Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe

In the late 70s, Werner Herzog got so pissed off with kindred spirit Errol Morris not completing a film project that he made a bet: if Morris finished ‘Gates of Heaven’ and got it shown on the big screen, Herzog would … well, the clue’s in the title.

Thus it was that Herzog ate his shoe in front of a live audience at a screening of Morris’s film while Les Blank turned up to make a documentary about it. Herzog and Blank were already renowned documentarians at this point (Blank would later make ‘Burden of Dreams’, about Herzog’s arduous ‘Fitzcarraldo’ shoot) while Morris had just taken his first step along the road that would lead to ‘The Thin Blue Line’, ‘The Fog of War’ and ‘Standard Operating Procedure’.

The nexus of eccentric talent distilled into the twenty minutes of ‘Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe’ would be astounding even if the film was in any way conventional. Which it isn’t. ‘Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe’ is bonkers on many levels, beginning with its title.

The film opens with Herzog disembarking from a plane and offering a laconic wave to Blank’s camera, as if cheerfully acknowledging the absurdity of the undertaking. This to a soundtrack of ‘Old Whisky Shoes’ by the Walt Solek Band. In a car from the airport, Herzog muses in typically deadpan fashion on the interrelatedness of filmmaking and gastronomy. As usual with Herzog, you get the sense that pearls of wisdom are being formed in an oyster of satire.

The nature of the bet is only briefly touched on, with Herzog claiming encouragement of a protégé (it has been suggested that it was more in the way of a sarcastic aside, made in despair of the likelihood of Morris ever completing a project). Various other bits of business fill up the twenty minutes. There’s the culinary preparation, to start with: Herzog stews his shoes for five hours, having packed them with garlic, rosemary, red onions, duck fat and salsa. (Disclaimer: The Agitation of the Mind does not condone the consumption of footwear and accepts no responsibility for readers who attempt this recipe.)

There’s Herzog discoursing on Morris’s fully-formed maturity as a filmmaker on the basis of just one feature; and Herzog discussing earlier crazy escapades, such as jumping into a field of cacti on the set of ‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’. Clips from this film, as well as ‘Gates of Heaven’ and Charlie Chaplin in ‘The Gold Rush’ intersperse the interviews. The boots Chaplin eats in that film were actually crafted from liquorice. Herzog, however, munches on the real thing, cutting up one boot – he promises to eat the other if Morris’s film gets picked up by a major studio – with scissors and slowly chewing his way through the small pieces, washing them down with beer. The previous paragraph’s disclaimer still applies, by the way.

In all honesty, the shoe-eating is something of an anti-climax. Blank doesn’t linger on it, except to record Herzog’s caveat that he will not be eating the sole since one does not eat the bones of a chicken. Coming from a notorious hater of chickens, this comment tells its own story.

What really lingers in the mind from ‘Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe’ is his impassioned declamation (another word would be “rant”) on the inadequacy of images, particularly in advertising and commercial cinema. He calls for a holy war on bland and meaningless images. Yes, you read that right. A holy war. But then again this is the man who, in the Faber & Faber title ‘Herzog on Herzog’ warns that our grandchildren will blame us for not throwing hand grenades into TV studios because of adverts.

Herzog doesn’t want to see the Marlboro Man toking on a cigarette. Herzog wants to see something new; that redefines sensory perception. So when, at the end, he calls for “More shoes! More boots! More garlic!” it’s not because he’s developed a taste for Clarks’ finest – it’s a battle cry to the directors and film students and dreamers of the world to get behind him and take a different view and create images that will form a new filmic vocabularly. The shoe-eating was just to get their attention.

Jack Reacher

Regular readers will be aware of my Werner Herzog obsession. It’s always been in the back of my mind that one day I might be called upon to codify the depth of my abiding love for all things Herzogian. A fixed point now exists from which that measurement can be taken.

Last night I watched ‘Jack Reacher’. Purely because Werner Herzog was in it.

Just to contextualise: ‘Jack Reacher’ is a film starring Tom Cruise, adapted from a novel by Lee Child. Let’s consider the two halves of that statement. I’ve only ever read one Lee Child novel and it was a blandly written thing that consisted of stock characters reacting with violence to contrived situations. 400 pages as a delivery system for a lunk-headed protagonist punching, head-butting and shooting one-dimensional villains. It made Andy McNab look like Dostoyevsky. Hell, it made Duncan Falconer look like Turgenev. The one defining characteristic of Child’s scrap-happy hero Jack Reacher (a surname that veers too close to reach-around for me to take it seriously) is that he’s a big bloke. This brings us to Tom Cruise and here I will simply quote a comment my friend Mark left on Facebook last night when I mentioned my choice of viewing for the evening: “Sorry, but Tom Cruise was completely wrong for the role. Jack Reacher is a very big man not a shortarse like Cruise.”

Which is as accurate a summarising comment as I’ve come across. McQuarrie’s script labours to portray Reacher as enigmatic, elusive and dangerous before the character has even made an appearance. Then Tom Cruise shows up and scowls and reminds us that he’s a bit too short for this kind of role.

It’s perhaps no coincidence that the first ten minutes of the film, before Reacher shows up, are superb. Compressing three different narrative strands – the build-up to a shooting, the sniper making infinitely patient preparations; the shooting itself; the police investigation that swiftly identifies a suspect – into a pacy and tautly edited montage, this opening sequence gave me real hopes for the film. However, it settles into mundanity far too quick and the grace notes that enliven it thereafter are few and far between.

