by Paul Cronin
Considering that on the opening and closing pages of this book we are told he doesn’t consider filmmaking a “real profession” and looks upon his job “with great suspicion,” Werner has weathered the past fifty years with grace and skill. I respect him – recalcitrant by nature, an unyielding opponent of sacred cows – in equal measure for his individuality, grace, candour, fortitude, natural authority, apparent effortlessness, discipline, tolerance, joyousness, single-mindedness, adaptability, plain-spokenness, unpretentiousness, practical sensibility and what Lotte Eisner called “visionary vehemence.” There is no complacency, self-pity, torpor, abstruseness and diffidence in Herzog’s world. Hats off to the uncompromising Werner also for the fact that it’s a point of pride for him that he has no office, personal assistant or secretary, that his inbox always runneth over, that he does it all himself. He has always been out there working hard, with the required confidence, even if the eyes of the entire crowd were fixed on players at the other end of the pitch. I applaud his thoughts on conceptual art, the preponderance of indiscretion, bicycle helmets and hand sanitizers, his acceptance of the personal sacrifice that filmmaking necessarily involves, his (misplaced) fear of outliving his welcome as a filmmaker, his deep love of Bavaria, his dismay at how too many of us seek insulation from adversity. He’s good company too, these days happy with himself. Werner is stoical, but also sentimental. Bruce Chatwin’s description is on the button: “immensely tough, yet vulnerable, affectionate and remote, austere and sensual.”
Herzog would never dream of displaying the multitude of awards accumulated over the years proudly on his mantelpiece. He knows the value of the never-ending search for novelty, even if he is someone who will sit in silence for as long as it takes, who appreciates the peace and quiet of home life, of “an easy chair with a cup of tea,” who deletes unlistened-to phone messages when there are too many to handle (“Everything of importance eventually reaches me anyway”). He is principled too, a man of his word. In 1984, cameraman Ed Lachman said that “Werner once told me that if he said he’d be at a certain place on a certain street and on a certain day in 1990, he’d be there.” Admiration also flows in the direction of Herzog for moving so effortlessly between fiction and non-fiction, and as the entrepreneurial film producer for having maintained financial control of almost the entirety of his body of work. Herzog the kinosoldat is unshakable, forceful but not strident, able to withstand it all, bowing only when he chooses to. While at work on this book, Werner explained he wanted something done a particular way. I suggested to him that “the publisher doesn’t usually do that.” He absorbed what I told him, paused, then said softly, “I’m not interested in how things are usually done. I want it done this way.”
I thank Werner for his time on A Guide for the Perplexed, which inevitably means less to him than any one of his films. “As someone who has given literally thousands of interviews over the years, as well as filmed many conversations for my own films,” he told me, “it has been forever clear to me that journalists who rely on tape recorders inevitably get the story wrong, but those who sit, listening carefully, writing down the odd word, taking in the bigger picture, have a better chance of getting the story right.” I do have hours of recordings that document some of my time with Herzog, but he is nonetheless tolerant of this book, even if he feels – probably correctly – that its tone sometimes fails to capture his true self with enough precision. “Too verbose,” was the frequent charge Werner laid on the book. He immediately knew what was important. The chat-show-like elements – the boring, flippant, vague bits – were removed, a blade taken to the overwritten passages, certain “overcooked” ideas, those where Werner “endlessly pontificated,” scaled back.
Years ago, shortly before publication of the first edition, as Werner ploughed through a rough draft, he actually made it quite clear he had regretted ever agreeing to co-operate. This is, after all, someone who by his own admission lives with as little introspection as possible, who would rather embark on a thorough exploration of the world’s jungles, deserts, fields, cities and mountains than look inside. (“Oceans have always eluded me, both in life and in my films, even if I can appreciate them and even if I feel I understand men of the sea.”) Fortunately, Werner considered this second edition respectable enough to give considerable time to, including twelve intense days as we refined the manuscript together, working through it line by line, reaching for the thesaurus, chuckling at the possibilities, reading entire chapters out loud to each other. I particularly appreciated the moment when, before one of our final meetings, Werner opted out of pain relief during a trip to the dentist so he could be clear-headed during an afternoon session.
I am often asked how I met Werner, so please permit an aside, concerned with how I came to edit this book, which is itself a representation of the themes it expounds. If A Guide for the Perplexed is a roundabout treatise on how to spark dormant curiosities we never knew we had, immobilise evil forces forever raining down on the filmmaking process, neutralise the surrounding stupidity, clear the decks, wrench from the deepest recesses the requisite courage, flush away all obstacles (internal as well as physical), reclaim dignity (or, at least, adjust to there being none), accept the hardships, stomach the dejection and angst, counteract the self-doubt, brush yourself off after the kicks and slaps, and just get down to work, then it’s the best example in my life. Time spent on work you believe in is never wasted.
