger Ebert. “That was perfect.” Nonetheless, less than a month to make a film as nearly perfect as Grizzly Man struck me as almost impossible to believe. It was possible, Herzog said. “I saw it so clearly. There was not one moment of thinking.”
Herzog’s world is not thoughtful. It is reactive, lined with thorns, and frequently blown through by ill winds. One of his most striking films, The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner (1974), about competitive ski jumping, gives us replay after replay of ski jumpers landing badly, their scissoring skis explosively shed, followed by a final image of unconscious jumpers sliding to gentle stops in the snow. Just as often, though, Herzog’s ski jumpers succeed. Action is neither rewarded nor condemned but rather enacted within a vacuum emptied of everything but its potential poetry. No filmmaker is better at evoking the curious beauty of our indifferent universe.
What is surprising, in light of this, is how tender Herzog can be—but it is a cunning tenderness. One of his first documentaries, Land of Silence and Darkness (1971), opens with the voice of its deaf-blind subject, an elderly woman named Fini Straubinger, who went blind at fifteen and deaf at eighteen as the result of a nasty fall. “When I was a child,” she says over a blackened screen, “before I was like this, I watched a ski-jumping competition. And one thing keeps coming back: those men going through the air.” Herzog archivally obliges Straubinger’s memory with gorgeous silent footage of ski jumpers soaring off their slopes. But this is not Straubinger’s memory; it is Herzog’s. In fact, he wrote the lines for her. Straubinger did not mind, believing that the sequence was representative of her experience, whatever the literal content of her few remaining sighted memories was.
Later in the film, Straubinger and some of her deaf-blind friends visit a zoo, where they play with a recalcitrant monkey. The monkey, who undoubtedly has a greater awareness of the fact that it is being filmed than most of Herzog’s deaf-blind subjects, reaches out and yanks the lens’s casing off Herzog’s camera. This is a moment many filmmakers would have elided, but Herzog keeps it in, as though reminding us of his camera’s presence. Herzog’s films are filled with similar breaches, both explicit and implicit, and viewed in the aggregate his work becomes a way of thinking about mediation: between viewer and image, between fact and fiction, between the real and the unreal. Grizzly Man may be Herzog’s best-known (and most commercially successful) film, at least of recent years, but it is also his most straightforward and unmediated, which is to say, his least representative.
In Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997), Herzog’s astonishing documentary about the escape and survival of a German-American pilot named Dieter Dengler from a Pathet Lao prison camp in 1966, Herzog shows us Dengler entering his home, near San Francisco, whereupon he opens and closes the front door several times before entering. “Most people,” Dengler explains, “don’t realize how important it is, and the privilege that we have, to be able to open and close the door. That’s the habit I got into, and so be it.” Dengler did not actually have this habit. In fact, it was Herzog’s idea. Although it embodied a real feeling Dengler had, it was not a real activity. Assigning to Dengler an activity he did not engage in is what Herzog has called “the ecstatic truth,” wherein literal accuracy cedes its ground to emotional accuracy, a subjective realm entered through manipulation and fabrication. Consider a disquieting sequence later in the film, in which Herzog takes Dengler to the Thailand-Laos border, hires a group of Thai villagers to tie Dengler up, and runs the former captive through the jungle much as he had been run through the jungle three decades before. “Uh-oh,” Dengler says, as he feels the binds bite around his wrists, “this feels a little too close to home.” Herzog narrates, “Of course, Dieter knew it was only a film. But all the old terror returned, as if it were real.” Here the manipulation is blatant, if profoundly unsettling. Later, when Dengler uses a Thai villager to reenact a notably awful story involving Dengler’s stolen engagement ring and the Viet Cong’s machete-based method of dealing with theft, the villager becomes visibly upset. Dengler notices and hugs the man. “Don’t worry,” he tells him. “It’s only a movie.” It is as though Dengler, in simply telling his own story, has become the filmmaker.