The spiciest of said grace notes is Herzog, playing a sinister eminence grise known as The Zec. His first appearance, emerging from the shadows at a subterranean rendezvous, delivering a sibilant-heavy monologue about the brutal nature of survival, is gonad-shrivellingly scary. If Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson haven’t earmarked him for Blofeld duties on the next Bond outing, they’re missing a trick. He doesn’t get much more screen time until the final act, and a rather flabby mid-section – enlivened only by a decent, old-school car chase – presents us with a succession of bored performances by people from whom we expect better: Richard Jenkins delivers the only bad Richard Jenkins performance I’ve ever seen, Robert Duvall chuckles a lot and gives line readings that suggest he’s having difficult focussing on a teleprompter; and Rosamund Pike’s cleavage plays the most unconvincing lawyer in the history of cinema.

The climactic action scene at last returns Herzog to the stage, and proves that as long as someone has an intensity and a dark charisma, they need do nothing more than sit perfectly still in the unlit corner of a room and still pose an infinitely greater threat that the pumped-up muscle men running around firing off the ordinance outside. And even then, McQuarrie (also directing) keeps cutting away from Herzog to revel in the mano-a-mano nonsense. How nonsensical? Here’s an example: having mown down two antagonists with a submachine gun and got the drop on a (more dangerous) third, Reacher tosses away his weapon and a beatdown ensues .... while two further aggressors are lurking nearby and the life of a hostage is still at risk. The groan that accompanied my face-palm was probably heard miles away.

Despite the juvenility of its source material, ‘Jack Reacher’ could have been a decent movie. Michael Fassbender as Reacher? He has the size and the physicality, not to mention the acting chops to imbue the character with some depth. The rest of the existing cast? Responding to a director who energizes them, why not? And speaking of directors, I can only imagine how batshit crazy wonderful it would have been helmed by Herzog himself and conceived as an action movie companion piece to ‘Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans’.

Werner Herzog

I’m celebrating Werner Herzog’s 71st birthday here at Agitation Towers with a large glass of wine and my well-thumbed copy of ‘Herzog on Herzog’. Some favourite quotes:

“I remember having a public discussion with the diminutive Agnes 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.”

“Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared with a good kung-fu film.”

“I never had a choice about becoming a director. This became clear to me within a few dramatic weeks at the age of fourteen when I began to travel on foot and converted to the Catholic faith. After a long series of failures it was only a short step into filmmaking, even though to this day I have problems seeing it as a real profession.”

“Maybe the most important piece of advice I can give those of you heading into the world of film is that as long as you are able-bodied, as long as you can make money yourself, do not go looking for office jobs to pay the rent … Go out to where the real world is, go work as a bouncer in a sex club, a warden in a lunatic asylum or in a slaughterhouse. Walk on foot, learn languages, learn a craft or trade that has nothing to do with cinema. Filmmaking must have experience of life at its foundation.”

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?

There’s an elephant in the room when it comes to ‘My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?’. It’s a big elephant with floppy ears and a trunk like a fire hose and somebody’s painted on the side of it, in garish pink letters, “this is, y’know, that Werner Herzog film produced by David Lynch that looks more like a David Lynch film than a Werner Herzog film”. If someone would be so kind as to take the elephant outside and pass me my elephant gun, maybe we can have an intelligent conversation.

Oh, don’t worry about the elephant by the way. The blunderbuss is for use on the next jackass who sits up excitedly during the scene where a dwarf in a tux wanders onscreen, and points and says “Look, it’s a dwarf! That’s a David Lynch moment!” I have five words for said jackass: Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen.

Granted, ‘My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?’ – hereinafter, ‘My Son…’, since even the acronym treatment (‘MSMSWHYD’) is liable to give me RSI – starts out in startlingly non-Herzogian fashion with Detectives Havenhurst (Williem Dafoe) and Vargas (Michael Pena) shooting the shit in their cruiser as they head over to a murder scene. The deceased is a Mrs Macallam (Grace Zabriskie); the perp is her son, Brad (Michael Shannon). Brad has holed himself up across the road from the murder scene with a couple of hostages. A large chunk of the movie consists of Havenhurst and Vargas trying to open up a dialogue with Brad before the SWAT team open up a different kind of dialogue that involves hot lead. 

In between attempts to appeal to Brad, Havenhurst and Vargas interview his girlfriend Ingrid (a winningly sympathetic Chloe Sevigny) and his erstwhile mentor, theatre director Lee Myers (Udo Kier). Brad’s increasingly fragile mental state is thus revealed in a series of flashbacks – some of which say more about the witnesses than about Brad – which document the months leading up to the murder. The first signs that he’d bummed a ride out of Normal, we learn, were after he returned from Peru. No sooner is this bit of dialogue out than we’re in Herzog territory good and proper, and to all the naysayers I offer this screengrab:

 

Of course, we were in Herzog territory all the time. The desperately self-delusive Brad is a man-child redolent of Bruno S. in ‘The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser’ and ‘Stroszek’. Herzog’s bleak vision of Americana in that latter film may have been upgraded from Wisconsin to San Diego in ‘My Son …’, but the same sense of dislocation, of alien-ness, remains. The dancing chicken at the end of ‘Stroszek’ finds is corollary in the flamingos that turn out to be Brad’s hostages. 

