Werner Herzog - A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin

by Paul Cronin

  Listen, in the opening minutes of Handicapped Future, to the gloriously optimistic wheelchair-bound young girl who ran out of things to dream about at the age of five and wants nothing more than to walk, visit America, and meet the Indians of her favourite western. Consider the dignified Aborigines in Where the Green Ants Dream, with their moral claim to ancient lands, up against the deranged officialdom of the white man’s courts. Watch Reinhold Messner weeping at the thought of telling his mother her other son is dead. All are in some form a representation: the benign minds of Fini and Vladimir Kokol; the chronic back pain of the Bad Lieutenant; the maniacal fury of Gene Scott, ecstatic frenzy of Brooklyn preacher Huie Rogers and murderous impulses of Carlo Gesualdo; Bokassa in Bangui feasting from his vast refrigerators, and death-row inmates chatting behind the bulletproof glass windows of Texas prisons; flying into the abyss with Steiner, and frolicking with Timothy Treadwell and the bears of Alaska; inside the comforting cockpit with Dieter Dengler, and struggling through the terrorising jungle with Juliane Koepcke; standing over the only person left on a deserted island about to explode, and swimming under the dream-like Ross Ice Shelf; sweeping over speechless children amidst the oblivion of post-war Kuwait, and listening to melancholic ballads sung by young Miskito Indians in Nicaragua; encountering the inhabitants of the undulating dunes of the Sahara and the cast of characters at the inaccessible McMurdo Station, then moving down into a cave adorned with immaculately preserved Palaeolithic art and up to the vertiginous Cerro Torre; bearing witness to the authority of exiled film historian Lotte Eisner and the self-reliant, snowbound hunters of Siberia; marvelling at those seeking some form of religious salvation, be they fervent pilgrims, half a million peripatetic Buddhists, or figures crawling on ice in search of a lost city.

  There is also Herzog’s own implacable autodidactic nature and knowledge that the entire world is on offer should we be able to muster the requisite excitement; his never-ending Bildung (self-improvement, personal transformation), refusal to sing in public, and mythical final moments, walking – alone and unbound – until no road is left; his attempts to nurture a community on the fringes of Germany’s most important film festival, to create a utopia in South America, to construct a modern-day atelier, brimming with collaborating artisans, where communal working methods can blossom far from the commercial excesses of Hollywood. Consider also a perfect football match while walking across mountains of sugar beet from Munich to Paris (see Of Walking in Ice); the excesses of African slavery; the hypnotic state of a doomed, archaic society; a plague-ridden city rejoicing in its disintegration; a small-scale, close-knit and well-functioning film crew; imbecilic aliens who land on Earth and get nothing right; travelling on foot to pull together a divided nation (and, en route, saving a young Albert Einstein from choking); space exploration; the ability to fly. Herzog seeks nothing but freedom. Reinhild Steingröver tells us that both nature and culture are presented in Herzog’s work as “inescapably hostile realms.” Werner can do nothing but try to elude the potential menace nonetheless.

  7 SURVIVAL

  Werner lives a life of austerity, asceticism, authenticity. In an interview recorded more than thirty-five years after Herzog made his first film, his friend and collaborator Florian Fricke said: “Werner Herzog is one of the few friends that are very famous and have, regardless of their fame, not changed at all. He is in no way different from the way I knew him twenty-five years ago. He still drinks his beer from the bottle.” (I have taken a number of subway rides with Werner in New York after a taxi ride was deemed extravagant.) Herzog has always had respect for audiences, aware that the admirers of his films have for years put food on the table, insisting he doesn’t lead the life of an “artist,” claiming instead the title of “soldier” or “craftsman.” Debatable perhaps, but probably something we can live with. After all, as Walter Gropius told us nearly a century ago, “The artist is an exalted craftsman.” What is certain is that while both German states of the second half of the twentieth century might have been “crassly materialistic” (as Günter Grass once described them), Werner never has been. He recognised at an early age that money would never get him what he wanted (though it might someday become, he said in 1976, “a concomitant of my work”) and has long since chosen the hands-on existence of someone whose living space is manifestly conjoined with his professional life. Happy to integrate himself into mainstream film culture whenever the right opportunity arises – whether it be working with Twentieth Century Fox on Nosferatu or, as a director for hire, thirty years later, on Bad Lieutenant – there have been no major deviations in Werner’s life. When the abyss stares up at him, Werner looks fixedly back, then moves on. “A comedy with Eddie Murphy,” he says, “would be my way of pulling back from the edge.”

