The Philosophy of Werner Herzog (The Philosophy of Popular Culture) 9781793600424, 9781793600431, 1793600422

Citation preview

The Philosophy of Werner Herzog

The Philosophy of Popular Culture Series Editor: Mark T. Conard, Marymount Manhattan College The Philosophy of Popular Culture series comprises volumes that explore the intersection of philosophy and popular culture. The works are devoted to a subject in popular culture, such as a particular genre, filmmaker, or television show. The essays investigate the philosophical underpinnings, or do a philosophical analysis, of the particular topic. The books will contain smart, jargon-free essays that illuminate texts (films and TV shows) in popular culture, and they will introduce non-specialists to traditional philosophical ideas and issues. The governing ideas of the series are that texts in popular culture are worthy of philosophical analysis and that philosophical thinking and traditional philosophical concepts can enlighten us and enrich our everyday lives. Recent titles in the series: The Philosophy of Werner Herzog, edited by M. Blake Wilson and Christopher Turner Neil Young and Philosophy, edited by Douglas L. Berger Joss Whedon as Philosopher, by Dean Kowalski The Philosophy of Christopher Nolan, edited by Jason T. Eberl and George A. Dunn The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth, edited by David LaRocca The Who and Philosophy, edited by Rocco J. Gennaro and Casey Harison

The Philosophy of Werner Herzog Edited by M. Blake Wilson and Christopher Turner

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2020 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wilson, M. Blake, 1966- editor of compilation. | Turner, Christopher, 1975- editor of compilation. Title: The philosophy of Werner Herzog / edited by M. Blake Wilson and Christopher Turner. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2020. | Series: The philosophy of popular culture | Includes index. | Summary: "Legendary director, actor, author, and provocateur Werner Herzog has incalculably influenced contemporary cinema for decades. This essay collection by professional philosophers and film theorists from around the globe offers a diversity of perspectives on how the thinking behind the camera is revealed in the action Herzog captures in front of it"-- Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020030721 (print) | LCCN 2020030722 (ebook) | ISBN 9781793600424 (cloth) | ISBN 9781793600431 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Herzog, Werner, 1942---Philosophy. Classification: LCC PN1998.3.H477 P55 2020 (print) | LCC PN1998.3.H477 (ebook) | DDC 791.4302/33092--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030721 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030722 TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Foreword Paul Cronin Acknowledgments Introduction Christopher Turner and M. Blake Wilson “I Am What My Films Are”: Listening to Herzog’s Ecstatic, Essayistic Pronouncements David LaRocca 2 Herzog’s Sublime and Ecstatic Truth: From Burke’s Physiological Aesthesis to the Dionysian Unveiling Patricia Castello Branco 3 The Conquest of Uselessness as a Practice of Film and Thought Daniele Dottorini 4 Filmmaking and Philosophizing against the Grain of Theory: Herzog and Wittgenstein Mihai Ometiță 5 Nature and Natural Meaning in Grizzly Man Marc Furstenau 6 Reflections from the Abyss: Herzog’s Philosophy of Death M. Blake Wilson 7 Fake News and Ecstatic Truths: Alternative Facts in Lessons of Darkness Kyle Novak 8 The Great Ecstasy of Werner Herzog: Truth, Heidegger, Apocalypse Ian Alexander Moore 9 The Film Artist as Discoverer of the Marvels of Everyday Life: a Kracauerian Reading of Werner Herzog Christopher Turner 10 Werner Herzog and the Documentary as a Revelatory Practice Antony Fredriksson

ix xi xiii

1

vii

1

21

39

55 69 95

117

135

153

171

viii

Contents

11 On Experience and Illumination: Werner Herzog’s Dialectical Relationship with Society Stefanie Baumann 12 Herzog’s Philosophy of Masculinism Will Lehman 13 Herzog’s Post-Tragic Aesthetic: A Kierkegaardian Perspective Anthony Eagan and Simon Thornton 14 Werner Herzog on Circles, Chickens and Impotency Tyler Tritten

187 203

215 233

Index

253

Contributors

261

Foreword Paul Cronin

Werner Herzog has said of the book we collaborated on that it is “the only competent comment on my work out there, and that there is ever likely to be.” Add to this his dictum: “I live my life with as little reflection as possible.” A tricky combination of sentiments. Admitting the conflict, we should be glad about his refusal to admire or engage with film theory. Much better that he directs all his energies to making films. Yet, because of Werner’s provocative assertions, because of his insistence that nothing good can come from philosophizing on his films, to the cinéastes and scholars of the world I say: Go for it, losers. Show us what you’ve got. The series of reports in this book reveal the new insights that can emerge when some of the savviest thinkers on the subject—here, an intrepid and international band of Herzog fans and aficionados—take up the mantle without shame or need for approval. Herzog’s films are ours, not his, and we can do with them what we must. Even with so much already said and written (some of it by Werner, despite himself), this book shows that there is much left to think about Herzog’s films, even while he warns us against thinking about them and then abandons us, leaving town for his next assignment. Paul Cronin School of Visual Arts Editor, Werner Herzog A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin

ix

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, we would like to recognize the contributions of the outstanding scholars who made this volume possible. As this book took hold, we met fellow Herzog watchers from across the globe who were eager to delve into the challenge of probing the philosophy of this notorious soi disant anti-philosopher. We are pleased to present their work as part of a truly universal collection of work, with perspectives from Portugal, Romania, Italy, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. There was no book without you, and we are grateful for your willingness to be included in this first volume of essays dedicated to the philosophy (or, again, anti-philosophy) of Werner Herzog. Standout among our contributors has been David LaRocca, whose expertise in the field of film and philosophy, and the film philosophy of Herzog in particular, has inspired us from the beginning of the project to its logical end: the book you hold in your hands right now. His good cheer and fastidious attention to both detail and deadline kept this book moving along at a crisp pace, and (perhaps unbeknownst to him) he has served as a kind of ‘virtual mentor’ throughout. We have drawn upon his previous works, particularly his The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth (also with Lexington Books), as models for what a good book on the philosophy of film (or perhaps more accurately: philosophy as film) ought to look like. We hope this book looks like one of yours, David. It is somewhat cliché to say “we couldn’t have done it without you,” but we really and truly couldn’t have done it without you. Thanks again. Aside from his writings on, and interviews with, Werner Herzog (his Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed [Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: 2014] proved to be a must-have for the editors and contributors to this book), Paul Cronin lent guidance, advice, and his Foreword to this volume. Thank you, Paul. Bill Irwin was instrumental in steering this project towards Lexington Books, where it found a home and an appropriate publisher. Accordingly, we would also like to thank our editor at Lexington, Jana HodgesKluck, and assistant editor, Sydney Wedbush. Jana has supported this project from its very beginning, and we have always known that the thoughts and ideas contained herein were in good care under her guidance. xi

xii

Acknowledgments

With his Werner Herzog—Filmmaker and Philosopher (Bloomsbury, 2019), Richard Eldridge paved the way for books dedicated to Herzog’s philosophy and Herzog as philosopher. We grateful to Richard and also to George Dunn for reviewing the manuscript. Blake thanks his wife Abby and their canine companions Oskar and Pancho for their patience during the editing and organization of this book as well as for their willingness to watch and rewatch the films of Herzog and many others. Blake also thanks Wayne Northcutt, Ted DePalma, Sri Chintakrindi, Jason Maune, Max Pensky, his students at Cal State Stanislaus, and co-editor and great friend Chris Turner for the many discussions about Herzog over the years. Chris would like to thank his wife Neesha and his son Finn for their patience and encouragement during the completion of this book. Chris would also like to thank his friend and erstwhile collaborator Ian Moore, whose lecture on Herzog Chris moderated last year in Dallas, for a fruitful discussion of Herzog’s film artistry. Finally, Chris especially thanks his co-editor and friend Blake Wilson for our wonderful conversations on Herzog and film. Lastly, we thank Werner Herzog for bringing his images to the world, and we thank Lena Herzog for her cover photograph. M. Blake Wilson Christopher Turner California State University, Stanislaus

Introduction Christopher Turner and M. Blake Wilson

Along with Alexander Kluge, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, and others, Werner Herzog emerged as a distinctive force in New German Cinema in the 1970s, and was hailed by François Truffaut as “the most important film director alive.” He has gone on to direct almost twenty fictional feature films and even more documentary films, author a number of his own screenplays, direct several television shows, and he has also acted in his own films as well as those of others. For instance, he has recently made quite the pop-cultural splash playing ‘The Client’ in Disney’s entry into the Star Wars saga, The Mandalorian, hamming it up as a cosmic Euro-villain while publically promoting the ‘Baby Yoda’ craze that has swept the United States and beyond. In addition, Herzog has staged more than a dozen operas, composed work for theater, and authored several books; importantly, he has been the subject of fascinating and provocative interviews, which have arguably revealed more of his work than the works themselves. His most well-known films include Aguirre, the Wrath of God, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Fitzcarraldo, Rescue Dawn, Grizzly Man and Cave of Forgotten Dreams. These works, if not the majority of his output, are characterized by a focus on misfits and outcasts, an exploration of the boundaries of fantasy and madness, and the representation of an ‘ecstatic truth’ that differs from and is more significant than what Herzog calls the ‘accountant’s truth,’ or a simple restatement of facts. Indeed, he is virtually without peer due to his prodigious and inspired output, of which the late Roger Ebert once remarked that “[e]ven his failures are spectacular.” However, he has taken a decidedly antagonistic stance against critical, academic, and so-called “intellectual” interpretation of his work: I do not belong to the ranks of intellectuals who have a philosophy or a social structure in mind and then make a film about it . . . [M]aking a film has much more to do with real life, with living things, than it has with philosophy. 1

To those familiar only with his films, which, standing on their own offer much grist for the philosopher’s mill due to their philosophical implications and explications, Herzog’s quote might seem not only quixotic but disingenuous. After all, for a filmmaker who quotes Pascal and Heidegxiii

xiv

Introduction

ger, and who has presented clearly philosophical themes (viz. nature versus nurture, man versus society) in his films, it might be surmised that Herzog would actively court scholarly attempts at evaluations of his work such as those featured in this volume. But to those who study not only his films but also his writings and most revealingly his interviews— namely, the philosophers and film scholars who wrote this book—his comments come as no surprise, for Herzog is uncannily steadfast in his insistence that his films do not reflect theory or philosophy. But his words and works beg for attention from philosophers. While he has often been interviewed, and film critics have endlessly analyzed and dissected his ouevre, philosophers have yet—until now—to substantially engage with the thought process that undergirds Herzog’s writings, interviews, or film work. Hence, this book and the works of the philosophers who wrote it. With such a rich field from which to mine Herzog’s philosophy, the vines are ripe for those who wish to be more than merely entertained by his films, enlightened by his books, or intrigued by his interviews. Although occasionally in direct contact with the wheelhouse of philosophers when he makes explicitly metaphysical or epistemological claims, much of what he reveals to the public in interviews seems carefully scripted, and even repetitive; it often appears as if he were reading certain Herzogian tropes from a script. Perhaps this should come as no surprise, for the man is, after all, a purveyor of them. Several contributors to this volume observe this phenomenon. It is either a skill or a carnival barker’s trick, an art or a knack, 2 and he uses it to tirelessly promote his films (after all, he is his films) through interviews and occasionally media and publicity stunts, such as the time he ate his shoe after losing a bet with fellow filmmaker Errol Morris, leading to Les Blank’s aptly-titled and very entertaining nonfiction film of the event, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, 1980. When he engages in these types of activities, Herzog scholar Bridgette Peucker critically observes that his behavior “smacks of crafting a persona, of performing rehearsed texts.” 3 While there are a number of publications available on Werner Herzog as filmmaker, the first book to include “Herzog” and “philosophy” in its title and as its contents is Richard Eldridge’s Werner Herzog: Filmmaker and Philosopher (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019). This is surprising, given Herzog’s prominence as a filmmaker, thinker, and cultural figure. As Eldridge has claimed, Herzog’s “interests in filmmaking are on the whole more existential, ontological, and transfigurationally normative than they are descriptive, sociohistorical, and oriented toward local political problems.” 4 The contributors to this volume, many of whom respond directly to Eldridge’s claim, are diverse in identity, thought, style, and perspective, and bring a wider understanding of Herzog’s philosophy than would be possible from gazing through a single lens.

Introduction

xv

While disclaiming his engagement with the ‘scholarly’ pursuits of philosophers, he has nevertheless ambitiously outlined his epistemological reflections and aesthetic program in manifestoes such as the “Minnesota Declaration” and “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth,” which receive sustained consideration in the chapters that follow. Herzog’s explicit rejection of academic critique and interpretation, his denial of philosophical and literary influences (even as he implicitly or explicitly refers to artists, authors, and philosophers), and his claims to be merely concerned with practical matters all form a real challenge for interpreting the significance of his work. In conversation with Paul Cronin, Herzog has witheringly remarked that On the table in front of us is a pile of academic articles about my films that you brought over for me to look at. The minute you leave here today, it will all be thrown into the trash. The healthiest thing anyone can do is avoid that impenetrable nonsense. My response to it all is a blank stare, just as I respond to most philosophical writings . . . I get my ideas from real life, not books. 5

Herzog’s pronounced antipathy for critical interpretations of his work is best summed up in his response to such interpreters: “Go for it, losers!” So, despite knowing this, why do philosophers push back against Herzog’s undoubted opposition to this project and ‘go for it’ anyway? Why dedicate the time and effort to engage in the kinds of acts that Herzog dismisses as “impenetrable nonsense”? Wouldn’t Herzog presumably throw this book in the trash, too? Fortunately, we are not writing this book for Werner Herzog, but for an audience of his readers and viewers who, familiar with his work to varying degrees, would like an opportunity to think with and against him by exploring the meaning of his spoken, written, and film work. Herzog, we believe, would like to preserve a sacred space for the ineffability of his aesthetic representations and their mysterious and revelatory effects. Our response to his attempt to immunize himself from critical scrutiny by claiming a monopoly on interpreting the significance of his own work is to restore its effability. Artworks are made by artists, but artists do not control the reception of their work nor the interpretation of its significance. Since the time of Socrates, authors have had to reckon with the consequences of putting their work ‘out there’ in the public domain. 6 If Herzog wants to avoid criticism, the only way to do it successfully is to conceal his work from the public and keep it to himself and to those he deems worthy. However, it is difficult to imagine a more prolific filmmaker (and public intellectual of sorts) over the last half century than Herzog, which makes his work ideally receptive of the kind of critical inquiry and analysis offered by the contributors to this book. But critique remains a challenge: Herzog dismisses it as an artificial explanation and classification of ecstatic art into prefabricated academi-

xvi

Introduction

cally or politically fashionable categories or frameworks. For Herzog, that is a poor substitute for the real experience of cinema: viewers should simply approach his films with open eyes and open mind, free of political positions, value judgments, biases, and critical attempts to explain the deeper meaning lying behind the surface. The assumption here, taken to be self-evident by Herzog and most certainly unwarranted, is that those without formal education have an easier time doing this than those with formal education. This is precisely what Wittgenstein’s therapeutic imperative, “Don’t think, but look!” suggests: do not think about works of art, but look at the images brought forth on the screen. 7 Of course, this injunction is as much a philosophy of film as its negation. Mindful of Herzog’s dictum, “When everything is explained it gets boring very quickly,” 8 we hope that what follows does not explain Herzog to an audience that needs to better understand him. But we do hope to explore Herzog’s film work and his own writings and interviews to see what might emerge in the course of thinking and seeing. In other words, we present a journey through Herzog’s oeuvre, eliciting a variety of significant aspects and themes in his work, taking up varied perspectives on what is at stake there, all the while bringing Herzog’s work into a dialogue with the history of philosophy and its current manifestations. We will not subsume or subordinate his work into categories or classificatory schemas, opting instead to shed light on various films, scenes, and selfinterpretations in interviews and speeches, to take what Herzog has already given us and think it through, ponder it, and if anything, deepen and expand upon it. Recalling Herzog’s provocative challenge to his would-be interpreters (“Go for it, losers!”), this taunt was convincingly rebutted in the eighteenth century by Gottfried Ephraim Lessing in “The Reviewer Need Not Be Able to Do Better Than That with Which He Finds Fault.” 9 His criticism of academic writing and life has been a commonplace in Germany since (at least) Schopenhauer’s “On University Philosophy,” 10 although Herzog, who lives currently lives in southern California, undoubtedly profits from the anti-intellectualism that has become prominent in the United States since the middle of the last century with its origins in anticommunist hysteria, manifested in suspicions about egg-heads in ivory towers. In an interview, Herzog pointedly remarked that: I feel safe from the world knowing that between the rumours and me is a strong shield of false Herzogs. The parodies and misperceptions protect and serve as unpaid bodyguards, so I do my best to keep the rumours alive. Let them sprout and grow, let the mythology mushroom. I want more of these doppelgängers, these stooges, however crazed, to do battle out there. They take the brunt while I get on with my work. 11

Introduction

xvii

Is the Herzog of the “Minnesota Declaration” or even of this interview just another doppelgänger, another stooge, between us and Herzog himself? Where exactly do the ‘false’ Herzogs end and the ‘true’ Herzog begin? It won’t help to answer these questions by consulting the indexes of any number of Herzog-related publications. For example, despite entries for ideology and aesthetics, there is no index entry for philosophy in Paul Cronin’s Werner Herzog A Guide for the Perplexed. If its frequent use by the contributors to this volume is any indication, Cronin’s is the definitive guide to Herzog’s philosophy. Interestingly, this perspective is shared by Herzog himself. As he tells Cronin, “I live my life with as little reflection as possible,” but he recognizes that Cronin’s book “is the only competent comment on my work out there, and that there is ever likely to be. In that respect, I’m glad it exists.” 12 And without drifting, we hope, too close to a ‘boring’ schematicism, it should be made clear that despite his protestations otherwise, Herzog is not immune from the rare use of the word ‘philosophy’ or a clear engagement with the language and method of philosophers. Explaining why he named the production camps for both Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo “Pelicula o Muerte” (Film or Death), Herzog revealed that the names reflect his “philosophy of filmmaking.” 13 In a 1982 interview, he remarks, “I don’t have any life goals. I have existential goals.” When his interlocutors push him to explain, he replies, “I don’t want to get philosophical now. But believe me, I’ve thought about this question for a long, long time. And I’d have to go into way too much detail in order to explain what I understand by existence, by life, by existential goals, and by life goals.” 14 More recently, when Cronin asks him about his public service announcement film From One Second to the Next (an admonition against texting and driving), he considers how the success of the film can be statistically quantified by a drop in road fatalities due the avoidance of the dangerous practice he depicts in the film. This “accountant’s truth” leads him to a Herzogian ecstatic truth: “There’s an interesting philosophical question here,” he speculates. “You can quantify certain events—such as the number of accidents and fatalities every year—but how can you quantify things that haven’t happened? How can we quantify the number of people not texting while driving? How many wonderful wives have you never met in your life because they left the plaza fifteen seconds before you got there?” 15 An anti-philosophical filmmaker? Hardly. But the philosophy of a Herzog or a Hitchcock is not merely this kind of speculation about what might have been. For the auteur, there is a philosophy about filmmaking (how they think about and then implement the creative acts involved with capturing image and sound and presenting the film as a work of art), in addition to a filmmaker’s philosophy—their beliefs about existence, reality, reason, and right behavior. As several contributors to this volume show, there is also the phenomenological experience of cine-

xviii

Introduction

ma as philosophy, exploring what it is like to view a Herzog film that makes for different aesthetic/somatic experiences than those produced by a Riefenstahl, Fassbinder, or Von Trier film. In Herzog, these seem to merge: filmmaking seems to so totally engulf him that he and his films are inseparable. Or is it the other way around, where his own beliefs so overwhelm his art that his films cannot be distinguished from his life? Another question for our contributors. We begin our collection of essays on Herzog’s film work with David LaRocca’s “‘I Am What My Films Are’: Listening to Herzog’s Ecstatic, Essayistic Pronouncements,” a programmatic piece that serves as an extended preface to the entire volume as well as an informal ‘lit review’ of many of the reference materials that will figure prominently in the following chapters. It is a kind of prolegomenon to the interpretation of Herzog, which will guide us through the Scylla of the academic—the drawing of comparisons to or the imposition of classifications on his work—and the Charybdis of taking Herzog himself to be the only reliable authority for understanding his own work. The following chapter, Patricia Castello Branco’s “Herzog’s Sublime and Ecstatic Truth: From Burke’s Physiological Aesthesis to the Dionysian Unveiling,” provides a compelling account explaining why Edmund Burke’s conception of the sublime is a better source for thinking through the status of the sublime in Herzog’s films (such as Lessons of Darkness) than the more famous articulation of the sublime offered by Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Judgment. Branco’s conclusion provides an important reminder that Herzog’s conception of ecstatic truth, while seemingly opposed to the mere facts of the accountant’s truth, does not simply dispense with them. Daniele Dottorini’s “The Conquest of Uselessness as a Practice of Film and Thought” examines the philosophical significance of misdirection, striving, and the proliferation of personae in Herzog by way of a sustained reading of passages from Nietzsche’s literary masterpiece, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. By exploring the complex and conflicting relationship between Herzog’s cinema and the concepts of Romanticism, Dottorini joins other scholars (most notably Laurie Ruth Johnson and her recent study Forgotten Dreams: Revisiting Romanticism in the Cinema of Werner Herzog 16) in rethinking and transforming Romanticism in light of Herzog’s emphatic claim, offered in yet another of Cronin’s interviews, that “You can’t get a more contrary position towards the Romantic point of view than mine.” Typical, perhaps, of his own iconoclasm, his claim is qualified by Herzog’s gushing appreciation for the work of German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, whose revelation of the “inner landscapes” that “exist only in our dreams” are goals that Herzog himself has “always tried to do with my films.” 17 The next chapter, “Filmmaking and Philosophizing against the Grain of Theory: Herzog and Wittgenstein” by Mihai Ometiță, presents a

