by Paul Cronin
By offering up the background to each of his films and how they were made, Herzog offers details of form, structure and – indirectly – meaning. As he articulates his techniques, ideas and principles in the conversations that follow, his way of looking at the world is made clear. His “credo,” as he puts it, “is the films themselves and my ability to make them.” Truffaut once explained that making a film is like taking a boat out to sea, the director at the helm, forever attempting to avoid shipwreck (in his Hitchcock book he describes the process as a “maze of snares”). Being tossed about on the waves is the very nature of filmmaking, a state of affairs only an amateur would whine about. (“I’m not into the culture of complaint,” Herzog says. To his fictional son in julien donkey-boy: “A winner doesn’t shiver.” Physicist Lawrence Krauss: the universe doesn’t exist to make us happy.) In short: you’re always asking to be sunk. Or, per Herzog, who describes himself as a product of his cumulative humiliations and defeats, filmmaking “causes pain.” In discussing the day-to-day experiences and hard graft of the cinema practitioner, in stressing how vital it is for each of us to follow our own particular channel, in acknowledging that the name of the game is faith, not money, A Guide for the Perplexed furnishes the reader with an oblique ground plan to help navigate the rocks and manage the daily calamities.
Not coincidentally, these are the same ideas that underpin and flicker steadily throughout the three days of Herzog’s extemporizing at his irreverent and sporadically executed three-day Rogue Film School. Nietzsche tells us that “All writing is useless that is not a stimulus to activity.” Similarly, Herzog declaims that his ultimate aim with Rogue is to be useful rather than explicitly didactic, something I suspect he succeeds in, much to the delight of all those youthful, awestruck participants. His rousing description of the filmmaker and how he needs to move through the world, confronted at every turn by obstructions, paints him as an ingenious, brazen, indefatigable problem-solver, with forgery and lock-picking as metaphor. “This man has no ticket,” says Molly in the opening minutes of Fitzcarraldo, as she and Brian crash into the lobby of the opera house in Manaus after having rowed for two days and two nights from Iquitos. Yet, insists Molly, Fitzcarraldo has a moral right to enter the auditorium, see his hero Caruso in the flesh, and hear him sing. In this spirit, Herzog believes, the natural order would be disrupted if a misdemeanour didn’t occasionally intrude into the life of a working filmmaker. To help jump the hurdles, he suggests, purloin that which is absolutely necessary. It has always been Werner’s own particular long-term survival strategy.
Over the Rogue weekend, as Herzog responds to his audience, telling story after story from memory, a repository filled with decades of filmmaking tales, this idea becomes ever clearer. I find in my handwritten notes, taken at Rogue in June 2010, the following: “Raphael talks about some rule he broke when filming at Chernobyl. Werner exclaims: ‘That was a very fine and Rogue attitude.’” It might all have something to do with the exquisite Herzog line recorded by Alan Greenberg on the set of Heart of Glass: “There is work to be done, and we will do it well. Outside we will look like gangsters. On the inside we will wear the gowns of priests.” What I can decisively say is that Herzog and the Rogue participants I met have been mutually forgiving of each other, considering the former is wholeheartedly dismissive of traditional film schools, and the latter a self-selected group which, if truly Herzogian in temperament, would gently throw the offer of a place at film school back in their hero’s face.
Rogue – where the emphasis is more on surveying one’s own “inner landscapes” than anything else – is a strong stimulant, the pedagogic equivalent of being doused with ice water. It affirms that Herzog’s stupendous curiosity and love of the world, his explorations into uncharted territory across the planet, his insatiability for inquiry and investigation, his voracious appetite and intensity of belief, his attraction to chaos in its many iterations, have never been stronger. With his makeshift film school, a summation of many years’ work, Werner has seized hold of ideas that appear in interviews stretching back forty years, acknowledged their contemporary relevance, then recalibrated and brushed them down. By doing so, he has left behind previous incarnations. The stalwart of New German Cinema has long been displaced. The accused of any number of Fitzcarraldo controversies is in the past. The director of five features with Klaus Kinski (the last one made more than a quarter of a century ago) is more or less gone. What remains is the resourceful, optimistic filmmaker, still going strong, shepherding us into action, showing us how to outwit the evil forces, leading by example. “I have fortified myself with enough philosophy to cope with anything that’s been thrown at me over the years,” says Herzog. “I always manage to wrestle something from the situation, no matter what.”
