A companion to Werner Herzog 9781405194402, 9781782688310, 1782688315

Table of contents :
Werner Herzog's Companions: The Consolation of Images Brad Prager --
Part I Critical Approaches and Contexts. 1 Herzog and Auteurism: Performing Authenticity / Brigitte Peucker --
2 Physicality, Difference, and the Challenge of Representation: Werner Herzog in the Light of the New Waves / Lu︠cia Nagib --
3 The Pedestrian Ecstasies of Werner Herzog: On Experience, Intelligence, and the Essayistic / Timothy Corrigan. Part II Herzog and the Inter-arts. 4 Werner Herzog's View of Delft: Or, Nosferatu and the Still Life / Kenneth S. Calhoon --
5 Moving Stills: Herzog and Photography / Stefanie Harris --
6 Archetypes of Emotion: Werner Herzog and Opera / Lutz Koepnick --
7 Coming to Our Senses: The Viewer and Herzog's Sonic Worlds / Roger Hillman --
8 Death for Five Voices: Gesualdo's "Poetic Truth" / Holly Rogers --
9 Demythologization and Convergence: Herzog's Late Genre Pictures and the Rogue Cop Film in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call --
New Orleans / Jaimey Fisher. Part III Herzog's German Encounters. 10 "I don't like the Germans": Even Herzog Started in Bavaria / Chris Wahl --
11 Herzog's Heart of Glass and the Sublime of Raw Materials / Noah Heringman --
12 The Ironic Ecstasy of Werner Herzog: Embodied Vision in The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver / Steiner Roger F. Cook --
13 Tantrum Love: The Fiendship of Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog / Lance Duerfahrd. Part IV Herzog's Far-Flung Cinema: Africa, Australia, the Americas, and Beyond. 14 Werner Herzog's African Sublime / Erica Carter --
15 Didgeridoo, or the Search for the Origin of the Self: Werner Herzog's Where the Green Ants Dream and Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines / Manuel Köppen --
16 A March into Nothingness: The Changing Course of Herzog's Indian Images / Will Lehman --
17 The Case of Herzog: Re-Opened / Eric Ames --
18 The Veil Between: Werner Herzog's American TV Documentaries / John E. Davidson --
19 Herzog's Chickenshit / Rembert Hüser --
20 Encountering Werner Herzog at the End of the World / Reinhild Steingröver. Part V Toward the Limits of Experience: Philosophical Approaches. 21 Perceiving the Other in the Land of Silence and Darkness / Randall Halle --
22 Werner Herzog's Romantic Spaces / Laurie Johnson --
23 The Melancholy Observer: Landscape, Neo-Romanticism, and the Politics of Documentary Filmmaking / Matthew Gandy --
24 Portrait of the Chimpanzee as a Metaphysician: Parody and Dehumanization in Echoes from a Somber Empire / Guido Vitiello --
25 Herzog and Human Destiny: The Philosophical Purposiveness of the Filmmaker / Alan Singer.

Citation preview

Werner Herzog Continually blurring the line between fiction and reality, Werner Herzog has made a career of crossing boundaries and reinventing himself. Since his early emergence as a leader in the New German cinema, Herzog is now widely recognized as one of the most acclaimed and innovative filmmakers of the modern era—as well as one of its most controversial and enigmatic figures.

A Companion to

“Contrary to his self-presentation, Werner Herzog is a filmmaker profoundly influenced by the history of film, art, and literature and an integral part of the spatial imaginaries and aesthetic sensibilities of the postwar period. It is the main achievement of this anthology, expertly put together by Brad Prager, to highlight these connections with rich and insightful articles on Herzog and painting, photography, opera, geography, documentary, and the essay film. And at last, we understand the strange power exerted by the chicken in Stroszek…” Sabine Hake, The University of Texas at Austin

A Companion to

Edited by

“Werner Herzog towers as one of world cinema’s most engaging, energetic, and enigmatic directors. A Companion to Werner Herzog charts the career of an extraordinary artist whose only predictable feature remains his unpredictability.” Gerd Gemünden, Dartmouth College

Werner Herzog

Cover Photo: © Peter Foley / epa / Corbis

“Brad Prager has collected together a world class and diverse group of scholars to map out with great lucidity the complex interconnectivity of Herzog’s equally diverse oeuvre.” Paul Cooke, University of Leeds

Prager

Brad Prager is Associate Professor of German and an active member of the Program in Film Studies at the University of Missouri. He has authored two monographs: Aesthetic Vision and German Romanticism: Writing Images (2007) and The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (2007). His articles have appeared in New German Critique, Studies in Documentary Film, Art History, and in the Modern Language Review. Most recently he has co-edited the collections The Collapse of the Conventional: German Film and its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (2010) and Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory (2008).

W i l e y- B l a c k w e l l C o m pa n i o n s t o f i l m D i r e c t o r s

A Companion to

Werner Herzog

A Companion to Werner Herzog presents more than two dozen original scholarly essays that probe deeply into various aspects of Herzog’s career and eclectic body of cinematic work. Contributions from internationally recognized film scholars and Herzog experts offer fresh perspectives on such topics as Herzog’s engagement with music and the arts, his selfstylization as a global filmmaker, the director’s Bavarian origins, and even his visionary collaboration—and love–hate relationship—with the late actor Klaus Kinski. Filled with illuminating insights, A Companion to Werner Herzog offers a long-overdue exploration of the life and artistic contributions of one of the true giants of international cinema.

Cover design: Nicki Averill Design and Illustration

Edited by

Brad Prager

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A Companion to Werner Herzog

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Wiley-Blackwell Companions to Film Directors The Wiley-Blackwell Companions to Film Directors survey key directors whose work constitutes what is referred to as the Hollywood and world cinema canons. Whether Haneke or Hitchcock, Bigelow or Bergmann, Capra or the Coen Brothers, each volume, composed of 25 or more newly commissioned essays written by leading experts, explores a canonical, contemporary and/or controversial auteur in a sophisticated, authoritative, and multi-dimensional capacity. Individual volumes interrogate any number of subjects – the director’s oeuvre; dominant themes, well-known, worthy, and under-rated films; stars, collaborators, and key influences; reception, reputation, and above all, the director’s intellectual currency in the scholarly world. Published 1. 2. 3. 4.

A Companion to Michael Haneke, edited by Roy Grundmann A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock, edited by Thomas Leitch and Leland Poague A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, edited by Brigitte Peucker A Companion to Werner Herzog, edited by Brad Prager

Forthcoming 5. A Companion to Pedro Almodovar, edited by Marvin D’Lugo and Kathleen Vernon

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A Companion to Werner Herzog Edited by

Brad Prager

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

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This edition first published 2012 © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell. The right of Brad Prager to be identified as the author of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 9781405194402 (hardback) Set in 11/13pt Dante by SPi Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India

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Contents

Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments

viii xiv

Werner Herzog’s Companions: The Consolation of Images Brad Prager Part I

1

Critical Approaches and Contexts

33

1 Herzog and Auteurism: Performing Authenticity Brigitte Peucker

35

2 Physicality, Difference, and the Challenge of Representation: Werner Herzog in the Light of the New Waves Lúcia Nagib

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3 The Pedestrian Ecstasies of Werner Herzog: On Experience, Intelligence, and the Essayistic Timothy Corrigan

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Part II

99

Herzog and the Inter-arts

4 Werner Herzog’s View of Delft: Or, Nosferatu and the Still Life Kenneth S. Calhoon

101

5 Moving Stills: Herzog and Photography Stefanie Harris

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6 Archetypes of Emotion: Werner Herzog and Opera Lutz Koepnick

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7 Coming to Our Senses: The Viewer and Herzog’s Sonic Worlds Roger Hillman

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Contents

8 Death for Five Voices: Gesualdo’s “Poetic Truth” Holly Rogers 9 Demythologization and Convergence: Herzog’s Late Genre Pictures and the Rogue Cop Film in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call—New Orleans Jaimey Fisher Part III

Herzog’s German Encounters

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208

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10 “I don’t like the Germans”: Even Herzog Started in Bavaria Chris Wahl

233

11 Herzog’s Heart of Glass and the Sublime of Raw Materials Noah Heringman

256

12 The Ironic Ecstasy of Werner Herzog: Embodied Vision in The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner Roger F. Cook 13 Tantrum Love: The Fiendship of Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog Lance Duerfahrd Part IV

Herzog’s Far-Flung Cinema Africa, Australia, the Americas, and Beyond

14 Werner Herzog’s African Sublime Erica Carter 15 Didgeridoo, or the Search for the Origin of the Self: Werner Herzog’s Where the Green Ants Dream and Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines Manuel Köppen 16 A March into Nothingness: The Changing Course of Herzog’s Indian Images Will Lehman

281 301

327 329

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17 The Case of Herzog: Re-Opened Eric Ames

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18 The Veil Between: Werner Herzog’s American TV Documentaries John E. Davidson

416

19 Herzog’s Chickenshit Rembert Hüser

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20 Encountering Werner Herzog at the End of the World Reinhild Steingröver

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Toward the Limits of Experience Philosophical Approaches

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21 Perceiving the Other in the Land of Silence and Darkness Randall Halle

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22 Werner Herzog’s Romantic Spaces Laurie Johnson

510

23 The Melancholy Observer: Landscape, Neo-Romanticism, and the Politics of Documentary Filmmaking Matthew Gandy

528

24 Portrait of the Chimpanzee as a Metaphysician: Parody and Dehumanization in Echoes from a Somber Empire Guido Vitiello

547

25 Herzog and Human Destiny: The Philosophical Purposiveness of the Filmmaker Alan Singer

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Filmography Compiled by Chris Wahl Index

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Notes on Contributors

Eric Ames is Associate Professor of German and a member of the Cinema Studies faculty at the University of Washington. He is author of Carl Hagenbeck’s Empire of Entertainments (2008) and of Ferocious Reality: Documentary According to Werner Herzog (2012). Kenneth S. Calhoon is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon. He is author of Fatherland: Novalis, Freud, and the Discipline of Romance (1992) and the editor of Peripheral Visions: The Hidden Stages of Weimar Cinema (2001). He has recently completed a book-length project entitled Affecting Grace: Theater and Subject from Shakespeare to Kleist. Erica Carter is Professor and Head of German at King’s College London. Her recent research focuses on the early film theory of Béla Balázs, and on the experience of Empire among German-speaking exile film audiences in mid-twentiethcentury Britain. Her publications on cinema and popular culture include Dietrich’s Ghosts. The Sublime and the Beautiful in Third Reich Film (2004), the co-edited German Cinema Book (2004), and Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory (2010). Roger F. Cook is Professor of German Studies and Director of the Film Studies Program at the University of Missouri. He co-edited The Cinema of Wim Wenders: Image, Narrative, and the Postmodern Condition (1996) and has written extensively on New German Cinema and contemporary German film. He has also written on eighteenthand nineteenth-century German literature, with a particular emphasis on Heinrich Heine. He is the author of By the Rivers of Babylon: Heinrich Heine’s Late Songs and Reflections (1998) and the editor of A Companion to the Works of Heinrich Heine (2003). Timothy Corrigan is a Professor of Cinema Studies, English, and History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. His books include New German Film: The Displaced Image (1994), A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam (1991),

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Critical Visions: Readings in Classic and Contemporary Film Theory (co-authored with Patricia White and Meta Mazaj), and The Essay Film: from Montaigne, after Marker (2011). He is the editor of The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History (1986) and Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader (2011). Corrigan also serves as editor of the journal Adaptation and is a member of the editorial board of Cinema Journal. John E. Davidson is the founding Director of the Film Studies Program and Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at The Ohio State University. He is the author of Deterritorializing the New German Cinema (1999) and  the co-editor of Framing the Fifties: Cinema in a Divided Germany (2007). His  recent publications include works on TV-documentary practices, Kluge, Bitomsky, cinematic realism after reunification, and the mourning of labor. He is currently completing a monograph on Ottomar Domnick, and his ongoing interest in cinema as a social practice of “automobilization” will culminate in a study of German film that will span the twentieth century. Lance Duerfahrd is Assistant Professor of English at Purdue University. He has recently published articles on crying and disability in William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, on the nonspeaking characters in Marx Brothers’ movies, and on the films of Billy Wilder and Joseph Lewis. He is completing a book about Samuel Beckett entitled The Work of Poverty. Jaimey Fisher is Associate Professor of German and Cinema and Technocultural Studies and is the Director of the Cinema and Technocultural Studies program at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Disciplining Germany: Youth, Reeducation, and Reconstruction after the Second World War (2007) and is the co-editor of Critical Theory: Current State and Future Prospects (2001), The Collapse of the Conventional: German Film and its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (2010), and Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility (2010). He has published articles in Iris, New German Critique, Genre, and German Quarterly. Matthew Gandy is Professor of Geography at University College London and was Director of the UCL Urban Laboratory from 2005–2011. He has published widely on cultural, urban and environmental themes, including depictions of nature and landscape in the visual arts. His essays on cinema include explorations of the work of Michelangelo Antonioni, Todd Haynes, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Hiroshi Teshigahara. Randall Halle is the Klaus W. Jonas Professor of German Film and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. His research interests include German visual culture and film theory, critical theory, queer theory, and social philosophy. His essays have appeared in journals such as New German Critique, Screen, German Quarterly,

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Notes on Contributors

and Film-Philosophy. He is the co-editor of After the Avant-Garde (2008), Light Motives: German Popular Film in Perspective (2003), and a double special issue of Camera Obscura on Marginality and Alterity in Contemporary European Cinema. He is the author of Queer Social Philosophy: Critical Readings from Kant to Adorno (2004) and German Film after Germany: Toward a Transnational Aesthetic (2008). Stefanie Harris is Associate Professor of German and Film Studies at Texas A&M University. Her research and teaching focus on interdisciplinary approaches to literature and media, aesthetics and politics, literary theory, media theory, and film. She has published numerous essays on literature, film, and other media, and is the author of the book Mediating Modernity: German Literature and the “New” Media, 1895–1930 (2009). Noah Heringman is Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri. He has published Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History (2003) and Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology (2004), and he is currently completing a book entitled Sciences of Antiquity. He has also published articles on Romantic poetry, the history of geology, natural history, and antiquarianism. His current research aims to locate an ethnographic form of deep time at the intersection of art history and colonial voyaging. Roger Hillman is Associate Professor of Film Studies and German Studies at the Australian National University, Canberra. His book publications include Unsettling Scores: German Film, Music, and Ideology (2005), which has a chapter on Werner Herzog, and he is the co-author of Transkulturalität: Türkisch-deutsche Konstellationen in Literatur und Film (2007). His other research interests include European cinema, and film and music more generally. Rembert Hüser is Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches visual arts and film and media studies in the Departments of German, Scandinavian & Dutch, and Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature. He is currently interested in architecture as notational system, Mike Kelley’s Petting Zoo, Beethoven ‘70, and FSK’s version of “I Wish I Could (Sprechen Sie Deutsch)”. Laurie Johnson is Associate Professor of German at the University of Illinois, with additional appointments in Comparative Literature and in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. Her specialties are German Romanticism and Idealism, with interests in the history of psychology and psychiatry and in psychoanalysis. She is the author of Aesthetic Anxiety: Uncanny Symptoms in German Literature and Culture (2010) and of The Art of Recollection in Jena Romanticism (2002). Lutz Koepnick is Professor of German, Film and Media Studies and Chair of the Department of German at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written

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widely on German film, visual culture, and literature, on media arts and aesthetics, and on critical theory and cultural politics. His book publications include: Framing Attention: Windows on Modern German Culture (2007); The Dark Mirror: German Cinema between Hitler and Hollywood (2002); and Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power (1999). His co-edited or co-authored volumes include: After the Digital Divide? German Aesthetic Theory in the Age of New Media (2009); Window/Interface (2007); The Cosmopolitan Screen: German Cinema and the Global Imaginary, 1945 to the Present (2007); Caught by Politics: Hitler Exiles and American Visual Culture (2007); and Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of German Culture (2004). Manuel Köppen teaches at the Humboldt University in Berlin, where he completed his habilitation in 2004. He has also been guest professor at Cornell University and the University of Amsterdam. Besides numerous essays, he has authored two monographs: Sozialdemokratische Belletristik vor dem ersten Weltkrieg. Eine Untersuchung zum Zusammenhang von literarischer Struktur, Wirklichkeitssicht und politischer Praxis (1982); and Das Entsetzen des Beobachters. Krieg und Medien im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (2005). He has also edited or co-edited the volumes: Kunst und Literatur nach Auschwitz (1993); Bilder des Holocaust. Literatur—Film—Malerei (1997); Die andere Stimme. Das Fremde in der Kultur der Moderne. Festschrift für Klaus R. Scherpe (1999); Passagen. Literatur—Theorie—Medien. Festschrift für Peter U. Hohendahl (2001); and Kunst der Propaganda. Der Film im Dritten Reich (2007). Will Lehman is Assistant Professor of German at Western Carolina University. His research focuses primarily on German fantasies of, and interactions with, nonEuropean native peoples. He has published articles on German cinema and television as well as the German-Jewish-Argentinean writer Roberto Schopflocher. His current book project, German Faces, Other Spaces, examines the relationship between cinematic images of German ex-patriots in “uncivilized” native spaces and the continued cultivation of Germanness within an increasingly homogenized Europe. Lúcia Nagib is Centenary Professor of World Cinemas at the University of Leeds. Her single-authored books include: World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (2011), Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia (2007), O cinema da retomada: depoimentos de 90 cineastas dos anos 90 (2002), Em torno da nouvelle vague japonesa (1993) and Werner Herzog: o cinema como realidade (1991). She is the editor of The New Brazilian Cinema (2003), Mestre Mizoguchi: uma lição de cinema (1990), and Ozu: o extraordinário cineasta do cotidiano (1990), and the co-editor of Theorizing World Cinema (2011) and Realism and the Audiovisual Media (2009). Brigitte Peucker is the Elias Leavenworth Professor of German and a Professor of Film Studies at Yale University. She is currently at work on Aesthetic Spaces: The Place of Art in Film. Her earlier books include The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film (2007), Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival Arts (1995), and Lyric Descent in

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the German Romantic Tradition (1987). She is editor of the Blackwell Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder (2012), and the author of many essays on questions of representation in film and literature. She serves as Director of Graduate Studies for the Combined Program in Film at Yale. Brad Prager is Associate Professor of German and a member of the Program in Film Studies at the University of Missouri. He has authored two monographs: Aesthetic Vision and German Romanticism: Writing Images (2007) and The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (2007). His articles have appeared in New German Critique, Studies in Documentary Film, Art History, and in the Modern Language Review. Most recently he has co-edited the collections The Collapse of the Conventional: German Film and its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (2010) and Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory (2008). Holly Rogers is Lecturer in Music at the University of Liverpool. She published several articles on music in art cinema during her post-doctoral work at the Humanities Institute of Ireland, and she currently holds a research fellowship at Trinity College Dublin. She is author of Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Art-Music (2012). Her recent research focuses on the use of sound by early video artists. Alan Singer is Professor of English at Temple University in Philadelphia. He writes frequently on issues in aesthetics and literary theory. His most recent critical book, The Self-Deceiving Muse: Notice and Knowledge in the Work of Art (2010) addresses literary, painterly, video, and filmic texts. His newest novel is The Inquisitor’s Tongue (2011). Reinhild Steingröver teaches German and film studies at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester. She also curates silent film with live new music programs in Berlin and Rochester, NY. She is the author of a monograph on Thomas Bernhard, and has co-edited After the Avant-garde. Engagements with Contemporary German and Austrian Experimental Film (2008) as well as Not so Plain as Black and White. Afro-German History and Culture, 1890–2000 (2005). She is currently completing a book entitled Last Features: DEFA’s Lost Generation. Guido Vitiello is Assistant Professor at the University of Rome “La Sapienza,” where he teaches Film Studies. His recent research focuses on such topics as the Holocaust in film and popular culture, and on the memory of the Third Reich in German film. He is the author, among other books, of Una stagione all’inferno. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg e la questione della colpa nel cinema tedesco (2007), and he has published numerous essays on film, history, and Holocaust memory. Chris Wahl is a Research Fellow at the Film and Television University “Konrad Wolf ” in Potsdam-Babelsberg where he is working on a project about slow motion

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and superimpositions funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Wahl is the author of Sprachversionsfilme aus Babelsberg: Die internationale Strategie der Ufa 1929–1939 (2009). He is also the co-editor of Der Mann mit der leichten Hand: Kurt Hoffmann und seine Filme (2010), which deals with Kurt Hoffmann, the most popular German director of the 1950s, and he is the sole editor of Lektionen in Herzog: Neues über Deutschlands verlorenen Filmautor und sein Werk (2011), the first scholarly book in the German language on Werner Herzog since the 1970s.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Jayne M. Fargnoli, Executive Editor at Wiley-Blackwell, who has worked with me on this project and provided me with support from the start. I also appreciate the contribution of Project Editor Galen Young, who oversaw much of the book’s later development, as well as that of Tessa Hanford, who put time and effort into seeing it through the final stages. I have benefited from being in dialogue with each one of the volume’s contributors. In particular I owe thanks to Brigitte Peucker, who was editing A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder as I was assembling this volume. On more than one occasion she offered me much needed advice. I am also grateful to  Kenneth S. Calhoon, Erica Carter, Manuel Köppen, and Guido Vitiello, for providing indispensable comments. Particular acknowledgment is due to Chris Wahl, who has been a remarkable interlocutor. At every turn he has been generous with insights, resources and ideas, and I am thankful that we have been in contact from beginning to end. I am also appreciative of feedback and resources provided by Eric Ames, especially for his observations concerning Werner Herzog’s work as a documentary filmmaker. For advice at various stages I thank Dagmar Herzog, Eric Rentschler, and Michael D. Richardson. Samuel Frederick provided an important literary source at a key moment, and Kristin Bowen and Eric Ludwig each performed valued editorial work. Most important, I am grateful to my colleagues in the Department of German and Russian Studies at the University of Missouri. They have supported this project from its inception, as has the University of Missouri’s College of Arts and Science, which provided me, once again, with the time and resources I needed. Personally, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Andrew Hoberek and Anne Myers. Their companionship means a great deal to me.

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Werner Herzog’s Companions The Consolation of Images Brad Prager

I should be all alone in this world Me, Steiner and no other living being. No sun, no culture; I, naked on a high rock No storm, no snow, no banks, no money No time and no breath. Then, finally, I would not be afraid any more. Text on the screen at the end of Herzog’s The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1973)1

It moves through you like a flash and forever enlightens your entire existence. Sometimes from across the centuries you find someone who feels like a brother. In one illuminating instant you know that you are not alone. […] It was as if a stranger had reached out his arm to me from across the depths of time and placed his hand on my shoulders so that I would no longer be alone. Herzog, on the landscape painter Hercules Segers (1983)2 At the end of The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, Werner Herzog’s unconventional documentary about a ski-jumping woodcarver, the above ode to isolation appears written across the screen. Herzog acknowledges that these words, altered slightly to fit the context, are lifted from “Helbling’s Story” by the Swiss author Robert Walser. The story consists of the reflections of a man, who by his own account does not have the mind for serious work, only pretends to read books of interest, and admits that he is nothing special. At its conclusion, Helbling, without much fuss, declares himself deficient and unfortunate, and resolves that he would be better off alone. He sees his misery as the fault of others and wishes that all his A Companion to Werner Herzog, First Edition. Edited by Brad Prager. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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companions would vanish, taking the world along with them. Although the most stunning compositions in Herzog’s documentary depict Walter Steiner, an athlete and craftsman, isolated from the sports fans below and floating in freedom against an empty background, the connections between Steiner and Walser’s Helbling are by no means self-evident. Why would Herzog, who seems to like and even admire his athletic protagonist, conclude his film with these particular lines? The inclusion of these lines at the film’s end has more to do with Herzog’s approach to Walser than with his views about Steiner. Herzog’s work—in this case a film about an athlete who is, at times, at odds with his public—takes up a dialogue with other works of art, and although Herzog notoriously eschews the rhetoric of influence and avoids sustained comparisons, he embeds his own filmmaking within a long cinematic and literary history. In studying his body of work, one is confronted with an artist who has had an extraordinarily varied career, both as a writer and as a filmmaker, and who is in the habit of interpreting his own works for us. What, then, can be accomplished by considering the affinities, or, to say it differently, the moments of literary and cinematic companionship, where Herzog’s work is concerned? Haunting a project such as the present one is the idea that Herzog, who presents himself to the public as a solitary wanderer, perhaps needs no companions, and that his work can be better assessed in isolation. This collection of essays, which operates from the assumption that Herzog’s writings and films benefit from exploring their points of contact with others’ ideas, is devoted to an investigation of interconnections. It presumes that the study of the director’s writings and films, in its past, present and future modes, gains from expanding horizons, even if that examination sometimes strays from the directions in which Herzog points us. At every phase of his storied career Herzog has declared and even insisted on his distinctiveness. Beginning with early press coverage that labeled him an “individualist among outsiders” (Plula 1971: 58) and a well-known interview where he allied himself with “eccentrics” (Borski 1973: 6), through to public conversations nearly four decades later, Herzog has asserted that his work and his worldview are unlike those of others.3 The claim is, of course, irrefutable: there is no Herzog but Herzog. And beyond that simple fact his reputation for unpredictability and for constant reinvention has been well earned. However, for someone who insists on his own incomparability, he is also acutely attentive to the long heritage with which his work aligns itself. His writings and films are part of a self-conscious and oftrevisited lineage, one that he perpetually reinforces through his own passionate appreciation of art. At the end of The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner Herzog adapts Walser’s reflection on isolation, calling upon Walser as one would call upon a companion and including him among that vast assemblage of artists and outcasts whom he identifies as having reached out to him from across the span of time. In that group Herzog also includes the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Hercules Segers, about whom he expressed a similar admiration in 1983, ten years after the completion of Steiner. Although Herzog inclines toward isolation, asserting that

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he is a solitary wanderer and that his work stands apart from all others, he draws his inspiration from a bounty of aesthetic interlocutors including Walser, Segers, and scores of others whose names he has mentioned over the course of countless interviews. In an essay partially devoted to reflecting on the sublime sensations associated with his own films Herzog again transcribed his version of Walser’s words. Most of that essay is devoted to Longinus, the Greek philosopher thought to have authored the treatise On the Sublime. After commenting on Longinus Herzog reproduces Walser’s slightly amended lines as part of his explanation about how a film’s spectator completes the sublime experience. Building on Immanuel Kant’s idea that “the sublime is not to be sought in the things of nature, but in our ideas” (2003: 134), Herzog asserts that sublimity is an effect; its truths are located in the spectator, rather than on the screen. For this reason, one can infer, the connection between his film and Walser’s prose is left open, and the ecstatic charge strikes the viewer when he or she completes the circuit.4 Akin to his observations about Segers, the part of that essay that deals with Longinus is an ode; he praises the Greek philosopher and refers to him as a “good friend” (2010a: 11). Herzog is aware that there is ambiguity about the authorship of On the Sublime, and that it is widely acknowledged that it may or may not have been written by a person named Longinus, yet he enthusiastically proclaims his affinity for that text’s author, who, like Segers, has reached out to him from across the span of time. His words of praise echo those he expresses for the French filmmaker Jean Rouch, whose film The Mad Masters (1955) features performers in a trance-like state. Herzog says that in making Heart of Glass (1976), a film in which he hypnotized his cast, Rouch’s film was a source of courage, and it was as if he had someone “like an older brother, who was giving me support, giving me advice” (Herzog 2007). For Herzog the works of the philosopher Longinus, the artist Segers, the author Walser, and the filmmaker Rouch each incline toward that “ecstatic truth” he associates with “illumination.” The truth is, in this case, unconnected to political or ideological standpoints and must always be disentangled from what he has called the “truth of accountants,” which “creates norms” (Cronin 2002: 301). Following from such influences Herzog’s cinema inscribes itself into a history of truth-illuminating images. Referring the reader to the word’s etymological origins Herzog notes that for the Greeks “truth,” or aletheia comes from lanthanein, which means, “to lie hidden or unseen.” Truth, as that which is unhidden, reveals what is concealed and is thus the product of an “act of disclosure” (Herzog 2010a: 11). He adds that this disclosure is, “a gesture related to the cinema, where an object is set into the light and then a latent, not yet visible image is conjured onto celluloid, where it first must be developed, then disclosed” (2010a: 11). Cinematic images are thus the product of a  relation: they are captured by one person in the sealed space of the camera, revealed by another in the developing process, and reach yet a third in the darkness of the movie house. Cinema takes place between interlocutors, and it appears as

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the result of an exchange; found by one, its ecstatic truth must be sought by another. One can surely clear away the etymological arguments, which for some readers may echo those of Martin Heidegger, and rather note that in Herzog’s scenario the addition of light, first upon the celluloid and then in the theater, is indispensable to truth’s revelation. Every one of the metaphors in his essay on Segers is likewise bound up with light’s appearance. Herzog describes its influx alternately as illuminating, enlightening, and akin to a flash. Franz Kaf ka, who loved the cinema, formulated matters similarly, writing, “art flies around the truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding the dark void, a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before” (1991: 39). Truth thus emerges at a point of contrast: the darker the space, the more dynamic the beam that bisects it. Cinema draws its strength from darkness. From this perspective cinema’s truth is transferred illumination. This is one consequence of defining cinema in the language of disclosure. A less mystifying account, however, would underscore how art is at its most fascinating when it is illuminating art. Rather than waiting for the illumination of truth from a work that is deemed to be independent of all others, it may be constructive to think along other lines and ask which part of the truth Herzog claims for art is concerned with works illuminating one another. The image whereby one artist reaches out to another across time suggests a method of interpretation that aims to close a gap between the past and the present. Herzog’s relentless references to art’s history—the closing of the fissures that divide, say, a 32,000-year-old cave drawing, a dance by Fred Astaire, and a screen performance by Klaus Kinski—can be seen as an effort to find continuities and rebuff the distinctions brought on by the forward motion of time. Herzog’s Signs of Life (1968), for example, which is about a soldier driven mad owing to the remoteness of his post, stands alongside Segers’ desolate seventeenth-century imagery. The well-known shot in Herzog’s first feature film of a windmill-covered landscape takes its inspiration from the Dutch artist, whose paintings and etchings of windmills were ciphers for more than only the air’s quiet movement. They bespoke the human encroachment on the landscape as well as the hazards of having an overly deliberative mind. Yet one has to acknowledge that it is not only Segers who alters Herzog, but that Herzog likewise alters Segers. One returns to the paintings subsequent to viewing Signs of Life and sees their pathos relative to a maze of interconnections between madness and isolation. The history of Herzog’s work contains a multitude of such reciprocal disclosures. In order that viewers not miss them, Herzog takes it upon himself to recommend a ceaseless stream of works. He has a habit of intoning his recommendations such that one is made to feel that even if one has read the book or watched the film in question, one has not looked at it hard enough or seen its truth through the darkness. With this degree of gravitas Herzog offers a reading list to those who plan to attend his Rogue Film School, a place where one supposedly also learns

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how to pick locks and steal cameras. The reading list seems like a practical joke intended to discourage his devotees: he endorses only the most unwieldy books including Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel novels, a cycle of sixteenth-century works that add up to more than a thousand pages, and he also suggests reading The Warren Commission Report, which is 880 pages long. This latter recommendation seems particularly counterintuitive. At first glance this account of the Kennedy assassination is the very materialization of what Herzog would describe as the accountants’ truth; it provides only provable facts rather than illuminating something that is generally hidden from sight. The book is, however, not without its ecstatic moments. It includes unlikely details such as the extent to which Jack Ruby was fond of dogs, how he referred to them as his children, and “became extremely incensed” when he witnessed their maltreatment (1964: 804). Is Herzog being unserious, or does he see a moment of truth-illuminating disclosure in this collectively authored report? Does The Warren Commission Report, either because of its strange and unlikely set of details, or because of its notoriously contested facts, have something ecstatic about it? In light of these examples of reciprocity comments Herzog made early in his career about the filmmakers Satyajit Ray and François Truffaut can be explained. Herzog contends that earlier films, when seen next to his work, “learn from him.”5 That the statement is hyperbolic seems to be a deliberate provocation. How can films produced prior to his “learn from him”? The sentiment expresses something about Herzog’s companions and about the productive nature of affinities. He does not like to feel that other films influenced him, yet reciprocal illumination may be entirely distinct from the discourse of influence. Although Herzog frequently presents himself as a solitary pilgrim, his art itself gravitates toward the companionship of other works, and leans toward interconnections with other artists. Despite the proposition’s seductive appeal, art is at no point independent from art, and the interaction between texts and films may even be the engine of their sublimity insofar as that interaction throws the sublime experience of synthesis back upon the spectator. Among Herzog’s cinematic companions he frequently mentions trailblazing filmmakers such as D. W. Griffith and Tod Browning. Herzog’s feature film Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), to choose another example from early in the director’s oeuvre, echoes what at first seems to be an unlikely source: Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925). Chaplin’s film opens with a sequence that depicts the Chilkoot Pass in Alaska. A trail of a prospectors proceeds up a mountainside, each of them tiny as ants. Chaplin then cuts to a high-angle shot, and we see the prospectors’ backs and shoulders as they, one after the next, ascend the mountain and nearly bump up against the lens. Herzog’s Aguirre begins with a strikingly similar image, and its proportions resonate unmistakably with Chaplin’s. That single shot may still be Herzog’s best known, and although he had made feature films before Aguirre, for many viewers this striking tableau set his international career in motion: a snaking trail of Spaniards and their indigenous servants is reduced to the smallest

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conceivable scale, almost lost amid the lush green verdure. Herzog’s gold rush, the search for El Dorado, is here transposed from Chaplin’s Alaska, and the works of the two path-breaking independent filmmakers can be linked. Seen in this way—in the light of inverse influence—we might now view both films differently. For example, in one of the subsequent sequences in The Gold Rush, Chaplin depicts his lone prospector stalked by a bear. It is a poignant moment in which Chaplin’s preoccupied figure is unwittingly shadowed. Illuminated by Herzog’s work this Alaskan bear becomes something that can only be described as a stirring fore-echo of Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005). Although it was, in that latter film, expressed as recklessness, Treadwell’s intrepid spirit was simultaneously American and pioneering. Both of these Alaskan figures remain unaware of the extreme danger that awaits them. Chaplin’s prospector, because he is so decidedly sympathetic, shares a common pathos and depth with Treadwell, especially once his footage has been presented and framed by Herzog. In what follows I consider how Herzog’s work is connected with other approaches, including German writers and filmmakers, prewar filmmakers, and tendencies in American independent cinema. The contributors to this volume have not been asked them to restrict themselves to single films; Herzog’s works hang together, and they reward attempts to see them in this light. It is a pitfall of thinking in auteurist terms that every work by a given director is of a piece with the whole, yet so many themes recur that such thinking is inevitable, and, insofar as art is its own companion and film can illuminate other films, it is desirable. The twenty-five essays in the present volume—whether approaching the matter in connection with French film, Dutch painting, or American poetry—seek to illuminate not only key moments within individual films, but also the approach of the filmmaker as a whole, examining his language and his images with respect to their composition, historicity, and context.

New Images During the 1970s and into the early 1980s Herzog was commonly associated with the New German Cinema, whose representatives were largely independent filmmakers, though they each also profited from the group’s wider recognition. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, and a few other leading lights defined them. Timothy Corrigan notes that cultural-historical context rather than a collective stylistic signature identified that set’s higher profile filmmakers, observing that they shared a “common zero ground,” and gathered around “the machinery of filmmaking” as a means of “freeing themselves from the suspicions of their native language” (1986: 6). Referring to Truffaut’s famous fictional figure from The 400 Blows (1959), a young man in France who rebuffed all authority, Corrigan called the cohort of postwar filmmakers, who were rendered fatherless because of the war,

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“Antoine Doinels” (6).6 Herzog’s decision not to trouble himself with film school, but rather to continue as an autodidact and a student of the world, can be linked to his decision not to participate in signing the group’s political manifestoes. Akin to Wenders and Fassbinder, Herzog was feted at Cannes where he was awarded the Grand Jury Prize in 1975 for The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974). Throughout this time he consented to precious few collective affiliations, yet his refutation was not always absolute. As late as 1979, after he completed his transnational production of Nosferatu—The Vampyre (1979), which starred Kinski and the Swiss actor Bruno Ganz alongside the French actress Isabelle Adjani, Herzog participated in a group interview for the magazine Der Spiegel. In the company of young directors Uwe Brandner, Reinhard Hauff, and Hark Bohm, all of whom were, like Herzog, born during World War II, Herzog boasts, “we dominate the cinema with our films; we are German film. We are not the young-film movement or something like that.”7 By the end of the interview Herzog has emerged as the dominant voice. Careful readers can already detect intimations of tensions with Bohm that would grow into conflicts over Herzog’s South American film Ballad of a Little Soldier (1984) (see Bohm and Zimmer 1984), yet Herzog was clearly, at this point, willing to sit together with other filmmakers and, more important, to use the word “we.” Despite his professions of isolation, Herzog produced a number of identifiably German films in the 1970s, including The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Heart of Glass (1976), Stroszek (1977), and Woyzeck (1979), and he was, in some measure, himself produced by the German film industry over the course of that decade. His filmmaking, regularly supported by the public television station ZDF, emerged out of a specific cultural context. Whether or not he considered New German Cinema’s filmmakers to be his companions, he benefited from the growth of and the attention given to the German film industry. Herzog praised many of his fellow filmmakers, especially Fassbinder,8 and he now and again worked with Wenders, stepping more than once before the latter’s camera. In a staged encounter in Tôkyô-ga (1985), Wenders’ feature-length documentary about images, simulacra, and the cinema of Yasujirō Ozu, Herzog appears to fortuitously bump into the documentarian Wenders in Japan. Herzog there describes his willingness to climb 8,000 meters or travel with NASA on Skylab in search of what he describes as “new images.” At the Cannes Film Festival a few years earlier Herzog had similarly spoken directly into Wenders’ camera for the documentary Room 666 (1982). At that festival in May 1982—a year in which Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982) and Wenders’ Hammett (1982) were both in competition—a number of filmmakers, including Michelangelo Antonioni, Steven Spielberg, and Fassbinder, who died only a few weeks later, all answered questions about the fate of cinema relative to the looming shadow of television. As in Tôkyô-ga Herzog shows a willingness to collaborate and even to have a bit of fun: he is the only one of the various filmmakers who shuts off the droning television that Wenders has left on in the background as a bit of documentary mise-en-scène, and Herzog also takes off his shoes as he responds to Wenders’ written talking

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point. This last act may have been playful self-citation on Herzog’s part: he would perhaps rather avoid being put in the position of having to eat his shoes, as he had done in front of the director Les Blank’s camera shortly before, in Berkeley, California in 1979, to settle a wager with Errol Morris. In his answer to Wenders Herzog offers a bit of optimism: he concludes, “I’m not all that worried,” noting that television may have its uses, and that we might one day do our banking or choose groceries with such an item, but that television will not replace the experience of cinema. Comments related to those Herzog made in Wenders’ Tôkyô-ga can already be found in much earlier interviews in which he argues that his goal is “to show images, which have not been seen yet in cinema.”9 Herzog wants to reveal something altogether new, yet he deliberately introduces tendentious and much discussed topics into his films such as the history of war, colonial exploration, and the exploitation of the earth. Insofar as his films are about looking—at war-torn landscapes, at the slave trade, or at the faces of the colonized themselves—they are also reflections on the history of images. Herzog expresses his rhetoric in evolutionary terms when he, in Blank’s Werner Herzog Eats his Shoe (1980), maintains that we were going to “die out like dinosaurs” if we do not develop adequate images. In seeking to present us with a view of our fate, or in pursuit of a standpoint from which we might otherwise see ourselves, we can understand Herzog’s fascination with animal and alien perspectives. A flock of flamingoes in Fata Morgana (1969), for example, is meant to be perceived only fleetingly as an impression of movement that challenges our sensitivity to form, or as a means of seeing the world as representatives of an alien civilization would see it (a theme to which he returned in The Wild Blue Yonder [2005]). There is always the intimation that we should seek an “outside” to how we perceive the world, regardless of the fact that we are unlikely to find it. To listen to him speak in Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, the “inside” we inhabit is defined by advertising, capitalism, and television shows such as Bonanza; in a film such as The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, that inside consists of those limitations defined by language; and in Fata Morgana, it is primarily our human (and specifically, western) perceptual apparatus that defines it. The concept of the “new image,” however, presents a dilemma—one that is related to the problem of companions—insofar as images are within rather than external to history. Herzog for the most part declines to make explicit statements of advocacy, and his images are undeniably chosen in accord with his claim of autonomy; he wants his films subordinated to no extant discourses and prefers to avoid political speech. After his return from an earlier Cannes Festival, in 1968, Herzog responded to the question of whether he intended to be part of the political protests that were brewing in connection with the upcoming Berlin Film Festival. He had left his short film Last Words (1968) in that year’s competition at Oberhausen, where others had withdrawn their entries, and he hoped his films would be evaluated on an unpolitical basis. In a short essay that bears the title “Howling with the Wolves” Herzog expresses regret that in times of political tension one does not

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have a right to expect to be understood in a nuanced way; sides are chosen, and those who do not howl with the wolves will be counted among the lambs (1968: 460). For this reason, Herzog explains, he has stated that Signs of Life, which is about World War II but takes place in Greece and is freely adapted from a story by the German Romantic writer Achim von Arnim, was unpolitical. The imagery on which Herzog draws, with its reference to lambs and wolves, is surely biblical, yet it also can be seen to refer to Heinrich von Kleist’s “St. Cecilia or the Power of Music: A Legend” (1810).10 In that story, which was also written during the Romantic era, iconoclasts come to the city of Aachen to destroy a cathedral and are reduced to a trance-like state by the beauty of religious music; they find themselves only capable of howling like wolves. One interpretation of Kleist’s story is that the power of music, that is, the power of aesthetics, trumps political rebellion and reduces politically motivated revolutionaries to making braying, animalistic sounds. It brings out what Herzog sees as a truth about political speech. The nature of their collective action is animalistic; they howl like madmen, and thus lose control of their selfexpression. An ecstatic performance triumphs over politically motivated violence, and art saves the cathedral. By most accounts Herzog’s films aspire to reach beyond the bounds of prosaic language and inspire in the viewer an experience of sublimity. The sublime has, however, a unique function; following Burke and Kant it tends to be defined in asocial terms, especially when compared with the sociability generally linked to beautiful representations. Beauty is gentle, its experience is predicated on universal agreement, and its appearance affirms the presence of a larger (typically divine) plan. The sublime, however, is challenging and is viewed as the acknowledgment of the solitary subject’s lonesome struggle to impose categories, concepts, and meanings on grandiose or terrifying objects. Perhaps for this reason, owing to this specter of solipsism, Herzog’s filmmaking has always been shadowed by sublimity. It is, in other words, not the images themselves, but the sum of the figure cut by the director taken together with his work that causes us to examine his images under the sign of the sublime. Yet genuine isolation—the confrontation with truly new images—is inconceivable insofar as the perception of cinematic images is always already social; the act of viewing is invariably embedded in context, in history, and in language. This, then, is the source of an ever-present tension in engagements with Herzog’s work: his images point toward an isolation, an autonomy and a sui generis status that they cannot claim. Corrigan aptly identifies the movement of the director’s films as one “between a language of some sort (history, literature, politics, etc.) and the hypnotic substance of images” (1986: 16). Alan Singer, who describes the director’s sublime visions as always embedded in self-reflective irony, articulates this back and forth movement similarly, writing: “Herzog’s vistas are deliberately not a release from the rigors of contemplation that is the seductive pleasure of the sublime, but are ever more engrossing visual situations that compel attention to their unique formal determinations. By contrast with the pleasure of sublimity, these determinations might even be described as the exigencies of an

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inescapable historical will/knowledge insofar as the traces of their production are integral to their compositional order and intelligibility” (1986: 188). For all his consciousness of the hazards of contemplation, Herzog is not in the tradition of Bertolt Brecht, and he is not primarily concerned with undercutting our aesthetic absorption. The juxtapositions in his films take a distinctive shape, and his most ecstatic moments are purposefully set in opposition to the historical determination of vision. They are held up against the history of the image in the form of Richard Wagner (in Fitzcarraldo [1982] and Lessons of Darkness [1992]), Leni Riefenstahl (in Scream of Stone [1991] and Cobra Verde [1987]), and even, now and again, a figure such as Karl May (in Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Ballad of a Little Soldier).11 Although Herzog professes little interest in Riefenstahl and May, he incorporates into his work what Singer describes as an “inescapable historical will/knowledge,” a will and knowledge that are inescapable on two levels: the associations that follow from them are inevitable, especially for his German audiences; and they are also mesmerizing. They are compelling, and are for this reason deliberately laid aesthetic traps. To vary Marshall McLuhan’s famous formulation: the mystification is the message. Herzog is an enchanting magician, yet he is also a modern critic of beguiling practices, and he thus reflects our stupefaction back at us. The history and historicity of his images—their “uses”—are always incorporated into and repurposed in his works. Having excused himself from associations with New German Cinema and delinked himself from most major art historical trends, Herzog sometimes stylizes  himself in accord with a Romantic “forest isolation” (Waldeinsamkeit). Jan Christopher Horak describes the director’s stylization as that of the prophet-artist, who remains “apart from the temporal problems shared by most mortals” (1986: 31).12 This image—the self-stylization as literary figure in search of solitude—recalls figures such as Christopher McCandless, the subject of Jon Kracauer’s 1996 nonfiction book Into the Wild, who undertook to separate himself wholesale from society, as well as Byron’s Childe Harold, who, while roaming in foreign lands, learns from solitude the lessons of death (2004: 136). Herzog’s published diary, The Conquest of the Useless (2009), where he documents the difficulties that beset the production of the film Fitzcarraldo, contains many such images of the self in Romantic isolation. His journal is full of language and sentiments associated with Waldeinsamkeit, where the Wald in question is the Amazon. His stylized self-reliance is illustrated in his description of a soccer game in Lima, where the director found himself confused as to which players were on which team. He concludes: “I knew the only hope of winning the game would be if I did it all by myself […] I would have to take on the entire field myself, including my own team” (2009: 8). Even more characteristic is a curious incident from around the time Herzog was isolated by the burden of his dream of enacting Fitzcarraldo’s vision of hauling a steamship over a mountain. Coming to terms with the fact that no one would help him realize his plan, he writes: “In the evening I finished reading a book, and because I was feeling so alone, I buried the book on the edge of the forest with a borrowed spade” (2009: 244).

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The incident is curious: for whom does Herzog want us to believe he is leaving this message? For what future reader? Is he setting the book aside for posterity or is he burying it once and for all? In gravitating toward total isolation Herzog becomes a character akin to those that grace his films. His travel diary Of Walking in Ice—a chronicle of his journey on foot from Munich to Paris in the winter of 1974—is filled with hyperbolic valorizations of solitude. It includes customary Herzogian declarations such as “when I move, a buffalo moves. When I rest, a mountain reposes” (1980a: 8). In such passages its tone has everything in common with the power fantasies of Kinski’s Lope de Aguirre, who declared that the earth quaked beneath him when he walked. To read with Horak, who is a remarkably close reader of Of Walking in Ice, one might think of this as “posturing” (1986: 37), or even as messianic fantasy (35). Herzog is a character in his own ongoing film, and the dedifferentiation of documentary and features, for which he has become famous, contributes to the blurring of the lines: the real Timothy Treadwell, the quasi-fictional Aguirre, and the lyrical wanderer Herzog—their dreams gravitate toward isolation, and toward shaping the world to accommodate their singular vision. The enthusiastic naturalist, the visionary yet diabolical conquistador, and the German filmmaker each create their own worlds. The grander the vision, the more expansive and varied the inner landscape. Yet these characters and their visions exist in language and in history. The self, like the work of art, can never be truly isolated.

Herzog’s Writing There are ample writings by Herzog apart from Of Walking in Ice and Conquest of  the Useless. The trail of texts is long, and the German novelist and scholar W. G. Sebald is one example of a writer who acknowledged his authorial affinity with Herzog. He generally wrote about Herzog in a context in which writers such as Walser, Wittgenstein, and Nabokov more frequently appeared. Indeed Herzog emerges as an influence in more than one of the author’s novels.13 Sebald, who died in an auto accident in 2001, was nearly the same age as Herzog (he was born in 1944, Herzog was born in 1942), and was from a region of Germany close to the one in which Herzog was raised. In a 2001 essay entitled “Moments Musicaux” Sebald indicates that he felt spoken to by the scene in Fitzcarraldo in which the protagonist, played by Klaus Kinski, believes that Enrico Caruso is acknowledging him from the stage of a Brazilian opera house during a performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Ernani.14 In Herzog’s film, Kinski believes he has been swept up; having been made part of the production he swoons ecstatically. The incident comes early in the film, and the encounter with the stage bespeaks the confusion of reality and fantasy that becomes the film’s major theme. Sebald writes that upon seeing the production of Ernani in Herzog’s film, he recalled having seen that same opera as

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a child in a town identified as “S.” The letter likely indicates the town of Sonthofen in the Bavarian Alps, which lies only 130 miles from Herzog’s own “S.,” that is, Sachrang, where the young film director was simultaneously growing up. In Sebald’s essay, he writes that the local upholsterer and tobacconist played the lead roles in the production, and Herzog’s cinematic scene becomes a cipher through which Sebald replays moments from his own past. He too is transported as if onto the stage. At a subsequent point in Sebald’s essay he recounts how he had a ticket to see a production of Verdi’s Nabucco (1842), at the Bregenz Festival when it was staged there in 1993–4. He grew concerned that the treatment of the persecution of the Jews in this opera would be vulgar, and he found himself, for this reason, prepared to part with his ticket. At this point, he explains, a woman who asked him whether he might have a spare ticket approached him. In what is clearly an evocation of one of the initial moments of Fitzcarraldo, we are informed that she—like Kinski and Claudia Cardinale in Herzog’s film, who have traveled by boat to see Caruso—has “come a long way” (2005: 195) and that she is disappointed that there are no tickets available. Sebald notes that this woman likely approached him because he “looked like someone let down by his companion” (195). One can surmise that here, owing to his suspicions about how the festival was putting Verdi to use, he felt let down, and for this reason he heads home where he takes comfort (or refuge) in his books. Herzog is of the same generation as a cohort of postwar writers, which includes Sebald, but also more widely known ones such as Peter Schneider and Peter Handke. Herzog once praised Schneider’s Der Mauerspringer (The Wall Jumper) highly in a published review, describing the novel as both good and urgent (dringlich) (1982: 213), but he would surely protest against such comparisons. He has never been directly affiliated with Schneider or Handke, nor does he think of himself as specifically German (he prefers to describe his origins as Bavarian).15 He has  doubtlessly walked a path quite different from such writers, and it would be  a  mistake to include him in that category without underscoring the many caveats, yet in examining the work of his early years there is also cause to consider the connections. Herzog’s interest in the historical figure Kaspar Hauser, for example, links his projects with those of Handke, who was, like Herzog, born in 1942. Handke and Herzog are an unlikely combination insofar as Handke is more commonly connected with Wim Wenders. Those two collaborated on a number of films and share a common mood characterized by protagonists who drift from place to place, and by their joint attempt to articulate their disaffection negatively through the absence of affect. Such tendencies are generally associated with the so-called new subjectivity of the West German 1970s, a literary movement that appears to have spoken little to Herzog. A 1967 poem by Handke entitled “Fright” (“Erschrecken”) ends with the line “This desert is a Fata Morgana!” which, in denying the desert its dominance, may be meant as a reassuring conclusion to an ode to fear (1974: 149). As a word for “mirage” fata morgana occurs regularly enough in German, yet if one considers

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Herzog’s own remarks as to how Africa has always left him frightened (Cronin 2002: 47), one might be tempted to picture a parallel between Handke’s anxious verse and Herzog’s excursion in the late 1960s, from which he returned with the film Fata Morgana.16 However, Handke’s play Kaspar, also published in 1967, sheds more light on concerns common to both. When we first encounter Kaspar in Herzog’s 1974 feature film he is in a state that one can describe as pre-lingual; the legendary Kaspar Hauser, who appeared in Nuremberg in 1828 was approximately 16 years old at the time he emerged, but here, played by the 42-year-old Bruno Schleinstein (a.k.a. Bruno S.), he is a full-grown adult, who has not yet acquired language. He has at least one word at his command, but no syntax, and to our knowledge he has seen little of the world beyond the dark cellar in which he has been held captive. He is in possession of a toy horse and repeatedly says the word “horse” while playing with it. At times he is visited by a man who feeds him and he is ultimately deposited in the city streets with a letter of introduction that includes a sentence he has rehearsed: “I want to be a gallant rider, as my father was before me.” Kaspar is cast into the world, and both Handke’s play and Herzog’s film draw attention to the painful, forced acquisition of language as the unavoidable entrée into a society that Kaspar, in all iterations of the story, comes to regret. The authors’ respective Kaspars are used to illustrate social limits, and the cruel irrationalities of a society for which socialization is violence. The figures are a means of boundary testing, and Herzog relies on Kaspar to draw out a depiction of willfully brutal behavior, one that ends with his sympathetic main character on the coroner’s cold dissecting table. Both his story and Handke’s rely on their protagonists’ transgressions—his role as the clown who renders society’s coarse clownishness transparent—in order to depict inhumaneness. On behalf of his belief in the necessity of new images, Herzog similarly tests the social limits when he eats a shoe in Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. While Herzog eats his own footwear—pieces of a sturdy looking work-shoe that Herzog has cooked in garlic and duck fat—he articulates his hope for change, noting that films may “change our perspective on things.” When he is asked about the social import of film Herzog says that in the long term it may be valuable, but he then adds, “there’s a lot of absurdity involved as well. As you see, it makes me into a clown. And that happens to everyone. Just look at Orson Welles, or look at even people like Truffaut. They have become clowns. […] What we do as filmmakers—it’s immaterial. It’s only a projection of light.”17 Herzog’s shoe-eating feat took place in the United States, and although he eventually moved there, German authors in the 1970s tended to take a skeptical if not a cynical position vis-à-vis American freedom. This typically involved looking for an apparently more authentic America in places such as the Midwest, and in Herzog’s case, he looked to Wisconsin. The idea was to see beyond America’s selfrepresentation, specifically in film, and in order to do that, writers and filmmakers had to venture beyond Hollywood. In Stroszek, Herzog looks at the United States through the eyes of a character again played by Schleinstein. America is harsh and

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Stroszek, the protagonist, tries to emigrate there adventurously along with his two close friends and his mynah bird, who upon arrival falls victim to coldness and cruelty; the bird does not live to see Wisconsin. Owing to Stroszek’s status as an emigrant he is displaced, and because the film is focalized through him, the United States can be re-visualized as an alien landscape. Stroszek cannot make sense of his impressions at least in any conventional way, and he resists the logic of American capitalism just as Kaspar Hauser, Schleinstein’s comparable character, had resisted a professor of logic’s rational machinations in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. America’s instrumental reason remains opaque to Stroszek, and in this way he functions similarly to a number of Handke’s protagonists. In his inability to make sense of American nonsense, he is particularly akin to the unnamed narrator of Handke’s novel Short Letter, Long Farewell (1972). In the course of his road trip through the United States Handke’s protagonist can barely make sense of the stories he reads in the newspapers or out of a stage performance by Lauren Bacall. By the time he reaches the Midwest nearly every sign and gesture perplex him. Throughout the 1970s Herzog wrote prodigiously, and his published screenplays seem to require their own genre: they are published as “film-stories” (Filmerzählungen). In the front pages of the published book that contains the filmstories of Aguirre and Kaspar Hauser (published under the translation of its German title, Every Man for Himself and God Against All), Herzog explains that the texts in that collection, apart from Land of Silence and Darkness (which can be described, relative to the other two films, as a documentary), have remained completely unchanged, that is, they are as they were prior to shooting. “The films themselves,” Herzog writes, “followed a very different evolution” (1980b: 5). His screenplays are not just similar to or parallel to literary writing, they are literature, and transforming them into visual images is a means by which Herzog expresses his awareness of the gap between media. Early in his career he won the prestigious Carl Mayer Prize for his screenplay for Signs of Life, which was inspired by Achim von Arnim’s novella “The Mad Invalid of Fort Ratonneau” (1818). Herzog had already begun, at that point, to help give the concept of autorenkino a new shape. It was not that the German language cinema of the 1970s would present the adapted works of great authors, nor was autorenkino an indication that directors, akin to Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford, would be the sole authors of their films. A new definition was emerging: the director was meant to be seen equally as a writer. Although it is true that Wenders’ adaptations (of Handke and of Nathaniel Hawthorne) and Fassbinder’s (of Theodor Fontane, Alexander Döblin, and Daniel Galouye) each display their director’s signatures and can be called reimaginings of literary works, these directors were simultaneously writing essays, plays, and short philosophical texts that stood independent of their films. Along these changing lines Herzog was defining himself as a writer-director who was equally a writer and a director. The new legitimacy of German cinema, to which he often referred at that time, came not entirely because his films—alongside those of Wenders, Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, and others—were as artistic

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a mode of expression as texts by Kleist, Büchner, and Kaf ka, but also because the filmmakers’ writings could stand on their own.18 Herzog’s version of the historical Kaspar Hauser story—the film-story on which his film is based—shares much in common with Jakob Wassermann’s betterknown novel owing to the known facts associated with the historical account. It  also shares some commonalities with Handke’s play. All three are concerned with the violent or deforming effects of language acquisition and the socialization of the subject. Setting aside the question of whether we view Herzog’s films as an immense body of work that returns to interrelated themes, his film-stories are themselves literature in the sense that the Romantics defined it, that is, in them the surface of the world is reflected back to us through the altered mirror of prose; it appears to us as simultaneously refracted and recognizable, both strange and familiar. In Every Man for Himself, for example, we find a mythologized world where the language-less—or rather the language-acquiring—homo ferus is placed in a carnival alongside the miniature King of Punt, who is descended from a race of giants who have, in the course of successive generations, become smaller and smaller. “If the lineage were to continue,” we are told, “one would not be able to see the last King of Punt for he would skip away like a flea” (1980b: 134). In reminding us that we are growing smaller, the King serves as a symbol of reverse evolution, or the idea that the mastery of nature might be an illusion and that we could be headed toward our own eradication. In the prosaic and callous autopsy that ends the film-story, Kaspar’s head is cut open, to be explored in the name of science. Herzog writes: “all of a sudden, music sets in. An aria from a very old recording, full of dignity, beautiful and solemn. The voice carries peacefully and without strain. The doctors work efficiently, diabolically” (1980b: 180). Herzog is not at this point describing images he has filmed, although the language sounds like prose inspired by his filmmaking. This is prose written for a film that may come to be, and these words are evocative regardless of their fate, that is, whether or not they were adapted for the screen. The fact that Kaspar’s head is opened is a tragic sign of the brutality of the world into which he has fallen, and it was foreshadowed by the blow to the head delivered by the unnamed man who originally held him in hiding and then abandoned him to the world. The unnamed man’s blow left him with a scar that warned him of life’s perils, as if to say: this is how the world will harm you. It recalls both Odysseus whose scar was the sign that he had left another life behind, and Kaf ka’s Rotpeter, the ape from “A Report to an Academy” (1917), who was violently forced to acquire language and grow accustomed to the cruel world of men.19 The transformation of words into images is the concealed core of Herzog’s art, whether it concerns the adaptation of literary works, or simply the representation of his own prose upon the screen. He is a writer who consistently calls the relationship between words and images into question, from Last Words through to Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010). The fact that his film-stories are not quite novels suggests a peculiar intermediality. Herzog translates his texts from word-images

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to screen-images, and this fascination with that act of translation resonates with his repeated denunciation of storyboards, which, he says, “remain the instruments of cowards who do not trust in their own imagination” (Cronin 2002: 104). He is highly aware of the separateness of text and image, and storyboards appear to court the danger that one will mistake the one for the other, that is, that cinema will become something planned on the page, mapped as one might map an excursion, rather than something elusive that is captured, at best unexpectedly. Along these lines one might revisit fragmentary images throughout the film-stories. The fleeting and suggestive word-pictures in Nosferatu call for their realization; his prose longs to be pictured. In Nosferatu Lucy is surrounded by a procession of coffins, and here Herzog’s writing expresses one of his authorial trademarks: a brief description of a profound emotion followed by a simple gesture. Lucy is filled with sorrow when confronted by the shadows of death. Herzog writes: “Lucy despairs, realizing that it is futile, that no one will listen. She turns away” (1979: 146). Herzog describes a moment that can be seen to exist independent of the filmic images that follow it. Not only by adapting von Arnim, Herbert Achternbusch, and Bruce Chatwin, but in adapting his own prose as well, Herzog repeatedly recasts literature via the sound and movement of cinema, highlighting especially the moments that resist translation from one into the other. At times his own texts, particularly Nosferatu and Every Man for Himself, inherit the structure of the Romantic fragment, and in that spirit his writing is the antithesis of the accountants’ truth embodied by The Warren Commission Report. That text, because it aims to be comprehensive, inspires little demand for a supplement. Herzog’s work, starting with that first period of his filmmaking—from Signs of Life to Fitzcarraldo—began a continuing dialogue between words on the page and their realization on screen.

Cinematic Companions Herzog has frequently stated that he remade F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) in order to close the gap in German film history between the great filmmakers of the Weimar Republic and those of the postwar generation. The period from 1919 to 1933, especially owing to its historical association with German Expressionist film, was unquestionably a heyday within German cinema’s history, and it makes sense for a child of the war who became a filmmaker to want to return to that point of origin and ask what the industry would have been like, had Germany not gone through its most historically significant sliding door. Lotte Eisner identified the hallmarks of cinema style during the period prior to fascism in her famous 1952 study The Haunted Screen. Although the term “Weimar cinema” encompasses a far larger body of work than only Expressionist films, Eisner concentrated on articulating how the legacies of Romanticism and major existential motifs could be

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found in Expressionist masterpieces such as Murnau’s Nosferatu, The Last Laugh (1924), and Faust (1926), in E. A. Dupont’s Variety (1925), as well as in Fritz Lang’s Destiny (1921), Metropolis (1926) and M (1931). Eisner was important to Herzog in part because of her close readings and her attention to detail, but also because of her respect for cinematic authorship. She attended to the signatures that Expressionist directors left on their films. Looking at the work of Lang, Murnau, Robert Wiene, and G. W. Pabst, Eisner notes the various directors’ specific tendencies and their respective treatments of what was, prior to color, film’s central medium: light and shadow. Out of respect for Eisner Herzog undertook his journey on foot in winter from Munich to Paris in 1974. She was ill, and he claims he believed that his pilgrimage would somehow contribute to saving her life. But what does it mean to try and close this gap? Expressionist films are conventionally identified as the last great German films before the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, but why, specifically, should the films from this era be particularly important to Herzog, who would otherwise pay little mind to traditional film historical accounts. His desire must be viewed not in terms of this historical narrative, that is, that the New German filmmakers were a generation without fathers and that they therefore needed to turn back the clock and affirm their affinity with their Weimar era grandfathers, but rather as an aesthetic choice, that is, as a judgment in favor of a certain attitude in filmmaking, one that is of a piece with Herzog’s repeatedly stated aesthetic principle: he wants to produce a cinema where the audience can “trust their eyes again.”20 It would be a mistake to read this as a programmatic statement against special effects; in Weimar films, and particularly in those films associated with German Expressionists, there are surely special effects. It is more closely tied to a call to Herzog’s investment in returning to something along the lines of what has been referred to as a “cinema of attractions,” which denotes an emphasis on spectacle over narrative.21 This is not to say that Murnau’s Expressionism was without narrative—absolutely not—but rather that there was special attention, extending into the era of Expressionist cinema, paid to display and exhibition, and that it contains an aesthetic impulse that now and again corresponds to the carnival or cavalcade. Though the term “cinema of attractions” refers to the very earliest cinema, prior to 1906, the idea that cinema was once more concerned with “showing” powerful images than with relaying narratives closely echoes a basic tenet of Herzog’s practice. With respect to the concept of the new image, it reflects the hope that the spectator might have the opportunity to see something not yet absorbed by an over-determined form. The theme is repeated in Herzog’s comments about his work on Fitzcarraldo, which was filmed around the same time as Wolfgang Petersen’s acclaimed Das Boot (1981). Petersen’s film was shot in Bavaria Studios in Munich, while Herzog, at close to that same time, was in Peru taking his chances with border wars and snakes. When he says that he really needed to hoist his steamship over a mountain and that he did not want to shoot a film with special effects in which a boat floats in a bathtub Herzog seems to be drawing a direct comparison between his own

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filmmaking style and Petersen’s. In Fitzcarraldo, he would later profess that you can see the real strain on people’s faces, and audiences are seeing an exploit, not a special effect; they can thus believe their eyes again (Osegueda 2009). The same impulse can be said to guide Herzog’s unconventional desire to film the largest chicken he can find being chased by a dwarf, who is riding a miniature horse, around the world’s largest tree (Bissell 2006: 72). This frequently expressed fantasy, which, when spoken by anyone else, would suggest the influence of hallucinogens, has less to do with the power of narrative than with putting a spectacle of extraordinary scale before the viewer. The unexpected proportions would, theoretically, constitute a new image, one that would challenge our perceptions in part because what we are seeing would not be a special effect; we would have no choice but to believe our eyes. The very phrase—to believe one’s eyes again—returns us to this same prewar era of cinema, specifically to Leo McCarey’s Duck Soup (1933), featuring the Marx Brothers. Chico Marx, costumed as Rufus T. Firefly, the part played by Groucho, asks Firefly’s wealthy and suddenly confused paramour Ms. Teasdale, “well, who are you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” In adapting this provocation as a doctrine Herzog crosses paths with the Marx Brothers, and it is clear that the gap to which he refers extends beyond the bounds of only German cinema. He praises Murnau’s work, but also that of D. W. Griffith, Buster Keaton, and Charlie Chaplin.22 In Herzog’s discussions of films from this era, he frequently reminisces about a Fu Manchu film that he saw when he was young. He relates that the film was part of his first encounter with cinema as synthetic, which is to say: his primal scene of coming to terms with film consists of realizing that the same shot could be edited into the film more than once (Cronin 2002: 9). It is odd that even as a young man he would have instinctively held a Fu Manchu film to the standards of a documentary, yet this original conflation between documentaries and features ultimately attended and defined much of his subsequent filmmaking decisions. But what can be said to characterize such a cinema? In this regard a major point of reference is Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932), and it is perhaps in relation to this film, even more than to Nosferatu, that Herzog succeeded in closing a gap.23 Indeed Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970), whether consciously or unconsciously, whether implicitly or explicitly, can be seen as an earlier attempt to build a bridge to the most apparently eccentric spectacles of that earlier era. Herzog’s 1970 film is so akin to Freaks it looks like he might already have meant to reclaim the aesthetics of prewar cinema eight years prior to embarking on his Nosferatu project. Along with films such as The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), Freaks was produced at a specific point in MGM Studios’ history when it was concerned with marketing astonishing spectacles, owing in part to the soon to be applied restrictions of the Hayes Code. Freaks has a carnival atmosphere, and its setting can be linked to Dupont’s Variety, although Dupont’s style is much more reserved. The carnival is a significant locale for Herzog, who uses sideshows and sideshow barkers in Invincible (2001), Woyzeck, and elsewhere. Browning’s film enacts what Chris Wahl, in this volume, refers

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to as an “inversion” whereby viewers see themselves in the otherwise marginal characters, while the so-called normal types—the regular guy and the popular gal—are revealed to be cruel oppressors. Browning’s film normalizes its freaks, who are surely more humane than their counterparts. Hans, a dwarf and carnival freak, is apparently involved with Frieda, another freak, yet he is in love with Cleopatra, a coquettish trapeze artist, who is tall, conventionally attractive, and thus not one of the freaks (at least not at the film’s onset). Hans is played by Harry Earles, who was born Kurt Schneider, and who plays the part with a heavy German accent. Cleopatra tries to exploit Hans, first because it is amusing and then to take his money. The other freaks, who reveal how compassionate they are, come to his rescue. The inversion, to use Wahl’s term, is one aspect of Herzog’s inheritance from Browning’s work, but some of the latter director’s images resonate throughout Herzog’s oeuvre.24 A scene in which the freak known as KooKoo dances on a table anticipates a scene in Heart of Glass, where Herzog’s Ludmila dances comparably. The kinship, the fore-echoes, and the reciprocal cinematic sublimities can hardly be disregarded. The German couple at the center of the film, Hans and Frieda, could have stepped right out from Even Dwarfs Started Small. Most striking of all, however, is an image of Frieda from early in the film, standing next to a miniature horse (Figure I.1). Was this, for Herzog, the inception of that image? Here, in this vivid and unusual tableau, Browning depicts Frieda’s fear for Hans. We also see social critique insofar as the progress of Enlightenment appears to be turned backwards (nature may be outgrowing us, we may be growing smaller), and Browning stages a perspectival shift without the help of effects; one can believe one’s eyes again. Although Herzog frequently refers to Freaks, Browning’s West of Zanzibar (1928) may be an even closer cinematic companion. The film offers little insight into Africa because it was shot in California, rather than on location. However, as with Herzog’s Aguirre and Cobra Verde, the themes of the film recall Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which, like Browning’s film, is set in the Congo. The details of the twisted melodrama are hardly Herzogian: based on Chester De Vonde’s play Kongo (1926), the film tells the story of Phroso, a vaudeville magician who is crippled from the waist down during a physical confrontation with his wife’s other lover. The rest of the film concerns a revenge plot wherein Phroso, now profiteering in colonial Africa and known by the moniker “Dead Legs,” drags himself along the ground, anticipating Johnny Eck’s performance as “Half-boy” in Browning’s later Freaks. In the Congo, Dead Legs engages in a fanatical and Kinski-esque performance. Like Kinski’s Cobra Verde, he asserts his authority over the Africans gathered around him, but he is always potentially at the mercy of their numbers and their zoolatrous rituals. Many of the connections between Browning’s portrait of the Congo and Herzog’s films are creaturely: Dead Legs finds friendship with chimpanzees, which is a motif in Herzog’s films, and he describes himself as having been turned into an animal, one that is “now poised to bite.” Shots of insects throughout the film recall close-ups in The White Diamond (2004) and images of alligators recall

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Figure I.1 Hans (Harry Earles) and Frieda (Daisy Earles) in Freaks (1932). Directed by Tod Browning, produced by Tod Browning for MGM.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call—New Orleans (2009). Most of all, however, the vaudeville magic show Browning includes at the film’s beginning learns from a viewing of Herzog’s films; its compositions strongly resemble the powerfully filmed stage performances in Invincible. Here, as with Freaks, the films, owing in part to the common desire to compel viewers’ gazes rather than to give themselves over to narrative conventions, reciprocally shed light on one another’s most inspired images. Along similar lines, Herzog’s affinities with Murnau, who immigrated like Herzog to the United States, are well known and have been often discussed. Herzog’s fascination with Murnau seems to come largely from Murnau’s faith in the communicative power of the visual image. Murnau did not want to give up silent cinema. He hung on to it as long as he could, past the advent of sound, and his faith in the power of the cinematic image is something shared with Herzog. It  is not that Herzog rejects language’s central role in film, but rather that the images in his films are, like works of art, meant to stand on their own, and this

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investment in their independence is coupled with a pervasive distrust of rhetoric for its own sake. The image should bear the bulk of the weight, and one can see Murnau’s influence—the echoes of his silent cinema—in some of the long dialogue-free passages of Herzog’s Nosferatu. Murnau’s last film, Tabu, was released in 1931, during the same period as Freaks, and it is Herzogian as well: it was independent cinema insofar as Murnau ultimately financed it himself, and it was filmed on location in Bora Bora. Apart from some transcribed letters and signs that are part of the diegesis, the film is virtually without text. It is a love story that, like West of Zanzibar, trades on ethnographic fascinations. Bordering on documentary in its use of island extras, Murnau’s filmmaking was attended by a rhetoric of authenticity that Herzog would later adopt. And, akin to Herzog’s The Wild Blue Yonder, the film features beautiful undersea footage. In his fascination with prewar cinema—his praise for Lotte Eisner, for Murnau, and for Browning’s Freaks—Herzog seeks to reclaim cinematic pleasure from its formulaic fate. The problem is not only that one can no longer trust one’s eyes, that is, that conventional Hollywood film has nothing unmanufactured to show us, but that, following from the pitfalls of melodrama and narrative cinema’s over-determination, it also has nothing fascinating to offer. In this way as well, Herzog’s unhistorical readings collapse the ages of cinema; films from the 1920s and 1930s are fresher than the ones today. Herzog expresses his enthusiasm for Swing Time (1936), and its famous scene in which Fred Astaire dances with his shadows, which Herzog chose to include in his film Cave of Forgotten Dreams.25 This backdrop, in which the shadows are so much larger than the man who casts them, recalls one of cinema’s most famous shadows: the one cast in Murnau’s Nosferatu. In Swing Time, however, Astaire is turned into a shadow puppet, and his image is writ large on a cavernous wall. The sequence is odd in that Astaire is in brown face make-up, which should be disquieting for contemporary viewers. For Herzog’s purposes, however, the scene trades on ideas about truth, authenticity, and reality in relation to art. Insofar as Astaire dances with his shadows, we can view the scene as a comment on the joys of fabrication, specifically on fabrication as a function of play with light. As these shadows dance, as they come alive, they begin to win a measure of truth, which means that Astaire himself— the “real” Astaire, paradoxically hidden behind make-up—runs the risk of becoming the falsehood. As Kaf ka writes, “truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie” (1991: 35). If the shadows become the man, the man might become the shadow. For Herzog, suspending the relation to truth, or the rendering it impossible to answer the question as to which is the true image, is key. He champions our inability to dissect the sources of light beyond the caves we inhabit. Astaire, as Lucky Garnett, likewise seems to enjoy being the truth and the lie, the light and the shadow, the puppet and the figures on the wall. In other words, he is acting as though he enjoys being cinema itself.

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American Independence Even Dwarfs Started Small resembles Browning’s Freaks, but it is also akin to Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1970) from that same year. New York Times’ critic Vincent Canby, who wrote about Even Dwarfs when it played at the New York Film Festival, quoted Herzog who said that it had nothing to do with the calculated and surreal cinema of Luis Buñuel. To Canby, the film seemed isolated, and, in its segregation from contemporary politics he saw an “uninvolved intelligence” (1970: 58). Herzog had been interested in American cinema since 1964 or earlier, writing a piece in praise of Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, and others, which was published in a journal called Filmstudio, and he later became acquainted with Francis Ford Coppola, who founded the company American Zoetrope in 1969. By permission, Coppola imitated scenes from Aguirre in his Apocalypse Now (1979). A sequence in which the boat drifts downriver while arrows are flung at the crew from the shore appears as a wholesale recreation of Herzog’s film. When it came to the production of Fitzcarraldo, however, Herzog borrowed back from Coppola, who had been turning his own large-scale production into a work of performance art. Both directors tested the limits of cinema, and Coppola was intent on doing with his film crew what the United States had done in Vietnam: he aimed to go into the jungle and become it, to be infected by its mysteries. The two films were treated as alibis for their filmmakers’ personal odysseys, ones that were captured on film. Eleanor Coppola, who filmed the documentary footage that served as the basis for Hearts of Darkness (1991), recorded testimonials from her husband, who, like Herzog, feared for the state of the production, engaged with the native cultures, and concerned himself with turning his jungle landscape into something resembling a dangerous character. In Herzog’s case all of this was caught on film in Burden of Dreams (1982). As Chris Wahl discusses in this volume, Herzog has stylized himself as a major figure in American independent cinema. He is a rare example of a European auteur from the 1970s who successfully crossed over. But even as he has become an American filmmaker, self-citations are everywhere to be found in the work. In other words, his signature persists. Not only is Rescue Dawn (2006) a feature film remake of his own documentary Little Dieter in the form of the American Prisoner of War (POW) film (and it would be difficult to argue that the film deviates thoroughly from the genre), but one is tempted to see the dwarf in the POW prison in Rescue Dawn as an echo of the many other dwarfs in his films, that is, as a moment of self-citation. Still more evident are the jellyfish in Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant, a mise-en-scène that recalls both Dieter Dengler’s inner world as well as that of the false prophet and hypnotist Hanussen in Invincible. This is, of course, not a merely ornamental signature. The movement of the jellyfish is a major metaphor; like the undersea creatures in The Wild Blue Yonder they occupy a discrete time and space, and, like Dengler and Hanussen, they very much inhabit their own worlds.

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In making his own Bad Lieutenant Herzog deliberately avoided picking up on the themes of the earlier “Bad Lieutenant” film by American director Abel Ferrara. Herzog was correct in declaring that his film was not a remake. William Finkelstein’s screenplay abandons most of the Catholic themes that render Ferrara’s collaboration with Harvey Keitel so earnest. Jaimey Fisher discusses the film in detail in this volume, but of interest where Herzog’s self-stylization is concerned is his disputation with Ferrara, which involved invectives such as Ferrara saying that Herzog can “die in hell” (Anon. 2008). The conflict mirrored the public disputations in which Herzog engaged with Kinski, and from which both of their careers benefited. Herzog claimed to have no idea who Ferrara was, and was heard saying, “I don’t feel like doing an homage to Abel Ferrara because I don’t know what he did—I’ve never seen a film by him. I have no idea who he is. Is he Italian? Is he French? Who is he?” (Defamer 2008). But for those paying attention this dialogue started many years earlier. Toward the end of Ferrara’s Dangerous Game (1993) Keitel plays the part of a vainglorious and self-absorbed film director, who has pushed his actors a step too far. As he sits in a Los Angeles hotel room we hear Herzog’s voice. He is speaking to Les Blank’s camera in Burden of Dreams, explaining that he lives or dies with Fitzcarraldo and that if he doesn’t finish the film, that is, haul the steamship over the mountain, he would be a man without dreams, which he doesn’t want to be. As Blank’s film of Herzog appears in Ferrara’s film, it may or may not be the case that Ferrara is likening Keitel’s character, Eddie Israel, to Herzog. More important is that it indicates a lineage of reception of Herzog within American film that goes far further back than his American “breakthrough” Grizzly Man. Thirteen years prior to Dangerous Game Blank had filmed Herzog eating his shoe on behalf of another independent documentarian, Errol Morris. As Chris Wahl points out, his breakthrough in the United States was a long process that had already started in the 1970s. A pinnacle in his relationship with American independent cinema is My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (2009) for which David Lynch served as an executive producer. The oxygen mask that appears in a sequence filmed at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in LA signals the secret presence of Blue Velvet (1986) in this film, and the stylized acting throughout calls to mind something similar to LA native Gregg Araki’s films such as Nowhere (1997), which are specific to their context insofar as they mean to illuminate the evacuated interiorities of their westcoast and ultramodern main characters. Though this artificial LA stylization may link this film to those of a director such as Araki, Herzog refuses to render his own protagonist two-dimensional; his main character is complex, in part because he carries with him a historicity of Herzogian protagonists. The film’s narrative was based on the true story of Mark Yavorsky’s murder of his mother, although much of the script is an invention only somewhat inspired by those events. It focuses on classical themes owing in large measure to the real influence of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, which inspired Yavorsky. Moved by Aeschylus’ drama Yavorsky, who is called Brad in Herzog’s film, concocted the idea that murdering his mother would be a kind of sacrifice in order to save the world. He kills his mother with an antique sword that

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Figure I.2 Brad Dourif, Verne Troyer, and Michael Shannon arrayed in a tableau in My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (2009). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Eric Bassett for Defilm, Industrial Entertainment, and Paper Street Films.

was intended for use as a stage prop, and insofar as he conflates life with what transpires on the stage, the film calls Fitzcarraldo to mind. Herbert Golder, a Professor of Classical Studies, who also collaborated with Herzog on Invincible, wrote the screenplay for the film. Golder drew on a number of different dramatic texts and was himself Herzogian insofar as he did not restrict himself only to the Oresteia. Herzog had praised Longinus for deliberately combining varied passages of the Iliad without signaling (2010a: 10); here, when it comes to passages from Classical drama, he and Golder do the same. The film is also filled with Herzogian self-references, including the director’s favorite tree, dwarf, and horse story, which is articulated in the film by Uncle Ted, played by Brad Dourif. The scene in which Uncle Ted relates Herzog’s vision is followed by a frozen tableau; the characters on screen look directly into the camera and hold their positions artificially (Figure  I.2), which is not the only time this happens in the film. The fact that this is not a freeze frame but rather a moment of moving picture motionlessness underscores the open avowal on the part of the actors and their characters of the consciousness that they, on the one hand, are being watched by the camera, and, on the other, that their characters have taken up residence in a stylized dream world defined by the strong will of the pathological protagonist. The slowness and the artificial gazes into the camera signal key transitions throughout the film and each indicate that the characters have entered into Brad’s world. The film’s slowed-down hostage standoff seems to be poking fun at action film genre conventions. The absorption in the time associated with another’s world recalls, of course, the world-shaping powers of Herzog’s other strong-willed protagonists, but stylistically it most evidently recalls Herzog’s short film made in that same year, La Bohème (a.k.a. O soave fanciulla; 2009), which takes place in Ethiopia

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and involves a couple staring directly into the camera while we hear the declaration of love between Mimi and Rodolfo from the first act of Puccini’s opera. Self-citations are a means for Herzog to extend his authorial signature into his more recent productions; the song is the same, the words have changed. Anyone who has watched Herzog’s films will recognize that the scenes set in Peru are meant to call Aguirre to mind. Even the flamingoes return for a central role here, having appeared in Precautions Against Fanatics (1969), Fata Morgana, and elsewhere. While in Fata Morgana they seemed to be sublime otherworldly creatures, moving at an oddly strange pace against the backdrop of an African landscape, they here echo the plastic pink flamingoes that grace American lawns, and resonate parodically with the American eagle (Brad refers to his pet flamingoes as “eagles in drag”). But there are echoes of moments from earlier films as well, and the film, as a thriller based on an actual crime, deliberately or inadvertently interacts with Fritz Lang’s M. When Brad, before the murder, is divesting himself of his earthly possessions, he leaves his basketball in a tree for someone to find. The real murderer, Yavorsky, was a basketball player and had spoken about a recurring fantasy that the whole world would freeze, that there would be only him and the basket, and he would be able to take the shot.26 After Brad leaves the basketball behind, he walks away, and the world around them—the busy park—slows to a crawl. The abandoned ball evokes two central indications of murder in M, and once again, we have the closing of a gap. M’s opening scenes involve a child’s balloon caught on power lines, which are here recalled in the branches of the tree. Subsequently, a child’s ball rolls into the frame, the indication that the ball and its owner have been separated. After this scene, at the very end of My Son, My Son, a child—dressed to evoke the protagonist—picks up the ball that had been left behind, providing what could be read either as a counterintuitive note of optimism, or as the foreboding indication that other murders in the same spirit will follow. The overlap with M may be accidental, yet in another sequence Brad holds up a pillow (with which he may be intending to smother his mother), which has a large “M” on it. The embroidery reads “M is for Mother not for Maid.” If the citation is deliberate, then it is more than merely playful; although it can be understood as a refusal to take the conventions of the genre to heart, it can also be seen as part of a lifelong project of simultaneously incorporating and rejecting formal demands. The acknowledgment and rejection of those expectations began with The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, which both was and was not a sports documentary, and continues through to My Son, My Son, which both is and refuses to be a thriller. But the most recurring companion among those shadows found in Herzog’s films may be Icarus, the mythological figure who attempted to fly to the sun.27 The image of Icarus, who soars but also falls, can be linked to attempts to reach great heights in the stories of Walter Steiner and Dieter Dengler, as well as that of Graham Dorrington in The White Diamond, and it can even be linked to Herzog’s mountain climbing alter ego Reinhold Messner insofar as his expeditions are attempts to approach the heavens. To think of another early modern Dutch artist

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(apart from Segers), one might note that this theme, as it appears in Herzog’s work, calls to mind Pieter Breugel’s Landscape with Fall of Icarus (1558). In that painting Icarus has already fallen and we see him submerged beneath the water. In the corner of a vast pastoral landscape, we see only legs and a hand, clambering about, hoping not to drown. Perhaps as a punishment for his failure, he remains hidden from us. But to close a gap, we may note that four centuries later an American artist, Chris Burden, performed a piece named after Icarus. In 1973 he invited spectators to come to his studio at a given time, entered the space naked, had his assistants lift one end of a six-foot sheet of plate glass onto each of his shoulders such that they resembled wings, and had gasoline poured down the sheets of glass before setting them on fire. The glass went shattering to the ground. If one places Breugel and Burden’s concepts next to one another, or permits them to disclose truths about one another’s work, two sides of Herzog’s filmmaking come into view. Burden’s role might be represented by Kinski, uncontained and possibly menacing, insisting that he be at the center of things. Breugel’s depiction of the fall, however, recalls the modest pathos of a quiet and seemingly unseen failure. Stroszek or Kaspar, that is, Bruno Schleinstein, could represent this part. Indirectly intersecting with one another in Herzog’s work, the images of failed flights illuminate one another, even from across the depths of time.

Notes 1 2

3

4

5

This English version of the text is drawn from Herzog’s essay ”On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth” (2010a: 12). That essay is translated by Moira Weigel. The German reads: “Wie ein Blitz durchfährt es da einen und erhellt auf immer die ganze Existenz, und manchmal hat man, über Jahrhunderte hinweg, einen gefunden, der einem wie ein Bruder zuwächst. Man weiß in einem plötzlichen Aufleuchten, daß man nicht mehr alleine ist. […] Es war mir, als hätte mir über die Tiefe der Zeit hinweg ein unbekannter den Arm ausgestreckt und die Hand auf die Schulter gelegt, damit ich nicht mehr allein sei” (1983: 101). My translation. Herzog later described the experience to Cronin in similar terms (2002: 136-137). In a public conversation with the author Pico Iyer, Herzog explains: “I don’t know what exactly it is. I say it with the necessary caution: there is no one nowadays who writes prose like me. Nowhere. In no country. In no, of no age group. There’s no one who writes prose like me. […] I shouldn’t comment any further, but—it’s just very good stuff ” (2010b: 28:19–28:53). Herzog praises Longinus for “welding together” two separate passages from The Iliad without noting their separate origins. Herzog writes, “It is impossible that this is a mistake” (2010a: 10). Herzog obviously appreciates that Longinus is prompting a synthesis in the reader. Herzog tells Kurt Habernoll that Satyajit Ray, whose rhythms he admires, “learned from me” (“hat bei mir gelernt”) (1968: IV). Similarly, when asked about the connection between his film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) and François Truffaut’s The Wild

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Child, Herzog said, “no, it doesn’t matter that Wild Child was made in 1971 [sic]; [Truffaut] has learned from me” (Benson and Karman 1976: 42). The Wild Child is from 1970. For more on this connection to Truffaut, see the chapter by Lúcia Nagib in this volume. Italics added. The German remark reads: “wir beherrschen die Kinos mit unseren Filmen, wir sind der deutsche Film. Wir sind nicht der Jung-Film oder so etwas” (1979: 181). On this point see Wahl’s chapter in this volume. The German reads: “Bilder [zu] zeigen, die es im Kino bis dahin noch nicht gegeben hat.” See Hopf (1975). Peucker, who famously names Herzog as the most authentic heir of the Romantic tradition (1984: 193), has contended that Kleist is really a secret source for Signs of Life (1986: 226). On this topic see the chapter by Will Lehman in this volume. Horak is quoting Rentschler (1984: 86). The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) is referenced in Sebald’s novel The Emigrants, when the narrator of the first of the book’s four sections vividly describes images that are certainly from Herzog’s film. There is also an oblique homage to Stroszek in The Rings of Saturn (1999: 36) in the form of a bird who marches continually in circles about his cage. On Fitzcarraldo’s acknowledgment from the stage, see Lutz Koepnick’s chapter in this volume. For extensive reflections on Herzog’s self-representation as Bavarian see Wahl’s contribution to this volume. Handke’s German line reads “Diese Wüste ist eine Fata Morgana!” (1974: 148). Erica Carter examines Herzog’s interest in Africa in the present volume. For a study of key contexts from which Fata Morgana emerged, particularly the correlation to the African films of Bernhard Grzimek, see Kaes (2010). This film, specifically its relation to Les Blank’s body of work, is discussed in Prager (2010). On this see the interview with Kent (1977). On the connection to Kaf ka’s story, see Vitiello’s chapter in this volume. See also Prager (2011). Herzog says, “I would like to refer back to Fitzcarraldo, where I pulled a real steam ship over a mountain. It was not a digital effect. I wanted to get across that it’s important for the audience to trust their eyes, where they can recognize a real human being and an actor, where they are not deceived by digital effects all the time” (Osegueda 2009). This is not to say that Gunning’s (1986) concept of cinema of attractions, which is meant to apply to very early cinema, can be directly mapped onto Herzog’s films. I only propose that it may offer insight into some of Herzog’s provocations vis-à-vis narrative filmmaking. Herzog comments on these figures in Cronin (2002: 138, 153). Herzog praises Freaks in Cronin (2002: 60). At the film’s end Cleopatra is punished for her bad behavior by being turned into a half-woman, half-chicken, who can only gobble. The punishment is Herzogian. For more on Herzog’s longstanding contempt for chickens, see the chapter by Rembert Hüser in this volume.

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Herzog recommends viewing Swing Time along with Viva Zapata and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in “3 DVDs Worth a Close Look” (2010c). 26 This slowness and freezing find a parallel in Tristan Patterson’s Dragonslayer (2011), a documentary about a California skateboarder. The final monologue, which involves stopping time, strongly resonates with this motif from My Son, My Son, as well as with the last words of Herzog’s documentary about Walter Steiner. 27 Scott Watson makes this connection with respect to The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, and interprets Icarus as a major motif in that film. See Watson (1986).

Works Cited Anon.: “Abel Ferrara Would Like Werner Herzog and Nicolas Cage to Please Die in a Fire,” nerve.com (May 27, 2008), http://www.nerve.com/archived/blogs/abel-ferrarawould-like-werner-herzog-and-nicolas-cage-to-please-die-in-a-fire. Benson, Sheila, and Karman, Mal: “Herzog,” Mother Jones, 1.8 (November 1976): 40–45. Bissell, Tom: “The Secret Mainstream: Contemplating the Mirages of Werner Herzog,” Harper’s Magazine 1879, December, 2006: 69–78. Bohm, Hark, and Zimmer, Jürgen: “‘Die zehn Gesichter der kleinen Soldaten’: Ein kritischer Kommentar zu Werner Herzogs Fernsehfilm über Nicaragua,” Vorwärts 47, November 17, 1984. Borski, Arnim: “Exzentriker—das sind die anderen,” Der Abend, July 6, 1973: 6. Byron, Lord: Childe Harold (Cheshire: Cool Publications, 2004 [original 1818]). Canby, Vincent: “Dwarfs Started Small,” New York Times, September 17, 1970: 58. Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness (London: Penguin Books, 2007 [original 1902]). Corrigan, Timothy: “Producing Herzog: From a Body of Images,” The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, ed. Timothy Corrigan (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 3–22. Cronin, Paul, ed.: Herzog on Herzog (London: Faber & Faber, 2002). Defamer: “Defiant Werner Herzog to Defamer: ‘Who is Abel Ferrara?’” gawker.com ( June 4, 2008), http://gawker.com/395038/. Eisner, Lotte: The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt, trans. Roger Greaves (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973 [original 1952]). Gunning, Tom: “The Cinema of Attractions. Early Film, its Spectator and the AvantGarde,” Wide Angle 8.3/4 (1986): 63–70. Habernoll, Kurt: “Auflehnung gegen jeglichen Zwang: Gespräch mit dem jungen Bundesfilmpreisträger Werner Herzog,” Die Welt. Berlin Edition. July 13 (1968), Section: “Die geistige Welt”: IV. Handke, Peter: Kaspar (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1968). Handke, Peter: Short Letter, Long Farewell, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: New York Review of Books, 2009 [original German, 1972]). Handke, Peter: The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld, trans. Michael Roloff (New York: Continuum, 1974). Herzog, Werner: “Rebellen in Amerika. Zu Filmen des New American Cinema,” Filmstudio 43 (1964): 55–60. Herzog, Werner: “Mit den Wölfen heulen,” Filmkritik 7 ( July 1968): 460–461.

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Herzog, Werner: Stroszek—Nosferatu. Zwei Filmerzählungen (Munich: Hanser, 1979). Herzog, Werner: Of Walking in Ice: Munich–Paris, 11/23 to 12/14, 1974, trans. Martje Herzog and Alan Greenberg (New York: Tanam Press, 1980a [original 1978]). Herzog, Werner: Screenplays. Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Every Man for Himself and God Against All. Land of Silence and Darkness, trans. Alan Greenberg and Martje Herzog (New York: Tanam Press, 1980b). Herzog, Werner: “Absurde Anfälle der Ordnung: Werner Herzog über Peter Schneider: Der Mauerspringer,” Der Spiegel 21, May 24, 1982: 210, 212–213. Herzog, Werner: “Schwanger gehen mit ganzen Provinzen. Über den Landschaftsmaler Hercules Segers,” Süddeutsche Zeitung 126, June 4–5, 1983: 101. Herzog, Werner: “Werner Herzog Introduces Sans Soleil and Les Maîtres Fous, followed by Q&A,” Film Forum Podcasts, June 1, 2007. Herzog, Werner: Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo, trans. Krishna Winston (New York: HarperCollins, 2009). Herzog, Werner: “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth,” trans. Moira Weigel, Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 17:3 (2010a): 1–12. Herzog, Werner: “An Evening with Werner Herzog, In Conversation with Pico Iyer,” Campbell Hall, UC Santa Barbara (April 7, 2010b), http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Px4cPMMn2HU. Herzog, Werner: “3 DVDs Worth a Close Look,” Morning Edition (September 16, 2010c), http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129830847. Hopf, Florian: “Die Filme gehören zu dem, was unsere Mitte ausmacht,” Frankfurter Rundschau 192, August 21, 1975. Horak, Jan-Christopher: “W.H. or the Mysteries of Walking in Ice,” The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, ed. Timothy Corrigan (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 23–42. Kaes, Anton: “Zwischen Parodie und Phantasmagorie: Das ‘Paradies’ in Werner Herzogs Fata Morgana,” Paradies. Topografien der Sehnsucht, ed. Claudia Benthien and Manuela Gerlof (Cologne: Böhlau, 2010), pp. 231–248. Kaf ka, Franz: The Blue Octavo Notebooks, ed. Max Brod, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 1991). Kant, Immanuel: Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Kent, Leticia: “Werner Herzog: ‘Film is Not the Art of Scholars, but of Illiterates,’” New York Times, September 11, 1977: Arts 19, 30. Kleist, Heinrich von: “St. Cecilia,” The Marquise of O—, and other stories, trans. David Luke and Nigel Reeves (New York: Penguin, 1978). Kracauer, Jon: Into the Wild (London: Pan Books, 2007 [original 1996]). Longinus: On the Sublime, trans. Thomas Roscoe Rede Stebbing (Oxford: Shrimpton, 1867). Osegueda, Elisa: “Exclusive Interview: Werner Herzog,” fandango.com (November 15, 2009), http://www.fandango.com/behind-the-scenes_exclusiveinterview:wernerherzog_296. Peucker, Brigitte: “Werner Herzog: In Quest of the Sublime,” New German Filmmakers: From Oberhausen Through the 1970s, ed. Klaus Phillips (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984), pp. 168–194. Peucker, Brigitte: “The Invalidation of Arnim: Herzog’s Signs of Life (1968),” German Film and Literature: Adaptations and Transformations, ed. Eric Rentschler (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 217–230.

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Plula, Ekkehard: “Einzelgänger unter Außenseitern: Der junge Regisseur Werner Herzog,” Der Tagesspiegel—Berlin, February 7, 1971: 58. Prager, Brad: “On Blank’s Screen: Les Blank’s Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe and the gravity of the director’s subject,” Studies in Documentary Film 4.2 (2010): 119–136. Prager, Brad: “Mit den Augen des Tieres: Werner Herzogs Primaten,” Lektionen in Herzog. Neues über Deutschlands verlorenen Filmautor Werner Herzog und sein Werk, ed. Chris Wahl (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2011), pp. 210–233. Rentschler, Eric: West German Film: In the Course of Time (Bedford Hills, NY: Redgrave: 1984). Sebald, W. G.: The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1996). Sebald, W. G.: The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1999). Sebald, W. G.: “Moments Musicaux,” Campo Santo, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2005), pp. 181–196. Singer, Alan: “Comprehending Appearances: Werner Herzog’s Ironic Sublime,” The Films of Werner Herzog. Between Mirage and History, ed. Timothy Corrigan (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 183–205. The Warren Commission Report. Report of President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The Official Complete & Unabridged Edition (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964). Walser, Robert: “Helbling’s Story,” Selected Stories, trans. Christopher Middleton and others (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux: 2002), pp. 32–43. Wassermann, Jakob: Caspar Hauser, oder, Die Trägheit des Herzens (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1983 [original 1908]). Watson, Scott B.: “‘Harried by His Own Kind’: Herzog and the Darker Dimensions of Icarus,” Arete: The Journal of Sport Literature 3.2 (1986): 71–78. “‘Wir sind nicht mehr der Jungfilm.’ Spiegel-Interview mit den Regisseuren Herzog, Brandner, Bohm, Hauff,” Der Spiegel 25, June 18, 1979: 181, 183.

Additional Films Cited Araki, Gregg: Nowhere (1997) Blank, Les: Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980) Blank, Les: Burden of Dreams (1982) Brabin, Charles and Vidor, Charles: The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) Browning, Tod: West of Zanzibar (1928) Browning, Tod: Freaks (1932) Chaplin, Charles: The Gold Rush (1925) Coppola, Eleanor: Hearts of Darkness (1991) Coppola, Francis Ford: Apocalypse Now (1979) Dupont, E. A.: Variety (1925) Ferrara, Abel: Bad Lieutenant (1992) Ferrara, Abel: Dangerous Game (1993) Huston, John: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) Jodorowsky, Alejandro: El Topo (1970)

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Kazan, Elia: Viva Zapata (1952) Lang, Fritz: Destiny (1921) Lang, Fritz: Metropolis (1926) Lang, Fritz: M (1931) Lynch, David: Blue Velvet (1986) McCarey, Leo: Duck Soup (1933) Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm: Nosferatu (1922) Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm: The Last Laugh (1924) Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm: Faust (1926) Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm: Tabu (1933) Patterson, Tristan: Dragonslayer (2011) Petersen, Wolfgang: Das Boot (1981) Rouch, Jean: The Mad Masters (1955) Stevens, George: Swing Time (1936) Truffaut, François: The 400 Blows (1959) Truffaut, François: The Wild Child (1970) Wenders, Wim: Hammett (1982) Wenders, Wim: Room 666 (1982) Wenders, Wim: Tôkyô-ga (1985)

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PART I

Critical Approaches and Contexts

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Herzog and Auteurism Performing Authenticity Brigitte Peucker

Michel Ichat’s Victoire sur l’Annapurna (1953) is incomplete, André Bazin tells the reader of “Cinema and Exploration,” because an avalanche “snatched the camera out of the hands of [Maurice] Herzog” (1967: 162). Bazin’s description conjures up a film camera immersed in snow, its lens obscured. No act of photographic registration can take place here: there is no distance between the hapless camera and its object. Struggling to delineate cinematic realism, Bazin evokes a limit case in bringing the real into the film frame, one in which the camera seized by an avalanche figures the collapse of world with filmic apparatus. Its existential weight intensified by its unrepresentability, Maurice Herzog’s peak experience is sublime. It’s the explorer’s brush with death that evokes Bazin’s central metaphor for the indexical image: the Veil of Veronica “pressed to the face of human suffering” (1967: 163). I have long suspected that Bazin’s account is what inspired Werner Stipetić to change his name to Werner Herzog, perhaps also to assume his particular aesthetic stance, since Bazin’s story contains all the lineaments of the portrait Herzog draws of himself as auteur. It’s the portrait of someone for whom the conquering of a mountain is co-extensive with filming it, for whom filmmaking demands a physical investment, and landscapes produce essential images because death lurks in the natural world. Most centrally, it’s the portrait of a filmmaker for whom authenticity is at stake. But what is the nature of this “authenticity”? It doesn’t reside in Bazinian realism in a strict sense, although it’s connected to its more metaphorical, expanded expression. Herzog’s relation to reality is evident in his images: more than one of Herzog’s films document the water droplets that splash up onto the camera lens as it almost merges with the watery scene it seeks to capture. Such moments span the trajectory of Herzog’s filmmaking: we find them in films that stretch from Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) to Fitzcarraldo (1982), to his joint effort with Zak Penn, Incident at Loch Ness (2004), even to Rescue Dawn (2006). More is involved than A Companion to Werner Herzog, First Edition. Edited by Brad Prager. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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simply the indexical relation that all film images bear to reality: moments such as these trump indexicality by figuratively eliminating the gap between sign and referent.

Authenticity: Ecstatic Truth and Physical Investment What is meant by authenticity, then? Can it be conferred? How is it expressed? It is certainly not the “accountant’s truth,” a conventional realism that Herzog disparages in his Minnesota Declaration of 1999. The governing idea of Herzog’s manifesto— that “there is such a thing as a poetic, ecstatic truth”—has been so often cited by the director and his critics that it’s become a cliché (Cronin 2002: 301). Herzog asserts that there are “deeper strata of truth” in cinema, strata that can only be reached “through fabrication and imagination and stylization” (Cronin 2002: 301). And while the Minnesota Declaration may very well have originated in the uproar at the Berlin Film Festival surrounding the screening of Lessons in Darkness (1992)—an aestheticizing film essay about Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion—Herzog claims that his manifesto was the product of a sleepless night spent watching TV. Everything he watched, he tells Paul Cronin, was banal and inauthentic until, at 4 a.m., hardcore porn was on the screen. Its images suddenly conveyed “something real,” a “real naked truth” (2002: 239). Herzog’s investment in the “real naked truth” lies in its zero degree realism, grounded in the assumption that the sex act simply is what it is, the real. But in addition to the value placed on the real as beyond signification, the privileging of the pornographic image points to Herzog’s assertions concerning the physicality of filmmaking, as well as to a mystical belief that its corporeality will somehow be taken up into the image to reside there as “truth” or “authenticity.” The most notorious instance of this belief involves the full-size ship in Fitzcarraldo that—at Herzog’s insistence—was hauled over a mountain with pulleys and ropes: it is the extraordinary human effort required to perform this act, when registered by the camera, that renders the image authentic. It’s not the blood, sweat, and tears of the actors alone that is taken up into the images of a film, it is centrally the physical investment of the director, who treks through jungles, contracts fevers, and makes the difficult ascent himself. This is the point at which Herzog’s assertions betray their mystical dimension. For Herzog the physicality demanded by cinema involves a subjective effort not only to merge with the material world, but also to merge with the image itself. How, then, is the privileging of physical investment, of the real, related to the Minnesota Declaration’s emphasis on the production of an “ecstatic truth?” This question calls to mind the troubled image of Herzog as a maker of so-called documentaries whose artifice is criticized for undermining the objectives of the genre. Somewhat idiosyncratically, Herzog makes no distinction between films with a documentary focus and fiction films; he asserts that documentaries are “just films”

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(Cronin 2002: 95 and 240). When it emerged that Herzog had invented the purported line from Pascal that is the epigraph of Lessons in Darkness, he justified his fabrication as a routine aspect of the fiction-making process. The ends justify the means: the fictional line ascribed to Pascal—“the collapse of the universe will occur like creation—in grandiose splendor”—invests the film’s images with apocalyptic, sublime import.1 For Herzog, this false citation is no different from the other devices that inflate the film’s meaning. As in Fata Morgana (1969) and The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1973), Lessons in Darkness features frontal shots of war victims delivering scripted poetic monologues, one of which voices the recurrent Herzog theme of the insufficiency of language. Is it a paradox, then, that like so many of Herzog’s films, documentary or otherwise, Lessons in Darkness has recourse to voice-over narration. Here, too, it is Herzog’s own voice, awe-filled and somber, that sets the tone. “I am a storyteller,” says Herzog, “and I used the voice-over to place the film—and the audience—in a darkened planet somewhere in our solar system” (Cronin 2002: 249). It’s not the referential dimension of language that’s at stake, but rather its affective, lyrical function. Herzog is present in this text as a voice that haunts it, that produces affect. Herein language and voice are aided by music: as in earlier films such as La Soufrière (1977) and Nosferatu—The Vampyre (1979), Lessons of Darkness draws on musical passages from Wagner operas (specifically Das Rheingold, Parsifal, and Götterdämmerung) to evoke an atmosphere of foreboding and death. Not surprisingly, Lessons also exhibits its constructedness by citing other films in the Herzog canon: self-citation serves as a means of constructing both self and text, further blurring the difference between the two. The footage of abandoned vehicles rusting in the sand is lifted from Fata Morgana, for example, a film with which it has a great deal in common. As in Fata Morgana, images in Lessons have the look of a mirage: the real landscape becomes surreal as the color, composition, rhythm, and sound of the film are synchronized with fine arts precedents in mind—evocative of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, for instance, or of the earth sculptor Michael Heizer. For the sake of effects such as these the film’s images are sometimes deliberately duplicitous, as when—Herzog admits in an interview— “little heaps of dust and oil” (Cronin 2002: 243) stand in for desert dunes. In seeming contradistinction to his insistence on physical investment and photographic registration, then, Herzog’s film practice welcomes all manner of artifice, provided that it promotes an “ecstatic inner truth,” that it lends the film image the poetic qualities he admires. No matter—it would seem—that the filmic means that confer this “ecstatic truth” upon the image produce another type of authenticity, different in kind from the authenticity conferred by physical investment. Both ideas of authenticity have their origins in a subject who affirms its mystical apprehension of the world. Brad Prager has pointed to the relevance of Adorno’s The Jargon of Authenticity to Herzog’s filmmaking (2007: 3–5), but it may be profitable to elaborate on the points of connection between German existentialist discourse of the early

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twentieth century and the underlying concerns of most Herzog films. When, for example, Adorno accuses “the authentic ones” (1973: 27)—naturally Heidegger is pre-eminent among them—of “existential adventurism” (1973: 32), this is a term easily applied to Herzog. Pertinent, too, is what Adorno calls a “pose of existential seriousness” (1973: 34), perhaps most easily located in the earnest, hushed voiceovers of so many Herzog films. It goes without saying that a “pathos of uniqueness” (1973: 35) attaches to his work as well: witness the documentary La Soufrière, a film shot on the evacuated island of Guadeloupe while the volcano of that name was threatening to erupt, or Heart of Glass (1976), the fiction film in which Herzog hypnotized his actors to enable them to speak more poetically. In fact, there is even a certain overlap between “the authentic ones” and Herzog in the matter of language since, for Adorno, existential “babble” actually reaches for something behind language, something that evades its grasp (1973: 48). And insofar as existentialism does privilege language, qua Adorno, behind this privileging there lurks the premise that it’s “the whole man” who speaks (1973: 14), not simply the intellect. As Adorno is at pains to point out, many of the ideas espoused by “the authentic ones” were adopted by the National Socialists: among these are the “gesture of rooted genuineness,” and a “penchant for primitivism that privileges the indigenous and the mute,” which Adorno exposes as “belonging to the historical conquerors” (1973: 48). The rhetoric of the genuine and the privileging of muteness are at home in Herzog’s films—the latter literally, in Land of Silence and Darkness (1971). Like Adorno’s “authentic ones,” Herzog values inwardness. But, more importantly, Herzog seems to share their belief that death is the sublime counterpart of life, that it is the guarantor of authenticity, perhaps even the authentic itself. An existential belief in authenticity, writes Adorno, is located in the cast of mind for which death is the substratum of the self. In its investment in authenticity, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) is the fiction film that has pride of place in the Herzog canon. Kaspar is a character who—like “the authentic ones”—is identical with himself, at one with the world until the fall into language introduces the difference that culminates in his death. In one episode after another, Herzog’s film emphasizes Kaspar’s uniqueness, illustrating this quality by way of visions of landscapes. The aura of the genuine—enhanced by music—carries over into other images of the film, many of them set pieces from Romantic lyric. As for the relation of authenticity to the physical engagement of the auteur, it’s telling that Herzog claims to have planted the beans and flowers in Daumer’s garden himself (Cronin 2002: 103). Kaspar Hauser’s stunningly beautiful images—Kaspar’s name spelled out in watercress and the flickering dream of the Caucasus—seemed at the time of the film’s release in the United States to be wholly new images, although even then Herzog’s posture of creating ex nihilo, was discernible as a pose.2 Is the film “genuinely unique”—or does its investment in uniqueness serve an end? In The Jargon of Authenticity, Adorno reads the rhetoric of uniqueness as a feature of the marketplace; while such rhetoric may appear to attack modernity, in actuality, Adorno asserts, it is modernity’s waste product (1973: 45).

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The discourse of authenticity surrounding Herzog’s films was read as a marketing strategy by Jan-Christopher Horak as early as the mid-1980s. Premised on the notion that Herzog creates a public persona that resonates with that of the visionary characters in his films, Horak’s indictment of Herzog is in many ways convincing. As Horak argues, a consistent authorial persona emerges from Herzog’s films, books, scripts, interviews, and from the films about him. At issue specifically is a Herzog text called Of Walking in Ice (1980), purportedly a journal of a walking trip from Bavaria to Paris. This written text shares with Herzog’s films a concern with the insufficiency of language, suggesting that even poetic language can merely gesture in the right direction. The text promotes Herzog’s walking tour as a sort of pilgrimage undertaken to “prevent” the death of Lotte Eisner, doyenne of the New German Cinema. Emphasizing Herzog’s physical investment in the pilgrimage—he purportedly carried a reel of his film Kaspar Hauser, dedicated to Eisner, all the while—walking itself functions as a guarantor of the genuine and authentic. In this instance it was Herzog’s belief that the effort expended by the pilgrim would buy off the Fates and keep the ailing Eisner alive. (She did, in fact, survive.) But, like Herzog’s documentaries, Of Walking in Ice is fictionalized in a number of ways: Herzog presents himself as passing through forbidding landscapes in which he encounters few people, although—as Horak points out—the regions he describes are among the most thickly settled areas of western Europe (1986: 32). Further, in this text Herzog as self-proclaimed vagabond claims to have resorted to thievery in order to survive—another way of living on the edge. This rhetoric recalls Herzog’s claim to have stolen his first 35 mm camera, and it gives one pause—even if pointing out the artifice in Herzog’s self-stylizations is tantamount to subscribing to an “accountant’s truth.” Today, of course, we can include Herzog’s DVD commentaries on his own films among the proliferation of texts in which Herzog’s authorial persona also resides. (There is also his Web site, www.wernerherzog.com.) Especially enlightening is Herzog’s commentary on the DVD of Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams (1982), the film made about the filming of Fitzcarraldo. This commentary enables Herzog to amplify and correct Blank’s view of Herzog’s shoot. (Not that one can really blame Herzog for doing so, since the press raged about human rights violations of which Herzog was later exonerated by Amnesty International.) And then there is the recently translated Conquest of the Useless (2009), a transcription, as Herzog would have it, of the diaries he kept while shooting that same film, diaries which he wrote in a miniaturized script, presumably in order to conserve paper while in the jungle. Interestingly, what one notices when—in fairly quick succession—one reads Conquest of the Useless, watches Herzog’s My Best Fiend (1999), his film about Klaus Kinski with Herzog’s voice-over, and reads the interviews by Paul Cronin is that many formulations, even longish passages in all three texts repeat one another word for word. This, too, smacks of crafting a persona, of performing rehearsed texts. How do such strategies relate to the discourse of authenticity that haunts Herzog’s oeuvre? Are they reconcilable with this discourse, or are they in fact

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responses to marketplace pressures? For Timothy Corrigan, like Horak, “Herzog’s is a practice aimed unmistakably at calling attention to itself, mimicking an industry’s tactics for self-promotion and representation” (1986: 21). Certainly the many forms of textuality that encase Fitzcarraldo—arguably Herzog’s greatest commercial success—point to a desire to capitalize on what sells. In many ways I am convinced of the rightness of this argument. And yet there may be another way to read the deliberate intertwining of life and work, of fictional character with authorial self, of text with text. The pro-filmic is central to Herzog’s filmmaking. As I’ve claimed, Herzog’s intense concern with the physicality of filmmaking emanates from a belief that the filmic image is somehow imbued with the reality involved in the circumstances of its making—with the effort of the bodies of those who create it. This (mystical) belief extends beyond Bazinian indexicality—it is an intensification of what Philip Rosen has referred to as Bazin’s subjective obsession. For Rosen, Bazin is “a subject obsessively pre-disposed to invest belief ” in an image that contains something of the real (2001: 21) and, to my mind, Herzog shares this predisposition. But might the desire of the subject to engage with the pro-filmic in order itself to register as a trace in an “authentic” image not have as an equally compelling corollary the desire that this self be contained within multiple forms of representation? I am thinking of Herzog’s voice-overs in his “documentary” films; of the Herzog featured in Burden of Dreams, but also in My Best Fiend; of the staging of the self in films such as Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (Les Blank, 1980); of the commentaries on DVDs; and of the written texts. It’s no accident that I Am My Films is the title of the Erwin Keusch and Christian Weisenborn documentary about Herzog (1978). Just as the “authenticity” of the Herzog film is equally predicated on the belief in a relation to the real conferred upon the image by physical investment and by the repeated recourse to artifice, what I am calling the performance of authenticity has two dimensions. As we’ve said, Herzog affirms physical investment for its ability to infuse the image with the real. From another perspective, however, the various forms of projection into the image are procedures that enclose that self within representation. As such, they can be read as fantasmatically protecting the real, temporal self within the imaginary, atemporal world of art. The melding of the real with representation effected by these practices may be their goal because this confusion effectively blurs the boundary between life and death. It is to the art historian Michael Fried’s work with its various forms of figured permeability between the real (the artist or the spectator) and the painted image that I owe my interest in this (figured) movement between representation and the real.3 But although I choose here to mention Fried and Diderot in connection with such issues, I could have elected to look at contemporary installation art with the same problems in mind. As in our time (think reality TV and videogames) the juxtaposition of representation and the real were much in vogue during the eighteenth century, as Diderot’s reviews of contemporary French painting in his Salons make clear. In one text, to cite an example, Diderot as spectator describes

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a walk he is taking through the countryside—only to reveal at the end of his detailed description that it hadn’t been a natural scene, after all, but rather a landscape painting he’s been describing. It is the realism of the depicted scene (in the conventional sense) that promotes Diderot’s figurative entry into the painting, of course, and he uses his description to make that point. But Diderot’s conceit entails more than that. In Diderot’s Salons, the (figured) movement into the image world is often accompanied by a counter-movement: the (figured) movement out of the painted surface into the real world, as when Diderot describes fruit in a Chardin still life as being so real that he can (almost) reach in, pull it out, and peel it. It is in this reciprocal gesture that representation is figuratively brought into reality and vice versa. In visual and other representational practices, there is often a deliberate blurring between the—aesthetic? psychological?—goals of figuring the real and a satisfaction in the role played by illusion. In such practices, reality and fiction are permeable to one another: the movement between them is a two-way street. Immersion is their object. What factors contribute to artistic practices of this sort? Rosen’s work on Bazin argues that the lynchpin of Bazin’s concern with indexicality is temporality. Bazin’s obsessive interest is essentially defensive: there’s a sense in which time is both preserved in film and, when it’s projected, experienced as duration. Film, in other words, simulates control over time. Further, as Rosen puts it with Jean-Louis Comolli, an obsessive investment in an image that registers the “real” is indicative of “the struggle of the subject to maintain itself in the face of materiality” (2001: 34)—that is, it’s a protection against aging and death. The Bazinian project, Rosen convincingly argues, lays bare the “irrationality at the heart of cinema, a desire for permanence (of subjective existence, of identity)” (2001: 39). Similarly, Herzog’s projection of an authorial persona into textuality—through physical investment in the image, through identification with the films’ characters, and by a variety of formal means— may likewise originate in a drive for preservation, imaginary as such a solution to the problem of temporality may be. (Such strategies recall Adorno’s perception that an existential belief in authenticity is typically grounded in the feeling that death is the substratum of the self.) We will return to this issue later.

Theatricality and Identity Herzog’s authorial identity is performative in the sense of being an acting-out: identity is performed and its performance is identity-creating. Even the early documentary, The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, conveys the sense that when Herzog’s voice-over speaks reverently of the “ecstasy” Steiner experiences through the “art” of ski-flying, Herzog is also referring to his own art of filmmaking, replete with “ecstatic truth.” At the biographical level, Herzog’s identification with Steiner is corroborated by the interview with Cronin, in which Herzog mentions

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his own earlier participation in the sport of ski jumping. Further, Herzog connects Steiner’s ambition of flying—“defying gravity”—with the obsessive behavior of Fitzcarraldo, who similarly rebels against this law of nature.4 Filmmaker, documentary subject, and fictional character merge through authorial self-projection; subject and object are blurred. At one point in Conquest of the Useless, Herzog muses whether he should not play Fitzcarraldo himself “because my project and the character have become identical (2009: 140). But Herzog’s connection to Steiner has a physical dimension as well: “I could feel the weight of his thigh on my shoulder,” Herzog tells Cronin about the film crew’s efforts to coax the reticent Steiner into opening himself up to the camera by carrying him through the streets. “At this moment,” Herzog continues, “the film suddenly became quite clear for me because of this immediate physical sensation with this man. I know it sounds strange, but only after this did I truly respond to all those shots we had of him flying through the air and understand how to use them properly” (2002: 96). Here touch replaces words, establishing a physical yet nevertheless mystical correspondence between filmmaker and subject, visionaries both. Mystically, the real of the body imbues the image with authenticity. Only after this corporeal experience, Herzog claims, did he know how to edit the slow-motion shots of Steiner’s flights through the air, the sublime shots that speak equally of ecstasy and death. Action is slowed, Steiner is suspended in flight, the moment of flight is artificially extended. Herzog goes so far as to suggest that his identification with Steiner is so profound that even Herzog’s stylization of Steiner’s monologue is still “true,” brings out the “truth” of Steiner’s identity—and justifies Herzog’s unacknowledged borrowing from the writer Robert Walser to express it. Once again the loosely worded citation—approaching the fictional—is justified because it promotes the ecstatic truth that is a goal of Herzog’s filmmaking. Years later Herzog made yet another documentary whose governing metaphor is that of flight: Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1998). The film was commissioned by German TV for a series called Voyages to Hell, and the choice of subject was Herzog’s: Dieter Dengler, a pilot who survived a plane crash and imprisonment by the Viet Cong in the mid-1960s. For the film’s somber epigraph, Herzog draws on Revelation 9:6, lines which had already made their appearance in Lessons of Darkness: “And in those days shall men seek death and not find it, and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.” Once again written language sets the tone of existential angst that hovers uncomfortably over the film’s opening sequence, even as Dieter enters a tattoo parlor. Irony is only partly at play here: the tattoo that’s been created for Dengler is of galloping horses he saw in a dream, an image that alludes to the four horses of the Apocalypse. But in his monologue—scripted by Herzog— Dengler deems the tattoo inappropriate, claiming that the vision he’d intended the tattoo to capture was not of death, since “Death didn’t want me.” By way of the film’s opening sequence, then, the sublime import of death is deliberately undercut, suspending Little Dieter between high seriousness and absurdity in a discomfiting fashion. Herzog’s film seems to want it both ways.

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Herzog’s voice-over intones over black and white archival footage of bombers in flight; Dengler’s voice speaks over aerial footage of napalm explosions in color. As in Lessons of Darkness, the alienating beauty of horror is underscored, this time by bursts of red and orange in the green lushness of the jungle. At one point in the film, Dengler insists that it was only when he was on the ground, a prisoner, that he understood these landscapes to be anything other than “a grid on a map,” that he realized that there were people down there “who suffered and died.” Death and absurd humor, aesthetic experience and death: to these antitheses the film adds another. Repeatedly the film hugs the interface between reality and representation. Says Herzog: “everything is authentic Dieter, but to intensify him it is all re-orchestrated, scripted, rehearsed” (Cronin 2002: 265). It’s difficult to say whether the biographical incident on which little Dieter’s dream of flying was founded was scripted or not: Dengler tells us that an American bomber pilot, shooting all the while, flew so close to his house that the child Dieter and the pilot locked eyes. In interviews, Herzog asserts its truth (Cronin 2002: 264). The film is structured to emphasize similarities, as well. In addition to a prologue, the film has four parts, complete with titles that give another narrative away: The Man, The Dream, The Punishment, The Redemption—setting up a narrative that is equally readable as the story of its author Herzog, a topic to which we’ ll return. (In addition to these, the DVD of Little Dieter also includes what Herzog calls a post-script: Dengler’s military funeral in 2001.) From the beginning biographical ties between Dengler and Herzog are emphasized. Dengler, a German, was a small child during the postwar years. Like Herzog, he grew up hungry and without a father; like Herzog, he admired his grandfather who, in Dengler’s case, resisted the Nazis; like Herzog today, Dengler loved to cook. Archival footage has a role to play here, too, such as when Allied bombers attack German cities, creating fields of rubble that, in Herzog’s words, constitute “a dreamscape of the surreal” (Cronin 2002: 265). Footage filmed in Germany, archival (in black and white) and contemporary (in color), is cut with Dengler displaying his war medals in his California house (on a mountaintop, of course), protesting that he is not a hero because “only dead people are heroes.” Occasionally the voice-overs—spoken by men who speak very good English, but with slight German accents—are difficult to distinguish from one another. At one point one wonders whether Dieter is speaking of himself in the third person, or whether Herzog assumes the voice-over in mid-story. Is this confusion an accident of editing, or is it intentional? Later on in the film, Herzog will speak on behalf of Dengler when he says: “Vietnam didn’t seem real at all, so alien, so abstract.” But Herzog was not there. My point is not only that the film figures a blurring of auteur and protagonist at the biographical level, since we have noted this feature in other Herzog films. It is also that by way of this merger, and by various other, sometimes formal means, Herzog contrives to position himself within the film in a way that exceeds his roles as interviewer and filmmaker.

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It is its hybrid quality and mix of ontological registers that characterizes Little Dieter most profoundly. The film brings together several locations (California, Germany, New York City, Vietnam, and Thailand, where Herzog’s film was shot), several temporalities (the present of the film’s shooting; archival footage of World War II, of post World War II New York City, and of the Vietnam War; footage shot in 1966, after Dengler’s release; footage shot after his death in 2001; the “present” of an instructional film purportedly made for the U.S. military), five kinds of footage (fictionalized, as in the tattoo parlor; archival footage; Dengler’s narration and reenactment; 1966 footage of the newly released Dengler; the instructional film) plus photographs, and voice-overs spoken by two voices—Dengler’s and Herzog’s. It is not surprising, then, that some degree of confusion ensues. As mentioned above, Herzog’s film contains clips from a military instructional film designed to teach survival methods in the jungle. (Herzog uses clips from it in Rescue Dawn, as well.) But the last shots of the instructional film that we see—shots of an American waving a white cloth frantically—are preposterously protracted, given that a plane has already spotted the man. Was this sequence appended to the instructional film by Herzog? It would seem so, since when Little Dieter Needs to Fly reenacts the scene of Dengler’s rescue, such excessive waving is again on view. Indeed, it recalls images from Herzog’s earliest feature film, Signs of Life (1968). When Herzog took his production to Thailand, near the Laotian border, he shot reenactments of scenes from Dengler’s war experiences—not with an actor, however, but with Dieter himself. This choice promotes several boundary crossings between acting and experiencing: on one occasion, Herzog’s voice-over points out, the filming became too real for Dengler, it was “too close to home,” he says, although the spectator is assured that, even for Dengler, “it was only a film.” As Herzog puts it to Cronin, Dieter “had to become an actor playing himself ” (Cronin 2002: 265) amidst the Thai actors who assumed the roles of the Vietnamese. Dengler’s expressions and gestures seem to produce a reality effect in those around him. When one of these actors is affected by an episode Dengler is recounting, Dengler reassures him that, unlike the prisoner of war whom Dengler has been talking about, he shouldn’t worry—he still has his finger. At times Dengler performs the motions of the actions he performed in the past, but against landscapes he never managed to reach, as in the scene filmed on the banks of the Mekong River. Temporalities, places, and identities are intertwined and role-playing produces real feeling. The latter effect also promotes an authenticity of sorts. The occasional glimpses of mountains, the lush jungle foliage, meandering streams, and rice paddies also give the film the weight of the real. It goes without saying that Herzog’s film was shot on location—or as close as possible to it—but the prison camp where much of the action takes place is of necessity a set. There are sequences in which the Thai actors in costume simply stand around near Dengler; not knowing, perhaps, what to do. In such moments, they seem to function as local color for Dengler’s oral recitation. But are they in fact performing their role as actors—or are they just being themselves? As so often in Herzog’s

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documentaries, the camera shoots Dengler and the actors frontally, home movie style, thus lending the film the amateurish feel that simulates a lesser remove from reality. The film camera moves to track the action; only rarely does it investigate spaces on its own. (When it does, it lingers on the landscape.) But reenactment is only one of the ways in which Herzog’s documentary attempts to narrate the actual but now past events of Dengler’s personal history. Artifice takes several other forms, as well. Often Dengler simply tells his story to the camera, but occasionally he uses black and white drawings that resemble storyboard images to assist him in his narration. Does the presence of these drawings make his tale more real, or more artificial? Like a film’s storyboard, the drawings in Little Dieter inscribe a camera position into the image, and thus vary in point of view as well as content: one is of the prison camp from above, for example, while others depict moments of action, with the protagonists sketched into the scene. Undeniably they make Dengler’s story come alive. On the other hand, when the film resorts to the authority of photographs to authenticate events and persons, their static quality and out-of-time feel render the narrative less vivid. Along with the archival footage, the photographs serve as “guarantors” of documentary—not of ecstatic—truth. In these various ways, then, Little Dieter Needs to Fly oscillates between reality and artifice, generating a seemingly endless series of figure/ground effects. Two of the more “poetic” sequences in this film are vintage Herzog. Aerial footage of a plane “cemetery” features the camera tracing a huge circle from above, a signature movement of futility across this field of “birds.”5 Recording— and aestheticizing—the detritus of civilization, this sequence echoes similar scenes in Fata Morgana. Of particular interest in this sequence are signature images introduced by an abrupt cut, images we’ ll turn to below, since the sequence preceding the cut is also of importance. The cut occurs during an interview in which Dieter is seated in the cockpit of a plane such as the one he flew in the Vietnam War, wearing an airman’s suit that resembles the one he wore as a pilot. A great show is made of Dengler’s “costuming” for this sequence as he removes the suit from a mannequin such as one might see in a flight museum (Figure 1.1). In other words, in Herzog’s film the “real” man sits in an “authentic” airman’s suit in an “authentic” plane—they are not replicas. What is awry is the temporality of the scene—it merely simulates the past it seeks to evoke. But once again the film stresses reenactment, a register in which actual but past events are staged using “real” elements—in this case, most significantly, the actual person whose story is told. While I would argue that reenactment may generate an emotional response in the performer of his or her own story—a response that closely resembles the affects he originally experienced—it cannot breach the temporal gap that separates it from the original event. Reenactment’s attempt to recover the original event elides the passage of time.6 Then, as Dieter’s narrative continues, there’s the unexpected cut to Dieter in an entirely new location.7 Now he’s positioned in front of a tank with jellyfish floating dreamily through its blue water. It is a signature shot for Herzog, vividly recalling

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Figure 1.1 Dieter Dengler removes a flight suit from a mannequin in Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1998). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Lucki Stipetić and Werner Herzog/ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

the bats gliding through a similarly luminescent blue medium in Nosferatu, a slowmotion shot the film uses more than once, the sea turtles that glide limpidly through blue water in Fata Morgana, and the diver in the icy blue depths of Encounters at the End of the World (2007). In Nosferatu, the bat sequences overtly suggest that they are equally signs of the visionary (they are suspended in the “blue” of Romantic inwardness that saturates the German tradition) and of death, connected as the bats are to the vampire who brings the plague. Not surprisingly, then, Dengler’s voice-over in the aquarium also addresses this topic. Dengler insists that when near death, he felt himself to be floating through a thick medium; death, he says, looks like a jellyfish tank. Needless to say, this sequence was scripted by Herzog. Significantly, the abrupt cut from reenactment to a signature image privileges the authenticity conferred by artifice and emanating from a fear of death over the incomplete “reality” conferred by reenactment. Reenactment’s erasure of “history”—of the passage of time—can never be complete enough to arrive at the past. On the other hand, the sequences replete with lyrical figures in slow motion, suspended in a blue medium—sequences that are deliberately “out of time”—may overcome by imaging the fear of death that colors the experience of temporality. If the titles that separate Little Dieter into parts tell the story of a man’s “Dream,” his “Punishment,” and his “Redemption,” what is implied by this sequence? At one level the film demonstrates the emergence of a personal narrative out of an historical narrative, the story of how Dengler survived not one war, but two. Yet “Redemption”—this is the title given to Dengler’s tale after his escape from the Viet Cong—follows Dengler’s “Dream” of flying and his “Punishment” by imprisonment and torture. In what sense is Dengler in need of redemption? Is it because he—like Icarus, like Walter Steiner, like Herzog himself, and many another Romantics—dared to rebel against Nature by defying the laws of gravity? Or is

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Dengler in need of redemption because, when he bombed Vietnamese villages, he was oblivious to the fellow humans whose death he caused? And why, exactly, is the urge to fly born of Dengler’s brush with death by bombing while a very young child in Germany? Does this incident figure the emergence of imagination—or does it suggest that the desire to fly is an unconscious desire for retribution against the pilot? Why does the American pilot Dengler purports to have seen in close up serve as his role model? Isn’t he a punishing father figure like the one who inexplicably stabs Kaspar Hauser? While his childhood in Germany is integral to Dengler’s experience and identity, it wouldn’t on the face of it seem essential to the story of Dengler’s role in the Vietnam War. Nor would it seem necessary for the film to include a photograph of Dengler’s grandfather, of whom it’s said that he was the only man in his hometown not to join the Nazi Party. Or is it precisely these inclusions that are essential? Of course Herzog’s documentary was made for a German TV audience for whom Dengler’s origin is of compelling interest, and there’s the matter of Herzog’s personal identification, as well. Dengler’s is the story of a German who made good—actually became a hero—in the United States, just as Herzog has recently made good in Hollywood. Dengler claims that he was able to survive Vietnam for reasons that are specifically tied to his German background: in his voice-over he claims that his grandfather’s resistance to the Nazis enabled his own refusal to sign a Viet Cong document condemning the United States. And the extreme hardships Dengler survived in postwar Germany as an apprentice to a brutal master are recuperated for him in Vietnam, where they helped him hold out against starvation and the jungle. Indeed, Germans are presented primarily as victims in Little Dieter, and the intertwining of World War II destruction from Dengler’s German perspective with Dengler’s wartime experiences in Vietnam from his American perspective is yet another way in which Herzog’s film thrives on ambiguities. If strains of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung in conjunction with the Vietnam War are used to cement a connection between the Nazis and the United States, then the music is surely mock-heroic, indicative of misguided heroism.8 Might the film be suggesting that “redemption” be conferred on Germans—and on Americans as well? There’s a sense in which Little Dieter equates Germans with Americans via the body of Dengler, a German national become U.S. citizen—and then exonerates both from guilt. Although Herzog is by no means an historical filmmaker, historical events provide the fabric of this film, and there is a sense in which the film contributes, like Günter Grass’ Crab Walk (Im Krebsgang, 2002) to the recent discourse surrounding German suffering during World War II. Thus the conflation of temporalities in Little Dieter takes on a deeply ideological significance. But insofar as Dengler’s desire to fly is a reaction formation to a traumatic event in early childhood, Herzog’s film complexly concerns the preservation of the subject in the face of death. And if Little Dieter Needs to Fly presents Dengler as a dreamer who is punished before being redeemed, isn’t this Herzog’s narrative of himself, of the man who dared to make a film predicated on pulling a ship over a mountain,

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oblivious to the pain and suffering of others, who’s punished (by the press), then finally redeemed by the reception of Fitzcarraldo? Interestingly, the DVD version of Little Dieter appends a postscript to the film’s final credits. It’s a curious choice of placement, and no doubt this footage is missed by some viewers. It’s now 2001, a title tells us, and we’re about to witness Dengler’s funeral. He is buried with full military honors, and the mood is somber as the camera records the action. There is no dialogue; there are no voice-overs. This absence of the personal calls to mind Horak’s comment concerning the absence of the personal friendship Herzog actually had with Eisner from the text Herzog wrote about his pilgrimage to her (1986: 29). Is there, then, in fact a decorum that shields the most private aspects of the lives of others from aesthetic intervention? If Herzog appears to have withdrawn his directorial persona almost entirely from this footage, what is the reason for this retreat? Perhaps it’s a sign of respect for the solemnity of the occasion. Perhaps by withdrawing his persona from the film Herzog suggests that every man’s death is his own. Or does his reticence derive from the postscript’s subject—the rites that re-incorporate the real of the corpse into culture? When at the end of the ceremony that is the end of the film, a squadron of F14s flies through the air, the film camera follows these planes until they nearly disappear behind the delicate tracery of branches against the sky. The footage concludes, in other words, with the image of the plane as bird that for Herzog signals imagination, and in which authorial identity resides. Herzog re-enters the text.9 With Grizzly Man (2005), the interpenetration of authorial persona and filmed subject is even more pronounced. We notice it first at the level of the footage: Herzog’s “documentary” about Timothy Treadwell relies heavily on found footage, archival footage shot by Treadwell himself. Interspersed with Treadwell’s tapes are Herzog’s interviews of Treadwell’s significant others—his friends, his parents, and those who facilitated his “work” in what Treadwell refers to as the “Sanctuary” and “Grizzly Maze” of Alaska. Once again there are points of similarity between Herzog and his subject, including the theatricality of their voice-overs over “documentary” footage—the hushed tones, for instance, designed to promote suspense or awe. And, like many another Herzog hero, Treadwell rebels against nature and society: “How dare you challenge me?” Treadwell angrily demands of the Park Service, echoing Aguirre in a minor key. (Irony is at work here, at least for Herzog, who chose to include this bit of footage.) More centrally, Herzog speaks of Treadwell’s attempt to seek “a primordial encounter” with nature, one that has something in common with religious experience. Also like Herzog at so many moments in his filmmaking, Treadwell finds himself on what he calls “the precipice of great bodily harm and death,” an existential position that confers value on those who live it. While filming is confessional for Treadwell, a “search for himself,” artifice is centrally important. His self-fashioning is identity creating; like Herzog, Treadwell changed his last name to one more suitable for his intended career as an actor. Pointing out that Treadwell’s footage features him as the central character of his

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own film, Herzog reads “ecstasy and an inner turmoil” in Treadwell’s story. And there are other points of convergence: in Grizzly Man, Herzog refers repeatedly to the theatricality of Treadwell’s enterprise, as when his voice-over speaks of the actor in Treadwell as “taking over from the filmmaker,” or when he suggests that the “mythical character” into which Treadwell was turning himself “led to fabrication.” Is Herzog speaking self-consciously here? If so, what of the observation that Treadwell “seems to hesitate in leaving the frame of his film”? Herzog’s remark is posited on an (imaginary) identification of the subject with his footage: at one level Treadwell’s reluctance to leave the frame implies anxiety about relinquishing the sense of identity the camera confers. Especially—but not exclusively—in retrospect, this reluctance implies that Treadwell correlates the temporality of the running camera with the temporality that governs all of our lives. Since it is Herzog’s voice-over that hints at these issues, does Herzog covertly acknowledge not only the interpenetration of filmmaker and filmic subject in his own films, but also the (imaginary) co-extensiveness of the authorial subject with his films? Theatricality permeates Grizzly Man; Treadwell has a fully mediatized identity. In Treadwell’s footage, we don’t simply encounter it in Herzog’s stage-whisper voice-overs. It’s also apparent in Treadwell’s televisual turns, the signing on and off by means of which he simulates live broadcasts. Treadwell’s dream was to be a TV celebrity: his parents suggest that his downward spiral began when he wasn’t given the Woody Harrelson role in Cheers. Granted, it is Treadwell’s drive to be a grizzly— his psychotic drive—that sets the stage for genuine horror. But his life with the grizzlies, while recording an “authentic,” if psychotic, drive to “become animal,”10 must also be seen as an acting out that takes theatrical forms. His self-staging of experience is overt: the “sign” of an evil presence inscribed on a rock (a happy face—surely there’s self-irony here), and the little piles of stones he “discovers” after the arrival of hunters are beyond question borrowings from The Blair Witch Project (1999). When Treadwell suggests that the scene is “Freddy Kruger creepy,” it’s clear that he’s making a detour from his action film into the horror genre. The same holds for Herzog: staging and theatricality are everywhere apparent in Grizzly Man. The coroner, Dr. Franc Fallico, who claims to have sifted through Treadwell’s remains, hams it up in his interviews: wide-eyed, he moves towards the camera for an extreme close up, and his vivid description of body parts produces the affects typical of horror. TV advertising competes with the horror genre as Dr. Fallico mentions that Treadwell’s watch, found attached to his severed hand, “is still running.” In marking the passage of time indicated by titles, Grizzly Man refers again to The Blair Witch Project and to one of the techniques by which the latter film “makes real.” By way of such stagy and ironic turns in Herzog’s film, the Internet hoax that promoted Blair Witch as a record of “real events” is made to resonate here. Performance strategies take center stage in Herzog’s filmed conversations with Jewel Palovak, Treadwell’s erstwhile lover and friend. Her clumsily flubbed lines

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are not inadvertent—she doesn’t stumble over her words because she’s moved by memories of Treadwell. Rather, Jewel’s role is multiply connected to theatricality. When warned by Herzog that she should “never ever” listen to the tape of Treadwell’s death (the lens cap was closed, preventing an image from being recorded), Jewel’s body language reveals that she’s familiar with it already, but she plays along with Herzog’s staged horror: she will, she promises Herzog, “never ever” listen to it. With respect to Herzog’s own performance, this exchange is surely an example of “the actor taking over from the filmmaker.” Bad faith is at work here: while Herzog urges Jewel not to listen to the sounds of Treadwell’s and Amie’s demise—and deliberately omits them from his film—he includes Fallico’s overly detailed verbal description of their deaths as extrapolated from forensic evidence. Another scripted anecdote is equally telling. Jewel’s story of her first meeting with Treadwell isn’t really about that event: instead, she describes working in a restaurant that features Renaissance-style feasts (Treadwell also worked there), a kind of dinner theater that serves up living history. Jewel’s role as waitress also obliged her to act, since while waiting on table she was costumed and made to stay in character. When one family pressured her to “do it up big,” as Jewel tells it, she angrily poured extra lighter fluid around the Sterno burner over which she was to heat soup, causing a blaze that terrified all. (An act of arson is committed by the rebellious Stroszek in Herzog’s Signs of Life.) For Herzog, the implication of Jewel’s story, in which the real in the form of a dangerous fire emerges out of staged history, is that “culinary art” (Brecht’s term) is undone and the unscripted reaction of the spectators is “authentic.” There are other such “borderline” situations in the film, situations in which the juxtaposition of the real with the simulated produces ironic undertones. Like Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Grizzly Man includes a mannequin of a native Alaskan in authentic garb on display in the Alutiiq Museum. As in Little Dieter, this scene plays on the juxtaposition of “authenticity”—it is genuine native clothing—and the artifice of the figure. When the museum director—playing himself—shows Herzog around, one of his exhibits is a taxidermy grizzly who supposedly lost a paw to greedy tourists. But a substitute paw has been attached to the stuffed bear—by means of an ace bandage (Figure  1.2). It’s only one of the humorous touches by which the film covers over its more serious project. The museum’s version of the grizzly bear—a “real” stuffed bear—resonates with Treadwell’s childhood toy, the teddy bear that still accompanies him into grizzly country.11 Filmed living grizzlies, a stuffed “real” grizzly, a stuffed toy bear, a man who would be a grizzly: Herzog’s film once again lays out a spectrum of ontological registers, of degrees of simulation that would appear to question the concept of authenticity. If for Herzog authenticity is grounded in the importance invested in death, then the film’s darkest irony concerns the unnecessary death of Treadwell and his partner. It’s not the fact of their death per se, but rather the manner of their death that’s at issue. Echoing similar lines from Signs of Life and from La

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Figure 1.2 A bear that has had its paw taken by tourists in Grizzly Man (2005). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Erik Nelson for Lions Gate Films and Discovery Docs.