Introduction

xix

thought-provoking solution to the puzzle of how to reconcile Herzog’s avowed anti-intellectualism with his own autodidacticism and zest for learning new things through exploration, experimentation, and pragmatic problem-solving. Ometiță observes that Wittgenstein’s work outside of philosophy (to wit, his practicum as a gardener in a monastery) echoes Herzog’s expectation that filmmakers should also work outside of their professions, as, for example, a bouncer in a sex club or a warden in an insane asylum. This essay is followed by Marc Furstenau’s “Nature and Natural Meaning in Grizzly Man,” a discussion of what is perhaps the most wellknown of Herzog’s documentaries. Furstenau convincingly demonstrates that Herzog’s critical interpretation of the significance of Timothy Treadwell’s tragically misguided effort to live among grizzly bears in Alaska is just as dependent on the assumption of purpose in nature as Treadwell’s own worldview, albeit with an inverted emphasis on nature as hostile threat rather than a utopian realm of peaceful cohabitation. In “Reflections from the Abyss: Herzog’s Philosophy of Death,” M. Blake Wilson joins Herzog in a descent into the abyss of death, a subject that is remarkably predominant in many of Herzog’s films but also in their production. Wilson shows that death is no mere trope for Herzog: both Grizzly Man and Into the Abyss feature first- and second-hand stories of horrible bloodshed and violence. In these films, we are told about the contents of the infamous Treadwell ‘death tape,’ and one of Herzog’s interviewees in Into the Abyss describes the execution of one of the other interviewees—a murderer who is executed ten days after Herzog interviews him in prison. Wilson seeks to understand not only how Herzog frames moral problems related to killing and death and how they relate to questions about responsibility and punishment, but also to show, by drawing upon popular and scientific “bear attack” literature, how Herzog himself encounters moral problems entailed by both his own insistence on ecstatic truth and his disparagement of the accountant’s. Next, in the timely “Fake News and Ecstatic Truths: Alternative Facts in Lessons of Darkness,” Kyle Novak’s critical assessment of Herzog’s conception of ecstatic truth is contrasted with the Trump administration’s recent attempts to posit ‘alternative facts’ and disparage ‘fake news.’ Novak, drawing on the later Baudrillard and Deleuze, carefully distinguishes between ‘ecstatic truth’ and ‘alternative facts’ and helps to clarify the important differences between Herzog’s approach and that of the Trump administration and its cronies. Critically, Novak asks whether documentarians have a responsibility to tell the truth, a question shared by both Moore and Wilson in the present volume. In “The Great Ecstasy of Werner Herzog: Truth, Heidegger, Apocalypse,” Ian Alexander Moore explicates Martin Heidegger’s conception of truth as ‘unconcealment’ by attempting to trace the intellectual ground upon which Herzog erects his own self-professed conception of ecstatic

xx

Introduction

truth. Moore clearly shows Herzog’s debt to Heidegger, a thinker Herzog claims not to understand even as he obviously draws on him in, for example, reconstructing the etymological origins of the Greek term for truth, alētheia, and the significance of the alpha privative for understanding truth as dis-closure or un-concealment. Following Moore, Christopher Turner’s “The Film Artist as Discoverer of the Marvels of Everyday Life: A Kracauerian Reading of Werner Herzog,” interprets Herzog’s oeuvre (films, written works, speeches, interviews) in the light of Siegfried Kracauer’s film theory, charting a series of deep affinities in Kracauer’s vision of film as redemption of physical reality and Herzog’s vision of filmmaking as a journey of discovery, fraught with danger while also revealing mystery and marvel. Antony Fredriksson’s “Werner Herzog and Documentary as Revelatory Practice,” which proposes understanding Herzog’s documentary films as instances of revelatory practice rather than veridical representations of reality, offers a nuanced discussion of cinéma vérité that provides a crucial context for critically assessing Herzog’s occasionally simplistic reduction of it to the mere presentation of ‘accountants’ truth. Fredriksson’s chapter supplements LaRocca’s in their mutual exploration of Herzog’s propaedeutic advice that aspiring filmmakers ought to begin to master their craft by walking; an entry exam for film students, for example, might require them to complete a five-thousand-kilometer journey by foot. Next, Stefanie Baumann’s “On Experience and Illumination: Werner Herzog’s Dialectical Relationship with Society,” a reading of Herzog from a Frankfurt School perspective, reveals that regardless of Herzog’s anti-intellectualism, his antipathy to historicism, and his refusal to conceive of his films as animated by any explicit politics, political resistance is still at work in Herzog insofar as his films deliberately do not fit the systematic structure of the culture industry, even while remaining part of it (and even achieving popularity). Baumann’s essay here brings to light the implicit political dimensions of Herzog’s aesthetics—something Herzog himself wants to deny—and presents an intriguing contrast to Tyler Tritten’s contribution in this volume. Will Lehman, in “Herzog’s Philosophy of Masculinism,” considers another aspect of Herzog’s work entirely—the status of masculinity. Lehman shows that Herzog’s conception of masculinity valorizes traditional ‘manliness’ and is at odds with the director’s own professed admiration for women, something we can quickly appreciate when we recognize that female protagonists are conspicuous by their absence in Herzog’s films. Although Lehman does not discuss her, Herzog has addressed why Amie Huguenard, the woman whose death alongside Timothy Treadwell is depicted in Grizzly Man, is nearly absent from the film. Treadwell’s footage only features her for a few minutes, yet Herzog considers there to be “something deeply heroic” about her. He also indicates that he would like to make a separate film on Amie, but cannot because he lacks access

Introduction

xxi

to her story due to her family’s unwillingness to be interviewed. 18 Although this additional information does not detract from Lehman’s thesis, it does bode in favor of a possible reconciliation of Herzog’s personal masculinism and his filmmaking. “Herzog’s Post-Tragic Aesthetic: A Kierkegaardian Perspective,” by Anthony Eagan and Simon Thornton, surveys the Danish philosopher’s thoughts on comedy and tragedy to suggestively consider affinities between “the quixotic forms of madness” on display in the figures of Timothy Treadwell (Grizzly Man) and Don Lope de Aguirre (Aguirre). Indeed, the two men (one real, and the other fictional) attract Herzog’s attention for rather obvious reasons: they are more or less alone in their darkly comic struggles to dominate a natural world that is not merely indifferent to their lives but actively advancing their inevitable demise. Nietzsche also attracts the attention of Tyler Tritten, whose “Werner Herzog on Circles, Chickens and Impotency” draws upon the recurring images of circularity (and chickens) in Herzog’s films and connects them to the themes of impotency and futility. Tritten turns to Nietzsche to articulate a modern conception of the tragic at work in Herzog and to provocatively argue for the claim that Herzog’s films are essentially apolitical. Although the philosophers in this volume rarely attempt to psychoanalyze him (after all, this book is not titled The Psychology of Werner Herzog), Herzog’s mother, Elizabeth Herzog, interviewed in 1976 while traveling with the production crew during the filming of Heart of Glass, explains that Herzog had no close friends as a child. “That’s why,” she says, “he makes films.” She also says, “Werner cannot bear to see people who are sick, who are suffering. It terrifies him. The thought of death makes him so compassionate. It makes him fight.” 19 We hope this book earns a fight—and not a “blank stare”—from Herzog, and we hope it does not end up in his trash with the work of other academics who are equally fascinated by him and his work. Perhaps such a confrontation will provide him some insight into own work as well as the work of this international cadre of scholars, all of whom think deeply and look closely at the thinking and gazing of this most fascinating and prolific of artists. ENDNOTES 1. “Werner Herzog: ‘comme un rêve puissant . . . ’” Jeune Cinéma 81 (SeptemberOctober 1974: 12-16. Interview conducted in Munich, August 1973, trans., Japhet Johnstone. Reprinted in Werner Herzog: Interviews, ed. Eric Ames, as “Werner Herzog: ‘Like a Powerful Dream’” by Noureddine Ghali (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 18. This quote is popular with philosophers and reappears in several of the following chapters. 2. Plato, Gorgias, 463a6-465e1.

xxii

Introduction

3. Bridgette Peucker, “Herzog on Auteurism,” in A Companion to Werner Herzog, ed. Brad Prager (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), 39. See also Turner’s contribution to this volume. 4. Richard Eldridge, Werner Herzog: Filmmaker and Philosopher (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 171. 5. Paul Cronin, Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 177. See LaRocca in the present volume. 6. Plato, Phaedrus, 275d-e. 7. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York: MacMillan Company, 1953), §66. 8. Werner Herzog and Paul Cronin (ed.), Herzog on Herzog (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), 162. 9. See Gottfried Ephraim Lessing’s Sämtliche Werke, ed. by Karl Lachmann and Franz Muncker (Leipzig: Göschen’sche Verlagshandlung, 1900), 15:62-65. 10. See Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 1, trans. and ed. by Sabine Roehr and Christopher Janaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 125-176. 11. Cronin, Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, 197. 12. Cronin, Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, 431. 13. Werner Herzog, quoted in Maureen Gosling, “Recuerdos Peruanos,” in (eds) Les Blank and James Bogan, Burden of Dreams, (Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 1984), 164. 14. Bion Steinborn and Rüdiger Von Naso, “Fitzcarraldo: A Conversation with Werner Herzog,” in Werner Herzog: Interviews, Eric Ames (ed) (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 61-62. 15. Cronin, Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, 430. 16. Laurie Ruth Johnson, Forgotten Dreams: Revisiting Romanticism in the Cinema of Werner Herzog (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2016). 17. Cronin, Guide For the Perplexed, 141-142. 18. Cynthia Fuchs, “A More Athletic Approach: An Interview Werner Herzog on Grizzly Man,” in Werner Herzog: Interviews, Eric Ames (ed) (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 158-159. 19. Alan Greenberg, Every Night the Trees Disappear: Werner Herzog and the Making of Heart of Glass (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2012), 144.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Cronin, Paul. 2014. Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Fuchs, Cynthia. 2014. “A More Athletic Approach: An Interview Werner Herzog on Grizzly Man.” Werner Herzog: Interviews. Eric Ames (ed). Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Ghali, Noureddine. 2014. “Werner Herzog: ‘Like a Powerful Dream.’” Werner Herzog: Interviews. Eric Ames (ed). Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Gosling, Maureen. 1984. “Recuerdos Peruanos.” Burden of Dreams. Les Blank and James Bogan (eds). Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Greenberg, Alan. 2012. Every Night the Trees Disappear: Werner Herzog and the Making of Heart of Glass. Chicago: Chicago Review Press. Herzog, Werner and Cronin, Paul (ed.). 2002. Herzog on Herzog. London: Faber and Faber. Lessing, Gottfried Ephraim. 1900. Sämtliche Werke. Karl Lachmann and Franz Muncker (eds). Leipzig: Göschen’sche Verlagshandlung. Peucker, Bridgette. 2012. “Herzog on Auteurism.” A Companion to Werner Herzog. Brad Prager (ed). Oxford: Blackwell.

Introduction

xxiii

Schopenhauer, Arthur. 2014. Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. 1. Sabine Roehr and Christopher Janaway (trans. and ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steinborn, Bion and Von Naso, Rüdiger. 2014. “Fitzcarraldo: A Conversation with Werner Herzog.” Werner Herzog: Interviews. Eric Ames (ed). Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

ONE “I Am What My Films Are” Listening to Herzog’s Ecstatic, Essayistic Pronouncements David LaRocca

Werner Herzog is a very well-read and highly articulate filmmaker— especially when thinking aloud about his own films—and yet he regularly cultivates a defiantly anti-institutional, indeed, anti-intellectual posture. If this is a defensiveness borne of his accomplished autodidacticism, so be it. If, for whatever reason, he refuses—and mocks—academic analysis and theorizing of his work, we must live with it. The same person who counsels aspiring filmmakers to “read, read, read, read, read,” who established his own “film school” (which, by the way, mandates a book curriculum as well as a film syllabus), also unrelentingly emphasizes that “film schools are a waste of time.” 1 And so, despite his double status—as a talented, illuminating reader of his own work and a (playfully?) hostile antagonist to those who would dare seek deeper meanings in his films—a philosopher and film theorist cannot help but be intrigued. As Herzog has said in reply to the intellectually curious, “pedantic theoreticians of cinema”: “Go for it, losers.” 2 Taking the bait, as I have before, 3 in this chapter I offer a critical account of selected remarks on what may be, despite his objection, a veritable philosophy of filmmaking—or, at the least, gestures toward one. Instead of attempting to discern a coherent system (surely, a lost cause), I aim to glean while listening to the essayistic, often repetitive, and engagingly paratactic qualities of his pronouncements. Indeed, the films I study partake in the genre of “essay films”— those that intentionally bypass any presumptions to a definitive “state1

2

Chapter 1

ment” or unified “argument” and thereby present themselves, instead, as experiments, thematic explorations, trials, studies, assemblages, and varied sites of encounter. 4 Though there are pertinent moments from “masterclasses” Herzog has offered over the years, as well as interviews with the likes of Jonathan Demme, and more conspicuously, Les Blank’s legendary portraits, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980) and Burden of Dreams (1982), I attend mostly to documentaries featuring the filmmaker, that is, biographical and autobiographical essay films that are by design and definition contributions to metafilmmaking and metaphilosophy: Christian Weisenborn’s I Am My Films: A Portrait of Werner Herzog (1976-78, with Erwin Keusch) and I Am My Films, Part 2, Thirty Years Later (2010); Peter Buchka’s To the Limit and Then Beyond It: The Ecstatic World of Filmmaker Werner Herzog, (Bis ans Ende und dann noch weiter: Die ekstatische Welt des Filmemachers Werner Herzog, Ein Essay von Peter Buchka, 1989); Dreams and Burdens (2005); and lastly, Herzog’s own, Werner Herzog: Filmemacher: An Autobiographical Documentary Short (1989). My work for this chapter is motivated by a wish to cull and assess elements from these documentaries, and related texts, so that they might be drawn into service for the wider critical conversation about Herzog’s philosophical contributions—in particular, what philosophers and film theorists might do with his work. Yet the question that haunts the undertaking remains: do his pronouncements forestall the very efforts here proffered? When it comes to thinking philosophically about his films, what can and should we make of Herzog’s consistently imposed obstructionism? THE ENIGMA SPEAKS If one is not sure whether an enigma is at hand, consult the nearest bibliography of articles, chapters, reviews, interviews, and books on (or by) Werner Herzog. Given the number of works addressing Herzog, a number that has proliferated in recent years, and one that has been uncannily supplemented by Herzog’s own industry as a prose stylist (publishing books, articles, and “manifestos” along the way, not to mention the capacious commentary he provides in his films and “upon” them, e.g., in DVD commentaries), we can be sure that a mercurial figure is among us. To be fair, and to be sure, Paul Cronin’s magisterial Herzog on Herzog (2002)—which has since its publication been updated, expanded, and enriched into the (aptly retitled) seminal tome Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, Conversations with Paul Cronin (2014)—has served as just such a Maimonidean guide for those of us who have sought orientation in, among, and toward Herzog’s varied films. Many days, it can feel like the Peruvian jungle—home to such labyrinthine narratives as Fitzcarraldo, its companion documentary Burden of Dreams (dir., Les Blank

“I Am What My Films Are”

3

and Maureen Gosling, 1982), Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), and Wings of Hope (2000), among other works—is our best metaphor for the thicket of ideas we find (or more often, lose) ourselves in. Among other recent ventures in Herzog interpretation—by turns exegetical and midrashic— we find The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History (1986), and The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (2011), both by Timothy Corrigan 5 ; The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (2007) and A Companion to Werner Herzog (2012), both by Brad Prager; Ferocious Reality: Documentary According to Werner Herzog (2012) and Werner Herzog: Interviews (2014), both by Eric Ames; Every Night the Trees Disappear: Werner Herzog and the Making of Heart of Glass by Alan Greenberg (1976/2012), and many other authors and editors gamely going at the project of making sense of Herzog’s movies and musings. Yet, as I mentioned in a previous attempt at arranging some thoughts on the speculation of a “humanistic sublime” in Herzog, I found myself amused and thwarted by Herzog’s insistence that academic, critical, or theoretical approaches to understanding film are bankrupt. 6 And so, here again, in this volume, another group of seasoned scholars have stepped up to make something in prose of Herzog’s cinematic sounds and images. What can be added? Given limitations—and we know how Herzog loves limits—I will, in what follows, attempt to offer a brief critical digest of the ways in which we might reasonably (perhaps, decidedly, a Herzogian bête noire) speak of Herzog’s philosophy of film, or of filmmaking; or cine-philosophy (depending on your preference). By now, most major and mainstream directors have found themselves on camera, on screen, explaining themselves and their films—from the press junket to the authorized biography, from the critical reevaluation of earlier work, to festschrifts and encomiums, and to the now-disappearing but much-loved DVD commentary tracks and “special features”—and so we live at a time when asking about a given film (again, by a major talent) also means that we can find a documentary or interview or public talk (now often available on YouTube) that can provide evidence for theorymaking (his or her own, or ours). Befitting the temperament of a classic Herzogian adventurer, Herzog himself often exceeds even the vast commentary of his celebrated peers (e.g., witness the director commentary on the several boxed sets of his films as well as his copious and capacious interviews, seminars, and perhaps most crucially, his self-styled, selfinvented Rogue Film School). While the previously mentioned resources (as well as the contents of the book in hand) supply indexed access to whole worlds of Herzogian pronouncements, purloined apothegms, and provocative calls to action, I wish to turn to a small, but substantial segment of the Bavarian director’s vast corpus: those works in which he has made himself or allowed himself to become the subject, often the subject-in-reflection-about-his-filmand-filmmaking. Given Herzog’s availability to (both sides of) the came-

4

Chapter 1

ra, it is not surprising, though it is to be sure, perplexing (that word again), that one of these works is titled “I am what my films are” [Was ich bin, sind meine Filme], though more often promoted under a different translation—viz., “I am my films.” (As a moment of sideways film history, we might also note that Herzog’s fellow “Werner”—Rainer Werner Fassbinder said “Ich bin meine filme.” As Herzog encourages lock-picking and the forgery of documents, so we could add calculated appropriation. 7 Moreover, as we consider phraseology and attribution, perhaps some attention to the standard—to many, accepted—translation of Was ich bin, sind meine Filme is in order: Christian Weisenborn’s two films are rendered as I Am My Films; the title of this chapter proposes a variant: “I am what my films are.”) Sphinx-like, Herzog sends us back to ask “What are your films?” before we might begin to sketch a reply to how Herzog is somehow ontologically coextensive with them. For example, if his films are fictions, then Herzog is one too; if documentary, then Herzog likewise becomes a creature of nonfiction; if his films are encounters with “ecstatic truth,” then how would we discern this status in and of the director as well? Of course, his films can be all these things, and more, and thus we would appear to be in need of another (first?) step in our discovery and appreciation of Herzog’s cinematic creations. To this end, as we have in various “commentaries” on his own work, we will look to Herzog to tutor us—to provide us tuition in—the illumination of his enigma, that is, of his films, and of the philosophy they contain or he adopts in making them. “ALL AROUND THE MOVIE” (ŽIŽEK’S CLOSET COMMENTARY ON HERZOG) The much-celebrated Criterion Collection has made a habit of inviting people—usually famous filmmakers and actors, but also god forbid, a film theorist (!)—into its store-room closet to browse the titles and comment on them. In one memorable close encounter in the closet, we find Slavoj Žižek extemporizing on the values and virtues of films by Ernst Lubitsch, Peter Weir, Louis Malle, Ang Lee, David Lean, Roberto Rossellini, Sergei Eisenstein, Charlie Chaplin, Alfonso Cuáron, Carl Dreyer, and Lars von Trier. And then his free-flowing analysis comes to a sudden halt. In his distinctive syntax (preserved in an animated quotation), and with a knowing spice of advertising added to placate his host, Žižek remembers an example of a film he does not like to watch: I must confess that I cheat sometimes: if the movie drags on, I do a little bit of fast forward or whatever and so on. But the reason I like Criterion is that even if it’s a bad movie you can get, you usually get, a good running commentary and all the making-of stuff and so on. And sometimes, I must say, I enjoy this additional stuff more than movie itself.

