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.

appaloosa: this year's oater

The long and short of it is that if I'd stumbled across this on late-night television I'd have been happy as the clam from the adage. The deciding factor is that I have to wait too long between my oaters -- a year, two years -- and my appetite gets whetted. I start to salivate; my expectations get pumped up. I wind up hoping for the Unforgiven or 3:10 to Yuma every time. To quote Jessica Lange in Sweet Dreams, people in hell want ice water, but that don't mean they get it.

This is a project from the heart for Ed Harris, directing and starring in a script written by Robert B. Parker. Harris loves a Western. You can feel it from the first frames, the love that went into the making of it, and the good things about it are many: the relationship between Harris as Virgil Cole and Viggo Mortensen as his sidekick is chief among them. The banter between the hero and his sidekick makes or breaks a buddy-western, and these two actors have an engaging and affectionate rapport. Then there's the authentic feel of the weaponry, a sense that the guns were chosen with pride and care. My boyfriend was particularly impressed by how authentic the gunshots sounded, -- so, well-done, foley artists.

The movie's built on a foundation of good, strong set-pieces: a train ambush, a stand-off with the Chiricahuas (which Viggo solves in a wonderful manner), a trial and a kidnapping, some gunfights, some betrayals and a showdown. Everything, in fact, that you'd expect from a Western. It's the frame upon which these pieces rest which feels creaky and insubstantial. The timing is off, and it never does work up a full head of steam.

I'm working on a theory that the best Westerns are very specifically concentrated in time. Stagecoach and High Noon and Yuma are compressed into very short periods. Alternatively, a movie like the Searchers spans years but the task at hand is so exactly focused as to provide the needed compression. Now look at a near-great but flawed movie like Peckinpah's Major Dundee (flawed or not, one of my favorites): it starts up gangbusters with a classic juxtaposing of buddy/nemeses Richard Harris and Charlton Heston, there's a specific task at hand, lots of action and suspense, then Heston's Dundee gets shot through with an arrow and the film takes a dark respite while his wound heals but he becomes a drunk. Because of the time passage, the film is split in two pieces, lending it an emotional complexity, as the characters are given time and space to grow, but Peckinpah never quite recovers the suspense. In a way, it sacrifices greatness as a Western to explore possibilities in other areas.

*WARNING: SPOILERS THIS PARAGRAPH*

Appaloosa has a specific Big Bad (Jeremy Irons, with not enough to do as the wicked rancher Randall Bragg) to be put down, and although he acts as catalyst for the major events, the canvas of the story is stretched out over such a long and indefinite period of time that the concentration relaxes, and the focus is soft and diffused. Soon after riding into town, Harris meets the love of his life (Rene Zellweger as a widowed piano-player, giving us not a single moment that is not entirely predictable for anyone who's already seen a Rene Zellweger movie, and who among us can say we have not?). In the next moment they are building a house, and, just as suddenly, she's making moves on other fellas. The psychology of her character might seem both apt and interesting except that the uncertain passage of time confuses things, and we get her perhaps interesting psychology told to us in clumsy exposition instead of watching it unfold and discovering it for ourselves.

Ach. It's not a bad film. It's got good fun. It's got Lance Henriksen, and I'd ride a long way through bad weather to watch that man act. The final showdown is concise and graceful, marred only by Viggo's bookend voiceover narrations, which are unwieldy and unnecessary.

