Werner Herzog - A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin

by Paul Cronin

  Because it was necessary that Werner appear physically in My Best Fiend, we decided to film atop Huayna Picchu, as this was a mountain of destiny. The opening shots of Aguirre were filmed here, the army of men descending the narrow defile we were about to ascend. The climb is an almost vertical four-hundred-metre ascent to an altitude of nearly four thousand metres, up steeply pitched and well-worn stone steps carved by the Incas hundreds of years ago. The four of us took turns carrying the heavy 16mm camera. Some steps were worn down almost completely in places, and the stones underfoot – sometimes slick from rain – made it difficult at times to keep from slipping. In places the path narrows and one has to hug a boulder as one inches along a slender ledge. The drop is, needless to say, sheer. When we reached the summit we filmed Werner looking off into the hovering clouds, made more dramatic that day by the strong sun they were hiding. On the way down, along the steep steps, we got a few shots of Werner running up the steps towards us from a lower elevation and then disappearing into a passageway. Half joking, I told Werner that his brisk ascent had looked too leisurely and wasn’t very convincing. Suspecting I might be right, Werner decided on another take. This time he literally bounded up those treacherously steep steps like a mountain goat, taking an astonishing ten seconds off his previous time. I was absolutely certain I could not have matched this feat. It was not merely the speed, but the balance and footing. It brought back to me the very first time I climbed a flight of stairs with Werner in an office building in Munich. He bounded two at a time. The alacrity with which he attacked the stairs took me by surprise. I really had to strain to the utmost to keep up.

  Werner wanted some shots taken of him standing on top of the giant boulders on the upper stretch of the Urubamba river. It had rained all morning, and the giant boulders – smooth as glass from a thousand years of raging water of unimaginable force exploding over and around them – were especially slippery. As it was the dry season, the river was low, and the boulders, completely submerged when the river is high, protruded some thirty or forty feet above the river below. A fall, needless to say, would be fatal. The cameraman Peter Zeitlinger was harnessed and tied to someone else who was also roped. Because our stills photographer had refused to venture out onto the slippery rocks, Werner directed me to climb a rock higher than all the others, where I could shoot stills without obstruction. I could barely keep my footing, so tried to stay low, hugging the slick rock, but Werner walked nimbly across these vitreous surfaces and then bounded from boulder to boulder, sometimes leaping across crevices several feet wide, with a straight drop into an abyss of raging river below. He moved with the sureness of a mountain goat. I watched in amazement as I looked at the others roped and harnessed. (I did, somehow, manage to take one of the best photos of Werner, in mid-leap over the abyss, that I have ever taken.) He wasn’t showing off or taking some unwarranted risk; he was merely making his way through this landscape – this river and these rocks of destiny where he had filmed both Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo all those years before – with absolute self-assurance.

  As gravity would have it, what goes up must come down. On what was one of our first trips together to the Telluride Film Festival, we attended a picnic at the top of one of the ski lifts. We had intended that afternoon to see a screening of a film, but had lost track of time and suddenly realised it was starting in only a few minutes. There was a huge line for the chairlift and we knew if we waited, we would miss the film. One of the event organisers offered us the next chair, as Werner is always a special guest – even patron saint – at Telluride, but Werner didn’t want to jump the line. Instead, he turned to me and said, “Let’s just run down.” And, with that, he bolted down the mountain.

  III. DANCING SOUL

  In the fall of 2001 I published a translation from the ancient Greek of Euripides’ play The Bacchae. I conceived it as a text for performance – just as Euripides had intended it to come to life on a stage – and worked my version out through readings and rehearsals with actors and dancers. My goal was to be true to the spirit of the original and to capture something not only of Euripides’ complex tone and heightened poetic language (alternating as always in Euripides with colloquial speech), but also something of the play’s structured dramatic power and scenic forms, something you cannot render by merely translating words (or writing learned endnotes). Naturally I sent Werner a copy. Around that time he was scheduled to reprise his production of Wagner’s Tannhäuser for the Houston Opera Company and suggested I meet him there. I asked him if there was anything he needed me to bring, as I always did whenever we were to meet up. Once he needed me to meet him in Vienna – from where we were flying to Thailand for Little Dieter Needs to Fly – with three pairs of handcuffs we would need for the film. (They sent up a red flag at security and I almost missed the plane. I had to surrender them to the captain upon boarding, and they were given back to me when I arrived in Vienna.) This time Werner said, “Bring only one thing: a Greek text of The Bacchae.” He added that he had questions about some of my renderings.

  By the time I arrived, Werner had already marked in my version the passages he had queried, and we spent much of the afternoon prior to opening night in his hotel room reading these passages against the Greek original, which he read aloud as fluently as if he were a professor of Greek, even though he probably hadn’t studied the language since he was sixteen years old. There were any number of things he queried, but he was particularly focused on my translation of the lines from the opening chorus of the play: θιασεύεται ψυχὰν/ ἐν ὄρεσσι βακχεύων/ ὁσίοις καθαρμοῖσιν (ll. 75–77). The expression is, admittedly, not easy to put into English. The chorus is singing of the glories of the god Dionysus. The lines literally mean something like, “the one who joins his soul with the Bacchic holy throng, inspired with Bacchic ecstasy in the mountains, in sacred purifying rites.” As I was composing my version in sprung rhythms to be sung or chanted by a chorus moving to the words, the lines broken into tercets to indicate rhythmical phrases, I rendered it as “so wholly there/ on the mountain/ dancing his soul/ over and into/ the pack of Bacchus.” “Wholly” is a homonym of “holy” and so does the double duty I wished it to, but Werner wasn’t entirely convinced. He liked the “dancing soul” but thought it didn’t go far enough in expressing the mysterious notion in the Greek.

