by Tom Bissell
Rescue Dawn’s budget is around $10 million, some of it Hollywood money. Thus I asked Herzog if this meant Rescue Dawn qualified as a “studio film.” Herzog laughed and 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. (As Daniel Zalewski wrote in his 2006 New Yorker profile of Herzog, Marlton, at one point, suggested to his director that a recent adventure film starring the Rock would be a useful model for Rescue Dawn.) But of Marlton Herzog had nothing bad to say. “What endears to me to him,” 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. The film is in the can. I am very close to finishing it now, even though there was a six-month hiatus because there were no funds for post-production. We were in limbo for a while. Which also is okay. It will not damage the film.”
“Money,” Herzog has said, “has two qualities. It is stupid, and it is cowardly.” Later he would admit to me that he was preemptively planning on not showing up at various film festivals if his film was edited without his permission, and that Christian Bale had also promised to boycott any showing of a bastardized Rescue Dawn. In the end, Herzog was allowed the cut of the film he wanted. The man’s determination to work solely on his own terms struck me as personally inspiring and profoundly depressing. The filmmaker who made Fata Morgana, Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, and The White Diamond deserved some late-career fate altogether handsomer than this.
Bini and Herzog were now working on Rescue Dawn’s final sequence, when, 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 embraced figure is Herzog himself. The chopper was too small for him to be elsewhere, and Herzog insists on being close to his actors as they perform.
The first take Bale plays grimly, almost emotionlessly. The next take Bale plays with smiling relief. In the third take Bale holds on to Herzog’s legs with childlike tenacity, and in the fourth he looks up at Herzog and grins. All of the takes conclude with Herzog handing Bale a Butterfinger. Only two of these takes have good sound. In every take the soldier going through Dengler’s satchel finds a half-eaten snake, yelps, and falls back. Unfortunately, this gentleman’s performance is the worst thing about all four takes. 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 a member of 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 had 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 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 many weeks 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, I told Herzog how much I admired him, and how thankful I was 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 some time, ecstatic and not quite alone.
—2006
KAPUSCINSKI’S LAST JOURNEY
Ryszard Kapuscinski disappeared in the dead of winter, January 2007, half as well-known as his influence would lead one to expect. He went into the beyond Nobel-less, like Joyce and Proust and Nabokov, but to many who read him he was as iconic: “deity” was used, more than once, in his assorted funeral songs. While desperate formulations such as “world literature” conjure up bongos, beads, and sitting Indian-style, the books Kapuscisnki wrote may actually qualify, as evocative and singular in English as they are in their native (and what is said to be austerely fine) Polish. For many of us, the day of his death was a dark cold day.
Until 1983, most Western readers would have mistaken the man for Polish espresso. Thanks to the efforts of the husband-and-wife team of William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand, Kapuscinski’s first book to appear in English was The Emperor (originally published in Polish in 1978), a spell-casting oral history of Haile Selassie’s rule over Ethiopia. The Emperor was followed in 1985 by what many believe to be his masterpiece, Shah of Shahs (originally published in 1982), a short, tense, fragmentary account of the 1979 Iranian revolution. It was followed in 1987 by Another Day of Life (originally published in 1976), his bizarre and shattering reportage from Angola as its former Portuguese overlords fled for their lives. These three books brought Kapuscinski Western acclaim as perhaps the world’s leading literary journalist. The acclaim was rather tardy seeing that for the past three decades Kapuscinski had been filing dispatches from the Indian subcontinent, Asia, Latin America, and, most often, Africa, initially in the service of a Polish youth journal as its first and only foreign correspondent and later for the Polish Press Agenc
y. As his now-famous about-the-author note from The Shadow of the Sun (2001) informs us, Kapuscinski “witnessed twenty-seven coups and revolutions” and “was sentenced to death four times.” A biographical precis many nonfiction writers would do anything, short of earning it, to have.