“I Am What My Films Are”

5

For example, Werner Herzog. Fitzcarraldo. I think it’s a pretentious fake. The other one, similar movie: Aguirre, The Wrath of God is much better. But there is, I think, the title is The Burden of Dreams. A documentary on the making of Fitzcarraldo. I think it’s much better than the movie itself. So that’s why I like Criterion. Forget the movie. I’m a corrupted theorist. Screw the movie, I like to learn all around the movie. 8

We will not, then, shortlist Žižek for a review of Herzog’s films, since the lesson is overt: better to discuss his films than to watch them! Yet, Žižek’s love of the paratexts Criterion makes possible on its robustly produced, high-end DVDs is indicative of a behavior we see in Herzog himself: he, with seemingly peerless endurance and unflappable vigor, speaks about his own work (as he does in the rightly vaunted Les Blank and Maureen Gosling film, Burden of Dreams). Just at Žižek has, then, spotted one of the most illuminating supplemental texts in our potential thinking about Herzog’s own films, he also gives us a clue to the way we may wish to “learn all around the movie”—and Herzog’s movies more generally—in order to understand something more fundamental about what animates his thinking, we might say, his philosophical stance. Yet, as we proceed, we might as well move forward with some candor, since we will not find a quick, consistent key by which we can translate Herzog’s pronouncements into the language and logic of professional philosophy, or for that matter, film studies. Herzog does not speak those languages, but instead summons mystical, archaic lexicons, and feeds on terms familiar to the Romantic, poetic, and transcendental. His remarks can seem to conjure little worlds unto themselves rather than offer a coherent portraiture or a balanced architectonic. He does not build a system or systems, but instead catches glimpses of what lies at the limit of comprehension—and often just beyond it. Indeed, nearly a half-century ago he declared a sentiment that has recurred throughout his career, in myriad forms and instances: I am not an intellectual. I do not belong to the ranks of intellectuals who have a philosophy or a social structure in mind and then make a film about it. Nor do I think that I succumbed to literary or philosophical influences. I can say, for the most part, that I am illiterate. I haven’t read much and am therefore utterly clueless. In my case, making a film has much more to do with real life, with living things, than it has with philosophy. All my films were made without any reflective contemplation, or hardly any. Reflections always came after the film. 9

Doubtless we have already encountered, even here in the early 1970s, what might be called Herzog’s (unwittingly cultivated?) Socratic irony: his wish to appear untutored, which, as he must know, invokes the wisdom of saints and sages. The more he protests to grand theory, the more he courts self-deprecation, the more “we theorists” and film fans appear

6

Chapter 1

to run to his defense, as if to say: “No, Werner, you are an intellectual, indeed, you are wise!” Time and again, though, Herzog’s outward contempt for theory, for the pursuits of intellectuals and philosophers, film theorists and their “schools,” makes itself known; and coupled with that rejection and brazen dismissal comes the sense that he is, in fact, very much an insider—which is to say, a reader, a theorist, a student. 10 He said as much at his Rogue Film School, before an audience of aspiring filmmakers and Herzog enthusiasts: “If you don’t read, you will never be a filmmaker.” 11 One of the enigmas we should be working with (in what has been said thus far and in what follows) is the relationship between creation and reflection in his film production (e.g., does “reflection always [come] after the film,” or does it not also, and very often, motivate its making?); another is the extent to which Herzog’s rhetoric (of ignorance, anti-theory, indeed, illiteracy!) is part of the philosophical edifice he has intentionally or inadvertently built. INSIGHT WITHOUT INSTRUCTION In Christian Weisenborn’s I Am My Films: A Portrait of Werner Herzog (1976-78), with a title, as my chapter title alludes, that can be variously translated as “I am my films” and “I am what my films are”—a distinction worth dwelling upon—our interviewer, Laurens Straub, asks Herzog a seemingly innocuous question, something to set the occasion in motion. Herzog doesn’t disappoint. “What is your earliest memory?” Straub asks, to which Herzog replies: “My absolute earliest memory is of seeing God himself.” 12 Follow-up questions ensue: “Were you scared of God?”—“No, I thought he was fine. . . . I think he was in overalls.” An ecstatic image of his “savior” suddenly descends to the pedestrian, whereupon Herzog nonchalantly ends the story: “Later I found out it must have been someone from the little power station that was nearby.” The shape of this vignette is iconic, and one that repeats in various encounters with Herzog—indeed, Herzog retells a version of this story in a different autobiographical film, Werner Herzog: Filmemacher: An Autobiographical Documentary Short (1989) 13—a simple question followed by a fabulous reply, which turns back suddenly to familiar terms. Going from God to overalls in a breath is not uncommon. Instead of mocking such patterns of thought and speech, I think it more productive—especially since it is so prevalent across his films as well as his off-the-cuff comments in interviews—to treat them as indicative of his ongoing debate between the “accountant’s truth” and the “ecstatic truth.” The distinction is by now familiar, but let me gloss it briefly, since it may now be confused with popular (if contested) phrases in our contemporary moment such as “fake news” and “alternative facts.” Ecstatic truth is not about fakes, hoaxes, and lies, but rather is truth that is

“I Am What My Films Are”

7

emergent from fabrications. Thus, ecstatic truth is not aimed to leave one in a morass of contradictions, or lost in a field of misinformation, but, much more like a bit of legerdemain, to conjure truth from fiction. Ecstatic truth is, therefore, not the truth of the journalist, but of the mystic. And thus of the mystifier. In large measure, because of Herzog’s delivery—his unsmiling earnestness, his calm cadence, his baritone Bavarian inflection, his dramatic diction—we have joined him in that moment of encounter with the divine. We are, if briefly, believers. That Herzog confesses the godhead is but a mechanic who passed by the house is of little consequence to that glimpse of grandeur. The accountant’s truth is admitted, but not before we are treated to a kind of truth that exceeds it. Having emphasized that he spent his childhood alternating between a “gang” of children, a dozen or more in all, in a “chaotic” family with various “litters” of siblings, and also enduring long stretches of solitude and illness (on one occasion a dysenteric fever had him dreaming he was being eaten by a shark, only to realize a lesser—but still astonishing— reality that rats were biting into his skin), Herzog tells us about a formative bit of his educational experience: I really hated it in school. It was just torturous. I think we spent six months reading Goethe’s Iphigenia. And six months on Faust. It was truly inhumane and terrible. I still haven’t read Faust, simply because it made me physically sick. Back then I knew something was missing. We’re forced to analyze it and pick it apart in a pseudo-academic way. It drives away any chance we have of loving these works. I always believed that the most important thing with a film or a work of literature or a painting or whatever was just to love it. [ . . . ] When I go to watch a film [ . . . ] there are moments when a realization suddenly strikes me. It flashes through me like lightning. And I know I am no longer alone. There are times like that in filmmaking [ . . . and], yes, you find them in real life too. 14

We are presented, then, with two primary models of encounter with art: a “pseudo-academic” style that favors “analysis” but leaves Herzog “physically sick,” and a contrasting intuitive and receptive mode, based in love, which allows “realization” and insight to strike, like lightning. As Herzog’s ridicule of the academic matures over the years, we can see that he drops the “pseudo” prefix since it is, in his view, redundant. Herzog’s quietist, intuitive approach, as well as a certain cultivated mysticism or even naïve wisdom, comes up, for example, when Laurens Straub remarks, “A lot of children keep secrets. Do you have a secret?” 15 How should Herzog answer this? First, by admitting, “Yes, of course, secrets played a big role,” and then imposing a meta-reflexive obfuscation appropriate to the subject, “But I won’t talk about that.” Thus the presence of a reality is coupled with notions of the unspeakable, the unsayable, the inexpressible, the ineffable. 16 For examples of this “to the limit” without a culminating result, we can look to Herzog’s films about

8

Chapter 1

natural phenomena (e.g., in La Soufrière [1977], where a volcano stirs but then doesn’t erupt—“waiting for an inevitable disaster” that, in fact, never comes to pass); or in his fictions that feature mutes or the deaf-blind (e.g., Land of Silence and Darkness [1971]) or people under hypnosis (Heart of Glass [1976]) or people with mental impairments (any film with Bruno S., and arguably, in a playfully provocative way befitting Herzog’s relationship, with Klaus Kinski). Time and again, Herzog summons conditions in which we might be treated to an expression of profundity, and time and again that end is forestalled—sometimes tragically (e.g., Grizzly Man [2005]), other times with parody and metacinematic trickery (e.g., Lessons of Darkness [1992]), on still other occasions with a kind of wry, witty withholding (e.g., My Best Fiend [1999]). “Yes, there are certain things which should remain sacrosanct,” Herzog continues on the subject of keeping his secrets. “[ . . . ] It’s not good to know everything. You can’t live like that.” Herzog extends the notion of “knowing” or not knowing (or keeping knowledge a secret) by registering his disdain for the presumed knowledge of the mental sciences: “That’s what I don’t like about psychology. First, because they’re so cocky, like it’s a normal discipline with substantiated evidence. But actually it’s reached the same stage as cranial surgery had during the mid-pharaonic period [ . . . ]. Like centuries of bloodletting showed the helplessness of medicine. Psychology is the helplessness of our times.” 17 Herzog’s almost Nietzschean critique of psychology reminds us anew of the ways sanity is a leitmotif of his films—that is, whether people have it or not, whether the sane are the impaired ones and the insane are the ones to be trusted and followed. “There’s a certain fatalism about [psychology] because it tries to shed light into every corner of what makes us human. [ . . . ] You can’t live in a room with the lights blazing in every corner. It makes for uninhabitable, unhomely people, you know?” Cinema, as a technology, is by definition a medium of illumination, yet it is also a form that invites us to gather in dark rooms (where the corners remain in the shadows). Herzog’s fascination with the primitive qualities of the human—from mysticism to cave painting—seem to provide his preferred account of psychology: we are dreamers by nature, so we are wisest when we give credence to visions, when we are captivated by fata morgana. Film, as Herzog practices it, is not forensic, not for the accountability of history (say, in the way that Ken Burns’ multipart documentary portraits are meant to be both). Instead, the sounds and sights on screen form an alternate space of hallucination, where we can gather to replay our individual and collective phantasms.

“I Am What My Films Are”

9

THE VIRTUE OF FILMMAKING ON FOOT Moving ahead a decade to Werner Herzog: Filmemacher: An Autobiographical Documentary Short (1989), we catch a glimpse of another aspect of Herzog’s imaginative primitivism. He speaks of a Bavarian childhood spent walking long distances—including the child-like hope of holding things together by means of personal effort and concentration (e.g., “I thought a person walking around [the country, i.e., the then-bifurcated Germany], always tracing the border, would somehow keep the country intact.”) 18 When the child grows up, though, he retains his adolescent sense of mystical powers, including those tied to the pre-industrial human: Sometimes I kind of jokingly say, “My films are all films made while walking.” There is some truth to that. Because many pivotal experiences in my life were done on foot. For example, I walked from Munich to Paris one winter—that’s 800 or 900 kilometers—because someone very important to me was dying [viz., Lotte Eisner]. And I thought that walking there might save her. [ . . . ] [Walking long distances] is a completely unique way of life, of existence, that has almost completely disappeared from our everyday lives. 19

This passage includes some of the hallmark rhetorical structure of a Herzogian pronouncement: an admission of unseriousness (“Sometimes I kind of jokingly say”) followed by a very seriously presented bold irrationalism predicated on some kind of appeal to a link between mental and extra-mental realities (“And I thought that walking there might save her”) and then, at the last moment, an almost trite anthropological observation (“almost completely disappeared from our everyday lives”), that, nevertheless, links his personal experience to the realm of a shared crisis and a possible resolution (“completely unique way of life, of existence”). It is often very difficult to parse the logic of such a structure when it occurs, and especially when it is repeated many times in the course of a film. A viewer may glom onto the provocative pseudo-science (e.g., that walking a long distance might save an elderly woman from death) or dwell on the observation that ancient man lived a different life than contemporary man, and these attachments—one way or another—will inform one’s relationship to the film, to Herzog’s pronouncements within it, and whether one takes them seriously or not. Yet, there is at least one more element to note from this brief remark made in Werner Herzog: Filmemacher, namely, the way in which walking on foot is transitively related to filmmaking—as if walking and filmmaking are (necessarily) kindred undertakings, both literally and figuratively. For example, the outing on foot to reach Paris is not filmed (since, as we are told, Herzog walked alone), but, in time, it ends up on film as a story (as it does here and elsewhere, and in Herzog’s book Of Walking in

10

Chapter 1

Ice [1978] 20). Of his published diary, Herzog says it is “literature created more by my feet than my head, and remains closer to my heart than any of my films.” 21 Herzog’s esteem for this work of writing—writing, as it were, “done by feet” (and thus not the head and the hand), and overtly in contrast with (his) filmmaking—is, in part, a testament to his affection for Lotte Eisner, who was such a crucial support to him, but also an indication of his regard for the power of walking on foot from one place to another. Lesson #9 (of 13) in his now-iconic manifesto “Minnesota Declaration” reads: “Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.” 22 Herzog glosses the contrast this way: “When you travel on foot it isn’t a matter of covering actual territory, rather a question of moving through your own inner landscapes. [ . . . ] The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.” 23 With the virtue of walking underscored here, one can take a veritable tour of Herzog’s films, scanning along the way for figures of walking— whether it is along a cliff-hugging mountainside trail at the beginning of Aguirre, the Wrath of God or atop artic ice-seas, as in Encounters at the End of the World; with Timothy Treadwell in the grizzly maze of Alaska, with Dieter Dengler navigating the jungle forests of Laos, or discussing with Reinhold Messner a proposed film with Klaus Kinski ascending the Himalayas, 24 walking informs Herzog’s films even as it is figured by Herzog’s own, personal peripateticism. “When walking,” he tells us, “I have the most intense instances of imagination, of planning. I write profusely, work on projects and screenplays.” 25 Reading (and writing) is not, usually, something one can do while walking. And though Herzog has been known to insist that his students at the Rogue Film School “read, read, read, read, read, read,” 26 there is a counter-value in the movement of the body beyond the screen, beyond the page: “I get my ideas from real life, not books. When I hear the kind of language used by zealots and film theorists, Venetian blinds start rattling down.” 27 Herzog certainly does not gain inspiration for filmmaking by reading film theory, and seldom cites films made by others as a point of departure. Rather, it is by means of a noncinematic or nontheoretical activity, such as walking, that one’s “inner landscapes” are revealed, as if daydreams were the better inspiration for art—”when walking I experience exciting voyages into my own imagination, and fall into deep reveries.” 28 Or as Gilles Deleuze has remarked on Herzog’s pathways: “The walker is defenseless because he is he who is beginning to be [ . . . ].” 29 Given Herzog’s emphasis on his rural Bavarian upbringing, and the role walking played in his formative years, one can wonder if walking is more of contingent inspiration, say, in the way that automobiles and the “road trip” figure in the imaginative landscape (both inner and outer) of many American teens from the 1950s onward, and as exemplified in cinematic form—from Rebel Without a Cause to American Graffiti, from National Lampoon’s Vacation to Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, from to Thelma and Louise to Little Miss Sunshine. Herzog has a way of naturalizing and thus universal-

“I Am What My Films Are”

11

izing the virtue of walking, whereas we might be better off considering his emphasis as an indication of private value and meaning—much in the same way as the mountains (of his homeland in Bavaria) could be said to stimulate his pursuit of other epic landscapes (from Peru to the Taiga). “CONSTRUCT FILMS, DON’T DECONSTRUCT THEM” In the concluding lines of voiceover in his filmed self-portrait, Werner Herzog: Filmemacher: An Autobiographical Documentary Short (1989), the author pauses over a photograph of himself at work on set (preparing to snap a slate), and notes with a kind of heroic self-deprecation: “Looking at me here you can see the toll filming can take on me. But that’s the life I lead. I wouldn’t want it otherwise.” 30 Twenty-one years later, as time continues to take its toll (and more than thirty-four years since his first documentary portrait of the director), we find Christian Weisenborn picking up with Herzog in I Am My Films, Part 2, Thirty Years Later (2010)—this time very far from a cloistered room in 1970s Munich, or even from the open mountainsides of Bavaria, but instead in Venice, Italy, and in company with the likes of Nicholas Cage, Eva Mendes, and Michael Shannon. Soon enough, though, we are driving—yes, driving— in Los Angeles, with Herzog at the wheel, and Weisenborn in the side seat. Herzog begins, speaking in German: “It’s really a jungle out here. I always say it’s a substitute for . . . ”—Weisenborn eagerly supplies an answer: “The Bavarian forest?” Herzog chuckles: “No, Tuscany.” 31 One thing is clear, now a proud resident of Los Angeles County, Herzog has adapted to the car culture of his new home, if not the ostentatiousness of the homes he is invited to, which he declares are “totally uninhabitable.” The conversation turns, though, to what might be called Herzog’s inhabitation in his films (especially his documentaries), a presence that is sufficiently distinctive that his work is fodder for parody by others. 32 Reflecting on finding himself in front of the camera in The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner (1974), standing in the foreground holding a microphone (like a sportscaster reporting on the Olympics) with a ski jumper descending behind him, Herzog notes half-a-lifetime later: I had my doubts and have them today with regards to my presence in the film. But it did lead me to think that what was basically right about the concept was to avoid making documentaries totally anonymously. Documentaries should always make a personal note felt in them. Because the films I made were not commissioned by someone, but were made because of my own deep fascination with the subject. [ . . . ] I’ve now become my own commentator. 33

Herzog couples two distinctive attributes of his approach to filmmaking, especially of documentaries, namely, that the work should be driven by personal passion and that it should (even if it is funded by others) be

