EL CHACAL DE NAHUELTORO (Littín 70): [4]

This blog post is titled in Spanish because that is the language in which the film exists. I am not referring to the film's dialogue, though naturally that too is in Spanish. Rather, the film seems to be ontologically Spanish-language, its path to me only briefly interrupted by the American movie site Netflix. And yes, the DVD does play on an American TV, so presumably it was originally packaged with that intention. Still. Miguel Littín, the director of this lovely film and many others, is represented only by EL CHACAL DE NAHUELTORO on Netflix, and this seems to me more surprising than if he were absent in total. As one of the founding documents of New Chilean Cinema, EL CHACAL is certainly a big deal in Chile, and Netflix seems to have conceded as much. So, where then are the other films of this influential director? I realize it's borderline ridiculous to take Netflix to task for a crime of omission not exactly uncommon to a major movie rental service. It's more that I'm becoming acutely aware of the Netflix hegemony, the parameters of which can be seen in the several titles a month that either enter the Saved section of my Queue or depart it altogether. I boosted EL CHACAL DE NAHUELTORO to the upper regions of my Queue for fear of losing it to the mass culling, as a 70s Chilean arthouse film could hardly stand up to the multi-million grossers Netflix increasingly favors. I'm well aware that alternatives exist in Fandor and Mubi, and I suspect I will soon be exploring them for reasons both pragmatic and personal. Personal, meaning they would be far greater allies to me as I comb the margins of international art film. Netflix can only hinder me from here on out (even as I've just added two early Raoul Ruiz films to the Queue).

EL CHACAL DE NAHUELTORO survives for now, and I am glad, because it's a film I would regret losing the chance to see. It is familiar in its focus but original in its telling, and that originality plays no small part in the effect it achieves. Its impoverished locale suggests Béla Tarr, but its shooting style suggests, of all people, Wong Kar-Wai. Or perhaps, more accurately, one of Wong's French antecedents. A film of 1970, EL CHACAL seems uncannily tuned in to the frantic energy of the French New Wave. The first flowerings of the Nouvelle Vague had only just begun to infect cinemas of the world, and though I can't speak with any authority on the cinephile circles of 1960s Chile, it seems stunning to me nonetheless that Littín would have internalized the Nouvelle Vague to such an extent already. Beyond its appreciation for kinetics, the film seems similarly aware of how a generic plot can be distorted to lay bare inner truths. EL CHACAL contains elements of the procedural, the redemption drama, and the neorealist cri de coeur, but is ultimately none of those things. It is, in its hybridity, something new. It sees differently. By watching it, so do we. Littín's camera is perpetually unmoored, ambulating along a depressed rural Chile in pursuit of one restless soul. This is El Chacal, the Jackal, and his life seems defined by movement as much as Littín's cinema. Our first glimpse into his childhood finds him at a sprint. He is being chased by a Chilean policeman, but the fury of his young feet seems to suggest something far larger is after him. 

El Chacal, or José del Carmen Valenzuela Torres, is rootless in the most fundamental ways. With no father and a mother barely able to support him, José's early life is a string of trials with no resolutions. José's affectless voiceover in recounting these years reveals the full damage of these hardships. There is no room for fondness, modulation, or even distance. The miseries of those times are the miseries of now. José's life has not improved in any appreciable way, and his final damnation seems like the most inevitable of all. Alone and intoxicated, he kills, in quick succession, a widow and her five children. Though each killing has its own gravity, I was viscerally repelled by the sight of El Chacal stomping on a baby's carriage. The mere filmic association between wailing cries and crushing foot made my breath catch in my throat, even though there was plainly no infant was actually harmed. 