Kapuscinski’s African dispatches largely made his name. Like his countryman Joseph Conrad, to whom he is often compared and to whom he bears almost no resemblance, Kapuscinski has become embedded in the continent’s literary firmament. Upon Kapuscinski’s death, however, the young Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina attacked “the racist writer Kapuscinski” as being the author of some “all-time classic lines about Africa,” such as, “In Africa, the notion of abstract evil—evil in and of itself—does not exist.” It is hard to blame those angered by some of Kapuscinski’s more careless statements about Africa. His risky generalizations may suggest a seeming lack of recognition of Africa’s varied and heterodox cultures, but that seems a minor sin in light of how deeply he attempted to understand it and how much of his life he spent there. Kapuscinski knew, of course, how complicated his subjects were. “The European in Africa,” he wrote in The Shadow of the Sun, “sees only part of it,” and can only fall short when attempting to describe “the immense realm” of African psychology. His subject matter was local but his tone was cosmic, dislocated, and sometimes surreal. His miner’s light lingered deep in recesses of totalitarianism, mysticism, and revolution—places where truth begins to lose access to the photosynthesis of fact. A coloration not often noted by those in opposition to Kapuscinski is that his is the Africa of a man from a subject country who discovered it just as its nations were snapping the leashes of their colonial masters. In the end, great nonfiction writing does not necessarily require any accuracy greater than that of an honest and vividly rendered confusion. The limits of human perception cruelly bind us all.
Kapuscinski’s final book, Travels with Herodotus, is about the Father of History, a man so bound by his fifth-century BCE perception and experience as to appear by modern standards almost intellectually comatose. “He had never heard of China,” Kapuscinski writes, “or Japan, he did not know of Australia or Oceania, had no inkling of the existence, much less the great flowering, of the Americas. If truth be told, he knew little of note about western and northern Europe.” He also believed that Ethiopian men ejaculated black semen. Yet, to Kapuscinski, Herodotus was “the first globalist,” and “the first to argue that each culture requires acceptance and understanding.” How much Herodotus actually traveled we cannot know, and a good deal of Travels with Herodotus is occupied with Kapuscinski’s ceaseless wonderings about his early life (“Did he build sand castles at the edge of the sea?”), family history (“Might Herodotus’s father have been a merchant himself?”), and personality (“Perhaps he had a naturally inquiring mind?”). The book’s true nature, however, is that of an unabashed memoir, the author’s first, and it opens with Ryszard, aged 19, studying Greek history at Warsaw University. Although a Polish translation of Herodotus was not available until 1955, shortly after Stalin’s death, Kapuscinski became a lifelong pupil of Herodotus’s time, “a world of sun and silver, warm and full of light, populated by slender heroes and dancing nymphs.” It was also a world that seemed determined to destroy itself through internecine warfare.
Kapuscinski shortly graduated and became a journalist. After being censured, hounded, and then exonerated by the authorities for writing an expose of a grisly Polish factory intended to be a Communist showcase—a story curiously unmentioned here—Kapuscinski was rewarded with his first foreign assignment. He had asked for Czechoslovakia, the strangest place he could then imagine. He was given India. His assigning editor presented the young journalist with a gift: “It was a thick book with a stiff cover.... On the front, stamped in gold letters, was Herodotus, THE HISTORIES.”
Kapuscinski took the book with him everywhere—to India, to Afghanistan, to China, to Cambodia, to Rangoon. “Sometimes,” he writes, “when the offices emptied in the evenings and the hallways grew quiet.... I reached for The Histories of Herodotus lying in my drawer.” We are thus intended to believe that Herodotus served as Kapuscinski’s lifelong companion and was, in some ways, his intellectual hero. Yet one will search in vain for any mention at all of Herodotus in Kapuscinski’s previously published books in English. Is it all a device? If so, similar slipperiness has earned Kapuscinski no small amount of criticism from the sheriffs of nonfiction, most recently Slate’s Jack Shafer, who plucked the press tag of out Kapuscinski’s fedora in an early 2007 piece titled “The Lies of Ryszard Kapuscinski.” But calling Kapuscinski a liar is akin to one of the Pharisees investigating Jesus’s story of the prodigal son and proclaiming that the young man in question never left home at all. Obviously, one should not set out to consciously deceive in a piece of writing that purports to be true. From this understanding the gradations begin.