The genius of Michael Shannon’s performance is the glimpse he gives us of the stunningly out-of-kilter way Brad’s mind works. You can easily imagine Brad sitting cross-legged in front of the TV for a Herzog marathon, favouring the crazed, messianic performances of Klaus Kinski in ‘Aguirre, Wrath of God’ and ‘Fitzcarraldo’ and fancying himself as America’s equivalent thespian talent. He’s an actor, is our Brad. Or at least he thinks he is. What we see of his rehearsals for Myers’s howlingly pretentious production of the Orestes tragedy is enough to convince otherwise. 

Herzog throws out satirical barbs left, right and centre. ‘My Son …’ is poisoned love letter to a nation’s obsession with fame; a skit on actorly eccentricities (you can almost feel the ghost of Kinski hovering just offscreen); the most deadpan send up of cop movie conventions you’ll ever see; and an exercising in bouncing bizarro ensemble combinations off each and seeing what happens. Case in point? This scene …

 

… where Brad, already way up Bonkers Creek and demonstrably deficient in the paddle department, goes to borrow a sword from his jaw-droppingly racist and homophobic white trash ostrich-farmer uncle (Brad Dourif) while Myers camps in up in the background. Or the dinner table conversation which redefines awkward, where we have Shannon, Zabriski and Sevigny playing the scene as if it were written by Strindberg and directed by Mike Leigh and the two of them were at fisticuffs over how it should be played while their cast tried to do the take under a veil of abject embarrassment. 

Did I mention that ‘My Son …’ is a weird little film? 

Perhaps its weirdest element is its visual aesthetic. While images proliferate that could only have been conjured by Herzog, it looks uglier, muddier and less ecstatically poetic than is to be expected from a Herzog film. It was filmed using lightweight digital cameras, and while a whole generation of directors might have embraced the RED ONE, it pissed Herzog off no end. “An immature camera,” he declared, “created by computer people who do not have a sensibility or understanding for the value of high-precision mechanics which has a 200-year history.” 

Fortunately, the film was created by a man whose understanding and values are at the other end of the spectrum. Oh, and it was produced David Lynch.

In brief: Cave of Forgotten Dreams

There’s a scene in ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’ where the screen is filled with a computer-mapped image of the interior of Chauvet Cave in southern France – home to a veritable art gallery’s worth of pre-historic cave paintings – while Herzog delivers an unusually ordinary bit of expository voiceover. Cut to one of the technicians responsible for the mapping, sitting at a desk, computer in front of him, discussing the mapping work. Again, it’s all very typical of a documentary opening with the History Channel’s logo. Then the technician happens to mention that he comes from a non-scientific background; Herzog interrupts him and asks what he did before; the man gives a self-conscious grin and answers that he was in the circus. And – bingo! – we’re in Herzog territory good and proper.

While ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’ – haunting music and dream-like meditations on the unknowable past notwithstanding – is one of the more orthodox entries on Herzog’s CV, it’s still the kind of film that only Herzog could have made. The chance to film, in strictly regimented conditions and with an almost draconian time limit, an area that will never been seen except by a handful of scientific experts must have been irresistible to modern cinema’s most passionate explorer. The historic importance of the paintings was established very shortly after their discovery in 1994 and the cave was immediately sealed off. Restrictions around access were imposed to preserve the cave’s climate and conditions. Herzog and a crew of just three had to use battery powered equipment and use lighting which gave off no heat.

Sure, it’s not as crazy as the “hey, there’s a small island that might just get blown to shit by an active volcano, why not let’s fly in?” aesthetic of ‘La Soufriere’, but there’s that same sense of race-against-time filmmaking at work. Oh yeah, and he shot it in 3-D as well. (Full disclosure/bone of contention: ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’ came and went in Nottingham cinemas in something slightly faster than the blink of an eye. I’ve only seen it on DVD in bog standard 2D. It still rankles that I didn’t get to see it on the big screen and in the original format. I think it would have proved cinema’s only genuinely tactile use of the form.)

‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’ is several things – the least of which is a documentary about cave paintings. It’s about memory, perception, dreams, and the passing of time. And it’s an act of liberation. It takes the sealed Chauvet cave, wrests it from the hands of researchers and academics, and makes a beautiful and richly textured gift of it to the world.

Herr Herzog and Ms McGowan

Joint birthday greetings to Werner Herzog …

… for whom the words “maverick” and “genius” might well have been invented;

and to Rose McGowan …

… for whom the phrase “enough to make a priest kick a hole in a stained glass window” almost certainly was invented.

Rescue Dawn

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Werner Herzog / In category: 10 of 10 / Overall: 100 of 100

Okay, maybe this is a bit of a cheat – I’ve already reviewed ‘Rescue Dawn’ on The Agitation of the Mind; back in November 2007, during the blog’s first month of existence – but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed the right film to end the Operation 101010 project on.

The first title I reviewed for Operation 101010, on 20 January 2010, was Werner Herzog’s astounding documentary ‘Little Dieter Needs to Fly’. ‘Rescue Dawn’ is his feature film exposition of the same story. The same narrative perameters apply: German-American Dieter Dengler is driven to become a pilot. He enlists, trains and is sent to Vietnam. He is shot down over Laos, captured, endures inhumane conditions and eventually escapes.