12

Chapter 1

driven by a fiercely independent ambition to create a film of one’s own (i.e., a work that cannot be read generically or anonymously as if it simply appeared on earth without being authored by an individual with a body, a mind, and opinions). With this spirit in mind—one that Herzog attributes to the success of his self-created Rogue Film School—we may glean reasons for his antagonism to intellectual or film-theoretical approaches to making movies. In conversation with Paul Cronin, Herzog says: “On the table in front of us is a pile of academic articles about my films that you brought over for me to look at. The minute you leave here today, it will all be thrown into the trash. The healthiest thing anyone can do is avoid that impenetrable nonsense. My response to it all is a blank stare, just as I respond to most philosophical writings.” 34 Herzog’s fury and indifference (can he sustain both attitudes?) seems genuine, and yet, instead of alienating those of us who are poised to take the bait, it can feel like an invitation for further thinking. Herzog’s earnest dismissiveness confounds those of us who care about philosophical scholarship on film—what calls and counts for thinking about cinema. Invoking an image from his beloved Peruvian jungle (where all he hears is “strangulation and murder”), Herzog declares: “Academia stifles cinema, encircling it like a liana vine wraps round a tree, smothering and draining away all life. Construct films,” he admonishes, “don’t deconstruct them. [ . . . ] Whenever I encounter film theorists, I lower my head and charge.” 35 On the diploma for the Rogue Film School, the embossed seal reads “Not for the faint of heart,” and so it must be that to face Herzog—and his anti-intellectual ideology of film—one must meet his strength with strength of one’s own. Perhaps, as a marker for this kind of counter-force, we can cite the life and work of Jean-Luc Godard and certain other French cinéastes (among them Chabrol, Demy, Resnais, Rivette, Rohmer, Truffaut, and Varda) who transformed their intellectual love of cinema into the making of movies. To the joy of those who write about films, the critics of the French New Wave make one believe that criticism is a way of making films without a camera—that, in effect, criticism shows us what movies do, and how we might (or must!) think about them. In this way, the film critic does not even have to make the passage to filmmaker, since writing about film is a kind of writing of film—a creation by way of illuminative remarks. To which Herzog would surely reply, as he has in print: “Go for it, losers.” 36 To forestall pedantry and self-seriousness, and as a bid for self-reflexiveness, that is, as we read these lines and the sentiments they contain in a book about Herzog, it may do us some good to simply acknowledge the variations of Herzog’s sense of humor. Depending on where you look in his films, Herzog can achieve rather profound moments of philosophical commentary, but he can also seem ponderous—even, at times, a parody of himself. 37 If we are sure, for example, of the type of seriousness in his films that we wish to defend, we can also spot those moments when he

“I Am What My Films Are”

13

allows himself—and us—a bit of fun. Consider the moment in Encounters at the End of the World (2007) when Herzog is taking stock of the accommodations at McMurdo station and concludes with biting vitriol that the place includes “abominations such as an aerobics studio and yoga classes.” 38 The intensity of his disdain, in this instance, is played for laughs; his persona as a wild dreamer is coupled with that of an irascible curmudgeon. (We might contrast such tongue-in-cheek culture critique with the bruising insights he declaims in Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams or, indeed, in the self-portrait documentaries that have been drawn into service for this chapter). Picking up after this interlude, then, if we (still) seek the spirit of Herzog’s remarks to the cinéaste and would-be filmmaker, it may be closer to a mentor’s worry that ideas (and the precedents set by others) will get in the way of one’s work, attempted or otherwise. As Herzog has said: “Reading about cinema is of little use to aspiring filmmakers. [ . . . ] I always felt that if you really love cinema, the healthiest thing to do is ignore books about it.” 39 Note again, a certain Nietzschean strain in these comments about what is “healthiest”—as if filmmaking were an exercise, even a test of one’s endurance, one’s fortitude (hence all the walking! And yet another Nietzschean trope). In I Am My Films, Part 2, he goes into more detail about how he himself, and the films he has created over the last half-century, have provided a worthy model for emerging talent: Especially in the last ten to twenty years it has become ever clearer that many young film directors as well as writers see me as a point of orientation. I don’t want to exaggerate, but that’s the way it is. Some see me and my way of making films as a source of hope. Plus, the fact that I was able to start projects with practically nothing but my own energy and without making myself completely dependent on an industry. And after this pressure and this great fascination [by others] became so strong, and came towards me like a slow-moving avalanche, I’ve now sometimes had interactions with the public. And recently, with this becoming more and more intense, I’ve tried to channel this and founded my own film school, the Rogue Film School. 40

We must deduce, then, that the Rogue Film School is an anti-school: it will contain lessons that you will not find in typical film schools. The “school,” such as it is, must cultivate an anti-learning, a way in which “students” can hear their own voices, follow their own instincts, and, in effect, ignore the “teacher” insofar as he is an impediment to doing one’s own work. 41 The paradox is evident. The student must submit to an authority that insists on her own authority; such “instruction” is more like a summons, even if it comes in the form of a command. Though Herzog often speaks calmly, as he does in the voiceover commentary to many of his films, there is also a palpable intensity that may be mistaken for aggression or defiance.

14

Chapter 1 That’s how films should be made. We are directors. We are storytellers. We are people who create. We are not people who have a camera that is surveilling a bank or till. Take action! Create! [ . . . ] [W]ith imagination, with collective dreams, with all sorts of things. That’s what we have to strive for if we want to make something that will hold up for years to come. I’m not afraid of that at all. I’ve been attacked again and again. My response to that is always very clear: I’ll lower my head and lock horns straight away. [ . . . ] I don’t avoid contradiction, I confront it. 42

With all this head-lowering, some could take Herzog’s bravado literally, for example, as part of some archaic, brutish, hyper-masculinist ethic for any filmmaking-adventurer who aims to flout danger and possible death at every turn (from approaching exploding volcanoes [La Soufrière] to making a film in the Amazon in the midst of a civil war [Fitzcarraldo]). But there is a less brazen version that may more ably apply to all filmmakers, namely, to create without excuse, without apology, without citing all the obstructions and obstacles familiar to making art, in short, to simply “Take action!” There is the fear, of course, that when such advice is stripped of Herzog’s Bavarian accent and now-iconic timbre, indeed, the intensity of his person, these credos become at once prosaic and predictable—like the ad copy for a brochure announcing a film school based on self-help principles. VIGOROUS ESSAYISM While many literary-philosophical essayists may qualify as those who have “retired”—in the sense of pulling back from the fray in an effort to reflect and comment—Herzog presents an active, engaged, model of vigorous essayism, where filmmaking is a full-bodied enterprise suited to one’s health (unless, of course, it’s taking its toll). Herzog’s allergy to intellectualism started early, for instance, when he disparaged the way German literature was being taught to him in his adolescence, yet it abides steadily throughout his life: an academic approach is stultifying, where the only healthy option is to pick up a camera and make a film (picking locks and forging permits, if necessary). Despite Herzog’s faithful dismissiveness of analysis (perhaps in both the philosophical and psychological senses), we may yet conclude that his resolute dedication to making films—regardless of hindrances and hurdles—is a form of essaying (from essais), that is, of attempting, of trials, of undertaking the work of trying. One virtue of Herzog’s vigorous essayism (and it is something that would make for a defensible philosophical position, if he should want to have it) is the artful way in which he makes films that resist being thesisdriven. Herzog himself, quite notoriously, blends or equivocates on the difference between feature films and documentary films, and part of that

“I Am What My Films Are”

15

shared universe involves an unwillingness (as noted earlier) to share all the secrets, to spell everything out (even if one were able to do so). We could say that Herzog’s quietism especially well-serves the documentary mode, where creators are so often caught up with evidence-finding and argument-presentation that they lose sight of the mystery that haunts the proceedings. Moreover, when Herzog’s brand of essayism is coupled with his dedication to what he calls “ecstatic truth,” we are presented with a unique challenge to documentary form’s presumed status as a default registry of the “accountant’s truth.” In short, when essayism and ecstatic truth join forces, as they do most compellingly in Herzog’s “documentary” experiments, we are presented with an undeniable challenge to the standing categories of journalism and art, fact and fiction, information and revelation. As Deleuze has remarked, in a similar vein: “there is the sublime action, always beyond, but which itself engenders another action, a heroic action which confronts the milieu on its own account, penetrating the impenetrable, breaking the unbreachable.” 43 Walking, making paths, trespassing, crossing, ascending—these are embodied movements to the limit, and thus put us ever closer to an encounter with the sublime. In Peter Buchka’s self-described “essay,” To the Limit and then Beyond It: The Ecstatic World of Filmmaker Werner Herzog (1989), Herzog, sounding a bit like a Jungian and a follower of Joseph Campbell, says: “I believe that cinema is rooted in dreams and common desires. And that it’s rooted more in collective wishes than it is in reality. I also think that cinema can use artificiality, fiction, and imagination to reveal a whole new reality that lies behind it all.” 44 Herzog’s dogged pursuit of filmmaking—in his own strenuous practice of shooting in unforgiving locations—is often paired with his interest in figures who have endured extremes (e.g., a prisoner of war, a prisoner on death row, an exile, an errant colonizer, a disquieted conquistador, a troubled “protector” of bears, even a highjump skier). Herzog’s efforts—his attempts, his essaying—are focused on cinema’s power to “awaken images” that lie dormant in us. 45 He postulates that there is a “grammar of images” that we share and that they form an “inner history”—both of which can be stimulated or made evident by motion pictures. In turn, we are faced with “an image of humanity” conjured by a “humanistic sublime.” 46 In The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence, Thomas Weiskel writes “the essential claim of the sublime is that man can, in feeling and in speech, transcend the human,” and consequently: “The humanistic sublime is an oxymoron.” 47 In another place, I have aimed to say something about how Herzog’s war films, as I call them, “antagoniz[e] the oxymoronic status” of Weiskel’s troubled syntagma. Indeed, my way into the defense of, or deliberation on, the validity and vitality of the humanistic sublime is none other than Herzog’s own patented brand of ecstatic truth. There I note:

16

Chapter 1 While the sublime in the romantic or transcendental sense is meant to suggest an experience that gets you out of your humanness, where you feel instead connected to the external, eternal, absolute, or atemporal, the humanistic sublime by contrast is informed by a return to, a remembrance of, or a reengagement with the human through an encounter with nature—that is, with limits, obstacles, the extremes of existence, fatality, mortality. 48

Part of the intrigue of the present investigation resolves itself into how and whether Herzog’s essayism—as expressed and articulated in the foregoing films—contributes yet more evidence to a functioning notion of the humanistic sublime. The audience for this chapter will vary, as it does for Herzog’s films, and depending on one’s sense of mission and professional identity, the “lessons” of Herzog’s filmmaking will range in their coherence and effect. The academic may be amused but unmoved, happily returning to her scholarly pursuits (which may include further analysis of Herzog’s films, and the philosophy of film more generally); the filmmaker may be inspired—in part because she is freed by Herzog from any sense of needing to fulfill prerequisites; and the moviegoer may take a second look at Herzog’s oeuvre, wondering if there is more than portraits of unflattering, troubled humanity and ponderous imagery, but instead, something to take up or undergo, as if movie-watching itself were a form of vigorous essayism—an art, a practice, a trial that itself can yield ecstatic truths from the humanistic sublime. ENDNOTES 1. The claim that film school is “a waste of time” is repeated by Herzog in many places, including in conversation with Conan O’Brien (https://youtu.be/ 2UEY_O0GeBM). More elaboration is given in places such as the chapter “Going Rogue,” in Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, Conversations with Paul Cronin (New York: Faber and Faber, 2014), 212-50. 2. Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, 387. See also my “‘Profoundly Unreconciled to Nature’: Ecstatic Truth and the Humanistic Sublime in Werner Herzog’s War Films,” in The Philosophy of War Films, ed. David LaRocca (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014), 438. Remarks on Herzog developed here were enriched by an ongoing conversation with Paul Cronin, and more recently with Richard Eldridge. I joined Cronin and Eldridge at the event “Think Herzog!” sponsored by Sukhdev Sandhu and his Colloquium for Unpopular Culture and hosted by Sarah Girner at the Deutsches Haus at New York University in April 2019; I thank them all for stirring the spirit and the mind that might give some expression to it. In November 2019, I joined Paul Cronin for a visit to Clinton, New York, where we were welcomed at Hamilton College by Scott MacDonald for an installment of his ongoing Forum on Image and Language in Motion. And I add further thanks to Mario von der Ruhr for expert translation assistance. 3. See, for example, “‘Profoundly Unreconciled to Nature’: Ecstatic Truth and the Humanistic Sublime in Werner Herzog’s War Films,” in The Philosophy of War Films, ed. David LaRocca (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014); “Hunger in the Heart of Nature: Werner Herzog’s Anti-Sentimental Dispatches from the American

“I Am What My Films Are”

17

Wilderness (Reflections on Grizzly Man),” in Dark Nature: Anti-Pastoral Essays in American Literature and Culture, ed. Richard J. Schneider (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016); the section “Film as Lie as Truth,” in The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth, ed. David LaRocca (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017); and “The Autobiographical Sublime: Achieving Herzog’s Persona at the Intersection of the Home Movie, Self-Citation, and Autofiction.” Estetica: Studi e Ricerche, vol. X, January-June 2020. 4. For substantive contemporary engagements on the essay film, all of which inform the content and context of the present chapter, see Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Essays on the Essay Film, ed. Nora Alter and Timothy Corrigan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017); Laura Rascaroli, The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (New York: Columbia University Press, a Wallflower Book, 2009/2014) and How the Essay Film Thinks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); and The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia, ed. Elizabeth A. Papazian, and Caroline Eades (New York: Columbia University Press, a Wallflower Book, 2016). 5. See also Timothy Corrigan, “The Pedestrian Ecstasies of Werner Herzog: On Experience, Intelligence, and the Essayistic,” in A Companion to Werner Herzog, ed. Brad Prager (2012), 80-98. 6. See LaRocca, “‘Profoundly Unreconciled to Nature’: Ecstatic Truth and the Humanistic Sublime in Werner Herzog’s War Films,” in The Philosophy of War Films (2014), 438-40. 7. Fassbinder’s line “Ich bin meine filme” is part of the promotional material for Annekatrin Hendel’s Fassbinder: Ein Dokumentarfilm (2015). 8. Criterion Collection. “Slavoj Žižek - DVD Picks.” YouTube video. 05:06. September 26, 2014. https://youtu.be/OqpxT_iJ8Mc?t=176. 9. “Werner Herzog: ‘comme un rêve puissant . . . ’” Jeune Cinéma 81, (SeptemberOctober 1974): 12-16. Interview conducted in Munich, August 1973, trans., Japhet Johnstone. Reprinted in Werner Herzog: Interviews, ed. Eric Ames, as “Werner Herzog: ‘Like a Powerful Dream’” by Noureddine Ghali (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 18-23. 10. See Wilson’s chapter in this volume for a similar observation. 11. Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, 236. 12. I Am My Films: A Portrait of Werner Herzog (1976-78), 00:03:56. 13. Werner Herzog: Filmemacher (1989), 00:26:22. On the nature of repetition in Herzog’s remarks, see Eric Ames’s introduction to Werner Herzog: Interviews, xiii. 14. Werner Herzog: Filmemacher (1989), 00:26:50. 15. Werner Herzog: Filmemacher (1989), 00:28:56. 16. On this last point, see LaRocca (2014), 437-82. 17. Werner Herzog: Filmemacher (1989), 00:29:19. 18. Werner Herzog: Filmemacher (1989), 00:02:22. 19. Werner Herzog: Filmemacher (1989), 00:02:30. 20. Werner Herzog, Of Walking in Ice: Munich-Paris 11/23 to 12/14, 1974, trans. Martje Herzog and Alan Greenberg (New York: Tanam Press, 1980; originally published 1978). For a commentary, see Jan-Christopher Horak, “W. H. or the mysteries of walking in ice,” The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, ed. Timothy Corrigan (New York: Methuen, 1986), 23-44. 21. Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, 256. 22. Werner Herzog, “Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema,” in The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth, ed. David LaRocca (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), 379. 23. Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, 256, 255. 24. Werner Herzog: Filmemacher, 00:03:20. 25. Werner Herzog: Filmemacher, 00:06:10. 26. Herzog emphatically encouraged his students at the Rogue Film School, in a session I attended in Newark (June 2010), that reading is essential to filmmaking: “If

18

Chapter 1

you don’t read, you will never be a filmmaker,” Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, 236. See also LaRocca, The Philosophy of War Films, 438-39, 484. 27. Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, 177. 28. Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, 255. 29. Gilles Deleuze, “The Figure of the Large and Small in Herzog,” in Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans., Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 185. 30. Werner Herzog: Filmemacher (1989), 00:28:03. 31. I Am My Films, Part 2, Thirty Years Later (2010), 00:01:20. 32. See David LaRocca, “Hunger in the Heart of Nature: Werner Herzog’s AntiSentimental Dispatches from the American Wilderness (Reflections on Grizzly Man),” in Dark Nature: Anti-Pastoral Essays in American Literature and Culture, ed. Richard J. Schneider (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 231; and the section “Sincere, not Cynical Images,” in LaRocca (2014), 469-71. 33. I Am My Films, Part 2, Thirty Years Later (2010), 00:11:40. 34. Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, 177. 35. Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, 178. 36. Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, 387. 37. For more on Herzog, parody, and self-parody, see LaRocca, “Hunger in the Heart of Nature: Werner Herzog’s Anti-Sentimental Dispatches from the American Wilderness (Reflections on Grizzly Man),” in Dark Nature (2016). 38. Encounters at the End of the World (2007), 00:20:30. 39. Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, 178. 40. I Am My Films, Part 2, Thirty Years Later (2010), 00:13:11. 41. As I noted earlier [see note 23], given Herzog’s zeal for reading—though not reading film theory and criticism—we stumble into zones of paradox, where learning and anti-learning make company. While we might turn to a quintessential American remark on reading—say, from Emerson: “‘Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss” (“Success,” from Society and Solitude, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. VII [Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007], 150)—we may wish to match Herzog’s spirit or milieu by reaching out to a Teutonic tradition for more astringent rejoinders to his apparent contempt for theory and criticism. A tour could commence with G. E. Lessing’s “The Reviewer Need Not Be Able to Do Better with That Which He Finds Fault” (Der Rezensent braucht nicht besser machen zu können, was er tadelt in Sämtliche Schriften), ed. Karl Lachmann and Franz Muncker (Leipzig: Göschen’sche Verlagshandlung, 1900) and then continue with a compendium culled from Lessing’s contemporary, G. C. Lichtenberg, who wrote: “A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it, an apostle is unlikely to look out. We have no words for speaking about wisdom to idiots. Whoever understands the wise is wise already” (Notebook E, #215 in Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Philosophical Writings, ed. and tr., Steven Tester [Albany: SUNY Press, 2012], 69). Thanks to Christopher Turner for drawing my attention to Lessing and Lichtenberg. For more on learning, unlearning, and anti-learning, see also LaRocca, “Teaching without Explication: Pedagogical Lessons from Ranciere’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster in The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Emperor’s Club,” Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Vol. 10. (2016); “We Were Educated for This? Paideia, Agonism, and the Liberal Arts,” Girls and Philosophy: This Book Isn’t a Metaphor for Anything, ed. Richard Greene and Rachel Robinson-Greene (Chicago: Open Court, 2014); “The Education of Grownups: An Aesthetics of Reading Cavell,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, 47, no. 2 (Summer 2013); “‘A Lead Ball of Justice’: The Logic of Retribution and the Ethics of Instruction in True Grit,” The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers, ed. Mark T. Conard (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, updated edition, 2012); “The Limits of Instruction: Pedagogical Remarks on Lars von Trier’s The Five Obstructions,” Film and Philosophy, 13 (2009): 35-50; and “A Desperate Education: Reading Thoreau’s Walden in Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows,” Film and Philosophy, 8 (2004): 1-16. 42. I Am My Films, Part 2, Thirty Years Later (2010), 01:34:58.

