I’ve been in a state of ecstasy for the past week. One man and three movies have allowed me to achieve a deeper level of truth and understanding of film, philosophy and humanity than with any other director I’ve yet had the chance to encounter.
And yet for all the time I’ve spent with him for the last five days, I’m still struggling to search for the ecstatic truth behind Werner Herzog.
Here is a man with an unmistakable legacy. For him to do a complete takeover of Indiana University and the IU Cinema that I love so deeply is unprecedented. Glorious digital screenings of “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” “Fitzcarraldo” and “Nosferatu the Vampyre” accompanied two Herzog lectures on “The Search for Ecstatic Truth” and “The Transformative Role of Music in Film” throughout all of last week.
It was an opportunity to see some of the best work of a cinematic auteur while simultaneously picking the brain of a notorious character.
Going in, I expected a man capable of candid, spontaneous insanity coupled with darkly poetic and far reaching ruminations on life.
Herzog did not disappoint. His impeccable German diction gives him a nuanced charm, and his hilarious life stories were like sharing moments with an old friend.
But everything I assumed about him was an exaggerated caricature. Herzog is a man of two minds. He is a genius and a madman, a poetic optimist and a dour pessimist, a philosopher and a man of utmost practicality, a realist and yet someone with fantastical dreams and ambitions, a grimly serious speaker and a twistedly sardonic storyteller.
Speakers like my personal friends Jon Vickers and James Paasche described his films as a delicate mixture of reality and artifice achieved through improvisation, impossible shooting conditions and Herzog’s own quest for ecstatic truth. His fictional films are surreal but often draw from reality and authentic landscapes. On the other hand, his documentaries cut deep with their harsh true stories, and yet Herzog shows no qualms at outright fabricating moments and constructing a narrative for his subjects.
The man I witnessed this week is a similar combination of reality and artifice. His poise and character as a public speaker is so captivating that he hits right at your body and mind. And yet his rambling stories and outrageous anecdotes may be little more than apocryphal. But together we get an image of a giant, an artist, and an icon. His presence is truer than anyone working in the movies today.
I started the week with a screening of “Aguirre, Wrath of God.” I had seen the film before, but only in the German version. Herzog made many of his films in both English and German, reshooting multiple scenes and dubbing others later. English however is his preferred version, the language that his star Klaus Kinski performed in (in fact, he never dubbed the German version himself. Herzog claimed Kinski demanded a million dollars to record his voice in German, namely because he believed it to be the worst of his many films, and Herzog got an actor to do a “better” Kinski than he could have), and the language Herzog’s production company always shows to American audiences.
From the film’s famous first moments, we get a sense of Herzog’s split between beauty and darkness. Thousands of natives and soldiers in armor are climbing down a mountain in Peru in a magnificent helicopter shot purveying their descent, but our eyes are simultaneously torn between the walkers and the foggy brilliance of the sky to their right.
The Krautrock band Popol Vuh’s hauntingly electronic orchestrations lend the moment a serene solitude that in another film would be treated like an action scene. Herzog does a similar thing in “Fitzcarraldo” when a boat is careening down the rapids, and Herzog shoots in draining slow motion rather than aggressive hand-held cinematography and editing.
Herzog does not for a moment glamorize their quest. These people look plain desperate. Neither film had an astronomical budget, but “Aguirre’s” was significantly less than “Fitzcarraldo’s,” and the Spanish conquistadors’ garbs and weapons look notably low rent and pitiful. No, this is a film of people already stuck in the mud who manage to sink deeper and deeper.
We see madness so clearly in the eyes of Klaus Kinski as Aguirre. His lanky, hunchback poise and his stringy white hair immediately grant him the presence of a twisted leader. One audience member pointed out he never takes off his costume. He is so deeply embedded in this character. Herzog observes him testing his patience and an inch from madness as he stands silently next to an annoying native pan flute player performing the same, hollow tune.
“Fortune smiles on the brave and spits on the cowards,” Aguirre says. If Herzog believes this, it’s the reason he braved the rainforests of Peru and the rapids of the Amazon to make this film. Herzog said working on location has a sort of “voodoo.” We feel it when the rapids took away a raft in the middle of the night and the development was written into the film, or when a rat is seen scurrying on deck and picks up two babies in its mouth. “If these shots are not in the film, I have lived in vain,” Herzog recalled Monday evening.
Thank goodness they are. By the film’s end when the characters have completely descended into madness, we are left empty of feeling and reality, and Herzog does it all through such elegant simplicity. Arrows and spears enter the frame silently on a whim. A boat resting in a tree looks so strikingly real, and yet we can’t be sure. Monkeys suddenly teem on board, and our whole world seems to circle around in one final shot.
Herzog said that raft might still be going around in circles were we to return to it today. Such is the power of his films. “Aguirre” is the pinnacle of modern, art cinema. Its story is not pretentious, nor is it a genre picture, but it has a distinctive, timeless quality and an incalculable mood.
“It’s not primitive, but it’s not academic,” Herzog said. “There’s a poetry in between.”
