the mighty and colossal werner herzog

*At a cinema near you right now: Herzog's latest documentary, Encounters at the End of the World*

Somehow in high school I stumbled across an old issue of Rolling Stone and in it was Jonathan Cott's classic interview of Werner Herzog ("Signs of Life: Werner Herzog", RS 226, 18 November 1976). The entire piece is riveting, but I was particularly taken with this story, as told by Herzog, from the set of Heart of Glass:

During the tryouts, I wanted to find out about the poetic quality of the cast, so I hypnotized them and said: "You are in a beautiful and exotic land which no person from our country has ever set foot on. Look in front of you--there is an enormous cliff, but on looking at it more closely you'll find that it's actually one solid piece of emerald... In this country, a couple of hundred years ago, a holy monk lived here and he was a poet and he spent his entire life engraving just one inscription into this emerald cliff... Open your eyes, you can read the inscription."

A single paragraph, and I was madly in love.

Despite my passion, only one time have I watched a film of his more than once. It was Nosferatu, which I saw first in an arthouse in Eugene. In love with the man already, and sufficiently Goth to throw myself with some zealotry into the vampire mythos, I fully expected to fall in love with the film as well, see it over and over until it became part of me, ran in my blood and lived inside my bones. That is, I expected the film to be simple enough that my reaction to it could be simple, and that was not the case. I left the theatre weary and ill at ease, uncertain about what I'd seen. Arguably one of the more accessible of his features, it's still no stroll in the park. The long, slow deterioration of the town being crushed by its nameless plague is exhausting and beautiful at once, and the easy glamour I preferred in my vampires was nowhere to be found. I didn't watch it again until some twenty years later; its beauty was still compelling and awful, its slow horror still unflinching.



Passing years mitigate infatuations and encourage realizations: like that a man with so strong a vision-- a vision so potent that he is arguably the star of all his films, he so overshadows his actors-- while easily lauded as a poet from a distance, might look up close like a powermad control-freak. Cott says:

Herzog's concern with the extremities of experience is meant to bring to light what Master Eckhart called the "scintilla animae"--the spark of the soul... Herzog has fashioned a spiritual and aesthetic program similar to the great magus Giordano Bruno: that of opening the "black diamond doors" within the psyche and of returning the intellect to unity through the organiziation of significant images.

This "concern with extremities" pushes his actors into notorious hardships. In the extras on the Rescue Dawn DVD, Christian Bale and Steve Zahn speak of swimming in snake-filled rivers, walking barefoot through thick jungles, pulling leeches off their skins, eating live maggots and chewing the hide off a raw snake, not to mention lying manacled to their prison-mates and enduring the constant attentions of biting ants; all this after having lost maybe a third of their normal body weight apiece. Although Herzog claims that the hardships are disciplines through which cast and crew are inspired into manifestations which would otherwise be impossible(as quoted in Les Blank's Burden of Dreams), he might lay himself again open to charges of tyranny and sadism but that he willingly undergoes anything he asks anyone else to do, always a great inviter of respect.

Still, when Klaus Kinski, a fellow constantly on the verge of making himself ridiculous through his own self-importance, throws a hissy-fit on the set of Fitzcarraldo (as seen in My Best Fiend), he looks like a primadonna but perhaps really has reached a breaking point which many actors might have long before. People were nearly killed during its filming (in a plane wreck); two natives were struck through with arrows and another lost a foot to snakebite; even the original star, Jason Robards, jumped ship after 40% of the shooting was done, having picked up amoebic dysentery. Robards' desertion led to the loss of Mick Jagger, who was playing a sort of Lear's Fool to Robard's Irishman, a loss which Herzog called irreparable and rather than try to recast it, wrote the character out of the finished film (see also Burden of Dreams). And the end product seems oddly anticlimactic, as if the real movie was never made, and what hit the theatres was a patchwork of compromises. Kinski, for all his fascination, is not by any stretch of anyone's imagination an Irishman, and his lack of a sidekick makes for much ranting at barely comprehending natives and long Herzogian stretches of silence. Anyway, that's how I remember it. It's been many years, and it's doubtful I'll ever watch it again.

What I have watched repeatedly across the years is Les Blank's Burden of Dreams, his documentary about the many tribulations dogging the making of Fitcarraldo, and this explains the sense of anticlimax. The real drama was on the set and in the mind of the director, and most of that didn't make it in front of the lens. Herzog's steady, clipped way of speaking English, with its overemphasis of consonants and lovingly precise choice of words, is at odds with his wild romanticism. This soft-spoken steadiness, his unbending solidity under pressure, a dry and understated sense of humor, his childlike interest in the world, and the sheer poetry of his vision are the things which make his arrogance not only palatable but completely unimportant.

In one of my favorite quotes (from the Great Ecstasies of the Filmmaker Werner Herzog, a companion book issued by the Goethe-Institut in honor of a 1995 retrospective), Herzog describes the notebooks he kept in the last phases of shooting Fitzcarraldo, notebooks written in such tiny print as to be, for all intents and purposes, written in cypher:

In the end, everybody deserted me. Nobody believed anymore that the boat could be moved over the mountains, and no one believed either that one day that film would be completed. I felt very lonely then, and my last anchor, my support, the one thing I could firmly hold onto, was writing. These texts do not resemble a true diary: they are texts in which the writing tries, as if through a magical process, to prevent the next misfortune. And these texts have such a terrible beauty that I still don't dare read them today...

This encapsulates the Herzog mythos quite wonderfully. He is a visionary who has undertaken an impossible task, and so a romantic. He will use any method or tactic to achieve it, even magic: he is a magus, but also a pragmatist. Everyone has turned away from him: he is an outsider. And, most importantly, he achieves his ends, the world and its opinions be damned... and in this respect, he is the master of all he surveys.