A nonfiction writer’s style provides the first corresponding clue as to how we are to approach the facts at hand. The style of the plainspoken, rigorously invisible journalist semaphores one kind of approach, that of the poetical, allusive, and interactive journalist another. These are not competitive styles. One is contentedly earthbound while the other mingles in a Milky Way where morality is not a matter of proper dates and chronology but of representational accuracy context, language. Its mode of communication is not discursive, or even necessarily informative, but visionary. It is called poetic license for a reason: one has to earn it. As Kapuscinski once said, the subtle tyranny of what happened “is exactly what I avoid.” He continued, “If those are the questions you want answered, you can visit your local library.”
There is distressingly little to argue over in Travels with Herodotus. The narrative floats about like an uncaptained trireme—in the Sudan, Kapusciski meets some questionable individuals, smokes a joint with them, goes to a Louis Armstrong concert, and then ponders the Nile, which gets him thinking about Herodotus—and the pectorals of his language have lost some definition. “I burned the midnight oil studying up on guerrilla warfare in the jungles of Burma and Malaysia,” he writes at one point. Whether the presumably comparable Polish phrase being translated here is as hoary can only be guessed. It may be unreasonable to expect a writer in his seventies to strive toward the same kind of originality as he did in his youth. But the writer in question is Ryszard Kapuscinski. There is a reason we do not allow our superheroes to grow old.
Those who know Kapuscinski’s work have their favorite moments. The scene in Shah of Shahs wherein Kapuscinski imagines a moment in which a police officer threatens a man in a crowd, who for the first time in his life “doesn’t budge... and this is precisely the beginning of the revolution.” His description of how half of the Angolan city of Luanda was shipped away in crates during its siege, “as if a pirate fleet had sailed into the port, seized a priceless treasure, and escaped to sea with it.” The sorcerer casts a few enchantments in Travels with Herodotus, but only one of them comes within range of either of the above. It occurs with Kapuscinski’s account of the construction of the Great Wall of China, built over thousands of years with “dedication and devotion” and “exemplary discipline.” And then the classic Kapuscinskian reversal: “This is how the world’s energy is wasted.”
A nameless energy gathers as one reads deeper into Travels with Herodotus, and one begins to realize that, in many ways, Kapuscinski’s previous books, however brilliant, were somewhat impersonal. Here, finally, we experience the early tremors Kapuscinski underwent for the privilege to write them. Not all of it is painful; much of it, in fact, is delightful—especially the revelation that Kapuscinski learned English from Hemingway. And one finally sees that in writing about Herodotus Kapuscinski is actually writing about himself. Herodotus tried to get the best information available, Kapuscinski notes, “and, given the epoch, this speaks to a tremendous expenditure of effort and to great personal determination.... And if he knows something, how does he know it? Because he heard, he s
aw.”
Kapuscinski saw more, and more clearly, if not always perfectly, than nearly any writer one can think to name. Few have written more beautifully of unspeakable things. Few have had his courage, almost none his talent. His books changed the way many of us think about nonfiction, and made many of us want to travel for ourselves, and see for ourselves. Herodotus, Kapuscinski reasonably imagines, interviewed many of his subjects by campfire. “Later, these will be called legends and myths, but in the instant when they are first being related and heard, the tellers and the listeners believe in them as the holiest of truths, absolute reality,” he writes. And so “the fire burns, someone adds more wood, the flames’ renewed warmth quickens thought, awakens the imagination.” How much smaller and colder the world now seems with Kapuscinski gone.