The long and the short of it is: I liked it, but I left the theatre unsatisfied, already craving next year's Western, and hoping to God it's not made by Kevin Costner.

every prophet in his house: carnivale

If destiny exists, it exists for the malefactor, same as the godlike. You read about Hitler's life and find a chilling and unmistakable air of vocation in it; apparently he had a calling every bit as strong and mystical as any saint's. ETHOS ANTHROPOI DAIMON, Heraclitus said some 2500 years ago, a statement which usually shows up in English as, "Character is fate," but translates literally as, "A man's character is his daimon." According to Plato's Republic, each of us chooses his Daimon prior to birth, a being both subjective and objective, abstract and real, both within us and beyond us, some combination of guardian angel, touchstone and life-path. Our Daimon keeps us to our chosen purpose when we stray, sometimes gently, sometimes driving us with brutal force. The Greek word EUDAMONIA, which finally grew to mean something like happiness, earlier meant "having a good daimon." If you've chosen a good daimon, your life will tend towards the smooth and blissful, and if you've chosen one choleric and surly, things won't come easy. Yeats (who had a turbulent but acknowledged relationship with his Daimon) said, "Each DAIMON is drawn to whatever man... it most differs from, and it shapes into its own image the antithetical dream of man," and "...there is a deep enmity between a man and his destiny... [yet] a man loves nothing but his destiny."

These last words might be splashed across a title card at the opening of Carnivale. Set in the dustbowl of the 1930s, it tells the parallel tales of Ben Hawkins and Brother Justin Crowe, twin avatars, one the servant of light, the other of darkness, and nothing is black and white. The world of Carnivale is dirt and sepia coloured, like the Great Depression itself. Nobody ever gets completely clean. Blizzards of dry topsoil blow across the land like Biblical furies. When we meet these men, one is earnestly seeking to follow God's will and offer hope to the many homeless and destitute, the other is skulking and mistrustful, his legs still sporting the chains of an escaped murderer. One finds a family amongst carnies and roustabouts, the other begins his true ministry while locked in an asylum. Both spend much of the first season trying to escape their individual destinies. Brother Justin, until he accepts his mission as "the Left Hand of God," wants only to do good works; Ben Hawkins wants only to be left alone. Questions arise, up into the last moments, about where the evil resides, how much is there, and how much of it is inevitable.

This was an extraordinary moment in television. It lasted for two seasons, twenty-four episodes, all told. Talk about bold: the first season is all exposition, all set-up for the second. Amazingly, it works. We are introduced into the time and the lives of the characters, and we watch as these mirror avatars are roused up from their mediocre human lives, each to travel through his own peculiar Chapel Perilous, never meeting but sharing overlapping nocturnal dream-lives. In the second year, they are drawn together into an inevitable but unpredictable piece of armageddon between God's two warring hands.

Here are a handful of champion performances: particularly by John Carroll Lynch as Brother Justin's chief henchman, John Hannah in the best two episodes ("Babylon" and "Pick a Number") as the doomed and cringing barman in a Texas helltown called Babylon, and Robert Knepper as a radio journalist who becomes entangled with Brother Justin's story. The best,--in fact, possibly the best performance I've ever seen on the small screen--is by Toby Huss as the weak and good-hearted carnival-barker Stumpy. Surrounding these champion performances are a host of very fine ones, and the women are a downright revelation. With minimal makeup and no trick lighting, women who would normally fall into the unsexed category of the too-heavy, too-natural and too-old are given full sway in displaying their considerable charms. Pushing 60, Adrienne Barbeau's face is creased and worn and lovely, her sensuality as powerful as ever as the strong and virgin (in the old, pagan sense of being unowned by man) snake-dancer Ruthie.

One never sees God in Carnivale. There are characters with preternatural traits: the mysterious Management, who runs the carnival with an iron hand but never emerges from his trailer, or Sophie (Clea Duvall) who has a disturbing empathic connection with her comatose mother (unsettlingly played by Diane Salinger). No character ever sees God, but Destiny is nearly a character in itself, it is so fully present. The first episode kicks off with a dark and manic dream sequence, every flashing image of which is part of the greater destiny of Ben Hawkins, only we don't know it until much later. There's not a loose end here; the writers knew every nuance of the world they were creating from the first words and images. Nobody ever sees God, but there is no question that someone is there. Some puppet-master with a heightened sense of mischief and at least a little bent toward sadism is the organizing intelligence behind this vast and fascinating chess-game.