I still enjoy a flashback recall of the vertiginous opening of “Aguirre, The Wrath of God”–the conquistadors and their Indian porters descending by footpath out of the clouds down a sheer wall, the silence broken only by an occasional stone clattering into the abyss. Later in the film, there was the memorable vision of Klaus Kinski as Aguirre, the camera whirlpooling around him on a jungle river as he floated on a raft surrounded by dead men and screeching monkeys. Above, in the branches of a towering tree rested a full-size Spanish galleon. Here was the madness and the beauty of dreams, all crystallized in one swirling shot. Garcia Marquez could write this sort of thing on a piece of paper in the privacy of his study; Herzog could film it out there in the world! He created spectacle on the scale of a Cecil B. DeMille, but as might have been staged by Todd Browning, the director of “Freaks” (and not so coincidentally, one of Herzog’s favorite auteurs).
Along with Rainer Marie Fassbinder and Wim Wenders, Herzog was part of that great ’70s flood of what has come to be called the New German Wave. Fassbinder whipped up rich, historically urgent melodramas, Wenders concocted American-influenced, spiritually hungry adventures, but Herzog’s cinema were the most radical of the lot. He shot myth as much as movies. It was as if his ultimate ambition was to film the first seven days of the Book of Genesis, allowing the primordial elements–rivers and deserts, oceans and jungle, the sun and the moon–as strong a point of view as humans. Herzog’s unabashed love for remythologizing the world, his trust in the volatilities of the unconscious and his pleasure in the power of spectacle alarmed many German leftists. Folks get nervous around Germans with a thing for myth. Herzog simultaneously mocked the perfectibility of man, while exulting in his endless dreams and visions. “Civilization,” he says, “is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.”
Given his stature, fecund mind and productivity–Herzog has made 11 features and 34 documentaries since 1962–I find it deranging that his last major theatrical release was “Fitzcarraldo” back in 1982. Since then, there have been a few features and plenty of brilliant documentaries, but they have been hard to find, even if you live in a major city. An era in which eager exegetes rhapsodize about the philosophical underpinnings of “The Matrix Reloaded” is not hospitable to a true genius who disdains explication. “Film should be looked at straight on,” Herzog has said, “it is not the art of scholars but of illiterates.” Fortunately, we are now blessed with an extraordinary book of interviews, “Herzog on Herzog” (340 pages. Faber and Faber. $16), ably conducted and compiled by Paul Cronin, which should not only refire a movie lover’s interest in Herzog, but proves beyond a doubt that the director’s own life would make one hell of a Werner Herzog movie.
But for the crazy fun of it, let’s begin with a few rumors, shall we? By themselves, unqualified and unrebutted, they suggest that Herzog is a most remarkable presence. Such lore does not accumulate around mere accountants. Nor does it cling to even the ostensibly brave visionaries of Hollywood. Herzog, for instance, is said to have supervised the volcanic actor Klaus Kinski from behind the camera with a rifle. Untrue, says the director. He did, however, threaten to shoot Kinski (who was also his best friend and alter ego) if the actor fled the production of “Aguirre,” deep in the Peruvian jungle, as he was in the process of doing. “He had enough instinct to understand this was no joke or hollow threat,” Herzog slyly confesses, “and screamed for the police, even though the next outpost was 300 miles away.” The distance between legend and fact in this example is impressively small.
In the storied case of Werner Herzog eating his own shoe, the distance would seem to be nonexistent. He had promised the filmmaker Errol Morris that he would eat his shoe when Morris, a notorious ditherer, finally finished his first movie (which became the documentary “Gates of Heaven”). And that Herzog did, sitting with knife and fork on stage before a full house in Berkeley, the shoe nicely sauteed in duck fat. Les Blank recorded the meal for posterity in a film aptly enough called “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.”
It has also been rumored of Herzog that he pledged to the accident-prone dwarf cast of the 1970 film “Even Dwarves Started Small” that if they survived the rest of filming without any further incident, the director would throw himself into a cactus. Imagine getting to write the previous sentence about Steven Spielberg, by the way. This story has been around for at least 25 or so years–I heard it from a film buff back in the ’70s. It also appears to be true. “A director should not be safe and sound behind the camera while the actors are feeling all alone out there,” Herzog says. “So I put on some goggles to protect my eyes and jumped from a ramp. And I can tell you that getting out is a lot more difficult than jumping in … The spines were the size of my fingers. I do not think I have any left embedded in me. It seems that the body absorbs them eventually.”
Getting out is a lot more difficult than jumping in … A fair description not only of cactus-diving but of moviemaking, as well. Yet Herzog is an exemplar of true faith. He comes across in this collaborative self-portrait as one of the canniest holy fools around. Canny in that he knows how to wrestle the most unlikely of film projects through to conclusion, movies that required the conviction of saints to even launch. Winch a boat over a mountain in the middle of the jungle, as he did in “Fitzcarraldo”? He finds the way to do it. Build a Spanish galleon and put it in the trees, as he did in “Aguirre”? He constructs an actual ship and lifts it up there. Hypnotize an entire cast to give a film the feeling of collective sleepwalking, as he did in “Heart of Glass”? Herzog learned hypnosis and literally mesmerized his actors–a skill that he also must have used on the various brave souls who had the fortitude to invest in his ventures. He often put his own money into his pictures, and sometimes began films without having the resources to finish them. Inevitably, providence (and sometimes German TV) came to the rescue.
In fact, “Herzog on Herzog” ought to serve as a required text for every film school in the country (or better, for every unattached aspiring director, if there are any) as it enshrines the value of independence, of getting work done without the sponsorship of large studios. Filmmaking is more than anything an athlete’s endeavor, says Herzog. “It does not come from abstract academic thinking; it comes from your knees and thighs.” Physical courage is required. He recommends that future directors learn boxing, juggling, magic tricks, that they walk, for example, from Madrid to Kiev, notebooks in hand. Herzog himself was a cagey club soccer player and is famous for his long treks on foot. He downplays the amount of technical knowledge needed. He denigrates storyboards as “the instruments of cowards.” Sound is every bit as important as the visuals in a film, he says, citing the French director Robert Bresson as a master of the varieties of silence. It is in the editing room where a film “has a privilege to live its own life and develop its own character.” “You must let the material escape the clutches of the script,” the director argues. Herzog’s dicta are the illuminations that come not from developing a career, but from pursuing a vocation, a calling.
And above all else, that vocation has rested on the premise that fiction trumps fact, and that faith placed in the imagination as the agent of story will be rewarded by the wild gods. “The deep inner truth inherent in cinema,” he tells Cronin in the course of an attack on the relative literality of cinema verite, “can be discovered only by not being bureaucratically, politically, and mathematically correct.” There is a paucity to mere fact, Herzog insists. “Through invention, through imagination, through fabrication, I become more truthful than the little bureaucrats.” To this end, the director even invented a Blaise Pascal epigraph for his movie, “The Lessons of Darkness”: “The collapse of the stellar universe will occur–like creation–in grandiose splendor.”
The little bureaucrats are everywhere these days, it seems, which may be one reason Werner Herzog seems to have disappeared from the increasingly junky center of the culture, a place he occupied so spellbindingly in the ’70s. But if you can’t see Herzog’s glorious films in the theaters with any regularity these days, you can at least read about them in this tart, wondrous book (or even see a few classics in Anchor Bay’s DVD series) and be happy that the director is still out there, on some ice floe or mountain top, turning the weightlessness of dreams into the gravity of great movies.
