1. Nature
One of the funniest things ever recorded is comedian Paul F. Thompkins' impersonation of Herzog. ("Trader Joe's on Hyperion.") There is, thankfully, much more.
And it's funny because it's half true.
No doubt Herzog is no typical Romantic. He sees no easy, seamless connection between humans and our environment. He sees no ultimate redemption in our willingness to commune with forest or jungle or wildlife habitat. Shamanism is for suckers.
Famously, in a documentary about Fitzcarraldo, he comments that the jungle birds aren't singing, they're screaming in pain.
But once in a while he gives up the game. While nature isn't exactly our friend, it's worthy of our respect. In The White Diamond (2004) he has the opportunity, via the talents of a professional mountain climber, to record footage from a sacred cave behind a waterfall. It's been untouched by humans for centuries. He refuses to do so. Why not? Out of respect for the locals and their beliefs in part, but tonally it's clear Herzog is more concerned with breaching some unspoken pact with yet another unknowable, physical place.
Nature is not some demi-monde for Christian or Romantic faith, but it is a space like any other that must be respected and analyzed. There is dirt and trees and plants and life. And birds, of course.
If only to push back on the stereotype of the cold nihilist yet again, Herzog is by his own admission a lifelong walker and hiker whose only friend growing up was the Bavarian landscape (Portrait of Werner Herzog 1968).
There is a necessarily symbiotic but impossibly absurd relationship between nature and humanity, but a relationship nonetheless.
2. Dreams
In the recent documentary Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World (2016) Herzog deal with Artificial Intelligence. Interviewing various experts in the field he has two simple questions for the realization of true A.I. -- Can a machine fall in love? Can the internet dream of itself?
Again, the portrait of the German nihilist with no concern for human sympathy was partly an invention of the young, angry-ish artist himself and the rise of the German New Wave. Herzog is no naive Romantic, but he's not at all above asking essential questions as to what we share, even when communication is difficult.
In an early (and quite beautiful, completely essential) documentary Handicapped Future (1971) it's made clear that Herzog's humanism isn't of a sentimental or brotherly love sort, but it is humanism. It's a humanism of our individual struggles as thinking, imagination-filled creatures. Very early in the film he interviews a girl in a wheel-chair and asks her about her dreams -- "Do you dream a lot like that?" He's audibly taken aback when she tells him she dreams plenty at night, but during the day at school she shouldn't, even while her friends are playing outside without her.
Dreams are what make us fully human, even more than love itself. To deny dreams, to make it harder for another person to dream their dreams, is the definition of cruelty. And the modern world can be very cruel.
As a corollary, difficult dreams are more sacred than the easy ones. Impossible dreams are what make us fully human.
3. Communication
Herzog is a voracious reader (and not a bad writer himself), so I'm sure he's come across Joseph Conrad's "We live as we dream -- alone." The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) would have us depressingly believe that deep down we are simply baying animals with no hope of actually speaking to one another in a meaningful way. A later documentary like Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) looks admirably at our ancestors, but also despairs that we will never truly know what they wanted to tell us.
But then you get to the early companion pieces Land of Silence and Darkness (1971) and Handicapped Future (1971) (the former about deaf-blind folks). These films are very much about people who, despite all odds, are desperate to communicate in any way possible, though sign language, through music, through simple acts of touch.
It was silly of me to ever think that Herzog would entertain the notion that human communication is impossible (always difficult, of course, but never impossible) because then he would have become an insurance salesman.
4. Subjective Intertextuality (or, a one-person dialogue)
A theme but also a technique. Very specific images repeat and fold in on themselves -- the riderless car of Even Dwarves Started Small (1971) spinning in desperate circles as some form of a chaotic black ritual becomes the spinning truck of Stroszek (1977), a symbol of what a person leaves behind after being defeated by the sheer absurdity capitalism. Even the name Stroszek hearkens back to the main character of his first feature, Signs of Life (1968). The attempted plot of an early documentary, Fata Morgana (1971), is picked up and re-used over thirty years later in The Wild Blue Yonder (2005).
Also, kneeling camels for some reason. And animal shit for obvious reasons. And birds. Always birds.
5. The Impossible
Of all five themes this one speaks for itself. In The White Diamond Herzog tries to prevent a naive dreamer from killing himself in a home-made dirigible. Being confronted for the first time with the desires of mad-men to do the impossible, Herzog role-reverses into the worried parent. Herzog tells the man that dignified stupidities are worthwile. Heroic stupidities can be sublime. But stupid stupidities? Throwing your life away and not even getting any decent footage of it? How absurd.
And a quick note:
I was unable to watch two of Werner Herzog's films:
The Flying Doctors of East Africa (1969) The first documentary he ever made, and I couldn't find a copy anywhere.
The Transformation of the World Into Music (1994) A documentary about the annual Bayreuth (Wagner) festival in Germany. Same problem.
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