Soufrière, Herzog’s voice-over claims that there was “a certain absurdity in their end.” No doubt there’s self-irony in these words. Nevertheless, as always in Herzog films, authenticity is what’s centrally at stake. There are handheld effects in Treadwell’s footage, sequences in which water splashing up on the camera lens recalls those ubiquitous signature shots in Herzog films. And there are the Bazinian moments when Treadwell’s footage captures what Herzog calls “an inexplicable image of the cinema.” These are moments of “serendipity,” as Herzog terms them, moments when “reality” suddenly wanders into the frame—in the form, for instance, of a fox cub at play, stealing Treadwell’s baseball cap. Here the camera truly captures “life as it is”—but in the form of a narrative, a drama. Footage such as this provides Herzog with an occasion to rail against “the studios,” which, as he says in the film, can’t even dream of “such glorious effects.” As this remark makes clear, for Herzog unstaged “real life” in film can simultaneously be “an effect.” But there’s another kind of image that Herzog privileges in Treadwell’s footage, those brief glimpses of “empty moments that have a strange, secret beauty.” Such non-narrative moments—featuring grasses, for instance (Kaspar Hauser), or poppies waving in the breeze (Woyzeck, 1979)—are central to Herzog’s own filmmaking. These sequences are distinguished from those that feature the playful fox by virtue of their non-narrative “secret beauty” that aligns them with Romantic hieroglyphs, images of nature whose import is mystical. They have this in common with Peter Zeitlinger’s aerial shots of the icy blue glacier in Grizzly Man, images that recall Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Sea of Ice (1823–5): the paradox for Grizzly Man is that the scene from nature is also a scene from art. While Zeitlinger’s images of the Alaskan glacier are clearly of a real landscape, what characterizes them—and makes them signify for Herzog—is that they are finally insusceptible to analysis. This is because the glacier is another landscape of death; icy blue, it brings to mind the jellyfish aquarium of Little Dieter.

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Authenticity is veiled in mysticism, yes, but it also resides in “the real” of the body. Grizzly Man includes grizzly images of body parts, as well as verbal references to them: Sam Egli, the helicopter pilot, claims to have filled four garbage bags with Treadwell and Amie’s “blood and guts.” A cub’s paw, a dead baby fox—Zeitlinger’s camera records them all, while Willy the pilot tells us that he realized Treadwell and Amie had died when he spotted a human ribcage on the ground below. Even in its most reduced state, as a trace of the body, the real functions as a guarantor of authenticity, such as when Grizzly Man records the scattering of Treadwell’s ashes across a former campsite. What’s left of Treadwell is beyond subjectivity: the ashes as material trace of the body merge with the natural world that produced it. Dust is returned to dust; the boundary between the human and its environment has collapsed. Illustrative of this concern in Herzog’s film is the sequence in Treadwell’s footage that unfolds around “Wendy’s poop.” Touching the bear’s recently deposited excrement, Treadwell is overwhelmed by the sensation that it is still warm, that what had just been inside the bear, part of her body, is now outside it. For Treadwell, “it’s her life; it’s her,” but what Herzog may find compelling about Treadwell’s anecdote is the sense that the permeability of inside and outside has its analogue in the fragile boundary between subject and object, one that his films deliberately blur.

Self-parody If the artifice and ironies of Herzog films should seem too subtle or elusive, a look at Incident at Loch Ness, directed by Zak Penn and co-written by Penn and Herzog is in order. It stages them magisterially. A mise-en-abyme “documentary,” it’s overtly played for humor, and it too takes a turn towards the horror genre along the way. In deference to the “camera at water level” trope in Herzog, a precredit sequence features a life-jacketed body floating in the water, shot from this position. As the film’s narrative tells it, Incident at Loch Ness is a (digital) John Bailey documentary, a film about the making of a (celluloid) Herzog film with a self-parodic title, The Enigma of Loch Ness. Complete with interviews during and after the shoot, Bailey’s film has the working title Herzog in Wonderland before events take this film in another direction: it’s important to point out that this turn, too, is a fiction. The film—is it Bailey’s or Penn’s?—begins with a dinner party given at Herzog’s home in Los Angeles—fictively located at the corner of Lookout Mountain and Wonderland Avenue. Members of Herzog’s production team and crew are treated to a dinner prepared by Herzog whose menu is slated to include yucca which, Herzog tells the camera, is “slightly toxic” if not properly cooked. Memorabilia from various shoots decorates Herzog’s stucco house, including an arrow from Fitzcarraldo with a “very serious poison” on its tip, and the gun with which Herzog threatened Klaus Kinski. Among photos on the wall

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is one of Lotte Eisner, “my mentor,” as Herzog still refers to her, alongside “manipulated” photos of Nessie, the Loch Ness monster. There’s a shot of a page from Herzog’s miniaturized diary of the Fitzcarraldo shoot, Conquest of the Useless, and Herzog confesses sheepishly to his reputation for shooting films in dangerous places. Bailey’s film includes short clips from Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, Burden of Dreams, My Best Fiend, and La Soufrière. The film begins, in other words, with a collection of Herzogiana, theatrically annotated by the filmmaker himself. Herzog plays Herzog; the tone is tongue-in-cheek, self-parodic. In later interviews with Bailey, Herzog recites his famous distinction between fact and truth; truth is “like poetry” and preferably “ecstatic,” and suggests that, as a culture, “we need the very dark monsters.” All this is vintage Herzog. In the meantime, Bailey and his crew shoot Herzog at the drug store, buying razor blades—“a banality” that one shouldn’t record on film, comments Herzog. The film presents Bailey, of whom we catch only the occasional glimpse, as the “real” documentary filmmaker; Herzog as the (mostly) independent filmmaker that he is; and Zak Penn as a Hollywood producer par excellence. When Herzog calls for a “real” crypto-biologist for the film, Penn agrees to provide one, but it’s later revealed that the man is really an actor. (Fata Morgana and Encounters at the End of the World also feature “pseudo-scientists;” people working at the borders of science and the imagination are a long-standing interest of Herzog’s.) Discovering Penn’s subterfuge, Herzog wonders aloud: “who is real and who is not?” (He is not serious.) The line between “truth” and “fiction” is multiply blurred as Penn reminds Herzog that Herzog has often insisted that “cinema is lies.” Although Penn wants the director of photography to shoot some Scottish local color—a shepherd on a hillside, for example—he settles for a shot of a fighter plane flying overhead; it’s more of a Herzog shot (recall Little Dieter) than a comment about contemporary Scotland. Penn provides the production with an inflatable Nessie, a children’s toy, but Herzog refuses to include it in his film, both evoking and mocking his own insistence on a real ship for Fitzcarraldo. When Herzog discovers that Penn has asked the crew to shoot footage of the inflatable Nessie, Herzog calls the film “a hoax.” Representing Hollywood, Penn wants to imitate “an authentic expedition” by giving cast and crew jumpsuits complete with the production’s logo; the sonar operator that Herzog wanted for the production turns out to be an actress in a tiny bikini. Time and again Penn’s, Bailey’s, and Herzog’s artistic differences are played up for the sake of humor, as when Bailey’s intrusive camera pushes through a nearly closed door in order to eavesdrop on a private conversation. Sometimes performance seems too much in evidence: there are moments when Herzog barely prevents himself from smiling as he speaks his lines, and the actor who plays the “crypto-biologist” isn’t very adept at improvisation. The film’s fiction is that Herzog is making one film, Penn is making another, and Bailey is making a third. Then suddenly, just as their disagreements come to a head, a large shape appears in the water. The whole production is stopped, even

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Figure 1.3 Zak Penn draws a gun on Werner Herzog in Incident at Loch Ness (2004). Directed by Zak Penn, produced by Zak Penn and Werner Herzog.

Herzog doesn’t want to keep the camera rolling—all everyone wants to do is look into the water. (Is this an allusion to the young Mozart in Kaspar Hauser?) On Day Three, some members of the crew leave the production in disgust (Fitzcarraldo; Rescue Dawn), and Penn draws a gun (Herzog and Kinski) to force Herzog to continue (Figure  1.3). In a later interview with Bailey Herzog declares that “whatever film I had planned had turned into something like a horror film.” (Indeed, this film, too, includes titles that mark ever more specific units of time, recalling The Shining [1980] and The Blair Witch Project.) But now it’s implied that the “real” Nessie is on the scene, ramming into the boat with tremendous force. When the frightened Penn and the crypto-biologist make off in a lifeboat, Herzog vows to strangle Penn with his bare hands when he catches him. Then Herzog grabs a camera and ducks “beneath the surface” (Signs of Life) of the water to capture an image of the monster, although he doesn’t succeed. At this point in the film its spectator is still in a state of confusion, wondering what’s an effect and what isn’t, and who has staged what. Penn turns up alive (his is the life-jacketed body in the pre-credit sequence), but it’s discovered that both the crypto-biologist and the production manager have actually died (in the fiction that’s the film), recalling the scandals surrounding the production of Fitzcarraldo. At the end of the film Penn, the Hollywood man, admits that truth is more exciting than fiction. Hamming it up, he wonders who—aside from the two dead people—suffered as much as he, the film’s producer, did. Herzog explains to Bailey that the two deaths are “tragedies” and that, as a result, “the truth did not seem ecstatic—it seemed vulgar and pointless” (echoes from La Soufrière and Grizzly Man). Penn’s and Herzog’s remarks concerning the (filmic) deaths of the crypto-biologist and the production manager are clearly marked as self-parodic. But a false note enters the film with the mention of death, even if it’s been clear from the start that everyone involved in the film is having fun, that the film was

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never intended to be serious: at one level, the film is a game played by a group of friends who happen to be in the trade. Yet during the dinner party that opens the film, Penn explains that he’s financing Herzog’s production (of the film that was never made, The Enigma of Loch Ness) in order to expand Herzog’s audience to include fans of Hollywood cinema. (Recall that Penn orders the shooting of Hollywood-style footage that he plans to cut into the film, no doubt a reference to the shooting of Rescue Dawn.) Encased in the fiction that governs the film as a whole, this explanation, too, is a fiction. Or is it? More importantly, what might Herzog’s motive for involving himself in such a self-parodic production be? Mocking Herzog’s most cherished principles of filmmaking, the film spoofs not only Herzog’s themes, but also the postures that define him as an auteur. If it is postulated on a movement from what Erving Goffman terms “belief in a part” to cynicism, this need not be permanent (2007: 59). Is Herzog’s willingness to participate in fact commercially driven, or does the oscillation of registers—the different degrees of fictionality that constitute Incident at Loch Ness—serve a more important function? Isn’t this film the most baroque vehicle for containing himself within representation in which Herzog has participated so far? If the movement between reality and fiction is consciously and overtly stylized by the film, need this signify that Herzog’s investment in this oscillation is less intense because more selfconscious? A jeu d’esprit the film may be, yet it nevertheless enables Herzog to move back and forth with bravura between its multiple registers of reality and fiction. Interestingly, Incident at Loch Ness’ lengthy credit sequence is interspersed with outtakes from the film that suggest yet another conflation of real people— the actors—with the fiction in which they participate. Ever performing himself as auteur and as subject, for Herzog there may be no difference.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

For a discussion of Herzog and the sublime, see Peucker (1984) and (1995: 88–94). See Peucker (1986). See Peucker (2007). This theme informs many Herzog films, among them his first feature, Signs of Life (1968), and—most notably, perhaps—Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972). Planes represented as birds are typical of Herzog’s work: see also The Flying Doctors of East Africa (1969) and Fata Morgana. See Bill Nichols (2008), which includes a reading of Little Dieter Needs to Fly. I’m indebted to Jesse Maiman for pointing out the interest of this cut. The same musical passages are used in Lessons in Darkness and Nosferatu, and they are most obviously mock-heroic in La Soufrière. Little Dieter Needs to Fly is of particular interest among Herzog’s documentaries because  it’s the only one that was made into a feature film, thus representing the Dieter Dengler material in yet another register. With Rescue Dawn’s claim to be based

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on a true story, as a title maintains, this fiction film—more like a Hollywood film than any other film of Herzog’s—lends yet another dimension to the re-working of the “authentic” material that is present in Little Dieter. As in other Herzog productions, there were huge difficulties during the shooting, and members of the crew, unpaid and struggling in the Thai jungle, left the production in disgust. While making the film, Herzog himself lost thirty pounds, ate maggots, and bit into snakes—Herzog’s physical investment set an example for others to do the same. As yet another gesture in the direction of melding performance with the real, the deprivation to which Herzog subjected himself—to his mind, at least—promoted participation in the image. But the typical Herzog non-narrative images—shots of animals, for instance— are very few and fleeting. Some footage for the film was even shot without Herzog’s awareness, footage that could be used to make the film resemble Hollywood films more closely. See Jeong and Andrew (2008: 4). It’s not difficult to see Treadwell’s interest in bears as a form of arrested development, at the very least. His mother notes that as a child he shared her interest in animals; a sign with images of bunnies in her garden advertises “garden tours.” Treadwell’s anxiety about being gay is suggested by an image of a sign in Herzog’s footage that reads “Nick’s Pansy Farm,” but it flashes by so quickly as to be nearly subliminal.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W.: The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). Bazin, André: “Cinema and Exploration,” What is Cinema? Vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 154–163. Corrigan, Timothy: “Producing Herzog: From a Body of Images,” The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, ed. Timothy Corrigan (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 3–19. Cronin, Paul, ed.: Herzog on Herzog (London: Faber & Faber, 2002). Goffman, Erving: “Performances: Belief in the Part One Is Playing,” The Performance Studies Reader, ed. Henry Bial (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 59–63. Grass, Günter: Im Krebsgang: eine Novelle (Göttingen: Steidl, 2002). Herzog, Werner: Of Walking in Ice: Munich–Paris, 11/23 to 12/14, 1974, trans. Martje Herzog and Alan Greenberg (New York: Tanam Press, 1980 [original 1978]). Herzog, Werner: Conquest of the Useless: Reflections on the Making of Fitzcarraldo, trans. Krishna Winston (New York: HarperCollins, 2009). Horak, Jan-Christopher: “W. H. or the Mysteries of Walking in Ice,” The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, ed. Timothy Corrigan (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 25–42. Jeong, Seung-Hoon and Andrew, Dudley: “Grizzly Ghost: Herzog, Bazin and the Cinematic Animal,” Screen 49:1 (Spring 2008): 1–12. Nichols, Bill: “Documentary Reenactment and the Fantasmatic Subject,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Autumn 2008): 72–89.

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Peucker, Brigitte: “Werner Herzog: In Quest of the Sublime,” New German Filmmakers: From Oberhausen through the 1970s, ed. Klaus Phillips (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984), pp. 168–194. Peucker, Brigitte: “Literature and Writing in the Films of Werner Herzog,” The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, ed. Timothy Corrigan (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 105–117. Peucker, Brigitte: “Herzog’s Unassimilable Bodies,” Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 88–94. Peucker, Brigitte: The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). Prager, Brad: The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (London: Wallflower Press, 2007). Rosen, Philip: Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

Additional Films Cited Blank, Les: Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980) Blank, Les: Burden of Dreams (1982) Ichat, Michel: Victoire sur l’Annapurna (1953) Keusch, Erwin and Weisenborn, Christian: I Am My Films—A Portrait of Werner Herzog (1978) Kubrick, Stanley: The Shining (1980) Myrick, Daniel: The Blair Witch Project (1999) Penn, Zak: Incident at Loch Ness (2004). Written by Zak Penn and Werner Herzog

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Physicality, Difference, and the Challenge of Representation Werner Herzog in the Light of the New Waves1 Lúcia Nagib

It is typical of New Waves and New Cinema movements to resort to physicality as a means to establish a material link between cast/crew, the profilmic event, and the resulting film, so as to generate a sense of belonging and identity. Firmly rooted in the New German Cinema and akin to all New Wave movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the oeuvre of Werner Herzog also relies, perhaps more intensely than that of any of his contemporaries, on a physical approach to filmmaking. However, physicality, in his case, seems to derive from an irretrievable loss of identity, a rupture between the human element and its environment through which the materiality of the former comes to the fore. Reality thus becomes synonymous with difference, a fact embodied by the legions of extraordinary beings who populate his entire output. In this chapter, I will investigate the nature and validity of Herzog’s claims to difference, its relation to physical filmmaking, and the kind of realism resulting from his mode of address within and beyond the realm of representation. Starting from the director’s body itself, I will proceed to the examination of physicality in his oeuvre in the light of hitherto little explored historical and aesthetic connections with New Wave and New Cinema movements, in particular the Nouvelle Vague and the Brazilian Cinema Novo. A physical, or, in his preferred expression, “athletic” approach to cinema has been the cause of Herzog’s entire career, now spanning more than four decades of uninterrupted filmmaking. At the same time, characterizing physicality in his films is anything but a simple operation. Not only because there is a general perception that, as Gilles Deleuze put it, Herzog “is the most metaphysical of film directors” (2005: 189), but because physicality in his films can only be properly A Companion to Werner Herzog, First Edition. Edited by Brad Prager. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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apprehended once a major obstacle is abstracted from them: the director’s body itself. The complexity of this task can be measured by both the number of films he has directed so far—nearly sixty since his first short, Herakles (1962)—and the ubiquity of his visual and/or aural presence in the majority of them. Authorial presence takes place in Herzog’s films in a variety of ways: through the director’s intradiegetic bodily appearances as the film narrator; through his extradiegetic voice-over commentaries; through apocryphal or (mostly adapted) quotations in the form of titles applied to the films, whose tone and contents leave no doubt as to their source being, again, the director himself; or pointed cameo appearances. Authorial assertion and physical presence is a common device in so-called “modern” cinema, where it is usually employed to call the spectator’s attention to the reality of the cinematic apparatus and the tricks of representation. Not so in Herzog’s case. His voice in spoken or written form, often accompanied by his visual appearance, is invariably that of the conventional omniscient narrator, detached from the historical world and endowed with the power to determine the film’s unified perspective and meaning. This resonates with the “voice-of-god” or “voice-of-authority” typical of the expository mode in the documentary genre, as defined by Bill Nichols (1991: 37). Nichols includes in this category both visible and invisible speakers, as well as explanatory titles, all of which are inherent in Herzog’s narrative repertoire. Traditionally, however, the voice-of-god is that of a professionally trained speaker, with no authorial input, so as to confirm its neutrality and objectivity with relation to the facts in focus. Herzog also resorted to this kind of professional narrative voice in his early films, such as Signs of Life (1968) and The Unprecedented Defense of the Fortress Deutschkreuz (1966). But his highly subjective discourse was hardly suitable to a neutral reading, and even risked involuntary humor, a case in point being the end of Signs of Life, when an uninterested speaker reads off-frame grandiloquent lines of inscrutable philosophy. This danger was certainly perceived by Herzog himself, who subsequently tried using selfquestioning and self-parodic multiple voice-overs in Fata Morgana (1969). This was an interesting experiment, which, however, had no follow-ups, as he decided thereafter to take up the narrative voice himself, a role he has performed in the conservative voice-of-god/voice-of-authority style ever since, even when he must speak in his heavily accented English, a trait which over the years has become integral to his public persona. In all, Herzog’s attitude seems to be in frank contradiction with his claim that “he is his films,” as expressed in the title of a documentary about him, I Am My Films (Erwin Keusch and Christian Weisenborn, 1979). Not so much in the sense of a split auteur figure, divided between the abstraction of words and the density of images, as once observed by Corrigan (1986: 6), but in the director’s unrelenting efforts to outdo his films to the point of turning them into mere accessories in the construction of the legend around his person. In fact, his urge to control the perception and reception of his films goes far beyond his intrafilmic voices. Despite his pose as an artisan and manual worker, averse to intellectual reflection and oral

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expression, Herzog has proved in all these decades an extremely eloquent writer and speaker, through a voluminous literature about and around his films, alongside copious interviews, and public talks he is always keen to volunteer all over the world. With the release of most of his oeuvre on DVD, in boxes, cases, and discs duly illustrated with photographs of the director himself alongside or even in lieu of images of his films, one is additionally presented with Herzog’s voice providing critical commentary about his own product in the extras, a role normally performed by third parties, such as film experts, crew, or cast members. The self-mythologizing, victimizing, and heroicizing machinery set in motion with rare competence by this hard-working and highly organized filmmaker leaves so little room for independent criticism that one wonders why so many of us still bother to write about him— or rather, if at all possible, about his films. The reason can only be that Herzog is not his films, and that these are at the same time more and less than the director wants us to believe. Herzog, as a person, is a media phenomenon, whose writings and opinions hardly ever surpass the level of self-help literature or New Age esotericism. His  theory about his own spontaneous generation, “as if film history had never existed” (Pflaum 1979: 59), and that “cinema is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates” (Greenberg 1976: 174) cannot be taken at face value by any serious criticism. This, however, allows me to explore the main theme of this chapter, concerning difference as synonym for material reality. An undeniable trump of Herzog’s oeuvre as a whole, difference has become for him the subject of unrelenting commercial exploitation. More than that: by disengaging himself from history and film history, he has fashioned himself to the international media as the embodiment of difference. However, as is the case with all artworks, Herzog’s films are solidly grounded in history, film history, and the director’s and his collaborators’ cultural backgrounds, and for this reason are much more than a mere collection of “eerie” visions and landscapes, as the director likes to describe them. Herzog’s oeuvre, and his early work in particular, are invaluable eye-witnesses, of both social and scientific interest, of man-provoked destruction, death, and decay (Fata Morgana, La Soufrière [1977]), of human–animal kinship (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser [1974], Heart of Glass [1976], Stroszek [1977]), of man’s (as Herzog’s films are hardly ever about women) irrational thirst for power (Herakles, Aguirre, the Wrath of God [1972], Heart of Glass, Echoes from a Somber Empire [1990]), of how the debris and detritus of capitalist society extend their tentacles to the farthest corners of the globe (Encounters at the End of the World [2007]). Most strikingly, Herzog’s documentary approach (even when fictional) to ethnic, disabled, and other minorities has drawn worldwide attention to their personal plights and political causes (Land of Silence and Darkness [1971], Where the Green Ants Dream [1984], Wodaabe—Herdsmen of the Sun [1989]). Herzog’s keen perception of the physical world and his typically New Wave drive to unveil hidden aspects of reality have placed him at the forefront of international trends which would take years or even decades to develop, not least his “athletic” relation to artistic production, which was in advance by around a

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decade of the ethos of healthy eating, exercising, drug-free living, and environmental respect. The music produced by the Popol Vuh ensemble, led by Florian Fricke, Herzog’s personal friend and collaborator, is also a clear predecessor of the atmospheric New Age music which would take some 15 years to become trendy, after its groundbreaking launch in Aguirre. Above all, with his tireless search across the world for “transparent images,” Herzog has anticipated the severed sensory links with the world of a late-capitalist, globe-trotting society, eternally searching for difference through indiscriminate tourism, only to find more of the same: identity everywhere. However, his physical cinema operates at its best on the basis of a presentational mode, in the sense of what Rancière defines as an “aesthetic regime of art,” which, according to him, affirms the “absolute power of style.” For Rancière, a work of art conceived under this regime, “would bear no traces of the author’s intervention and display instead only the absolute indifference and passivity of things with neither will nor meaning” (2006: 117). It is precisely in the indifference of things, the sheer, opaque materiality of death that pervades Herzog’s oeuvre as a whole, where physicality is presented as an irreducible element. This is particularly noticeable in his focus on race, ethnicity, mental and physical disability, poverty and marginality in general, in films where characters are given room to express themselves beyond stereotypical understandings of (their) difference. These characters and situations are, however, found in the objective world as a given and remain stubbornly resistant to representation. Hence Herzog’s misadventures with mainstream cinema and Hollywood, into which he periodically tries to introduce his “athletic” methods. Examples of real enactment of Hollywoodian fantasy are Cobra Verde (1987), Rescue Dawn (2006), and above all Fitzcarraldo (1982), this being, in my view, Herzog’s most complete failure to this day, but also his greatest box-office success, thanks to the media event it became with the sensational narrative, cleverly woven by the director, of the disasters surrounding its production, and his heroic acts in overcoming them. The fact that physical and representational realisms remain tenaciously separate and conflictive in Herzog’s work has been recently spotted with sharp precision by Jeong and Andrew apropos of Grizzly Man (2005). Commenting on Treadwell’s own film among the bears within Herzog’s film, the authors note that: “Treadwell’s video is the authentic cinematic kernel, the uncontrollable outside, lodged inside the film, a trace of the Real which Herzog tries vainly to envelop in his well-formed film language” (2008: 8). They conclude by saying that: “Through the yawning gap opened up between the two irreconcilable languages in Grizzly Man, the spectator/ auditor glimpses the Real and recognizes it as death itself ” (2008: 11). My interest in this chapter is likewise to look into the gap between presentational realism and the representation of physical experience so as to retrieve the indexical trace—or the absolute materiality of death. To that end, I will draw links between Herzog and other directors akin to realism in its various forms, including surrealism. In particular, I will focus on François Truffaut and Glauber Rocha, representing

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respectively the Nouvelle Vague and the Cinema Novo, whose works had a decisive weight on Herzog’s aesthetic choices to the point of originating distinct phases of his outputs. The analyses below, though restricted to a small number of films, will hopefully help us evaluate Herzog’s position within, and contribution to, film history.

Physical Difference In Truffaut’s Nouvelle Vague milestone, The 400 Blows (1959), an object of encrypted symbolism crops up within an otherwise thoroughly realistic narrative, offering a most curious and enlightening insight into Herzog’s Fata Morgana and another film he shot practically at the same time, Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970). I am referring to the pair of goggles worn by Mauricet, a classmate of the protagonist Antoine Doinel (Figure  2.1). Little has been written about this unexpected accessory, meant for swimming, but proudly sported by Mauricet during school time. Gillain connects it to the act of stealing, a theme which pervades the film from the moment Antoine’s best friend René accuses Mauricet of having bought the goggles with stolen cash (1991: 77). As for the character of Mauricet, Gillain defines him politically, as the “collaborationist,” as opposed to René, the representative of “resistance” (1991: 63), Mauricet being the one who goes to Antoine’s house to squeal to his parents on his playing truant. But the question remains: why swimming goggles? No clue is sufficiently developed in the narrative to justify the recurrence of this mysterious object. The violent reaction it triggers is, however, crucial to the narrative, as for once it gives the pupils the chance to collectively

Figure 2.1 The pair of goggles worn by Mauricet, a classmate of the protagonist Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows (1959). Directed by François Truffaut, produced by François Truffaut for Les Films du Carrosse and Sédif Productions.

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express their discontent with the repressive teaching methods utilized in their school. This is how this is staged: While Mauricet—who seems to be not only wealthier, but also more studious than his classmates—is reciting a poem in class, his goggles are snatched from under his desk, repeatedly pierced with pencil blows by Antoine and René, and run through the other pupils who empty an ink container into them before returning them to their thoroughly dismayed owner. It is common knowledge that Truffaut was under the spell of Jean Vigo’s anarcho-surrealist boarding-school masterpiece Zero for Conduct (1933) when he shot The 400 Blows. However, hardly any surrealist procedures can be found in his film, except perhaps for these goggles, which, with typical surrealist humor, are torn from their primary function so as to reveal their material reality. In any case, this does not prevent this decontextualized object being entirely absorbed into the cause–effect chain of a perfectly sutured montage. A thoroughly different effect is, however, produced when these goggles migrate into Herzog’s Fata Morgana and Even Dwarfs Started Small (Figure 2.2). In the former, goggles proliferate on the faces of different characters in the middle of deserts and other settings, in which they are partially or completely displaced, and always disconnected from, and actually obtrusive to, the narrative flow. Goggles are worn by a biologist who studies the behavior of desert lizards such as the one he holds up to the camera as he speaks; by one of the black children repeating “blitzkrieg is insanity” on the command of a white German teacher; and most disturbingly by a drummer who performs in duo with a middleaged pianist with the looks of a housewife. In all these cases, the goggles prevent eye contact between characters and the camera (thus the viewer), adding to the illegibility of the scenes in question. They are thus presented as uprooted characters, remainders of an unspeakable destruction that has stolen from them their nexus with the world and even their ability of coherent speech, as illustrated by the drummer whose singing through a distorting microphone is entirely incomprehensible. Goggles appear again in Even Dwarfs Started Small, covering the eyes of a couple of blind dwarfs, the twin sisters Azúcar and Chicklets. This film about rebel dwarfs in an educational institution bears comparison to The 400 Blows in interesting ways. In Truffaut’s film, the school is equivalent to a prison insofar as Antoine moves from the former to the latter to encounter the same levels of brutality, as exemplified by the violent slaps in the face he receives in both places. The photographic session at his admission to the reformatory gives him a taste of this violence, as the photographer manipulates his head as if it were an inanimate object and makes him hold up a sign containing his identity number. Something similar happens in Even Dwarfs Started Small, which, after the opening credits, moves on to a photographic session of the dwarf Hombre, whose participation in the rebellion will be told in flashback. As with Antoine, Hombre is ordered to hold up a large sign with his identity number. More significantly, both Antoine and Hombre are subsequently interrogated by off-screen individuals. Antoine’s interrogation is famously carried out by a female voice-over for which Truffaut allegedly never managed to find a face. Hombre, in his turn, is questioned by a male voice, which is actually

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Figure 2.2 Proliferating goggles in Fata Morgana (1969) and Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970). Both films directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Werner Herzog/Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

the only one seemingly coming from a “normal” person, in a film in which all visible characters are dwarfs, including the institution’s educator and even the lady in the car who accidentally stops by to ask for directions. This off-screen voice of authority thus locates any existing “normality” in another, metaphysical realm, as opposed to the physical world of the dwarfs, in which difference is the norm. The similarities between the two films stop here, as there are no collective rebellions in The 400 Blows except in the form of an innocuous massacre of a pair of goggles, while Even Dwarfs is the site of an almost unbearably detailed physical enacting of a nonsensical, self-destructive uprising. According to the interrogator’s

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voice-over at the beginning of the film, the rebellious dwarfs had been left behind for bad behavior on a collective outing with the institution’s director. This causes an explosion of anger against the institution and its rules which leaves no objects, trees, flowerpots, or animals intact in the building. Nothing in Truffaut’s suave storytelling style can even remotely compare to this; however, a number of further clues to Herzog’s surrealist tendencies can be drawn from Truffaut’s forefather, Jean Vigo. Suffice it to remember that in Zero for Conduct the principal of the boarding school in which a rebellion of the boarders takes place is a dwarf played by the veteran actor Delphin. As in Even Dwarfs, surrealist dislocation here means glaring disproportion between the dwarfs’ Lilliputian size and the huge dimensions of all objects around them. This causes some hilarious moments in Zero for Conduct, for example, when the principal struggles to rest his hat on a high mantelpiece, or when he looks in a mirror and checks himself against the image of his tall subordinate instead of his own. In Even Dwarfs, the irritating tension created by the sadistic and often disgusting acts committed by the dwarfs (one of whom eats the flaking skin of her own leg) are also somewhat alleviated by a few humorous moments drawing on disproportion, such as the “marriage” between Hombre and Pobrecita which cannot be consummated because Hombre is too short to climb up the bed. But Herzog’s film does not at all concern humor, but rather the uncontrollable drive to cruelty, meant to highlight the unbearable materiality of difference. And here we touch the work of another surrealist, Luis Buñuel, most notably his film about poor children in Mexico City, The Forgotten Ones (1950), which Herzog highlights as his favorite within Buñuel’s work (Nagib 1991: 246). This film was seen by both critics and the director himself as his renaissance after a long silence, which aligns him to the pattern of early-career filmmakers (including Vigo, Truffaut, and Herzog) who devote their initial works to children with whom they share a process of learning about the world. What brings The Forgotten Ones close to Even Dwarfs is the imaginative freedom with which the story is handled, regardless of any moral patterns this may contravene. At its launch, the film was execrated by left and right alike, and indeed Buñuel is merciless with his characters, and so is Herzog—at least in Even Dwarfs—which means that for both directors poverty or disability is not a reason for victimization. A horrifying proof of this is offered in The Forgotten Ones through the character of a blind singer, who performs at a market to the sound of his own combined instruments. The man is followed by a group of thuggish kids, who attack him with stones, break his instruments and steal his money, while the blind man brandishes his cane aimlessly around him. Lying on the ground after the assault, the man stares ahead unaware that a chicken is staring back at him. Later, however, the blind man proves no better than his assailants, as he exploits an abandoned boy and tries to rape a girl who regularly brings him milk. What happens with the blind twins in Even Dwarfs resonates remarkably with this, with the aggravating detail that sadistic representation is replaced with

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presentational, real sadism. The blind twins are constantly bullied by the other dwarfs and wave their canes around them without ever hitting their target. But this does not mean that they have any better principles than their tormentors, as they relish mounting on the real-life corpse of a sow killed by the other dwarfs from which the piglets continue to suck. The chicken parallel, a Herzog favorite, is also offered in its most macabre version in the images of a cannibal chicken pecking at a dead mouse and, more revoltingly, at another live chicken, whose protracted killing is patiently detailed by the camera. That the blind twins are not only wearing goggles, but also swimming caps, in an arid location with no signs of sea or swimming pools, singles them out through a supplementary distinctive sign within a world of physical difference. Indeed, the twins are the only ones who do not participate in the rebellion orchestrated by the other dwarfs. Are they “collaborationists” just like Mauricet in The 400 Blows? In any case, they are blind, which could justify the goggles as corresponding to the dark sunglasses often worn by blind people, in which case this would also resonate with Buñuel. Commenting on Belle de Jour (Luis Buñuel, 1967), Evans identifies the dark sunglasses sported by the protagonist Séverine as a sign of authority as well as of bourgeois blindness (1995: 156). Buñuel was a fetishist, and objects in his films are always turned into sexual fetishes of one kind or another, including sunglasses, canes, chickens, and birds in general. It is therefore easy to see how surrealist displacement would serve him in the creation and multiplication of genital substitutes, which are governed by no politics other than desire. Even Dwarfs also deals with the explosion of repressed sexuality, an exception in Herzog’s work, in which eroticism hardly plays any role. This can be inferred from the interrogator’s voice-over at the beginning, which relates that the dwarfs have engaged in gang-rape of the cook Marcela, although in the flashback sex is a much milder event, only suggested in the innocent bedroom scene in which the groom fails to perform and resigns himself to leafing through the giant porn magazines found in the educator’s bedroom. The goggles remain, however, unrelated to all this. An outspoken sign of difference, they are nevertheless entirely arbitrary, and could be placed on the face of anyone, even an undistinguished black kid among other black kids in an African setting, as seen in Fata Morgana. This wandering sign of difference is there to indicate the displacement, the severed links with all places of origin and belonging, not only of dwarfs or blind people, but of the entire human race, and is therefore an allegory, as is everything else in Even Dwarfs. Bazin highlights in The Forgotten Ones a truth which “transcends morality and sociology: it is a metaphysical reality, the cruelty of the human condition” (1982: 54). Herzog is also trying to send a message about the displacement of human beings as a whole in a world marked by the indifference of death. The fact that dwarfs are adults in children’s bodies results in their encapsulating and cancelling out the roles of villains and heroes, perpetrators and victims. They thus constitute a totality reaching beyond their individual existence. This is why, despite their despicable acts, unbearable high-pitched voices and laughter, sadism against animals of all sorts, and outright stupidity in destroying

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their own environment, the dwarfs do not become detestable to the viewer (even if the film may do so), because there is no suggestion that they are an abject other; on the contrary, they are simply the norm. Of course, the viewer may disagree with the nihilist and rather conservative idea that humans revolve around themselves without ever making progress, as symbolized by the truck turning around itself in the courtyard of the educational institution; or that humans are animals just like the cannibal chicken, and a monkey can therefore replace Jesus Christ on a cross carried by the dwarfs at the end (a scene, incidentally, which is strongly reminiscent of the inspector tied to an upright bed, in Zero for Conduct); or that humans live in a prison of their own making, like the dwarfs, who rather than escaping through the paved road at their door, prefer to climb the lava cliffs which are too high for them and force them to return (reminding us again of Buñuel and the party prisoners in The Exterminating Angel [1962]).2 But there is certainly more to it. Prager links the allegorical style in the film to the expressionist deformation that opposed the racial ideals of Nazi Germany (2007: 57), and the fact that all dwarfs, despite their fictitious Spanish names, are native German speakers, resonates with this assessment. On the other hand, difference, in other Herzog films, is often related to artistic gift. In Stroszek, the protagonist Bruno, a childish mind imprisoned in a half-developed adult body, is a street singer and plays multiple instruments like the blind man in The Forgotten Ones. Kaspar Hauser, in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, another child–adult, also likes to express himself through music. In the short Last Words (1968), a wonderful shot, capturing the protagonist’s hands playing the lyre and going down to show the built-up shoe on his disabled leg, establishes a direct link between art and disability. The difficulty in all these cases, however, is to find the normality against which difference is necessarily defined, and the virtues of art recognized. Virtually all Herzog’s characters, from protagonists to unimportant extras, have something odd about them, as if all of them carried a pair of goggles in their pocket. It is the mirror that drives one mad, that is: the impossibility of difference. This is the horror that the dwarfs are shouting out to us: their inevitable belonging to the masses, the herds that so horrified Nietzsche and deserve nothing except utter indifference from nature. Against these ignominious herds, Nietzsche had conceived the superman, and this is also the path Herzog follows in a subsequent strand of his fiction filmmaking. In the next section, I will examine his adventures in the land of giants and the implications this entails to his realist drive and physical method of filmmaking.

Trance From the early 1970s, Herzog’s films grow. Not only do they become outspokenly narrative and fictional, but their characters expand in size and meaning. The antihumanism emanating from a humanity equated to animals and the inanimate

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world, as observed by Elsaesser (Corrigan 1986: 150), is now replaced by aspiring super-humans. Cast-away, small-scale rebels, such as the soldier Stroszek in Signs of Life or the dwarfs in Even Dwarfs Started Small, give way to prophets of the apocalypse and New World conquistadors endowed with cosmic vision, as in Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Heart of Glass. “Dwarfs” continue to make their appearances, but they have also grown to become romantic heroes endowed with an artistic gift, such as the protagonists of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and Stroszek, both performed by the eternal child Bruno S. Increasingly, bodily difference incarnated by real cast-away and disabled characters, gives way to representational difference played out by professional actors, as epitomized by the figure of Klaus Kinski, who came to symbolize a significant portion of Herzog’s output. Herzog has always made, and continues to make, all possible efforts to keep alive the legend that Kinski, unfortunately deceased in 1991, was as mad in real life as he is in his Herzogian roles, with the obvious intention of maintaining a continuum of the reality of difference across his oeuvre. The change is, however, undeniable and entirely natural, as the director and his collaborators learned more about their métier, absorbed new influences, and matured. What is distinctive in Herzog’s case is the way in which his evolution towards narrativity, heroic storytelling, and ultimately commercial cinema coincides with a turn to South American themes and locations. As I will argue in this section, the decisive event in this development seems to have been his becoming acquainted with the works of Brazilian Cinema Novo and, in particular, Glauber Rocha. From the early 1960s the Cinema Novo films started to collect aficionados and emulators across Europe, but it was in Germany where it was most warmly received among the new generation of filmmakers. The impact of these, alongside other Latin American films, became visible in German cinema from the late 1960s, with Herzog being undoubtedly the filmmaker who most consistently and productively engaged with Cinema Novo. He is the first to acknowledge this relation, even attributing the original title of his The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, “Every Man for Himself and God against All,” to a phrase he heard in Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s Macunaíma (1969). Relations with Macunaíma are also visible elsewhere, for example, in Fitzcarraldo, which features the extraordinary actor Grande Otelo in a minor role of a clownish railroad warden. Otelo, one of Brazil’s all-time greatest actors, is the memorable performer of Macunaíma’s title role, the “characterless hero” of Mario de Andrade’s seminal novel, who arrives in the world already in the body of an adult in Andrade’s film. He thus personifies the kind of child–adult allegory dear to Herzog’s fictional imaginary. Herzog used many other Cinema Novo actors in his Latin American films, most famously the MozambicanBrazilian director Ruy Guerra, who plays Don Pedro de Ursúa in Aguirre. José Lewgoy, another Brazilian celebrity who embodied the populist leader Vieira in Glauber Rocha’s Entranced Earth (1967), was also cast for important roles in Fitzcarraldo (the rubber baron Don Aquilino) and Cobra Verde (the sugar rancher

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Don Octavio Coutinho). The Brazilian presence in the cast of these films is further enhanced, for example, with the minor role as the porter of the Manaus Opera House played by Milton Nascimento, one of Brazil’s most important composers and singers, whose music in Ruy Guerra’s The Gods and the Dead (1970) is certain to have impressed Herzog. Ruy Polanah, who appeared in Carlos Diegues’ Ganga Zumba (1963) and Ruy Guerra’s The Guns (1964) and again The Gods and the Dead, is another of Herzog’s favored actors, cast in Fitzcarraldo. These are, however, only the superficial signs of much stronger affinities underpinning the form and content of Herzog’s films from Aguirre onwards. Before delving into Herzog’s specific case, let us have a brief look at the kind of attraction Cinema Novo might have presented to the New German Cinema. Ismail Xavier ascribes Cinema Novo’s impact abroad to the fact that it “gave political meaning to the demands for authenticity typical of the European art cinema, combining those demands with the careful observation of reality” (1997: 4). It is indeed the case that, in its first utopian phase, Cinema Novo was defined by a turn to the materiality of poverty as found in the rural, dry hinterlands of the Brazilian northeast, called sertão. This secured a strong realist backing to the modernist aesthetics it was voraciously borrowing from Brecht, Eisenstein, Buñuel, Visconti, Pasolini and Godard, among others. Cinema Novo’s three initial masterpieces, Rocha’s Black God, White Devil, Pereira dos Santos’ Barren Lives, and Ruy Guerra’s The Guns, all released between 1963 and 1964, are firmly grounded in this formula. However, Cinema Novo’s most innovative contribution probably has to do with dimensions: the monumentality of its dry landscapes, the power of messianic religion over the destitute masses, the enormity of hunger, a word which lies at the core of Glauber Rocha’s aesthetic thought, as famously expressed in his 1965 manifesto “An Esthetic of Hunger.” Thus, while lending itself to modern and self-questioning forms of storytelling, Cinema Novo opened up to metaphysical issues and supra-rational, trance-like states of mind which until then had lacked cinematic expression. Baroque excess and characters in trance accrue and predominate in Cinema Novo’s production after the 1964 military coup, which sees the demise of the socialist project and throws middle-class filmmakers, together with their screen alter-egos, into an ethical crisis in the face of class struggle, as seen in Entranced Earth, Hunger for Love (Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1965), Antônio das Mortes (Glauber Rocha, 1969), The Heirs (Carlos Diegues, 1970), Gods and the Dead, and many other films. In a remarkable analysis, first published in 1967, Jean-Claude Bernardet had already noted the first signs of this crisis germinating in Cinema Novo’s utopian phase, most notably in the figure of the hitman Antônio das Mortes, as he first appears in Rocha’s Black God, White Devil: Economically dependent on the ruling classes, [this middle class] attempts to adopt the perspective of the people. But because it lacks a perspective of its own, it fails to constitute a real class, becoming instead atomized. Antônio das Mortes has the bad

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conscience Marx talks about. And this bad conscience is no other than Glauber Rocha’s own, or mine, or that of us all …. It seems to me that this is why Antônio das Mortes has such a seductive power, and this is why he is so resistant to interpretation. To interpret Antônio is to analyze ourselves (Bernardet 2007: 99).

In 1969, Antônio das Mortes reappears as the title role of Antônio das Mortes, which won the best director award in Cannes for Glauber Rocha and became his greatest success and most influential film abroad. In this film, the middle-class ethical dilemma finds expression in the figure of a regretful Antônio das Mortes, who, after having killed any number of cangaceiros (north-eastern outlaws) and messianic leaders, as seen in Black God, White Devil, returns to face a cangaceiro straggler, but falls for a saintly woman and eventually takes the side of the poor he had been hired to crush; more significantly, he symbolically exhorts the enlightened classes to take up arms, by throwing a gun into the hands of a school teacher. This situation resonated remarkably with events in Germany, then witnessing the ascension of the Red Army Faction (RAF) guerrilla movement, whose members were mainly recruited from the intellectual, progressive middle classes. As a result, citations of Antônio das Mortes proliferate in German cinema in the early 1970s, starting with Fassbinder’s The Niklashausen Journey (1970), in which a character called Antônio, sporting Antônio das Mortes’ long dark cape, wide-brimmed hat, flashy-colored scarf and rifle, is questioned by Fassbinder himself as to the role of the middle classes in the revolution. Though Fassbinder would never engage directly with the left-wing utopianism prevailing in his time, Rocha’s Antônio das Mortes inspired him to direct, in Elsaesser’s words, his “most explicit look at both the rhetoric and the sentiment behind radical activism and ultra-left militancy” with a film situated “on the contact points between peasant mysticism and agit-prop theatre, the cult of Virgin Mary and revolutionary messianism” (1996: 27–28). Elsaesser goes on to define The Niklashausen Journey as part of a batch of “anti-Heimat films,” including The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach (Volker Schlöndorff, 1970), Mathias Kneissl (Reinhard Hauff, 1970), Jaider, the Lonely Runner (Volker Vogeler, 1970), Servus Bavaria (Herbert Achternbusch, 1977) and, more relevant to my analysis, Werner Herzog’s Heart of Glass. Interestingly, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, the film which immediately follows Herzog’s contact with Brazilian production, and even more so Fitzcarraldo, have been called by Elsaesser, “Heimat films in the jungle” (King et al. 1993: 130). But it is Heart of Glass which is more revealing of this productive encounter and of Herzog’s focus shift towards questions of power, messianism, and the enactment of  trance with real characters and locations. This film has been condemned by those quite rightly worried about evidence of “an instrumentalism that would increasingly become more apparent both on- and off-screen” in Herzog’s films, as Rentschler put it (Corrigan 1986: 160). At issue here is the fact that Herzog allegedly hypnotized most of the cast in the film, something which Rentschler connects to

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that infamous heritage under discussion in Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler, the procession of fictional mesmerists … which presaged the ascent of totalitarian leadership over a spellbound nation. Weimar films in fact display a marked predilection for hypnosis and hypnoid states, suggesting an affinity between these phenomena and the gripping potential of the cinematic medium itself (Corrigan 1986: 160).

Clear though these relations might be, once again it is imperative to separate the director from his films in order to properly comprehend the latter. That the cast was under hypnosis is something that Herzog asserts or rather boasts about, but many members of the cast themselves would deny it, as did, for example, Stefan Güttler, who plays the important role of a glass industrialist. When pressed, Herzog himself acknowledges that several cast members were not hypnotized, including the remarkable actor Josef Bierbichler, who plays the main character Hias and precisely the one who, in the film, is endowed with visionary and prophetic powers, as well as the real-life glass-factory workers and others. Whoever is familiar with the constructedness of Herzog’s discourse about himself should at least cast some doubts on his actual power to hypnotize whoever it is, not to mention his intentions to hypnotize the audience with the film’s opening sequence focusing on the torrent of a waterfall, which is perfectly innocuous even to the most suggestible child. On the other hand, it is not uncommon that directors resort, through mere acting exercises, to emptying actors of their own personalities and even of their acting skills, so as to obtain from them a sort of mechanical delivery, as Ozu and Bresson, for example, have done. This is very much the kind of effect aimed for in Heart of Glass, with its paused, impersonal deliveries, as if actors were puppets or vehicles for someone else’s voice. As a result, it becomes a slow film, one which requires attention and intellectual engagement, and not at all the kind of cathartic identification elicited by popular action cinema. Its central character, Mühlhias (shortened to Hias in the film), is a legendary figure of a wandering prophet, who allegedly lived in the Bavarian forests in the late eighteenth century. In the film he prophesies the doom of a whole population living around a ruby-glass factory, whose formula has been lost with the death of the last keeper of its secret. The young industrialist, living alone with his demented father, also goes insane with the approaching end of his empire and tries through violent means to retrieve the lost formula. Herzog added an opening and ending to the original Achternbusch script, so as to enhance the emphasis on the character of Hias and his apocalyptical prophesies. This also gave him the opportunity to insert some of his typical authorial titles, following the thoroughly unrelated final episode of the men living on an isolated island, who doubt that the Earth is flat and venture into the sea: “It may have seemed like a sign of hope that the birds followed them out into the vastness of the sea.” Rentschler highlights Achternbusch’s discontent with these changes, through which Hias was removed from the film’s main action and reduced to walking around “in a coat taken from Orff ’s idea of

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peasant theatre” (Corrigan 1986: 163). It may be that Herzog was inspired by Orff, but what really strikes you about Hias’ coat is its similarity to Antônio das Mortes’ cape. In fact this Bavarian prophet is strongly reminiscent of Antônio das Mortes, as well as of other Rocha characters, not least the preacher Sebastião, in Black God, White Devil. Admittedly, the kind of religious discourse pervading both Heart of Glass and Black God, White Devil goes back to European medieval traditions, which results, for example, in the industrialist’s promise to “carry a millstone to Trier” if the ruby-glass formula is found, in Heart of Glass, mirroring the image of Manuel carrying a heavy boulder up the steps of the Holy Mount, in Black God, White Devil. As for Hias’ position as a distant observer of an imminent catastrophe, as if detached from the diegesis, this defines him as a character entirely in the league of Antônio das Mortes, even if the kind of distancing effects employed in Herzog’s narrative are not Brechtian in the same way that they are in Rocha and also Fassbinder. Just like Antônio das Mortes, Hias plays the role of the mediator within the master–slave dialectics of a class society, looking straight at the camera as if talking directly to the spectator. Placed outside his own prophecies of social doom, he conveys an external point of view akin to that of the filmmaker, as suggested by Bernardet apropos of Antônio das Mortes. It is, however, in the physical enactment of the trance—regardless whether through hypnosis or not, the actors are clearly prey to a trance-like state—of a whole population gone insane under the rule of a mad tyrant that Heart of Glass most resembles Rocha’s works. The demented industrialist’s father, played by Wilhelm Friedrich, who refuses to leave his armchair

Figure 2.3 The industrialist’s father, who refuses to leave his armchair in Heart of Glass (1976). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Werner Herzog/Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

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(Figure 2.3), even resembles physically the celebrated actor Jofre Soares, the blind landowner who has also lost his wits in Antônio das Mortes. One must also note that through some kind of uncanny coincidence Rocha and Herzog were resorting to very similar motifs already at a time when they could not possibly have known of one another’s work.3 Incomprehensible singing through voice distortion as seen in the scenes with the pianist and drummer or the religious procession in Fata Morgana, or the girlish voice screaming a song in the opening of Even Dwarfs, find a striking parallel with the high-pitch female voices singing an African-Brazilian, trance-inducing repetitive religious motif in the opening of Entranced Earth. Antônio das Mortes is littered with such endlessly repetitive, often irritating religious singing, which is mostly incomprehensible even for those who understand Portuguese. That all this maddening noise is not at all a studio trick, but direct recording of local singing traditions among the inhabitants of Milagres where the film is set, produces the disturbing sense of a land in actual trance. The reality of this trance is reinforced, both in Herzog and Rocha, by the circular movement performed by characters, vehicles and animals, and, in Rocha’s case, also by the camera, conveying the sense that not only those in the film, but also those making it are gyrating and out of control. For Herzog as much as for Rocha, trance is that in-between, transitory state in which ideal touches material world, physics unites with metaphysics and art with the real. The extraordinary beauty of Heart of Glass clearly demonstrates how characters, colors, lighting, and landscapes of classical and romantic paintings, by Georges de la Tour, Vermeer, Adolf von Menzel and, as always in Herzog, Caspar David Friedrich, spring to life in quasi-documentary images of Bavaria, its typical demographics, its dialect, and a real, ancient glass factory. In Antônio das Mortes, it is the popular iconography which becomes animate in the north-eastern sertão, including its kitschy colors and materials, such as the plastic flowers carried by the landowner’s wife, her purple fluffy long gown, and the scene of Saint George killing the dragon with his spear, a picture which decorates many Brazilian homes and interestingly resonates with pop-art compositions. Trance thus situates both Heart of Glass and Antônio das Mortes on the borderline of cinema and other arts, and, more importantly, favoring allegory, it allows for a historical connection between past and present events, facts and beliefs, religion and politics. The uses of trance, on the other hand, are also where Rocha’s and Herzog’s aims diverge radically. The former’s interest is to show how religious and other irrational impulses inflect politics and add complexity to political cinema; conversely, in Herzog, the emphasis is placed precisely on these inexplicable, irrational phenomena, to the detriment of politics. Rocha is always concerned with realism, be it related to the phenomenological real or the reality of the medium, both of which result from an ethical-political stance. Conversely, Herzog’s project is to change fiction into reality, one which brings him to grips with representation and ultimately to the opposite of medium realism, that is, narrative realism. One could say that it is the trance-inducing surplus of reality, as found in Cinema Novo,

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minus its political content, which introduced a watershed into Herzog’s work, offering him fodder for his first serious venture into commercial narrative cinema, Aguirre, the Wrath of God.

Presentational and Representational Real Aguirre constitutes Herzog’s most accomplished film within his Kinski-starred Latin American trilogy, and the one which actually lends some indexical resonance to its entirely representational follow-ups, Fitzcarraldo and Cobra Verde. Herzog is straightforward about his commercial intentions, when conceiving of Aguirre: In a way, by making Aguirre I set out to create something of a commercial film ... . The film was always intended for the general public and not the strictly art-house crowd. After looking at my previous films, it was quite clear that I had been serving only the niche market, and with Aguirre I made a conscious effort to reach a wider audience. If I could have been absolutely guaranteed an audience for the film I would have made it differently, probably rougher and less genre-orientated (Cronin 2002: 76).

Indeed, Aguirre achieved an international box-office response as no Cinema Novo films had ever done, partly thanks to the elements of period and adventure genres embedded in its linear narrative. But also, of course, thanks to the trendiness of the subject and approach. The area of Machu Picchu, in Peru, where the film is partly set, was a favorite destination in those days among youths in search of some magical esotericism—a fact which became the butt of a joke in Fassbinder’s Rio das Mortes (1971). Aguirre’s esoteric overtones are reinforced by the New Age music of Popol Vuh as applied to the hazy images of the Andes at the film’s opening and other scenes. As usual, Herzog attributes the conception of Aguirre almost entirely to his own imagination, except for the basic historical facts, and it is certainly mere coincidence that the first script to Rocha’s Black God, White Devil was called The Wrath of God. However, the fact that El Dorado is the allegorical land of Entranced Earth is not. Herzog was clearly impressed with the monumentality with which El Dorado is portrayed in Rocha’s film and the weight of reality the myth had acquired thanks to the real locations. This can be seen in the majestic opening of both films: in Entranced Earth, an aerial shot over the sea leads to pristine mountains covered with thick forest as far as the eye can see, accompanied by trance-inducing candomblé chanting.4 In Aguirre, the aerial shots of the Andes with the Popol Vuh hypnotic background music produce a similarly monumental effect. Characters in both settings are reduced to minuscule dimensions, which justifies their later delusionary, quixotic behavior towards such crushing environments. The protagonist’s tragic pathos, in

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Entranced Earth, is enhanced with the help of the operas O Guarani, by Carlos Gomes (one which Herzog directed in the Manaus Opera House years later), and Othello, by Verdi, as well as by Villa-Lobos’ grandiose Bachianas. The use of Verdi is particularly significant as far as Herzog is concerned, as it makes the background sound to a series of scenes shot in the imposing interior of Rio’s Opera House, a feature which affects Aguirre and even more so Fitzcarraldo, whose very subject is the erection of an opera house in the jungle, with several scenes shot inside the Manaus Opera House. The main purpose, in Aguirre, was to abolish the divide between representational and real worlds, and for this reason the entire crew and cast were submitted to the torments of location shooting in the Andes and the Amazon jungle and rivers. A sense of reality of events which supposedly happened centuries ago is achieved by characters clad from head to foot in inadequate garments and equipment, dragging with them large animals and trunks entirely unfit for locomotion in those cliffs covered with thick forest. As always, Herzog does not fail to express his intentions through explanatory lines placed on characters’ lips, in the manner of authorial interferences, and thus Aguirre duly announces that “We will stage history like others stage plays.” This phrase actually finds a better match in Entranced Earth, in which the history of Brazil’s discovery is allegorically staged on a beach with the presence of the Portuguese court representative and an Indian, both dressed in carnivalesque outfits, a priest in his cassock, and the country’s present-day tyrant Porfírio Díaz in a business suit. This follows the Brazilian carnival tradition of historical allegories combining different temporal layers, an arrangement which comes to a head with Diaz’s coronation on the steps of his palace at the end of the film. One would not fail, moreover, to note the resemblance of the priest in Entranced Earth (played by Jofre Soares, whose performance of the landowner in Antônio das Mortes had already echoed in Heart of Glass) with monk Carvajal, both of whom are incidentally reminiscent of the priest performed by Antonin Artaud in The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928). The actual trump of Aguirre, however, lies in its prevailing aesthetic of silence, one which reflects the lack of encoded language and rational thought to account for nature’s indifference. Aguirre’s aesthetic of silence is in fact the utmost expression of what Carroll has referred to as “presence,” apropos of Herzog, that is: A quality of experience wherein the percipient encounters a phenomenon that— because it is not readily assimilable via language or the routines of instrumental reason—evokes a feeling of strangeness or alien-ness such that, rather than prompting the percipient to discount the phenomenon as an hallucination, instills a sense of utter and inexplicable thereness of the object of attention (Carroll 1998: 285).

Kinski in particular benefits from the very few lines he is given, which preserves him from the facile hysterics he too often slips into in both Fitzcarraldo and Cobra Verde. Once again the enlightening parallel here is Rocha, whose films offer blank faces in silence as a counterpoint to trance and a mirror of nature’s inertia vis-à-vis the hero’s plights. In Rocha, silence is heavily gendered: it is often women in silence who watch expressionless their power-obsessed male partners sink into an abyss of

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religious and/or political verbosity. Examples are Rosa and Dadá in the face of delirious Corisco and Manuel, in Black God, White Devil; Sílvia mutely observing Paulo Martins’ despair as he wavers between the populist and the dictatorial leaders, in Entranced Earth; Dona Santa impassively watching Antônio das Mortes’ class dilemma, in Antônio das Mortes; and, in the same film, the blind landowner’s wife untouched by her husband’s convulsive disintegration. Women, whenever present, are also often mute spectators in Aguirre, pointed examples being Aguirre’s daughter and Ursúa’s wife, but silence also marks the behavior of the Indian, the monk Carvajal, and other characters turned indifferent to the promises of El Dorado. Characters increasingly lapse into a stasis of blank faces looking straight at the camera, as Aguirre’s expedition is caught in endless vicious circles which finally bring his raft to a standstill. Silence relates to, but does not necessarily confirm, Deleuze’s statement that “Herzog is the most metaphysical of film directors,” mentioned at the opening of this chapter. In his brief discussion of Herzog’s auteurist motifs in Cinema 1: Movement-Image, which does not go down to any kind of formal analysis, Deleuze identifies, on the basis of the recurrent figures of dwarfs and giants, a metaphysics which supplies all action with a double dimension. For example, Aguirre’s heroic act of confronting the rapids corresponds, on one level, to the conquest of El Dorado, but also, on another level, to his ambition to become the world’s greatest traitor, by betraying his peers, the king, and ultimately god (Deleuze 2005: 189). As form, however, this metaphysics is itself “betrayed” by the lack of depth not only of the natural surroundings, but also of characters reduced to the wordless catalepsy that precedes certain death. They are the negation of any possibility of transcendence, caught as they are in a permanent state of Spinozian immanence as defined elsewhere by the same Deleuze as “a Life,” which is no longer dependent on a Being or submitted to an Act: This indefinite life does not itself have moments, close as they may be to one another, but only between-times, between-moments; it doesn’t just come about or come after, but offers the immensity of an empty time where one sees the event yet to come and already happened, in the absolute of an immediate consciousness (2004: 179).

An example of immanence privileged by Deleuze is that of the character of a scoundrel in a Dickens novel, who is in a coma, that is, not quite alive, but also not yet dead; his occasional signs of life awaken general sympathy, but once he appears to be actually reviving such sympathy reverts back to repulsion. This suspension of life between moments, according to Deleuze, produces a blissful state of neutrality beyond good and evil, which is in every respect comparable to the pure presentational physicality of the empty silence found in Aguirre. This is also where Herzog’s cinema comes closest to Cinema Novo’s aesthetic of trance, as seen in the post-coup production of Guerra, Diegues, and most of all Rocha, one deriving from a political crisis which affects subjective reasoning.

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Presentational immanence is precisely what is lacking in Herzog’s two subsequent Latin American instalments, Fitzcarraldo and Cobra Verde. These could indeed be seen as the representation for commercial purposes of the presentational realism Herzog had developed in Aguirre by cleverly resorting to Cinema Novo’s aesthetic innovations and monumental locations. The disasters that plagued the making of Fitzcarraldo are not at all the result of nature’s conspiracy against the director’s artistic genius, but of a flawed project attempting to bring together a number of disjointed threads: the story of an Irish man who carried the parts of a ship over land between two Amazon tributaries; Herzog’s fascination with the dolmens and menhirs of Carnac; his interest in opera; his eagerness to enter the celebrity world by casting the likes of Jason Robards, Mick Jagger, and Claudia Cardinale (the former two abandoning the project halfway through the shoot); plus a potpourri of decontextualized Cinema Novo citations, Nascimento, Lewgoy, and Otelo, mentioned above, being just a few of them. Herzog’s undisguised intention to outdo Hollywood by staging a sort of African Queen ( John Huston, 1951) in the real jungle, however, only showed how resistant his cinematic conception remains to sutured narrative representation. Cobra Verde is even more inclusive in its overarching ambition, with no better results. Here, in fact, Herzog attempts to cover Cinema Novo’s contribution from the very beginning to its latest developments. Black God, White Devil lends it the blind cordel singer, the character of the hinterland bandit (Cobra Verde is in fact the personification of the “Blond Devil,” as the cangaceiro Corisco, a protagonist in Black God, White Devil, was called in real life), the desert littered with animal carcasses, the Iberian-style towns revolving around a Catholic church. One can even detect some touches of Sebastião Salgado’s photographs in the scenes shot in the goldmines of Serra Pelada. But it is actually from Diegues and his much later erotic comedy, set in the slavery period, Xica da Silva (1976), a far cry from his Cinema Novo days, that Herzog borrows the popular ingredients of slave period drama that prevail in the film. This includes the unconvincing and rather sexist image of a black queen willfully delivering herself through an erotic dance to the utterly blond Kinski-Cobra Verde, very much in the manner of Zezé Motta in the title role of Diegues’ soft-porn blockbuster. Always trying to outdo his models, Herzog multiplies the number of black slaves offering their bodies to the blond male by creating an entire army of naked female youths in Africa who dance and sing to the bandit. Needless to say, despite the location shooting which again subjected an international and voluminous cast to all sorts of unnecessary suffering, all this failed to lend any sense of realism to the film, least of all an obviously exhausted Kinski, at that point unable to do much more than scream and grimace even when rehearsing his own performances in spaghetti westerns. In the land of god and the devil, it is Aguirre’s aesthetic of silence which conveys the pure, inarticulate bliss of cinematic reality, one which is typical of a New Wave self-questioning ethics of power drawing on sheer physicality.

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Notes 1

This chapter is a heavily edited extract of a much longer chapter on Herzog, published in Nagib (2011), reproduced here by kind permission of Continuum International Publishing. I thank Brad Prager for his many useful suggestions to my editing work. 2 For further comparisons between Even Dwarfs and Buñuel’s films (The Exterminating Angel, An Andalusian Dog [1929], and Belle de Jour [1967]), see Nagib (1991: 47ff ). Emmanuel Carrère (1982: 20) also draws comparisons with Land without Bread (1933). 3 In an interview with me Herzog stated that he was a friend of Rocha’s and that once they spent a period in the house of a common friend in Berkeley (Nagib 1991: 253), but I was unable to establish exactly when this happened. Rocha was in the United States, including Los Angeles, in 1964, showing The Turning Wind (1962) and Black God, White Devil. Rocha did not spend long periods in the United States again before the 1970s. I am not aware of him ever mentioning Herzog in his abundant writings, though other Germans, such as Fleischmann and Straub, are constantly referred to. 4 Candomblé: Afro-Brazilian religion, whose rituals are aimed at inducing trance and spiritualist communication with deities called orixás (orishas).

Works Cited Bazin, André: The Cinema of Cruelty: From Buñuel to Hitchcock (New York: Seaver Books, 1982). Bernardet, Jean-Claude: Brasil em tempo de cinema: ensaio sobre o cinema brasileiro de 1958 a 1966 (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2007). Carrère, Emmanuel: Werner Herzog (Paris: Edillig, 1982). Carroll, Noël: Interpreting the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Corrigan, Timothy: New German Film: The Displaced Image (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983). Corrigan, Timothy, ed.: The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History (New York: Methuen, 1986). Cronin, Paul, ed.: Herzog on Herzog (London: Faber & Faber, 2002). Deleuze, Gilles: “Immanence: A Life,” The Postmodernism Reader: Foundational Texts, ed. Michael Drolet (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 178–180. Deleuze, Gilles: Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Continuum, 2005). Elsaesser, Thomas: Fassbinder’s Germany: History, Identity, Subject (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996). Evans, Peter William: The Films of Luis Buñuel: Subjectivity and Desire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Gillain, Anne: François Truffaut: Le Secret perdu (Paris: Hatier, 1991). Greenberg, Alan: Heart of Glass (Munich: Skellig, 1976). Jeong, Seung-Hoon and Andrew, Dudley: “Grizzly Ghost: Herzog, Bazin and the Cinematic Animal,” Screen 49:1 (Spring 2008): 1–12. King, John, López, Ana M., and Alvarado, Manuel, eds.: Mediating Two Worlds: Cinematic Encounters in the Americas (London: BFI, 1993).

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Nagib, Lúcia: Werner Herzog: o cinema como realidade (São Paulo: Estação Liberdade, 1991). Nagib, Lúcia: World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (New York: Continuum, 2011). Nichols, Bill: Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). Pflaum, Hans Günther: “Interview,” Werner Herzog, Reihe Film 22, ed. Hans Günther Pflaum, Hans Helmut Prinzler, Jürgen Theobaldy, and Kraft Wetzel (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1979). Prager, Brad: The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (London: Wallflower Press, 2007). Rancière, Jacques: Film Fables (Oxford: Berg, 2006). Rocha, Glauber: “An Esthetic of Hunger,” Brazilian Cinema, ed. Robert Stam and Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 69–71. Xavier, Ismail: Allegories of Underdevelopment: Aesthetics and Politics in Modern Brazilian Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

Additional Films Cited Achternbusch, Herbert: Servus Bavaria (1977) Buñuel, Louis: An Andalusian Dog (1929) Buñuel, Louis: Land without Bread (1933) Buñuel, Louis: The Forgotten Ones (1950) Buñuel, Louis: The Exterminating Angel (1962) Buñuel, Louis: Belle de Jour (1967) de Andrade, Joaquim Pedro: Macunaíma (1969) Diegues, Carlos: Ganga Zumba (1963) Diegues, Carlos: Xica da Silva (1976) dos Santos, Nelson Pereira: Barren Lives (1963) dos Santos, Nelson Pereira: Hunger for Love (1965) Dreyer, Carl Theodor: The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) Fassbinder, Rainer Werner: The Niklashausen Journey (1970) Fassbinder, Rainer Werner: Rio das Mortes (1971). Guerra, Ruy: The Guns (1964) Guerra, Ruy: The Gods and the Dead (1970) Hauff, Reinhard: Mathias Kneissl (1970) Huston, John: African Queen (1951) Keusch, Erwin and Weisenborn, Christian: I Am My Films (1979) Rocha, Glauber: The Turning Wind (1962) Rocha, Glauber: Black God, White Devil (1964) Rocha, Glauber: Entranced Earth (1967) Rocha, Glauber: Antônio das Mortes (1969) Schlöndorff, Volker: The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach (1970) Truffaut, François: The 400 Blows (1959) Vogeler, Volker: Jaider, the Lonely Runner (1970) Vigo, Jean: Zero for Conduct (1933)

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The Pedestrian Ecstasies of Werner Herzog On Experience, Intelligence, and the Essayistic Timothy Corrigan

to lose our importunate, tormenting, ever lasting personal identity in nature … and begin to be objects of curiosity and wonder even to ourselves William Hazlitt, “On Going a Journey” (2004: 77) Why travel, I would say, if not to be in touch with the ordinary in non-ordinary ways; to feel and think ordinarily while experiencing what can later become the extra-ordinary in an ordinary frame. Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Altérité: The D-Image Effect” (2004: 195) I originally became a fan of Werner Herzog’s films as part of my interest in the internationalization of the New German Cinema in the 1970s. Uneasily grouped with filmmakers like Wim Wenders, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Helke Sanders, and many other remarkable directors from Germany, I—like many filmgoers and scholars at that time—responded to Herzog’s films and this latest new wave as part of a continual reworking and investigation of postwar narrative cinema, and this German instance of that reworking, through its many different strategies, described explicit or implicit engagements with historical narratives of lost fathers, displaced homes, political traumas, and illusory discontinuities and continuities. Whether it was the death of Fassbinder in 1982, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, or simply the commercial whims of art cinemas, the so-called New German Cinema clearly lost its supposed coherence and momentum (as a familial label at least) in the last two decades, but with that dispersal has come, for me and others I believe, a deeper appreciation of the variety of cinematic practices and perspectives A Companion to Werner Herzog, First Edition. Edited by Brad Prager. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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outside that earlier new wave, its nationalistic image, and its predominantly narrative focus. With Herzog’s cinema especially, the last two decades have made clear that his cinema has always offered perspectives besides those identified with the New German Cinema and its alternative narratives. Here I wish to look at a Herzog cinema of a different kind. Here I wish to consider Herzog’s cinema as not a visionary cinema but as a cinema of ideas. At this moment in history more than thirty years after Herzog’s international arrival I want to consider his so-called documentaries as part of a tradition of essay films, a practice that represents, I believe, through the course of the last twenty years, the most important shift in contemporary film practice. In this context, the travels of Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1998) is one of Herzog’s most complex excursive essays, following the journey of the child Dieter Dengler as he sets out from the ruins of Dresden overwhelmed and inspired by massive U.S. bombers that launch him as a flyer into the space of the Vietnam War. In the end, his flight comes crashing to earth when, after being shot down in 1966, he escaped from a prison in Laos only to become a desperate walker through jungle mazes. In Herzog’s film, Dieter theatrically reenacts his travel on foot, which he narrates and Herzog comments upon in complimentary flat tones, so that the heroics and horror of this travelogue become a strangely pedestrian experience. He recounts how during his escape his and his companion Dwayne’s bare feet were “cut to shreds” as they alternated the use of one sole of a tennis shoe. Eventually these feet become “white stumps” and themselves unrecognizably human shapes covered with blood, mud, and leeches. Visually for the final part of this recitation Dieter sits stationary before the static and flat background of the landscape that had transformed him from a flyer into a walker. The threat of death, identified with an insert of a rather meek bear, in an uncanny anticipation of Grizzly Man (2005), is the physical and metaphysical sign that deflates a transcendent yearning and vision into the mundane and everyday, signaled through his rescue with an “SOS” sign constructed from the debris of a parachute. Yet, even then, his redemption becomes “just a mirage” compared to visceral intensity of his escape, and the film concludes (before a funeral epilogue) with Dieter’s visual ramble through a “heaven for pilots”: a vast redundancy of grounded flights and planes, a recollection of repeated airplane landings that open Fata Morgana (1969) and a stunning image of the inevitable grounding of vision and desire in its harsh encounters with the geography of the world.

The Essay Film The precedents for the essay film extend back through 400 years of the literary essay, moving at least from Montaigne to Samuel Johnson and William Hazlitt to James Baldwin and Christa Wolf, with each of these distinctive voices representing different phases within the vast historical and cultural evolution of the essay.

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Through these many incarnations, the essay has been consistently characterized as some version of “personal expression,” aligning this practice primarily with its essentially romantic formulation as a “personal essay.” Far more than what seems self-evident here, this connection between the essay and personal expression opens, for me, the more complicated, dynamic, and often subversive qualities of the essay. Essayistic practices have been most innovative and suggestive, in short, in how they have troubled and complicated that very notion of expressivity and its relation to experience, that other cornerstone of the essay. If both verbal and visual expression can commonly suggest the articulation or projection of an interior self into an exterior world, essayistic expressivity describes, more exactly I think, a subjection of an instrumental or expressive self to a public domain as a form of experience that continually tests the limits and capacities of that self within the world. Experience becomes the lynchpin in this activity with all the density and dynamics suggested by Miriam Hansen’s reformulation of Oscar Negt and Alexander Kluge: for her “experience is that which mediates individual perception with social meaning, conscious with unconscious processes, loss of self with self-reflexivity; experience as the capacity to see connections and relations … ; experience as the matrix of conflicting temporalities, of memory and hope, including the historical loss of these dimensions” (1991: 12–13). Within this framework, we find in the best of essays the difficult, often highly complex—and sometimes seemingly impossible— figure of the self or subjectivity thinking in and through a public domain, in all its historical, social, and cultural particulars. These points have been variously, differently, and certainly more fully engaged and articulated by the many twentieth-century champions of the essay, such as Georg Lukács and his notion of the essay as “judgment without verdict” (1974: 18) or Robert Musil in his 1930 essayistic novel, The Man Without Qualities, where the essay becomes “the unique and unalterable form assumed by a man’s inner life in a decisive thought” (1995: 273).1 Finally there is T. W. Adorno’s “The Essay as Form,” conceivably the most rigorous and theoretically sustained argument about the essay as “the reciprocal interaction of concepts in the process of intellectual experience” through which “the thinker does not actually think but rather makes himself into an arena for intellectual experience, without unraveling it” (1991: 13). Indeed, while these descriptions and definitions refer to the literary essay, they apply equally to non-literary forms of the essay, such as the photo-essay and the essay film, although both significantly begin to recreate the public domain so central to the essayistic as increasingly defined by the imagistic and, more specifically, the technological image.2 For Herzog’s essay films specifically, Adorno’s observation could be a motto: The essay “honors nature by confirming that it no longer exists for human beings” (1991: 11). The defining years for the essay film is the turbulent period of 1940–45, when, amidst the devastations of World War II, film culture on many fronts struggles with the new versions of experiential realism and how they might be the grounds for more complex reflections and spectatorial activity—distinctly different from classical contemporary modes of identification or cognition.3

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As  Paul Arthur has noted, it was only “after the Holocaust—our era’s litmus test for the role of individual testimony in collective trauma—that essay films acquire a distinct aesthetic outline and moral purpose” (2005: 61). In 1940 experimental filmmaker Hans Richter wrote a commentary in which he coins an innovative genre called “The Film Essay,” a new practice which he claims evolved out of the documentary tradition but which, instead of presenting what he calls “beautiful vistas,” would aim “to find a representation for intellectual content,” “to find images for mental concepts,” “striving to make visible the invisible world of concepts, thoughts, and ideas,” so that viewers would become “involved intellectually and emotionally” (1992: 195–196). Very much related, André Malraux delivers at about the same time his Esquisse d’une psychologie du cinéma arguing for “the possibility of expression in the cinema” (1946: 14). In 1948, in his essay “The Birth of the New Avant-Garde: The Caméra-Stylo,” Alexandre Astruc announces the foundational terms for the essay film and the French New Wave: To come to the point: the cinema is quite simply becoming a means of expression, just as all the other arts have been before it . . . After having been successively a fairground attraction, an amusement analogous to boulevard theatre, or the means of preserving the images of an era, it is gradually becoming a language. By language, I mean a form in which and by which an artist can express his thoughts, however abstract they may be, or translate his obsessions exactly as he does in the contemporary essay or novel. This is why I would like to call this new age of cinema the age of the camera-stylo (camera pen). This metaphor has a very precise sense. By it I mean that the cinema will gradually break free from the tyranny of what is visual, from the image for its own sake, from the immediate and concrete demands of the narrative, to become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language…. It can tackle any subject, any genre. The most philosophical meditations on human production, psychology, ideas, and passions lie within its province. I will even go so far as to say that contemporary ideas and philosophies of life are such that only the cinema can do justice to them. Maurice Nadeau wrote in an article in the newspaper Combat: “If Descartes lived today, he would write novels.” With all due respect to Nadeau, a Descartes of today would already have shut himself up in his bedroom with a 16 mm camera and some film, and would be writing his philosophy on film: for his Discours de la Méthode [sic] would today be of such a kind that only the cinema could express it satisfactorily (1999: 159).

These claims would immediately become technologically viable with the arrival of portable lightweight camera technology, introduced as the Arriflex system in Germany in 1936 and as the Éclair 35 mm Cameflex in France in 1947. More than coincidentally, these different “camera-stylos” would also feature reflex viewing systems linking the pragmatics of filmmaking with the conceptual reflexivity of the emerging essay film and its “idea of the cinema expressing ideas” (Astruc 1999: 159).

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This relation between mobile technology, economics, and the essayistic underlines the distinct historical forces that come into play during these formative years and suggests a larger point that remains an undercurrent throughout the longer future of the essay film: That the power of essay may be significantly tied to an representational agency that emphasizes its ephemerality rather than permanency, which in turn may illuminate its notable prominence and success today. As with the early history of the literary essay and its connection with new forms of production and distribution, lightweight camera technologies of the postwar years through the 1960s and the port-a-pack and videotape revolution after 1968 (and later the Internet and digital convergences of today) significantly encourage and underpin the active subjectivity and public mobility of the essay film that begin with the claims and practices of the essayistic in the 1940s. The particularity and paradoxically public intimacy of address and reception has followed the essay through eighteenth-century coffee houses and pamphlets and nineteenth-century lecture halls and journals to the film festivals and college art cinemas that define the essay film in the postwar years to the specialized TV distribution of Germany’s ZDF, central Europe’s Canal+, Britain’s Channel 4, and other cable and TV venues. Related are the changing economic demands of documentary filmmaking where particularly in recent years the costs of archival footage, music, and other copyrighted materials has, at least, encouraged more personal perspectives and materials that require considerably less financial resources. That those cinematic foundations in the 1940s and 1950s are originally so largely French (as the theoretical foundations of Benjamin, Adorno, and others are largely German) should help explain the prominent place of the French New Wave (and later the New German Cinema) in exploring the essay film from 1950 through the 1970s. Within the historical context of postwar French cinema, moreover, several prominent historical and critical touchstones—regarding auteurism, cinéma vérité, and the literary heritage of the French New Wave—emerge, which not only inform French films of this period but also carry over into the extended global and contemporary practices of the essay film.4 In addition to Astruc’s writings, several specific films, documents, and trends signal and support this relationship and highlight broader practical and conceptual shifts, as this practice evolves through the 1950s into the 1960s, creating a historical and cultural context in which, by the  mid-1950s, the term essai cinémathographique is in frequent use in France.5 In these defining years, these possibilities become articulated specifically through the potential of the “short film” to provide a freedom from the restriction of the authority invested in the expressivity of auteurism and the documentary truth of cinéma vérité, as well as the organizational principles of film narrative, all remade as a conceptual “sketch” capable of releasing a distinctive subjectivity as a public thinking. More exactly, a specific group of films and their contemporaneous or subsequent critical responses to them become flashpoints in the formation and recognition of essayistic practice during this period: Alain Resnais’ 1948 short film Van Gogh, Jacques Rivette’s 1955 essay for the Cahiers du cinéma, “Letter on

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Rossellini” (1985), and its characterization of Paisà (1946), Europa ’51 (1952), and Germany, Year Zero (1948) and especially the Viaggio in Italia (Journey to Italy, 1953) as seminal essay films, and Georges Franju’s Le Sang des bêtes (Blood of the Beasts, 1948) and especially his Hotel des Invalides (1951), as seen by Noel Burch (1981) as prototypes for an essay cinema of ideas. Appearing the same year as Astruc’s proclamation of a new kind of cinema of ideas, Resnais’ Van Gogh is serendipitously emblematic of a short essay film that works both as a portrait and a critical commentary, a film less about painting than about the grounds for a cinematic expression that engages, questions, and thinks a painterly style while evading narrative formulas and conventional documentary strategies. Bazin would rightfully insist that this film has little to do with popularizing a painting and a painter but rather it announces a particular “aesthetic biology” that adapts the painting as a cinematic textuality, recreating “not the subject of the painting but the painting itself ” as a textual “refraction” (2005: 142). Godard would go even farther to claim for it an inventiveness and historical importance that points to a new filmic practice: “If the short film hadn’t existed, Alain Resnais surely would have invented it … from the blind, trembling pans of ‘Van Gogh’ to the majestic traveling shots of ‘Styrene’ what in effect do we see? A survey of the possibilities of cinematic technique, but such a demanding one, that it finishes by surpassing itself, in such a way that the modern young French cinema could not have existed without it. For Alain Resnais more than anyone else gives the impression that he completely started over at zero” (Monaco 1979: 18). By 1953 this filming degree zero would produce the “Group of Thirty,” a body of filmmakers that would include Resnais, Chris Marker, Agnés Varda, and Astruc, and which would revitalize the short film as the grounds for developing essayistic practices. As François Porcile notes, the short film in this postwar context describes an incipient practice which instead of suggesting juvenilia describes an exploratory energy that liberates it as a kind of testing of both expression and address: “Next to the novel and other extensive works, there is the poem, the short story or the essay, which often plays the role of the hothouse; it has the function of revitalizing a field with fresh blood. The short film has the same role. Its death will also be the death of film, since an art that ceases to change is a dead art” (1965: 19).6 At this point in history, the short film offers especially a form expression whose concision necessarily puts that expression under material pressure as a fragmentary testing and provisional engagement with a subject whose incompleteness insists it is an artistic and intellectual activity in process. Reconfiguring the implications of the short film in April 1955, Jacques Rivette’s “Letter on Rossellini” identifies a trend that also can define longer films as cinematic drafts or sketches. In these films, he argues, “the indefatigable eye of the camera invariably assumes the role of the pencil, a temporal sketch is perpetuated before our eyes” (1985: 194),7 and specifically in Rossellini’s Paisà, Europa ’51, and Germany, Year Zero, there is “the common sense of the draft … For there is no

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doubt that these hurried films, improvised out of very slender means and filmed in a turmoil that is often apparent from the images, contain the only real portrait of our times; and these times are a draft too. How could one fail suddenly to recognize, quintessentially sketched, ill-composed, incomplete, the semblance of our daily existence?” (1985: 195). For these films and most recognizably for Rivette’s Viaggio in Italia, the model “is the essays of Montaigne,” and “Viaggio in Italia … with absolute lucidity, at least offers the cinema, hitherto condemned to narrative the possibility of the essay” (1985: 199). “For over fifty years now,” Rivette continues, “the essay has been the very language of modern art; it is freedom, concern, exploration, spontaneity; it has gradually—Gide, Proust, Valery, Chardonne, Audiberti—buried the novel beneath it; since Manet and Degas it has reigned over painting, and gives it its impassioned manner, the sense of pursuit and proximity.” For Rivette, in these films “a film-maker dares to talk about himself without restraint; it is true that Rossellini’s films have more and more obviously become amateur films; home movies” (1985: 196). Here “home movie,” “amateur,” “pursuit,” and “proximity” assume, I’d argue, those particularly positive values associated with an essayistic foregrounding and dramatization of the personal, a transitional, barely authorized, and relatively formless shape of the personal subjectivity, the replacement of a teleological organization with an activity defined by the object itself, and a productively distorting overlapping of subject and object. The “sketch” as a historical prototype and marker of the essayistic thus becomes the vehicle for a public subjectivity in the process of thinking or what Noel Burch would later describe as the intelligent mediation of conflicting ideas. In his Theory of Film Practice and its concluding discussion of nonfictional filmmaking, Burch describes two contemporary models as the film essay and the ritual film. For the former, he identifies Georges Franju’s Le Sang des bêtes and especially his Hôtel des Invalides as breakthrough films. These “active” documentaries “are no longer documentaries in [an] objective sense, their entire purpose being to set forth thesis and antithesis through the very texture of the film. These two films of Franju are meditations, and their subjects a conflict of ideas … Therein lies the tremendous originality of these two films, which were to cause nonfiction film production to take an entirely new direction” (1981: 159). For Burch in the late 1960s, Franju becomes “the only cinematographer to have successfully created from pre-existing material films that are truly essays,” and his heritage becomes especially visible in Godard’s essay films of that period, such as Vivre Sa Vie (1962) and Masculin-Feminin (1966) where an “element of intellectual spectacle” announces this a distinctive “cinema of ideas,” long ago dreamt of by such dissimilar filmmakers as Jacques Feyder and Eisenstein (1981: 162).8 As early as 1958 André Bazin would famously respond to the watershed appearance of Chris Marker’s Letter from Siberia (1957) by designating it an “essay film.” In December 1962, referring to his beginnings as a writer for the Cahiers, Godard, perhaps the most renowned and self-professed film essayist, would extend and to a certain extent canonize this alternative history of the art cinema by noting the

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bond between the critical essayists writing for Cahiers du Cinéma, Positif, and other French film journals in the postwar years: All of us at Cahier [du Cinéma] thought of ourselves as future directors. Frequenting cine-clubs and the Cinematheque was already a way of thinking cinema and thinking about cinema. Writing was already a way of making films, for the difference between writing and directing is quantitative not qualitative…. As a critic, I thought of myself as a film-maker. Today I still think of myself as a critic, and in a sense I am, more than ever before. Instead of writing criticism, I make a film, but the critical dimension is subsumed. I think of myself as an essayist, producing essays in novel form or novels in essay form: only instead of writing, I film them (1972: 171).

Explicitly drawing on the tradition of Montaigne and implicitly dramatizing with each film that central problem of thinking through our daily and public experience of signs, sounds, and images, Godard characterizes his work during this period as that of an experiential improviser and a thinking critic, which transports the logic of essayism to longer films such as Masculin-Feminin, 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (2 or 3 Things I Know about Her, 1967), and La Chinoise (1967). One glaring irony within this symbiotic relationship between the French New Wave and essayism is—in a way that is absolutely pertinent to evaluations of Herzog—that the latter works expressly to trouble and often undermine the coherency of what is commonly thought the hallmark of that new wave: auteurism. As the essay film comes more clearly into historical view, one of its most distinguishing features—especially visible from Godard’s films of the 1960s to Alexander Kluge’s films of the 1980s and 1990s—is the foregrounding of its literary heritage in the material performance of language as part of an encounter with the dominance of a public culture of visual technology. While inheriting from the literary essay a critical encounter between subjectivity and a public history, the essay film (and its relative the photo essay) adds a key third dimension to the evolution of the essay: the foregrounding of language across and through the moving image as part of the product and process of thinking and conceptualization through film. This is where and why Gilles Deleuze becomes, I believe, one of the few to suggest incisively a theoretical basis for postwar cinema that does service and justice to the practice of the essay film. Running counter to models of both classical film narrative and avant-garde cinema, the essay film swerves from the naturalization processes of both documentary realism and narrative fiction, in redefining models of both expressivity and receptivity in the cinema. Or, in Deleuze’s brashly suggestive phrase: “‘Give me a brain’ would be the other figure of modern cinema. This is an intellectual cinema, as distinct from a physical cinema” (1989: 204). I am hardly the first to remark on the shift in documentary practices as they moved through versions of cinéma vérité to the sometimes extreme emphasis on subjectivity as the foundation for the contemporary documentary. With a more complex and subtle notion of the relation between subjectivity, experience, and thinking, notions of the essayistic and the essay film offer, however, a historical and theoretical depth

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to the so-called subjective documentary that is especially important in the case of Herzog’s films: Whereas the notion of a subjective documentary has commonly been the starting point for an accusation of neo-romanticism in Herzog’s documentaries, describing them in term of the essayistic reframes them as precisely about the limitations of subjectivity and the demands to rethink self hood in terms of a public sphere, which for Herzog is always aligned with the natural world.9

Herzog’s Essays To associate Herzog’s films with travelogues or, more specifically, excursive essays might seem reductive only if one does not recognize the experiential power of an essayistic encounter with the physical world and Herzog’s distinctive and regular recreation of its terms. Herzog toys even with the literary precedents of the essay with his Of Walking in Ice (1980), a somewhat off-centered but still literary travel memoir. Constructed from a journal kept from November 23 to December 14, 1974, this memoir describes Herzog’s journey on foot, from Munich to Paris, as a quest to visit the dying Lotte Eisner in Paris whom, according to Herzog’s foreword, “German cinema could not do without” (1980: 5). In the quest to link the lost history of German cinema with its contemporary renaissance, this emphatically private literary account articulates many of the structures and terms that would be among Herzog’s most significant contributions to his essayistic travelogues within New German Cinema. Travel here occurs against a background of visual, audio, and physical surfaces that function more as a spatial boundary between self and world than do the borders, villages, and countryside he crosses. Very quickly, the putative directional quest gives way to a kind of excursive wandering through spaces that anticipate those future cinematic metaphors of an icy glacier, a dessert, a jungle, and, most recently, a maze, and long before his anticlimactic meeting with Eisner in Paris, the intense loneliness of a spatial isolation begins to generate that central figure of the essayistic, “a dialogical rapport with myself ” (1980: 66). Out of this rapport emerges a voice through which the world turns poetic, allegorical, other worldly—describing, for instance, “a forest turned into pillars of salt, a forest with its mouth open wide” (1980: 31)—and Herzog himself begins to wonder if he “is still looking human” (1980: 23). The experience of travel becomes an encounter with the world as a “Yawning Black Void” (1980: 44) that seems to eradicate self, consciousness, and most importantly self-consciousness in a way that generates not knowledge of that world but a profoundly physical “knowledge coming from the soles” of his shoes (1980: 10). Here the traveling subject begins to “possess the thoughts of animals” (1980: 15). Or, as he projects an image on an acquaintance seen on the road, this road trip creates “thinking with such intensity that he metered his thoughts with vehement gestures, as if he were speaking” (1980: 26).

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Defining these experiences in Of Walking in Ice, as well as Herzog’s more cinematic travel essays, is one of the aphorisms from his 1999 “Minnesota Declaration”: “Tourism is sin, and travel on foot [a] virtue” with tourism associated with cinéma vérité filmmakers “who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts” (Cronin 2002: 301). Following on its eighteenth-century beginnings, touristic travel becomes travel through different versions of the picturesque where the traveler appropriated the world through images of it. Conversely travel on foot means, quite literally, subjecting the traveler to the world as a way of losing oneself viscerally, emotionally, and intellectually in an experiential space and time that entrances, over-takes, disorients, and dissolves that traveler. Often approaching a state where fatigue gives way to hallucinations, it implies a physical engagement with the world in which the movement of the body on the earth creates a kinetic movement of the mind, resulting in a consciousness not of the mind’s appropriative powers but of its always physically diminutive place on the surfaces and edges of the world—too small, too weak, too blind, too slow. Or in Deleuze’s words about Herzog’s films, “The walker is defenseless because he is he who is beginning to be, and never finishes being small” (1986: 184–185). For the most determined and conceptual travelers, “traveling on foot” thus generates that other defining principle of Herzog’s essay films, the perception of an ecstatic truth ferociously differentiated especially from the “truth of accountants” practiced by cinéma vérité. “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema,” Herzog writes, “and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization” (Cronin 2002: 301). If “traveling on foot” creates an extraordinary diminishing and dispersal of the traveler in and through the world, it ultimately releases perception from the conventional grounds of experience and invites perceptual “fabrication and imagination and stylization,” often suggested in Herzog’s films through the figure of flight. Here one walks on the visceral boundary that defines a human experience of the world, on the edge of what Gertrud Koch describes much more critically as “the otherness of a sensual realm of experience” (1986: 79), and here the walker experiences irrepressible and soaring desire to find or fantasize meaning there. At this essayistic crossroads of experience, subjectivity, and conceptualization, Herzog’s travelogues become not reports of sights seen but transformative restagings of self through extravagant testings of visceral ideas about human desire and possibility in the world. Herzog’s documentary films are then walks around the deserts, jungles, and mazes of the world in search of a truth found at the crossroads of fantasy and failure. From the desert plains of Fata Morgana to the remote bear mazes of Alaska in Grizzly Man and the struggles to understand Antarctica in Encounters at the End of the World (2007), what distinguishes these geographies is their sometimes fierce and sometimes comical confusion of boundaries and borders, insides and outsides, centers and peripheries. Exploring these worlds becomes exploring the limits of experience as the experience of limits, which invariably leads to a kind of failure or

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collapse: the bombastic extremity of human efforts and gestures before the massive indifference of the world able only to call attention to the intense longing for significance.10 Land of Silence and Darkness (1971) offers the controversial and extraordinary depiction of this dilemma as deaf/blind men and women grope and stumble between dark surroundings and a fragile inner world; in The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1973) the spectacular soaring of a skier into a vibrant outer space necessarily falls to earth. A heroic climb towards the heavens and the mouth of an active volcano in La Soufrière (1977) ends with a comical whimper and descent as the expected natural disaster fails to respond to the filmmaker’s quest for an extravagant response to the barren, deserted world around him. Fantasies of foot travel, the ecstatic truths of these essay films describe consistently the radical diminution of a self within the experience of a world so massively indifferent that it becomes, by default, a concomitantly horrifying and casual dismissal of the human desire for sense and self hood, a dismissal and a desire which in their collision leave behind only the material detritus, artifacts, and scars of thought as physical testimonies to the struggles and claims of human intellect and knowledge of a self in the world. This is where I agree with Deleuze’s claim that Herzog is “the most metaphysical of cinema directors” (1986: 186), at least if we understand metaphysics as that realm where visions becomes ideas and experience generates thoughts. For Deleuze, “In Herzog we witness an extraordinary effort to present to the view specifically tactile images which characterize the situation of ‘defenseless’ beings, and unite with the grand visions of those suffering from hallucinations” (1989: 12). This continual compositional showdown between the very large and the very small in Herzog’s essay films concretizes the showdown between the physically opaque and the theatrics of desire as the figuration of limits. “As Ideas, the Small and the Large designate both two forms and two conceptions,” according to Deleuze. “These are distinct but capable of passing into one another. They have yet a third sense and designate Visions which deserve even more to be called Ideas” (Deleuze 1986: 184–185). For Herzog, in short, visions are hardly about transcendence but rather about that experiential convulsion where the human engages inhuman geography and releases a sometimes sensual, sometimes comical, and sometimes ferocious idea. If in Herzog’s essay films the visionary becomes an ordinary walk through extraordinary spaces, thinking becomes an active, gymnastic, athletic encounter with a world that refuses to accommodate it. In both its literary and cinematic practices, the essayistic voice is, as we have said, frequently the central measure of a subjective movement through experience: authorial persona or audio voice-over describes, comments, questions, reflects, and generally mediates the visual and intellectual relation between an observing eye and the world and spaces it sees and experiences. Perhaps partly because of the visual eccentricities and splendor of Herzog’s films, the essayistic voice in his films is, I think, generally underestimated. For it is this precisely structured, epistolary voice of experience and the drama of its language that infuses

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Herzog’s travelogues with the pressure of thinking so central to the essay film. If Herzog’s subjects typically act out the strain between the theatrics of desire and the resistant surfaces of the world, his voice becomes the supportive, mediating, and interfering intellect that, in its wonderful reticence, does not and cannot resolve that tension. While there’s certainly some irony in describing films so well known for their stunning images in terms of their audio track, it is Herzog’s voice which foregrounds so importantly the energy of thought left along the road of a theatrically experienced world. Language and voice have been a preoccupation in virtually all of Herzog’s films. From Last Words (1967) and How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck (1976) to Lessons of Darkness (1992) and Gesualdo—Death for Five Voices (1995), one discovers the shape and texture of language as both a central thematic, poetic, intellectual, and formal force. In How Much Wood, for instance, the rapid and barely comprehensible stream of language from Lancaster County auctioneers becomes a frenetic stream of words attempting to keep pace with the collision of nature and capitalism. Lessons of Darkness, a science-fiction film about a collapsing “planet in our solar system” (which is of course our own planet), opens with “a creature [trying] to communicate something to us” and later we hear that those many individuals traumatized by war “don’t ever want to learn how to talk.” In both the documentaries and narrative films, language represents a fragile, mobile, and usually hopeless effort to claim order and significance from the world. In his essay films, Herzog’s voice-over becomes a hovering counterpoint to the voices and languages within these films, most obviously as a way to foreground his presence as a reflexive intelligence surrounding and permeating the images on the screen. It is the linguistic shape of that voice in which one hears the urgency of essayistic thinking, which might be characterized in terms from The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser as calmly moving between silence and screaming. Fairly consistently through his travel films, Herzog’s language employs mythic aphorisms, conceptual paradoxes, philosophical abstractions, wry wit, and quizzical reflections interjected into the films through a voice pacing itself along a vocal range of tones from the extraordinarily calm and rational to the insistent, bemused, and quizzical. Most striking and important for me is the grain of Herzog’s voice in its over-articulated pronouncements and articulations that call attention to the material fragility of language itself. Above all I would describe the distinctive qualities and power of this epistolary voice as reticent in a way similar to Thomas Elsaesser’s description of Herzog’s creationist language spoken by Lotte Eisner in Fata Morgana as “deliberately inadequate and highly ironic” so as to imply “other models of understanding which are subverted by a commentary at once ludicrous and solemn” (1989: 166). Reticence becomes in these films a way of calling attention to the necessity of a language, consciousness, and significance as the vehicle for mapping and engaging the world, while acknowledging the strain and difficulty of reconciling conceptual ideas with the fierce or blank inhospitality of that world.

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Herzog’s Grizzly Man is not only a superb example of my earlier points about the pedestrian ecstasies of Herzog’s excursive essays but also one of his most pronounced deployments of essayistic voice and language as epistolary engagements with another person’s video letters, a dialogue along the charged line between the human and inhuman. The film is partly an excursion into the natural world of the grizzly bear colonies of Alaska, but more accurately an essay on the impossibility of that journey and a testimony to the inevitable destruction of the human subject in attempting to articulate that place. Indeed, Adorno’s observation could also be the motto of this film: the essay “honors nature by confirming that it no longer exists for human beings” (1991: 11). Like other Herzog films, the center of this film can be characterized in terms of that tension between the theatrics of vision and the visceral, tactile surfaces of the world, between the enfeebled human and “the overwhelming indifference of nature,” as ideational visions stretched between the small and large—all most specifically and concretely figured in the encounter between the gigantic grizzly bears and the alternately silly and paranoid Timothy Treadwell who believes he so harmoniously bonds with those bears. In shot after shot, the large and lumbering figures of the grizzly bears and the vast landscapes of the Alaskan wilderness literally brush against the figure of a fidgety blond surfer boy to create the intimate and electrifying edge that the film travels along (Figure  3.1). At one point Treadwell films a ten-foot grizzly against a pine tree and when the bear wanders away Treadwell giddily positions himself in that absent body, a bizarre image of the small inhabiting in the large, and an eerie anticipation of Treadwell’s death when consumed by a grizzly. At this stage, Treadwell acts out his physical proximity to the space of nature as an almost speechless excitement.

Figure 3.1 Timothy Treadwell, the bears, and the vast landscape of Alaska in Grizzly Man (2005). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Erik Nelson for Lions Gate Films and Discovery Docs.

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Figure 3.2 The eyes of the grizzly that may have killed Timothy Treadwell, as depicted in Grizzly Man (2005). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Erik Nelson for Lions Gate Films and Discovery Docs.

What I find most provocative and distinctive in this film, however, is how Herzog’s visionary realm becomes largely a product of the artifact of Treadwell’s videotapes of himself and his travels into the bear colony, so that Treadwell is a subject known and engaged by Herzog primarily as a videotaped object like a moving postcard, a kind of artifact, as Adorno notes, that has always fascinated essayists more than origins or presences. For Herzog, Treadwell’s self and world are inseparable from their fabrication through his ubiquitous video camera and his relentlessly theatrical self-portrait, and this alone signals the crucial distance Herzog maintains as an observer of a cinematic theatrics attempting to transform the world into its stage. More explicitly than perhaps any other Herzog subject, Treadwell constantly composes and carefully stages himself against the background of the world and the world within the frame of his camera: often he sets up and films several times various takes in order to polish his verbal delivery, try out different bandanas or fix his hair, or to perfect his entrances into the frame to simulate dramatic action. The prominent lack of shot/counter shots becomes a necessary structural product of this imagistic narcissism, remarked, for instance by Herzog’s voice-over when he comments on the complete absence of eyeline shots of Treadwell’s girlfriend Amy and culminating in the concluding close up of the “indifferent” eyes of the grizzly that may have killed Treadwell (Figure 3.2). Despite Treadwell’s relentlessly comic and bathetic insistence on his identification with grizzlies, wild foxes, and their natural world, this film, like much of Herzog’s cinema, refuses the logic and spatial bonds of classical naturalized identification. Grizzly Man becomes, in short, not so much a portrait of a man’s encounters with the extremes of the natural world but a meditative reflection on

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an obsessive self-portrait in which a passionate subject acts out his longings and frustration on the surface between self and world, here less the icy soles of one’s feet than the glass of a camera lens. Like other Herzog essays, although here more grotesquely, the insistent and relentless interiority of the reflective subject, Treadwell, ironically succeeds only when it becomes exteriorized and ingested by the world he wishes to possess. Especially in this odd travelogue into the wilderness, voice and language become the critical vehicle for mapping this journey between interior and exterior spaces. Mary Ann Doane has theorized the peculiar and powerful movement of the film voice, particularly as that voice aims to locate the “fantasmic body” represented by film but, especially through voice-off, voice-over, and asynchronous or “wild” sound, which always threaten to “expose the material heterogeneity of the medium” (1980: 40). For her, film’s audio voices are capable of identifying, crossing, and muddling boundaries according to interior audio spaces, voice-off spaces, disembodied voices, and the capacity for voice “to lend itself to hallucination” (1980: 44) or to act as a force “capable of interpreting the image, producing its truth” (1980: 42). Indeed a fortuitous beginning to this play with language and voice in Grizzly Man is Treadwell’s own high-pitched, childish tones, terms, and sentence structures: calling out to grizzlies he’s named “Sergeant Brown,” “Rowdy,” and “Mr. Chocolate,” whispering conspiratorially about his secret hideaways from intruding tourists and park service personnel, and throwing tantrums like a boy refused his toys, Treadwell becomes a vocal mix of Kaspar Hauser and Aguirre. In one of the most remarkable cinematic demonstrations of self in the film, Treadwell launches in repeated takes into verbal attacks on the National Park Service, barely able to control his flood of words and expletives. Here he addresses himself as his own imaginary audience as if he is a Travis Bickle in the wilderness, and generates a rant that reminds Herzog, the voice-over, of his own experience when one of his actors turned on him. Throughout the film, Herzog’s intervention as the audio voice-over is in one sense a standard essayistic strategy, but here it forecloses all possible romanticism in this travelogue as nature film. In the end, Herzog’s voice-over remaps Treadwell’s own cinematic travelogue to another world through his reframing of it as a revelation that these travels are not about the place of nature but about the space of an inner self and the collision of that space with the massive outer space that refuses it until death. That, as Herzog says at the conclusion of the film, “is what gives meaning” to Treadwell’s life. The central scene in the film is an audio scene when Herzog listens to Treadwell’s death recorded by a video camera with a lens cap still on. This is the only scene in the film in which Herzog is visible as a mediator, which emphatically underlines the importance of his decision not to replay this tape of Treadwell’s last voice and thus, as Herzog puts it, make Grizzly Man a “snuff film.” If the unheard screams and grotesque sounds of Treadwell’s death represent in many ways the fate of language and voice living on an edge that it refuses to recognize is a razor’s edge, Herzog’s

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pronounced reticence here announces an audio gap at the very heart of the film. It is a terrible hallucination without images, a screaming voice without sound, and a commentary that can only mutter and suggest destroying the tape. At that place where the visible disappears in the horribly literal collapse of the subjective and interior within the exterior world, the film pinpoints the limit of language and voice in the articulation of experiential space. At that limit is, for Herzog, where essayistic thinking hovers, where, in Seung-Hoon Jeong and Dudley Andrew’s Bazinian reading of the film, the place clears a space “to think about the unthinkable” (2008: 12).11

Notes This essay appears in part within an expanded discussion in my book The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 1

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Musil’s lengthy reflection continues with the critical reminder: “Nothing is more foreign to [essayism] than the irresponsible and half-baked quality of thought known as subjectivism” (73). Of the growing scholarship on essayism, two early studies provide an important literary grounding: Graham Good’s The Observing Self: Rediscovering the Essay (1988) is a solid introduction to some of these positions, while Réda Bensmaïa’s The Barthes Effect (1987) takes a more specific look at the theoretical formulations and practices of the essay in Roland Barthes. An important sidebar to my argument is a broad debate within film studies as to the modernist heritage of the cinema as a whole: One side claiming that a modernist practice enters film culture after World War II, while the other insisting that film is inherently a modernist form. At the center of these debates, I believe, is the representational confrontation between the technological image and language as expression. If film form has always reflected modernist concerns with spatial fragmentation and temporal motions, its early association with mass culture tended to undermine its radical potential for subjective expression and interpretation and to reshape them as realist transparencies. In this context, the precursors of the essay film appear only on the margins of classical film culture as lecture films like Eadweard Muybridge’s demonstration of how animal locomotion fits a scientific logic or travelogues such as Lyman Howe’s early movie presentations and tours. For the essay in general and the essay film in particular, the dynamics of reception always has been a distinguishing feature, beginning in the 1920s with the cine-clubs, the formation of an audience for whom film was less about entertainment than a forum for reflecting and debating social issues and experience and evolving through Gilbert Cohen-Seat’s “filmology” movement in the 1940s. Note Marker’s blending of the poetic and essayistic in his rephrasing of the cinéma vérité as “‘ciné, ma vérité’ (‘cinema, my truth’)” (Lupton 2005: 84). It is worth noting that the so-called Left Bank of the French New Wave (Marker, Resnais, Varda, and others) figure more naturally in the formation of the essay film because of their consistent interest in film’s interdisciplinary connections with literature and the other arts, yet a wide range of other filmmakers, inside and outside France, respond to the possibilities of the essay film.

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These in turn anticipate one of the most fertile and productive forums for the essayistic and its relation to the sketch: found in anthology films, such as Far from Vietnam (1967) and Germany in Autumn (1978). As a theoretical marker of the essay film’s relation to the short film and the larger issue implied, Jacques Aumont’s study of “the film sketch” in “The Variable Eye” reminds us of this representational overlap between the temporality of the nineteenth-century essay and a temporality in the cinema engaged by the essayistic cinema of the 1950s. Around 1800, Aumont notes significant change in the status of the image as “sketch” as it anticipates photography and film, as well as, I believe, the short essay film: “the crux of these changes may be dated to the period between 1780 and 1820, when a veritable revolution occurred in the status of the nature sketch: the ébauche, an attempt to register a reality predetermined by the project of a future painting, gave way to the étude, an attempt to register reality ‘just as it is’ and for no other reason” (1997: 232–234). See also Arthur’s chapter “The Resurgence of History and the Avant-Garde Essay Film” in Arthur (2005). To call attention to the work of ideas in Herzog’s films is not to equate them with the essay films of Godard, for instance—whom, by the way, Herzog refers to as an intellectual counterfeit (Cronin 2002: 138). As Deleuze says of Heart of Glass, “The search for the alchemical heart and secret, for the red crystal, is inseparable from the search for cosmic limits, as the highest tension of the spirit and the deepest level of reality” (1989: 74–75). This perceptive analysis of the film through the framework of Bazin’s notion of becoming animal summarizes this movement toward a kind of thought this way: “Through a belated advent made possible by two cameras, a ghost is called forth, triggering our becoming-ghost. Subordinating film language to the animal scream, Herzog has given us room to think about the relation between animal and human death, about the (im)possibility of becoming-animal, about the quasi-presence of ghosts, about the ontology of the cinematic image and about the other real worlds immanent in all these conundrums. He has, in short, cleared room to think about the unthinkable” ( Jeong and Andrew 2008: 12).

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor: “The Essay as Form,” Notes to Literature, Volume 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 3–23. Arthur, Paul: A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film since 1965 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). Astruc, Alexandre: “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: Le Caméra-Stylo,” Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader, ed. Timothy Corrigan (Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1999), pp. 158–162. Aumont, Jacques: “The Variable Eye, or the Mobilization of the Gaze,” trans. Charles O’Brien and Sally Shafto, The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of

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Photography, ed. Dudley Andrew (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), pp. 231–258. Bazin, André: What is Cinema? Vol. 1, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Bensmaïa, Réda: The Barthes Effect: The Essay as Reflective Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Burch, Noel: Theory of Film Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). Cronin, Paul, ed.: Herzog on Herzog (London: Faber & Faber, 2002). Deleuze, Gilles: Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Deleuze, Gilles: Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). Doane, Mary Ann: “The Voice in Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,” Yale French Studies 60 (Cinema/Sound, 1980): 33–50. Elsaesser, Thomas: New German Cinema: A History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989). Godard, Jean-Luc: Godard on Godard, trans. Tom Milne (New York: Viking, 1972). Good, Graham: The Observing Self: Rediscovering the Essay (London: Routledge, 1988). Hansen, Miriam: Babel & Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Hazlitt, William: “On Going a Journey” (1822), Selected Essays of William Hazlitt 1778 to 1830, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2004), pp. 71–82. Herzog, Werner: Of Walking in Ice: Munich–Paris, 11/23 to 12/14, 1974, trans. Martje Herzog and Alan Greenberg (New York: Tanam Press, 1980 [original 1978]). Jeong, Seung-Hoon and Andrew, Dudley: “Grizzly Ghost: Herzog, Bazin and the Cinematic Animal,” Screen 49.1 (Spring 2008): 1–12. Koch, Gertrud: “Blindness as Insight: Visions of the Unseen in Land of Silence and Darkness,” The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, ed. Timothy Corrigan (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 73–86. Lukács, Georg: “On the Nature and Form of the Essay,” Soul and Form (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974), pp. 1–19. Lupton, Catherine: Chris Marker: Memories of the Future (London: Reaktion Books, 2005). Malraux, André: Esquisse d’une psychologie du cinéma (Paris: Gallimard, 1946). Minh-ha, Trinh T.: “Altérité: The D-Image Effect,” Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film, ed. Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), pp. 193–210. Monaco, James: Alain Resnais (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). Musil, Robert: The Man without Qualities, I (New York: Knopf, 1995). Porcile, François: Defense du court-métrage français (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1965). Richter, Hans: “Der Film Essay: Eine neue Form des Dokumentarfilms,” Nationalzeitung (May 25, 1940). Reprinted in Schreiben Bilder Sprechen, ed. Christa Blumlinger and Constantin Wulff (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1992), pp. 194–197. Rivette, Jacques: “Letter on Rossellini,” Cahiers du Cinéma. The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave, ed. Jim Hillier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 192–204.

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Additional Films Cited Brustellin, Alf, R. W. Fassbinder, et al: Germany in Autumn (1978) Franju, Georges: Blood of the Beasts (1948) Franju, Georges: Hôtel des Invalides (1951) Godard, Jean-Luc: Vivre Sa Vie (1962) Godard, Jean-Luc: Masculin-Feminin (1966) Godard, Jean-Luc: 2 or 3 Things I Know about Her (1967) Godard, Jean-Luc: La Chinoise (1967) Ivens, Joris, William Klein, et al: Far from Vietnam (1967) Marker, Chris: Letter from Siberia (1957) Resnais, Alain: Van Gogh (1948) Rivette, Jacques: Journey to Italy (1953) Rossellini, Roberto: Paisà (1946) Rossellini, Roberto: Germany, Year Zero (1948) Rossellini, Roberto: Europa ’51 (1952)

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PART II

Herzog and the Inter-arts

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Werner Herzog’s View of Delft Or, Nosferatu and the Still Life Kenneth S. Calhoon

The final shot of Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu—The Vampyre (1979) is worth the wait. A lone figure on horseback careens into view, racing away from the camera across a sandy expanse (Figure  4.1). Rider and mount appear to lean into the wind, whose force and direction are signaled by sand tracing vaporously over the ground. Heavy clouds—the effect of an inverted double-exposure—roll in from the right and deepen the already damp palette while providing a visual counterpoint to the blowing sand, which follows a shifting diagonal from left to right. The rider recedes quickly into the distance but hovers as a dark speck at the horizon, which divides the frame cleanly between earth and sky. The sluggish gallop projects the taedium of the previous scene, in which the presumed rider, Bruno Ganz’s manic and distracted Jonathan Harker, asks for his horse and proclaims that he has much to do. “Now,” he adds, as if to summon the concluding shot. The metronomic ticking of a clock yields to the transcendent strains of the “Sanctus” from Charles Gounod’s Messe solennelle de Sainte Cécile (1855). The music imbues the moment with a somber beauty even as it contradicts the spirit of restless pursuit and infinite desolation. The scene, which could double as another of Kaspar Hauser’s dreams, evokes a line—from Gottfried August Bürger’s 1773 ballad Leonore—whispered by one of Harker’s traveling companions in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (first published 1897): “Denn die Todten reiten schnell” or “For the dead ride swiftly” (Stoker 1983: 9).1 It is a fitting coda to a film whose outcome deviates from Stoker’s novel as well as from F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu of 1922, to which Herzog intended his 1979 version as an homage. Without rehearsing the complicated specifics of Herzog’s interpretation of Murnau’s already vexed adaptation of Stoker’s narrative (Prawer 2004: 7–20; Prager 2007: 101–102), let us emphasize that Herzog’s film pays tribute to Murnau’s visual language while also reviving aspects of a novel whose publication was closely contemporaneous with the advent of motion pictures. The following A Companion to Werner Herzog, First Edition. Edited by Brad Prager. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Figure 4.1 A lone figure on horseback in Nosferatu (1979). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Werner Herzog/Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

passage from Harker’s journal is striking in its intimation of a kind of primitive cinematic phantasmagoria (Barnouw 1981: 19–33). Harker, having just climbed aboard Count Dracula’s calèche, casts a parting glance back at the diligence that has brought him to the appointed rendezvous: “Without a word [the driver] shook his reins, the horses turned, and we swept into the darkness of the Pass. As I looked back I saw the steam from the horses of the coach by the light of the lamps, and projected against it the figures of my late companions crossing themselves” (Stoker 1983: 10). This description has a visual echo at a comparable juncture in Herzog’s Nosferatu, where Harker is shown proceeding on foot alongside a snow-fed mountain stream. Like the blowing sand in the shot described above, the direction of the rushing water underscores the traveler’s weary determination. Harker trudges into view from behind a formation of rock, which divides the frame vertically, and from behind which a bright white light is shining (Figure 4.2). The light, whatever its source, envelops Harker in a misty halo and casts a long shadow on the path, which angles into the foreground from left to right. Soon a coach drawn by a team of panting horses overtakes Harker from behind and slows to take him aboard. Horses and carriage fill the screen before moving on, and the shot, with a framing that places the viewer in the vehicle’s path, not to mention the diegetic incorporation

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Figure 4.2 Jonathan Harker trudges into view in Nosferatu (1979). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Werner Herzog/Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

of the film projector’s incandescent beam, links the scene to the very birth of cinema.2 The overture to Wagner’s Rhinegold churns all the while, feeding the anticipation that has been building since the previous sequence, which concludes with a shot of clouds gathering above mountains at nightfall. Appearing briefly between these two scenes is a direct citation from Murnau’s film—the gaunt, two-dimensional silhouette of the vampire’s castle. This is the shot with which the original Nosferatu closes, indeed, it occurs intermittently, as a leitmotif, in both films. The earlier film, and early film as such, is an explicit presence in a piece of cinema that is deliberate in its exploitation of those features that made Murnau the most painterly of the Weimar filmmakers. A ruin, the skeletal façade of the vampire’s castle reflects the Romantic affinities of both directors. It also conflates the photograph, which this particular shot appears to be, with an image of decay, recalling the death-like stillness that early photography imposed on its subjects. Murnau employed various pre-cinematic techniques at critical junctures in his narrative: the vampire’s stealthy, almost avian emergence from the hold of a ship is rendered through stop-action photography; earlier, when the fiend advances along a corridor directly towards the camera, his forward movement is indicated by the abrupt succession of two still photographs, the second of these shot at much closer range than the first. The effect is startlingly primitive for a filmmaker capable of the most seamless and fluid transitions. At these crucial moments, Murnau’s film decomposes, exploiting what is inherently uncanny—undead—about the medium that cinema displaced. Garrett Stewart delivers an insightful analysis of how such a “convolution of visual technology” provides for a structure that enables contemporary culture to “flirt with the elegiac  mood in heritage films even while celebrating the supremacy of the present.” Cinema, he writes, “promotes its own representational agenda by recovering the naïve ruptures that greeted its arrival on the scene of mere

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Figure 4.3 Nosferatu reaches for the door of the heroine’s bedchamber in Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922). Directed by F.W. Murnau, produced by Enrico Dieckmann and Albin Grau for Jofa-Atelier Berlin-Johannisthal and Prana-Film GmbH.

photography” (Stewart 1999: 244). He is referring to Francis Ford Coppola’s own treatment of the Dracula theme (Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 1992), which includes an extensive episode at a turn-of-the-century cinematograph, but which also develops the vampiric potential of the photographic medium, which entombs its subjects, holding them in a state of suspended animation. Walter Benjamin attributed the “melancholy beauty” of old photographic portraits to their retrenchment in the “cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead” (2007: 226). The encased daguerreotype that Coppola’s Harker keeps of his fiancée displaces what in Murnau’s film is a locket containing a painted portrait (and which in Herzog’s version encloses a lock of hair). “The image is enchantingly beautiful” (Das Bildnis ist bezaubernd schön)—a line from The Magic Flute suggests itself as the Count reaches for the photograph and, in his greedy excitement, upsets an ink well.3 The ink, though it has not spilled directly onto the image, seeps mysteriously beneath the protective glass and begins to envelop the young woman. The billowing stain is one of the “necromantic shadows” around which the film’s eroticism coalesces (Stewart 1999: 238–39, 244), but it also signals the presence of Murnau in Coppola’s production, for already in the original Nosferatu, the vampire’s shadow seems disconnected from its source. At a point in Herzog’s interpretation, the vampire’s inky silhouette pours up the front of Harker’s modest brick home—a clear citation of the scene in Murnau’s film where the Count’s fluid and disembodied shadow reaches for the door of the heroine’s bedchamber (Figure  4.3). The film’s climax thus constitutes a mediatic regression; the composition not only mimes the tonal inversion of a photographic negative but also revives an old theatrical technique whereby low-angle lighting was used to project human figures as shadowy giants

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Figure 4.4 Samuel van Hoogstraten, “The Shadow Dance,” engraving for his Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst, Rotterdam, 1675.

(as illustrated in 1675 by Samuel van Hoogstraten [Figure  4.4]). Photography in the original sense, this method recalls the ancient account of the origin of painting as provided by Pliny the Elder: a young woman traces the outline of her lover’s shadow on the eve of their separation (Gombrich 1995: 30). The classical fable in turn points to the camera obscura, which inflects a pair of films in which the fiend is vanquished photographically, that is, through exposure to daylight. Copyright restrictions required Murnau to disguise his literary source, which he achieved in part by changing the names of the various characters. Dracula thus becomes Orlok, Renfield becomes Knock, Van Helsing becomes Sievers, Harker becomes Hutter, his fiancée Mina becomes his wife Ellen. Herzog restores the original names, but in what might be seen as a “secondary revision” in the Freudian sense, Harker acquires a different spouse, for she is now called “Lucy” and as such is the namesake of Stoker’s Lucy Westenra, Mina’s more sensual and seductive (and also doomed) counterpart (Mayne 1986: 125–126).4 Like the novel, both films separate inhibition and desire and project them as two distinct individuals, though it is now primarily Harker and the vampire between whom these traits are distributed, the latter propelled by the passion that is so stunted in the former. Already in Murnau’s film, the object of Ellen’s longing is indeterminate, for she is shown waiting for “her beloved” among the dunes, though it is the vampire, not her husband, who is arriving by sea. It is in fact the Count who responds when she calls out from afar to her husband, who is in the process of being molested by his host. The Count, who appears to have heard her, turns to face in her direction, exits the bedchamber and prepares for his immediate departure. Herzog is true to Murnau’s seamless construction of what Thomas Elsaesser has called an “architecture of

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Figure 4.5 Murnau’s Vampire evaporates in Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922). Directed by F. W. Murnau, produced by Enrico Dieckmann and Albin Grau for Jofa-Atelier Berlin-Johannisthal and Prana-Film GmbH.

secret affinities” (2000: 238). His Dracula, to whom Klaus Kinski lends an affecting combination of fatigue and torment, also rises at the distant call, his long nails tapping gingerly, like a spider’s legs, on Harker’s breast, as if he were listening with his fingers. Ellen and Lucy alike eventually summon the vampire to their beds, causing him to linger until dawn and thereby exposing him to the first, fatal rays of the sun. Murnau’s vampire (Max Schreck) merely stiffens and evaporates before the open window (Figure  4.5); Herzog’s Dracula dies convulsively, wheezing and moaning while his eyes burn with deadly sunlight. The pathos of Kinski’s performance is appropriate given the difference between the two films, for whereas Ellen sacrifices herself for her husband (seen grieving at her bedside as the film ends), Lucy releases the vampire from what he earlier characterizes as the misery of immortality. Herzog’s Harker inherits the curse of eternal life from the extinguished Count. Yet his headlong rush into a barren landscape merely repeats his initial, hurried errand to the Carpathians, from which he expects the benefit of getting “away from these canals, which never flow anywhere except back on themselves.” It is a figure of poor circulation, and Harker’s later metamorphosis into a vampire mimics the kind of spiritual or psychic dissolution that medieval physiologists attributed to stagnant humors (Prawer 2004: 63). He gradually assumes Dracula’s drained complexion, the extreme pallor of which is the antithesis of sanguinity— of a disposition made cheerful by an abundance of blood. Albrecht Dürer’s famous Melencolia I (1514; Figure  4.6), an allegory of the temperament determined by a prevalence of black bile, is relevant in part because the inscription bearing the engraving’s title is held aloft in the claws of a bat-like creature (Figure  4.7). The

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Figure 4.6 Albrecht Dürer, Melancholia. 1514. Engraving. British Museum, London. Photo: The Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY.

Figure 4.7 Albrecht Dürer, Melancholia. 1514 (detail).