There is a bottomless mystery here that the film never pretends to know, and that is what interior state could possibly compel such a series of murders, most of whom were children. The film's José is repeatedly asked that question, and other than a twistedly honorable desire to not have the orphaned children suffer, he has no answers for us. I like this very much about the film, because no narrative could convey the depths of such pain, victim or perpetrator. Movies may be able to conjure the fantastical madness of homicide at times, and certainly the "antihero" concept/narrative is predicated on some notion of proximity leading to understanding. I find those approaches rudimentary and useless, respectively, so it pleases me to see EL CHACAL DE NAHUELTORO leaving its main character's personality as something of a cipher. Littín is correct: El Chacal is a product of social forces, and though we may become familiar with other aspects of his personality, it is a fool's task to try and vicariously educate ourselves about the act of killing. And I very much doubt the real José del Carmen Valenzuela Torres could teach us anything we don't already know.

In place of psychologizing unfathomable moral transgressions, Littín opts to examine inhumanity of a more familiar kind. The bigger crime, a crime too vast to fully grasp, is the endurance of living conditions that starved José del Carmen Valenzuela Torres of any hope for a better future. Poverty, in its benumbed agony, leaves human beings jagged and raw. Help comes from nowhere, cruelty comes from everywhere. Chile is hardly the only guilty nation, but especially before Allende, it had little help to give its poorest citizens. More often than not, they died as they lived, destitute and ignored. The irony at work here is that El Chacal's lifelong poverty was more than normal in his time, it was expected. Neither did the widow and her five children receive any help that might have kept their paths from crossing El Chacal's. It was only his eventual brutality against them that brought the group of them any attention. One can almost see the seeds of a satire here, murder as the key to overcoming lifelong invisibility.

But that's not what Miguel Littín is up to. His approach is despairing but gentle. It's clear that he has empathy for the widow and her hardships. One stray line of dialogue, about the difficulties faced by the bereaved once their loved ones can no longer help, sums up a lifetime of struggle. She and each of her children bore their own private crosses, and Littín grants them the place they deserve in the narrative of their killer. At first, it may seem that they are the real-life subjects more worthy of a cinematic tribute. As Littín's formally oblique narrative reaches its midpoint, though, his approach becomes clear. El Chacal, like so many anonymous strivers, find his life changed by sudden fame. He is partially rehabilitated, learning to read, craft, and connect with other people. Vagrant no more, he can focus on matters other than brute survival. I've said little of lead actor Nelson Villagra so far, but his performance seems almost designed to elude easy description. El Chacal, in this film, recedes from both personal interactions and the movie frame. Despite his notorious crime, the man himself creates little impression before or after it. He is barely present in his own life's story. It is only when he receives the kindnesses of society does he, at long last, speak up for himself. The detachment of his early autobiography morphs into deep engagement in his new life. José del Carmen Valenzuela Torres, it turns out, likes soccer. He likes to construct guitars, and he accepts the faith that was thrust upon him before it meant anything. He feels remorse for a crime whose origins he cannot explain. As a (puzzlingly nondescript) supporting character interviews him for television, José hopes aloud that Chile's president will be moved by his progress and pardon him.

Can it be a coincidence that this film was released in 1970, the year of Salvador Allende's election? Miguel Littín more or less avoids the actual work of the political process, preferring instead to depict Chile's countryside as its living, breathing result. The tragedies simply pile up by inertia. Then they give way for a brief moment, and José finds himself removed from the vicious cycle. The narrative follows as he grows and learns, cresting with his final plea for mercy. Judging by the decadent parade that accompanies as Chile's president meets Brazil's, even such an inspirational transformation cannot puncture the apathy. What head of state could be bothered to recognize a lowly murderer's moral awakening? The film evinces no anger, only a bitter resignation. Far from reducing EL CHACAL DE NAHUELTORO to an apolitical film, Littín's narrative points all the way to the top. If Patricio Gúzman chronicled the first time a president gave a damn about the poor, then Miguel Littín reminds us why such a president was necessary in the first place.