My original piece on ‘Rescue Dawn’ was a mere 240 words, by far the shortest review I’ve posted on the blog. When I wrote it, I felt that Tim’s review on Antagony & Ecstasy said all that needed to be said; his article certainly reflected my feelings on the film. I concluded: “There’s much to admire … And yet … this is Herzog in the jungle. This should be ‘Aguirre’ with planes, ‘Fitzcarraldo’ goes ’Nam. What it is, ultimately, is a dichotomy. It’s simultaneously one of the best things I’ve seen in a multiplex this year and arguably the most ordinary thing in Herzog’s filmography.”

So now, rounding out a bizarre triple-bill that started with ‘Some Like it Hot’ and ‘Seven’, I find myself concluding today’s movie marathon with my first viewing of ‘Rescue Dawn’ since November 2007. And I still maintain that it’s an exceptionally well-made film, with a sterling performance from Christian Bale as Dengler (who starved himself to the kind of skeletal frame he exhibited in ‘The Machinist’) and an excellent supporting turn from Steve Zahn (as Duane, Dengler’s closest friend in captivity). To see Zahn – who usually does smug, wiseass, or smug wiseass – delve into a hitherto unexplored capacity as an actor is a revelatory. Jeremy Davies gives his usual wild-eyed, flapping hands, strangulated syntax Jeremy Davies performance, but I find him less annoying in ‘Rescue Dawn’ than most of his other films.

Peter Zeitlinger’s cinematography, while never quite reaching the mystic/poetic visuals of ‘Aguirre, the Wrath of God’ or ‘Fitzcarraldo’, is never less than evocative. Herzog’s script is focused and direct: ten minutes in, Dengler’s plane is down; less than twenty minutes in, he’s captured; by the half hour mark he’s at a PoW camp and starting to think about escaping. Herzog captures the banal, routines and unpredictable outbursts of violence from the guards that characterize life in the prison camp. He charts the physical depletion of the captives and their desperation in eating grubs and suffering dysentery. He has an ear for their camaraderie and banter, too, but without descending into cliché or jingoism.

(Parenthetically, the ending – which I did find hopelessly jingoistic first time round – I have since learned is depicted pretty much as it happened. So fair dues.)

The escape comes about two thirds of the way into the movie, two groups of prisoners striking out in different directions. The rest of the film follows Dengler and Duane as they trek arduously through the jungle, trying to evade Laotian troops while attracting the attention of the occasional US helicopter or search plane.

‘Rescue Dawn’ is, by turns, exciting, grueling, suspenseful and (finally) cathartic. From most contemporary directors, this would be top-of-their-game stuff – possibly a masterpiece. From Herzog, it’s curiously pedestrian, but it proves that (a) even cinema’s premier maverick can turn in a conventional, mainstream work and (b) Herzog should always be a freakin’ maverick.

The Flying Doctors of East Africa

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Werner Herzog / In category: 9 of 10 / Overall: 94 of 100

Made in 1969, the year after his feature-length debut ‘Signs of Life’, the 45-minute documentary ‘The Flying Doctors of East Africa’ is – even by Herzog’s admission – an impersonal project:

“I was asked to make it by colleagues of the doctors themselves, and though I do like the final result, it is a film that is not particularly close to my heart. In fact I do not even call it a film, it is much more a Bericht, a report.” (Quoted in Herzog on Herzog, ed. Paul Cronin.)

Indeed – to be a little more blunt – it often feels like on of those clunky public information films you’d expect to see lampooned on ‘The Simpsons’ (“I’m Troy McClure, you might remember me from such films as …”). The film documents in po-faced style the work of the Flying Doctors service established in Tanzania by the English surgeon Michael Wood, staffed mainly by volunteers and maintained almost entirely by charitable contributions.

The vital importance of being able to ferry medical staff by air in two hours to remote villages it would take a day to get to by jeep is established quickly, and there’s no doubt that Wood and his team are heroes in the efforts they make and the painfully limited resources they have to cope with.

On the minus side, the interview footage is often stilted. It’s evident that even the otherwise entirely capable and confident Wood is ill at ease in front of the camera. The most wooden interviewee is a nurse who vocalises, word by hesitant word, the difficulty of communication with the natives (in the unreconstructed style of the times, she cringingly refers to them as “these people”).

The outcome of communication problems is, however, serious. A young boy, nil by mouth prior to major surgery, is secretly fed by his parents who mistakenly believe that they are fortifying him. Complications under anaesthetic result in his death. Herzog immediately identifies the key issue as cultural differences:

“The most interesting scenes stemmed from my interest in vision and perception. One of the doctors in the film talks about showing a poster of a fly to the villagers. They would say, ‘We don’t have that problem, our flies aren’t that large’, a response that really fascinated me. We decided to take some of the posters … to a coffee plantation to experiment. One was of a man, one of a huge human eye, another a hut, another a bowl and the fifth – which was hung upside down – of some people and animals. We asked people which poster was upside down and which was of an eye. Nearly half could not tell which was upside down and two-thirds did not recognise the eye … For the locals these five objects apparently just looked like abstract compositions of colours. It was clear there brains were processing images in a different way.” (Quoted in Herzog on Herzog.)