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Figure 4.8 Albrecht Dürer, Saint Jerome in His Study. 1514. Engraving. Photo: Jörg P. Anders. Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin/Art Resource, NY.

avatar common to Dürer’s plate and Herzog’s film brings the loss of blood into association with the classic symptoms of melancholy—increasingly apparent in Harker himself—such as lethargy and a need to sleep during the daylight hours. Another shared characteristic is distraction (Zerstreuung), a psychic state whose material counterpart in Dürer’s engraving is the disorderly assortment of implements “strewn” (zerstreut) about the winged figure with the shadowy countenance. The image contrasts famously with another engraving by Dürer from the same year, St. Jerome in his Study (Figure  4.8), which may be thought to emblematize distraction’s antonym, namely “concentration” (Sammlung). The pronounced linear perspective of the latter situates the sanctified translator within an interior whose order presumably mirrors the subject’s inner life. The hourglass that hovers immediately above the heads of both figures is not only a memento mori but also a reminder that “tidiness” is an attribute of time. The Dutch tijd mediates between the English “time” and the German Zeit and points to an archaic connection between time and the tides (Gezeiten) and thus between time and natural rhythms

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of the seasons, the phases of the moon, the menstrual cycle, and so on (Calhoon 2003: 129–146). The image of St. Jerome even includes what was to become a mainstay of trompe l’oeil painting: letters, writing instruments, and scissors held in place by a ribbon tacked to the wall. This general orderliness is consistent with a space whose every nook is explored by natural light cascading through the large windows. (Note also in this regard the large sun bonnet.) There is much in Dürer’s portrayal of St. Jerome that looks forward to the Dutch interiors and still lifes of the subsequent century. We shall return to these, but let us emphasize for the moment that the two engravings have the effect of clearly opposing melancholy to the same light of day that is Dracula’s downfall. Shakespeare’s ever melancholic Hamlet, “punished,” as he says, “with a sore distraction,” defends himself against the complaint that “the clouds still hang on [him],” maintaining to the contrary that he is “too much i’ the sun” (2002: 1350). Benjamin draws Shakespeare’s monumental tragedy into the orbit of the Baroque Trauerspiel and cites the following lines of Hamlet’s to illustrate the midnight setting indispensible to these plays: “’Tis now the very witching time of night, / When graveyards yawn, and hell itself breaths out/Contagion to this world” (2002: 1371). These lines are redolent with implications for Nosferatu and for the vampire theme generally, as is the curse (which is also a self-curse) that Benjamin subsequently quotes from a German Baroque exemplar: “even beneath the earth I shall remain thy bitter enemy.” The significance of the midnight hour lies in the nature of fate. Because fate is parasitical of time, its manifestations seek to enter the temporal dimension at the very hour at which time was thought to stand still “like the tongue of a scale” (1977: 135). This aspect of time becomes apparent at a key moment in Nosferatu: Harker has arrived at Dracula’s castle and is served a late dinner by his host (though Jonathan is the true “host,” if we entertain the issue of parasitism fully). The table, which is situated in an alcove, is laid with a roast as well as an assortment of fruit; a slender glass of cut crystal, which the Count fills with wine, dominates the setting. Ganz is mercurial in his silent conveyance of bafflement and anxiety. His attention is drawn by a clock, which grinds ponderously to life and strikes twelve. The object is redundant in its representation of death. A skull is mounted at the top of the housing, from which a small bat is seen hanging. The skull opens, and a miniature death rises from the cavity and rings a bell (Figure 4.9). A door below the clock-face opens and the grim reaper emerges, mechanically swinging his scythe before disappearing within. With the final chime, the lid of the skull slams shut. The sequence brings the elements of a still life painting into association with the death’s head that sometimes figures into a genre that displays material possession while exposing its vanity (see, for example, Figure 4.10). The shot of the clock further replicates a feature common to these still lifes, namely the lighting that accentuates the shallow, screen-like aspect of the space behind the objects. The action of the clock causes Harker, who is absent-mindedly slicing a piece of bread, to cut his thumb. Aroused by the sight of blood, Dracula pursues Harker to an adjacent

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Figure 4.9 A miniature figure of death rises from a clock in Nosferatu (1979). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Werner Herzog/Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

Figure 4.10 Pieter Claesz, Vanitas—Still Life. 1656. Oil on oak. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

room, where the exhausted traveler collapses into a chair before a sepulchral fireplace. He awakes the following morning to find the table laid with a lavish breakfast (Figure  4.11). The camera slowly examines the rich assembly of fruits, melons, meats, fish, decantered wine, and fully dressed fowl. A further reference to the conventions of nature morte occurs that night when Harker is shown seated at a small table, penning a letter to his wife Lucy. Before him a flower vase lies toppled, its desiccated contents spilled in a bunch across the tabletop. The long-dead bouquet recalls a scene in Murnau’s film in which Harker presents his wife with an armful of freshly picked flowers only to have her ask mournfully, as she cradles the blossoms

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Figure 4.11 A lavish breakfast is set for Harker in Nosferatu (1979). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Werner Herzog/Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

in her bosom, why he “killed” them. Her question goes to the essence of the still life generally and more specifically to paintings that feature abundant and colorful arrangements of cut blooms, such as those by Ambrosius Bosschaert. Noting the programmatic absence of wildflowers from these painted bouquets, Norman Bryson emphasizes the artificial qualities of flowers that are products less of nature than of exacting horticultural labor. Meticulously rendered, the lush blooms are analogues of the painter’s own efforts, in which the manifest signs of painstaking craftsmanship displace visual enjoyment as the painting’s justification. The predominantly monochrome palette of the Dutch still life is thus a reflection of an artistic habit that, in conformity with a broader social regimen, disavows pleasure in favor of work (1990: 108–110). Bryson’s analysis may be amplified and complicated by the inclusion of the related practice of landscape design, which during the eighteenth century sought, in effect, to hide productivity from itself, thus enabling man to rediscover the products of his labor as nature (Schneider 1992: 92–94). In this vein, the breakfast to which Jonathan rises exhibits a mysterious autonomy, implicitly posing the question as to how it got there given the conspicuous absence of servants in the Count’s household. The ripe excess of the morning banquet is at odds with the world that Harker has left behind, and this world is continuous with the milieux commonly depicted within an earlier Dutch tradition bent on distinguishing affluence from sheer accumulation. In that tradition, domestic spaces, which gleam from a combination of opulence and cleanliness, are suffused with a spirit of virtue made evident by the strict observation of routine and the prudent use of time. Stoker’s Harker exhibits an obsession with the decreasing punctuality of the trains as he ventures into a world in which the moon holds sway and attunes the body to a time that ebbs and flows. One of the achievements of Herzog’s production is to situate the Victorian Harker within a Dutch interior, shooting much of Nosferatu in Delft (Figure 4.12), thereby imprinting the

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Figure 4.12 From a bridge in Delft in Nosferatu (1979). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Werner Herzog/Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

film with a visual repertoire reminiscent of the painter synonymous with a city that is in turn immortalized in oils. Delft becomes the physical scaffolding for Wismar, the starting point in both Murnau and Herzog’s versions. The place-name Wis-mar dredges up the semantic compounds sedimented in the name Vermeer. Observing that the great Dutch painter often divided the syllables of his name, signing his canvases Ver Meer, Thomas Schestag suggests how the resulting phrase translates variously as “going towards” and “coming from” the lake or sea (maere), given that ver gestures in two opposite directions. These (and other) resonances enable Schestag to understand the incomparable View of Delft (ca. 1658; Figure 4.13) not merely as a quasi-photographic copy of a townscape but as a kind of isle of death: “From this double point of view, Vermeer’s Vue de Delft paints a scene along the banks of a stagnant river. It is the remembrance of a scene on the banks of the river Lethe. In the foreground, on rose-colored sand, a couple of people, painted in blue, are on their way, silently between two lives. They stand close to the boat of ferryman Charon. It is as if the painting’s current title—Vue de Delft—had been augmented [vermehrt] to yield another: Ver Meer” (Schestag). The hint of stagnant water, which recalls Jonathan’s complaint about canals that “never flow anywhere except back on themselves,” is but one of the ways in which Vermeer’s View of Delft haunts Herzog’s Nosferatu, which features a harbinger of death who in fact arrives “from the sea.” In Herzog’s film as well as Murnau’s, Harker’s wife, who awaits her husband’s return from the sea, is shown seated among the dunes, indeed, amidst seaside grave markers, though this particular scene invites comparison to works by the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, whose importance for Herzog is widely accepted (Prager 2007: 83–85, 105–106). It is intriguing to consider how, in a certain mise-en-scène, Delft serves as a backdrop onto which one of Friedrich’s signature motifs—a procession of coffin-bearers—is superimposed. Friedrich’s Abbey in the Oak Forest (1809/10),

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Figure 4.13 Jan Vermeer (van Delft), View of Delft. Ca. 1658. Oil on oak. Mauritshuis, The Hague. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

which frames a wintry funeral against a ruined monastery, not only exemplifies this motif but also suggests a model for the shot, discussed earlier, of the crumbling façade of the vampire’s castle. A more profound and defining reference to Friedrich can be discerned in the film’s final shot, which, in situating its figure at a horizon that cleanly divides heaven from earth, exploits the cinematic potential of the painting it almost indisputably cites: The Monk by the Sea (1809; Figure 4.14).5 My proposal is that Friedrich’s painting constitutes a reduction of the View of Delft. The solitary figure in the former realizes the advertency summarized by the combined morphemes ver meer. The formal similarity is anchored by the lone monk, whose placement corresponds precisely to that of the two women conversing on the riverbank in Vermeer’s painting (Calhoon 2005: 652). The two paintings resemble each other also in that neither includes vertical elements that would reinforce the framing, instead permitting the eye to follow the horizontal axes to the edges of the canvas (Alpers 1983: 27). In this way, Vermeer’s painting anticipates Friedrich’s own inclination towards abstraction, relevant to this particular example in light of the two ships that Friedrich included in his composition before painting them out.6 As the one painting (View of Delft) dissolves into the other (The Monk by the Sea), ships and town alike are revealed as phantoms, fading from view and leaving only a sky of gathering clouds—clouds that in Herzog’s final shot invade the heavens like blooming swirls of ink before the screen goes black. Joseph Leo Koerner has interpreted Friedrich’s famous seascape as an expression of disillusionment in which transcendence takes the form of a simple dissolution of structure. The painted surface is not extended into infinity but, on the contrary,

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Figure 4.14 Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea. 1809. Oil on canvas. Photo: Jörg P. Anders. Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin/Art Resource, NY.

is brought oppressively close. Koerner identifies the solitary monk as the carrier of the same melancholy evident in an early self-portrait (1802), in which Friedrich drew himself in the iconic posture—head propped on hand—familiar from Dürer’s engraving (1990: 119–21). The clouded countenance of Dürer’s allegorical figure has a correspondence in the overcast skies common to The Monk by the Sea and the View of Delft. The dynamism of Vermeer’s composition invites one to suspect that the clouds that have darkened the town will, in the next instant, spread their ponderous shadow over the as yet bright foreground.7 This accords with a general artistic habit that Benjamin relates to the radical disjuncture, definitive of the Baroque, between this world and the Beyond: “For the dominant spiritual disposition, however eccentrically it might elevate acts of ecstasy, did not so much transfigure the world in them as cast a cloudy sky over its surface. Whereas the painters of the Renaissance know how to keep their skies high, in the paintings of the baroque the cloud moves, darkly or radiantly, towards the earth” (1977: 79). Benjamin’s formulation, which could well describe the View of Delft, also captures the condition of Friedrich’s subject, splayed between longing and despondency. It is the condition of Goethe’s monastic Faust, who is rebuked and ridiculed by the anima mundi and left to his Gothic chamber littered with Urväter-Hausrat— with the accumulated paraphernalia of many generations (1994: 34). Faust’s subsequent attempt to translate Scripture aligns him not only with Dr. Luther but also with St. Jerome, whose notably un-melancholic pose (in Dürer’s engraving) harmonizes with his daylit milieu of ordered, evenly spaced objects. A counterpart in Herzog’s film to Faust’s cluttered study would be Renfield’s dingy and claustrophobic office, its towering shelves overflowing with papers and books. The shot of Harker and Renfield examining a map of the Carpathians (Figure  4.15) is itself

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Figure 4.15 Harker (Bruno Ganz) and Renfield (Roland Topor) examine a map of the Carpathians in Nosferatu (1979). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Werner Herzog/ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

Figure 4.16 Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, Dr. Faustus. Ca. 1652. Etching. Location: Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Photo: Victoria & Albert Museum/Art Resource, NY.

suggestive of the Dutch pictorial canon—Vermeer’s Geographer comes to mind— and is yet another indication of how a vast image-repertoire conducts its history into Herzog’s film. Rembrandt’s etching of Faust in His Study (ca. 1652; Figure 4.16)

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conveys both a structure and an atmospheric tenebrism adopted by early German filmmakers and especially Murnau, whose own Faust (1926) translates this radiant image into a feature-length sequence. The lineage of these images implicates even those engravings by Dürer as representations of theatrical sets and lends the numerous objects that fill them the quality of stage props. As a reminder of human mortality, the hour glass in each image merely epitomizes the power that all dead objects (of which the skull is the more ominous example) acquire over the living (Benjamin 1977: 132). What Lotte Eisner described as Murnau’s “obsession with inanimate objects” helps link the director’s reputed melancholy with the medium of animation itself and further implicates motion pictures as the mediatic antithesis of the still life (1973: 105).8 The essentially modern fable of Dracula masks its modernity beneath a neoGothic carapace and imparts renewed power to crucifixes, mirrors, holy wafers, and the like (Moretti 1988: 94). Stoker’s Dracula is sufficiently modern even to make mention of a Kodak camera, which Harker has used to photograph the estate he offers in sale to the Count (Stoker 1983: 23). In his play The Wild Duck (1884) Henrik Ibsen prescribes the following, minutely elaborated set—Hjalmar Ekdal’s photography studio. Hjalmar is himself a melancholic, and this cluttered interior, which like the still life is haunted by human absence, is an index of his distraction.9 We may for the moment regard the setting as a tableau unto itself, which imports into the realm of theater the tradition of painting that specialized in detailed portrayals of private interiors: The room, which is quite large, is recognizably an attic. On the right is a pitched roof with big skylights, half covered by a blue curtain. In the corner, top right, is the entrance-hall door; downstage, on the same side, a door leads into the living-room. Similarly there are two doors on the left wall, and between them an iron stove. On the rear wall are broad double sliding doors. The study is cheaply but pleasantly furnished. Between the doors on the right, off the wall a little, stands a sofa, with a table and some chairs; on the table, a lighted lamp, shaded; in the corner by the stove, an old armchair. Various pieces of photographic apparatus and equipment are disposed about the room. On the rear wall, left of the double doors, is a bookcase containing a few books, some boxes and bottles of chemicals, various kinds of instruments, tools and other objects. Photographs and one or two little things like brushes, paper and so on are lying on the table (2009: 129).

The setting has, incidentally, its own “Dutch” application, for the Ekdal home formerly belonged to a sea-captain known as “The Flying Dutchman,” about whom the young heroine, Hedvig, remarks innocently, “he wasn’t a Dutchman at all.” Hedvig, who works in her father’s studio retouching portraits, often finds refuge in an adjacent loft filled with strange and archaic artifacts, which the captain had left behind. Among these is “a big clock with figures that are supposed to pop in and out.” When Hedvig tells the visitor for whom she describes the clock that it “doesn’t go anymore,” he extrapolates: “So time stands still in there.” The

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observation suggests a vulnerability to fate confirmed by another object—a book that contains “a picture of Death with an hour glass, and a girl” (2009: 158–159).10 This patently Baroque allegory portends the child’s death and helps identify Ibsen’s play as the kind of post-classical tragedy in which “demonic fate … throws the guiltless into the abyss of general guilt.” This again is Benjamin, who goes on to cite a scholar of Baroque drama concerning the emergent role of inanimate objects as carriers of destiny: “It is characteristic of the tragedy of fate not only that a curse or guilt is inherited within whole families, but also that this is associated with … a fatal stage property” (1977: 132–133).11 The threshold between Realism and Symbolism, which Ibsen’s domestic drama straddles, is mirrored in the contrast between the photography studio, filled with the atomized leftovers of a modern existence, and the loft, made available only through Hedvig’s description—a place where “time stands still” and whose various Baroque objects rise to the level of tragic omens. The corresponding threshold in Stoker’s Dracula is marked by the Danube, beyond which lies a region where “strange figures” proliferate and time is dominated by the moon. Harker wages war against his own imagination by keeping a meticulous diary, and his careful inventory of the Count’s domicile—of the gilded table service and the centuriesold drapery and furnishings—shares an impulse with Ibsen’s characteristically detailed stage settings.12 These settings serve as catalogues of the objects and implements that, taken together, compose the existence of the people who inhabit the scene, communicating something of their state of mind, or rather the degree to which the state of their minds and the space they occupy are inseparable. The loft that Hedvig describes is an “other place,” an imaginary realm in which even material objects find refuge from a world of drudgery and base economic survival. At the same time, the old clock and the disturbing allegory of death are indications of what is uncanny about this other space, which frightens even as it attracts. Transylvania, whose very name (“beyond the forest,” as Renfield explains) announces liminality, is another such space, though it would seem that when Harker enters his employer’s dark and cluttered den, ascending steep stairs amidst teetering stacks of paper, he has already crossed the essential threshold. Upon entering, he leaves the flatlands behind and with them the soft colors and buttery light that typify those many interior scenes, including those that exploit, à la Murnau, the frames of windows, or what seems the ultimate establishing shot: mewing kittens doing feisty battle amidst apples and neat piles of books on the ledge of a hutch, its glass doors revealing an ordered array of white porcelain dinnerware. This same piece of furniture is the backdrop against which Harker’s final transformation is framed, those china wares mimicking the milky pallor of the young man’s complexion. A “Flying Dutchman” in his own right, Harker races out across an empty landscape of sand and sky, its barrenness the seeming negation of the still life that introduces Harker and Lucy’s domestic milieu. The negation is superficial. British director Peter Greenaway has held that artists like Rembrandt and Caravaggio, as the first to paint artificial light, were filmmakers

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Figure 4.17 Willem Claesz Heda, Breakfast Table With Bramble Pie. 1631. Oil on oak. Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

avant la lettre (2008). Greenaway’s provocative claim identifies these painters likewise with a Baroque theatricality absent from those still lifes in which, not untypically, a requisite crystal goblet (Figure 4.17) bears oblique witness to a natural light source, reflecting and often multiplying windows whose frames bend with the curvature of the vessel or diffuse into the depths of the wine. The surface of the river in the View of Delft exhibits a similar diffusion, and we can say, following Hanneke Grootenboer, that the still lifes and landscapes of the period reveal a “shift in composition in terms of a new proportional relation between sky and land” (2005: 77–78). These half-filled glasses, which by an apparent accident import into the image windows that would otherwise remain “out of frame,” not only help achieve an effacement of artistry but also exhibit the same formal reduction observed above in Friedrich’s The Monk By the Sea. Vermeer’s earlier canvas already mimics the muted colors of the still life and, rather like those breakfast tableaux with their often disorderly assortment of mundane objects, produces an “effect of self-evidence” (Grootenboer 2005: 86). One school of thought cites these qualities in support of the argument that Dutch paintings of this era constitute “realistic,” lexically neutral transcriptions of the given world (Bryson 1990: 120–121). The preponderance of objects with clear symbolic value—keys, cracked walnuts, compasses, spent matches, books with pages marked, skulls—would tend to resist this current, but even those paintings that have no obvious purpose beyond a certain material archaeology nonetheless communicate an emptiness which, as the original sense of vanitas, is symbolic. Grootenboer emphasizes the fields of light and color before which the various objects are positioned, asserting that these “backgrounds” are at once flat and empty, thus signifying “a void in painting that is devoid of painted objects” (2005: 79). To reinforce an earlier point, the field above the horizon in Friedrich’s The Monk By the Sea is at once empty and flat, projected as a plane

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Figure 4.18 The Count greets his newly arrived guest in Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922). Directed by F. W. Murnau, produced by Enrico Dieckmann and Albin Grau for Jofa-Atelier Berlin-Johannisthal and Prana-Film GmbH. Image courtesy FriedrichWilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung. Distributed by Transit Film GmbH.

and brought close. The German Untiefe, which denotes both shallowness and great depth, is suited to the paradox of a painting in which the background is at once proximate and unfathomable. While the arc that connects The Monk By the Sea to the Dutch table-scape is perhaps tenuous, the monk himself stands for the asceticism that was also part and parcel of the (Calvinist) culture of the still life, just as the concept of nature morte has its counterpart in the “mimesis unto death” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1985: 54) embodied by the lone figure transfixed before an overwhelming void. A famous still from Murnau’s Nosferatu illustrates the director’s practice of using traditional techniques of pictorial composition to create his signature depth-offield (Figure  4.18). The photo, which condenses consecutive shots into a single moment, shows the Count and his newly arrived guest in the far background, framed against a bright surface by a length of darkened arcade. Of particular note is the fact that the portals are not aligned along a central axis; instead, the viewer is positioned well to the left as if to offset the fearful Hutter, who is pressed against

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Figure 4.19 Francesco Guardi, Architettura con maschere carnevalesche. Ca. 1770. Oil on canvas. Gift of Guglielmo Lochis. Accademia Carrara, Bergamo.

the wall to the right. Frank Ankersmit has remarked on a similar framing in a capriccio by Francesco Guardi (Figure 4.19), in which the Venetian lagoon is seen at a distance through an arcade, beneath which an assembly of Pulcinelle, to the apparent dismay of an equal number of onlookers, are engaged in activities that include cooking, eating, bickering, wrestling, even urinating. As in the still from Nosferatu, the point of view in Guardi’s painting is not centered but skewed to the side in a way that causes the line of sight to bend towards the right. Ankersmit comments on the form of the arcade and the unique, paradoxical effect of the tunnel, which brings the vanishing point closer while fostering the illusion of greater distance. Tunnels, he suggests, “may undo … the difference between threedimensional space itself and its projection in the two-dimensional space of a painting” (Ankersmit 2005: 269). This formal liminality is personified by the Pulcinelle, whom Ankersmit identifies as larvae in the classical sense—souls of the dead “condemned in popular culture to a meaningless and purposeless wandering about and thus to a permanent boredom” (2005: 273). This boredom is the acedia figured during the Middle Ages as the “demon of noontide,” the belief being that midday, when the sun was at its zenith, represented a time of crisis—an hour at which one’s susceptibility to temptation was most acute (Kuhn 1976: 43–44). It is

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the time also at which Pan, the man-goat hybrid of antiquity, played on his pipe and inspired in humans the eponymous “panic” that induces nightmares and causes the hair to bristle (Hammond and Scullard 1970: 773). Roger Caillois once observed that it was not until chiming clocks were introduced that midnight acquired the “objectively perceptible status” that was otherwise the exclusive property of noon. Whereas night was undivided in its totality, noon represented the precise instant at which the sun was directly overhead—the moment at which demons and ghosts (“they who cast no shadow”) could walk among humans undetected.13 Mechanical clocks are thus coeval with the Manichaean inversion by which evil came to be associated not with the burning sun but its absence: “whenever clocks with chiming bells and their famous ‘twelve strokes of midnight’ have enabled people to gauge the exact timing of the fateful hour, midday has given up its place to the deepest hour of darkness” (Caillois 2003: 126). This overlay of noon with midnight has its technical parallel in early film, in which nighttime scenes were of necessity shot in daylight. In Murnau’s Nosferatu, accordingly, the fiend is known by his distended shadow and the visible sounding of a Baroque timepiece marks both midnight and the simultaneity of events in Wismar and Transylvania (indicated by a title card reading “At the same hour”). The concern with the consequences of ennui was a feature of monastic life, for it was believed that moral vulnerability increased with exposure to the sun. The strict routine by which the monk led his life was designed as a bulwark against dissipation. The visual regime of Herzog’s Nosferatu constructs Harker as a “monk by the sea” beset by the kindred afflictions of boredom and melancholy. When, as a preface to riding off into a desert of blowing sand, he proclaims that he has “much to do,” we recognize in his metamorphosis no more than a redoubling of his defenses. His urgent determination throughout helps isolate what is essentially monastic about a modern, secular way of life devoted not only to work but to temporal discipline. It is to such discipline that the Dutch still life bears witness, and it is noteworthy that the crisis brought on by the Count’s arrival in Wismar culminates with a shot of a banquet table swarming with rats. A further relevance for the theme of boredom can be discerned in the scene— one in which Herzog departs markedly from Murnau—where the Count pays a nocturnal visit to Lucy as she is preparing for bed. Earlier that evening the vampire appears before the Harker home, watching and listening undetected as those inside contemplate a remedy for the listless Harker, who is seated at the left. A plentiful bouquet of creamy blooms fills the lower half of the window that frames both the lamp-lit interior and the clandestine visitor. Another bouquet is displayed in the subsequent scene, in which Lucy (Isabelle Adjani) is brushing out her hair before a mirror. The door behind her—visible in the mirror—opens and closes, revealing the shadow that previously engulfs the front of the small home. The shadow-play borrowed from Murnau here coincides with the traditional belief that vampires have no reflection; Dracula emerges full-bodied only when he steps to the side and back into frame (Figure 4.20). A picture of wan fatigue, the Count is dwarfed by his

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Figure 4.20 The Count (Klaus Kinski) steps into the frame while speaking with Lucy (Isabelle Adjani) in Nosferatu (1979). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Werner Herzog/Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

Figure 4.21 The avatar of Dürer’s Melancholia makes an appearance in Nosferatu (1979). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Werner Herzog/Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

shadow, the silhouette of his effete talons dangling limply above Lucy’s head. In the ensuing dialogue, Dracula contradicts a fatalism expressed by Lucy in terms that vaguely complement Jonathan’s complaint about the aimless course of the local canals: “The rivers all flow without us.” The indifference of the universe to man, the irresistible certainty and cruelty of death—this is her theme, against which Dracula maintains that “not being able to die is crueler yet.” In characterizing his condition as a state of eternal torment Dracula gestures to that Medieval

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world and more specifically to a region in Dante’s Inferno, in which those who refused to live—were plagued by sloth and indecision—inhabit the vestibule of the afterlife and “have no hope of death.” Delft, to the extent that it carries into Herzog’s film the resonance of Vermeer’s painting, is commensurate with the “gray malignant shores” of the bog-like Styx (Kuhn 1976: 57).14 The Klosterkrankheit or “cloister-disease” of acedia similarly has a resonance for Nosferatu given the vampire’s cloister-like dwellings, including the desolate house he inhabits in Wismar (which in Murnau’s film he reaches by crossing a Styx-like moat.) The idea of divine retribution cast as an eternity of “meaningless action” likewise isolates Langeweile—the temporal iteration of “boredom”—as a point of intersection between narrative content and cinematic structure. Scenes in Herzog’s film such as the one in which Harker is shown lying unconscious at the feet of a boy playing a screeching violin, or another in which the camera follows the carriage bearing Harker home as it traverses a water-filled landscape, are calculated in their seeming interminability. Harker’s transformation makes him into a caricature of renunciation—of the death-in-life that has defined his existence from the beginning. He rides off into the distance just as he once galloped eagerly toward the Carpathians at Renfield’s behest (and at a moment’s notice). The desolation of that final expanse is consistent with the barrenness of his marriage, which his sudden errand east merely seals. The narrow, parallel beds in which he and Lucy sleep are separated by a night table sporting an impressive mahogany clock. Freud wrote in his Introductory Lectures that the appearance of clocks in dreams often expressed anxiety about a late or missed period (1977: 330), and the clock that stands guard between Harker and his wife serves as the guarantor of the same childless union to which Murnau’s Ellen alludes when she cradles the aforementioned bouquet and asks plaintively, “Why did you kill them, the beautiful flowers?” Her question implicates the still life, whose materials she holds in her arms, as part of the system that marshals punctuality as a shield against desire. It is not surprising, then, that the clock that strikes midnight in Dracula’s lair should inspire such anxious wonder. The bizarre timepiece in Herzog’s film, even more so than its precursor in Murnau’s, not only proclaims the witching hour but also—as a visual device of proto-cinematic import—holds Harker spellbound while instantiating the “cut” that subjects him to Dracula’s demonic thirst. Bloodthirsty, the Count is a despot of Baroque proportions. He carries a chiaroscuro with him wherever he goes. His fatal allergy to natural light makes him the personified contrary of those paintings in which the only light is natural. Already Murnau introduced him as one who emerges from darkness, framed by porticoes that help create the distinctive depth of Murnau’s mise-en-scène (Eisner 1973: 104–105). Dracula (Orlok) is the visual synonym of that depth. His direct movement toward the camera undoes the flatness common to the canvas and the movie screen and redefines both as Untiefen. His formal effect is to fix the void, lending body to the nothingness that lies behind the still life and makes every instance of the genre a vanitas. Herzog’s particular “View of Delft”

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helps attune us to the disquieting stillness (of water, of life) in Vermeer’s great painting, revealing Delft and Transylvania as parallel “hearts of darkness.” Harker’s journey into the region of “ghosts, thieves and wolves” is a regression that weakens the “realist” regimen of the Dutch habitus in favor of full-blown allegory, which Herzog’s grim clock epitomizes. At the hour when time stands still, Harker comes face to face with a spectacle that unites the meaning and material of the still life and provides, to invoke Conrad’s Marlowe, “food for thought and also for the vultures” (1988: 57).15

Notes 1 Stoker’s translation reads “For the dead travel fast” (1983: 9). 2 I am alluding to Lumiére’s L’Arrivée d’un train, screened in Paris in 1895. 3 A gramophone-era recording of Tamino’s aria is heard in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974). 4 See also Freud (1976: 488–508). 5 Regarding the relevance of Friedrich’s paintings to cinema, see Hollander (1989). 6 See Rosenblum (1975) and The Abstraction of Landscape (n.a. 2007). 7 I owe this insight to Christopher Braider. 8 See also Prinzler (2003). 9 See Wolfgang Sohlich: “The flotsam and jetsam of a defunct culture have sedimented in his cavernous mind and closed all roads to his intellect and heart” (1992: 102). 10 The book, which Hedvig identifies as Harryson’s History of London (1776), is of the sort that Harker finds in great abundance in Count Dracula’s library—“books … relating to England and English life and customs and manners” (Stoker 1983: 19). 11 Hedvig’s fate is congenital: She sacrifices herself for Ekdal after he convinces himself that her failing eyesight, which may actually be the result of her labor in the studio, has been inherited from the man he suspects of being her true biological father. 12 Harker mentions that he had seen very similar fabrics in England in a museum setting, but that these—compared to those in Dracula’s castle (where time stands still)—were threadbare and moth-eaten (Stoker 1983: 19). 13 It is worth noting that in Vermeer’s View of Delft, while the reflections of the buildings shade deeply into the water, as if to suggest a nether world, the human figures on the sunny bank are shadowless. 14 Thanks to Cristina Calhoon for alerting me to some of the possibilities discussed here. 15 See also Calhoon (2008: 178).

Works Cited n.a., The Abstraction of Landscape: From Northern Romanticism to Abstract Expressionism (Madrid: Fundación Juan March, 2007). Alpers, Svetlana: The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

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Ankersmit, Frank: Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). Barnouw, Erik: The Magician and the Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). Benjamin, Walter: The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977). Benjamin, Walter: Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 2007). Bryson, Norman: Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). Caillois, Roger: “The Noon Complex,” The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, ed. Claudine Frank, trans. Claudine Frank and Camillie Naish (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 125–129. Calhoon, Kenneth S.: “The Moon, the Mail, and the Province of German Literature,” 1848 und das Versprechen der Moderne, ed. Jürgen Fohrmann and Helmut Schneider (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003), pp. 129–146. Calhoon, Kenneth S.: “F. W. Murnau, C. D. Friedrich and the Conceit of the Absent Spectator,” Modern Language Notes 120 (2005): 633–653. Calhoon, Kenneth S.: “Charming the Carnivore: Bruce Chatwin’s Australian Odyssey,” Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of the Modern Journey, ed. John Zilcosky (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), pp. 173–194. Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness (New York: Norton, 1988). Eisner, Lotte: The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt, trans. Roger Greaves (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). Elsaesser, Thomas: Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary (London: Routledge, 2000). Freud, Sigmund: The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1976 [reprint of 1953 edition]). Freud, Sigmund: Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1977). von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang: Faust: Texte, ed. Albrecht Schöne (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994). Gombrich, E. H.: Shadows: The Depiction of Cast Shadows in Western Art (London: National Gallery Publications, 1995). Greenaway, Peter: Rembrandt’s J’Accuse: Conspiracy & Murder in the Nightwatch (Hilversum: VPRO, 2008). Grootenboer, Hanneke: The Rhetoric of Perspective: Realism and Illusionism in SeventeenthCentury Dutch Still-Life Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Hammond, N. G. L. and Scullard, H. H. eds.: The Oxford Classical Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). Hollander, Ann: Moving Pictures (New York: Knopf, 1989). Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor W.: Dialektik der Auf klärung (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1985). Ibsen, Henrik: An Enemy of the People; The Wild Duck; Rosmersholm, trans. James McFarlane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Koerner, Joseph Leo: Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

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Kuhn, Reinhard: The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). Mayne, Judith: “Herzog, Murnau, and the Vampire,” The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, ed. Timothy Corrigan (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 119–132. Moretti, Franco: Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller (London: Verso, 1988). Prager, Brad: The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (London: Wallflower Press, 2007). Prawer, S. S.: Nosferatu – Phantom der Nacht (London: British Film Institute, 2004). Prinzler, H. H.: Murnau: Ein Melancholiker des Films (Berlin: Bertz, 2003). Rosenblum, Robert: Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition; Friedrich to Rothko (New York: Harper & Row, 1975). Schestag, Thomas: “Vermeer’s Signatures.” Unpublished. Schneider, Helmut: “The Tree and the Origin of the Modern Landscape Experience,” The Idea of the Forest: German and American Perspectives on the Culture and Politics of Trees, ed. Karla Schultz and Kenneth S. Calhoon (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), pp. 89–102. Shakespeare, William: The Complete Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller (New York: Penguin, 2002). Sohlich, Wolfgang: “Allegory in the Technological Age: A Case Study of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 6 (1992): 99–118. Stewart, Garrett: Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Stoker, Bram: Dracula, ed. A. N. Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).

Additional Films Cited Coppola, Francis Ford: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) Murnau, F. W.: Nosferatu (1922) Murnau, F. W.: Faust (1926)

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Moving Stills Herzog and Photography Stefanie Harris

Imagination: the specific ability to produce and to decode images. Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography1 Werner Herzog’s Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) begins with a scene of photography—a mug shot, to be exact. Told as an extended flashback, the film starts at the end in a police processing center, where Hombre, a member of the rebellious group of the film’s title, sits uncomfortably in a chair and attempts to follow the instructions of a photographer who is never shown. Hombre struggles with the placard identifying his booking number, holding it either too high or too low, backwards or upside down, in a scene that both reinforces the disproportionate relationship between material objects in the built world of the institution and its inhabitants and broadens that disjuncture to include the processes for the mediation of experience itself. Captured as a criminal in a photograph (Figure  5.1), Hombre and his image are posed, fixed, and categorized in direct contrast to the unbridled mayhem of the day’s events shown in ninety minutes of screen images. In the scene in the police station, the mug shot is further complemented by a photographic aerial map of the educational institution that Hombre and the other dwarfs briefly take over in a rebellion that seems to have no motivational trajectory other than its own staging. In the image, the main building of the institution and other outbuildings are all carefully identified, as are the roads leading to the compound. Assigned its place in the landscape from a perspective that assumes comprehensiveness and command, this pictorial information is little aid in mapping either the location or the structure of the narrative of the film story itself. Rather, I offer that the deliberate staging of these two events of photography at the start of the film is meant to establish a formal counterpoint with Herzog’s own filmmaking practices. With the images of the mug shot and the map, Herzog A Companion to Werner Herzog, First Edition. Edited by Brad Prager. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Figure 5.1 Hombre (Helmut Döring) with an oversized booking number in Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Werner Herzog/Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

distinguishes between a particular type of photographic image as restrictive, normative, and a form of control, as opposed to a flow of cinematic images that emphasize their own immediacy, singularity, and physicality. In other words, the filmmaker distinguishes between an image where meaning is imposed from outside the image (the discursive sphere of the law, of medicine, of social structures), and the potential for experiencing the world in the spontaneous interaction with the image itself. That the aerial photograph of the compound is superimposed after a long sequence of tracking shots only further emphasizes the discrepancy between motion and stasis. It is notable that this initial scene of photography in Even Dwarfs Started Small takes place in a police station, suggesting that Herzog’s deliberate inclusion of the photographs here may have less to do with a critique of the technology of the photographic process itself (with which cinema, of course, overlaps significantly) than with certain practices of photography, the codes through which photographs are produced and encountered, and a symbolic dimension of the photograph that Herzog exploits. The distinction between photography and film is typically articulated along a series of dichotomies formulated around movement, temporality, and framing, all of which play a role in the construction of orders of signification.2 And Herzog’s inclusion of photographs in his films, at least in his early work, largely exploits this binary between mobility and immobility, life and death. Photographic images are presented as frozen moments in time, and despite the open-ended temporality of one’s encounter with the material object, they reference the past and gesture to an absence that cannot be overcome. Cinematic images move, and in their movement and fleeting time on the screen, create a

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present tense of the scene pictured in which the encounter with the image creates its own experience in the imagination of the viewer. In the words of Roland Barthes, the photograph and the cinema correspond to different “informational economies” in which the photograph is “related to a pure spectatorial consciousness and not to the more projective, more ‘magical’ fictional consciousness on which film by and large depends” (1977b: 45). If cinema is a medium of projection, constructing an alternative reality, then a photograph shows the world as fixed and flat. When the two media are combined, such as when a photograph interrupts the flow of cinematic images, the disjuncture opens up parallel dimensions of mediation that allow the cinematic spectator to reflect on their respective modes of presentation and meaning-making. With regard to Herzog more specifically, this self-reflexive gesture functions as moments within his films where the filmmaker stages a rejection of semiotic codes and practices of mediation that result only in the “worn-out images” that his own projects (by his assertion) continuously seek to repudiate. If the map of the institution is descriptive (and prescriptive), depicting the exterior world as it is, Herzog will privilege cinema as depicting alternative realities and inner landscapes that he claims to bring to the screen. The rebellion of Herzog’s characters (indeed even his own self-styled character) against a social order that deforms or destroys them is a central component of many of his films. All the Stroszeks, dwarfs, Aguirres, Kaspars, and Woyzecks, readily come to mind.3 Asked to link his films, Herzog asserts they are “all desperate and solitary rebels with no language with which to communicate” (Cronin 2002: 68). Statements such as these have quite reasonably led to critical analyses of his films as turning on a language crisis, or as an attempt to express an immediate relation to the world that precedes or exceeds linguistic categories. In my own look at a selection of his films, I will, however, pursue a different approach to this question, namely how Herzog selectively employs photographs or scenes of photography both as markers of a civilization that distorts the landscapes of the mind (and in this way functioning only within the linguistic and social realm) and as events that may affect us outside of these prescribed social codes. In a film like Even Dwarfs Started Small, the negative valence of photography is made explicit by associating the medium not only with an oppressive state authority but also the considerable cultural authority exercised by the mass media. Photographic images are repeatedly ridiculed, criticized, and lampooned by the rowdy group, as in their response to a Polaroid of Hombre and one of the other dwarfs taken from such a low angle that they appear as giants. Later when Hombre is locked into a bedroom with one of the female members of the group, the deliberate parody of bourgeois marriage and sexuality—Hombre cannot even manage to get onto the bed—is underscored by the illustrated magazines that the couple find in the room and bring out to show the others. Dominated by photos of female bodies, the disparity between the idealized bodies pictured and the bodies of the dwarfs looking at the pictures is highlighted both visually and verbally. Just like the bed that Hombre cannot climb into, the dwarfs are excluded from

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representative images of the social body. The mass-produced images celebrate consensus and participate in the manipulation of a culture and society from which Herzog’s filmmaking practice deliberately and repeatedly distinguishes itself.4 If, as Roland Barthes argued, the photograph is the “most social of institutions,” then we may use it in order to discover “the forms that our society uses to ensure its peace of mind and to grasp the magnitude, the detours and the underlying function of that activity” (1977a: 31). This is not to reduce Herzog’s engagement with the photograph to a tension between commercial and non-commercial images, or between those images that reinforce or subvert cultural norms. Rather the different relationship to time, to movement, and to the status of the referent offered by each medium articulates a central problem of his work: the negotiation between exterior and interior worlds. An article published at the beginning of Herzog’s career, “Rebellen in Amerika” (1964), provides some insight into this question and the cinematic preoccupations that have inflected Herzog’s own filmmaking practices in the decades since. The essay describes a series of film screenings by the experimental filmmakers of the so-called New American Cinema, including works by Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, and others.5 Foremost Herzog is impressed by a film aesthetic that rejects the aesthetic categories of literature or theater, meaning films that rely less on narrative construction in favor of a “distillation of purely cinematic means of expression”: movement within the image, editing between images, and the juxtaposition of acoustic effects and the image (1964: 57). In other words, Herzog celebrates a cinema that showcases the specific possibilities of the film medium as moving, sequential images (and in this way, shows himself the heir as well to filmmakers of the 1910s and 1920s who likewise sought to distinguish a uniquely cinematic art). Herzog highlights the withdrawal of the images from narratability, in favor of a more direct means of communication that foregrounds the sensuality of images and their emotional resonances. Avoiding the rational and over-intellectualized domains of language and linguistic systems, the films present the potential of experiencing images in their immediacy rather than through the filter of language. Herzog’s evident delight in these films (and his disdain for mainstream film critics who dismissed them) borrows from some of the same terms Brakhage used to talk about the possibility of creating cinematic images before or in spite of their linguistic fall: Imagine a world before the “beginning was the word.” […] But one can never go back, not even in imagination. After the loss of innocence, only the ultimate of knowledge can balance the wobbling pivot. Yet I suggest that there is a pursuit of knowledge foreign to language and founded upon visual communication, demanding a development of the optical mind, and dependent upon perception in the original and deepest sense of the word. […] There is no need for the mind’s eye to be deadened after infancy, yet in these times the development of visual understanding is almost universally forsaken (1992: 71–72).

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Unencumbered by the literary script, Herzog likewise writes, “visions” should be presented as something that happen (in the present) rather than remaining merely descriptive, thereby permitting a “new relation to reality” (1964: 57). Creating images that maintain something of their spontaneity is not to say, however, that the images are a natural presentation of empirical reality. Rather “the documentary character inherent in every film recording” (because of the photographic relationship between the film image and its referent) is intentionally manipulated through camera movements, editing, or other technical processing in order to overcome mere anachronistic naturalism (1964: 57). The appearance of a lack of formal discipline is indeed the hard-won result of highly stylized, “intensive” images that communicate in excess of prescribed linguistic conventions and touch the spectator in the recesses of her own imagination (1964: 58). To examine the role of photography in Herzog’s films is to examine the extent to which his films, no matter their subject, are always also self-reflexive exercises that directly or indirectly address representational practices. Or as Herzog has repeated in numerous variations in interviews and film commentaries: “For me, it has always been a question of doing just one single thing: searching for a new grammar of images and expressing this desire through the films I have made” (Cronin 2002: 202). In Herzog’s work, both the immobility of the photographic image as such, as well as its tautological relationship to its referent, are presented as both foreclosing and redefining the possibility of its functioning as just such a “new image.” Although I will not argue for an evolution of Herzog’s work per se, I will trace the role of photography in three films that span his career: Signs of Life (1968), Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1998), and Wheel of Time (2003). Like Even Dwarfs Started Small, Signs of Life employs photographs to critique their representative status in the world against which both the main character, Stroszek, and the filmmaker himself rebel. Little Dieter deploys photographs, or rather a single photograph, to expand the possibility of a different kind of (traumatic) narrative, though one that may have more to say about the filmmaker than the subject of the documentary. My discussion of Wheel of Time situates the film as part of a larger project including Lena Herzog’s extended photo essay, Pilgrims, that most explicitly addresses, both in its content and its form, the external depiction of a so-called “inner” landscape and the role of the viewer of such images.

Photography and Stasis If the title of Herzog’s Signs of Life takes up the subject of mediation as its theme, the film itself repeatedly makes clear that such “signs” are not to be found in the multiple photographs of domestic life that are a repeated visual motif throughout the film.6 Set in Greece in 1942, though with scant reference to the war, Herzog’s film is loosely based or “borrowed” from Achim von Arnim’s nineteenth-century

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novella The Mad Invalid of Fort Ratonneau (Peucker 1986a: 217). The protagonist of the film is Stroszek, a German soldier in occupied Greece who has been sent to convalesce on the island of Kos where he, along with two other soldiers, Meinhard and Becker, protect a munitions depot at an abandoned fortress. The men are accompanied by Stroszek’s Greek wife Nora who cooks for them, and the four live in relative isolation in the confines of the fortress, aimlessly wandering the grounds, sleeping, eating, and otherwise looking for diversions in the harsh and unrelenting landscape. Eventually, Stroszek goes mad and chases the others from the fort, threatening to blow up the munitions and thereby endangering the inhabitants of the village; however, his outburst results only in a dead donkey, a singed chair, and a spectacular fireworks show before he is taken away. As a result of the film’s striking visual compositions, judicious use of silence in the soundtrack, and depiction of characters who either do not or cannot speak, analyses of the film largely emphasize the film’s presentation of the central problem of signification and the failure of language as a viable communicative system.7 Stroszek’s mental breakdown as a break with society is linked to his “inability to formulate his experience by means of any semiotic code” (Peucker 1986a: 227) and his turn, instead, to visual images, primarily fire (a central motif already in Arnim’s novella). While valid, the emphasis on the conflict between verbal language and the image may obscure how Herzog juxtaposes different types of images themselves in order to depict Stroszek’s conflict and eventual breakdown. Although Signs of Life does not sacrifice narrative storytelling altogether, the film does make recourse to stylized images, particularly as a way of signaling an internal experience that cannot be directly communicated, and often in juxtaposition with other image-making practices, particularly photographic portraiture. In other words, the tension may not, or not only, be between language as a social code and Herzog’s highly individual internal images, but different image-making codes that associate photography with stasis and death, and film with movement and being. As one of Herzog’s earliest films, Signs of Life stakes a claim for cinematic legitimacy that will inform decades of his film work. When they first arrive at the fortress, Stroszek and his wife move into the quarters of the former caretaker and his family who have seemingly left most of their belongings behind when they were forced to leave, including the many framed photographs that hang on the walls. While a voice-over informs us of Stroszek’s inability to integrate himself into society either professionally or socially and of his vague sense of discomfort in the new surroundings, Nora takes out a small stack of her own photographs and looks through them smiling before handing them to Stroszek who glances through them distractedly. Nora retrieves the photographs and inserts them around the edges of the frame already over the bed (Figure 5.2), in a sense inscribing the couple in the domestic history of the house and preparing for their own domestic story. As Nora says, perhaps this will be the place where she has their child. Stroszek, meanwhile, places an animal skull on the bureau next to their bed, before Nora objects and he carries it back outside. Most directly, the

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Figure 5.2 Photos inserted around the edges of a frame over the bed in Signs of Life (1968). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Werner Herzog/ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

photographic images are associated with the construction of a social space and a particular domestic narrative: husband, wife, and child. However, Stroszek marks this scene with stasis and death—the skull. As opposed to signs of life, photographs are literally signs of death: of those family members lost and commemorated through the photographs on the wall, and of the individual who must conform to these social narratives. This relationship between photographs, stasis, and death is reinforced in a later scene in which Meinhard, obsessed with insect life on the island, stands in front of a wall of photographs while he pours insecticide into a jar holding cockroaches, slowing killing them. The long history of writing on photography has often associated the photograph with death, or what Barthes called the “funereal immobility” of the photographic image (1981: 6). If one thinks of photography as three interrelated processes (the photographer, the person or thing photographed, and the viewer of the image), then one might think of the association with death in multiple ways. On the one hand, Barthes will argue that the person photographed is rendered a “specter” (1981: 14) as the subject is “mortified” (11) and transformed into an object by the photographer and all of the future viewers of the photograph. Here Barthes speaks of the sensation of inauthenticity one feels when seeing an image of oneself, in that one’s idea of oneself never “coincides” with the image: “for it is the image which is heavy, motionless, stubborn (which is why society sustains it), and ‘myself ’ which is light, divided, dispersed” (1981: 12). The association with death may even be experienced when looking at a photograph of a stranger because of the temporal confusion introduced by the fact of photography: “by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously introduces belief that it is alive … but by shifting this reality to the past, the photograph suggests that it is

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already dead” (1981: 79). The photographs that affect Stroszek so negatively in Signs of Life do so both in terms of what they show (social repressiveness and homogenization) and how they show (fixed and unchanging). As the instruments of both representation and self-knowledge, photographs are firmly embedded in family life, securing the past and shaping the future. We permit photographs to serve as incontrovertible evidence of our family myths, our most cherished memories, and desires; however, in the repetition of their staging and the codes of posing and production, photographs reveal how individual memory and desire is shaped by broader cultural forces that normalize and domesticate these instincts. For this reason, Pierre Bourdieu has called photography the “domestic manufacture of domestic emblems” (1990: 28), inasmuch as photographs show or depict, through the images presented, the bourgeois social unit as a series of repetitive (mass-produced) poses. Although each photograph depicts an individual, the individual in the photograph is constructed in a particular way, conforming to the presentation of the family as a happy, productive, cohesive unit. Notably, the gypsy who visits the fortress, and with whom Stroszek almost immediately identifies, situates himself outside of the domestic sphere. He claims that he does not know where he was born, possibly in Portugal, and that he is a king, separated from his tribe as a child and always in search of them. His life is movement; his “sign” is something that cannot be captured in a photograph: the dance. For the photograph does not only present a certain version of bourgeois domesticity, raising it to the iconic level, but further, freezes it, capturing and stopping a moment in time. Again, to borrow from Bourdieu: “The logic of the reciprocal solemnization of people and scenery tends to turn the photograph into an ideogram which eliminates from the environment all circumstantial and temporal aspects, such as people moving, in short, everything that constitutes life” (1990: 37). The framed photographs emerge again as a central visual metaphor late in the film after Stroszek has threatened to blow up the fortress, and the town is forced to evacuate some of its residents. Unable to take all of their belongings, the people are seen carrying framed photographic portraits from their houses, and we see a line of framed photographs along a white-washed wall while the voiceover informs us: “He said he would blow up the whole place—and wanted to make the earth shake. Then people would see what was really going on in the houses and what was really at the bottom of everything. He wanted finally to bring this to light.”8 A scene in which Stroszek’s own wedding picture is taken reveals this discrepancy, and like Even Dwarfs Started Small emphasizes not only the material object of the photograph but also the context and conditions of its production. In the wedding pose, Stroszek and Nora stand in the middle of the frame, surrounded by two elderly couples. Stroszek pants heavily and twitches, and his demeanor, agitation, and facial expression are at odds with the stillness of the others. Although we never see it, one can only imagine that the composition of the eventual photograph will be marred by subtle movement of the central figure of the portrait. His rebellion

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against systems of institutionalization—bourgeois domesticity, military orders, even language itself—is signaled by his resistance to the photograph. Of the composition of the shot, Herzog has said: “What I had done was to make the actor Peter Brogle race me as fast as he could for two kilometres around Kos. Everyone else was on set ready to roll while we were running back to set at top speed. I quickly tossed Peter a towel for him to dry his face and made him line up with the others, telling him, ‘Stare at the lens and try to suppress your heavy breathing.’ So he stood there, his face totally disfigured, and when you watch the scene you really do not know what is going on with the guy” (Cronin 2002: 80–81). The brief shot of the wedding photograph is juxtaposed with other images in a montage sequence that unfolds in silence and includes reflected circles of light from the water, small fish swarming in circles, a bird struggling to fly, a cemetery—images that reinforce the idea of stasis, repetition, and death against which Stroszek struggles. Herzog invites us to consider the scene one of the central moments of the film (a counterpoint, perhaps, to the famous image of the valley of windmills), saying of it: “These kinds of shots are where the film holds its breath. They feel as mystifying and intense to me as to any other spectator, and I am convinced it is moments like these that truly decide my films. They are the places where the various threads suddenly run together to form a knot. They propel the plot forwards, even though I do not really know how” (Cronin 2002: 80). Although in films like Even Dwarfs Started Small, Signs of Life, and Stroszek (as we will see), photographs are employed to mark this moment, I should emphasize that the photograph is used in a metaphorical sense here, to signal a rebellion (both of the protagonist and of the filmmaker). For this reason, the photographic pose even appears anachronistically in a film like Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), a narrative set in the sixteenth century, in which Herzog deliberately stages “a tableau, a highly stylized shot where all the characters look directly into the camera, like an old photo from the nineteenth century” (Cronin 2002: 79). If, as Brad Prager has argued, films like Even Dwarfs Started Small, Signs of Life, and Stroszek, depict “madness on a minor scale,” while Aguirre operates on a “grand scale,” a through line among them is a tension between something we might call signs of photographic stasis as opposed to cinematic life. Almost a decade after Signs of Life, Herzog again employed a photograph to mark the repression of the individual in Stroszek (1976), his film about an unlikely trio who leave Berlin for Wisconsin in an attempt to start a new life. The photograph functions as the narrative and symbolic pivot between the two locations. In a scene just before their move, Herr Scheitz shows Stroszek and Eva a photo of his nephew Clayton in Wisconsin, posing with his assistants and the dog (Figure 5.3). A corner of a building makes up the background. As the characters look at the image, the camera zooms in until the photograph briefly occupies the entire screen. Here the photo functions initially as an idealized image of the characters’ projected desire for a new beginning and a new life away from Berlin; however, it does not tell the whole truth in the manner in which it has been framed.

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Figure 5.3 A photograph of Herr Scheitz’s nephew in Wisconsin. From Stroszek (1977). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Werner Herzog/Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

The building they stand in front of is, we will learn later, a mobile home parked in what is essentially a junkyard. And the once idealized wide-open spaces of the American Midwest will ultimately prove more repressive than the prison cell from which Stroszek is released at the start of the film.9 The screen image of the photograph cuts immediately to an aerial view that presents Manhattan in a static longtake as a glamour shot, invoking all of those “worn-out images” from magazines, postcards, and posters with which Herzog consistently contrasts his own cinematic images. Once Bruno, Eva, and Herr Scheitz arrive in New York, however, we never see a point-of-view shot of their own experience of the view from the Empire State Building, nor of the landscape they pass as they drive to Wisconsin, as if to accentuate the disconnect between the media images in circulation and their own scenes of disillusionment. Unlike the promise of the photograph, the everyday world of America is experienced only as mediocrity, restriction, over-rationality, and desensitization. Retrospectively we realize that Herzog has offered us a distinct counterpoint to the failed photograph in the “TV” image Bruno had reluctantly given up when he leaves his jail cell in Berlin in the opening minutes of the film.10 Bruno is fascinated by the fuzzy, opaque images reflected in a glass water bottle that hangs from a window in his cell. Indeed the ethereal image reflected in the water is one of Herzog’s favorite cinematic motifs: an image that is both located in the physical world and lacks a material referent. This variation of an image of an image is a frequent hallmark of Herzog’s films, whether it is a reflection captured in a mirror, in water, or in oil, or even the mirages of Fata Morgana (1969). Detached from the material world, the film images assert a link to an inner world that can only be depicted in fleeting images that evoke mystery and access to the “optical mind” (to borrow Brakhage’s term). The shapes of subtle human forms reflected in the

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water of the glass point to a world outside the realm of reality, and belonging to the imagination. We cannot create a narrative for what is happening in these images; that is we cannot contain it within the reified structures of the already known. All we can do is feel it, experiencing it as a sensory and emotional event that cannot be scripted or restricted as such, but before which we are present. In similar fashion Herzog offers an alternative to the wedding photograph in Signs of Life in a brief shot of the reflection of Stroszek and Nora in a well into which a stone has been dropped, so that their image in the water below is moving and fluid. If photographs in these films are marked by stasis and fixity and their relation to death, the fleeting nature of the reflection of the pair and its gentle movement open another possibility of expression in an attempt at expressing what Herzog calls an “intensified truth” of experience to which the spectator might also be present. Likewise, Stroszek’s fireworks display is the visible manifestation of his rebellion, as the black screen is punctuated by fleeting traces of white light, thereby highlighting that signs of life cannot be fixed but are essentially associated with mobility.11 The fireworks are in a sense only a distillation of the cinematic image to its component parts: light and movement. These then contrast with the traveling shot at the end of the film taken from the back of a truck moving down a dirt road kicking up a cloud of dust so that no light at all can be seen.

Photography and Trauma If Signs of Life and other early films employ photographs and allusions to photographic practices as a fatal mark of the repression under which his protagonists suffer, Herzog’s documentary film Little Dieter Needs to Fly, about the Germanborn American pilot Dieter Dengler’s escape after his plane was shot down over Laos in the early stages of the Vietnam conflict, uses a photograph to open a space for the production of alternative memory practices. In the film, Herzog employs photographs, newsreels, and other documentary footage to retell Dengler’s story, as well as reenactments of Dengler’s capture and escape, interviews, and other staged encounters. Indeed Dengler is only one of the film’s narrators—Herzog himself serves as a parallel narrator through extensive use of voice-over that intervenes in the telling. The documentary is a highly constructed composition that establishes an explicit connection between Dengler’s initial desire to become a pilot as a young boy witnessing the bombing of his hometown in Germany by American pilots during World War II, and Dengler’s own service as a pilot, imprisonment, and eventual escape. Linking the events, Herzog employs the structure of traumatic repetition.12 Two types of photographs, or at least two positions toward the photograph, emerge in the film, the one most associated with what in The Minnesota Declaration, Herzog’s own personal manifesto on documentary film, he has called the “truth of accountants” that “creates norms” and the other with

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an “ecstatic truth” of “illumination” (Cronin 2002: 301). On the one hand photographs appear in the film as visual evidence of Dengler’s statements. At regular intervals, we see photographs of Dengler, his family members, his fiancée, and his fellow soldiers at various points as they are mentioned in the film narrative. Here photographs play a subsidiary role, serving to bolster the veracity of any given statement, although the legitimacy of the photograph may likewise be called into question. When, for example, Dengler describes how he and his brothers stood at their attic window and watched the planes flying in to bomb their town, the film cuts first to documentary footage of an air attack, and then after Dieter points to a house similar to the one in which he lived, to a black and white photograph of young boys standing at a window. Not only does the photograph misrepresent the scene (two boys are depicted instead of the three that Dengler mentions), but further appears wholly inadequate to communicate the import of the moment at which Dengler claims he found his calling: “from that moment on Little Dieter needed to fly.” Similarly a framed photograph on the wall of the adult Dengler’s house in northern California shows an airplane just as it lifts off a carrier at sea, depicting Dengler’s plane at the moment it takes off for the flight during which he will be shot down (or at least so Dengler claims). And a photograph of the teenage Dengler depicts him in “the moment he left” for America. The photographs lend external verification to the story, rendering the narrative more believable or convincing. Even so, their deployment in the story simultaneously undermines their legitimacy, since we as viewers may become suspicious that the “moments” captured—the boys at the window, the plane lifting off, the teenager heading off with his rucksack—do not in fact correlate with those moments which they claim to depict. Herzog privileges instead a different photograph of Dengler, which Herzog himself describes (as opposed to the others that are narrated by Dengler himself ). With this move, it is clear that the filmmaker privileges his own version of the narrative. Of the film, Herzog has commented on the extensive stylization at work: “We were very careful about editing and stylizing Dieter’s reality. He had to become an actor playing himself. Everything in the film is authentic Dieter, but to intensify him it is all re-orchestrated, scripted, and rehearsed. It was my job as the director to translate and edit his thoughts into something profound and cinematic” (Cronin 2002: 265). The filmmaker shows that he is less concerned with the timeline and facts of the case than with an “intensified truth” on the nature of man and of an inner experience that may defy simple narrating (Cronin 2002: 241). The only photograph to appear more than once in the film, it depicts Dengler shortly after his rescue (Figure  5.4). He is shirtless, emaciated, with an intense facial expression that does not accord with the calm demeanor and pleasant smile of the contemporary Dengler we see on screen. Unlike the other photographs that are presented as static, material objects in which a moment in time is frozen, this photograph is made to move, as the camera pans across it and zooms in on it, until the image takes up the entire film screen and the center of the image becomes the

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Figure 5.4 A photograph of Dieter Dengler shortly after being rescued in Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1998). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Lucki Stipetić and Werner Herzog/Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

depthless eyes of the emaciated man, while the other figures in the image are cropped out. Herzog mobilizes this photograph in similar fashion twice during the film, using it to frame the story of Dengler’s crash and ultimate rescue. In the camera’s movement across the photo, Herzog releases the image from the temporal and referential restraints with which it is marked, setting up the possibility for an alternative truth and access to an experience that defies or exceeds linguistic articulation. In appearing to move, the photograph is intended to move us, the viewer, who may be touched by the image rather than simply informed through its descriptive function. The privileging of the photograph of the emaciated Dengler just after his rescue not only focuses the film on trauma, but more specifically on the role of photographic practices in mediating that experience and reflecting on it. For in the photograph, and in Herzog’s own identification with it, we gain a sense of where image-making practices might not only reproduce the material world mimetically, but provoke a recognition of an internal vision that is not referentially based. Here, Roland Barthes’ writing on photography may prove helpful. In Camera Lucida, Barthes maintains that the essential quality of the photograph constructs a paradox, namely that the photograph is both utterly generalizable and utterly particular, as a function of both what and how it shows. The generalizable aspects of a photograph—studium—are those coded elements we perceive in the photograph as a consequence of our cultural knowledge (all of the evidentiary photographs in Little Dieter Needs to Fly). The utterly particular aspects of a photograph—punctum— interrupt these processes of cultural knowledge, leaving us touched by the image but without the capacity to name what it is that moves us (the film’s privileged photo). Since Barthes defines semiology (or the analysis of any system of signs as systems of signification) as a subset of linguistics, to designate meaning (or the

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signified) is to fall back on language. However, as an analogon of the object pictured, the photograph always also establishes a quasi-tautological relationship between signifier and signified, or as he writes later in Camera Lucida, “the referent adheres” (1981: 6), resulting in a loss of substitution or equivalence that is characteristic of true sign systems. This constitutes what Barthes calls the photographic paradox, which is to say that the photograph is both coded and a “message without a code” (1977a: 17). Although we may apprehend the photograph within a particular cultural context and set of norms and use any set of linguistic terms to describe any given photograph, this second order message or coding (what Barthes calls the connotation of the image) does not fully contain or comprehend its denotative or analogic function. Pure denotation, Barthes argues, does not mean neutrality or even objectivity, however. In other words, Barthes—although typically categorized in the so-called realist camp of photography because of his privileging of the continuity between the photograph and its referent—makes no naïve assertion of something like photographic objectivity, whether it be in the formal qualities of the image or its technical make-up. Rather, the denotative message of the photograph is that which suspends language and blocks meaning, description, or narration. Twenty years before the publication of Camera Lucida, Barthes already suggested that denotation, as a “this-side of language” (a phrase that recalls Brakhage’s comments), may only be found at the level of traumatic images, in which the traumatic image is “the photograph about which there is nothing to say” (1977a: 30–31). In other words, the traumatic image is that which remains unintegrated and cannot be contained by reason or the social body, or as Herzog will claim of certain images, “critical analysis cannot penetrate” (Cronin 2002: 163). Such images, Barthes will argue, accommodate latency (memory) but not scrutiny, which is to say that their referent is not (or not only) to be found in the external world but also as a memory of a vision—the dematerialized referent that is the privileged image of so many of Herzog’s films. We note a further shift from Signs of Life here. Namely if in the earlier film, the emphasis is on the negative reaction of the photographed subject (Stroszek), here the balance shifts to the viewer of the image: Herzog himself. The tension in the photograph of Dengler presents a complex temporal relationship: certainly it depicts him shortly after his rescue, but the photograph also harbors a memory of a more distant past of the child in postwar Germany and it operates within the present tense of the cinematic experience of Herzog’s film. The photo provides an associative link to Dengler’s childhood growing up in great poverty during and after the war—“Herzog: He was down to eighty-five pounds. Dengler: I knew hunger as a child.” But the link also points to the filmmaker as Herzog merges their life stories: “As a child, Dieter saw things that made no earthly sense at all. Germany had been transformed into a dreamscape of the surreal, and this is exactly what we see in the film, shots of the bombed-out cityscapes. Like me, Dengler had to take charge of his life from a very early age, and because as children we both knew what real hunger was, we had an immediate rapport”

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(Cronin 2002: 265). In a sense, Herzog tells us that Dengler’s story is his story and that he has recognized in the photograph the “truthful” if not “factual” depiction of his own imagination and memory, just as he hopes that his spectators will engage in a similar experience watching the film: “My honest belief is that the images in my films are your images too. Somehow, deep in your subconscious, you will find them lurking dormant like sleeping friends. Seeing the images on film wakes them up, as if I am introducing to you a brother whom you have never actually met” (Cronin 2002: 61). This claim for the photograph verges on an ethical breach, of a part with the criticism Herzog has received from various quarters for exploiting the subjects of his films. (Dengler is, after all, filmed retracing his steps through the jungle with his hands tied behind his back.) The poignancy of the photo, and its effect on the viewer, is not, however, about claiming Dengler’s experience in the jungle for oneself—but of gaining access, if only fleetingly, to a different kind of knowledge about oneself and the world that is not available linguistically. If, as André Bazin argued, the photograph serves to “embalm time” (1967: 14), it differs from painting in that the photograph both is and is not a product of the natural world. It is “an hallucination that is also a fact” (1967: 16).13 Or in Herzog’s preferred terms, it can function as a pivot between external and interior worlds, physical reality and inner landscapes.

Photography and Imagination If the photograph stands in for the repressive and fatal aspects of a mass culture that undermines the freedom of the individual in Signs of Life, the contingency of every photographic image may also permit an alternative and individual relation to the imagination as we saw in Little Dieter Needs to Fly. In this tension between the referential world and the inner world, social institutions and the individual, inauthenticity and authenticity, Herzog constructs a self-reflexive mediation of the fictional drama of so many of his characters. We notice this same constellation in his longest prose work, Of Walking in Ice, a quasi-travelogue of his journey on foot from Munich to Paris in 1974 to visit an ailing Lotte Eisner. As the embodiment of the tradition of pre-war German cinema, Herzog’s trek to save Eisner from dying suggests that nothing less than the future of filmmaking is at stake. The images that Herzog describes along the way present overwhelmingly forgotten and neglected landscapes that are reclaimed by the walker, who discovers symbolic value in all of the trash and debris that have been so carelessly discarded by a civilization focused on commercial value. As Jan-Christopher Horak has noted, both the contrived situations and the self-consciousness of the text (which is no more a documentary than any of the filmmaker’s films), “signify Herzog’s revulsion with modern civilization’s evolution toward institutionalization and mass culture, and more specifically, all those persons (sheep) who have not resisted this integration into that structure”

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(1986: 35).14 Horak criticizes the banality of Herzog’s prose which hews to a one-dimensional symbolic pole, unable to simultaneously convey the physical reality of the material world as his film images do. Although Herzog has claimed that the book “is closer to my heart than all my films together … because of the many compromises that filmmaking entails,” the detail of the physical landscape means the book reads less like a continuous diary and more like a series of descriptions of isolated images, or a linguistic photo essay (Cronin 2002: 282). In this last section, I turn to Herzog’s Wheel of Time, a film about pilgrimage and walking that visualizes many of the ideas already expressed in Of Walking in Ice. In this latter example, however, we have the benefit of considering just what such a photo essay might look like in Lena Herzog’s book-length project conceived at the same time, Pilgrims: Becoming the Path Itself. The photo essay presents an alternative depiction of the inner landscapes that are the extended theme of Werner Herzog’s film. Wheel of Time is a documentary film that depicts the Buddhist Kalachakra Initiation ceremonies in Bodh Gaya, India, and Graz, Austria, and the pilgrims who have traveled there, sometimes under excruciating conditions. The focal point of the Kalachakra Initiation is the construction of an elaborate sand mandala which is laid out around the symbol of Mount Kailash in Tibet, considered by some religious groups the spiritual center of the world. In the film, Herzog calls the mandala a “depiction of an inner landscape,” immediately linking the activity of the monks with his own cinematic project. The Dalai Lama appears to confirm this description of the mandala as an inner landscape when he rejects the idea of the mandala as a blueprint for a three-dimensional structure, asserting instead that it is a “reminder of a visualization” of an internal image rather than an external object. In other words, the mandala that the monks laboriously construct is an image of an image. And so when Herzog asks a young monk who is working on the mandala, “Can you see it with your eyes closed?,” the monk responds, “Yes, but I can’t show you. It’s visioned, you know. It’s thinking.” In his article on Herzog’s use of landscape in his documentary films, Eric Ames associates the mirages in Fata Morgana or the mandala and images of Mount Kailash in Wheel of Time with the cinematic image itself, in that they both offer “a space of referentiality that is also fleeting and inaccessible” (2009: 59). If the mandala is a temporary exteriorization of an inner vision, Herzog “gives it a new twist, flaunting the spatial, kinetic, and apparitional qualities of the film medium and the assertive stance of documentary in particular” (Ames 2009: 63). While the narrative of the film is organized by the construction and the destruction of the sand mandala and its role in visualization processes of the mind, Herzog’s camera lingers on the physicality of the pilgrims who have arrived to participate in the ceremony or who circle the holy mountain. All of the images of walking, prostrating, eating, touching, and pushing contribute to the physicality of a film that continuously references the role of the body in these scenes of sacred spirituality and recalls depictions of his own cold, hunger, pain, fatigue, and physical exhilaration in Of Walking in Ice. From his questions to the monk on the image of the mandala,

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the filmmaker cuts to a long segment on the pilgrimage around Mount Kailash, the complementary physical landscape to the inner landscape of the mandala. This section ends with a long still take of the mountain, edited as a point-of-view shot of what the pilgrims see as they stand at a designated observation point marked with a column. From this long take, Herzog cuts back to the scene of the mandala, thereby making the connection explicit, namely that the film likewise serves as an exteriorization of an inner vision. If, however, the construction of the mandala is dictated by centuries-old sacred texts, the film images of Wheel of Time are the product of a single imagination. In all of the self-referential moments of the film— fingers wiping the lens, crew members in the frame, Herzog’s jocular comments to the Dalai Lama—the hyper-mediated quality of the images deadens our capacity to be transported by what we see. This explicit link between the mandala, Mount Kailash, and the medium through which they are represented is almost entirely missing, however, from the images in Lena Herzog’s book, and is only asserted in the introductory text written by Werner Herzog. Indeed the photographer omits any overt presentation of either the mandala or Mount Kailash in its entirety as an image to be contemplated and beheld over time. The photographs taken in India include a single shot of the empty table onto which the mandala will be constructed, and one oblique view of the mandala in the early stage of its construction. And the iconic shape of Mount Kailash is seen in only one of the series of images taken in Tibet, and then at a great distance and diminished in emphasis in contrast to the trucks in the foreground of the picture. Otherwise, the mountain is shrouded by fog or clouds. For the photographs attempt to get at something different from the film, which is not the direct presentation of place but an essay that creates peripheral views of these sacred landscapes with its focus on the space of ritual itself. The photographs largely reject the composition, balance, and proportion of a postcard or travel poster, and so manage to work both with and against the early tradition of landscape photography, whose principles of composition were largely drawn from landscape painting, including “the respective proportions of landscape and sky, the framing of a distant view by foliage artfully arranged in the foreground, the frequent use of an expanse of water to reflect and so enhance the beauty of the view” and so on (Buscombe 1995: 89). If on the one hand landscape photography both influenced and supported tourism, rendering the landscape an object that could be easily and readily consumed, landscape photography participates in rendering the natural world an aesthetic object, to be gazed at in reverential contemplation. Mountain scenery especially “seems inescapably bound to a kind of spiritual uplift, as if the verticality of the mountains were in some way a metaphor of their effect upon the observer” (Buscombe 1995: 91). By contrast Lena Herzog’s photographs emphasize people, the objects they carry, the debris they leave behind, and the curves and bumps of the path itself. Indeed the photo essay omits altogether what one might call pivotal or iconic moments in the ceremonies, whether it be the completed mandala, the Dalai

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Lama, or the raising of the pole in Tibet (all of which are pictured in Wheel of Time), choosing instead to focus on peripheral accumulations of the process rather than its culmination. This emphasis on process is fundamental to the genre of the photo essay itself, that does not isolate a single image as somehow representative of the experience but situates multiple views, with differing sizes and focal points, as extended associative, emotional, and symbolic links. With the term photo essay, I borrow from W. J. T. Mitchell’s definition of the genre as referring to a constructed and delimited sequence of photographs that presume a common referential reality, emphasize a personal point of view, and are necessarily partial or incomplete in their attempt to get at the truth of a subject. With some notable exceptions, there are few directly shared images between the film and the photo essay, suggesting that the two media, while complementary tools in the project, remain nonetheless distinct.15 Lena Herzog’s photographs offer a third view of the event of photography, operating neither as the mass cultural object of repression in Signs of Life, nor as the found image that sparks a sense of recognition and alternative memory practices in Little Dieter. The photographer constructs an intentional space of contemplation that the viewer is free to experience at her own pace, in her own order, and through her own imaginative processes. In other words, unrestricted by either the conventions of social practices or a singular directorial statement. Here the writing of Vilém Flusser with its emphasis on the convergence of social, historic, and technical conventions in the production of the photograph may be instructive as a counterpoint to the photographic narrative offered by Roland Barthes. In an extended essay on photography, Flusser gives this definition of the photographer: “a person who attempts to place, within the image, information that is not predicted within the program of the camera” (2000: 84). With this statement, Flusser underscores that photography is not an individual pursuit in which an autonomous and subjective vision is wordlessly presented, but that photographic practice functions within a network of social, political, and ideological concerns. Flusser goes on to argue, therefore, that a “philosophy of photography is necessary for raising photographic practice to the level of consciousness, and this is […] because this practice gives rise to a model of freedom in the post-industrial context in general” (2000: 81). As a learned, constructive practice, photography simultaneously references its own restraints, limits, and systems of rules. For example, by calling attention to the frame, we can reflect on what is both inside and outside visibility, inasmuch as the frame interrupts the artificial transparency of easy communication. As such the photograph may be most effective (and affective) when it disrupts our existing relationship to it as a viewer, refusing to contain or to show an objectified reality that only reaffirms the mechanisms of consensus-making and insists instead on the role of the imagination in the production of new ideas. The photographer’s challenge is thus “to oppose the flood of redundancy with informative images” (Flusser 2000: 65) that invite the viewer to new ways of thinking and participation with the image.

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Throughout the photo essay, Lena Herzog consistently changes the focal point of her images, ranging from extreme close-up to broad, expansive long shots. Although the contemplation of any single image might be said to present the controlling perspective of the photograph, by varying the point of view throughout the series, we as the viewers are never permitted a static and comprehensive distance from the image which we then control and manipulate. Instead, figures, buildings, and objects are captured from multiple angles, suggesting a more heterogeneous experience. One is struck, especially, by the many images in which a single face in the crowd looks directly at the viewer, in a gesture of acknowledging both the photographer and the viewer of the photograph. In their look, however, the figures simultaneously harbor an inwardness. Thus the sacred experience is not laid bare, and forced to conform to the conventions of seeing, but is offered up as a process for the viewer of the photograph to imagine or to visualize internally. If Wheel of Time presents how one might document the externalization of the inner landscape, a process which the filmmaker himself seeks to double, Pilgrims opens the space for the viewer to contemplate an inner landscape that is not given or shown but serves as the catalyst to our own imagination. Ironically, perhaps, the open-endedness of the photo essay as a gesture to participate and to experience a process (instead of an end product) may ultimately prove more liberating and offer a richer field of experience than the film itself. The photographer and media artist Andreas Müller-Pohle has described two categories of photographers, those who re-affirm social reality in the act of “documentarism” and those who produce new ways of seeing or what he calls “visualism.”16 These poles would appear to complement Werner Herzog’s criticism of cinéma vérité as opposed to his own brand of cinematic invention. One is often faced with a certain conundrum, however, in Herzog’s films, especially his documentaries, namely the sense that his documentary subject is always also himself, and that for all the beauty and power of his cinematic images, the alternate reality and intensified truth that he offers is limited to the scope of the filmmaker’s own imagination. In their silence, obliqueness, and startling freshness, the images in Lena Herzog’s photo essay appear as “signs of life,” tied to their material referent through the technique of their production but freeing the imagination to contemplate and conjure one’s own inner landscape instead of one that has been imposed.

Notes 1 2

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See Flusser (2000: 83). Works addressing the multiple relationships between photography and cinema more broadly and which were helpful in the formulation of my own ideas include: Andrew (1997); Beckmann and Ma (2008); Petro (1995); Sutton (2009); and Wolfe (1987). Jan-Christopher Horak (1986) makes a convincing case for reading Herzog’s own autobiographical works, especially Of Walking in Ice, the filmmaker’s diary of his trek from Munich to Paris upon learning of Lotte Eisner’s serious illness, as fiction in which Herzog plays the role of a character from one of his own films.

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In this way the deliberate contrast Herzog draws between the photographic images and his own cinematographic images can be likened to the explicit visual distinction he will later make between the video-footage of the Gulf War seen by millions on CNN and his own film, Lessons of Darkness (1992) (Cronin 2002: 243). In addition to overwhelmingly positive descriptions of the films themselves, Herzog’s depiction of the filmmaking practices of these filmmakers highlights his own vaunted production code: independence from the mainstream industry ensures a visionary and uncompromised product, just as the “Ein-Mann-Projekte” (one-man shows) of these American filmmakers guarantees the uniformity of their vision (Herzog 1964: 56). The emphasis on the role of photographs in the film is underscored in the New Yorker Video DVD. The menu for scene selections literally frames each chapter as a photograph set in the plain wooden picture frames we recognize from all the family photographs in the fortress and the houses in the Greek village. See especially Peucker (1986a and 1986b), and Prager (2007: 50–56). “Er werde den ganzen Ort mit in die Luft fliegen lassen, er wolle die Erde zum Beben bringen. Da käme dann schon heraus was wirklich in den Häusern sei und was wirklich unter den Dingen liege. Er wolle das endlich ans Licht bringen.” See Beard (1992: 64–69). The publicity poster from “Bonanza” (another idealized media image of the American West) that hangs above his cell-mate’s bed can also be understood within this category of deceptive “photographic” images. See Benelli (1986) for a close reading of movement/stasis as depicted in the lines/circles that function as leitmotifs depicting the rebelliousness of the protagonists of Signs of Life and Aguirre. In his monograph on Herzog, Prager includes his analysis of Little Dieter in a chapter titled “War and Trauma.” The chapter groups Herzog’s war-related films as both paradoxically engaging with and retreating from larger political questions that may be expected from German-born filmmakers of Herzog’s generation: “Trauma serves as a means of reducing historical events to localised or individual experiences, and this focus on individual trauma now and again undercuts the possibility of studying broader historical questions about wars and their causes” (2007: 143). Although Bazin (like Barthes) is usually relegated to the realist camp, Daniel Morgan’s essay, “Rethinking Bazin” (2006) maps out an alternative understanding of Bazin’s work on photographic/cinematic realism that takes account of the stylization of the image in order to probe the ways in which a photograph/film works. Just as he identifies with Dengler’s photograph, Herzog compares himself to figures he has seen in a photograph, namely the sepia-toned image of Native Americans driven from their ancestral lands in a driving snow ahead of the forces of modernization (1978: 35). Although Herzog does not name the photographer, it is likely one of Edward S. Curtis’ images, specifically “Vanishing Race,” the first image of his series, The North American Indian. The publication of the screenplay to Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call—New Orleans (2009) is paired with another photo essay from Lena Herzog. Although the photos were all shot on the film set, they do not function as production stills in the strict sense. In his brief introduction to the photographs, Werner Herzog writes, “The

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photos would rather capture something different; they would represent the Inner Landscape of the scene, the state of introspection, moments of self-reflection of the actors and actresses—in contrast to what an actor in a film has to do, a projection to the outside” (5). Instead we are encouraged to consider the photographs as “an interior view of the content. Hence, many of the pictures have no outward correlation to the film itself […]. I love the fact that there is a separate reality in these photos. They speak for themselves” (5). The figures in the photographs often look directly at the camera, addressing the viewer, rather than permitting the viewer some kind of peek behind the scenes, and we note the frequent appearance of mirrors in the pictures, and images in which the figures appear only as a mirror image. A two-page collage of photos at the end of the volume serves the more common documentary function of production stills and includes images of the director interacting with the crew and actors, shot set-ups, and blocking lines on the floor—in other words, the technical process (and celebration) of filmmaking that is nowhere evident in the preceding photo essay. See Flusser (1998).

Works Cited Ames, Eric: “Herzog, Landscape, and Documentary,” Cinema Journal 48.2 (Winter 2009): 49–69. Andrew, Dudley, ed.: The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography (Austin: University of Texas, 1997). Barthes, Roland: “The Photographic Message,” Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press, 1977a), pp. 15–31. Barthes, Roland: “The Rhetoric of the Image,” Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press, 1977b), pp. 32–51. Barthes, Roland: Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). Bazin, André: “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” What is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California, 1967), pp. 9–16. Beard, William: “American Madness: Concepts of Culture and Sanity in The American Friend and Stroszek,” Yearbook of Comparative Literature and General Literature 40 (1992): 59–74. Beckmann, Karen and Jean Ma, ed.: Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). Benelli, Dana: “The Cosmos and its Discontents,” The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, ed. Timothy Corrigan (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 89–103. Bourdieu, Pierre: Photography: A Middle-brow Art, with Luc Boltanski, Robert Castel, JeanClaude Chamboredon and Dominique Schnapper, trans. Shaun Whiteside (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). Brakhage, Stan: “Metaphors of Vision (1963),” Film Theory and Criticism, 4th edition, ed. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 71–78.

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Buscombe, Edward: “Inventing Monument Valley: Nineteenth-Century Landscape Photography and the Western Film,” Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, ed. Patrice Petro (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 87–108. Cronin, Paul, ed.: Herzog on Herzog (London: Faber & Faber, 2002). Flusser, Vilém: “Visualismus/Dokumentarismus Laut Müller-Pohle,” Standpunkte: Texte zur Fotografie, ed. Andreas Müller-Pohle, Edition Flusser, Vol. VIII (Göttingen: European Photography, 1998). Flusser, Vilém: Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion, 2000). Herzog, Lena: Pilgrims: Becoming the Path Itself. Text by Werner Herzog (London: Periplus, 2004). Herzog, Werner: “Rebellen in Amerika. Zu Filmen des New American Cinema,” Filmstudio 43 (1964): 55–60. Herzog, Werner: Of Walking in Ice: Munich–Paris, 11/23 to 12/14, 1974, trans. Martje Herzog and Alan Greenberg (New York: Tanam Press, 1980 [original 1978]). Herzog, Werner: The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call—New Orleans (New York: Universe, 2009). Horak, Jan-Christopher: “W. H. or the Mysteries of Walking in Ice,” The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, ed. Timothy Corrigan (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 23–42. Mitchell, W. J. T.: Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Morgan, Daniel: “Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics,” Critical Inquiry 32 (Spring 2006): 443–481. Petro, Patrice, ed.: Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). Peucker, Brigitte: “The Invalidation of Arnim: Herzog’s Signs of Life (1968),” German Film and Literature: Adaptations and Transformations, ed. Eric Rentschler (New York: Methuen, 1986a), pp. 217–230. Peucker, Brigitte: “Literature and Writing in the Films of Werner Herzog,” The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, ed. Timothy Corrigan (New York: Methuen, 1986b) pp. 105–117. Prager, Brad: The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (London: Wallflower Press, 2007). Sutton, Damian: Photography, Cinema, Memory: The Crystal Image of Time (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Wolfe, Charles, ed.: “On Film and Photography,” Wide Angle 9.1 (1987).

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Archetypes of Emotion Werner Herzog and Opera1 Lutz Koepnick

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Werner Herzog was often seen as a director attempting to translate Richard Wagner’s concept of the “total work of art” (Gesamtkunstwerk) into the realm of German auteur cinema. According to this understanding, Herzog not only sought to turn the world into an aesthetic spectacle, but also to overwhelm his spectators with monumental gestures and grandiose visions. Recalling Wagner’s stress on mystical totality, Herzog was said to dissolve the boundaries of the aesthetic, to replace social engagement with romantic excess, and to redefine the sublime as a site of irrational transcendence and individual redemption. Like Wagner’s monumental operas, Herzog’s art—it was concluded—resulted in no less than a precarious aestheticization of life. It invalidated ethical or political considerations, and it approached the world as if it were grand opera itself, a universe solely designed for dramatic expressions of empathy and perverse self-sacrifice. To the extent that Herzog since the mid-1980s has repeatedly worked as an opera director himself, he has certainly helped to fan the flames of such arguments. Ever since his 1985 staging of Ferruccio Busoni’s Doktor Faustus at the Teatro Comunale di Bologna, opera productions have played a key role in Herzog’s biography, and it might come as little surprise that Herzog has recurrently been drawn to bring Wagner’s works onto international stages, in particular those whose plots revolve around heroic hardship and religious acts of self-denial (Lohengrin, Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, and Parsifal). Opera, for Herzog, is at its best whenever it invites spectators to adopt attitudes of quiet thoughtfulness and contemplative absorption. Whether he has worked in Milan, Verona, and Genoa, in Washington and Houston, or in Bonn, Erfurt, and Bayreuth, his focus has been on opera productions eager to express the indefinable and—in accord with what Herzog himself understands as the genre’s “exotic probability calculations”2—display A Companion to Werner Herzog, First Edition. Edited by Brad Prager. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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grand passions in axiomatic form. By and large, opera critics praise Herzog’s stage work because it tends to avoid the hubris often associated with the German “director’s theater” (Regietheater): Herzog’s stage designs remain more or less abstract and in this way direct the viewers’ attention to the music and drama itself rather than distract the audience with idiosyncratic interventions, nagging social commentary, or showman-like special effects. Many critics thus tend to see Herzog’s work as an opera director as being in striking contrast to the operatic extravagance of his cinematic works. While these critics consider Fitzcarraldo’s desire to bless the Amazon jungle with grand opera as a key to Herzog’s overall trajectory as a film director, they think of Herzog’s opera productions as a strange refusal to comply with what his films seem to promise, namely the reconstruction of the world as a total artwork in whose context aesthetics triumphs over all other spheres of life. According to Herzog, opera comprises a world of its own (Cronin 2002: 259), following the demands of a logic different from that of film.3 During the early stages of his life Herzog had little training in music, nor did he ever acquire the ability to read a score. What fascinated him about opera, however, was its capacity to utilize performative stylization in order to feature the power of human emotions—love, hate, jealousy, or guilt—in all their unmediated vehemence. For Herzog, grand opera functions as a medium reducing complexity; it presents a parallel world in which the negation of realistic expectations—opera’s distance from the monotony of everyday life as much as its extravagance of expressive means—helps unearth truths that remain hidden otherwise. Against all odds and probability, opera succeeds in transforming the world into music, and, in its moments of highest expressive theatricality, it becomes able to articulate what will remain unspoken in the domain of the everyday. Grand opera affects viewers precisely because of its paradoxes: its abstractions generate inner truths, its reductionism spurs intensity; its artificiality enables emotional depth; and its theatricality gives plausibility to that which is otherwise wholly improbable. Insights such as these are hardly original. They echo longstanding discourses on art, and they appear with some regularity in opera program guides attempting to boost declining audience numbers. Nevertheless, Herzog’s general ruminations on opera offer valuable insights into his overall work. They provide a clearer picture of his role as an opera director as much as they help assess the influential role of music and the ever-recurring presence of operatic themes in his films in general. As I shall argue in the pages to come, Herzog’s observations on opera should give us cause to rethink the former understanding of his film aesthetics in terms of a Wagnerian project of aestheticization, as part of a supposed totalitarian effort aimed at forcing art and life into synthesis. In contrast to the criticism of the 1970s and 1980s, this essay will mostly focus upon quite un-Wagnerian moments in Herzog’s work, moments in which theatricality and aesthetic absorption, the active knowledge of the process of seeing and the experience of undisturbed

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contemplation, do not mutually exclude, but instead condition one another. Let me begin with two brief examples in order to establish the terms of this argument. Filmed in collaboration with the English National Opera and the satellite channel Sky Arts, Herzog’s five-minute short film La Bohème (a.k.a. O soave fanciulla, 2009) carries the viewer to southwest Ethiopia. While we hear the duet O soave fanciulla, the declaration of love between Mimi and Rodolfo from the first act of Puccini’s La Bohème (1896), we see images that contain relatively little motion, including a group shot of five Mursi warriors seated against a backdrop of intertwined branches and trees. Their guns lean against their upper bodies, their gaze is directed straight at the camera. After studying the men, Herzog’s camera cuts to a close up of a woman with ornamentally cropped hair and large jewelry in her ears. Her gaze encounters the camera with a certain indifference. A couple of moments later the camera pans to the left, bringing a man’s face into the frame. His shoulder seems slightly raised, his right hand is holding a stick. With some small measure of agitation, as though he means to challenge the camera’s gaze, he moves his head back and forth, shifting the perspective of his own gaze, but never truly averting his eyes from the camera. Another cut reframes the couple and shows it from greater distance. The image now includes the midsections of the two sparsely clad Mursi; it also reveals the sun-saturated clearing in which both present themselves to the eye of the camera. At times the sequence calls to mind a photograph underscored by dramatic music, and it only acquires momentum when the man and woman abruptly move towards and then away from one another, finally going their separate ways. The remainder of the film presents three more couples, filmed similarly and conducting comparable mini-dramas of departure. Throughout the film, it will remain unclear whether Puccini’s duet was audible to the dramas’ protagonists (although the clarity of the soundtrack leaves no doubt about the extradiegetic source of what we hear as spectators), nor does Herzog’s camera ever explain whether the five armed men from the beginning are facing the couples and are thus meant to be considered spectators to the action and our own representatives within the diegesis. In what is likely the most curious scene from Herzog’s German TV production The Transformation of the World into Music (1994), Herzog films himself sneaking into the wings of the Bayreuth Festival Theater during a rehearsal of Wagner’s Lohengrin in order to conduct an interview with Werner Junold, the fire marshal on duty. His face illuminated by a flashlight, the marshal takes up the right third of the frame, whereas Herzog can be seen on the left holding a microphone. The center of the image offers us a direct view of the stage; it depicts heroic tenor Paul Frey, his body turned toward the auditorium, his profile visible to us. Frey sings a long aria from his title role. In a subdued voice, the playful and mischievous tone of which cannot be missed, Herzog urges Junold to describe his fourteen years of work at the Bayreuth Festival Theater. Junold tells us about short circuits and small fires that were put out without distracting the viewers’ attention; about his wages, which at one time paid for no more than a couple of ham sandwiches; and about

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his passion for Wagner’s music, which he has listened to for decades as a quiet sideline observer. Toward the end of the scene, Herzog urges Junold to prove his operatic proficiency by asking the fireman to sing along with Frey. Junold promptly begins, first merely ennunciating the words and then with a restrained humming. Although it is clear to both Herzog and the marshal that Junold has no future as an opera star, both of them enjoy producing their own opera parallel to the one taking place on stage. The scene comes to an abrupt end when Junold recognizes that his humming may have disturbed Frey’s performance on the actual stage. Still smiling, the fireman turns his head away from the camera to listen once again to the musical drama through the gap that continues to occupy the center of the frame. Both scenes could hardly be more different. Their protagonists are worlds apart, and they each navigate the emotional economy of opera differently. And yet, it is not difficult to discern certain correspondences as well—commonalities pointing us toward the essence of Herzog’s understanding of the operatic. First, both examples share in common the fact that their respective performers are absolutely conscious of the camera’s presence. Horizontal and forward-facing compositions in both films underscore this sense of awareness, this recognition of being seen by the film crew and future spectators. In both scenarios, acts of looking and listening are marked as profoundly theatrical actions. Far from relying on the darkness, anonymity, and privacy of the Wagnerian auditorium and its infamous mystical abyss, the process of seeing and being seen here is being realized in the full light of our and the performers’ attention. Second, while both scenes are unified in their attempts to highlight the theatricality associated with being seen by camera and director, both Junold and the Mursi are also depicted as protagonists whose relation to the camera remains thoroughly distanced—they do not bend themselves to the will of the camera. The use of long shots allows the protagonists of Herzog’s La Bohème to play out their mini-dramas in a space that gives the impression of being categorically separate from the camera, the spectator, and the editing room. What is decisive here, however, is less the camera’s gaze as it might imprint its power onto the visual field, than the couples’ respective gazes as they resist the presence of the director and draw lines between their world and the one of cinematography. In Herzog’s Bayreuth film, by contrast, the flickering flashlight contributes decisively to create the impression that Junold, Herzog, and the camera all assume a middle space, which remains equally distinct from the stage in the background and from the space of the spectator. The use of a flashlight—so often employed in twentiethcentury filmmaking as a marker of violent looking (think only of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927)!)—here provides a rhetorical means to establish Junold’s autonomy relative to claims made upon him by the spectator. Third and finally, the reflexive awareness of seeing and being seen in both films, in contrast with traditional expectations, does not inhibit the possibility of affective intensity and absorption but instead serves as their very condition.4 Neither

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Junold nor the Mursi are in any way hindered by the presence of the director, the camera, and—by extension—the observer from entering into the world of opera. The Ethiopian couple may be turning Puccini’s duet on its head insofar as it leads them to play out an unqualified farewell rather than a scene of unconditional love, and Junold may caricature Lohengrin’s profundity through his consciously dilettantish harmonizing, yet in both cases Herzog clearly depicts his protagonists as engaged in activities that are inwardly centered and emotionally fully absorbed. For him, ecstasies of affect and the aesthetic—the stock-in trade of classical opera—here result from nothing less than the camera’s separation of distinct orders of experience. Owing entirely to the fact that the filmic medium both makes the spectator present and forces him or her to stand at a distance, Herzog’s protagonists assume a mode of presence and absorption that could not be achieved without the presence of the filmic apparatus. Herzog thus directly links the experience of absorption to the theatrical. For him, concentrated authenticity is not to be had without a certain artificiality, and performativity is essential to the emotional lure of opera and its ecstatic visions. Herzog’s world of opera is one in which total art becomes possible through strategies of confinement and separation alone. Opera’s transformation of the world into music can only take place within a defined radius, a parallel world, one that is not expected to function as a surrogate for or an assailant of the real one. Similar to how ecstatic experiences of absorption and attentiveness in Herzog’s work owe themselves to the knowledge of being seen and the autonomous logic of the aesthetic, so does Herzog’s world of opera, despite all its rhetoric of redemption and transcendence, thus remain fundamentally indebted to what must be seen as a metaphysics of failure. Opera can only dream its dream of transforming the world when containing any totalitarian intentions, when refraining from any attempt to force its logic of ecstasy and excess onto the world beyond its boundaries. For only if opera knows how to recognize the impossibility of its own visions, only if it allows us to see the world beyond its purview as an unfinished and irredeemable process, only then can it develop its constitutive affective traction in the first place. Just as much as distance and theatricality define the condition of the possibility of contemplative absorption, opera for Herzog likewise requires failure—our knowledge that things will never really come to a redemptive and thus fully resolved end—in order to bring great feelings to the point of axiomatic representation. We would be mistaken, however, if we understood this as a pessimistic or fatalistic project. Grand opera does not only rely on the contingency and entropy of the world in order to represent archetypal emotions within a selfenclosed cosmos. Because it invites spectators to absorb themselves with rapt attention into a profoundly useless world—one that is entirely sealed off unto itself—it also declares the real world a realm of openness and unpredictability, a world governed neither by strict necessity nor by absolute impossibility. Hardly anything could set itself apart more dramatically from Wagner’s hope to reconstruct the world as a mythic total artwork than Herzog’s vision of opera as

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a parallel world, one constitutively aware of its own limits and its theatricality and precisely only thus able to express its deepest truths and intensities. Instead of drawing the spectator under its spell, grand opera, for Herzog, operates as a medium in whose horizon self-awareness and self-forgetting, the reflexive acts of seeing and being seen, ecstatic absorption and theatricality energize one another without ever reaching the climax of a triumphal finale. Understood in this sense, grand opera serves as a model of what Brad Prager refers to as Herzog’s cinema of aesthetic ecstasy and truth (2007: 6–7). The following pages are dedicated less to reconstructing the operatic matrix of Herzog’s films as a whole, and much more to probing the open tensions between reflexivity and absorption as manifested in various of the director’s films. More concretely, this essay seeks to show how Herzog’s films repeatedly take recourse to the operatic so as to allow us to complicate the role of passion, absorption, and reflexivity in his overall work. While many critics during the 1970s and 1980s stressed certain continuities between Herzog’s neo-Romantic passion for opera and an aestheticizing and latently fascistic revival of the sublime, the following pages aim to show that the role of opera in films such as Gesualdo—Death for Five Voices (1995), Fitzcarraldo (1982) and Lessons of Darkness (1992) is dedicated to a project of productive failure, a project not only fully aware of the taut relationship between the theatrical and the contemplative, but also involving complex negotiations of epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions.

Art and Truth Herzog’s Death for Five Voices is devoted to the life of Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa and composer of countless madrigals, whose often startling key changes transformed spiritual music during the sixteenth century. To be sure, Gesualdo’s continuing fame owes as much to how the chromatics of his madrigals have inspired post-classical opera composers, as it does to the operatic side of his life, not least of all the tragic deaths of Gesualdo’s wife Maria d’Avalos and her lover in 1590. Though Gesualdo was never punished for murder, Herzog’s interest in the nobleman is of little surprise: The dramatic amalgamation of art and madness in Gesualdo’s life anticipates much of what has been on view in Herzog’s films from the 1970s onward, whether it included performances of Klaus Kinski or not. Noticeably, however, Herzog’s film stages Gesualdo’s life less in the style of a documentary than as an essay film. Herzog approaches his subject matter through fragmentary images so as to open a space for independent thought and imagination.5 Passages in which conductors and music experts summarize aspects of Gesualdo’s life alternate with sequences depicting the attempt of two chefs to cook up the menu of Gesualdo’s orgiastic wedding meal; the tour of a house master leading us through the site of the grim murder; an interview with a man who

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supposedly remains anonymous, yet walks us through Gesualdo’s castle and reminds us of the prince’s mad plan to surround a valley with his favorite trees; and various abbreviated performances of Gesualdo’s madrigals, performed especially for the camera. In almost every scene of the film, camera and director actively structure the attention of the viewer. And at no point do the interviewees and performers leave any doubt that they are fully aware of the presence of the recording apparatus, attending to the camera without ever being disrupted in their enthusiasm for the music or the person of Gesualdo. Instead of allowing the passions of the devotees to become part of a calculating self-display, Herzog’s camera seems to intensify passions and exaltations, or in fact to bring them to life in the first place. This entanglement of intense affect and staged theatricality culminates when Herzog’s camera, as if accidentally, comes across a ghostlike voice and person in Gesualdo’s dilapidated castle. We see images of ruins: inner courts that have been reclaimed by nature; a functionless chair in the middle of debris and weeds; spider webs that have taken on the outline of a window frame. Suddenly, rupturing the silence, we hear a woman’s energetic singing. The camera goes into motion. It  performs a slow pan of 180 degrees and lands upon the shadow of a woman dressed in black, who runs down a flight of stairs as if she were trying to avoid the gaze of the camera. A hunting expedition of sorts takes us through many rooms of the castle, the camera becoming ever more agile, the woman always one doorframe ahead before she has no room left to continue her flight. As she comes to rest in the bay of a closed window, we now glimpse her whole appearance for the first time. We see her black flowing dress, her fire red tresses of hair, and the portable CD player she is carrying with her. With astonishing tact and politeness Herzog asks the woman from off screen who she is and what she is doing in this place. The woman responds in Italian, answering that she is the reincarnation of Maria d’Avalos and that she continues to live on the premises of the palace. In response to Herzog’s questions, she also admits that she has just sung a song of Gesualdo’s composed shortly before the tragic night of the murder. In  some ways, the tone of the conversation recalls the aforementioned scene from Herzog’s Transformation of the World into Music; it is at once conspiratorial and strangely intimate. The woman’s body leans against the wall lined by cracks (Figure 6.1). The window takes up the left side of the frame, exterior light casting dramatic shadows on the singer’s face and on the neckline of her dress. She recalls the last days of “her” life with Gesualdo, while her gaze moves back and forth stage right, sometimes directed out the window and sometimes at Herzog, who seems to be positioned off to the right behind the camera. Finally she offers to play one of Gesualdo’s compositions with the help of her portable CD player, a madrigal composed shortly before the double murder and marked by despair and the longing for death. After first selecting the wrong track, she then interprets the right recording in a state of uninhibited ecstasy. Her hands gesticulate enthusiastically, her voice sings along with the recording, and her body seems completely

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Figure 6.1 Maria Ilva Biolcati in Gesualdo’s dilapidated castle in Gesualdo—Death for Five Voices (1995). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Lucki Stipetić for Werner Herzog Filmproduktion and ZDF.

overtaken by the music and its powerful affects. After a short time Herzog asks her to turn off the music, which—as he indicates—appears strange to him, only then to ask the singer for her address and phone number. As she gazes directly into the camera, she answers that she lives in the heavens but can also be found in La Scala, Milan’s famous opera house, as long as one is willing to search for her by circling the theater’s chandelier with the help of a helicopter. The scene’s humor is odd and perplexing. And yet, it leads us straight to the heart of Herzog’s understanding of the intersection between opera and film. The ghost of Maria d’Avalos is played by Maria Ilva Biolcati, an Italian prima donna widely known by the name Milva. Since the 1960s she has been celebrated as a performer crossing diverse genres and media, as a pop singer, stage actress, opera diva, and TV star. Nothing in her role as the ghost of Gesualdo’s wife, murdered more than four centuries ago, allows the observer to forget that Herzog had planned the scene from start to finish. Even the original moment of surprise is thoroughly calculated. When the camera sets out to pursue the mysterious singer, it recalls visual strategies familiar to viewers of horror films. Through its unsteady subjectivity, the camera serves as our avatar in Herzog’s diegetic space, as a medium endowing the cinematic image with haptic dimensions. Herzog deliberately arouses fear, horror, and distressing anticipation in the viewer; we feel physically drawn into the events on screen due to the image’s tactile dimensions. At the same time, however, Herzog’s direction insists on distance, not simply because the scene as a whole highlights the acts of seeing and being seen, but also because the presence of the camera in no way prevents the false Maria from giving herself over to musical madness. As a result, the viewer is positioned in an unusual limbo—in a place in which distance and operatic intensity, euphoria and reflexivity, go hand in hand.

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As Herzog has repeatedly stated, truth is best achieved through staged artificiality. Herzog’s essay and documentary films leave no doubt that they are consciously constructed for the camera and the viewer, thus radically questioning the naturalistic dogmas of dominant documentary practice. Herzog’s concept of aesthetic truth aims neither at bringing unstylized reality to light, nor does it seek to unmask what is shown in all its constructedness. His films instead pursue what should be understood as truth-effects, out-stylizing what is stylized in life itself in all of its extremism. Staged events here evoke deep emotions whose intensities and absorptive qualities do not simply dissolve in light of their theatricality. As she pretends to re-embody the moving drama of Gesualdo’s life, Milva’s appearance in Death for Five Voices follows precisely this formula. As if energized by the very presence of the camera, Maria’s exaltation opens up a space for the viewer wherein we might feel moved and absorbed without necessarily surrendering our distance. In the end, Milva’s performance remains as strange as Gesualdo’s gloomy music. Their world is separated from ours, yet it is precisely in contemplating this space of separation that we may encounter Herzog’s kernel of aesthetic truth. Only in face of this space of empathetic distance, of Herzog’s gestures of futility and failure as it were, do camera and viewer succeed in coming into contact with the life of Gesualdo and hence with the opera of his existence. What remains are mere approaches and attempts: fleeting snapshots that in turn allow us to experience the openness and indeterminacy of our own position in relation to the remote and self-enclosed drama of Gesualdo’s existence.

Opera and the Ethics of Acknowledgment Even more than three decades after the fact, the scandals accompanying the filming of Fitzcarraldo remain central to many critics’ approach to Herzog’s overall work. Fitzcarraldo’s maniacal attempt to haul a steamship over a mountain, to bring opera to the jungle, and to collapse stable boundaries between the ethical, political, and aesthetic continue to be read as emblems for Herzog’s project of filmmaking in general—of Herzog’s prolonged and quasi-Wagnerian undertaking to conquer the useless. This is not the place to add yet another comprehensive analysis to the existing literature about the integration of opera and life, art and power, excess and economy in Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo.6 Let me simply point out here that it remains somewhat open to question whether this alleged confusion of spheres is in fact entirely supported by both the narrative dynamic and audio-visual design of Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. Think, for instance, of the film’s final sequence, depicting the triumphant return of the steamship, the Molly Aida, to the Amazonian port of Iquitos, and famously staging an onboard opera performance of Bellini’s I puritani in full costume. With his mighty cigar in his mouth, Fitzcarraldo paces the deck of the ship and—in the posture of a grand impresario—revels in the

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performance while the port’s residents are shown as they wave at the approaching ship. Fitzcarraldo, who in a previous scene had asserted that Wagner’s music speaks little to him, here comports himself at first glance like a maestro attempting no less than to transform the South American jungle into a new Bayreuth. However, in looking closely at the audio-visual dynamic of the closing minutes of Fitzcarraldo, we may develop second thoughts about the extent to which Herzog himself endorses this vision of a total artwork. First of all, there is little doubt about the fact that Fitzcarraldo’s intoxication owes itself not only to being intensely absorbed by the staging of Bellini, but also at the same time by his own visibility. Fitzcarraldo’s transformation of the world into music thus turns out to be hardly as totalizing as one would expect at first: it requires external reference points and demarcations without whose existence the entire scene would collapse. Second, it is difficult not to note that Herzog, in the final moments of Fitzcarraldo, refuses to provide any images that show boat and audience, stage and spectators on land, in one and the same frame and hence as elements of a homogeneous space. Herzog’s editing clearly implies that the crowd’s enthusiasm is directed at the operatic spectacle coming toward them, yet the decisive absence of any single shot mapping the entire scene has the consequence that boat and shore come across as ontologically separate and seemingly self-contained worlds. Third, witness how Herzog allows Bellini’s music to continue after a truly abrupt cut while the screen no longer shows any images whatsoever, thus adding to the impression of fragmentary spaces the perception of image and sound—visuality and music—as fundamentally disjointed, as something radically at odds with the illusion of a totalizing artwork. Fitzcarraldo may interpret his own life again and again as grand opera, yet Herzog’s film insists that opera can only be opera when it remains aware of its own artificiality and autonomy, when it refuses to mix life and art with one another and hence rejects any attempt to blur the lines between the aesthetic and the unaesthetic. What is more decisive for the present argument, however, is to cast light on the opera scene at the onset of the film: the staging of Verdi’s Ernani in the opera house at Manaus, attended by Fitzcarraldo and his girlfriend Molly (Claudia Cardinale). Campily staged by Werner Schroeter, the production has been much commented upon, particularly the depiction of Sarah Bernhard and its travestylike elements. In Schroeter’s staging, Bernhard is, for reasons of bodily infirmity, being mimed on stage by another actress while she herself remains clearly visible in the stage vestibule. Strangely enough, however, Schroeter and Herzog decided to have the female on-stage role played by a male performer, perhaps to underscore the extra-territoriality associated with producing a European opera in the Amazon jungle. Enrico Caruso appears clearly annoyed by the overstated bearing of the false Sarah Bernhard; he finds himself distracted from the dramatic gestures of his own suicide scene by the other performer’s egoistic excesses. In this way Schroeter stages Ernani as a drama in which artistry is replaced by artificiality, emotion by eccentricity, dramatic depth by ridiculousness, and authenticity by

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Figure 6.2 Caruso points out towards the audience in Fitzcarraldo (1982). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Werner Herzog and Lucki Stipetić/Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

performative superficiality. The only one whose attention is not in the least disturbed is Fitzcarraldo, despite the fact that his tousled hair and oil-stained suit mark him as an outsider amid the entire gala performance. He is interested neither in the other opera patrons, nor in the details of the staging; he is concerned only with Caruso’s vocal artistry. As the latter’s Ernani sinks the dagger into his own chest and—his arms outstretched—falls still singing to his knees (Figure  6.2), Fitzcarraldo believes himself to be both personally seen and acknowledged by Caruso. With his eyes wide open, he stares in the direction of the stage. He then turns to his companion Molly and, while Caruso brings his dramatic death aria to a conclusion, whispers excitedly: “He is pointing at me … he means me.” Does this belief to be seen and acknowledged by Caruso’s gesture simply display Fitzcarraldo’s madness? Does it bring to view a megalomaniacal act of misrecognition and self-delusion? Or is much more in play? To answer these questions, let me suggest a way to understand Fitzcarraldo’s intense experience of being acknowledged, and even more so: Herzog’s staging thereof, as part of an ethical program of recognition whose logic is deeply driven by aesthetic impulses. What I mean here by ethics should certainly not be misunderstood as a moral or moralizing project. On the contrary, the ethical here is solely concerned with marking out operative forms of human interaction, securing structures of intersubjective exchange, and setting limits on possible abuses of the individual, even by one’s own instrumental reason. To be recognized and acknowledged by Caruso across the boundaries of the orchestra pit, and to meet his gesture with a similar gesture, does not imply to lose one’s self completely in the other or to subject the other to one’s own willfulness. On the contrary, Fitzcarraldo’s experience of relationality, of being seen and meant, is predicated on the recognition of the other as other and hence on the acceptance of that

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ontological boundary between different subjects expressed by the presence of the stage itself and the theatricality it displays. In the decisive moment of recognition, Herzog’s camera shows Caruso and Fitzcarraldo from frontal perspectives, not in order to erase the spatial distance between them, but instead to draw our attention to the impossibility of establishing proximity without maintaining distance, of encountering the other without acknowledging difference. On the other hand, Herzog’s positioning of the camera and his editorial work in this sequence reveal that Fitzcarraldo’s drama of referentiality depends decisively on the labor of aesthetic imagination. Fitzcarraldo himself may not be conscious of this, because to him the boundary between fantasy and reality, between the imagined and the real, constantly blur. Yet instead of simply deconstructing Fitzcarraldo’s exuberant imagination, Herzog’s visual direction here treats the imagination as an irreducible ground of the real and the ethical itself. Insofar as Herzog edits structurally comparable images of Caruso and Fitzcarraldo—each with outstretched arms—in opposition to one another, he defines the camera as a medium that, comparable to the processes of the imagination, enables viable forms of human reference and contact, the intensity and humanity of which rely directly on the suspension of pure factuality. A site warranting difference and the non-identical, Herzog’s ethics critically requires aesthetic experience and imagination in order to be able to acknowledge the other as other. Precisely because it denies any attempt to force self and other into one single frame, Herzog’s camera protects his cinematic vision against the possible dangers of pure aestheticization and the romanticization of the other. Just as Herzog not once in his Amazon films adopts exoticizing perspectives that subject indigenous populations to empathetic gestures, so the figure of Caruso in Fitzcarraldo ultimately never loses his strangeness and foreignness.7 Caruso’s song and gesture touch Fitzcarraldo precisely because they cannot be subordinated to rationalistic axioms of seamless understanding and identification. Fitzcarraldo’s experience of recognition implies not only acceptance of the constitutive otherness of the other, but also that one experiences the relational aspects of human encounters as a force field in which the other will no longer appear as a mere mirror image of one’s own will. This same idea is brought to bear in the scene in which Fitzcarraldo allows Caruso’s voice to resound in the jungle with the help of his gramophone. His initial aim is to offer up something to meet the threatening, yet invisible drums of the Indians. His point, however, it is not to subordinate the other to the claims of colonial power and European high culture. His deployment of mechanically reproduced opera instead hopes to mark decisive differences, and in this way it is meant to enable a possible scenario of mutual recognition. As interpreted by Herzog’s camera and editing, then, Fitzcarraldo’s dream of bringing grand opera to Iquitos is dedicated to nothing else but the idea of establishing a space of human relationality in which modern goal-oriented thinking loses its imperative sway. This idea echoes the overall value of opera in Herzog’s work and thought which considers opera’s aesthetic extravagance and anti-naturalist

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theatricality as a conveyer belt for undistorted forms of relationality. Opera, in Herzog’s view, empowers non-instrumental experiences of reference and human interaction, experiences that do not negate the particularity of the other through structures of total identification. Opera’s use lies in its uselessness, and thus precisely in what Herzog, with reference to Ernani, calls its “exotic probability calculations” (2009: 175). It teaches that we can never really get a hold of and control the other as much as we are never fully capable of controlling or possessing our own self in relation to the world. Grand opera locates the birth of open forms of human relationship in the very failure of the modern regime of willfulness and self-preservation, it encourages self and other to encounter and be affected by one another without ever subordinating the one to the other. Similar to how, in Herzog’s perspective, grand opera often stages dramatic scenes of seeing and being seen, so does opera clarify the extent to which neither self and other, nor ethics and aesthetics, can do without one another—that each requires the other in order to protect human interaction from the totalizing terror of instrumental reason.

Catastrophe and Beauty On October 27, 2008, Herzog’s production of Parsifal, Wagner’s final musical drama, premiered at the Queen Sofia Palace of the Arts in Valencia. Completed in 2005 by Santiago Calatrava, Valencia’s opera house—with its miraculously suspended roof and its proximity to a local cathedral possessing a chalice often considered the true Holy Grail—seemed perfectly suited for staging Wagner’s sacred festival play. Herzog’s production remained close to Wagner’s original conception while at the same time recalling Bayreuth’s abstract stage designs of the immediate postwar period. Much of the activity on stage took place in front of a huge round glass window, which many critics understood as a retooled satellite dish, a secularized symbol for Parsifal’s general themes of salvation and transcendence. With the exception of the closing scene, in which the audience could witness a projected image of the opera house disappearing into outer space, Herzog’s staging remained free of any actualizing extravaganzas. Herzog’s direction instead centered on color and light effects, and on carefully choreographing the placement of bodies in space. Rather than transposing the drama entirely into the language of the present, Herzog’s attempt was to find effective symbols to depict events and actions on stage as simultaneously contemporary and timeless. Herzog’s interest in bringing Parsifal to the stage is not surprising, given the fact that Wagner’s last opera comes up again and again in Herzog’s filmic work. In particular the ethereal prelude to Parsifal’s first act resonates in Herzog’s documentary and essay films, especially where Herzog’s camera soars over landscapes that have been struck by catastrophic violence and captured images that do not call to mind salvation and transcendence, but instead fatefulness, apocalypse, and

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hopelessness. Think, for example, of La Soufrière (1977), in which Wagner’s music accompanies aerial shots that present the evacuated island’s volcano and communicates a sense of impending catastrophe (one that, of course, will never occur). Or think of certain sustained shots in Lessons of Darkness, images of the desert landscape of Kuwait after the first Gulf War, filmed from the perspective of a seemingly weightless and floating helicopter. We see bomb craters, burned out tanks and trucks, landing strips that have become useless, and finally a fully demolished satellite dish—all this while Wagner’s music plays in the background rendering what is already eerie about the ruined landscape still more alien. Herzog’s critics usually do not hesitate to understand Herzog’s use of Wagner when screening scenes of destruction as a precarious strategy of aestheticization. For example, in Unsettling Scores: German Film, Music, and Ideology, Roger Hillman reproaches Herzog for transforming postwar landscapes into his own private Bayreuth, obscuring political realities for apolitical purposes, and thus repeating nothing less than the stylized politics of Leni Riefenstahl (2005: 146–150). In the eyes of critics such as Hillman, Herzog’s aesthetic concept and praxis at once continue the tenets of nineteenth-century Romanticism and replay the way in which Nazi Germany sought to turn power and war into media spectacles of first rank. Like Nietzsche, Herzog is said to believe that our modern world can only be justified as aesthetic phenomena, and he—similar to Wagner—is seen to prescribe an aesthetic that does not shy away from transfiguring individual or collective tragedy. In their use of Wagnerian music, Herzog’s films—it is concluded—conjure aesthetic moods and symbols of sublimity so as to convert contemporary disasters into mythical and therefore inevitable events. That Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness reaches back to Parsifal, Wagner’s musical drama most strongly associated with the motif of redemption, may at first glance confirm such suspicions. As I have argued elsewhere, however, Herzog’s coupling of images of devastation with Wagnerian sounds of transcendence is far more complex,8 in particular if we recall the very dialectic that structures the theme of traumatic recovery in Parsifal, namely the assumption that only the spear that inflicted the wound can facilitate its healing. Herzog’s aim in using Wagner’s music of redemption is to encounter traumatic events straight on, not in order to make us empathize with violence and destruction, but in order to make us learn how to overcome the petrification of post-traumatic time and hence re-animate its painful standstill. Herzog’s strategy, in other words, is homeopathic: it seeks to beat traumatic arrests at their own game without failing to remember their original causes, their pain and brutality.9 Whenever Parsifal dominates Herzog’s soundtrack, no one is redeemed from anything. Herzog’s point instead is to use the constitutive temporality of the filmic medium to pry history free from its own annihilation of movement and affection. Instead of mastering the past and present in the name of redemption, Herzog’s Wagnerian lesson of darkness is to encounter trauma and violence head on, not in order to subject the viewer to the pull of historical fate, but rather to uphold the idea and promise of an open future. Contrary to post-1960s

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German discourses on Vergangenheitsbewältigung—the hope to master traumatic pasts through cognitive strategies of “working through”—Herzog’s aim is to administer controlled doses of catastrophe in order to teach the viewer—like Parsifal—how to live and keep moving in face of the ubiquity of disaster. Throughout his career Herzog has refused to understand his films as art cinema and hence to reflect in any detail about the exact relationship between auteurist film and aesthetics, film and art. Herzog’s homeopathic confrontation with traumatic experiences, however, may very well define the center of the director’s aesthetic program: the effort not only to look traumatic catastrophes directly in the eye, but rather to uphold the possibility of sensual presence and futurity in face of trauma and violence, and therefore not to sacrifice the liberating potential of modern contingency to modernity’s logic of reification and mythical stupefaction, of traumatic stoppage and inevitability. Yet instead of further exploring the roots and dimensions of Herzog’s homeopathic aesthetics, let me here simply point out the extent to which this aesthetic is deeply indebted to the logic of opera. What critics often reproach as the logic of aesthetic stylization and distanciation in Herzog’s work, when examined more closely proves to be a method of dynamically relating proximity and distance, affect and artificiality, excess and self-reflexivity with one another. It is a method that makes historically productive what Alan Singer has called the unhistorical and detemporalized figure of the “ironic sublime” in Herzog’s work (Singer 1986: 193–195). Similar to how the anti-naturalistic theatricality of opera triggers deep emotions without allowing the spectator to become one with the protagonists, the use of Parsifal in Herzog has the goal of making pathos and affect possible without giving us the illusion to fully identify with those exposed to and haunted by catastrophic disaster. Musical quotations from Parsifal permit Herzog not only to lay bare operative structures of seeing and being seen, but to demarcate the ontological difference between the space of representation and that of the observer. He does this not in order to transfigure real harm or to offer sublime spectacles, but for the sake of finding in the midst of perceptions of differences—the idiosyncrasies of the aesthetic—that which allows us to set frozen history in motion again. To be sure, it is difficult not to see the gliding aerial shots borne by Wagner’s redemptive music in Lessons of Darkness as elements of a precarious desire for aestheticization. Yet while they transform into art what seems opposed to art, there is little reason to reprimand such shots as an overt replay of fascism’s aesthetics of war. For Herzog, aestheticization neither seeks to justify an otherwise unjustifiable world, nor does it contain the roots of a totalizing impulse to level the boundaries between politics and art, ethics and aesthetics. On the contrary, aestheticization is that which draws our awareness to the very boundaries of the aesthetic, and in doing so, it challenges the observer to perceive both the world and themselves in a new way, to (re)discover new ways of perception through unexpected experiences of motion and affect. Unlike Wagner (and Riefenstahl), Herzog’s indulgence in operatic excess and aesthetic heroism does not serve the quest for a new mythology,

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for binding symbols and meanings that could exhaustively fill the absence of sense and meaning in our postmetaphysical age. In the 1880 essay “Religion and Art,” Wagner ruminated, “One might say that where religion becomes artificial, it is reserved for Art to save the spirit of religion by recognizing the figurative value of the mythic symbols which the former would have us believe in their literal sense, and revealing their deep and hidden truth through an ideal presentation” (1994: 213). As a composer and festival director, Wagner aspired to follow this formula and correct the putative pathologies of modern secularized life in all its differentiation, such that aesthetic material was to reconstruct the possibility of religious experience. Art and opera, in Wagner’s view, were to reinterpret ancient symbols and religious myths, and thus regenerate what, in the course of the Enlightenment, had lost its power to bind and integrate. Herzog’s career as a film and opera director may be driven by a quest for grand visions, images, and gestures, but we would miss the import of Herzog’s aesthetic if we simply reduced it to attempting to reinvent mythology, or seeking to reconstruct unquestionable forms of social homogeneity after the fall of unified religious systems of social integration. The bombed satellite antenna we see at the end of the Parsifal passage in Lessons of Darkness stands in a constitutive tension to Herzog’s use of a dish-like stage design in the Parsifal production in Valencia. Both may be interpreted as symbols of hope, transcendence, and redemption from earthly disaster. In distinction to Wagner, however, for Herzog aesthetic representation no longer suffices to communicate timeless meaning and binding orientation. The wish for aesthetic transcendence in Herzog is directly related to and based on opera’s very limitations, and is thus always fully aware of its inevitable failure and futility. The glass panes in Valencia may recall the inoperative satellite dish in Kuwait. And yet, instead of seeking to fill old symbols with new content, Herzog embraces the aesthetic as a means to stage the fragmentariness and contingency of the symbolic itself—the fact that it takes more than just symbolic and aesthetic visions in order to extricate ourselves from the catastrophes of the modern world.

Opera Time Film and opera, according to Herzog, relate to one another like cat and mouse. They are incapable of ever truly being in harmony, because both media expose the audience to a fundamentally different flow of emotions and thus to a different organization of temporality (Cronin 2002: 260). While opera cannot compete with the editing processes and the changing camera angles of film, film can only envy opera’s apparent anti-naturalism and its calculated production of archetypal emotions. Opera adaptations are, in this sense, as destined to failure as any effort to bring opera to the stage with filmic means. Herzog’s engagements as an opera

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director since the middle of the 1980s have remained true to this belief. Instead of synthesizing the media of film and opera and fusing the two together into a seamless spectacle, Herzog has, even where Wagner’s musical dramas have been at the center of his directorial activities, stayed away from inter-medial production strategies and instead attempted to do justice to the specific logic of opera as a stage event. At the same time, however, opera provides a forceful model of much of what Herzog attempts to achieve in his feature and essay films. What is at the heart of Herzog’s work as a film director is his aim to explore opera’s dualistic structure—the coexistence of closeness and distance, artificiality and excess, emotion and calculation—as a means to push filmmaking in new directions, and hence to develop a cinematic aesthetic which combines contemplation and the awareness of being seen—absorption and reflexivity—into a productive dynamic. Herzog’s understanding of the differing temporalities of opera and film is significant in this context. Conventional film music, especially insofar as it emphasizes narrative continuity, underscores atmospheric elements that structure the viewer’s attention. Film scores primarily act as media of temporal acceleration. Their principal task consists not least in driving the teleological force of cinematic narrative and in coupling the causality of psychological motivation with the forward-moving vectors of the plot. Opera music, on the other hand, from Herzog’s perspective, can function as a source of deceleration; it opens a space of sensory perception able to stretch and delay the purposiveness of narrative time. Instead of halting the nervous flows of our present moment in the name of quasi-mythical time, the sounds of opera in Herzog’s films enable a form of presence unwilling to lose sight of unresolved images, memories, and visions. They emphasize the uncertainty and ambivalence of what it means to be contemporary, and they invite us to understand our present as a site of inexhaustible exchange, a site at which heterogeneous histories and anticipations may cross in fundamentally unpredictable ways. Herzog’s world is one abandoned by God, one in which—as expressed by the epigram at the beginning of Fitzcarraldo—God did not complete his work of creation. For Herzog, opera allows us to hold onto our demand for sensual presence and aesthetic experience amid a world largely void of sense, meaning, and metaphysical orientation. Grand opera gives listeners and viewers, in the absence of any hope for final redemption and fulfillment, the promise of a life in motion, a life affected by and affecting its conditions. Although opera and film may never be able to fuse into seamless unity, opera is able to slow the haste of the mechanical film projector such that audiences may project their own inner images, visions, and hopes into the images projected by the apparatus. Instead of sensually overwhelming the audience in the style of Wagner, opera, for Herzog, adopts the function of reclaiming the legitimacy of our own ephemeral sensuality vis-à-vis a world in which disaster radiates triumphant. Grand opera in film defends the possibility of powerful feelings in an age whose speed shows little patience for ecstatic passions and absorptive forms of perception.

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Notes 1

2

3

4 5 6 7 8 9

This essay is based on a previous article, entitled “Archetypik der Gefühle—Werner Herzog und die Oper,” Lektionen in Herzog: Neues über Deutschlands verlorenen Filmautor Werner Herzog und sein Werk, ed. Chris Wahl (Munich: text + kritik, 2011), pp. 234–259. I am grateful to Brooke Shafar for her assistance with the translation. In the entry to his film diary, written during the filming of Fitzcarraldo, Herzog writes: “I was reading the translation of Piave’s libretto of Ernani […] and in the foreword I came upon the breathtakingly idiotic comment that the most blatantly unbelievable passages had been deleted—when it is precisely the incredible elements that account for the beauty of the story, or rather of opera as a genre, because those elements that cannot be accounted for even by the most exotic probability calculations appear in opera as the most natural […]. And the Grand Emotions in opera, often dismissed as over the top, strike me on the contrary as the most concentrated, pure archetypes of emotion, whose essence is incapable of being condensed any further. They are axioms of emotions. That is what opera and the jungle have in common” (2009: 175; emphasis added). Herzog’s position is radically different from that taken by Schroeder (2002), whose work starts from the position of an apparently unproblematic compatibility and interdependence between opera and film. In this respect one observes a similar tendency in Herzog to that which Fried (2008) sees in the work of many photographers, both Germans and others, since the 1990s. For more on the essay film, see among others Corrigan (2008). For a thorough critical assessment of the role of opera and music in Fitzcarraldo, see Leppert (2007). On the question of colonial perspectives in Herzog’s Amazon films, see arguments by Davidson (1993) and Koepnick (1993), as well as by Friedberg and Hall (2007). For my earlier assessment of the role of opera in Lessons of Darkness, see Koepnick (2008). The role of homeopathic elements in German cinema of the 1970s and 1980s is closely studied by Santner (1990: 19–26) as well by Flinn (2004: 1–25).

Works Cited Corrigan, Timothy: “‘The Forgotten Image between Two Shots’: Photos, Photograms, and the Essayistic,” Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography, ed. Karen Beckman and Jean Ma (Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 41–61. Cronin, Paul, ed.: Herzog on Herzog (London: Faber & Faber, 2002). Davidson, John E.: “As Others Put Plays upon the Stage: Aguirre, Neocolonialism, and the New German Cinema,” New German Critique 60 (1993): 101–130. Flinn, Caryl: The New German Cinema: Music, History, and the Matter of Style (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Fried, Michael: Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

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Friedberg, Lillian and Hall, Sara: “Drums along the Amazon: The Rhythm of the Iron System in Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo,” The Cosmopolitan Screen: German Cinema and the Global Imaginary, 1945 to the Present, ed. Stephan Schindler and Lutz Koepnick (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), pp. 117–139. Herzog, Werner: Conquest of the Useless: Reflections on the Making of Fitzcarraldo, trans. Krishna Winston (New York: HarperCollins, 2009). Hillman, Roger: Unsettling Scores: German Film, Music, and Ideology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). Koepnick, Lutz: “Colonial Forestry: Sylvan Politics in Werner Herzog’s Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo,” New German Critique 60 (Autumn, 1993): 133–159. Koepnick, Lutz: “The Sound of Ruins,” German Postwar Films: Life and Love in the Ruins, ed. Wilfried Wilms and William Rasch (New York: Palgrave, 2008), pp. 193–208. Leppert, Richard: “Opera, Aesthetic Violence, and the Imposition of Modernity: Fitzcarraldo,” Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, ed. Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 99–119. Prager, Brad: The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (London: Wallflower Press, 2007). Santner, Eric L.: Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). Schroeder David P.: Cinema’s Illusions, Opera’s Allure: The Operatic Impulse in Film (New York: Continuum, 2002). Singer, Alan: “Comprehending Appearances: Werner Herzog’s Ironic Sublime,” The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, ed. Timothy Corrigan (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 183–205. Wagner, Richard: Religion and Art, trans. William Ashton Ellis (Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 1994). Originally: “Religion und Kunst,” Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 3. Auflage (Leipzig: E. W. Fritzsch, 1888).

Additional Films Cited Lang, Fritz: Metropolis (1927)

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Coming to Our Senses The Viewer and Herzog’s Sonic Worlds Roger Hillman

Soundings Film soundtracks normally have three components: dialogue, ambient sound, and music. The first two belong to our everyday world, even though film rarely renders them naturalistically. Music can also belong to that everyday world, when a character turns on the radio, sits down to strum a few chords on a guitar, etc. But more frequently music operates in film as a convention that we have come to accept. We know that the characters on screen can’t hear what we hear, and what we rarely question. In the latter usage of music, the source of sound is off-screen (nondiegetic), namely a studio orchestra, a synthesizer, a recording acknowledged in the end credits, whatever. With a director like Herzog we know that some of the vocabulary used to this point is a priori unlikely to apply—“normally,” “naturalistically,” “convention.” He uses all three channels of sonic information, but in combination they have a different effect to the films of other directors. For mainstream film, sound design (with Walter Murch at the peak) is an increasingly profiled aspect of its technology. The yet broader ambitions of Herzog, providing sounds to accompany hitherto unprecedented images, would seem to require a grander and more amorphous (less technology-bound) term—“sonic worlds,” in the subtitle above, is an attempt in this direction. This chapter will focus on, but not be confined to, music. The other two sound channels are worth brief comment.1 Herzog’s films are not notable for their well-wrought narratives, nor for their subtle psychological portraits of expressive individuals (especially females). He often deprives characters of speech, and instead imposes a voice-over in which the voice is frequently his own (e.g. Lessons of A Companion to Werner Herzog, First Edition. Edited by Brad Prager. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Darkness [1992]; Little Dieter Needs to Fly [1998]). This voice projects rationality in the manner of its delivery, if not always in the concepts and register of language that it delivers. It is the first of a number of signs we shall find of Herzog’s control, of the choreography of ideas, images, and sounds in his films. In this his approach is reminiscent of a very different contemporary, Alexander Kluge, whose equally distinctive voice, equally lacking in theatricality, frequently links documentary images in the kaleidoscopic mosaic stones that comprise his own films. Kluge’s narration combines “the omniscience of an objective narrator with the subjectivity of a narrating character” (Lutze 1998: 85). Herzog functions as mediator of his images and puppeteer of his figures from the edge; Kluge (e.g. in Die Patriotin [1979]) sutures the often absurd perspectives (the Knee), historical junctures, and disparate images of his miniature museums. But the voice-overs of both Kluge and Herzog provide a counterbalance of surface plausibility, rather than any remote sense of dramatically persuasive storytelling (compare, say, Orson Welles in The Magnificent Ambersons [1942]). That this is palpably a surface, even a mask, has partly to do with 1970s Federal Germany and its relationship to German intellectual and historical traditions of the past. Herzog’s voice-overs are important for his scripts, but also, as part of the soundscape his films create. A further part of that soundscape is ambient sound, or in some telling cases, its absence—this will be pursued in concrete analyses below. But with this chapter’s focus on music, it is worth pointing out that all three aspects of the soundtrack normally interact, or else are in close proximity. Yet again, not with Herzog, who separates them out more than most directors. Where Wim Wenders strove to regain a freshness of images, above all through a slower pace of editing, long stretches of Herzog’s films are notable for a sanctity of (a particular channel of ) sound. Herzog is renowned as a visionary, a tag applying equally well to his feature films and his documentaries. His own self-styling reinforces that stereotype. Yet in the majority of cases these exceptional images are accompanied by music, and often not by any other sound. This means that the viewer’s experience of what fills the screen is simultaneously filtered via the cinema’s sound system. Does Herzog strive for sounds that no one has ever heard, or at least that few in the audience will be likely to have assimilated culturally as part of their acoustic upbringing? Yes and no. At one extreme he integrates throat singing, which we might at most expect in an ethnomusicological documentary. Tuvan singers interact with sounds of the natural world, are largely men (relevant to Herzog’s weak characterization of women), and combine up to four different pitches including an ongoing drone effect—almost a one-man equivalent of Western polyphony. This combination must lend such singing great appeal and power within the worlds that Herzog creates. Little Dieter Needs to Fly and Bells from the Deep (1993), discussed later in this chapter, illustrate this. At the other extreme, Herzog’s soundtracks typically feature excerpts from the canon of Western classical music, albeit frequently with a twist that lends them his own signature (and thereby lessens any gap between them and non-Western music). He also uses original compositions, i.e. music

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coming to his film with no prior connotations, most notably the haunting tones of Popol Vuh in the opening sequence of Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972).2 This music instantly negates the potentially documentary quality of the images, and above all the preceding semblance of documentary in the citation of an excerpt from the priest’s diary, the slender historical basis of the film. The music descends in register and instrumentation from an ethereal realm until it takes on a fully developed bass line, complementing perfectly the trajectory of the camera (from eye-of-God perspective to eye-level shots of the river at the foot of the opening mountains) and of this ill-fated expedition. This kind of match between images and sound, to the point where the two become inseparable, is what sound theorist Michel Chion (1994: 224) has termed “synchresis,” “the forging of an immediate and necessary relationship between something one sees and something one hears at the same time.” Chion’s concepts are altogether fruitful for approaching Herzog. Alongside early cinema’s attempts to escape the tyranny of the frame, through irising, masking, and the like, Chion asks: What is the corresponding case for sound? The exact opposite. For sound there is neither frame nor preexisting container […] Further, these sounds can be situated at different narrative levels, such as conventional background music (nondiegetic) and synch dialogue (diegetic)—while visual elements can hardly ever be located at more than one of these levels at once. So there is no auditory container for film sounds, nothing analogous to the visual container of the images that is the frame (1994: 67–68).