Herzog’s ecstatic truth finds its way into his feature films as well. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser fictionalizes the real story of a young man who turned up in a nineteenth-century German town with scarcely any speech and no experience with the outside world, for he had been kept chained in a cellar, by unknown parties, for the first two decades of his life. In the role of Kaspar, Herzog cast a nonprofessional actor, the incomparable Bruno S., who was in actual fact a prostitute’s son who had spent twenty-three years in various institutions, where he was often beaten and kept in deep isolation. In Stroszek, the story of a luckless German street musician who travels to the American Midwest to improve his life, and fails miserably, Herzog uses Bruno S. again. The film’s most disturbing scene involves Bruno S.’s character being beaten by pimps in his apartment, which Herzog chose to film in Bruno’s actual apartment. This sequence, Herzog has admitted, “pains me so much because it was probably the kind of treatment that had been doled out to him for years when he was a child.” Two other sequences offer equally startling but far less brutal ecstatic truths: a scene in which Bruno talks to his prostitute girlfriend about life in America (under the Nazis, Bruno says, they beat you and cursed you, but in America, “They do it ever so politely, and with a smile”) was improvised, reflected what Bruno S. himself felt upon his first trip to the United States, and results in what is perhaps the most intimate moment in the film. For another sequence, Herzog flagged down two Wisconsin deer hunters and asked them if they would agree to be filmed while one of his elderly German actors spoke to them in German. They agreed, and Herzog turned on his camera. After listening for a few moments to this strange little German discuss the power of “animal magnetism,” the deer hunters look at each other, laugh, get into their car, and quickly drive away. Herzog never saw the deer hunters again. It is one of the funniest sequences in any of Herzog’s movies.
For Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972), a violent, troubling film about a breakaway expedition of Spaniards searching for El Dorado along the Amazon River while gradually going mad, Herzog filmed on the Amazon with a cast and crew who nearly went mad. The reality of the shoot constantly intrudes into Aguirre’s story. When the raft he was filming on developed a mouse infestation, Herzog filmed the mice. When part of the raft was in danger of being sheared off by low-hanging branches, Herzog scrambled for his camera, captured the collision, and incorporated it into the film, which ends with the megalomaniacal Aguirre (played by the megalomaniacal Klaus Kinski) coming to grief on a raft crawling with spidery little monkeys. While Aguirre wanders about his raft, his comrades dead, his mind slipping past the final checkpoints of sanity, he delivers a mad speech—parts of which Herzog says incorporate an equally mad speech delivered by the Zanzibari revolutionary John Okello—while the monkeys skitter around him.
In Fitzcarraldo (1982), Herzog again tells the story of a dreamer searching for salvation in the Amazon. Fitzcarraldo’s doomed quest to bring opera to the Amazon requires dragging a 340-ton ship over a mountain to reach an inaccessible river; Herzog naturally decided that he would actually drag the ship over the mountain. The film thus becomes an allegory of itself. Herzog spent three years in the jungle making Fitzcarraldo, and in the process had to deal with scrapping everything halfway through when his original star, Jason Robards, fell ill with dysentery and was forbidden by his doctor to return to Peru; plane crashes; a border war between Peru and Ecuador; Herzog’s arrest by the authorities; several crew members’ injuries (including one man chainsawing off his own foot after being bitten by a poisonous snake); and attacks by hostile Indians (one of which resulted in two members of the production undergoing eight hours of surgery). When the time came to recast Fitzcarraldo’s leading man, one might have expected Herzog to opt for an actor with peace at the center. Herzog, however, cast the miracle of ill temper that was Klaus Kinski, even though he knew Kinski “would freak out” and “go totally bonkers” in the jungle. Kinski did not disappoint.
Yet Herzog continued working with Kinski—they eventually made five films together—and in this, one can detect something of the perversity that impelled the director to drag a boat across a mountain in the first place. Herzog has never really been able to fully account for his and Kinski’s twisted reliance upon each other. He did pull from Kinski some astonishing performances—particularly in Woyzeck, a film basically composed of several long one-take sequences—but their working relationship involved serial pledges to kill each other. Kinski, who died in 1991, wrote in his autobiography that “I absolutely despise this murderous Herzog. . . . Huge red ants should piss into his lying eyes, gobble up his balls, penetrate his asshole, and eat his guts!” 44. Herzog maintains that he helped Kinski write many of the book’s anti-Herzog diatribes, and Herzog’s take on their relationship, the documentary My Best Fiend (1999), is notable for its searching tone and gentle touch.