3 WANDERLUST
Werner’s fine-tuned sympathies are those of a thoughtful, exacting and studious polyglot poet who, when translating his work and that of others, is aware of the delicate nuances of one word over another, not just in German, but also English and other languages, including ancient Greek. Herbert Achternbusch has written that Herzog has an “addiction to words,” and Werner himself wonders in this book whether “I might be a better writer than I am a filmmaker.” This is the same Werner Herzog who, during a 1988 public conversation at the National Film Theatre in London, spontaneously told his audience, after rejecting the more ludicrous claims about the production of Fitzcarraldo, “If you don’t believe me, we can go out into the street and fight it out. I have no proof but my physical body.” Werner’s approach to everything is that of a fearless pioneer, an intrepid seeker who, as he explained in a 1982 interview, doesn’t “want to live in a world where there are no lions anymore.” At the age of seventy he remains extraordinarily agile, and gallops rather than strolls. All things tactile and corporeal are pre-eminent. His engagement with the world is experiential, not ideological. For Herzog, film is athletics, not aesthetics. (Cameraman Ed Lachman: “What is strongest is the content of the images, not a formalistic attitude about what an image is.”)
Never has Herzog lived vicariously through others. The sedentary life has never been for him. Ready to pack his bag at any moment, he usually doesn’t know where he will be next month. A joy of geographical inquiry has forever characterised his existence, even before he ever picked up a camera. This is something the Germans have a word for: Fernweh, which could be translated as “a yearning for distant lands.” (Herzog may be right in claiming to be the only person to have filmed on all seven continents.) Remote peoples and faraway places, however inhospitable, are a crucial source of inspiration, and there is no reason to doubt Werner when he says that if a one-way journey of exceptional exploration were offered, if the opportunity arose to leave the stratosphere and go in search of untainted images, he would jump at the chance. With his ability to sniff out the lyrical and extraordinary, which is usually there for all to see (“We thank NASA for its sense of poetry,” Werner tells us at the end of The Wild Blue Yonder, perhaps laying to rest once and for all the notion that irony is beyond him), the visceral experiences are imbibed, after which the stories, characters and scenarios take shape, and the images pour out with an exactitude and urgency that make Herzog more a transcriber than an author per se. The scripts – often unconventional in format, part of Werner’s quest to establish a new form of literature – are prepared only for the purpose of fund-raising. Their author has never needed them to realise his ideas. Wrote Wagner of his process: “The detailed musical treatment is more of a calm and considered finishing-off job, which the moment of real creation has preceded.”
The legend is that in his travels, the never-tentative Herzog seeks the strongest currents and most treacherous waters (“That slope may look insignificant,” says Fitzcarraldo, “but it’s going to be my destiny”). His long-time cameraman Peter Zeitlinger insists that “Werner never takes the paved road, always the dirt track,” adding that he has, “probably from mid-puberty, been trying very hard to die a gran
d, poetic death.” According to Zak Penn, who has directed Herzog as an actor in two films, “Werner fulfils the important role of a physical adventurer. We live vicariously through him, wishing we had his courage and nerve. He’s a paragon, a mythic hero.” (Pauline Kael’s description: a “metaphysical Tarzan.”) It’s up for debate whether the unflappable Herzog is being truthful when insisting he is no reckless risk-taker, but what we can be certain of is that he seeks what Robert Walser called a “very small patch of existence,” a non-hierarchical and self-governed land without profanity, absolutism, servility, mendacity, sorcery, demagoguery, dogma, ossification and unnecessary rules and regulations, devoid of repressive political manipulation and slavery, free from rampant, gratuitous commodification, welcoming of poets and contrarians, with a minimum of bureaucracy, where self-determination, inquiry and pluralism can flourish, and a secular community is offered the chance to thrive under its own humane guidelines. “To be honest,” he told me last year, “I wish I didn’t have to travel so much these days, but if you want to make a film in Antarctica, you have to get on an aeroplane.”