Viewed thus, the potential of sound for Herzog’s conception of film (and of course not confined to his) is vast. When concrete images on the screen expand and become triggers for the unconscious, for states of awe or ecstasy, the process is facilitated by particular sounds through their very boundlessness. “Out of time and out of space, music communicates with all times and all spaces of a film, even as it leaves them to their separate and distinct existences” (Chion 1994: 81). “Out of time and out of space” positions music at the core of the Herzog enterprise. And its transcendence of representation accords with the fifth tenet of his Minnesota Declaration: “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization” (Cronin 2002: 301).

On Wings of Song Ahead of any sound, Little Dieter Needs to Fly starts with a text from Revelations filling a darkened screen. When the opening credits are of this order, however selfironic the gravitas might be, any subsequent documentary quality of the film’s narrative and/or images is immediately tempered by the domains of the mythical,

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the timeless, the apocalyptic. Bartók’s Buciumeana (Romanian Folk Dance no. 4), muted in volume but lush in the orchestration of this version, complements shots of Dieter at the wheel of his car, a slower musical passage situating from the outset the quality of his hallucinations. The first voice we hear is Herzog’s voice-over, and then while the music continues Dieter muses on how he still hears the voices of dead friends (from the Laotian sphere of the Vietnam War). The hierarchy is established, firstly disembodied music as voice of the cosmos (music transporting the viewer beyond the visually representable world of the observational documentary); then the voice of the puppeteer, the director of the film; and finally the interviewee, who despite his total articulateness and incredible fluency of narration, ultimately responds to the puppeteer. Black and white newsreel-type footage of the war yields to the gaudy color of napalm explosions from an aerial perspective, an Apocalypse Now-type ride across fields and villages. But the soundtrack silences these explosions, and any sound other than the continuing Buciumeana, which lends these images a completely different quality.3 Thus is the introduction structured to a film whose four succeeding parts narrate the typically Herzogian progression of “The Man,” “His Dream,” “Punishment,” and “Redemption,” with a coda of whimsy. The same Bartók work segues the sections “The Man” and “His Dream.” Then over footage of an aircraft carrier, a tango introduces yet another “alien” musical touch, continuing outright incongruously over shots of bombed-out Germany. Inasmuch as Dieter’s aircraft carrier comrades become his family, effectively adopting him after his later rescue, it is possible that an abstruse reference is made to Kluge’s Abschied von gestern (Yesterday Girl, 1966), in which footage of the main figure’s bourgeois family life is accompanied by a tango. Dieter’s wanderings as a late teenager take him to New York, where Glenn Miller’s In the Mood on the soundtrack both evokes the New World, but also its incursion on the Old (with associations of the postwar occupation of Germany by U.S. troops, as depicted in nightclub scenes in Fassbinder’s Marriage of Maria Braun [1979]). Standing out against the counterpoint of a tango against Germany in ruins, this use of what might almost be termed acoustic stock footage—Glenn Miller for New York, as viewed by a bright-eyed boy from Europe—nonetheless goes beyond the generic. The synchresis, as Chion calls it, keeps shifting, as images of the napalm explosions from the Introduction return. This time they are accompanied by throat singing, music that could hardly be further from the film’s historical origin (Coppola, via Griffith) that the images seem to be gesturing towards, namely “The Ride of the Valkyries.” Herzog’s relentlessly even voice, ever at odds with the intoxication of his vocabulary in such moments, explicates the musical cue’s relationship to the images: “like a distant, barbaric dream.” Distant, certainly, but neither the distance of Laos is at stake, nor the two-way transatlantic span of Germany and the United States. Instead, if this arresting music evokes any geographic moorings at all when used thus, it is somewhere quite different to any of the above. That lack of specificity becomes part of Herzog’s design in crafting his own, private Vietnam survivor’s

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story from elements that would have pointed a more conventional filmmaker in the direction of a historically and geographically concrete documentary. Towards the end of this section, Wagner’s Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde enters on cue when the pilot, recounting his crash landing, uses the word “dream.” Unsure of the substantiality of death, he likens it to a thick flow, pointing to floating jellyfish in a tank behind him, lit by an intense blue. The musical “thick flow” is Wagner’s orchestration of death as ecstasy, albeit in a completely different context to Dieter’s (whose account does include a fiancée; with Herzog, however, this motif is confined to a ring, and a tale of ring fingers that is worthy of the Brothers Grimm).4 So in terms of Dieter’s narration, heavily choreographed by Herzog, Wagner remains a quirky, eclectic choice. Far more concrete in its referentiality would seem to be Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony, which is heard near the beginning of Part 3. This enters on cue when Herzog’s voice-over intones the words “in his dreams” to accompany dream images of wrecked planes, nullifying Dieter’s longing to escape. In its two-directional traverse of the Atlantic (apt for music composer, film figure, and film director), the cultural reference functions as a (popular) high art equivalent to the Glenn Miller example above. But unlike the latter, the Dvořák returns, the “Going Home” melody at that, almost half an hour later, over the word “freedom.” Like an image of the Statue of Liberty transferred to the realm of sound, it then becomes a kind of sonic reenactment, in the same way that the bear, the “guards” leading Dieter into the jungle, and so many other touches are unabashedly a visual (and mock-dramatic) reenactment. What then is foregrounded is again Herzog the puppeteer, or even maestro. But any cultural logic remains on his terms, as throat singing returns on the soundtrack while Dieter’s “captors” lead him into the jungle, and is repeated over Dieter’s dreams of a boat that “just went somewhere else.” Similarly the tango from earlier is matched to shots of a U.S. Army survival kit, and of Dieter looking contemplatively out across the Mekong River. During Part 4, “Redemption,” Bach’s “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring” accompanies his “mirage” of the hospital, while the concluding images, an aerial tracking shot of a seemingly endless sea of grounded airplanes, are underscored by a melody titled Madagascar, which belongs to none of the sonic worlds above. Throughout these musical variations punctuating sections of the film, the quality of Dieter’s voice and its dominant dramatic staging maintain fluency, not missing a beat within sequences which frequently have few edits. Except for its excitable pace, the delivery only betrays outward emotion when the Mekong River is reached. But characteristic of the whole film, Herzog stage-manages even emotion. As Dieter is led off into the jungle by his “captors” in the reenactment, and can only be viewed from behind, Herzog speaks of the emotions pounding in his (Dieter’s) breast: “of course, Dieter knew it was only a film, but all the old terror returned, as if it were real.” The narrative itself seems to demand such emotion, but shots to that point of an outwardly composed Dieter have belied it. The sheer momentum generated by his monologue is not remote from the world of Huie

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Rogers, to be explored later in this chapter. As for the interventions of Herzog’s voice, the following assessment by Michel Chion is directed at voice-over narration more generally, but captures both effect and purpose of Herzog’s use of the device: “Textual speech is inseparable from an archaic power: the pure and original pleasure of transforming the world through language, and of ruling over one’s creation by naming it” (1994: 173). Herzog’s voice never just provides a commentary; it is instrumental in implementing his visual and sonic creations.

Visionary Sound Across diverging narratives (e.g. Aguirre, La Soufrière [1977], Scream of Stone [1991]), Herzog’s films frequently end with a defeat that is ironized, and yet grand (in the endeavor itself ). Does music provide one more grand defeat, in approaching meaning, or does it transcend the inadequacies of language? Conventionally regarded as a language, music is a further sign system. The interiorized world— thoughts, ideas, indeed any abstraction—cannot ultimately be made visible, cannot be rendered with a visual correlate. But these mental landscapes can be suggested, made palpable, by music. (The absence of both is the territory of Land of Silence and Darkness [1971].) And that music by no means has to emanate from a visible source to document the mind. The most innovative scene in Polanski’s The Pianist (2002) shows hands poised over the keyboard, while the music of the head triumphs over the enforced outer silence. The latter alone guarantees safety in the timeframe of the traumatic Holocaust discourse. The triumph of imagined sound, shared by the viewer, signals a post-traumatic phase contemporary with the film’s release. But “subjective” sound is not what characterizes Herzog’s films; unlike the Polanski example just given, music in Herzog does not normally signal that we are privy to the sound world of the person on screen. One direction taken by sound, and primarily music, in Herzog’s films is a kind of antipode to Beethoven. Here the outer world, the world of bureaucrats, is deaf to the inner voices of the exalted and creative individual. Matching Herzog’s confidence in seeing and articulating images that have never been seen before,5 he positions his listening viewer as the inner ear of Beethoven, hearing sounds that are only accessible to Stendhal’s happy few.6 This is the modification to the preceding paragraph: subjective sound, yes, but so subjective as to be not generally accessible. The films that exemplify this variation are Bells from the Deep: Faith and Superstition in Russia (1993) and Pilgrimage (2001). A film still of pilgrims on the ice, in Bells from the Deep, would never in its own right persuade us of the existence of a city beneath the ice (Figure  7.1). Without sound the figures seem colorfully deluded. But with sound, possibilities arise which immerse us into Herzog’s project of the utopian. At least for the duration of some frames, melded with their soundtrack accompaniment, the bells that the

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Figure 7.1 An image of pilgrims on the ice in Bells from the Deep (1993). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Lucki Stipetić/Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

pilgrims claim to hear are not just inner voices, acoustic mirages confined to the point of view of their inner ears. The ambiguous spatiality of sound makes it a crucial channel for the kind of nomadic borders on which Herzog thrives, the liminal space between ecstatic vision and delusion, between faith and superstition. As the film’s title comes up on screen we hear bells, and see an image of a pilgrim on the ice. At this stage the sound is registered as nondiegetic, an offstage sound effect conventionally complementing the dominant image. We have already noted Michel Chion’s insistence that in the interrelationship between an image and a sound accompanying it, the meaning of each cannot be considered in isolation. Herzog’s achievement by the end of this film is to reinvest the earlier “synchresis” with new meaning. For in a concluding scene with the same sound effect and a further image of pilgrims, the pealing of bells has, at the subjective level, been transformed into a diegetic sound. (Or at the very least, a metadiegetic sound, a term first applied by Claudia Gorbman [1987: 22–23] to sound as imagined by a character, with no judgment as to its delusional quality or otherwise.) We are privy to the acoustic point of view/of hearing of the faithful pilgrim, the old woman telling her tale of her vision. Mentally superimposed on images of pilgrims crawling on the ice, we share the acoustic vision of a sunken Atlantis, the mythical city of Kitezh. And the film stops at an acoustic vision—Herzog wisely refrains from suggestive visuals. If faith can be documented, then the transformation of the sound of bells in the course of the film makes it a documentary of the soul. Even if our skepticism returns once outside the cinema, Herzog has made us accomplices to the acoustic mirage. The location of this sound world in another dimension is prepared from the outset. The first sequence features remarkable throat sounds made by a man with a wizened face, as ice floes pass in the background. This is followed by the

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gravel-voiced invocation of a shaman. We are immersed in these strange worlds with no commentary7 and no translation of the texts. Musical performance presents a particular slant to questions of performance to or for a camera (registering visual images). In a third musical act we see a duo performing Tuvan throat singing to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument, with the same background of ice floes in motion. These opening sequences then establish a thematic primacy of music in a film about faith. It is music of a kind presumably unfamiliar in idiom to most viewers,8 the converse of, say, Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera Kitezh (which has been called the Russian Parsifal, as it also blends medieval legend and Christian mythology). Kitezh is the Russian Monsalvat, and pilgrims to the sacred lake hope to hear bells ringing from the city’s invisible churches. The throat-singing sound effect, so remote from bells, is fully as extreme as that in How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck (1976), and it prepares us for the leap of faith required to contemplate the city beneath the ice, visually sealed off, but resplendent in sound. In a sequence called “Transmission of Cosmic Energy,” somewhat reminiscent of Invincible (2001), a charismatic stage figure (Alan Chumack) seems to be conducting a congregation, with stunning singing filling the auditorium. In fact those gathered are watching his hand movements, willing subjects of visual hypnosis. We the viewers (only us, I’m assuming) are listening, in an acoustic trance, to music that seems choreographed to match the body movements. The power of Alan Chumack is palpable; that of Herzog, in summoning music of the spheres, is still greater. Here the effect of what Chion calls “suspension” (1994: 132) is striking, since we can tell that the assembled multitude’s lips are not moving, that they are not the source of this swell of sound. The convergence of the worlds of sight and sound, crucial for the full effect of the pilgrims crawling on the ice near the end, comes with a scene in which a bellringer plies his craft in a bell tower. His movements seem idiosyncratic, but the resulting sounds are wholly convincing. In a detail that seemingly has to be a fabrication of Herzog, and in the context of this film may well be true for that very reason, the man is a former movie projectionist. With reference to the BBC sound recording Vanishing Sounds in Britain, David Tomas (1996: 125–126) writes: “If the notion that the past is to be represented in terms of sounds is curious, then it is doubly so when one considers the peculiar quest to preserve the ‘sounds’ of church bells [there follows a whole catalogue of mechanical objects]… The project seems old-fashioned or quaint […] unless one considers the ‘sound effects’ as junctions between social and sonic spaces.” This is precisely the bridge created by the bell-ringer and his wondrous sounds, atop a cathedral, where the sonic spaces of an outsider figure blend with the site of historically drenched religious ritual. It separates the sound of these bells from the category of more random ambient sound—these sounds have social as well as aesthetic significance. A historic compression of this landscape is projected with the bells and the surrounding countryside over which they pealed. “There are fewer distant sounds in the city, just as there is less distant viewing. The loss of distant hearing is one of the most significant changes in aural

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perception in history” (Schafer 2005: xv). This man also embodies the depth-charge soundings of Russian history. The figure whose art is a magnificent relic of a bygone age has never known an identity in the present. Born in 1944, he has never been able to find his parents (World War II? Stalin?). In this film, with its time capsule of an almost intact civilization from another age, distant hearing is gloriously restored in the sequence “The Sunken City of Kitezh,” with the bells of yore—still more remote than history; in myth-time—audible to the converted. The bell-ringer, acoustic “witness” across history as master of an anachronistic art,9 is the most telling among Herzog’s cast in setting up the full effectiveness of the film’s final scene. The bell-ringer sequence links up with the section “The Sunken City of Kitezh,” in which a woman sings a song that presumably recites the myth, and a soprano plus bass combination renders choral music. The presence of real bells in the preceding footage predisposes us to receptivity towards the myth; via the very real presence of other bells, we will into existence the sunken Orthodox cathedral beneath the ice. A section about the tomb of Saint Sergei at Zagorsk returns us to the dramaturgy of the beginning, with liturgical sounds uninterrupted by commentary, and then a strong painterly quality attaches to figures crossing a bridge, as singing continues. The last section of the film is titled “Pilgrims on Thin Ice Seeking a Vision of the City of Kitezh.” This is the fulfillment of the woman’s story, and of our initiation into the inner world of the screen figures, as we are vouchsafed their acoustic vision. Herzog’s penultimate sequence offers perfect images to draw together, almost as their Platonic idea, the facets of Russian faith and superstition that the film has documented. They also surely involve a strong degree of self-reflexivity on the filmmaker’s part. Herzog’s proclamation of what he brings to cinema is echoed by the notion of an invisible city which the pure in heart and soul might perceive (returning us to Parsifal, but also to a whole Russian tradition of holy fools, to be found for instance in Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia [1983]). The transcendence of the visual by the audible—“hearing” the city of Kitezh suffices for believers—in turn strongly flavors Herzog’s conception of the soundtrack in his documentaries. Herzog admired the Taviani brothers as the masters of sound;10 the Sardinian shepherd choir as part of the musical forces in The Wild Blue Yonder is likely to be a distant echo of their Padre Padrone (1977). There is a scene early in the Tavianis’ Night of the Shooting Stars (1982) in which we hear the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The credulous villagers strain to see the liberators they have awaited so long, and a boy on his father’s shoulders claims he can actually see them. Demystification follows swiftly, and the sound source proves to be a mischievous character playing a record. Herzog departs from this Tavianis example by withholding that last degree of his acoustic mirage, which he thus keeps intact. The sound of the bell(s) is not sourced to a record player or anywhere else. Instead, the myth is superimposed upon reality, as Herzog seeks to document faith and superstition without separating them out, and without irony. In the Tavianis

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example, the directors balance the individual acoustic point of view against the visual information communicated to us viewers. With Herzog, on the other hand, the presence of sound carries a further heightened intensity, which transforms the visual reality into myth, and enables the self-transcendence of the visual object. The earlier, realistic bell sounds prepare this, and are to be located on a continuum of perception with the bells of Kitezh. There is a seamless transition between the two realms of what is seen and what is visionary. The transition, creating a kind of threshold space of consciousness, of what could almost be termed a Fata Morgana of faith, is also achieved by the ambient sounds of the final sequences on the ice, alongside the (presumably) Orthodox liturgy which sees out the film. Both film narrative and viewers are immersed in the conviction of the pilgrims on the ice. A key concept in Michel Chion’s deliberations is the acousmêtre, embodied most memorably by the title figure in The Wizard of Oz (1939). This is a being whose effect and power reside in his acoustic attributes. Beyond these resides a pathetic or banal figure, visually unimposing. The potential thereby lent to voice-overs in film narratives transmits in Herzog’s film to a never-seen article of faith, the city of Kitezh. Its substance relies on a combination of imagery beneath the threshold of sense impressions, evoked by communally observable sounds for its ongoing mythical status. The sounds are not remote from those anyone has ever heard, but the images they evoke are unique. The stage of disenchantment never even threatens in Herzog’s film; the director himself remains an intact wizard, and skates across the thin ice dividing religion and superstition, at least as projected here. This is the ledger balance for his weighting of the narrative, and outwardly it is surprisingly close to the acoustic dictates of classical film sound. But “the ‘reality’ of ” Herzog’s “diegetic world” is of a different order to what classical narratives have in mind.11 The fact—the accountant’s truth, this time surprisingly furnished by Herzog (Cronin 2002: 252–253)—is that the pilgrims on the ice are played by two drunks fetched by the director from the next town. This of course assumes that one lends Herzog the interviewee the same credence one lends/wants to lend his images. The result is no doubt viewed by him as vindicating his stance, the prioritizing of poetic truth. It also provides a further illustration of his take on opera: “when the music is playing, the stories do make sense. Their strong inner truths shine through and they seem utterly plausible” (Cronin 2002: 259). We are left then, far beyond this one film of Herzog’s, with incompatible paradigms, with operatic ethnography. And the more banal distinction between Herzog’s feature films and documentaries yields to the revelation that both are variations on the fantasy spaces of opera. Elsewhere in this volume Lutz Koepnick writes of the positioning of the spectator of Milva’s appearance in Gesualdo—Death for Five Voices (1995) as being somewhere between distance and operatic intensity, a similar vanishing point. For Koepnick, the mediator in that scene is the camera functioning as “avatar” of the spectator. In Herzog’s films, that kind of paradox normally operates on the soundtrack too. On the one hand there is the unimpassioned voice-over of Herzog,

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plus the unflappability of Herzog the interviewer, and on the other, the music of Wagner or John Tavener, or the hypnotic voice of Leonard Cohen. Alongside (brief ) coastal scenes, and extended sequences of Mexican pilgrims, the film Pilgrimage includes footage from Bells, largely from the final section, “Pilgrims on Thin Ice.” One of the images repeated in both films is a breathtaking long shot and long take where the camera pans from a distant village across the ice, to pick out a solitary background figure with a sled, perhaps a pilgrim. In Bells this is accompanied by the liturgical music that began in the Zagorsk shrine, so that a narrative link is created between the worshipping community, and the dwarfed individual, before continuing with the Kitezh sequence. In Pilgrimage the sole piece of music continues, combining all in a timeless but also placeless ecstasy, and without any sense of a micro narrative. If such a concept seems far too conventional to be relevant to Herzog’s documentaries, the camera’s slow pan across territory between civilization and the distant figure has nonetheless constructed the sense of a pilgrimage for the viewer, but unlike the earlier film, any further link is forgone. In Bells, faith and superstition are connected to society through the institutionalization of the Church, in particular the mysticism of the Russian Orthodox Church; Pilgrimage shows religious observance in the abstract, religion on the ice. The overlapping footage is cut differently, and differs further in the music that accompanies it. In Bells it had been accompanied by voices that could be emanating from the cathedral at Zagorsk, intoning Russian Orthodox religious music. Sir John Tavener’s score (Mahamatra) permeates Pilgrimage, still with a strong devotional tone, but a more rarefied one. In discussion with the composer, Herzog admits to there having been realistic sound which has been removed, for the sake of his ecstatic truth approach. Wondrous though the music is, its isolation on the soundtrack ensures that the figures remain hermetically sealed images. This too is familiar from other Herzog films, Lessons of Darkness and the opening sequence of Aguirre, for a start. But while hermetically sealed, and often in extreme agitation, the movements of the figures are remote from what strikes us as (by design) melodramatic acting in the silent film era. A couple of the Mexican pilgrims, though lost in the pain and the ecstasy of their devotional procession, do seem aware of the camera. This might take us back to conventions of the earliest documentaries of the silent era, but contravenes the camera’s omnipotence: even pilgrims viewed from an eye-of-God perspective do not return the divine gaze. The effect is a heightened version of what Chion calls “suspension,” which “occurs when a sound naturally expected from a situation (which we usually hear at first) becomes suppressed” (1994: 132). He refers to a scene in Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990) in which ambient sound effects, originally present, are removed although the visuals demand them, “and all we hear now is a supernaturally beautiful voice singing.” Throughout Pilgrimage, Herzog sustains the latter effect without the lead-in of natural sound. Chion continues: “An effect of phantom sound is then created: our perception becomes filled with an overall massive sound, mentally

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associated with all the micromovements in the image. […] We explore its spatial dimension more easily and spontaneously; we tend to look more actively to the image to tell us what is going on” (1994: 132). Without the bridge of naturalistic sound, a comparable phantom effect in Pilgrimage is almost a parallel universe rather than a graduated spectrum in the direction of abstraction, or potentially of ecstasy. And the “overall massive sound” becomes an act of iconoclasm in the original sense, a transcending of graven images. “Sound is mental, cannot be touched. An image can; this is what is done in religious ceremonies” (Chion 1994: 132). In Herzog’s hands, the humbleness of the imagery of religious icons, and of the supplicants themselves, is submerged by the exaltation of the music, a mobile spirit of place that carries all before it. The lack of ambient sound effaces what cultural anthropologist David Tomas calls “ephemeral and fragmentary histories” (1996: 105). When dialogue is also absent, what remains creates the parameters for sonic myth, an acoustic equivalent of the oneiric state traditionally associated with Herzog’s images as rendered by his cinematography. Whatever the degree of empathy established with the devotees in the film Pilgrimage, they are never represented from within nor even fully located without—there is no equivalent of the sound of ice cracking—so that the worlds remain parallel, on opposite sides of the lens, and of the sound barrier. Music is used here to immunize the viewer against anything other than the ecstatic truth, just as the impossible narrative weight borne by Philip Glass scores in Godfrey Reggio’s films filters out the political commentary that seems to inhere in the images. Of the two companion piece films, Pilgrimage may well be the more beautiful, but Bells from the Deep strikes me as the more effective through its attempt to render more of the humanity of the human vessels of religiosity.

Hearing When the Eyes Play Tricks The very notion of a mirage occupies a space that must appeal to Herzog, situated between reality and (naturally) heightened reality, and associated with the strong presence of heat and the desert, i.e. remote from European civilization. Herzog’s Fata Morgana (1969) first outstrips German civilization with its non-German sounding title, for all those who do not recognize it as a standard German expression for “mirage.” In its opening sequence, planes land at an airport on eight occasions, the first as an ambit gesture (the creator Herzog arriving in Africa?!) and then after the title “The Creation,” one landing for each biblical day. The sequence is dramatically like the opening of Handke’s almost contemporary play Kaspar (1967), with its multiple repetitions of one sentence. But Herzog’s minor variations within the repeated pattern establish the motif of visual mirage, not least through making us wonder whether a feature has altered from one of the earlier landings. A shimmering effect is actually created by the emissions of the planes, i.e. a civilization-induced

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mirage rather than a natural trick of light. Silent birds seem oblivious to the noise and movement, either flying across the screen (whereas their technological imitators are shot front-on) or else remaining stationary in the foreground. The spontaneity and unpredictability of their movement clashes with the planes, seemingly predestined to repeat one trajectory. While it is no surprise that above the planes’ racket no birdcalls are audible, their absence is a further example of Herzog’s favoring of single soundtrack channels succeeding each other, as discussed above. Music starts at the end of the landings, Baroque strings yielding to an organ, before the fluency of Mozart’s Coronation Mass (from the “Kyrie” movement) is introduced as a kind of sonic tracking shot over images of sand dunes. The latter anticipate Herzog’s own The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), as well as resonating with a scene that comes late in Pasolini’s Teorema, of a comparable flight from civilization. High European culture is juxtaposed against primal landscape,12 the same equation as in the opening sequence of Aguirre, there confined to the visual level. A range of music follows, music whose provenance seems to be increasingly Eastern, until the organ music reappears. Transposed to shots of kids in a desert village, and little boys on a donkey, it finds no geographical anchor, while conversely any ambient sound that might have fleshed out this setting is absent. But any hermetic seal that might have surrounded these boys is shattered by their line of vision, directed straight at the camera. This potentially returns the colonial gaze of Said’s Orientalism, in reversing the objectification emanating from the camera’s/viewer’s gaze. (Or else, if objectified, what we view becomes mummified. It then has interest as a museum exhibit, but not the potential for exoticism.) The camera’s construction of the boys matches the taming of even Huie after his performance in Huie’s Sermon (1981). Yet again, towards the end of this opening part of the film’s triptych, “Creation,” Herzog is the true creator—of world theater. The returned human gaze in turn qualifies the hypnotic tracking shots of landscapes. At the level of music, no consistent pattern locates us either in the (visual) clash of civilizations that evolves, or as distanced from it. From the opening music evoking Western worship, the soundtrack progresses from God to the highest human office with Mozart’s “Coronation” Mass, and then to slightly Eastern music, with a sense of exoticized ritual. There is virtually no break between the different musical examples. Nor is there any ambient sound after the noise of the landing aircraft, up till the shot of a village, some half an hour later. Over a long shot of a donkey cart traveling on a narrow neck of land a kind of hillbilly music appears, but it recurs towards the end of the film over completely different images. In section 2, “Paradise,” the inroads of civilization are largely of German postcolonialism, with the accents of the pseudo-scientists, and above all the sentence “the Blitzkrieg is insanity” (der Blitzkrieg ist Wahnsinn). Cheerily performed by children, this has an ironic overtone of the empowerment of mimicry in Bhabha’s sense, matching the return of the postcolonialist gaze that was analyzed above. The dominant music, however, is palpably from a continent beyond both

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Africa and Europe: Leonard Cohen’s songs “Susanne” (1967) and “So Long, Marianne” (1967). It is complemented at the beginning of the section by brief music from a transistor radio, and a Delta blues extract. In this section too, all villagers are acutely conscious of the camera, i.e. visually far from “naïve,” but shots are drained of sound, even for instance when one of the villagers raises a stick to break stones. The effect of this is as if the colonial gaze were also being returned on the soundtrack, where the markers of our imaginings rather than theirs are clear through the musical choices. Their eyes return our gaze, and we never hear the world as they might, either. In the final section, “The Golden Age,” we hear the first “live” music; quotation marks are required because its performance is virtually dead. The dark goggles that had rendered the bizarre scientist anonymous reappear here with the singer, a misleading gesture towards (stereotypes of ) a gifted, blind jazz musician. His passionless voice is distorted throughout this dreary music, with the unflatteringly shot pianist further distancing the mood from the party streamers and lampions of the mise-en-scène. This ghastly duo is the opposite pole to the film’s chameleon title, mechanically rendering a form of “art” whose circularity (melodic circles, plus the apparent lack of an audience beyond the increasingly reluctant us) belies any narrative of the linear progression of civilization, of creation finding its moorings in a golden age. The solipsism of transplanted civilization is complete; its swansong, still more tellingly than the dislocated visuals, is barely still a song.

Speaking in Tongues If, as Simon & Garfunkel wrote in “Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall” (1965), one can be “blinded by the light of God and truth and right,” then is it fair to ask whether one can be deafened by the light of God as well? Or else by its sonic equivalent, radiant chant? What is the role of sound in religious ecstasy, when the spirituality takes quite different expression to that in Bells or Pilgrimage? And what happens when the “mirror on the wall” is in fact Herzog’s merciless camera, confronting a momentarily stilled main figure in the final frames? The acoustic assault of Huie’s Sermon makes it difficult viewing/listening. An impassioned Brooklyn preacher preaches to the converted. One of his invitations to his congregation is: “Can you say something to me? Come on, say something to me,” but this is no dialogue. Instead it develops into an antiphonal incantation, a microcosm of the serried ranks of the earthbound faithful, transported into their future being as the angelic hordes. Language is not bound by verbal logic; in some places it is not bound by comprehensibility. Its rendering approximates to the chanting of ritual, neither to speech nor music.13 The very fact that diction becomes secondary strongly differentiates the sonic effect of Huie from Dr. Gene Scott in God’s Angry Man (1981).

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In two sequences of the 42-minute long film the camera leaves the church interior and tracks run-down houses and vacant, boarded up buildings, a gesture towards contextualization. But rather than the social thrust of more conventional documentary, this is primarily a rerun of a Herzog trademark, parallel to the tracking shots past the debris and bones of civilization in Fata Morgana, for instance. It is the auteur’s palimpsest. On the accompanying soundtrack, it is as if one were still inside the church. The continuing praise transfigures the decrepit surrounds, while ennobling the faithful. The sermon itself, like the congregation’s responses, becomes ever more impassioned. Words are punctuated by gasps of “huh,” and a rapid catching of breath, as the signifiers of language yield ever more willingly to the hypnosis of sound, complemented by crooning from the congregation, ever more rhythmic clapping, percussion instruments (drums, cymbals), and riffs on the organ. (The overall effect is not far away from hip hop avant la lettre.) Shots of greater variety portray congregation members from different angles, ahead of a laying on of hands on girls’ heads and necks. The camera then cuts away to two adult baptisms in an expansive body of water, with the ongoing accompaniment of the choir’s music. Lulled by the outdoors sequence discussed at the beginning of this paragraph, we (at least those unfamiliar with such U.S. churches) assume that this well-lit scene is taking place outdoors. But the suturing of the soundtrack has caught us out. Only when the camera draws back do we realize that this is in fact inside the church, above the choir pews, a kind of airborne baptismal font, an irresistible subject for Herzog. Choral rhythms slow down alongside the immersions in the pool. At the very end, Huie himself is shot looking straight at the camera (Figure 7.2), as well as glancing downwards and sideways. He is silent (though not visibly

Figure 7.2 Huie Rogers looks directly into the camera at the end of Huie’s Sermon (1981).  Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Werner Herzog/Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

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exhausted by the preceding service), but blinking. After extended footage of observational documentary, Herzog’s directing here is palpable, and in the context of the film it almost seems the result of a challenge to the central figure to stem the flood of sound. Visually there is no longer anything remarkable about this man who has just given such a distinctive acoustic performance. Lost, once removed from the sonic realm as his home territory, he is tamed by Herzog’s camera. The performance dominated by Huie is over, because its director would have it so. But the almost static visual tableau of this coda, drained of sound, reinforces its crucial role in this communal religious observance. There is a sound which could easily have been edited that bridges the final images to the end credits, a kind of acoustic swish-pan (like a celebrated sound effect near the end of Taxi Driver [1976]). Sound “connects, and it requires surrendering oneself to, and immersing oneself in, participatory experience. A society which values sound over vision would therefore also be a society which values lived experience over detached analysis […] and subjective immersion and surrender over objective scrutiny, control and power” (van Leeuwen 1999: 196). David Lynch knows better than anyone else how sound penetrates below the visual surface, confirming the suspicion his camera arouses that an invisible (and hence in his films even more threatening) substratum is present, which only the naked ear can detect. Herzog’s sound design is less differentiated, more diffuse than Lynch’s. But in relation to the religious settings of Bells from the Deep, Pilgrimage, and Huie’s Sermon, it evokes a still more fundamental spectrum within the synchresis of sound and image: “No wonder that sound has so often been associated with the mystical and the religious, while vision was associated with knowledge, especially scientific knowledge” (van Leeuwen 1999: 196).

Conclusion Herzog’s frequent separation of the three main elements of the soundtrack— dialogue, ambient sound, and music—is largely at odds with mainstream cinema. The strong presence of music for extended sequences, and music alone on the soundtrack, no doubt reflects the non-urban settings of so much of Herzog’s oeuvre. But the combination of images and sound also points in the direction of silent cinema, a familiar move in relation to this director, but normally confined to themes, homage (and self-positioning), and visuals (above all of course his Nosferatu—The Vampyre [1979]). This archaic (film-) sound world would seem to have (film-) historical as well as aesthetic implications. Herzog’s forays into Africa, South America, or Asia, while retaining European culture with many musical choices, frequently resonate with an earlier stage of global film culture, when the technological coordinates of “synchresis” (to return to Chion’s term) were different. Alongside his films’ challenges to ethnography, they represent a kind of sonic atavism, a throwback to an earlier stage of film culture.

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Monologues are not absent from these films, whether Herzog’s own voice-over, or the seemingly obsessive (but in fact directorially controlled) monologue of Dieter’s voice-over. But dialogues were never Herzog’s forte, nor indeed a structural requirement of his particular brand of narratives, which are not primarily about human communication. That effect is furthered in the long stretches of music alone on the soundtrack, leading in extreme cases to parallel, complementary sensory channels of the visual and the acoustic, with the latter further limited to music. When human figures are visible but not audible (see discussion of Pilgrimage above), their hinge function is missing. The music remains disembodied in a literal sense, and if the music is vocal, there is nothing to anchor it in the reality of performance or at least performability. The privileging of music as partner to the visuals creates a highly distinctive “synchresis.” For as used by Herzog, even music from the Classical Western tradition (from Pachelbel in Kaspar Hauser through to Wagner, above all Wagner, in many features and documentaries) is neither generic, nor culturally specific. Alongside Herzog’s unprecedented images, the inflections of his sonic worlds are rendered by a relatively closed system, the image–sound relationship of an acoustically visionary director.

Notes 1 2

3

4

5

6

7

On the relationship between the verbal and the visual in Herzog, see Peucker (1986). Leppert’s description of Popol Vuh’s music in Fitzcarraldo (1982) applies equally well to Aguirre: “The music affects timelessness, if only on account of the mix of sounds that cancel out historical and cultural specificity” (2007: 100). Comparison with the opening sequence of Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), a film that appears frequently in Herzog scholarship, is instructive for the two films’ soundtracks. In Coppola’s film explosions in the jungle are also seen without being heard, at ground level, and much closer than in Little Dieter. But soon the inverted head of the figure whose nightmare this is, is superimposed, and before long his voice, the voice of the dreamer, is heard. There is a direct segue between dream and reality with a sound bridge between the (now identified) blades of the ceiling fan, and the real sound of a helicopter outside. None of these bridging devices occurs in Herzog’s dream states, because it is never so apparent that they are unambiguously dream states. A villager forcibly removes Dieter’s engagement ring. He alerts his Viet Cong captors to this, and they return to the village and “avenge” him, chopping off the finger wearing Dieter’s appropriated ring. See Rost’s transcription: “I believe, or rather I am certain, that I have particular images, images I can see on the horizon and can articulate, which may be relatively new to the cinema, something that has never been seen before” (1996: 373, my translation). In connection with this film, Prager writes thus of music and ecstasy: “Music, poetry and, as far as Herzog is concerned, filmmaking do not communicate prosaically, but ecstatically” (2007: 129). Music itself stands apart from the ground bass of Herzog’s voice-overs.

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8 In fact generically so, beyond Herzog’s use of it. Huron (2006: 215) writes: “Commonly, listeners will form a broad category of ‘otherness’ into which all deviant stimuli are, by default, indiscriminately assigned. […] for the inexperienced listener, much of the remaining world of music is clumped into a single ‘exotic’ category. Hence, for example, Inuit, Tuvan […] singing would be indistinguishable to many listeners, despite the extreme cultural and geographic distances separating their […] origins.” 9 “In medieval society, church bells were never proscribed though they were the loudest and most persistent sounds in the city” (Schafer 2005: xv). 10 In the third program of the 1991 ÖRF series “Filmstunde,” in which his guest was Michael Kreihsl, he speaks glowingly of a sequence in their film Allonsanfan (1974). 11 Davison writes that, “to a certain extent, all film sound and music falls into the category of the acousmatic,” that is, we hear sounds without seeing their source. She adds, however, that, “classical film sound usually denies its acousmatic character: to do otherwise would be to admit the separately manufactured nature of the sound– image complex in film, and thus deny the ‘reality’ of the diegetic world, revealing its mechanical, technological origin” (2004: 128). 12 Vindication of the importance of the sound design for the overall effect of Herzog’s films comes with English dubbing (Werner Herzog Film: DVD Edition– Documentaries and Shorts). The difference is incredible once Herzog’s bizarre (in timbre) narrator of myths is effaced by a strong, straight, identifiably U.S. voice—even these images suddenly become the stuff of a National Geographic narrative rather than a Herzogtype pilgrimage. 13 “The language used in the sermon is […] more like an incantation for emotional expression than a vehicle for straight communication. Periodically, the text slows down […] But, more often, Huie’s words come out as song, the constant litany-like humming, not unlike the jungle droning that plagues and enchants Aguirre and his men” (Van Wert 1986: 61).

Works Cited Chion, Michel: Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Cronin, Paul, ed.: Herzog on Herzog (London: Faber & Faber, 2002). Davison, Annette: Hollywood Theory, Non-Hollywood Practice: Cinema Soundtracks in the 1980s and 1990s (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). Gorbman, Claudia: Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). Handke, Peter: Kaspar (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1968). Huron, David: Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). Leppert, Richard: “Opera, Aesthetic Violence and the Imposition of Modernity: Fitzcarraldo,” Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, ed. Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 99–119.

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Lutze, Peter C.: Alexander Kluge: The Last Modernist (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998). Peucker, Brigitte: “Literature and Writing in the Films of Werner Herzog.” The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, ed. Timothy Corrigan (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 105–117. Prager, Brad: The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (London: Wallflower Press, 2007). Rost, Andreas: “Kinostunden der wahren Empfindung; Herzog, Wenders, Fassbinder, und der Neue deutsche Film,” Positionen deutscher Filmgeschichte, ed. Michael Schaudig (München: Diskurs-Film-Verlag, 1996), pp. 367–408. Schafer, R. Murray: “Introduction,” Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds, ed. Jean François Augoyard and Henry Torgue (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), pp. xi–xvi. Tomas, David: Transcultural Space and Transcultural Beings (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996). van Leeuwen, Theo: Speech, Music, Sound (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1999). Van Wert, William: “Last Words: Observations on a New Language,” The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, ed. Timothy Corrigan (New York: Methuen. 1986), pp. 51–72.

Additional Films Cited Coppola, Francis Ford: Apocalypse Now (1979) Fassbinder, Rainer Werner: Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) Fleming, Victor: The Wizard of Oz (1939) Kluge, Alexander: Abschied von gestern (1966) Kluge, Alexander: Die Patriotin (1979) Kurosawa, Akira: Dreams (1990) Pasolini, Pier Paolo: Teorema (1968) Polanski, Roman: The Pianist (2002) Scorsese, Martin: Taxi Driver (1976) Tarkovsky, Andrei: Nostalghia (1983) Taviani, Paolo and Taviani, Vittorio: Allonsanfan (1974) Taviani, Paolo and Taviani, Vittorio: Padre Padrone (1977) Taviani, Paolo and Taviani, Vittorio: Night of the Shooting Stars (1982) Welles, Orson: The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)

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Death for Five Voices Gesualdo’s “Poetic Truth” Holly Rogers

These voices—they’re a kind of bridge back to the human world Aldous Huxley (1972: 50) Referred to by Herzog as “one of the films closest to my heart,” Gesualdo—Death for Five Voices is a mix of documentary, fiction, and musical performance (Cronin 2002: 238). The film, released in 1995, is an hour-long documentary filmed for ZDF television, which explores the life and music of Don Carlo Gesualdo, the reclusive, avant-garde madrigalist of the sixteenth century who murdered his cheating wife and her lover. Herzog’s fascination with the composer comes as no surprise. The director boasts a lifelong preoccupation with music, a fixation that led him to the theater, where he directed eighteen operas, including Lohengrin at the Bayreuth Festival in 1987.1 It is the back-stage preparations for this annual festival that Herzog documents in his 1994 TV film, The Transformation of the World into Music. The comparison between the auteuristic Wagner and the obsessive Herzog is easy to make: not content with writing both libretto and musical setting for his work, for instance, Wagner was compelled to make his own theatrical environment (in Bayreuth) where he could control all aspects of staging, lighting, and atmosphere. Herzog’s similarly compulsive mentality was amply documented in Burden of Dreams (1982), Les Blank’s documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo (1982), in which the cast were asked to pull a steam ship over the watershed between two tributaries of the Amazon, much to the bewilderment of the local population. The influence of musical drama on Herzog’s cinematic work is often clear to see, particularly in the eight films scored by Florian Fricke of Popul Vuh, which demonstrate an unusual audio-visual cohesion. Two documentaries released in 2005 demonstrate explicitly the meticulous attention given to the sounding of A Companion to Werner Herzog, First Edition. Edited by Brad Prager. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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image in Herzog’s films. In the Edges: The Grizzly Man Session (2005) outlines the process of scoring for Grizzly Man, charting Herzog’s close involvement with musician and composer Richard Thompson: at one stage, the director, who portrays himself as a co-composer, declares that “there is never anything like background music in my films.” In a similar fashion, Requiem in Space: Werner and Ernst Make Music (2005) provides insight into Herzog’s collaboration with Ernst Reijseger, a Dutch jazz cellist who contributed to the music for The Wild Blue Yonder (2005). While it is easy to put such a relationship with music down to an auteuristic desire for complete artistic control, it can also be argued that the resultant audiovisual synthesis sees Herzog reach for a higher harmony that harks back to the nineteenth-century Wagnerian aesthetics of intermedial unity. While Lutz Koepnick points out that Herzog uses excerpts from Wagner’s operas to create a “disjunctive soundtrack” in La Soufrière (1977) and Lessons of Darkness (1992), the influence of the opera composer’s aesthetics can clearly be seen in Herzog’s working methodologies (Koepnick 2008: 203). The search for a Gesamtkunstwerk (or total work of art) by Wagner and others during the nineteenth century was fuelled by a desire to create a unity larger than the sum of its parts. Wagner considered opera a unity in which no one art was subservient to another. For him, the separate branches of the arts—music, architecture, poetry, dance, and painting—when united around drama, could produce a synthesizing, or “totalizing” effect (Wagner 1849: xviii). Because film is an art with multiple authors, there is a “risk of rupture” (Paulin 2000: 62); “the farther music and image drift from a kind of mutual dependency,” explains Kathryn Kalinak, “the more potential there is for the disruption or even destruction of the cinematic illusion” (Kalinak 1999: 15).2 At first glance, Herzog appears to be aiming for such a “totalizing” effect in his films. Herzog’s interest in music has repeatedly drawn him to characters in some way engulfed by music. This can be seen in both his documentaries (which often focus on musicians, such as Yuri the bell-ringer in Bells From the Deep: Faith and Superstition in Russia [1993]) and his fiction films: driven to the brink of insanity through his love of Caruso’s voice, Fitzcarraldo’s attempt to build an opera house in the Amazonian rainforest makes him one of the most memorable of Herzog’s musical protagonists. But Fitzcarraldo is also one of the most memorable of Herzog’s characters to demonstrate psychotic obsessional behavior. While his documentaries frequently focus on people driven by some sort of mania (Aguirre the conquistador, Timothy Treadwell the bear fanatic, Reinhold Messner the mountain-climber, and Graham Dorrington the aeronautical engineer, to name but a few), Herzog’s fiction films are similarly driven by characters with single-minded and obsessive inclinations, Fitzcarraldo being the most notable example. From this perspective, it is easy to see why Gesualdo, remembered for his turbulent life-story as much as his progressive and experimental madrigal writing (as biographical titles, such as Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa: Musician and Murderer [Gray and Heseltine 1926] and Assassinio a cinque voci [Consiglio 1967] attest),

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attracted Herzog’s attention. Like Fitzcarraldo, Gesualdo is a protagonist driven by both music and mania. Largely forgotten after his death, the composer only reentered the public imagination during the twentieth century. Likened by Aldous Huxley to a “fantastic character out of a Webster melodrama,” Gesualdo appeared as a protagonist in a novel by Anatole France, a short story by Julio Cortázar, and in operas by Franz Hummel and Schnittke (Huxley 1972: 50). For some, interest in Gesualdo’s music bordered on fixation: Stravinsky arranged the Italian’s madrigal Beltà poi che t’assenti in Monumentum pro Gesualdo (1960) and made several pilgrimages to his castle, for instance, while English composer Peter Warlock’s reported fixation with Gesualdo almost led him to suicide. Herzog recalls his first encounter with Gesualdo’s Sixth Book of Madrigals with similar zeal, describing it as “a moment of complete enlightenment for me”: I was so excited I called up Florian Fricke at three in the morning and did not stop raving about it. Finally, after half an hour, he said, “Werner, everyone who is into music knows about Gesualdo and the Sixth Book. You sound as if you have discovered a new planet.” But for me if was as if I had discovered something tremendous within our solar system, and out of that sprung a film about Gesualdo which I carried within me for many years (Cronin 2002: 258).

This “Sixth Book” that so captivated Herzog was Gesualdo’s last complete collection of madrigals (he left only fragments of a seventh). The madrigal, a secular vocal form in which every poetic image is set to a different musical unit, stood in stark contrast to the smooth, polyphonic writing of Palestrina (1525–1594) and other Renaissance composers. Palestrina’s style was later codified by eighteenthcentury composer Johann Joseph Fux in his pedagogical text, Gradus Ad Parnassum (1725). According to Fux, Palestrina’s style was characterized by a dynamic and continuous musical flow that moved mainly by step (any melodic leap had to be countered by an immediate stepwise movement in the opposite direction in order to restore order). In order to preserve his even polyphonic flow, Palestrina confined dissonant intervals to weak beats, or provided immediate resolution for those found in stronger parts of the bar. Rather than progress via such a smooth, melismatic continuum, madrigal composers placed their texts within disjunctive and oppositional sections, in which melodic lines could include both leaps and dissonance. Gesualdo’s madrigals took disjunction to an extreme and his compositional style charts an increasingly chromatic and progressive method that reaches fruition in the harsh, unresolved dissonances of the Sixth Book. Alessandro Guarini, writing in 1610, compared Gesualdo with Dante, because his word setting does not “avoid harshness, nor shun dissonance itself,” but is rather “artistic against the rules of the art”: the composer, he continues, does not “fear to employ hard, unusual and strange sounds” (Degrada 1965: 268). Venturing into a soundworld awash with unprepared dissonance, cross-relations, unusual intervals, and chromatic non-functional harmony—“strange sounds”—Gesualdo developed a style distinctly at odds with that of his contemporaries. In fact, his later madrigals sounded,

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according to Huxley in The Doors of Perception, “as though they might have been written by the later Schoenberg” (1972: 50). Its title taken from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93), the book recalls an afternoon in 1954 in which the author consumed 4/10ths of a gram of mescaline in an attempt to transcend his own self. While under the drug’s influence—and with his “doors” open— Huxley revisited writings and artworks with which he was already familiar, including several Buddhist texts and the work of Botticelli and Cézanne. At one stage, Huxley turns his emancipated perception to music: Mozart’s C-Minor Piano Concerto was interrupted after the first movement, and a recording of some madrigals by Gesualdo took its place. “These voices” I said appreciatively, “these voices—they’re a kind of bridge back to the human world.” And a bridge they remained even while singing the most startlingly chromatic of the mad prince’s compositions. Through the uneven phrases of the madrigals, the music pursued its course, never sticking to the same key for two bars together. In Gesualdo, that fantastic character out of a Webster melodrama, psychological disintegration had exaggerated had pushed to the extreme limit, a tendency inherent in modal as opposed to fully tonal music. The resulting works sounded as though they might have been written by the later Schoenberg. “And yet,” I felt myself constrained to say, as I listened to these strange products of a Counter-reformation psychosis working upon a late medieval art form, “and yet it does not matter that he’s all in bits. The whole is disorganized. But each individual fragment is in order, is a representative of a Higher Order. The Highest Order prevails even in the disintegration. The totality is present even in the broken pieces. More clearly present, perhaps, than in a completely coherent work. At least you aren’t lulled into a sense of false security by some merely human, merely fabricated order. You have to rely on your immediate perception of the ultimate order. So in a certain sense disintegration may have its advantages. But of course it’s dangerous, horribly dangerous. Suppose you couldn’t get back, out of the chaos (Huxley 1972: 50–51).

Huxley’s intoxicated experience of Gesualdo’s madrigals was paradoxical: for him, the “disorganized” fragments of music offered at once a “bridge back to the human world” and a “horribly dangerous” chaos that may close the door back to normality forever. The idea that fragmented structures could somehow enable access to a higher form of unity—thus providing “complete enlightenment”—is shared amongst various artistic practitioners of the sixteenth century. Although the designation of Mannerism most often refers to the later years of the High Renaissance in the visual arts (around 1520–80), Gesualdo’s later music arguably represents the beginnings of such a style in music. The preoccupation with maniera (“style” or “manner”) and the consequent emphasis of artifice over naturalism can clearly be seen in the work of Caravaggio, Tintoretto, and Parmigianino: mannerist stylization, for instance, is obvious in the elongated proportions in Parmigianino’s Madonna

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with the Long Neck (1534–40).3 Just as Parmigianino’s distorted perspective drew attention to style over natural representation, Gesualdo’s later madrigals emphasized an unnatural musical flow in which the means of expression—the form— was elevated above all else to create what Glenn Watkins has described as an “overload” (1991: 108). Italian music theorist and composer Vincenzo Galilei (father of Galileo) was one contemporary to bemoan the impossibility of delivering the first-person emotionalism of the madrigal text in a multi-voiced, polyphonic form (Watkins 1991: 104). Death for Five Voices pays particular attention to the possible relationship between Gesualdo’s increasingly “dangerous” harmonic complexity and his melodramatic biography, an interest that has preoccupied many musicologists. In 1990, Denis Stevens, for instance, hypothesized that the composer’s modernistic soundworld “came, in all probability, from his manner of life,” his musical disjunction with his milieu evidence of an increasingly neurotic, guilt-ridden mind (Stevens 1990: 410). The part of the composer’s story that secured his mythical afterlife begins in 1586, shortly after his marriage to his first wife (and first cousin), Donna Maria d’Avalos who, according to the Chronicle of the Venetian Ambassador to Naples, was “the most beautiful lady in the city” (Gray and Heseltine 1926: 19). At this time, Gesualdo was not yet recognized as a composer but was well known as the hereditary Prince of Venosa and the Count of Consa with a family seat just outside of Venosa. Before 1590, for instance, he had published only a single composition, and, although the first two books of madrigals are thought to have been completed during this time in semi-secrecy and only posthumously published (between May and June 1594, the year of his second marriage), they are in a style that indicates little of the experiments he would later carry out. However, after several years of marriage, problems began to arise between Gesualdo and Donna Maria. Several contemporary sources, including the official report from the Grand Court of the Vicaria and what has become known as the Corona Manuscript, a chronique scandaleuse of the period, offer a record of subsequent events. Although the latter is no doubt the less trustworthy of the two, its poetic delivery offers an exciting account of events: the enemy of human nature not being able to endure the sight of such great love and such conformity of tastes in two married people, implanted in the bosom of Donna Maria unchaste and libidinous desires, and an unbridled appetite to enjoy the beauties of a certain cavaliere. He was Don Fabrizio Carafa, Duke of Andria, perhaps the most handsome and graceful cavaliere in the city, vigorous and flourishing and not yet thirty years of age (Watkins 1991: 8–9).

According to the manuscript, Donna Maria enjoyed “the beauties” of Don Fabrizio “many times for months on end” and as their “amorous meetings became habitual, it was no longer possible to keep their love secret” (Watkins 1991: 9–10). When Gesualdo learned of his wife’s infidelity, he was driven to desperate

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vengeance. Pretending to leave his palace for an overnight hunting trip, the composer watched as Don Fabrizio, thinking the house empty, made his entrance. Contemporary reports suggest that Gesualdo returned to the palace around midnight, accompanied by a troop of armed cavalieri and, finding his wife compromised, “first killed Signor Fabrizio Carafa, Duke of Andria … and afterwards killed the lady herself, in this manner avenging the injury which he had received” (Gray and Heseltine 1926: 19). However, Gesualdo’s revenge did not end here. The Corona Manuscript reports that “[t]he bodies were dragged outside the room and left on the stairs, the Prince ordering the servants not to move them from that place”: Gesualdo then “made a placard which explained the cause of the slaughter which they affixed to the door of the palace” (Watkins 1991: 12). These awful events captured the Neapolitan imagination, with poets such as Ascanio Pignatelli, Horatio Comite, and Giambattista Marino preserving the sadness and horror of the double murder for posterity: in “On the Death of Two Most Noble Lovers,” Tasso, poet and close friend of Gesualdo, writes of a “sad Naples, clothed in mourning, for the dark fate of beauty and of virtue” (Watkins 1991: 27). Perhaps as a result of the copious retelling of the revenge, several myths emerged. Gesualdo and Donna Maria had produced only one son, for instance: however, after the murder, rumor abounded that, although there exists no record of his birth, there had been a second son, a child with an unfortunate, yet distinct resemblance to the Duke. According to hearsay, the grief-stricken Gesualdo rocked the boy’s crib so violently that he added infanticide to his list of crimes. After a long trial, the Neapolitan courts let Gesualdo go free due to his status as a nobleman and the composer entered a period that has been left relatively unrecorded until 1594, when he visited the Este court at Ferrara, a center for musical innovation that housed fantastic musicians, such as the concerto delle donne (three virtuoso female singers), a fine collection of instruments, including Nicola Vicentino’s archicembalo with six keyboards, and a court responsible for supporting innovative literary figures and artists. For many decades, the Este court had offered sponsorship to composers such as Obrecht, Josquin, Isaac, Willaert, and Lassus and a group of progressive musical minds, including Rore and Luzzaschi who represented what Monteverdi termed the seconda prattica.4 During his stay (which lasted from 1594–96), Gesualdo published his Third and Fourth Books of Madrigals (in March 1595 and 1596, respectively), which, with their texts infused with death, suffering, cruelty, pain, anguish, and despair, began to demonstrate a more enriched and daring chromatic vocabulary. While it is easy to suggest that both choice of text and more adventurous setting in these books are the product of a guilty mind, Watkins argues that Gesualdo’s experimentation is more likely the result of immersion in Ferrara’s innovative musical milieu and the presence of accomplished performers able to perform highly demanding music (Watkins 1991: 149).5 When Gesualdo returned from Ferrara in 1595 with his second wife Leonora, he secured a group of resident virtuoso musicians and began work on his last two complete books of madrigals. Leonora, however, appears to have been with the

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composer for only a short amount of time (rumors abounded that he treated her badly) and he became increasingly isolated. Although there are fifteen years between Books Four and Five, Watkins speculates that, due to a lack of recorded travel until his death, Gesualdo became increasingly reclusive, remaining either in his castle or in Naples in order to dedicate himself to music (Watkins 1991: 80). While Stevens argues that “sufficient medical and other documentary evidence is at hand to prove the composer a hypersensitive, haunted, sadistic and unhappy creature,” rumors about how this melancholy manifested itself abounded (Stevens 1962: 332). According to Tommaso Campanella, an Italian philosopher and theologian writing in 1635, Gesualdo asked his servants to beat him each night; he became so obsessed with his uncle Carlo that he obtained his skeletal remains; and that the composer’s death on September 8, 1613 was at the hands of the mistreated Leonora (although evidence seems to suggest, somewhat disappointingly, that his cause of death was an asthma attack).6 It has become a popular belief that Gesualdo’s descent into a “haunted, sadistic” mind-set encouraged the adventurous turn in his compositional style. In 1611, Gesualdo hired his own printer, Jacomo Carlino, in order to produce the Responsoria for Holy Week as well as the Fifth and Sixth Books of madrigals. As mentioned, although Book Five demonstrates a marked increase in unusual and difficult melodic intervals and the juxtaposition of unrelated chords (as demonstrated by the beginning of Languisce al fin; O tenebroso giorno), it is in Book Six that Gesualdo really embraces dissonance: several madrigals even make use of all seven sharps and six of the flats in order to emphasize words such as “love,” “pain,” “agony,” “death,” and “ecstasy” (although often this only represents a brief passage of each piece). The effect on the listener of this constantly shifting tonal core is one of both excitement and anxiety. As the music slides in unpredictable directions, the emotion of each word is emphatically heightened, the shock of the “horribly dangerous” modulations demanding of the listener an emphatic hermeneutic engagement that blows wide the doors of musical perception. “The other books are more within the context of his time” explains Herzog, “but with the Sixth Book of Madrigals all of a sudden Gesualdo seems to step 400 years ahead of his time, composing music that we hear only from Stravinsky onwards” (Cronin 2002: 261).

The Poetic Truth Triple murder, melancholy, mania, obsession, and an avant-garde compositional style to match: whatever the truth behind Gesualdo’s story (and the double murder is the only thing that undoubtedly occurred), the composer has become buried beneath five hundred years of legend. Somewhat unusually, the process of Gesualdo’s mythologization had already begun during his life, as we can see from the unreliable nature of primary sources such as the Corona Manuscript. Once his

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music re-entered the public consciousness during the twentieth century, titles such as Musician and Murderer only added to the intrigue and speculation. In Death for Five Voices, the enigmas surrounding Gesualdo are treated with relish. The “truth” is a complicated thing with Herzog. While his feature films that deal with real subjects often filter actual events through a highly interpretative lens (in Aguirre, the Wrath of God [1972], for instance, the travels of several conquistadors combine to create one meta-historical adventurer), his nonfiction films typically favor the enigmatic parts of a given subject; those elements, in other words, more prone to mythologization. Michael Renov has described documentary film in terms of four functions: to record, reveal, or preserve; to persuade or promote; to analyze or interrogate; and to express (Renov 1993b: 21). However, recognizing that each of these functions harbors the potential (or even necessity) for invention, Renov considers fictional and documentary film as firmly enmeshed in terms of semiotics, narrativity, and performance as though the “two domains inhabit one another”: Indeed, nonfiction contains any number of “fictive” elements, moments at which a presumably objective realization of the world encounters the necessity of creative intervention. Among these fictive ingredients we may include the construction of character … emerging through recourse to ideal and imagined categories of hero or genius, the use of poetic language, narration, or musical accompaniment to heighten emotional impact of the creation of suspense via the agency of embedded narratives (e.g. tales told by interview subjects) or various dramatic arcs (Renov 1993a: 2–3).

There is always, in other words, a creative vision shaping the recording, transfiguring the real through shot, location, duration, sound environment, mise-en-scène and so on. Philip Rosen has argued that it is narrativity that provides the connective strand between the three representational practices of history, documentary, and the fiction film (Rosen 1993). Related to this, yet occupying another fictive realm is music, an added voice that, as we shall see, can change fundamentally the way in which an image is read. Such mimesis results in what Paul Arthur describes as a “tangled reciprocity” between the two genres (1993: 108). In Herzog’s documentaries, the “tangled reciprocity” is clear to see. The mediation process in his work with living (or recently deceased) protagonists is rarely concealed. Brad Prager identifies an “obvious staginess” in Grizzly Man, for instance, moments when Herzog “lets the camera roll long after most filmmakers would have cut” (Prager 2007: 89). And yet, while the intrusion of the camera threatens to rupture both the realism and the fictional diegesis of Treadwell’s world, Thompson’s epic nondiegetic (off-screen) guitar eulogies suture the “‘fictive elements” whilst also softening the home-movie feel. Although recent documentaries such as the BBC’s Planet Earth series are often accompanied with music (in this case, George Fenton’s sumptuous orchestral score), the use of soundtrack in nonfiction film is complicated. In mainstream film, music assumes the paradoxical role as a tool with which to add verisimilitude to moving images, despite

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the lack of soundtrack in many people’s everyday lives: it can make us less aware that what we are watching is fiction and allow us more readily to empathize with the characters we have just met. In documentary film, spectators do not need to be drawn into an imaginary world. Speaking of TV documentary, John Corner points out that “[o]ur involvement here is different from the way in which we are spectators to a ‘visible fiction.’ We may be the addressees of direct, spoken address, images may be offered to us as an illustration of explicit propositions, we may be cued to watch sequences as witnesses to the implicit revelation of more general truths. In this context, musical relations are likely to become more self-conscious, and less intimate, than when watching fiction” (Corner 2002: 358). By this reasoning, Fenton’s score for Planet Earth and Thompson’s for Grizzly Man are not designed to lead spectators into certain narrative positions—to engage them with the fantasy—but rather accompany and highlight the images. Yet in Grizzly Man, where there is “nothing like background music,” the nondiegetic guitar augments the cinematic, transporting the audience further into the film world in order to encourage empathy with Treadwell and his neurotic adventure: it performs a suturing role, in other words, similar to that of the mainstream film soundtrack. But while it is true that fictive elements, such as this musical suture, “inhabit” documentary filmmaking, Herzog’s nonfiction films can sometimes be overwhelmed by the poetic. Herzog has often warned that “the word ‘documentary’ should be handled with care” and in 1999, as part of his retrospective at the Walker Art Gallery, he issued his Minnesota Declaration, a list of twelve points that demonstrated his rage against cinéma vérité and its superficial “accountant’s truth” (Cronin 2002: 239). Although Herzog later described the declaration as being “somewhat tongue-in-cheek” (Cronin 2002: 238), it nevertheless articulates his fraught relationship to the real. The fifth point, for example, embodies his view: “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as a poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization” (Cronin 2002: 301). If we compare Herzog’s views on documentary with the Mannerist promotion of artifice over naturalism and, in particular, the theorization of Mannerist painters such as Giorgio Vasari that “art” (rather than nature) could create art, we find two views that are unexpectedly alike. Mannerist artists believed that inspiration no longer had to be taken straight from nature—it no longer had to emulate realism—but rather could be found in other artworks. The results of this displacement of reality can be seen in the paintings of Caravaggio, Tintoretto, and Parmigianino, in which distortion and invention point towards a higher reality, or “ecstatic truth.” At first glance, then, it appears that Herzog’s method draws nonfiction and fiction film into an even more densely tangled interplay than that identified by Arthur. In many cases, for instance, Herzog’s fly-on-the-wall approach is clearly staged. Many scenes are subjected to heavy direction and the mediation process of filmmaking is highlighted: “I rehearse and I shoot six times over, like in a feature film” explains Herzog; “And sometimes I create an inner truth. I invent, but I invent

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in order to gain a deeper insight” (Davies 2006). This marriage of invention and insight, however, is not as paradoxical as it at first seems, and in The Cinema of Werner Herzog, Prager goes some way towards unraveling the apparent contradiction in the director’s approach. He acknowledges Herzog’s proclivity for invention in his stylized, rehearsed, and sometimes even scripted documentaries by discussing them together with his fiction films: but at the same time, he makes sure to point out that he does not consider the director’s documentary work to be fictional. Prager articulates this distinction clearly: Herzog “abandons the pretence of capturing the real world on film and instead captures poetic truths he feels are inspired by the world” (Prager 2007: 8). By this logic, Herzog’s embrace of filmic artifice brings him closer to documentary’s etymological root in the Latin docere: his aspiration is not to show but rather to teach, something articulated in the fourth point of his declaration, which states that “[f]act creates norms, and truth illumination” (Cronin 2002: 301). In this way, Herzog reaches for a greater truth in his documentary work: “Herzog’s comments reveal that he is somewhat Nietzschean in his relationship to the truth, by which I mean that he seems to feel truth is something found less in the world than in the work of art” (Prager 2007: 8). Calling into question the nature of authenticity and historicity, then, Herzog strives for a new “truth” that lies behind, or rather within, the world he shoots. The scarcity of reliable primary sources about Gesualdo makes for a complicated process of fabrication in Death for Five Voices. With biographical information largely residing in creative sources (contemporary poems, later novels, operas, and personal obsessions), the historical referent—that “fantastic character out of a Webster melodrama”—had become saturated with “poetic, ecstatic truths” long before Herzog embarked on his documentary. In this light, Herzog’s desire to “illuminate,” rather than to document Gesualdo’s life and music, makes perfect sense: “I would say it was misleading to call films such as Bells from the Deep and Death for Five Voices ‘documentaries.’ They merely come under the guise of ‘documentaries,’” explained Herzog in an interview (Cronin 2002: 239). By Herzog’s own admission, “most of the stories in the film are completely invented and staged, yet they contain the most profound possible truths about Gesualdo. I think of all my ‘documentaries,’ Death for Five Voices is the one that really runs amok, and it is one of the films closest to my heart” (Cronin 2002: 238). Some of the first indications that the film is running “amok” are the two main, yet staged, encounters in Gesualdo’s ruined castle. Stravinsky recalled the “measly” castle as being “the residence then of some hens, a heifer, and a browsing goat, as well as of a human population numbering … a great many bambini. None of these inhabitants had heard of the Prince of Venosa and his deeds… In short, it was difficult to imagine the high state of musical culture that once flourished on this forlorn hill” (Watkins 1991: x). Things are very different when Herzog visits, however. First, we encounter a lady who believes that she is the ghost of Donna Maria d’Avalos (she is actually played by Italian actress Milva); and later, we meet a man who attempts to purge the castle of its demons by playing his bagpipes into

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the cracks in its walls. The first encounter is introduced by an out-of-control voice, as we see a woman with flame-red hair run from the camera through ruinous yet elegant rooms. In reply to Herzog’s question, “who are you and what are you doing here?,” the woman replies that she is the reincarnation of Donna Maria: then in an even stranger twist, the woman plays Gesualdo’s music from a portable CD player, singing along in a low, rich voice. Somewhat indecisively, she gives her address as “heaven” or in the big chandelier in La Scala Opera House in Milan, in the second row right by the pillar, in a “box clad in red damask; that’s where I live.” Replacing Stravinsky’s hens and goats with “poetic truths,” Herzog’s Donna Maria wonders why her dwelling has changed so significantly; what had happened to her reality? Seeming stuck between the real location and Herzog’s “inner truth,” the spirit of Gesualdo’s murdered wife finds herself in limbo between documentary and fiction. “She is there to stress the profound effect Gesualdo’s music has had on people over the centuries,” explains Herzog (Cronin 2002: 261). The encounter, then, is symbolic, suggestive of Gesualdo’s mythical afterlife rather than the castle’s “measly” reality. Although he never acknowledges the fact/truth binary within the film’s narration or dialogue, Herzog openly delights in the dissonance between myth and reality in which his Donna Maria endlessly wanders. We hear, for instance, the untrue (yet widely speculated) story that Gesualdo murdered his son. Within the film, the narrative voice does not comment on the verifiability of the tale; rather, the story is simply presented as though what really happened is less important than the legends it initiated. Elsewhere, however, Herzog confesses his “illumination”: I invented the story of Gesualdo placing his two-and-a-half-year old son—whom he doubted was actually his child—on a swing and having his servants swing him for two days and two nights until the child was dead. There is an allusion in some of the existing documents to him killing his infant son, but no absolute proof. That he would have a choir on either side of the boy on the swing singing about the beauty of death is also invented, though in one of Gesualdo’s compositions there is such a text (Cronin 2002: 262).

It is clear that the episode has roots, but only in allusion and in the stylized, Mannerist text of Gesualdo’s madrigals themselves. As the film progresses, and despite the “obvious staginess” of many of its scenes, it is sometimes difficult to extrapolate the truth. We visit a museum in which the curator speaks of a clay disc embossed with enigmatic symbols that had nothing at all to do with Gesualdo (Herzog explains that he had seen it in the museum and it “engaged” his mind to such an extent that he fabricated a letter from the composer to his alchemist asking him to “unravel the secret of these strange symbols”), while Herzog’s visit to a local mental health clinic reveals two patients who think that they are Carlo Gesualdo.7 We hear of the difficulties of keeping them apart from one another, and yet it remains unclear whether or not this dialogue is scripted.

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Other scenes, however, operate as clear recreation: two chefs’ description of Gesualdo’s well-documented 120-course wedding feast for a thousand guests while proclaiming that he was a “devil,” for instance. The film’s last scene acts as an admission of the fictionality of these digressions: a performer from the local renaissance fair speaks to his mother on a cellphone (it was actually his brother on the phone, standing just off camera). “The Gesualdo film is almost over,” he declares before staring right into the camera in open acknowledgment of the film’s technology; a gesture of fictionality that finishes the film. As the actors wander away, it becomes clear that Death for Five Voices operates more productively as a documentary about the Gesualdo myth. As one of the films “closest” to Herzog’s heart, Gesualdo’s fictive elements are not inaccuracies so much as an exploration of the composer’s constant reimagining: and such reimagining appears to be increasingly Manneristic in its distortions as realism is foregone in favor of interpretation. A similar mediation of the historical referent is common in composer biopics. In his work on films about Mozart, Guido Heldt notes that musicologists tend to view such films as “curiosities, distortions of the truth, capable of undoing decades of scholarly work in two hours of screen time” (Heldt 2009: 21). Immortal Beloved (1994), for instance, does much to both highlight and perpetuate the myths that have come to dominate the notion of “Beethoven,” while the central premise in Amadeus (1984)—that Mozart was killed by Salieri—is ungrounded in scholarship. While such films may represent “distortions of the truth,” they are nevertheless important indicators of contemporary interest, audio-visual evidence of the reasons why a composer’s music and life have captured a public’s imagination. Mainstream cinema, as a commodity, can be Janus-faced, constructing biographies through the lens of a public’s cultural values in order to entice the same to the pictures, something that led Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler to attack cinema for epitomizing a “degenerated aesthetics” (Adorno and Eisler 1947: 20). But such aesthetics can only be considered degenerated if film were operating as a form of ethnographic musicology: in the case of Immortal Beloved (Beethoven) and Amadeus (Mozart), historical accuracy gives way to sweeping mythologization, in which Mozart wrote his own requiem and a near-deaf Beethoven composed his Ninth Symphony as an emphatic manifestation of his heroicism. While such films give an audience what they want (a great story), they also accurately describe how many audience-members view these composers, telling us “not how it was, but rather, how it is today” (Rogers 2006). Although Death for Five Voices shares many of these tendencies, it nevertheless operates via a different array of forces. The interest in the mythologized Gesualdo is always evident, and Herzog is keen to investigate Stevens’ theory that Gesualdo’s soundworld became increasingly vanguard in tandem with his haunted and unhappy life. However, unlike the protagonists of the quasi-biographical feature films above, here Gesualdo remains rather opaque precisely because Herzog avoids exploring—or speculating about—Gesualdo’s inner life in the conventional

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way: we are not given a narrative adventure, but rather an investigation in which the syntactical, temporal, and causal links become increasingly obscure. And these lacunae are embraced: viewers are given snippets and asked to construct their own logic. Unlike the films above, there is little attempt to narrativize, or even to situate biographically, the music, the only “true” artifact in the film. Rather it sits starkly on its own as musical tableaux. The unusual “inaudibility” of music in film has been a point of much theoretical debate: the fact that music has an undeniably powerful role to play in cinema, and yet it is not often consciously heard or processed. Theorists Claudia Gorbman and Jeff Smith argue for the positive functions of such “unheard melodies,” suggesting that, by eluding the perceptual awareness of the spectator, “inaudible” music is able to create a secure binding of spectator and fiction: musical perception becomes an unconscious process that conceals awareness of the film’s discontinuities, thus drawing the spectator “further into the diegetic illusion” (Gorbman 1987: 59; Smith 1996). Working along similar lines, Caryl Flinn hypothesized that the right question is not whether or not an audience hears the music in a film, but rather, at what level that perception takes place: by eluding the conscious mind, music can work on the subconscious and thus assume an enormous power over the reading of a film (Flinn 1992).8 In films about composers, however, music is pushed to the foreground. One of the fundamental dilemmas of the music biopic is this: Should we use the composer’s music as “film music,” or rather keep it as the filmic object around which the film is constructed? In many examples, including Immortal Beloved and Amadeus, the music fulfills both functions, as Heldt explains: The double role of a composer’s music as object and means of narration links the life, implying a “romantic” aesthetic of expression. Alternatively, the narration may use the music to comment on the significance of biographical events, resulting in a slightly weaker biographical reading. But in each case, works and life charge each other with significance. This becomes particularly obvious if the same pieces are used in both functions, if outer and inner life blend (Heldt 2009: 25).

A potential problem with using well-known pieces as film music rather than as the central focus—of blending “outer and inner life”—is that it can bring, to use Anahid Kassabian’s phrase, the “immediate threat of history,” as its familiarity means that the music becomes at once “audible” and laden with prior significance (2001: 3). This “threat of history” can manifest itself in several ways. Kubrick’s use of Beethoven in A Clockwork Orange (1971), for instance, makes good use of this threat: the Ninth Symphony signifies on a filmic level as music-as-sound; it is strident, defiant, exultant, and, above all, aggressive, whipping Alex into a frenzy of violence. But this is not all. Knowledge of Beethoven’s biography adds to the musical narrative another dimension: triumph-over-adversity, the mythical afterlife, the heroic, and the canonical. Kassabian theorizes that such external knowledge can

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function as powerful triggers of memory and emotion within each spectator. This, in turn, encourages from the audience an “affiliating identification” with the film, as each person can relate to events in a very personal way. But while the audience responds emotionally to easily recognized music, the gaps have to be filled in by the film’s images in order to make the reaction narrative-specific; that, in short, the film takes control of the music and realigns memory. Unsurprisingly, this view is a popular one amongst directors, including Quentin Tarantino, who has claimed that his films can blot out all other associations and “own” the song (giving the director total control) (Lack 1997: 70).9

Musical Performance With music present both nondiegetically and as onscreen performance, Death for Five Voices oscillates constantly between the “inner and outer life” of Gesualdo. There are several moments, for instance, in which the mediation process of the film is pushed to the background by the presence of off-screen music; when Herzog uses music as a filmic device. At the film’s beginning, for example, nondiegetic music operates as a suture, smoothing the locational change from inside (an interview) to out (an external door). At other points, the music appears from both beyond and within the film world. In one instance, bagpipes are heard as the camera pans around the ruined castle. Despite the initial impression, however, these sounds are not nondiegetic but, rather, acousmatic10: after a good deal of visual roaming by the camera, the sound is finally located in the image of a bagpipe player projecting his music into the walls “to keep him [the evil spirit] from escaping. The spirit, it is, Gesualdo’s,” explains the player. Later, when we are shown the horrific preserved bodies of Donna Maria and Don Fabrizio, a nondiegetic wash of strings reminiscent of Bernard Herrmann’s early film scores heightens the sense of unease. But this time, it is not until much later in the film that the music becomes anchored in the image. Again operating from beyond the film world, the music accompanies the visual journey to the Summer Palace of d’Avalos, where a man shows us around in a brisk, official way. The music becomes gradually louder as a high string tremollando shimmers under a solo tenor voice: a bass line then fades in and the words “from the opera On the Death of Maria d’Avalos” appear across the screen. Relieving the strings, a brass chord summons the image of the opera’s composer, Donna Maria’s descendant, the Prince d’Avalos, flicking through his score. He then sits at the piano and picks out some chords with well-fed fingers before showing to the camera his family tree and explaining his relation to Maria, a “very proud woman.” For a moment, he leaves his own music and picks out an excerpt from Gesualdo’s Moro lasso (no. 17) from his Sixth Book, a piece described by early musicologist Charles Burney as “shocking and disgusting to the ear” (Grove Music Online). You find such dissonance in “Bruckner and Strauss,”

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explains the Prince, but not in Mozart. When the image later takes us to what will become the Prince’s archive, the opera starts again, this time led by a falsetto voice that crescendos as we reach the bed in which Donna Maria was murdered. Despite the documentary-feel of these scenes (the unrehearsed dialogue, the awkward pauses, the short lecture at the piano), the elements are pulled together by the nondiegetic presence of the Prince of d’Avalos’ opera in a distinctly filmic way. While disparate parts of Death for Five Voices are held together by the nondiegetic music of Gesualdo and the Prince d’Avalos, the film has several scenes of music performance that halt the narrative flow: two separate groups of singers sing madrigals (mostly from the Sixth Book) and part of his Tenebrae. During these performances, music is not an integral part of the diegesis, but rather stands alone as musical tableaux, acting like another segment of Herzog’s episodic structure; a type of aural close-up, as it were. As though in recognition of the “poetic, ecstatic truth” inherent in the music, these aural close-ups represent the only parts of the film that are not “invented or staged”: rather, they are presented without elaboration or fabrication. To start with, the self-contained performance scenes are not introduced by the voice-over. The first tableau, for instance, consists of the members of the vocal ensemble Il complesso Barocco, dressed casually in shirts, jeans or shorts and sandals, sitting in relaxed postures (some with legs crossed), singing Gesualdo’s Deh, come invan sospiro (VI, no. 9), as though to themselves. The second, the five-voice madrigal from the Fourth Book, lo tacerò, ma nel silenzio mio (IV, no. 3), is performed by the Gesualdo Consort who, directed by Gerald Place, stand in a doorway framed by enormous and imposing wooden cupboards. Again, wearing their own clothes, the Consort seem to be rehearsing rather than performing, as they use sheet-music and offer minimal eye contact with one another, or the camera. These two performances and the scenes that follow (the wedding menu scene, the viewing of the bodies, and the interview with the caretaker) are all framed by what appears to be an impromptu, rather lackluster biographical narration by Place. The director hunches over a sheet of notes, reading in an uncertain voice and pausing at one point as a clock chimes in the background. Before embarking on a plotted narrative of Gesualdo’s life, Place claims that we only listen to Gesualdo’s music now because of his controversial life story. Later on, we again return to Place, who, seated in a different location, speaks of Gesualdo’s second marriage, and the last sixteen years of his life, where he seemed to be “haunted by demons and wracked with remorse.” It is interesting to note that the scholarly narrative is given to the choir directors; the musicians, who deliver the fruits of their historical research in a drab and factual way that contrasts greatly with Herzog’s passages of invention. The next performance is again given by Il complesso Barocco and marks an important moment in the film. This time, the five singers and a harpist occupy a library. Still in their own clothes, the group sits in a tight circle, an intimate gesture that indicates that they are not so much performing as simply singing to one another (Figure 8.1). This introverted arrangement not only suggests that the music has a

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Figure 8.1 Members of a vocal ensemble perform in Gesualdo—Death for Five Voices (1995). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Lucki Stipetić for Werner Herzog Filmproduktion and ZDF.

life outside of its performance, but seems also to mirror the difficult intensity of the piece being sung. Beltà, poi che t’assenti (VI, no. 2) illustrates the broken “floodgates” of Mannerist musical gesture through its incredibly fast modulations and accumulation of dissonances (Stevens 1962: 332). These local innovations are structured within the sectional style common to Gesualdo’s earlier madrigals, although the six sub-sections of Beltà are much more dramatically defined, ranging from homophony, to chromatic imitation, to polyphony to diatonic consonance, harmonic and structural dissonance that the more hermeneutically minded might consider evidence of the composer’s split, volatile personality. One part of the circle is occupied by the musical director, Alan Curtis, who sits at a spinet but does not play or sing. Once the piece is over, he turns to speak over his shoulder, explaining to the prying camera about Stravinsky’s two pilgrimages to the castle of Gesualdo. Emerging from the dissonant echoes of the madrigal, Curtis’ voice acquires a degree of associative power. But more than this: the choice of one of Gesualdo’s most chromatically ambivalent pieces skews Herzog’s narrative towards the bizarre. The scene changes to a long shot of the castle accompanied by the sound of bells. The soundscape remains the same as the camera moves into and through the ruined castle, feeding us shots of spider webs, ruined floors, old furniture: and it is from these ruinous images that the spirit of Donna d’Avalos emerges. It is as though Herzog, despite his desire to offer the music untouched, cannot help himself.

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The next performance is unique in its contextualization. Returning to Il complesso Barocco seated, as before, in a circle in the library, their music on their knees, Curtis, still speaking over his shoulder, begins to analyze the music that will follow. Extracts of Moro lasso (VI, no. 17) are first played by Curtis on his spinet, before he asks each singer in turn to sing their lines: finally, we hear the complete madrigal: “Each individual voice sounds perfectly normal,” explains Herzog, “but in combination, the music sounds so ahead of its time, even of our own time” (Cronin 2002: 261). When sung together, for instance, the opening homophonic setting of “I die, alas, in my grief ” includes eleven chromatic pitches, including a move from C# major to A minor in first inversion, while the next line, “and he who can give me life” is more diatonic, faster and melismatic, resulting in a bold and sudden stylistic rupture that characterizes much madrigal writing. The move away from Palestrina’s conjunct polyphonic style could not be more dramatic. Although moving by step, the surface chromaticism creates the feel of continual tonal slippage, as though the singers themselves were succumbing to the devastating effects of overwhelming grief. This feeling is compounded by the opening harmonic shift from C# major to A minor, a progression that is not only very unusual, but also results in a chromatic bass-line descent from C# to C㽇. Such a lament-like progression makes listening to this opening an uneasy business as musical expectation is continually thwarted. It is moments like this that reminded Herzog of Stravinsky’s neoclassical edifices and caused Huxley to liken Gesualdo’s later style to that of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique. Juxtaposed against this opening, the second line, although more musically coherent and texturally uplifting, nevertheless comes as a shock. It is underpinned by functional harmony and each part abandons the smooth grief-stricken chromaticism for a buoyant and disjunctive melodic line. In his enlightened state, Huxley was able to distinguish between the apparent disorganization of Gesualdo’s madrigal structure and the coherence of the individual fragments: “The Highest Order prevails even in the disintegration” he writes; “The totality is present even in the broken pieces. More clearly present, perhaps, than in a completely coherent work.” Listening to Moro lasso, we can hear exactly what he meant. Although the two lines are articulated through very different musical styles, it is from this very difference—these “broken pieces” of word painting—that meaning arises. In a few short bars, we are presented with abject grief and the hope of redemption, two contrasting emotions that are put into sharp relief (and are thus brought closer together) through juxtaposition with their opposite. The last performance of Death for Five Voices marks a turning point in the film. Place’s group sings the Plange quasi virgo from Gesualdo’s Tenebrae. But this time, the image leaves the performers, roaming instead over sculptures of human forms, and lingering on a low-lit, dead figure of Christ. When the image moves outside to show a young boy being hooked to a harness in order to perform for the town celebrations, the Tenebrae becomes nondiegetic, finally fading out under the increasingly cacophonous real-world sounds of women singing, people dancing,

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and a jousting competition. The music again becomes film music, rather than film object, smoothing over the changes before finally disappearing in the name of realism, transporting the audience from within Gesualdo’s world (his music), to his “outer” life.

“Broken pieces”? Requiem in Space and In the Edges demonstrate the close proximity that Herzog likes to assume with the composers and musicians of his films in order to move closer towards a totalizing unity of disciplines. In Death for Five Voices, however, Herzog’s relationship with Gesualdo plays itself out formally, replacing an auteuristic and Romantic Gesamtkunstwerk with a disjointed and ruptured dialogue between two artists. Broadly speaking, the film can be considered a work in two parts, which constantly interlock with one another. First, it is a film that pivots around moments of pure performance where the music simply speaks for itself, as though the “greater truth” that Herzog searches for in his documentary can be found in Gesualdo’s five “strange” voices. Framing these performances are the dryly delivered accounts of the composer by the director of the Gesualdo Consort. Playing against these sections are the episodes of “invention and fabrication” from which spring spirits and bagpipe players, mad cooks, and magical objects. As these two methods of filmmaking bounce off one another, Death for Five Voices becomes increasingly episodic: visually still scenes of musical performance collide with rhapsodic fantasy adventures. Viewed in this way, the film can be read as homage to late Mannerist madrigal composition, with its alternating tonal homophonic voicing and chromatic, polyphonic rampages. Death for Five Voices, in other words, is structured in a way closer to musical form than it is to a filmic or literary narrative: an episodic, bitty and sectional structure, moreover, akin to that of Gesualdo’s late madrigals. As we have seen, the beginning of Gesualdo’s Moro lasso represents a dramatic departure from the seamless trajectory of Palestrina’s polyphony. The madrigal juxtaposes conjunct chromatic homophony with angular tonal polyphony in order to elucidate the profound meaning that lies within such disjunction. In a similar way, Herzog rejects the sutured, narrativized flow of mainstream film (and “totalizing” operatic forms) for a series of disparate and antagonistic scenes and styles. Yet, as Huxley said of Gesualdo’s music, “The totality is present even in the broken pieces.” From Herzog’s “fabrications,” in other words, springs a lucid and Manneristic whole. Vasari embraced the idea that art rather than nature could inspire art; and here Herzog plays out this aesthetic beautifully. Rather than attempt a historical investigation into the composer’s milieu, the director takes as his point of departure Gesualdo’s music, which, with its wild juxtapositions and chromatic inventions, is already an interpretation (or translation) of what Fux would consider a natural musical flow. The result is not an

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exploration of Gesualdo’s interior “psychosis” in the way found in Immortal Beloved and Amadeus, but rather an audio-visual palimpsest of the musical forms found in the Sixth Book of Madrigals. Death for Five Voices, then, reflects and explores Gesualdo and his afterlife by means of his own compositional devices, performing a structural accolade that leads us right to the heart of the composer’s work; to its “poetic, ecstatic truth.”

Notes 1

Other operas conducted by Herzog include Mozart’s The Magic Flute (Teatro Bellini in Catania, 1991, conducted by Spiros Argiris; in 1999 he directed another production in the same theater, this time with conductor Zoltan Pesko) and four productions of Wagner’s Tannhäuser (Teatro de la Maestranza, Seville, conducted by Klaus Weise (1997); the Teatro di San Carlo, Napoli, conducted by Gustav Kuhn (1998); the Teatro Massimo, Palermo, conducted by John Neschling (1998); the Baltimore Opera Company, conducted by Christian Badea (2000)). 2 See Paulin (2000: 62), and Kalinak (1999: 15). 3 It must be remembered that, as with many designations, the term manierismo was a label applied later. 4 Herzog’s interest in this group of composers was already evident in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), in which the four-voice requiem, Missa Pro Defunctis (1578) by Orlande de Lassus is heard on the soundtrack. 5 Earlier, Watkins states that, “It is no surprise that the Mannerist composer writes not only ‘new music,’ incorporating the most recent speculative advances of the academies and the theorists, but also ‘virtuoso music’—music for virtuoso listeners as much as for virtuoso performers” (1991: 107). 6 The idea that Gesualdo was murdered was suggested by Gray and Heseltine (1926: 43). 7 In response to the question, “for Death for Five Voices you took the most basic facts about Gesualdo and illustrated them with stylized scenes that would reinforce the major elements of the story?”, Herzog replies: “Take, for example, the scene shot in the castle of Venosa where there is a museum. In one of the glass showcases there was one piece—a clay disc with enigmatic script-like symbols of it—that really engaged my mind with puzzlement and gave me sleepless nights. I very much wanted to use the object in the film, so I wrote to the director of the museum—in actuality the Dean of Milano Law School—a monologue about the disc that he should speak whilst standing next to the showcase. He presents a letter from Gesualdo to his alchemist, enlisting his aid in deciphering the mysterious signs on the disc. ‘The prince had spent sleepless nights trying to unravel the secret of these strange symbols’, the professor explains. ‘In the course of this activity, he became lost in a labyrinth of conjectures and hypotheses. He almost lost his reason in the process’. What I wanted here was to play on the fact that in the final years of his life Gesualdo was basically mad; he really did lose his mind” (Cronin 2002: 261). 8 As such a device, music has increasingly found its way into the documentary film. As there is no need to preserve the illusion of “diegetic illusion” in nonfiction film, music was once most common for comic situations or light-hearted scenes

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(Corner 2002: 362): yet now, it is becoming increasingly prevalent, as George Fenton’s orchestral score for David Attenborough’s luscious TV series Planet Earth (2006), which operates in an incredibly filmic way, attests. 9 Polish director Andrzej Wajda, however, sees it differently, suggesting in Double Vision that quoted classical “music swallowed up the personality of the director, the scriptwriter and the actors, transforming the cinema into a series of pictures illustrating the eternal music” (1990: 112). 10 After Michel Chion (1999), I here use the term “acousmatic” to designate sound that has one foot in the image as opposed to “nondiegetic,” which is music never concretely (or at least visually) linked to the film world.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor and Hanns Eisler: Composing for the Films (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947). Arthur, Paul: “Jargons of Authenticity (Three American Moments),” Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 108–134. Chion, Michel: The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). Consiglio, Alberto: Assassinio a cinque voci (Naples: Berisio, 1967). Corner, John: “Sounds Real: Music and Documentary,” Popular Music 21.3 (2002): 357–366. Cronin, Paul, ed.: Herzog on Herzog (London: Faber & Faber, 2002). Davies, Dave: “Filmmaker Herzog’s ‘Grizzly’ Tale of Life and Death,” National Public Radio ( January 13, 2006), www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4774946. Degrada, Francesco: “Dante e la musica del cinquecento,” Chigiana 12 (1965): 257–275. Flinn, Caryl: Strains of Utopia, Gender, Nostalgia and Hollywood Film Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). “Gesualdo”, Grove Music Online, www.oxfordmusiconline.com. Gorbman, Claudia: Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987). Gray, Cecil and Philip Heseltine: Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa: Musician and Murderer (London: Kegan, 1926). Heldt, Guido: “Playing Mozart: Biopics and the Musical (Re)Invention of a Composer,” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 3.1 (2009): 21–46. Huxley, Aldous: The Doors of Perception (London: Penguin, 1972). Kalinak, Kathryn: Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999). Kassabian, Anahid: Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music (New York: Routledge, 2001). Koepnick, Lutz: “The Sound of Ruins,” German Postwar Films: Life and Love in the Ruins, ed. Wilfried Wilms and William Rasch (New York: Palgrave, 2008), pp. 193–208. Lack, Russell: Twenty Four Frames Under: A Buried History of Film Music (London: Quartet Books, 1997).

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Paulin, Scott D.: “Wagner and the Fantasy of Cinematic Unity,” Music and Cinema, ed. James Buhler, Caryl Flinn, and David Neumeyer (New England: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), pp. 58–84. Prager, Brad: The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (London: Wallflower Press, 2007). Renov, Michael: “Introduction: The Truth About Non-Fiction,” Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov (New York: Routledge, 1993a), pp. 1–11. Renov, Michael: “Towards a Poetics of Documentary,” Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov (New York: Routledge, 1993b), pp. 12–36. Rogers, Holly: “Beethoven’s Myth Sympathy: Hollywood’s Re-construction,” British Postgraduate Musicology 8 (2006), www.bpmonline.org.uk/bpm8/index.html. Rosen, Philip: “Document and Documentary: On the Persistence of Historical Concepts,” Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 58–89. Smith, Jeff: “Unheard Melodies? A Critique of Psychoanalytic Theories of Film Music,” Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), pp. 230–247. Stevens, Denis : “ New Music: Gesualdo in a New Light ,” Musical Times 103 ( 1962): 332 – 333 . Stevens, Denis: “Carlo Gesualdo,” Musical Times 131 (1990): 410–411. Wagner, Richard: “Outlines of the Artwork of the Future,” trans. William Ashton Ellis. In Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2001 [orig. 1849]), p. xviii. Wajda, Andrzej: Double Vision: My Life in Film (London: Faber & Faber, 1990). Watkins, Glenn: Gesualdo: The Man and His Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

Additional Films Cited Blank, Les: Burden of Dreams (1982) Forman, Milos: Amadeus (1984) Kubrick, Stanley: A Clockwork Orange (1971) McClintock, Nicolas: Requiem in Space: Werner and Ernst Make Music (2005) Nelson, Erik: In the Edges: The Grizzly Man Session (2005) Rose, Bernard: Immortal Beloved (1994)

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Demythologization and Convergence Herzog’s Late Genre Pictures and the Rogue Cop Film in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call—New Orleans Jaimey Fisher

Hank was a great detective, alright. And a lousy cop. Tanna (Marlene Dietrich) in Touch of Evil (1958) Just because he likes to get high doesn’t mean he stops being police. Stevie (Val Kilmer) in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call—New Orleans (2009) One of Werner Herzog’s later films, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call—New Orleans (2009), might be best known for something another filmmaker said about it. When he heard how Herzog’s film was to take up the title and perhaps the topic of his earlier Bad Lieutenant (1992), Abel Ferrara fumed Werner Herzog “should die in hell.” Herzog was reported to have replied “I have no idea who Abel Ferrara is,” a somewhat coy response in light of Ferrara’s status as a well-known cult director and given the clear similarities between the films, including scenes seemingly derived from the original.1 On the other hand, Ferrara’s condemnation of Herzog seems confusing or confused (or both), coming as it does from a filmmaker who memorably remade Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) as simply Body Snatchers (1993). I  do not intend, however, to weigh in on a controversy whose publicity served both directors, but rather to explore the question of cinematic influence. Despite Herzog’s assertion that he has few or no significant forebears (“I have no idea who Abel Ferrara is”), every film, no matter how original, unusual, or even sublime, is made in the shadow of other films—they are involved not only intertextually but almost always generically with ones that have come before. A Companion to Werner Herzog, First Edition. Edited by Brad Prager. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Many of the generally positive reviews of Herzog’s Port of Call offer observations along these lines, remarking how unusual it is for the German auteur of global repute to make a sort of sequel, one whose plot is familiar territory for a bad-cop drama. In post-Katrina New Orleans, Lt. Terence McDonagh struggles to find the drug-gang murderers of a Senegalese immigrant family of five, while also confronting his personal demons, which include a gnawing drug addiction, a growing gambling habit, and the challenges of a heart-of-gold, call-girl girlfriend. Even as they remark on the familiar genre territory, almost all critics admit that this was, despite its clear generic status, still a Herzog film. The aspect most frequently cited in this vein is the unexpected appearance of animals, especially a dead alligator and its living companion in one highway-accident scene and then, shortly thereafter, two iguanas on a coffee table, whose perspective the camera suddenly adopts. Another much mentioned trademark of Herzog’s cinema is his relationship to actors and casting more generally, most famously with Klaus Kinski but also, for instance, with unconventional actors like Bruno S. In Port of Call, he obliges with what many consider Nicholas Cage’s best work in years as well as the rapper Alvin “Xzbit” Joiner playing the drug kingpin opposite Cage’s cop. Of these auteurist trademarks, however, Herzog himself seems to prefer his animals: at the Venice premiere of the film, he said, with his (human) actors sitting beside him, that the alligators and iguanas provided for the “best moments of the film” (Hoberman 2007). He also identified those animal moments, in an interview, as the particularly “Herzogian” aspects of the film; an observation that invites speculation on what aspects are not Herzogian and why (Mitchell 2009). Herzog, in turning his name into an adjective (“Herzogian”), highlights the extent to which his career has been self-consciously auteurist. Scholars and critics have tended to foreground Herzog’s quest for new images, ecstatic truth, and authenticity, but these are terms borrowed largely from Herzog’s own vocabulary in speaking (as he often and fondly does) of his work. But, herein, I would like to address how we are to understand this quasi-Romantic focus on authentic, new images, on the poet not averting his eyes, as Herzog likes to put it, with these genre films.2 Can sublime cinematic moments suddenly emerge in the hackneyed alleys of a genre film? Few critics have thematized his generic engagements beyond his entanglement with the Heimat film and it has only rarely been emphasized how even one of the world’s most famous auteurs is engaged very deliberately (and occasionally derivatively) with the system of world cinema and its genres. The Ferrara/Herzog controversy reminds us that European art cinema operates self-consciously within a system of world cinema that offers precedents and master texts not only in art film, but also, in perhaps greater measure, in the considerable number, massive popularity, and long history of genre films. I therefore hope to do more than, as many reviews do, just uncover Herzog’s auteurist moments, sprinkled as they might be throughout Port of Call, as if to suspend or negate its generic aspects—such an undertaking would illuminate little that is new about the film. Nor will I attempt to trace the similarities and differences between

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Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant and Herzog’s “remake.” Instead, I aim to consider the film against a broader canvas of film genre and (therefore) history. I attempt to explore how a formerly European auteur, who now calls Los Angeles his home, works within the system of world cinema and refunctions genre for his own purpose. Port of Call offers both a reading of and a deliberate deviation from an established film genre. It brings into focus a largely neglected strain of Herzog’s work and a trend that is increasingly pronounced in his late films, namely, his engagement with mainstream genre cinema, and underscores how even a deliberately selfstyling auteur negotiates genre while also exploring and exploiting it for his own particular ends.

Herzog and Genre: Generic Demythologization vs. Points of Convergence Despite his self-cultivated auteurist reputation, Port of Call is by no means the first time that Herzog has taken up genre film in his work. Although Rainer Werner Fassbinder is the New German Cinema director most associated with (variations on) genre, Herzog’s Heart of Glass (1976) engages with the German Heimat film, a genre that dominated popular cinema in 1950s Germany and against which the New German Cinema in no small part defined itself (see Wickham 1989: 112–120 and Prager 2007: 92–93). Heart of Glass was a kind of anti-Heimat film, a film that critically deployed the iconography and conventions of the putative Heimat film (idyllic rural settings, universal conflicts of family and romance, allegedly simple folk) to demonstrate how, perhaps particularly in postwar Germany, nothing was as it seemed. Heart of Glass depicts the historical tension between craft and industrial modes of production in small-town economies as well as the violence that underpinned such rural communities; Herzog’s famous hypnotizing of much of the cast could be taken as ironic comment on how the 1950s Heimat actors sleepwalk through these beloved rural milieux. Heart of Glass represents a particular kind of generic engagement for an auteurist director, one that was at least underway if not widespread in the late 1960s and 1970s. In their studies of genre, Thomas Schatz and John G. Cawelti discuss how genres enter a period of self-reflexivity, sometime after their appearance and consolidation (Cawelti 2003: 250–251; Schatz 1981: 36–41). Such self-reflexivity can yield, among other things, what Norman Kagan (1982) has called “genre commentaries” (in Robert Altman’s films, for example, on the war genre in M*A*S*H [1970]) or what Cawelti calls the “demythologization” of a genre and its associated cultural myths (in Arthur Penn’s films, for example, of the western in Little Big Man [1970]). In such commentary and demythologization, the director selfconsciously deploys the themes, motifs, and iconographies of genres to subvert

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them, something certainly both Altman and Penn achieved again and again, Altman undertook this not only in M*A*S*H, but (as Kagan details) also in his western McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1972), his detective film The Long Goodbye (1973), and his show-business film Nashville (1975). For his part Penn (as Cawelti details) reworked the gangster film in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), the detective film in Night Moves (1975), and the western in The Missouri Breaks (1975). Herzog’s generic engagement in Heart of Glass locates that film within such a tradition of generic commentary and demythologization, a demythologizing reaction to the Heimat film shared with other 1970s New German Cinema directors, including Volker Schlöndorff and Reinhard Hauff.3 A different kind of generic engagement emerges from Herzog’s Nosferatu—The Vampyre (1979), where, instead of creating a critical or even anti-genre genre film, he attempted a kind of generic bridge to one of his self-styled forebears, F. W. Murnau, the director of the classic 1922 Nosferatu: Symphony of Horror. As Prager notes, because Herzog’s interest inclined him to follow rather than critique Murnau, this is a more straight genre film that “would not be misplaced in a list of horror classics” (2007: 100). Some shots are clearly borrowed from the original, which Herzog considers a “masterpiece” and the “greatest of all German films” (Cronin 2002: 152). With his Nosferatu Herzog takes a generic position altogether different from the critical commentary and demythologization detailed above. Herzog’s selfreflexivity here is different from directors like Altman’s or Penn’s, or even German directors like Fassbinder’s or Christian Petzold’s, all of whom go further in deliberately commenting on, demythologizing, and dismantling popular genres. Herzog leaves the generic aspect of Nosferatu largely intact, and so his approach here requires a different line of thinking. In his introduction to Kagan’s study of genre in Altman, Raymond Durgnat suggests that Altman’s films “relate to genres by convergence rather than divergence” (Durgnat 1982: xv–xvi).4 Durgnat suggests that Altman deploys generic aspects in a way that uncovers, fosters, and elaborates points of convergence with his own auteurist interests. For example, in Altman’s work, the convergence between the genre and what Durgnat calls “the real world” proves repeatedly fruitful, which may explain Altman’s large ensemble casts and sprawling, sometimes chaotic, plot developments. Although I am not entirely convinced that convergence rather than commentary is primarily what Altman is after, I do think that such convergences are in part what Herzog seeks in his later genre films: that is, not merely sprinkling his auteurist touches (an alligator or an iguana) into a genre film, but rather seeking and interpreting elements of that particular genre that converge with his own cinema. In this way his genre films represent, I would argue, compelling readings of genres that then intensify particular points of convergence with his own cinema, rather than more thoroughgoing dismantlings or demythologizations of genres. These intriguing points of convergence, the subsequent processes of intensification, and the consequences of both are what I investigate in the following.

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To return to the alternative generic logic of Nosferatu, Herzog does initiate an important and revealing change from Murnau’s film, but it suggests a point of auteurist convergence and intensification, rather than a critical comment and demythologization. His central change, one that foreshadows what he undertakes in his Port of Call, recasts the figure at the center of the narrative, that is, the film’s protagonist. Herzog was clear that, with Kinski as his Nosferatu, he was trying to humanize the vampire in his “existential anguish,” a self-conscious development from Murnau’s more frightening and “insect-” like bloodsucker (Cronin 2002: 155; see also Prager 2007: 102). Herzog recasts this character especially via casting and performance, the latter not least by casting his own recurring leading actor Kinski as the monster. This playing with genre via an existential retooling of the protagonist while leaving the genre aspects largely intact—an intensification achieved largely through performance—is what marks Herzog’s Port of Call. In Nosferatu, the film with which he aimed to recover a legitimate film culture in Germany, he turned to what Prager calls essentially a genre film, thus to a surprising observance of the genre, though one, certainly, inflected through carefully negotiated auteurism, particularly an auteurist reimagination of its protagonist. Herzog’s engagement with genre seems to have entered a new phase around 2001 with the films Invincible (2001), Rescue Dawn (2006), Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call—New Orleans (2009), and My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? (2009). With these four films—all made with well-known, even A-list Hollywood stars and shot in English language—Herzog demonstrates a new production trend that works with popular commercial genres in a way hitherto unprecedented in his career.5 What is particularly surprising, however, is, as with the contrast between Heart of Glass and Nosferatu above, Herzog does not engage extended commentaries or demythologizations of the genres in which these films are made, as Penn or Fassbinder might well have. Instead, he reads genres for points of convergence with his own auteurist interests, limning those genres for his own interests and inclinations while leaving them largely intact. For example, as many positive reviews accompanying its release confirmed, Rescue Dawn functions quite clearly (and well) as a war film; it belongs to what Rubinstein has called (in films ranging from Bridge on the River Kwai [1957] to Rambo: First Blood [1982]) the POW-escape subgenre of the wider war-film genre (Ebert 2007; Hoberman 2007; Rubinstein 1994: 458–459). It is worth noting that the scenes in Rescue Dawn most typical of the war genre are almost all added to the documentary Herzog had made about the feature’s protagonist Dieter Dengler, such that Herzog chose (from both Dengler’s voice-over in the documentary and Dengler’s published memoir) many scenarios and stagings that conform, more than the documentary, to war-genre expectation. While Herzog deploys a number of the familiar devices of the war film, Rescue Dawn simultaneously intensifies those points of generic convergence with his own auteurist interests: his war-film protagonist is, like the filmmaker himself, a German survivor of World War II. By foregrounding a protagonist who intersects Herzog’s interests (and his own biography), Rescue Dawn resists the war

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film’s familiar substitution of the nation with the platoon or unit: Dieter—another of his visionary protagonists—is utterly unique, and the film seems geared to emphasize his existential loneliness against the collectivism that Dana Polan has foregrounded in the war film (Polan 1986: 112). In Rescue Dawn, too, Herzog engages with a well-known genre and exploits its familiar devices, but he nonetheless recasts the genre via its protagonist. As in Nosferatu and, as I shall detail, in Port of Call, it is by casting a Herzogian protagonist into a genre film that the director offers a variation on an existing form.

The Rogue Cop and the Corrupt City This sort of generic convergence and intensification—especially of the protagonist type—is to be found in Port of Call, but, to comprehend these mechanisms, one needs, of course, the context of the pertinent genre. As Nick James observed, the film has clear links to a series of bad or renegade cop films, a genre that Tom Gunning has called “the rogue cop film” ( James 2010; Gunning 2008: 423). The rogue cop film emerged as part of what we now call film noir, and Herzog himself repeatedly refers to his own film as a noir (Herzog 2009: 4). A number of films now considered canonical films noirs featured rogue policemen as their protagonists, including Where the Sidewalk Ends (Otto Preminger, 1950), The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953), The Big Combo ( Joseph Lewis, 1955), and the work usually seen completing the original noir cycle, Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958). If one takes, as most do, John Huston’s Maltese Falcon (1941) as the breakthrough noir, then the rogue cop genre appeared in the middle and late phases of the original noir cycle, thus a shift in the middle and late stages to a different protagonist that could carry the banner of modernist ambiguity in film noir. The excessively, often needlessly, violent cop had been a staple of Dashiell Hammett’s politically inclined writing as early as the 1920s and 1930s (Naremore 1998: 50). As Naremore recounts, the morally liminal status of the police was clear from the earliest film adaptations on, given that Sam Spade was made a policeman at the end of his ambiguous character arc (Naremore 1998: 56). In the late 1940s, the detective protagonist, typically a loner undertaking a lonely moral quest, had started to shift to the central figure of the policeman. Gunning, in fact, traces the migration from the private detective to the rogue policeman as one of the key developments of the “strongest 50s films noirs”: In the 40s, the film noir most often centered on the private eye…. The 50s film noir detective more frequently is a member of the police force, a public employee maintaining law and order, rather than self-employed go-between sorting out sordid affairs behind the cops’ backs… the cop hero generates tension within the police force. He chaffs against police procedure and carries out his personal quest for justice or revenge, often becoming a “rogue cop” (2008: 423).

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Still operating within noir’s constellation of pessimistic themes and modernist narrative, these films foreground a new protagonist in order to limn the ambiguous psychologies of crime in the service of a higher purpose. For example, in Lang’s The Big Heat, David Bannion, played by a simmeringly angry yet coldly detached Glenn Ford, investigates the car-bomb murder of his wife, an investigation that takes him up the ladder of social and political hierarchy of his city. The eponymous “big heat” is that higher moral force that Bannion wants to marshal against the criminals despite, even against, city authorities and police. In Otto Preminger’s Where the Sidewalk Ends, Mark Dixon is a recently demoted policeman with a temper that turns an interrogation into a murder that he has to cover up, making him hardly better than the criminals he has sworn to fight. And in Welles’ Touch of Evil, perhaps the most celebrated of these films, one policeman, Mexican official Miguel Vargas, played by Charlton Heston in brown-face make-up, investigates, out of his jurisdiction, the corrupt methods of a U.S. cop, Hank Quinlan, who is played by Welles himself, in a Texas–Mexican border town. Welles’ title change, from “Badge” to “Touch” of evil, emphasizes the contradictory and highly ambiguous legal and moral milieu in which all of these policeman protagonists operated. The “big heat,” the place “where the sidewalk ends,” and a “touch of evil” requisite for effective police work all underscore the limits of law enforcement as they are institutionalized and practiced in corrupt society. The films, even in their titles, point to a second, perhaps higher, moral order to which the protagonist owes his allegiance even as he (always a he) violates numerous laws and protocols of the compromised society. In the drug-addled nature of its protagonist’s turpitude, Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant is a long way from these classic noirs, but it engages precisely this premise and many of its themes. In Ferrara’s film, the Lieutenant, who is never given a name in the film, has at best a morally and ethically challenged approach to law enforcement, but in the end manages to learn, while investigating the brutal gang rape of a nun, to do the right thing even as his ultimate action is flagrantly illegal. Even if Ferrara’s film seemed radically new in its mixture of titillation, degradation, and unexpected moral elevation, it follows the long line of generic innovation via an evolving protagonist, one dating back at least to Welles’ own performance in Touch of Evil. In Port of Call Herzog finds points of convergence with the generic trope of the rogue cop and intensifies them. These points of convergence reveal a number of key aspects of the rogue cop genre, in terms of both technical iconography and thematic convention. In particular, Herzog intensifies the lone moralist protagonists of the genre by way of his own visionary heroes. As Prager argues, Herzog’s work is perhaps best known for its series of visionary, uncompromising, often unhinged “heroes,” who, as Prager puts it, “remain by and large unconvinced of reality’s impenetrability” (2007: 20). Refusing the reality around them in favor of their own moral order is certainly a trait demonstrated, even if to a lesser degree, by this long line of rogue cops who consistently refuse to accommodate the world around them, something Herzog certainly unfolds and intensifies in his rogue cop film.

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The opening of Port of Call locates the viewer in precisely the ambiguous milieu of the corrupt but ethical rogue cop sketched above. The first impression Terence McDonagh makes is certainly that he is a loner cop with underlying anger and suspect morals: he and his partner Stevie (Val Kilmer) have returned to an abandoned police station “in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina” to check the locker of a colleague, Duffy, whose opportunistic wealth they apparently resent (a theme of class antagonism that appears in policiers from The Big Heat through The French Connection [1971] and beyond). McDonagh empties Duffy’s locker by unceremoniously tossing its contents onto the floor until they find photos of Duffy’s naked wife. Stevie, sensibly, thinks they should return the photos to Duffy, but, to Stevie’s suggestion, McDonagh declares, “Fuck Duffy. Just fuck him. Fuck all of them” and stuffs the photographs into his breast pocket (Finkelstein and Herzog 2009: 107). Viewers’ first impression of the eponymous Bad Lieutenant thus mixes a sudden outburst of temper, the cultivated disdain of the loner, and vague overtones of seaminess. An opening scene with a protagonist poring over nude photos recalls another memorable opening that likewise foregrounds the questionable quasi-cop ethics of its protagonist, namely, Chinatown (1974). In the opening of Chinatown, private investigator Jack Gittes ( Jack Nicholson) shows a client photos he has taken of the client’s half-dressed wife in various sex acts with another man. The intertextual relationship is clear: “Duffy” is also the name of one of Gittes’ two omnipresent associates. A former and likely rogue cop, Gittes’ slightly shady professional activities turn out to be just a minor symptom of the much deeper corruption and graft that underpin the paradigmatic American boomtown. Like Gittes, McDonagh shows himself to be a corrupt man of his corrupt times, but, also like Gittes, McDonagh also eventually distinguishes himself from the wider, compromised context by undertaking an obsessive quest for the good, a good setting them both apart from and against that context. This hint of an uncompromising moral core also arrives early in Port of Call: immediately after stealing Duffy’s photos and exhorting “[f]uck them all,” McDonagh and Stevie discover a prisoner whom Duffy abandoned to his rapidly flooding cell. Viewers’ initial impressions of the bad cop McDonagh are at first confirmed when he suggests a bet on how long before the prisoner drowns, but then, surprising both Stevie and viewers, McDonagh strips down and jumps in the water to save the prisoner. The opening thus foregrounds the protagonist’s corruption, matching it with a city where police did, in fact, steal cars while abandoning prisoners during the storm, but it also highlights McDonagh’s almost capricious ethical commitment to counteract the chaos around him (“La. Police Car Theft Charges” 2005). With his sudden and surprising jump into the water, the film cements its link to the contradictory rogue cop, to the lonely and disdainfully moralist officer of the law mentioned above. But this opening sequence also offers auteurist elements in its staging and camera work while leaving its generic elements intact. The sequence opens with an overhead and low-key lit shot of a snake slithering through the contaminated

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waters of the flooded jail. The snake slither-swims in and out of a cell’s prison bars, drawing attention to the inmate, named Evaristo Chavez, left locked in his cell and likely—absent any redemptive intervention—to drown in the rising waters. The matter of a flooded prison and abandoned prisoners resonates with the historical events of Hurricane Katrina and also (or perhaps even in its historical engagement but also distortion) immediately recalls Herzog’s recurring interest in animals and their interactions with the human world (Rohde and Drew 2005). When, at the end of the sequence, McDonagh dives in to save Chavez, he enters the water and presumably the cell just as the snake did, which is the first of the associations between him and the iguanas and alligators mentioned above. Moreover, the jump to the water also establishes a downward camera tilt that Herzog favors in many films: from Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) to Rescue Dawn, he uses vertical spaces and downward motion traced by the camera to suggest both the vertiginous state of civilization and his protagonist’s place in it.

Bad Cops: Seething Bodies and Misplaced Investitures The auteurist association of McDonagh with the snake, and with reptiles more generally, continues in the next sequence, to which the visual track cuts while “Are you okay?” lingers as a soundbridge. With that as the plot hook, viewers can assume he is not okay, something the first image of the second sequence confirms: viewers see an over-the-shoulder shot of a physician examining McDonagh’s S-shaped spine in x-ray (Figure  9.1). Herzog thereby begins the second sequence

Figure 9.1 A physician (Robert Pavlovich) examines McDonagh’s S-shaped spine in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call—New Orleans (2009). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Stephen Belafonte, Alan Polsky, Gabe Polsky, John Thompson, Randall Emmett, and Edward R. Pressman.

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with the same slithering S-shape as the first sequence. Throughout the film, in fact, the camera will repeatedly follow McDonagh (primarily with steadicam shots) as he slithers around the city and its memorable architecture, reinforcing Herzog’s propensity to circular motion in his camera work. Here, too, is a point of convergence between the subjective camera of the noirish rogue cop film and Herzog’s auteurist proclivities. Even more than his use of vertical space and downward camera motions, the circular movement of the camera has proven an identifying mark of his cinema, including perhaps most famously his circular camera movement around Klaus Kinski in Aguirre. The circles of Kinski’s performance in Aguirre include not only his memorably crablike movement (with a similarly distorted spine) through the Peruvian jungle, but also his dizzying spiral, that is, Kinski’s starting from out of the camera’s sight and then spiraling into the frame, such that Herzog’s protagonist seems to ambush the viewer. Playing Terence McDonagh in a very different milieu, Nicholas Cage copies Kinski’s spiraling motion explicitly, one aspect of Herzog’s overall deployment of his familiar circularity in the so-called Crescent City. One of the most memorable and cited aspects of Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant is his unabashed use of Harvey Keitel’s body in all of the Lieutenant’s questionable predilections, especially for both drugs and sex. Keitel’s performance emphasizes the material and corporeal rather than abstract application of the law, in some sequences memorably veering into the somatic, that is, the pre-symbolic body. In its corporality his performance echoes that of Orson Welles in Touch of Evil, who wore a fat suit to foreground his hulking proportions. Similarly, in Port of Call, Herzog’s second sequence emphasizes how the rest of the plot will unfold McDonagh’s compromised body (and its pharmaceutical remedies) as key subtexts. Surrounded by medical images of the body, McDonagh learns that he has injured his back, presumably from his jump into the water to save Chavez, and that he will have to take painkillers indefinitely, even though he is allowed to return to work. The first two sequences of the film, with the forgotten prisoner and then McDonagh as a prisoner of his own body, his own pain, and, in short order, his own addictions, foreground the precarious state of the rogue cop’s body. This is undoubtedly one of the most important genre tropes by way of which the badcop genre converges with Herzog’s auteurist interests, and it underscores why the genre might have interested Herzog. As Prager has pointed out, Herzog is a filmmaker focused on the physical: in the foreground of his films is the body, the bodily senses, and the extreme bodily challenges of his protagonists. This may come, in part, from his own vision of what filmmaking should be, which he says, “comes from the thighs” (Prager 2007: 2), and he underscores (somewhat unconvincingly) how many great filmmakers were also athletes (Mitchell 2009). Many of his films deploy unusual bodies such as those of dwarfs and strong men and make unusual demands of those bodies, for example, of the extreme weight loss of his actors in Rescue Dawn, a weight loss Herzog participated in, as he repeatedly

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Figure 9.2 A public ceremony celebrating the policeman-protagonist of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call—New Orleans (2009). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Stephen Belafonte, Alan Polsky, Gabe Polsky, John Thompson, Randall Emmett, and Edward R. Pressman.

informed the press. Kinski’s unbalanced posture throughout Aguirre is one of the most memorable aspects of the film, and seems in fact mimicked by Cage with his (somewhat inconsistent) lopsided back throughout Port of Call. In the rogue cop genre, the body of the renegade policeman materializes his tortured relationship to the law he is meant to uphold, something Herzog’s film reads out of the genre and intensifies in both Cage’s performance and the camera’s close, often subjective tracking of it. This tension between the particular body of the rogue cop and its general function as representative of the law underpins the sequence following McDonagh’s medical appointment, namely, the promotion ceremony recognizing his valor during the storm (Figure  9.2). This scenario is another one familiar from the rogue cop genre in general, namely, the investiture of honor in the protagonist via a public ceremony in spite of his private shortcomings, which undercut it. Central to the operations of law enforcement in this genre is how the law invests the symbolic order in the individual enforcing the law. This investiture of the individual with a special symbolic significance—indeed, with the institution of the law itself—involves what Pierre Bourdieu has described as a “performative magic” that transforms an individual by localizing the general law within him or her. By ceremonies of both naming and apparatus—in this case, by rank and badge—an individual becomes the mouthpiece of an entire collective, thereby taking up his or her position in the symbolic order as the enforcer of that order (Bourdieu 1991: 105–106). But, of course, an awareness of that as both performative and magic makes such investitures unstable, an instability played upon by many rogue cop thrillers, not least in the opposite of the investiture, the familiar scene in which the cop is stripped of badge and/or gun.

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Figure 9.3 A public ceremony in Citizen Kane (1941). Directed and produced by Orson Welles.

A number of films noirs, including Citizen Kane (1941) and Chinatown, offer such public rituals that invest central characters with civic functions only to have them undercut by their private shortcomings (Figure 9.3). Even Martin Scorsese’s The Departed (2006) offers two such “investiture sequences,” one for each of the film’s twin protagonists, which frame the entire narrative. In the first Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) is inducted into the Massachusetts State Police to the ceremonial tones of bagpipes. But Colin works covertly for the organized crime boss, Frank Costello ( Jack Nicholson), something that is made clear in this sequence’s tension between public investiture and private subtext. While the montage editing emphasizes the investiture ritual and performative magic that Bourdieu describes, the camera slowly starts to assume Colin’s point of view, that is, to offer what Peter Verstraten calls his internal focalization: viewers shift from the (expected) perspective of the public watching the induction, to point-of-view (POV) shots of Colin and therefore Colin’s focalization (Verstraten 2009: 41–43, 74–75). Over two hours later, in the film’s penultimate sequence, the film revisits another ritualistic investiture, this time an official police funeral that posthumously decorates William Costigan with the medal of merit. Again, a private story, one of police roguery, undercuts the public ritual. Costello and Costigan are both dead, but Colin’s pregnant girlfriend knows the truth about his criminal work and his role in Costigan’s death. Port of Call is likewise bookended by two public ceremonies celebrating its policeman-protagonist, such that the film repeatedly deploys the generic cliché,

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but Herzog intensifies, to his own ends, the internal focalization mentioned above. The first promotion ceremony comes immediately after the sequence above, when viewers learn of McDonagh’s back pain and his prescription pain killers, so that these two sequences, the medical visit and then public ceremony, are linked by the fallibility of the rogue cop’s body. After two long shots of the ceremony like those above, that is, emphasizing the symmetries and overarching rational organization of civic rituals, Herzog cuts to a long-take: a noticeably shaky handheld shot that follows McDonagh up to the podium to receive his medal and promotion. Such hand-held following shots, particularly those emphasizing the subjectivity of its internal focalization, recur frequently in Herzog’s work; for example, in his commentary on Rescue Dawn, he praises his regular cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger for his ability to use this sort of handheld camera to stay close to his protagonist, particularly in the thick of the Thai jungle. But in Port of Call Herzog has relocated this familiar long-take, hand-held following shot to an unusual setting (at least for him), namely, the formal public ceremony of a municipal police department. He has deployed the familiar, contradictory investiture of the genre—a moment that intersects his own auteurist interests in physicality and loneliness—and then interpreted and intensified a recurring generic cliché according to his own stylistic inclinations.

Legal-Narrative Iterability and the Degenerating Cop The end of the film explicitly revisits this public ceremony and alters its scheme for internal focalization, but other revealing repetitions of scenes follow long before the end. Such repeated performances of actions such as arrests, interrogations, and jailhouse confrontations are central to the genre. Many of the rogue cop films vary the regular mechanisms of the policier, with the first instance played at the edge of legality and the second usually well beyond legitimate legal procedure. The putative abstract iterability of law thus conventionally degenerates into the law-breaking violence of the bad cop. Such iterative but degenerating performances of the law provide rogue cop films with their basic narrative trajectories. For instance, in The Big Heat, Bannion’s attempted asphyxiation of one “thief ” involved in police corruption is successfully realized in his ultimate killing; in Touch of Evil, Quinlan’s violent questioning of the suspect Sanchez is then radicalized in his gothic murder of Joe Grande; in Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, the Lieutenant’s interrogations become more and more incoherent as his drug episodes grow as iterative as his police activity. Two of Port of Call’s most memorable sequences—they are repeatedly raised in the reviews—provide just such repetitions and degenerating iterative performances of the law. First, there are McDonagh’s apprehensions of the drug kingpin Big Fate’s key associates, G. and Midget. In the first, at a stake out of G.’s hideout, McDonagh circumvents a large police deployment, asks a neighbor, a young

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woman with a baby, to use her backdoor and yard. He passes through her house, picking up a bag of marijuana on the way, and enters G.’s hideout through the backdoor. From the back, McDonagh then surprises G., bent over with gun in hand studying the police in front. McDonagh is thus able to apprehend a feared gangster without a shot, brings him out to the police waiting out front, and exalts repeatedly and somewhat comically, “I love it.” A good piece of police work, admired by the rogue cop himself. The apprehension of Midget ten minutes later revisits this set up, but also intensifies its roguish and comedic aspects—not entirely a surprise, given that this second apprehension follows the drug-induced iguana-on-the-coffee-table sequence mentioned above. Once again, McDonagh knocks on the door and finds a young woman with a baby. Although this time it is actually Midget’s girlfriend, she also cooperates with the police, repeating the scenario with G.’s arrest. This time, McDonagh does not surprise Midget, gun poised and studying the police, but rather, perhaps fitting the latter’s moniker, finds him hiding in an armoire. And this time, instead of immediately bringing Midget in for an interrogation in the station as he did with G., McDonagh has another police officer leave him alone with the suspect in the bedroom. Although viewers might expect a more aggressive questioning alone and away from the station, McDonagh instead politely asks Midget if he can light up, as Midget puts it, a blunt. The marijuana itself represents a repetition, likely the bag he put in his breast pocket as he went through G.’s neighbor’s house in the first arrest. McDonagh says, by way of nonchalant explanation, that it relaxes him, goes on to observe calmly that it’s amazing what one can get done when “there’s a simple purpose guiding you through life” (at first viewers do not know if he means his investigation or his taking drugs). Midget’s conclusion about McDonagh (“You trippin’”) is on the mark. Another iterative but degenerating performance is even more important to registering McDonagh’s roguish behavior, namely, his questioning of Binnie Rogers, the grandmother of the only witness to the murders. Daryl Rogers, a 15-year-old grocery delivery boy, happened to be present during the slaughter and is the only means the police have of identifying the murderer (the difficulty in convincing witnesses to testify is an ongoing issue in New Orleans). Unable to locate the boy, McDonagh and another police officer go to the nursing home where Ms. Rogers works as a caregiver. Her elderly charge—Antoinette Fahringer, the wealthy, white mother of a U.S. Congressman—affects indignation at the intrusion, but Daryl suddenly emerges from a balcony window, revealing that Ms. Rogers has, indeed, been hiding him. For a while Daryl is willing to cooperate with the investigation, at least until he realizes how unreliable a protector the drug-addled McDonagh is, at which time he flees. When McDonagh returns to Ms. Rogers’ workplace to try to find him again, the set up revisits the arrangement of his first trip there, but this time revises and intensifies the familiar questioning scenario for absurdist effect. Although the setting is the same, with Ms. Rogers and Fahringer in the same room and in the same position as before, viewers do not see McDonagh enter the

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room. When Ms. Rogers closes the door, McDonagh is lurking behind it, inscrutably using an electric shaver, perhaps to freshen himself up for the questioning to come. When the two older women refuse to tell him where Daryl is, McDonagh gently strokes Fahringer’s face and then removes her oxygen tube and tightens it around her neck, to the shock of both. When they continue to refuse to reveal Daryl’s whereabouts, McDonagh pulls his large handgun and holds it to Ms. Rogers’ head until she confesses that Fahringer bought him a plane ticket and sent him to England to live with her family there. At first, McDonagh seems to regain his composure, but soon he is again running amok, declaring, “you selfish cunt” and yelling, with a menacing brandish of his .44 magnum, “I should fucking kill you fucking both.” Seeming both angry and despairing—another of Herzog’s existentialist protagonists—McDonagh ends the questioning with an unexpectedly political observation, “You are the fucking reason this country’s going down the drain,” and departs (Finkelstein and Herzog 2009: 153). This is the first time McDonagh remarks on degeneration in the wider culture. The comment’s non-sequitur nature and the lack of follow-up do not invite much reflection on its veracity. Bracketing any truth content in McDonagh’s ostensibly political observation, this sequence—one of the most discussed in the reception of the film—veers into what Herzog calls stylization. Here again, it seems that Herzog has found a generic convergence—the cop’s extreme, even histrionic anger and indignation at his corrupted milieu—with his own auteurist inclinations. As Prager recounts, there are a number of moments in both Herzog’s documentaries and feature films when the work revokes the more or less earnest register in which the films appear to be made. In these stylized moments, the film suddenly breaks out of its generic parameters and enters a mode of such exaggeration and/or excess that the viewer is reminded of the medium itself (Prager 2007: 23). I would underscore how these moments are quite often linked to the excessive performance of Herzog’s protagonists, not least in the work of Klaus Kinski or, as here, in the work of Nicholas Cage channeling Kinski. These are the moments that Cage, at Herzog’s exhortation, really indulges the “bliss of evil” (Mitchell 2009) and, apparently, “lets the sow out,” to invoke the Bavarian adage Herzog says he offered to Cage when the latter asked about his motivation for McDonagh (Sturm 2010). Of course to report to interviewers how he quoted a graphically Bavarian proverb to a Hollywood A-lister like Cage is itself a bit stylization and excess, one the auteur is happy to deploy inside and outside his films.