“I Am What My Films Are”

19

43. Deleuze, Cinema 1 (1986), 184. 44. To the Limit and Then Beyond It: The Ecstatic World of Filmmaker Werner Herzog (1989), 00:03:38. 45. To the Limit and Then Beyond It: The Ecstatic World of Filmmaker Werner Herzog (1989), 00:08:01. 46. To the Limit and Then Beyond It: The Ecstatic World of Filmmaker Werner Herzog (1989), 00:11:11. For more on Herzog’s account of the sublime, see “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth,” trans., Moira Weigel, Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 17, no. 3 (2010), 1-12. For more on the humanistic sublime, see LaRocca (2014), 437-82. 47. Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 3. 48. LaRocca, “‘Profoundly Unreconciled to Nature’: Ecstatic Truth and the Humanistic Sublime in Werner Herzog’s War Films,” in The Philosophy of War Films (2014), 437, 440-41.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Corrigan, Timothy. The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). ———, “The Pedestrian Ecstasies of Werner Herzog: On Experience, Intelligence, and the Essayistic,” A Companion to Werner Herzog, ed. Brad Prager (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012). ———, and Nora Alter, ed. Essays on the Essay Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). Deleuze, Gilles. “The Figure of the Large and Small in Herzog,” Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans., Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Emerson, Ralp Waldo. “Success,” Society and Solitude, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. VII (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). Ghali, Noureddine. “Werner Herzog: ‘Like a Powerful Dream,’” reprinted in Werner Herzog: Interviews, ed. Eric Ames (Jackson: The University Press of Mississippi, 2014). Herzog, Werner.Of Walking in Ice: Munich-Paris 11/23 to 12/14, 1974, trans. Martje Herzog and Alan Greenberg (New York: Tanam Press, 1980; originally published 1978). ———, “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth,” trans., Moira Weigel, Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 17, no. 3 (2010). ———, Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, Conversations with Paul Cronin (New York: Faber and Faber, 2014). ———, “Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema,” in The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth, ed. David LaRocca (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017). Horak, Jan-Christopher. “W. H. or the mysteries of walking in ice,” The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, ed. Timothy Corrigan (New York: Methuen, 1986). LaRocca, David. “The Autobiographical Sublime: Achieving Herzog’s Persona at the Intersection of the Home Movie, Self-Citation, and Autofiction.” Estetica: Studi e Ricerche, vol. X, January-June 2020. ———. “A Desperate Education: Reading Thoreau’s Walden in Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows,” Film and Philosophy, Vol. 8 (2004). ———. “The Limits of Instruction: Pedagogical Remarks on Lars von Trier’s The Five Obstructions,” Film and Philosophy, Vol. 13 (2009).

20

Chapter 1

———. “‘A Lead Ball of Justice’: The Logic of Retribution and the Ethics of Instruction in True Grit,” The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers, ed. Mark T. Conard (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, updated edition, 2012). ———. “The Education of Grown-ups: An Aesthetics of Reading Cavell,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 47, no. 2 (Summer 2013). ———. “‘Profoundly Unreconciled to Nature’: Ecstatic Truth and the Humanistic Sublime in Werner Herzog’s War Films,” The Philosophy of War Films, ed. David LaRocca (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014). ———. “We Were Educated for This? Paideia, Agonism, and the Liberal Arts,” Girls and Philosophy: This Book Isn’t a Metaphor for Anything, ed. Richard Greene and Rachel Robinson-Greene (Chicago: Open Court, 2014). ———. “Hunger in the Heart of Nature: Werner Herzog’s Anti-Sentimental Dispatches from the American Wilderness (Reflections on Grizzly Man),” Dark Nature: Anti-Pastoral Essays in American Literature and Culture, ed. Richard J. Schneider (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016). ———. “Teaching without Explication: Pedagogical Lessons from Ranciere’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster in The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Emperor’s Club,” Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, 10. (2016). ———. “Film as Lie as Truth,” in The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth, ed. David LaRocca (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017). Lessing, G. E. “The Reviewer Need Not be Able to Do Better That With Which he Finds Fault” (Der Rezensent braucht nicht besser machen zu können, was er tadelt in Sämtliche Schriften), ed. Karl Lachmann and Franz Muncker (Leipzig: Göschen’sche Verlagshandlung, 1900). Lichtenberg, G. C. Notebook E, #215 in Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans., Steven Tester (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012). Papazian, Elizabeth A. and Caroline Eades, ed., The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, a Wallflower Book, 2016). Rascaroli, Laura. The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (New York: Columbia University Press, a Wallflower Book, 2009/2014). ———. How the Essay Film Thinks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

TWO Herzog’s Sublime and Ecstatic Truth From Burke’s Physiological Aesthesis to the Dionysian Unveiling Patricia Castello Branco

In the work of Werner Herzog, the encounter with primordial nature draws specifically on the philosophical concept of the sublime, which is one of the most important keys to understanding the philosophical framework of Herzog’s films in that it condenses some of his major themes, including truth, factuality, ecstasy, reality and fantasy. Herzog establishes numerous points of contact between his films (and notably in his famous lecture “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth” 1) and the sublime, drawing upon the theories of Kant and Longinus on the subject. I will try to demonstrate, however, that Edmund Burke’s perspective of the sublime as a physiological experience is closer than Kant’s eminent transcendental concept, or even the early theorization by Longinus, to the encounter with the absolute presence and material dimension of nature and bodies (human and non-human) in Herzog’s films. Here, bodies and landscapes function as central aesthetic elements insofar as they open both immanent and transcendent meanings, simultaneously containing the facts and their overcoming, and thereby opening themselves to what the filmmaker calls the ‘ecstatic truth.’ Ecstatic truth is an experience strongly connected with the actions of Herzog’s heroes and anti-heroes in films such as Grizzly Man (2005), Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), and Fitzcarraldo (1982). Here, ecstatic truth is experienced as an encounter with natural forces, which is very similar to Nietzsche’s description of the Dionysian (as described in his Birth of Tragedy) and rooted 21

22

Chapter 2

in a particular aesthetics of the physiological sublime. Grizzly Man, a documentary film directed by Herzog, focuses on Timothy Treadwell, an environmental activist and bear enthusiast who, over the course of thirteen years, traveled to the remote Katmai National Park on the Alaska Peninsula to live among and “protect” the grizzly bears in their natural environment. He was an unusual character, living purposefully in the wilderness and trying to bond with the bears, whom he considered to be endangered. During his expeditions he filmed more than one hundred hours of video footage of the bears and himself, some of which depicts him dangerously close to them. Treadwell intended to use these images to raise public awareness to the necessity of protecting these extraordinary animals. He believed that he could achieve this goal by demonstrating that humans could bond with bears by accomplishing the impossible task of gaining the bears’ esteem and respect. In 2003, during what would become his last summer in Alaska, Treadwell and his partner, Amie Huguenard, were killed and eaten by one of the animals that Treadwell had been trying to connect with over the years, a twenty-eight-year-old brown bear whose stomach was later found to contain their remains and clothing. In the face of this horrifying outcome, Treadwell’s enterprise acquired a strange dimension: how should his actions be interpreted? Were his actions respectful of the bears? Was Treadwell a brave hero, a martyr willing to sacrifice his own life for a cause he believed to be bigger than himself, or was he a sweetly deluded individual, an exhibitionist whose irresponsible actions resulted in the exact opposite of his initial intention? Instead of befriending the bears, did he augment the fear and general distrust for these wild animals? Was the attempt to establish a relationship with the bears respectful of their wild nature? What did Treadwell ultimately expect to achieve and overcome? Treadwell’s extraordinary story constituted the raw material of another enterprise: Herzog’s film, which, in addition to Treadwell’s striking original footage, also includes interviews with people who knew or were involved with Treadwell, as well as experts on wild bears and Herzog’s own reflections on the questions posed earlier. At the beginning of the film, the director explains (in a typically ominous voiceover): “I discovered a film of human ecstasies and darkest inner human turmoil. As if there was a desire in him to leave the confinements of his humanness and bond with the bears, Treadwell reached out seeking a primordial encounter. But in doing so, he crossed an invisible border line.” 2 These initial words deliver the aesthetic key to understand not only Treadwell’s extraordinary adventure, but also Herzog’s own film. The director’s use of Treadwell’s footage and his interpretations of the ecologist’s actions and character, we will soon come to realize, places this documentary at the core of the filmmaker’s main themes and aesthetic quests, which also inspired two of his most famous feature films:

Herzog’s Sublime and Ecstatic Truth

23

Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, both of which were also filmed in wild locations within the depths of the Amazonian rainforest. The former tells the story of the expedition of a sixteenth-century historical Spanish soldier, Don Lope de Aguirre, who adventured down the Amazon River leading a small group of conquistadores in search of El Dorado, the legendary city of gold. The latter centers on Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald (whom the natives call “Fitzcarraldo”), a passionate man whose foremost desire in life was to build an opera house in the deepest jungles of Peru. In all of these works, Herzog focuses on a central character, a man in remote and magnificent natural environments and landscapes, whose actions are driven by an eccentric purpose that entails confronting wild nature and challenging, on his own account, some of the roughest forces of the planet: the depths of the Amazon jungle, or the remote Alaskan wilderness and its resident grizzlies. Additionally, the three works unfold in the same way: the films begin with a clear distinction between man and nature, and between cultural order and natural laws. However, as the action progresses, this initial separation gives way to a gradual assimilation of the protagonist’s human nature by primordial forces and powers. In all of them, nature is portrayed as the Absolute Otherness, as the primordial unity that threatens the individual and menaces the principle of individuation. An individual man, progressively drawing closer to nature’s unlimited power, inevitably ends up destroyed by it. The characters’ attempt to overcome human limits and frontiers leads them to annihilation and death as they end up being totally absorbed by natural forces, progressively surrendering to the natural world and abandoning themselves to the ecstasy and terror that comes with this process. As each film unfolds, the protagonists lose their rationality and begin to develop strange, weird behaviors—in some cases appearing insane—as if they had raised themselves to a dimension that was identical to the vast, virgin forests in Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, or to the forces and power of the grizzly bears, the most ferocious animals on the planet, in Grizzly Man. In other words: they display an experience of the sublime in their aesthetic meeting with nature. THE PHYSIOLOGICAL SUBLIME The sublime has been the designation for the quality of awe-inspiring and overwhelming objects, before which the individual experiences greatness, magnitude or intensity. Introduced by Dionysius Longinus’s treatise Peri Hypsous in the first century CE, the sublime (hypsos) acquired, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a renewed interest that fascinated philosophers such as Burke, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Hegel. The significance of the idea of the sublime in Herzog’s films can scarcely be

24

Chapter 2

considered a novelty: critics and academics have been discussing the concept for years, 3 and the filmmaker’s ideas about the subject were eventually published in an article titled “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth,” 4 which Herzog has authored himself. The majority of the academic discussions addressing the issue of the sublime in Herzog’s work focus on its connections with Romanticism and German Idealism. Brigitte Peucker, for example, has as early as 1984 significantly called Herzog “the profoundest and the most authentic heir of the Romantic tradition at work today.” 5 Questioning this view, Alan Singer subsequently contended that ‘irony’ is the fundamental feature of Herzog’s sublime: “Herzog’s mystic worlds finally always reveal the conditions of their viewing as their most oracular truth.” 6 In placing the ironic sublime within the problem of representation and temporality, and thereby questioning representation itself, Singer tries to demonstrate that Herzog’s sublime is more focused on temporality and history than on transcendence. In this chapter, I do not interpret Herzog’s sublime in the light of its similarities with Romanticism, nor do I endorse Singer’s view of the sublime “committed to history as a vital form of cultural production.” 7 Alternatively, I discuss Herzog’s focusing on that which exceeds ordinary perception, that which aims at transcending the everyday relationship with the world and the way it is connected with his notion of ‘ecstatic truth.’ On the other hand, and this time questioning the association between Herzog and German Idealism, I assert that Herzog’s films develop within a profound merging of the empirical and the physical. Herzog’s sublime, as we shall see, dwells in the material world and in the physiological body of the characters, both functioning as the paths for reaching transcendence. In his defense of the thesis that Herzog’s films recognize the impossibility of transcendence, Singer argues that in Herzog’s ‘ironic sublime’ the differences between Burke’s and Kant’s approaches are not relevant because “in both the Kantian and Burkean sublime representation is a problem overcome by the mind surpassing its own faculties, dissolving the bonds of temporality in the discovery of a timeless unity that needs no representation because it needs no thought or image to animate it.” 8 In opposing this view, I demonstrate that the differences between Burke and Kant are essential and that Herzog is a Burkean rather than a Kantian, developing his work within what I call a physiological sublime, which entails a substantial focusing on the senses. Despite the significant amount of work supporting the romantic influences on Herzog, the filmmaker has himself refused these connections 9 and has instead stressed the influence of classical antiquity in his approach to the sublime. In the essay “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth,” 10 Herzog explains why the idea of ekstasis, which he had borrowed from Longinus, is fundamental to his work and how Longi-

Herzog’s Sublime and Ecstatic Truth

25

nus’s association of the sublime with an overpowering force has run thematically throughout his films. The Hellenistic philosopher was concerned mainly with rhetoric and ‘high’ language, but he also articulated many ideas and themes that have been taken up by later philosophers interested in the sublime in nature and in art, such as how the sublime relates to magnitude and great things, its elevating and expansive effects on the individual, and its association with strong expressions and intense emotional responses. Longinus did not offer a clear definition of the term ‘sublime,’ although he did claim that the most important characteristic of the sublime is the power to form “great conceptions” which raise the spirit “above the ordinary.” Thus, the sublime is characterized as follows: 1) by the effect it causes on listeners—ecstasy—as distinguished from rhetorical art’s telos of persuasion; and 2) by its sources, which Longinus identifies as the ability to conceive of high thoughts, including: a strong and enthusiastic emotion (pathos); a particular way of constructing figures; a form of noble expression; and a composition of dignified and elevated words. Longinus states that the first two sources depend on nature, while the rest also involve mastery of artistic technique. So, for Longinus, the natural sources of the sublime are greatness of thoughts and emotions, which together create the experience of ecstasy in listeners. 11 The word ekstasis designates an emotional state that implies, according to its etymology, an outflow of the self, in which a person steps out of himself into what Herzog calls an “elevated state—where we can raise ourselves over our own nature.” 12 Herzog’s main interest in Longinus’s conception of the sublime lies precisely in the connection the latter establishes between the sublime and ‘ecstatic experiences,’ a link that will be fundamental, as we shall see next, to Herzog’s notion of ecstatic truth. In addition to Longinus, Herzog also briefly discusses Kant’s idea of the sublime, through which, Herzog says, “we are able to elevate ourselves over nature.” 13 In spite of this reference, Herzog’s sublime is hardly compatible with Kant’s philosophical positions. The total failure of rationalism, which we find in the sublime experiences of Herzog’s films, is radically different from Kant’s conclusions about the necessary connection between the sublime and the reinforcement of the superiority of our rational faculties. In fact, whereas Herzog emphasizes that the sublime overpowers and dominates reason, Kant holds that the feeling of the sublime reinforces the supremacy of the rational side of our faculties. Although Kant describes feelings of exaltation in the face of objects and their grandeur, he believed that these feelings result only from our initial frustration at the inadequacy of our imagination to comprehend the magnitude of these objects. In Kant’s perspective, we pass through an initial phase that is similar to Longinus’s description of the experience of being overpowered, but we soon realize the confirmation of the superiority of reason over the limitations of the senses. For Kant, the sublime is thus an aesthetic experience we have

26

Chapter 2

when we are in front of an object and our sensitive nature feels its own limitations to represent that object due to the latter’s greatness, force, and threatening power. That initial feeling is, however, balanced by our rational nature that feels the object’s superiority, its freedom, and its absence of restrictions. Kant contends that we are physically inferior to these objects, but we rise morally above them by means of ideas. In experiencing the sublime, our dependence and smallness are thereby revealed because we are sensitive beings, but our freedom is also reinforced as rational individuals. These two opposing views of the consequences of the sublime are mirrored in Herzog’s films. The Greek philosopher’s ideas, as we have already stressed, exercised an enormous influence on Herzog. In fact, the sublime in Herzog’s films depends on the inability of reason to respond to the overwhelming forces and strengths faced by his characters (in the feature films) and participants (in the documentaries). For that reason, I have argued elsewhere 14 that Herzog’s films, besides sharing same important features with Longinus’s perspective, embody the physiological sublime of Edmund Burke as it is described in his 1756 treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. There, Burke develops an alternative model of understanding the sublime that stresses the physical effects of the sublime by asserting that sublime experiences happen mainly in the body and in the senses. As Vanessa Ryan has notably maintained, “Burke´s aim is to show that the fundamental effect of the sublime is to exclude the power of reason” and that “the experience of the sublime is thus limited to sensation and to emotion arising from a ‘tension in the nerves.’” 15 So, for Burke, what is the sublime? The sublime is that which causes ‘astonishment’: “That state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.” 16 And what causes terror? What is the source of the sublime? We are terrified by vastness, obscurity, by what is powerful, by all the privations (vacuity, darkness, solitude and silence) and by what is infinite. For Burke, “Infinity has a tendency to fill the mind with that sort of delightful horror, which is the most genuine effect, and truest test of the sublime.” 17 Astonishment and terror are also the main sensations arising from encounters with the omnipotent forces of nature in Herzog’s films. It is interesting to notice how these films visually make use of the same sources of the sublime that Burke identifies in his treatise: magnitude, infinity, difficulty and magnificence, “a great profusion of things which are splendid or valuable in themselves.” 18 Accordingly, Herzog’s natural landscapes are magnificent, infinite, difficult and hostile. The characters in Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, immersed in the infinite greenness, face the Amazon jungle. In Grizzly Man, the wilderness of Alaska’s landscape is emphasized by the magnificence of the wild bears and the magnitude of the strengths that rule their ruthlessness. Likewise, the actions of Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo and Treadwell are

Herzog’s Sublime and Ecstatic Truth

27

tremendously dangerous and stress the dominating power of the sublime. These experiences cause “fear and pain,” the very same feelings that Burke identifies as the subjective sources of the sublime. “For me,” Herzog says, “a true landscape is not just a representation of a desert or a forest. It shows an inner state of mind, literally inner landscapes, and it is the human soul that is visible through the landscapes presented in my films.” 19 This treatment of landscape, however, extends well beyond the three films already discussed: the African desert in Fata Morgana and the burning oil fields of Kuwait in Lessons of Darkness are also sublime. Here, Herzog displays the sublime experience of the protagonists and the sublime dimension of their surroundings: sublime landscapes engender sublime actions, with the sublime being shifted from the natural objects and forces directly to the body of the characters and vice versa. However, besides this direct experience of the sublime, in which characters and landscape merge, we have, on the other hand, the indirect experience of the spectators, sitting in a dark room, witnessing sublime actions and objects displaying on the screen. Their experience of the sublime is mediated by the action of the ‘heroes’ and by the images that unfold before their eyes. Film spectators are in a safe place, where they can feel terror and pain arriving with gigantic and frightening intensities and forces, while also suffering, in this sense, with the protagonists. However, the fact that they are not physically menaced creates an experience where pleasure and pain are not felt as opposites, but as complements. Burke maintains that in art, pain and pleasure merge, unlike direct experiences. The sublime experience in art thus results from an overlap between pleasure and pain, i.e., from what Burke designates a delightful terror where art permits us to experience terror from afar, and terror “is a passion that always produces delight when it does not press too close.” 20 Similarly, in Herzog’s films the viewers are overwhelmed by the greatness of objects and the actions of the characters. They can experience the sublime, and feel terror and pain. Nevertheless, the experience is also accompanied by a sensation of delight and empowerment. A delightful terror arises from these sublime experiences in art. In Burke’s view, the physiological sublime depends upon sensations that result from intensities, movements, and modes of emergence. The mental reaction derives from the physical, rather than the reverse. 21 Burke proposes a sensorial account of the sublime in which the body is seen as the means to open human existence to a magnitude that lies beyond the individual self. Likewise, in Herzog’s works, the sublime experience depends upon the protagonists’ body and their physical approach to the landscape. Klaus Kinski’s strong physical performances stress the importance of the primordial bond between the body of the heroes and the body of the landscape, with the former eventually being totally absorbed by the latter. In Aguirre, for instance, Kinski’s body seems to be progressively invaded by the natural forces that rule in the