  8 RELIGION

  Herzog is a humanist, a materialist awe-inspired by scientific exploration and progress, disdainful of the supernatural, but with an appreciation more profound than most of the ethereal, of what Christopher Hitchens would describe as “the numinous, the transcendent or – at its best – the ecstatic.” Organised religion plays no part in Werner’s life. But the divine and the sacred and the ineffable always have.

  9 POLITICS

  Politics are rarely mentioned explicitly in A Guide for the Perplexed, but unpack Werner’s thoughts about (a) “the lack of adequate imagery” as an incalculable danger to society, and (b) our failure to lob grenades into television stations, and it becomes difficult to divorce these two issues from their wider context. Both ideas reflect Amos Vogel’s work as an historian, author and curator, the belief that most of the images around us, suffused with commercialism, are worn out and pernicious in their banality, that television chokes off and impoverishes (“Es verbloedet die ganze Welt”). Both are intertwined with the animosity felt by some towards those diabolical bureaucrats who – with robust corporate backing – reap vast fortunes via the time-wasting, conformist, escapist sounds and pictures with which they regularly assault the world. Both could be dubbed “political” ideas, as per Orwell’s definition: “Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.” To paraphrase Orwell, the deprivations of cinema have political and economic causes, and are not due simply to the “bad influence” of individual filmmakers. When “civilization is decadent,” the images it reflects “must inevitably share in the general collapse.” We are, all of us, in this day and age, at the mercy of overwhelming and impersonal historical, economic and environmental forces, so it’s unlikely that the tide of stagnant cinema will ever be beaten back. There are, fortunately, some willing to confront the corrupted, debased, stale, adulterated, ready-made and cliché-ridden images that surround us. The actions of an enlightened individual or vanguard few, ready to kick back no matter what the odds, those striving for the ideal, can inspire regeneration. Werner has long recognised that he can’t change the world through his films, but he can help us better understand certain things.

  Although ideology is always handled in Herzog’s films and interviews with, as he might describe it, “a pair of pliers,” even if the timeless – not the topical – is what he has always been consumed by, and though his “visionary” stance means his work is “unmediated by historical or socio-political concerns” (as Eric Rentschler writes), it could never be argued that Herzog is an apolitical figure. Werner’s anti-despotic verve, for example, is active indeed and given the right circumstances would surely define his very existence. He once told me – without a hint of bluster or bravado – that he would never bear witness to a regime like the Third Reich on home soil for the simple reason that he would stand and fight, surely dying in the process. In an unpublished recording of a conversation with Amos Vogel from 1970, Werner suggested an important lesson needed to be learnt by those in charge, and that he hoped the United States would “lose the war in Vietnam.” Referencing events at the Cannes and Oberhausen Film Festivals, in an article written for a German f
ilm magazine in 1968 – a politically and socially convulsive year for many countries around the world – Herzog wrote that

  In a climate of radical political activities, it becomes impossible to communicate anything based on a personal decision, because any pronouncement is reduced to fit a lopsided friend-or-foe construct …

  The lesson I have learned from the events at Oberhausen and Cannes is that a filmmaker cannot and must not keep his films out of the political debate. For such a standpoint, the situation in the field of cultural politics has become far too serious. In these times of upheaval it is no longer possible to try and rescue one’s film and shelter it in the safe corner of neutrality. A filmmaker can no longer remain neutral, nor can he make the excuse that it is really everybody else who has turned his film into a political statement.

