Chances are if you're my friend and interested in film, we’ve exchanged words about Werner Herzog. He seems to come up a lot. Rather than me writing something about him, I thought it might be more interesting if I asked these friends of mine to write one or two sentences about the man or his work and then mash up these responses. Here’s the result.
If Herzog were given the challenge to write “two sentences” about a person, he would find a way around the obstacle and help the viewer realize not only his process in achieving the goal of overcoming the constraint, but also help the viewer learn something about the person he was profiling, who inevitably was a reflection in some way of himself, who is the most creative, outlandish, devious, driven, resilient, inspired, and unrelenting soul trapped behind the deceivingly monotonic guise of a German accent I have had the good pleasure of stumbling upon.1 It is the human condition to stumble, we enter the world stumbling and we leave it stumbling. In between we lumber, most of the time in darkness, though sometimes we encounter resplendence.* A while back, I encountered an essay written by Clotaire Rapaille, a psychologist and marketing expert who believes that consumer behavior has nothing to do with rational thinking -- it is driven instead, he claims, by our “reptilian brains." It struck me then that this idea was fundamentally important to filmmaking too: the way we parse a frame, respond to an edit, tune in to a story has everything to do with our instinctual selves. No one understands and makes use of this more effectively than Werner Herzog. 2 And sometimes our blind wanderings lead us into the presence of greatness.* So maybe it was 10 years ago, a friend and I drove down to the Telluride Film Festival. Late one evening I found myself in a gondola going over the mountain with two other women and Werner Herzog. He was charming, informative, gracious, polite...charismatic. He didn't expect me to know who he was, which was helpful since I hadn't heard of him then. 3 "It's not a significant wound," he said after getting shot during an interview. 4 “Shoot him again. His soul is still dancing.” 5 It is this dancing soul that makes him * such a great storyteller (iguana-cam 6) and his amazing voice (best voice over narration ever 6) and for this reason his is the only DVD director's commentary (for Aguirre, the Wrath of God) that I've sat and listened to all the way through. 7 I wonder now, though, is it his dancing soul or something else, something more humanly elemental?* Artistic ego reaches new heights of narcissism. In spite of that turn-off, the asshole still moves me. 8 This is the simultaneous repulsion and attraction to Herzog, and it can be seen in one shot in La Soufriere, where he leads his cinematographers to the maw of a volcano that’s erupting to capture a spectacular image. Fearless, irresponsible, insane or just an uncompromising filmmaker? You decide, but you must acknowledge this: he’s leading them and he’s carrying the tripod. 9 Ah, the Lessons I learned of Darkness put fire under my heart, boiling my tears into humidity illuminated by the color of the screen's territory. 10
Thanks to the contributors:
1. Serge J-F. Levy
2. Andy Bowley
3. JWD
4. Evan Losow
5. Quote from Bad Lieutenant – Port of Call
6. Brendan Hay
7. CP
8. Rolando Teco
9. David Licata (me, the masher of this post, not the Other David Licata)
10. CD
* I channeled these interstitial bits from Herzog himself.
Image: The masher watching La Soufriere.