Was this the moment when Herzog’s own doors of perception stood open. “Processing images in a different way.” Is there any better mission statement, over forty years after he made this little seen and seemingly minor work, for what Herzog has tireless striven to achieve in his cinema?

A few more (slightly drunken) thoughts on Stroszek

Maybe ‘The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans’ isn’t Herzog’s first American crime movie. Maybe ‘Stroszek’ is Herzog’s ‘Taxi Driver’. Bruno S.’s title character, a more or less blameless innocent denied even a cathartic last stand when he finally does pick up a gun, has a greater moral claim than Travis Bickle to the title “God’s lonely man”.

The driverless truck running in endless circles from ‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’ is replaced by a driverless truck that circles a few times before its engine catches fire. Whatever snuffed out the American dream has also presided at the death of anarchy.

There’s a fast-talking auctioneer in ‘Stroszek’. Herzog’s auctioneer documentary ‘How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck’ – juxtaposing the English language stuck on fast-forward with the statelier pace of the Amish lifestyle – was made the same year. The way auctioneers’ talk isn’t natural. They’re the dancing chickens of linguism.

Herzog’s snowy compositions of Berlin streets make me think of a Bob Dylan album cover and yet bring Lou Reed’s music to mind.

Stroszek

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Werner Herzog / In category: 8 of 10 / Overall: 91 of 100

‘Stroszek’ is inarguably the most emotionally shattering work Werner Herzog has ever put his name to. It has, infamously, become known as the film Joy Division singer Ian Curtis watched just before he hanged himself. An extreme reaction (although it should be noted that Curtis did himself no favours by listening to Iggy Pop’s Dostoyevsky-inspired slice of miserablism ‘The Idiot’ straight after watching it), but I guess there’s something in that evil soulless fucker of dancing chicken at the end that’s capable of destroying rationalism and convincing you that there is nothing left but the bleak emptiness of despair.

So what compelled Herzog to create this hour and three quarters of bleakness? Some run in with the American studio system that caused him to render that country’s cultural heritage as an act of artistic suicide? Some failure of his own creative vision from which he reeled in self-critical agony? Some personal tragedy so deep and heartbreaking that he was driven to paint ‘Stroszek’ in the harshest and darkest shades of black?

Er, no. He made it to say sorry to Bruno S. for not casting him in ‘Woyzeck’.

For those not in the know, Bruno S. was the idiot savant street musician whom Herzog cast in the title role in ‘The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser’ (a film whose German title ‘Jeder Fur Sich und Gott gegen Alle’ – ‘Every Man for Himself and God Against All’ – I much prefer). During production, Herzog told Bruno S. that he wanted to make a film of Georg Buchner’s unfinished play ‘Woyzeck’ and would cast him as the lead. Herzog shot ‘Woyzeck’ back to back with his loose but inspired Bram Stoker adaptation ‘Nosferatu – Der Phantom das Nacht’, using the same crew, and quickly realised that ‘Nosferatu’ star Klaus Kinski was better suited to play Woyzeck.

By way of apology, Herzog knocked out the script for ‘Stroszek’ (the similarity of the protagonist’s name to Woyzeck surely no coincidence) in a couple of weeks, and shooting the second half of the movie guerrilla style in America without a permit. But then again, this is Werner Herzog we’re talking about and small matters like getting permission to film have never stopped him. This is only one of many reasons I fucking bloody love the guy so much.

‘Stroszek’ casts Bruno S. as the eponymous man-child, turned loose after two and a half years in prison (the nature of his crimes is never disclosed, but alcohol is categorically blamed for his behaviour). His first act as a free man is to go into a pub and order a beer. Can’t knock him; I’d have done the same myself. It’s while he’s knocking back said beer, however, that he becomes reacquainted with his old girlfriend Eva (Eva Mattes), now turning tricks for a couple of thuggish pimps in some of the most horrible fashions ever to disgrace the 1970s.

Scraping out a meagre living singing in courtyards, Stroszek’s life takes a turn for the once when pimp-boy’s violent behaviour towards Eva quickly transfers itself to Stroszek. Then Stroszek’s elderly neighbour Herr Scheitz (Clemens Scheitz) offers a way out that seems to good to be true: a new life living and working in America with his nephew.

Too good to be true? You can say that again! Stroszek, Scheitz and Eva find themselves in Railway Flats, Wisconsin, a town so bleak and run down it makes Beirut look like the Riviera. Scheitz’s nephew, Clayton (Clayton Szalpinski), runs a dingy garage and is such a poster boy for personal hygiene and sophisticated demeanour that he removes a broken tooth with a pair of pliers and swills his bleeding gums with a can of beer. He has a face like the back end of a pick-up truck and sniggers about the possibility of shagging Eva. Yup, this guy is so déclassé that Cletus from ‘The Simpsons’ looks like Alistair Cooke in comparison.

Stroszek and Eva take out a loan to buy a mobile home, but soon fall behind with the payments. An unctuous type from the bank threatens repossession. Eva starts turning tricks again. Stroszek falls into despair. Things come to a bad end after Stroszek and Scheitz’s attempts at making easy money from a life of crime fail spectacularly. And, brother, do I ever mean spectacularly! If Bonnie and Clyde’s watchword was “we rob banks”, Stroszek and his OAP wingman demonstrate how not to do it by striking when the bank’s closed and robbing the barber’s shop next door for $32 instead. The concept of a getaway doesn’t seem to occur to them.