4 IMAGINATION
Werner offers counsel at his Rogue Film School, but I can’t imagine he himself has ever asked anyone for advice. Errol Morris has spoken of a line from an interview with Gabriel García Márquez, who, after having read Kafka’s Metamorphosis for the first time, said to himself, “I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that.” It was the same line Errol muttered to himself upon exiting the Pacific Film Archive, having just seen Werner’s Fata Morgana for the first time. We know what he means. In his 1977 review of La Soufrière, Amos Vogel described Herzog as “the most important director now working in Germany. One of the great film talents of our time, not even at the peak of his creative life, Herzog is a person who will not compromise, who deliberately remains ‘unclassifiable,’ hence attacked by those who must classify.” Perhaps this is why Herzog’s films, even those made forty years ago, don’t appear to have aged one bit.
The stories in this book and Herzog’s improvising at Rogue make clear that he has chased his deepest fascinations since his earliest days. Some films might have been adapted from literary sources or inspired by real-life events, but with their unique view of the world every one is created ex nihilo, predicated on his singular imagination. At a point in his career when many would have run out of ideas – a moment when accolades and retrospectives are flowing thick and fast – Werner has in the recent past become a beacon of hope for neophytes everywhere, looked upon by many as someone who has forever risen unblinkingly to the challenge. “I encourage myself, since nobody else encourages me,” he wrote in 1974.
After working closely with a number of filmmakers – big and small, famous and unknown, living and dead – I feel confident in telling people there’s no point in comparing Herzog to anyone. It isn’t that he’s a non-conformist, responding to his surroundings and actively setting himself apart. He just naturally is apart, which makes it foolish for anyone to try to emulate him. Rogue – where the concept is all his, where he maintains full control – is the result of his avoidance of institutions of any kind. While he isn’t unhappy, throughout this book, to ally himself to a small number of people with whose centuries-old work he feels a vigorous concordance, Herzog really is his own startlingly original man, and his repeated insistence that his films can’t be categorised as part of the Romantic tradition reflect his disregard for any club that might have him as a member. For Herzog, there was never a question of film school or an apprenticeship. Instead, he burst upon us, fifty years ago, almost fully formed as a filmmaker, ready to share his personal fantasies at any cost. Werner is one of those few figures who have created a body of work worthy of sustained investigation, yet one so disassociated from the world of cinema around him – so “cut off from every web of film history,” as Hans Schifferle has written – that knowledge of such things might actually get in the way of appreciating his films.
5 STORYTELLING
At the Opéra Bastille in Paris, during dress rehearsals for Herzog’s 1993 production of The Flying Dutchman, the electronics malfunctioned. “The mammoth iceberg was drifting towards the orchestra pit and sometimes we couldn’t even open the curtain,” says Werner. “It turned out that all these problems were triggered by a special kind of signal, a taxi call frequency. If a cab drove past the opera house, this state-of-the-art computer equipment went haywire. I insisted we use more primitive techniques instead. Anything else was dangerously inadequate.” For Herzog, analogue will almost always win out over digital. Although he has an abiding passion for every stage of the filmmaking process and is happy to experiment with the latest piece of equipment, technology has never been Werner’s thing. He is a primeval sophisticate of great erudition who yearns nostalgically for a pre-literate, pre-electric (or postliterate and post-electric) existence, where the primitive wisdom of the uninstructed and those able to memorise stories and poems, then recite them free of all props, predominates.