(photo credit: en.wikipedia.org)

SALESMAN (Maysles/Maysles/Zwerin 69): [3.5]

First: a heartfelt RIP to Albert Maysles, the man who has shaped film documentary beyond measure. In a moment of true existential absurdity, I found myself informed of his passing seconds after sharing my most recent blog post on Twitter. That post, on Werner Herzog, grappled with Herzog's craft by citing none other than the Maysles brothers themselves. How many people in the world do you spontaneously recall, hours before their unexpected deaths? The sight of his name in the Trending topics had an ominous feel to it, and my suspicions were confirmed when I clicked to find out the news. Based on my own reaction and that of the Twitter algorithm, I'm sure the sense of loss was heavy among cinephiles. Still, seeing all of Twitter lit up with remembrance seemed a worthy tribute to Albert Maysles' legacy. Any superlative describing the Maysles' contributions to film would be a gross understatement. They are (despite there being two of them) singular.

I may not think of Albert and David Maysles every day, but their films are never far from my mind. I remember watching GREY GARDENS with my mom in mutual bemusement, a memory we still reference to this day. That viewing was a formative experience of surfing the same cinematic wavelength with another person. The world of the Beales beguiled us, and our venture into it was the kind of precious shared time I always hope to have with my mom. Their GIMME SHELTER, equally notorious in its time, remains to me a defining tower of non-fiction complexity. To stare into the murky depths of its supremely troubling last sequence is to stare into the abyss of murder itself. Few documentaries dig so deeply into their subjects and our minds, and we have the Maysles brothers to thank for both of them. Who were these men, who have brought us such films? I know so little of them, but now they are both gone. As I finish watching SALESMAN, the last of the Big Three films I haven't seen, I hope my continuing experiences with their films bring me a greater appreciation of the men behind the camera. We are unlikely to be gifted with another such pair of masters anytime soon.

I mention the Big Three films, by the way, because they have had long afterlives as cultural landmarks, and the Criterion Collection has seen fit to enshrine them as such. And I mention the Criterion Collection because I watched SALESMAN through Criterion, and it brought something interesting to mind. The clean presentation of this movie, more than half a century old at this point, removes any easy distance between the subjects and the viewer. This movie could very well have been filmed yesterday, save for a few give-away period details. The absence of distracting scratches or film grain has an odd effect of removing it from its historical time. It is not ahistorical in the sense that it transcends its cultural context and somehow becomes "universal," but rather that its specificity is contiguous with any period of modern American history. These are men of my grandfather's generation, men who look like younger versions of him, or perhaps of my dad. Or me. They are white men, and I'd wager that white men in generations to come will look a lot like them as well. We cannot view them as relics of a bygone age because they are simply the white men we have always known, for better and (often) for worse. They are representative of a time in history that extends far beyond 1969 in both directions. We cannot distance ourselves from them anymore than we can distance ourselves from the white men of today.

This is what film restoration can do for us. Where postmodern pastiche knowingly perverts iconography and stereotypes of earlier eras (witness, say, the American Horror Story series on cable TV), a restored film from decades earlier exudes an almost uncanny familiarity. This is not the self-conscious fantasia of period pieces. This is reality, or reality filtered through the cameras of Charlotte Zwerin and the Maysles brothers. While we cannot directly access our own reality any better than Zwerin and the Maysles could access 1969's, we interpret these realities similarly, because the world has simply not changed very much since then. The casual racism of the Bible salesmen is ugly to watch, but I can confirm from personal experience that this is the way white men talk to each other, alone in a room together. Their profane and cynical jabs at the world around them are the stuff of high-profile comedy today, presented to you by such curators as Seth Rogen and Daniel Tosh, Sony Pictures Studios and the Comedy Central Network. Is this really the enlightened age from which we can lampoon the stuffy, conservative mid-century America? To put it lightly, I have my doubts. When we do not view the past as influencing the present, we cannot see the source of what pollutes the present. SALESMAN doesn't have any answers of course, and how could it? What it can do is capture its world from its particular perspective, so that even we who do not sell Bibles for a living can learn to see the world more clearly.