Herzog’s Generic Retreat? This mode of excess and stylization has increasingly become part of the rogue cop genre, as the films, through their iterative but degenerating performances, pivot on the moment that the cop’s behavior becomes more (and more theatrically)

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excessive to the law—here, too, an aspect of the genre seems consistent with Herzog’s auteurist inclinations. Certainly, Touch of Evil veered into such stylized territory, not least with Welles’ Expressionist staging and performance of Quinlan, for example, in the famous last sequence, in which his mumbling ramble over a landscape of refuse is tracked by Vargas and a grotesquely baroque listening apparatus. The noir cycle ended with Quinlan’s collapse into brackish waters, an extremely stylized noir protagonist to which Welles had added his auteurist touch. Such excess, stylization, and auteurism in the genre reached new heights (or lows) in Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, such that these evolving generic aspects would seem to enjoy an elective affinity with Herzog’s cinema. This is true in one iterative performance of Port of Call, namely, the Gator’s Retreat sequences early and then late in the film. These sequences are probably where Herzog’s Port of Call is most similar to Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant; they seem at least influenced and perhaps derived from the earlier film. In one of the most discussed scenes from the earlier film, the Lieutenant pulls over two young club goers from New Jersey. When he hears that they are driving without licenses or the permission of their parents, he exploits the situation for an unusual kind of sexual assault, masturbating next to the car while the two young women mime sex acts independent of one another. Although Ferrara gives credit to Harvey Keitel’s uncommonly naturalistic acting in the sequence, he remarks in his DVD commentary that one simply never knows what scene will become the most famous. In this scene—perhaps the most memorable in a generally unforgettable film—the Lieutenant shows himself willing to deploy the law as a very deliberate metteur-en-scene: he draws on the allegedly abstract and universal law to stage (very particular) scenarios for his own corporeal pleasure. Herzog’s Port of Call revisits a very similar scenario, but arranges it, over the course of the entire narrative, in the iterative and degenerative fashion explored above. Eighteen minutes into the film, and thus right around the conventional first turning-point in the script, at the conventional end of its Act One, the camera finds McDonagh, like Ferrara’s Lieutenant in the sequence above, in his car late at night. An over-the-shoulder shot shows him watching two young club-goers, a heterosexual couple, emerging from a club called Gator’s Retreat. As they walk flirting arm-in-arm across the street to a parking lot (“Oh, you’re so cute”), McDonagh follows in his car with its lights flashing, the camera staying with him and over the shoulder, creating another S-tracking camera movement POV shot that confirms both McDonagh’s reptilian slithering and Herzog’s auteurist propensities. After ordering the couple against the wall and threatening arrest, McDonagh demands drugs from them (“Where’s the kibble?”), not as evidence, but for his own use. The woman in the couple complies by lighting up crack cocaine for him, blowing it into his mouth from close proximity, and then further obliging him with sex. As in Ferrara’s staging of the sexual assault by Keitel’s Lieutenant, the rogue cop is again positioned next to the car whose occupants he is exploiting for illicit needs. When the angry and despairing boyfriend moves to leave, McDonagh, apparently

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undistracted by the ongoing sex act, withdraws and discharges his gun in the air, yelling “you watch your fucking girlfriend” (Finkelstein and Herzog 2009: 123). As in Ferrara’s film, what starts as an arrest (an articulation of the abstract law on the particular criminal) ends in a scenario specifically staged for the (very) particular policeman’s pleasure. This memorable scenario is revisited ninety minutes later, in the last five minutes of the film, when the sequence opens with the same establishing shot of the “Gator’s Retreat” sign late at night. Remarkably, even the voices from the first sequence are initially replayed on the soundtrack (the identical “oh, you’re so cute!”), although the couple, viewers soon realize, is actually different. The camera stays in McDonagh’s car, again slithering along with his point-of-view as he tracks them to the parking lot, and he uses more or less the same lines about “the two of you match a description,” “passing drugs in the club,” and, most ominously, “empty your pockets, dump out the handbag.” At that point, because the staging is so similar, Herzog can edit elliptically and cuts away—viewers know from the nearly identical staging how the “arrest” is going to end. The degenerative aspect of the repetition is particularly telling because it comes after the second investiture sequence I reference above, one in which the plot registers seemingly significant improvements in McDonagh’s behavior and life. The second investiture sequence clearly quotes the first in its master shot and symmetrical composition, but, in this repetition of the symbolic investiture that elevates McDonagh to the rank of captain, Herzog never offers the cut to the conspicuously shaky handheld camera. Instead, McDonagh’s internal focalization comes via static POV shots that eventually frame (and inform the viewers about) his pregnant girlfriend Frankie and his cleaned-up father and stepmother. After the ceremony, McDonagh drives Frankie to a stately home, presumably their new home together. It is the first time viewers see a residence for McDonagh, and Frankie was living in a high-rise apartment. With this repetition of the symbolic investiture, the film seemingly registers not degeneration but improvement, highlighting a clean McDonagh, invested with a new promotion and settled into apparent domestic bliss. But then, just as McDonagh is promising Frankie that he will quit working nights, Herzog cuts back to the second Gator’s Retreat sequence above, a repetition recalling McDonagh’s abiding reptilian nature. In this way, the repetition of the Gator’s Retreat sequence undercuts this repetition of the symbolic investiture, shows how it, despite its steadier internal focalization, is nonetheless as precarious as the first such sequence. The subsequent concluding sequence, however, offers some hope, although in a very “Herzogian” vein. After the repetition of McDonagh’s farcical police procedure outside Gator’s Retreat, the camera finds McDonagh in a hotel room alone, presumably doing the drugs he just stole from the club-goers. A hotel employee with a room-service meal mistakenly enters McDonagh’s room and recognizes McDonagh as the man who saved him in the film’s opening sequence. Praising McDonagh for saving his life, Chavez does not see the drugs at first, but then asks

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Figure 9.4 Terence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage) and Evaristo Chavez (Nick Gomez) seated before an aquarium tank in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call—New Orleans (2009). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Stephen Belafonte, Alan Polsky, Gabe Polsky, John Thompson, Randall Emmett, and Edward R. Pressman.

McDonagh if he is okay, to which Terence admits “Sometimes I have bad days” (Finkelstein and Herzog 2009: 190). Chavez promises to get him out of there, and the final two long-take shots of the film locate them sitting on the floor of the New Orleans Aquarium, which affords an image of them almost submerged in the tank (Figure  9.4). The image of McDonagh and Chavez seemingly under water with aquatic life returns viewers to the flood at the beginning, but now they sit on the floor together, merely watching. They hardly talk, although McDonagh says “I still hate that I ruined my underwear for you,” which itself is a repetition funny in its understatement, in that saving Chavez ruined much more of McDonagh’s life than his underwear. McDonagh nonetheless laughs, although it comes a beat late if it were meant to be laughter at his own underwear joke, so viewers do not know if it is a drug-induced belatedness or a more general laugh at his, their mutual, and/or the city’s existential condition. This ending and McDonagh’s ambiguous, unlocatable laugh recalls the philosophical protagonist that he introduced into Murnau’s Nosferatu. Such an ending reminds that, despite Port of Call’s specific historical references to the aftermath of Katrina (a quintuple murder, drug gang chaos, cops in Cadillacs abandoning prisoners), Herzog’s film does not much address, as many rogue cop films do, the context of its particular corrupt city (see Tyree 2010: 26–28). Despite the citation of Chinatown in its opening, it does not detail the seamy underbelly of the specific city in which it unfolds. Certainly, the film generated much attention for its setting in post-Katrina/Rita New Orleans, but Port of Call actually makes surprisingly little use of the famously picturesque city or its uniquely disastrous history. Herzog has shot films in devastated or abandoned locales before (Lessons of Darkness [1992] or even The Unprecedented Defense of the Fortress Deutschkreuz [1966]), but, in those

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films, the destruction and ruins are much more thematized than in Port of Call—one can well imagine that this film was, as Herzog recalls in interviews, actually written for another city (Mitchell 2009). Indicative in this delocalizing regard is the book that Herzog and his wife Lena published about the film and their experiences in New Orleans: instead of offering the Herzogs’ impressions and images of the city beyond the film, the illustrated volume offers only photographs made of the sets and locations already manipulated for the movie. In  its text, it offers few impressions of the city or its history beyond Herzog’s two-page introduction and the Finkelstein/Herzog script (a script, as noted above, written for another city). Ultimately, despite his interest in the local fauna, Herzog does not opt to make New Orleans’ memorable cityscapes or landscapes (or, through the flooding, cityscapes turned into landscapes) vehicles for the “inner landscapes” of which he often speaks, nor for the sort of sublimity (in a deteriorating city’s back alleys) I queried above. The urban city of the bad-cop film might, in this way, be an oblique point of generic convergence for Herzog, but not really one that speaks to his auteurist interests—he has frequently been more interested, as he is here, in the subjective, even existential response to landscapes, the abyss, and animals than in their social or political aspects. Such an ending reminds how far Herzog’s late genre films are from those of Penn, Fassbinder, or even his own Heart of Glass, as those films are much more overtly engaged in critical commentary and demythologization of the genres in which they self-consciously trafficked. In this generic vein, it is revealing that Port of Call does not conclude as cynically as Chinatown, which dismantles the detective genre by utterly degrading its protagonist, or as pessimistically as Touch of Evil or Bad Lieutenant, in both of which the rogue cop protagonist is shot at the end, undercutting their lonely moralists’ dubious triumphs. Rather, Herzog’s Port of Call ends with a moment of improvised solidarity that intensifies a couple of his auteurist trademarks—more animals coupled with existential absurdity—while leaving, like many of his feature films since 2000, its genre largely intact. What can one make of this ending? What does it tell us about Herzog and these late genre films? It confirms the importance of deliberate, even self-conscious auteurist performances throughout the openly generic film, which, in the end, much like the book about New Orleans Herzog and his wife have published, seems to prefer (“Herzogian”) self-referentiality to a critical engagement with any specific context, either social or generic. This preference for self-referentiality comes across not only in the ending that leaves the rogue-cop genre intact in a last, ambiguous laugh, but also in the film’s narratively climactic scene, in which Big Fate is set to shoot McDonagh, but, through McDonagh’s manipulations, ends up shooting McDonagh’s antagonist Dave instead. Dispatched by one of Frankie’s aggrieved but connected clients, mobster Dave has tracked McDonagh to Big Fate’s and plans on taking all of the drugs on the table, that is, both McDonagh’s and Big Fate’s cuts. Indignant at the unjustified theft, Big Fate shoots Dave, which neatly eliminates two problems for McDonagh: Dave and, apparently, Fate’s need to kill

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somebody, since McDonagh and Big Fate then celebrate by smoking McDonagh’s “lucky crack pipe.” The pipe also nicely ties up McDonagh’s murder investigation, since it gives the detectives the elusive (here, DNA) evidence to convict Fate. At this precise moment of narrative climax and resolution—one in line with the genre’s regular redemption of the rogue cop through some compromised reconciliation with the law—Herzog opts for another moment of self-referentiality. When Fate and his associates kill Dave and the two men he has brought with him, McDonagh tells Fate to shoot Dave again because “his soul is still dancing”—a seemingly nonsensical line explained by the sudden eruption into the sort of subjective internal focalization mentioned above. Viewers see a second Dave (same costume, though with a Mohawk haircut) break dancing next to his own corpse, and then they see an iguana emerge. The iguana-linked internal focalization of McDonagh recalls those moments that critics cited as the most auteurist, something confirmed by the soundtrack choice of Sonny Terry’s “Lost John,” which played in the memorable final moments of Herzog’s Stroszek (1977), in which a sideshow chicken dances on a spinning hotplate. Terry’s rendition of “Lost John”— replete with remarkable whooping sounds—seems as if it might deliberately be mimicking animals, much as Herzog’s protagonists (less knowingly) mimic animals in their behavior. The sudden musical choice, at odds with most of the scored instrumental music of the rest of Port of Call, connects Cage’s McDonagh to Bruno S.’s Stroszek, the iguana to the chicken, confirming Herzog’s long-term animal analogies for his degenerate protagonists. But the choice also shows how Herzog’s Port of Call primarily explores the genre—here at its conventional shoot-out zenith—to find points of convergence with Herzog’s own, self-conscious auteurism and then intensifies them. If the film, as I sketched above, is a series of repetitions that degenerate (the recurring investment rituals, the parallel arrests of Fate’s associates, the recurring Gator’s Retreat indulgences), then this narrative climax— one sporting the abrupt entrance of animals, dancing, and Sonny Terry’s “Lost John”—seems a repetition within the imaginarium of Herzog’s own work. The narrative climax—in a film that plays with genre but does not demythify it, a film that unfolds in a destroyed city but does not investigate it—is as self-contained as the aquarium in which Herzog leaves viewers at the end, memorable as the containment (both generic and auteurist) may be.

Notes 1

The screenplay was written by William Finkelstein (who has written for police procedurals in the past), and it is unusual for Herzog to make a feature film based on another’s script, so one should allow for Finkelstein’s deriving scenes from Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant. Herzog emphasizes, however, that he did make changes to the original script. 2 See, for instance, the interview with the BBC during which Herzog was shot by a sniper. Returning to the interview after having been wounded, he says “the bottom line is the poet must not avert his eyes” (“Werner Herzog gets shot”).

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3

In Schlöndorff ’s The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach (1970) the theme of a (failed) rebellion against authority would seem to parallel its generic positioning as a kind of anti-Heimat film. The Heimat (and somewhat anti-Heimat) sensibility has continued to attract German audiences; for example, the Bavarian Heimat comedy Grave Decisions (2006) has attracted over 1.8 million visitors. 4 Durgnat’s introduction is the rare one that gently contradicts the argument of the book it introduces: he prefers the notion of generic convergence to genre commentary, which is what Kagan emphasizes in Altman’s films. 5 Throughout this period, 2001–09, Herzog also continued to make documentaries, but because these four films were made within eight years, the genre films seem like a pronounced and noteworthy tendency in his career.

Works Cited Bourdieu, Pierre: Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Cawelti, John G.: “Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films,” Film Genre Reader III, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), pp. 243–261. Cronin, Paul, ed.: Herzog on Herzog (London: Faber & Faber, 2002). Durgnat, Raymond: “Foreword: The Man with No Genre,” American Skeptic. Robert Altman’s Genre-Commentary Films, ed. Norman Kagan (Ann Arbor: Pierian, 1982), pp. xi–xvii. Ebert, Robert: “Rescue Dawn (2007),” rogerebert.com ( July 13, 2007), http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070712/REVIEWS/70620008/1023 (accessed October 18, 2010). Finkelstein, William and Herzog, Werner: “Screenplay, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans,” in Werner Herzog, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call—New Orleans (New York: Universe, 2009), pp. 106–190. Gunning, Tom: The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London: British Film Institute, 2008). Herzog, Werner: The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans, photographs by Lena Herzog (New York: Universe, 2009). Hoberman, J.: “Man Down,” Village Voice, July 4, 2007. James, Nick: “Heart of Darkness,” Sight and Sound 20:6 ( June 2010): 32–34, 36. Kagan, Norman: American Skeptic. Robert Altman’s Genre-Commentary Films (Ann Arbor: Pierian, 1982). “La. Police Car Theft Charges Investigated (AP),” usatoday.com (October 7, 2005), www. usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-10-07-cadillaccops_x.htm. Mitchell, Elvis: “Werner Herzog,” The Treatment. KCRW.com (December 2, 2009). Naremore, James: More than Night: Film Noir in its Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Polan, Dana: Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 1940–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Prager, Brad: The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (London: Wallflower Press, 2007).

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Rohde, David and Drew, Christopher: “Prisoners Evacuated After Hurricanes Allege Abuse,” New York Times (October 2, 2005): 26. Rubenstein, Leo: “War Films,” Political Companion to American Film, ed. Gary Crowdus (Lakeview, 1994), pp. 455–462. Schatz, Thomas: Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System (New York: Random House, 1981). Sturm, Rüdiger: “Werner Herzog lernt nur von schlechten Filmen,” Die Welt (February 10, 2010), www.welt.de/kultur/article6316734/Werner-Herzog-lernt-nur-von-schlechtenFilmen.html. Tyree, J. M.: “Treme vs. The Bad Lieutenant.” Film Quarterly 64:1 (Fall 2010): 23–28. Verstraten, Peter: Film Narratology, trans. Stefan van der Lecq (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). “Werner Herzog gets shot by LA sniper during interview,” YouTube, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ylXqc8TQ15w. Wickham, Christopher: “Heart and Hole: Achternbusch, Herzog and the Concept of Heimat,” The Germanic Review 44.3 (1989): 112–120.

Additional Films Cited Altman, Robert: M*A*S*H (1970) Altman, Robert: McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1972) Altman, Robert: The Long Goodbye (1973) Altman, Robert: Nashville (1975) Ferrara, Abel: Bad Lieutenant (1992) Ferrara, Abel: Body Snatchers (1993) Friedkin, William: The French Connection (1971) Huston, John: Maltese Falcon (1941) Kotcheff, Ted: Rambo: First Blood (1982) Lang, Fritz: The Big Heat (1953) Lean, David. Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) Lewis, Joseph: The Big Combo (1955) Murnau, F. W.: Nosferatu: Symphony of Horror (1922) Penn, Arthur: Bonnie and Clyde (1967) Penn, Arthur: Little Big Man (1970) Penn, Arthur: The Missouri Breaks (1975) Penn, Arthur: Night Moves (1975) Polanski, Roman: Chinatown (1974) Preminger, Otto: Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) Rosenmüller, Marcus H.: Grave Decisions (2006) Schlöndorff, Volker: The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach (1970) Scorsese, Martin: The Departed (2006) Siegel, Don: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Welles, Orson: Citizen Kane (1941) Welles, Orson: Touch of Evil (1958)

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PART III

Herzog’s German Encounters

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“I don’t like the Germans” Even Herzog Started in Bavaria Chris Wahl

When Werner Herzog was interviewed by Jonathan Demme in the TimesCenter in New York on June 10, 2008, he took every opportunity to express antipathy toward Germany and sympathy for Bavaria, the region of Germany in which he grew up.1 This chapter investigates the reasons behind Herzog’s bifurcated relationship to his homeland—to his Heimat—and for his eventual emigration from there to California. It also analyzes the special meaning Herzog’s Bavarian heritage holds for his work. Bavaria has a particular significance within the Federal Republic of Germany. In terms of square area it is Germany’s largest region, and it is the most powerful economically. However, it is also the most politically and religiously conservative of the German states (Bundesländer). Prior to the establishment of the German Empire under Otto von Bismarck, the Kingdom of Bavaria long maneuvered between Prussia and Austria, central Europe’s two major powers, with the goal of protecting its autonomy as much as it could.2 Their desire for sovereignty has continued to this day and expresses itself in the often-heard slogan, “we are who we are” (wir sind wir, or mir san mir when said in the Bavarian dialect). On the political level the typical Bavarian consciousness expresses itself in the fact that the regional political party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), which was founded in Würzburg after World War II, has resisted subordination to the larger national party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Even today the CSU operates as a sister party to the CDU, which allows it to act as a spearhead against both national and European federalisms.3 Two businesses whose calling cards directly refer to their Bavarian origins are the soccer team FC Bayern-Munich (FC Bayern München), founded in 1900, and the car and motorcycle manufacturer BMW (Bavarian Motor Works, or Bayerische Motoren Werke AG), which was first formed under the name Rapp A Companion to Werner Herzog, First Edition. Edited by Brad Prager. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Motorworks in 1913. Both organizations claim to embody the top of their class. Within Germany Bavaria is infamously proud of having the country’s ostensibly—and perhaps genuinely—most challenging secondary school exam (Abitur). For these reasons, it was hardly surprising when Edmund Stoiber, Bavaria’s Minister-President from 1993–2007, uttered the following sentence in the course of the 2005 federal elections: “If everywhere else things were as they are in Bavaria, we would have no problems at all. It ’s only that, ladies and gentlemen, we have large parts of the population who unfortunately aren’t as wise as we.”4 This sort of unflinching arrogance has likely been an obstacle to having a Bavarian Minister-President elected to the office of Chancellor.5 The task the CSU assigned itself from the very beginning, and which it still today attempts to discharge, is the building of a democratic peoples’ party that the political right can claim, one not perceived as standing for extreme positions and—more important—for extreme actions. Munich, Bavaria’s capital, was after all the site of Hitler’s Putsch in November 1923 when the Nazi Party (the NSDAP) made their first brutal stab at usurping power. Ernst Röhm, who was born in Munich in 1887, played a prominent role in the attempt. As a veteran officer of World War I, Röhm led the Nazi thugs, Hitler’s “Storm Division” (the Sturmabteilung or SA), until he was murdered in 1934. Munich is also home to the building that served from 1930 to 1945 as the NSDAP headquarters, otherwise known as the “Brown House,” in which Adolf Wagner, the party’s infamous regional director resided. Wagner’s repressive measures clearly surpassed the “usual” ones. The counterpart of this brutish and inane twentieth-century tradition was the intrepid and uninhibited Anarchist movement that shared many members with Munich’s Soviet Council (Räterrepublik), and which established itself in April and May 1919, only four short years prior to the Putsch. Most of that group’s participants met with a grim demise. And of course the Scholl siblings— Hans and Sophie—along with their fellow resistance fighters from Munich’s renowned Ludwig Maximilian University have not been forgotten long after the Nazi era. Their group, “The White Rose,” refused to be silent, and they paid for their refusal with their lives. Years after World War II, in June 1963, the “Schwabing Riots” broke out in Munich. In the tradition of Schwabing—the city’s bohemian district—the riots served as a prelude to Europe’s subsequent youth rebellion. Peter Fleischmann’s documentary Autumn of the Dead-beats (Herbst der Gammler, 1967) offers a striking portrait of the “asocial” element that converged in Schwabing over the course of that decade. Rioters clashed not only with the police but with the city’s “normal” citizens as well. It is no wonder that large numbers of people gathered in Munich at the time; the fresh cultural winds of the Federal Republic were rushing in, as was typified by the numerous filmmakers who found themselves there.6 Among them was Herzog, who was born in Munich, and who has repeatedly emphasized that the city has changed for the worse over time. Herzog declares: “Munich is a chic and empty city. It is empty of meaning”

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(2008: 64). He links the city’s transformation to a distortion of its original Bavarian character. In conversation with Laurens Straub, Herzog observes: “As you describe [the Bavarian character], it no longer exists. Its traces have been washed away. Munich, for example, the Bavarian capital, is more or less predominantly occupied by Prussians, the enemies, so to speak, of Bavarianness.”7 What has been washed away is the sometimes absurd give and take between the extremisms of tradition and modern individualism. This is surely what Herzog is referring to when he speaks of the Bavarian soul. According to him, both of the Munich personalities, the comedian and film-producer Karl Valentin as well as the writer, director and painter Herbert Achternbusch, gained—or were granted—a deep insight into that soul. In the latter case, the author’s insight is apparent in the template he provided for Herzog’s film Heart of Glass (1976).8 Herzog’s early twelve-minute short film Precautions Against Fanatics (1969) clearly speaks to the Bavarian nature. According to Herzog the film deals with “people who are under a great deal of pressure. The pressure comes, first of all, from the fact that they are prominent people and see themselves that way, and second, that they have been put under the external pressure of a foolish task. Then, all at once, something pours out of them … ! Like physicists who experiment with materials when they are trying to learn about an alloy inside and out—how it responds to extreme heat, extreme pressure, extreme radiation and the like” (Herzog 1976: 125–126).9 Herzog’s film portrays various men protecting racehorses from a vaguely defined group of “fanatics.” The horses’ guardians make silly speeches in the company of animals and they make themselves look ridiculous. An old and apparently confused man, who speaks in the Bavarian dialect, tries repeatedly to disrupt the horse-keepers’ work and drive them from the racing field. The question soon arises: who is really the fanatic and who is helpless; is it the horses or their ostensible protectors? This inversion, if one may formulate things this way, refers not only to a meteorological phenomenon often found in Bavaria, but also describes a rhetorical figure, one by which principles of uncertainty and reversal come into play. It is in some respects particular to Bavarian culture, where social pressure and personal freedom appear as extreme poles. Herzog returns to this trope in almost all of his films—often relying on the presence of animals, which makes us take note of animalistic characteristics in people—such that one may be tempted to refer to a “Herzogian inversion.” Since the start of his career Herzog was fiercely attacked in the public sphere, and inversion arose as a stylistic means of defense in his films. It subsequently came to be employed as a strategy for defending himself in interviews. In a workshop conducted in 1979 by the film critic Roger Ebert in Chicago, Herzog recounted: “In Germany, in my own country, people have tried to label me personally as an eccentric, as some sort of strange freak that does not fit into any of their patterns” (Walsh 1979: 9). But Herzog rejects such reproaches; precisely because they come from the majority, they are wrong. History has proven that mass tastes are the

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material of eccentricity. Along precisely these lines one can point to an interview six years earlier in which Herzog said: I believe it is the rest of them who are the outsiders. The real eccentric of our time is Peter Alexander. When they look back from the year 2010, he will seem completely laughable, eccentric and unhinged, just as it looks to us today in the case of Wilhelm II, who at that time seemed to stand at the center of things. Now he seems ridiculous and wildly eccentric, whereas an apparent outsider, like the Swiss author Robert Walser, who lived at the edge of the world and sat for thirty-five years in a madhouse, formulated things in his time that remain valid for us today (Borski 1973: 6).10

In the mid-1970s it was still an act of anarchic inversion to call Peter Alexander, the beloved singer, actor, and entertainer, who so many mothers once longed to have for their son-in-law, an eccentric.11 Today, however, Alexander’s pop-hit films from the 1960s including And Get This One to Bed by Eight (… und sowas muss um acht ins Bett, Werner Jacobs, 1965) are indeed happily consumed as “trash cinema.” Those who grab the limelight of the Zeitgeist will be silly in retrospect, but those who create something unique in opposition to fashionable trends, will survive over the long haul, even if they are only taken seriously after their deaths. Along these lines the voice of courage must have spoken to Herzog over the course of those years when his films were, by and large, harshly criticized. He made efforts to sensitize the public to its own shortsightedness by refashioning the concept of eccentricity, which is commonly used to refer to people who move beyond the norms. Herzog applied it instead to those people who find themselves going beyond that which is meaningful. An eccentric is, to Herzog, not someone who has a boat hauled over a mountain in the jungle for the purposes of a film with the aim of accomplishing something lasting, but is instead someone who looks nice on television and wiles away the viewers’ time with harmless diversions.12 One is not automatically an eccentric because he or she works with freaks and dwarfs. Herzog employs characters of this sort so viewers of his films can actively achieve a degree of inversion; so they can reflect on or see themselves in Kinski, in Bruno S., or in one of the dwarfs of Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970). Jay McRoy and Guy Crucianelli approach the question from this perspective where they analyze Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932), a film that Herzog lauds (Cronin 2002: 60, 136), alongside Gummo (1997), directed by Harmony Korine (in whose film Julien Donkey-Boy [1999] Herzog played a leading role). McRoy and Crucianelli describe matters thus: To paraphrase David J. Skal and Elias Savada, when seen in the right light and from the proper angle, virtually anyone can be made to appear extraordinary, abject, or “freakish.” Consequently, Tod Browning’s Freaks and Harmony Korine’s Gummo require audiences to recognize the inequities intrinsic in the very practice of film spectatorship. At the very least, they necessitate a re-examination of the extent to which film viewers, like the filmmakers whose visions they consume, project their own (pre)conceptions of “normalcy” and “freakishness” upon the projected images that have come to define the very shape and politics of cinema (2009: 271).

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Bavaria has a history of so-called eccentrics, who passionately pursued that which they took to be meaningful. As Herzog might express it: they pursued their interests ecstatically. Where he identifies himself as Bavarian, he is inscribing himself into a lineage that includes figures such as King Ludwig II, the so-called “Moon King,” who—most likely owing to his homosexuality—never married. Ludwig II also let the business of governing be neglected, gave himself over to alcohol, and was ultimately declared mad. He either drowned himself or was drowned by others in Lake Starnberg under circumstances that remain mysterious to this day. As a newly crowned King in 1864 his first act of office was naming Richard Wagner, who was deeply in debt and whom Ludwig considered a genius, his personal Statecomposer.13 He hoped his regency would be defined by its great artistic accomplishments, rather than by the wars in which he more or less involuntarily participated in 1866 and in 1870–71. Herzog overtly constructs connections with King Ludwig and his over-powering, kitschy creations, which even today are among Germany’s biggest tourist attractions.14 Herzog asserts: “The most imaginative Bavarian of all was King Ludwig II. He was totally mad and built all those castles that are so full of this quintessentially Bavarian dreaminess and exuberance. I always felt that he would have been the only one who could have done a film like Fitzcarraldo, apart from me” (Cronin 2002: 23).15 Yet another facet of Bavarian culture that resonates with the style of Ludwig II is the Catholic Baroque, a tradition with which Herzog associates himself. It tends toward the atavistic, rhapsodic, and fairytale-esque and can be found in the architecture—especially the religious constructions—of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which often employ onion-shaped spires. The grandest realization of the style is Neuschwanstein, Ludwig’s unfinished dream-castle. When it comes to Catholicism, Bavaria is known as the most “fundamentalist” German State.16 For example: in contrast with Germany’s other states, a crucifix hangs in most every Bavarian schoolroom. A judgment of the Federal constitutional court from May 16, 1995 (generally referred to as “the crucifix-decision”) received popular nationwide support for repealing the corresponding Bavarian school regulation. In practice the court’s judgment changed little. Crosses hang in Bavarian classrooms as they had before, and they are removed only after specific complaints and in individual incidents. In this case, one suspects that the façade of religious tradition conceals another example of the typically Bavarian attempt to hold firm to its perceived autonomy. However, in the above quotation about Ludwig Herzog is referring to the distinctive cultural imprint left by the powerful convergence of Germanic and Celtic heroism that forms a basis for Roman Catholic Christianity. In the equally Catholic Rheinland region, the pagan inheritance emerges when winter is driven out during Carnival (Mardi Gras), which functions as the annual release of elemental forces. In Bavaria the burden is borne by the world-famous Oktoberfest, which was held for the first time in 1810 at the Theresienwiese in order to drink the beer that was brewed in March and could no longer to be preserved. Today Munich’s festival stands alongside Cologne’s Carnival as the uncontested high point of rollicking, or even “ecstatic,” drunken German festivals.

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Figure 10.1 Men sitting in a tavern with their beer mugs in Heart of Glass (1976). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Werner Herzog/Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

German beer culture, which was decisively shaped in Catholic cloisters during the late middle ages, is undoubtedly at its most colorful and meaningful in Bavaria, which is home to five of Germany’s six oldest operational breweries. Moreover, along with the Oktoberfest, Bavaria has a tradition of beer gardens, which likewise lies close to Herzog’s heart. The director’s filmic self-portrait Portrait Werner Herzog (1986) begins at the Oktoberfest, and a very archaic scene of Bavarian beer culture is found in Heart of Glass: Two men sit in a tavern across the table from one another, each “armed” with a beer mug (Figure 10.1). One smashes his mug on the head of the other, who in turn empties his beer over his companion’s head. At one point in an interview with Paul Cronin, Herzog states: “Dammit, now you’ve got me thinking about warm Bavarian pretzels coming right out of the oven with some good butter and a thick beer. You just cannot live without things like that. This is what being Bavarian is really all about” (Cronin 2002: 24). In this respect what is true for Herzog goes for Ludwig II as well. As Wolfgang Till notes: “[Ludwig] was Catholic, one could say: through and through, but not in the confessional sense; he was Catholic in a way that corresponds to the essence of Bavarian-Baroque piety” (2010: 63).17 Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who came from the Swabian part of Bavaria, possessed a similarly extravagant imagination anchored in popular cultural traditions. Herzog observes: “You see this kind of baroque imagination in Fassbinder’s films, the kind of unstoppable and ferocious creativity he had. Like his work, my films are not thin-blooded ideological constructs that we saw a lot of in German cinema in the 1970s. Too many German films of that era were thin gargling water instead of real thick stout” (Cronin 2002:  23). In Dominik Wessely’s Reverse Angle: Rebellion of the Filmmakers (2008) Herzog narrates how the nineteen-year-old Fassbinder came to his office to screen his short films and ask whether Herzog would act as his producer. Herzog says he

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told Fassbinder he would have to produce his own films; the two of them were so different that they would certainly end up in conflict with one another. Herzog later reflected: “Fassbinder and I had different political perspectives. But as a person I always appreciated him” (Herzog 2008: 57). Both of them have in common that they are autodidacts (Herzog cut short his university studies in Munich, while Fassbinder, at around the same time, was being rejected from the newly established film academy in Berlin [the dff b]), and that they occupy positions at the edges of New German Cinema’s spectrum.18 In contrast with Herzog’s contemplative and mystical cinema and his fascination with the opera, Fassbinder made films that were rooted in the contemporary political culture and in his so-called “Anti-Theater.”19 For his part, Herzog never wanted to be political; unlike Fassbinder he did not contribute to the omnibus film Germany in Autumn (1978), and by his own account he cannot stand the theater (Cronin 2002: 220–221). While Herzog avoids filming nude scenes, car trips, and telephone conversations as much as possible, Fassbinder, a fan of Hollywood and genre films, took a passionate interest in interpersonal relationships and in the banal details of everyday life.20 One can assume that his timely critical melodramas exerted an important influence on people like Hans W. Geissendörfer, one of Fassbinder’s partners at Filmverlag der Autoren who became the creator, producer, and initially even a director of Lindenstrasse, the first German soap opera (which has aired continuously on public TV since 1985). By contrast, Herzog worked from the very beginning of his career on a particular fusion of fictional and documentary forms. In their combination of powerful symbolism and unmediated authenticity, his films exceed TV’s diminutive frame. While Herzog places a lot of value on the choice of locations and seems pleased when his productions are obstructed by that natural world he transforms into “inner landscapes” on the editing table, the chain-smoking Fassbinder sought mostly tight interiors, which created a kind of hothouse atmosphere in which personal, “inner worlds” were staged.21 But both filmmakers share a sense of regional rootedness and a certain rural resolve that has enabled them to successfully pursue their completely personal visions of filmmaking in the face of both obstacles and critics’ reservations. No other German filmmakers of that generation polarized the public sphere to the extent that these two did for years. While Herzog was chided for indulging in a neo-fascist Romanticism, mainly during the filming of Fitzcarraldo (which was released in 1982, the year Fassbinder died), Fassbinder’s play Garbage, the City, and Death (1974) unleashed a scandal, in the course of which its writer-director was labeled a “left-fascist” and an anti-Semite (Baer 1982: 128). Since the beginning of their careers both filmmakers’ productivity was hardly outmatched. In Fassbinder’s case the unilateral overstrain contributed to an early death that posthumously gave him a legendary status akin to a number of 1970s rock stars. By contrast, Herzog succeeded in being the only New German filmmaker—unlike his colleague Wim Wenders—who, through emigrating and rediscovering himself at the age of fifty, successfully averted creative decline. Evidently, Fassbinder had also played with the

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idea of “getting out of Germany” and “shooting a film in America” (Binotto 2002: 74). Whether he would have been able to establish himself there, given his directing style and his history of authoritarian relationships with actors and collaborators, is yet another matter. What mainly disturbs Herzog about theater productions and TV programs are the patterns of speech practiced there (see Rost 1986: 71, 126). In I Am My Films—A Portrait of Werner Herzog (Christian Weisenborn and Erwin Keusch, 1978), Herzog reproaches his interviewer Laurens Straub that his questions are, “too much like a talk show.” In his own films, starting with The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1973), Herzog voiced the narration himself (usually in the form of extradiegetic commentary), rather than leaving everything to professionals schooled in rhetoric. In all cases the question was one of authentic expression, not eclipsed by vanity or other charades. Communication—or its impossibility—is generally a leitmotif in his films, and one should not underestimate the role in that interest played by the fact that the upper-Bavarian dialect is in fact Herzog’s mother tongue, and that German is in some respects the director’s first foreign language.22 Although the Bavarian dialect, alongside that of Berlin, is among Germany’s most beloved (and among those most often heard in films), speakers of southern German tongues always run the risk that they won’t be taken seriously by their northern countrymen. Even for German audiences, one of the great charms of My Best Fiend (1999), Herzog’s narrative about his relationship with Klaus Kinski, lies in the contrast between the serious tone of Herzog’s voice and his southern inflection. One could go so far as to assert that a reason for his flirtation with a vague anti-intellectualism lies with tendencies on the part of German-speaking academics to hold against Herzog his linguistic rootedness in the more coarse and direct—arguably less abstract and ironic—Bavarian dialect. He did not learn Bavarian in Munich, but rather in Sachrang, in the Bavarian Alps bordering Austria, where he grew up in what could be described as the German jungle (especially when one takes into consideration how removed from civilization and surrounded by mountains and forests the village was in the 1940s and 1950s). The freedoms associated with the postwar period, which coincided with a dearth of reliable authority figures, clearly had something to do with Herzog’s extraordinary self-confidence.23 Sachrang is currently a pleasant place with a number of completely renovated or newly built farmhouses, a ski school, a well-maintained cross-country ski run, and a handful of taverns. Because the hillsides can hardly be described as dangerous, and because Sachrang does not lack for snow and sunshine in winter, the town has established itself as a holiday destination where one can engage in winter sports with one’s children. Herzog also partook; in the district known as “Berg” (mountain or, in this case, alp) he lived nearly adjacent to a ski jump that still exists today and upon which he must have first discovered his enthusiasm for “ski-flying,” the sport to which The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner is devoted. But Herzog’s name is hardly known to Sachrang’s contemporary residents. As great an impression as the town seems to have had on his personality, is as little of an impression

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he left there. It seems that this widely traveled man has nowhere left fewer traces behind than there. The star in Sachrang is not Werner the ecstatic, but rather “Peter the Miller” (Der Müllner-Peter), born Peter Huber in 1766. Huber had an extraordinary education for a miller, which included knowledge of music and medicine upon which he seems to have come inexplicably. In the 1970s Carl Oskar Renner wrote a novel based on the sparse set of details that are known about this folkloric figure, and Bavarian Broadcasting (Bayerischer Rundfunk) adapted the novel at great expense as a three-part miniseries—from a teleplay by Oliver Storz and under the direction of Wolf Dietrich—entitled Sachrang: A Chronicle from the Mountains (1978).24 In Renner’s fiction the unusual miller is grossly caricatured; his pride and his will to defy authorities are so pronounced that it is difficult not to think of the motivating forces behind Herzog’s work. Herzog likes to stylize himself similarly as someone to whom knowledge and abilities come in secret ways, and as someone who is virtually fearless.25 Moreover, because—with the exception of Fini Straubinger in Land of Silence and Darkness (1971) and Juliane Köpcke in Wings of Hope (1998)—few female figures are central to his films, one wonders whether Herzog would have been impressed by the story of Peter’s strong and assertive wife, who was always in the shadow of her husband’s unusualness, or “eccentricity.” Maria Hell was a good deal younger than her husband; he married her at the proud age of 48, although he was repeatedly warned away from her. She led an inappropriate life for a farmer, which means, simply put, that because she had musical and artistic talents similar to those of her husband, she was, against the social conventions, unwilling to wither away. The bedroom furniture that she brought into the marriage (in accord with tradition), she is said to have painted herself. According to the oral lore she was a carpenter, but historians apparently strongly doubt this because at the family property—the Ertlhof—the requisite tools are not to be found. Without having given her husband a child Maria Hell drowned in 1824 in the high waters of the Prien River, and for this as well—according to the legend—she may have been responsible. Was it a despairing suicide owing to the impossibility of self-realization? Herzog’s declaration that he is a Bavarian thus leads back to an array of attributes connected with the region. There is: the claim of singularity, or, the will to a special status; the particularly pronounced tension between individualism and the extremes of authoritarianism and anarchy that became the basis for Herzog’s system of inversion and for his eccentricity of the meaningful; and the overarching Catholic Baroque tendencies associated with dreamy, fairytale mysticisms and with rural environs (the coarse dialect and the mountainous woodlands of the upper Bavarian south where he grew up). From this ancestral pool Herzog culled the themes and images of his works. While it was optimal for the development of his character, it also seems to have prepared him to go his own way. This unique background also kept him from participating in the same existential struggle as others of his generation; it kept him from paying heed to the dominant Zeitgeist and kowtowing to a certain political correctness. For this reason, from the end of

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the 1960s through the beginning of the 1990s, Herzog was subjected to massive attacks from critics and intellectuals as well as from leftist activists, who only rarely demonstrated a nuanced understanding of his life and his films. Instead they argued against him on purely emotional or ideological levels, and selectively reproached him for his exploitation of defenseless persons, particularly the handicapped and the indigenous; they said that he “aestheticized” suffering, and reviled him as a fascist.26 “There’s so much hatred there against my films that you probably wouldn’t even believe it,” Herzog lamented during a trip to the United States in 1979 (Walsh 1979: 9). In that same year Herzog spoke openly about leaving Germany, but his claim was conditional: “I will not, don’t want to and can’t emigrate to Hollywood. I don’t want to and don’t intend to leave my culture—my country perhaps, yes” (“Wir sind nicht mehr der Jungfilm” 1979: 183). Approximately fifteen years later Herzog finally settled in California, first in San Francisco and then in Los Angeles, where he found greater recognition, established himself as a king of independent cinema, and worked with Hollywood luminaries including Christian Bale, Nicolas Cage, and Willem Dafoe. Has this been the unbelievable story of an integration one would never have thought possible, or is it the opposite: the logical endpoint of a predictable development? How did Herzog shift from being Bavarian to being Californian? At the beginning of the 1960s, when Herzog came to the United States for the first time, he was a student of history and literature at the University of Pittsburgh. He came with a fellowship but returned it shortly after his arrival (Cronin 2002: 20). Later Herzog filmed Stroszek (1977)—in New York, in Plainfield, Wisconsin, and in Cherokee, North Carolina—so that he could “define his position on this country,” as he himself expressed it (Walsh 1979: 11). He also emphasizes the role played by the New York Film Festival, which opened its doors to him and to his first feature film Signs of Life (1968), and by Tom Luddy, program coordinator and later director of the Pacific Film Archive.27 He made both of these claims in 1979 during the workshop organized for him in Chicago by Roger Ebert. His friendship with Ebert, the Chicago Sun Times’ film critic, who in 2005 was the first member of his profession to receive a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, contributed decisively to his rising popularity in the land of boundless opportunity. While Herzog told Jonathan Demme in 2008 about his aversion to Germany, Demme read to him from an effusive letter of admiration Ebert had recently written (Ebert 2007). Herzog never had a spokesperson like that in his homeland. A few film critics, like Hans Günther Pflaum, for example, have passionately defended Herzog’s work since the early 1970s, but not one of them has a standing comparable to Ebert’s. The famous film critic and film historian Lotte Eisner praised his debut Signs of Life up until her death in 1983. She was a European film legend, but from her exile in the Parisian Cinemathèque Française, she had little influence on German public opinion. The recognition that Herzog enjoyed in the U.S. film scene following Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) is on indirect display in the short film Werner Herzog Eats His  Shoe (Les Blank, 1980), made in Berkeley, California. More than anything,

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that  film documents Herzog’s self-confidence; it is a downright ridiculous “action-advertisement” for the work of Errol Morris, who was at the time a budding but wholly marginal American filmmaker. Herzog had promised Morris, should he finish his first film, Gates of Heaven, which he ultimately did complete in 1978, that he would eat his shoe. This exploit should not be dismissed all too quickly as a meaningless private joke. People like Morris (or even Michael Moore), who have an understanding of the staged, documentary narration of the so-called “new documentary film,” work along exactly the same front as Herzog himself.28 This distinguishes the United States from Germany, where a more classical documentary methodology, one that distances itself from fictional film, is encouraged. “Front” is yet another significant keyword, especially if one thinks of the term frontier and broadens it to include the term “frontier spirit.” It stems from a quality of U.S. culture, emerging from the very recent settlement of the country by Europeans under adventurous conditions—a journey into the unknown with which Herzog can well identify. And while the director bemoans the “culture of complaint” in Germany (Herzog 2008: 64), in California, his adopted homeland, Herzog still encounters what he describes as a “permanent optimism” (Sponsel and Sebenig 2006: 52). In the 1990s another well-known southern German with the “frontier spirit” moved, like Herzog, into the Los Angeles area. The former professional soccer player Jürgen Klinsmann, who was born in 1964 in the Swabian city of Göppingen, has lived in Huntington Beach with his Californian wife since 1998. From 2004 to 2006 Klinsmann was coach of the German national team, which he revolutionized. He also brought change to the German Soccer Association, which is among the biggest and richest individual sports organizations. Klinsmann imitated the commitment of American sports coaches and led the 2006 German national team to a surprising third place finish in the world championship (the FIFA World Cup), which was held in their own country. After that, in July 2008, he was taken on as coach by the German soccer champions FC Bayern Munich in order to bring in fresh ideas and new formations. The arrangement fell apart owing to the team manager’s impatience, and Klinsmann was let go only ten months after being hired. Despite the dissimilarities between Herzog and Klinsmann, they share a common “pioneering” spirit—a spirit of discovery— alongside an enthusiasm for positive thinking (on a rational basis) and an unbelievable conviction in their own creative powers. California, and especially Los Angeles, quite obviously represents an environment well suited to such qualities. When making his first feature length film, Signs of Life, Herzog, at age twentyfive had set forth for Greece, which had yet to be overrun by tourists. Since then he has grazed every continent for unused images, and has even sought out footage from outer space and from the depths of the ocean (as in The Wild Blue Yonder [2005]).29 He shares a constant longing to be on the road, crossing boundaries and pushing limits, akin to that of the famous South Tyrolian Alpinist Reinhold Messner, about whom he made the cinematic portrait The Dark Glow of the Mountains (1984). At that time the two planned a collaborative film project in the

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Himalayas, which never came about.30 Both Messner and Herzog grew up in little locales surrounded by mountains. One recalls that Herzog comes from the district known as Berg, and in fact the mountains have long served as the German frontier (as the boundary to the south) and the Bergfilm, or “mountain-film,” can even be seen as the German western.31 This parallel also expresses itself in the work of individual directors. The last film and consequently the legacy of the Austrianborn Fred Zinnemann, the Jewish émigré who today is best known for the western High Noon (1952), is the mountain film Five Days One Summer (1982). The film picks up motifs that can already be found in films from The White Hell of Piz Palü (Arnold Fanck and Georg Wilhelm Pabst, 1929) through to Föhn (Rolf Hansen, 1950). In this case, frontier spirit denotes a mixture of courage and the capacity to coolly calculate dangers, qualities that—dissociated from their national and historical associations—Herzog ascribes not only to himself and to Messner, but also to two other émigrés, the protagonists of Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1998) and Wings of Hope, Dieter Dengler and Juliane Köpcke.32 Köpcke was the sole survivor of the crash of a plane on which Herzog was originally supposed to be flying. Afterward, she walked for days through the Peruvian jungle until she was finally discovered in a state of complete exhaustion. About her, Herzog says: “What I like very much about Juliane is that she did everything right in order to survive her ordeal” (Cronin 2002: 268). He adds, “the only reason she survived […] was because of her ability to act methodically through those absolutely dire circumstances” (270). With Dieter Dengler Herzog’s veneration goes even further. As Ian Buruma notes: “Dieter is himself a marvelous narrator, whose German-inflected voice blends interestingly with Herzog’s to the point of becoming almost indistinguishable. This is more than a simple case of the director’s identification with his subject; he almost becomes Dieter” (Buruma 2007: 26). Similar to Herzog, Dieter grew up during World War II in the Black Forest (Schwarzwald), a rural and mountainous region in southern Germany. He left Germany for the United States shortly after the war with the stated goal of becoming a pilot and was, during the Vietnam War, shot down on his first mission after only forty minutes. Dengler became an involuntary hero because he was the lone American POW to escape imprisonment in the jungle. Herzog marveled at this deed, which Dengler seems to have achieved primarily for reasons of his unflappably positive attitude, so much so that he chose him as a role model. Not for nothing Herzog explains that during the filming of Rescue Dawn (2006), the feature film remake of his documentary about Dengler, when he did not know what to do, he would ask himself, “what would Dieter do?”33 Without a doubt it plays a significant part in Herzog’s decision to emigrate that his films have met with a more positive reception in the United States and especially in California.34 He has also found an enormous creative wellspring there, which he seemed not to find in Germany. Nonetheless, at first glance there is a tremendous contrast between his nostalgia for Bavaria and his life in California. In California Herzog probably finds it difficult to undertake his inspirational

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constitutionals. But just as he consistently emphasizes an athletic approach to filmmaking, the activity of a director is primarily to create “substitutes for dreams.”35 In Herzog’s case the claim is entirely literal: he maintains that he suffers from not being able to dream (Cronin 2002: 61). Where else, then, would he be better off than in the city that is home to Hollywood, the so-called “dreamfactory”? Even if Herzog still remains deeply bound to his Bavarian homeland, it clearly offers him too little room for his visions. In exchanging Bavaria and California, Herzog traded what was beloved but unbearably parochial for a culture that was ugly on its surface yet came equipped with an enormous imagination.36 According to Herzog a significant part of the human dreams and cultural trends from the last fifty years have come from Los Angeles, which also include, “idiotic behavior like hippies and pot smoking … Or skateboards and aerobics” (Herzog 2008: 87). But the prerequisite for Herzog’s exchange of homelands was a process, during which concrete elements that were associated with his ancestry had to be brought to an abstract level—a level of dreams—in order that they might be resurrected elsewhere. This transformation is documented through Heart of Glass, Herzog’s very personal “Heimat” film based on Achternbusch’s screenplay. That Herzog takes distance from the figures of his childhood in that film is evinced in the fact that he hypnotized all the actors, with the exception of Josef Bierbichler, who plays the seer (and who is, for that reason, an alter-ego of the director). Consequently, his actors communicate with him and with us as if through a veil of fog. We interact similarly with the Bavarian landscape, which we first encounter in a time-lapse sequence. Clouds cover the landscape and then are supplemented with slightly visually distorted images from Alaska, Yellowstone National Park, Monument Valley, and Niagara Falls.37 Herzog explains, “This is Bavaria, but so stylized and crafted that you can not recognize it as that. Basically it is the landscape of a western.”38 Through his presence-manipulating hypnosis and through the appearance of distorting optical tricks, the specifically local characteristics of otherwise familiar landscapes become bodiless, internalized images that can be reconstructed as various locations of the earth. Brad Prager notes: “While the film may be construed as a comment about German Heimat, the director’s expressed intention is to universalize his landscapes of the mind” (2007: 98). It seems imperative to expand this claim to include his “characters of the mind.” Herzog is not an explorer in the sense that he would be interested in continually accumulating new impressions from a manifold of lives or simply in collecting landscapes. He is instead interested in repeatedly identifying certain patterns, ones sought and found in a variety of forms and in different places. The hypnosis in Heart of Glass is not primarily directed at the viewer, as it is in Lars von Trier’s hypnotic Europa trilogy.39 Instead it assumes, next to the narrative formalization—its “somnambulistic journey into the sunset” (schlafwandlerische[n] Hineingehen[s] in den Untergang [Hortmeyer 1976: 48])—the function of a reflection on memory. As a sideline the film deals with the forgotten formula for the manufacture of ruby glass. Not coincidentally Klaus Wyborny’s visual effects are similar

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to those that Chris Marker manufactured with an analog image-synthesizer for his Sans Soleil (1983), an essay film that “contemplates the nature of memory, history, and representation” (Lupton 2005: 149).40 In von Trier’s Europa (1991) the hypnotist-narrator directly addresses the viewer, although this is more of a commentary on the hypnotic qualities generally attributed to the film than a serious attempt to hypnotize its viewers. Herzog had actually once played with the idea of hypnotizing the public before the beginning of screenings, but he refrained (Cronin 2002: 130). “Hypnotic” films like Heart of Glass tend not only to lull the concentration of the viewer, but demand, for precisely that reason—in contrast, for example, with action films—the highest degree of concentration, and they make great demands on the conscious mind. Eric Rentschler does not account for this when he alleges that Herzog has, in the case of Heart of Glass, taken on exclusively the negative side of those Weimar films that demonstrate a predilection for hypnosis (such as Dr. Mabuse the Gambler [Fritz Lang, 1922]) (Rentschler 1986: 160). The parallels between Herzog and von Trier (who is quoted on the German DVD packaging of Heart of Glass as saying, “a fantastic film”) are not exhausted by their mutual fascination with hypnosis. The sacrifice that Emily Watson’s character, Bess McNeill, undertakes on behalf of her husband in von Trier’s Breaking the Waves (1996), for example, is somewhat similar in its spiritual and downright ecstatic qualities to that which Herzog had to undergo when he walked on foot from Munich to Paris in winter of 1974 in the hope of saving Lotte Eisner’s life. The coastal Scottish highland, which plays a supporting role in von Trier’s film, lies both geographically and conceptually close to the Skellig Rocks, which are near Ireland and are where the closing sequence of Heart of Glass was filmed. Herzog describes filming the pivotal point of the scene, where, “there was one man, who stands on the peak of a cliff and stares at the ocean, into the unknown.” He adds, “This small figure, seen from the distance is a self-portrait” (Paganelli 2008: 122). In this portrait, one can imagine the young Herzog, living in his Bavarian village where he had not yet heard of technical achievements like the telephone or the cinema (Cronin 2002: 4). He explains: “At the very end […] some people venture out in a boat, in a very fragile boat, onto the open ocean, because they want to explore, they want to see, where the world ends. Does it end in an abyss or not? And there are a few who have the courage to set out. […] I recognize myself in some way in the film, just like that, as though I had been there as an actor too.”41 One can interpret this simultaneously heroic and tragically staged sequence and view it as an adumbration of Herzog’s own migration to the new world; it anticipates his decampment. Initially no one in the United States applauded Herzog’s film, but in France they did. “Herzog consciously chose Paris as the world showcase for his newest film. He felt more comfortable in France because he was sooner understood there than in the Federal Republic” (Schütte 1976). As a matter of fact the Frankfurter Rundschau reported on April 12, 1977 that the film had “in seven Parisian cinemas in the first two weeks more than 40,000 viewers—more than any other German film in past years.” The critics and the public in Germany presented themselves as at best

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irritated, and many were positively indignant: “Heart of Glass is a feeble amalgam of Achternbusch’s raw, anarchic imagination and Herzog’s pseudo-mystical, undulating visual falderal. Underscored by the cosmic music of the group Popol Vuh, the film attempts to send the viewer on a fog-filled journey” (Limmer 1976: 143). The fog-filled journey that resulted from Achternbusch’s “raw, anarchic imagination” together with Herzog’s “visual falderal” may on one level be his completely personal rhapsodizing, but it is also connected to his baroque and spiritual “folklore.” Herzog emphasized this years later, noting that Heart of Glass deals with “the story of my childhood” and “the mysterious world outside” upon which the seer Hias, an actual figure from the pages of Bavarian history, tries to impose some order, albeit by way of mystical prophecies (Paganelli 2008: 98). Prager notes that, “This type of mystical character would not likely have found a place among the Heimat films of the 1950s” (2007: 96). Even if Herzog does not condemn the Heimat film genre in principle, his interest lies more with mountain films from the prewar period than with Heimat films of the postwar period.42 Both are typically German and are rooted in similar—sometimes even the very same—places. However, while Heimat films deal with the reconstruction of a nation in a picturesque landscape, mountain films, originating in the 1920s, deal with individual heroism in a transcendent landscape. One film from the period during World War II particularly impressed Herzog: Wally of the Vultures (Die Geierwally; Hans Steinhoff, 1940).43 The heroine of the title is a young woman, Wally, whose ostensibly masculine talents, as well as her stubbornness and her courage, would have impressed the wife of Peter the Miller from Sachrang. When watching the power struggle between Heidemarie Hatheyer and Eduard Köck, who plays Wally’s father in the film, one would almost describe Wally of the Vultures as “ecstatic,” and it is not surprising that Herzog likes the film. Also dominant, in contrast to those Heimat films of the 1950s, is the depiction of the harsh and hardscrabble life in the country, which is far more typical of mountain films. Contributing to this spiritual sense—to the film’s naturemysticism—is a sequence that presumes the existence of mountain sprits and begins with a depiction of clouds that the time-lapse sequence in Heart of Glass may have used as a model. The interest in mysticism is likely what separates Herzog from most other German filmmakers of his generation, who, at more or less the same time, were producing their “anti-Heimat films” like Hunting Scenes from Bavaria (Peter Fleischmann, 1969), Mathias Kneissl (Reinhard Hauff, 1970), and The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach (Volker Schlöndorff, 1971). The aforementioned essay by Eric Rentschler appeared in the mid-1980s and was part of a wave that gained steam during the course of the early reception of Fitzcarraldo. The reproach of fascism was being leveled at Herzog with increasing frequency. Rentschler seems almost personally confronted by Herzog’s rejection of academic discourse and allows himself a somewhat strong reaction, the tenor of which is that Herzog instrumentalizes people and landscapes for the sake of his own “steely romanticism” (Rentschler 1986: 178). Whoever fails to perceive this, it seems, must be “overcome by Herzog’s ministrations” (167). Here Rentschler does not shy

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away from comparing Herzog’s team meetings, about which he only has second-hand knowledge, with Hitler’s table talks (Tischgespräche), speaking of a “Gleichschaltung on the heterogeneity of existence,” and bringing Goebbels’ name into it, because the latter said: “we are all more or less romantics of a new German mood” (175). As Rüdiger Safranski (2007) correctly observes in his study of Romanticism (at least indirectly) it is an analytic error to assert that certain attitudes can no longer to be tolerated in the fields of creative activity and thought, because those attitudes of art production and speculative philosophy had reached into the practical policies of National Socialism and brought with them devastation. Romanticism and mysticism have a tradition that extends far beyond the Nazi body of thought and is not automatically discredited by them. It also speaks against Rentschler’s diagnosis that he adopts elements of Nina Gladitz’s argument. For a time she tried to promote herself on Herzog’s coattails with her documentary Land of Bitterness and Pride (1982) in which she draws parallels between Herzog’s use of Indian actors and assistants in Fitzcarraldo and Leni Riefenstahl’s deployment of interned Sinti and Roma in Tiefland (1944).44 Gladitz’s documentary is rife with one-dimensional and transparently black and white depictions, to which she adds not a shred of reflection on her own position. Here, one has to wonder who has really adopted Nazi rhetoric. To return to the starting point of my reflections: the difficult relationship between Herzog and his homeland is, on the one hand, indebted to an identification with the almost separatist role his Bavarian ancestral region traditionally plays in German history, and on the other hand, to the opposition between the protective-conservative and the anarchic elements that are ostensibly inherent in the Bavarian nature. The basis for Herzog’s capacity to adapt well to an environment like California, and especially to Hollywood, which is at first glance diametrically opposed to his lifestyle, may be rooted in his enthusiasm for both the pagan characteristics of Bavarian folk and Baroque culture and in the myths of the mountain films (and, consequently, in his frontier spirit). Herzog’s former double-role, which earned him so much animosity in the Federal Republic of Germany, is now divided between two countries: In Germany, he still plays the part of the misunderstood, sensitive poet; while in the United States he presents himself as an ultra-tough Germanic lone wolf. For both positions he draws from the cultural capital of his contradictory Bavarian homeland, and both are driving forces in his films—films that he not incorrectly labels Bavarian.45

Acknowledgments Portions of this chapter originally appeared in German under the title, “‘Ein Erlebnis, das ich nicht missen will’—Die Rezeption von Werner Herzog in Deutschland” (Wahl 2011). This English version appears here with the permission of Dr. Clemens Heucke and edition text + kritik.

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Notes 1 For this interview see the DVD Extra Jonathan Demme Interviews Werner Herzog included with the DVD Encounters at the End of the World (Discovery Communications, 2007). 2 On this see Prinz (1997: 381–387). 3 Apart from the governing period of Wilhelm Hoegner, member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) from 1954–57, the CSU has always held the office of Minister President. From 1962 until 2008 the government oversaw Bavaria with an absolute majority. 4 See “Das war ja Stoiber im Bierzelt in Bayern” (“That was indeed Stoiber in the Bavarian beer tent” 2005). In the election Stoiber was particularly criticizing the population of the five new German states, i.e. the former German Democratic Republic. 5 Franz Josef Strauss, Stoiber’s political mentor, who was prime minister from 1978 to 1988 in Bavaria, also failed to win the national election. In an interview in May 1988 Herzog calls Strauss, “the only ‘Baroque’ politician, in a comprehensive and positive sense, in Germany today” (Quaresima 1988: 88). 6 With Die Zweite Heimat (1992) Edgar Reitz made a filmic memorial to the general sense of elation in Schwabing of the 1960s. In 1971 the Filmverlag der Autoren, a union of young directors, was founded in Munich. According to the homepage of the distributing arm of the organization, Herzog worked closely with them from Aguirre on (“Der Filmverlag”). Herzog himself describes their relationship as less close: “I was invited to be a part of the organization, but I said no. […] Later on they did take over some of my early films and distributed them” (Cronin 2002: 35). On the rise and fall of this unusual authorial collective, see the documentary film Reverse Angle: Rebellion of the Filmmakers (2008). 7 See the commentary on the German language DVD of Heart of Glass (Kinowelt Home Entertainment Inc. 2004, at 52:16). 8 See the commentary on the German language DVD of Heart of Glass (at 38:45). Beyond Achternbusch and Valentin one could also cite a number of other figures such as the authors Ludwig Thoma (1867–1921) and Oskar Maria Graf (1894–1967); the humorists Weiß Ferdl (1883–1949) and Gerhard Polt, who was, like Herzog, born in Munich in 1942; the musicians Hans, Christoph, and Michael Well, who founded the Biermösl Blosn, their band for “new folk music” in 1976, or Hans Söllner (born 1955), who is known above all for his “Bavarian Reggae” and for speaking out in favor of the legalization of marijuana. 9 Herzog makes a similar comment, comparing his work to that of a physicist, in Cronin (2002: 19). 10 Almost 30 years later in conversation with Paul Cronin, Herzog repeated the statement he made back then: “When you look at my films you see there is absolutely nothing eccentric about them. […] In comparison to me, all the rest are eccentric” (Cronin 2002: 68). 11 Ten years later it remained that way. Herzog told an audience: “This Peter Alexander, with his perky countenance, denies the existence of the first and second world wars. This man stands for a world in which the historical disasters of this century are declared null and void. […] All my wrath and all my conceptions of what constitutes an enemy, I direct toward Peter Alexander (laughter)” (Rost 1986: 61–62).

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According to his friend Gerhard Bronner, the Vienna composer and cabaretist, Alexander sold himself short his whole life, and sacrificed a potentially challenging career for fantastic sums of money, which overwhelmed him. He became completely withdrawn after 1996 and, like the late Marlene Dietrich, would not even let himself be photographed. Friends spoke of him as though he were dead. See The Man Who Was Peter Alexander (Birgit Kienzle, 2006). Alexander actually died on February 12, 2011. Till notes, “[Ludwig II] spoke and thought in Wagnerian phrases and thus became the pioneer of a fashion that practically the entire educated class of Europe had embraced at the turn of the century” (2010: 13). In 1987 Herzog staged Wagner’s opera Lohengrin in Bayreuth for the first time. In Herzog’s films Wagner (his Parsifal) appears as early as 1977, in La Soufrière. “Richard Wagner and the buildings, in either order, are the two great cornerstones of Ludwig’s life. Next to those, everything else—political life, the Bavarian people, his family life—are mere episodes” (Till 2010: 13). In a different interview Herzog points to Fitzcarraldo as, for this reason, the one among his films in which the presence of Bavaria comes out most strongly (Quaresima 1988: 87). Pope Benedict XVI, alias Joseph Ratzinger (born in 1927) comes from upper Bavaria, the rural region in the south in which Werner Herzog grew up. On Herzog’s Catholicism, see his comment to Cronin: “I had a dramatic religious phase at the age of fourteen and converted to Catholicism. Even though I am not a member of the Catholic church any longer, to this day there seems to be something of a distant religious echo in some of my works” (2002: 10). For this reason Herzog speaks of the “New Bavarian Film” (Quaresima 1988: 87). Fassbinder recruited some of his closest film collaborators from his “Anti-Theater,” which he founded in 1968. On the commentary to the German DVD of Scream of Stone (Kinowelt Home Entertainment Inc, 2005, at 55: 16) Herzog remarks on the first and only nude scene of his career. Herzog here means nude scenes in the sense of classic love scenes. Sonja Skiba as Ludmilla appears naked in Heart of Glass, and many actresses and extras appear partly nude in his “colonial” films such as Cobra Verde (1987). On “inner worlds,” see Elsaesser (1996: 22). Elsaesser adds: “[It] is not the Germany of Rhine castles […] and Bavarian mountains (Heart of Glass), of romantic Caspar David Friedrich landscapes (Kaspar Hauser) or the Black Forest (Woyzeck) that we look for in Fassbinder. […] Karsten Witte once rightly remarked that in Fassbinder ‘you find everything of Germany that is not the Lorelei and Neuschwanstein’ […]” (1996: 22). Elsaesser is referring to Witte’s essay on Fassbinder (1985: 159). Herzog explains: “at the age of eleven I had to learn Hochdeutsch which was a painful experience for me” (Cronin 2002: 23). He adds: “[German] is of course my culture, my language, although in truth my first language is Bavarian. What I miss most in Los Angeles is the Bavarian dialect. […] I don’t miss Germany, but I miss the Bavarian dialect” (Herzog 2008: 63). Herzog adds: “It was anarchy in the best sense of the word. There were no ruling fathers around and no rules to follow. We had to invent everything from scratch” (Cronin 2002: 5).

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The premiere was on December 26, 1978 on the station ARD. Since then there have been many airings, most recently in January 2007. Owing to the continuing success of the TV movie there is now even a Müllner-Peter-Museum in Sachrang, which opened its doors in 2001. See on this point Herzog (2008: 71–72). On the reproach that he has mistreated handicapped persons, see, for example, Koch (1986); on the claim that he mistreated indigenous persons, see in particular the filmic accusation Land of Bitterness and Pride (Nina Gladitz, 1982); the suggestion that Herzog “aestheticizes” horror has been made largely with reference to Lessons of Darkness (1992). For his thoughts on this, see Sponsel and Sebenig (2006: 58) as well as Cronin (2002: 245); on the accusation of “left-fascism,” see Wahl (2011). On the New York Film Festival, see Walsh (1979: 34). Tom Luddy directed the Pacific Film Archive from 1975–1980. See Herzog (1979). On the “new documentary” see Williams (1993). When he appears in Wim Wenders’ Tôkyô-ga (1985), Herzog speaks about his readiness to seek out the most remote places for new images for our civilization. He continually emphasizes the necessity of this undertaking. Instead Herzog filmed Scream of Stone (1991) on Cerro Torre in South America, which is based on an original idea by Messner. See Barnouw (1993: 100). For a definition of the mountain film as its own genre, see Rapp: “There are and have been many feature films in which high mountains serve as a motif or setting, but the authenticity of the alpine scenery was only given such prominent importance in the German mountain film. Distinct from the alpine films of other countries, it was only the German mountain film that succeeded in developing into its own film genre and being successfully distributed to cinemas. Because most of the films were made in the Swiss and Austrian Alps, the label ‘German’ had to be added to the productions. They were regularly produced by German companies and were initially intended only for the German market” (1997: 7). On his readiness to take risks, particularly during the filming of La Soufrière, see Cronin (2002: 19, 150). On Reinhold Messner, see Herzog (2008: 76–77). See the featurette entitled The Making of a True Story on the DVD of Rescue Dawn (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer-Studios Inc. 2007). The last of the featurette’s four chapters is called “What Would Dieter Do?” For more on the reception see Wahl (2011). This phrase, “the substitute for dreams” (Der Ersatz für die Träume), refers to Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1979 [original 1921]). On this point, see Göttler (2007). Herzog asserts: “In no case do I want to live in a sleepy place like Florence or Venice. These cities are over. They have wonderfully beautiful surfaces and are museums at actual size. Los Angeles has absolutely no surface. It is just ugly and lacking in style. But there’s a lot beneath the surface that hasn’t yet been seen.” The time-lapse images were shot at the peak of Lusen Mountain in the Bavarian Forest and were captured over a period of ten or twelve days through combining a number of individual images. See the commentary on the German DVD of Heart of Glass (at 2:23). Distortions effected by, for example, the experimental filmmaker Klaus Wyborny’s use of wide angle and telephoto lenses simultaneously, were implemented earlier in Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974).

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38 See the commentary on the German DVD of Heart of Glass at 6:38. 39 On the comparison, see Bellour (2009: 400–410). Von Trier’s trilogy consists of The Element of Crime (1984), Epidemic (1987), and Europa (1991). 40 The distortions caused by the synthesizer stand for the unraveling of time. They reduce the original images more and more to ghostly outlines, and the reduction is intended as the equivalent of human memory. See Lupton (2005: 153). 41 See the commentary on the German DVD of Heart of Glass at 1:05:52. With these words Herzog—over a decade after his arrival on the Californian coast—breaks off his commentary, even though the closing sequence to which he refers begins 20 minutes further into the film. 42 See Herzog in Borski: “I have nothing against films such as Green is the Heath (Hans Deppe, 1951); a public need for sentimentality is satisfied in them, a need that is calculable, similar to the need for toilet paper and for coffins” (1973: 6). 43 See the commentary on the German DVD of Heart of Glass at 16:22. Despite Steinhoff ’s prominent role in the Nazi cinema, this film is primarily a successful mountain film rather than a fascist media product. It is based on Wilhelmine von Hillern’s novel Geier-Wally. Eine Geschichte aus den Tyroler Alpen (1875), which was not only adapted for the theater and the opera, but also many times for film and TV. These adaptations included: Die Geier-Wally (E. A. Dupont, 1921), Die Geierwally (František Cáp, 1956), Die Geierwally (Walter Bockmayer, 1987), and Die Geierwally (Peter Sämann, 2005). 44 For a balanced account of the affair surrounding Fitzcarraldo see Carré (2007: 82–87). 45 On this, see Beier. Herzog says, not for the first time: “I have never left my culture. Wherever I go, I make Bavarian films” (2010: 135).

Works Cited Baer, Harry: Schlafen kann ich, wenn ich tot bin. Das atemlose Leben des Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1982). Barnouw, Erik: Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film (New York: Oxford University Press 1993). Beier, Lars-Olav: “In der Risikozone,” Der Spiegel 6, February 8, 2010: 132–135. Bellour, Raymond: Le Corps du cinéma. Hypnoses, émotions, animalités (Paris: P.O.L éditeur, 2009). Binotto, Thomas, ed.: Das fliegende Auge. Michael Ballhaus, Director of Photography, im Gespräch mit Tom Tykwer (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 2002). Borski, Arnim: “Exzentriker—das sind die anderen,” Der Abend, July 6, 1973: 6. Buruma, Ian: “Herzog and His Heroes,” New York Review of Books, July 19, 2007: 24–26. Carré, Valérie: La quête anthropologique de Werner Herzog. Documentaires et fictions en regard (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2007). Cronin, Paul, ed.: Herzog on Herzog (London: Faber & Faber, 2002). “Das war ja Stoiber im Bierzelt in Bayern,” faz.net (August 11, 2005), www.faz.net/s/ RubA24ECD630CAE40E483841DB7D16F4211/Doc~EBD5EA00F29A2493CB1FAB E8C3F093906~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.html.

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“Der Filmverlag der Autoren,” Online version of booklet accompanying the DVD collection Filmverlag der Autoren Edition (2009), www.filmverlagderautoren.de/material/FDA_Hauptteil.pdf. Ebert, Roger : “A Letter to Werner Herzog: In Praise of Rapturous Truth,” rogerebert. com (November 17, 2007), http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/ article?AID=/20071117/PEOPLE/71117002. Elsaesser, Thomas: Fassbinder’s Germany: History, Identity, Subject (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996). Göttler, Fritz: “Die Sesshaftigkeit ist unser großes Unglück,” Interview with Werner Herzog, Süddeutsche Zeitung, June 24, 2007. Herzog, Werner: “Interview with Kraft Wetzel,” Herzog/Kluge/Straub, ed. Peter W. Jansen and Wolfram Schütte (Munich: Hanser, 1976). Herzog, Werner: Unpublished interview with Herzog by Jörg Bundschuh and Christian Bauer. LzK 20/43. File: “Werner Herzog: Texte, Interviews,” Herzog Collection, Deutsche Kinemathek (Berlin), 1979. Herzog, Werner: Manuel de Survie—Entretien avec Hervé Aubron et Emmanuel Burdeau (Nantes: Capricci Editions, 2008). Hortmeyer, Gerd: “Darsteller gesucht, die sich hypnotisieren lassen,” Die Zeit, November 26, 1976: 46–50. Koch, Gertrud: “Blindness as Insight: Visions of the Unseen in Land of Silence and Darkness,” The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, ed. Timothy Corrigan (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 73–86. Limmer, Wolfgang: “Teutonischer Guru,” Der Spiegel 52, December 20, 1976: 143. Lupton, Catherine: Chris Marker: Memories of the Future (London: Reaktion Books 2005). McRoy, Jay and Crucianelli, Guy: “‘I Panic the World’: Benevolent Exploitation in Tod Browning’s Freaks and Harmony Korine’s Gummo,” Journal of Popular Culture 42.2 (2009): 257–272. Paganelli, Grazia: Segni di vita. Werner Herzog e il cinema. (Milano: Il Castoro 2008). Prager, Brad: The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (London: Wallflower Press, 2007). Prinz, Friedrich: Die Geschichte Bayerns (Munich: Piper, 1997). Quaresima, Leonardo: “Hanna e i giganti di ghiaccio. Conversazione con Werner Herzog,” in Il villaggio negato. La Baviera e il cinema tedesco degli anni ottanta, eds. Annamaria Percavassi, Leonardo Quaresima and Elfi Reiter (Florence: La Casa Usher, 1988), pp. 87–91. Rapp, Christian: Höhenrausch. Der deutsche Bergfilm (Wien: Sonderzahl, 1997). Rentschler, Eric: “The Politics of Vision: Herzog’s Heart of Glass,” The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, ed. Timothy Corrigan (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 159–182. Rost, Andreas, ed.: Werner Herzog in Bamberg. Protokoll einer Diskussion—14./15. Dez. 1985. (Bamberg: Selbstverlag, 1986). Safranski, Rüdiger: Romantik: Eine deutsche Affäre (München: Carl Hanser, 2007). Schütte, Wolfram: “Titanisches Auf begehren wider den Realismus. Werner Herzog Film Herz aus Glas,” Frankfurter Rundschau, November 16, 1976.

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Sponsel, Daniel and Jan Sebenig: “Interview: Werner Herzog,” Revolver: Kino muss gefährlich sein, ed. Marcus Seibert (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, 2006), pp. 49–61. Originally in Revolver 2 (1998). Till, Wolfgang: Ludwig II. König von Bayern. Mythos und Wahrheit (Wien: Christian Brandstätter Verlag, 2010). von Hofmannsthal, Hugo: “Der Ersatz für die Träume,” Reden und Aufsätze II 1914–1924, ed. Herbert Steiner (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1979 [original 1921]), pp. 141–145. Wahl, Chris: “‘Ein Erlebnis, das ich nicht missen will’—Die Rezeption von Werner Herzog in Deutschland,” Lektionen in Herzog. Neues über Deutschlands verlorenen Filmautor Werner Herzog und sein Werk, ed. Chris Wahl (München: edition text + kritik, 2011), pp. 15–82. Walsh, Gene, ed.: “Images at the Horizon”: A Workshop with Werner Herzog Conducted with Roger Ebert (Chicago: Facets Multimedia, 1979). Williams, Linda: “Mirrors without Memories. Truth, History, and the New Documentary,” Film Quarterly 46.3 (1993): 9–21. “‘Wir sind nicht mehr der Jungfilm.’ Spiegel-Interview mit den Regisseuren Herzog, Brandner, Bohm, Hauff,” Der Spiegel 25, June 18, 1979: 181, 183. Witte, Karsten: “Hölle & Söhne,” Im Kino (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1985), pp. 159–161.

Additional Films Cited Blank, Les: Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980) Browning, Tod: Freaks (1932) Deppe, Hans: Green is the Heath (1951) Dietrich, Wolf: Sachrang: A Chronicle from the Mountains (1978) Fanck, Arnold and Pabst, Georg Wilhelm: The White Hell of Piz Palü (1929) Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, et al.: Germany in Autumn (1978) Fleischmann, Peter: Autumn of the Dead-beats (1967) Fleischmann, Peter: Hunting Scenes from Bavaria (1969) Gladitz, Nina: Land of Bitterness and Pride (1982) Hansen, Rolf: Föhn (1950) Hauff, Reinhard: Mathias Kneissl (1970) Jacobs, Werner: And Get This One to Bed by Eight (1965) Keusch, Erwin and Weisenborn, Christian: I Am My Films—A Portrait of Werner Herzog (1978) Kienzle, Birgit: The Man who was Peter Alexander (2006) Korine, Harmony: Gummo (1997) Korine, Harmony: Julien Donkey-Boy (1999) Lang, Fritz: Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922) Marker, Chris: Sans Soleil (1983) Morris, Errol: Gates of Heaven (1978) Reitz, Edgar: Die zweite Heimat (1992) Riefenstahl, Leni: Tiefland (1944) Schlöndorff, Volker: The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach (1971)

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Steinhoff, Hans: Wally of the Vultures (1940) Wenders, Wim: Tôkyô-ga (1985) Wessely, Dominik: Reverse Angle: Rebellion of the Filmmakers (2008) Von Trier, Lars: The Element of Crime (1984) Von Trier, Lars: Epidemic (1987) Von Trier, Lars: Europa (1991) Von Trier, Lars: Breaking the Waves (1996) Zinnemann, Fred: High Noon (1952) Zinnemann, Fred: Five Days One Summer (1982)

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11

Herzog’s Heart of Glass and the Sublime of Raw Materials Noah Heringman

To add to both the horror and sublimity of these scenes, they sometimes conceal in cavities, on the summits of these mountains, founderies, lime-kilns, and glass-works; which send forth large volumes of flame, and continued columns of thick smoke, that give to these mountains the appearance of volcanoes. William Chambers, Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, 1772 A man contemplates the remains of the industrial insect (Ein Mensch betrachtet die Reste des Industrie-Insekts). Herbert Achternbusch, Die Stunde des Todes (“The Hour of Death”) (epigraph), 1975

Visual Legacies of Nature and Technology In 1772 Sir William Chambers envisioned a style of landscape architecture that would draw heavily on the sublime in all its registers, including the technological sublime. Although England, unlike Germany, had large water-powered and even steam-powered factories by the 1770s, Chambers’ glassworks-cum-volcano probably resembles a pre-industrial workshop more than it resembles these mills. But in early industrial England, both ways of working belonged to an aesthetic category that flattened these distinctions along with the distinction between industry and nature itself. Joseph Wright of Derby, for example, achieves similar effects with his paintings of an iron forge by night (1772, 1773) and an early factory, Arkwright’s Cotton Mills by Night (1782–83). Sequences inside the glassworks in Werner Herzog’s Heart of Glass (1976) seem strongly influenced by this industrial subgenre of A Companion to Werner Herzog, First Edition. Edited by Brad Prager. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Romantic painting.1 Herzog probably did not read Chambers’ Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, although Chambers did originally find his most responsive audience in Germany: his Jardin Anglo-chinois was most fully realized—complete with artificial volcano—by Franz von Anhalt-Dessau at Wörlitz. But the doomed glassworks in Heart of Glass does resemble the architect’s pseudo-volcanic glassworks in one crucial respect: it integrates the technological sublime with the natural sublime. Herzog’s powerful montages of Alpine mountains and raging waterfalls alternate with scenes inside the glassworks, suggesting a sublation of the technological by the natural sublime—an apocalypse in keeping with the prophecies of Hias, the film’s central character. Unlike the glowing forges of Wright’s paintings, Herzog’s eighteenth-century Bavarian glassworks will not make the transition to industrial modernity. The art of making the famous ruby glass is lost because the master workman, Mühlbeck, has died without revealing the secret of the process, or, figurally speaking, because the transcendence that it stands for is predicated on a loss of origins. Other scholars have pointed out various aspects of Herzog’s engagement with the Romantic sublime in Heart of Glass and other films (see especially Peucker 1984). The proto-industrial echoes of the sublime in Heart of Glass have a unique importance not only for the plot and symbolism of the film, but also for its relation to a more immediate context, the Heimatfilm. Moreover, the mid-twentieth-century nostalgia for pre-industrial village life that informs the Heimatfilm also comes up for scrutiny in Herbert Achternbusch’s pseudo-autobiographical novel Die Stunde des Todes (“The Hour of Death”), from which Herzog’s screenplay is drawn. Herzog’s long montage sequences, shot in the western United States, the southwest coast of Ireland, and other spectacular settings, constitute his most obvious departure from Achternbusch’s script. Without losing entirely Achternbusch’s ironic distance from the scenes of village life, Herzog balances that irony with footage of raw nature and a broader emphasis—familiar from his other films of the period—on preconscious and visionary states, the raw material of language. The ruby glass derives materially and spiritually from the dreams of the alchemists, from Goethe’s anti-Newtonian Theory of Colors (Zur Farbenlehre), and from a tradition of color symbolism memorably captured by Ernst Meister in a 1962 poem that describes transcendence as “an other light” (ein anderes Licht). Here the ruby sun of the apocalypse sets on the horizon of experience, illuminating a flock of birds no longer either heavenly or earthly: “beyond the/beyond. Their/beaks are rubies” ( Jenseits von/jenseits. Die/Schnäbel rubinen) (Meister 1979: 74). With these antecedents, Herzog’s ruby glass cannot assimilate the ethos of industrial modernity. The film returns raw materials to their raw state, dwelling with the metaphysics of origin—the belief in a mythic wholeness to which we long to return—that marks the romantic sublime at least as powerfully as its affiliation with the Enlightenment and technological progress. In other words, Heart of Glass does not simply embrace the quest for mastery (visual or technological) that is associated with the sublime, but also takes seriously the limitations on human agency that are evoked by raw sublimity.

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Heart of Glass has had a polarizing effect both on reviewers and on film scholars. Much of the debate has turned on the ideological baggage of Herzog’s sublimity and specifically on his manipulation of the actors—supposedly under hypnosis during shooting—and the setting. Is his sublime “ironic,” as Alan Singer argues, distancing viewers from the “metaphysics of longing” in which the characters are embroiled (Singer 1986: 195)—or does it demand submission from us as well, enlisting “actors, audience, and critics” as “unquestioning followers” (Rentschler 1986: 163)? Summing up two opposite tendencies in the response to Heart of Glass, Singer and Rentschler also offer differing assessments of the Romantic legacy behind this film, though both agree that it is present. For Rentschler, Herzog here inaugurates a pursuit of aesthetic vision at all costs that reduces history itself to an “inevitable natural cataclysm” (173), authorized in part by visual allusions to the landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich (allusions that also link this film to Nazi aesthetics, in Rentschler’s view). For Singer, the point of these painterly panoramas is precisely that they are non-naturalistic, revealing “nature as artifactual” in the manner of the Kantian sublime (Singer 1986: 195). Herzog himself encouraged these associations, but in my view the emphasis on Friedrich in these and other critics is one-sided. Wright of Derby—though not cited by Herzog himself— embodies an equally relevant aspect of the Romantic legacy: his technological and dynamic scenes answer the quiescent and depopulated landscapes of Friedrich, just as the fiery and unstable glassworks in the film anchors the narrative that is fitfully interrupted by Herzog’s non-narrative sublime landscape sequences.2 Wright’s paintings explain no more than Friedrich’s, but they help to restore the connection between the technological and the natural sublime and thus facilitate the recovery of historical circumstances encoded or suppressed by this film. By juxtaposing a fragile proto-capitalist mode of production with the sublime of wilderness, Herzog captures the Romantic refusal to acknowledge any contradiction between the technological and the natural sublime. Sir William Hamilton, a British contemporary of Chambers who studied real volcanoes, makes this connection from the other side, comparing a lava flow to a “river of red hot and liquid metal, such as we see in the glass-houses” (Hamilton 1772: 6). In addition to his industrial and pre-industrial scenes Wright famously painted Vesuvius in eruption while visiting Naples, and Herzog himself shot a film at the foot of an active volcano in La Soufrière (1977) shortly after Heart of Glass was completed. Volcanoes too produce glass (obsidian), but technological glass, to become fluid at the more manageable temperature of 1200°C, requires potash. Potash, charcoal, and quartz were among the raw materials abundantly present in the Bavarian Forest (Weinberger 2001: 34–35). The ruby glass required further interventions that the film presents as contingent and non-transmissible, raw in the sense of “irrecoverable”—and hence like transcendent origins. The obsessive aristocrat who owns the glassworks ends up in prison, having discovered the lost secret ingredient in the blood of a virgin servant girl, whom he murders, and subsequently sets the works on fire (recalling Chambers’ “horror and sublimity”). This fire, which of course

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takes place at night, prompts a masterful sequence of painterly images that evoke Wright’s Cottage on Fire at Night (c. 1785–93). By situating this film in relation to the history and imagery of technology, we may recalibrate its relation to Romanticism. At the same time, considering the glassworks in its historical context makes it possible to reinflect the questions of historical agency that have been raised by the film’s critics. I will argue that the film is not an allegory of capitalism or technological modernity but a quasi-historical narrative of organic community, nostalgic and yet critical. Mühlbeck’s intuition and technical mastery are lost, and the film’s alternative vision, represented by the wilderness footage, frames human mastery as contingent: not at the mercy of a cataclysm, but dependent on the unstable interaction of social and environmental history. Achternbusch’s script explicitly sets the action in the eighteenth century, and although the film follows this screenplay closely, it is not ostentatiously a period piece. This occasional historical vagueness, compounded by the frequently recurring footage of other parts of the world, may have promoted allegorical readings of this film (beginning with Aufderheide and McCormick 1978), and specifically the common but anachronistic identification of the owner of the glassworks as an “industrialist.” In the script this character has a name, Goldfinger, referring to the colloidal gold that was in fact needed to make ruby glass, one reason for its value. The absence of this name in the film is one of many small but telling historical omissions on Herzog’s part. The proto-industrial mode of Bavarian glass production also supports the complex regionalist agenda of this film, which itself coincided with the advent of heritage tourism on the so-called “Glass Road” (Glasstrasse) in the mid-1970s. The friction between the film’s transcendent claims and its historical setting suggests that the longing for origins precedes the loss of elemental harmony with nature, as elusive in this pre-industrial setting as in the nostalgic present.

Hearts of Glass The prophet Hias leaves the aristocratic glassworks owner behind in prison to resume his course as a wanderer above the sea of fog, but the glowing images of the glassworkers remain to signal a more dependent relation to nature. By seizing the owner (played by Stefan Güttler and referred to simply as the “lord” or “master” [der Herr] in the film) when they find he has set the works on fire, the villagers come closest to enacting the political revolution that Hias (Sepp Bierbichler) has foreseen. But after the catastrophe they seize him too, blaming him (like the Trojans) for what he has merely predicted. Confined to the dungeon with the owner, he shows emotion for the first time in the film, pacing like a caged animal and longing to see the woods again. The owner responds, laconically: “And you don’t want to see people again? I like you. You have a heart of glass.” Brad Prager

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has pointed out a deeply rooted connection in this film between visual perception and glass, specifically images of green glass in Romantic literature that signify “the lenses through which all subjective perception takes place” (Prager 2007: 96). Herzog’s ruby glass, as Prager argues, acts as a visual medium, both as the object of the owner’s longing and as an inspiration to other characters who see visions while gazing at the ruby vessels. Moreover, the heart and the human body themselves are vessels of ruby glass, or so the owner comes to believe. The fragility of these vessels registers in “the almost irrelevant dimensions of the human body with respect to nature” in the wilderness sequences and in related films such as La Soufrière—which also, as Prager points out, underscore “the landscape’s indifference to our presence” (2007: 110). Herzog himself, in Alan Greenberg’s published journal of the production of the film, speculates that the “fragile” or “translucent” state of Hias’ heart results from his lonely condition as a prophet (Greenberg 1976: 57). Since Hias is the character associated with unmediated vision in Herzog’s film, it is worth recalling another mineral analogue for transparency, rock crystal: “as pure as crystal/shall your mind [Gemüte] be” (Silesius 1948: 1). Unlike the owner and the villagers, Hias does not depend on the ruby glass for his visions. The visionary gift returns to him once he is released back into the forest, but the owner’s vision seemingly has spent itself. The glassworks and its protoindustrial tragedy seem to vanish in the face of Hias’ vision of a “rocky island,” which materializes as the film’s concluding sequence. But Herzog uses some of the same actors for this sequence, otherwise totally removed in plot and setting, reminding us that the ruby glass sustained more visionaries than one. This final episode is one of several added to the script that greatly accentuate the role of the seer, sometimes identified with Herzog himself (e.g., Rentschler 1986: 172). The wilderness footage allows us to see through Hias’ eyes, but his interactions with the villagers, and arguably the concluding sequence as well, remind us that raw material is a social substance. Two other added visionary episodes have garnered less attention. Before she is murdered, the servant girl, Ludmilla, has a vision of a depopulated village while gazing at the owner’s cabinet of ruby glass. One of the glassworkers, too, develops a visionary gift. As the owner’s longing turns to madness, he invites this young worker to his table to impart a vision of the “land of ruby” inspired by the loss of Mühlbeck’s technique. Mühlbeck’s nontransmissible technology expresses the historical contingency that generates the narrative of catastrophic loss out of the narrative of organic community itself. Hias, seemingly the only one exempt from the spell of the ruby glass, consistently predicts the destruction of the works. But his prophecy merges with local events and it remains a question whether he is truly exempt from the “madness” that runs “rampant in the village.” In addition to sublime wilderness and the glowing furnace of the works, the film offers another visionary locus in the appropriately named Schauschrank. This vitrine or viewing cabinet holds the owner’s collection of choice pieces—in prosaic reality, etched glasses adorned with red flashing like those made in

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nineteenth-century Bavarian and Bohemian workshops.3 This cabinet is the scene of the owner’s first metaphysical declaration of longing, as he examines a glass produced by Mühlbeck’s technique: “and this splendor will now be lost to the world!” It is also the scene of Ludmilla’s vision. Gazing into the glowing vessels and tracing their shapes in the air, she sees a town populated only by animals. For “How could people live in glass houses?” she asks, just before Hias startles her and she breaks a piece of the precious glass. This line (added by Herzog) helps to explain the charge of banality leveled by some reviewers, but it does express the flaw in the owner’s analogy between glass and the body. In a chilling pendant to this scene in the script, the owner declares after killing her that her body must be added to the pieces in the vitrine (Schauschrank) once she has finished “cooling”: “Then she will fracture no more. She will have pride of place in the vitrine” (Achternbusch 1975: 49). Herzog replaces the second of these lines with a splendid improvisation on the metonymy of glass and blood: “that is the pure mixture!” (das ist das reine Gemenge!), the owner exclaims, confirming his hypothesis that blood is the missing secret ingredient. (In the script, he is heard lapping it up, another omitted detail that underscores Herzog’s shift in the direction of alchemy and mysticism—though he did embrace vampirism two years later in Nosferatu— The Vampyre [1979].) The owner’s murderous experiment on Ludmilla (Sonja Skiba) directs attention to a form of oppression more closely associated with the aristocratic household than with labor in the glassworks. Both this killing and, in less extreme form, the worker’s command performance of his vision of the land of ruby, are symptoms of the owner’s madness. “This with the ruby glass is a sickness of the master (des Herrn),” as the innkeeper informs Hias on his arrival in the village. Hias himself has declared that “madness runs rampant in the village,” but there is a fairly constant tension between the owner’s delusions and the workers’ competence, as when they smuggle loads of glass across the border for sale, rather than throwing them into the lake as the owner has commanded. Although from a scenic point of view the gifted worker appears as a dependent at the master’s table, his verbal mastery is of a piece with the imperturbable industry of the glassblowers in scenes inside the works. In one of these scenes the master kneels in a kind of ecstatic prostration while the workers file in and surround him in an almost threatening manner. In his performance the visionary worker claims “the land of ruby” as “my land,” while the owner listens in rapt attention: “All people dance in the red glow [Schein]. … Their blood, their life, everything is in the glass, in the red, in the color … everything is in this land, and everything is ruby.” Ludmilla is constantly objectified by the owner and his eager secretary (Clemens Scheitz), who refer to her as the “domestic” (das Dienstmensch), a genderless locution that somewhat exaggerates the classed speech of the period setting. Skiba was hypnotized for her visionary scene at the vitrine, and her inspired description of a depopulated townscape is entirely improvised, or so Herzog claims in the commentary. Mark Wickum, in the “production notes” appended to the DVD of this film,

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writes that Ludmilla’s murder may be understood as a “sly comment on critics who accused him of going too far in the name of art” (Wickum 2001). This may be giving Herzog too much credit, but it does make an apt rebuttal to those readings that represent this episode as a typical and unselfconscious instance of exploitation on Herzog’s part. The murder represents the culmination of his interest throughout the film in the objectification of this servant girl, displacing the narrative of exploitation from the idealized pre-industrial setting of the workshop to the social relations of feudalism. Both the insistence on aristocratic mannerisms and the proto-industrial character of the glassworks militate against reading the film as an allegory of capitalism. Herzog admits to introducing the theme of madness into the script (DVD commentary), and although general to some extent, it afflicts the owner most strongly because it is inherited. The owner’s father, a character introduced by Herzog, announces the loss of Mühlbeck’s secret to viewers early on. His haunting, demented laughter punctuates this announcement and becomes a recurring index of madness in the film, as well as a sign of aristocratic inheritance. The owner’s first soliloquy and subsequent visions link the ruby glass most strongly to the metaphysics of origin, the belief in a mythic totality or integrity that was lost with the secret of the glass. As his obsession develops it takes on a religious character. Herzog keeps the fiery origins of the physical glass present as well by intercutting these visionary declarations with extended shots inside the works, particularly the round furnace with its flaming apertures. In contemplating the “second glass” in the vitrine, the owner demands, “what will save me now from the chaos of the universe (Unbilden des freien Weltalls)?” Unbilden literally means “non-images,” thereby evoking the capacity of the glass as a visual medium that renders forms intelligible. The loss of that primal order is already figured here as a quest for salvation, a quest that culminates in an at least implicitly Christian image of blood sacrifice, the murder of Ludmilla. In the next sequence of this kind, the owner kneels before an image of the virgin, extolling the original “purity” of the glass and literalizing the metaphor by way of original sin: “The fracture is Sin” (Der Sprung ist die Sünde). After a pious “Amen,” Adalbert (his secretary or steward, a role analogous to the “scribe” also played by Scheitz in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser [1974]) echoes the owner’s speculation that this “fracture” or sin spells doom for the factories. He cites prophecies attributed to Hias that underscore the idea of a historical necessity behind the decline of the factories—a decline already symbolized by ruined medieval castles. “The ruby must save us,” the owner replies. Though “factory” is used in its pre-industrial sense in this film, the image of a post-technological future is deliberately vague, like all of Hias’ prophecies, and can be applied to the late industrial setting as well. The continuing association with blood, however, renders the ruby glass something more than an industrial product. The owner later explains the problem in terms of his own aristocratic blood: “I need a glass to hold my blood, or it will drain away.” The ruby glass is not transparent. Like the philosopher’s “stone of wisdom,” as Herzog puts it in the commentary, “it could stand for anything.” The visionary

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episodes connected to the glass offer analogies between glass vessels and the body that seem fundamental, and connected to the lapsarian narrative about the glass and moral purity. By contrasting visionary subjectivities they also draw attention to social inequality, unsettling the nostalgic view of organic community. Two of the episodes set glassmaking technology in the context of consumer culture and display in the form of the vitrine—a glass case for the display of glasses destined for show (rather than use). In the context of vision, it is worth recalling an episode in the history of another glassmaking technology—lenses and prisms—that also saw dramatic advances in the early modern (pre-industrial) period. Newton first definitively isolated red light along with other prismatic colors in his experimentum crucis involving two prisms, described in 1672. Simon Schaffer’s “Glass Works,” an essay on this discovery, points out that the transparency of glass, and of optical instruments in particular, was subject to vigorous debate in the wake of Newton’s experiment. The transparency or self-evidence of Newton’s result—the analysis of white light into “primitive” colors—depended on the transparency of the prism, which remained to be established (Schaffer 1989: 70–71). The ruby glow, der rote Schein, provides a filmic medium in which human eyesight, too, is something less than transparent. Hias’ unmediated vision produces unconnected images of nature and obscure prophecies. Adalbert, who seems at first to turn his eyes heavenward in piety, evinces an astonishing capacity to roll them back in his head, with only the whites showing—when he does not wish to see. (Many of the actors display the whites of their eyes, a gesture that seems to function as a conventional sign of being under hypnosis.) In the murder scene, Herzog juxtaposes Adalbert’s rolling eyes with a long close-up on a painting of St. Francis gazing heavenward and receiving the stigmata. In this Christian context, the owner’s obsession may be glossed as a religious mistake, a confusion between sacramental blood and a vessel that appears already imbued with blood. The sacrament supposed to erase original sin is thus juxtaposed against the fragility of a body that “cracks” easily, a fragility that also characterizes technology in the film vis-à-vis raw nature.

Raw Materials: Between Industry and Alchemy Glass manufacture is the technology that brings visionary subjectivity into focus in this film, along with associated historical questions. The loss of Mühlbeck’s secret appears at first to inhabit the realm of fable rather than social history. In the first episode of dialogue inside the works, one glassworker (the young visionary) despondently observes to another: “he could easily have written down his method for making the ruby glass.” The older worker responds, “have you ever written a word?” seemingly to remind the younger that they are all illiterate. The younger man, undeterred, persists, “but he could have talked.” The myth of origin is

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displaced from writing to speech in what seems a classic Derridean move; but as in Derrida, this move casts doubt on the authenticity of the origin. The owner’s father announces Mühlbeck’s loss directly to the camera just prior to this dialogue, deploying a key word (Gemenge) mistranslated (here as “secret”) both times that it appears in the English subtitles: “Mühlbeck is dead, and no one knows the formula (Gemenge) of the ruby glass.” This chemical term for a heterogeneous mixture— sand and potash, the raw materials of glass, in this case with an added “secret ingredient” (die Beigabe), most likely gold (III) chloride for “true” ruby glass or Goldrubin—recurs in the young master’s speech when he pretends to have found “the pure mixture” (das reine Gemenge) in a later scene. In this way Herzog creates a mythology of the ruby glass while at the same time alluding to its historical associations with alchemy and industrial secrecy (see Blau 1983: 51). Two ways of understanding the lost technique emerge from the next sequence inside the works, one more aesthetic and the other more practical. Gigl, the only glassmaker whose name is given in the film, comes up with the practical solution. In another interpolated scene, the young owner reports to his father: “the glassmaker Gigl thinks he has the secret of the ruby glass.” In the ensuing demonstration, Gigl twice blows experimental bubbles of the purported ruby before a spellbound audience of all the glassworkers as well as the owner, his father, and Adalbert. The owner—scrutinizing Gigl’s face more closely than his product— angrily rejects these attempts as inauthentic, but there is no objective evidence of its failure. The glass is still glowing from the furnace while the owner pokes at it with his rapier, and the color cannot yet be determined. This reaction exemplifies the owner’s more purely aesthetic approach to the problem, and also constitutes a notable intervention in the narrative. In Achternbusch’s script, a stage direction indicates that the glass looks brown (bräunlich) when Gigl holds it up for inspection, suggesting that the failure is apparent to everyone (Achternbusch 1975: 28). Even the later episode, in which the owner announces in the works that he has discovered the secret, ends in Achternbusch with the workers cheering the owner and carrying him out in triumph. But the film represents the owner as already mad in the earlier scene, accentuated by the father’s demented laughter; a long close-up on this actor’s laughing face cements Gigl’s failure and also signals the aristocratic inheritance of madness. In the later scene, Güttler uses gesture to point to the thesis that blood is the secret ingredient, and his madness is a foregone conclusion for the workers. This is the solution that first dawns on him in the confrontation with Hias and solidifies after his dinner with the visionary worker, when he declares that he has found a “secret” that he can “sell to all the glass works.” Inside the works—not long before the murder—Güttler makes it clear what secret is meant by running his hands along his body and saying, “I have it … we all have it.” Curiously, this realization dawns in a moment when the owner still seems focused on a practical solution, waving a vial of yellow powder in Hias’ face and demanding that he intuit the formula. At this point his declared need for a vessel to hold his blood is still an aesthetic

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Figure 11.1 Joseph Wright of Derby. An Iron Forge. 1772. Oil on canvas. Copyright Tate Museum, London, 2011.

symptom of the threat of cosmic disorder that the loss of the formula represents for him. But the yellow powder and Gigl’s attempts to recover the formula stand for the historical practice of glassmaking that madness and vision never transcend entirely in this film. The final sequence inside the works, nearly four minutes long, inhabits a documentary realm that owes something to genre paintings of industrial scenes and perhaps to educational TV as well. The camera tracks individual workers with different specialties, dwelling on different products and stages of the process. One extended close-up shows a man forming a delicate horse figurine out of an unformed bubble of blown glass. This shot, along with much of the sequence, is illuminated by ambient light from the large round furnace with its twelve blazing apertures. Herzog draws attention to this “very elaborate lighting” in the commentary: “much of the impression is as if the glowing glass has illuminated the scene.” Wright’s An Iron Forge (Figure 11.1) achieves the same effect with a molten bar of iron. Here the labor of the workman bent forward in the foreground is set off by his looming Cyclopean master as well as the family members who look on. Herzog’s scenes lack this domestic component, though there is a comparable symmetry between active and resting workers, and between this and the earlier sequences showing the works empty or idle. The prominence of the forge in Wright’s frame mirrors the important role played by the furnace and glassworking equipment in Herzog’s compositions in this sequence (Figure 11.2). Both compositions emphasize labor power as well by crowding relatively small, dramatically lit spaces with bodies.

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Figure 11.2 Images of the glassworks in Heart of Glass (1976) resemble the glowing forges of Wright’s paintings. Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Werner Herzog/ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

Wright’s painting valorizes technology as natural, and so too—albeit with some historical qualifications—does this dynamic sequence in Heart of Glass. From a purely visual standpoint, Wright’s painting (among others by him in this vein) provides a better analogue than the seventeenth-century genre scenes of Georges de la Tour, who is cited by Herzog himself. In these domestic interiors—such as The Dice Players (c. 1650)—lighting is provided by a candle or other small source of flame. Herzog emulates these scenes in the tavern which, together with the works, makes up the social world of the film. But using a glass furnace or a glowing forge to light a scene of industry is a different kind of gesture. The illumination comes

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not merely from the fuel but from the raw material (glass, iron) undergoing transformation. The furnace produces an artificial sunlight that makes the daylight coming through the windows in the film seem nearly irrelevant. William Chambers playfully combines the technological with the natural sublime in the form of the “artificial volcanoes” described in my epigraph. Wright creates different kinds of paintings around each motif—Iron Forge vs. Vesuvius in Eruption—but taken as a whole, his oeuvre suggests a family affinity between the two kinds of sublimity. Like Wright, Herzog is interested in both kinds, and links the two specifically through fire and lighting. He comes closest to collapsing this distinction in the destruction of the glassworks, which also marks a limit to the productivity and viability of the human technological sublime. Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness (1992), a brooding exploration of burning oil wells in the wake of the first Gulf War, offers a powerful parallel. The comparison to Wright helps to show how Herzog employs the visual idiom of the technological sublime to establish glassmaking technology as natural. Herzog did not choose this traditional glass blowing arbitrarily, however, and part of the point is that technology in general has left nature behind. With Wright, perhaps largely for historical reasons, the case is very different; the iron forge, the cotton mill, and scientific instruments are all equally of interest to him. In the late industrial context, traditional glassmaking stands for a technology in which the materiality of the object is still a limiting factor. “Average glass,” by contrast, is “fabricated in huge assembly lines,” as Herzog explains in the commentary. There are no glass blowers in the modern factories, but the workshops in Bavaria prove that “certain things still can’t be done purely with mechanical devices.” Other traditional industries might be contrasted with mass production, but the technical aspects of glass blowing, including its associations with heat and light, render it a special case. Despite the high intensity of the production process, it requires virtually “no tools” apart from the blowpipe. It is hard to imagine a more archetypal technology in a film concerned, as Herzog repeatedly says, with archetypes: at least in theory, the works can be constructed and operated using entirely pre-industrial processes and materials, and the blowpipe itself harnesses human breath to make the material yield to manual dexterity. In the commentary Herzog recalls his astonishment at the ease with which the figurine and other objects were produced from “incredibly hot matter”: “I’ve never seen people who understand material as they do … they’re actually real artists.” On one level, Herzog sees himself here as documenting a demanding and dangerous vocation that mirrors his own (like ski-jumping, rock-climbing, or grizzly-chasing). Perhaps art, too, is a technology that approximates the natural sublime because of the risks it involves, because it is an organic process involving the body, and because the product embodies the process. (In the case of the glass its ruby color reinforces these organic associations.) The comparison with Wright’s paintings suggests that traditional glassmaking partakes of the technological sublime as it was first envisioned in the Romantic period, as analogous with and

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ultimately subject to natural forces. Unlike many examples in science fiction film, Herzog’s technological sublime is not posthuman, but his interest in the physical hardships associated with “authentic” technology is not purely nostalgic either.4 The organic community sustained by the low-input technology of glassmaking in the film might seem to be yet another ideological construction in support of the Romantic dream of “creat[ing] as nature creates” (Peucker 1986: 225). But this community is evidently on the brink of collapse, beset with violence and chaos and unable to preserve its technological mastery. The burning glassworks brings together the two kinds of genre painting, represented by Wright and de la Tour, that may be seen (apart from landscape painting) as influences on this film. An especially animated and carnivalesque scene in the tavern provides the setting for the catastrophic news that the works is on fire. The tavern scene and the conflagration taken together become a reflection on the hardships of life in a remote pre-industrial village. (In the nearly contemporaneous Stroszek [1977], the hardships of life in a 1970s Wisconsin hamlet—and for that matter in Berlin—can be seen as remarkably similar to those of village life.) In the tavern, a villager dances with the corpse of a man he has killed the previous day, and the glassworkers applaud while outside their aristocratic employer capriciously destroys their means of livelihood. On hearing news of the fire, the men rush out, but the atmospheric low light of the tavern interior is only gently augmented at first by a reflection on the open door of the flickering from the burning glassworks. The ensuing shot, one of the painterly masterpieces of a painterly film, positions a hurdy-gurdy player against the backdrop of this projected flickering light. This musician, another early modern prototype, improvises a keening dirge for the works around the words “the glassworks is burning” (die Hütten brennt). The two worlds of somber pre-industrial interior and burgeoning technology meet in this open doorway.

The Art of Glassmaking Besides Romantic painting, there is another, more immediate context for Herzog’s historicism in Heart of Glass: the recovery of local history and technology in northeast Bavaria by manufacturers and cultural historians. Bavarian cultural nationalism also brought Herzog and Achternbusch together for this project—the first time Herzog did not use his own screenplay—though it later became a point of contention between them (Achternbusch 1980: 266–267). Alan Greenberg quotes Herzog’s instructions to the casting committee as saying that he chose to shoot the glassworks scenes at “the glass factory of Eisch Ltd, in Frauenau (near Zwiesel), which is the only such place to preserve an old round furnace that still functions” (Greenberg 1976: 19). Another traditional facility, Joska, opened its doors in nearby Bodenmais in 1975 and commissioned a history of the industry by Reinhard Haller,

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whose many publications have focused on the history of glass in the region and on the Hias legend (which he claims is spurious)—the same two features that stood out to Herzog and Achternbusch. Although Haller examines records of Glashütten operating in the Bavarian Forest as early as the sixteenth century (1975: 11–13), the ruby glass appeared first in the ducal glass works in Potsdam, and only reached the south much later—as much because of industrial secrecy as because making it was a difficult and expensive process. The secret was first discovered by Johannes Kunkel, a former alchemist employed at Potsdam by the Duke of Brandenburg, whose Vollkommene Glasmacherkunst (Quintessential Art of Glassmaking, 1679)—though otherwise complete—deliberately omits the “curious technique” for making ruby glass. He writes initially that the time for disclosure has not yet come (Kunkel 1992: 396) and further justifies the need for secrecy in a protective letter (Schutzschrift) added in 1689 (471). Specimens of Kunkel’s ruby glass survive, however, and histories of technology well into the nineteenth century continue to celebrate his invention of ruby glass.5 The history of glassmaking thus offers a direct antecedent for Mühlbeck’s secrecy and opens a vista on the mystical and alchemical traditions associated with glass and ruby glass in particular. Achternbusch credits Mühlbeck explicitly with “inventing” the ruby glass (1975: 22), a formulation that alludes to the long history of (mostly fraudulent) attempts to recapture Kunkel’s secret process (Blau 1983: 51–52, 157). His treatise opens with a comparison between glass and gold that helps to contextualize the specific alchemical use of gold in ruby glass. At the same time, paste—Glasflüsse or künstliche Edelsteine—could be used to emulate real gemstones, and this technique is a major focus of Kunkel’s compendium. He holds the resemblance between paste and gemstones to be based on a real affinity, like the alchemist’s transmutation of base metals into gold. He also notes problems with earlier attempts, however, dismissing Antonio Neri’s formula for “ruby” rock crystal (among others) as a subtle illusion (subtiles Blendwerk) (Kunkel 1992: 98). In the DVD commentary the interviewer notices this affiliation when he asks whether the ruby glass stands for “the philosopher’s stone, or something that doesn’t exist.” Herzog replies that the film’s visions are real, suggesting that for him the ruby glass motif captures an interplay between authenticity and show, rather than simple unreality.6 Kunkel’s treatise helps to reveal the mystery and secrecy that Herzog evokes in Heart of Glass as part of a historical engagement with the proto-industrial setting. Secrecy was essential to the ability of what were essentially cottage industries— hence Glashütte—to command shares of a large international market (Kunkel 1992: 382, 471) as prescribed by Franklin F. Mendels’ concept of “protoindustrialization” (Weinberger 2001: 72). “True” ruby glass depended literally on gold as raw material added to the Glasgemenge—the heterogeneous mixture of raw materials prior to melting. At the same time, red and red-violet (or Goldrubin, generally synonymous with Goldpurpur) carry powerful symbolic associations that contribute to the mystique of the ruby glass both in Kunkel’s treatise and in

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Herzog’s film. Ruby itself is one precious material in which the color naturally occurs. “True” ruby glass, like other artificial gemstones, aspires to be indistinguishable from the gemstone. Goethe cites Tyrean and royal purple, among other precedents, to help justify the priority he places on red light—rather than white light—as the true primitive color in his anti-Newtonian Theory of Colors. The mystery of Herzog’s ruby glass incorporates material history, then, but also the aesthetic history suggested by Goethe’s Romantic revival of pre-Newtonian optics. As I argued earlier, transparency is very much at issue in Herzog’s elaboration on the theme of colored glass as a visual medium. Goethe demonstrates empirically that any attempt to increase the concentration of a blue or a yellow introduces a reddish glow (rötlicher Schein), which intensifies consistently to violet or orange (Goethe 1960: 478–479). He goes on to explain this intensification as a sublime teleology, arguing that red (not white) contains all colors (497). By looking through ruby glass at a landscape, Goethe claims, we can get a sense of the red light that will fill earth and sky on the Day of Judgment (500). Goethe’s conclusion powerfully illustrates the metaphysical tradition of color symbolism attached to red, a tradition that reinforces Herzog’s interest both in lost origins and in last things—as particularly evident in the apocalypse insistently envisioned by Hias in the film. One pseudo-historical element of this apocalypse is an invasion of the Reds (“when you see the Reds coming, you must run”), and color symbolism operates formally throughout the film in many ways, as Noël Carroll has noted (1998: 296). For Achternbusch, the most memorable image in this film was the Muscovy duck, with its carbuncular “blood-red head,” that Herzog placed on Hias’ table during the long sequence in which he prophesies in the tavern (1980: 267). The owner’s “metaphysical longing” for this absolute red (to adapt Singer’s language) drives him to call on Hias in a scene that momentarily suggests a visionary affinity between them. Rentschler has pointed out that as Hias climbs the stairs to the counting-house his shadow blends with the owner’s on the wall, suggesting a kind of doubling that Rentschler (1986: 160) rightly associates with the expressionist tradition of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920). Their difference becomes apparent when the owner commands, “Du sollst die Beigab für den Rubin sehen.” The English translation, “you are to see the secret of the Ruby,” misses a vital contradiction. Beigabe means “additive”—here the ingredient added to the generic Gemenge of sand and potash—and the owner is holding a vial of yellow powder in his hand, making Hias literally see it. The true “secret” is merely a chemical compound, but the owner’s vision of blood, here made explicit for the first time, replaces history with myth so completely that he cannot see it himself. The loss of mythic wholeness manifests itself in the body, which can no longer hold his blood nor stand the sight of the sun. Hias is umoved by this appeal, warning, “you will never see the sun again.” These hints of vampirism together with the blending shadows may indicate that Herzog was already engaged in the study of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) that led to his own Nosferatu two years later.

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Though vision is more central to the main plot, regional economic history and the technology of glassmaking deeply inform the visual language of Heart of Glass. The environmental historian Elisabeth Weinberger classifies eighteenth-century Bavarian glass manufacture as a secondary application of forest resources, rather than a truly proto-industrial sector. But she gives further examples of protoindustrialism in the Bavarian Forest (Weinberger 2001: 75), among which Kraxenwarenfertigung, or the production of back-basket wares, also relates directly to the film. Herzog himself appears in the relevant scene, which features Kraxenwaren—goods transported to market by workers carrying wooden racks or baskets on their backs. According to Achternbusch, glass made in the Bavarian/ Bohemian Forest was transported by oxcart as far as Barcelona (1980: 264)—a description that conforms to proto-industrialism even better than transport by foot, because of the international reach of the market. Herzog, however, combines the tradition of Kraxenwaren with history of the glass. At dinner with the visionary young glassworker, the master announces that he will sell his secret— blood, as we have learned in the dialogue with Hias—to the other glassworks. In anticipation of newfound wealth from the sale of his industrial secret, the owner takes two radical steps. He orders a larger furnace for the works and demands that ten racks (Kraxen) of the ruby glass be thrown in the Arbersee, a lake near Bodenmais.7 In a majestic shot we see a procession of ten workers (including Herzog himself ) striding along with the racks of glass on their backs, clanking musically. Hias explains to Ludmilla that these workers are “not so stupid”; they will actually smuggle the glass across the border and sell it. This procession of glass bearers, like several other somber processions in this film, evokes his apocalyptic vision that the villagers will not heed: “like sleepers they wander knowingly into their doom.” The owner’s sublime vision of superabundance—dying the lake red—figures the self-delusion of the technological will to power.8 The critical desire to see Goldfinger as a capitalist or “industrialist” (Prager 2007: 96) is somewhat off the mark in the sense that Herzog uses glass technology to describe an earlier historical location, one more closely associated with organic community and unmanageable raw materials. The glass industry flourished at a time when more than one-third of Bavaria was forest (Weinberger 2001: 56), supplying ample wood and potash, and reached its peak long before industrialization (Haller 1975: 21). In its proto-industrial phase, glass manufacture provides an ideal setting for the filmic realization of a Romantic technological sublime. It brings small groups of laboring bodies in close conjunction with a fiery and still imperfectly understood manufacturing process. Newspaper reviews and subsequent criticism have frequently attended to the pictorial nature of this film—in more than one case condemned as un-filmic or static imagery (Bilderstillstand) (S. S. 1977; see also Petz 1977)—but have chiefly noticed the echoes of Friedrich in Herzog’s wilderness footage (Fü 1977). The scenes of technological sublimity, by contrast, give a sense of raw materials being transformed by a dangerous and difficult artistic process. Technological mastery, as in the owner’s vision of a lake dyed red, is

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only an illusion—and so too is the mastery of the film editor, if Singer is right about the deliberately “artifactual” nature of Herzog’s wilderness sequences. Lotte Eisner herself, in an interview recorded by Herzog in Portrait Werner Herzog (1986) anointed him as the heir of Romanticism, and Herzog glosses her remark by showing us two Friedrich paintings, The Monk by the Sea (1808) and The Wanderer before the Sea of Fog (1818). The tiny figure of the monk, he explains, is “insignificant in contrast to the magnitude of the landscape.” The technological sublime offers a different visual language, but provides another avenue for exploring human insignificance, inasmuch as the technology of glass proves as fragile and irrecoverable as the substance itself.

Blood and Soil: History and Apocalypse If filmmaking technology in 1976 was more advanced than glassmaking technology in the late eighteenth century, then Herzog’s analogy is at least implicitly nostalgic. The setting of proto-industrial Bavaria inescapably brings Heart of Glass into dialogue with the Heimatfilm genre. Herzog, for his part, has flatly denied that it is a Heimatfilm (Achternbusch 1980: 266), while at the same time he has emphasized regional and biographical elements in the film, particularly in the DVD commentary. Christopher Wickham has identified numerous ways in which “the Heimatfilm is undermined consistently” by Heart of Glass, which he compares in this respect to  earlier parodies of the genre (1989: 116). Wickham argues further that Achternbusch’s own Bavarian film, Das letzte Loch (The Last Hole, 1981), “justifies” the stronger term Anti-Heimatfilm, partly because it confronts the Nazi past directly (1989: 117). The question remains concerning the element of regionalism in Achternbusch’s script and Herzog’s transformation of it in the film. The Hour of Death features an autobiographical narrator preoccupied with negotiating his Bavarian identity, and Achternbusch’s writing about the film touches on his rediscovery of prewar Bavarian culture (Achternbusch 1980: 264). Herzog is very explicit about his Bavarian roots, and their discussions leading to the film evidently built on this regional affinity (Greenberg 1976: 56). Thus it is easy to sympathize with Achternbusch’s surprise when he reports that Herzog rebuffed his congratulations for having made “the best Heimatfilm ever” (Achternbusch 1980: 266). Yet Achternbusch’s script—confirming Wickham’s distinction between the two films—seems the more critical of the two, including elements of what looks like ideology critique in his references not only to the Nazi past but to the eighteenthcentury legacy of colonialism, references that Herzog omits. A closer look at Herzog’s changes to the script will help to clarify the critical aspects of his nostalgia and its relationship to the issues of technology and aesthetics outlined so far. Herzog’s film necessarily makes more explicit connections between the eighteenth-century and contemporary economies of the Bavarian Forest. His film

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celebrates proto-capitalism and the heritage glassworks (such as Eisch, where Herzog did his shooting) revive it. Although Achternbusch briefly associates the history of glass with his own experience of the landscape, his thematic inspiration seems to have come less from contemporary culture than from the regionalist tradition, especially from Hans Watzlik’s Nazi-era novel Die Leturner Hütte (1932).9 Watzlik’s neo-Gothic setting returns us to the question of the elemental raised by Herzog’s wilderness footage and to his preoccupation with natural forces in this film. Watzlik’s well-crafted novel promotes the elemental as a myth, a specifically regionalist myth. It is safe to assume that Achternbusch’s irony, though unstable, undermines the original force of Watzlik’s representations of volcanic glassworks (Watzlik 1932: 180) and tempestuous passions. As Singer argues, Herzog’s filmic technique itself problematizes the representation of nature’s superhuman (or elemental) power; but Achternbusch’s purpose in appropriating Watzlik is less clear. The Hour of Death lacks any acknowledgment that some details of plot and whole sentences of dialogue in the script are lifted directly from Watzlik’s novel. If Herzog even knew of the borrowing, it entered his film only at second hand, and so it becomes possible to draw a strong line of demarcation between the film and the literary sources. As Brigitte Peucker argues in an essay on Herzog’s Signs of Life (1968), Herzog’s departures from his sources are of special importance in his adaptations, partly because of his stated “hostility toward the written text” (1986: 218). Heart of Glass uncharacteristically uses another writer’s screenplay, so Peucker’s paradigm is especially helpful in drawing attention to the ways in which the film revises Achternbusch’s script. Herzog and Achternbusch differ substantially in their treatments of history. Both are drawn to the pre-industrial past, but Achternbusch links it explicitly to the more recent past, specifically the Nazi past, whereas this link is suppressed by Herzog. Rentschler (1986) has explored this suppression from the point of view of ideology critique, and the topic deserves further discussion in light of Die Leturner Hütte, the influence of which has remained unrecognized. My initial concern here is with differentiating the nuances of nostalgia in the novel and the film as well as the formal features that bear on the historical fullness of each project. Rentschler makes the point that Herzog “encourages people to view him as a medieval artisan” (174), and certainly Achternbusch, too, presents himself as an artisan or wordsmith. Both narratives ally themselves with the timeless craft of prophecy as practiced by Hias. Whereas the novel performs many other experiments with apocalyptic vision, Herzog greatly amplifies the role of Hias and accentuates the continuities between the pre- or proto-industrial setting and the post-industrial future that Hias foresees. The novel brings this future to bear in many other ways, from its post-industrial epigraph to the narrator’s first-hand account of apocalyptic events, such as the collapse of a Munich-like city, along with the rest of civilization, while he flees by car and, eventually, on foot (Achternbusch 1975: 80–82). Thus narrative technique multiplies available avenues for prophecy, while in Herzog’s film it is Hias who dwells on the question

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that preoccupies Achternbusch’s contemporary artist-narrator: “Am I really the last one left?” (Bin ich wirklich noch der Letzte?). In the context of the novel the script is an anomaly—historically speaking it only illustrates the “slavery” (20) and “injustice” (14) that persist into the present day, and the novel as a whole dwells mainly on the postwar period. Herzog’s film incorporates elements of pastiche, mixing medieval music with eighteenth-century costume and quasi-documentary with fable or allegory (particularly in the final sequence). Though in the DVD commentary he repudiates “New Age bullshit,” the film’s experiment with hypnosis is one of many elements that situate its aesthetic within a 1970s counterculture quite foreign to Achternbusch’s modernist rebellion against bourgeois culture. The soundtrack constitutes a major revision in this regard. Herzog’s long-term collaboration with the group Popol Vuh, who contributed much of the music for this and other films—along with the group’s independently recorded albums—exemplify one strand of the 1970s commercialization of psychedelia. The atmospheric music of Philip Glass in Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisquatsi (1982), specifically in conjunction with the non-narrative wilderness footage featured heavily in this film, continues this tradition. Thomas Binkley and his colleagues in the Studio der frühen Musik, whose music comes to the fore especially in the final sequence, represent another, deliberately anti-commercial strand of the evolution of 1960s counterculture—in this case archival scholarship taking the place of naïve historical reenactment (Lasocki 1995). By presenting itself as an “artist’s novel” (Künstlerroman) in the tradition of avant-garde modernism, Achternbusch’s work easily achieves critical distance from the eighteenth-century vignette of the glassworks. In the film, by contrast, narrative play with heterogeneous periods and locations and with the notion of authenticity itself provides the critical element of a nostalgia that actively encourages historical interpretation. Here the embedded history of technology and visual language of sublimity, in place of Achternbusch’s overt narratorial intrusions, enable this historical reflection. Even Herzog’s seemingly uncritical valorization of Hias—a semi-legendary product of regional folklore—becomes a historical gesture by introducing the theme of revolution, which permits a synthesis of social and environmental history. Though offering an independent treatment of the screenplay, the film is inescapably marked by Achternbusch’s borrowings from Watzlik, whether Herzog was aware of them or not. Peucker suggests that in his screenplay for Signs of Life, Herzog takes advantage of the literary complexity of his source text by using Achim von Arnim indirectly to comment on Kleist (Peucker 1986: 226). By working with a screenplay that he did not write in this case, Herzog arguably loses control of the literary genealogy of the screenplay. Watzlik’s novel is not a historical novel, and Achternbusch transposes aspects of his plot and characters to the eighteenth-century setting. He takes his cue, however, from Watzlik’s own clever allusion to the eighteenth century as “the periwigged century” (das zöpfische Jahrhundert) (Watzlik 1932: 101), a phrase adopted for the stage direction that

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describes the owner’s costume (Achternbusch 1975: 26). In Watzlik the phrase evokes the feudal legacy that he foregrounds in his Gothic treatment of a loosely contemporary Bohemian setting. Herzog, working at two removes from Watzlik, is more attentive to historical detail than Achternbusch and yet less cautious about myth. Apart from introducing the wilderness footage and giving Hias greater prominence, Herzog’s greatest change from the script may be his attention to feudalism and especially the elaboration of blood inheritance and class conflict, as I argued earlier. He draws these implications, and the attendant longing for lost origins, out of some crucial lines of dialogue in the script, which I quote again here to show how directly they are derived from Watzlik’s novel: “My god, that was the second glass. And this splendor will now be lost to the world. What shall protect me now from the chaos of the universe (von den Unbilden des freien Weltalls)?” (Achternbusch 1975: 29). Achternbusch redacted these lines from sentences uttered by Oswald Leturner in Die Leturner Hütte. He conflates two episodes in which Watzlik’s glassworks owner, like his double in the film, contemplates ruby glasses from a Schauschrank or vitrine, likening them to blood. He too is driven mad by an obsession with reproducing a certain shade of ruby that he finds in older specimens, such as the ones he is examining when the first two sentences are spoken (Watzlik 1932: 62).10 In his second meditation Oswald also makes the claim that the glass “protects us from the chaos of the universe” (schützt uns vor den Unbilden des freien Weltalls) (96), a statement simply changed to a question by the Achternbusch/ Herzog character in his lament over the loss of Mühlbeck’s secret. In both the script and the film the analogy between glass and blood remains implicit until it is actualized in the murder of Ludmilla, and up to this point much of the tension in the narrative comes from the owner’s secrecy concerning this analogy. In Watzlik, the analogy is explicit from the start. According to the narrator’s description of the glass, “blood seemed to move in it as in an artery” (62). Consequently there is less suspense, though considerably more gory detail and black magic, involved in the eventual disclosure that Oswald Leturner too seeks his secret ingredient in the blood of young women (Watzlik 1932: 278). These borrowings help to explain Achternbusch’s assumption that Heart of Glass would be a kind of Heimatfilm. While the resulting film is not directly indebted to the Heimatfilm tradition, the script draws directly from an antecedent genre, the Heimatroman, and the relationship is further clarified by the generic term sometimes used to distinguish nationalist and regionalist novels of the Nazi era, “blood and soil” (Blut und Boden). Watzlik’s thematic link between blood and the nominally German soil of the Bohemian Forest inspires Achternbusch’s ideological engagement with this literary history. The Bavarian/Bohemian Forest is a border zone, and Heart of Glass decisively relocates the quest for the ruby glass on the Bavarian side of the Rachel- [Roklan-] Mountains, rather than claiming the Czech side for the German landowning class as Watzlik does. Documents gathered in the volume Hans Watzlik—Nazidichter? (Hans Watzlik—Nazi Writer?), the first

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substantial piece of scholarship on this once famous author, confirm his membership in the Nazi party and his activism as a mouthpiece for the political interests of Germans in Sudetenland (the German-majority portion of Czechoslovakia annexed by Hitler in 1938), activism that extends to “mythologizing the soil” (Koschmar and Maidl 2006: 15). In more than one sense, the influence of Die Leturner Hütte sets Heart of Glass apart both from the satirical mode of engagement with Heimatfilm and from direct engagement with the Nazi past. As Wickham points out, the focus on Bavaria that is present in Herzog and in Achternbusch allows for a cultivation of regional identity as opposed to the problematic federal German identity associated with the Federal Republic of [West] Germany (Wickham 1989: 115). In Portrait Werner Herzog and elsewhere, Herzog proclaims an essential Bavarian identity bound up with his childhood experiences there. In his essay on Herzog’s film, Achternbusch recalls his own discovery of local lore and tradition while making brooms with his grandparents, who first told him of a prophet in the forest. This was a moment of recovery, he writes: “I found a little heart in me, where the rubble of the bombings had been” (ich fand ein kleines Herz in mir, wo eigentlich Bombentrümmer lagen) (Achternbusch 1980: 264). In this passage he drifts into the language of his screenplay, identifying this regional “heart” of postwar recovery as the “heart of glass” that will protect him from the “chaos of the unchecked universe” (Unbillen des freien Weltalls), another adaptation of Watzlik’s phrase. Herzog may be alluding to this episode when he claims, in the DVD commentary, that Achternbusch wandered through the Bavarian forest collecting prophecies handed down from the original prophet of the woods, Hias or Mühlhiasl. Compared to Achternbusch’s anecdote of his grandparents, The Hour of Death offers a much less sentimental perspective on village life. In Herzog’s film, it seems initially that there is no such counterweight to the nostalgia suggested by his greatly increased, and apparently naïve, emphasis on Hias, which (as Rentschler has observed) suggests a problematic identification with this character. Achternbusch himself dismissed Herzog’s presentation of the character as “CarlOrff-style-peasant theater” (Orff bauerntheater) (Achternbusch 1980: 267). One early reviewer framed the dilemma in this way: do we understand Heart of Glass as true demonic inspiration, “or shall we call it a gigantically exalted Heimatfilm, a peasant saga, diseased with Kitsch?” (Niehoff 1976). Critical nostalgia presents a third possibility, informed by the surprisingly rich historicism of Herzog’s engagement with the history of glass and the technological sublime, but also by the political content of Hias’ prophecies themselves. In his numerous variations on the theme of revolution—for example, “the peasants will eat cakes and discuss politics … the elegant and fine people will be murdered”— the decline of the traditional technology and society of the glassworks also carries revolutionary promise. The film follows the script quite closely in this sequence (Achternbusch 1975: 48, 51), in which Herzog intercuts Hias’ long prophecy in the tavern with the murder of Ludmilla and the fire in the glassworks. Several sentences

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in the script coincide, in turn, with the prophecies collected and attributed to Hias or Mühlhiasl by J. E. Landstorfer in 1923 (Haller 1993: 13–16). Haller presents substantial archival evidence to suggest that these prophecies are redacted from other sources and that Landstorfer’s attribution of them to “Hias” is spurious (69–70). Yet Landstorfer’s text was often reprinted throughout the twentieth century, and Achternbusch incorporated some of its prophecies directly while also improvising freely on traditional themes, including the three days’ darkness from Exodus (10:22) often associated with Revelation. Herzog’s own fascination with apocalyptic darkness returns in Lessons of Darkness, in which he also quotes Revelation directly. Achternbusch takes the eighteenth-century setting as a vehicle for the critique of contemporary bourgeois society. In a line omitted by Herzog, Harfentoni recommends that the glassworks, given the loss of Mühlbeck’s secret, should shift its production to glass beads because of the high demand for them among slave traders. “There are always slaves,” he concludes (Achternbusch 1975: 35), underscoring the narrator’s earlier declaration that contemporary society is a form of slavery (20). Herzog’s historicism is more visual than narrative; the words of the film focus more on the timeless, transcendent applications of the historical material. In many ways the film is anti-regionalist, which perhaps explains Herzog’s disagreement with Achternbusch at the premiere. I have argued that this film invokes the visual and philosophical legacies of Romanticism to position technology at the unstable intersection of flawed human nature and sublime raw materials. Herzog addresses the heterogeneous geography of the wilderness footage he uses to instantiate this raw sublimity by “declaring” these North American and Irish landscapes—one hopes with self-conscious absurdity—“Bavarian.” The glassmakers’ attempts at technical mastery, and even Hias’ pursuit of visionary clarity, reveal a longing for lost origins that are precisely transcendent, and not local to Bavaria or any other place. Local lore and the history of glass supply a critical framework for this nostalgic longing, showing it to be present already within the pre-modern organic community posited as the object of post-industrial and postwar nostalgia. The wilderness sequences themselves may nonetheless be seen as an expression of this nostalgia, especially in the context of contemporary films such as Koyaanisquatsi. In this respect, the “raw materials” in Heart of Glass anticipate the decontextualized, recolonized rain forest of Fitzcarraldo (1982). But Heart of Glass does not celebrate technological mastery. In the end Lessons of Darkness may provide a better analogue with its subtle examination of technology accompanied by prophecies from Genesis and Revelation. Here petroleum is the fiery raw material, initially harnessed to human purposes, that finally escapes human control. Throughout Heart of Glass, twin legacies of Romanticism—the natural and technological sublime—provide painterly expression of the contingencies surrounding human agency. As in Romantic iterations of the technological sublime, technology is represented as analogous with and subject to natural forces; but the ruby glass and its unique history specifically capture the technological will to power as a fragile illusion.

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Acknowledgments For their inspiring feedback and insights on the topic of this chapter, the author would like to thank Stefani Engelstein, Sean Franzel, Elizabeth Hornbeck, Rick Jurasek, Brad Prager, and Jay Gupta. This chapter is for Jay.

Notes 1 On Wright’s painting in the early industrial context, see Fraser (1988). 2 Herzog cites Friedrich in the 1986 documentary Portrait Werner Herzog. He also cites the influence of Georges de la Tour (1593–1652), whose candlelit genre scenes may also have influenced Wright’s dramatically lit interiors, such as An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump (1768). Both strands in Wright’s oeuvre are relevant to Heart of Glass, as I will argue further below. 3 These may be modern imitations manufactured by Eisch, as Herzog says in the DVD commentary, though they could also be historic pieces from the collection of this manufacturer, whose facility Herzog used for the production. On the market price of such pieces see Carlile (2002). 4 Postmodern examples might include the posthuman technological sublime of Blade Runner or the films of David Cronenberg. See also Nye (1994). 5 See, among others, Busch (1811: 242). The ARTstor database includes a ruby glass teapot, c. 1700, attributed to Kunkel (spelled Kunckel). 6 On the problematic of authenticity in Herzog, see further Brigitte Peucker, this volume. On the eventual substitution of copper for gold in the manufacture of ruby glass (and Kunkel’s influence in Bavaria), see Blau 1983: 157–158. Kunkel also addresses this issue in his extensive commentary on Neri’s methods for achieving “blood-red” and other colors (see further 83–84, 89, 119–121). On Kunkel’s transition from alchemy to the glass industry, see Günther Stein’s preface (Kunkel 1992: vii). 7 Other place names in the film or script that localize the action in the vicinity of Bodenmais and Zwiesel include Rachelgebirge, Rabenstein, Falkenstein, and Straubing. 8 The ruby glass is a product, not a natural resource like the blue crystals of Leni Riefenstahl’s The Blue Light (1932). Riefenstahl’s villagers rashly exploit these crystals in a narrative of technological mastery that Rentschler views as analogous to Heart of Glass (Rentschler 1986: 170). 9 There is no translation of Watzlik’s novel into English. The title might be rendered as Leturner’s Glassworks, or The Glassworks of Oswald Leturner. Hütte here and throughout the glassmaking literature is short for Glashütte, or glassworks. 10 Achternbusch alters Watzlik’s prose somewhat in the first two sentences, unlike the third. In the script and film, however, Goldfinger’s reference to this glass as the “second” is unmotivated and hard to explain absent the context of Oswald’s first speech, in which he reveals that the glass in question is only the second specimen of true ruby he has seen: “No one will believe that this is only the second glass of this kind that I have met with … These uncanny (unheimlich) red glasses are practically lost to the world (wie von der Welt hinweg getilgt)” (Watzlik 1932: 62).