That poetry in between has always been what Herzog is after, which he described in great detail on his Tuesday night speech.
He shot in the jungle because he finds it to be a place of imagination, mystery and dark secrets. And yet he finds it obscene and dangerous. He neither loves nor hates the jungle. The same goes for Kinski, for those wondering. And in that mindset, he doesn’t share in the view of his “Grizzly Man” subject Timothy Treadwell or with other environmentalists who he repeatedly called “New Age idiots.” (He didn’t care for “Avatar” either)
“People think I’m a closet romantic,” Herzog rebutted to a question about his demeanor and the poetry he sees in the world. “The Disney-fication of nature is exactly what got Timothy Treadwell killed, it’s what got his girlfriend killed, and its what got two innocent bears shot.”
Rather, what Herzog is after is something deeper. In one of Herzog’s introductions, Jon Vickers quoted him as once saying, “What moves me is not reality but the question that lies behind it.”
This Herzog calls ecstatic truth. It’s the understanding of the world that comes from the out of body experience that creates a moment of ecstasy in your state of being. Facts, as Herzog says, are not necessarily truth. They’re human constructions just as anything.
“We shouldn’t be like flies on a wall. We should be hornets ready to sting,” Herzog said at a film conference where countless other filmmakers championed cinema verite. A documentary should be upfront and in your face to get a true understanding of the subject, not hidden such that the person is unaware of the camera. “Cinema verite is the truth of accountants,” Herzog said. And the only way then that a sublime feeling of ecstasy can be conveyed through film is by incorporating “fabrication, stylization and imagination.”
A good way of seeing what Herzog means is by looking at “Grizzly Man,” a popular subject for questions just about every night Herzog spoke.
Herzog saw poetry in Treadwell because he was a man who wanted to become a bear. He desired so badly to feel an out of body experience, and Herzog is just the person to understand him. Here is a man without much of an agenda or motive, and yet Herzog aims to understand him and show how others fail to. Even what others would call a documentary constructed from found footage, Herzog sees it as something other than cinema verite because he recognizes that Treadwell really is performing for his own camera.
The resulting film is pure Herzog. It’s his own human construct, imbued with the ideas of a person who thinks the “common denominator of the world is chaos, hostility and murder,” and not as Treadwell sees it. The imagination comes from our harrowing belief of what the sound of Treadwell being mauled might sound like. The stylization comes when Herzog enhances the narrative of this nature film by asking questions of perceptions and personas. And the fabrication comes into play near the end of the film, when the pilot is singing along with the soundtrack. “People said, what a beautiful moment you captured, whereas this is a beautiful moment that I staged,” Herzog confessed.
This is not the only incident of Herzog betraying the facts of his documentaries. And yet Herzog would argue that although his films are not always strictly factual, they add to the overall truth of the film.
If Herzog had created a legend in his documentaries, could he be doing the same thing with his stories in front of audiences? Would it matter?
While on a tangent after a question about the 360-degree shot at the end of “Aguirre,” Herzog mentioned one of his first jobs was confiscating cars from stout Bavarians at the Munich Oktoberfest. This was no easy task, he explained. But when the parking lot was empty and he had cars remaining, he would drive them around and allow the car to drift in circles on its own. When the cops saw him doing this, he leaped out of the moving car and tossed the keys to the officer.
Herzog suddenly sounds more like Clint Eastwood than an art house director, but it seems to fit our own perception of a wacky Herzog capable of anything. And in an indirect way, it answered that guy’s question better than a factual one could have.
What is a relief though is knowing that the legends that exist around “Fitzcarraldo” are exactly true. The story of this film involves an Irish businessman with a dream of bringing opera to the jungle in Peru, and part of his plan to accomplish this involves sailing a ship deep into the rainforest the wrong way up two rivers so he can then drag the boat over a mountain into a nearby river on the opposite side.
Whereas before we could not imagine a boat being pulled over a mountain, now we can. If Herzog was going to spend the time pulling a boat over a mountain without special effects, he was damn well going to show us it actually happening. He patiently lets the camera sit watching this massive object slowly move inches up a steep incline. And for 20 minutes the boat slowly ascends and descends, not seemingly overnight in a brief Hollywood montage. Herzog really did achieve the unthinkable, and he doesn’t spoil the moment.
Seeing this film in tandem with “Aguirre,” the two are very similar films in their production and their themes. Both shot hundreds of miles from civilization deep in the Amazon, a man with a wild dream is portrayed by Klaus Kinski as a madman sinking deeper into confusion in his pursuit.
“Fitzcarraldo” is not the mental masterpiece “Aguirre” is, but nor is it as heavy or devastating in terms of depicting madness. “Fitz” has a bittersweet ending, and it becomes a better, more touching one than the impractical ending. What’s more, it still demonstrates virtuoso filmmaking by Herzog in his exploit of the voodoo of the jungle through sound, editing and style.