SALESMAN is instructive in other ways as well. When the four main salesmen take time to attend a sales conference, the terms of their employment become remarkably clear. Melbourne Feltman, "the number one salesman of the world's number one best-seller," exhorts the less-successful attendees to put their hearts and (Christian) souls into their work, to truly believe in what they do. Here we can see the beginnings of the "do what you love" mantra*, under which laborers are meant to devote their lives to capitalism, not because it is a necessary (?) evil, but because it is the moral thing to do. In the 60s and 70s, neoliberalism as we know it was still just a twinkle in Alan Greenspan's eye, and its ideology had not yet evolved into the dominant logic of American culture. It made sense at the time to expect Bible salesmen, presumably religious as they were, to love what they do. Indeed, as one speaker at the conference notes, why would they abandon higher-paying positions for something as lowly as door-to-door salesmanship, if not to honor the one true God? This joining of sacred spirituality and vulgar commerce may seem like the ultimate form of Sartrean bad faith, but again, who are we to judge? We are a nation of mediocre DIY artists, English-major digital freelancers, and aspirational businessmen/coding specialists who sleep next to bedside tables stacked with Steve Jobs biographies**. The noble promise of spiritual enlightenment promised by Melbourne Feltman has long since crumbled to dust. Our gods are consumer goods, and we worship them dutifully, selling our labor for them in place of a distant, unknowable higher power. We are the precariat, and we do it all out of love.

This irony of putting on your public face for such private subject matter doesn't go ignored. The film's main focus is on Paul Brennan, the salesman who seems least able to reconcile the gap between profit and prophet. He is a fascinatingly inscrutable man. Mumbling bitterly about his customers when he's not speaking in caricatured Irish patois, Brennan seems poorly-equipped to the false intimacies of salesmanship. Listening to his spiel tells a different story, if only for that span of time. He claims the Bible is the best purchase a customer can make, that it would never lose its value and always hold a cherished place in the home. He draws on his own Irish heritage and buoyantly chats up his customers en route to sealing the deal. The first scene of the film, showing Brennan pitching to a young mother, appears as a suburban idyll, a place where believers can meet in piety. But by the end of the film, Brennan is falling apart at the seams. He seems the truest believer of all when he's selling, but his constant grumbling leaves his colleagues hardly able to stand him. Even he seems aghast at times how cynical he is.

Where is the real Paul Brennan? The brief glimpses into his personal life provide scant clues. A phonecall home to his wife (conspicuously unseen) reveals little inner life. He claims to be homesick for Boston after only four days, but that train of thought disappears soon after emerging. In any case, it's hard to imagine what could be rooting him there. He profanes the name of Jesus with the Maysles brothers around, only to put on a wholesome performance for the customers moments later. Out of all the salesmen, he seems the least devout, as well as the least willing to hide behind pleasantries. What drives him to house after house, door after door? My guess, and it can only be a guess, is what I've recently come to view as "infra-ideology". It's belief in belief, or a belief in the sanctity of ritual. The challenge and the overcoming. Absent any meaningful manual labor, the likes of which men tend to valorize, Brennan's extended journey seems to be the reason in and of itself. There's no end in sight, nor any particular goal, other than the eternal chase of the sale. Paul Brennan simply continues onward. Who knows, maybe there's something over the horizon. Or in the next life.

If Paul Brennan's ambivalence seems pitiably unexamined, I would at least argue this is an honest response to the affective labor demanded of him. He's clearly no fundamentalist, and whatever depths of spirituality move him to sell those hefty Bibles, they're not enough to give him peace of mind after repeated failure. Those dead ends illuminate the falsity of his salesman performance all the more, leaving him adrift and alone in a sterile American landscape. But this confused Bible salesman never really left us. He just learned to sell different things. When religion was the glue of white American culture, we were sold cheap, gaudy paraphernalia to capitalize on it. The omnipresence of religious knick-knacks grew oppressive to the children of those believers. Before long, an exodus began. Malls replaced churchs, rock stars replaced gods. The cycle continues, and the worship becomes secular. Throughout it all, capitalism didn't blink. It's just as happy to sell us iPhones instead of Bibles. Hell, iPhones cost more and go "out of date" every few years, so this state of affairs is probably even better. Who needs the permanence of religion when you can have planned obsolescence instead?