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Works Cited Achternbusch, Herbert: Die Stunde des Todes (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975). Achternbusch, Herbert: Die Atlantikschwimmer: Schriften 1973–79 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980). Aufderheide, Pat and McCormick, Ruth: “Werner Herzog’s Heart of Glass: Pro and Con,” Cinéaste 8.4 (1978): 32–34. Blau, Josef: Die Glasmacher im Böhmer- und Bayerwald in Volkskunde und Kunstgeschichte [1954] (Grafenau: Morsak, 1983). Busch, G. C. B.: Handbuch der Erfindungen, Vol. 5 (Eisenach: Wittekindt, 1811). Carlile, Janet: “Glass Pedigree: Ruby Red Bohemian Glass a Golden Find,” The Ottawa Citizen, May 18, 2002: I4. Carroll, Noël: Interpreting the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Chambers, William: A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (London: W. Griffin, 1772). Fraser, David: “’Fields of Radiance’: The Scientific and Industrial Scenes of Joseph Wright,” The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design, and Use of Past Environments, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 119–141. “Fü, Th.” “Romantische Bildvorstellungen,” Westfälische Nachrichten (Münster), June 25, 1977. Goethe, J. W. v.: “Zur Farbenlehre: Didaktischer Teil,” Goethes Werke, ed. Erich Trunz and Rike Wankmüller (Hamburg: Christian Wegner, 1960), 13: 314–523. Greenberg, Alan: Heart of Glass (München: Skellig, 1976). Haller, Reinhard: Historische Glashütten in den Bodenmaiser Wäldern (Grafenau: Morsak, 1975). Haller, Reinhard: Matthäus Lang (1753–1805), genannt “Mühlhiasl”: vom Leben und Sterben des “Waldpropheten” (Grafenau: Morsak, 1993). Hamilton, William: Observations on Mount Vesuvius, Mount Etna, and Other Volcanos (London: T. Cadell, 1772). Herzog, Werner, and Hill, Norman: Commentary. Heart of Glass. DVD. Anchor Bay, 2001. Koschmar, Walter and Maidl, Václav, ed.: Hans Watzlik—ein Nazidichter? (Wuppertal: Arco Wissenschaft, 2006). Kunkel, Johannes: Ars vitraria experimentalis, oder, Vollkommene Glasmacher-Kunst. ed. KarlHeinz Manegold and Wilhem Treue, intr. Günther Stein (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1992 [original 1679]). Lasocki, D: “The Several Lives of Tom Binkley: A Tribute,” Early Music America 1.1 (Fall 1995): 16–24. Meister, Ernst: Ausgewählte Gedichte 1932–1979 (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1979). Niehoff, Karena: “An den Schlaf der Welt gerührt,” Tagesspiegel, December 18, 1976. Nye, David: American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). Petz, Thomas: “Der Fluch der Bilder,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, March 19, 1977. Peucker, Brigitte: “Werner Herzog: In Quest of the Sublime,” New German Filmmakers: From Oberhausen Through the 1970s, ed. Klaus Phillips (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984), pp. 168–194. Peucker, Brigitte: “The Invalidation of Arnim: Herzog’s Signs of Life (1968),” German Film and Literature: Adaptations and Transformations, ed. Eric Rentschler, (New York: Routledge, 1986), pp. 217–230. Prager, Brad: The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (London: Wallflower Press, 2007).

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Rentschler, Eric: “The Politics of Vision: Herzog’s Heart of Glass,” Between Mirage and History: The Films of Werner Herzog, ed. Timothy Corrigan (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 158–181. “S. S.:” “Wirre Endzeit-Visionen,” Rhein-Neckar Zeitung (Heidelberg) August 19, 1977. Schaffer, Simon: “Glass Works: Newton’s Prisms and the Uses of Experiment,” The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences, ed. David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, and Simon Schaffer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 67–104. Silesius, Angelus: Der cherubinische Wandersmann, ed. Will-Erich Peuckert (Wiesbaden: Dieterich, 1948). Singer, Alan: “Comprehending Appearances: Werner Herzog’s Ironic Sublime,” Between Mirage and History: The Films of Werner Herzog, ed. Timothy Corrigan (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 182–205. Watzlik, Hans: Die Leturner Hütte (Berlin: Wegweiser-Verlag, 1932). Weinberger, Elisabeth: Waldnutzung und Waldgewerbe in Altbayern im 18. und beginnnenden 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 2001). Wickham, Christopher: “Heart and Hole: Achternbusch, Herzog, and the Concept of Heimat,” The Germanic Review 64.3 (Summer 1989): 112–119. Wickum, Mark: “Production Notes,” Heart of Glass. DVD. Anchor Bay, 2001.

Additional Films Cited Achternbusch, Herbert: The Last Hole (1981) Murnau, F. W.: Nosferatu (1922) Reggio, Godfrey: Koyaanisquatsi (1982) Riefenstahl, Leni: The Blue Light (1932) Scott, Ridley: Blade Runner (1981) Wiene, Robert: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

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The Ironic Ecstasy of Werner Herzog Embodied Vision in The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner Roger F. Cook

Individuals in extreme situations of various kinds serve frequently as protagonists in both the documentary and feature films of Werner Herzog. Several of his films focus on flying (Little Dieter Needs to Fly [1998], The White Diamond [2004]), some on risky athletic endeavors (The Dark Glow of the Mountains [1984], Scream of Stone [1991]), and others on dangers caused by armed conflict, accident, or natural forces (Aguirre, the Wrath of God [1972], Wings of Hope [1998], Grizzly Man [2005]). In an early made-for-TV documentary that combines several of these elements, Herzog follows the talented Swiss ski jumper Walter Steiner from the training period in summer 1973 through the 1974 ski-flying competitions in Schattenberg and Planica. In a set of interviews in 2001–2002 Herzog spoke in some detail about The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, asserting at one point that it “is definitely one of my most important films” (Cronin 2002: 95). Although it is wise not to make too much of such declarations, the film is clearly more than just a documentary look at the sport and one of its stars. Ski jumping certainly holds a special place in Herzog’s imagination. Growing up in the Bavarian Alps, he was an avid skier who dreamed as a kid of becoming a champion ski jumper, but gave the sport up at the age of sixteen (Walsh 1979: 4). When he first caught sight of the young Swiss skier “flying like a bird,” his childhood passion for the sport was awakened and generated the idea for the film. At the time Steiner was an inexperienced seventeen year old who had not yet distinguished himself, and Herzog proudly relates how he recognized something special in him and predicted early on that he would be the next world champion (Cronin 2002: 95). A Companion to Werner Herzog, First Edition. Edited by Brad Prager. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Steiner’s success in the sport was key to the TV network’s interest in the documentary and gets more than its due in the film. It is not, however, what drives Herzog’s fascination with ski flying. An episode from Land of Silence and Darkness (1971), which premiered three years earlier, provides some insight into Herzog’s intentions in The Great Ecstasy. At the beginning of the film, he has the blind and deaf protagonist Fini Straubinger say in a voice-over that as a child, before she went blind, she attended a ski-jumping event and that the image of the skiers’ faces keeps coming back to her. Her voice-over is set to an empty black screen and followed by a sequence of three shots of ski jumpers flying through the air with their mouths open. Telling her that it was important to the film, Herzog persuaded her to say this although she had actually never seen ski jumping (Cott 1974: 55–56). He explains that he thought the “solitude and ecstasy of the ski-jumpers as they flew through the air” (Cronin 2002: 241) represent well Fini’s solitary state of mind. The shot of skiers floating in slow motion with open mouths becomes the hallmark image for representing the mind–body state of the ski flyer that he explores in The Great Ecstasy. Herzog has insisted that his filmmaking is not guided by philosophical or literary ideas of what he wants to convey. Rather he works intuitively, guided in the case of The Great Ecstasy by a sense of the ecstasy he feels when watching ski jumpers. “Contemplation always comes after the film,” he says (Cronin 2002: 70). I take this to mean after the shooting of the film, but before it has been shaped into a finished work. If this is true, then one might expect that the directorial choices and filming techniques are an integral part of what the film is trying to convey and would likely be foregrounded as such. This occurs explicitly in The Great Ecstasy, with Herzog discussing such issues as camera placement, film speed, audio recording, and choice of location in voice-overs scattered throughout the film. Gregory Waller stresses such filmic choices as the key to understanding the film, while dismissing Herzog’s statements about ski flying as inconsequential: “nothing he says offers any insight into Steiner’s great ecstasy” (1980: 27). I agree with Waller in this regard, but take issue with his claim that the critical attention to filmic style is part of an attempt to deliver “a ‘visionary’ portrait of Steiner’s great ecstasy” (1980: 34). I question whether a static visual form such as portraiture would have any more success expressing the ecstasy of ski flying than Herzog’s verbal descriptions. In my own analysis of the technical and aesthetic choices that drive the film I focus on a dynamics of movement that can evoke an embodied film reception. Reading at times perhaps against the grain of Herzog’s own “contemplation” of the film, I argue that the film does not offer a revelation of Steiner’s great ecstasy, through either visual or verbal representation, but rather elicits a film experience that enables the viewer to participate in that ecstasy. If Herzog works intuitively as a filmmaker rather than according to preconceived ideas and includes the process in the final product, then one might expect that not everything fits together into a unified, consistent whole. In The Great Ecstasy this is certainly the case. I begin my analysis with those moments in the

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film that divert from his effort to explore the “solitude and ecstasy” of ski flying. Rather than exclude them from the film, effectively shortchanging the filmmaking process in favor of a conceptual vision, Herzog incorporates them into a complex aesthetic design. The secondary concerns that intrude and disrupt the film’s proper focus become part of a complex ironic narrative that inscribes the film as a whole.

“The best ski flyer of all time”: Hyperbolic Filmmaking and Self-Irony Although important for the TV network that supplied the funding, Steiner’s success and status in the sport of ski jumping was not an essential part of what Herzog set out to explore in his film. To emphasize this point, Herzog takes pains to highlight the difference between his project and a mainstream media that is preoccupied with the more mundane aspects of victory and defeat. He uses the sports media that are covering the same events as a foil for setting off and accentuating his filmic approach to ski flying. At the first official competition shown in the film, he explains in a voice-over that because the jumping at the Schattenberg Ramp at the beginning of 1974 was televised live, he was more interested in the things occurring at the event’s periphery. The only two scenes from that event show skiers from the Soviet Union practicing their jumping form off the ramp and shots of Steiner walking off after a jump, completely ignored by the press and fans. Herzog explains that Steiner was injured and not able to perform up to his normal level, and then adds, “No one paid any attention to the defeated Steiner.” This sets the tone for the main distinction he is trying to make throughout the film between himself and the mainstream press. He suggests that he is investigating an integral aspect of ski flying, while the major media networks play up the more superficial thrills of competition and danger in order to attract a large audience. The situation at Schattenberg contrasts starkly with the later scene at Planica where Steiner wins easily and Herzog has to compete with announcers and reporters for access to him. After his successful Sunday jump that wrapped up the victory, excited media reporters and fans surround him offering their congratulations. The Wide World of Sports announcer appears in this scene in his bright yellow American Broadcasting Company ski jacket. As he attempts to corral the victorious Steiner, his cameraman is not ready (“Where’s my cameraman?”). When the cameraman is set, the announcer addresses Steiner by his first name, congratulating “Walter” as “the ski flying champion of 1974.” His tone and sense of familiarity suggest that he is broadcasting to the most avid ski-jumping fans in the world. His final words, “You’ ll be coming to America next year, huh,” make him appear comical to the more knowledgeable European ski-jumping fan. The scene is obviously intended to cast a critical light on Wide World of Sports, with its dramatically hyped coverage of sports from around the world. Although it is not mentioned in the

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scene, the show’s famous tagline, “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat,” comes to mind as the target of Herzog’s disdain. At the same time as Herzog is setting his film off from the mainstream sports media, the film shows him engaging in some of the same tactics. We see him at times in front of the camera with microphone in hand, reporting on the competition in much the same fashion as the network reporters. Even the professed interest in what is happening on the margins follows a pattern of media coverage, one used by shows like Wide World of Sports. Just as Herzog follows Steiner for “behindthe-scenes” insights, major networks offer interviews and anecdotes that add a personal-interest dimension to the broadcast. These stories provide the necessary level of engagement for viewers who would otherwise not be sufficiently invested in the outcome of the competition. Influenced perhaps by his own youthful dream of becoming “a great ski jumper” or his pride at having recognized Steiner’s promise, Herzog actually outdoes the networks in hyping the event and one of its star jumpers. At the beginning of the first training day Herzog, speaking on camera like a sports announcer, is ramping up the anticipation that there could be a world record because the starting point was set so high up on the ramp. He also goes to great lengths to convince the viewer that ski flying entails mortal danger. Twice during the film he includes a sequence of violent crashes, showing each first in normal speed and then in slow motion. These sequences recall a dramatic clip that was part of the lead-in to the Wide World of Sports. From the early 1970s, until the show ended in 1998, the introduction showed a clip of a horrible crash of the ski jumper Vinko Bogataj. In the voice-over to the lead-in, the shot was synched to Jim McKay’s dramatic delivery of “and the agony of defeat.” Still today, ski jumping associations complain of the damage the clip has done to the sport.1 They claim that it implanted in the public a greatly inflated notion of the risk involved in ski jumping. Herzog makes no reference to the clip or its effects, but among the several hard falls he shows in the film he includes two that are similar to the Wide World of Sports clip. Neither is part of the jumping events shown in the film. In the first, the skier loses his balance and falls while still on the ramp, then flies off it completely out of control, crashing into the area next to the slope much in the same manner as Bogataj had done in 1970. In the second, the skier loses control right after the jump and then falls hard to the ground. In both cases, the skier bounces off the slope several times with his body flopping around much like a ragdoll. The slow-motion replay accentuates the force of the repeated impacts. As he exaggerates the mortal danger involved in ski flying, Herzog also presents himself on the side of Steiner over and against the Yugoslavian officials and public who are willing to expose him to excessive risk. Before the final jump he explains in a voice-over that the officials were attempting to speed up the ramp by protecting it from the sun with sheets of foil, again putting a ski flyer of Steiner’s ability at risk of severe injury or even death. While the insinuation is that Herzog opposes such decisions, the voice-over during the shots of officials taking up the foil serves

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Figure 12.1 Herzog at the base of the ramp in The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1973). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Werner Herzog/Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

to whip up dramatic intensity for his coverage of the final jump. Earlier scenes also raise questions as to whether the filmmaker is more concerned about Steiner’s well-being or the film’s dramatic effect. After the second training jump in which he falls and suffers a mild concussion, Herzog includes a shot of himself with microphone in hand up by the ramp, building up the drama now in a subtle tongue-incheek fashion often found in his films. He explains that from their vantage point they could not see Steiner come into view down below and knew something must have happened. He then calls down below on a walkie-talkie to find out how badly he was injured (Figure 12.1). He explains that he was worried that Steiner might be too severely injured to continue in the competition, and that would have meant the end of the film after the second-practice run. Then the film cuts to a shot of Steiner carrying his skis into a first-aid tent while Herzog says in voice-over that this shot was taken immediately after the fall “with one of our four cameras.” And finally, he replays the jump in a 70-second slow-motion shot accompanied by a voice-over of Steiner complaining that the officials will not listen to him when he warns that the set-up is too dangerous. Just before the replay Herzog explains: “We will be showing the 177-meter flight in slow motion. The sound you hear was recorded a minute later on the spot in a cabin that was too dark for filming.” Once again, Herzog shows more concern for his filming techniques than for Steiner’s well-being. Herzog also inflates Steiner’s status among the elite ski jumpers as a means of ratcheting up interest in the film (Davidson 1980: 18–19). During the initial footage they shot at the Austrian training facility in fall 1973, he proclaims in a voice-over: “We decided to focus our film on Walter Steiner, because among the present-day ski jumpers he is absolutely in a class of his own. To my mind, he is the best ski flyer of all times.” Then he finds himself immediately on the defensive when the film moves to the Schattenberg competition. To explain why Steiner did not com-

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pete well with the other jumpers, he first mentions that he was hampered by injuries that he had sustained in a fall two weeks earlier (a light concussion and a cracked rib). As if that were not enough, he adds that the GDR skier Hans Georg Aschenbach won the competition, offering this seemingly inflated account of the advantage he enjoyed: “One has to keep in mind that the skiers from the GDR start the season with a big advantage in training, because in the course of the year they complete approximately ten times as many practice jumps as all the other competitors.” At Planica he again makes what seems like a strained effort to convince the viewer of Steiner’s exceptional abilities. He mentions that the top GDR, Soviet, and Japanese jumpers are not taking part, but goes on to describe Steiner’s superiority over the other competitors in a way that implies that he is that much better than all the other leading ski jumpers at the time. His hyperbole has in fact misled critics into overestimating Steiner’s prowess as a jumper (Koller 2002). After watching the film, an unknowledgeable viewer would certainly be surprised to discover that Steiner never held the world record for the longest jump or ever received the maximum twenty style points for a jump from all five judges—as other skiers have. In the first part of the film these exaggerations might easily go unnoticed by most viewers. As the film progresses they become more evident. After a Yugoslavian announcer grabs a quick word from Steiner following his victory-sealing jump, Herzog enters the frame and tells him, “Herr Steiner, you got twenty points from three of the judges, I think that is the first time that has ever happened.” He responds, “It may have happened once before, but never to me.” Herzog persists, “It hasn’t happened in your lifetime anyway.” Steiner replies, “Yeah, not to me, in any case,” intonating his reply in such a way to say “I am telling you, others have done it and in my lifetime!” Herzog seems confounded by his refusal to go along with the hype. With the inclusion of this awkward exchange and Steiner’s dismissal of his exaggerations, Herzog deliberately exposes to the viewer his excessive fixation on Steiner’s supposedly exceptional abilities. As the film cuts from this scene to the preparations for Steiner’s final leap, Herzog declares outright that Steiner’s jump of 166 meters was probably the most perfect ever in the history of ski flying. Following directly on the heels of Steiner’s rebuke, this claim draws even more attention to Herzog’s willingness to inflate and embellish for effect. Throughout the film Herzog exaggerates Steiner’s position among the world’s best ski jumpers in a self-evident manner that raises questions about his purposes in making the film. Most notably, the inclusion of the extremely awkward moments where Steiner refuses to participate in Herzog’s hyperbole suggests that these moments of critical self-exposure are part of a larger aesthetic strategy for making the ecstatic experience of Steiner accessible to the viewer. The conflict between what the filmmaker sees as the great ecstasy of ski flying and how he is going about trying to capture it on film comes to a head on the first day of the official competition when Steiner starts lower down on the ramp.2 As we watch him preparing to jump, Herzog gives a voice-over commentary, once again making unsupported claims about Steiner’s exceptional status: “Walter Steiner did something

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that, as far as I know, has never happened before. He started a section lower down than all the other competitors. He would have certainly crushed the competition. Because of his incredible superiority they would have had to shorten the run so much that nobody else would have jumped more than 130 meters.” After he jumps a mediocre 135 meters, Steiner explains to the camera that it cost him a lot of nerves to start from this lower position but that he had to because it would have been simply too dangerous for him from the higher starting point. He then says, “But it doesn’t matter. I want to ski fly, and this is the first time I didn’t have to be afraid.” This simple declaration stands in stark contrast to the dramatic voice-over account Herzog provided before the jump. It also recalls Steiner’s earlier description of ski flying: “When you enter the actual flying stage of a jump you become aware of the tension in your head. I could even close my mouth at that point because I can sense that it is unnecessary, that it is just caused by the tension. At this moment everything clicks, and you become aware of what’s going on. This is what makes ski flying magnificent.” When Steiner’s simple statement, “I want to ski fly,” recalls his earlier description of the ecstasy of ski flying, it also reveals how far afield Herzog has strayed with his claims about Steiner’s superiority and the expectations of a world record. The desire to fly that animates Steiner is expressed in a story that Herzog has him tell right before the film’s final shot. According to Herzog,3 it took him numerous attempts to get Steiner to tell about this episode from his youth: “I once had a young raven, that was really something. It still had almost no feathers. I reared it on bread and milk and when it could fly, it used to meet me, or saw me coming on my bike from far off. … Unfortunately it kept losing more and more feathers. Maybe it was the food I was feeding it. The other ravens plagued it. The commotion would start early in the morning. The other ravens cawed, he wanted to flee, of course he couldn’t get away and would fall to the ground. So I’m afraid I had to shoot him. It was a torture to see him being harried by his own kind because he couldn’t fly anymore.” This story represents allegorically two of the key ideas about Steiner that are central to Herzog’s portrayal. The first is that ski flying is important to him, whether he wins championships or not. It is the act of flying that inspires him. And second, he is harassed by “his own kind” (other people, in the form of the press and the Yugoslav fans) because he is different (in his case, because he can fly).4 The irony that Herzog directs against himself is in part an awareness that the demands made on Steiner by the media and public—which are analogous to the harassment suffered by his flightless raven—include his own efforts to film Steiner. In the end, he too contributes to the media circus that threatens to divert Steiner away from his simple desire to fly. His efforts to build up drama around the event in Planica and the expectation that something dramatic will in fact occur put Herzog in alliance with the Yugoslavian public that Steiner says wants to see either a world record or him crash trying to achieve it. Although his interests are different from those of Wide World of Sports or the fans, he too is harassing Steiner by trying

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Figure 12.2 The camera fixes on a silent Walter Steiner in The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1973). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Werner Herzog/Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

to get at what drives him to undergo the extreme risks of ski flying. At one point his reverence for his subject borders on the messianic. As the camera pans over the crowd and the rows of buses that brought the crowd to the final day of the competition, he exults: “50,000 spectators showed up and it all seemed a bit like a great pilgrimage.” Even when the film reflects critically on the filmmaker’s fixation on his subject, it does not implicate Steiner himself in the critique. The desire to win and be the best in the world, the lure of success and fame, the adulation of the fans, all these are enticements that Steiner seems to resist reasonably well while pursuing his dream of flight. In this regard, Herzog’s inability to separate himself fully from the media frenzy has its own self-redemptive aspect. He displays his own foible in such a way that it elevates the subject of his film even more.

The Ecstasy of Flight Despite all the ironic undercutting of Herzog’s approach to filming Steiner, the film presents the ecstasy of ski flying as something real, and something that can provide unique insights into the nature of human experience. Throughout Herzog emphasizes the sport as ski flying rather than merely an extreme version of ski jumping. The sport has been given the name ski flying in part because aerodynamics plays a greater role than in the more common version of the sport that takes place on smaller hills. For Herzog, the mental component involved in finding the right aerodynamic posture to enable flight is more important than the athletic ability of the ski jumpers. He has said this about the film: “And it is rarely muscular athletic men up there on the ramps; always it is young kids with deathly pale pimply

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complexions and an unsteady look in their eyes. They dream they can fly and want to step into this ecstasy which pushes against the laws of nature” (Cronin 2002: 96). One scene in the film suggests that Steiner’s ability to achieve the mental state experienced during dreams of flying is the key to his extraordinary ability as a ski jumper. Steiner describes how he would get in trouble in school for daydreaming about flying on skis. He would fantasize about taking off on his skis and then flying out over the surrounding hills and forest in slow motion before eventually making a gentle landing far from the jumping area. The voice-over of his account plays while the camera fixes on a silent Steiner, rather than in a normal talkinghead shot of him on camera (Figure  12.2). This simple departure from the usual documentary technique suggests that the dream contributes in a key way to Steiner’s knack for ski flying. Although what he describes is a daydream about flying on skis, his account corresponds to the common dream scenario of the body lifting off and flying on its own. Whether Steiner ever actually had this dream or not, the feeling he describes closely accords with the euphoric feeling experienced during dreams of flying, particularly during lucid dreaming (LaBerge and Rheingold 1990: 124–26; Lewis 1995: 89–90). It is, however, more than just the affective state experienced during such dreams that link them to ski flying. During dreams of flying the brain is in effect exercising neural processes that support both mental and sensorimotor functions associated with flight. These capacities are rarely needed in waking life, but support crucial skills essential for ski flying. Because humans have not evolved to be creatures of flight, the sport requires that the skier assume an exceptional state of consciousness, one similar to that experienced during dreams of flying. To attain the physical equilibrium necessary for ski flight, various levels of consciousness must be suspended at the crucial point after the skier has executed the jump and reaches the point of flight. Just as the skier must hold affective consciousness and the potential effects of fear at bay, rational and perceptual consciousness also become dangerous interlocutors during the brief period of pure flight. Perceptual attention to the environs and activities taking place below would interfere with vision’s difficult task of helping the skier maintain the right body position in the air. The mental perception that distinguishes particular objects is suspended in the early stage of the jump when the skier is attempting to gain maximum lift and carry. Only when he begins to prepare for the landing does he need to consciously perceive his surroundings in order to negotiate the return to terra firma. Rather than performing its more common function in the service of perception, vision supports the proprioceptive system in the critical task of maintaining the body’s feeling of horizontal orientation. Although proprioception works primarily on the basis of nonconscious input received from within the body (from muscles, joints, the vestibular system, etc.), the tacit processing of visual information about the body in motion (visual proprioception) also contributes to stable movement and the maintenance of posture (Gallagher 2005: 45–47).

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The film’s shots of Steiner’s jumps recall his dream image of flying on skis and serve to put the viewer in touch with the mind–body state of the skier. Just as his daydream of flying played out in slow motion, Herzog presents all of his most accomplished jumps in slow motion, focusing the attention primarily on the key phase of flight. He also shoots the first part of the jumps from a low angle, such that we do not see the skiers’ bodies in relation to the ground. Nor does the position of the camera give the viewer the sense of watching from a firmly anchored spot on the ground. Thus, one vital part of visual proprioception, perception with respect to the ground, is deactivated in the viewer during this part of the flight. The body’s relationship to the ground is an important aspect in the visual production of kinesthesia (Gibson 1986: 183). As the body moves, vision registers the position of the body or parts of the body relative to the ground and establishes a sense of proprioceptive body weight. Herzog situates his cameras so as to remove the ground from sight during the flight phase of the jump and reduce the proprioceptive sense of weight normally produced through vision. The effect with respect both to the body of the ski jumper and to the virtual body of the viewing subject as it is situated via the camera is an enhanced sense of weightlessness. Herzog juxtaposes the shots of Steiner and other skiers flying through the air with contrasting sequences of unsuccessful jumps. These jumps serve to portray graphically the extent of the risk that the skiers are taking. They also provide another perspective on the delicate balance of mental faculties required to sustain control during the critical moment of flight. In the slow-motion shots of skiers crashing the viewer can see and feel the exact moment where the shift occurs into a mind–body state that cannot sustain flight. These jumps also correspond to a common dream experience that expresses the mind–body state associated with them (Lewis 1995: 88–89). Dreams of falling are much like their more positive counterpart of dreams of flying in the sense that the neurodynamic orientation of our body in real environments is suspended—with one essential difference. The somatic sensation in falling dreams is linked to the real-world context in which the weight of our bodies is subject to gravity. When the falling begins in dreams, visual proprioception disengages totally so that the dreamer tends to black out and lose visual imagery altogether (Cook 2011: 99–102). The slow-motion footage of the failed jumps enables the viewer to hone in on the exact moment of the shift from the “dream state of flying” to the “dream state of falling.” Herzog also shows in slow motion the violent consequences of this momentary lapse—out-of-control bodies crashing into the slope and bouncing along the ground. These images provide a visual counterpoint to Steiner’s description of the gentle landing in his flying fantasy. However, the more essential element for his exploration of ski flying is the threshold moment that separates flying and falling. Leading up to the final climactic jump, Herzog shows how tenuous the mind– body state required for flight is. The first two shots of ski jumpers are crashes. Then, in the first talking-head interview Steiner explains how a jumper must show respect for the mountain, but must also hold fear and its detrimental physical effects

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(such as heart palpitation) at bay. He says that for that reason he never watches film of jumpers crashing and that he will continue to enjoy jumping higher and further as long as nothing has happened to him. During the last part of this statement Herzog cuts from the shot of Steiner talking to one of him crashing at the Oberstdorf big hill in 1973. This is typical of the way Herzog often impishly plays with the expectations and emotions of the audience, while simultaneously evoking a frame of mind that can make the desired connection between the viewer and the exceptional individual who is the subject of the film. At the end of the Oberstdorf jump we see Herzog with microphone in hand standing at the marker where Steiner landed. As we watch him and his crew measuring from that point down the slope, he tells us that Steiner was in grave danger and that if he had landed 10 meters further down he would have surely died. Here Herzog is revving up the dramatic tension for both the jumping competition to come and his filmic project of revealing the “mystery” of the ski flyer. He ends the section about the crash at Oberstdorf by declaring in dramatic fashion, “I am standing where the film has its origins.” If the film has its origins at the point of Steiner’s crash at Oberstdorf, it has its culmination in the final jump sequence at the end of the film. In the build-up to it, the film also traces the learning curve that the filmmaker had to traverse before knowing how to present this final sequence. Shots of Steiner’s jumps display his ability to overcome affective interference (fear) and assume the mind–body state of flight. Even when he crashed at Oberstdorf it was not because he lost mental equilibrium and slipped into an affective state associated with falling. He executes the jump and flight superbly, which is why he lands dangerously low on the slope. Only as he is coming down and realizes the danger he is in does he try to compensate and is not able to finish the landing properly. When the same thing happens again during his second training jump at Planica, Herzog plays the jump a second time in slow motion so that the viewer can follow his almost perfect form throughout the entire flight—including the landing this time. In the slow-motion replay it becomes clear that he crashes after landing only because he was past the safe point on the slope. The film presents the jumps during the competition at Planica in a way that highlights the distinction between the flight phase of the jump and the shift in focus to the landing. Herzog films the first part of the jumps from below in slow motion, so that we see Steiner pitted against the sky as backdrop. Then during the second part of the jump, the camera follows him from above so that we see him descending with the slope, crowd, and rest of the surroundings as the backdrop. In this way the viewer takes part in the shift from a state of suspended conscious perception during flight to awareness of the approaching surface and the need to negotiate a smooth landing. In the climactic jump of the Planica competition the slow-motion footage of the first part of the jump is set to gentle music by Popol Vuh. The music then gives way slowly to the cheers of the approving crowd, with the sound building to a roar as he lands and skis down to the run-out. The return of ambient sounds signals the return of perceptual consciousness, and the gradual

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crescendo of cheers marks a shift in affective consciousness. The ecstasy of pure flight gives way to the joy of having executed a successful jump and reaping the approval of the crowd.

The Aesthetic Ecstasy of the Filmmaker Herzog In The Great Ecstasy Herzog employs these tactics as part of his self-proclaimed attempt to transfigure reality and to render the world ecstatic (Prager 2007: 5–7). As he presents several of Steiner’s jumps throughout the course of the film, he is searching for the perfect technique that not only displays the ecstasy of flight, but also lets the viewer experience it. This requires a filmic strategy that enables the viewer to engage with the movement and force of the film rather than view it from a more distant, observational point of view. The slow-motion footage extends the duration of the flight phase, facilitating the viewer’s ability to assume a state of consciousness similar to that of the ski flyer. The placement of the cameras guides perception and spatial orientation in the viewer in a way that enhances the feeling of flight. The music evokes feelings of elation similar to those experienced during dreams of flying and, presumably, during the flight phase of the jump. However, as I have argued here, the film is also attended throughout by a pervasive sense of irony that undercuts the filmmaker’s enthusiasm for the exceptional nature of his subject. This raises the question whether Herzog concludes that film is incapable of enabling the viewer to participate in the “great ecstasy” of ski flying. Or, does the irony indicate that the carefully constructed shots of Steiner’s jumps could be effective, if Herzog’s romanticization of his subject did not get in the way? To understand the film’s combination of aesthetic exultation and selfcritical irony, we need to see the process of Herzog struggling to find the right stance as filmmaker as an integral piece of both the understanding he gains and the aesthetic strategy for conveying it in the film. The film’s ironic distance to its own pursuits exposes the lure of transcendence that almost inevitably accompanies moments of ecstatic experience and interferes with the film’s ability to convey it. In this regard, The Great Ecstasy is an early example of Herzog’s deployment of a “formal irony”5 that draws the viewer back from the “quasi-revelatory height” (Prager 2007: 7) of a transcendent moment to the immanence of embodied film viewing. The irony that attends the filmmaker’s veneration of Steiner guards against the temptation to see the ecstasy of ski flying as a revelatory moment, rather than an experiential one. The account I have given of the mental state during ski flying points to an exceptional bond between the mind and the body. The ski jumper must effectively neutralize perceptual, affective, and cognitive forms of consciousness during the critical stage of the jump, but this occurs in the service of a stronger fusion of all body faculties. It enables sensorimotor systems (proprioceptive, kinesthetic) to

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take over unimpeded by other forms of input that would inhibit them from operating at the exceptional level of neurodynamic control needed for flight. As the brain’s energy becomes almost completely consumed by neural processes that do not produce conscious mental images, higher-order consciousness and the sense of self associated with it temporarily fade. Given these facets of the ecstatic experience Herzog is attempting to evoke, it is not surprising that what Brad Prager has said about his films in general—“the ecstasies that attend his films … are induced by way of our bodies” (2007: 6)—is particularly true for The Great Ecstasy. However, in contrast to other films, the ecstasy so induced does not lead to “deliberate abandonments of the body” (Prager 2007: 6). The Great Ecstasy does not transport the viewer to a realm of Kantian aesthetics where the experience of a revelatory height elicits “an intuition of the beautiful” or “the sensation of the sublime.”6 The result is a more embodied state of mind rather than an abandonment of the body. There is an integral connection between the film’s focus on a moment of intense fusion of mind and body and Herzog’s approach to filmmaking. In interviews about how he works, Herzog has stressed that it is more about athletic participation than academic or aesthetic thinking (Cronin 2002: 101). He says that “it comes from your knees and thighs,” and tells how he needs to become involved in the physical work on film projects, including everything from carrying heavy canisters of film, to moving furniture or even a piano, planting a garden needed for a set, or just speaking loudly (Cronin 2002: 102–103). He also maintains that for him intuition is more important than planning. He makes this point with an analogy to his own participation in sports before he sustained a serious injury. Although he only fantasized in his youth about becoming a ski jumper, he was an accomplished skier and avid soccer player. He describes his unique skill-set as a soccer player in a way that sheds light on his fascination with Steiner and how he went about making the film: “I played for a bottom division football team for years and would score lots of goals even though technically almost everyone was a better and faster player than I was. But I was always able to read the game and would often end up in the spot where the ball would land. When I would score I would never actually see the goal posts and the bar, yet somehow I knew where the goal was. If I had seriously started to think about what I was doing, my game would have crumbled in a split second and the ball would have been blocked by five defensive players. It is the same with making a film. If you see something, you should not allow much time for structural deliberation. Just head into it physically, without fear” (Cronin 2002: 102–103). Herzog sees in his intuitive and physical approach to filmmaking an affinity with Steiner. The film’s one scene about Steiner’s woodcarving is the only one that alludes to such a connection, and might explain why Herzog refers to Steiner as a woodcarver in the film’s title, rather than as a ski flyer. Steiner displays sketches that he has made to guide his work on a natural block of wood he is carving in his studio. He says that they do not represent complete, thought-out concepts that he is trying to reproduce with the sculpture, but serve rather as points of

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reference. The carving takes shape more spontaneously as he interacts intuitively and physically with the wood. Herzog’s need to take part in all the physical activities involved in filmmaking reflects the kind of experience he is seeking to capture in The Great Ecstasy. An anecdote from the shooting of the film highlights the connection between Herzog’s style of filmmaking and what he discovers about the physical act of ski flying. He tells how he was having trouble convincing Steiner to open up to him and was unsure what he was going to do with all the footage they had shot. Then one evening he and his crew lifted Steiner on their shoulders and began carrying him through the streets. “I could feel the weight of his thigh on my shoulder. At that moment the film suddenly became quite clear for me because of this immediate physical sensation with the man. I know it sounds strange, but only after this did I truly respond to all these shots we had of him flying through the air and understand how to use them properly” (Cronin 2002: 96). The weight of Steiner on his shoulder made Herzog aware of the key element of ski flying that he wanted to make palpable to the viewer—the ability to defy gravity and find a momentary state of weightlessness. What he realized is that in the crucial phase of the jump certain physical functions must eclipse cognitive control in the mind of the skier. Once he had gained this understanding, he was able to structure and present the footage so as to build up to the final jump where Herzog finds the aesthetic approach that he thinks best conveys the ecstasy of ski flying. Against this backdrop it becomes clear what Herzog means when he proclaims that Steiner’s jump of 166 meters at Planica was “probably the most perfect ever in the history of sky-flying,” even though it was neither a world nor even a ramp record. What he is actually proclaiming, it seems, is that this is the most perfect filming of a ski jump in the history of the sport. As his adulation of Steiner intensifies, so too does his own sense of accomplishment with the film. He seems to be boasting that his aesthetic strategy for presenting Steiner’s 166-meter jump—the combination of the slow-motion footage set to the music of Popul Vuh during the flight phase, followed by the landing and the return to the cheers of the fans in normal speed—captures that unique quality he had intuited in Steiner. In the context of his self-proclaimed filmic triumph, Steiner’s raised arms that serve to maintain his balance through until the end of the run-out are co-opted to celebrate Herzog’s filmic presentation of the jump. The final bit of self-critical irony comes at the end of the competition. While Steiner is atop the medal stand being celebrated as the ski-flying champion and photographed by the media, Herzog intercuts the scene twice with shots of locals dressed in traditional garb holding aloft kitschy wooden carvings of birds in flight. This humorous touch of parody is not aimed at Steiner, who handled himself throughout with focus and dignity, even while the meet officials were making decisions that put him at great risk. It mocks the officials and fans Steiner had disparaged for wanting to see spectacular jumps and possibly crashes. But it also implicates the filmmaker who has abandoned his purported higher purposes for the “thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.”

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Figure 12.3 Steiner celebrates the pure ecstasy of flight in The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1973). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Werner Herzog/Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

The lesson about his own misguided approach has not been lost on the selfindulgent filmmaker. To the contrary, it becomes an integral piece of the overall aesthetic plan. The film cuts abruptly from the victory ceremony to Steiner telling the story of his pet raven, and then to the final footage of one of Steiner’s jumps. The single, continuous shot of the jump is slowed down so that it lasts for two minutes and plays through the closing credits. It begins at the point where Steiner has just reached the flight phase of the jump, and the camera follows him all the way through the landing and into the run-out area. In the last part of the shot Steiner gracefully carves out sweeping slow-motion curves. His hands remain spread aloft, now not so much as a sign of victory as a celebration of the pure ecstasy of flight (Figure 12.3). What Herzog has learned in the course of pursuing the subject of his film is displayed in this final shot. First, it suggests that the viewer can only experience the embodied moment of flight effectively by participating in the full arc of the mind–body state of the ski jumper, from the moment he achieves flight until he comes to rest at the bottom of the hill. The intrusion of the filmmaker with his over-determined ideas about this ecstasy would impede the viewer’s ability to do so. Second, the ecstasy can only be conveyed through a stylized, aesthetic rendering of it that must traverse the inevitable tendencies to romanticize and must be attended with irony. In this sense, the progression within the film from an overly exuberant portrayal of Steiner to an aesthetically balanced account that captures the ecstasy of the ski flyer completes its own full arc, in a fashion analogous to the final shot of Steiner ski flying. As Steiner skis away from the camera, the shot gradually loses focus. This does not suggest that he wants to withdraw from the world, but rather that the filmmaker has grasped how the ecstasy of ski flying is something that can only be experienced at a certain remove from the demands made by the sports media and public. But even here, an element of irony remains in the choice of text that is

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transposed over the image as Steiner skis into the run-out. Herzog takes an excerpt from the final passage of a short story by Robert Walser and modifies it only slightly to fit his context: “I ought to be all alone in the world. Just me. Steiner, and no other living thing. No sun, no culture, just me, naked on a high rock. No storm, no snow, no streets, no banks, no money, no time, and no breath.”7 This overdrawn notion of a total escape from the world is Herzog’s vision and not Steiner’s. Nowhere in the film does Steiner’s anger at the demands on him by the ski-jumping officials and the public translate into a desire to live in isolation. In fact, just before he tells the story of his pet raven, Steiner is on the medal stand smiling and holding the trophy above his head. This suggests a quite different idea of what the “escape” of ski flying means for him than the Walser text. The less obvious but persistent irony at the end of the film remains to guard against a reading of Steiner’s ecstasy that would strip it of its embodied, experiential dimension. In the end, the beautiful shots of ski flying, the arc of ironic narrative, and the final sequence that brings it all full circle work in unison to enable the viewer to experience the ecstasy of flight unencumbered by idealistic meddling.

The Special Resonance of Herzog’s Ecstasy Herzog revisits many of the same aspects he is exploring in Steiner ten years later in a comparable TV documentary that serves as a companion piece to The Great Ecstasy. The different stance toward the subject in this later film helps shed light on the ecstasy that Herzog is pursuing not only in these two films, but in much of his work. The Dark Glow of the Mountains has a protagonist who, like Steiner, both leads a life apart from the paths and conventions of mainstream society and finds release in an extreme, high-risk sport. Herzog displays a sense of respect and admiration for its protagonist, Reinhold Messner, as well as an inner personal connection to him, much like he does for Steiner. And yet, The Dark Glow lacks the irony that permeates The Great Ecstasy. One reason for this is obvious. When he proclaims Messner the world’s best mountain climber, there are both more concrete achievements to back up the claim and a widespread consensus that he is the most accomplished climber of his generation. But it is more than just the absence of hyperbole that accounts for the difference. The mortal risk to which extreme mountain climbers such as Messner expose themselves is much greater than in ski flying and suggests that climbers are driven by a more complex psychological motivation. Herzog states from the beginning that the film’s goal is to discover and reveal what drives someone like Messner to take such risks. As the camera in the opening scans the rugged peaks of the Karakoram mountain range where Messner and his fellow climber Hans Kammerländer will attempt to climb two 8000-meter peaks in succession, Herzog declares in a voice-over, “What is the fascination that drives them to the peaks like addicts? Aren’t these mountains and peaks like something deep within us all?”

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As with Steiner, Herzog feels that he shares with Messner a certain desire for solitude and isolation. He lacks, however, the kind of compulsion that motivates the climber to conquer the highest mountains. He gives the viewer an idea of what he does have in common with Messner in their final conversation. Messner describes a vision he entertains of walking endlessly with no destination: “I imagine sometimes now, or I have the wish, that I just keep walking for decades, or perhaps even forever, … simply walking until the world ends.” Herzog indicates how this part of the climber’s mental make-up resonates with him when he chimes in to say that he has a similar fantasy. He does not elaborate in the film, but in an interview about The Dark Glow he offers this account: “I like the idea of just disappearing, walking away, turning down the path and just carrying on until there is no path to follow. I would like to have Huskies with leather saddle bags and just walk and walk on until there is no road left” (Cronin 2002: 193).8 Just as he follows Messner and Kammerländer in the film only up to the base camp, and then stays behind as they embark on a life-threatening climb,  he also shares this idea of walking endlessly with no goal only up to a certain point. Like Steiner and Messner, Herzog is drawn to situations that can generate an intensity of experience absent in everyday life. Not only does he make films about individuals who put themselves in danger, he also takes similar risks himself as filmmaker, at times purely for the excitement, it seems, rather than any aesthetic reason (La Soufrière [1977]). He is, however, also wary of the responses that films of this kind can evoke in his viewers. The self-mastery and exploits of such exceptional individuals as Steiner and Messner tend to generate feelings of auratic wonderment and awe that can easily morph into visions of transcendence. Herzog himself is also subject to this temptation. It poses to him as filmmaker a threat that corresponds to the addiction to mountain climbing he sees in Messner. When he asks, “Aren’t these mountains and peaks like something deep within us all?”, the question also applies to his need to film extraordinary subjects and events. Is what he wants to explore and convey in his films not something that can be found in ordinary people and in our day-to-day existence? The critical self-irony in The Great Ecstasy exposes Herzog’s need to seek out individuals in extraordinary situations where their bodies are pushed to some kind of existential limit. Despite his avowed adherence to filmmaking as an intuitive art rooted in physical engagement with the here and now, he does not fully trust the power of film to transfigure reality through embodied experience. Unable to free himself from the urge to capture something transcendent, he projects such qualities onto Steiner. Herzog is attracted to Messner for many of the same reasons that he found Steiner fascinating, but he refrains from idealizing his exploits in The Dark Glow. What he discovers in the course of the film leads him to question, rather than to romanticize Messner’s passion for mountain climbing. The Dark Glow exposes Messner’s compulsion to climb the highest, most remote and foreboding mountains as part of a need to escape more radically from some forms of human interaction, and from parts of his own past

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(Cook 2012). For Herzog, the fantasy of walking endlessly expresses the desire for an implicit sense of belonging to the world that is missing in modern life. It is for him an idea that can guide the way he lives and works within society, rather than a call to walk away from it. By contrast, Messner’s attempt to climb two 8000-meter peaks in succession, as Herzog frames it in The Dark Glow, reflects a desire for the kind of isolation articulated in the Walser quotation at the end of The Great Ecstasy. In place of the formal irony that he deploys against himself in The Great Ecstasy, Herzog features the natural wonder of the Karakoram and the composure of its peoples as a foil to the quixotic pursuits of the modern mountain climber in The Dark Glow. Living in the shadows of these mountains for centuries, these inhabitants never had the need to ascend their peaks until foreigners showed up and enlisted their assistance. In this regard, Herzog sees Messner’s compulsion to climb as symptomatic of a certain deficiency in advanced civilization. In one of the interviews in the film Messner himself asserts, “Mountain climbing is a sign of the degeneration of humanity.” Nonetheless, Herzog senses that there is something valuable, and even vital that he shares both with Messner and the people of the Karakoram. It is the desire to live fully in the present, as the people of the Karakoram do without needing to ascend the mountains that tower above them. In place of Messner’s misguided, almost suicidal, attempt to rediscover this simpler form of existence in the most extreme type of endeavor, Herzog strives to make moments of it accessible through film. Instead of escaping from a modern world that has lost its sense of fascination and wonder, he seeks to rekindle such experience through his films. Shaped by his vision of “aesthetic ecstasy,”9 both The Great Ecstasy and The Dark Glow belong to a cultural practice that extends beyond the cognitive not to something higher, something transcendent, but rather to something deeper: “If there is a core similarity (i.e., a cladistic homology) of the SELF across all mammals, the shared emotional attributes offer us a variety of special resonances that can be tapped and cultivated across individuals, species, and societies through affectively rich artistic, intellectual and other cultural practices” (Panksepp 1998: 580). Connecting with this level of the self does not necessarily reveal something that our culture would consider beautiful or ethical in a Kantian sense. It yields rather an intensity freed from the compulsion to exalt it as transcendence. The ecstasy of ski flying provides a momentary return to this mode of experience, one that is achieved not by intellectual or artistic striving, but by a death-defying feat of mind– body control. The ecstasy of flight that drives Steiner to risk bodily harm occurs only when the ski flyer can find refuge in what we might call a “still point of consciousness.” Herzog designs his entire film to capture the moment of “special resonance” achieved in the mind–body state of the skier during the flight phase of the jump. This experiential, rather than revelatory, moment at the heart of The Great Ecstasy puts us in touch with an evolutionary stage of consciousness that we share across a wide province of both human and nonhuman life, but that is increasingly alien to modern human existence.

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Notes 1

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8

See for example, the article by Ken Anderson on the website of Ski Jumping USA (http://www.skijumpingcentral.com/docs/danger.pdf ). See also the response to a question about the dangers of ski jumping on the website of the Minneapolis Ski Club (www.minneapolisskiclub.com/faq.htm). Davidson also points to this contrast: “the slightly absurd analysis of the competition clashes with the lyrical expressionism of the skiers’ breathtaking flights” (1980: 19). See also Prager on the sense of hyperbole and the irony that accompanies Herzog’s coverage of the events (2007: 22–23). Given Herzog’s propensity to insert fictional elements as seemingly actual events or stories into his movies (Cott 1974: 55–56), I have some doubt about the authenticity of this “event” in Steiner’s life. I wonder, for example, how Herzog knew about it, if it was so difficult to draw the story out of Steiner. Also, at one point in his telling of it, Steiner seems to have difficulty concealing the fact that it did not actually happen. One could also imagine that Steiner was reluctant to tell the story because it was fabricated. This thematic implication resurfaces two years later in the short film No One Will Play with Me (1976). The protagonist Martin, a young schoolboy, is isolated and made fun of by his classmates because he is underprivileged and lacks proper nourishment. His prize possession is a pet raven that can speak and cry out “goal.” When Nicole, one of his classmates, befriends him and helps him become integrated into the group of school kids, he gives her his raven as a gift. Prager uses this term to describe how Herzog’s “aesthetic stylisations” keep the audience aware that this is a film and not simply reality placed on the screen in front of their eyes. In the case of The Great Ecstasy he argues, similar to my reading, that the gross exaggerations produce a “narrative irony” that casts “constant doubt on the assertion that Steiner should be revered as a heroic athlete who strives for a glimpse of an otherwise unattainable utopia” (2007: 23). He also claims that this irony is not directed at Steiner or meant to undercut the ecstasy that he experiences in ski flying. I agree with Prager when he associates Herzog’s filmmaking in general, but not The Great Ecstasy in particular, with these modes of aesthetic experience. In many of his films, shots of natural landscapes (Fata Morgana [1969], The Dark Glow, Encounters at the End of the World [2007]), or exceptional humans (Land of Silence and Darkness [1971], The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser [1974]) produce such responses. In The Great Ecstasy, however, the focus on the dynamic act of ski flying does not elicit moments of sublimity, at least not of this kind. Experiences of the sublime tend to occur when the viewer is frozen, standing in awe of the magnitude or raw beauty of the world. For this reason as well as others, I do not agree with Davidson when he sees “the white slopes of Steiner … no longer as distinct physical entities, but as goads to, and symbols of, human yearnings and dreams” (1980: 15). The excerpt comes from the 1913 short story “Helblings Geschichte” (Walser 1971: 72). In addition to changing “Helbling” to “Steiner,” Herzog alters the original in only two places: he changes “on a high cliff ” to “on a high rock,” and “not even a wave, no water” to “no snow.” See also his diary of his journey on foot in 1974 from Munich to Paris to visit Lotte Eisner in hospital (Herzog, 1980).

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9 The term stems of course from Prager’s book. As I have indicated in references and notes in the last two sections of my article, my understanding of Herzog’s aesthetic approach to rendering the world ecstatic in his films agrees with his for the most part. My reading advances the concept into areas of affective, embodied modes of response not covered in his book.

Works Cited Anderson, Ken: “The Thrill of Flight, the Agony of Misperception. So How Dangerous is Ski Jumping REALLY?,” skijumpingcentral.com (March 11, 2010), www.skijumping central.com/docs/danger.pdf. Cook, Roger F. “Correspondences in Visual Imaging and Spatial Orientation in Dreaming and Film Viewing,” Dreaming: Journal of the Association for the Study of Dreams 21:2 (2011): 89–104. Cook, Roger F.: “Spatial Orientation and Embodied Transcendence in Werner Herzog’s Mountain Climbing Films,” Heights of Reflection: Mountains in the German Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century, ed. Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012 [forthcoming]). Cott, Jonathan: “Signs of Life: Werner Herzog, Filmmaker and Seer, Speaking the Language of Dreams, Ravens, Dwarfs, Roosters, Prophets …,” Rolling Stone, 18 November, 1974: 48–56. Cronin, Paul, ed.: Herzog on Herzog (London: Faber & Faber, 2002). Davidson, David: “Borne Out of Darkness: The Documentaries of Werner Herzog,” Film Criticism 5:1 (Fall 1980): 10–25. Gallagher, Shaun: How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005). Gibson, James J.: The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1986). Herzog, Werner: Of Walking in Ice: Munich-Paris, 11/23 to 12/14, 1974, trans. Martje Herzog and Alan Greenberg (New York: Tanam Press, 1980 [original 1978]). Koller, Michael: “The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner,” senses of cinema (February 2002), http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/01/19/ecstasy.html. LaBerge, Stephen and Rheingold, Howard: Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming (New York: Ballantine, 1990). Lewis, James R.: The Dream Encyclopedia (Detroit: Gale Research, 1990). Panksepp, Jaak: “The Periconscious Substrates of Consciousness: Affective States and the Evolutionary Origins of the Self,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 5:5–6 (1998): 566–582. Prager, Brad. The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (London: Wallflower Press, 2007). Waller, Gregory A.: “The Great Ecstasy of the Woodsculptor Steiner: Herzog and the ‘Stylized’ Documentary,” Film Criticism 5:1 (Fall 1980): 26–35. Walser, Robert: “Helblings Geschichte,” Kleine Dichtungen, Prosastücke, Kleine Prosa, ed. Jochen Greven, vol. 2 of Das Gesamtwerk, 12 vols. (Geneva: Helmut Kossodo, 1971), pp. 56–72. Walsh, Gene, ed.: “Images at the Horizon”: A Workshop with Werner Herzog Conducted by Roger Ebert at the Facets Multimedia Center, Chicago, Illinois, April 17, 1979 (Chicago: Facets, 1979).

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Tantrum Love The Fiendship of Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog Lance Duerfahrd

You can’t direct. Things really happen. You can’t direct. It’s ridiculous. And this is what I call genius, if the director is this way. Klaus Kinski in My Best Fiend I can see through him like one can see through water in the sink, and I know what’s in there and I know what can be mobilized and I know what can be articulated. … He knows that I can bring his innermost qualities into life in front of the camera. Herzog, in reply to Kinski, above Klaus Kinski has entered acting lore as an insatiable figure. He didn’t leave a legacy: he left an aftermath. A living accident, he turns co-workers, directors, fellow actors into witnesses, and directs their attention from the set and towards the “scenes” he made in dressing rooms, cafeterias, and all spaces adjacent to those we see on screen. These fits happen off screen and frequently off record (one is always late arriving for a lightning strike), and are measured only in the devastation they leave behind: Herzog’s reminiscence about Kinski’s 48-hour rage in a locked bathroom when they lived in a boarding house together; a short film whose title articulates its director’s urgent plea, Please Kill Mr. Kinski (David Schmoeller, 1999); innumerable halted productions and torn contracts. While making Fitzcarraldo (1982), Herzog notes, “Several times Kinski threw a tantrum, once because someone touched his hair. Not even my hairdresser is allowed to touch my hair, Kinski screamed” (Herzog 2009: 175). These rages cannot be dismissed, like their causes, as petty. They form a crucial part not only of Kinski’s reputation but of his artistic work. Tantrums are mini instantiations of Kinski’s performance. They redraw the world in curious ways and A Companion to Werner Herzog, First Edition. Edited by Brad Prager. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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institute paradoxical limits: what is his hairdresser supposed to do now? Insofar as they articulate undirected passions, the “scream outs” (as Herzog termed them) fulfill Kinski’s definition of what really happens on screen. In these moments he becomes “impossible,” unwilling to suffer anybody’s direction. His screen presence is similarly eruptive and voluminous. “Assholes!” he says when asked about directors who demand second takes from him, “Do you ask a car crash for another take? Do you ask a volcano for another take? Do you ask the storm for another take?” (Kinski 1985: 186). To the dismay of those with whom he works, Kinski takes car crashes, volcanoes, and storms as his acting models. Kinski hits the screen with all the force implicit in that idiom. Reviewers consistently remark on a metamorphic quality in the actor. “[Kinski’s] is a mouth to suck the sleep out of Sleeping Beauty or to tear at raw meat,” writes David Thomson, indicating that Kinski lurks somewhere between a malevolent wolf of fable and a literal one (Thomson 1980: 23). Robert Kolker describes his “melancholy rat’s face,” suggesting that it’s not enough to speak of Kinski as merely a rodent, but rather as a rodent with a memory of what has been lost, an air of sadness (Kolker 1983: 263). This grieving process is echoed in Pauline Kael’s observation that Kinski “held his mouth like a dowager” (Kael 1984: 401).1 Kinski doesn’t appear on screen so much as he becomes on screen. His cinematic metamorphosis includes both unanticipated and abandoned forms: a melancholy rat, he retains the trace of what he once was or once had. Herzog and Kinski struggle the over the nature of Kinski’s transformation. Together they pursue a cinematic husbandry but war over what kind of animal they aim to raise. Their films provoke zoological questions in the spectator: How are we to classify the species known as actor? What new allegiances between man and animal does his performance forge? How does the actor exceed becoming a display of training à la Lassie or Toto? Is the cinematic animal to be domesticated? Left in peace? Caged? Paraded? Freed? Listened to? Eaten? How can one man become a bestiarium? Each collaboration features a different contested animal aspect: the crablike walk and chicken profile of Aguirre; the wolf claws and caged demeanor of Nosferatu; the emergence of homo erectus within the military posture of Woyzeck standing at attention; and the strange cross-breeding of Cobra Verde (1987) with cells from a film yet to come, Kinski’s own Paganini (1989). Herzog and Kinski encounter one another going in opposite directions. It is for this symmetry of opposition that Herzog dubs Kinski his best fiend, his most proximate and needed enemy. Herzog’s claim that he could direct landscapes, for example, prepares him for the way Kinski strives for the unrepeatability and inexplicable devastation of natural disaster. Herzog teaches himself to be meteorologist and seismologist to Kinski’s tantrums. Though Herzog never successfully directs a volcano to do another take, his La Soufrière (1977) elicits (through the spectator) a double take on a volcano that refuses to erupt on cue. At risk to himself and his crew, Herzog voyages to the evacuated island and documents the uncanny hue of a landscape in the shadow of imminent destruction.

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Imitation Crab: Aguirre Walking has a simultaneously functional and mystical value in Herzog’s world. “To travel on foot is a virtue” is one tenet in his Minnesota Declaration (Cronin 2002: 301). Herzog often notes how he thinks and even dreams while walking. He forms tight fraternities with other walkers such as Bruce Chatwin, who on his deathbed bestows his rucksack upon Herzog. Of Walking in Ice (1980) is Herzog’s journal of his pilgrimage from Munich to Paris upon hearing that friend and film critic Lotte Eisner was deathly ill, undertaken in the conviction that this voyage would deflect her death. A burning chair is a recurrent image in Herzog’s work and sums up the director’s estimation of the instruments of sedentary activity. The epigraph from Herzog above, “I know what can be mobilized and I know what can be articulated,” finds literal application in Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) where he tells Kinski to “walk like a crab.” Asking Kinski to relearn walking reflects the enormous directorial and pedagogical project of Herzog’s film. The suggestion hits at the base of the actor’s movement on screen, converting the agency of walking into a mobilization, a term that suggests movement coerced by force, as in a preparation for war. In Kinski’s crab-body, Herzog also discovers what can be “articulated,” that is, re-jointed and re-angled. He proposes a multiply articulated creature as Kinski’s acting model. Herzog is interested in articulation less as an expression of meaning than as an array of interruptions he introduces into the figure of the actor’s body. The walk provides cinema with one of its fundamental hieroglyphs. Early film theorists wondered at the way it becomes, on screen, something simultaneously expressive and symptomatic. Rudolf Arnheim rhapsodizes, When in Grand Hotel Greta Garbo walked through the lobby with a springy, dynamic gait, she produced not only the most beautiful moment of the film but also perhaps the most telling characterization of the dancer, whose part she was playing […] Garbo could give equally strong expression to the human soul by the rhythm of her gait, which, depending on the occasion, was victorious and energetic, transfigured, or tired, broken, anxious, and feeble (1957: 183).

Herzog’s request that Kinski walk like a crab intercepts the link Arnheim detects between actress and expression. Into the intimate space between an actor and his stride, Herzog inserts the crab and in the process veers Aguirre away from psychological study towards something closer to Muybridge’s animal motion study. Yet why does Herzog choose this creature to haunt Kinski’s movement? The crab for Herzog is a figure fraught with associations that include war and despotism. In Herzog’s films Echoes from a Somber Empire (1990) and Invincible (2001), footage of crawling crabs appears in conjunction with the emergent figure of absolute power.2 The documentary images show us a ground glimmering with crab movement. The crab walk is, to use Herzog’s term, the most stylized of animal motions,

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verging already on those of a machine. The furiously angled articulations of the creature work autonomously from but also in conjunction with one another. Its movement seems to be the work of a slurry of small imperatives, the closest thing we have in nature to a bureaucracy of motion. In his first film, Herakles (1962), Herzog’s camera surgically extracts crab qualities from the exercises of weightlifters. Bicep routines and sit-ups on an inclined plane are framed in such a way as to turn both into pincer movements, which are then interspersed with images of planes flying in formation and dropping bombs. To get from the body to military power, Herzog has to go by way of the crab. It is not Kinski’s costume that effectively evokes the crab: the other actors wear similar plates of armor, yet only Kinski seems truly crustacean. A complex interaction transpires between Kinski’s fabulously angled movements and his costume: their combined effect makes us hallucinate the cloth peeking through the joints of the armor into a kind of crab meat, a carnal texture that offsets the surrounding carapace. Yet at the same time Kinski’s movements do not allow us to draw a direct line to the crab. In his discussion of indexical signs, Charles Sanders Peirce offers this example: “I see a man with a rolling gait. This is a probable indication that he is a sailor” (Peirce 1976: 8). Yet to what calling would we connect the walk we see in Aguirre? Arrhythmic and non-repetitive, Kinski’s walk cannot be subsumed under a single indexical function. Instead of pointing to the crab (the way the rolling gait points to the sailor), Kinski’s stride seems to be a screen through which other things point. Kinski does not give us “imitation” crab (as might be suggested by Herzog’s advice to him) any more than he employs official gestures to encode his character’s authority. He seems rather pushed or aggressed by power. Aguirre’s signature moment occurs as the caravan gets stuck in the mud. Instead of directing the indigenous servants out of the predicament, Kinski hurls himself upon them with such rage that the whole group comes to a shuddering standstill. The chains connecting the men only provide Kinski with a further network of bodies through which to pulse his anger. Far from organizing and commandeering the chains, Aguirre becomes entwined with them. Kinski’s balky strides prefigure the first steps of Kaspar Hauser, whose feet and legs are brutally kicked forward by the cloaked caretaker standing behind him. Kinski advances likewise, mechanized through invisible blows. This movement, which seems less the product of an internal agency than a response to an external force, allegorizes the actor’s relation to his director, who, like Kaspar’s father figure, teaches his actor how to walk. Kinski’s ambulation absorbs not only the content of Herzog’s directive (to walk like a crab) but its fact. Kinski renders his walk not as something he does but as something he endures. His ambulation assimilates to itself all the barbarism of the colonial enterprise and saves the film from having to constantly demonstrate that enterprise. Kinski never draws his sword, yet he stabs ahead with his walk. It also becomes the means by which the landscape is registered, as if he were the pin on a seismological instrument. His movement introduces new imbalances into the terrain and already fulfills his

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prophesy at the end of the film that the earth will quake wherever he steps (“the earth I pass will see me and tremble”). Turning Herzog’s concept of an “inner landscape” inside out, Kinski’s walk activates the swamp and makes us cognizant of the sinking ground even when he is not, technically speaking, caught in the mud. Other surfaces compel Kinski to bind his angles into larger units. The spacing of the boards upon the raft for example elicits a wider stride, giving Kinski the appearance of a stiff twin compass. Here he becomes a cartographical instrument whose motion marks out the space he traverses, converting ground into territory. Kinski at rest is something of a misnomer. Immobile, he remains a maelstrom of planes and irradiating lines. His shoulders sharply tilted and his entire weight seemingly on his back foot, Kinski occupies every space as if it were the peak of a mountain. His damaged stance makes it seem like he’s mountaineering over level ground. Kinski violently renders the contrapposto of Renaissance sculpture. Whereas the latter indicated the balance of the figure and, by implication, man’s peace with himself, Kinski’s version suggests man bristling atop a broken world, the human figure deified as lobster claw. Herzog says that he “introduced these physical aberrations into the film gradually, and with real precision, and so at the end of the film Aguirre is even more deformed” (Cronin 2002: 91). Here Herzog’s and Kinski’s visions seem to mesh. Kinski takes his director’s order to render a crab-metaphor and slowly disassembles it over the course of the film, so that by movie’s end he moves as erratically as the stock market index. Aguirre does not suffer from an incontrovertible condition predating the start of the film and therefore seeming to belong to history. Rather his body is a contraption that gives the film its principle of time: the film unrolls as an escalating and evolving aberration in Kinski’s physique.3 Yet the Aguirre character is also an occasion for zoological confusion. In I Am My Films (Erwin Keusch and Christian Weisenborn, 1978) Herzog describes how he worked on Kinski’s costume for four weeks trying to cosmetically create the effect of a “malignant growth” emerging from his shoulder blade. Only when Kinski hits upon the idea to move the hump to the front of his costume, creating what Herzog calls a “chicken breast” (Hühnerbrust) is Herzog satisfied. How did this alteration in Aguirre’s appearance generate Herzog’s satisfaction? It marks the moment at which Herzog ceases thinking about Aguirre as a problem of costume or cosmetics and begins picturing him (even before the film begins production) as a projected figure. Herzog settles on the shadow cast by his character. In migrating the tumor from back to front, Herzog withdraws Aguirre from the convention of the hunchback as tyrant (Richard III) or as outcast (the hunchback of Notre Dame). Instead of being secured firmly as a citation of previous images and ancient ailments, Aguirre’s condition becomes harder to recognize and diagnose. Herzog ranks Tod Browning’s film Freaks (1932) as “one of the greatest films ever made” (Cronin 2002: 60). That film concludes with the long-delayed glimpse into the cage of Cleopatra, the circus beauty turned into bird-woman at the hands of the freaks she slighted. By already turning Kinski into a strange sort of chicken from the

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film’s onset, Aguirre thus begins where Freaks ends. Instead of culminating with the revelation of the completed human/bird metamorphosis, the cinematic punch line, Herzog submits Kinski to dual animal evolutions. Kinski produces a heterogeneous animal, rather than a simple likeness. Kinski’s performance becomes the site for what Herzog elsewhere calls an “animal drama.”4

Free Range Chicken In devising a solution for his costume, however, Kinski exposes his character to another drama that included Herzog. The director’s antipathy for chickens is well known. Of all animals they are the least welcome on Herzog’s ark. In Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970), images of one chicken cannibalizing another effectively serve as the movie’s clock, measuring the film’s progress into anarchy. These are interspersed with images of a hobbling chicken tormented by his peers. Another recurring image is of a chicken darting right to left and back again, as if Herzog were suggesting that chickens, contrary to one popular figure of speech, run no differently with their heads on than cut off. Herzog’s hatred of this bird may be his one philosophically elaborated point. He has repeatedly said, “look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity. It is […] bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity” (Cronin 2002: 99). The small eyes of this bird open up a sizable abyss for the director: this encounter betokens the only instance in which sublimity inspires in Herzog not wonder but a shudder, a response of fear (mixed with enmity and respect). An overlap exists between the fiendish stupidity of the chicken and Herzog’s “best fiend,” Kinski, who has, Herzog says in another context, “been endowed with a fair share of natural stupidity” (Cronin 2002: 293). This reserve of stupidity, a kind of stubbornness in which the absence of thought blurs with the independence of thinking, seems common to both bird and actor. To Herzog, stupidity has the resiliency of Odysseus’ wiliness, but in reverse gear. Stupidity is unpredictable, assumes forms that are equally (endlessly) surprising and disappointing. In short it is impossible to calculate, outwit, or govern. “You can’t legislate stupidity” is one of Herzog’s lessons of darkness.5 In Signs of Life (1968) Herzog hypnotizes a chicken in order to test its ability to act (a kind of casting all for his subsequent film Heart of Glass [1976]). The hypnotized bird seems to sleep, plays dead; unconscious, it literally follows a straight line drawn on the ground (at odds with the poetry Herzog seeks from hypnotized actors). Kinski likewise obstructs hypnotic and, implicitly, directorial suggestion. The image riveted to Herzog’s memory, from Children, Mother, and the General (Laslo Benedek, 1955) shows Kinski waking up. Kinski lifts himself from the depths of sleep with a disorientation so internal that he seems to have difficulty recognizing where he is. Habitual actions (checking his watch, putting on his hat) slowly reattach the character to his brutal military duties. Herzog shows this scene three times in

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succession in My Best Fiend as part of his own coming-to-awareness of the multiplicity of signs and gestures by which Kinski evinces his return to waking life, even after waking. Kinski’s signature moment is one in which he tumbles through the labyrinth of the waking process, setting him apart from the hypnotized actor who leaves his open-eyed sleep through a snap of the director’s fingers. Aguirre famously opens with two movements that transfix the viewer. A tilt moves our vision from the hazy summit to the mountain paths. Simultaneously, a zoom slowly reveals the millipede action of countless Conquistadores and indigenous servants moving across the frame. This shot is repeated three times, each time with a slight difference. Fata Morgana (1969) opens with a series of shots showing planes that are landing; just as we expect the plane to taxi, another begins its descent. Aguirre likewise opens by repeatedly drawing the line between sky and earth, each shot slightly displacing the one preceding it in the process of offering only a provisional beginning. The film starts mythically, seeming to resume rather than to begin. A different movement breaks our reverie: the downward arc of a cage containing two chickens, hurtling through the air before shattering on the mountainside below. This violent descent of the object interrupts the fascination instilled by the gently alighting camera. The cage seems to have been hurled rather than merely dropped. Our fascination is also broken by a question about the very status of the image: is this achieved by accident (a chance fall) or by design (done under direction and hence closer to an execution)? The faint line in all of Herzog’s films (but particularly in Aguirre) between documentary and fiction is here drawn across the dead bodies and crumbled cage of the two birds.6 The camera seems suspiciously ready for this accident and tracks the cage’s chaotic tumble down the hill. The more we think of this as a projection of a bird the more it shies away from the status as an event and becomes a sign, or rather an index—a weathervane featuring a rooster on top, registering a wind blowing from the unseen Game in the Sand (1964).7 This sign returns within Aguirre with a sudden force that mimics a chance event. It seems almost like a parody of bird flight: a cage first moving through the air, before dooming the birds to gravity.8 The projectile quality of the image (and the idea that it is a re-projection of Herzog’s earlier film) is in severe contrast with the punctuation provided by another object which marks the proper “end” to the mountain scene: the falling cannon. There is no pretense to flight in this object. It falls and there is a cut to an explosion, then another cut to an image of fog blending with the smoke from the explosion. The editing allows the landscape to ingest the cannon, instead of enwrapping the viewer in a question. Although Kinski looks like a chicken, his performance is (as in the case of the crab) evocative and transfigurative, rather than imitative. Consider the moment in the film in which the rafts have all drifted away and the men are busy cobbling new ones together. (This scene appears in I am My Films after Herzog discusses the chicken breast solution to Kinski’s costume.) We never see Kinski give orders to start making new rafts (because he is not the leader of the expedition he is not

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authorized to do so). His behavior therefore takes the place of an explicit directive. Walking around curiously, he inspects various items on the ground. Keeping his back rigid and his hands riveted to his side, he often rests one knee on a rock just to get his hand nearer to the thing (a piece of metal, a barrel with an iron clasp) he wishes to pick up. “Pick up” is not the right word. Kinski’s hand is barely operative. He seems to select objects and place them off to the side to be gathered up by the attendant trailing at a circumspect distance. Kinski selects but refuses to possess; divides but doesn’t retain (that is the task of the retainer), physically nominates objects but has no interest in their value or use. His entire body pecks divisively at things, makes distinctions, but leaves consequences to others. Yet in forsaking the prehensile power of his hand, Kinski acquires a far more demonic authority. The tyranny of his gesture becomes palpable to us by sending it through the semiotic transformer of the chicken. The abysmal stupidity of the chicken (as Herzog has it) seems to articulate the movement of a power that never justifies and never works; it intrudes, separates, and persists. Kinski performs not only the part of the chicken but also its cage. He seems at times to be more zoo than animal. A hyperbole of straps, rivets, and ties secures his costume. Their excess suggests that the costume is fastened, rather than fitted, to his body. Though Herzog possibly wanted to increase the crab-signs by making Aguirre’s costume so shell-like, it looks more imprisoning than protective. The film constructs a visual homology between the servants carrying caged chickens down the mountain and the next image of Kinski ferrying himself within his own armature. He seems like a sheer will, trapped inside a balky costume that it drags behind like an excrescence. Kinski’s movements evoke the peculiar mixture of automatism and spontaneity of the Tin Woodsman in The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939). Yet where the latter figure works with the limitations of his metallic costume and even dances with rickety grace, Kinski’s entire performance enacts rage against his metal strictures. If the Woodsman’s performance allows him to integrate with his costume, Kinski’s opens up a maximum asynchronicity with his. Crouching, squirming, writhing, Kinski is situated within his armor in a manner wholly antithetical to the priest in Aguirre, who coughs up blood and walks waistdeep into a river without suffering the slightest unseemly displacement from his sacral robes. Herzog exploits this rift between Kinski and his costume in order to introduce a new temporality into the film: a time of waiting, as if the hollow in Kinski’s chest were filled with time detained. When one of the rafts is stuck in an eddy, the men stand, yell, and gesticulate emphatically. Kinski responds by sinking deeper into his costume. The others speculate into the night about how the soldiers must be getting sick from spinning in circles. What we see, however, is not sea-sickening. Herzog cuts back to images of the men on the raft pointing and shouting. This footage changes only marginally, as if the film were caught in a bracket of time. Nausea is felt not in their movements but in Kinski’s posture and glance. His stare is not empty; rather, it looks upon emptiness. Kinski is the one mired in the eddy: this is the first “Kinski spiral,” and he is not even moving. We

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sense his invisible rage at inertia and the delay in the expedition. The chicken breast cavity, rather than Kinski’s forehead, is the locus for this unuttered insight. It is apt that all the others pass this wasted time by getting out of their costumes. Aguirre’s daughter is helped out of her cumbersome neck cloth, Helena Rojo sits covered scantily in a shawl, and Husto Gonzalez uses his helmet to give his horse a drink. The time of recreation is articulated as the distinction between actor and costume. The relics of fashion they wear nevertheless can be unpinned at any moment. Pinned within an outfit from which he can never disrobe, Kinski counteracts the notion of costume as period piece. The iron heave in his armor suggests a different temporality at work: a gouging patience, or history as tantrum. Marking the authority of the auteur over the actor, Alfred Hitchcock famously states, “all actors are cattle” (Truffaut 1980: 140). Hitchcock suggests that the director’s task is to usher actors through the film, imposing “direction” on their dull movements. Herzog’s animal metaphors for Kinski indicate a more strenuous challenge: he compares the actor to a “hybrid racehorse” he had to domesticate (Cronin 2002: 209). Herzog pictures himself more as a jockey or trainer than as a Hitchcockian rustler. Implicitly he allies himself with early cinema’s efforts to bridle the horse’s movement for the eye. Etienne-Jules Marey, for example, used the camera to break down the horse’s gallop into successive frames, eliminating the impenetrable confusion it presents to the naked eye. Speaking of Kinski as if he were pure energy ready to bolt in any direction, Herzog describes how during the making of Cobra Verde he had to “hold him together and make him productive, to harness all his insanity, his rage and his demonic intensity” (Cronin 2002: 209).9 If Hitchcock’s comparison underscores the minimal agency of his actors, Herzog’s testifies to Kinski’s uncontainable and exorbitant agency: the actor as Secretariat. Herzog’s directorial role combines the functions of trainer and jockey: “Nobody could tame Kinski as well as I did towards the end of Aguirre” (Cronin 2002: 91). Yet Kinski persistently speaks of himself as an animal that is neither free nor tamed, but rather one that is caged. “I am an animal born in a cage. But where an animal has claws I have talent” (Kinski 1985: 182).10 As Aguirre, Kinski brings the metal structure in tight: his armor shell remains an indispensible opposition as it restrains him, seeps through his whole body, and seemingly rusts his movements. Kinski says his talent replaces the animal extremities. “Talent,” which sounds like “talons,” assumes the characteristics of a set of sharp instruments that flay and divide. Skills are honed like claws. They are the exposed part of the caged creature, the only part that peeks through. In Nosferatu—The Vampyre (1979) Kinski wholly mobilizes this caged affect: it is the source of the count’s reserve. Kinski infuses the vampire’s inability to die with aristocratic tact. Though his face lurks in an expressionless limbo, his hands—even closer in this case to talons—perform a sign language for which there is no glossary. They seem to peek out from the wall (or from under the coffin lid) of his deathless state. Breaking with the arthritic rigidity of Max Schreck’s manual condition, Kinski’s fingers undulate like underwater plants.11 Nosferatu asks Nina for the love she gives Jonathan and is denied. All in the same

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Figure 13.1 Klaus Kinski in the climactic scenes of Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Werner Herzog/Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

motion his hand flays the air, clenches, demands, gives blessing, points outward, and withdraws into itself. Kinski’s hand proffers a visible sign so offset from his own body that each moves independently of the other: the hands seem to exit the scene belatedly, in Kinski’s wake. In his autobiography Kinski writes, “A photograph is a kind of prison, where my feelings will be tortured to death” (Kinski 1997: 229). Etymologically designating a room, the camera becomes a painful extension of the cage into which Kinski feels born. Like a torturer, the camera squeezes information from Kinski’s body, turning him into a field of readable signs by thoroughly immobilizing him. How does this remark furnish us with a possible rationale for Kinski’s decision to act in moving pictures? To answer this we have to ask what prevents film from merely replicating the misery of the photographic medium: what keeps it from being a prison twentyfour times a second? Much of what Kinski does effectively on screen—his subtle movements, his capacity to do something rather than merely indicate that he is doing something—breaks with the indexical function of the photograph. Moreover Kinski’s performances comprise a sustained test of the proverbial fourth wall of cinema, assessing its thickness, its incarcerating potential, and the actor’s inability to tear it down (talons are no match for the cage). For example, Kinski frequently looks at the camera, yet without thereby reminding us of the artifice of filmmaking. Though he studies the camera intensively, directly, and always unblinkingly, his gaze never successfully settles there. His prisoner’s stare seems both abridged (falling short of the camera) and addressed to the far horizon, projecting to some imaginary space beyond the camera. Reversing the usual order of things, Kinski makes the look of recognition into an illusionary encounter, rather than an anchor in the real.

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Figure 13.2 The vampire (Klaus Kinski) approaches Harker (Bruno Ganz) with undulating fingers, like talons, in Nosferatu (1979). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Werner Herzog/Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

Acting as Chiropraxis: Woyzeck Speaking about his preparation for Aguirre, Kinski claims he protested Herzog’s impulse to give his character a hump: “I won’t need a phony hump, or a costumer or a makeup man smearing me up. I will be crippled because I want to be. I’ ll get my spine used to my crippling. Just as I’m beautiful when I want to be. Ugly. Strong. Feeble. Short or tall. Old or young. When I want to be. The way I hold myself will lift the cartilage from my joints and use up their gelatin” (Kinski 1997: 216). Kinski is cognizant of the expressive potential of the back in a way that evokes silent cinema and particularly the work of Chaplin. Arnheim describes a scene aboard a tossing vessel in The Immigrant (1917): “[Chaplin] is seen hanging over the side with his back to the audience, his head well down, his legs kicking wildly—everyone thinks the poor devil is paying his toll to the sea. Suddenly Charlie pulls himself up, turns around, and shows everyone he has hooked a large fish with his walking stick” (1957: 36). Kinski makes method acting similarly physiological, bringing it down into the very joints. He won’t play crippled: he will hold himself in such a way as to actually cripple himself. In order to act, Kinski must first act upon his own spine. Indeed, one of the curious dimensions of Kinski’s work with Herzog is the frequency with which his back is on view. It contradicts Herzog’s claims in My Best Fiend that Kinski claims, “the face is the only landscape of any interest.” But Kinski was not all about the face. Looking at the films it is clear that Kinski was also into the about face. Turning one’s back to the camera was a popular idiom in the method actor’s handbook (Wexman 2004: 128). Yet whereas Stanislavsky-inspired actors did this to shore up private spaces in

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which they psychologically merged with their roles, Kinski presents his back as a marker of his animal-becoming. We are introduced to Aguirre’s back first. His crab-motion mechanics as he descends the mountain are offset by a gesture of civility: he proffers his hand to his daughter in order to provide her some balance. The back is not a shield for the face but rather an object of intrinsic interest. Kinski’s movements through Herzog’s films could be graphed as a set of spineexperimentations that constitute an investigation into what it means to walk upright on film. Herzog notes one of the influences on his films to be the Rückenfiguren paintings by Caspar David Friedrich.12 These feature a solitary standing figure, his back to the viewer, looking out at the mountains, at icebergs, or into valleys. Herzog observes, “My films are about as anthropological as…the images of Caspar David Friedrich” (Cronin 2002: 213). Whereas characters such as Hias from Heart of Glass fulfill the figure’s contemplative function (instilling in us a similarly meditative and awe-struck distance from the landscape), Kinski performs its anthropological function. First, he magnetizes our attention towards his back: when Kinski stands in a field, we don’t see the field.13 Is this not the source of our surprise with what Herzog calls the “Kinski spiral,” the physical maneuver in which Kinski steps before the camera as if to enter the image as a Rückenfigur, only to suddenly pivot and face the camera? Kinski twists his legs so as to coil his spine, and the unseen mechanism of his stance allows him to abruptly exchange recto for verso. In the process, he turns his back into an address to the viewer. Brad Prager notes how Timothy Treadwell appears to cite the Kinski spiral by walking abruptly into frame (2007a: 90). At the same time, Treadwell provides us with a contrast to Kinski’s movement. Treadwell had a penchant for planting the camera in view of a “telling” landscape (the bear in the distance recovering after a fight, for example), after which he would walk into frame, then turn to the camera. There is a sequential logic of landscape/back/ address, and Treadwell designs the shot so that these do not contaminate one another. He places himself securely between the camera and that background reserve that he wanted to protect and about which he wanted to lecture. By contrast, Kinski’s twist centripetally pulls our attention away from the background and into the space between actor and camera. Collapsing the opposition between moving into the landscape and moving toward the camera, the spiral resembles a theatrical aside, one in which the movement (rather than the actor) seems to whisper to us. Where does homo erectus fit in Kinski’s laboratory of the spine? Upright man appears not at the end of some natural or genetic evolutionary process, but as the effect of a ferocious imperative and as the by-product of power. Towards the end of Aguirre, Kinski picks his way across the raft littered with the decimated crew and stops only to wake Husto Gonzalez from his slumbering posture. As the camera circles the raft, Aguirre undertakes the most arduous labor he performs in the whole film: he forces Gonzalez to his feet in order to get him

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into an attentive stance, gun poised on whatever threat may emerge from the jungle. Reaching through the wooden beams interposed between them, Kinski pulls the lethargic Gonzalez to his feet by sliding him against the upright pole as if it were a prosthetic backbone. The circling camera gives us the prototype of an MRI of Gonzalez’ ragged column of vertebrae. It provides a diagnostic image of the final construction undertaken in this expedition: the sick Gonzalez forced to stand at attention over an indefinite enemy, almost expected to die holding this posture. All of Woyzeck (1979) is pervaded by the brutality of this single gesture. Woyzeck constitutes Kinski’s most intense investigation of the spine as it is alternatively straightened and crumpled by authority. Here Kinski is subject to an order that redefines man as the military animal. In the opening credits Kinski stands frantically at attention as if he were immersed in a deep lake with only this posture to keep his nose above water. The blanket tightly rolled atop Kinski’s knapsack contains all the folds and kinks that he is working out of his spine: it seems a correlate to his clenched innards, or possibly to the defiant fist he cannot make. When not called at attention, his spine slackens and he stands pigeon toed. An electrical charge goes through Woyzeck with each click of his heels. His whole body resembles the famous dead toad’s leg that becomes animate only with the application of voltage. The laboratory metaphor is apt: Woyzeck literally becomes an experimental animal. His doctor limits his diet to peas, drops cats from a second story window into his arms, moralizes to him about urination (defined not as a call of nature, but as a set of muscles Woyzeck can control), and pins Latin terms like medals onto his physical and cerebral aberrations. Woyzeck’s free time is spent at the circus watching a monkey in a soldier’s uniform made to stand upright (“the lowest rank of humanity!” proclaims the barker). Kinski’s chiropractic performance, of man hurled at his anthropological destiny through military order, allows us to overlook the surprising paucity of décor in this film. A row of uniforms on hangers, a gun leaning against a wall, are all the battle paraphernalia we see. We forget the film’s minimal weaponry because of the siege state that Kinski brings to the screen. In the world of the play’s original author, Georg Büchner, there is no war, only endless soldiering, training, preparation. Imperatives go through Woyzeck like psychic gunshot. As he shaves the general in the first scene (Figure 13.3), Kinski intersperses the task with clicks of his heels, standing abruptly upright in reply to the words of his superior. These salutes insert a strange bodily punctuation into the conversation, as Kinski must move from leaning over the general’s face with a straight razor to turning himself into a human exclamation mark. His chore interrupted, he subsequently speeds it up as if he’s lost ground. In the background we see a soldier polishing his boots. He seems at peace with this activity, keeps his head down, and works in a steady rhythm. The soldier presents an unbroken surface to us. Yet Woyzeck stands at attention at every opportunity, his

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vertebrae alert to the faintest summons of power hidden in the tones of playful or philosophical banter. As the general stews in his melancholia, saying how the sight of windmills makes him sad and how he never wants to see another one again, Kinski clicks his heels and replies, “Jawohl, Herr Hauptmann,” as if it were Woyzeck’s duty to make sure the general never sees or thinks about these things. Kinski renders Woyzeck as having a duplex structure of attention. These coincide with the split in attention that Herzog suggests has been instituted by cinema. Each sort of attention is undivided, at the same time it is radically different from its opposite. The first type of attention is structured by the practical necessity of using a straight razor. This attention sustains what Herzog calls “the accountant’s truth” (an expression by which Herzog describes cinéma vérité) and involves the meticulous auditing of reality. Woyzeck’s attention to technical diligence is echoed by Herzog’s own: Herzog’s depiction of the general’s shave is, like the face of the general, without cuts. The other half of attention is not a state of mind but a posture, the upright military stance geared towards a more indeterminate reality of authority. In place of the accountant’s truth, this spinal-ready posture suggests the subject’s accountability to something not quite visible: Kinski’s stance is a reply not just to the general’s call but to a general call, articulated alternatively by the letters he sees spelled out in the toadstools, the murmuring he hears under the earth, and Herzog’s own directives. His eyes seem to behold something both foreign and inevitable, like the ancient horror of seeing one’s fate. In this way standing at attention has a peculiar resonance with the hypnotized stare, which is simultaneously receptiveness to suggestion (isolated in the figure of Herzog, the director) and an inner recollective state. The soldier at attention and the hypnotized subject share an uncanny focus, a focus that exceeds conscious attention. At what inner object do Herzog’s subjects stare? Herzog’s cinema looks through the eyes of the private who stands at attention, much more so than through the sight of the rifle, as might be suggested in the rumor that Herzog directed Kinski with a gun to keep him on the set. Cinema through the rifle trains itself on a target, an object it aims to obliterate. Herzog is opposed to “training” of any sort, and this includes the training of the eye. Herzog frequently speaks of his actors as soldiers of cinema, and the ready posture of the soldier in Woyzeck suggests that he must untrain his eye in order to see the horizon.

Managing Kinski’s Posthumous Scream: My Best Fiend In My Best Fiend and in interviews Herzog describes his unique skill at eliciting Kinski’s vocal rage. Herzog’s could “direct” Kinski on screen only after having strategically incited his anger off screen: “I provoked him, making a remark so he would explode and continue screaming for one and a half hours.” Herzog was

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not new to off-screen sparring: in I Am My Films, during the production of Stroszek, he challenges his actor, ex-boxer Wilhelm von Homburg, to get in the ring with him. With Kinski Herzog’s needling was calculated to deplete the actor’s rage: he let Kinski scream the way a doctor lets blood. He stands his ground until Kinski finally would “scream himself empty.” In I Am My Films Herzog describes these as “scream outs.” Herzog’s English neologism is visceral: it sounds like something closer to exorcism, a displacement of vocal material to the exterior of the body, or even a turning of the body inside-out through the voice. Herzog conceives of Kinski’s voice as a quantity of animality that could be used up and exhausted. This physical element, the phlogiston of Kinski’s wildness, burns itself up through yelling. Releasing Kinski’s tantrum off screen, Herzog induces a subdued but more intensive performance from him on screen. At public talks Herzog holds his hand in front of his face to visualize the proximity—a distance more suited to a whisper—at which Kinski would scream at him for hours. These moments tap into Herzog’s stoniness and impassivity: to endure them, he allies himself with the inanimate world: “In the midst of Kinski’s bellowing and raving, which brought all work to a standstill, I stood like a silent rock wall and let him crash against it” (Herzog 2009: 238). In the opening scene of My Best Fiend the director does his best to architecturalize his first experience of Kinski’s voice, as if that encounter could only be commemorated by recalling the rooms it engulfed. Herzog returns to the boarding house (now a penthouse) in which he and his family temporarily lived with Kinski shortly after the war. As the primal scream is conjured by Herzog, it throws the layout of the apartment and even the guest/host relationship into disorder: Herzog proceeds to give a tour of the house to the genteel older couple presently living there.

Figure 13.3 Woyzeck (Klaus Kinski) stands at attention in Woyzeck (1979). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Werner Herzog/Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

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The voice seems to evict the current occupants. Resurrecting Kinski’s destructive rants amidst the lavish décor of the contemporary setting is a real challenge; it resembles the effort to recreate the experience of bloodshed in a war museum. Herzog proverbially wants the walls to do something louder than talk, so that they may testify to Kinski’s penchant for extreme vocalization. Yet because the walls have been torn down since Kinski and Herzog lived there, Herzog summons these absent witnesses by projecting the old blueprint over the space as he walks through it. “Here there was a wall,” Herzog reminisces. These walls constitute a kind of “scream” memory for Herzog. He recollects long erased partitions for the way they echoed, absorbed, and articulated Kinski’s rants. Herzog recalls how Kinski often locked himself away to rage, aspired to a solitude hard won in a boarding house, or practiced his speech exercises for ten hours in the closet. Here we may recall the first words of another impressive screamer, Gene Scott, in Herzog’s God’s Angry Man (1981): “Turn the volume up…When I scream I want to be heard!” Kinski’s screams by contrast are more overheard than heard. Herzog’s architectural memory endows his testimony of Kinski with a foundational quality. The older couple concedes to the changes made in the floor plan in a way that makes Herzog’s description of what happened there into a declaration. This reflects the testimonial structure of My Best Fiend: returning to those places where he struggled with Kinski, Herzog dilates his memory before minimally articulate onlookers whose mere presence provides a physical (rather than uttered) testimony. While recollecting the hallway down which Kinski ran before knocking the door over, Herzog tries to render the actor’s scream. It raises an immediate challenge: how do you cite, or how do you imitate, an outburst? Describing how Kinski screamed at the woman who ran the boarding house for not ironing his shirts properly, Herzog intones, “Klara…you sow!!!” (Klara…Du Sau!!!) Instead of reproducing the scream’s decibel levels, Herzog transmits its expansiveness by means of a full and breathy whisper, as if he were recreating Kinski’s rage within a doll house, not a boarding house. He effectively conveys how saturating Kinski’s voice is, filling Herzog’s lungs and clasping his throat in the process. Instead of an imitation we get a haunting: Kinski as ghost-voice that floods space and passes through walls. The scene concludes with audio of Kinski’s recitation of a German translation of a poem by the fifteenth-century French poet François Villon, in which the poet enumerates the ingredients for a stew into which slanderers’ tongues should be thrown. The camera pans away from the discussion toward a space that was once Kinski’s room: his words cascade over the fresh renovations and a bowl of fruit with a pineapple in it. The moment reinforces the impression rendered by Herzog of a place steeped in Kinski’s screams. Juxtaposed with the neatly lavish kitchen décor, Kinski’s voice emerges through the renovations: not by means of them but in spite of and at odds with them, like an X-ray disclosing a structure under the one we see. Kinski reads off the items for the bizarre stew as if he were simultaneously a town crier, a judge, and (appropriately, since the bedroom where he rehearsed his

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voice is now a kitchen) a chef: “The brain of a tomcat who doesn’t know how to fish, the urine of a donkey in heat… wolf ’s milk, gall of oxen and flooded latrines, the foam that dribbles from the mouths of rabid dogs.” Kinski cuts through the image as he claws at the language of Villon’s poem: each component of this complex animal recipe is enunciated so crisply and pointedly that Kinski’s own tongue seems to be a dicing implement proportioning ingredients. The recipe is also a verdict, a death sentence for slander. The voice emanates from a previous and unseen space and provides a transition to Herzog’s pursuit of Kinski’s memory on the Urubamba River. Brad Prager observes about Kinski: “His forte was in not acknowledging where the stage ended and the world began” (2007b: 84). We might say that this space between the stage and the world was acknowledged only by Kinski’s scream. As loud as a lunch whistle, Kinski’s outbursts notoriously brought all production to a halt. In My Best Fiend, photographer Beat Presser described Kinski’s instinct for realizing what was amiss, even behind the camera, as an “almost animal presence.” “He sensed with 25 people on the set when somebody in the back was whispering.” Herzog cites an instance in which Kinski blew up at a sound assistant and demanded that he be fired: “You swine! You were grinning!” (Cronin 2002: 89). Kinski’s so-called animal sensibility responded to people and things outside his immediate vision and included the space of production. Kinski forces us to redraw the line between the stage and the world: it is drawn not divisively, as a line in the sand, but rather connectively, in a way that reflects Kinski’s sensitive attunement to movements and noises and unconscious tics in the physiognomy of sound assistants. Kinski picked up on things beneath the human radar. He was wired to the world like a finely tuned but unpredictable alarm system. In the 1971 performances depicted in Jesus Christ Savior (Jesus Christus, Erlöser, Peter Geyer, 2008) Kinski turns the arena in which he performs into a crucible for denunciations, insults, catcalls, and cries of sacrilege. Kinski lets the audience’s screaming infiltrate his performance as part of an acoustic whirlwind of accusation and blasphemy that, ironically, recreates the persecuted condition of Jesus. Kinski keeps walking off the stage and finishes his show before an empty stadium. “Occupation: Laborer” Kinski says, as if reading off the details from a Wanted Poster for Christ, before we hear this riposte from the audience: “But you’ve never done any work.” To whom, Jesus or the actor Kinski, is this addressed? What do the actor and savior produce, and why is their labor suspect in the eyes of the audience? Referencing the popular contemporary musical, Kinski says that he will not be a “superstar”: “I am not your superstar, who plays his part for you up on the cross and then punches you in the jaw when he falls out of character.” Kinski suggests that he aims to become not the iconic Jesus but the ironic one: the Jesus deposed from his familiar role as well as from his cross.14 He lives off the interruptions of his role, repeatedly recommencing the performance in the course of a single show. Kinski’s approach here is wholly antithetical to that of the method actor with which he (and particularly this assumption of the Jesus role) is frequently

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grouped. The principle of an actor’s immersion in a role does not apply to Kinski, whose desire is to fall out of one. In My Best Fiend Herzog provides a clip of Mick Jagger and Jason Robards, the original cast for Fitzcarraldo, yelling about opera from the bell tower. They do this in a loud but strangely dispassionate manner, as a pair of sports fans would hoot for their team to win. They break the town’s silence but in a way that would never suggest that the town would find the idea difficult to grasp. This is juxtaposed next to a clip of Kinski, who delivers the scene quite differently. He is pushed into the bell tower. When he speaks his words seem to come long after the wish they represent, long after some internal wish has articulated itself inwardly, and now it’s as if we only overhear him talking to himself. Kinski’s intensity does not exclude the lower frequencies: the whisper, the murmur, or the finger pointing down at townspeople who can barely see him. Three utterances by Kinski hit our ears at varying decibels: “ I want an opera house. I want to have an opera house. I want to build an opera house.” These sentences conjugate Kinski’s madness. The fine but crucial differences between having, wanting, and building get lost in the momentum of Kinski’s performance. Kinski allows us to imagine a man thrown by fate towards something he doesn’t quite grasp (here, the idea of opera itself ). His body does not follow, as do Jagger’s and Robards’, the correlated rhythm of the cheer, but rather careens around the bell tower as if it understands something he cannot, like the weight of the impossible, which is what opera in Peru is supposed to represent. In a moment conveying the unexpected nature of Kinski’s outbursts, Les Blank, who was filming Herzog and Kinski on the set of Fitzcarraldo, turns his camera on in mid-scream and hastily pans and zooms his camera towards Kinski. The recording process begins in mid-scream and excises this sentence from Kinski’s torrent of words: “Do I or don’t I scream!” (Schrei ich oder schrei ich nicht!). Blank’s speechactivated camera fortuitously suggests that Kinski is rewriting Hamlet’s famous query about existence: to scream or not to scream? No less than Hamlet’s question, however, Kinski’s yelling is about the status of existence: not the division between being and not being but rather the faint line between animal and human being. This line cannot be logically estimated or drawn, only screamed. Though causes are reshuffled, rejected, and renovated throughout the argument, Kinski primarily disputes the living conditions on the set with production manager Walter Saxer. Kinski calls the food pig’s swill, and refers to Saxer as a swine for allowing such provisions. He then segues from the quality of the food to the absence of dietary choice. He seems to feel he is being forced to eat: being fed from a trough, rather than eating. “Worse than a madhouse!” screams Kinski as the barnyard morphs, via the cafeteria, into a prison and a psychiatric ward.15 Saxer tries to stand on this side of the barnyard fence by upholding standards for proper behavior, informing Kinski that he should act like a Mensch. Kinski doesn’t say what might characterize proper conditions (either animal or human or both) for filmmaking. These conditions are never laid out in a contract (Kinski tried: he was famous for

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exorbitant demands such as “no roosters on the set of Fitzcarraldo” (Herzog 2009: 268). Rather, these are only ascertained in the endless petition of Kinski’s scream. Kinski resumes with Saxer the “animal drama” in which he and Herzog were embroiled. What is new and striking is the bewildering pressure Kinski’s animal performance exerts on Blank’s camera. Blank’s mad scramble to document the moment conveys the kinetic and frame-rupturing movement of the outburst. The myth that Herzog needed a rifle to keep Kinski on the set and in frame becomes wholly understandable as we watch Blank’s efforts to maintain a proper focus on Kinski’s eruption. Blank is a less capable hunter than Herzog. He doesn’t document Kinski’s scream so much as he frantically tries to catch up to it. Since Kinski’s vocal performance implodes the structure of dialogue, Blank has a difficult time knowing when exactly to focus on Kinski, on Saxer (from whom Blank seems to anticipate a timely reply), or on the faces of the countless extras for whom the argument brings a welcome break. The camera keeps pushing Kinski out of frame to trace the shrapnel-like movement of his voice, as if Kinski’s authoritative vocality required Blank to repeatedly restore its acousmatic status.16 The cinematography of the scream suggests that Blank wants to follow its independent trajectory, see it live in the amazed faces of the extras, but also to anchor it to a source by returning to Kinski and zooming in on his mouth. Kinski’s yelling lacerates the screen as it does the sense or the cause of the argument (screaming often seems like a search for reasons to scream). It does to this moment of My Best Fiend what the insects do to the images in Aguirre: fly in and out of focus, alight on random targets, eat away at things, come and go uninvited.

Acting as Prolepsis: Cobra Verde Herzog’s working relationship with Kinski concludes with Cobra Verde. This film shifts the terrain of their struggle and in the process exhausts the film language that previously allowed director and actor to war so productively on screen. Cobra Verde begins indicatively in a place of death where animal bones are scattered around a grave. Kinski kneels at the graveside such that he seems to be mourning Herzog’s camera, or at least the absence of Thomas Mauch, the cinematographer on the previous Kinski/Herzog films, who left the production after repeatedly becoming the target of Kinski’s verbal firestorm. As the camera pulls back it begins a 360-degree pan of the landscape. This movement both cites and inverts the concluding shot in Aguirre. Instead of moving centripetally around Kinski and anchoring his busted stance at the center of an empty world, the camera here performs its spiral apart from the actor. The camera bids adieu to Kinski in favor of a panoramic view, returning to Kinski’s face as if assuring us that he will always be where he is supposed to be. The only Kinski spiral in Cobra Verde is a funereal one,

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Figure 13.4 Fitzcarraldo (Klaus Kinski) calls out from the bell tower in Fitzcarraldo (1982). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Werner Herzog and Lucki Stipetić/ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

occurring at the end of the film in the actor’s death throes, as he is rolled towards and away from shore by the motion of the waves. Cobra Verde transfigures the nature of the struggle between Kinski and Herzog. In his commentary Herzog remarks: “there was something about his presence in the film, and the presence of a film he hadn’t shot yet and that was Paganini. He brought some climate into my film that didn’t belong there, and still to this day I have some difficulties with parts of the film.” Instead of a struggle over the model within the film (about how precisely to walk like a crab), Cobra Verde features a struggle that takes place between films, between the one under production and the film to come. By somehow citing his own presence from a film he is yet to make, Kinski unmakes Cobra Verde. Herzog had declined Kinski’s offer to direct Paganini. His synopsis of the screenplay is as follows: “There is a half page of fucking, then a half page of fiddling, and so on, for six hundred pages” (Herzog 2009: 185). Cobra Verde gives Kinski the opportunity to refuse his refusal, and he seemingly goes ahead with the Paganini project, with Herzog as the director, just as he once intended. This represents an extreme case of Kinski’s ironic practice: not an instance of “falling out of character,” but rather one of “falling from the film.” Kinski’s performance therefore introduces a peculiar temporality into his screen image: the fictional “now” of the film is undercut by a more elusive future perfect tense in which Kinski performs a film that will have happened. Kinski enacts this future perfect tense on screen through a distinct mood of boredom, the existential state in which all futures are subject to a premature dissipation as if they had already been lived out. Kinski elevates the profound boredom of his character from a state to an act: it becomes Kinski’s boredom with his character, with his lines, with the vistas, with the production, with fellow actor José Lewgoy.

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Throughout Cobra Verde Kinski appears to be biding his time on screen like a prison sentence he were carrying out. Kinski incarnates da Silva’s waiting as his own. When da Silva says, “I long to go forth from here to another world,” and if we exchange “world” for “film,” we overhear the articulation of Kinski’s own restless ambition. Kinski directed Paganini less than two years after making Cobra Verde. Herzog’s dismissal of Kinski’s only directorial effort—that he “was not a great director. He only pretended to be” testifies to a further extension of Kinski’s ironic stance, namely that he was an actor acting as a director. One of the pressures Paganini brings to bear upon Cobra Verde emerges from the later film’s almost complete absence of synchronized sound: the images float loosely over the soundtrack and the post-production dialogue. This is highly bizarre in a film about a musical genius. Rather than playing the violin, Kinski plays at playing a violin, a mime lodged silently at the heart of a film featuring an overbearing greatest hits soundtrack. What Kinski brings with him into Cobra Verde is not so much a performance of madness as a very peculiar kind of performing body: the look of a man who knows his speech will be dubbed. Kinski was well acquainted with this subacoustic condition: working on international co-productions throughout his career, he suffered frequent separation of body and voice. One result of Herzog’s passion for filming in raging environments is the loss of synchronized sound under the noise of the Urubamba River. After finishing Aguirre, Herzog informed the actor that he would be needed for one and a half days to do synch work. Kinski then set the hyperbolic terms for hiring his voice: one million dollars. Kinski’s frequent silence in Cobra Verde merges with the way the character suffers the discourse of others: he strangely hits his stride in the awkwardness of tea time, when the plantation owner’s daughters snicker at him and explain, “He just doesn’t talk to anyone!” On those occasions in which Kinski does speak, his mouth seems clouded over by his posture (face down as he rolls in the grass with a lover), poorly illuminated by torch or candlelight, hidden by his hair and seemingly with his own puffy lips. Even though it seems that Kinski is actually uttering his lines, he acts as if his voice were to arrive in post-production; that is, as if speech transpired in a future-perfect tense no different from the time of Paganini. Herzog tries his best to combat this acting-as-if-to-be dubbed. Herzog says there is “a certain stylization Kinski forced on the film that is vaguely reminiscent of spaghetti westerns” (Cronin 2002: 209). Herzog accommodates Kinski’s performance by framing its discrepancies within the genre noted for its maximum separation of voice and image. In Fitzcarraldo, with help from an old Victrola, Kinski is the purveyor of a voice (Caruso’s) projected over the silence of the jungle. Kinski reverses this in Cobra Verde, intensively retaining his voice and anticipating a blank space in the soundtrack. An acoustic void hovers around Kinski’s character as he walks into the town square, as if he could not be penetrated by the chatter of rumor and reputation that causes the townspeople to flee at his approach. At other instances in Cobra Verde, Herzog pushes the camera through chaotic spaces only to stabilize it in a

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close up of Kinski’s speaking face. The plantation owner rampages through his house yelling at his daughters for carrying da Silva’s children. “What do you have to say for yourself, cowherd?” “I am the bandit Cobra Verde” Kinski says in perfectly synched sound. Another instance gives us a point-of-view shot through a bewildering crowd as a slave tries to escape. The tracking shot abruptly hits the wall of Kinski’s face with a visual and aural bang: “Don’t run” Kinski says, “it’ ll only be worse for you.” The effect of this (since we find it hard to justify that the slave might recognize Cobra Verde) is that the escaped man seems literally arrested by the rare instance of sound converging with Kinski’s mouth. Both moments testify to Herzog’s desperate attempt to synchronize Kinski with both the soundtrack and the protagonist, to have him become Cobra Verde. Interviewers frequently ask Kinski why he made so many terrible movies. This question is on the mind of anyone who has suffered through such films as Shanghai Joe (Mario Caiano, 1973), a rare spaghetti western–kung fu hybrid, in which we await Kinski’s arrival in a way that lends credence to his own claim, in his Jesus phase, to redeem the unredeemable. Late in his career he replies to the question with the following: The fact that a movie was total shit did not bother me. For example, let’s say that there’s a hand that is used to playing the violin excellently. Let’s say that hand belongs to the world’s greatest violinist. But, the man finds himself out of work. Someone tells him, “I don’t have a job for a violinist but I do have a job for someone who is willing to carry out trash.” The violinist takes the job. He has to do his new job well or else he won’t get paid. He won’t eat. Although his hand is forced to carry garbage, that doesn’t diminish the skill of the hand (Kinski 1983: 40).

Kinski compares his performance in trashy films to taking out the garbage. Kinski’s real and imagined money issues compelled him to appear in films—over 135—with the profligacy of an extra. Far from claiming Midas powers to turn trash into gold, Kinski welcomes the alienation entailed by required labor. Method acting tries to erase this alienation through a process of identification and immersion: the hand of the actor would become that of the trash collector. In defining film production as a kind of athleticism, even Herzog sees performance as a convergence of body and skill. By contrast Kinski accentuates the distance between acting and talent. He counterbalances the hand that is forced (by necessity and need) with the hand that is bound (the violinist’s disengaged hand). The violinist’s hand is thereby sequestered, or imprisoned, from what it must do for money. Contrary to the interviewer’s suggestion, Kinski never wasted his talent. He instead diligently unapplied it in the work he did. In the process his acting became just that: a concern with producing effects rather than with fulfilling or actualizing his capacities. These capacities assume the characteristics of the animal claws that, according to Kinski, they replaced. Talent becomes an unadaptable limb, brutally at odds with the manual labor of acting. Kinski’s talent exists in excess of

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applicability and looms around the business he must get down to on screen. Yet it does not go unnoticed. Herzog claims he could detect Kinski’s performance as Paganini within his performance as Cobra Verde. Unlike the troubadour poet who opens the film singing about da Silva, Kinski never picks up a violin in playing da Silva. Kinski’s violin performance goes unheard but not unseen as he submerges his virtuoso’s hand within the hand of the bandit Cobra Verde. Kinski makes himself into a refuge for his Paganini-to-come. Perhaps Kinski’s greatest skill as an actor is the way he disjoins talent from the activity he undertakes on screen, in order to do it unlearnedly, and in the hope that what happens there might acquire the same unassuming reality and distinct necessity as taking out the trash.

Notes 1

Kael’s review of Fitzcarraldo carries this further by describing Kinski’s performance as the transposition of two actors: “We don’t quite know what Kinski’s Fitz is, because he’s not like anyone else in the world (except maybe Bette Davis playing Rutger Hauer)” (1984: 404). 2 Writing about Echoes from a Somber Empire, Prager notes: “Herzog connects crabs metonymically with tyrants, and here as elsewhere he defines humans in relation to our animal counterparts: the despot is at once a crab and a man, barely recognizable as human” (2007a: 33). 3 The forces that push through Kinski’s deformed Aguirre also blow through Nicholas Cage’s slanted-and-recessed-shoulder performance in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call—New Orleans (2009). The differences, however, are striking. The later film grounds McDonagh’s condition first in the action on screen (in the opening scene he jumps into a jail submerged in water) and in the medical diagnosis by his chiropractor. The film gives us an etiology that feeds the story, as McDonagh becomes addicted to painkillers. Cage’s corporeal performance shores up a depiction of a literally crooked cop. By contrast, Kinski’s condition isn’t articulated as an “ailment”; it grounds nothing. 4 Herzog coins this phrase to describe the life and death dramas that come with animals being in close quarters during the making of Fitzcarraldo. Two chicks are put in a rabbit hutch to keep them from the cat. But one chicken “drowns in a saucer containing only a couple of millimeters of water. The other…slipped through the woven wire to one of the albino rabbits, which, murderous through and through, wanted to devour it instantly…Why do these animal dramas preoccupy me so? Because I do not want to look inside myself ” (2009: 83). 5 In the instance of its declaration, this lesson of darkness indicates the bottomless nature of stupidity. Common sense tells us that Jesse Ventura (who is quoted here) means to say “You can’t legislate against stupidity,” that is, you can’t make laws that prohibit, for example, people from riding their snow mobiles across melting lakes in spring. Yet what the statement in fact says is “you can’t make stupidity a part of the law.” You can’t give orders that would put stupidity into practice, into law. So, strangely, stupidity is outside the law. The bottomless quality of stupidity is testified by the fact that both statements, though seemingly opposite to one another, are true.

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This moment in Aguirre recalls the death of a donkey in Luis Buñuel’s Las Hurdes/ Land without Bread (1933). The narrator of Buñuel’s film informs us that the Hurdanos only eat donkey when one of the creatures happens to slip and falls to its death. Yet this “chance occurrence” suddenly takes place before our very eyes. Artifice intrudes as we see a puff of gun smoke on the frame’s edge and the donkey falls. This title refers to Herzog’s second film, featuring children and the slaughter of a rooster. He has never screened the film. We will recall that in Stroszek (1977) the title character flies with his bird Beo, but is not allowed to enter the United States with him. The bird is confiscated and Herr Scheitz exits customs with an empty cage: “What kind of country is this that would take the good Beo?” That is, what kind of country only permits you to keep the cage? In his autobiography Kinski heaps scorn on the trained actor, he who attends acting school to learn things like how to die on stage, but more specifically the actor who responds to the directorial imperative as if it were a Milk-Bone: “No outsider can imagine the stupidity, blustering, hysteria, authoritarianism, and paralyzing boredom of shooting a flick for Billy Wilder. The so-called ‘actors’ are simply trained poodles who sit up on their hind legs and jump through hoops. I thought the insanity would never stop. But I got a shitload of money” (Kinski 1997: 299). Kinski gives endless variation on this theme. In the same interview: “I am like a wild animal who is behind bars. I need air! I need space!” (Kinski 1985: 178). Or from his autobiography: “I feel like a wolf who has been chased into the city” (Kinski 1997: 305). When Clements informs Kinski that their conversations wouldn’t be structured like “routine interviews” and that he would have freedom, Kinski interrupts her, screaming, “Freedom! Freedom! That’s what every shitty ruler promises you before he takes over!” (Kinski 1985: 178). As an anarchist chained to his bunk in David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago (1965), Kinski loudly suggests that everyone else works for Hitchcock: “I am the only free man on this train. All the rest of you are cattle!” As Nosferatu pours wine for Jonathan, his fingers gracefully slither around the decanter without Kinski ever even watching where his fingers are on the crowded dinner table. By contrast, Max Schreck’s Nosferatu is manually stymied. When, in Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), the vampire sees a locket photo of Harker’s wife fall suddenly on the table, he cannot use his fingers to pick it up and must drag the locket over the edge of the table into the palm of his other hand. The hands of Murnau’s vampire are no match for a flat object on a flat surface. In the film Portrait of Werner Herzog, Herzog compares these figures to the images of Hias in Heart of Glass and to a poster designed for his production of the opera Faust. See also Peucker (1995: 91–101). Kinski’s film Paganini and his pornographic films such as Fruits of Passion (1981) put this question to the test in the bedroom. When Kinski is shown graphically fornicating with his co-stars, we look at him rather than at the genitalia involved. Pornography is perhaps the limit test for method acting, where converging reproductive organs threaten to reduce the actor (otherwise engaged in the enterprise of “merging with his role”) to an extension of his anatomy. Aus der Rolle fallen, to “fall out of character” or “drop out of your role,” is one of the terms by which Friedrich Schlegel describes irony’s interruption of the illusion of fiction. See de Man (1996: 178).

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Kinski should know: at age twenty-four he spent several months in a psychiatric clinic after being deemed a danger to himself and to others. Stricken with jealousy for a woman, he proceeded to spend several nights sleeping on her balcony or, the doctor’s report says, “in her apartment, but without her knowing it.” Another telling detail from Kinski’s health records: “He always had that piercing look (diesen stechenden Blick), this sharp voice.” See Gehrman (2008). 16 On this see Chion (1999: esp. 140).

Works Cited Arnheim, Rudolf: The Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957). Chion, Michel: The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). Cronin Paul, ed.: Herzog on Herzog (London: Faber & Faber, 2002). de Man, Paul: Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Gehrman, Laura: “Diagnose: Schizophrenie, Psychopathie/Psycho-Akte von Klaus Kinski entdeckt,” BILD July 21, 2008. Herzog, Werner: Of Walking in Ice: Munich-Paris, 11/23 to 12/14, 1974, trans. Martje Herzog and Alan Greenberg (New York: Tanam Press, 1980 [original 1978]). Herzog, Werner: Conquest of the Useless, trans. Krishna Winston (New York: Ecco Press, 2009). Kael, Pauline: “Up the River,” Taking It All In (New York: Holt Rinehart Winston, 1984). Kinski, Klaus, “Klaus Kinski, The Master of Screen Depravity Speaks,” Interview with Ed Naha, Fangoria 24 (1983): 40–43. Kinski, Klaus: “Klaus Kinski & The Thing,” Interview with Marcelle Clements, Playboy, 32.11 (1985): 84–87, 178–190. Kinski, Klaus: Ich Brauche Liebe (Munich: Heyne Verlag, 1991). Kinski, Klaus: Kinski Uncut, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Viking, 1997). Kolker, Robert: The Altering Eye (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1983). Peirce, Charles Sanders: “What Is a Sign?,” The Essential Peirce (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976). Peucker Brigitte: Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival Arts (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1995). Prager, Brad: The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (London: Wallflower Press, 2007a). Prager, Brad: “To Live and Let Lie With Klaus Kinski,” Tank Magazine 5.1 (2007b): 82–87. Thomson, David: “The Many Faces of Klaus Kinski,” American Film 5.7 (1980): 22–27. Truffaut, François: Hitchcock/Truffaut (New York: Touchstone Books, 1980). Wexman, Virginia Wright: “Masculinity in Crisis: Method Acting in Hollywood,” Movie Acting: The Film Reader, ed. Pamela Robertson Wojcik (Routledge: New York, 2004), pp. 127–144.

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Additional Films Cited Benedek, Laslo: Children, Mother, and the General (1955) Browning, Tod: Freaks (1932) Buñuel, Luis: Las Hurdes/Land without Bread (1933) Caiano, Mario: Shanghai Joe (1973) Chaplin, Charles: The Immigrant (1917) Fleming, Victor: The Wizard of Oz (1939) Geyer, Peter: Jesus Christ Savior (2008) Keusch, Erwin and Weisenborn, Christian: I Am My Films—A Portrait of Werner Herzog (1979) Kinski, Klaus: Paganini (1989) Lean, David: Doctor Zhivago (1965) Murnau, F. W.: Nosferatu (1922) Schmoeller, David: Please Kill Mr. Kinski (1999) Terayama, Shûji: Fruits of Passion (1981)

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PART IV

Herzog’s Far-Flung Cinema: Africa, Australia, the Americas, and Beyond

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Werner Herzog’s African Sublime Erica Carter

Consider this contradiction: In a 2001 interview on his mesmerizing study of the cinematic mirage, Fata Morgana (1969)—a film shot largely in the African desert— Werner Herzog observes that Africa “has always somehow left me frightened. […] Even though I was very cautious in Africa, it always seemed to go wrong for me there” (Cronin 2002: 47). Yet the continent has retained an enduring fascination for Herzog. His first African encounter came in 1961 when, aged nineteen, he set out in the direction of the Republic of Congo, his journey motivated by “the idea that our civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness, and that in this country everything overwhelmingly dangerous had come out into the open.” Herzog was prevented from reaching the Congo by what he has come to regard as a fortuitous illness, since it saved him from the fate of fellow Europeans who perished in the early 1960s on the same route (Cronin 2002: 2). But he returned to Africa seven years later to make three films, the educational documentary The Flying Doctors of East Africa (1970), the experimental Fata Morgana, and the feature Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970). Following a further African feature inspired by Bruce Chatwin’s 1980 The Viceroy of Ouidah, Cobra Verde (1987), a trip to the Southern Sahara in 1988 produced Herzog’s study of the nomadic tribe of the film’s title, Wodaabe—Herdsmen of the Sun (1989), followed in 1990 by Echoes from a Somber Empire, Herzog’s joint exploration with the journalist Michael Goldsmith of the historical legacy of the Central African Republic’s maniacal dictator, Jean Bedel Bokassa. Herzog traces his fascination with Africa to the continent’s supposed affinity with the “primordial,” the “archetypal,” “chaos and darkness.” Much like Conrad, whose fiction he greatly admires, Herzog returns to Africa repeatedly as a source of the ecstatic aesthetic truth to which his filmmaking aspires. In Fata Morgana and Flying Doctors, that truth derives from Herzog’s confrontation of camera and A Companion to Werner Herzog, First Edition. Edited by Brad Prager. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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audience with modes of perception that unsettle Western epistemologies and visual regimes. In a key moment in Flying Doctors, African laborers at a remote medical outpost in the Kenyan bush are shown images of a human eye, which they apparently fail to recognize as representations of a human organ. The encounter recalls early research by colonial filmmakers, who used similar experiments to demonstrate the alleged crudity of the “primitive” visual imagination (Burns 1992). Herzog, by contrast, interprets the Kenyan villagers’ perplexity as evidence of a “culturally conditioned” disparity between African and European perceptual modes (Cronin 2002: 46). This relativist interpretation suggests an attachment in Herzog to visions of an incommensurable African–European cultural difference that administers a shock, apparently, to Western perceptual habits. In Fata Morgana, Herzog’s camera is thus fascinated, and the spectator held entranced by the perceptual disorientations of the desert mirage. The cars, buses, human figures, and other mobile forms that appear here on the Sahara’s shimmering horizons may be perceptible both to the human eye and to the camera; yet they are in fact chimeras, tricks of the light suggesting a material presence that is in actuality an absence, a virtual image of an event or object in an altogether other location. Echoes from a Somber Empire may not entirely replicate Fata Morgana’s fascination with the mirage; the monster conjured in the film image of “Emperor” Bokassa is all too palpably real. Yet the film shares with its precursor a preoccupation with African encounters that move both filmmaker and viewer into uncharted experiential territories. In Echoes, this border-crossing is instigated by Bokassa’s alleged cannibalism, and his transgression therefore of one of humanity’s most entrenched cultural taboos. In Wodaabe’s more lyrical vision, Herzog crosses historical epochs to explore what his voice-over terms the “primordial” mores of a “stone-age tribe,” a nomadic branch of the Fulani people who migrated in “prehistoric times” to the sub-Saharan Sahel. The film’s focus is on WoDaaBe rituals that celebrate a people who “consider themselves to be the most beautiful […] in the world,” and whose images move us therefore into the realm not of documentary, but of “beauty and desire” (Cronin 2002: 214–215).

The African Sublime Africa, then, for Herzog, generates images of the ineffable that transport both viewer and filmmaker beyond the limits of ordinary vision. The quest for the extraordinary is, of course, both central to Herzog’s larger cinematic endeavor, and an aspect of his filmmaking that leads critics and reviewers to dub him an artist in search of a contemporary sublime. While Brigitte Peucker thus highlights the debt to Romanticism she perceives in Herzog’s “difficult quest for the sublime” (Peucker 1984), Alan Singer reads Herzog’s early films as staging an encounter with sublimity, only to refuse what he terms the sublime’s “consoling authority” (Singer 1986: 184).

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Singer explains as follows his account of Herzog as an artist who yearns after, yet refuses or ironizes sublimity. In the German idealist aesthetics which is, for Singer, Herzog’s “inescapable cultural origin,” confrontations with sublime Nature threaten to overwhelm the viewing subject with the perception of a power that exceeds rational understanding. But the subject is saved by the mobilization of what Kant termed the supersensible, the faculty that regulates the sublime by relocating it within the realm of human understanding. Human reason does not make the sublime object fully comprehensible, but establishes it rather, maintains Kant, as a property involving three Ideas—God, freedom, and immortality—that are universally accessible to, if not fully comprehended by, rational man.1 According to Singer, Herzog by contrast refuses the “delusive idealism” of a sublimity mastered through an embrace of this triad of transcendent ideals. In a reading of early films including Fata Morgana, Heart of Glass (1976) and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), Singer identifies repeated instances of a cinematic practice that pauses on the threshold to transcendent knowledge, then, recognizing the impossibility of transcendence, returns to wrestle instead with the contingencies of human experience and historical time. I consider below in more detail the undulating tracking shots of Fata Morgana, or the laconic voice-over which Singer identifies as ironizing any quest for transcendence, and reveling instead in the concrete particularity of extraordinary life-worlds. As we shall see, there is much evidence to support Singer’s account both in Herzog’s aesthetic practice, and in his own pronouncements on his work. He has, for instance, explicitly rejected the conceptions of artistic genius that ground eighteenth-century conceptions of the sublime (Cronin 2002: 70, 139). Herzog has also situated his early works in particular within a German cultural tradition, Weimar modernism, that is notable for its antagonism to an idealist aesthetics of beauty and the sublime. His admiration for Weimar cinema is expressed most famously in his repeated tributes to the film critic and historian Lotte Eisner; and Eisner’s The Haunted Screen (1973) in turn opens a window on a Weimar film culture that saw in the film medium a fundamental challenge to the anachronistic verities of bourgeois aesthetics. Her work is peppered with allusions to Weimar critics who saw modernity as shaped around aesthetic experiences—distraction (Siegfried Kracauer), alienation (Bertolt Brecht), Bergsonian duration (Béla Balázs)—that resist capture within accounts of the beautiful or sublime. That Herzog shares with the Weimar theorists, as Singer’s work suggests, an impatience with “cultural values that have become unreal” (Kracauer 1987: 94) is evident in his search for film images which open cinematic perception to an experience of the radically new. And yet, twenty-five years on from Singer’s seminal account, there are reasons to revisit the issue of Herzog’s relation to the sublime. Not the least of these is Herzog’s own recent suggestion that we understand his practice in terms of a search for the sublime. In a speech delivered after a Milan screening of his Lessons of Darkness (1992), Herzog elucidated as follows the quotation from Blaise Pascal that prefaces the film.

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“The collapse of the stellar universe will occur—like creation—in grandiose splendor” (Blaise Pascal). [This] quotation should serve as a first hint of what I am trying to deal with in this discourse. […] With this quotation as a prefix I elevate (erheben) the spectator, before he has ever seen the first frame, to a high level from which to enter the film. And I, the author of the film, do not let him descend from this height until it is over. Only in this state of sublimity (Erhabenheit) does something deeper become possible, a kind of truth that is the enemy of the merely factual. Ecstatic truth, I call it (Herzog 2009: 1).

In what follows, I use this recent statement as a first rationale for returning to the question of Herzog’s sublime. If Herzog’s relation to sublimity is as ambivalent as might be suggested by the clash between his own comments, and Singer’s account of his “ironic sublime,” then how does this ambivalence become evident in his early African films? And what features of Herzog’s Africa locate the remoter territories of that continent as sites of an aesthetic experience of the sublime?

An African Sublime? The mirages of Fata Morgana are among the most evocative exemplars of Herzog’s search throughout his films after images that hover on the border between the “real” and the unreal, mundane empirical reality and the sublime. The same oscillation between aesthetic truths and rational understanding is evident in Herzog’s refusal in Wodaabe of ethnographic visual modes, or in the evocative operatic music track of all his Africa films. This quest for an aesthetic evocation of “Africa,” rather than a representation of its truths via the ratio of the documentary camera, recalls philosophical conceptions of the sublime as a mode of understanding which is affective as opposed to cognitive or reflective. But Herzog also situates Africa as a location for his exploration of the sublime’s experiential mix of attraction and danger, horror and pleasure. Herzog shares with other commentators on the sublime a visceral distaste for global image cultures that repackage as exotic commodities wild landscapes and minority peoples. As the artist and critic Anthony Haden-Guest suggests, “there is no landscape so savage, no wilderness so wild…remote and rugged—okay, so sublime—that [it does not today] offer lucrative prospects for Extreme Sports promotions” (Haden-Guest 2001, cited in Battersby 2007: 19). Haden-Guest’s point certainly holds for those vast transnational territories absorbed in the modern period into global markets for commercial images. Global tourism, for instance, shipped an estimated 800 million travelers around the world in 2005, and is hailed as a “passport to development” in emerging economies including the Pacific and Asia as world tourism’s “growing giants” (Rogerson 2007: 361). Yet four decades after Herzog’s first African sojourn, the continent retains an ambivalent position in this globalized tourist economy. While the “Big Four” of African tourism—Egypt, South Africa, Tunisia, Morocco—have been joined in the early twenty-first century

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by smaller states now developing niche tourism (eco-tours, adventure sports, wildlife tourism, African heritage) for international markets, the African regions explored by Herzog between the 1960s and 1990 remain marginalized from those developments through a combination of poverty, political instability, and political resistances to a tourist economy rooted in imperial expansion from the late nineteenth century on (McGregor 2003; Rogerson 2007). Official warnings to Western tourists, in particular since the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, confirm the picture of Central and West Africa as territories beyond the pale; hence the blanket instruction by foreign ministries across Europe to avoid travel to large areas of the Congo, the Sahara, Nigeria, Mali, Mauretania, and Niger. Those warnings notwithstanding, African tourism is on the increase, including in such high-risk countries as Nigeria or Zimbabwe (Rogerson 2007: 365). Like all symbolic spaces beyond cultural borders, sub-Saharan Africa still exerts, it thus seems, on the global tourist imaginary a mix of attraction and repulsion, desire and fear. This, of course, is precisely what feeds Herzog’s fascination. A filmmaker whose perpetual effort is to rescue the film image from its pacification under a consumerist gaze is bound to be drawn by world regions that resist absorption into Western markets, spheres of political influence, and visual regimes. In HadenGuest’s terms, moreover, these may also be territories that offer the recuperation of a contemporary sublime. Sublime experience is understood in philosophical aesthetics as destabilizing the subject, producing the “shock” of “an object or an entity that […] exceed[s] the capacities of the human to imaginatively grasp or understand it” (Battersby 2007: 1). In mass tourism, sublimity is repackaged as Haden-Guest’s extreme leisure experience, amongst whose African highlights one might include Zambezi white water rafting, or Kenyan “safaris of the sublime” (Scott 2010). Herzog’s films, by contrast—unsurprisingly for a filmmaker for whom tourism is “sin” (Cronin 2002: 301)—struggle to restore to the viewing subject the experience of a sublimity that splits her/him between pleasure and terror, conscious understanding and the incomprehensible abyss. The African continent is for Herzog, moreover, a place where he himself has experienced the sublime shock of an ill-understood terror: during his imprisonment in Cameroon, for instance, or his desert exploits in Fata Morgana, around which he has woven a mythic narrative of confrontation with dangers including possible shooting by the Algerian military, or perishing in a Sahara he crossed with three companions at a time of year when even desert nomads refused to travel South.

