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.
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