by Tom Bissell
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)—Herzog’s favorite of his films—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 and alighting upon the snow with physics-defying lightness. 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 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 San Francisco home, 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. While 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 his 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 an eponymous 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 mental institutions, where he was often beaten and kept in deep isolation. In Stroszek (1976), 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.” (Bruno S. told Herzog right before they shot the scene, “I’m going to be a good soldier, and I’ve been hurt much worse before.”) 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 first trip to the United States, and results in what is perhaps the most moving, 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 films.
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 river 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. The end of Aguirre, Herzog says in the film’s DVD commentary, is “so strange and so real at the same time.” 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. After pointing out in the commentary that it was nearly impossible to choreograph the monkeys (and Herzog received dozens of monkey bites to prove it), Herzog says, with a laugh, “You just have to follow the monkeys.”
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 in order to reach another, 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 (twice) 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,4 even though Herzog knew Kinski “would freak out” and “go totally bonkers” in the jungle. Kinski did not disappoint.
Yet Herzog kept working with Kinski—they eventually made five films together—and in this, one can detect something of the perversity that impelled Herzog to drag
a boat across a mountain in the first place. Herzog has never really been able to provide full accounting 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!”5
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 on 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 much 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 nonfiction. 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 to 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 “celebrants” 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.” A critic, perhaps, could. But in presuming to name it she, too, will have become an artist.
For the final-stage edits of his new film Rescue Dawn, Herzog was working out 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 the other with “laser tattoo removal” specialists, among whom one Dr. Tattoff stood out.
After introducing me to Joe Bini, his 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 semi-automatic 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 make to remake what had already been recognized as one of his most extraordinary films?
“It’s basically the same story,” he said, “but it’s unfinished business. Much 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 understood 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, 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 and fiction may 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 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—even by those who fanatically insist that any fabrications, however small, inserted into what is intended to be “real” result in fiction—and they implicate even such elementary decisions as choosing where to begin telling a story. Yet is not choosing where to begin a story so subjective it amounts to a lesser brand of fabrication?
Herzog went back to observing Bini, whose round face was lit with the glow of the three flat-screen monitors off of 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 useable 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 previous 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 Houser, 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 by 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.6 It is not a bludgeoningly impressive sequence when judged alongside the sinking of James Cameron’s Titanic, say, but what Herzog captured has to it a dreadful intensity altogether lacking in the more expensive film.