Granted, Herzog milks moments like these for absurdist humour (likewise a narratively redundant but bitingly funny scene about two feuding farmers and the no-man’s-land strip of dirt that separates their properties), but there’s no humour whatsoever in the denouement, which takes place at a deserted funfair. Stroszek rides a chairlift to nowhere and the dancing chicken keeps on dancing. Herzog has spoken of the idiocy of chickens. The chicken in ‘Stroszek’ goes beyond idiocy. Its meaningless gyrations go beyond a black joke at the expense of Stroszek himself; it stands as a metaphor for cultural emptiness; an epitaph for the clichéd myth of the American dream – something that probably never existed in the first place.

Heart of Glass

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Werner Herzog / In category: 7 of 10 / Overall: 71 of 100

‘Heart of Glass’ (a.k.a. The One Where Herzog Hypnotized His Cast) is a strange, dreamlike fable that makes an interesting companion piece to Herzog’s earlier ‘The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser’. But whereas ‘Kaspar Hauser’ has an enigma (the eponymous man-child) under scrutiny by rationality, science and social mores, ‘Heart of Glass’ depicts a community spiralling somnolently into irrationality until enigma is all that remains.

Mühlbeck, foreman at a glass factory upon which the town’s economy is dependent, dies and takes to his grave the secret of the factory’s prized “ruby glass”. Production ceases. The workers stand around idle. The factory owner and the town elders fret. A mystic, Hias (Josef Bierbichler), descends from the mountains and prophesizes disaster. The torpor that besets the town drains its inhabitants of their humanity.

‘Heart of Glass’ opens with a series of landscape shots, mist drifting across the countryside. Not a word is spoken until about six minutes in, when a quasi-philosophical voiceover murmuringly accompanies the eerily beautiful shots of the natural world. It sets the tone. The dialogue in ‘Heart of Glass’ is deliberately artificial, like listening to a poem being recited over the images.

The images, pace anything Herzog puts his hand to, are often extraordinary. An early scene has Hias crouched in front of a mountain pass, portentously delivering his first prediction. Behind him, shrouded in mist, two bridges precariously span the ravine. Two people will cross, he tells his glassy-eyed audience, one on each bridge; one will be a liar, the other a thief. The camera drifts upwards. Two indistinct figures ghost across the bridges. No further clue is given to their identity.

The first time I saw ‘Heart of Glass’, it frustrated the hell out of me. Paced slower than an arthritic snail on mogadon, elusive and inconclusive in equal measures, I tried to hard to find meaning in the film, searching each frame for clues, symbols, recurrent imagery. The ending fucked with my head as well. A sort-of denouement at around the one hour ten minute mark is abandoned almost as soon as it’s introduced; Hias is made a pariah; retreating back into the mountains, he narrates a story about a forgotten society on a barren island who believe the world is flat until one of their number, having spent decades staring out to sea, begins to doubt. Their story is left as open to interpretation as that of the glass factory and the community it supported. The film ends.

Subsequent viewings have led to me to hazard a guess that ‘Heart of Glass’ is actually a film about the loss of meaning; about ennui, both social and spiritual. Either that, or it’s a zombie film without flesh-munching, action scenes or a Tom Savini cameo. Your guess is as good as mine.

Asked by Paul Cronin in his book Herzog on Herzog whether the whole hypnosis angle was a gimmick, Herzog had this to say:

“Everyone but the lead character – the only clairvoyant one amongst them – was hypnotized before playing their scenes. I stress that the hypnosis was for reasons of stylization and not manipulation. I certainly did not want a bunch of performing puppets for the film. For years people have accused me of wanting to have more control over actors in my films. In the context of what we were doing in ‘Heart of Glass’, I assure you that as a director I would have been much better off having actors who were not in a trance.”

The White Diamond

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Werner Herzog / In category: 6 of 10 / Overall 70 of 100

‘The White Diamond’ opens with a potted history of aviation, before settling into the story of Graham Dorrington, an aeronautical designer who –

No, scratch that. Potted history of aviation, my ass! This is a Werner Herzog film. ‘The White Diamond’ opens with a skilful collage of archive footage depicting mankind’s earliest attempts to get off the ground, often ending in disaster, with Herzog calling time on his oblique history lesson at the point where “the real future of aviation was thought to be the airship. Like the roads now filled with automobiles, the skies would be full of airships.”

This opening section fades out with images of the Hindenburg descending in a coruscation of flames. And on this sobering note, the film settles into the story of Graham Dorrington, an aeronautical designer who pioneers a sort of mini-airship for use in scientific research above the jungle canopies of Guyana.

At first, Dorrington seems an atypical Herzog protagonist. There’s a boyish enthusiasm in his to-camera discussions of the work he’s involved in; he’s passionate but never obsessive. He comes across as too good-natured to embody the kind of crazed jungle-bound undertakings that Herzog portrays elsewhere in his filmography. Put it this way: if ‘The White Diamond’ were a feature and not a documentary, Dorrington would be played not by Klaus Kinski but Stephen Fry.

Gradually, though, Herzog works his way towards the tragic and defining event of Dorrington’s career; the event that still haunts him, that throws its shadow across a decade of his life and over the current project.