6 THE HOLY FOOL
There are few filmmakers who don’t tell stories of people in trouble, struggling to overcome obstacles, humiliated, wracked with anxiety and confusion, adrift, at odds with the world, called upon to fight against adversaries. The outsider and rebel is a dramatic trope that stretches back to the beginnings of storytelling. But Herzog’s protagonists – extremists all – are of a particular persuasion. Amos Vogel wrote that the Holy Fool inhabits the films, the figure who “dares more than any human should, and who is therefore – and this is why Herzog is drawn to him – closer to possible sources of deeper truth though not necessarily capable of reaching them.” In his monograph on Herzog’s Nosferatu, S. S. Prawer suggests there are two characters ubiquitous in Werner’s world: “outsiders in a society where they can never feel at home, and which in the end destroys them; and rebels who try, by violent means, to realise what their lives refuse them, but also ultimately fail.” The wide and colourful variety of these individuals, the sheer number in both his documentaries and fictions – represented always with empathy and compassion – make clear that they all somehow reflect their creator’s innermost enthusiasms. It is never incongruous to see Herzog on screen, responding and interacting.
Some of these figures (Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, Walter Steiner, Reinhold Messner, Francisco Manoel, Graham Dorrington, brazen all) seek overwhelming challenges, while others (Fini Straubinger, Adolph Ratzka, Kaspar Hauser, the premature baby of Stroszek, the anguished Woyzeck, Michael Goldsmith, Jared Talbert, the victims of From One Second to the Next) have burdens thrust upon them. We are repeatedly confronted with dispossessed outcasts and eccentrics, estranged loners, struggling overreachers and underdogs who live in extremis, at the limits of experience, isolated and fraught with problems of communication and assimilation, railing against sometimes stifling social conventions, often foolhardy and spirited enough to embark on undertakings they know are futile, thus providing a series of vivid definitions of the human condition, alongside some level of insight into the society, even the entire historical era, in which they live. “The existential dimension of his characters always seems to take precedence over any social issue against which they might revolt or from which they might suffer,” writes Thomas Elsaesser.
The titular strongman hero of the ironic Herakles – who takes on the twelve labours, assuming tasks he can’t possibly succeed in – is the quintessential Herzog anti-hero. To clean the Augean stables he has to empty out an enormous garbage dump, while resisting the Stymphalian birds means being confronted by the might of the United States Air Force. Stroszek, from Signs of Life, is caught in a hermetically sealed circle of repetition and inevitability, unable to break out except by force of sheer violence. He extends himself far beyond his means, pushing his limits and exceeding his own capabilities. The failure of his titanic struggle is preordained, but in the face of overwhelming oppression Stroszek never stops trying anyway. It isn’t unlike the other Stroszek – played by Bruno S. a few years
later – who finds himself standing in the freezing cold as his repossessed mobile home is loaded onto a truck and driven away. Stroszek wants to rob a bank, but it’s closed, so he holds up the local barbershop instead. (“I think it’s the saddest robbery I have ever seen on screen,” Werner says.) The little people of Even Dwarfs Started Small know it makes no sense to rebel against bourgeois table manners, that this is a lost cause, but they do it anyway. The delusional Aguirre – searching for something (El Dorado) that doesn’t even exist – defies nature to such an extent that nature inevitably hits back. His was a suicidal mission from the start. Fitzcarraldo – a film that retains a powerful hold on audiences more than three decades after it was released – is a projection of Herzog’s almost unattainable fantasies, though he had no choice but to ensure that reality caught up with the imaginary events swarming through his mind. The most poignant moment in Invincible is the return of Zishe Breitbart to the shtetl where he grew up, desperately warning his fellow villagers of the impending Nazi threat (“We have to get strong. We shall need a thousand Samsons”). To abdicate ambition and cast aside unrealised hopes and dreams means to encounter a heavier burden. “Even a defeat is better than nothing at all,” says the voiceover during the final seconds of The Unprecedented Defence of the Fortress Deutschkreuz.