Sublime Terror and the Figure of the Black Christine Battersby has argued that this association of sublime experience and terror derives most centrally from the Kant of the 1790 Critique of the Power of Judgement. The Third Critique, observes Battersby, “t[ook] a stand against

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empiricists such as Burke whose account of mental functioning emphasized passivity, sensibility and affectivity.” Kant moved instead towards an understanding of the sublime that was now “described as involving terror and its simultaneous transcendence” (Battersby 2007: 9). In Kant, it is predominantly the confrontation with sublime Nature that engenders both terror, and its overcoming via the supersensible. Battersby, by contrast, takes a cue from Lyotard when she extends the domain of the sublime to encompass all those forms of difference that inspire terror in the face of the “unpresentable” (Lyotard 1986: 78). She is, moreover, not the first among contemporary philosophers of the sublime to have highlighted the conjunction between sublime experience and a politics of cultural difference that is especially problematic in relation to that “terrifying” Africa to which Herzog has regularly returned. Herzog’s fascination with a terrifying Africa has antecedents in a philosophical aesthetics that has long associated the black and the dark with the ambivalence of the sublime. Burke’s aesthetics, for instance, as Sander Gilman explains, is organized around a “neoplatonic dichotomy of light and dark” that situates blackness as “a negative force in the realm of perception” (Gilman 1975: 375). Blackness in Burke is linked to the sublime because it confounds ordinary (polychromatic) visual perception, and inspires as a result a terror in the face of the unknown. For Kant, meanwhile, it is not blackness as the object of vision that is at issue, but black skin color as the marker of an inferior capacity to participate in the world community of rational beings, and thus to share in the universal experience of the sublime. In his “Of the Different Human Races” Kant divides humanity into four distinct racial types—the white, the Negro, the Hun, and the Hindu—and attributes to the white race a superior capacity for the “non-sensuous … conceptual … abstract (and) logical” thinking that is required for an experience of the sublime (Kant 1775-7: 11–12; see also Battersby 2007: 76–77). There runs, then, through idealist aesthetics a strand of hierarchical thinking that discriminates both against blackness as a quality of the aesthetic object, and against the black or non-European other as the subject of artistic vision. Herzog’s repeated return to Africa as a symbolic figure for sublime darkness is thus one source of the charge leveled against him by Eric Rentschler and others of an “instrumentalism” that reproduces the discriminatory hierarchies of bourgeois aesthetics. For Rentschler, Herzog’s all-consuming quest for the visionary image leads him to “intrude upon and often abuse those very tenuous and vulnerable entities he otherwise so readily used to champion” (Rentschler 1986: 160, 176). And this charge is certainly justified if we see Herzog as uncritically replicating the eighteenth-century quest for the sublime. Bourgeois aesthetics from its inception identified in sublime experience the source of that impulse towards mastery which Rentschler calls instrumental. For Kant, as we have seen, the horror of the sublime is countered by the supersensible, the faculty that regulates the sublime by relocating it within the realm of the transcendent Idea. Though rational humanity may not fully grasp the sublime object, reason can nonetheless give access to an

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understanding of sublimity as a property that resides, for instance, in ideas of universal freedom, or of God (Battersby 2007: 32–33). In visual representation since Kant, a similar regulatory impulse has been visible in traditions that contain the sublime other within the conventionalized visual forms of the picturesque or the “primitive.” One pertinent example of the former is the late nineteenth-century landscape painting of the “Südwester” (“Southwesters,” or German settlers in what is now Namibia): artists such as Axel Erikson and Johannes Blatt, who depicted this German colonial territory as “a magnificent landscape” tamed by the erasure both in actuality, in the genocidal German war against the Herero, and symbolically, in landscape paintings devoid of human presence, of all traces of the black population as indigenous “enemy within” (see Forster 2004: 166). Primitivism, meanwhile, runs as a recurrent strand throughout German modernism, beginning with the Expressionist idealization of the black other in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, and others, and culminating in Leni Riefenstahl’s fetishistic celebration of the black body in her film Olympia (1938), or in her coffee-table photographic collections The Last of the Nuba (1974) and The People of Kau (1976). Arguably, however, Herzog’s Africa films challenge what Gilman terms the sublime’s “anthropomorphism of darkness in the figure of the Black” (Gilman 1975: 377; see also Prager 2007: 185). I referred above to Alan Singer’s proposal that we read Herzog as adopting an ironic stance that recognizes the impossibility of achieving through the cinematic image the transcendence envisaged by either Burke or Kant (Singer 1986: 185–187). Herzog’s films themselves, moreover, suggest that if we are to situate his cinematic vision as “sublime,” then this is a sublimity that defines itself in unequivocally post-Kantian terms. As Battersby again helpfully explains, the contemporary sublime envisioned among others by JeanFrançois Lyotard differs from earlier understandings in its account of the sublime’s effect on the viewing subject. Kant envisaged a transcendence of the sublime at the moment when the mind moves beyond the abyss and into the supersensible. For Lyotard, by contrast, the terror evoked by the spectacle of human difference produces a “surrender or displacement of the ego” that is not recuperated by the supersensible. In his account, the “I” remains displaced and fragmented by the sublime experience of incommensurable difference that is the product of encounters across cultural and “racial” divides. The recognition of that incommensurability is, indeed, the source of a postmodern ethics, in the sense that the subject, potentially at least, is forced to question her/his own authority to define the supposedly universal norms of cultural experience (Battersby 2007: 1; Lyotard 1986: 81–82). What this produces on the one hand is a capacity to grasp and embrace that multiplicity of self hoods which is integral to the “postmodern condition” of Lyotard’s account. That there is also a loss involved here—a relinquishing of the subjective cohesion and mastery that is central for instance to Kant—is an issue that I pursue below in an account of Herzog’s films which sees them as evoking neither a Kantian overcoming of sublime experience nor a postmodern

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fragmentation, but a melancholic narcissism that returns repeatedly to the melodrama of a European and masculine subject now incapable of ordering or mastering Africa’s “primordial” sublime. In a discussion of Herzog’s treatment, first, of African landscapes, and second, of the black body, I explore the response evinced both in the spectator and in the diegetic authorial subject—a figure whose vision and voice are located audio-visually in the documentary camera and in Herzog’s voice-over—by the unsettling experience of an African sublime. I focus here on three of Herzog’s Africa films, Fata Morgana, Wodaabe, and Echoes from a Somber Empire. The films are chosen for the light they shed on Herzog’s heuristics: his approach, that is, to an exploration of African aesthetic truths. Though all three belong to the documentary genre, they all also abjure the empiricist truth claims of documentary naturalism, and are thus emblematic of Herzog’s aesthetic mode of understanding and knowing “Africa.” Second, the twenty years spanned by my chosen titles coincide with the emergence of a postcolonial African cinema in both North and sub-Saharan Africa—the regions that are also the location for all three of the films discussed below. Filmmakers including Ousmane Sembene (Senegal), Med Hondo (Mauritania), Cheick Oumar Sissoko, Souleymane Cisse (Mali), and numerous others developed during this period a filmmaking practice that sought to inscribe in world cinema an African gaze and voice. In the conclusion to this article, I briefly use the example of Cisse’s Yeelen—a film credited by Roy Armes with “changing the whole course of sub-Saharan filmmaking” on its release in 1987 (Armes 2006: 48)—to explore the fate of Herzog’s cinematic vision when his gaze is returned by a filmmaking practice that rediscovers in African landscapes and peoples (here, the Malian Bambara) not a Eurocentric sublimity, but the rituals and magic of African demotic tradition.

Fata Morgana, Mirage, and Montage In summer 1968, Herzog set off across the Sahara desert in a small car carrying himself and a team of three including his long-term friend and collaborator, the cinematographer Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein. These were unpropitious times for such a trip. The rainy season had begun; communication routes were closed across the desert and the sub-Saharan Sahel; filmmaking itself was a daily battle to preserve melting filmstock against the depredations of sand, wind, and soaring temperatures—up to 50°C at the trip’s hottest point. Characteristically, Herzog saw these dangers as a necessary element in a Herculean struggle to wrest from this alien landscape images that enter the sphere of an exalted truth. Though the film was originally conceived as a science fiction narrative about aliens from the planet Andromeda, Herzog found himself captivated by the strangeness of the desert landscape, and abandoned his original plan. He now had no script, or any preconceived narrative structure; he only knew, he

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Figure 14.1 A montage of airplane landings in Fata Morgana (1969). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Werner Herzog/Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

said, that “there was something I needed to film down there in Africa,” in a desert landscape whose “visionary aspects […] were so much more powerful than any single idea for the film I had previously had” (Cronin 2002: 47). The final cut of Fata Morgana, assembled by one of postwar West German cinema’s most gifted editors, Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus, comprised a collage of sequences shot primarily in the Sahara, but occasionally also in other locations including the salt lakes and mountains of Kenya and Tanzania, and Lanzarote, the island setting for Even Dwarfs Started Small. The montage organizes these disparate passages into a tripartite essayistic reflection on the nature of the film image. Part I, “Creation,” begins with a protracted montage of airplane landings across a single day at an unnamed airport (Figure  14.1). As Alan Singer points out, the camera cuts away repeatedly a split second before touchdown, lending to the sequence a cyclical motion which he reads as the first of many ironic commentaries on the narrative teleology of a film with three sections titled “Genesis,” “Paradise,” and “The Golden Age” (Singer 1986: 187). Certainly, the film’s opening moments foreground the formal qualities of the cinematic image. As the day wears on, the heat intensifies, shrouding the planes in a rippling haze that prefigures the mirage shots of later sequences, and establishes Fata Morgana as a meditation on the transformation of the film image under the extreme conditions of intense heat and blinding light. The film then shifts to repeated images of the fata morgana, or mirage, of Herzog’s title. The fata morgana is in the first instance a natural phenomenon caused by temperature variations in desert landscapes. The desert mirage arises when refracted light projects images normally concealed behind the horizon into a virtual space within the onlooker’s or camera’s line of sight. But the fata morgana is also a mythic reference to Morgan

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le Fay, a powerful sorceress of Arthurian legend whose name appears in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s medieval epic poem Parzifal, as well as in the myth of the ghost ship the Flying Dutchman, the latter said to appear as an omen of foul weather in tempestuous seas.2 The Morgan le Fay of legend was skilled in the art of shape-shifting, and used that talent to lure unsuspecting travelers to her kingdom under the sea. Similarly, the fata morgana as naturally occurring mirage confounds and disorients both the desert traveler and the film viewer. The spectator’s faith in the veracity of the celluloid image is thus undermined in Herzog’s film by shots of mirages that capture only a simulacrum, not an object with a material referent within the space of the camera frame. From the opening airplane sequence, the film cuts to a desert horizon, its shimmer replicating the runway heat haze, but suggesting also a sea or river that we know is incongruous in the desiccated landscape this image depicts. Across the horizon, a distant object veers busily to right and left, its movements erratic, its contours ill-defined: is this a car? a boat? a human figure? The disturbance of vision in this early shot is repeated throughout the film in long takes of scintillant horizons along whose contours the fata morgana projects a series of nebulous, shimmering, and ambivalently amorphous silhouettes. There is an important link between the disruption of vision that the fata morgana provokes, and Herzog’s quest for a cinematic sublime. Already in Kant’s third critique, the failure of visual perception to master its object figures as one source of the “negative pleasure” of the sublime. The eye’s inability, for instance, to contain large objects within its visual field is presented by Kant as provoking that awe in the face of magnitude which he terms the mathematical sublime. The dynamically sublime, meanwhile, understood by Kant as an aesthetic judgment provoked by the apprehension of a superior power, becomes accessible similarly through “sights”—“threatening cliffs,” hurricanes, “volcanoes with their all-destroying violence”—that “we gladly call ... sublime, because they elevate the strength of our soul above its usual level, and allow us to discover within ourselves … the courage to measure ourselves against the all-powerfulness of nature” (Kant 2000: 129–145). As Brad Prager has noted, Kant’s eighteenth-century preoccupation with a sublime that becomes evident not as a formal property of the object of vision, but through the effects generated by a disoriented visual perception in the spectator’s inner life, finds its nineteenth-century visual equivalent in German Romantic art. Prager’s example is the landscape painting of Caspar David Friedrich, the visionary artist whom Herzog also claims as an inspiration for his oeuvre. Prager shows how Friedrich’s refusal of the “visual cues” used in eighteenth-century pictorial landscapes to create the impression of three-dimensional space produces a tension between spatial accuracy, and a disorienting evocation of the infinite. That tension is also characteristic of the Kantian “mathematical sublime,” and Prager shows how Friedrich translates the Kantian preoccupation with perceptual disturbance into a visual language of the sublime whose features include an absence of “standard signs of differentiation” between foreground and background, and a refusal of

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that visual balancing of horizontal and vertical planes which conventionally established the pictorial landscape as a source of the beautiful in art (Prager 2002: 71–72). A further feature of Friedrich’s Romantic sublime is his refusal of Renaissance perspective, and his eschewing in particular of the central vanishing point. The wide skies of works including Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818), Abbey in the Oak Forest (1809–10), or Moonrise over the Sea (1822) draw the eye outwards in a vertiginous exploration of seemingly limitless lateral space. The image’s center, meanwhile, is either lost in the haze of an ill-defined horizon,3 or obscured by objects and figures that surge uncannily into the foreground, blocking access to the vanishing point, and depriving the image of that fixed and distant center from which the visual coherence of classical perspective derives. In breaking the established rules of pictorial perspective, Friedrich’s paintings are understood, in sum, to create in the spectator that “perspectival disjuncture” (Prager 2002: 73) which is also the foundation of the sublime. It is, moreover, Herzog’s similar disruption of the spatio-temporal rules of pictorial landscape that situates his Fata Morgana as a twentieth-century realization of the sublime. A defining feature of the sublime is what Kant terms “limitlessness,” a quality that “does violence to our imagination” because it “cannot be contained in any sensible form” (Kant 2000: 128–129). In Friedrich’s landscapes, this vertiginous experience of limitless space is achieved through a disorganization of classical perspective that leads the eye to a visionary space beyond the pictorial frame. The film medium, however, is distinguished from landscape painting by a dynamization of the image that situates filmed landscapes within time’s durational flows. Already in the eighteenth century, what Prager terms “traditional perspective regimens” favored compositions that lent temporality to the image by leading the eye “from place to place … like a walk in the countryside” (Prager 2002: 73). With the advent of the film medium, this movement of the spectator through time was accelerated by virtue of the very mobility of the film image: a quality accentuated through mobile camera, bodies in performance, the movements of the montage, and later, music and sound. Herzog’s Fata Morgana, moreover, shares with its silent predecessors a relish both for perceptual experiment, and for the aesthetic possibilities of cinema as a visual realization of new temporalities. The film may specifically be seen as exploring how cinema’s mobilization of aesthetic perception extends the spectator’s capacity for an experience of the sublime. In Caspar David Friedrich’s landscapes, sublimity is achieved in part through depictions of an indeterminate semi-darkness (is this twilight, is it dawn?) that disrupts coherent time schemes. Empty spaces at the image’s border or its perspectival center, meanwhile, suggest an uncanny void beyond the time–space of ordinary vision. In Herzog, a cognate dissolution of the spatio-temporal boundaries of pictorial space is achieved by the film’s accelerated movement of landscape through time. Fata Morgana is shot and edited as a film on the move, Part I especially comprising a haunting sequence of extended traveling shots that chase the desert

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horizon into a seemingly infinite off-screen space. From the film’s opening desert mirage, the camera cuts to a traveling shot across the desert that pauses first on a distant rocky outcrop, then on a dark object protruding awkwardly from the sand. Like the many shapes that surface in medium or long shot as Herzog’s itinerant camera comes momentarily to rest, this object of uncertain type and origin is then abandoned as we cut to an extended track in the reverse direction along the desert sand. Here then, the establishing shot that, in narrative film, would fix the time and space of the action confronts us instead with the enigma of an indeterminate object snatched only fleetingly from the mobile flow of filmic time. This dynamic of restless movement and troubling stasis persists throughout Part I of Fata Morgana, as long tracks and pans across the horizon are briefly arrested by some new mirage, or by shots of the detritus of deracinated desert lives: here an abandoned airplane, there a lost machine of uncertain function, elsewhere animal skeletons and abandoned buildings suggestive of the morbid fate awaiting desert nomads when they come to rest. Mobility, by contrast, appears as the source of a vibrant visual poetry that infuses the camera’s objects with the aesthetic qualities of music and the lyric form. One breathtaking extended tracking shot along undulating sand dunes captures a visual rhythm that is further accentuated in the music track. Mozart’s choral kyrie eleison, like all the music selected for the final cut, matches in pace, rhythm, dynamics, and fluctuating pitch the desert landscape’s visual ebb and flow. But most significant is Herzog’s ability to create of the desert an image with protracted extension in time. This sequence was the result of a day’s digging to create a smooth surface for Herzog’s passing car, and its length (two minutes) and sustained direction begin to suggest infinite movement through lateral space as one key feature of the aesthetic truth he seeks. This search for a mobility that extends into infinite space is reinforced on the one hand by the film’s countless long tracks, pans and aerial shots, on the other by a montage that disrupts spatial coherence by connecting sequences from quite different locations: now the Sahara, now the Ivory Coast or East Africa. In a sequence late in Part I, the film cuts from a long track along Saharan sands, to a soaring aerial view, shot in East Africa, of flamingoes dissolving into a blur of pink. As in the earlier sand dune sequence, the organizing logic here is neither that of narrative, nor of ethnographic spectacle, but of a sustained mobility that confounds realist perception and triggers the experience of a de-spatialized filmic time. A further connection to early cinema is relevant here. In his 1930 The Spirit of Film, Béla Balázs described as follows the capacity of montage to move the filmed image into a new dimension beyond the mundane temporalities of the lived everyday: The peculiar feature of the rhythmic formations created by montage is that they bring together in counterpoint elements of the most dissimilar spheres. In music, melody is juxtaposed to melody: in architecture, form to form. In montage, it is tempos and forms, movements and directions as well as emphases on elements of

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the action that are blended and combined. … What emerges in the resulting synthesis is a sixth dimension, something new and special. A rhythmic formation that is experienced optically and yet is not visible (Balázs 2010: 179).

For Balázs, this dimension beyond visual perception and empiricist truth was that of Bergsonian duration, a quality explored by Bergson in his writing on melody. Bergson’s emphasis is on melody as a durational totality that “gradually com[es] into being through time” (Balázs 2010: 149). Herzog’s Fata Morgana, by contrast, may be seen to use the montage to open up a dimension not of totality, but of a limitless movement through space and time that is evocative of the Kantian sublime. This, of course, runs counter to Alan Singer’s suggestion that Herzog recognizes through irony in Fata Morgana the incongruity of a twentieth-century quest for the sublime. Singer points as an initial instance of this ironic sublime to Fata Morgana’s voice-over, read by Lotte Eisner. Herzog, via Eisner, here first resurrects an ancient sacred text, the Mayan Popol Vuh, only to evoke through Eisner’s “regretful” vocal tone a betrayal of past innocence that is visually reinforced by the military hardware littering the desert as she speaks. The “Paradise” of Part II, as Singer secondly points out, is more explicitly parodied in Herzog’s bemused encounters with desert eccentrics: a goggle-wearing Berlin expatriate and specialist in desert lizards; or the French ex-Legionnaire now stranded in “paradise” after switching sides in the Algerian war of independence (1954–1962). The irony peaks, arguably, in Part III, “The Golden Age,” when Herzog shifts scene to a brothel that houses only a grim-faced piano-playing madam thumping out Latin rhythms to the accompaniment of her (also be-goggled) pimp on drums (Singer 1986: 187 and passim). This latter scene is certainly bleakly comical in its incongruity as an image of any golden age. Singer reads, accordingly, in this and similar sequences Herzog’s recognition of the anachronistic nature of the very quest for sublimity on which Fata Morgana apparently embarks. Yet we might wish to pause here and listen again to Herzog himself. In a section of his audio commentary for Fata Morgana not transcribed by Paul Cronin for his published interviews, Herzog comments on the brothel madam’s piano-playing. This is, he observes, “the saddest music I’ve ever heard. I don’t have a sense of irony. [J]ust….abysmally deep sadness” (Herzog 2001). Herzog’s comment suggests a different reading of his relation to the sublime Africa he encountered on his early Sahara trip. If Fata Morgana’s Part I evokes an experience of sublimity, then that experience leaves Herzog prey, apparently, to melancholy in the contemplation of some unspecified, but “abysmally sad” loss. To specify further both the nature of that loss, and of its attendant melancholy, let us turn now to a different African encounter: not Herzog’s meetings with the limitless desert landscape, but with African subjects whose challenging gazes reveal his melancholia as rooted in part at least in a postcolonial loss of mastery over the African sublime.

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The Sublime Other: the African and Herzog’s Documentary Look In Part II of Fata Morgana, “Paradise,” Herzog’s camera moves in from long shots to medium shots and close-ups that establish a new relation between the camera, the spectator, and the inanimate objects and human figures that now surface in closer proximity. “Paradise” opens with two figures emerging from a dark cave or building into the summer desert’s intense light. A blind man just left of center screen is guided forward by an adolescent whose portable radio, with its strains of Western rock, makes especially strange this first close encounter with the human inhabitants of the Northern Sahara. The man speaks to camera, but no voice-over translates; we are left only briefly to guess at his story before the camera cuts to a boy in flowing djellaba, who crouches in the sand dunes to present to camera the film’s first specimen of local fauna, a diminutive desert fox (Figure 14.2).

Figure 14.2 Herzog’s camera eventually encounters human inhabitants in Fata Morgana (1969). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Werner Herzog/Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

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Two features unite these two brief sequences with later human encounters in this film. The first is the studied precision with which Herzog’s human subjects present themselves to view, not posing or performing, but squaring up to or frankly returning the camera’s curious gaze. The second is the shots’ duration. As in a later image of another boy, laconic in the extreme as he presents to the camera a second fox hanging in what appears to be a lethal stranglehold from his outstretched arm, the length of the take uncomfortably heightens the sense of mutual incomprehension that pervades encounters between Herzog’s camera and the inhabitants of this desert milieu. Herzog describes these mute encounters as “moments of uncertainty” that are in his view neither voyeuristic nor exploitative, but speak simply of a “terrible sadness and despair” (Cronin 2002: 53). What is revealed by the desert landscapes of Fata Morgana, he continues, is simply “absurdity,” existences “so bleak” that they suggest that “something about Creation must be wrong” (Herzog 2001). If these landscapes and the peoples who inhabit them are sublime, in other words, then this is a sublimity that cannot be mastered by the Kantian supersensible, but that demands instead a recognition of the abyss of mutual incomprehension that separates camera and spectator from the straggling groups and desert vagrants who drift into the camera’s view. Fata Morgana now establishes what will become a recurrent trope in Herzog’s African films: that of the African body as the repository of that sublime incommensurability which, as we saw above, is understood by Lyotard as the point of departure for a postmodern ethics of cultural difference. Long takes in close-up and mid-shot register that incommensurability through mute encounters that dramatize the impossibility—from the perspective of Herzog’s camera at least— of either transparent communication, or universally shared human truths. But they also beg the question of Herzog’s ethics. John Davidson has written of Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) that the film, although ostensibly a critique of European colonialism, in fact reproduces colonial relationships by projecting in the figure of Aguirre “a Eurocentric inner self as Other” (Davidson 1999: 24). Rephrased for Fata Morgana, Davidson’s comment would suggest that the “sadness” Herzog identifies in his subjects is no more than a projection of his own melancholy in the face of the incommensurable abyss.

Wodaabe In response to Davidson, I want finally to explore two further examples of Herzog’s African films, Wodaabe and Echoes from a Somber Empire. Premiering on West German public TV (on the channel Südwest 3) on June 12, 1989, the FrancoGerman co-production Wodaabe first follows the fortunes of this nomadic tribe of Fulani ethnicity in a journey across Sahel grazing pastures and ritual sites. The film

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was shot in the rainy season after a four-year drought that had decimated the tribe and their livestock. This is, however, no anthropological study of a threatened people, but a lyrical essay on WoDaaBe dance, dress, music, ornament, courtship, and wedding ritual—aesthetic practices that cement the WoDaaBe’s vision of themselves as the earth’s most beautiful people: “herdsmen of the sun.” Herzog was, moreover, by no means the first Western visitor to recognize in WoDaaBe cultural practice a potent source of the visionary image. From the early 1970s on, the WoDaaBe featured repeatedly in National Geographic and other coffee-table must-haves, including Gert Chesi’s lavishly illustrated The Last Africans (1977). Enchanted by their ritual dances, elaborate costume and make-up, and delicate craft goods, the photographers and writers of this 1970s and 1980s exoticist wave celebrated the WoDaaBe as “a peaceful and beautiful people, existing outside history, [and] preoccupied with exotic performances, with a particular focus on dance” (Loftsdóttir 2002: 9). Herzog’s opening voice-over description of the WoDaaBe as a “stone-age” tribe seems initially to place his film in the photographic tradition of such as Chesi, and of course of Leni Riefenstahl, whose works grant to non-Western peoples a place not as historical agents, but as commodified images of a lost exotic past. But as the film unfolds, it becomes less a lament for a lost African prehistory, than an exploration of a putatively shared Euro-African aesthetic predicament. Three recurrent visual and sonic tropes help present as mutual the affective investment by Herzog and his WoDaaBe subjects in ideals of beauty now under threat from the global trade in the commodified image. The film opens with a long traveling shot along a line of young WoDaaBe men swaying to the rhythm of a low, murmuring chant. Herzog’s voice-over introduces this as a ritual dance performed by WoDaaBe men

Figure 14.3 A ritual dance performed by WoDaaBe men in Wodaabe—Herdsmen of the Sun (1989). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Patrick Sandrin for Canal Plus and Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

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adorned with beads, make-up, and scanty but highly decorative dress. The men’s seductive eye-fluttering and come-hither lips are captured in close-up by Herzog’s camera (Figure  14.3), but are more centrally directed at a line of young women who scrutinize the men from a discreet distance, poised to choose the most beautiful among them as their partner for the following night. In contemporaneous representations of tribal ritual, Western photographers and filmmakers had used fetishistic images of “African” splendor to close off the ambivalence produced by the spectacle of the African other under Western eyes. In Wodaabe’s opening sequence, by contrast, the viewer is visually disoriented by an obliquely angled camera that distorts perspective, flattening its subject’s faces and highlighting their strangeness as apparently two-dimensional objects with—as yet—no defined existence beyond the uncanny space of this opening shot. On the one hand, then, the sequence works to suggest an irreducible otherness in Herzog’s WoDaaBe subjects. At the same time, Schmidt-Reitwein’s camera replicates in its own fluid movement the rhythm of the WoDaaBe chant, blunting in so doing the strangeness of the image, and drawing the spectator into an experience of the sinuous rhythm of WoDaaBe music and dance. The ambivalently empathetic camerawork of this opening shot recurs in subsequent narrative sequences where WoDaaBe storytellers revisit the “terrible years” of drought, or young men scavenging among the rubbish tips of a Nigerien uranium mining town lament the urban WoDaaBe’s inability to “walk sweet earth.” Sustaining a respectful distance as it tentatively circles its subjects; or coming to rest in medium shots that quietly register WoDaaBe conversations between lovers and friends, the camerawork recalls E. Ann Kaplan’s distinction between a voyeuristic filmic gaze that enfolds its objects within solipsistic scenarios of the viewing subject’s own anxieties or desires, and what Kaplan terms the “looking relation”: a cross-cultural and intersubjective look fueled more by mutual curiosity than by concupiscence, and productive of a shared “kinesthetic, bodily, [and] sensual” knowing. Kaplan draws this distinction in a study that revises film theory’s long association of the filmic gaze with both a sexual and an imperialist objectification, and argues instead for a more fluid and mutual exploration of commonalities across cultural divides. She proffers Claire Denis’ semi-autobiographical Chocolat (1988) as one exemplification of this “looking relation,” and the film is of interest for Wodaabe in its mirroring of some at least of the textual strategies of Herzog’s film. Chocolat revisits memories from Denis’ onscreen alter ego, the child France, and explores through the perspectives of France, her mother Aimée, and their servant Protée the mutually fluctuating attraction and repulsion that characterized household relationships during France’s childhood in colonial Cameroon. France’s mother, Aimée, for instance, shares with her black servants the intimacy of eating, washing, sleeping, cleaning [and] cooking,” and thus becomes the vessel for a filmic exploration of the “sensual knowing” that Kaplan associates with the process of “looking for” (not gazing at) the other in postcolonial film (Kaplan 1997: 154–172).

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The combination in Wodaabe of exploratory mobile camera and unobtrusive mid-shots can be read as replicating both the mutual intimacy between the camera and its filmed objects, and the respectful but curious distance which Kaplan identifies as a feature of the “looking relation” in Chocolat. But the key to Wodaabe’s aesthetic of cross-cultural commonality lies in Herzog’s choice of music. In the film’s opening sequence, the WoDaaBe chant fades into a haunting rendition of Charles Gounod’s 1895 Ave Maria. Gounod’s melodious rearrangement of the first prelude to Bach’s 1722 Well-tempered Clavier is heard here in an antiquated (1902) recording of Alessandro Moreschi, the only castrato of the bel canto tradition ever to record on phonograph. A singer internationally reputed for his plangent vocal style, Moreschi is echoed later in the film by songs from similarly legendary early twentieth-century divas including the soprano Lili Lehmann in a grief-stricken 1907 rendering of Mozart’s “Non mi dir” (Don Giovanni); the contralto Emmi Leisner, heard first in her 1928 version of Händel’s “Ombra mai fù” (Xerxes), later in a 1926 recording from Händel’s Julius Caesar; and Ria Ginster in her 1929 “Recordare Jesu Pie” from Verdi’s Requiem. Scratchy, distant, fluctuating in quality and tone, these treasures from the sound archives evoke both the beauty of early technological productions of the human voice in song, and the melancholy of a later twentieth-century loss of faith in that very aesthetic of the beautiful which the recorded operatic voice sustains. Inserted in the sound montage as the nondiegetic accompaniment to sequences including the young WoDaaBe’s make-up sessions in the run-up to the beauty pageant that forms the film’s visual core, or WoDaaBe camels sauntering incongruously towards an uncertain future across an urban bridge, the arias also suggest, moreover, a powerful resonance between Herzog’s own nostalgia for a lost aesthetic integrity, and the WoDaaBe’s experience of contemporary threats to a way of life organized—in Herzog’s idealized vision at least—around “beauty and desire.”4

Echoes from a Somber Empire If Wodaabe, then, may be read as a lament for an aesthetics of the beautiful whose loss is felt as keenly by Herzog as, apparently, by his WoDaaBe subjects, then Echoes from a Somber Empire offers itself rather as a study in the fate of an idealist aesthetic of the sublime. Released only a year after Wodaabe, Echoes traces, through the eyes of the British journalist Michael Goldsmith, the life story of Jean Bédel Bokassa, the rapacious dictator who held sway first as military ruler, later as Emperor of the Central African Republic from 1966 until his overthrow in 1979. Goldsmith had fallen foul of Bokassa when he visited the capital city, Bangui, in July 1977 to cover Bokassa’s coronation as Emperor. When part of a telex filed by Goldsmith to his Johannesburg office became garbled, it was intercepted by police, and Goldsmith was arrested, along with his Washington Post colleague Jonathan Randall, on suspicion of spying for South Africa.

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Echoes begins with a dream that recalls the trauma for Goldsmith of his arrest, his subsequent torture, and a death sentence that was commuted in August 1977 following interventions from foreign powers, and from Goldsmith’s wife Roxanne (Titley 1997: 87–88). Realized by Herzog in an opening fantasy sequence, the dream of an army of crabs flooding the earth’s surface with a blood-red sea of armored bodies and menacing claws presages a narrative of ferocious violence that will surface via Goldsmith’s memories in this film. Goldsmith returned to Central Africa with Herzog to shoot Echoes, and the film is structured around his interviews with key protagonists in Bokassa’s story, interspersed with archive footage motivated by their various memories of the deposed Emperor. Voice-overs from Bokassa’s children, his wife Augustine Assemat, his cousin and former political rival David Dacko, the French defense lawyer Francis Szpiner, or others including, on occasion, Bokassa himself, provide sound bridges to still photographs and archive film, but also regularly fade into musical fragments whose somber tone intensifies the film’s darkly brooding mood. Opening with Bartók’s Four Pieces for Orchestra Op.12—a piece that is contemporaneous with Bartók’s opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, and that shares the opera’s sinister undertone—the music track meanders through variations on a theme of violence including Prokofiev’s Sonata for Two Violins, or the film’s concluding Schubert nocturne Opus 148, a musical study whose circular return to the same repeated note echoes the tragedy of a Central Africa apparently mired in the similar circularity of resurgent memories of a traumatic past. The atmosphere of loss which this music evokes is reinforced by archive footage of a Bokassa whose material body remains inaccessible to the director’s and the film audience’s view. Bokassa was tried in 1986 on his return from French exile for crimes including treason, cannibalism, murder, and embezzlement; he was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and he lived in solitary confinement until his release three years after the completion of Echoes, in 1993. For the duration of Herzog’s film, Bokassa remains therefore a figure accessible only through archive images. The abundant archive footage in Echoes reveals Bokassa’s status as a prime object of global media attention during his period in power. But it evokes also, through music and voice-over narration, the melancholy of a community of victims robbed, since Bokassa’s imprisonment, of an object on which it might fix fantasies of redemption or revenge, and left instead to wrest residual meaning from raw memories of senseless atrocity and the depraved abuse of power. It is this evanescence of Bokassa’s image in Echoes, moreover, which situates this film in the realm of a specifically Herzogian African sublime. We saw above how Burke prepared the ground for an aesthetics that locates the black body as a site of irreducible otherness and sublime terror. The Bokassa of Echoes certainly exhibits the characteristics of infinite power and terrifying violence that are key features of this sublime black body. That he is a man without limits is evident in the boundless sexual appetites that leave him boasting of at least fifty-four children and a

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procession of lovers and wives; or in a capricious violence that has him murder and maim opponents out of nothing more palpable than sexual jealousy or fleeting whim. Bokassa fancied himself a descendant of Napoleon, and the coronation sequences where he crowns himself Emperor display a similarly unlimited lust for the trappings of imperial power—bejeweled horse-drawn carriages, loyal retinues, an army marching relentlessly to his murderous tune. Bokassa’s hunger for self-aggrandizement was surpassed in its monstrosity only by the cannibalism which witnesses repeatedly report as the most abhorrent feature of his despotic rule. In this sense above all, he appears to epitomize the stereotype of the black body as a source of terror in the face of the sublime. But Herzog does not fall easily into the trap of stereotype or racist cliché. On the contrary, Bokassa’s absence as materially present body from the text of Echoes demands a reading as a self-reflexive signal of Herzog’s own inability to render palpable, and thus cognitively to master this powerful emblem of a troubled African history in the aftermath of European colonial rule. Echoes, furthermore, makes repeated reference to Bokassa’s ambivalence as an emblem of some “sublime” African other. Bokassa served in the Free French Army under General de Gaulle, and saw action in Indochina fighting on the French side of an anticolonial war before returning in 1961 to head the army of a newly independent Central African Republic. That he modeled himself on French as well as African authoritarian figures is evident in Bokassa’s own avowed adulation of Napoleon, and in his defense lawyer Szpiner’s insistence that Bokassa embodies neither “African” nor “French” traits. For Szpiner, Bokassa is simply a figure “beyond and apart” whose history epitomizes—as does that of the French revolutionary Saint-Just, whom Szpiner cites in the same interview—the crystalline violence of absolute power.

Conclusion I have argued in this article for an understanding of Herzog’s African films in two senses as encounters with an African sublime. In Fata Morgana’s landscapes, first, Herzog discovers a limitlessness or magnitude, and an overwhelming of human perception that recall both Kant’s mathematically and dynamically sublime. That Herzog parts company with Kant on the subject of reason’s capacity to master its sublime other is illustrated by a second feature of his exploration of African sublimity, which is his response to confrontations with the black other embodied in the persons of WoDaaBe tribespeople, desert nomads, or Emperor Bokassa. In relation to the WoDaaBe, I have suggested, Herzog abandons the position of mastery afforded by the Eurocentric camera of such as Chesi or Riefenstahl, and tests out instead through empathetic camera and music what Kaplan terms a “looking relation” of mutual curiosity and cross-cultural identification.

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In Echoes from a Somber Empire, mastery of the other is similarly precluded by the film’s recognition of Bokassa not as a figure of irreducible African difference, but as the image in a “dark looking glass” of such European predecessors as Robespierre or Napoleon (Prager 2007: 195). The Herzog of Fata Morgana, Wodaabe and Echoes, in sum, engages with but recognizes as obsolete a Burkean or Kantian sublime in which the ego of the Western observer triumphs over its African “other.” All three films deploy a visual language that foregrounds, whether in the mirages of Fata Morgana, the camera’s flattened perspectives on WoDaaBe dancers, or the fragmentary archive footage of Bokassa, the camera’s incapacity to contain African landscapes and peoples within Western visual regimes. These films seem in one sense, then, to realize that Lyotardian postmodern sublime which Battersby defines as “a mode of encountering—and celebrating—the incommensurable” (Battersby 2007: 18). But there is a difference between Herzog and Lyotard. Lyotard cautions against the “nostalgia for presence” evoked by confrontation with human difference, and demands instead a “war on totality” that “activates” differences and eschews melancholic nostalgia for the consensual aesthetics of the bourgeois age (Lyotard 1986: 79–82). Herzog’s Africa films, by contrast, defer the shock of difference, using music and voice-over in particular to explore perceived commonalities at the level of experience and affect. That this exploration produces precisely the melancholia against which Lyotard warns is most evident in Herzog’s use of music. In all three films, the music of Mozart, Händel, Bach, or Bartók expresses through European musical idioms—opera, the German Baroque—a putatively shared Euro-African anguish: sadness at the loss of beauty in modernity (Wodaabe), or over a toxic modernity that litters the sublime landscapes of the Sahara with industrial debris, reduces WoDaaBe men to scavengers on uranium-mine wastegrounds, or calls forth the scourge of an African despotism modeled on imperialist Western regimes. As camera and music move beyond difference to explore an affective mutuality, they provoke, then, a recognition of the self in that other which triggers an experience of the sublime. This is most devastating in the case of Echoes. Rightly recognized in this film as the product of a shared Euro-African history, Bokassa becomes here no longer a figure of absolute difference, but the hybrid emblem of an abjection he shares both with the authorial subject (Herzog), and by extension, with the spectator. Sublime difference thus produces, not a triumphant mastery of the African “other;” it inflicts instead the narcissistic wound of a perceived identity with the abject and the debased (in the case of Bokassa) or (in Wodaabe), with a “prehistoric” tribe apparently stripped of the capacity to master history and move forward through time. Hence, for instance, Herzog’s conflation of his own voice with that of the WoDaaBe when, at the end of the film, his voice-over equates his own expatriate condition with the WoDaaBe’s displacement from traditional pastures in four years of drought. “We follow the cattle,” Herzog intones, “we simply follow the cattle.”

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Herzog has said, “The more I have progressed as a filmmaker, the more I find it is real life I have been filming, my life” (Cronin 2002: 201). Deprived of the capacity to master the sublimity of the other, Herzog, in other words, performs in his films an imaginative leap that asserts an equivalence of the other with the self. The ethical territory he now enters is, however, precarious indeed. Herzog’s audience does not need reminding that Africa is a continent scarred by European colonial histories. In his films, those histories are palpable: in the hybrid Euro-African figure of Bokassa, for instance, or in Flying Doctors, in the echoes of colonial psychology that, as I noted above, haunt the film’s exploration of “African” perceptions of an image of the human eye. Herzog claims as legitimation for his “unprocessed and fresh” images of extraordinary worlds—including “Africa”—that they expose as “abused…useless and exhausted” our prevailing visual culture, and illuminate the world instead with the light of a fully historically adequate aesthetic truth (Cronin 2002: 66–67). Yet there are moments when even Herzog does not escape the established visual idioms he so detests. Writing not on Herzog, but on a contemporary condition he terms “postcolonial melancholia,” Paul Gilroy has identified the melancholic mood that is pervasive in Herzog as the product of the “multilayered trauma” of Europe’s loss of Empire after World War II (Gilroy 2004: 2). Drawing on Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s classic account of postwar West Germany’s “inability to mourn” (Mitscherlich 1975), Gilroy reminds us that the traumatic loss of a fantasy of omnipotence associated by the Mitscherlichs with post-fascist Germany is characteristic also of a broader European incapacity subjectively to master postcolonial loss. The Mitscherlichs famously draw on Freud’s essay, “Mourning and Melancholia” (Freud 1957, original 1917) to identify in the postwar culture of the Federal Republic the classic signs of a Freudian defense against ego collapse: a manic drive to economic reconstruction, coupled with narcissistic investment in narratives of personal suffering. In the German case, this oscillation between narcissism and mania (stock responses to an unmastered trauma for Freud) are the product of the shattering of a collective ego ideal in the person of the Führer, and a failure to contain that trauma through a collective mourning of the victims of German fascism, foremost among them the European Jews. For Gilroy, a cognate failure of mourning is evident in a postcolonial melancholy that translates the shock of lost Empire into “melancholia’s signature combination of manic elation with misery… and ambivalence” (Gilroy 2004: 114). The place of German-born filmmakers, Herzog included, within Gilroy’s postcolonial narrative is, of course, complex, since Germany lost direct access to colonial rule when she ceded her colonial territories to other European powers in 1918. Yet that loss of colonial territory also inflated what Susanne Zantop has identified as a desire to “regenerate” the German colonial self by “ventur[ing] forth … to conquer and appropriate foreign territories.” Such conquest took place either in historical reality, in Nazi Germany’s murderous expansion eastwards after 1939, or

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phantasmagorically, in literary and other cultural fantasies of exotic territories and peoples that “set the frame for a regulation of knowledge of otherness” (Zantop 1997: 2–16; Zimmerer 2005). As Zantop also usefully notes, Germany’s peculiar route into imperial history, in particular the German struggle against French imperialism during the Napoleonic wars, promoted “a sense of identification with the colonial underdog, and hence fantasies replete with compassion and self-pity” (Zantop 1997: 8). Her comments, alongside Gilroy’s, place Herzog’s visions of a shared Euro-African destiny in his African films within a representational tradition that is problematically enmeshed with broader colonial and imperial histories. What Zantop and Gilroy help us see is that, at their worst, Herzog’s films share with more explicit “colonial fantasies” (Zantop) both a self-pitying melancholic mood, and a fetishization of the African other that obliterates the particularities of her/his lived history. When the anthropologist Kristin Loftsdóttir traveled to Niger to work in the mid-1990s among the WoDaaBe, she found therefore not Herzog’s historically anachronistic “stone-age tribe,” but a migrant people with long experience of adaptation to poverty, drought, and political threat. What is for Herzog the devastation of a nomadic people confined by drought to urban misery becomes thus for Loftsdóttir one instance of “migrant work as a form of diversification strategy during times of difficulty.” WoDaaBe migrant work, she continues, is “not to be categorized so easily as a…loss of cultural identity. Clearly, for many WoDaaBe it constitutes a new fallback strategy…seen by the migrant workers as connected to mobility… and placed within the tradition of seeking other subsistence activities during difficult times” (Lofsdóttir 2002: 13). Loftsdóttir’s account of a people moving across historical temporalities, occupying in agile succession the time of industrial modernity, and the mythic temporality of such ancient rituals as the WoDaaBe courtship dance, contradicts, of course, Herzog’s morbid vision of his African protagonists as “ruined people in ruined places” (Cronin 2002: 52). But it echoes other, specifically cinematic ripostes to the vision of abjection common to Herzog and other Western observers similarly fascinated by the visual mysteries of the African continent. Herzog’s Wodaabe and Echoes are contemporaneous with a late 1980s wave of films by African directors who seek a film language adequate to the articulation of—to borrow a term from Herzog—a specifically African “ecstatic” or aesthetic truth. One title in particular serves to illustrate the challenge these films pose to Herzog’s melancholic African sublime. Released two years before Herzog’s Wodaabe, in 1987, Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen (Brightness) won that year’s Jury Prize at Cannes, and has since achieved canonical status as the vehicle of an African postcolonial voice within international arthouse film. The film charts the struggle of the young man Niankoro (Issiaka Kane) for the possession of a “special knowledge—the knowledge of Nature—that is exclusive to the Bambara people of Mali” (Ukadike 1994: 255). Encouraged by his mother (Soumba Traore), Niankoro embarks on a pilgrimage to the spectacular rockface villages of the Bandiagara escarpment, home

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to the Dogon tribe, and the site in Yeelen of Niankoro’s final confrontation with the sorcerer father Soma (Niamanto Sanogo) who struggles throughout the film to foil his son’s supernatural quest. Dogon country also figures in Fata Morgana, where it ranks among the most spectacular of Herzog’s evocations of Africa’s sublime landscapes. Yeelen, by contrast—and there is a parallel here with the WoDaaBe’s syncretic melding of traditional practice with contemporary urban experience—captures and enfolds the transcendent within the space of history and the mundane everyday. In much traditional African cultural practice, the distant vistas of the sublime are supplanted as sources of transcendent vision by magic, myth, and ritual forms that are embedded within scenarios of lived quotidianity. Repeatedly in Cissé’s film, magic and the supernatural thus quietly erupt within the mise-en-scène, as for instance when Soma’s muttered imprecations cause a tree’s spontaneous combustion, or Niankoro turns a group of young adversaries momentarily to stone. Though criticized by some for what is seen as its re-exoticizing of Africa’s “ineffable” mystery, Yeelen is defended by others as a film which “creates a dialectic of the old and the new,” detaching the miraculous sights and sounds of the African desert from Eurocentric visions of sublime infinity, and locating them squarely within the experiential flux of the lived everyday (Murphy and Williams 2007: 124–125; Ukadike 1994). Compelling as they are, Herzog’s African works, in conclusion, only rarely explore the ordinary Africa of Cissé and Loftsdóttir: a continent whose cultures absorb the extraordinary, the ineffable, and the miraculous into the pragmatic experience of mundane quotidianity. Herzog turns repeatedly instead to apparently “ruined” landscapes and protagonists whose image feeds his own melancholia in the face of an aesthetically impoverished contemporary world. I have called his identification with those images narcissistic. In the Freudian schema, the flipside of narcissism is a megalomania fueled by the withdrawal of libidinal investment in the other, and an inflated affective investment in the self ’s internal world. It is tempting to read in this light as megalomaniacal Herzog’s insistent return in his Africa films to his own voice-over, and his repeated assertion in interviews (or, in more fantastical form, in his ill-conceived 1987 slave epic Cobra Verde) of an ego that contains universal experiences of Africa within its own expansive creative bounds. “The…difference between you and me,” Herzog once suggested to Paul Cronin, “ is that I am able to articulate with some clarity…our collective dreams” (Cronin 2002: 61). The postcolonial critique of Herzog which this article attempts must, in contrast, question the homogeneity of this dreaming collectivity, resisting both the narcissist’s grandiosity, and his flirtations with a supposedly primordial African sublime. Wodaabe in particular, I have indeed suggested, prefigures just such a resistance in its staging of the intersubjective “looking relation” of E. Ann Kaplan’s account. The film recalls comments by the social theorist Zygmunt Bauman, who was once drawn to the fata morgana, as was Herzog, as a metaphor for the fog that constitutes unfamiliar landscapes and peoples as “bizarre shapes in the passing clouds” (Bauman 2003: 30). Bauman’s plea for an empathetic social

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practice that cuts a path through the fog—“walk[ing] through the days,” as he puts it, “as if difference did not matter”—finds an occasional visual equivalent not just in Wodaabe, but in passages throughout Herzog’s African films. Literalizing Bauman’s metaphor, Michael Goldsmith, the key protagonist and interviewer in Echoes, walks alongside his various interlocutors, murmuring encouragement as he prises from them stories of atrocity about Bokassa and his murderous regime. These and similar moments explain, finally, the continued attraction of Herzog’s African films, revealing as they do a filmmaker who, on occasion, penetrates the mists of postcolonial melancholy, staging conversations with his African subjects that illuminate the complexities of their contemporary predicaments, and rescuing them in so doing from the perceptual distortions of sublimity’s blinding light.

Acknowledgments With thanks to Brad Prager for illuminating editorial comments, and to Silke Panse for first piquing my interest in Herzog’s African films.

Notes 1

I am indebted to Christine Battersby for this summary of Kant: see Battersby (2007: 32–33). 2 Both Parsifal and The Flying Dutchman are of course operas by Richard Wagner, and given Herzog’s operatic interests, they may be a source of the film’s title. 3 The most famous example is Friedrich’s 1818 Chalk Cliffs on Rügen. 4 The shot is of a bridge over the river Niger in Niamey, the capital of Niger. As Herzog himself observes, the shot’s “depth and beauty” takes it beyond the realm of ethnography, which would interpret the image perhaps as evidence of the WoDaaBe’s incongruity within the urban spaces of African modernity. For Herzog, the shot seems instead to crystallize the mood of beautiful melancholy that his encounter with the WoDaaBe provokes. See Herzog’s comments in Cronin (2002: 214).

Works Cited Armes, Roy: African Filmmaking. North and South of the Sahara (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006). Balázs, Béla: Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, ed. Erica Carter, transl. Rodney Livingstone (Oxford: Berghahn, 2010). Battersby, Christine: The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference (Oxford: Routledge, 2007). Bauman, Zygmunt: Liquid Love. On the Frailty of Human Bonds (Oxford: Polity, 2003).

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Burns, James: “Watching Africans Watch Films: Theories of Spectatorship in British Colonial Africa,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 20:2 (2000): 197–211. Chatwin, Bruce: The Viceroy of Ouidah (London: Pan, 1982 [original 1980]). Chesi, Gert: The Last Africans (Schwatz: Perlinger, 1977). Cronin, Paul, ed.: Herzog on Herzog (London: Faber & Faber, 2002). Davidson, John E.: Deterritorializing the New German Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Eisner, Lotte: The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt (London: Secker and Warburg, 1973). Forster, Larissa: “Zwischen Waterberg und Okakarara: namibische Erinnerungslandschaften,” Namibia-Deutschland. Eine geteilte Geschichte, Larissa Forster et al. (Wolfratshausen: Minerva, 2004). pp. 164–179. Freud, Sigmund: “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914–1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), pp. 237–258. Gilman, Sander: “The Figure of the Black in German Aesthetic Theory,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 8:4 (1975): 373–391. Gilroy, Paul: After Empire. Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (New York: Routledge, 2004). Haden-Guest, Anthony: “On the Track of the ‘S’ Word: A Reporter’s Notes,” Sticky Sublime, ed. Bill Beckley (New York: Allworth Press, 2001), pp. 49–56. Herzog, Werner: “Audio Commentary,” Fata Morgana, DVD, Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2001. Herzog, Werner: “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth,” trans. Moira Weigel, Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 17:3 (Winter 2009): 1–12. Kant, Immanuel: “Of the Different Human Races” (1775–6), The Idea of Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi and Tommy L. Lott (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), pp. 8–22. Kant, Immanuel: Critique of the Power of Judgement, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Kaplan, E. Ann: Looking for the Other. Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze (London: Routledge, 1997). Kracauer, Siegfried: “The Cult of Distraction. On Berlin’s Picture Palaces,” trans. Thomas Levin, New German Critique 40 (Special Issue on Weimar Film Theory, Winter 1987): 91–96. Loftsdóttir, Kristin: “Knowing What to Do in the City. WoDaaBe Nomads and Migrant Workers in Niger,” Anthropology Today 18:1 (February 2002): 9–13. Lyotard, Jean-François: The Postmodern Condition. A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986). McGregor, JoAnn: “The Victoria Falls 1900–1940: Landscape, Tourism and the Geographical Imagination,” Journal of Southern African Studies 29: 717–737. Mitscherlich, Alexander and Mitscherlich, Margarete: The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior, trans. Beverley R. Paczek (New York: Grove Press, 1975 [original 1967]). Murphy, David and Patrick Williams: Postcolonial African Cinema. Ten Directors (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).

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Peucker, Brigitte: “Werner Herzog. In Quest of the Sublime,” New German Filmmakers. From Oberhausen through the 1970s, ed. Klaus Phillips, (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984), pp. 168–194. Prager, Brad: “Kant in Caspar David Friedrich’s Frames,” Art History 25:1 (February 2002): 68–86. Prager, Brad: The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (London: Wallflower Press, 2007). Rentschler, Eric: “The Politics of Vision,” The Films of Werner Herzog. Between Mirage and History, ed. Timothy Corrigan (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 159–182. Riefenstahl, Leni: Die Nuba—Menschen wie von einem anderen Stern (Munich: Paul List, 1973). Rogerson, Christian M.: “Reviewing Africa in the Global Tourism Economy,” Development Southern Africa 24:3 (September 2007): 381–392. Scott, Julia: “Safaris of the Sublime,” Activity and Adventure Holidays 2010, www. activityandadventure.com/article/reader/Safari%20of%20the%20Sublime. Singer, Alan: “Comprehending Appearances: Werner Herzog’s Ironic Sublime,” The Films of Werner Herzog. Between Mirage and History, ed. Timothy Corrigan (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 183–205. Titley, Brian: Dark Age: The Political Odyssey of Emperor Bokassa (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997). Ukadike, Nwachukwu Frank: Black African Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Zantop, Susanne: Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany: 1770–1870 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). Zimmerer, Jürgen: “The Birth of the Ostland out of the Spirit of Colonialism: A Postcolonial Perspective on the Nazi Policy of Conquest and Extermination,” Patterns of Prejudice 39.2 (2005): 197–219.

Additional Films Cited Cissé, Souleymane: Yeelen (Brightness, 1987) Denis, Claire: Chocolat (1988) Riefenstahl, Leni: Olympia (1938)

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Didgeridoo, or the Search for the Origin of the Self Werner Herzog’s Where the Green Ants Dream and Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines Manuel Köppen The desert is vast. The desert is empty. Werner Herzog (1984: 103)

Encounters “The six-year-old Grégoire da Silva pointed to a column of ants marching into an unplugged refrigerator and said, ‘The refrigerator exists’” (Chatwin 1988: 16). According to Bruce Chatwin this was the sentence from his 1980 book The Viceroy of Ouidah that Werner Herzog liked best. The existentialist instinct (Spürsinn) associated with the ant column overlapped with the project Herzog was working on at the time, Where the Green Ants Dream (1984). Herzog had envisioned that a mass levee of those insects would appear in his film as an Australian aboriginal dream. He describes his first contact with Chatwin, his soul-mated storyteller, as an ecstatic experience. In 1984 Chatwin, in the company of Salman Rushdie, was on a four-week tour of the Australian outback—a trip that he transformed into The Songlines (1987). Herzog’s message reached Chatwin: on his way to Europe, would he stop by Melbourne, to talk over the script of Herzog’s planned film? “He immediately began to tell stories,” Herzog remembered, “and when he stopped for breath, I tried to fit mine in. That went on non-stop for almost 48 hours.” His friend, the director Paul Cox, hung in there for at least one day of this conversational A Companion to Werner Herzog, First Edition. Edited by Brad Prager. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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marathon and reported the same: “Bruce did most of the talking. We sat around the table for 22 hours. It was fascinating. […] It started with the songlines, and then Werner wanted to know more about Patagonia. Bruce told story after story” (Yule 1999: 50–60 min.). Herzog and Chatwin were at work on related projects. In both cases the work dealt with describing the relationship between Australian aboriginals and their land. In retrospect Chatwin described the coincidence somewhat laconically: “He had his ideas. I had mine. I felt that to mix them would only add to the general confusion” (Chatwin 1989: 138). There might have been a reason for Chatwin’s distanced take on matters, which he noted in 1988: his ideas about the mythical significance of the dreamtime in aboriginal culture deviated too much from Herzog’s cinematic perspective. Moreover, in The Songlines, which he had published only shortly before, Chatwin had chosen a wholly different narrative approach. But despite the differences, the parallels remain astonishing. At first glance both deal with a clash of cultures, which is foregrounded against a similar main plot. In Herzog’s work the aboriginals are confronted by a mining company doing demolition work in the desert and threatening a mystical spot: the place where the “green ants” dream. A young white geologist named Lance Hackett tries to intervene and act as a mediator. In Chatwin’s work the songlines, the mythical dream-paths of the aboriginals, are threatened by a railroad company’s project. In this case, the figure who mediates between the aboriginals and the company is Arkady, the traveling companion of the narrating ego, who has the task of mapping the aboriginals’ songlines. Herzog and Chatwin use the same signifiers of technological civilization to show the rift between the Western world and indigenous culture; in both depictions of industrial intrusiveness aircraft and bulldozers play more or less central roles. And although neither work presents a glorified image of the aboriginals, the example of aboriginal people nonetheless provides an origin story that enables the relativization of Western conceptual images. Chatwin’s The Songlines was a worldwide success and it initiated a “dreamtime” boom: crowds of tourists populated the Australian outback with Chatwin’s book in their backpacks. And there were also imitators—extremely commercial literary “origin-journeys” (Ursprungsreisen) to see the aboriginals of the sixth continent— akin to Marlo Morgan’s Mutant Message Down Under (1991a).1 Morgan’s work initially presented itself as an account based on personal experience, but it proved to be an even more fictional product than Chatwin’s, which had been labeled a novel. By contrast, Herzog’s film remained a more moderate success, which he later explained in terms of public expectations; following the mammoth project Fitzcarraldo (1982), the audience did not appreciate a more reserved and straightforwardly told project like Where the Green Ants Dream (WdgA DVD: 42 min.). On the other hand it would seem reasonable that Chatwin, who offered an open narrative approach alongside the mythologizations—not only where he addressed the culture of the aboriginals, but also when it came to the origins of humanity—had provided readers an essentially more accessible sketch than Herzog’s, with its closed

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dramaturgy and the morally didactic message of its conclusion. The following chapter is less interested in speculations about the potentialities of narrative strategies, especially when it comes to the retrospectively hard-to-calculate and only partially determinable expectations of the audience, but it is instead concerned with simply comparing those two narrative strategies.

Green Ants and Other Differences That the ants in indigenous peoples’ dreams had to be green is in no way indicative of a sympathy for the politics of Germany’s Green Party, which for Herzog remains more red than green (insofar as it is more like a red cape waved in front of a bull). The image is instead connected with the camouflage pattern on military transport aircraft. The plot is geared toward this analogy, and it draws visual power from it in order to narrate the clash of cultures. The aboriginals stand firm in their refusal to reveal the “spirit place” of the green ants, which is threatened by the mining company’s demolitions, but they then become embroiled in the company’s compensation offer: a green transport aircraft, which floats down to them and stands there like a lost and oversized insect. A substitution: their dreams for a technological artifact that could hardly be of use to them. In the logic of the aboriginals, however, it makes sense. For them, the airplane is the “great winged ant” with which they hope to reach the spirit land in the east, where the green ants have gone and disappeared. The dream of the green ants is an origin story with an apocalyptic spin. Miliritbi, the tribal elder, explains to the vice president of the mining company: “If you gonna mining in this land, you gonna destroy the land of green ants. And green ants will come out and destroy the whole universe world.” The vice president reacts uncomprehendingly: “What we’re doing here is exploring an option.” In Herzog’s narrative the aboriginals defend the right to dream against industrial rationality’s claims to power. Those who destroy the earth, so goes the message, destroy the world as well. In this respect, the mythology of the green ants has an additional zoological dimension. Somewhat toward the middle of the film the biologist Ernest Fletcher appears, who, to the astonishment of Lance Hackett, not only knows how to explain that the green ants of the dreamtime dream of the origins of the world, but also how they do it. During thunderstorms they orient themselves due north like small metal fragments, and they then pause in order to begin their dream. Herzog absolutely wanted to produce this image, but there was no securing an ant column, even with the help of a powered refrigerator. The attempt to paralyze crawling extras by cooling them, in order to get them to align in an orderly formation, fell apart owing to the animals’ constant need to be in motion; their hypothermically induced dreamtime ended whenever the flood lights came into position (WdgA DVD: 50 min.).2

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According to Herzog’s book about the making of the film, which appeared simultaneously with the film’s release, the ants-in-suspension were intended to be the opening image: “Like an army of small soldiers all the ants are facing in one direction. We have never seen ants in this way before. Their distribution in the sandy soil is completely arbitrary, but they have paused in their business, as though aligned by a strange magnetic force, as though they were all listening in one direction, and as if the dreams were audible. They pause this way—two hundred thousand of them” (Herzog 1984: 9). Instead of opening with this image of mythical stasis, Herzog dynamizes the sequence featuring Fletcher the biologist. Alongside aerial images of the landscape and slow, deliberate pans across static portraits that emphasize moments of peace, Herzog includes this sequence, filmed with a handheld camera. The style corresponds to Fletcher’s exalted, almost wild speech pattern, as though his research on green ants has affected him personally: a type of mimetic transformation into his object of investigation. In this way it succeeds imagistically and dramaturgically in establishing a center; it constitutes an antiimage of the frozen ants through its depiction of a highly mobile ant researcher. But this belongs among the many little ironic twists in a film told with otherwise familiar pathos. Where the Green Ants Dream begins with grainy images of a tornado underscored by an aria from Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem. These images will return at the end of the film, when they present the full force of the storm and are accompanied by original diegetic sounds. The images were filmed in Oklahoma by Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein, and they correspond to the apocalyptic motifs into which the Australian landscape is embedded. The landscape, which is visualized with static shots and long, impressive aerial sequences, is what Herzog would refer to as embarrassed, or insulted (beleidigt) landscapes.3 “Kilometer by kilometer the dusty desert is torn up and despoiled,” in Herzog’s description. “The vastness of the country is monstrous, and the small rocky outcroppings, despoiled by gaping black tunnels, are monstrous. Prefabricated houses stand haphazardly in a wasteland that was formerly a desert” (Herzog 1984: 22). Even if Herzog is outraged by the crimes against nature, his images manage to fascinate us. His Australia is a surreal landscape of yellow-reds beneath a blue sky, and the mounds are reminiscent of a lunar landscape or of an inadvertent land-art project left behind by the Opal mining company in the South Australian town of Coober Pedy. The film draws its strongest effects from the conflict staged over and over again between the broad sweep of the land and the artifacts of technological civilization: the conveyor belts, the bulldozers, and the rusted skeletons of buses and construction cranes which stand like foreign bodies or things that have been attacked by monstrous insects (Figure 15.1). Not coincidentally these images recall Herzog’s Fata Morgana (1969), his essay film from the Sahara, in which aircraft wreckage and cement mixers appear as relics of a vanished civilization. The aboriginals are placed in a landscape that is both scarred by civilization and made interesting by those scars. And they have been placed there in a literal sense: the natives in the film came from northern Australia, from the community of

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Figure 15.1 Landscapes that resemble things attacked by monstrous insects in Where the Green Ants Dream (1984). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Lucki Stipetić/Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

Yirrkala on the Gulf of Carpentaria, approximately 1500 miles from Coober Pedy. Before any white person or even another life form can be seen, the aboriginals are there: we hear the Didgeridoo and the “strange rhythmic sounds,” which, as Herzog writes, “seem to come from the Earth’s own interior,” where “prehistory and unreality grapple with one another and want to produce earthquakes” (Herzog 1984: 9). For this reason, even though they are dressed in blue jeans and flannel shirts, they carry archaic spears. The film’s first images presage the showdown in the form of a bulldozer advancing toward the aboriginals. Thanks to Lance Hackett’s intervention they are able to hold their ground and defend the green ants’ spirit place. But it is not only about dreams and mythic places; the land rights of the native inhabitants are also at issue. A template for the plot was a 1968–70 trial in which the Yolngu people unsuccessfully sued the Nabalco bauxite company, which claimed mining rights in their territory. Herzog, who had studied the case files, sets the second part of his film, after the appearance of the ant researcher, alternately in Melbourne and in the mining settlement. The change of settings opens up the possibility that the clash of cultures will take on new dimensions. On the one side there is the match cut to the last words of the ant researcher: he attests to the flight of the insects and then the green military vehicle appears on Coober Pedy’s lone airstrip. It lurks at the edge of the desert as a strangely hybrid artifact of both technological civilization and mythic spirituality. On the other side, Miliritbi and Bandharrawuy, the guardian of the songs, both decked out in business suits with shirts and ties, appear as hybridized strangers deposited into a spectacle that is hard to beat for its strangeness. The Australian court system takes after the British model: the judges wear ceremonial wigs, and the legal proceedings make clear that between the claims of the aboriginals, which are said to be supported only by “hearsay,” and the European legal norms, there can be no common understanding.

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In this encounter of alien worlds there are several ironic takes on Western civilization’s claims of superiority: when Bandharrawuy’s digital watch proves unruly and begins to beep; when the elevator in a tall building gets stuck twice in the same way; or, on the other hand, when the aboriginals take possession of the airplane and kindle a campfire in its cabin. But for all the good humor with which the film sometimes tells its story, it puts forward a concept of strangeness that renders difference absolute. The self and other each remain self-contained constructs, not to be mediated. The opposition takes on a thoroughly moral form: the original entitlement and the deeper knowledge are on the side of the aboriginals. In certain passages of dialogue this is presented as a thesis. When Miliritbi insists on his claim, for example, and speaks directly to the vice president of the company, he argues: “You tell me what is this Land Rights Act? Because we have been here for 40,000 years—longer than you cames.” Again, when Hackett speaks to Arnold, a dropped-out anthropologist who lives alone in a shack at the edge of the desert, he explains that he wants more intimate knowledge of the natives. The answer Arnold gives him serves as the central message of the film: “I know nothing! Nothing! Except one thing. […] You better get out of here. Go back where you came from. Your civilization destroys everything, including itself.” Herzog no longer appreciates the film’s tone of “moralizing self-righteousness,” as he describes it in the DVD commentary. But all the same, the plot’s conception was always geared toward presenting a moralizing message. In the story’s center is Hackett, the sensitive and skeptical hero, who transforms from a mining company geologist into one of the company’s critics. He too becomes a dropout, quitting his service and taking up residence in the old water tank where Arnold once resided. In the film’s closing image, Hackett, after he has left his radio-cassette recorder in the hands of a little indigenous girl, disappears like a Western hero into the wide landscape of the Opal mining fields. The aboriginals’ attempt to reach the spirit land in the east via plane resulted in a crash landing, and the dream location of the green ants has fallen victim to a demolition explosion. Even without the tornado imagery that precedes the finale, the outlook for modern civilization would appear gloomy. In the terms of classical dramaturgy Herzog recounts a European drama of education (Bildungsdrama) in the Australian desert. Two things are learned: the mania for progress is steering us toward catastrophe, and there can be no mediating between Western civilization and the mythical knowledge of the indigenous peoples. Yet in addition to this there is also the story of an older woman and her cocker spaniel named Benjamin Franklin, who has gone missing and is suspected to have disappeared into the underground labyrinths of the Opal mines. It is a side story, which could be written off as ironic commentary. It is accompanied by wonderfully melancholic images, such as when the dog’s owner is seen waiting near a tunnel where she has placed a small dish with fresh dog food. This image of waiting for a sign of life from the depths is cut parallel to a shot of a group of aboriginals, who are waiting for a return of the green ants. “It is also a strange story with

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this lost dog,” Herzog comments retrospectively. “It really has nothing to do with the main plotline. But sometimes, I don’t know how it comes about, stories such as this one about the lost dog suddenly become more important than the beginning of a normal film” (WdgA DVD: 8 min.). How the story of a hunting dog that gets lost in the mines would resolve itself meaningfully is difficult to say. But the nominal reason for this side story is clearer. The woman, Miss Strehlow (played by Colleen Clifford), corrects Hackett at one point, who mistakenly says her name “Miss Strehler.” In the list of characters that appears in the film-book, she is named “widow with dog.” Following a logical thread, the late husband of Miss Strehlow is likely an allusion to none other than Theodor Strehlow, who died in 1978 in Alice Springs. He was the source of the anthropological information for Chatwin’s The Songlines.

The Songlines, or the Discovery of the Synthesis The substantial tome Songs of Central Australia (1971), in which the linguist and anthropologist Theodor George Henry Strehlow collected his decades-long research into the ceremonial poesie of the Arrernte people, was an inspiration and guide for Chatwin’s trip to Australia. The text is mentioned in Chatwin’s book in which the first-person narrator returns to the hotel room on one of his travel days in order to read Strehlow’s Songs. He describes it as, “an awkward, discursive and unbelievably long book” (Chatwin 1987: 68), and with this distanced gesture, he sums up its accomplishment: “[Strehlow] wanted to show how every aspect of Aboriginal song had its counterpart in Hebrew, Ancient Greek, Old Norse or Old English: the literatures we acknowledge as our own. Having grasped the connection of song and land, he wished to strike at the roots of song itself: to find in song a key to unravelling the mystery of the human condition. It was an impossible undertaking. He got no thanks for his trouble” (1987: 69). However, Chatwin sets out precisely on the path of Strehlow’s synthesis. Katherine Strehlow does not appear in Chatwin’s book, but she remembers him well. “The telephone rang. He introduced himself and said what a wonderful book the Songs of Central Australia was. And I said: ‘Oh, then hello to the first person who’s ever read it’” (Yule 1999: 92 min.). In The Songlines, the narrator, after reading Strehlow’s book and fortified by a bottle of wine and two double brandies, sets out to retell the creation story of the aboriginals: to enact the mimetic recreation of a myth. According to the myth, the ancestors, in the fabled dreamtime, created themselves and then the world, into which they then sung themselves and its objects into being. During the journey of creation, before they went back into the earth, the entire world was covered in a web of songlines. The space was thus marked through and through, and for their descendants it became a kind of holy text. The reader has been informed that on their path the ancestors left behind

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spirit-children, a kind of “musical sperm,” as Arkady puts it (Chatwin 1987: 60). The spirit-children determine the future of each native, so that he, with his birth, oversees a section of the original songline, and each is bounded by sacred sites that refer in turn to certain episodes in the original voyage of creation. “Every ‘episode’ [is] readable in terms of geology” (1987: 13). With this mythical knowledge, however, there comes a duty to repeat symbolically the forefathers’ work of creation in a ritual of walkabouts. “In Aboriginal belief, an unsung land is a dead land: since, if the songs are forgotten, the land itself will die” (1987: 52). There are descriptions of songlines throughout Chatwin’s novel, but the book’s ethnological interests are limited. Until the final episode of The Songlines, the narrator meets only one aboriginal, Joshua, who can explain a dream path to him: the “Perenty Songline.” But Joshua also tells Chatwin’s narrator the “Story ’bout the Big Fly One” (1987: 154), and it finally dawns on him that this is in no way the songline of an indigenous myth, but is instead the description of a flight to London including the “maze” of the airport facility followed by a ride on the London Underground. Aboriginal vision incorporates Western technology. On one occasion they even borrow a bulldozer to furnish the land with miles of tracks, “circles, loops and figures of eight” (1987: 235), which could give the songlines an entirely new dynamic. The promising hunting expedition the narrator is permitted to undertake with the character Donkey-donk, turns out to be the brutal slaughter of a kangaroo, in which a gun, a car—which is more effective—and finally a spanner wrench are all employed as weapons (1987: 211). And the plane, which in Herzog’s film lifts off unsteadily in the direction of the spirit land, ends up, in Chatwin’s version, much less spectacularly in the bushes. Children of aboriginals have stolen the keys and ditched the plane in the sand behind the runway (1987: 225). Chatwin wants to avoid the cliché of the noble savage, but in such episodes he suggests that the aboriginals have developed no concept of alterity. Objects of Western civilization are effortlessly integrated into their own origin story. Arkady, the narrator’s traveling companion, explains: “Aboriginals believed that all the ‘living things’ had been made in secret beneath the earth’s crust, as well as all the white man’s gear—his aeroplanes, his guns, his Toyota Land Cruisers—and every invention that will ever be invented; slumbering below the surface, waiting their turn to be called” (1987: 14–15). The absence of alterity fascinates Chatwin insofar as he is concerned with the possibility of a dialogic relationship between mythical and logo-centric systems of thought; he shows how the aboriginals are able to integrate Western technology into their mythical origin stories, but he stages a strictly incommensurable relationship between the self and other. Chatwin looks for convergence in mediation. The reader learns through experience that Arkady is not only a tireless bushwalker, but that after his long marches home, he would “play the music of Buxtehude and Bach on the harpsichord,” because their “orderly progressions” corresponded to the “contours of the central Australian landscape” (1987: 2). When Rilke writes, in the third sonnet to Orpheus, “song is existence,” this song corresponds to the original act of creation of the songlines. A “featureless

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stretch of gravel [is] the musical equivalent of Beethoven’s Opus 111” (1987: 14). And the songlines themselves have to be imagined as a “spaghetti of Iliads and Odysseys” (13). Such comparisons, even if they are sometimes pointedly ironic, are not just metaphors for Chatwin. They are the outline of his concept of intercultural communication and translation. This is not about going native (or “go[ing] bush” [1987: 141]), as shown by the failed initiation of Graham and Mick, the members of a rock band from Alice Springs. Cultural identities persist, yet what Chatwin considers is the potential for an enduring exchange. Of Chatwin’s utopia, Jürgen Raithel writes, “The dangerous regressive-restorative potential of mythic thought, his collectivizing tendencies and his ethical blindness, are kept in check through a logos-defined rationalism; conversely, the mythical spirituality of the Aboriginals acts as a counterweight to the wholly rationalized and potentially necrophilic logic of the whites” (Raithel 1999: 148). For Chatwin, what is fascinating about the songlines is that they bespeak a completely different temporal and symbolic logic. The opposition between oral and written culture, which Herzog showcases as the principal conflict in the legal battle over land rights, becomes the starting point of Chatwin’s reflections. In The Songlines Western cartography, as a graphically fixated and writing-centric discourse network, stands opposed to an orally transmitted and reproduced cartography. In this way the logic of difference and demarcation encounters a spatial orientation system that does not recognize concepts of boundaries and binary distinctions because lines and places are merely “sung.” It stresses a type of onomatopoetic unity between signifier and signified and consistently rebukes binary distinctions through mythologizing the act of naming. The tjuringa, the oval plaques of the aboriginals in which the paths of the ancestors are engraved, not only signify, but are that which is itself symbolized. “It is the actual body of the Ancestor (pars pro toto); It is a man’s alter ego; his soul; his obol to Charon; his titledeed to country; his passport and his ticket ‘back in’” (Chatwin 1987: 287). Accordingly, a rock formation symbolizes not just the history of a living being; it is this living being and its history. But the real key to Chatwin’s interest in this type of orientation system lies not only in its identificatory intensity, but rather in the ritual of continual re-creation associated with walkabouts, which serve a relationship of exchange between the present and the past. The songlines are precisely what Chatwin, on the basis of his reading of Strehlow’s book, hoped and expected to find in Australia: a descriptive system where differences between signifier and signified, as well as between present and past, oscillate without disappearing, and one that is bound to the physical and spiritual act of walking. With The Songlines Chatwin realized the project he had long planned: to write a book about man’s nomadic nature—a book that was originally supposed to be titled “The Nomadic Alternative.” For Chatwin, it is always about an alternative. The nomadic people served as a sort of model, which is as much about spirituality as about origins. In a conversation with Father Terence, who sees

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the desert as an opportunity “to find one’s way to God,” the narrator tells him: “‘I believe something similar about the desert […]. Man was born in the desert, in Africa. By returning to the desert he rediscovers himself ” (1987: 65). Society should rejuvenate itself through ascetic, migratory existence. Elsewhere in Chatwin’s book, the narrator explains: “The idea of returning to an ‘original simplicity’ was not naïve or unscientific or out of touch with reality.” According to him, “Renunciation […], even at this late date, can work.” His Arcadian traveling companion agrees: “The world, if it has a future, has an ascetic future” (1987: 133). This recalls Lance Hackett, Herzog’s sensitive hero, who dedicates himself to living an ascetic life in the desert. But Chatwin does not sketch out an alternative of this sort. The model of an alternative lifestyle and mode of experience seems, in all immodesty, to be the narrator himself, and even more so Arkady, his traveling companion and conversation partner. Arkady is an idealized figure as well as an ego-ideal, who succeeds in moving effortlessly between cultures.4 He has a capacity akin to that of the Aboriginals, who, despite all the damages of civilization, enact this movement perfectly: they adapt the other to suit themselves. For Herzog that was already the basic idea when Miliritbi and Bandharrawuy are viewed through the aircraft’s windshield, sitting in the cockpit of the “great winged ant.” The emblematic image was also used to advertise the film. At issue for Herzog is incompatibility, but Chatwin’s conception is much more concerned with hybridization and synthesis. For this very reason Chatwin does not underscore the parallels between the cultures, but instead sets out in search of a common origin. He does not locate this origin in the African desert, but rather as an initial spark of evolution in a cave in Swartkrans, in the Transvaal. There, in older layers of sediment, are not only skeletons of Homonids, and, in newer layers of sediment, those of people, but also, as if in a transitional connecting layer, the remains of Dinofelis, a species of carnivores resembling the saber-toothed tiger. In terms of biological evolution, the conclusion could be drawn, based on this residential community, that humans’ decisive individuating leap consisted of using weapons in order to successfully fight against Dinofelis. Chatwin, however, goes further and tries to link logos and mythos: “Could it be […] that Dinofelis was Our Beast? A Beast set aside from all the other Avatars of Hell? The Arch-Enemy who stalked us, stealthily and cunningly, wherever we went? But whom, in the end, we got the better of ?” (Chatwin 1987: 255). Thus, at the end of the text, Chatwin finds the mythical place of origin at which man, his tools, his aggressive drives, and even his spiritual knowledge can be traced back across cultures. The Dinofelis passages belong to the collection of notebook entries that are made up of the material from which Chatwin wanted to develop his book on nomadry, and which become more and more dominant from the middle of the text on. Many critics believe that the notebook entries themselves form a kind of songline (Huggan 1991: 65). Others, like Raithel (1999), see clear connections to Deleuze and Guattari’s “Nomadology” (2004) to Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1998), and to Levi-Strauss’ famous principle of bricolage as a basic model of ethnological work (1968). To that one need only add that Chatwin’s approach to writing would

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fit effortlessly into an “aesthetics of diversity” (Ästhetik des Diversen), along the lines of the “poetic geography” that Victor Segalen (1983) proposes. In any case, the notebook entries, when taken as a whole, shape an artfully composed assembly of quotations, impressions, and descriptions. They are a kind of journey into a textcontinuum shaped by history, science, and myth. It is about sedentariness and the desire to wander; about the journey as a pattern for experience; about providing an explanation of aggression and even about the origins of mankind; it is a text that could be described as nomadized. Chatwin leaves linkages open, allowing for contradictions and even deliberately staging them. He works with ironic or grotesque fragments and constructs, when viewed together, a method of correspondences that claims nothing less than to create a network. It does not assert meaning as a whole, but rather appears capable of producing connections. In order to close this “wandering” text with aphoristic fragments (Sinnentwürfen) that extend from the ancestors to Dinofelis in a meaningful way, Chatwin offers up an Arcadian finale: a journey in which everything turns out well once the railway company has given up its plan to force its way into the land of the songlines. Together with Arkady and Marian, the third in this group of true travelers, the narrator accompanies an aboriginal on his way to visit three relatives, who are lying on their deathbeds with their tjuringas. “‘Aren’t they wonderful?’ Marian whispered, putting her hand in mine and giving it a squeeze.—Yes. They were all right. They knew where they were going, smiling at death in the shade of a ghostgum” (Chatwin 1987: 294). To sublate differences, the narrative has to turn to the last conceivable synthesis: death, which is depicted here as a return to origins. One might consider this mythopoetic kitsch, but it is, on the other hand, a highly effective final tableau for a story that proposes travel as a principle by which to live.

Relationship Problems: The Viceroy of Ouidah and Cobra Verde The conceptual differences that appear when comparing Herzog’s Australian tale of education—his Bildungsgeschichte—and Chatwin’s experimental travel text, present themselves similarly when one looks at Cobra Verde (1987), Herzog’s adaptation of Chatwin’s The Viceroy of Ouidah. Herzog admired the book precisely because of its narrative style, and he puts its author on a level with Joseph Conrad: “Since Joseph Conrad we haven’t had such a voice. He expresses what defines us as people, and how our inner landscape looks” (Yule 1999: 72 min.). But Herzog insisted on writing the screenplay by himself, and he had his reasons for that. What Herzog describes as narrating in “concentric circles,” as a type of narrative “tunnel vision,” proves to be a complex system of temporal layers that enables Chatwin to place past events in a timeframe of over a hundred years and to tie them to the contemporary nation of Benin during the 1970s (CV DVD: 6 min.). Benin is connected to

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its history as Dahomey in the first half of the nineteenth century, a period that marked the end phase of a slave trade that had been successfully conducted for centuries. As in the case of The Songlines, Chatwin is concerned with producing connections rather than asserting causal relationships. The violence in Mathieu Kérékou’s newly founded People’s Republic is set in relation to the violent history of the country without making moral judgments or asserting historical continuities. Chatwin simply put forward the linkages between the intra-African slave trade and European and South American interests. He directs the focus onto the rather tragic history of a Brazilian slave trader, Francisco Manoel da Silva, who rises to the position of Viceroy of Ouidah. He is successful in a foreign country, but is ultimately betrayed there, in his business partners’ homeland. Fragments from the slave trader’s life circle into a kind of panorama, yet the story remains open owing to its multiple narrative layers. Herzog takes a dramaturgical approach that, as the opening song, “Francisco Manoel, the bandit Cobra Verde,” already makes clear, is oriented toward the tradition of the ballad. Da Silva’s life story can be told in a linear and exemplary fashion. Still more decisive is that Herzog put forth a Klaus Kinski film, which is why the figure of da Silva dissolves into that of the bandit Cobra Verde, who is only mentioned in passing by Chatwin. Kinski was able to stage it as one of his signature roles from the very beginning of the film: he plays it as an anti-hero, similar to the role he played in Sergio Corbucci’s legendary and snow-filled Italo-western The Great Silence (1968). The material at the beginning of Cobra Verde is set in Brazil, was filmed in Columbia, and looks stylistically like a spaghetti western. It includes edenic images of the estate of a sugar baron, which da Silva—in Herzog’s version of the plot—will never see again. Once in Africa, an adventure film unfolds around the desperate and enraptured da Silva, situated in the middle of a mass choreography of black actors. Here again, Herzog is trying to show Africa’s “foreignness,” and to place his hero in the greatest possible contrast with his environment. The film, however, takes on involuntarily folkloric characteristics when Herzog brings into the picture an authentic Ghanaian tribal king, Nana Agyefi Kwame II, along with his courtiers and cloaked in traditional festive attire. At the end, Kinski finds himself once again in a fateful and mythic situation. He desperately hauls his canoe out into the Atlantic, attempts to escape to nowhere and drowns in the surf. It is a visually striking mix of genres in which one thing remains constant: Kinski’s unchanging character. He consistently trades on that same facet of his repertoire, behaving as a nihilistic desperado, who, in his anti-bourgeois aspects, is, as Brad Prager points out, “Nietzschean through and through” (2007: 190). One thing must have irritated Chatwin, although he only gestures toward this when he recalls his visit to the set in Ghana. He surprisingly praises Herzog’s decision to turn to Ghanaian culture: “Werner, by hiring a real court and not changing a thing except the odd Taiwanese watch, more than makes up for lack of historical accuracy by establishing an authenticity of tone” (Chatwin 1989: 140). He was, however, estranged by the “lack of historical accuracy” where Herzog could not resist his “old Wagnerian touch” (1989: 141): despite the fact that Wagner’s music

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could hardly have been known in Brazil at this point in the nineteenth century, Herzog names two of the Brazilian sugar baron’s daughters Valkyria and Wandeleide. And Kinski, “a sexagenarian adolescent all in white with a mane of yellow hair” did not directly correspond to his “idea of a Brazilian slaver” (1989: 143). According to Herzog, Chatwin found the finished film “very good” (sehr schön) (CV DVD: 14 min.), yet Salman Rushdie reports that Chatwin’s perspective on Cobra Verde was “less than complimentary” (Rushdie 1991: 238). Whichever was the case, one can hardly imagine a bigger opposition than that between Chatwin’s Viceroy of Ouidah and Herzog’s Cobra Verde. On the one hand, snapshots of moments, a sense of searching, and a narrative that moves forward laconically; on the other hand, Herzog’s opulent screen drama, which yet again returns to his major theme: the staging of that which is strange or foreign as the experience of alterity. It serves, as Herzog says, to show “the complete foreignness of Africa” (CV DVD: 48 min.). As much as Herzog’s adaptation of Chatwin’s book makes clear the opposition between the writer and the writer-filmmaker, one might find a convergence between Herzog’s thinking and Chatwin’s in the film Herzog made just before Cobra Verde, about the nomadic people of the southern Sahara. Chatwin, given to a fascination with all things nomadic, had told Herzog about the Wodaabe people, whose existence as cattle-driving nomads was threatened by drought and by the expansion of the Sahel. Herzog took up the suggestion and made Wodaabe—Herdsmen of the Sun (1989). His interest was, yet again, in an indigenous culture threatened by Western civilization. At the center of the narrative is an annual beauty ceremony in which the young Wodaabe men present themselves to the women. Already the opening images—the festively decorated faces of the men—are underscored with Charles Gounod’s Ave Maria. Other nondeigetic employments of opera follow. Fitzcarraldo had sonicated the South American jungle with Caruso’s arias, attempting to put Italian opera where it is most foreign, yet the opera references in Wodaabe produce no similar confrontations. It is more revealing of a common intersection, a common cultural encounter, between two rituals, which may not be so alien when it comes to artificial cults of beauty. The device of underscoring the Wodaabe festival with arias may be indebted simply to Herzog’s fascination with operatically staged spectacles. From another perspective, however, he here shapes precisely the type of interconnection at which Chatwin, when it came to his foreign encounters, always arrived.

Epilogue Herzog repeatedly told this story, and Chatwin’s biographer Nicholas Shakespeare did not pass it up either. It is the tale of a wonderful friendship with a sad end, and it refers us throughout to mythic dimensions. They shared a common fascination: walking. “He was […] the only person,” Chatwin writes about Herzog, “with whom I could have a one-to-one conversation on what I would call the sacramental aspect of walking. He and I share a belief that walking is not simply therapeutic

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for oneself but is a poetic activity that can cure the world of its ills” (Chatwin 1989: 138–139). Herzog in turn reported that Chatwin always had a copy of the book Of Walking in Ice (1980) in his leather backpack. The book was the diary report of Herzog’s pilgrimage from Munich to Paris through the snow and rain, with which he hoped to contribute in some way to the recovery of Lotte Eisner, the most admired historian of German Expressionist film. Based on the fact that Eisner recovered when he arrived, Shakespeare concludes that Chatwin believed that Herzog possessed healing powers and therefore asked him to come to his deathbed in January 1989 (Shakespeare 2001: 557). Herzog himself prefers the variant that Chatwin absolutely wanted to see Wodaabe (557). By and by Herzog showed the delirious Chatwin excerpts from the film, which, in both Herzog’s story and Shakespeare’s, turned to the subject of walking and concluded with Chatwin’s request: “You must carry my rucksack, you are the one who must carry it.” Herzog replied: “Yes, I will proudly do that.” The duty remains sacred to Herzog: “Let’s say if my house was on fire, I would throw my children out of the window, but of all my belongings it would be the rucksack that I would save” (558). It probably all happened this way, yet at the same time, the story is larger than life. It transfigures Chatwin into a nomad, reaching a tragic end, and Herzog counterbalances his burden, taking on Chatwin’s inheritance in the form of that rucksack. “I still carry it, and I had it with me in the snow storm in Patagonia, sitting on it for fifty hours dug into the snow. It is much more than just a tool to carry things” (Cronin 2002: 283). Thus the encounter between Chatwin and Herzog ascends to the height of great tales: an encounter between two soul mates, who always remained foreign to one another.

Notes 1

The publication was rapidly followed by Morgan’s Message from Forever (1991b). Immediately after Herzog’s pronouncement on the “dreams” of the aboriginals, books that had something to do with the culture of Australian aborigines were regularly marketed in Germany as “dream books.” Chatwin’s The Songlines was called “Dream-trails” (Traumpfade), and Morgan’s books were given the titles “Dream Catcher” (Traumfänger) and “Dream Traveler” (Traumreisende). 2 Herzog says: “I wanted to distribute more than a hundred thousand ants like metal shards. And for months we experimented and tried to cool the ants to a temperature where they were almost inactive. It was not to be done. We couldn’t get it.” (WdgA DVD: 50 min.). 3 In German Herzog speaks of beleidigte Landschaften, which is literally “insulted landscapes.” Traditionally both he and his translators have used the English phrase, “embarrassed landscapes.” 4 Salman Rushdie has firmly rejected that he was Arkady. According to Rushdie: “The truth is, ‘of course,’ that Bruce is Arkady as well as the character he calls Bruce. He is both sides of the dialogue” (Rushdie 1991: 233). However, the life story and ancestry of Arkady Volchok, as well as the description of his appearance is probably borrowed from Toly Sawenko, a resident of Alice Springs who reads corresponding passages from the book in Paul Yule’s film (Yule 1999: 89 min.).

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Works Cited Chatwin, Bruce: The Songlines (New York: Penguin Books, 1987). Chatwin, Bruce: The Viceroy of Ouidah (New York: Penguin Books, 1988 [original 1980]). Chatwin, Bruce: “Werner Herzog in Ghana (1988),” What Am I Doing Here (London: Jonathan Cape, 1989), pp. 136–149. Cobra Verde (CV DVD): DVD Audio commentary by Werner Herzog and Laurens Straub, Kinowelt Home Entertainment, 2010. Cronin, Paul, ed.: Herzog on Herzog (London: Faber & Faber, 2002). Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix: A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004 [original 1980]). Derrida, Jacques: Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998 [original 1967]). Herzog, Werner: Of Walking in Ice: Munich–Paris, 11/23 to 12/14, 1974, trans. Martje Herzog and Alan Greenberg (New York: Tanam Press, 1980 [original 1978]). Herzog, Werner: Wo die grünen Ameisen träumen. Filmerzählung (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1984). Huggan, Graham: “Maps, Dreams and the Presentation of Ethnographic Narrative. Hugh Brody’s Maps and Dreams and Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines,” Ariel 22.1 (1991): 57–69. Lévi-Strauss, Claude: The Savage Mind (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1968 [original 1962]). Morgan, Marlo: Mutant Message Down Under: A Woman’s Journey into Dreamtime Australia (New York: Harper Collins, 1991a). Morgan, Marlo: Message from Forever (New York: Harper Collins, 1991b). Prager, Brad: The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth. (London: Wallflower Press, 2007). Raithel, Jürgen: Der Gott der Wanderer. Bruce Chatwins postmoderne Reisebeschreibungen. In Patagonia und The Songlines (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1999). Rushdie, Salman: “Travelling with Chatwin,” Imaginary Homelands. Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta, 1991), pp. 232–236. Segalen, Victor: Die Ästhetik des Diversen. Versuch über den Exotismus (Frankfurt am Main: Qumran, 1983 [original 1978]). Shakespeare, Nicholas: Bruce Chatwin: A Biography (Anchor Books: New York, 2001 [original 1999]). Strehlow, Theodor George Henry: Songs of Central Australia (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1971). Wo die grünen Ameisen träumen (WdgA DVD): DVD Audio Commentary by Werner Herzog and Laurens Straub. Kinowelt Home Entertainment, 2005. Yule, Paul: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin, BBC Films, 1999.

Additional Films Cited Corbucci, Sergio: The Great Silence (1968) Yule, Paul: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin (1999)

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A March into Nothingness The Changing Course of Herzog’s Indian Images Will Lehman

Almost forty years ago, Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) presented German audiences with a semi-historical account of the chaos that ensued when the Conquistadors, with their European conceptions of order, came into violent contact with the incalculability of the jungle and its invisible but dangerous inhabitants. Herzog’s second Amazonian feature, Fitzcarraldo (1982), features another equally obsessed but much more sympathetic European dreamer, whose failure to understand the natives of the jungle would also cause the failure of his grandiose mission— to bring European opera to the Amazon. Since 1982, Herzog’s plentiful “Indian images”1 have been confined largely to quasi-documentaries set in the most remote parts of the Americas, from Alaska to Patagonia, in which natives play roles of varying importance. In this essay, I will trace the evolution of Herzog’s Indian images through several of these films, paying particular attention to the two in which Native Americans figure most prominently and in which Herzog’s commentary most clearly reveals the place of Native Americans in his apocalyptic worldview and focusing on the political and moral imperatives that his images both engender and belie.

Indianthusiasm The last few years have witnessed a noticeable increase in academic attention paid to popular German interest in Native American culture, ranging from a generalized fascination with all things Indian to a belief that Germans and Native Americans share a special kinship that results from their supposedly similar histories and common destinies. Hartmut Lutz has called this phenomenon, which is not unique to Germany but A Companion to Werner Herzog, First Edition. Edited by Brad Prager. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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which seems to be more prevalent in the German-speaking lands, “Indianthusiasm” (2002: 167–168). Although Indianthusiam refers to an aspect of German popular culture, the images and texts that feed it come from both academic and popular sources. To be sure, the scholarly and scientific work of Alexander von Humboldt—who traveled to Central and South America between 1799 and 1804 and wrote extensively about his “discoveries” there until his death in 1859—contributed enormously to enduring German fantasies about the Native Americans that the Prussian count had encountered and to the desire to witness these “children of nature” first hand. The novels of Friedrich Gerstäcker, based on the author’s travels in both North and South America, likewise contributed to the growing collection of materials concerned with Native Americans. The “jubilant” reception of George Copway, the Ojibwa representative at the Third World Peace Congress in Frankfurt in 1850 (Peyer 2002: 141), reflected a growing fascination with Native Americans in Germany, at a time when the British and French public seemed to be losing interest in such romanticized images (Peyer 2002: 149). The popularity of live Indian “shows” touring in Germany, such as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, starting in the late nineteenth century and culminating in Sarrasani’s Wild West Show on the eve of the World War I (Kreis 2002: 196), paved the way for the full-scale appropriation of Native American cultural assets, as Indians were now seen as “something you can play” (Kreis 2002: 202). The most abiding literary source of Indian imagery in German culture, however, derives neither from anthropological studies nor from the travelogues of German adventurers, but from the western novels of Karl May, who in 1893 began publishing a series in which he claimed to recount his adventures as a land surveyor in the American frontier, where he had befriended and become blood brother to an Apache chief named Winnetou. The unparalleled success of these novels led May—whose reputation as an Indian expert was only minimally tarnished by revelations that he was really a career convict who had never even crossed the Atlantic—to become the most widely read German-language author of all time (Gemünden 2002: 247). His influence extended far beyond Germany’s borders. His stories can be seen as helping to establish a model for the Euro-Indian “bromance” fantasy, more than forty years before the creation of its American analogue, the Lone Ranger and sidekick Tonto. Unencumbered by any physical experience in the so-called New World, May based his descriptions on reports written by others (Jaehn 2005: 14) while embellishing them with “historical inaccuracies and improbabilities” (Langley 1996: 33). In his introduction to Winnetou 1, May formulates what would eventually become typical of paternalistic German attitudes toward Native Americans: The white man found time to develop according to his nature—from hunter to shepherd to farmer to industrialist over several hundred years. The red man never found this time, for it was never granted to him. Rather, he was expected to make a gigantic leap from the lowest level to the highest, without knowing that this demand would cause him to fall, mortally wounding himself (1893: 2).2

The red man is, for the narrator, so close to death that his friend, the German, only need to stand by his side so that “we can draw his eyes closed” (1). He regrets that

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European civilization has spoiled Indian culture, but claims that the “gruesome law” of nature is that the weak must yield to the strong (2). May thus resigns himself to telling the story of that noble Volk that still lives on in his soul: “I, you ask? Yes, I! I got to know the Indians . . .” (5). May’s German–Indian buddy narratives found resonance in the German public long after his death in 1912. With their exciting, yet uncomplicated plots and characters easily identifiable as good or bad, May’s westerns were easily adapted for popular cinema. Starting in the early 1960s, Harald Reinl was particularly productive in this regard, adapting five of May’s stories for West German audiences. German fascination with May’s fantasies of Native Americans continues unabated even into the new millennium, perhaps best evidenced by the public reception of Michael Herbig’s 2001 film Der Schuh des Manitu (Manitou’s Shoe), a spoof of May’s Winnetou stories, which has been described as “the most successful German film of all time” (Horak 2002: 37). Despite suggestions by several scholars that the German public is fascinated with “all things Indian” (Calloway 2002: 76; Gemünden 2002: 253; Lutz 2002: 168), it seems clear that it is not everything related to Native Americans that finds an eager audience in Germany, but rather a carefully selected subset of Native American practices and customs which meet very specific needs. The Indians that are constructed, portrayed, and emulated, for example, are almost always either Plains or Southwest Indians of the United States, perhaps due to the colorful traditional attire and fascinating ritual dances of these particular tribes—not to mention the widely available photos and detailed written descriptions of those aspects that best lend themselves to imitation. That members of these U.S. native tribes are often far more assimilated into Western culture than, say, the Inuit of Greenland or the Yuquí of Bolivia, attests to the supremacy of the imaginary in German Indianthusiasm. As an artist who has been filming real Native Americans for nearly half a century, Herzog has created an impressive collection of Indian images. This mosaic of representations is hardly monolithic, and over time Herzog and his films have expressed conflicting views on the relationship between Western civilization and Native American culture, thereby frustrating any attempt to isolate a unified semantic code with which to decipher his images. One can, however, detect a certain change in critical direction from his early features to his later documentaries. This change can be characterized as symptomatic of Herzog’s well-known apocalypticism, but, as I will show, it is also problematic in that it undermines efforts to ensure the future viability of Native American culture.

Herzog’s Early Indian Images Aguirre, Herzog’s first Amazon feature, tells the quasi-historical tale of the mutinous conquistador Don Lope de Aguirre (played by Klaus Kinski), who, with a group of mostly reluctant fellow mutineers, sets off to find the fabled city of

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gold, El Dorado. As his raft floats downstream, his dream of establishing a dynasty that will displace Spain as the dominant power of the region begins to unravel. One by one, his crew succumbs to hunger, fatigue, and the poisoned darts and arrows of the mostly invisible natives. As the film closes, Aguirre remains as the last man standing, but the audience is left knowing that his doom is sealed. In many ways, Aguirre successfully undermines popular conceptions of Native Americans, thwarting the expectations of the Indianthusiast. Lutz Koepnick has argued, for example, that by filming strictly from the limited perspective of the Western intruders and by refusing to portray the Amazonian natives as part of a living community, whom the Western audience can pretend to see without being seen, Herzog inverts the Western tendency by showing the European, rather than the Indian, as the spectacle in the forest (1993: 241). At other times, Indian images in Aguirre seem to actively engage Western fantasies and recreate the colonialist gaze, only to then rob this gaze of its colonizing power. When a native man and woman are taken from a canoe onto Aguirre’s raft, for instance, the camera lingers briefly on the woman’s unmoving face and then zooms out to focus for several seconds upon her exposed breasts. Here, Herzog invites us to partake in what is the hallmark of masculine colonial fantasy, namely to visually consume the body of the native woman. Yet, his image denies us of the satisfaction of that consumption, and in so doing distances himself both from the practices of popular ethnography—whose images tend to obfuscate the privilege of their creator by cutting the Western body from the frame—and from a fascistic-fetishistic aesthetic of otherness, which eroticizes power and domination and has been practiced most notably by Leni Riefenstahl in her photography of the Nuba of Africa (Gates 1998: 240). In stark contrast to Riefenstahl’s images, Herzog’s native female body does not project strength, pride, or defiance. Nor does it conform to Western notions of female beauty: her face is dirty, her breasts are saggy and uneven, and her tight skirt makes her belly protrude. Rather than reward the audience’s voyeurism with an opportunity to consume the native’s exotic body, that body is presented as plain and undesirable, such that what is ultimately exposed is more the viewer’s own attempt to colonize that body than the body itself. Thus, in its refusal to engage German fantasies of Native Americans, Aguirre stands in stark contrast to other German Indian-themed films of the time, such as Hark Bohm’s Bavarian Western, Tschetan, der Indianerjunge (Chetan, Indian Boy, 1973), in which a scantily clad, arrow-shooting, cattle-rustling Lakota boy—played by Bohm’s Asian foster son—is rescued by a solitary German sheepherder from execution at the hands of a greedy Anglo-American rancher. Herzog’s next South American adventure, Fitzcarraldo (1982), begins with an epigraph in which he claims that the Indians that inhabit the seemingly endless jungle shown on screen call this land “Cayahauri Yacu,” or the land that God has left unfinished until humans disappear from it. That the term “Cayahuari Yacu” appears to be Herzog’s invention should not surprise anyone familiar with the filmmaker’s other work, in which the goal of revealing a “higher truth” requires

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that he create aboriginal mythologies (Where the Green Ants Dream, 1984), fill Vietnamese spaces with Mongolian music (Little Dieter Needs to Fly, 1998), and even attribute invented quotes to famous historical figures (Lessons of Darkness, 1992). Brad Prager sees in this epigraph a sort of negative theology that denies reason the privilege it enjoys as catalyst in the unfolding of the divine plan (2007: 36), essentially a rejection of Enlightenment values. At the same time, one could also read this epigraph as a veiled invitation to Western colonialists to finish the work of creation that God started but left unfinished. Thus, just as the Indians will later “need” the European Fitzcarraldo in order to overcome divine punishment in the form of a curse on their land, Herzog’s epigraph suggests that they also need Western technology to overcome the curse of “incompletion” that prevents them from enjoying edenic bliss. The Indian images in Fitzcarraldo, filmed ten years after Aguirre, reflect the increasing complexity of Native American identities in the early twentieth century, by which time many Native Americans were so assimilated into Western ways of living (and thinking) that they no longer chose to identify as “Indian.” Thus, in Fitzcarraldo, the children at the missionary outpost Saramiriza, although wholly Native American ethnically, identify themselves as Peruvians and think “Indians” are the people “upstream” who don’t know how to read or wash their clothes. Cholo, the engine mechanic on Fitzcarraldo’s boat, is barely able to control the violent tendencies that seem to lurk below his Western-style clothes and is always the first to want to engage in a firefight with the “bare-ass” Indian attackers on the shore, even though he is obviously coded as a full-blooded native himself. The ship’s cook Huerequeque, whose mixed ancestry is signaled by his ability to speak and understand the language of the upriver Indians who board the boat, is likewise marked as a stereotypically degenerate result of cultural mixing: he is an uncontrollable drunk. Ironically, the more the Indians think and behave like Westerners, the less they seem to have in common with the romantic dreamer Fitzcarraldo, who claims to be very interested in the idea, expressed by some of the more traditional older Indians, that “our everyday life is only an illusion, behind which lies the reality of dreams.” Fitzcarraldo’s declared interest in this simplified version of the natives’ worldview is not meant to show serious engagement with Native American ideas and values. Instead, it is precisely the lack of sophistication of Fitzcarraldo’s interest that suggests a criticism of the superficial appropriation of a perceived (or invented) Native American cosmology for Western consumption that serves as one of the hallmarks of Indianthusiam.3 Yet not all Western appropriation of native knowledge is portrayed negatively, particularly when this new knowledge displaces Western traditions that Herzog sees as overly rational or Teutonic. Fitzcarraldo’s captain, known as “Orinoco Paul,” refuses to put his full trust in maps, relying instead on the taste of the water to determine how far upstream they still need to navigate to reach their destination. Having mastered navigating through the senses rather than through reason alone, the captain reaffirms the superiority of the European, who has access to all forms of knowledge.

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Within the narrative of Fitzcarraldo, one might see the portrayal of the jungle Indians as quite positive in terms of agency, in that, instead of being represented as powerless to stop the intrusion of rubber tappers (as well as the opera house Fitzcarraldo dreams of building), the Indians actually use Fitzcarraldo’s greed against him, and manage to keep their land while at the same time removing a curse from it. In stark contrast to scenes in Aguirre, the Indians who have boarded his ship play their pan flutes defiantly in the European’s face. At the same time, Fitzcarraldo’s blatant exploitation of Indian labor in pulling the Molly Aida over the mountain might be interpreted as a clear indictment of the colonialist enterprise. However, the Western bias inherent in this type of interpretation becomes clear when we take into account the opinion of the tribal council of the Aguaruna tribe, whose chief was interviewed during the making of Burden of Dreams (1982), Les Blank’s documentary of the making of Fitzcarraldo. When interviewed, the chief explained that the reason that the council had rejected Herzog’s plans to film on its territory was precisely because they feared that he would depict “how the Aguarunas and Huambisas were exploited and killed during the time of the cauchos.” In other words, for these Indians, to reenact or restage their historical emasculation at the hands of European colonialists is to repeat the crime. Indeed, the chief ’s argument calls into question the very possibility of representing the violence of colonialism without simultaneously recreating and legitimizing it, an argument taken up very effectively by scholars such as John E. Davidson (1999: 25–26). For most critics, however, it was not the theoretical problems of portraying colonialism that drew their ire, but the physical conditions of the filming itself, which, as Burden of Dreams shows, were every bit as risky for the local population as the events portrayed in Herzog’s film.

Ballad of the Little Soldier Shortly after the release of Fitzcarraldo, Herzog began work on a non-fiction film that attempts to portray a local Indian tribe’s heroic armed struggle against an oppressive government. Co-directed by Herzog’s friend Denis Reichle, Ballad of the Little Soldier (1984) can perhaps be categorized as the most ostensibly pro-Indian of Herzog’s works to date. Yet anyone who hoped that Herzog’s apparent advocacy work “with and for the Miskitos” of Nicaragua’s coastal northeast (Csicsery 1985: 15) might somehow atone for his perceived exploitations of Amazonian natives in the filming of Fitzcarraldo, released just two years earlier, would be gravely disappointed. The fact that the Indians in this film are fighting, with the financial backing of the CIA, against a revolutionary socialist government guaranteed that the film would be met with passionate disapproval on the part of that regime’s supporters, many of whom had also taken issue with what could be seen as Herzog’s neocolonialist filmmaking practices in Peru.

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The forty-four-minute film promises a unique inside view of the underground Misura army of the Miskitos in the early 1980s, who are fighting a war of independence against the four-year-old Sandinista government. Anti-climatic battle scenes and routine military training exercises are interspersed with interviews of women and children who have been victims of Sandinista violence. A boy reports that his brothers and father were shot and his mother “chopped up like meat” before his eyes. In another scene that calls to mind the grieving Kuwaiti mothers of Lessons of Darkness (1992), a Miskito mother recounts how three of her sons and a young daughter were all killed by Sandinista forces. Indeed, Herzog constructs a bleak and highly inflammatory image of Sandinista military tactics. It is thus not surprising that the film, which according to Timothy Corrigan, “was begging for a political scandal,” succeeded in creating one (1986: 12). Criticism of the film ranged from understandable irritation with Herzog’s sloppy journalism and his de-contextualized focus on the symptoms rather than the underlying causes of the war (Prager 2007: 148) to accusations that the whole production was “faked” (Horak 1986: 31) and that the interviewees are all liars (Roxanne DunbarOrtiz, quoted in Csicsery 1985: 9). My own interest in this film lies in deciphering its particular way of imag(in)ing Indians, the messages it conveys about them, and the relationship between these messages and those deriving from Herzog’s Indian images elsewhere. Already in the opening scene many of the tensions and motifs that the film seeks to develop are apparent. A young boy wearing a military outfit and holding a rifle sits on a bench under the thatched roof of an open hut (Figure  16.1). Behind him, the narrow trunks of tall forest trees metaphorically resemble prison bars, blocking access to the green light of the forest beyond. The boy turns to push the play button on his tape player and begins to sing along to a Spanish ballad. The song is

Figure 16.1 A young soldier at the very beginning of Ballad of the Little Soldier (1984). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Lucki Stipetić/Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

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about a schoolboy who is inconsolable because his love, a sleepy-eyed girl with a blue backpack, has not shown up in class. The singing youth has light brown skin, a slightly upturned nose, and blondish, slightly curly hair which pokes out from under his oversized green cap. He stumbles over some of the words and sings slightly off key with a voice that is both melancholic and tired, as if he has been asked to perform some mundane task. When his song is over, he stops the tape and looks back at the camera, smiling broadly for the first time, proud of his performance. In typical Herzog fashion, the camera lingers on him for another thirteen seconds, allowing for a moment of discomfort for both the performer and the viewer as the boy’s smile fades to a sad, confused stare directly addressing the camera. The audience meanwhile is left to reconcile the discord between the childishness of his song and the grim “adult” reality evidenced by his rifle and uniform. On his ring finger, a conspicuous gold band accentuates the image of a boy “dressed up” to look like a grown man. Besides encapsulating what Herzog and co-director Reichle see as the primary tragedy of this situation, the boy’s performance, with its props, outfits, and even the final period of silence during which one might have expected to hear applause, has an important function in establishing the director’s philosophy of truth in film. Herzog had employed a similar tactic in Fitzcarraldo, in which the opening shots of an opera performance included in the frame the woman who is actually singing the part for the actress on stage. The effect of these introductory performances is to highlight the “staged” nature of all cinema, thus complicating the traditional dichotomy between feature and documentary. While this approach gives greater freedom to the non-fiction filmmaker, who is no longer tied to simply documenting what Herzog sees as the “facts of the accountant” (Cronin 2002: 301), it also requires a willingness on the part of the viewer to forgive the “little lies” that the director introduces into the narrative in order to expose its inherent “ecstatic truth.” This is, of course, a favor more generously granted when that greater truth is actually understood as such by the viewer. When this is not the case, then the mere possibility that a particular scene is staged or that a seemingly spontaneous conversation is actually scripted allows a skeptical or hostile audience to dismiss all the film’s claims as fraudulent and all imagery as imaginary. Thus, Herzog’s non-fiction films are by their very nature extremely vulnerable to attacks upon their credibility, particularly in the case of a highly political film such as Ballad of the Little Soldier. Aside from its function in marking Herzog’s particular non-fiction style, the vocal performance of the boy offers other interpretive possibilities. Brad Prager sees the boy’s lack of emotion while singing, which is evocative of a ventriloquist’s doll, as symbolic of Herzog’s denial of the Miskitos’ agency in their own history, as they are powerless to effect a positive change for themselves no matter which regime they happen to fall under (2007: 48). Herzog certainly makes this claim in his voice-over, and some of his footage clearly seems to support it. For example, at one point Herzog and Reichle accompany an elite troop on a commando mission to attack a truck convoy in order to obtain badly needed weapons. But as soon as

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they cross the Río Coco into Nicaragua they come under fire and have to change their planned route, which takes them deep into unknown jungle where they eventually run out of water and are thus forced to abandon the mission and return home empty handed. As Herzog would have us believe, this is just one more defeat in the long history of their subjugation, proof of their powerlessness against forces greater than themselves. However, other moments in the film challenge this notion, not least of which is Herzog’s own commentary, in which he claims that this is the first armed resistance of Indians since the Spanish conquest of Latin America. Despite the inaccuracy of his statement,4 the fact that the Indians Herzog portrays are actively fighting the Sandinistas, that they would resist to the point of sending their own children into battle in order to protect their autonomy, clearly establishes that the Miskito do in fact have the ability to take their fate into their own hands. Once the boy’s song is finished and the viewer has been given time to feel as uncomfortable as possible, Herzog inserts his voice-over, first explaining the great difficulty he and Reichle have had in reaching the remote Miskito settlement, including a three-week trek on foot through jungle and swamps, constantly behind “enemy lines.” The Miskitos, he explains, are an Indian people who have lived isolated for hundreds of years in this coastal area. However, he adds, “their old ways of life have been greatly obliterated by the influence of Protestant missionaries of the Moravian church and the immigration of blacks from the Caribbean.” During this commentary, a woman and her young son are shown chopping up live sea turtles with machetes, and a nearby bowl indicates that they will be having the turtles for dinner, a practice in keeping with the “old ways” of the Miskitos (Dennis 1981: 279). This is but the first of many situations in the film where Herzog’s voice-over seems to contradict his own footage. Herzog’s statement, taken literally, is certainly misleading, and could easily be interpreted as racist, but I believe that the problem is perhaps one of translation: Herzog’s use of the term “blacks,” particularly when pronounced with a German accent, is an unfortunately harsh translation of the term Schwarze used in the German-language version. Likewise, his choice of the word obliterated as a translation of verwischt, creates the impression of a total break from the ways of the past, which the camera shows to be incorrect. In this case, Herzog might better have said confounded, smudged, or blurred. Indeed, the Miskito culture has evolved under the influence of Protestantism and through its contact with Englishspeaking descendents of Jamaican slaves (who in local terminology are referred to as “Creoles”), blurring, as it were, the imaginary lines of religion and race. But the totality of erasure from recognition, existence, and memory evoked by the word obliterated, suggests not only that there are no authentic Miskitos left, but also that present-day Miskitos have no real access to their past, no organic connection to history. Clearly, Herzog’s later commentary about the importance of the Miskito language in preserving their culture shows that he understands that there has been no

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real break with the past. As a company of Misura walks through the village, Herzog tells us that it takes a while for the villagers, whom history has taught to be extremely wary of soldiers, to realize “that for the first time, these are their soldiers, from their own midst, speaking their language.” The joy of seeing their troops incites a girl to start singing, and the crowd joins in. Yet based solely on Herzog’s commentary, viewers unfamiliar with both Miskito and Spanish are likely to infer, incorrectly, that they are singing in the Miskito language. This raises the question of why Herzog would lead viewers to the conclusion that the villagers were singing “in their language” when in fact this is not the case. It may be that Herzog, who speaks Spanish, finds it unnecessary to point out when the Miskito are speaking their language and when they are not. It seems more likely, however, that Herzog is consciously attempting to reduce the complexity of the linguistic situation of the Miskito in order to facilitate the audience’s ability to see them as unique and identifiably distinct from the Sandinistas against whom they are fighting. In terms of Herzog’s philosophy of truth, his omission of the accountant’s truth of the ethnolinguistic diversity of the Miskito is ignored so that the greater truth—that the Miskito have a right to armed resistance against the government of Nicaragua— will be more evident. Yet it is not simply a matter of Herzog’s footage complicating his commentary. In some instances, for example, the filmmaker’s voice-over contains factual errors. I have already mentioned Herzog’s dubious claim that the Miskito uprising is the first case of armed Indian resistance since the Spanish Conquest. This assertion has the clear intention of establishing the importance of his footage in a larger historical context. Of course, this type of self-aggrandizing is something to which Herzog’s audiences have grown accustomed and is perhaps to be expected from the filmmaker who has made it his life’s work to save “our civilization” by giving us “new images,” without which we will die out like the dinosaurs (Cronin 2002: 66). Yet, however much we may be able to excuse Herzog’s minor exaggerations as the forgivable conceits that they are, it becomes more difficult to accept those statements which run contrary to historical fact. In his effort to show the injustice of the Sandinista treatment of the Miskitos, Herzog presents in Ballad of the Little Soldier a short and highly simplified history of Miskito–Sandinista relations which not only gives short shrift to the centuries of geopolitical developments leading up to the point that Herzog entered the picture with his crew, but which also, consciously or mistakenly, distorts the basic facts on the ground. Starting with his lament of Miskito culture being diminished through contact with Protestants and Creoles, Herzog suggests that the basic thrust of Miskito culture has been to resist, then to gradually succumb to the “influence” of missionaries and racial Others. What he fails to point out is that it was precisely this mixing—the “whitening” of the Miskito through their long historical relationship to the British, which was maintained through a dynasty of British-aligned Miskito “kings” from 1661 to 1894, and the concomitant “darkening” of the population through centuries of intermarriage with Creoles (Dennis

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1981: 276)—which has served to set the Miskitos apart from the Catholic, Spanishspeaking Nicaraguans to whom they refer as “Spaniards” and whom they have always regarded with suspicion (292). In other words, it is not so much the “Indian” part of the Miskito that distinguishes them from other Nicaraguans—the majority of whom have partial Native American ancestry—but rather the very “mixed” Afro-Indian-Protestant identity that Herzog downplays. Perhaps the biggest liberty that Herzog takes in his voice-over is his characterization of the relationship between the Miskito and the former Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza. Herzog states categorically that “in the revolutionary struggle of the Sandinistas, the Miskitos sided with the Sandinistas.” In fact, the Miskito, and indeed the coastal population in general, were quite friendly toward the Somoza regime, and most did not participate in the liberation movement (Listov 1987: 62), a fact which can be attributed not only to the persistent anti-communist rhetoric of the coastal Protestant churches, but also to Somoza’s fluency in English and his strongman image, which conformed well to traditional Miskito power structures (Dennis 1981: 281–282). A much more pragmatic reason for the apparent lack of Miskito participation in the Sandinista uprising, which was ignored not only by Herzog, but also by the most committed Sandinista propagandists, was offered by a chief of the information section of the Sandinista newspaper Barricada, named only as Morales, in an interview with Soviet journalist Vadim Listov: The Indians, especially those in the north and northeast of the country, have had practically no experience of Somocism. The inhabitants of the Atlantic coast were spared Somoza’s police terror and mass reprisals. In other words, the “tyranny” from which the Sandinistas liberated the local population was only known to them through hearsay (Listov 1988: 119).

Thus, while there was no practical reason for the Miskitos to take up arms against Somoza’s regime, there were reasons to distrust the Sandinistas, who during their struggle against the dictatorship had occasionally raided Miskito villages in order to confiscate cattle and other property (Dennis 1981: 284), an abuse documented in Herzog’s film. After the Sandinista victory, the Miskito could hardly expect many favors from the new government, particularly considering the fact that many of Somoza’s soldiers had come from Miskito communities. The question remains as to why Herzog would misrepresent the historical position of the Miskito in the larger conflict between a corrupt and murderous dictatorship backed by the United States and a revolutionary movement actively supported by the Soviet Union. Aside from his usual resistance to what might be called the tyranny of truth of cinéma vérité, it may well be that Herzog relied on ex post facto claims that the Miskito had in fact been the friends of the Sandinistas all along, but it is certainly not unthinkable that the director simply chose to alter history in order to increase the audience’s perception of the justice of the Miskito

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cause. After all, who can fail to see the tragedy of an inexplicable turn of the Sandinistas against their former comrades in arms? Clearly, anyone interested in understanding the unique and complex history of the Miskito will not be satisfied with the raw information they are able to glean from Ballad of the Little Soldier. In fact, I would assert that more than all of his other non-fiction films, this one most directly brings into relief the dangers inherent in Herzog’s dismissal of the “superficial” truths that are constituted by the accountant’s facts. For in this film, which depicts actual, living boys who are about to be sent to their probable deaths, and in which actual, living women and children who have suffered unspeakable trauma are repeatedly asked to recount those experiences in such detail as to border on abuse, it becomes extremely important for the audience to have some confidence that the things they are seeing are not simply being invented for someone’s idea of ecstatic truth. Thus, Herzog’s penchant for altering details and scripting interviews in his non-fiction films can easily backfire when the deadly seriousness of the subject matter makes an audience unwilling to accept Herzog’s claim that facts are irrelevant. If we are to make sense of this film and its relationship to Indianthusiasm, it will require that we be willing to resist the urge to check every fact or even to see the Miskito depicted in it as unique individuals with singular stories to tell, but rather to discern and evaluate the overall message, the greater truth that Herzog wants to reveal through his footage and voice-over. This task is made easier by the fact that Herzog doesn’t actually give us the names of the people he films, with the notable exception of Denis Reichle, whom Herzog introduces as a French journalist who has accompanied the Misura for months and has “prepared our work on this film.” By enforcing the anonymity of the actors in this film, Herzog helps us forget that these are individuals, each with a unique history and future, focusing our full attention instead on the trauma that each of his interviewees has suffered and the feelings and emotions that these experiences produce. Robbed of a greater historical context through which these experiences might be understood as products of a global clash of ideologies, the viewer is expected to understand this suffering as a universal part of the human condition. Thus the child soldier’s desire to avenge his brothers’ deaths, even if it means killing other children, and the mother’s unspeakable grief over the murder of her children become fixed as timeless tropes, which, for Herzog, can then be projected onto any landscape and society. Particularly interesting are the scenes which depict the child soldiers as they are trained, marched in place, and reviewed by adult male instructors whom Herzog goes out of his way to portray as “outsiders” to Miskito culture. As Herzog would have it, the Miskito have “absolutely no military tradition” and have thus been forced to rely on former soldiers from Somoza’s feared National Guard. In fact, the Miskito have a long and proud military tradition which has led to their ascendency as the dominant native tribe in the region (Dennis 1981: 292). Furthermore, it is unlikely that the Miskito needed to rely on outside sources to find trainers, since they had been well represented in Somoza’s forces. The claim made by the first

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interviewed trainer that the boys are fighting for the “liberation of Nicaragua” clearly indicates that the speaker is part of the broader Contra movement and not simply part of the Misura, whose goal of independence was limited to the Miskito areas. Yet the strong native features of this man are instantly recognizable, and his assignment within Miskito territory suggests local origins. The second instructor’s coastal roots are also apparent in the Caribbean inflection of his English, and his mention of what has happened to “our people” indicates his identification as Miskito. Again, we are confronted with what appears to be a little lie whose purpose is to show how the powerlessness of the Miskito leads to their dependence on outsiders to effect social change, a further indication of what Prager sees as Herzog’s refusal of Miskito agency (2007: 148). Herzog’s denial of Miskito military history serves the same purpose as his claim that the “old ways” of Miskito culture have been obliterated, that is, erased from memory. Both assertions guide us into understanding that what we see and hear in Ballad of the Little Soldier is not so much part of a historical process, but rather a snapshot of the present moment. The concept of future time is also paid little attention in the film, for just as the Miskito seem to have a past which is outside time and history, their future is likewise dubious, as Herzog alludes to less than two minutes into his narration. The Miskito, he says, have “no illusions” as to their bleak future, which will require struggle against every future government of Nicaragua. In the final moments of the film, the Miskitos’ future is again called into serious question, as Reichle interviews the English-speaking military instructor of the boy soldiers, who feels that the nine- to eleven-year-old boys are the perfect age for military training because their minds have not yet been “corrupted,” and they are ready to die. Reichle interjects, annoyed, that it is easier to “brainwash” children, and the instructor agrees. At this point, Reichle himself becomes an actor in this film; walking slowly behind a row of boy soldiers as the camera follows along, Reichle tells the camera that this is a very sad morning for him, because in these boys he is reminded of his own childhood, which was cut short at the age of fourteen, when he was sent to Berlin as part of the last defense against the advancing Russians. It is a story which happened not only forty years ago, says Reichle, but which happens “around the world, I see, all over, every time … I can’t put out of my mind when I see all these kids, that, for me, I see them practically dead.” It is this scene which not only ties this film to German history, but reveals its intent to deal with specifically German psychological needs, including the paradoxical and highly problematic desire to erase the German specificity from images of Hitler’s boy soldiers. This blurring is encouraged by Herzog’s prior description of Reichle only as a “French journalist,” rather than an Alsatian who, as a boy, identified as a German and fought to save the fatherland. Reichle’s comparison of the Miskito boys with the National Militia, or Volkssturm units that Hitler had “thrown in front of the Russians in the final days before Germany’s surrender” (Prager 2007: 149) has another function as well: it “seals their doom” (Csicsery 1985: 12), assuring the viewer that their upcoming battles are

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nothing more than a hopeless march into the nothingness of death. In seeing them as already dead, Reichle is not simply foreshadowing the inevitability of their deaths at some point in the future. Rather, he collapses each and every possible future into the present of the film. In effect, he wants us to view his film like so much of the black and white footage of desperate German soldiers fighting in bombed out buildings in Berlin. Thus, as far removed as this imagery may seem from traditional Indianthusiasm, it serves the same function: to forge an identity between Germans and Native Americans as victims of forces much larger than themselves. Yet the awkward innocence of these boys, singing children’s songs in their bigboy clothes, giggling during their training, unable to articulate the slightest hint of ideological commitment, complicates any comparison between them and our ingrained images of evil Nazi soldiers. Rather, their stories of seeing their parents and siblings taken away by soldiers to be killed, of being forced by violence into an adult world, seem more likely to evoke the stories of the victims of the Nazi regime. Thus, if we are compelled to see these children as the unknowingly doomed in a film from the past, as walking corpses, then the imagery that is likely to come to mind is the footage of the unloading of arriving transports at Auschwitz, for it is in these well-known images that the viewer is most shockingly confronted not just with the uncanny appearance of innocents who are largely unaware of their fate, but also with the impossibility of saving them. By removing his images from the trajectories of time and thereby inadvertently calling to mind the image of an Auschwitz transport, Reichle presents the probable defeat of the Miskito army as synonymous with the annihilation of the Miskito people, whom the audience can only look back upon with pity, as a people whose time ran out. Through the erasure of the identities of the individual players and the historical specificity of the Miskito uprising, the film presents the current, ongoing struggle of the Miskito outside of time, reducing it to what we might imagine as old snapshots of distantly-related strangers who no longer have the power to challenge the stories that we fabricate about them. In this sense too, Ballad of the Little Soldier can be seen as another incarnation of German Indianthusiasm, which, as we’ve seen, prefers to trade in images of Indians outside of a historical context. At the same time, however, Herzog challenges the direction of the simulation, as it is the Miskito soldiers who dress up, pray, and often speak (and sing) like Europeans.

Ten Thousand Years Older Herzog’s latest non-fiction film trafficking in Indian images, Ten Thousand Years Older (2002) was released as part of the omnibus production Ten Minutes Older–The Trumpet, a collection of ten-minute shorts by auteur filmmakers dealing with the theme of time. Herzog uses his ten minutes to chronicle the incredible speed with which Brazil’s Uru Eu Wau Wau tribe was thrust from what the filmmaker calls a

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“stone-age existence” into relative modernity after the tribe’s first contact with non-Indians in 1981. Borrowing a phrase popularized by Andreas Lommel’s 1969 monograph about the decimation of Aboriginal Australian culture, Herzog’s film attempts to portray post-contact Uru Eu cultural development as a “Fortschritt ins Nichts,” or a “march into nothingness” (Zander 2002: 27). The film begins with an aerial flyover of a vast expanse of Amazon jungle wrapped in thick mist. The scene instantly evokes the opening shots of Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, although Herzog’s voice-over signals that what we are about to see is non-fiction. Despite the similarities between this and Herzog’s Amazonian features, this footage—indeed the entire first third of the film—is in fact not Herzog’s at all, but was appropriated from a British documentary by Adrian Cowell entitled Last of the Hidden Tribes: Fate of the Kidnapper (1998). The borrowed footage shows the first contact between the FUNAI (the Brazilian Indian Agency) and a small band of Uru Eu, which Herzog hyperbolically claims is probably the last event of its kind in human history: “There are no more unknown places and unknown people left on this Earth.” The final sequence of borrowed footage shows the Brazilians desperately trying to vaccinate the Indians, who after initial contact started dying of diseases like the common cold and chicken pox. According to Herzog’s narration, “A grim fate awaits them. Within a year or so the majority of the tribe is wiped out … they had missed out on the thousands of years during which they could have developed resistance.” The borrowed portion of the film thus concludes with a reaffirmation of Karl May’s understanding of development as the unavoidable destiny of human civilization. But whereas May’s Indians were never “granted” sufficient time in which to “catch up” to European civilization, Herzog’s wording suggests that the Uru Eu could have somehow prevented their own demise if only they had been able to step out of their timelessness to develop immunities to Western illnesses. Herzog’s own footage begins with a trek upriver, as he describes how twenty years after first contact, he and a crew ventured out to find some surviving tribesmen. They meet up with Tarí, the former war leader who had been filmed at the very first contact, and his brother Wapo. The two brothers now wear t-shirts and baseball caps and have seen TV and big cities. Tarí has even ridden in an airplane. As someone hands Tarí an old-fashioned wind-up alarm clock (Figure 16.2), Herzog explains: “They have a vague understanding of what a clock is used for. They know of the passage of the sun and the phases of the moon, but the past is much more alive for them.” Seemingly at the request of the film crew, Tarí demonstrates with an embarrassed smile how, in the old days, he used to make fire with two sticks, while Wapo shows how they used to fashion arrows without the use of metal. If these short demonstrations, performed in Western clothes and with minimal explanation and a hint of reluctance, are likely to disappoint the detail-devouring Indianthusiast, the abundance of details in the next several performances will likely inspire revulsion in all but the most hard-core devotees. Tarí, who Herzog claims wants to “show us how he would return to his people after a murderous

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Figure 16.2 Tarí receives an old-fashioned wind-up alarm clock in Ten Thousand Years Older (2002). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Lucki Stipetić/Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

raid” during the “glorious days” of his people’s war with the white man, begins to march back and forth in front of the hut, performing a ritual reenactment of his killing of a white man. His chant alternates between what seems like frantic animal noises and the crying of a child. Unable to continue because of his tuberculosis, his brother Wapo continues with a reenactment of killing two encroaching settlers, mimicking in invented Portuguese the screaming of the men and the crying of a child who had also been in the hut. In the next scene, we learn of “friendlier encounters,” in which the brothers had had sex with white women. As Herzog describes their “x-rated talk” about “fornication” and oral sex with two “salty tasting” women, Tarí is shown making obscene gestures with his hands, simulating copulation. In the final moments of the film, Herzog asks rhetorically: “What will happen to the Uru Eus?” In a statement that recalls his earlier description of the Miskitos, he answers his own question: “Tarí has no illusions.” Herzog goes on to mention the troubling tendency of younger Uru Eus to prefer integration into rapidly modernizing Brazilian society over the maintenance of their own culture and language—a problem echoed frequently by preservationists working directly with the Uru Eus (Miljöförbundet Jordens Vänner 2010). In closing, the camera returns to the clock that Tarí is holding to his ear while emulating the ticking sound. We then hear Herzog’s final words: “Tarí’s fate is not uncertain. He knows that time has run out on him and his tribe.” Ten Minutes Older – The Trumpet begins with a quote from Marcus Aurelius, in which the Roman Emperor (and stoic philosopher) equates time with a river. His statement is certainly consistent with Western notions of history, for even if we look backwards, upstream as it were, and imagine a space of timelessness that

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corresponds to the mythical beginnings of the nation, we see our destiny as lying somewhere downstream, although we know we will never settle permanently on any shore. In Aguirre, Herzog effectively challenges this European conception, as the murderous Spaniards paradoxically move increasingly further from “civilization,” and deeper into the perceived timelessness of the untamed landscape, as they move slowly downstream. In his later jungle films, however, Herzog not only begins to privilege Western forms of knowledge, but also reconfirms his commitment to Eurocentric understandings of time. In this later epistemological constellation, “downstream” is portrayed as everyone’s fate, and safe passage—at least for the European—is often guaranteed only by a studied, scientific mastery of those survival skills which help the hero outsmart the jungle and its perilous inhabitants, human and animal. In both Little Dieter Needs to Fly and Wings of Hope (1998), for example, the survival of the respective protagonists Dieter Dengler and Juliane Koepcke is assured only by their competent navigation through the jungle. Dengler’s cunning and fortitude allow him to evade hungry bears and vengeful Vietnamese villagers intent on decapitating him, while Koepcke’s expert knowledge allows her to elude the deadly stingrays that nearly kill her apparently less skilled Indian friend. For both Dengler and Koepcke, arrival downstream means physical salvation—even if at the same time it represents a return to a rational existence subtended by a spiritual abyss, where the prior traumas can only be suppressed in silence or manifested in compulsive behaviors. For Herzog’s Indians, however, downstream represents the death of their culture and the birth of their servitude to the white man, a theme already foregrounded in Fitzcarraldo. As the servile, assimilated Indians Huerequeque and Cholo ride up the Pachitea, they come face to face with reminders of their more powerful past. Thus, in the scene in which Fitzcarraldo’s crew is silently attempting to eat while surrounded by hostile Indians waving deadly spears, the eeriness of that silence derives not so much from the Western men’s confrontation with the wholly Other, but from the uncanny juxtaposition of the downstream Indian with the ghosts of his past. If Fitzcarraldo suggests that destiny lies downstream, then Ten Thousand Years Older confirms it beyond any question. As Herzog speaks of Tarí’s nephew Paulo’s embarrassment at being the “child of savages,” and his apparent desire to shed his identity as an Indian, the camera focuses at first on the young man’s face and then on the bow of the motorboat in which he and the crew are seated. The camera captures the forward movement of the boat, but never tilts upward to give the viewer any context that might establish location, suggesting the centrality of movement as a marker of linear time. Just as he had done in Ballad of the Little Soldier, Herzog omits important information and introduces inaccuracies into his voice-over, which serve not only to make his greater truth more apparent, but also to call attention to Herzog’s seemingly tireless drive to bring “new” images to the public. His omissions begin at the moment his own footage is inconspicuously appended to Cowell’s. Twenty

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years after those first images were captured, he tells us, “we ventured out in search of some of the surviving Uru Eus,” giving the impression that he is the first to embark on this adventure through time and is uncertain what he might find. In fact, Cowell’s recent documentary had already offered the public a rich and detailed history of both Tarí and Wapo, extending from first contact until 1999. In Cowell’s documentary, Wapo performs the reenactment of his slaying of a settler, but the incident is brought into the context of an ongoing war with the (white) outside world in which the Uru Eu are much more often the victims of murder than its perpetrators. When Herzog instigates a reenactment of the reenactment, he portrays the settlers as innocent victims of “murderous” raids. As alluded to above, Herzog’s intention here may be to shatter the common Western illusion of the “noble savage” living in harmony with his natural environment. But it seems that in his fervor to de-romanticize the Native American he has chosen instead to invert this Indianthusiast tendency by presenting images which accentuate the savage at the expense of the noble. In Burden of Dreams, Herzog had railed against the “overwhelming and collective murder” of the jungle, and in Grizzly Man (2005) he refers to murder as one of the common denominators of the universe. We can therefore assume that Herzog’s description of Uru Eu raids as “murderous” does not necessarily imply a condemnation of these acts or their perpetrators. Without reference to Herzog’s other uses of the term, however, the viewer is left with what appears to be an inflammatory accusation that elicits a sense of injustice and suggests that punishment might be in order—a conclusion supported to some degree by the filmmaker’s apocalyptic view of the Uru Eus’ future. Herzog’s use of the highly charged word fornication evokes an aura of immorality within the Uru Eu culture. Again, absolving Herzog of the charge of Eurocentrism requires recourse to his other work: In Burden of Dreams, Herzog had expressed his disgust at the fornication surrounding him in the “vile” jungle, and the term is unambiguously negative. But the religious (and human) connotation of the word in English is missing. For Herzog, copulation is simply the ugly process that ensures future generations of animals the opportunity to suffer the same degradations of nature that cause the birds of the forest to “screech in pain” rather than sing. In Grizzly Man, Herzog uses the same term to describe the mating between a male grizzly and the female whose cub the bear has just killed. Again, there is no condemnation, just a grudging resignation to, or perhaps even Herzog’s own celebration of, the amorality of nature. The problem therefore is less Herzog’s unintended suggestion of the Uru Eus’ iniquity, than his linguistic choices which tend to render them as pure nature. As the above examples show, Herzog’s disorienting omissions of context and apparent ignorance of the nuances of the English terms he employs leads to a problematic situation in which his Indian images seem unfairly negative, inviting condemnation from an audience who is led into seeing the natives as barely distinguishable from animals—one German reviewer even called Herzog’s treatment of

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the Uru Eu “zoological.” Unfortunately, Herzog’s selective omissions are compounded by his creative contouring of facts, which, as was the case in Ballad of the Little Soldier, is more difficult to overlook. He tells us, for example, that within a year or so of contact, the majority of the Uru Eu had died, and in an interview with Die Welt, Herzog claimed that 70% of the tribe died within one year (Zander 2002: 27). Cowell’s documentary, however, paints a very different picture. Since no count of individuals was made at the time of contact, all estimates of mortality are subject to scrutiny. Nine years into contact, Cowell came up with a solution, which was to have the Uru Eu themselves tell him how many of the ninety Indians he had photographed since contact had died in the meantime. He found that approximately 17% of the population had perished over the course of almost a decade, not 70% as Herzog claims. So why would the director so grossly overstate the mortality of the tribe? Again, it seems to be Herzog’s desire to convey a “bigger truth” that motivates his ardent refusal to indulge any demand for historical accuracy. This “bigger truth” Herzog spells out with the very last words of his voiceover: time does indeed drag everything into the abyss and has “run out” on the Uru Eu. Herzog’s filmic eulogy of the Uru Eu leads to two distinct consequences, only one of which is clearly within his intention. First and most obviously, it establishes Herzog as the filmmaker who brought us the final images of the last “unknown places and unknown people left on this Earth” and, as such, seems to announce the impending demise of Western civilization, whose now imminent inability to capture new or adequate images will, according to Herzog’s famous dictum, lead us to die out like the dinosaurs. It seems to matter little to Herzog that, even though in 1981 there were thought to be only four uncontacted tribes left in the Amazon area (Gorney 1981: A23), by the time he wrote his voiceover, many other previously unknown tribes had been “discovered” and the estimated number of Amazonian tribes living in total isolation had grown to sixty-seven (“More Isolated Indians” 2007). Secondly, and more precariously, Herzog’s narrative killing of the tribe serves to remove them from the present and place them into the timelessness of history, where the European is free to (re)construct them according to his own fantasies. Those familiar with Herzog’s work may very well understand that Ten Thousand Years Older is not really a film about Indians at all, but a comment on the intoxicating promise (but ultimate treachery) of global capitalism in particular, and the futility of human endeavor in general. Indeed, I would argue that Herzog’s provocative suggestion, as pessimistic and apocalyptic as it is, falls very much within the German philosophical traditions of both Nietzsche and Adorno. But for those viewers who take Herzog at his word, the potentially tragic consequence of their trust is obvious. It may well be that Western civilization is doomed to collapse and possible extinction, but to equate Western and Indian apocalypses is to ignore the fact that the Western hegemony is continually expanding and, for the time being, showing no signs of imminent collapse. At the same time, without immediate action, several Native American communities, including those that

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Herzog chooses to portray, are facing the real possibility of physical and cultural annihilation if Euro-American powers fail to act in the very near future. In other words, if we take Herzog literally and accept the sad “fact” that the Uru Eu are destined for quick extinction, there is no human (or even humane) reason to continue keeping poor, landless settlers from overcrowded urban slums from attempting to “develop” land now covered by rain forest. Thus, by eulogizing still-living Uru Eu in the name of higher truth, Herzog unintentionally precludes what is now seen as a real possibility—to allow other uncontacted groups to continue living as they choose, leaving contact as an option that only the Indians themselves have a right to exercise.