In 1993, testing a prototype of Dorrington’s mini-airship, the internationally renowned wildlife photographer Dieter Plage flew above the Sumatran rainforests. His camera became entangled in the canopy and, while trying to retrieve it, Plage fell from the airship. The fall killed him. When Dorrington eventually discusses the event, and the “heaviness” he feels over Plage’s loss, Herzog captures the moment sensitively; his camera is never a voyeur.

Plage’s death makes Dorrington trepidacious when it comes to the maiden voyage of his new airship, not least because he has two candidates eager to test it out and never mind the potential dangers. One – of course – is Herzog himself. The other is Marc Anthony Yhap, one of the indigenous populace who congregate to assist and/or observe. Herzog finds in Yhap the soul of a fellow poet. (The title comes from Yhap’s description of the airship.) The eminently laconic Yhap waxes lyrical about taking off in the airship, drifting slowly and peacefully all the way to Europe to be reunited with his family.

If the kinship between Herzog and Yhap is tangible, the slowly developing friendship between Dorrington and Yhap is poignant and forms the human centre of the film. The final scenes, bathed in the ecstatic truth that Herzog ceaselessly strives for, has Dorrington take Yhap up in the airship. The indigent’s delight is, if not an exorcism of sorts, then certainly a counterbalance to the weight Dorrington has been carrying around since Plage’s terrible accident.

Another moment of ecstatic truth – approaching, in this case perhaps, a spiritual truth – comes when Herzog’s cameras, lowered painstakingly, penetrate a hitherto inaccessible cave behind the Kaieteur Falls which provides roosting for innumerable white-tipped swifts. Call it legend, call it superstition, but the locals believe that said cave is holy, that whatever is discovered in there should never be made public. Herzog, respectful of their beliefs, opts to keep the footage under wraps.

“By dint of declaration the so-called Cinéma Vérité is devoid of vérité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants,” Herzog wrote in his gauntlet-throwing Minnesota Declaration. “Filmmakers of Cinéma Vérité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts. Tourism is sin and travel on foot a virtue.” He’s absolutely right. And here he proves that the absence of the image can be just as revealing and ecstatically true.

Even Dwarfs Started Small

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Werner Herzog / In category: 5 of 10 / Overall: 69 of 100

The late ’60s found Werner Herzog, just one feature film (‘Signs of Life’) and a handful of shorts into his prolific career, in Africa where, along with filming the commissioned 45-minute film ‘The Flying Doctors of East Africa’, he start shooting footage for what would become ‘Fata Morgana’. His original concept – which he returned to nearly forty years later with ‘The Wild Blue Yonder’ – was to structure the film as a document made by alien visitors who discover that Earth is a ruined landscape.

“… I decided to scrap this idea. The mirages that had taken hold of me and the visionary aspects of the desert landscape were so much more powerful that any single idea for the film I had previously had, so I junked the story, opened my eyes and ears, and just filmed the mirages of the desert.”

If this recollection sounds transcendental, the reality was quite different. Herzog, renowned for making films of visionary genius in the most inhospitable conditions imaginable, had a harder time than usual. The man who manoeuvred his way through military blockades during ‘Fitzcarraldo’ on a forged permit document and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of chutzpah didn’t fare so well on ‘Fata Morgana’. He and his small crew found themselves arrested on several occasions, incarcerated in overcrowded cells, mistreated. It wasn’t in the happiest frame of mind that he started work on his next picture ‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’*.

“When I returned to Lanzarote to start shooting ‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’ I was full of bitterness, affected by sickness and the film became a more radical film than I had originally planned. ‘Aguirre’ looks like kindergarten against this one. Somehow I had the feeling that if Goya and Hieronymus Bosch had the guts to do their gloomiest stuff, why shouldn’t I?”

Radical, definitely. ‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’ is a film that divided audiences of the time, particularly in Germany where Herzog was denounced as a fascist. Released during a period of widespread revolts and riots, Herzog’s critics claimed that the film satirised the revolutionary spirit instead of celebrating it.

“I told these agitators that the film had absolutely nothing to do with the 1968 movements, that they were blinded by zealousness and that if they looked at the film twenty five years down the line they might just see a more truthful representation of what happened in 1968 than in most other films.”

Read the above sentence a couple of times. There’s something of a dichotomy in that statement. Herzog is saying that ‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’ is not about the political and social chaos of 1968 – by extension, therefore, it is neither an allegory nor an overtly political work – however, viewed in retrospect it provides a more accurate commentary on the social and political climate it was born out of than many other, explicitly political, films of the time.

Or, I guess, you could just look at it as a movie about some dwarfs who go apeshit and revel in total anarchy. The nominal plot – the film offers little in the way of narrative; it’s more a collage of increasingly bizarre scenes – has Hombre (Helmut Döring) first observe and then participate in a destructive and cathartic day of rebellion while a nameless bureaucrat (Pepi Hermine) tries to cling on to his seat of power while impotently calling for order. The location is some kind of institute or facility. It doesn’t matter which. Take it as a microcosm: for the Germany of 1968, for the Britain of 1977, for the world of today. Works just as well in each case.