Of course, we have not fallen from a lost paradise. America was never any kind of Eden, not at its inception nor on the cusp of Christianity's decline. One need only look at the lonely and quiet homes of SALESMAN, the elderly women whose families have left and the people of color struggling to assimilate. Changes came, and we duly adapted. My main observation, one I find myself struggling with quite often, is whether anything has changed for the better. I do often think so, and even the smallest of gains made by marginalized people give me hope and courage for a future worth seeing. But on the flipside, I see a steep and ugly plunge from door-to-door Bible salesmen to tech industry entrepeneurs. I see a generation of armchair nihilists who lost their faith in gods, politics, and maybe most importantly of all, in people. Trust in others, and in change, comes with time, patience, and communication. If you can't be bothered, well, I guess there's always Netflix.

Paul Brennan at least had the ability to doubt. Next time you walk into an Apple Store and find a young, bearded Genius rushing up to greet you, look to see how much uncertainty you find in his eyes. I imagine it won't be much, because consumerism doesn't leave room for doubt. There is only belief, infinite and cold, in the beauty and the power of the iPhone. Innovation, creativity, and progress. Disruption, growth, and potential. Speed. Glamor. Love.

*I'm aware that Jacobin has lately come under scrutiny for its bullying behavior as a major leftist magazine (e.g. against The New Inquiry). I'm most familiar with the plight of Sarah Kendzior, but I imagine there are others as well. So I cite this article with apologies, as I don't want to legitimize them any more than they deserve. This article is the only one I've ever read from them that significantly guides my thinking, meaning I won't have much reason to cite any other ideas/articles of theirs in the future.

**I cite middle-class "career" examples because this is, at its most repulsive, a middle-class problem. Where before labor unions were meant to prevent exploitation of lower-class industrial workers, the disappearance of organized labor has not only freed capital to roll back the rights of the lower-class, but also to rebrand this exploitation into a Faustian bargain for the middle-class. Work tirelessly all your life without a set salary, benefits, or a pension, and maybe one day you'll be famous enough to not need any of it anyway! It's hard to imagine the working poor accepting further instability for deeply dubious promises of luxury and fame. Lucky for capital, then, that the middle-class is too estranged from the lower-class to intimately understand exploitation; and proximal enough to entrepeneurs through mass-media and social media to believe it stands a chance of joining the .1%!

THE DARK GLOW OF THE MOUNTAINS (Herzog 84): [4.5] / BALLAD OF THE LITTLE SOLDIER (Herzog/Reichle 84): [N/A] / PRECAUTIONS AGAINST FANATICS (Herzog 69): [2.5]

If we can permit the dubious comparison of film directors to writers, the analogy that would best suit Werner Herzog is, I believe, prose poet. Where Volker Schlondorff and Rainer Werner Fassbinder worked in various ways with narrative to illuminate social concerns, Herzog seems all the odder for his free-ranging inquiries into fundamental matters of life, nature, and death. There is of course no rule that a film movement, New Wave or otherwise, be bound by some sort of membership guideline. Striking, though, how occult Herzog appears in the light of his contemporaries' pointedly social film works. This is perhaps why his narrative features have been met with decreasing acclaim in the new millennium, while his documentaries remain highly regarded. Classical narrative, with its tightness and tidy resolutions, can only confine the shamanic Herzog. Such fastidiousness presents few opportunities to engage the vast fullness/emptiness of mortality. When Herzog speaks at the end of his superlative short documentary THE DARK GLOW OF THE MOUNTAINS about his desire to walk endlessly with no attachments, it sounds much like a metaphor for his films' searches for the transcendent beyond conventional plotlines.