I first became aware of Herzog at a screening of The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner and La Soufrière at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. I was about sixteen years old and remember feeling that these were some of the most intriguing films I had yet encountered. My interest in Herzog was sealed when (sitting behind Susan Sontag and Wallace Shawn) I saw Lessons of Darkness at the Film Forum in downtown New York. Years later I found myself up against a wall, so wrote a hubris-packed letter to Walter Donohue – who still handles film books at Faber and Faber – explaining I had something to offer. At the time I was assisting Ray Carney with his Cassavetes on Cassavetes, doing research in European archives and offering French translations, so had minor credentials and a flimsy connection to Faber. Walter called me, explaining that his second-in-command was about to leave for the Cannes Film Festival, and suggesting I spend unpaid time at the Faber office and see the operation from the inside. Less than a week later I was in the office of the man who might give the go-ahead to the one book I knew I wanted to do and felt the world needed to read. (There was a gaping and – as far as I could determine – inexplicable gap on bookshop shelves between Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock.) I turn to that other Herzog – Mr Bellow’s – for as concise an explanation as possible of my reasoning behind what has turned into years of work: I was (and remain) “overcome by the need to explain, to have it out, to justify, to put in perspective, to clarify.” And to put it all in one place.
After a week of answering phones amidst the stimulating, sedate atmosphere of Faber’s Queen Square office, I asked Walter why Herzog on Herzog didn’t exist. It seemed a natural fit in their interview-book series. Walter told me he had received various proposals over the years but hadn’t liked the approaches they had taken, suggesting they had been too academically orientated. I asked if I could do the book. Walter told me to put my ideas down on paper and he would take them to the editorial board. Word soon came down: move ahead with the project. Now all I had to do was persuade Herzog. I went home, wrote a short letter and faxed it to his office in Munich. A week later a reply arrived: “I have never circled around my own work. I do not like to do self-scrutiny. I do look into the mirror in order to shave without cutting myself, but I do not know the color of my eyes. I do not want to assist in a book on me. There will be no Herzog on Herzog.” I reached for my original letter, which turned out to be overly formal and uptight. My next one, considerably longer, laid out, in simple, emotive terms, who I was and why this was a worthy project, adding that I felt the final result would surely find an appreciativ
e audience. A few days later a fax arrived. “Thank you very much for your good letter which puts you as a person in a new and different perspective,” Werner wrote. “I will be in London in September. This seems to be the best opportunity to meet and talk things over.”
I tell you all this, dear reader, because – at the risk of sounding like a cheap self-help guru – it’s worth sticking to your guns, pursuing what you want, taking that leap of faith. I could easily have junked the entire project after receiving that first fax, but instead stuck with it. Werner is the first person I ever interviewed, but for some reason I felt I could make it work. The result is, I believe, the straight dope, a volume of uncluttered prose, not unlike Herzog’s films. “My stories are never deeply complicated and intellectual,” he explains. “Children everywhere can understand them.”
Nothing is imprecise in Herzog’s world. The characters in his films might occupy liminal positions, but Werner – an intensely instinctive filmmaker – never does. He does nothing by half. In the poetic Conquest of the Useless, we find this: “If I were to die, I would be doing nothing but dying.” He frequently took me to task when it came to my working methods, insisting it was all becoming stale (“When will the book be ready? Do the five-day version. It needs life! Leave the gaps in it, leave it porous. Shake the structure out and write it. Let’s get the motherfucker over and done with”) and accusing me of being an “endless fiddler” (guilty as charged). The line from Preston Sturges’s Unfaithfully Yours was written about him: “If you ever want anything done, always ask the busy man. The others never have time.”
There is lucidity in this book, there is a wonderful stubbornness and iron determination, there is conviction, compulsion and some obstinacy, there is a crystal-clear understanding of priorities, there is perhaps hyperbole. It is all apodictically (one of Werner’s favourite words) not stale. Even if it probably contains a few benign contradictions, I have great confidence in this book, which is the result of someone exercising his daunting powers of storytelling. A Guide for the Perplexed is, as Herb Golder once told me, “Werner on everything, from outer space to our inner lives.” A friend of mine describes it as “a truly passionate encounter, like an absorbing conversation that you stumble across in the back room of a party, where real ideas and personalities are being laid bare, away from all the noise and pretentious prattle in the kitchen.” While sleepless nights and being mired in duplicity (Going Rogue) became the norm over the years, a creeping and burdensome sense of responsibility caught up with me. The decade-long chase – which invited persuasive trips to Sachrang, Neuschwanstein and Skellig – provided a hearty, rewarding challenge. Fortunately it’s been that long, as things are only now starting to make sense. The immersion has confirmed two things: first, exploring Herzog’s body of work has served as an object lesson in how lifeless and superficial the interpretive/theoretical approach too often is, how so many resort to the pointless rehash. Second, it’s downhill from here for me. As someone who on occasion interviews people of cinema, Werner is the top of the pile. The raw material doesn’t get any better.