Works equally well – nightmarishly so, in fact – if you take everything literally. That way you’ve got only one of two films (to the best of my knowledge) that feature an all-dwarf case – the other being Sam Newfield’s 1938 western ‘The Terror of Tiny Town’ – and certainly the only film whose all-dwarf cast gleefully commit acts of arson and vandalism, throw themselves at or on top of moving vehicles, flick through pornographic magazines, stage a mock religious ceremony with a crucified monkey and laugh themselves hoarse at a camel as it takes a dump.

“… a rumour went round that to get the dromedary on its knees so long I cut its sinews. Very quickly I learned … that you can fight a rumour only with an even wilder rumour. So immediately I issued a statement that actually I had nailed the dromedary to the ground.”

‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’ is one fucked-up piece of cinema, even by Herzog’s standards. It’s a joyous hymn to irresponsibility, a slap in the face to audience expectations and a fuck-you two decades before the term was even coined to political correctness. If Alejandro Jodorowsky had made ‘A Clockwork Orange’ from a script by Salvador Dali, the end result couldn’t have been any weirder.

* ‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’ was released before ‘Fata Morgana’ as Herzog was initially hesitant about whether ‘Fata Morgana’ would find an audience.

(All quotes in italics are taken from Herzog on Herzog, edited by Paul Cronin.)

Mini Herzog-fest

It’s Werner Herzog’s 68th birthday today, so what better occasion to contribute a few more of his idiosyncratic and inimitable titles to Operation 101010? The next three days will constitute a mini Herzog-fest; I’m putting all of the Herzog DVDs I own but haven’t reviewed yet in a box and pulling out three at random. Look out for the first review in a few hours.

To get things underway, though, here’s some words of wisdom from the Bavarian maverick himself, as quoted in the indispensable Faber & Faber book Herzog on Herzog (ed. Paul Cronin):

“I have often spoken of what I call the inadequate imagery of today’s civilization. I have the impression that the images that surround us today are worn out; they are abused and useless and exhausted. They are limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution. When I look at the postcards in tourist shops and the images and advertisements that surround us in magazines, or I turn on the television, or if I walk into a travel agency and see those huge posters with that same tedious image of the Grand Canyon on them, I truly feel there is something dangerous emerging here. The biggest danger in my opinion is television because to a certain degree it ruins our vision and makes us very sad and lonesome. Our grand-children will blame us for not having tossed hand-grenades into TV stations because of commercials. Television kills our imagination and what we end up with are worn-out images because of the inability of too many people to seek out fresh ones.”

The Wild Blue Yonder

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Werner Herzog / In category: 4 of 10 / Overall: 58 of 100

There’s a scene in Tim Burton’s ‘Ed Wood’ where the eponymous wannabe director is looking through some reels of stock footage with a cutting room buddy. He speculates that you could make an entire movie using them.

This, apart from a few original scenes which feature Brad Dourif basically ranting to camera, is pretty much what Herzog has done with ‘The Wild Blue Yonder’. Except where Ed Wood’s footage is strictly B-movie B-roll, Herzog got his from NASA.

At its most effective, ‘The Wild Blue Yonder’ juxtaposes scenes of the earth seen from space, scenes of astronauts floating gracefully in zero gravity and scenes of divers exploring far beneath the Antarctic ocean. The depths of space and the depths of the sea cohere aesthetically in a tone poem of wondrous images given added meaning and poignance by Ernst Reijeseger’s strange, haunting and beautifully otherworldly score.

And if that had been the entirety of Herzog’s approach – a wordless poem of visual imagery and music – ‘The Wild Blue Yonder’ might have emerged as one of the oddest and greatest works by a man who has produced more odd and great cinema (the oddness and the greatness often inextricably intermeshed) than most. It could have been considered the concluding part of a loosely connected trilogy following ‘Fata Morgana’ and ‘Lessons of Darkness’.

Like ‘Fata Morgana’, it is an exploration into the uniqueness of the image. Like ‘Lessons of Darkness’, it postulates itself as a science fiction fable documenting the alien qualities of planet Earth as if through the perspective of a visitor from another world.

Only here, Herzog makes this aspect literal. He gives us a wild-looking Brad Dourif as the alien, raging at the folly of mankind. He recounts a story about Roswell, alien spores, a mission to the outer fringes of the galaxy and the discovery and planned colonisation of the Dourif alien’s home planet (the “wild blue yonder” of the title). Which all sounds very ‘X Files’/Arthur C. Clarke/Peter F. Hamilton, except that Herzog clearly doesn’t give a flying fuck about traditional (or even recognisable) sci-fi tropes. The Dourif scenes are so completely random and out of character with the deep space/deep sea footage that it’s tempting to wonder if Herzog had basically sold whomever stumped the budget on the sci-fi angle and then decided, with po-faced solemnity, to completely and utterly take the piss.

It’s a curious film, ‘The Wild Blue Yonder’. It’s quite definitely a Herzog film. Minor Herzog, but still intriguing. Get through the Dourif scenes (he has one or two moments that are moderately entertaining, but his verbiage becomes white noise after a while) and you’ll be rewarded with visuals and music that are genuinely haunting.

The Region 2 DVD I watched features a half-hour documentary, ‘A Requiem in Space’, about Reijeseger’s vision of the music, his collaborative approach with Herzog and the musicians he engaged, which is pretty much worth the rental price on its own. It clarifies some of the ideas behind the film and provides a fuller appreciation for Reijeseger’s ethereal score.