28

Chapter 2

jungle. The character embodies the same sublime characteristics as the milieu: his body postures, rhythms, movements, and expressions become sublime, bizarre, and as terrifying as the natural environment. The relationship between the protagonist’s body and the landscape takes the form of a kinship, or, more precisely, a ‘figural relationship.’ This ‘figural relationship’ between pure vastness and boundless nature engenders sublimity in actions and gestures, and generates a heroic action which confronts the milieu on its own account. Vastness (magnitude) and boundlessness (infinity), as well as difficulty and danger, are the key characteristics of the sublime in nature, which are mirrored in Kinski’s body and actions, but also in Treadwell’s horrendous death and his final physical merging with the bears. These scenes build important bridges between Herzog and Burke. Their physiological approach to the sublime grounds the idea that the “sublime is an overpowering force that limits the exercise of our mental and reflective capability: the sublime leads, not to an exaltation of our soul or of our mind, but to the strengthening of our body, to a strong nervous system, which ultimately compels us to action.” 22 However, these similarities do not erase some divergences. Burke emphasizes that the sublime is an overpowering force that limits the exercise of our mental and reflective capability, which happens when we experience pain or terror. This, in turn, causes an excitation of our nervous system. But he also maintains that this stimulus is accompanied by an awareness of the subject’s own limits. As Ryan notes: In his distinctive refiguring of the sublime, Burke identifies its significance with the way it confronts us with our finitude. From the confrontation with finitude and limitedness there arises a strong sense of humility and sympathy that in turn animates our actions. Rather than leading us to an experience of self-presence or self-exaltation, Burke’s sublime overpowers the self and our instinct to self-preservation motivates us to relieve our pain by relieving that of others. 23

This aspect guarantees the redemptive dimension of sublime experiences in artistic representations such as, for example, Greek tragedies. In Herzog’s films, however, the outcome of sublime experiences is totally different. Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo or Treadwell have no final redemption and face no ultimate reencounter with human finitude. They experience no humility and no relief from pain. As the three films unfold, the characters blend with nature and surrender to the contradictory states of exaltation and terror, dissolution and emancipation. The progressive awareness of their finitude leads not to humility and sympathy but to hallucination and delusion. They eventually become physically and mentally saturated due to the embodiment of nature’s power and infinity. Morality must be overcome in order to give way to life in all of its might. In this aspect, Her-

Herzog’s Sublime and Ecstatic Truth

29

zog’s characters are closer to Friedrich Nietzsche’s depiction of the Dionysian state, as we shall see next. THE PHYSIOLOGICAL SUBLIME AS TERROR AND EXALTATION Images and sounds of magnificence and difficulty, vastness and terror, ecstasy and strangeness are omnipresent elements in Herzog’s films, from the peaks of the Andes, to the massive green of the virgin forest, to the wilderness of the bears, to the insane adventure of descending the rapids on the Amazon River, and to the construction of an opera house in the heart of the jungle. The protagonists’ actions, their attempted immersion in Nature, their encounter with natural forces opens the doors to immanent experiences where the heroes are concurrently submerging themselves in the natural world and transcending humanness toward something mightier and infinitely stronger. Aguirre becomes like the jungle: physically exuberant, excessive, unjustifiable (mad), and amoral; his body and mind become indistinguishable and express a sense of empowerment and insanity. The same can be said of the destiny of Fitzcarraldo in his insane enterprise of constructing an opera house—the place where civilized humanity experiences the sublime through music—in the middle of the Amazon jungle, where these sublime experiences meet and demonstrate their kinship. In both films, approaching and relating directly to the rain forest comes with a price: the protagonist becomes like Nature—excessive, unjustifiable, ceaselessly moving, striving, creating, and destroying. Treadwell has a similar fate: by approaching too closely to the primordial forces of the wilderness in Alaska he eventually disappears and becomes nature in the most horrifying way when he is killed and eaten by a wild bear. Through the process of digestion the bear transforms Timothy’s body into a bear’s body, and he becomes a bearman: a Grizzly Man. From a strictly human perspective, the hero’s enterprise is one of total megalomania and insanity. Yet, even from the safety that is assured by our own human cultural universe, we can still grasp that there is something mightier happening, something not human, and that this phenomenon should not be judged by human standards. Nature is ruthless, wild, and brutal from the human perspective, and just as life brings forth and destroys without rule, without justification, and without reason, the protagonists are intrepidly prepared to destroy their own lives: they are willing to surrender their individuality to the natural forces they embody. And here we approach again the key characteristic of the sublime in Herzog’s films: the abandonment of all rationality and of all reason. In Aguirre, as the expedition penetrates deeper into the jungle, the protagonist’s insanity grows and, eventually, he ends up losing all morality, all civilized behavior, all culture. The immersion in nature engenders a feel-

30

Chapter 2

ing of overpowering, a sensation that nothing, nor anyone, could constrain his will: “When I, Aguirre, want the birds to drop dead from the trees, then the birds will drop dead from the trees. I am the Wrath of God. The earth I walk upon sees me and trembles.” 24 The very same megalomania is found in the words and behavior of the sweetly delusional Treadwell: “Occasionally, I am challenged and in that the kind warrior must, must, must become a samurai, must become so. . . . so formidable, so fearless of death, so strong that you will win you will win. Even the bears will believe that you are more powerful and in a sense you must be more powerful if you are to survive in this land with the bear.” 25 Proudly, he continues: “I will not die at their claws and paws, I will fight, I will be strong. I am one of them, I will be the master.” 26 Then he turns to the camera smiling, blowing the bears a kiss saying, “Love you Rowdy.” As he exits, the delusions of grandeur return: “That’s what I’m talking about, that’s what I’m talking about, that’s what I’m talking about. I can even smell death all over my fingers.” 27 Both Treadwell and Aguirre are overwhelmed by feelings of bonding with nature and succumb to the sense of excessive and unjustifiable overpowering this bonding offers. They become unreasonable. Fitzcarraldo’s intention to construct an opera house in Iquitos and his crazy act of transporting a steamship over a steep hill in order to access a rich rubber territory in the Amazon Basin are also unreasonable. Part of the characters’ delusion is due to the fact that they embody nature’s vastness and might. In this perspective, the human pathos of these films is connected with non-human ways of being in the world. The characters begin to try and channel nature’s energies and flows in order to put them at the service of their individual will. This, however, will not last: it will endure until the characters gradually begin to merge with nature and lastly face death, bonding with the ceaseless moving of life, always creating and destroying only to create once again. HERZOG’S DIONYSIAN HEROES Herzog’s heroes personify what Nietzsche calls the Dionysian state. In his seminal book The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche argues that Greek tragedy arose out of the fusion of two opposites: the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Apollo is described as light, beauty, rational thinking, order, form, reason, harmony, balance and individuation; while Dionysus is the god of wine, obscurity, chaos, excess, inebriation, ecstatic emotion and fusion. Nietzsche contends that with tragedy, the Greeks were able to establish a compromise between Dionysian truth (linked with the unbearable, the horrible), and Beauty (associated with Apollonian balance), a compromise between life (in all its overwhelming cycle of creation and destruction, ecstasy and terror) and human cultural and social creations.

Herzog’s Sublime and Ecstatic Truth

31

The Dionysian state is a way of being in the world where the subject is able to see the true essence of life—though still evidently inconsistent and meaningless—as sublime. In the Dionysian state, the blending of life with itself is celebrated. The principium individuationis is destroyed and the individual re-establishes the primordial unity with all creative nature. Man can now embody a new sense of unity where he feels connected with the willing of all life—with all men and with the whole of nature. Nature’s vitality and all-evolving dimension brings forward life itself— life as something indestructible, merciless, always becoming, always creating and destroying in its fertility and in its physical exuberance. Herzog’s depiction of the physical experience of the jungle—”for me, jungles have always represented something of an intensified form of reality” 28—echoes this Dionysian state in which Nature cries out: “Be as I am! Amid the ceaseless flux of phenomena I am the eternally creative primordial mother, eternally impelling to existence, eternally finding satisfaction in this change of phenomena!” 29 However, having been exposed to the Dionysian, the individual also feels a “blissful ecstasy, which arises from the innermost depths of man, indeed of nature.” 30 Herzog’s heroes and their action embody these Dionysian principles of vitality, power, intoxication, and ecstasy. They surrender to a sense of empowerment that entails a creative bias and a dissolution of all that is governed by the principle of individuation: society, culture, and man. The characters break with the principium individuationis by embodying the sublime features of almighty nature. They re-establish themselves with primal unity, in which they can grasp the true heart of nature—its vastness, magnitude, infinity, difficulty, magnificence, and its chaos. Nietzsche postulates that, unlike the Apollonian, which aims through its beautiful and balanced form to offer an illusory panacea for the pain and horror of human existence, the Dionysian dissolves all forms and offers an insight into pain and terror. Herzog explains that he believes “the common character of the universe is not harmony but hostility, chaos, and murder.” 31 In fact, his interpretation of nature personifies the Dionysian state in all its ambiguity: fascination and terror, fear and exaltation. This is evident in Herzog’s characters who display oddness in their bodily postures and gestures. We can readily grasp this display in Klaus Kinski’s physical performance and physical distortions that are visually accomplished by a progressive dissolution of the actor’s balanced proportions of gestures and expressions. The same can be said of Treadwell’s narcissistic display of postural arrogance in the face of the tremendous danger entailed by physical proximity to the bears. But what is more interesting in Herzog’s films is the way his characters’ bodies merge, not only with the landscape, but also with the mental state of the spectators. And again, the sublime occurs, not only in the actor’s actions and bodies, but also in the spectator’s experience. The viewer is immersed in sensations of strangeness in the face of the destruction of the principium individuationis

32

Chapter 2

he is witnessing on the screen, sharing the sense of madness and terror that arrives with it. Going outside oneself, i.e., ekstasis, causes the destruction of the principium individuationis. Herzog’s technical options in the films reinforce this feeling, charging almost all scenes with an abiding sense of the odd: from the haunting music, to the strangeness of the film’s stylizations, to the long close-ups, to the surreal sequence of illusory and non-illusory phenomena colliding, to the constant focus on the reversibility between Nature and human life (as in the shot that catches sight of a stranded horse in the river, as if the eyes of the horse were used by the river to return the gaze of the men in Aguirre, or the boat being pulled over a mountain in Fitzcarraldo), to the operatic scenes, to the death of Aguirre’s daughter or Aguirre’s final pathos with the invasion of monkeys in the closing scene of the film. The same happens in the treatment of Treadwell’s death in Grizzly Man. The killing was caught on videotape. However, Treadwell’s lens cap was on, so the recording only includes the audio portion of the tape. In Herzog’s documentary the viewer sees only the back of Herzog’s head as he listens to the audio through headphones. Treadwell’s former girlfriend, Jewel Palovak, faces Herzog and the camera. As she silently assesses his horrified reaction to the audio, her face becomes a shattered mirror of the director’s reactions, showing viewers all that they need to see: the horrifying pain and terror that accompanied Treadwell’s final bonding with the bears. All of these technical options, their effects, and results simultaneously contain the facts and their overcoming, opening the doors to what Herzog famously calls the ‘ecstatic truth.’ ECSTATIC TRUTH AS A DIONYSIAN EXPERIENCE Herzog’s account of truth is closely linked with the experience of the sublime and with Dionysian ecstasy. We have already seen how Nietzsche identifies Dionysian bliss with the limits of reason. In this state, man faces an abyss that is simultaneously a deeper level and also an illumination. In the Dionysian state we can enter the realm of a deeper truth 32 as we can glimpse briefly the cruel and ecstatic truth of the universe and of human existence within it, outside the protection of culture and society: “in the consciousness of the truth once perceived, man now sees everywhere only the terror or the absurdity of existence.” 33 The Dionysian is thus the revelation of truth as the annihilation of the individual: the “mysterious Primordial Unity,” 34 the “excess revealed itself as truth,” 35 “the annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of existence.” 36 Ecstasy, excess and dissolution of the individual allow us to face the Dionysian truth. This truth, however, is not empirical nor transcendental, but aesthetic. The Dionysian truth is not a property of objects which represent

Herzog’s Sublime and Ecstatic Truth

33

the world. Rather, it arises in acts of artistic creation and it resembles the true meaning of the world: creation, eternal annihilation of the individual, and destruction. In Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche perceived art as exclusive of truth, and he viewed the whole of existence as artistic in this sense: “only as an aesthetic phenomenon is the world justified” 37; or, “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.” 38 Similarly, Herzog believes that truth is ‘mysterious,’ something that we can only grasp through ecstasy and enlightenment in brief moments of illumination. In a famous quote, Herzog affirms that “only in this state of sublimity [Erhabenheit] does something deeper become possible, a kind of truth that is the enemy of the merely factual. Ecstatic truth, I call it.” 39 He continues: “In the fine arts, in music, literature, and cinema, it is possible to reach a deeper stratum of truth—a poetic, ecstatic truth.” 40 Herzog’s perspective of truth as an ecstatic experience is, in fact, one of his most debated and polemical issues. Much has already been said about this idea, particularly in considerations about documentary film. 41 Herzog, however, does not distinguish between documentary and fiction, 42 and the notion is as important to his documentary filmmaking as it is to his fiction. Herzog introduced the term ecstatic truth in his 1999 manifesto, “Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema.” The declaration was largely devoted to contesting what he saw as Cinema Verité’s philosophy and style of documentary filmmaking, which is purported to be the avoidance of subjectivity and the belief that truth arises from the simple presentation of facts. In opposition to this idea, Herzog contends that “Facts creates norms, and truth illumination.” 43 “Facts are the truth of accountants,” 44 whereas in cinema we can reach a “deeper strata of truth ( . . . ) an ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” 45 Against Cinéma Verité, Herzog proposes an alternative interpretation of the link between cinema and truth. Cinema should not present truth as factual data, since “facts only create norms.” 46 Beyond facts there is a much deeper truth, an ecstatic truth where we “gain our ability to have ecstatic experiences of truth through the Sublime, through which we are able to elevate ourselves over nature.” 47 In fact, ecstatic truth relates to the sublime in a very close way: the proximity to the sublime allows us to experience moments of enlightenment, which in turn produces illumination. Ecstatic truth “is mysterious and can only be grasped with effort,” 48 and it is “a kind of truth” that can be transmitted during a sublime state and which “is the enemy of the merely factual.” 49 Herzog’s account of ecstatic truth frames film as a searching positioned “at the intersection of the imaginary and the factual,” as he pertinently notes. 50 In actuality, Herzog does not simply propose an abandonment of facts. Instead, his notion of ecstatic truth takes the form of an

34

Chapter 2

encounter between facts and inspiration, between inner-visions and the material world, between personal experiences and the objects of the world. The referential world does not disappear. Facts and realities are components of the ecstatic experience that, however, must be related to “vision, style, and craft.” 51 This idea of truth as a triple encounter between the individual, the outside material world, and illumination does not signify, however, that films should be an expression of a personal inner vision. Ecstatic truth is the unavoidable meeting place between the world, the individual, and something that transcends both. It is a surplus of meaning that only arrives in ecstatic states, an opening to significance, a clearing, unconcealment, unveiling or a-lētheia, as Heidegger would have put it. Like Nietzsche, Herzog seems to believe that the task of art is to present the Dionysian abyss through the Apollonian means of aesthetic semblance. Cinema can provide an access to the Dionysian truth of the world through the epiphany of its appearance. Herzog’s films evoke the truth as an aesthetic phenomenon: the view of deeper layers of existence cannot be achieved by factual representation and must hence be induced by ecstasy, illumination, the annihilation of the “veil of Mâyâ.” 52 Like Nietzsche, Herzog aims at achieving a deeper truth by aesthetic means through the production of images that reveal what it means to exist in the world. Dionysian truth, or ecstatic truth, is an experience that engenders artistic creativity, but it is an experience where the authority of the ego, or of the individual points of view, is undermined: truth appears as an epiphenomenon of the more fundamental earthly drives. In regards to the Dionysian unveiling of Mâyâ, Nietzsche writes: In the Dionysian dithyramb man is aroused to the highest intensity of all his symbolic capabilities. Something never felt before forces itself into expression—the destruction of the veil of Mâyâ, the sense of oneness as the presiding genius of form, of nature itself. Now the essence of nature must express itself symbolically; a new world of symbols is necessary, the entire symbolism of the body, not just the symbolism of mouth, face, and words, but the full gestures of the dance—all the limbs moving to the rhythm. And then the other symbolic powers grow, those of music, rhythm, dynamics, and harmony—all with sudden spontaneity. 53

Fitzcarraldo is about an opera being staged in the rainforest. It is about the entire world undergoing “a transformation into music,” 54 where, says Herzog, “what happens in the plot is impossible, but the power of music enables the spectator to experience it as true.” 55 This unveiling of truth is similar to what occurs in “the non-visual art of music, the Dionysian,” where, according to Nietzsche, 56 the “Dionysian music especially awoke in that world fear and terror.” 57

Herzog’s Sublime and Ecstatic Truth

35

Similarly, Walter Steiner, the subject of another Herzog documentary, is “a Swiss sculptor and repeat world champion in ski-flying,” who “raises himself, as if in religious ecstasy, into the air. He flies so frightfully far, he enters the region of death itself.” 58 Like Fitzcarraldo’s dream of opera, Steiner’s religious ecstasy of raising himself into the air and facing death is a Dionysian ecstasy, a glimpse at the eternal death-birth cycle of nature. Herzog summarizes his goal as follows: I’m after something that you find in great poetry. When you read a great poem, you would instantly notice that there is a deep truth in it. You don’t have to analyze the poem in academic ways and all this. You know it instantly. It passes on to you and becomes part of your inner existence, and it’s the same thing in cinema. 59

The filmmaker relies upon cinema to reveal the universe’s inner nature. He ultimately finds chaos and Dionysian ecstasy, but his drive is to face man with the end of his corporal being, his “irrevocable fate,” and induce raw human reactions. Herzog sees the mortal power of nature as a way of revealing all of our deepest truths. His work is dedicated to capturing how environments, the landscapes in which those essentials can materialize, can produce illumination. In this sense, his interpretations are only as relevant as each one of ours as individual participants. Herzog’s interpretations, my interpretations, and your interpretations as viewers or readers are only explanations, whereas the encounter with the sublime in Herzog’s images aims at creating illumination, pursuing primordial encounters, and unveiling the brief glimpses of truth existing beyond mere individual certainties and beliefs. ENDNOTES 1. Werner Herzog, “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth.” Translated by Moira Weigel. Aron: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, 17, no. 3 (Winter 2010): 1-12, https://www.bu.edu/arion/on-the-absolute-the-sublime-and-ecstatic-truth/. 2. Grizzly Man, Documentary Film. United States: Lion Gate Films, 2005. 3. See, for example, the seminal works by Brigitte Peucker, “Werner Herzog. In Quest of the Sublime.” New German Filmmakers: From Obserhausen through the 1970s, ed. Klaus Phillips (New York: Fredrick Ungar Publishing Co., 1984), 168-94; and Alan Singer, “Comprehending Appearances: Werner Herzog’s Ironic Sublime.” The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, ed. Timothy Corrigan (New York: Routledge: 2014), 183-205. First edition 1986. 4. Herzog, “On the Absolute.” 5. Peucker, “Werner Herzog. In Quest of the Sublime,” 193. See also Eric Rentschler “The Politics of Vision: Herzog’s Heart of Glass,” The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, ed. Timothy Corrigan (New York: Routledge, 2014), 159-182. First Edition 1986; Brad Prager, “Werner Herzog’s Hearts of Darkness: Fitzcarraldo, Scream of Stone and Beyond,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 20 (2003): 23-35; Laurie Ruth Johnson, Forgotten Dreams: Revisiting Romanticism in the Cinema of Werner Herzog (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2016); Brad Prager, The Cinema of Werner Her-

36

Chapter 2

zog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth. (London: Wallflower Press, 2007); Matthew Gandy, “Visions of Darkness: The Representation of Nature in the Films of Werner Herzog,” Ecumene 3, no. 1 (January 1996): 1-21. 6. Singer, 184. On the issue of Singer’s concept of the “Ironic sublime” and Herzog’s relationship with the postmodern sublime see Erica Carter, “Werner Herzog’s African Sublime,” in A Companion to Werner Herzog, ed. Brad Prager (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2012), 329-355. 7. Singer, 184. 8. Singer, 186. 9. See Johnson, 3. 10. Herzog, “On the Absolute.” 11. Longinus, On the Sublime, ed. D. A. Russell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964). 12. Herzog, “On the Absolute.” 13. Herzog, “On the Absolute.” 14. Patrícia Castello Branco, “The Physiological Sublime in Klaus Kinski’s Aguirre,” in Klaus Kinski, Best of Cinema, ed. Matthew Edwards (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016), 27-39. 15. Vanessa Ryan, “The Physiological Sublime: Burke’s Critique of Reason,” Journal of the History of Ideas 63, (April 2001): 270-271. 16. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 53. 17. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 67. 18. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 71. 19. Werner Herzog, Herzog on Herzog: Conversations with Paul Cronin (London: Faber & Faber, 2002), 136. 20. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, xxi. 21. As David Bromwich notes, Burke “talks of the power of bodies to affect other bodies, and uses the word body to refer to objects both animate and inanimate.” Bromwich quoted in Ryan, “The Physiological Sublime,” 269. 22. Ryan, “The Physiological Sublime,” 277. 23. Ryan, “The Physiological Sublime,” 277. 24. Aguirre the Wrath of God, Film. West Germany: Werner Herzog Filmproduktion Hessischer Rundfunnk, 1972. 25. Grizzly Man. 26. Grizzly Man. 27. Grizzly Man. 28. Herzog, Herzog on Herzog, 86. 29. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy (New York: Dover Publications, 1995), 59-60. 30. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 3. 31. Herzog in Grizzly Man. 32. For a detailed discussion of the subject of truth in later Nietzsche, see for instance, Walter Kaufmann, Tragedy and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Originally published in 1968.) See also Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). For online texts on the subject see: Yunus Tuncel, “The Dionysian Revealed Itself as Truth: Have We Understood It?” Arion, November 19, 2016. http://agonist.nietzschecircle.com/wp/ dionysian-revealed-truth-understood-yunus-tuncel/#_ftnref1. For a discussion on later Nietzschean perpectivism and Herzog’s documentary films see K. Mitcheson, “Perspectivism in Nietzsche and Herzog: The Documentary Film as a Perspectival Truth Practice,” Film-Philosophy 17, no. 1 (2013). For a discussion on the relationship between Herzog’s films and truth see, for instance Prager, The Cinema of Werner Herzog. 33. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 23. 34. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 4. 35. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy,12. 36. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 23.