Herzog avoids filming in studios. His films, he has said, are “killed stone dead without the outside world to react to.” He resists resolutely such elementary film devices as the freeze frame or zoom. His camera is largely stationary, and he holds onto his images with vulturous patience. These are traits Herzog developed by necessity. Aguirre, for instance, was filmed with only one camera—the camera he liberated from the Munich Film School—and Herzog’s view of modern filmmaking’s “flashy tricks” and “excess of cuts” is predictably dour: “This kind of filmmaking . . . gives you a phony impression that something interesting might be going on. But for me it is a clear sign that I am watching an empty film.” For Herzog, emptiness is analogous to the devices most of us associate with film. Kinski, then, illustrates what it is about Herzog’s films that is simultaneously real, unmediated, and manipulated. While his actors deliver crazed, scripted speeches days after taking crazed, unplanned potshots at extras, and his non-actors are asked to reenact their most painful life experiences and then to engage in unusual behavior that will be portrayed as characteristic, we can see Herzog’s films as an ongoing attempt to illustrate the porosity of the barrier between fiction and non-fiction. What is any film, after all, but a series of images burned onto celluloid?
“When I see a great film,” Herzog has said, “it stuns me, it is a mystery for me.” Images, Herzog’s films repeatedly suggest, have their own mysterious reality that, finally, cannot be codified, only beheld. His strength as a filmmaker is certainly not psychological, and often his fictional characters behave inexplicably. Thus his tendencies toward halos of imagery, as though to fill in the motives his screenplays refuse to provide. This can sometimes amount to a kind of idolatry of composition. Herzog has not helped himself when he speaks of film as being the “art of illiterates,” or when he repeatedly expresses disgust toward film criticism. As one of Herzog’s more eloquent critics once wrote, Herzog and his fellow “celebrants of experience” believe that “there are more things in heaven and earth than are canvassed by our dictionaries. Most of us, I think, would assent to this.” But Herzog is not being mystical as a means toward will-to-power supremacy. His films are too overwhelmingly concerned with the vagaries of human experience, which is different from human behavior, to allow him such easy metaphysics, especially when the types of experience he is most interested in fall beyond the parameters of the imagination.
Fini Straubinger is real. Don Lope de Aguirre is not. Neither is a typical human being. Their realness is of only incidental importance when one attempts a full understanding of what Herzog has spent his career attempting to achieve. His films are the alembic through which life itself is distilled—not explained but distilled—and we are his fellow alchemists. Upon seeing the boat in Fitzcarraldo finally inch over the mountain, Herzog says this on his DVD commentary: “I always knew it was a central metaphor of this film, maybe even of life. And I can’t even say [a] metaphor of what. I can’t even name it.”
For the final-stage edits of his new film, Rescue Dawn, Herzog was working out of a suite of soundproof rooms in a gated building in an indistinct Los Angeles neighborhood, the nearby streets of which were lined on one side with tattoo parlors and on the other side with “laser tattoo removal” specialists, among whom one Dr. Tattoff stood out.
After introducing me to Joe Bini, the editor on his last nine films, Herzog sat down and prepared himself for yet another round. At this late stage, editing seemed to involve watching slightly different versions of the same take, discussing the microscopia of what made them better or worse, and, after a semiautomatic flurry of Bini’s mouse clicks, judging the results of their decisions, at which point they either moved on or started over.
Rescue Dawn is Herzog’s attempt to retell the story of Dieter Dengler, the captured pilot of Little Dieter Needs to Fly, who died in 2001. It is the first time Herzog has fictionalized one of his own documentaries, and during a lull I reminded Herzog of his statement, “I have never made a distinction between my feature films and my ‘documentaries.’ For me, they are all just films.” If that was the case, why did he feel the need to remake what had already been recognized as one of his most extraordinary movies?
“It’s basically the same story,” he said, “but it’s unfinished business. Much of what you see in Rescue Dawn is something you do not see or hear in the documentary. So there’s a huge amount of story that is untold.” When I asked if he approached representing the story differently now that it had assumed explicitly fictional form, Herzog shook his head. “I do not fear representation. I represent at the personal level. That’s what Dieter himself understood. When I said, ‘Dieter, I’d like to shoot a scene where you are opening and closing your front door,’ he said, ‘That might look funny—my friends will think I’m bonkers.’ And I said, ‘No, you have to understand this gives a deep insight into who you are.’ He looked at me and said, ‘I think I understand you.’ And he did it. He did something staged and scripted for the sake of truth, the deeper truth, something that is deeply embedded in his soul. You cannot make it visible otherwise. Of course, it depends on what you’re doing. Timothy Treadwell in Grizzly Man had been dead almost a year when I got his footage. And you do not invent around his material. You respect it. You don’t fool around with it.”