  The rapt Bacchae dance in the thrall of the god of ecstasy, Dionysus. They are not merely dancing on the mountain; their souls have become one with the mountain (“wholly/holy there”). Throughout the play, the landscapes through which the Bacchae move are described as alive, wild with god. At one point, the whole mountain is said to explode into an ecstasy when the Bacchic throng moves. Their dancing souls and the inspirited landscape fuse. The world they pass through merges with their dreams. When I think about it now, the passage Werner questioned is about as vivid an evocation of experiencing “ecstatic truth” – the mundane transformed into the miraculous – as any to be found in the whole of Greek literature. How uncanny that Werner – whose spirit is, like that of the Bacchae, consecrated to the ecstasy of truth and whose vision transforms landscapes into ecstatic dreams – should, of all the passages in the play, hone in on these lines and the difficulty, indeed near impossibility, of rendering them.

  IV. THE HUNT, OR WHAT IS INCIDENTAL

  One thing that always strikes me about Werner’s work is the nobility of human passion found there, a passion in no way invalidated by the impossibility of the quest or dream. The miracle at the heart of his films is mankind’s relentless struggle to find meaning, despite the indifference and hostility of the universe. However barren and parched the wasteland, however ice-encased and sheer the mountain, however fathomless the abyss, however dense and overgrown the jungle, the human spirit digs in, sends up its flare and ultimately – like Stroszek and his fireworks in Signs of Life, the existential flight of Walter Steiner, the scientists studying neutrinos in the upper atmosphere in Encounters at the End of the World,
the painters inside the Chauvet cave – writes its will across the sky in stars. The physical and metaphysical (the latter often arising in the fierce struggle to overcome the crushing gravity imposed by the former) are of a piece in Werner’s work.

  I always marvel at the way Werner manages to wring the sublime from the banal. He has a poet’s vision, one that arises from a stark, almost scientifically disciplined view. He admires Virgil’s Georgics because of the poet’s objective and rigorous attention to the minute particulars of life’s details, requiring the keenest powers of observation like those of a scientist, but combined with a poet’s sympathy. For Werner, like Virgil, a physical sense of place – a felt connection to the landscape over which one sweats – is essential to the full realisation of a human life. Virgil’s didactic poem on the dignity and meaning of working the earth is rich in close observation and study of the wonder and hostility of nature: its beauty, mystery and abundance, but also its savagery and horror; its indifference to us, but also its uncanny, incomprehensible power; its seasons of life, death and renewal, but also man’s tragic isolation; nature’s implacability and general law of inhumanity, but also those rare moments of anagnorisis, or recognition, when something like a familiar spirit – man fused with, mirrored by, implicated in nature’s exuberant larger pattern of existence – can be glimpsed. In Grizzly Man, Werner speaks in the voiceover narration of a moment of strange beauty, a deserted scene with reeds swaying in the wind, which we watch as he describes it. Treadwell had walked out of frame, having finished filming his staged scene, but had left his camera on, and this simple image of the wind blowing through the reeds – a found moment of unabashed nature just being nature, gusting, rustling, a wind suddenly out of nowhere mysteriously stirring, without regard to human intentions or framed by a cameraman’s eyes – was accidentally recorded. Robert Graves described such moments in poetry as the very essence of it, epiphanies of “things,” ordinary and yet mysterious, that make the hair on the back of the neck stand on end: “an apparently unpeopled or eventless scene … when owls hoot, the moon rides like a ship through scudding cloud, trees sway slowly together above a rushing waterfall, and a distant barking of dogs is heard, or when a peal of bells in frosty weather suddenly announces the birth of the New Year.”

  Werner is not beholden to modern sentimentality, or notions of propriety, or pleasing nostrums like political correctness, or any of the politely observed decorums and petty pieties of people not in the habit of saying what they really mean, think or feel. Like the horseman whom Yeats bids from the grave to pass him by, Werner casts a sober eye, on life, on death. When a mutual friend informed us he had been diagnosed with cancer and that there was a change of plan, Werner responded with fatal lucidity, “That is the plan.” But by saying Werner looks at reality with a kind of objective detachment, I do not thereby mean that he stands apart or remains aloof from it. I know of no one more in love with the world, more full of the capacity for wonder and awe, or more connected to what he sees. He looks at the world around him, takes it all in, the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the bad, and transforms it into an experience in cinema. Seeing the trees – one by one, for what they actually are – for the forest is as important to Werner as the other way around. This is the nature of Werner’s engagement with what he sees, an intensity of observation on the verge of fusion with his subject.