  The politicising of film, however, is fraught with dangers. This is to say that as soon as a crucial political moment is reached, what is expected of a film is automatically reduced. Film can no longer develop its full potential with regard to content and style because everybody’s interest will be focused on some palpable results to be gleaned from it. Instead of gaining an awareness of issues and developing questions, people will – according to the film’s political stance – primarily read or even force arguments out of it. That is why I have always sought to declare Signs of Life apolitical, though the film has as its theme an individual’s radical rebellion.†

  Jean-Pierre Melville wrote that a filmmaker “must be a witness to his times.” Werner is just that, though he has always observed and participated on his own terms. For him, poetry and abstraction will naturally overwhelm the prosaic nature of commonplace politics. Never hesitant to ridicule the more wrongheaded political activity of the 1968 era, Herzog suggests that today, should the zealous soixante-huitards take a look at the abstract Even Dwarfs Started Small – with its pint-sized insurgents and their disorganised, fragmented, misplaced, futile but still respectable revolutionary fervour – “they might see a more truthful representation of what happened in 1968 than in most other films.”

  10 ACCOUNTANCY

  “When he was in school,” Herzog’s mother once explained, “Werner never learnt anything. He never read the books he was supposed to read, he never studied, he never knew what he was supposed to know, it seemed. But in reality, Werner always knew everything. His senses were remarkable. If he heard the slightest sound, ten years later he would remember it precisely, he would talk about it, and maybe use it some way. But he is absolutely unable to explain anything. He knows, he sees, he understands, but he cannot explain. That is not his nature. Everything goes into him. If it comes out, it comes out transformed.” I once spoke to Herzog about the techniques behind his more stylised documentaries. If everything were explained, he said, “the charm of fabrication would disappear. I have no problem being a magician who doesn’t let his audience in on how his tricks are done.” Although we find in the pages below plenty of examples of this mischievous sleight of hand – Werner’s creative, often ingenious methods of unmasking, of liberating “truth” from its submerged depths, of showing us what we could not otherwise perceive – there are presumably many more we will never know about.

  How important, Herzog asks in his essay “On the Absolute, the Sublime and Ecstatic Truth,” is the factual? “Of course, we can’t disregard the factual; it has normative power. But it can never give us the kind of illumination, the ecstatic flash, from which truth emerges.” Reality has always been too obscure and unknowable for Werner to tackle head on. Mere facts – the “accountant’s truth” – have a shameful sterility about them, which is why he constantly plays with such things. He knows we respond more intensely to poetry than reportage and actuality, that the poet is able to articulate a more intensified, condensed, elevated and mysterious truth, that the artist is – wrote Amos Vogel – the “conscience and prophet of man.” Last year Dr Graham Dorrington, who was closely involved in the production of The White Diamond and appears as a central character in the film, wrote to me. “What is and was always clear to me is that Werner was never making a strict documentary. It was a film, carefully crafted with deliberate and remarkable style. What still amazes me is that gullible viewers (who wrote to me), or even some critics, assume that The White Diamond is a documentary that attempts to portray factual truth. That is why I don’t think my exposition of such truths is necessarily useful, i.e., I have accepted any necessary misrepresentation (or distortion), in the same way that a portrait by (say) Picasso, Jan van Eyck or Hieronymus Bosch is not a photographic likeness of anyone.” (Abbas Kiarostami’s version: “Every filmmaker has his own interpretation of reality, which makes every filmmaker a liar. But these lies serve to express a kind of profound human truth.” Even simpler, from Fellini: “Fiction may have a greater truth than everyday, obvious reality.”)