I thought of the sequence in Zak Penn’s agreeably minor and frequently amusing fictional documentary Incident at Loch Ness (2004), in which Herzog plays himself making a documentary film about the Loch Ness Monster. Penn, who has great fun playing himself as Herzog’s producer, stages repeated Nessie sightings until Herzog threatens to quit. The aggrieved Penn says to Herzog, “You once said to me, ‘Cinema is lies.’” Herzog’s response: “There’s a distinction. If you can’t make the distinction, if you just can’t make the distinction, why don’t you become a talk-show host?” The scene’s intention is comic, but the point it makes is a serious one. There are distinctions to be made. Herzog’s distinctions about when to mingle fact with fiction appear to take place within a corona of nebulousness, and may even appear self-justifying, but then so do most matters of human morality, which in all but a few extreme cases are fluid rather than fixed. The morality of all narrative art, whether fictional or fact-based, hinges upon knowing when the additives one injects into representation begin to poison rather than fortify the narrative—knowing, in other words, what to include and what to leave out. Every artist will judge differently, but these are judgments that must be made, and they implicate even such elementary decisions as choosing where to begin telling a story.
Herzog went back to observing Bini, whose face was lit with the glow of the three flat-screen monitors off which he worked. The left screen held a tabular file listing of all of Rescue Dawn’s catalogued shots and takes. The center screen was where usable shots were stored before their transfer into the final cut. The right screen held the ever-mutating film itself, and on it I watched Christian Bale (playing Dengler) and Steve Zahn (playing Dengler’s doomed friend, Duane Martin) wander, shoeless and bloodied, through some Thai jungle, which stands in for Laos.
Herzog described for me his typical process. Shortly after a film wraps, he and Bini view all the rough footage, which in optimal conditions they can do in one or two long sittings. While watching the footage, Herzog takes notes. These notes, he said, can be very cryptic—Bini smiled in apparent agreement—often amounting to nothing more than “!!” for takes he particularly likes. Herzog assured me he did not need to take extensive notes. “I remember everything, even the tiniest shots.” To illustrate this he asked Bini to call up a just-completed scene near the end of the film in which Dengler is signaling the spotter plane that ultimately summons a rescue chopper. While editing this scene, Herzog remembered, for instance, exactly how long the spotter plane hangs behind some treetops, for it was a moment he wanted to elongate as much as possible. He also remembered a certain look on Bale’s face from a previously discarded take, and made sure to insert it right after the plane reappears. Watching the rough cut again, though, Herzog seemed suddenly unsatisfied, and told Bini, “Probably we’ll need his face once more.” He then turned to me, as if in apology. “This is a very rough version.”
Herzog’s elephantine memory is necessary for several reasons, among them the fact that he does not watch dailies. Instead he knows “in my stomach” if a scene is strong or not. This is good and even noble, though only to a point. Occasionally in Herzog’s work, though usually in his feature films, there occurs some moment of inexplicable clumsiness. A key scene in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, for instance, in which the hero is attacked by his former captor, is so poorly filmed that what should be a frightening moment of reckoning instead looks like something out of a home movie: America’s Funniest Assaults. A look at that day’s rushes might well have prevented it. But what Herzog often lacks in elegance he more than makes up for in the unusual ferocity of his vision. The critic Clive James once wrote that today’s blockbusters, “despite the technical bravura of their components, rarely strike us as being very well put together. . . . The special effects leave NASA looking underfunded, yet the general effect, despite oodles of expertise, is one of a hyperactive ineptitude—of the point missed at full volume.” Herzog has never had in his films much in the way of special effects, though his film Invincible (2001) had some digital effects, as will Rescue Dawn. While making Fitzcarraldo, Herzog needed to send his three-story barge down rough, dangerous rapids. He did not use a model. He and his crew and actors climbed aboard the ship and filmed it themselves. At one point the vessel almost capsized. The footage Herzog and his crew shot from onboard is uniquely jarring, and the actors themselves look appropriately terrified. It is not a bludgeoningly impressive sequence when judged alongside the sinking of James Cameron’s Titanic, say, but what Herzog captured has a dreadful intensity altogether lacking in the more expensive film.
Rescue Dawn’s budget is around $10 million, some of it Hollywood money. I asked Herzog whether this meant Rescue Dawn qualified as a “studio film.” Herzog laughed, then shook his head. He has never made a studio film, and probably never will. He does not like to be edited, proudly maintaining that every one of his films is a “director’s cut.” He then informed me that Rescue Dawn’s financiers are “newcomers from different professions.” One is the Los Angeles Clippers forward Elton Brand, whom Herzog deemed “the most reliable investor in the whole thing.” Another is a man named Steve Marlton, a former businessman and nightclub owner whose lapses, both financial and aesthetic, during the filming of Rescue Dawn resulted in the dismissal of several of Herzog’s longtime collaborators and no small amount of trouble with the Thai authorities. But of Marlton, Herzog had nothing bad to say. “What endears him to me,” Herzog said, “is that he gave up a college career, quit everything, went into foosball, and then twice became the world champion foosball player. Of course, we ran into trouble on this film because he was too inexperienced. But that’s okay. That happens. We were in limbo for a while. Which also is okay. It will not damage the film.”
