Magic Hours

by Tom Bissell

  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 films and referenced them 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 their occasional yet distinct 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 of torture 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. Obscuring another’s history is not necessarily a hostile act, and arguments that Herzog has responsibilities to his subjects overlook the fact that even though Herzog may be filming under false pretenses, he is not presenting his films under any pretext but that of art. 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 ate a shoe after losing a bet to the documentary filmmaker Errol Morris), his formal accomplishments (more than fifty films, fourteen of which are features), and his acclaim (both Miloš Forman and François Truffaut have deemed Herzog the world’s greatest living filmmaker), he is relatively obscure when compared to directors of equal stature. (His most vocal American champions—Errol Morris, Francis Ford Coppola, Harmony Korine, Zak Penn—are usually filmmakers themselves rather than critics.) His 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 dirigible 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.

  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. These are not the coyly “experimental” touches typically associated with non-American filmmaking. They are, rather, exceedingly weird touches that come off as though one were entering a stranger’s REM state. 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 Stipetić in Munich in 1942, Herzog grew up in a lonely mountain village in Bavaria with a doting Croatian mother and 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 of Albania 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 35mm 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 a visionary, 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 bizarre and, to my mind, 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, which features the most memorable use of Wagner since Apocalypse Now), 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- and secret-handshake-filled cult. The mark of most cults 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. While 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,2 ski-jumpers, dwarves, bears, boats, wind, roosters,3 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 an early image 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 Herzog on 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 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 to 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 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 it 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 and 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, and given that, on the evidence of Grizzly Man and The White Diamond alone, his documentary powers have never been more burnished, I asked whether he had any interest in making a film about the second Gulf War?

  “No,” he said quickly. “That is something Americans are doing. And there are very, very good films emerging. And all of the sudden I hear cries of, ‘Move away from cinéma vérité!’ Cinéma vérité is the accountant’s truth, cinema’s answer of the Sixties. Look out now for different voices for imaginative films. And they are coming in throngs.” In 2006, Herzog was honored with an Outstanding Acheivement 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 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 ecst
atic, 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.