Werner’s World

Other filmmakers, before but particularly after the lightning strike of Godard in the early ’60s, have made the facts and processes inherent in making their films a part of their films—self-reflexivity, ironically flavored or not, has always been the sauce base for postmodernist cinema. But Herzog long ago cornered the market on making the entropic chaos of life on earth shape, fuel, and even poison what his movies essentially are. What the world does to his films as they’re being made, that’s what the film should be. Unlike many directors, Herzog has never been interested in control—he is a discoverer instead of a manipulator, and a fervent devotee of cosmic gestures, allowing the lunatic lyricism of nature and freak occurrence to overwhelm planned storymaking.

He has often courted this abandonment to chance by contriving his own metarealities: stranding his cast and crew in the South American jungle more than once, hypnotizing the entire cast for every shot of 1976’s Heart of Glass (talk about altered states: it’s a film peopled by balletic submergents), casting lifelong mental patient Bruno S. as the lead in not one but two movies, pushing a steamship over a mountain, and so on. (The ship in question, in 1982’s Fitzcarraldo, weighed thirty tons in the nineteenth-century true story, but Herzog’s ship is 300 tons; the real-world spectacle of performing the impossible in the wildest place on earth wasn’t merely a means to an end, it was the entire reason to make a film.) Herzog has always believed that the berserk reality of his films includes what isn’t necessarily on film—and doesn’t it? When he swore he’d eat his shoe if Errol Morris ever finished a film, he meant it, proceeding to eat his shoe publicly after Morris released Gates of Heaven in 1978. When he and Morris promised to go to Wisconsin to once and for all dig up Ed Gein’s mother and find out . . . what?, Herzog went (Morris didn’t), and ended up making Stroszek (1977), one of the great films ever made about America.

You never doubt watching a Herzog film that the locations, the risks, the discomfort, the sense of physical peril and lostness, the extraordinary feats of will, are all genuine. Cinema is not a dream factory, Herzog maintains, but a way toward a visionary genuineness. The act of watching something bizarre and unreasonable and poetic happen in real time was always his endgame, his prize ring. Every piece of his celluloid prioritizes the materialities Herzog has filmed and not the film project itself; the camera is merely part of and witness to the landscape, the landscape is not there for the camera. For everyone else, the behind-the-scenes debacles, circumstances, and miracles are simply audio-commentary fodder, but Herzog’s world continues in four dimensions whether a camera is rolling or not.

This is why the categories of fiction and nonfiction hold little interest for the man; his fiction films have been documentaries, and his nonfiction films have been elaborate contrivances. The rest of the world saw in Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo a headlong attainment of on-location realism, but Herzog saw a reality he only helped to create (the narrative), plunging through a reality he could only hope to experience in awe (the jungle). While we categorize Lessons of Darkness (1992) and Grizzly Man (2005) as documentaries, Herzog devised them as mythic episodes in an epic tale of humankind’s deadly, often disastrous efforts at confronting the Earth’s most extreme kingdoms. The Wild Blue Yonder (2005) is both at once, a mock-doc science fiction elegy that repurposes previously unreleased footage of life aboard a NASA shuttle mission, and of life beneath the waters of the Antarctic. Some film artists—think Rivette—may say nothing in their films is “real.” Herzog would say everything is, including the lies.

No major cinematic voice is less concerned with, or less likely to be lauded for, his “style” or “effect.” Maybe that’s why his critical profile has always been a little muted. Even as he’s primed for a mandarin’s worldwide retrospectives, and the honorary Oscar he’ll probably get, Herzog still endures the old condescending labels: crazed nomad, life-risking psycho, the New German Cinema’s most market-uncooperative coyote, victim of Spielberg-era popularization, voodoo-or-die man of outrageous principle, and recalcitrant visionary forced to make documentaries because he couldn’t be trusted with fiction-feature budgets. All of this is somewhat true, but it fails to consider the heroic largeness of his procedural ambition, and the fact that his adventuring has made his budgetary travails look much worse than they ever were. (Even his most notorious folly, Fitzcarraldo, was in fact modestly budgeted and profitable.) There’s a touch of Cassandra here; in his peak years Herzog was never quite successful in convincing the world that his vast ideas of metaphor, his earthbound-yet-unearthly exploration of how landscape understands life and vice versa, is how we all should invest our post-tech lives with weight and meaning. Today, in his seventies, Herzog is an imported Hollywood icon of sorts, playing franchise villains and doing TV voice work, and using his cool-rogue profile to enlist movie stars (Nicolas Cage, Michael Shannon, Nicole Kidman), as well as bigger budgets, making what are in the end far less adventurous films. A sign of the times, perhaps; Herzog definitely seems an animal born for a less virtual era.