But where someone like Terrence Malick seems alive to all the possibilities of experience in a given moment, creating a mosaic of emotion that gradually takes the shape of a plot, Herzog does conform somewhat to storytelling basics. He loves mapping out the beginnings and ends of experiences in his films (all the better to frame the incredible changes that happen within them, I'd assume). It would be a mistake to call this structure "narrativity" in the strictest sense; our own lives, and the events that comprise them, also have start- and end-points. More accurately, Herzog feels his way through a moment with words and pictures, letting his imagination roam freely in pursuit of the means to express that moment's sensations. It's this quality of his art that brings prose poetry to my mind. We can see it in Herzog's sometimes blunt manner of interviewing his subjects. He is often accused of manipulation, but is such directness any less manipulative than, say, therapy? Rather than sitting back and waiting for some vaporous, self-evident truth to reveal itself, Herzog dives in and messily fishes for depth. He enacts a confrontation and waits for an effect to emerge.

This approach, as I've said before in relation to Marker and the Maysles, seems more honest than falling back on such dubious notions as authenticity, spontaneous truth, or hands-off authorship. Herzog acknowledges his own specific inclinations and those of his subjects in order to create a dialogue that, at its best, can be continued by the viewers of his films. This is very much the case in THE DARK GLOW OF THE MOUNTAINS, in which several Teutonic adventurers brood over the nearness of death and extreme isolation. Occasioned by the looming danger of the mountains, an unlikely loquacity emerges in Reinhold Messner. After a (comically affectless) denial of friendship between himself and Hans Kammerlander, Messner becomes almost unable to stop sharing his feelings as the expedition nears its start. The walls of self-defense crumble, and Messner reveals that his brother's mountaineering death killed him in some way as well. He sobs when Herzog asks him how the death affected his mother, and we know even from his short reply that losing his brother irrevocably affected his life. These are men, like many, who cannot express the feelings that compel them to act the way they do. Fortunately, the tears do the explaining.

Not that Messner is totally inarticulate. He is, in fact, quite able to explain how climbing mountains is like addiction. Life goes on for him in the shadow of the peaks, and sooner or later he must ascend again. It is his great artistic achievement, as he says after the completion of his mission, a form of creation that only he can fully see and feel. His remarks close out an affecting interlude in which Herzog gifts us images of the men in action, backed by an instrumental score that humbly intimates the swirling emotions they must feel. It seems almost bizarre that the actual climbing of Gasherbrums I & II occupy such a small amount of the runtime, but Herzog's rationale was made clear from the beginning. It's the men's relationship to the mountain that matter here. In that context, one lengthy pan, from Messner and Kammerlander at the mountain base to Gasherbrum II's distant top, says everything we need to know.

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Let's not mince words. BALLAD OF THE LITTLE SOLDIER is a horrifying film. I was crushed by the abjection Herzog and Denis Reichle captured in his trip to Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas have been steadily destroying the indigenous Miskito people. Herzog summarizes the situation well: whether it's the Somoza dynasty or the Sandinista insurgents in charge, Nicaragua will not look after its original children. The Miskito, already ravaged by colonialism and imperial slavery, have little choice but to fight back, because civil war is already permanently in effect.

I was so overwhelmed by Herzog's and Reichle's documentary that I had to watch it twice to even wrap my head around it. The shock I felt in my first viewing couldn't be matched with a rewatch, and so I found myself full of weariness and resignation the second time around. Here, now, the disturbance lingers. To hear a mother talk of seeing her four children killed, or children recalling the murders of their parents and siblings, leaves me with nothing but horror. It's a horror that inflates well past the initial pained response and into an existential nightmare. I found myself glued to the faces of the Miskito as they recalled their traumas, observing in the place of whatever a more meaningful reaction would look like. There's little to say and even less to do. All I can do is pay attention while I see them and remember them after they've gone.