  Werner’s landscapes in film may be, as he calls them, fever dreams or inner landscapes, but their power comes from his genuine ability to dream them, to ensoul them with visionary power. In his essay that closes this book, physicist Lawrence Krauss defines genius as the ability to create something out of nothing. I would only add: to create something so utterly remarkable, wondrous and original that no one could ever have imagined it being created out of that nothing, even if one had been given a full breakdown of the original elements.

  Werner is more a predator than a grazer. The senses are always working the horizon for sustenance, the strategy for the chase being wrought minutely by instinct, the whole being braced for the struggle leading to the kill. Like a predator, he takes his spoils quickly and his rest at whatever hideaway happens to be near by and convenient. The hunt – his creative activity – is everything, and all else (possessions, meals, accommodations, social life) incidental to it.

  Herbert Golder is Professor of Classical Studies at Boston University, and the Editor-in-Chief of Arion, A Journal of Humanities and the Classics. He has worked with Werner Herzog since 1988 on films such as Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Wings of Hope, My Best Fiend, Invincible, The White Diamond and The Wild Blue Yonder. He played Rabbi Edelmann in Invincible and co-wrote the script for My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done.

  Afterword

  by Lawrence Krauss

  I will always remember the first time I met Werner Herzog. It was an incredibly disappointing experience. I was not disappointed in him, but rather in myself.

  As a graduate student in the late seventies and early eighties, movies provided much-needed respite from the combination of long hours and the constant feeling of insecurity that arose from being surrounded by a community of overachievers, each of whom was eager to relate their brilliance and accomplishments at the slightest opportunity. Being a graduate student at MIT, I frequented art-movie houses, I admit in part because of social pressure from my peer group, but also because the movies were generally much better and more interesting than American films.

  It was here that I first fell in love with Werner Herzog’s films. They were like nothing I had ever seen before, a visual feast combined with raw emotion, and sometimes, it seemed to me, celebrating the edge of madness. The first one I remember seeing was Aguirre, the Wrath of God, in 1977, around the time I started graduate school. It was also the first collaboration between Herzog and the unforgettable Klaus Kinski. I later learnt that the madness portrayed on screen mirrored the manic volatility of Kinski the man. At that time I could only assume this was balanced by an equal volatility in Herzog the director.

  Next for me was Fitzcarraldo, which came out in 1982, just after I had completed my PhD, staying in Boston to move from MIT to Harvard, and much closer to the movie theatre I frequented. My own situation had changed, and I felt like a big deal, no longer a lowly graduate student but a real person with an important enough job that I could now hold my own during cocktail-party conversations. However, when I learnt that for Fitzcarraldo Herzog had actually not only moved a real steamboat up and over a mountain deep in the Amazon, but had also essentially shot the film twice, in two equally remote locations, having lost Jason Robards and Mick Jagger in the process and replaced them with the unstable Kinski, my own accomplishments during the period seemed far less inspired, or demanding.

  Which brings me to my disappointment upon first meeting Werner. I had been asked to be a judge at the Sundance Film Festival in 2005, not because of my film expertise, but rather, I think, because I had written a book called The Physics of Star Trek, and the Sloan Foundation was sponsoring a prize for the best feature film incorporating scientific themes or characters. Since I knew science, and Star Trek was drama, I suppose they decided I had sufficient expertise to judge the combination of the two in a feature film. As it turned out, the twenty or so movies we had to judge were terrible. None fit the bill. If there was a realistic scientific character, the rest of the plot or cinematography was miserable. If the plot was scintillating, the science was awful. We judges ultimately met as a team and decided to enlarge the competition beyond pure fiction, and to include documentaries with a narrative theme, ones that hinged on a story. That year Werner’s gripping documentary Grizzly Man, about Timothy Treadwell, who spent thirteen summers filming and living with grizzly bears in Alaska before he and his girlfriend were killed and partially eaten by one of them, was in competition.

  The movie was visually riveting, and highly unusual. It was based for the most part on over a hundred hours of footage shot by Treadwell himself, material that Herzog praises for its visua
l quality during the film, which he narrates. What made Grizzly Man so memorable for me was not the visual background, but rather Werner’s remarkable narration. It would have been easy to present Treadwell as a two-dimensional character, a nut who felt a Disneyesque kinship with bears. But Werner clearly felt some real kinship with the loner Treadwell, who scorned human companionship in favour of time with these wild creatures.

  One scene captured for me the vital message of the film, and was the reason I was so pleased we awarded our prize to it at Sundance. There is a moment near the end with some of the last footage taken by Treadwell, perhaps of the very bear who killed him. The camera pans in for a close-up of the bear’s face and eyes, staring at the camera, and Werner narrates: “What haunts me is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature.” The message is clear: don’t mess with Mother Nature. Nature is neither good nor bad, nor does it care about us or our desires. The natural world is violent, and most of it is not suited for our existence. Our whims, our imagination and our happiness reside within us, and shouldn’t be imposed on a natural world that would carry on just as well without us. I still find this message profoundly moving, and I have never seen this commentary on our pitifully vain anthropocentric view of the universe expressed so pithily and in such a haunting context anywhere else.