Herzog’s Sublime and Ecstatic Truth

37

37. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 5. 38. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 52. 39. Herzog, “On the Absolute.” 40. Herzog, “On the Absolute.” 41. See, for example, Prager, The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Eric Ames, Ferocious Reality: Documentary According to Werner Herzog (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); William Van Wert, “Last Words: observations on a new Language,” in The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History; Thomas Austin, “ . . . To Leave the Confinements of His Humaness,” in Rethinking Documentary: New Perspectives, New Practices, ed. Thomas Austin and Wilma Jong (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2008), 51-66. 42. See, for instance, Herzog’s interview in Notebook, where he states: “documentaries, in my case, in most of these cases, means ‘feature film’ in disguise.” Herzog, Werner, “A Documentary Is Just a Feature Film in Disguise: An Interview with Werner Herzog” by Ben Simington, Notebook, December 12, 2009. https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/a-documentary-is-just-a-feature-film-in-disguise-an-interview-withwerner-herzog 43. Werner Herzog, “Minnesota Declaration.” (Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 30, 1999), https://www.wernerherzog.com/complete-works-text.html#2. 44. Herzog, “Minnesota Declaration.” 45. Herzog, “Minnesota Declaration.” 46. Herzog, “Minnesota Declaration.” 47. Herzog, “On the Absolute.” 48. Herzog, “On the Absolute.” 49. Herzog, “On the Absolute.” 50. Werner Herzog, Herzog on Herzog (London: Faber & Faber, 2002), 240. 51. Herzog, “On the Absolute.” 52. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 7. 53. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 11. 54. Herzog, “On the Absolute.” 55. Herzog, “On the Absolute.” 56. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 10. 57. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 11. 58. Herzog, “On the Absolute.” 59. Herzog, “On the Absolute.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ames, Eric. 2012. Ferocious Reality: Documentary According to Werner Herzog. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Austin, Thomas. 2008. “ . . . To Leave the Confinements of His Humanness.” Rethinking Documentary: New Perspectives, New Practices.Thomas Austin and Wilma Jong (eds). Maidenhead: Open University Press. Branco, Patrícia Castello. 2016. “The Physiological Sublime in Klaus Kinski’s Aguirre.” Klaus Kinski, Best of Cinema. Matthew Edwards (ed). Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Burke, Edmund. 1990. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carter, Erica. 2012. “Werner Herzog’s African Sublime.” A Companion to Werner Herzog. Brad Prager (ed). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Clark, Maudemarie. 1990. Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Cronin, Paul. 2002. Herzog on Herzog: Conversations with Paul Cronin . London: Faber & Faber. Gandy, Matthew. 1996. “Visions of Darkness: the Representation of Nature in the Films of Werner Herzog,” Ecumene 3, no. 1 (January 1996): 1-21.

38

Chapter 2

Herzog, Werner. 1999. “Minnesota Declaration.” (Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 30, 1999), https://www.wernerherzog.com/complete-works-text.html#2. Herzog, Werner. 2010. “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth.” Translated by Moira Weigel. Aron: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 17, no. 3 (Winter 2010): 1-12. https://www.bu.edu/arion/on-the-absolute-the-sublime-and-ecstatictruth/. Johnson, Laurie Ruth. 2016. Forgotten Dreams: Revisiting Romanticism in the Cinema of Werner Herzog. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Kaufmann, Walter. 1992. Tragedy and Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Longinus. 1964. On the Sublime. D. A. Russell (ed). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mitcheson, K. 2013. “Perspectivism in Nietzsche and Herzog: The Documentary Film as a Perspectival Truth Practice.” Film-Philosophy 17, no. 1. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1995. The Birth of Tragedy. New York: Dover Publications. Peucker, Brigitte. 1984. “Werner Herzog. In Quest of the Sublime.” New German Filmmakers. From Obserhausen through the 1970s. Klaus Phillips (ed). New York: Fredrick Ungar Publishing Co. Prager, Brad. 2012. A Companion to Werner Herzog. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Prager, Brad. 2003. “Werner Herzog’s Hearts of Darkness: Fitzcarraldo, Scream of Stone and Beyond.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 20: 23-35. Prager, Brad. 2007. The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth. London: Wallflower. Rentschler, Eric. 2014. “The Politics of Vision: Herzog’s Heart of Glass.” The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History. Timothy Corrigan (ed). New York: Methuen. Ryan, Vanessa. 2001. “The Physiological Sublime: Burke’s Critique of Reason,” Journal of the History of Ideas 63: 265-279. Simington, Ben. 2009. “A Documentary Is Just a Feature Film in Disguise: An Interview with Werner Herzog.” Notebook, December 12, 2009. https://mubi.com/ notebook/posts/a-documentary-is-just-a-feature-film-in-disguise-an-interviewwith-werner-herzog. Singer, Alan. 2014. “Comprehending Appearances: Werner Herzog’s Ironic Sublime.” The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History. Timothy Corrigan (ed). New York: Routledge. Tuncel, Yunus. 2016. “The Dionysian Revealed Itself as Truth: Have We Understood it?” Arion, November 19, 2016. http://agonist.nietzschecircle.com/wp/dionysianrevealed-truth-understood-yunus-tuncel/#_ftnref1. Van Wert, William. 2014. “Last Words: Observations on a New Language.” The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History. Timothy Corrigan (ed). New York: Routledge.

THREE The Conquest of Uselessness as a Practice of Film and Thought Daniele Dottorini

During the 1991 Viennale, Werner Herzog, then director of the Austrian festival, organized Filmstunde (film lessons), a series of meetings with various figures in a circus tent. The guests with whom the Bavarian director entertains himself from time to time are director Volker Schlöndorff, actor Ryszard Kapuściński, tightrope walker Philippe Petit, musician Michael Kreihsl, playwright Peter Turrini, cosmologist Kamal Saiful Islam, and illusionist Jeff Sheridan. “Film Lessons,” says Herzog, “showed the general public my approach to how I would run a film school. Every day at a fixed hour in the circus tent at the festival I invited a guest.” 1 Every discipline the guests represented becomes an image of film and, above all, of the film work, and of the concrete path that leads to its realization. The guests therefore become, first of all, images of film as work, operation, and effort. But there is something else, something that works more subtly on the (visionary and imaginative) outlook that, in Herzog's opinion, every director should have: “I believe our audience understood that it is not the curriculum of a traditional film school that makes you a filmmaker, but wild fantasies and an agitation of mind over seemingly odd questions.” 2 For Herzog, going beyond the canonical form of film— understood as a technique and as a language—means thinking of film work as fatigue, as an almost impossible effort and, at the same time, as an exercise of the wildest imagination. And it is in this sense that the film lessons become a laboratory for the notion and practice of the seventh art. The first of the guests was universally well-known tightrope walker Philippe Petit, who, on August 7, 1974, repeatedly crossed the space be39

40

Chapter 3

tween the then-recently built Twin Towers of New York while balanced on a cable. Once again, the question immediately arises: why does Herzog invite Petit to speak at a meeting whose title is Film Lesson? Petit is not only invited to speak at one of the lessons, but he also performed the evening before during the opening of the festival by walking on a cable suspended between the Apollo Theater and the festival building. Dressed like an elf, Petit performs with a magic lantern while throwing gold dust, thus opening the festival with a sign that emphasizes film’s magical, fantastic dimension and, at the same time—as the equilibrist himself will say during the meeting with the public—through a show that has required weeks of meticulous preparation. Herzog has been Petit’s friend for many years; he has taught him, the director confesses, how to pick a lock, a useful skill for those who travel enormous distances on foot and need to shelter in a dry place at night. In Herzog’s eyes, Philippe Petit is not only a tightrope walker and a magician, but he is also a conqueror of the useless, as the director writes on the back cover of one of Petit’s books, On the High Wire: “I salute you, the Fragile Man of the Wire, the Emperor of the Air. Like Fitzcarraldo you are one of the ever so rare and wondrous men: a Conquistador of the Useless. I bow my head in reverence.” 3 A conqueror of the useless: this definition is striking, because this sentence also gives its title to the working diary of the film Fitzcarraldo (1982), written between 1979 and 1981. 4 On the final pages of the book, where Herzog recounts how he felt after finally and truly carrying a ship over a mountain and then back into the water, we read these words: “The ship meant nothing to me—it held no more value than some broken old beer bottle in the mud, than any steel cable whipping around itself on the ground. There was no pain, no joy, no excitement, no relief, no happiness, no sound, not even a deep breath. All I grasped was a profound uselessness, or, to be more precise, I had merely penetrated deeper into its mysterious realm.” 5 Although it depicts one of the most titanic feats in the entire history of movies, the film comes to an end and leaves nothing but a feeling of uselessness, with no excitement or happiness in the director’s soul. But, adds the German director, “I had merely penetrated deeper into its mysterious realm.” 6 The making of the film departs from any consideration related to the creation of a work, a form, or an object. The effort, the work, and the fatigue of the realization lead, however, to a new awareness and therefore a conquest, but the conquest of something that has no material existence, revealing the useless, or rather uselessness, as precisely that which is taken away from the sphere of exchange, of gain, and of the possession of a good or of a value. But it is precisely this feeling, as we shall see, that paves the way for a deeper understanding of the complexity and mystery of reality.

The Conquest of Uselessness as a Practice of Film and Thought

41

Herzog’s words are philosophically dense and, at the same time, reject an idea of radical filmmaking. They subtract action, creation, and thought from any utilitarian logic, and it is into this aspect that we will delve in this essay. We can then return to the relationship between Petit and Herzog. As stated earlier, the French artist is an illusionist and a tightrope walker. During the lesson, Herzog asks Petit to tell the audience in detail about the long preparation for the previous evening’s wire crossing; they then discuss the concept of misdirection, a fundamental concept for those who create images, illusions, magic (but also for thieves and politicians, laughs Petit). The whole lesson revolves therefore—and Herzog never ceases to consider these aspects as an integral part of film itself—around the work, the effort, and the fatigue of creating a particular show like that of the tightrope walker and, at the same time, around the illusory dimension on which this show is based. Work, fatigue, effort: is it perhaps yet another embodiment of the principle of Streben (effort, tension), of effort as a necessarily human dimension theorized by Fichte? Or is it an echo of the Sehnsucht (desire, yearning aspiration, passionate longing) that constantly recurs in the writings of the German Romantics? The statement is not unusual: critics have often dwelled on the relationship between Herzog and Romanticism, seeing in the German director’s movies the re-proposition or reintegration of concepts and themes belonging to that cultural and philosophical movement. The relationship between Herzog’s cinema and the concepts of Romanticism is not a simple one. On the contrary, it is a complex and often conflicting relationship. As we will try to demonstrate in the following pages, Herzog’s cinema is also a laboratory where the philosophical concepts of Romanticism are rethought and transformed from the cinematic point of view so that they themselves become concepts of cinema. 7 In Romantic culture, Streben means “striving” (but also tension, restlessness), expressing a conception of life as an incessant effort, a continuous attempt to overcome any obstacles including material and spiritual ones. In Streben, anxiety (the feeling of the infinite) and impatience for every type of bond is manifested together with the desire to transcend daily reality, a typical theme of early nineteenth-century literary and philosophical culture. In Fichte, Streben becomes the ethical task of Man, the necessary movement of the subject endowed with infinite will, which cannot be blocked by the material world. This infinite task, which always places the outside world as a limit to be overcome, is necessarily connected with the other great term of Romantic culture, namely, Sehnsucht. As Germanist Ladislao Mittner writes, this is, in all likelihood, “the most characteristic word of German Romanticism,” 8 because by identifying the human task as the aspiration toward the more and the beyond, it ends up in a continuous failure and an impossible fulfillment. The very origin of the word

42

Chapter 3

reveals this failure, this incessant movement: Sehnsucht derives in fact from the terms das Sehnen, burning desire, and die Sucht, dependence. Literally, then, Sehnsucht could be translated as the dependence on desire, or rather the constant longing that leads human beings to never be satisfied with what they achieve or possess, but always pushes them toward new goals; again, it is in the root of die Sucht that the origin of the word das Sehnen is understood. Consequently, as Mittner suggests, the term can be translated as “a desire raised to the second power, a desire of desire, and therefore a desire that is exhausted in itself for the pleasure of desire.” 9 Coming back to Herzog’s words about how he felt after completing Fitzcarraldo’s feat and the insistence on the work and effort of the tightrope walker, we would then seem to be faced with a new declension of concepts resulting from the nineteenth-century German Romantic debate. But, if we look closely, the comparison works to a certain extent: Herzog’s filmmaking is certainly based on work and effort, and often looks for limits that must be faced. 10 But in all this, at the center of the German director’s interest lies the image, of which this work, which is not linked to utility, constitutes the foundation and the power of the possibility that the image may transcend pure representation: that is, it opens up to reality in a completely new way. It is therefore necessary to focus further on the figure of the tightrope walker, discovering other variations, other embodiments (as we shall see, that of the Traveler and the Pilgrim), and to be confronted with them, starting from one of the most philosophically dense figures in Nietzsche’s masterpiece, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. THE FALL OF THE TIGHTROPE WALKER Let us review what has emerged so far. The figure of the tightrope walker (and illusionist) Petit is placed by Herzog as analogous to film, or rather, as we shall see, to the film work that takes shape in his images. The illusory dimension (the magic trick, the misdirection), the work, and the effort therefore become not only and not so much the means to an end (the creation of a work), but the very meaning of the work and what constitutes its foundation. The image, whether cinematographic or theatrical, is body work: it includes such work within itself, and it constitutes its inner essence. For Herzog, the tightrope walker Petit then becomes the very image of the work of the filmmaker (just like the image of the forger and the charlatan magician was for Orson Welles 11); a powerful image, which reverberates in a sort of short circuit between filmmaking and philosophy, in another image of the tightrope walker given by Nietzsche in the prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. This work, written between 1883 and 1885, tells how

The Conquest of Uselessness as a Practice of Film and Thought

43

Zarathustra (the ancient and mythical founder of the ancient pre-Christian religion of Mazdaism, who in Nietzsche’s transfiguration became the prophet of the Overman and eternal return) joins men again after a long period of solitary meditation to announce the need to go “beyond” man, accepting the decline of old certainties and renewing their loyalty to the land and life. In the prologue, Zarathustra arrives in a city, where a crowd has gathered in the main square to wait for the performance of a tightrope walker. Zarathustra announces to the crowd the advent of the Overman and urges men toward its transformative goal. Irritated and skeptical, the inhabitants of the city make fun of the prophet. At that moment, the tightrope walker, believing that the bustle was due to the impatience of the spectators, begins his show. But suddenly, another character dressed in bright colors that make him look like a jester comes out of the small door from which the tightrope walker came out and addresses him in this way: “Forward, sloth, smuggler, pale face! Or I’ll tickle you with my heel! What business have you here between the towers? You belong in the tower, you should be locked away in the tower, for you block the way for one who is better than you!” 12 The jester gets closer and closer. Because of the tension, the tightrope walker falls down to the ground. Nietzsche points out how the crowd, seeing him fall, flees in all directions while the tightrope walker’s body plunges to the ground: But Zarathustra stood still and the body landed right beside him, badly beaten and broken, but not yet dead. After a while the shattered man regained consciousness and saw Zarathustra kneeling beside him. “What are you doing here?” he said finally. “I’ve known for a long time that the devil would trip me up. Now he is going to drag me off to hell: are you going to stop him?” “By my honor, friend!” answered Zarathustra. “All that you are talking about does not exist. There is no devil and no hell. Your soul will be dead even sooner than your body—fear no more!” The man looked up mistrustfully. “If you speak the truth,” he said, “then I lose nothing when I lose my life. I am not much more than an animal that has been taught to dance by blows and little treats.” “Not at all,” said Zarathustra. “You made your vocation out of danger, and there is nothing contemptible about that. Now you perish of your vocation, and for that I will bury you with my own hands.” When Zarathustra said this the dying man answered no more, but he moved his hand as if seeking Zarathustra’s hand in gratitude. 13

The gesture of Zarathustra is then the opposite of that of the city’s inhabitants. Not only does he not run away, but he rushes to the spot where the tightrope walker lies dying. The words of the prophet are consoling, but also indicative of a life choice that arouses his admiration (“You made your vocation out of danger, and there is nothing contemptible about that. Now you perish of your vocation, and for that I will bury you with