I can critique the film itself on ideological grounds. The rare attention given to the indigenous and Afroindigenous people does little more than parade them to an uncomprehending world. We learn little of their history beyond the textbook facts. Herzog, as I mentioned above, is never a neutral party, so his interviews with the natives can be defended by their (relative) horizontality of engagement. Even Reichle literally speaking to the camera over a silent Miskito boy's head has some merit to it, since his story of serving as a child soldier for Germany is, at the very least, an empathetic outreach into the experience of the film's subjects. Less defensible are the voiceovers straining for scholarly omniscience. This academic approach reveals itself most unattractively in the use of various words, such as "Indian," that belie the seeming impartiality of the process. Objectivity, that eternal illusion, is nothing but a fantasy of absolute knowledge yet to fade from the Western mind. In our vainglorious approximations of objectivity, white observers walk dazedly in circles within their own epistemological simulacra, where the Miskito are a "tribe" and white communities are "civilizations." It seems particularly ironic to view their communal lifestyle as "a primitive form of socialism" when far more developed Western countries have yet to even approach the social interdependence achieved by the Miskito. I believe in Herzog, but he is only as perceptive as his culture allows him to be, and so this short film finds him kneecapped by his own blind spots.

Likewise, Herzog's later insistence on the film's universal nature disservices the very real and unavoidable political circumstances which have shaped the tragedy he claims to be so apolitically observing. Phony humanism cannot sublimate the history of CIA-sponsored dictatorship and the resultant insurrections into some kind of philosophical lesson on the human condition. Unlike the educated white adventurers Herzog usually prefers, the Miskito cannot responsibly be reduced to objects of study for curious minds. To do so would create an immense power imbalance, a spectatorial condescension toward the realities of disadvantaged people who cannot be helped by pious liberal guilt. Their story is necessarily a political and social story. It is here that we encounter the ultimate limitations of Herzog's romanticism, however stirring it may be elsewhere.

For all my complaints, though, the atrocity remains. And I scarcely know what to do with it any better than Herzog or Reichle do. The button-pushing sight of a child firing a machine gun becomes, against the reality of the situation, just another heartbreak for which there will be no mourning. There's not much in the way of solace, other than a handful of songs which give voice to the pervasive sorrow. First an armed child sings along to a song on his radio, ambiguously channeling the singer's lamentations ("no puedo leer ni escribir;" I can neither read nor write). Another man sings a pretty love song in a refugee camp, its object of loss somewhere outside our ability to perceive. The last song, at the end of the film, comes from a second boy soldier, some wistful tune of lost or unrequited love. These songs, when interpreted by these singers, seem to speak to sadnesses greater than documentaries can visually grasp. The tears, the melodies, and the scars are all various forms of trauma. What we can see, as viewers, are only the last tremors of a seismic torment.

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At the tail end of this DVD from The New Yorker which has so distended this blog title comes PRECAUTIONS AGAINST FANATICS. To double back to a shameful metaphor previously used, this film strikes me as a short story. Films this length can be inexplicable sometimes; the sketch-like nature of a short story at least suits the ease of the medium, whereas even a 12-minute short film such as this requires quite a bit of money, technology, and effort. To what end Herzog made this film I cannot say ("elaborate on-camera practical joke" seems like the best explanation we'll get), and its placement following two grave short documentaries seems like an odd choice on behalf of The New Yorker. This film also has the distinction of being Herzog's first in color, having been made in 1969, while the other two come from 1984, mid-career, and thus make an agreeable couplet. It's all very strange.

Still, hermeneutics. The film's premise is amusing in an observational way, the idea that racehorses stand a serious risk of being swarmed by excitable viewers. Before long, that slender idea gives way into what almost reads as sketch comedy. A variety of young men give halting, thick-tongued monologues about their jobs and horses, almost invariably interrupted by a wheezing old man who insists they leave. The atmosphere turns peculiar, and the disorientation becomes funny. I thought at first that Herzog was shooting for a Roy Andersson-style take on sociality (or that of friend and fellow oddball Errol Morris), and I didn't expect him to pull it off with such drab style and subject matter. But to his credit he does, and so the film works. Like a short story, it establishes a distinct setting, a path to its destination, and a cluster of teasingly unique occurrences on the way. Herzog's intention remains opaque, but it's a testament to his craft that something so forgettable becomes lightly entertaining in his hands.