For about the past two and a half months, almost exactly in conjunction with the coronavirus outbreak here in South Korea and throughout the world, I've watched 63 of Werner Herzog's 66 feature and documentary films.
My first encounter with Werner Herzog came as a college student, when a religious studies professor offhandedly mentioned Aguirre, the Wrath of God as an interesting take on divine inspiration gone wrong. In any event, I really enjoyed it but I'd be lying if I said I'd fallen in love. Any Klaus Kinski performance is worth your attention, at least for a few minutes, but I more vividly remember watching it in conjunction with Roland Joffe's The Mission (1986, R.I.P. Ennio Morricone) which deals with similar history and themes. (Also, a roommate swore the soundtrack to the latter was really good for having sex to. Memory is always over-determined, just like history.)
Along the way through graduate school I remember seeing Fitzcarraldo (1982) in the context of colonial / post-colonial studies /excesses, and not really thinking too much about it other than the obvious insanity of pulling a ship over a mountain. (And succeeding.) And somewhere I watched Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979). It's Herzog's only pure horror film, and I really loved its slow, ponderous tension, making no compromise to the growing phenomenon of slasher / gore films. And of course knowing nothing about their on-set relationship, Kinski was riveting.
It was in the mid-naughts, staying with my sister for about a year, that I came across Grizzly Man (2005) just about the time it came out, or maybe a year or so after. I remember watching it with my sister and her husband and, at the end, not really knowing what to make of it. Or even to be honest, how to feel about it. I could sense the deep empathy and curiosity -- who wouldn't throw away the bullshit of modern life to go live with gorgeous, powerful, innocent bears? But there was also a sense of judgement -- Herzog's constant theme of nature's indifference to humankind -- that never let you forget that Timothy Treadwell was fucking crazy, despite the purity of his intentions. (John Krakauer's film version of Into the Wild came out in 2007, and I remember that and the sound-track were also big at the time. Five years after 9/11 and into the forever wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, moving back to nature was a comforting, if pitifully naive thought, for many of us Americans.)
So Grizzly Man was definitely the experience where I had to find out more about this dark, obscurantist German nihilist, who happened to also be capable of deeply human, humane works of both sympathy and critique.
I moved to South Korea to teach English in 2008. From there I managed to stay up to date with what followed -- Encounters at the End of the World (2007) and Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010). It's entirely possible that these initial contacts with Herzog have made me remember them more fondly than they deserve, but upon watching (and re-watching where necessary) every film ever made by him I'm still willing to bet that he was at the height of his cinematic powers between 2003 (Wheel of Time) and 2010. (This includes 2004's The White Diamond. This is where the title of this first post comes from, as Werner warns a man hell-bent on self-destruction that "heroic stupid" and "stupid stupid" are never the same thing.)
And yet, as the saying goes. And yet, on the feature-film side of things Herzog was turning out some absolute garbage. Taking to heart his belief and teaching that the truth of film always outweighs the mere reality of it, one of my pet theories is that he approaches documentaries like a pilgrim to his next act of prayer -- humble, determined, utterly sincere. But his feature films from about 2005 or so, not so much. Those are just self-imposed dares. How much can I get away with this time? How far can I go with the German nihilist shtick? Look at me, the naughty Bavarian bad-boy tricking Hollywood A-listers into projects they'll someday wish they, and their fans, could forget! (I'm looking at you, Nicole Kidman, Robert Pattinson, and Michael Shannon! I'm looking at you directly! Look on my works, and despair!)
And if the feature works pay for the documentary work, so be it. But according to box office numbers, these late features are complete cash black holes. Queen of the Desert (2015), a very bad parody of a Merchant and Ivory historical romance, made back two million on a budget of 36 million.
It would be bold of me ("Heroic Stupidity") to argue that for the most part Werner Herzog will be remembered for his post-1980's features. He won't. He will be remembered for almost all of his documentaries (especially 2003-2010) and most of his 70's and 80's narrative work.
And in addition to the many "hidden gems" amongst his juvenalia, his self-conscious experiments (early and later), and a truly weird, short film that hilariously makes fun of French people (I thought only Americans were allowed to do that?) I just can't be bothered to try and figure out why he has seemed to needlessly waste so much energy on "late Hollywood" movies. He's made so many of them by now that it's impossible to say he doesn't enjoy them, gets something out of them we can't fully appreciate, that perhaps fires his passion for the documentary work. (While not my absolute favorites, 2018's Meeting Gorbachev and 2019's Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin are both exceptional. I cannot fathom how his mind recovered to make these two films after the complete disaster of 2016's Salt and Fire.)
Even the young Herzog emphasized the keen importance of process, even if it makes your life difficult, if not miserable. For the 1976 feature Heart of Glass he famously hypnotized most of the cast. Less famously, reading all the interviews I could find, I could never discover why the hell he decided to hypnotize most of the cast. Like the mountains he grew up hiking and climbing in rural Germany as a child, the opportunity simply presented itself. There's no need to think about it beyond that.
His working relationship with Kinski was also, famously, sheer hell for the both of them. And sheer hell for everyone around them.
They went on to make six films together.
Finally, it's worth mentioning up front the one Herzog film that isn't just bad, like the recent features, but actually quite demonic. It's 1970's Even Dwarves Started Small, his second feature film, and one of the most hateful, repugnant movies ever made, ever imaginable. It was the one point in this project where I almost gave up.
It could only have been his filmic scapegoat, a self-exorcism of personal doubts, that allowed him to move on to the true greatness of later works. I cannot imagine what he was going through in his personal life at the time. Even Dwarfs is actively terrible. It is obscene. It is a monument to human (and quite literal animal) cruelty, perversely blessed by the crucifixion and parade of a terrified monkey through the smoke and flames of a wrecked automobile.
The whole thing could only have been made knowingly, on purpose, by a talented but deeply troubled young artist hellbent on the insistence that his legacy would be all or nothing, fully remembered or totally forgotten and damned. There is an element of a dare taken, which will come up in later films. But it is neither a dignified nor heroic dare, just a profane one.
Like the final audio recording of Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend being torn apart by a bear, there is no excuse for it to continue to exist.
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