Herzog believes that he can tell a good filmmaker in 60 seconds of watching a movie based on how they use sound. In fact, he can look away from the screen and still know something engaging is happening. It’s why Herzog places such value on music in his films and dedicated yet another lecture to it.
He opened with a Fred Astaire clip from “Swing Time.” He has the most insipid face and his movies have the most insipid plots, Herzog said, but he loves him so. This particularly famous moment shows Astaire dancing in front of three gigantic silhouettes. The pleasant sound of his rhythms coupled with the toweringly graceful imagery, “it really doesn’t get better than this.”
Music steers, motivates and agitates our souls, Herzog explained, and when it’s used well in film, it helps to visualize that which is hidden behind the film. What’s more, music has a more intense affinity with film than literature.
Because of yet another story that impacted Herzog deeply, he claims he has never sang in his life. As a child, he was obstinate in school and even more so in music class. He refused to sing, and the teacher threatened to not allow any kids out for recess until he agreed to perform. This incident affected him deeply, but now he has a kinship with artists such as Florian Fricke and Richard Thompson. “These collaborations do not change the course of my life. They only make it better,” he said.
I wondered what kinship he had with The Killers, for whom he is directing a live concert to be streamed worldwide this Tuesday. I asked how he could’ve possibly gotten involved with something like this, and apparently they reached out to him to direct, despite he being oblivious to them. I asked him, did he enjoy them? “It’s good rock music. I don’t like rock music with too much electronics on top, or when you can’t understand the lyrics. I like things like Elvis,” he said fairly hilariously.
At the end of the week, Herzog sat down with an afternoon interview with a former teacher of mine, Professor Gregory Waller. His first question was simple, but doesn’t have a short answer. “If you had access to a cinema like this, what would you put on the schedule for the first year?”
Herzog’s answers struck me as somewhat standard. Melies, Griffith, Kurosawa’s “Rashomon” and Mizoguchi’s “Ugetsu,” Huston’s “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” Kazan’s “Viva Zapata!”; perhaps Kiarostami was his most obscure selection. He confessed he is not the cinephile many of his fans are, and yet he would not show anything “mainstream” either. “For a lot of UCLA students I’ve met, film history seems to start at “Star Wars.”
These selections seemed to humanize him as a director, and for once in the festival we saw an artist capable of challenging films, but someone who never made films to be specifically obtuse.
“There is no conspiracy in Hollywood to dumb down the audience,” Herzog said. “My films are mainstream. The secret mainstream maybe, but there is no problem with the industry.”
People in the audience were doubtful, but the fact that Herzog did attract so many people in this small Midwestern town this entire week should be evidence that he’s right.
“The essentials of filmmaking have remained the same in the 21st Century. It’s the audience that’s changed,” Herzog said. “There has been a huge shift, but not in filmmaking itself.”
TV, 3-D and the Internet are all culprits of this shift, and all of them he has tinkered with in one way or the other. But at the end of the day, he can still make a film like “Nosferatu” and terrify and entertain an audience collectively.
The midnight screening of “Nosferatu” was probably the most fun I had at a screening all week. Herzog had a made a straight genre film, one that is fairly faithful to “Dracula” and Murnau’s “Nosferatu,” and yet it has the allure of something much greater and different. Kinski’s performance is electric. His screen presence allows Herzog to make a moody film without action, without worrying about the hammy performances of the rest of his cast and without sacrificing its audience appeal. It’s a masterpiece.
There is so much more to tell about Herzog and the events of last week. He forgot Nicolas Cage’s name. He talked about how glaciers can fart. He said he still has Klaus Kinski’s rifle and how the pair of them each had a plot to kill the other. He said that “Fitzcarraldo” could not have been made were it not for him forging a shooting permit with the Peruvian President’s signature. He said as an actor he’s only good when he’s dangerous, vile and debased. His first lecture was sold out in a room holding 400 people, turning away nearly 200. And his second was marred by a man who had a diabetic seizure 15 minutes before Herzog finished talking.
But I’d like to close with one of my favorite anecdotes of the week. A young man asked what was clearly a well thought out, carefully rehearsed question, one which he presumed would get a very profound response. “People may have a knee jerk reaction watching your films and say you’re a pessimist. But when I watch your films, I feel that you’re an optimist. How do you view yourself?”
“Well, I try not to look at myself,” Herzog said. “Sometimes I have to look at myself in the mirror, like when I’m shaving, but I try to avoid looking in my own eyes. If you’ve ever noticed a cat looking in a mirror, you know they avoid their eyes too. Sometimes dogs do it stupidly, but otherwise they try not to.”
I doubt that was the answer the man was looking for, but I couldn’t have gotten a better one. What Herzog did add though was that putting films and artists in terms of pessimism or optimism greatly narrows what the work is capable of.
That’s the key thing to take away about Herzog. He is a man of complexity and depth, not of exaggerated insanity or token profundity. His gift as a filmmaker is that he always hits both sides of the spectrum. He has ambitions and dreams that exceed most filmmakers.
Another introduction summed it up best. “No one will define Werner Herzog’s role other than Werner Herzog.”