Conclusion Herzog’s Indian images have evolved significantly in the last forty years. In his early Amazonian feature films, Herzog was reluctant to re-inscribe Hollywood conventions and popular German expectations of Indians, focusing instead on the European as spectacle against the backdrop of the jungle, rather than featuring Indians in their native and domestic spaces. In later films, however, Indians are increasingly highlighted as performers within the mise-en-scène of the jungle. But rather than staging some kind of native authenticity, these performers appear as players in anachronistic epilogues of dramas in which they and their cultures have already died, swept into the abyss of modernity. Western culture, Herzog suggests, is likewise doomed to extinction, inasmuch as its survival relies on the production and consumption of “new” images, the increasing scarcity of which is signified by the supposed finality of the Indians’ demise. Although the filmmaker mostly tries to subvert the stereotypical tropes of Indianthusiasm, to some degree he also becomes one of its practitioners. Like Karl May, Herzog stages the death of the “authentic” Indian in order to facilitate his telling of a “greater truth”—one which has more to do with Western notions of time, history, and the individual greatness of the author/auteur than with Native Americans or their culture.

Notes 1

2 3

In this essay, I use the term Native American to refer collectively to the first human inhabitants of South, Central, and North America. I use the term “Indian” to refer to what Daniel Francis (2002) has called the “Imaginary Indian,” the Native American as (s)he is staged, framed, defined, and sometimes given voice in the Euro-American imagination. All translations of May’s text are mine. Herzog’s veiled indictment of Indianthusiasm here is all the more discernible in light of his oft-expressed animosity toward the New Age movement, which is known for its

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readiness to adopt practices and beliefs borrowed from traditional Native American religions. Even if one interprets Herzog’s statement as being limited to Latin America, it is still factually incorrect. See Baines (1999: 214). Furthermore, small-scale wars between white settlers and Amazon tribes have been an ongoing issue since the Conquest. I can only imagine, based on Herzog’s equally untrue statement that the Miskito have “absolutely no military tradition,” that by resistance and military he is referring exclusively to modern (i.e. traditional European) warfare.

Works Cited Baines, Stephen Grant: “Waimiri-Atroari Resistance in the Presence of an Indigenist Policy of Armed ‘resistance.’ ” Critique of Anthropology 19.3 (1999): 211–226. Calloway, Colin: “Historical Encounters across Five Centuries,” Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections, ed. Colin Gordon Calloway, Gerd Gemünden, and Susanne Zantop (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), pp. 47–82. Corrigan, Timothy: “Producing Herzog: From a Body of Images,” The Films of Werner Herzog. Between Mirage and History, ed. Timothy Corrigan (New York: Methuen 1986), pp. 3–22. Cronin, Paul, ed.: Herzog on Herzog (London: Faber & Faber, 2002). Csicsery, George Paul: “Ballad of the Little Soldier: Werner Herzog in a Political Hall of Mirrors,” Film Quarterly 39.2 (1985): 7–15. Davidson, John E.: Deterritorializing the New German Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Dennis, Philip A.: “The Costeños and the Revolution in Nicaragua,” Journal of InterAmerican Studies and World Affairs 23.3 (1981): 271–296. Francis, Daniel: The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2002). Gates, Lisa: “Of Seeing and Otherness: Leni Riefenstahl’s African Photographs,” The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and its Legacy, ed. Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), pp. 233–246. Gemünden, Gerd: “Between Karl May and Karl Marx: The DEFA Indianerfilme,” Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections, ed. Colin Gordon Calloway, Gerd Gemünden, and Susanne Zantop (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), pp. 243–256. Gorney, Cynthia: “Brazilian Practices Dying Art of Making Contact with Indians: Brazilian Gently Introduces Amazonian Indians to Modern World,” The Washington Post, December 20, 1981: A23. Horak, Jan Christopher: “W. H. or the Mysteries of Walking in Ice,” The Films of Werner Herzog. Between Mirage and History, ed. Timothy Corrigan (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 23–42. Horak, Jan Christopher: “German Film Comedy,” The German Cinema Book, ed. Tim Bergfelder, Erica Carter, and Deniz Göktürk (London: British Film Institute, 2002), pp. 29–38. Jaehn, Tomas: Germans in the Southwest, 1850–1920 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005).

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Koepnick, Lutz P.: “Colonial Forestry: Sylvan Politics in Werner Herzog’s Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo,” New German Critique 60 (Special Issue on German Film History, 1993): 133–159. Kreis, Karl Marcus: “Indians Playing, Indians Praying: Native Americans in Wild West Shows and Catholic Missions,” Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections, ed. Colin Gordon Calloway, Gerd Gemünden, and Susanne Zantop (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), pp. 195–212. Langley, Greg: “A Fistful of Dreams: Taming the Wild West in the Old World,” Munich Found: Bavaria’s City Magazine in English 8.8 (1996): 33–35, www.karl-may-gesellschaft. de/kmg/sprachen/englisch/seklit/langley/index.htm. Listov, Vadim: “Question of Autonomy for Nicaragua’s Miskitos, Other Groups,” Soviet Union–International Affairs (JPRS-UIA-87-031) ( June 26, 1987): 61–64, handle.dtic. mil/100.2/ADA346572. Listov, Vadim: ”NICARAGUA: Problems of the ‘Miskito Land’,” Soviet Union–International Affairs 34.2 (1988): 119–127. Lommel, Andreas: Fortschritt ins Nichts: Die Modernisierung der Primitiven Australiens. Beschreibung und Definition eines psychischen Verfalls (Zurich: Atlantis-Verlag, 1969). Lutz, Hartmut: “German Indianthusiasm: A Socially Constructed German National(ist) Myth,” Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections, ed. Colin Gordon Calloway, Gerd Gemünden, and Susanne Zantop (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), pp. 167–184. May, Karl: Karl May’s gesammelte Reiseromane, Band 7 (1893) (Freiburg: Friedrich Ernst Fehsenfeld), www.karl-may-gesellschaft.de/kmg/primlit/reise/gr07. Miljöförbundet Jordens Vänner: “Reserapport Uru-eu-wau-wau och Mapuera mars 2009,” http://www.mjv.se/wordpress/?page_id=183. “More Isolated Indians Survive in Amazon Rain Forest, but Face Peril,” New York Times, January 18, 2007: A5. Peyer, Bernd: “A Nineteenth-Century Ojibwa Conquers Germany,” Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections, ed. Colin Gordon Calloway, Gerd Gemünden, and Susanne Zantop (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), pp. 141–164. Prager, Brad: The Cinema of Werner Herzog. Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (London: Wallflower Press, 2007). Zander, Peter: “‘Ich bin ja nicht gerade bekannt für kurze Filme’; Wie man auch in zehn Minuten alles sagen kann,” Interview with Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog, Die Welt, December 19, 2002, Feuilleton/Kino, 27.

Additional Films Cited Blank, Les: Burden of Dreams (1982) Bohm, Hark: Chetan, Indian Boy (1973) Cowell, Adrian: Last of the Hidden Tribes: Fate of the Kidnapper (1998) Herbig, Michael: Manitu’s Shoe (2001)

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The Case of Herzog: Re-Opened Eric Ames

In recent years, Werner Herzog has frequently revisited certain political concerns of his earlier work, including the very charges of environmental and human rights abuse that were leveled against him throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the most famous incident being Herzog’s altercations with indigenous Peruvians during pre-production of Fitzcarraldo (1982), a concern that received wide attention at the time, both in print and on film.1 The various rumors, allegations, and stories that circulated in the press became known in West Germany as “the case of Herzog.” Filming in a remote location near the contested border of Ecuador, Herzog ventured into a political jungle filled with rival factions, each with a certain interest in the area, including multiple different native councils, inter-tribal organizations, religious missionaries, political activists, oil and lumber companies, federal ministries, and government soldiers. The preparations for and production of Fitzcarraldo have been chronicled at length from many different and often conflicting perspectives.2 Only the briefest summary will have to suffice. In 1979, while negotiating with members of the Aguaruna community in the northwest of Peru, “Herzog found himself in the middle of an internal power struggle between members of the community in favor of working for the film and an inter-tribal group fighting for control over Indian affairs in that area. When Herzog refused to negotiate solely with this latter group, rumors of persecution of the Indians began to spread. The stories got sensational press, in Peru as well as in Europe and the United States” (Dolis and Weigand 1982: 58). The charges leveled against Herzog—though alleged and meant to provoke controversy—offer a sense of the chaos that preceded the film’s production. They include violations of native sovereignty, attempted bribery, slave labor, breach of contract, gun running, armed intimidation, false arrest, and imprisonment (with support from local police and military forces). In the words of his most outspoken critic in Germany, Nina Gladitz, who A Companion to Werner Herzog, First Edition. Edited by Brad Prager. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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also accuses Herzog of “fascism” and compares him with adherents of the Third Reich, “Herzog’s behaviors can in no way be distinguished from the policies of an occupying power that corrupts the natives in order to secure and expand its sphere of influence” (Gladitz 1979: 8). In his defense, Herzog maintains that he was a convenient target for organizations whose resistance against larger forces of political, industrial, and cultural domination had proved to be ineffective. Although the controversy would mark his fall from grace in the eyes of many film viewers, his visibility in the international press as a celebrated young German filmmaker now became a liability. In this case, ironically, it was the director who accused his critics of fabricating stories, inventing evidence, and producing false witnesses (not the other way around). Amnesty International cleared him of human rights violations, but the accusations and suspicions of abuse have stuck to the director ever since. In a way, the case of Herzog has never closed. Or rather, it has been re-opened again and again—not by historians of German cinema, most of whom later ignored Herzog, whether out of disdain or embarrassment, but rather by the filmmaker himself. He is, understandably, sensitive to the stigma that attached to him as a result of this controversy, and he responds to it in his films as well as in interviews.3 This movement of re-opening characterizes much of his endeavors since Fitzcarraldo, especially (but not exclusively) his work in documentary. As I will show, Herzog appropriates documentary conventions and forms of truth-telling, and puts them in the service of re-enacting and thereby reworking his own cinematic past. My key examples are The White Diamond (2004) and the lesser-known documentary short Ten Thousand Years Older (2002). Each film rehearses certain stock situations of cultural encounter, which also refer back to the entangled legacies of Herzog and Fitzcarraldo. The result, I suggest, is a form of double rehearsal that conducts politics via performance. It is a familiar move in the context of performance studies, but the idea of “doing politics” in this sense has yet to be explored in the context of Herzog’s documentaries. The topic of colonialism, by contrast, is well-trodden ground in the Herzog scholarship, particularly in regard to his feature films Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo. Lutz Koepnick, for example, has shown how each film deconstructs colonial practices of vision, imagination, and representation on the textual level, only to re-inscribe and reinforce those very practices on the level of film production. Koepnick thus focuses on the textual contradictions between the expression of political critique and the impossibility of transcending the terms of one’s cultural and epistemological context.4 Working from a similar insight, John Davidson has emphasized the context of “neocolonialism” (or, a new phase of Western domination operating primarily by economic means) as shaping both the production and the reception of Herzog’s films. Part of a larger, more intricate argument about the formation of New German Cinema and its cultural politics, Davidson’s readings of Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo work to support his claim that Herzog uses the appearance of colonial criticism in the service of continued domination.5 It seems to me, however, that the practice of affecting a critical pose

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(as perhaps Herzog does) in the interest of continued domination (as Davidson and others have argued) corresponds well to the idea of performance, of which I will have more to say later. At this point, it is enough to emphasize the shared impression that Herzog might be “doing” one thing while “saying” another. It is this relationship (which can assume various forms, including irony, allegory, duplicity, and ambivalence) that urges us to consider the interesting possibility of performance as a framework for analyzing Herzog’s films and their relationship to cultural politics. After all, as Philip Auslander has observed in another context, performance is of necessity “an elusive and fragile discourse that is always forced to walk a tightrope between complicity and critique” (1992: 31). The role of performance as a strategy for political expression can already be seen in Burden of Dreams (1982), a documentary by Les Blank and Maureen Gosling. It is usually treated as a straightforward example of a making-of film, one which “observes” the production of Fitzcarraldo from a critical distance and “reveals” the psychology of its overreaching director. This is somewhat odd, however, especially given the fact that Herzog invited the American filmmakers on this particular occasion, helped secure advance financing for their project, and negotiated with them through every phase of the project.6 For these and other reasons, Burden of Dreams can best be understood as a relational performance engendered by the interaction of various filmmakers and social actors, who are each served by the film in different and sometimes conflicting ways. For his part, Herzog consciously stages himself as a means of provocation. In one interview, for example, he claims that Fitzcarraldo might be “one of the last feature films with authentic natives in it,” before the latter fall victim to American-style consumerism and cultural homogenization.7 “They are fading away very quickly,” he says of tribal peoples in the Amazon, “and it’s a catastrophe and a tragedy that’s going on. And we are losing riches, and riches, and riches; we lose cultures, and individualities, and languages, and mythologies.” As he speaks, the image track shows native actors posing for the camera in historical costume, followed by a set worker who is wearing a “Mickey Mouse Disco” t-shirt, which reads (in Spanish) “Don’t Stop the Music.” Herzog’s polemic not only idealizes native peoples and trades in cultural stereotypes, but also recites the very argument that critics used against him in protesting the production of Fitzcarraldo and its impact on local cultures.8 He mimics the words of his critics almost verbatim for an effect—in this case, to promote his new movie. The actual consequences of his performance as a filmmaker, however, were always beyond his control. The making of Fitzcarraldo was an event so ideologically charged that Herzog has knowingly re-enacted it, again and again.9 In so doing, he is not alone; indigenous performance offers an unexpected connection, which is also worth recalling. On December 1, 1979, shortly after Herzog and his crew began filming in the jungle, their camp was burned to the ground by an armed group of Aguaruna Indians, who saw the camp within a longer history of foreign invasion and occupation. As Gosling reports in a (published) journal entry from 1981, “The camp was actually

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burned twice, the second time by Aguarunas who hadn’t been in on the first burning! And to this day, at the conclusion of their community assemblies, they repeat a theatrical representation of the burning of the camp, as a reminder of their successes at expelling outsiders, Herzog’s and another group 50 years before” (Gosling 1984: 131).

Documentary, Performance, Politics Herzog’s documentaries are neither politically oriented nor politically inert. It is significant, then, that one of his recurring moves in this mode is to foreground a passage, even a mere detail of blatant political significance, just long enough to either foreclose the subject, or to let it seem to drop out of the picture, abruptly and without explanation.10 Conventional means of politicizing documentary are intimated, but cut short. What remains is a clear sign of self-awareness (Herzog is not naïve, despite all claims to the contrary), a vague sense of irony (some might say evasiveness), and a lasting impression of strategy (especially if the detail is taken to be a red herring). There is indeed a method to Herzog’s madness. Regarded as performance, the supposedly apolitical documentaries become specifically political, though in terms that are unlike those favored by the more explicitly politicized examples of New German Cinema. The fact that Herzog mostly operates outside of Germany allows him greater latitude in his practice and makes him a different type of political filmmaker than most discussed by scholars of German film. His is not a kind of issue-oriented political sensibility (which is peripheral to his work). Nor does Herzog investigate the larger political formations that engender the specific situations that concern him. The register of political analysis here is not the content of a film’s commentary (as it is in social-issue documentaries), but rather the role of embodiment and re-enactment. The politics of performance lies in its understanding of documentary as a means of provocation, even selfprovocation. On another level, performance is also a methodological framework that informs and shapes my analysis of Herzog’s documentaries. Performance and documentary are related to each other in many different and sometimes contradictory ways, the complexities of which we are just beginning to explore. Documentary film has much to offer discussions of performance beyond the obvious contexts of theater and performance art, while performance has already become a compelling model for documentary theory and practice. In a study titled New Documentary, for example, Stella Bruzzi proceeds from the insight that documentary films are “performative acts whose truth comes into being only at the moment of filming” (2000: 7). As this formulation suggests, Bruzzi gives priority to the pro-filmic event, and especially to the triadic encounter of filmmaker, subject, and spectator. It seems to me, however, that a useful theory of documentary as performance cannot be

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reduced to either the subjective or the intersubjective, i.e. to an analysis of identity and social relationships as figured in non-fiction film. Such a theory would also need to acknowledge, for example, the many other aspects and phases of production as well as the changing contexts of exhibition and spectatorship. It would further need to account for documentary’s alterity both as a mode of filmmaking and as a type of performance. The very notion of documentary as performance implies more than just the recording of unique or recurring situations. It also refers to more than performance in the sense of display.11 With Herzog, for instance, there is a particularly strong emphasis on the role of extra-filmic activities, such as interviews and press conferences, which he uses to shape and control as much as possible the terms of his reception.12 In so doing, he has also cultivated a certain relationship to documentary as a cultural institution. His is a practice that confronts some of the most vexing issues of modern documentary—issues of performance, aesthetics, embodiment, and subjectivity—without pretending to resolve them.13 Documentary may be for Herzog a repudiated mode of filmmaking, but it is one in which he nonetheless actively intervenes and participates. Take, for example, the manifesto that he wrote for the Walker Art Center, in 1999, the so-called “Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema” (Cronin 2002: 301–302).14 As this piece goes to show, the documentary mode is both attractive and repulsive to Herzog for the same basic reason: namely, its privileged relationship to knowledge. Even while he dismisses the cultural associations of “fact” and “science” that attach to documentary in a hackneyed sense, he needs and employs the existing discourse of documentary and the sense of cultural authority that comes with it. If documentary can be defined as a “discourse of sobriety” (to borrow a well-worn phrase from Bill Nichols), then Herzog co-opts this discourse in the context of “ecstasy” and “inner truth” (Nichols 1991: 3–6).15 His attitude to documentary filmmaking is one of provocation, which is exactly why performance offers such a useful frame of analysis. Although Herzog is very well known for blurring the line between fiction and non-fiction, the many films that he has produced in the documentary mode tend not to invite fictional readings, i.e. they do not encourage the spectator to suspend disbelief. On the contrary, they extort belief from the audience, and they do so largely by employing some of the very cultural codes that make documentary a repudiated form for Herzog. The attitude of belief is further reinforced by extrafilmic means—in interviews, for example, through the filmmaker’s unflinching display of absolute conviction.16 Part of a larger (and largely gendered) repertoire of gestures and poses that Herzog has developed over the years, the show of conviction is not delusional, but rather strategic. However paradoxical it may seem, Herzog’s penchant for staging also enhances both the reality effect and the dramatic situation of his documentaries. A good example is when Herzog appears before the camera and thereby makes of himself a spectacle. In such instances, he is clearly acting out the role of a star director, who is filming a documentary.17

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Framing such moments in terms of performance allows us to highlight their constructedness and the specific ways in which they serve to connote “reality,” without engaging in the sort of fake/authentic assessment that plagues the scholarship on Herzog and on documentary film more generally. Instead, the salient issue becomes one of generative repetition. The inspiration for this idea comes from Richard Schechner’s model of performance as “restored behavior,” which he also describes as “twice-behaved behavior” (1985: 35). Both formulations define performance as behavior that is constructed, reproduced, and subject to revision (they do not imply that performance somehow recovers an “original” act). To explain what he means by this concept, Schechner offers the analogy of film editing and the use of found footage: “Restored behavior is living behavior treated as a film director treats a strip of film. These strips of behavior can be arranged or reconstructed; they are independent of the causal systems (social, psychological, technological) that brought them into existence. They have a life of their own. The original ‘truth’ or ‘source’ of the behavior may be lost, ignored, or contradicted—even while this truth or source is apparently being honored and observed” (1985: 35). The theoretical separation between the performing self and the behavior performed makes performance transmissible and thus intelligible and available to others. Furthermore, the notion of restored behavior offers a way of theorizing re-enactments that refer back to events that never actually happened, because it acknowledges that the repeatable form of any event is necessarily a construction. It also helps explain how performance is at its core a way of knowing, a form of epistemology that can be reshaped over time. In the words of Elin Diamond, “performance marks out a unique temporal space that nevertheless contains traces of other now-absent performances, other nowdisappeared scenes” (1996: 1). It is from this perspective that Herzog’s documentaries can also be seen as performances based on other performances. The creative dynamic is one of re-enactment in a new context. The effect is one of repositioning. Herzog uses the documentary mode in order to reposition himself for a new generation of mediasavvy spectators, who are deeply interested in reality programming and remarkably accepting of its theatricality—spectators who recognize the strategic function of “claiming the real” but otherwise acknowledge it as a construction.18 The widescale release of his latest documentaries (through various channels, including film festivals, commercial theaters, cable TV, DVD sales, and video-sharing websites) means that, while their appeal certainly includes those viewers who already “know their Herzog” (and therefore bring with them certain expectations of and associations with the filmmaker and his past), it also extends beyond them to reach viewers who are encountering his work for the very first time. Appealing to such diverse audiences simultaneously is perhaps the only way for Herzog to reposition himself in relation to the past and also stake a new claim for his work in the present. The formative experience of spectatorship, then, cannot be stressed enough. As Diamond has written in another context, “while a performance embeds traces of

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other performances, it also produces experiences whose interpretation only partially depends on previous experience” (1996: 2). The productive dynamic of reception reminds us that Herzog’s documentaries not only re-inscribe earlier performances, but also reinvent them. The strategy in each film, as we shall see, is to rehearse (more than once) a stock situation of cultural encounter, or what performance theorist Diana Taylor calls a “scenario” (2003: 54). By that she understands a performative structure “that is formulaic, portable, repeatable, and often banal because it leaves out complexity, reduces conflict to its stock elements, and encourages fantasies of participation” (2003: 54). What makes this structure useful for the purpose of my analysis is that it captures the important role of repetition (even cliché) both within and across Herzog’s films, while insisting on a multiplicity of possible versions, perspectives, and interpretations. It is the specific mixing of triteness and multiplicity, of repetition and reflexivity that characterizes the scenario as a “multicoded performance,” a term that Taylor uses to describe certain indigenous practices, but one that also builds on theories of postmodern aesthetics (2003: 44–50). Because scenarios are so widely understood, they are particularly susceptible to parody, resistance, and subversion. A major example is the act of “discovery” and its vital role in the history of intercultural performance in the Americas. Inherently theatrical, as Taylor and others have shown, discovery scenarios have been rehearsed, affirmed, and subverted, for more than 500 years (Taylor 2003: 53–78).19 To clarify my approach to this material, and to spare readers unnecessary confusion, I need to address a few issues up front. One has to do with the direct and indirect citation of Herzog’s films. This issue is typically framed in terms of authorship and understood as a textual strategy for maintaining the director’s status as an “auteur.”20 From this perspective, one could certainly argue that Herzog’s films always refer back to his earlier work, perhaps especially to those films for which he first achieved an international reputation. What I am suggesting, however, is that we use a different analytical framework—that of performance—to analyze the politics of citation and the “work” it does in specific films. The act of citation can be seen as part of a larger performance, which is equally devoted to producing effects in the present and to forging a new relationship to the past. In a hybrid medium such as film, issues of textuality and performance are always intertwined and cannot be neatly separated. They can, however, be studied in relation to one another, and Herzog’s documentaries offer particularly rich ground for this sort of research. The second issue has to do with intentionality. The material under discussion does not suggest another case of what Freud called a repetition compulsion. It is rather the strategic, differentiated use of repetition, and the desire to repeat, that interests me. Intentions, much less those of a wily director such as Herzog, are never clear. Nor must they be, however, in order for us to explore his work through a performance lens. Although it is not surprising that Herzog has revisited the contested terrain of Fitzcarraldo, it is interesting that he has done so in the context of documentary

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and by rehearsing certain well-known scenarios of discovery. Performance as reiterative behavior becomes a way of reinventing his own cinematic past, while promoting its rediscovery by an ever-changing audience. To emphasize performance as an analytical framework is to gain an outside perspective and bring it to bear on the films. What emerges from this perspective is the central role of performance in Herzog’s recent work as both a postcolonial method and a political strategy.

The Politics of Time The documentary short Ten Thousand Years Older is Herzog’s contribution to Ten Minutes Older (2002), an omnibus project in which each filmmaker has a mere ten minutes to reflect on the theme of time.21 In spite of its extreme brevity, and precisely because of it, the film is worth discussing with regard to Herzog’s past. Its treatment of the discovery scenario is no less remarkable. In this case, Herzog uses a repudiated concept of time so as to shift the focus of visual interest from the mythical moment of intercultural encounter to its social, historical, and physical consequences for the “discovered.” He spends the first five minutes reconstructing a past event, and the second five minutes showing another, more recent encounter. Adhering to a binary before-and-after structure heightens both the visual potency and the temporal abruptness of the juxtaposition. Set in the Amazon rainforest of Brazil, the film begins—significantly—with the use of found footage. The first image shows a foggy jungle landscape that immediately recalls the opening shot of Fitzcarraldo. In this case, however, the image quality has been conspicuously degraded to connote “the past,” giving clear indication of Herzog’s intervention in the present. The degraded image (which is pixilated and has a cold blue-green tinge to it) is due to rescan distortion, an effect produced by playing footage on a conventional TV and recording the screen with a video camera. The picture has also been considerably enlarged in order to produce digital “noise” (little dots that appear to be different colors). As the pixilation resolves, more and more of the rainforest becomes visible. And it is rapidly being destroyed. Dramatic images of deforestation flash before our eyes—fires blazing through the jungle, gold diggers on the move. From the opening shot to the voiceover commentary, the entire set-up rehearses the beginning of Burden of Dreams, which likewise quotes the opening shot of Fitzcarraldo, but does so for the purpose of reframing it. In Ten Thousand Years Older, as in Burden of Dreams, the narrator— in this case, Herzog—sets the scene, describing the jungle’s continuous invasion by settlers, miners, loggers, and soldiers, and thereby creating a political context for intercultural encounter. The issues that attached to the production of Fitzcarraldo— colonization, capitalist expansion, environmental destruction, and cultural imperialism—are also at stake in this documentary short.

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In a few sweeping lines, Herzog sketches a minimal yet efficacious version of the discovery scenario, and situates it historically. “In the remotest parts of the jungle, a mysterious nomadic tribe, the Uru Eu Wau Waus, defended their territory against advancing settlers. In 1981, this last of the hidden tribes was finally contacted.” A government-sponsored expedition was sent out, accompanied by a British–Brazilian film crew. “A hidden camera records the first contact.” We see grainy color images of mostly naked men and women, who are visibly wary of ambush, but unaware of being filmed. Anthropologists offer metal pots and utensils as gifts. Two of the Uru Eu men are visually singled out and identified by name: Tarí, the group’s “war leader,” and his brother Wapo. Speaking from an omniscient position, Herzog interprets this fleeting moment of “contact” as a temporal transformation of the most radical kind: “What they do not know is that these minutes will propel them forward ten thousand years. It will be a progress into the void. A grim fate awaits them.” The image track shows men, women, and children being treated with Western medicine. “Within a year or so,” we are told, “the majority of the tribe is wiped out by chicken pox and the common cold—lethal diseases for them. They had missed out on the thousands of years during which they could have developed resistance.” Throughout his narration, Herzog employs a concept of time first developed in the context of anthropology, where it has served both as a means of constructing cultural difference and as an instrument for implementing power. As Johannes Fabian argues in his well-known study, Time and the Other, the project of modern anthropology aims to create temporal distance between “us” and “them.” The primary technique has been to locate non-Western peoples either outside of time or in earlier periods (Herzog uses the term “stone age”). Fabian describes this technique as “the denial of coevalness,” which is his translation of the German term Gleichzeitigkeit, by which he means being in time together (1983: 31). A contrasting model of intersubjective time would collapse the distance between “us” and “them,” precluding the notion of absolute difference. The denial of coevalness is more than just a rhetorical move. To control the coordinates of time and space, Fabian contends, is to determine the conditions of domination. The assumption that the Uru Eu exist in another time is clearly a point of departure for the Brazilian expedition of 1981, as evidenced by the gifts of metal that the anthropologists bring with them. It is also a technique Herzog employs in recycling the footage of the event. Even when the long process of evolution is simply bypassed, as he suggests on the voice-over, the cultural practice of othering is swift, severe, and relentless. But the politics of time are not as clear-cut as it might appear in the first half of the film, which consists entirely of found footage. For this “discovery” of a lost tribe was not in fact “the last event of its kind in human history,” contrary to Herzog’s narration.22 Indeed, to identify the last in a long line of discovery scenarios is to perform a new act of discovery, which is either the one after the last or the beginning of a new series. The found footage is thus immediately followed by new material, shot in 2001, which shows Herzog’s meeting with a few of the surviving Uru Eu. He is accompanied by a translator, who also appears on camera, and by “the same Brazilian

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cameraman, Vicente Rios,” who worked on the ethnographic film. The cameraman’s noted presence, like the voice-over commentary, creates a sense of continuity that links the new footage to the old. The location, as Herzog describes it, is equally significant: “We set up a meeting just outside the reservation at the hut of a rubber tapper.” In other words, “we” are back in Fitzcarraldo territory, once again. If the continuous re-enactment of the discovery scenario has a numbing effect, the image of its aftermath is vivid enough to be startling. Tarí, the tribe’s former war leader, now suffers from tuberculosis, and undergoes treatment in a distant city. His brother Wapo appears to be physically healthy, but his clothes tell another side of the story: the painter’s hat and t-shirt that he wears are imprinted with Portuguese slogans from commercial advertising and local politics (not unlike the “Mickey Mouse” shirt from Burden of Dreams, only here the signs of cultural transfer are specifically Brazilian). The voyeurism of the hidden camera, which mediated the scene of “first contact,” is exchanged for the apparent directness of a formal interview and the embodiment of native performance. In contrast to the found footage, however, the new material emphasizes the continued role of indigenous performance in conveying memory and perhaps in coping with (if not healing) the so-called wounds of time. The key passage shows Tarí and Wapo each performing a type of ritual, which is coded within the film as traditional, but is clearly generated by intercultural circumstances, and made to be filmed on this occasion. Herzog introduces the passage in terms of nostalgia, which represents the performers in a manner that reflects back on his own practice: “They love to evoke the glorious time, when they waged war against the white man.” Tarí begins, chanting aloud and pacing back and forth, with bow and arrows in hand (Figure 17.1). “His chant is a ritual re-enactment of how he shot a man, and how the victim wailed.” From a fixed position, the camera swivels right and left, repeatedly, following and emulating the movement of the performer. That is, until Tarí abruptly stops; the effects of his tuberculosis prevent him from going further. Wapo steps in and re-enacts a different scene—this time, an attack on two white settlers encroaching on Uru Eu territory. There is a long history of showing tribal peoples as “last survivors,” a practice traced by other scholars in terms of museum display, popular entertainment, and  ethnographic film.23 The 1981 footage offers only a more recent example. In  reworking this material, Herzog at once contributes to the tradition of ethnographic display and comments on it from within. The added material, from 2001, takes the temporal conceit to its logical end and shows the outcome, which is predictable—but usually goes unseen, especially in the context of ethnography. The diseased performer, the native in Western attire—these are figures that preclude the very possibility of showing “untouched nature” and “prehistoric” peoples, as ethnographic spectacles so often claim to do. Indeed, such visible signs of intercultural contact and exchange are precisely the conditions that ethnographic film and its nineteenth-century predecessors would systematically work to conceal. Rather than soft-pedal the social consequences of “discovery,” Herzog puts them on display. “What will happen to the Uru Eu?” he asks in conclusion. “Tarí has no

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Figure 17.1 Tarí and Wapo re-enact memories of conflicts in Ten Thousand Years Older (2002). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Lucki Stipetić/Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

illusions.” And there the film ends. To show this situation is, for Herzog, to revisit the production of Fitzcarraldo and its surrounding controversy. Ten Thousand Years Older offers neither a revision of nor an apology for Herzog’s cinematic past. It does, however, work to reposition Herzog as a filmmaker who confronts head-on the consequences of colonial encounter, and it does so by means of footage that was made for another purpose.

On Good Behavior The spectacle of encounter, like that of suffering, foregrounds not only the temporal but also the ethical dimension of all this material. Clearly, “the case of Herzog” raises a number of questions about the ethics and ethical implications of

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filmmaking and of Herzog’s work in particular. In recent years, questions of ethics have been dramatically promoted from the margins of documentary studies to occupy “center stage” (Winston 2008: 234). Ethical debate here usually proceeds from certain distinctions between documentary and fiction film production, regarding the different assumptions, expectations, and working conditions they involve, even as commentators acknowledge that such differences are shifting and by no means fixed. Brian Winston thus claims that fiction films generally operate on “principles of ‘amoral efficiency’—or inefficiency, as with Werner Herzog during the making in the Brazilian jungle of his movie Fitzcarraldo, memorialized in the documentary Burden of Dreams. … The amoral jocularity of Herzog’s motto, ‘a película ou morte’ [sic]: ‘The Film or Death,’ is undercut by his actual endangering of his extras’ lives” (2008: 235–236). Added in passing to the second edition of Winston’s book, the case of Herzog is supposed to provide an obvious counterexample to an ethics of responsible filmmaking in the context of documentary, grounded in the filmmaker’s moral and social obligations to those who participate in the production. What makes this use of example interesting, however, is that Herzog actually reflects on this issue during the production of Fitzcarraldo (without, however, distinguishing between fiction and documentary). “You don’t make a film alone,” he says in one interview. “You can write alone. But when you make a film, you work with other people and enter a distinct field, in which specific categories of behavior—including moral categories—are necessary and have to be enforced. You can’t just go around them. As for me personally, for example, I’d never ask somebody else to do something that I hadn’t tried out myself in advance” (1982: 6). The point here is neither to mitigate nor to excuse the filmmaker’s behavior, but rather to question it more carefully, and to do so within the context of documentary debate. Ethics feature more prominently in Herzog’s documentaries than critics have yet to acknowledge. And in this context, they tend to be understood in normative terms as a set of rules and moral choices, especially (but not exclusively) in the encounters between the filmmaker and his subject. So it is hardly surprising that some of these films should also reflect back on Fitzcarraldo. Nowhere is this dynamic more fully developed than it is in The White Diamond. This film too begins with found footage. We see images of early aviation pioneers, experiments with various flying machines, actuality films of catastrophe— the “Hindenburg” in flames. They function as the point of departure for a movie about “the age-old dream of flying,” as Herzog introduces it on the voice-over. As the use of found footage would seem to suggest, The White Diamond entails a virtual voyage of rediscovery. The scientific genre of the film expedition serves as Herzog’s vehicle for returning (once again) to the South American rainforest as a site for exploring the memory of his own cinematic past. Though many of the director’s standard themes and previous films are referenced here, the project revolves around the making of Fitzcarraldo and, by extension, Burden of Dreams. It does so, however, without showing a single outtake from either film. Instead, The White Diamond rehearses selected moments from those productions in a new

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context, experimenting with different variables and outcomes. The various flights, simulations, and expeditions that take place in the film are aptly described as “tests.” The White Diamond is neither a serious scientific expedition, nor a fake one. Rather, it is a self-conscious performance of a documentary film that requires the participation of social actors, even if they are completely unaware of Herzog’s past or present concerns. The efficacy of such a performance hinges on the embodiment of documentary subjects, by which I mean the potential of social actors to either occupy or be staged and seen in multiple different roles. The central figure is Dr. Graham Dorrington, a contemporary British aerospace engineer, who designs a miniature helium balloon, which can carry two passengers and is specially built to maneuver around “the largely unexplored treetops of the rainforest,” what Dorrington calls “the prospecting element of this project,” that is the film expedition. He too is haunted by the past: the death of German wildlife cinematographer Dieter Plage, who crashed in 1993, when flying an earlier version of Dorrington’s airship over a jungle in Sumatra. Though immediately situated as the subject of his own story, Dorrington is also staged as a double of Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald (a.k.a. Fitzcarraldo), and—most especially—of Herzog as director of Fitzcarraldo. Dorrington’s “dream” of flying an airship over the rainforest activates a new scenario by summoning the past—namely, Fitzcarraldo’s “dream” of bringing opera to the jungle, and Herzog’s “dream” of pulling a steamship over a mountain. In the process, Dorrington receives the expected treatment, figured as he is in equal parts mad, brilliant, eccentric, and ridiculous. What makes this combination so potent, however, is its shifting relationship to Herzog and his mythical role as a filmmaker. When Herzog uses voice-over to comment on Dorrington’s project, he comments simultaneously on the making of Fitzcarraldo. In one scene, for example, Herzog makes a dramatic entrance, shifting the register of his presence from the sound track to the image track. He does so, we are told, in order to “confront” Dorrington about “issues of responsibility and principles” relating to the Dieter Plage storyline. And yet, Herzog’s walk-on and the ensuing “argument” also refer to the ethics of irresponsibility that attached to his public image as director of Fitzcarraldo. By appearing on camera and confronting Dorrington on screen, Herzog in effect stages himself at odds with his double.24 The scene is played for humor, as indicated by the dialogue. At issue here is whether a cinematographer should be allowed to man an untested airship, as Dorrington had allowed Plage to do. Herzog intervenes and dismisses such a practice as unprincipled—this from a director who is notorious for taking unnecessary risks, often at the expense of others. Nevertheless, Herzog’s intervention reiterates the very claim to morally principled behavior that he ascribed to himself as a filmmaker during the production of Fitzcarraldo (“I’d never ask somebody else to do something that I hadn’t tried out myself in advance”). Thus, the act of ethical decision making is put on display, lifted out to a degree from its immediate context, and related back (albeit indirectly) to Herzog’s contested public image. Turning

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the issue around, he proceeds to question Dorrington about the wisdom in flying the airship without a cameraman. “There is such a thing as follies,” Herzog remarks, using a term that many critics used to describe the making of Fitzcarraldo. “I accept that,” he says. Dorrington, however, objects: “This isn’t a folly!” “No,” says Herzog, “it is not a folly, but it would be stupid … to accept that you are flying without a camera on board.” The scene culminates in an absurd bit of dialogue, as only Herzog can deliver it: “There are dignified stupidities, and there are heroic stupidities, and there is such a thing as stupid stupidities, and that would be a stupid stupidity not to have a camera on board. I am going to fly,” he concludes; “I am going to fly with you.” Laughing, Dorrington asks in a final rhetorical gesture, “Do I have any options?” The scripted dialogue obviously works to put Herzog in the airship, where he can act out his reputation as a daring risk-taker and simultaneously be seen as a filmmaker who physically endures everything that is shown on screen. In this case, rather than put a cameraman at risk, he literally takes the camera into his own hands, and thereby enacts the standard of professionalism, code of conduct, and obligation to others that he has claimed to uphold throughout his career. The entire scene thus flaunts the complexity of Herzog’s recent work in documentary and its relationship to the ethical issues that cleave to his cinematic past. That relationship is constituted by the embodiment of Dorrington as multiple different figures and by Herzog’s dramatic interaction with them before the camera. A performance lens allows us to recognize the different roles played by the director and his double: Herzog is at once the parodist and the parodied, the hero and the villain, the ethical and the unethical, the dreamer and the demystifier of his own dreams. The White Diamond is a joint-venture in documentary, with Herzog and Dorrington each having a different stake in the project.25 Theirs is an expedition that is organized, rehearsed, and staged for the sole purpose of being filmed. In other words, the film is the occasion for the flight, and not the other way around; without the film, this particular expedition would never have taken place. When Herzog states in the voice-over commentary, “We chose the area of Kaieteur Falls, deep in the rainforest of Guyana in South America” (emphasis added), the phrasing stands out, because it signals not only the constructed nature of the event, but also the cooperation it involved. The rainforest in this film (as opposed to the jungle in Fitzcarraldo and Burden of Dreams) is discursively figured through a trope of idyllic nature, usually associated with earlier periods of maritime exploration and colonial expansion. “Here,” as Herzog narrates, “untouched landscape and a diversity of flora and fauna are found in perfect unity.” Nature as paradise? What happened to the director’s infamous assertion of the jungle’s murderous aspect? The image track mostly reinforces this idea of paradise, not only by the use of landscape pictures and aerials shot from the slow-moving airship, but also (more subtly) by the occasional images of jungle wildlife. One passage—a seemingly unmotivated series of close-ups on insects and frogs as well as a snake and what looks like a huge iguana—playfully

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re-enacts the most cited passage from Burden of Dreams, what I like to call Herzog’s stump speech, in which Herzog describes nature as “vile and base.” While he speaks, the film cuts to show a variety of jungle insects and animals, the effect of which seems to either confirm or contrast Herzog’s view of nature (critics differ sharply on this point of interpretation). The White Diamond mimics the image track of this very scene, without the famous monologue, and thereby achieves a  rather different effect: conjuring an image of pristine nature that is the film’s mythical setting.26 There is, however, another passage that undermines this image, one that Herzog prepares by describing it as “a complete change of setting.” It is a brief visit to a local, Brazilian-owned diamond mine. Here, by contrast, the forest has been cleared, the ground stripped bare, and reduced to a landscape of mud. What makes this exception so interesting is how it recalls and thereby implicates Fitzcarraldo in a visual critique of environmental destruction. The scene ends abruptly, without explanation. Not only the setting but also the role of social actors within the film engenders a sense of “Fitzcarraldo with a difference.” A former British colony and the only English-speaking country in South America, Guyana is an interesting destination, especially for those who can choose where they go.27 Its colonial legacy is foregrounded by a passage that is strongly reminiscent of various scenes from Fitzcarraldo, from Burden of Dreams, as well as from the wider history of colonial iconography and travel literature. We see a line of men, hired as “porters,” carrying on their backs the component parts of Dorrington’s airship, and setting up camp for the film expedition. Herzog explains: “British colonial rule brought Indians from India and Africans from the Caribbean. The native Amerindian population has shrunken to a mere three percent. Many of these men here are Rastafarians. This rough-and-tumble lot normally works as diamond miners.” Former colonial subjects, they provide the film with its central metaphor, “the white diamond.” And it is in conversation with local inhabitants that Herzog choreographs further scenarios of discovery. One of the scenarios is widely familiar, and has often been repeated in other contexts. It refers to the first Pacific voyage of Captain James Cook, an event which is synonymous with the great “age of scientific discovery.” Dorrington tells this story twice: first speaking directly to the camera, and later as part of a staged dialogue with Mark Anthony Yhap, a Rastafarian who is also a member of the film expedition. When Cook first approached New Zealand, in 1769, his ship was “invisible” to the island’s native inhabitants.28 Because the European ship existed outside of their cognitive universe, so the story runs, the Maoris were unable to see it.29 In yet another act of embodiment, Dorrington puts himself in the role of the explorer and the residents of a local mining village are cast in the role of the Maoris. The scenario is actually rehearsed numerous times throughout the film, and the variations are significant. In one instance, Herzog and his crew appear to rouse a man from his hammock, and ask him what he sees floating on the horizon, where the airship is clearly visible. “A white diamond?” the man replies quizzically,

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pausing and looking just past the camera (as if seeking either approval or guidance from the film crew) before he repeats the line. Instead of seeing a strange airship, or seeing nothing at all, he assimilates it to a category of local knowledge. The ultimate site of discovery in The White Diamond is Guyana’s famous Kaieteur Falls. It is here that the film returns to the central scene of Fitzcarraldo. In Herzog’s words, “there was one dangerous dream lingering: to fly the airship over the falls.” Why? What is the relationship to canopy prospecting, the film’s supposed project? The idea is floated for another reason altogether. If the parallels to Fitzcarraldo are not already clear: the waterfall evokes at once the jungle mountain that must be overcome in that film, and the deadly falls, the Pongo das Mortes, that cannot be avoided. It is a familiar scenario that plays out, however, as a farcical version of Fitzcarraldo’s risky engineering project. In Herzog’s words, “Prudence demanded a test.” From an overhang at the edge of the falls, Dorrington, Yhap, and another man launch a series of colored party balloons, each carrying a flute of champagne, and each test demonstrates the effects of a powerful downdraft in action. The test is of course ludicrous (especially when compared to the earlier scenes of high-tech experiments that are filmed in Dorrington’s laboratory), but it is not played for comedy. This is a voyage that is emphatically not undertaken. Instead, the process of making an informed decision, the test itself, is dramatized and repeated by Herzog’s film. His is an ethical enterprise—that is the upshot, anyway. The act of holding back, as Herzog does repeatedly within the film, implicates the spectator in the ethics and politics of documentary. There is another version of the discovery scenario in The White Diamond, one that is similarly suspended, but plays out in a different manner. The destination in this case is an enormous cave, which is located directly beneath the Kaieteur Falls. The cave has several functions within the film: It is a nesting place for more than a million swifts, a sacred place for local Amerindians, an echo chamber emanating quotations from Herzog’s previous films, a mythical space reminiscent of Plato’s cave; it is also a site of performance. The sequencing of this scenario is crucial. First, we see a shot composed of rock and water, the scale of which is unclear. Suddenly, the camera swings out over a precipice, revealing its location at the crest of the waterfall, and transforming what was (in retrospect) a close-up on bedrock into a vertiginous aerial view. The camera movement creates a sort of bungee-jump sensation, with all its cultural associations of physical daring and adventure. From an overhead angle, then, we see a lone climber suspended from a rope below (Figure  17.2), and hear his fading screams as he descends, only a few feet away from the falling water. “Out of curiosity,” Herzog comments, “our physician on location, an expert mountain climber, decided to have a look for himself. He wanted to see the mysterious nesting place of the swifts. From the bottom of the falls, the gigantic cave is inaccessible, and has resisted all attempts by explorers. We lowered a camera to him, hoping to gaze into the unknown. Later, we decided not to show his footage. We will show only the image from the spinning camera, as we pulled it back up on a rope.” Because the camera is aimed downward, it shows a receding spiral of rocks and water, the sound of which rises and falls with

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Figure 17.2 A member of the crew descends toward the cave of the swifts in The White Diamond (2004). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Werner Herzog, Lucki Stipetić, and Annette Scheurich for Werner Herzog Film GmbH.

each revolution. The effect is yet another twist on the circular-moving camera, what Brad Prager has described as “Herzog’s single most consistent formal gesture” (2007: 114). While authorship and style are certainly at stake in this scene, there is another salient issue: that of spectatorship. The spinning camera produces a dizzying effect, temporarily disrupting the stability of perception, which in turn comments on the viewer’s presumptive desire to know the secret contents of the cave. Documentary thrives on “epistephilia,” a term Nichols coined to denote both a “desire to know” and a “pleasure in knowing” (1991: 31, 178–180). Withholding the image at once conjures and spoils this pleasurable curiosity. A brief interview with the climber doubles the act of withholding, as the dialogue is left in the original and neither glossed nor translated. For viewers who do not understand German, it adds to the cave’s mystery; even for speakers of German, though, the interview offers no insight into the contents of the cave.30 Either way, the audience is put in the awkward position of questioning the filmmaker’s decision not to show the supposed footage, and searching for a reason behind it. Cut to another interview, this one shot with the waterfall as a backdrop. Herzog asks “an Amerindian former tribal leader,” named Anthony Melville, “how he views the cave.” If he had wings, Melville says, he would fly into the cave and see what lies inside of it. Herzog tells him of the videotape: “Now, one of our climbers went down on a rope and looked into it, with a camera. He saw what’s in there.” “Okay, okay,” Melville replies, “I don’t think they should ever publish it. I mean, what you see is yours; you keep it to yourself. But I don’t think it should be published as a whole, to say, okay, this is behind there. The whole essence of our culture tends to die away; we’d lose it.” In a visual economy where visibility implies loss, the act of withholding obtains positive value in itself. Native testimony thus

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provides both a narrative motivation and what is presently an indisputable cultural rationale for the filmmaker’s stated decision not to show the footage (despite all the physical effort and risk involved in obtaining it). The act of withholding is underscored both discursively and musically in the film’s last scene. It closes with an extremely long take of Kaieteur Falls, followed by a title, which offers a blessing (“May the Secret Kingdom of the swifts be around till the end of time, as the lyrics to this song suggest”), and what is presumably a piece of local Amerindian music.31 The final scenario of discovery explores a number of interrelated questions. Ethically, it raises the question of Herzog’s responsibility in representing the cave: Is there any compelling reason why he ought to show the footage (assuming it is usable), despite the Amerindian objection? It also begs the question of accountability: To what authority should the filmmaker be obliged to answer? Politically, the act of withholding raises the question of representation as a social issue: If Herzog were to go ahead and show the images as part of a film, what might be the consequences for the local Amerindian community? By virtue of withholding, then, Herzog stages himself as heeding an ethical imperative, presumably for the sake of both natural and cultural preservation, while at the same time producing an effect of secrecy that obtains within the film. The act of withholding can actually be traced throughout his documentaries. Here it is just inflected to evoke an ethics of responsibility in an intercultural context. Make no mistake: His is a performance which mimics the act of preservation, instead of simply advocating it.32 If there were any doubt about its status as performance, it is erased when Melville, the “former Amerindian tribal leader,” later appears working as part of the film crew. He too plays a role—more than one, in fact. The dialogue about the cave was presumably scripted, the footage was probably useless. For his part, Herzog acts out the role of a filmmaker from the outside who knows how to behave on location. His conspicuous display of cultural sensitivity is neither sincere nor disingenuous. It is a highly self-conscious performance of ethics and politics in the context of documentary. The question remains, whether this act of mimicry challenges (or even subverts) the ethics that underwrite “good behavior” as ideology.

Conclusion In this essay, I have argued that Herzog puts documentary in the service of reenacting and thereby revising his own cinematic past. Within this context, I have also identified a penchant for rehearsing certain well-known scenarios of discovery, which Herzog undertakes as a way of promoting the rediscovery of his work. In each instance, the event to be reimagined via documentary is the making of Fitzcarraldo as a formative experience in the director’s life and a pivotal moment in his career. The argument might be further extended with only slight modification to account for the publication of Herzog’s Conquest of the Useless (2004), a collection

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of diary entries and prose sketches written before and throughout the production of Fitzcarraldo. In one passage, he reflects on 1979 as “a year of catastrophes,” naming specifically the burning of his camp by the Aguarunas, the “criminalization of my person by the media,” and “a grotesque tribunal against me in Germany.” Nevertheless, work on the film continued, “in the knowledge, perhaps even only in the hope, that time would straighten things out; that the facts about all this would in the long run prevail” (Herzog 2004: 82). In regard to such reflections—and this one is set in italics, which would seem to indicate that it was recently added—it is important to stress that the diaries themselves make no apparent effort to “straighten things out,” nor can they be said to present “the facts.” Rather, it is the subjective immediacy and evidentiary power of written testimony that adds considerable nuance to “the case of Herzog,” and thereby contributes to its re-opening. This movement of re-opening creates an important connection between the book and the films, but the latter are distinguished by their structure of double rehearsal. As we have seen, Ten Thousand Years Older and The White Diamond each re-enact stock scenes of cultural encounter from multiple different contexts and perspectives. In so doing, they foreground the efficacy of performance as a framework for negotiating a new relationship to the filmmaker’s own past. Herzog’s documentaries do not merely repeat old situations of encounter; they also produce new ones. The present scenarios do not serve to promote a culturally sensitive colonialism, which is kinder, gentler, and consequently more insidious than ever before. In other words, they do not provide further evidence of “neocolonialism.” They do, however, mimic that position for an effect. The effect can be playful and humorous, as it is at times in The White Diamond, but it can also be painful and unsettling, as it is in Ten Thousand Years Older. The assessment of this effect depends not only on the filmmaker’s use of certain representational strategies and critical postures in a given situation, but also on the role of spectatorship. Whatever critical potential Fitzcarraldo might have held at one time has since been lost in the polarity of postcolonial shame. On the matter of Herzog’s legacy as a filmmaker, however, both the central importance and the productive dynamic of his work in documentary have become increasingly clear.

Notes 1

Public charges of exploitation began with Even Dwarves Started Small and continued with Aguirre, which was also filmed in Peru. 2 See esp. Blank and Bogan (1984). See also Gladitz (1979); “Werner Herzog” (1979); Conta (1979); “Marios Abenteuer im Dschungel” (1981); Mercadet (1982); “Werner Herzog und die Indianer” (1982); “Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo” (1983); Land of Bitterness and Pride (Nina Gladitz, 1984); and Rost (1986). 3 On the stigma that attached to Herzog after Fitzcarraldo, see Rost (1986: 24–25). On its persistence, see Herzog’s audio commentary on the DVD version of Fitzcarraldo, released in 1999 by Anchor Bay Entertainment, and “Dreams and Burdens,” a 2005

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interview with Herzog, which is part of the Criterion Collection’s DVD of Burden of Dreams (Les Blank, 1982). See Koepnick (1993: 133–159). See Davidson (1993: 101–130); (1999: esp. 1–34); and (2000: 263–278). On pre-production and production, see Blank and Bogan (1984: 12–13, 179); on postproduction, see Goodwin (1982: 46). Elsewhere, instead of romanticizing native actors, Herzog notes that many of them were assimilated, and emphasizes the creative ways in which they negotiated multiple cultures. See Rost (1986: 26–28, 68–70). See Gladitz (1979: 6–7). For an early indication of this phenomenon, see Rost (1986: 82–83). For example, in La Soufrière (1977), Herzog concludes his voice-over narration with the following line, spoken over the funeral march from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung: “In my memory, it is not the volcano that remains, but the neglected oblivion in which those black people live.” Because this claim is unsubstantiated by what precedes it, the spectator is left with a discomfiting sense of incongruity, which punctuates the film’s abrupt conclusion. For more on this film, see Ames (2012). The former is what Bill Nichols means by “performative documentary,” a category which he also uses to describe contemporary documentary practice more generally. See Nichols (2001: 130–138). A related and more recent practice is the digital repackaging of Herzog’s films. The Fitzcarraldo DVD, which was released in 1999, features extensive audio commentary by the director and the producer (Herzog’s brother) Lucki Stipetić. Audio commentary, which typically overrides the music and dialogue, adds a new layer to the film’s soundtrack, and thus a new level of meaning. This practice can also be understood in documentary terms, because it emphasizes authoritative verbal testimony and makes truth claims about the film’s production, while linking these claims to the final images in the very moment of their appearance before the audience. For more on Herzog and documentary, see Ames (2012). The “Declaration” is readily accessible on his official website, www.wernerherzog.com. On Herzog’s notion of “truth,” see Prager (2007). See on this point Bachmann (1977: 3). See on this point Bruzzi (2000: 155). I borrow this phrase from Winston (2008). See Fusco (1995: 37–63) and Castillo (2006). Herzog’s relation to authorship is tense and often contradictory. See on this point Corrigan (1986: 3–19). In the United States, Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet (2002; part two is subtitled The Cello) first aired on the Showtime cable network, and is currently available both online and as a DVD import. Other participating filmmakers include Chen Kaige, Spike Lee, and Wim Wenders. See Taylor (2003: 53–54). See especially Griffiths (2002) and Oksiloff (2001). Dorrington says the argument was “completely faked—pure acting.” “Graham Dorrington Interview,” BBC Storyville, 13 September 2005, http://www.bbc.co.uk/ bbcfour/documentaries/storyville/graham-dorrington.shtml (accessed 13 March 2007).

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Dorrington admittedly uses the film to promote his research to a popular audience— a project he had tried to develop for more than a decade, without success, before he met Herzog. See “Graham Dorrington Interview.” Apparently, Herzog asked Dorrington to rehearse part of this monologue. As Dorrington later commented: “I balked at one point when he wanted me to talk about curses” (BBC). The reference here is to Herzog’s damnation of the jungle in Burden of Dreams, when the production of Fitzcarraldo stalls, as it often does: “It’s like a curse weighing on the entire landscape, and whoever goes too deep into this has his share of that curse. So we are cursed with what we are doing here.” In this case, however, the superstitious pilot refused to play along. In other words, they did not choose Sumatra, a location that would have put the emphasis squarely on the Dieter Plage crash, and thus linked the film even more closely to Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1998) and Wings of Hope (1998). Having said this, I hasten to add that both of these films deal with a German trapped in a foreign jungle, and in this regard they too can be seen as “Fitzcarraldo films,” each with a different twist. The constructed nature of this scenario is further emphasized by its status as a myth that has attached to the figure of Cook’s ship in popular memory; no such incident is recorded in Cook’s journals, even though it is widely attributed to him. See Cook (1955) and Withey (1987: 129). I thank Nicholas Thomas for discussing this scenario with me. The unseen explorer can be juxtaposed to the unseen natives in Aguirre. Because the Spaniards envision the jungle as brute nature, they fail to differentiate the Indians, “perceiving them instead as mere extensions of the prehistoric forest” (Koepnick 1993: 141). The White Diamond, by contrast, offers native perspectives which are blatantly clichéd, deriving as they do from Western fantasies about non-Western peoples. Although it was exciting “to look behind the scenes of our waterfall,” the climber remarks, he saw in the cave what appeared to be “endless deep black space.” A vast surface suggesting a profound depth behind it, which nonetheless resists visibility— this is precisely how Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo each depict the rainforest. The climber’s description, however, indicates that the filming conditions were completely dark, which in turn suggests that the footage was unwatchable. For his part of the interview, Herzog’s use of hyperbole (“I am certain that you are the first person ever to look inside the cave”) reiterates the discovery scenario. The conspicuous use of “appropriate,” site-specific indigenous music offers a striking contrast to the soundtrack of Fitzcarraldo. See Friedberg and Hall (2007). At one point during the production, Dorrington suggested a scene promoting rainforest conservation, in homage to Dieter Plage, and this time it was Herzog who balked. See “Graham Dorrington Interview” (2005).

Works Cited Ames, Eric: Ferocious Reality: Documentary According to Werner Herzog (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). Auslander, Philip: Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992).

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Bachmann, Gideon: “The Man on the Volcano: A Portrait of Werner Herzog,” Film Quarterly 31.1 (1977): 3. Blank, Les: Burden of Dreams. “Dreams and Burdens,” Interview with Werner Herzog. Criterion Collection, 2005. Blank, Les and Bogan, James, ed.: Burden of Dreams: Screenplay, Journals, Reviews, Photographs (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1984). Bruzzi, Stella: New Documentary: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2000). Castillo, Susan: Colonial Encounters in New World Writing, 1500–1786: Performing America (London: Routledge, 2006). Conta, Manfred von: “Die Herzog-Horror-Picture-Show,” Stern, November 29, 1979: 100–113. Cook, James: The Journals of Captain James Cook on His Voyages of Discovery, vol. 1: The Voyage of the Endeavor, 1768–1771, ed. J. C. Beaglehole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955). Corrigan, Timothy: “Producing Herzog: From a Body of Images,” The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, ed. Timothy Corrigan (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 3–19. Cronin, Paul, ed.: Herzog on Herzog (London: Faber & Faber, 2002). Davidson, John E.: “‘As Others Put Plays upon the Stage’: Aguirre, Neocolonialism, and the New German Cinema,” New German Critique 60 (1993): 101–130. Davidson, John E.: Deterritorializing the New German Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Davidson, John E.: “‘Das Land, das Gott unvollendet ließ’: Werner Herzog und der Tropenwald seines Neuen Deutschen Kinos,” Der deutsche Tropenwald: Bilder, Mythen, Politik, ed. Michael Flitner (Frankfurt: Campus, 2000), pp. 263–278. Diamond, Elin: Performance and Cultural Politics (London: Routledge, 1995). Dolis, George and Weigand, Ingrid: “The Floating Opera,” Film Comment 18.5 (September– October 1982): 56–59. Fabian, Johannes: Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Friedberg, Lillian and Hall, Sara: “Drums along the Amazon: The Rhythm of the Iron System in Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo,” The Cosmopolitan Screen: German Cinema and the Global Imaginary, 1945 to the Present, ed. Stephan Schindler and Lutz Koepnick (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), pp. 117–139. Fusco, Coco: “The Other History of Intercultural Performance,” English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (New York: The New Press, 1995), pp. 37–63. Gladitz, Nina: “Der neue Sensibilismus oder: Wie aus der Liebe zum Film die Vergewaltigung von Menschenrechten werden kann,” Vierte Welt Aktuell 12 (“Der Fall Herzog,” special issue, 1979): 5–12. Goodwin, Michael: “Burden of Dreams,” American Film 46 ( June 1982): 46. Gosling, Maureen: “Recuerdos Peruanos,” Burden of Dreams: Screenplay, Journals, Reviews, Photographs, ed. Les Blank and James Bogan (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1984), pp. 119–209. “Graham Dorrington Interview,” BBC Storyville (September 13, 2005), www.bbc.co.uk/ bbcfour/documentaries/storyville/graham-dorrington.shtml.

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Griffiths, Alison: Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Herzog, Werner: “Fitzcarraldo: Ein Gespräch,” interview by Bion Steinborn and Rüdiger von Naso, Filmfaust 26 (1982): 2–15. Herzog, Werner: Eroberung des Nutzlosen (Munich: Hanser, 2004). Herzog, Werner: Conquest of the Useless: Reflections on the Making of Fitzcarraldo, trans. Krishna Winston (New York: HarperCollins, 2009). “Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo,” Cultural Survival Quarterly 7.2 (1983): 27. Koepnick, Lutz P.: “Colonial Forestry: Sylvan Politics in Werner Herzog’s Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo,” New German Critique 60 (Autumn 1993): 133–159. “Marios Abenteuer im Dschungel: Fünf Tote und ein Gelähmter: Bilanz der Dreharbeiten zu Werner Herzogs neuem Film Fitzcarraldo: Wie es dazu kam, erzählt Mario Adorf,” Bunte, August 20, 1981: 26–28. Mercadet, Elizabeth D. and Léon: “Paranoia in Eldorado,” Time Out (London), February 12–18, 1982: 12–13, 15, 17. Nichols, Bill: Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). Nichols, Bill: Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). Oksiloff, Assenka: Picturing the Primitive: Visual Culture, Ethnography, and Early German Cinema (New York: Palgrave, 2001). Prager, Brad: The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (London: Wallflower Press, 2007). Rost, Andreas, ed.: Werner Herzog in Bamberg: Protokoll einer Diskussion 14./15. Dez. 1985 (Bamberg: University of Bamberg, 1986). Schechner, Richard: Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985). Taylor, Diana: The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). “Werner Herzog: ‘So wahr Gott, der nicht existiert, mir helfe…,’” Kirche und Film 32.10 (1979): 25. “Werner Herzog und die Indianer,” Kirche und Film 35.4 (1982): A–E. Winston, Brian: Claiming the Real II: Documentary: Grierson and Beyond (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Withey, Lynne: Voyages of Discovery: Captain Cook and the Exploration of the Pacific (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1987).

Additional Films Cited Blank, Les: Burden of Dreams (1982) Gladitz, Nina: Land of Bitterness and Pride (1984)

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The Veil Between Werner Herzog’s American TV Documentaries John E. Davidson

A stranger can often learn important truths at a host’s fireside which the latter would perhaps conceal from a friend. Alexis de Tocqueville (2003)1

Repetition plus translation plus generalization gives, correctly calculated, clarification. Peter Sloterdijk (2009)2

Forethoughts Werner Herzog’s German Romanticism is different. We all know that, and we can maybe all agree that it has something to do with the beautiful hallucination of the cinema. To introduce my analysis of what are arguably the least romantic of Herzog’s works, I begin with Slavoj Žižek’s notion that hallucination is the ideology of cinema in order to set apart the kind of difference that may be at stake. One particular point for Žižek is the manner in which “Hollywoodesque” cinema’s hallucination gestures to real occurrence, like “larger historical catastrophe,” merely as the materialized form of “individual emotion,” while insisting that emotion such as “the trauma of a rejected lover” is the real occurrence. A specific mode of experience in the world, one that is only available to thought, is masked both by the emotional hallucinations of narrative as well as by cinema’s further insistence that the hallucination needs to be overtly reinforced as real. And so, a hallucinatory self-construction develops for individual audience members, based A Companion to Werner Herzog, First Edition. Edited by Brad Prager. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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in the common sense that emotional investment is both the guarantee of individuality and that which serves the good of all. “Is this not the supreme proof of the emotional abstraction, of Hegel’s idea that emotions are abstract,” Žižek writes, “an escape from the concrete network accessible only to thinking?” (2008: 232, emphasis in original). Such emotional abstraction underlies works as diverse as Veit Harlan’s Nazi-era melodramas, a recent American-made Hannibal Lecter film (Hannibal, Ridley Scott, 2001), and a “really bad” film rehashing of Stalingrad from a “European” perspective (as opposed to a German or Russian/Soviet one: Enemy at the Gates, Annaud 2001). Rather than arguing for a more Brechtian approach to spur thinking, Žižek sets the visceral cinematic landscapes of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) against this cinema of hallucination. Given the affinities of Herzog’s landscapes to Tarkovsky’s, one seems justified in awarding him a similar status in the camp resisting Hollywood ideology, a status supported by his lack of attention to Hollywoodesque storytelling structures and his use of the documentary mode as a means of accessing a sense of the metaphysical.3 Not that there is no affinity between much of Herzog’s work and the romantic positioning of Hollywood ideology, as Žižek sees it. Hyper-realism mixed with a “pathos of awe” in the face of “unspeakable suffering and the super-human endurance,” as well as the reduction of mass historical movements to individual combat, have become part of Hollywood’s signature more generally (Žižek 2008: 230). That is certainly close to a description of what many would recognize as markers of a “Herzogian” cinema. All that is missing, really, is the Hollywood love story, and Herzog has made it abundantly clear that he will never film one, which has been taken to comport with the sense that “personal attraction develops more between the director and his figures than among them” (Pflaum 1985: 148). Because of these characteristics in much of Herzog’s work, I have in the past been among those accusing him of trafficking in “Germanness”—in megalomaniacal romantic personalities and projections of fathomless interiorities—and exposing his double movement of inviting the audience into his characters’ hallucination and then endorsing the lie by generating an authenticity of the project of filmmaking that was then to reinforce the authenticity in his films (Davidson 1993; 1994). In the present essay I shift to explore Herzog’s trafficking in the hallucinatory self-constructions of “Americanness” in several straightforward TV documentaries of what could be called his first U.S.–American period, stretching roughly from 1976–1984.

The Measures Taken Again and Again Like so many films of the New German Cinema, How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck? (1976), Huie’s Sermon (1981), and God’s Angry Man (1981) were made with significant support from West German TV, public outlets that were charged with fostering a variety of cultural programming. Unlike most of the

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others, which showed in theaters, these three had their premieres on the “first” channel, ARD, and so their roughly 45-minute length was sculpted to fit into its format. Although he claims to always shoot for the cinema and nothing else, the fact that these films remained only small-screen telecasts posed no problem greater than accommodating a constraint in length for Herzog-the-craftsman, as he calls himself (Cronin 2002: 42). The relative lack of response at the time of their broadcasts, and in the critical discussion of the director since, however, seems fairly directly attributable to their “failure” to meet expectations about the nature of the Herzogian.4 For viewers unfamiliar with his less celebrated works, Herzog’s technique in these three films might seem remarkably objective, straightforward, and, well, “self-less,” none of which have been recognized markers of his documentaries, let alone the Herzogian film more generally. Though similar in length, in focus on special central figures, and in production time frame, these documentaries show none of the overt parody of form embedded in Herzog’s on-camera performance of the enthusiastic sports reporter in The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1973), for example. Nor do we hear more than a faint trace of Herzog’s voice-over, which seeks to establish heroic drama for the viewer in The Flying Doctors of East Africa (1969), a sense of the director’s passion for the extreme in La Soufrière (1977), and partisanship for the children in Ballad of the Little Soldier (1984). Nothing gestures here to mysteries shrouded from the viewer that only Herzog can provide a window into, as do the shots containing Fini Straubinger’s literal embrace of nature in Land of Silence and Darkness (1971) or the “extraterrestrial” landscapes of Fata Morgana (1969). Indeed, the sense of landscape that links Herzog to Tarkovsky and that is so much on display in the most Herzogian film shot in the United States—the fictional Stroszek (1977)—is not to be found in these three works. In addition to a seemingly extraordinary central subject, what these documentaries do share with almost all of his other work is a concern with the “situatedness” and the material apparatus surrounding the mentality, body, and language of the rituals that these figures practice fanatically. In How Much Wood…, Huie’s Sermon, and God’s Angry Man, the rituals are quintessentially American, and what makes them so is the publicly mediated nature of the practice that turns the extreme into the habitual. This practice has more to do with the rehearsal of individual emotion as a common good than with the expression of “real” belief and superstition, which separates these three pieces from works such as Bells from the Deep (1993). My claim in what follows is that they occasion insight into a kind of truth about the hallucinatory self-construction of America that is neither the superficial truth of accountants that this director abhors nor the metaphysical one many Germanists seek in his work. Shifting the terrain in order to avoid the pitfalls inherent in pursuing Herzog as a “romantic” or a German director, I develop a lens for this material not out of familiar German literary touchstones such as Kleist, Büchner, and Hölderlin, but rather out of Whitman, Du Bois, and Melville. Placing these films against the backdrop of foundational works of American letters makes explicit the

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historical depth of the material relations, symbolic self-constructions, and ritual casements with which they resonate. To establish the groundwork for that analysis, it is useful to have a brief look at Herzog’s self-positioning in relationship to the fanatical subjects whom he films in much of his fictional and documentary work. His early short film Precautions Against Fanatics (1969) is exemplary in its quirkiness and mix of scripted and unscripted moments. Shot at a harness-racing track near Munich, it features a handful of figures who address the camera directly to explain how the activities in which they are engaged help to prevent fanatics from coming in and running amok. In the process they show themselves to be absolutely fanatical in the sense that they seem to be living in the world that their own fantasy has produced (Prager 2007: 54). One guards the stalls against would-be break-ins by unseen figures, whom he calls “fanatics” again and again; another stands where there might be a crush of crowds eager to get close on a busy day; another walks a horse around and around a tree; yet another wards off illness for his horse with massive doses of garlic. The one figure who seems to recognize that these self-appointed guardians are (the) fanatics is an older, one-armed man, who claims to have been working with horses for forty years. In trying to shoo the interlopers away, along with the camera and crew, he himself turns into something of a fanatic who repeats a few phrases and gestures over and over again. There are a number of lessons to be found in Precautions regarding the world view at work in Herzog’s cinema. To guard against fanatics is to risk becoming one, and most often the drive in his work is to be the veil between such people and the viewer. Whether through speech or in action, fanaticism expresses itself in address to the camera in front of a backdrop of specific situations against which the speaker is set; however, those backdrops need have no intrinsic value— they are infinite and replicable. They may be stables, or horses, or flamingoes by a pond. The use of language delineates the fanatic’s world from that of those listening, in particular through odd formulations and repetitions, often accompanied by recurring gestures and idiosyncratic body language. There is a distinction to be made between the fanatically circular speech and movement of the little one-armed man, along with his companions in this film, and those who have taken the “terrible fall” into a world of fantasy production subject to utility.5 Additionally, fanaticism is egotistical and physical: I am big, says one over and over; another walks and walks (circles); another breaks tiles to show strength; another stinks, because he, too, eats the garlic; and another talks of the strength of his fist, and insists that seeing it is the connection to himself for the viewer. All in all, this reads something like a blueprint for Timothy Treadwell’s selfpresentation in his own video footage, even before Herzog edits it into narrative form in Grizzly Man (2005). Herzog has built much of his vaunted persona on his open embrace of a possible kinship with those at the edges of other humans’ experience, whether by physical necessity or inner exigency driven by their fantasy. But, quite often, especially

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in his voice-overs and interviews, he asserts himself as the reasonable figure who, in spite of all the sense of kinship to those he films, has a sort of distance from it. The well-known injections of commentary in Grizzly Man can stand as easy examples: Herzog talks of Treadwell’s madness at one point as that of an actor, one that he has seen before (in Kinski); Herzog contrasts his own understanding of the indifference of nature to Treadwell’s unbalanced sense of nature’s loving embrace. The seeds of their divergent points of view can already be sensed in Precautions, which can be read to prefer nature to its tamers (Rentschler 1986: 175). Like several other figures in Grizzly Man, Herzog’s voice-over insists that Treadwell crossed a line that should not have been crossed. Perhaps he got what he was asking for by playing with the bears, and perhaps he did them a disservice by getting them used to the company of humans. Yet, it is clear that Treadwell dies not because the bears become habituated to humans but rather because he becomes habituated to (some) bears and mistakenly assumes a kind of convergence between his grizzlies and all grizzlies. In the final instance the kinship between Herzog and Treadwell rests on a shared ability to put the camera in places where cinematic magic can happen, in planned and unplanned moments. But, just as Treadwell misunderstands his oneness with the wild, he also misconstrues a oneness with the camera. As was already recognized in the 1970s, Herzog knows that even a fanatical will of an eccentric cannot create a unity of cinema and experience (Borski 1973): his work balances between “lucid analyses of chaotic situations (undertaken in a spirit not unlike scientific research) and halluncinatory, seductive visions that plunge his audience into active experience of the irrational … In Herzog’s case, the point is the balance itself ” (Rayns 1974/75: 5). Throughout Grizzly Man, Treadwell’s video camera puts as much of a veil between himself and the viewer as anything else, and Herzog’s construction confronts us with realizations indicating that this difference is the experience of the cinema: I do not know what touching that bear is like; I am not the man I see running through the tundra; I am not the woman I cannot see running behind him with the camera; I am not dead. Already in Precautions, the viewer is close to and addressed by the irrational, and so is left to guard against those fanatics on screen, to put a veil between themselves and the suspicion that the fanatics reflect something of themselves, only to realize that the camera assures us—that I am not dead, that I am not that fanatic saying the same thing over and over again, that the repetition in my watching them in their practice does not make me a further, perfected initiate in their world. Such limits force the viewer to resist the underlying fantasy of identification with characters, the ideological hallucination of secondary cinematic identification. So, although it may at first sound counter-intuitive in regard to Herzog, a director steadfastly associated with dreams, visions, and hallucinations, the circle of fantasy-production in Precautions, not all of which is fanatical in the unwanted sense, can be read as a send up of how cinema succeeds and fails where it encourages identification with its troubled subjects.

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Perhaps “training nature” as a practice is rejected by Herzog; however, he makes clear that unchecked nature, such as the jungle or the grizzly, does not anchor particular points of identification for him.6 Certainly the oddly limited gait of the trotters pulling their sulkies strikes the viewer near the opening of Precautions, but their visible struggle with the “restraint” demanded of them makes these horses special. They strain to achieve without being able to give in to their desire to stride fully, an image of the discontented individual within civilization’s harness. Not so much the taming of nature as the idea of training itself (and training for use) is at stake for Herzog. Instead, then, of speaking of a fascination with depth, or spirit, or authenticity, or passion, or being sealed off from the world, and so on, one might better translate Herzog’s notion of “fanatics” as people who develop their own, individual systems of practice of “self-construction” that nonetheless become their point of connection to the world we all share. They employ what Peter Sloterdijk describes as systems of practice (Übungsysteme) that are idiosyncratic or extreme, or both, and are rehearsed to a point at which they appear normalized. “Practice” (Übung) is defined by Sloterdijk as “any operation, through which the qualifications of the actor for the next completion of the same operation is maintained or improved” and is introduced as the key term to understanding the anthropotechnologies of the current age (Sloterdijk 2009: 14). Signifying both the repetition that leads to a means of operating in a cultural domain and the operation itself, practice is a defining characteristic of human existence. “Living in practices” is the means by which the “human genuinely gives rise to itself.”7 The starting point of his investigation, directly playing off Engels and Marx, is the suspicion that “a specter is haunting the western world—the specter of religion” (2009: 9). Where Engels and Marx’s Communist Manifesto sought to answer their haunted age by creating an understanding in advance of the “body” of material relations that had never previously been incorporated, Sloterdijk’s task is to deal with a “real” ghost: western religious convictions that live on beyond their supposed death. In essence, Sloterdijk grounds his examination of contemporary practices in the physical networks made available by three foundational modernist discoveries: the historical materialism of Marx; the immunological biology of Paul Ehrlich; and the social-psychology of figures such as Sigmund Freud and Georg Simmel. Leaving aside the biopolitical aspect of Sloterdijk’s sociology, the remainder of this essay explores the presentation in How Much Wood…, Huie’s Sermon, and God’s Angry Man of American practices in hallucinatory self-construction.

Bells from the American Deep As in much of his other work a dual aspect inheres in the veil Herzog places between his viewers and the American fanatics he films, on the one hand giving us a glimpse of their extreme nature and yet, on the other hand, protecting us by

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absorbing their infectious nature through his own proximity to it. But, there is a difference in the films under consideration here, because the director takes himself out of the process in a sense, openly embracing a (more or less) standard documentary form and a restrained concentration on the material contexts of fanatical expressions. He maintains his focus on individuals in some form of extreme, stylized struggle—auctioneers contesting for a world championship, a bishop deploying his whole body to resist the sins of the world, a televangelist combating both the government and the possibility that God does not exist. However, by downplaying his identity as larger-than-life mediator—which in many ways is the core of the Herzogian film—these documentaries reposition and reanimate specific practices that have been explored in seminal American poetry, prose, and sociology. In framing this triad of documentaries in contexts drawn from nineteenth-century texts, I will use Herzog’s first American period as a kind of bookend to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835–40), perhaps the greatest example of a stranger coming to grips with the present and possibilities of this new country and reporting it back to his fellow Europeans. A key trope that he identified as a practice, perhaps the practice, enabling America to function was the “doctrine of selfinterest properly understood” as a path to being virtuous. It is the mechanism by which excessive privatization (he calls it “individualism”) is held in check and religious structures are carried over into the post-feudal age (see especially 609–616). Tocqueville recognized that this idea was neither new nor limited to the United States. Nevertheless, he added: but for present-day Americans it has been universally accepted. It has become popular; it is to be found at the root of all actions; it is woven into everything they say. It is uttered by the poor no less than the wealthy […] Self-interest properly understood is not a sublime doctrine, but it is clear and unambiguous. It makes no attempt at reaching great objectives but it does achieve all the aims it envisages without too much effort. Being within the scope of everyone’s understanding, it is effortlessly grasped and retained. Being wondrously in tune with the weakness of men, it easily achieves a hold which it has no difficulty in maintaining because it turns individual self-interest against itself, using the same goad which arouses them to control their passions. (2003: 611–12)

The important insight here is that the thing driving the bourgeois age to restraint is a logic that must necessarily subject virtue to means-ends rationality in constructing the self, and that has become self-understood: “that man helps himself by serving others and that doing so serves his own interest” (2003: 610). Tocqueville is moved to pen his ruminations by the noticeable anomaly of “equality in social conditions” that greets him in the States, wondering what that foretells (and forebodes) for the young country (2003: 12). He is rooted enough in his own historical situation both to marvel at the possibilities of democracy and to bemoan the lack of luster in the society to which it points. While Tocqueville, a Frenchman, sees the curtailing of aristocratic freedom in favor of equality as

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responsible for this decline, Walt Whitman chooses to link rather than oppose liberty and egalitarianism, and praises America for precisely this reason: No Homer, Shakespeare, Voltaire No palaces, King’s palaces nor courts, Nor armies on the land, nor navies on the sea, But countless living equal men: Average free8

America does get a genius voice in Whitman, but it also, of course, has gotten active armies and navies as well. A long century later Herzog presents images rooted in a more mature American context than that which occupied Tocqueville or enthralled Whitman, in which the many consequences of “self-interest properly understood” come into sharper focus. These American films delineate practices of equality that continue to mask and foster inequality in social conditions, and in doing so refigure what Sloterdijk calls “primary differentiations” within the three most vital realms supporting the hallucination of our American identity: capitalism, color, and creed. Unlike his French predecessor, Herzog does not deploy analytical acumen to lead us to an understanding of such contradictions in American life, but rather attends to and presents them as something like bells from the American deep. Unlike his poetic predecessor, he is enraptured by its rhythms from an analytical point of view. Although real neutrality is impossible, he seems to speak neither for nor against any side of these contradictions and in doing so restrains many of the self-aggrandizing gestures that viewers have come to expect from him. In the final analysis, these unHerzogian documentaries allow us to trace again the connection to the extreme and fanatical in Herzog’s romantic self-positioning, but reformulated in a different context and, thus, generalized in a manner that, if I calculate correctly, brings some indirect but explicit clarity to that subject as well.

Bodies at Auction—How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck? One fairly direct link between Precautions Against Fanatics and How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck? is the appearance of horses with similarly restrained gaits attached to buggies. The horses in How Much Wood… have long since completed their training and no longer strain, so while they embody an anachronistic symbolism of means-ends rationality (particularly when shot from the moving car), they are not “fanatical” because of the particular conquest of nature that they represent. The Amish who drive them, on the other hand, seem engaged in a fanatical practice of restraint and, ironically, they share a fanaticism with the figures in Precautions who seemed so unrestrained, particularly in bodily matters. As in that

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film, the camera marks out clear positions of “us” and “them” here, which will be reinforced by the veil between the viewer and their use of language (abstaining from speaking) and material matters (denying the body). Even the segments in which the locals struggle to produce adequate translations into Pennsylvania Dutch, which may make them seem silly to the German audience, link them to Herzog’s other fanatics in regard to language use. This then becomes a stepping stone to the more thoroughgoing fanaticism of the auctioneers’ practice, which is both radically idiosyncratic and the point of connection to the world from which it separates them. Herzog claims that the auctioneers in How Much Wood … exhibit the “real poetry of capitalism,” in that they carry its language to the extreme (Cronin 2002: 140). Both contemporary critics and scholars have dismissed this idea (see Hoberman 1978; Van Wert 1986); nevertheless, I think the claim merits another look. The structure of How Much Wood …, especially Herzog’s treatment of the auctioneers’ fanatical language, situates and lays bare the practices behind the United States’ version of the “English auction.” How Much Wood … begins with comments by the first-, second-, and third-place winners at the livestock auctioneers’ world championship of 1976, held in New Holland, Pennsylvania. After a brief demonstration of his craft, the first speaks of his boyhood-dream-come-true in becoming the world champion auctioneer. He then talks about how he got there, starting as a youngster: “I practiced with numbers […] Then you move on to tongue twisters. […] It requires a lot of practice.”9 He gives a demonstration of the tongue twister from which the film takes its name and then upon request slows the lines down to enunciate each word. He has a bit of difficulty at the slower speed, as he does later with a practice line of sales patter, because “there’s a rhythm that’s missing” without the speed. The second speaker says that he got his start at an auctioneering academy, where his first encounter was with an opera singer who taught him how to breathe. He then tells an anecdote about practicing while driving down country roads, using telephone poles as bidders. Speaker three says that he used the same technique, and also confides that he used the rhythm of milking a cow to develop his skills as a youngster even before that. In his segment, less than ninety seconds long, he insists that “practice makes perfect” in four different formulations. This opening foregrounds the notion of practice so central to Sloterdijk and does so by demarcating the three realms of human self-constructive practice. Speaker one operates in the realm of a “symbolic immune system” in the mythic structure of the dream-come-true; speaker two details the insertion of his body in the aspect of his craft dictated by “material relations;” and speaker three builds a “ritual hull” from the repetition of his favorite motto (see Sloterdijk 2009: 13). There is a great deal of overlap and slippage between these realms, which are interconnected by the common element of practice. How Much Wood … gives a clear demonstration of three further points about the practical mechanisms of anthropotechnology, which in turn help us understand

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better what Herzog uncovers in his American documentaries. First, these realms are parsed along binary “primary differentiations,” such as the “us and them,” “winners and losers,” and “haves and have nots,” with the former element, the “attractor,” serving as the privileged term of social desirability. Being aligned with the attractor is often determined by accrued cultural capital or expertise in a particular practice. The second key aspect is that, while aimed at the pursuit of overabundance and acclaim, practice works on an economy of restraint and renunciation itself, which helps mask material inequalities within the terms designated by the attractor itself. Third, until a practice has been explicitly demystified, the smaller the number of those explicitly initiated into the mysteries, the greater the number of those implicitly engaged in the practice. The relationship between the noisy individuals who practice auctioneering and the silent crowd filling the stands to participate shows that it is not an esoteric/exoteric distinction at work but rather a unity that is differentiated based on degrees of the practice. The audience does not speak the language of auctioneering during each sale, but they know the terms it delineates, and so those inside the sales arena are different from those outside the barn. Inside, those few who know enough of the practice participate in the bodily language of bidding that sets the ritual forward, which leads to final sales for that smaller group with the wherewithal. All can participate equally, but some practitioners are more equal than others. A telling moment illuminating these aspects occurs before the auction begins. Interviewing a group of men about what auctioneers do and about how to judge the winner, from off-camera Herzog poses the simple question: “who will win?” After a brief, awkward pause comes the reply, “the best man,” which elicits general laughter and repetitions. This moment, in which a bit of ritualized wisdom provides an answer to an insoluble question about the future, shows the practiced nature of “spontaneity” which is always being tamed and recuperated to fit the system. It also points to the important convergence of the two primary differentiations: winners and losers come together with the meritorious and those without merit. In each individual sale, the body and language of auctioneer form the veil between the two sides of these unequal pairings, and every “sold” that the auctioneer achieves seems to be his accomplishment, as it merits an individual “winner” in the auction—one who momentarily occupies the whole subset of the “haves” over the “have nots” (a third conflation of primary differentiations). Herzog’s simple choices in filming—primarily showing many competitors through the course of the day—allows the viewer to develop a generalized sense of “winners”: the three best auctioneers (whom we know from the film’s opening) are a displaced extension of the “have-the-mosts” whom we come to know over the course of the film, because their names are called again and again. We begin to realize that the front row seats seem to hold most of these people, so that the winners are in a sense already structurally positioned within the hall when the day begins (Figure  18.1). They are distinguished not so much by finer dress but by the place accorded them by practice and the frequency with which

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Figure 18.1 The placement of the auction winners in How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck (1976). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Werner Herzog/Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

their names are called. With the exception of the Amish, the audience’s outer appearance maintains the semblance of “equality in social conditions” that greets the stranger in this market-driven democracy. It is telling, however, that the name of the winner of each individual auction is not always asked for and given. Many of the competing auctioneers, who have come from across the country and beyond, ask people for their names because they are strangers and it belongs to the practiced form to do so, but if they don’t it doesn’t matter—the people running the show already know the names of the winners. Herzog’s neutrality exposes a basic fantasy: namely, the romantically American notion that everybody has an equal chance—in this case in the buying and selling of livestock and in being the “best man” at the sale. Herzog fantasizes in the frame of his own self-construction on the extremity of the verbal practice which determines the best men at the cattle sale.10 Viewing his film it is clear that he excludes his own monumental self-construction in order to show the viewer the material situatedness of not just that quintessentially

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American language, but of the mentality and the physicality of the figures he puts on screen as well, both human and animal. Thus, Herzog’s neutral approach leads to a more generalized formulation of a hallucinatory American self-construction, namely that “all have an equal chance as bodies at auction.” Here we strike a fanatical cultural trail that has not really become practice: I refer to Walt Whitman’s monomaniacal poetic practice, one commenting on the American institution of the auction not only reserved for cattle, one pointing us back to the color line. In 1946 Langston Hughes anthologized a Walt Whitman poem under the title “Bodies at Auction.”11 In 1855 Whitman had reflected on slavery in America and appropriated the image of the auction block, anticipating marvelously the arguments Darwin would put forward just a few years later. In doing so he used the forms of slavery against itself: Gentlemen look on this wonder, Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for it, For it the globe lay preparing quintillions of years without one animal or plant, For it the revolving cycles truly and steadily roll’d. (Whitman 2002: 85)

The poem aestheticizes and aggrandizes the slave’s body as human, as the crown of evolutionary creation. What separates the auctioneers’ practice from that of the poet is that Herzog’s champion, Stephen Liptay, and his colleagues make no mention of the qualities of the material bodies before them at all during the film, while Whitman “sings the body” at auction. In contradistinction to Herzog’s “masters of speech,” the poet’s voice takes its time and makes no mention of money—save to say that no bid could be high enough. In a sense, Herzog may be justified in wanting to find the new poetry of capitalism in the practice of the auctioneer. It finds a minimum adequate form that certain strains of modernism would have valued in the declaration that here, again, are bodies for sale, tracking what “the ask” and “the bid” are at the greatest speed possible. (“I’m bid 31 and a quarter; do I hear half ? Half, I’m bid 31 and a half, three-quarters; 31 and three-quarters…”) Ultimately, though, the auctioneers’ patter is less akin to a change in poetic language than to an anachronistic analogue of the way “the time horizons of both private and public decision-making have shrunk,” which David Harvey saw as classically indicative of the “condition of postmodernity” in the electronic age (Harvey 1989: 147). In either case, as Liptay points out many times, while one can reduce his line to a slower flow of real words, there is a quality injected through rhythm that becomes absolutely vital, and this, too, he shares with Whitman. In opposing ways Liptay and Whitman both use their language and their own body (Whitman’s poetic, Liptay’s real) to fashion a “now” to which there is no outside. But the poet expands his “now” to include history rather than to exclude it.

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Consider the opening stanza of the segment chosen by Hughes, which immediately precedes the lines cited above: A man’s body at auction, (For before the war I often go to the slave-mart and watch the sale,) I help the auctioneer, the sloven does not half know his business. (85)

Reference to the war caused by the practice of slavery, which had been predicted by Tocqueville, is inserted parenthetically by Whitman in a revision of 1881 as a kind of veil between before and after, but the passage remains in the present tense. “I often go” indicates an habitual practice, but it was “before the war,” which displaces “I help” into an odd realm of a present that should be past, and yet there is still a “body at auction” after emancipation. Whitman points to the roots of the practice of auctioning in slavery and indicates that slavery’s underlying fantasy, the hallucination of racial superiority, remains present after the official end of that institution. So “before the war” is now “after the war” as well. The now of the auctioneer’s language, on the other hand, is always reduced to the individual lot’s sale, and thus to a series of discreet “presents.” Each starts with the number of bodies in the lot and initial price, proceeds to the “sold” for that lot, and then repeats for the next lot. There is no “history” in this language, except for the trace of practice that makes the sale perfect: all else is explicitly excluded. The culture that perpetuates such American sales to this day, in which the auctioneer clearly has perfected his business, has erased traces of those roots. While one might think that the history of auctioning in this country links back inescapably to the practice of slavery and the color line, a quick search of the “history of auctioneering” brings no direct references, and many popular sources currently omit mention of American slavery altogether. Nevertheless, the figure of the auctioneer brings along an unwitting trace of this history: “During the American civil war goods seized by armies were sold at auction by the colonel of the division. Thus, some of today’s auctioneers in the United States carry the unofficial title of ‘colonel’.”12 Regardless of whether the “colonel” was originally blue or gray, the reference to the Civil War reinserts the veil of the color line into a practice from which it seems to have been whited out. Herzog’s American films find the figure of the colonel with this troubling trace dispersed throughout the land. In Stroszek the auctioneer is another world champion, who uses the title of “Colonel” and his role in dispossessing Bruno S. and his companions has been the subject of considerable comment (see Prager 2007: 74; Van Wert 1986). In How Much Wood…, someone in the background of the crowd hails Liptay as “Colonel,” honoring him as the best of the barkers. Unlike Stroszek, where Colonel Ralph Wade appears only briefly, Herzog’s documentary film places the fanatical bodily practice of the auctioneers—the colonels—at the center of decision making for a number of “primary differentiations,” and because of his position neither for nor against this phenomenon, exposes the endorsement of the

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hallucination that the best man wins, that the color lines of money and race are gone, which are lies that the Colonel sells again and again.

The Situating of American—Huie’s Sermon As Whitman provides useful intertexts to a viewing of How Much Wood…, W. E. B. Du Bois can provide insight into Herzog’s reflections on race in America, Huie’s Sermon. Du Bois famously postulated that the color line still represented the greatest challenge to American society in the twentieth century in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Part autobiography and part sociological study, The Souls of Black Folk was one of the first examinations of the reconstruction period as form-giving to “negro” life through the practices they carried forward into emancipation. Institutions of education were among the greatest purveyors of real opportunity in Du Bois’ eyes, but he was not blind to the pitfalls that came with such opportunity, as he relates in a chapter entitled “Of the Meaning of Progress.” While a young student at Fisk University in Nashville, Du Bois got a summer job teaching a handful of young black children in a rural part of Tennessee: “The schoolhouse was a log hut, where Colonel Wheeler used to shelter his corn” (Du Bois 2003: 50). Such schools were an investment by the committees governing over “Freedmen” in order to set up practices to overcome racial inequality, but much of that investment left in charge and even benefited those who opposed emancipation and thus helped to carry inequality forward as well. Colonel James T. Wheeler, for example, was a much-decorated Confederate Officer and member of the leading family in Giles County having an extensive history in the confederate cause. The County Commissioner in charge of the new education funds invited both Du Bois and the new teacher at the white school to dinner, but when the Fisk student arrived excited at the new possibilities in the post-slavery South, “even then fell the awful shadow of the Veil, for they ate first, then I—alone” (50). This whole episode, of course, showed some progress in equality but carried inequality along as well. As Du Bois remarks drily, “Progress, I understand, is necessarily ugly” (55). Adorning that chapter is an epigram cited in German from the fourth act of Friedrich Schiller’s The Maid of Orleans.13 In it the young voice beseeches God in a moment of doubt to send more adequate representatives if he wants the radical message he imparts through her to be spread, representatives better suited than blue-eyed believers, shepherds, and weak young virgins with feelings. Questions of doubt and faith abound in Du Bois’ work, because it recognizes the place and power of religion as part of the “black soul” and yet it is highly critical of many of its forms of expression and practice. In “Of the Faith of Our Fathers” he speaks about the difference in religious attitudes of those “behind the veil” of color in the South and the North. Having glossed the necessity of a kind of obsequiousness in the South as a hypocritical compromise, a lie employed by all socially “undeveloped”

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Figure 18.2 An illumination of the story of “Jacob’s Dream” in Huie’s Sermon (1981). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Werner Herzog/Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

groups in a similar structural position in order to get access to “modern culture” (145), Du Bois moves then to consider the extreme, nearly radical nature of those in part of the country where a modicum of freedom has had a foothold for longer and finds two groups: those in organized religion and those outside it. “The criminal and the sensualist leave the church for the gambling-hell and the brothel, and fill the slums,” he writes (145). That this pairing as a descriptor of black life in America has such a long history is perhaps the reason that Herzog’s camera finds it so easily on display in Huie’s Sermon, a film that the director says “needs no discussion,” adding that it is “about the joys of life, of faith, and of filmmaking” (Cronin 2002: 169). This documentary may be transparent at one level; however, there are assumptions here about the immediacy and the authenticity in the practices of African Americans that call for some commentary. Near the film’s beginning Herzog refers to an illumination of “Jacob’s Dream” (Figure  18.2). The image depicts a mythic past event, the vision of God’s angels ascending and descending to one man disembodied in a dream while sleeping with his head on a rock of a new and strange land. On awakening he realizes, “Surely the Lord is in this place; and I did not know it … . This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven” (Genesis 28: 17–19). More than a gesture to the ubiquitous nature of the Lord, Huie’s Sermon’s inclusion of this image shows its interest in the situatedness of this church within its physical context of a slum, of a primary differentiation between sacred space and profane environment. Understanding that difference relies on the expression of faith through the body of its main subject, Bishop Huie Rogers. The film works to unmask the conflation of the attractors of primary differentiations in Baptist religious practices (such as

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sacred and profane; saved and damned; haves and have nots). These attractors function along the lines of “self-interest properly understood” in what Herzog crafts as an immutably separate black universe. Of the three films under discussion here, Huie’s Sermon is the one into which the director projects himself the least. He does not appear on camera (as he does in How Much Wood …) or on the soundtrack (as he does in both How Much Wood … and God’s Angry Man). The film comprises relatively few, long, mostly static, takes, so the formal properties seem largely straightforward and neutral at first brush. Nevertheless, Huie’s Sermon might be considered the most manipulative of the three “American” TV documentaries. The camera is strategically placed to determine what is included in and excluded from the frame, and viewers only get a sense of what they have—and have not—been looking at later, when context is provided. For example, a one-minute-long take very close to the end of the sermon is a frontal, slightly low-angle shot of a baptismal pool with a transparent front allowing us to see church elders dunking new initiates while standing in about three feet of water. A pull back in rack focus accentuates the low-angle of the shot and shows that the pool is actually above the nave where the elders have been sitting behind Rogers as he preaches. Unlike the two shots that have dominated the previous thirty minutes—trained on Rogers as he preaches straight on from the front door or at a high angle from the balcony—this position finally reveals the relationship of the baptismal pool and the pulpit for the viewer. The visual “revelation” with roughly four minutes left in the film reshapes the church itself through its suddenly open avowal of what has been framed in and framed out. The film’s opening shot helps explain this practice of manipulative construction. It shows the front façade of The Greater Bible Way Temple in full screen from across Lincoln Place (the street sign visible).14 A slow push-in travels toward a group of nicely dressed young men standing by the front door looking at the camera as people enter before the service. An older man inquires about what holds this group up, at which point they gesture to the camera as if it were self-explanatory. The man doesn’t seem to think so, motions them inside, looks around to make sure that no one else is coming, and then disappears through the door. The camera pulls back and tilts up to display the church’s name again. This opening admits nothing to either side of the building and sets up the church as the entire world of the film, an impression reinforced by the fact that the film’s first cut takes us inside the church, where we remain for the next twenty minutes. A long sequence of the choir making a stylized entrance while dancing and singing, is shot from a camera positioned at the back of the hall facing the altar as they walk by and, though occasional images of faces in the congregation are intercut, the first third of the film consists by and large of two takes: the exterior façade and the interior area from this position. Rogers begins his sermon in a measured manner, and the intensity begins to build as he moves, stomps, and chants, pulling the congregation and film audience with him. The theme is “God is in control,” and Rogers has moved to the side and begun to really play the rhythm of call and response with his flock,

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Figure 18.3 Desolate houses and charred storefronts in Huie’s Sermon (1981). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Werner Herzog/Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

punctuated by his irregular breathing and the stomping of feet. As he repeats that he is glad that God is in control in this crazy world where girls have operations to be boys and the dollar has begun to slide, a sudden and unexpected cut jumps to a tracking shot of desolate houses and charred storefronts (Figure  18.3). While images that could be from a war zone scroll by, Rogers’ voice is the sound bridge, continuing its exhortation and claiming that God decides who is in the church and who is not. Since it is Herzog who decides what is inside and outside of the frame beneath Rogers’ commentary, his manipulation reminds us here of the more sociological analysis of Du Bois in explaining this dichotomy. By effectively putting the viewer in a car driving through a world nearly diametrically opposed to the secure, populated, opulent, boisterous world of the church, Herzog shows us the world of the black “criminals” and “sensualists” who have left the church. Unlike the film’s opening shot, the framing of this minute-long take traveling the streets, which recurs about ten minutes later, makes identifying the setting of this squalor impossible for the uninitiated viewer: no street signs appear and no landmarks locate the backdrop. Certainly for the German TV audience, the impression of this constructed sequence is that this devastation comprises the immediate

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physical context of the Greater Bible Way Temple. No doubt intended to make the faith expressed there all the more remarkable, the temple and the rituals practiced inside it become a specifically situated oasis in a seemingly endless urban blight.15 This situatedness retroactively explains the second shot in Huie’s Sermon, the illustration of “Jacob’s Dream” with angels descending behind him, which lies open as one enters the Temple. The appearance of this image is so swift as to be almost subliminal, but its meaning in practice is now reinforced through the film’s construction: it repeats, “I know that God dwells in this place,” Jacob’s ritual phrase that decides the primary differentiation of sacred versus profane in favor of the former, the privileged “attractor” term providing the ideological goad fostering self-interest properly understood. Huie’s Sermon situates the specific faith and joy of the Greater Bible Way Temple in relation to the general squalor of the slum. This may be done to make the viewer wonder at the power of belief in such circumstances but, intentionally or not, it also generates a sense of literal self-interest for being in the church. Rogers himself reinforces this by basing his preaching on variations of the theme of “selfinterest properly understood.” First he offers inclusion in the church as the answer to problems of the self that are leading people to do “crazy” things like having sex-change operations or relying on the stability of the dollar. But, as his sermon advances, we move to a longer term: never denying the drive to personal gain, Rogers addresses the fact that his flock, even though it is not doing those crazy things, needs other forms of compensation. He draws two men from the congregation, a petty accountant and a bus-driver, paints a picture of them going about their jobs, and then invokes the rapture as the ultimate differentiator between those who are taken up and those “left behind,” which will make earthly travails irrelevant. He then tells the story of a housewife, who feels that she “doesn’t do anything” like productive work: “and she’s gonna be in the kitchen, and flip up a pancake, and the pancake’s gonna stay up and she’s gonna stay up, too.” All this is punctuated with “hallelujahs” of the congregation. It is not unusual for religious discourse to displace the reward for the faithful into the hereafter, but this film also presents the practice of call-and-response in the service as an explicit expression of the “haves” inside the temple against the “have-nots” in the slum. Rogers’ conflates this with the (extremely conservatively framed) differentiations of normal/abnormal and sacred/profane. The film, however, situates these differentiations within a realm defined visually as the place of people of color, the counterpart to which is implied at the end of the first traveling shot in the slum. Just before cutting back to Rogers, the camera glides across a shiny, non-descript new building in the background, a building given no more contour than being “other” to all that we have seen thus far (Figure  18.4). Given Herzog’s practiced neutrality in the pieces I have been discussing, it seems clear that this traveling shot ends on this visibly “different” building in order to include the fact of structurally embedded racism in American society: i.e. it is a gesture to the world of whiteness that cordons off the “black” world of the sacred and the

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Figure 18.4 Images of another world included in Huie’s Sermon (1981). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Werner Herzog/Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

profane. Herzog’s “objective camera” thus brings with it a larger critical moment; however, as consideration of the multiple slippages at work in this film will show, it also relies on a discourse of authenticity that is blind to its own situatedness in a dichotomy of white and black. A critical claim of blindness to color may seem odd at first, since Herzog often takes race and difference as a given and is certainly not one to invoke a softhearted humanism averring that we are all equals. Herzog’s famous line in La Soufrière comes to mind, which shifts the concern from documenting an inevitable catastrophe to understanding a “black man’s relation to death.” Setting aside the question of race representation in Herzog’s work, I want to return to the notion of authenticity in his practice. Huie’s Sermon’s opening shot, which insists on this as a real place, also is followed by the quick gesture to Jacob’s dream, which symbolically depicts the Temple as a place in which we “know” God dwells. These two shots of differing duration take us into the Temple—one does so physically/materially, the other ritually. It is instructive to look now at how the viewer is extracted from that place. The film’s final shot is an extremely long take of Rogers standing by his pulpit, looking into the camera, with the pews and front entrance of the church visible behind him. Throughout the film the camera has been placed looking in the other direction (at the back or balcony of the church looking at the altar), but now the viewer is positioned at the very opposite end: although Huie is depicted in a three-quarter frontal shot, Herzog’s camera has gotten behind what was happening in the church and provides this shot looking out as an “afterthought.” In a 2007 conversation at Brandeis University, during which Herzog and Errol Morris share apologies for past transgressions that had estranged them from one another, the German-born director speaks of something that he feels Morris has

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mastered. From him Herzog has learned the “afterthought” in documentary, a practice of leaving the camera rolling after the purpose of a take has been fulfilled. Used most often after an interview, this technique elicits an unscripted action from the subject, who has been left in the dark as to whether things have concluded and so, eventually, provides a moment of unplanned reality in her or his reaction. Morris picks up the idea and expounds: It’s powerful because you can tell by looking at it it’s unplanned. It comes from this moment of being deeply uncertain what to do, what to say, what will happen next. […] If everything was planned, it would be dreadful. If everything was unplanned, it would be equally dreadful. Cinema exists because there are elements of both in everything. There are elements of both in documentary (Herzog and Morris 2008: 72).

The manner in which Herzog has adopted the practice of the afterthought is familiar to those who know his work, and when he decides to put such a moment in a film, it tends to underscore his claim that his fiction and documentary work is not necessarily to be distinguished. Morris implies that the afterthought’s power lies not just in being unplanned but in the viewer’s certainty that it is unplanned, which corresponds to Herzog’s perspective.16 It relies on relinquishing an implicit power in the interview/filming situation, but without informing the interviewee being filmed—it is the moment in the subject/object relationship when the object becomes productive of meaning (or, sinnstiftend) without realizing that it has subjectivity. Returning to the deployment of this technique in Huie, we see it intensified: the viewer does not know if an interview has taken place or not (Rogers is not shown speaking outside of the sermon), but after fifteen seconds of standing composed before the camera in a suit but no vestments, the Bishop becomes visibly uncomfortable, shifting his eyes back and forth questioningly, and finally leaves the frame, at which point the film cuts abruptly to credits on a black screen. The afterthought is the catalyst here for a discomfort that cracks apart the sense that Rogers is entirely the public persona that we have watched perform for more than thirty minutes, forcing a private, uncertain individual to emerge. Rogers, too, becomes a figure subject to self-interest properly understood, rather than a figure simply equivalent to the performance of his faith. Ironically, Herzog’s attempt to get an authentic reaction through the “afterthought” releases Rogers from the biased assumptions of authenticity that have undergirded the film’s presentation of his “black” preaching to that point. Herzog’s sense that this is a film that needs no comment thus has something of a dual edge to it. On the one hand, the people in this documentary are allowed no participation here beyond “doing what they do” for the camera, and their practice “speaks for itself.” Both the church and the slum are transparently of one black world here. More than a hint of essentialism may be at work in the presentation of “joy” captured by the seemingly neutral anthropologist’s camera. Herzog injects commentary in the way in which the very specific situatedness of the Temple and

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the general malaise of the black slum are constructed in the editing room, which rediscovers a trope in the same split—the same parting of the veil—among Northern African Americans that Du Bois had found: between the criminal and sensualist outside the church and those on the inside. But in The Souls of Black Folk there was a third group in the North, one that was of neither the Church nor the slums: the better classes [that] segregate themselves from the group-life of both white and black, and form an aristocracy, cultured but pessimistic, whose bitter criticism stings while it points out no way of escape. They despise […] submission and subservience […] but offer no other means by which a poor and oppressed minority can exist side by side with its masters. Feeling deeply and keenly the tendencies and opportunities of the age in which they live, their souls are bitter at the fate which drops the Veil between; and the very fact that this bitterness is natural and justifiable only serves to intensify it and make it more maddening (2003: 145–146).

Du Bois clearly struggles not to fall prey to such bitterness while training his eye on this group as well, to which he clearly could belong much more than those on the street or in the church. Herzog’s film eclipses any consideration of such a group, any group in the black community present outside of the church/slum dichotomy, in part because real existing conditions do not seem to reflect it, in part because Herzog can only envision such a group behind the camera in a racially un-demarcated realm (of both his crew and the German audience at home), one divorced from the American whiteness he gestures to critically in that one pivotal shot.

The Whiteness of the Whale—God’s Angry Man In Huie’s Sermon Herzog’s technique of the afterthought breaks through the absolute identity of Rogers with his public personae and cracks his seemingly endless confidence in his own exhortation that God is in control. The afterthought elicits quite a different response from a charismatic cleric in God’s Angry Man: Dr. Gene Scott, the featured televangelist, simply smirks as if his time in front of his own cameras had made this technique transparent to him. Neither dramatic nor telling enough to serve as a final moment, Herzog inserts this as an oddly quiet moment about midway through the film, which is otherwise dominated by Scott talking either to his cameras during his show or to Herzog’s while being interviewed. Decidedly missing from God’s Angry Man is the careful locating of this subject matter in a social space. Whereas How Much Wood … and Huie’s Sermon take the time to suggest a specific situatedness, this film is said to take place in Los Angeles but the viewer sees only the inside of a studio, the inside of a non-descript sitting room, or the inside of a limo. The other two documentaries use shots from a car moving slowly through an area to place their subjects and actions in a set of surroundings; the camera in the car sequences in God’s Angry Man neither looks out of the vehicle

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nor provides a background for the sequence that includes anything recognizable. The point is clearly that the TV-landscape in which Scott operates is unreal, not anchored, but the effect created by this non-space dominated by Scott is an inescapable sense of whiteness in a variety of meanings. Scott is unassuming in his appearance, a tall Caucasian man in his late forties with a good head of snow white hair wearing a light colored suit, and it is difficult in retrospect not to see a kinship to the image of Fitzcarraldo (being planned in this same time frame). In many ways the sense of whiteness is accentuated by the way this film seems the negative of Huie’s Sermon, for though both are charismatic religious leaders, the parallels between Rogers and Scott end there. Rogers is black, thronged by a black congregation, leads a church in a joyous expression of faith in song, has a preaching style that is presented as natural, and exudes a piety that is irrepressible. Scott is white, never shown with a congregation or individual worshippers (though he lists impressive numbers of parishioners in his two churches), the gospel song bits in his shows seem artificial and cute rather than authentic, and he never makes a pronouncement in the film that gets closer to piety than “God’s honor is at stake every night.” Of these three American TV documentaries, Scott comes closest to the fanatics with whom Herzog is most often associated—be they real (like Jean-Bèdel Bokassa) or fictional (like Kinski’s creations). While whiteness obviously is not necessary for becoming such a fanatic, there are powerful links from God’s Angry Man to the quintessential text in nineteenth-century American letters about whiteness and fanaticism, links hinted at by those critics who liken Scott to Captain Ahab of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Ahab is the fictional figure most often invoked to build comparisons to Herzog’s megalomaniacal worlds. This raving giant of literature, for whom Huie Rogers’ litany that “God is in control” is precisely the problem and who would thus challenge the sun itself in the sky, is a point of reference for writers over the decades when they talk about everything from Herzog as a director to Kinski as an actor to other figures who appear as the objects of his films (see, for example, Bush 1995; Fuchs 2005; Spiegel 1982: 186; Studer 2006). Ahab’s pursuit of the white whale makes an interesting point of comparison for Herzog’s fanatics, with “monomania” being the term that recurs most frequently in the chapter entitled “Moby Dick,” which explains Ahab’s obsession with the behemoth: All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick (Melville 1979: 186).

For Scott, as Herzog presents him, the government has become his Moby Dick, and he spends much of the film venting his hatred of “bureaucrats” both during his show and during interview segments. While “crazy Ahab” ultimately challenges God about this evil, Scott challenges his audience to recreate God through the practice of giving. He stops his show and

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leaves dead air hanging until certain sums have been collected, and vast amounts come in many nights; in other moments he simply berates the viewer. He never speaks of faith or love or even fear of God—if anything, he invokes a fear for God. The only existence of God is to be found in the size and wealth of the institution of the church that serves to uphold his image. But, though he fears for God’s honor, Scott does not say that he serves God. Rather, he cannot stand to see a church go down and, even if he weren’t contracted to do so, he would risk everything to help keep these churches afloat. He provides the emotional charge to connect the viewers to those abstractions so they can avoid the thoughts required by material experience. God’s Angry Man therefore proceeds not by endorsing a deliberately deceptive romantic position of identification, but rather by cutting through the level of hallucination of scripture and faith and moving straight to the economic relations necessary for those things to exist in this culture. In doing so a flood of material wealth for his church comes into existence. What makes Scott a fanatic as Herzog presents him is not so much his obsession as his development of a practice that absolutely refuses to employ the tropes that, from Tocqueville on down, have been used to shape equal ideological participation in structures of American inequality. The notion of “self-interest properly understood” is carried to the extreme: there is no appeal aimed at the audience members to contribute to save their souls or because there is a gain for them, but because God cannot exist without their money. In a manner anticipating the Supreme Court’s 2010 “Citizens United” ruling, the corporation has been raised to the higher level of the individual. The self-interest of the institution, properly understood, serves the greatest good of all—namely authenticating the existence of God, which is otherwise not in evidence. TV provides the world of abstract equality in social condition through which that authentication can take place. As Herzog presents him, Scott uses TV as a kind of prosthetic weapon against his adoring congregation, and he represents a moment of anthropotechnological evolution that is oddly anticipated by the remarkable simile Melville uses to describe Ahab: “He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it” (186). Scott feels he acts in a heroic fashion because life and death are always in the balance, but the irony is that this very weapon, TV, cannot sustain the heroic. This is best encapsulated by Herzog’s ending neither with an explosive tirade nor with an afterthought but rather with a lifeless pan of a bluewhite toned skyline set to kitschy music, the pathetic lead-in to Scott’s program, the Festival of Faith. The tone of that image and the sounds that accompany it bring us back to the topic of whiteness with which we began this section. It is a topic that much occupies Melville’s narrator, who begins the next chapter on “The Whiteness of the Whale,” with “what the White Whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid” (189). Since Ishmael is far closer to Herzog in these documentaries than Ahab, in closing I want to turn to his understanding of the practice of whiteness.17

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After a stunning rehearsal of cultural associations between whiteness and goodness and/or power throughout the western hemisphere and European history, Ishmael also notes that whiteness plays a role in just as many superstitions and fears. He speculates that one key is the “pallor of the dead” (194), the “spectralness” that attaches itself to the shade (195). But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why […] as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind (197).

Ishmael’s contemplation of whiteness when looking at the stars, where Herzog, too, finds only hateful chaos, gives a voice to that spectralness: Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as an essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? (198).

The whiteness of the Festival of Faith, into which Herzog draws us in God’s Angry Man, envelops both the magnetism of the cultic personality and the appalling realization that so many people have no imagination to grapple with the hues of mortality and so take recourse in giving money to somebody like Scott to establish a ritual hull for them. The congregation that practices in America’s TV landscape finds itself confronted with dumb blankness at all times. If there is an “inner landscape” illuminated through Herzog’s presentation of the practices of Dr. Gene Scott’s Festival of Faith, “the colorless, all-color” of Ishmael’s snowfield may well describe it. Ishmael creates a final point of contact with Herzog that has to do with the recognition of the problematic nature, the colorless whiteness, of illumination itself, which gives all color to nature: consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of [nature’s] hues, the great principle of light, forever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like willful travelers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him (198).

One is struck immediately by the Herzogian ring of this passage in, say, the reference to the universe, when unmediated, as a diseased and chaotic entity, or in

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Figure 18.5 A reflection on the medium itself in God’s Angry Man (1981). Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by Werner Herzog/Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

the anecdote of the fanatics whose practice takes them to the extremity of blindness. Herzog claims that his film practice offers us such mediation and that in doing so he is “into illumination for the sake of a deeper truth” (Murphy 2007); however, in his neutral presentation of Dr. Gene Scott he stresses that the medium of illumination can create a blindness when stared at too long.

Afterthought The films of Herzog’s “first” American period correspond to the rise of the first wave of the “conservative revolution” of Reagan (and Thatcher and Kohl). The later films that involve the United States—such as Grizzly Man, Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1998), Rescue Dawn (2006), and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call—New Orleans (2009)—seem devoid of the same sense of the deeply rooted, traditional American problematics. Herzog once shared that sense with Tocqueville regarding practices of equality in class, color, and creed that function both to develop and to mask inequality. Looking back today at the documentaries of this American period, one  sees how these early films engaged with the ghosts of religion, greed, and racism that have since reemerged to haunt the American political scene. If nothing else, there was an odd prescience in Herzog’s un-Herzogian documentary practice some thirty years ago, that of a stranger looking at “democracy in America” through a lens that illuminates where we were and were not heading with the language, situatedness, and material relations of our own hallucinatory

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self-constructions. The neutrality of his stranger’s perspective helps us see that the doctrine of American self-interest should now be properly understood: not a sublime doctrine, but one that is clear and unambiguous.

Notes 1 2

3

4

5

6

7

8

See de Tocqueville (2003: 25). Throughout this essay, variations on the term “America” appear without scare quotes because they are used with this text in mind. “Wiederholung plus Übersetzung plus Generalisierung ergibt, richtig gerechnet, Verdeutlichung” (Sloterdijk 2009: 33). Unless otherwise noted, all translations from German are the author’s. For representative readings of this metaphysical gesture in both Herzog’s fictional and non-fiction work, see Gandy (1996) and Ames (2009). Herzog notes an influence in Tarkovsky, but feels that he became too much the darling of French cinephiles (Cronin 2002: 138). For a commenter who wants to distinguish Herzog from Tarkovsky, see Chipperfield (2001). Though there has been some renewed commentary around these films when shown in retrospectives, the sense that they are atypical of Herzog remains. See Buruma (2007) as a recent example of a review of the “Documentaries and Shorts: 1962–1999” that ignores these pieces in favor of things that can be more easily aligned with the poetic renderings of master “raconteurs” like Bruce Chatwin and Ryszard Kapuscinski. While arguing that documentary is Herzog’s forte, Paul Arthur mentions God’s Angry Man only to claim its central figure, Gene Scott, is an anomaly in his oeuvre, and then return to romantic mystery: “Herzog’s strongest moments revolve around what can’t be shown” (Arthur 2005: 47). See Silverman (1981–82). Kaspar Hauser’s situation before and after his “fall” is a strong parallel here, but the division is not between a pre- and post-lapsarian state in regard to language, for even in the cave Kaspar knows signification—but rather between fanaticism and utilitarian or civilized behavior. At the outset, consistently rolling his toy horse back and forth and repeating the word “horse” (Roß), Kaspar is the quintessential fanatic. The sequence in The Wild Blue Yonder (2005) in which the speaker extols what untouched nature would look like (and shows us as much on camera) underscores rather than contradicts this point. Herzog has no patience for nature that he hasn’t trained with his camera (hence the recurrence of aerial shots in his films). Later in this essay, we may want to remind ourselves of his tirade against the heavens: “The sky is vile. They have no constellations, they just have chaos. The stars are a mess” (Goodwin 1982: 36). The full passage reads as a turning away from the various kinds of human praxis that reside at the heart of explanatory systems from Kant and Marx to Foucault and Habermas: “If man actually produces the human, then it is precisely not accomplished through work and its material results nor through the recently praised ‘work on the self,’ and certainly not through the alternately prized ‘interaction’ or ‘communication’: it is accomplished through life in practices” (Sloterdijk 2009: 13). Originally unpublished fragment, date uncertain: text and format taken from “America” (Whitman 2002: 598–599).

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9 Herzog’s translation supports the connection to Sloterdijk that I have established: Herzog translates this: “Ich übte mit Zahlen … übt man mit Zungenbrechern … Das braucht sehr viel Übung.” 10 He repeatedly professes to dream of a return to the area in which he uses the auctioneer to stage a fifteen-minute version of Hamlet, because it would be “powerful poetry” (see Cronin 2002: 141). 11 Originally untitled and unsectioned, Whitman’s 1946 poem from which these lines are taken was one of the “Children of Adam” pieces in Leaves of Grass. Hughes anthologized as “Bodies at Auction” parts VII and VIII of the poem, which, since the 1880 s, has been known as “I Sing the Body Electric.” 12 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auction, accessed July 20, 2010. This site is representative of the downplaying or even erasing of the slave trade in most popular sources when recounting the history of auctions. Even in this explanation, one suspects that the general, passive construction (“goods seized by armies were sold”) masks the crux of the history being referred to here. 13 Du Bois spent time studying and reporting on German culture and, thus, in that context offers something of a parallel to the outsider figures found in de Tocqueville and Herzog. 14 The Greater Bible Way Temple still sits at Lincoln Place and Rochester Avenue in the Weeksville section of Brooklyn. 15 On Herzog and spiritual versus material freedom for indigenous Americans, see Elsaesser (1993: 130–131). 16 Clearly, this sense of reality is not generated solely in the “unplanned” for the German director. Renewing and playing up the old Herzog-mystique of being a director who demands anything of actors and is willing to do anything himself to get them to do it, one of the chief topics in the promotion of Rescue Dawn (2006) revolves around Christian Bale biting a snake, which Herzog presents as having been planned all along. The first thing he asked Bale, he claims, was whether the actor would be ready to bite a snake in half. Why was that so important? “Because the audience must be able to trust their eyes. When you see Christian catch the snake and bite it, you know immediately this is not a digital trick or special effects” (Grant 2007). Bale, too, sees reality (rather than acting) in the moment of filming in a "snake-infested river"; however, the final product is “not real life” (see Murray 2007). 17 Ishmael professes to having, “a wild, mystical, sympathetical [sic] feeling” of identification with Ahab’s quest (180) even though he “could see naught in that brute [the whale] but the deadliest ill” (189). This uncannily parallels Herzog’s position vis-à-vis Timothy Treadwell.

Works Cited Ames, Eric: “Herzog, Landscape, and Documentary.” Cinema Journal 48.2 (2009): 49–69. Arthur, Paul: “Beyond the Limits: Werner Herzog’s Metaphysical Realism,” Film Comment 41 (2005): 42. Borski, Arnim: “Exzentriker—das sind die anderen,” Der Abend, July 6, 1973: 6. Buruma, Ian: “Herzog and His Heroes,” New York Review of Books, July 19, 2007: 24–26.

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Bush, Lyall: “The Wrath of Werner Herzog,” Moviemaker Magazine (November 30, 1995), www.moviemaker.com/directing/article/the_wrath_of_werner_herzog_3146/. Chipperfield, Alkan: “Murmurs from a Shadowless Land: Fragmentary Reflections on the Cinema of Werner Herzog,” Senses of Cinema 15 ( June 2001), http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/15/herzog_alkan.html. Cronin, Paul, ed.: Herzog on Herzog (London: Faber & Faber, 2002). Davidson, John E.: “‘As Others Put Plays Upon the Stage’: Aguirre, Neocolonialism, and the New German Cinema,” New German Critique 60 (1993): 101–130. Davidson, John E.: “Contacting the Other: Traces of Migrational Colonialism and the Imperial Agent in Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo,” Film and History 24 (1994): 66–83. de Tocqueville, Alexis: Democracy in America: And Two Essays on America, ed. Isaac Kramnick, trans. Gerald E. Bevan (London: Penguin, 2003). Du Bois, W. E. B.: The Souls of Black Folk, intro. Farah Jasmine Griffin (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003). Elsaesser, Thomas: “Hyper-, Retro- or Counter-Cinema: European Cinema and Third Cinema between Hollywood and Art Cinema,” Mediating Two Worlds: Cinematic Encounters in the Americas, ed. John King, Ana Lopez, and Manuel Alvardo (London: British Film Institute, 1993), pp. 119–135. Fuchs, Cynthia: “Review of Burden of Dreams” (2005), www.popmatters.com/film/ reviews/b/burden-of-dreams-dvd.shtml. Gandy, Matthew: “Visions of Darkness: The Representation of Nature in the Films of Werner Herzog,” Ecumene 3.1 (1996): 1–21. Goodwin, Michael: “Herzog: The God of Wrath,” American Film 7.8 (1982): 36–39, 42–43, 45–51, 72–73. Grant, Richard: “Werner Herzog: Chaos Theory,” Telegraph.co.uk (November 3, 2007), www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3669038/Werner-Herzog-chaos-theory.html. Harvey, David: The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). Herzog, Werner and Morris, Errol: “Werner Herzog [Filmmaker] in Conversation with Errol Morris [Documentarian],” The Believer, 6.3 (2008): 65–72, www.believermag. com/issues/200803/?read=interview_herzog. Hoberman, J.: “Over the Volcano,” Village Voice, May 22, 1978: 66. Melville, Herman: Moby Dick; or, The Whale (San Francisco: Arion Press, 1979 [original 1851]). Murphy, Mekado: “Werner Herzog is Still Breaking the Rules,” New York Times ( July 1, 2007), www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/movies/01murp.html. Murray, Rebecca: “Christian Bale Talks Rescue Dawn,” About.com (2007), http://movies. about.com/od/rescuedawn/a/rescuedaw062007.htm. Pflaum, Hans G.: Deutschland im Film: Themenschwerpunkte Des Spielfilms in Der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (München: Hueber, 1985). Prager, Brad: The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (London: Wallflower Press, 2007). Rayns, Tony: “Aguirre, Wrath of God,” Sight & Sound (Winter 1974/75): 5–6. Rentschler, Eric: “The Politics of Vision: Herzog’s Heart of Glass,” The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History. ed. Timothy Corrigan (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 159–182.

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Silverman, Kaja: “Kaspar Hauser’s ‘Terrible Fall’ into Narrative,” New German Critique 24–25 (1981–82): 73–94. Sloterdijk, Peter: Du mußt dein Leben ändern: Über Anthropotechnik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009). Spiegel: “Kunst als Wahn oder Caruso für den Amazonas,” Spiegel 10 (March 8, 1982): 182, 184, 186. Studer, Seth: “A Guide to the Films of Werner Herzog,” Bandoppler Magazine (February 21, 2006), www.bandoppler.com/0206_FG_Herzog.htm. Van Wert, William: “Last Words: Observations on a New Language,” The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, ed. Timothy Corrigan (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 51–72. Whitman, Walt: I Hear the People Singing: Selected Poems of Walt Whitman, ed. Langston Hughes (New York: International Publishers, 1946). Whitman, Walt: Leaves of Grass and Other Writings: Authoritative Texts, Other Poetry and Prose, Criticism, ed. Michael Moon (New York: Norton, 2002). Žižek, Slavoj: “Hallucination as Ideology in Cinema,” Precarious Visualities: New Perspectives on Identification in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, ed. Johanne Lamoureux, Christine Ross, and Olivier Asselin (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), pp. 229–244.

Additional Films Cited Annaud, Jean-Jacques: Enemy at the Gates (2001) Scott, Ridley: Hannibal (2001) Tarkovsky, Andrei: Stalker (1979)

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19

Herzog’s Chickenshit Rembert Hüser

We showed this film to an audience and asked them what they had seen, and they said they had seen a chicken. John Wilson, “Film Illiteracy in Africa” (1961: 9)1 In an anecdote concerning the surprising reception of an instructional film about waste disposal from a 1940s British ethnographic study in Africa, Marshall McLuhan exemplified that a picture is in fact a convention. While this foundational idea of media studies still holds true, in Werner Herzog’s case, diverse audiences from Africa, North America, and Europe may very well again defy expectations by coming out of the cinema and all remembering the very same image. (And yet another filmic image that, strictly speaking, is not part of the plot.) If one were to ask the audiences of Werner Herzog retrospectives which single take from all of his films had left the greatest imprint on their memory, the most common answer in all likelihood would be: the dancing chicken at the end of Stroszek (1977). No other take in a Herzog film has led a comparable life of its own, nor been as endlessly discussed in scholarship. No other take has morphed into an author portrait, transformed into both a pop song (by the band Life in a Blender)2 and into a video clip showing not only the original footage in black and white, but also following its subject in its little chicken archaeology to exotic places and museums in our midst where we can finally confront what agitates us. By now, the strange chicken that Herzog found in Cherokee, North Carolina has also become famous outside of the film as a subcultural marker for a generation other than Herzog’s. This first became evident in cryptic scratched-in graffiti in the lead-out groove on a vinyl record released in Manchester, England in 1981. While messages such as WHERE’S THE 14TH FLOOR3 or KEEP STUM PLUGARISM INFECTS THE LAND4 were a popular means of in-group A Companion to Werner Herzog, First Edition. Edited by Brad Prager. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Figure 19.1 Ian Curtis’s shoes at a crucial point in 24 Hour Party People (2002). Directed by Michael Winterbottom, produced by Andrew Eaton for Revolution Films.

communication within the early punk and post-punk scene, the reference to Stroszek was unusual. It could be found in close proximity to the Factory-label printing sticker of Still, the compilation album of the pioneering post-punk band Joy Division, which was assembled after lead-singer Ian Curtis’ death. By holding the record up to a light one could view the following at the end of side A of the double album: THE CHICKEN WON’T STOP, (on side B): -< -< -< -< -< -< (on side C): -< -< -< -