Bini and Herzog were now working on Rescue Dawn’s final sequence, in which, after weeks of wandering and hopelessness, Dengler is hauled into the rescue chopper. There were four versions of this scene, all of which had tiny variations of timing and tone, though the basic sequence of movements was the same. One man pulls Dengler aboard while another rifles through his doleful little satchel. Dengler then crawls for a figure who can be seen only from the waist down, whose khaki-uniformed legs he wraps his arms around. This figure is Herzog himself.
The first take Bale plays grimly, almost without emotion. The next take he plays with smiling relief. In the third take Bale holds onto Herzog’s legs with childlike tenacity, and in the fourth he looks up at Herzog and grins. All four takes conclude with Herzog handing Bale a Butterfinger. Only two have good sound. In every take the soldier going through Dengler’s satchel finds a half-eaten snake, yelps, and falls back. Unfortunately, this man’s performance is the worst thing about all four versions. Sometimes he takes too long to find the snake, other times he is too clearly “acting” when he finds it. The man was not a professional actor but rather a tourist whom Herzog’s production found in Bangkok.
The other problem with this scene—the film’s emotional climax—is that Herzog, as usual, filmed it with only one camera. (“The rhythm of a film,” he said once, “is never established in the editing room. The directors who rely on editing are cowards. Rhythm is made in the shooting—that is filmmaking. . . . Editing merely puts it all together.”) There was but one opportunity to cut away, when the pilot announces over his radio that they have Dengler. Bini opted to jump into the scene relatively late when Herzog noted how much he liked the manner in which the man who pulls Dengler aboard stomps his boot down next to Dengler’s head. (The soldiers are not yet sure if they have an American or a Viet Cong insurgent on a suicide mission.) The decision to go with the boot stomp locked Bini and Herzog into a take that otherwise had a few imperfections, which they minimized by cutting away to the pilot earlier than they had planned. This left them with the decision of which take to use when they cut back to Bale holding Herzog’s legs. Herzog was most fond of the childlike take, if only for the knowingness of Bale’s smile when he accepts Herzog’s Butterfinger. While Bale’s expression fulfilled its dramatic function (I have been rescued!), it had some other strangely private glimmering.
Much of Rescue Dawn was filmed in sequence. In many ways it had been a difficult shoot, and Bale, along with everyone else, occasionally lost his composure. On this day of shooting in particular, Bale and Herzog argued about Bale’s safety concerns, with Bale reportedly yelling, “I’m not going to feckin’ die for you, Werner!” What I was seeing on Bini’s screen, then, was a perfectly Herzogian paradox: the scripted film based on the documentary that contained fabrications had come down to a moment in which I was no longer sure if I was watching a hungry Dieter Dengler accepting a candy bar or a great director attempting to apologize to his leading man.
Herzog walked me to the door. I had spent only a few hours with him, but I had spent weeks watching and re-watching his films, and somehow I knew they had changed me. I wanted to tell Herzog this but was not sure how. Instead I asked him if he was ever frustrated that his films were not more widely known. He seemed to get somewhat shy before looking away. “I believe,” he said, “in what I call the secret mainstream. Kafka was there too. Today, yes, we know Kafka was the voice of an overwhelming bureaucracy with a deep evil inside of it. Often we see these figures in the secret mainstream. I am one of them.”
With that, embarrassed, I told Herzog how much I admired him, and how thankful I was that he had agreed to see me. Herzog seemed neither surprised nor pleased by my effulgence. Instead he looked at me for a disarmingly long time—so long, in fact, I began to feel like a character in a Werner Herzog film. Finally, he said: “There is a dormant brother inside of you, and I awaken him, I make him speak, and you are not alone anymore.” We shook hands and he was gone. I walked outside, through a curtain of Los Angeles sunshine, to the street’s edge, where I stood for a long time, ecstatic and not quite alone.
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| SEE ALSO: Criticism and interpretation; Independent filmmakers; Motion picture producers and directors; Herzog, Werner | ||||||||||
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