Since the first version of this book appeared, a desire emerged to make it a thing in itself, not just commentary. As such, its contents have been rewritten/augmented with – wrote Moses Maimonides of his similarly titled tome – “great exactness and exceeding precision, and with care to avoid failing to explain any obscure point.” The interview here has been consciously inflected in certain ways, carefully pushed in various directions, coloured with specific ideas. Everything in its proper place. Structure, rhythm and tempo were painstakingly imposed upon the Herzog in these pages, after the fact, with Werner’s words edited into single, often lengthy responses to prompts and questions that were, for the most part, written afterwards. (“You should let the readers know this. I sound so talkative in the book, but I’m really not that garrulous.”) Take this portrait of an individual, this carefully calibrated provocation, with the caution it deserves. This official version is no less of a construct than any of the multitude of Herzogs that populate cyberspace and elsewhere, those complementing and competing “doppelgängers,” as Werner calls them. There was no other way of presenting this much material so efficiently.
The notion of “perplexity” has been vaguely appropriated from Maimonides – Jewish philosopher, physician, mathematician, astronomer and mystic. Writing in the twelfth century, Maimonides addressed his tome to those respectful of science but struggling to balance that knowledge with a devotion to divine law, metaphysical beliefs and “profound mysteries.” Within his book, wrote Maimonides, are solutions to the big issue of his age: the problem of religion, which is “a source of anxiety to all intelligent men.” Werner’s attempts to address more contemporary concerns and answer the sharp questions that today hang in the air are documented below. How, for example, to put food on the table when a desire for self-expression is so overwhelming? Is individuality possible in such a homogenised world? Can the requisite tenacity and steadfastness be mustered when confrontations with unfavourable odds inevitably occur? How exactly do you hypnotise a chicken? By chronicling so clearly his own liberation from the impediments and strictures of our culture; by showing how to transcend the bankrupt world into which we are sinking, one choked with anti-intellectualism, cynicism, consumerism, fear, cowardice, vulgarity, extremism, laziness and narcissism; by articulating an untrammelled and distilled commentary on life and cinema, Herzog – our persistent, knowing and sceptical guide, his anarchic streak glowing – offers tough-love wisdom to bewildered doubters everywhere, those intimidated by the uncontrollable waves of information washing over humanity, caught in the violent seas of indifference that this godless, technology-ridden, semi-literate age has wrought.
Werner’s thoughts in his Guide for the Perplexed are part of a decades-long outpouring, a response to the clarion call, to the fervent requests for guidance. He presents us with his personal ethos, talks of himself and his work, and by so doing – by laying bare his pragmatism and righteousness – offers support and reinforcement, assisting each of us in the construction of our own personalised bastion. Herzog the wayfarer is a dynamic and open-minded chaperone on the path, accessible to all. He is the honest showman providing us with something like an instruction manual, with tools for living, a much-needed shot in the arm, a map to the resting point. To paraphrase Maimonides: those readers who have not studied cinema will still derive profit from many a chapter, but those who attempt creative and imaginative endeavours of any kind will surely derive benefit from every chapter. How greatly will he rejoice! How agreeably will these words strike his ears! Let the truth and right by which you are apparently the loser be preferable to you to the falsehood and wrong by which you are apparently the gainer.
The conversations in A Guide to the Perplexed take a chronological approach, with each film – from A Lost Western (1957) to From One Second to the Next (2013) – discussed in turn. Interjections have been kept to a minimum (there was never any “systematic questionnaire” or “long list of intricate questions” brought to bear, to quote Truffaut on his work with Hitchcock), and are presented as stepping stones more than anything else. (Wanting to listen to your own voice can be a deadly trait in an interviewer.) Conscious of the fact that there are few people who have seen every Herzog film, the interview is presented in such a way that even when the reader hasn’t seen the work under discussion, there will still hopefully be something immediate and tangible to appreciate.
Towards the end of this volume, readers will find a selection (made, initially, by me) of images drawn primarily from Herzog’s archive at the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin, new translations of his poetry (originally published in 1978), a journal written in 1982 during his walk around Germany, the legendary “The Minnesota Declaration” from 1999, and Herb Golder’s “Shooting on the Lam” (extracted and edited from an unpublished book-length manuscript), from which we learn that filmmakers with an intellect are able to fortify, educate and invigorate in ways that
institutionalised theorists and academics, in thrall to obfuscating sensibilities, can only dream about. This essay – which says more in a few pages than most pieces about Herzog’s films fail to say in a hundred – serves as a bulwark against theoretical utterances about the films.
Take it with a pinch of salt and don’t be one of those who ignore the self-mockery and humour Werner’s films and interviews are full of (one reason to search out some of the many readily available recordings of him). How best to transcribe the following with the playfully sardonic tone with which it was told? “I once had a public discussion with the diminutive Agnès Varda, who seemed to take offence at my postulation that a filmmaker, rather than having this or that quality, should be able to clear his or her own height. She didn’t like that very much.” Herb Golder recalls the production of Wings of Hope and My Best Fiend: “I remember a particularly gruesome species of tree we often encountered in the Amazon whose entire trunk was covered in thorns the size of small spikes.” Remarked Werner: “Let the tree-huggers try this one.”