  Dorrington’s comments lead to thoughts about a concept that appears throughout this book, most emphatically in Chapter 9. Werner’s attack on what he calls “cinéma-vérité” requires an elaboration. He frequently uses the term – always disparagingly – and it lies at the heart of his Minnesota Declaration (see p. 476), so it is worth introducing three interlocking ideas. First, film theory, in its many renderings, has never been Werner’s thing, and he readily admits to a lack of interest in cinephilia, so there is no good reason why he would know the differences between cinéma-vérité and Direct Cinema. The former evolved in the fifties in France and necessarily involved a level of intrusion by filmmakers – who had no compunction about making clear their presence – in whatever was being recorded. The latter is a form of non-fiction cinema that emerged not long afterwards in North America, whereby inconspicuous and unobtrusive cameramen were more or less forbidden to interfere with the supposed actuality they were faced with, where events were not to be altered for the sake of the film (no voiceover, no re-enactments, nothing staged, etc.). In simplified terms, it’s the difference between instigating something and capturing it by chance. Worth pondering is the notion that Werner’s criticisms of cinéma-vérité (“a malady, an endless reproduction of facts”) make more sense when aimed at Direct Cinema. Vérité filmmakers, wrote James Blue in 1965, “intervene, probe, interview, provoke situations that might suddenly reveal something. There is an attempt to obtain from the subject a kind of creative participation.” In other words, more or less what Herzog does with what he calls his “manipulations.” He even hails Les maîtres fous, by pre-eminent vérité practitioner Jean Rouch – who always brought some layer of calculated artifice to his work – as one of his favourite films. For Rouch, the camera was a catalyst, “an incredible stimulant for the observed as well as the observer.”

  Second, when it comes to this kind of non-fiction filmmaking, the word “truth” is a red herring, and always has been. If the poetry of Direct Cinema (or cinéma-vérité, or whatever you choose to call it) seems to appear by passing chance, it is an affirmation of the filmmakers’ artfulness. Direct Cinema – albeit often sociologically framed, in the tradition of reportage – was masterfully, deliberately produced in such a way as to penetrate what Werner would name the “deeper truth.” Even when the cameramen filmed quotidian reality, their work was anything but the fly’s view from the wall. There was always an active point of view, though all to the good if people believed this was “reality” up there on the screen. The best of the classic Direct Cinema films, if a touch less imaginative and “ecstatic,” if occasionally populated by characters more humdrum than Herzog’s and usually not quite so rehearsed, are no less truthful. The virtuosos of all forms of documentary cinema seek to draw audiences’ attention to particular details (through camerawork and editing, as they subjectively reorder material to meet the demands of the film), rarely claiming objectivity or outright truth. They don’t deny having interpreted events around them in varying degrees when they deem it necessary by exercising control, projecting themselves, creating a structure, imposing a “theme,” all without compromising the integrity
of the footage. “We express ourselves in an indirect fashion by expressing ourselves through what we find to be interesting around ourselves,” explained Direct Cinema cameraman Al Maysles in 1971. If Emerson was right when he told us that “Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures,” on closer examination there isn’t much of a philosophical divide between Werner’s “ecstatic” filmmaking and the foundational works of Direct Cinema, whose directors left a somewhat lighter mark on their end result – one not so fanciful or glaringly apparent – than Werner does on his.

  Third, Herzog’s Minnesota Declaration isn’t to be taken as gospel. It’s more a provocation than anything else. He knows full well there is no such thing as absolute transparency in non-fiction cinema, that a truly neutral image doesn’t exist, that only the surveillance cameras record objectively and impassively. The point is that Werner doesn’t dismiss vérité out of hand so much as use it as what Guido Vitiello describes as “a rhetorical device for establishing his own poetics by contrast.” For Herzog, it is an instrument of combat that allows him to position himself and define his approach within a sea of verisimilitude-obsessed bilge. (He isn’t alone here. “Cinéma-vérité” is a term of convenience that lacks any nuance and doesn’t begin to speak to the variety of film practices it encapsulates.) For Werner, that collection of twelve aphorisms, first articulated in 1999 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis before an enthusiastic audience, remains a way of mobilising support against the meretricious product being pumped out in every direction, those heinous crimes – indiscreet reality shows, pious and “unflinching” save-the-world rants, dreary talking heads, pseudo-anthropological didacticisms, sanctimonious and pre-digested feel-good weep fests (“the impossible triumph of the human spirit”), tawdry reconstructions, noxious filler between television commercials and/or film-festival parties (David Mamet calls it “the cheetah overpowering the same old antelope”) – committed in cinéma-vérité’s name by those preoccupied more with facts than “truth,” for whom veracity is obtainable only through the most conventional means. You other filmmakers out there, willing to do the hard work, Herzog admonishes, don’t turn a blind eye. Push back.