44

Chapter 3

my own hands”). The three figures (Zarathustra, the tightrope walker, and the clown) thus create a particular internal movement, which is at the same time a narrative and a philosophical movement. Just as he announces the advent of the Overman, Zarathustra is interrupted by the tightrope walker’s performance, as if to underline his closeness. Like the Overman, the tightrope walker is suspended above the abyss, and stretches a thin cable to get to the other side. He is not a man like all the others, but he is not yet the Overman; just as he is not the clown, his parodic version of himself, who believes he can go beyond his human condition with jokes and great jumps. The tightrope walker is unlike any other man. Zarathustra approaches the Overman and buries him with his hands because his vocation was danger—he was going beyond himself. From the point of view of the narrative construction of the scene, the particular montage of the elements is not accidental: the tightrope walker begins his performance while Zarathustra is talking to the men gathered in the village square. His words announce the advent of the Overman and—with an imaginary machine-like movement—we discover the artist who performs suspended over the void. While Zarathustra announces, under the skeptical and ironic gaze of the crowd, the advent of the Overman, two different figures somehow seem to put his words into action: on the one hand, the tightrope walker, in a still-too-human way; on the other, the clown, in a purely farcical form. Neither of the two figures is therefore able to embody the crossing that Zarathustra announces as necessary. But unlike the clown, the tightrope walker (now reduced to a purely transfigured mask) represents in the eyes of Nietzsche the one who tries to literally rise above his limitations, and that is why Zarathustra pays tribute to him, collecting his last breath and promising him burial. In the Nietzschean universe, the tightrope walker is a tragic figure, suspended in more than one sense, destined to fail and, despite this, ready to perform, and to go across that thin cable suspended over the abyss. But it is precisely in this reading that there is a further gap with respect to Herzog’s suggested analogy between filmmaking and tightrope walking. On a first reading, the tightrope walker in Nietzsche thus represents an approach to the figure of the Overman, but not yet a fulfillment. Certainly, as Roberto Calasso notes, a thought capable of facing selfovercoming can never be purely speculative for Nietzsche, but must necessarily bring into play the real and the physical dimension of the body. It will therefore be an “even very complex thought, in which, however, it will not be only the traditional figure of the philosopher who acts but also the likewise mysterious one of the funambulist.” 14 The association of the tightrope walker with the philosopher, the introduction of a figure that deviates from the image of thought as an immaterial form—but that in a certain sense introduces the body, physical effort, material risk—is cer-

The Conquest of Uselessness as a Practice of Film and Thought

45

tainly one of the elements that Nietzsche contributes to modernity with unique intensity. 15 As Calasso points out again: “By now we are no longer in the promised land beyond metaphysics but in a more familiar sphere. The one Nietzsche called the sphere of the Artistik, an indispensable word, closer indeed to the life of the acrobat than to that of the philosophy professor.” 16 Calasso, a heretical but passionate reader of Nietzsche, 17 then emphasizes the idea that permeates Zarathustra according to many interpreters: the one that sees in the various figures of the book not only conceptual figures, but a certain duplication or multiplication of the same figure— hence multiple in itself—of Zarathustra. “Is not,” Calasso asks, “Zarathustra's first stand-in a tightrope walker?” 18 Here an idea slowly takes shape that allows us to read once again and accord new meanings to the constellation of characters in the first part of Nietzsche’s text: Zarathustra, the tightrope walker, and the clown. Rather than an opposition or a dialectical relationship, we could claim, following Calasso’s intuition, that it is a multiplication, a passage from one character to another, from one figure to another. The three figures, we could say, are conceptual characters or personae. In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari introduce this expression to describe the ability of philosophy to create figures through which the philosopher’s discourse builds new concepts. “The conceptual persona,” they write, “is not the philosopher’s representative but, rather, the reverse: the philosopher is only the envelope of his principal conceptual persona and of all the other personae who are the intercessors [intercesseurs], the real subjects of his philosophy. Conceptual personae are the philosopher’s ‘heteronyms,’ and the philosopher’s name is the simple pseudonym of his personae.” 19 The conceptual character is therefore a mutating, iridescent, and complex figure. It shows the dynamism of philosophical thought, specifically, a nomadic and errant thought in the proper sense of a thought that multiplies itself in its heteronyms. Zarathustra, the tightrope walker, and the clown are then significant variations of a concept, namely that of going beyond, which never ceases to show its excess, its reversal, its parody, its tragedy. The conceptual characters, however, as further claimed by Deleuze and Guattari, are not the philosophical equivalent of aesthetic figures, such as the great Romantic characters or the great figures of art. There is a substantial difference: “The difference between conceptual personae and aesthetic figures consists first of all in this: the former are the powers of concepts, and the latter are the powers of affects and percepts.” 20 At the same time, however, the strength of both aesthetic figures and conceptual personae lies in their ability to exceed the linear vision of conceptual production or aesthetic creation. In both cases it is always a question of bringing order to chaos, of finding forms or ideas (percepts, affects, or, to use the terminology of Deleuze and Guattari: concepts): “Art

46

Chapter 3

and philosophy crosscut the chaos and confront it, but it is not the same sectional plane; it is not populated in the same way. In the one there is the constellation of a universe or affects and percepts; and in the other, constitutions of immanence or concepts. Art thinks no less than philosophy, but it thinks through affects and percepts.” 21 In Deleuze and Guattari, the proliferation of conceptual characters (Plato’s Socrates, Nietzsche’s characters, Niccolò Cusano’s Idiot, Kierkegaardian characters) reveals the particular dynamics of philosophical discourse: the conceptual character or characters are the stages of a subject’s becoming in the development of the concept. In order for new concepts to be born, it is necessary to create new characters, making them the intercessors necessary for the development of new concepts. In order to create a concept, the philosopher must in a certain sense transform himself into his character, forcing himself to create new perspectives. In the description of the specificity of conceptual characters (compared to aesthetic figures), Deleuze and Guattari underline, however, the closeness between the two forms, or the fact that one often transmutes into the other in a continuous becoming. From this point of view, then, could we think of the cinematographic form as a form that allows us to construct conceptual and aesthetic figures at the same time, or rather as characters who, in a certain sense, contain both the aesthetic dimension in the proper sense of the dramatis personae (the narrative characters who act as forms and driving forces of the narrative) as well as the conceptual dimension of the forms that synthesize the process of a directorial way of looking, creating its own images through this very metamorphosis, becoming a conceptual character? It is by starting from this question that we can then return to the particular movement of Herzog's films, in which we will find, in a particular light, the properly cinematographic sense of the conceptual character. Through this short journey along the particular constellation of characters that inhabit the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, we can return to the point from which we started, namely the particular relationship between work, physical effort, and creation in the work of Werner Herzog. THE ECSTATIC IMAGE: THE TIGHTROPE WALKER, THE TRAVELER, THE PILGRIM Calasso, as well as Deleuze and Guattari, coincide in underlining the relationship between the author and his conceptual characters as a relationship in progress, but never fixed once and for all. The tightrope walker in Herzog becomes, by analogy, the figure that best represents the pure non-purpose (or uselessness) of film. Compared to the tragic nature of Nietzsche’s tightrope walker (destined to die in an attempt to cross the abyss), Herzog’s tightrope walker never ceases to engage in serious play, to become the form through which the creation of images becomes pos-

The Conquest of Uselessness as a Practice of Film and Thought

47

sible, precisely as a free, not-for-profit activity, but one in which one’s whole self is brought into play. It is then in this sense that the conception of the cinematographic image in Herzog can be read. For Herzog, looking for his own conceptual persona means finding a way to reach a deeper image, capable of scratching the surface of perception. For Herzog, the erratic movement, as well as the continuous risk of those seeking balance while suspended over the abyss, is constituted by the forms through which the directing activity can become a genuine search for truth. The tightrope walker, as we have seen, contains in itself a fundamental double gesture in Herzog: the movement without a final aim, and the risk that puts one’s life at stake. The double gesture allows the filmmaker to have a different relationship with the world, in order to see the world in a different way. In the “Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema,” a sort of poetic-theoretical manifesto delivered by Herzog at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis on April 30, 1999, there are three points that summarize the meaning of this double movement: 1. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization. 2. Filmmakers of Cinema Vérité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.

3. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue. 22

In the synthetic and ironically evocative style of historical avant-garde manifestos, Herzog develops a precise methodological path. The Tightrope Walker, whom we have seen develop as a conceptual character specific to Herzog’s films, comes into contact with other characters recurring in the director’s words and images, such as the Traveler or the Pilgrim, who, as we will also see from Herzog’s film images, are at the same time powerful cinematic figures and images of a way of living and of seeing the world. Traveling as the base of cinema (and common to all these figures) is certainly not similar to tourism (which is a pity), 23 but traveling on foot is similar because it is the risky movement that allows us to reach Herzog’s deeper, ek-static truth: a truth of the image that therefore needs particular work in order to emerge. For Herzog, as Timothy Corrigan points out, going on foot ( . . . ) implies a physical engagement with the world in which the movement of the body on the earth creates a kinetic movement of the mind, resulting in a consciousness not of the mind’s appropriative powers but of its always physically diminutive place on the surfaces and edges of the world—too small, too weak, too blind, too slow. ( . . . ) “traveling on foot” thus generates that other defining principle of Herzog’s essay films, the perception of an ecstatic truth ferociously differ-

48

Chapter 3 entiated especially from the “truth of accountants” practiced by cinéma vérité. 24

Ecstasy is a word that frequently recurs in the Herzog’s interviews and writings. In this word, the German director concentrates the very meaning of cinematographic work as work related to the practice of philosophical thought, and close to the forms of mystical understanding of reality: Leaving one’s own human boundaries until one reaches a vision, as in religion, like the medieval mystics who experienced truth in an ecstatic form, coming out of themselves, leaving the boundaries of their human essence. It is also very fascinating to consider these visions as a kind of truth. In ancient Greek, truth is called alētheia and derives from a verb that means to hide, to obscure. Alētheia therefore has a negative connotation, it means taking something away and hiding it, taking it away from the visible, from the palpable. It’s a very cinematic concept because when you see something in front of your camera, you record it on the film, and yet there, on the film, there's nothing, other than a latent image. 25

A reinterpretation of one of the terms on which Western thought is based (alētheia) as an exquisitely cinematographic term shows the analogical progress of Herzog’s thought. The presence of the alpha privative indicates, moreover, that truth is a process of unveiling, which requires a path, an effort, a search, and an existential view inseparable from the search/detection of the true. In this respect filmmaking, like philosophical practice, is committed to grasping that deeper layer of truth as defined in the Minnesota Declaration. This deeper layer—the ecstatic dimension of Herzog’s truth—is certainly not the result of a mystical intuition, or of a Gnostic process, or of a pure grasp of truth ascending to a superior vision. As in philosophical practice, cinematographic research reaches a profound dimension of reality starting from concrete work that entails effort and fatigue of the body. In the Tightrope Walker, in the Traveler, in the Pilgrim—the figures that gradually interpret the meaning of film in Herzog—there is always work of the body at play, of the director as well as of his characters. Similarly, in philosophical research there is conceptual work that requires effort and causes fatigue. The creation of both conceptual and aesthetic characters recurs in Herzog in multiple forms. Pilgrimage (2001), in which the director films pilgrims from various parts of the world, opens with a fabricated quotation by the medieval mystic Thomas à Kempis: “It is only the pilgrims who in the travails of their earthly voyage do not lose their way, whether our planet be frozen or scorched: they are guided by the same prayers, and suffering, and fervor, and woe.” In a film without dialogue, composed of the tiring movements of pilgrims who crawl on the ice, walk on their knees, and stand for hours, the image is based on the musical commentary by John Tavener, who unifies the images in an organic path tra-

The Conquest of Uselessness as a Practice of Film and Thought

49

versed by the physical and inner effort of thousands of men and women together. 26 The film consists largely of footage filmed for Bells from the Deep (1993) and other Herzog films. The images come from different parts of the world and bear witness to different pilgrimage practices, such as men crawling along frozen lakes, believers kneeling in an Orthodox church, and pilgrims walking on their knees in Latin America; others, in Asia, move with their eyes pointed upward. It is this montage of bodies that constructs the particular form of the conceptual character of the pilgrim in Herzog. What unifies them is a particular way of practicing the physical gesture, the effort. The movement, diversified and repeated, in different places and times, clearly shows the becoming of a cinematographic and philosophical concept: physical effort as a tension, as a leakage from itself and as a form of ecstasy. The effort of the physical journey without destination in referenced in Dark Glow of the Mountains (1984), where, in a dialogue with Herzog himself, mountaineer Reinhold Messner talks about the dream of traveling only for the pleasure of traveling without a destination and without a place to reach. Even when faced with an impossible or visionary destination, Herzogian travelers are ready to lose themselves to madness or death, such as Aguirre and his handful of conquistadors in Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), to the point of losing almost every trace of humanity, such as Dieter Dengler in Rescue Dawn (2006). Every movement, every challenge of the body and the spirit are precisely in Herzog’s films both profoundly physical and profoundly interior. The Tightrope Walker allows us to see the world otherwise, but only as long as he is really suspended above the abyss. Here, then, we have the impossible movement of the ship that climbs the mountain in Fitzcarraldo or trips to the limit, to the border of the world, to catastrophic places that Herzog himself makes in order to film. So the conceptual characters, the aesthetic figures of his films, become Herzog himself—or, as Deleuze and Guattari would say, the director never ceases to become his own characters—putting himself permanently at stake, suspended over the abyss. But how exactly does this complex movement work, which in Herzog’s films always aims at going beyond an ordinary perception of reality, a movement in which work and physical and concrete effort are accompanied by the invention and continuous creation of forms and characters? To enter into these dynamics it is now necessary, as a final gesture, to resume the images and words of Herzog. In a speech delivered at the Milanesiana 27 in 2007, published under the title Dell'assoluto, del sublime e della verità estatica (“Of the Absolute, the Sublime and the Ecstatic Truth”), 28 the director explores many of the themes that interest him, starting with the need for film to go beyond the immediate perception of reality to arrive at a truth that is precisely unveiling itself (from the very meaning of a-lētheia, as mentioned above). To do this, Herzog continues, the director must work on several levels, trying at all

50

Chapter 3

times to go beyond his limits, to raise himself and the world he is passing through. It is in this sense, moreover, that the Tightrope Walker, the Traveler, and the Pilgrim become figures through which a new outlook is possible. The three figures are both concrete and abstract, figures of thought but also models of filmmaking. Let us just think of the operation that is the basis of a film such as Fitzcarraldo, in which the actual undertaking of carrying a real ship to the top of a mountain becomes not just an amazing anecdote or the final objective of the film, but the very meaning of filmmaking, its transcending of the story and a pure storytelling, a gesture that is removed from any logic of the useful—this is the emblem of a conquest of the useless. But, precisely for this reason, it stands as a real transcendence of the ordinary perception of the world. In his Milanese intervention, Herzog returns to the film, describing it as an example of a gesture capable of transforming the way one looks at the world: The film talks about a great opera in the virgin forest, and you already know that I personally took care of the opera staging, always inspired by a rule, for me categorical: only when a whole world has been transformed into music can you produce/create an opera. The beauty of opera is that reality plays no role in it and through opera there is an overcoming of nature ( . . . ). Events are statistically impossible, but the power of music makes the action perceivable by the spectator as true. 29

Only when the whole world has been transformed into music is it possible to create an opera. Only through a process of the world’s transfiguration is it possible to see the world otherwise, to grasp Herzog’s deepest truth. His words show the need to think of all cinematographic work as a gesture of going beyond the ordinary experience of the world. The film operation, the gestures of the Tightrope Walker, the Traveler, the Pilgrim, are all gestures that contribute to the search for a deeper truth, a truth that does not belong to the realm of the useful, but is the result of a passage over the abyss. This, for Herzog, is ecstasy. The truth is ecstatic, says the director, because it is the result of a leakage from himself; a risky gesture, in which the passage can also lead to failure, to losing oneself without escape. Yet, such ecstasy is what causes one to look up, to become a tightrope walker breaking the laws of everyday life. According to Herzog, The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1973) provides an image for this ecstatic movement. The film, dedicated to Walter Steiner, a Swiss sculptor who has been a ski jumping world champion for many years, presents itself as a sort of elegy of a passing experience. Steiner, according to Herzong, “rises in the air as if in religious ecstasy and, flying so incredibly far away, he approaches the death zone, the unsafety zone, only a few meters away and he would not land on the steep slope, but on a flat surface.” 30 In the film, Steiner tells the story of the death of a young crow he lovingly raised himself, but was then forced

The Conquest of Uselessness as a Practice of Film and Thought

51

to kill in order to spare it from suffering a long and painful agony. In the last sequence of the film, Steiner hovers in flight after the crow’s death. The camera deviates from the jumper, framing his flight in a long sequence shot in slow motion: “It is the majestic flight of a person, who carries on his face the expression of the fear of death and is ecstatic, as if in the grip of religious ecstasy. And then, a few meters before the ‘death zone,’ it is light and safe.” 31 It is in this gesture that Herzog's powerful idea of filmmaking is enclosed and, at the same time, it is in this gesture that the cinematographic and philosophical difference between Herzog’s figures and Nietzsche’s characters is revealed. Nietzsche himself had already said this: if the world is no longer given according to a divine order, if it reveals itself as pure complexity that requires a new vision, then thought (and film, Herzog adds) no longer has an a priori scheme, and must necessarily create tightrope walkers, travelers, and pilgrims capable of crossing spaces that until then had been considered inaccessible. The conquest of the useless is then, for both Petit and Herzog, an art and an attitude; time subtracted from immediate utility, from productivity itself, is time on the edge. There is not much difference whether it translates into tightrope walking or the film form. 32 This does not mean that the view of a filmmaking that faces reality must necessarily put life at risk; rather, this means that there is a profound idea that runs through the cinematic way of looking, an idea that sees the image as a borderline image, as an image that does not reveal an a priori preexisting world, but that seeks and creates new connections. For this reason as well, the exercise of looking, the ability to immerse oneself in the world to search for the least visible evidence, is fundamental for Herzog. This is why the figure of Petit, the tightrope-walking philosopher, is for the German director an extraordinary example of creativity as an “illegal act,” as subversion of the rules in pursuit of the creation of new montages. 33 ENDNOTES 1. Paul Cronin, ed., Herzog on Herzog (London: Faber & Faber, 2002), 227. 2. Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 228. 3. Philippe Petit, On the High Wire (New York: Random House, 1985), back cover. 4. Werner Herzog, Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo (New York: Harper-Collins ebooks, ePub, 2009). 5. Herzog, Conquest of the Useless, ePub, “Camisea, 4 November 1981.” 6. Herzog, Conquest of the Useless, ePub, “Camisea, 4 November 1981.” 7. For a critical reading of this concept, see for example Alan Singer, “Comprehending Appearance: Werner Herzog’s Ironic Sublime,” in Timothy Corrigan, ed., The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History (New York: Routledge, 2014); see esp. pp. 187-94. For a critical discussion of the relationship between Herzog and Romanticism, see above all Laurie Ruth Johnson, Forgotten Dreams. Revisiting Romanticism in the Cinema of Werner Herzog (Rochester: Camden House, 2016). 8. Ladislao Mittner, Ambivalenze romantiche (Firenze: D’Anna, 1954), 275.

52

Chapter 3

9. Mittner, Ambivalenze Romantiche, 275. 10. As Richard Eldridge points out: “what attracts Herzog’s interest is not the ordinary stuff of family life or commercial life, but instead . . . effort to break through to new forms of bodily self-presence, against the normalizing demands of social life,” Richard Eldridge, Werner Herzog: Filmmaker and Philosopher (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 111. 11. See in this regard one of Welles' manifesto films, F For Fake (1975), where everything (starting with filmmaking itself) is subjected to the game of reversal, illusion and magic trick. 12. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 11. 13. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 11-12. 14. Roberto Calasso, The Forty-Nine Steps (London: Pimlico, 2002), 11-12. 15. It would certainly be wrong to state that in the history of Western philosophy the physical and concrete dimension of existence has never been compared to the practice of thinking (let us just think of the close link that exists in Greek thought between philosophizing and living); certainly, in Nietzsche this dimension assumes a particular relevance of disruption toward the clear separation between physical activity and the activity of thought that characterizes modern (particularly German) philosophy. It is also in this sense that Nietzsche insists on paying attention to the passage, and to the physical path, of human existence. Man’s essence resides precisely in this passage suspended between the animal and the overman: “Mankind is a rope fastened between animal and overman—a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking back, a dangerous shuddering and standing still. What is great about human beings is that they are a bridge and not a purpose: what is lovable about human beings is that they are a crossing over and a going under.” Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 7. 16. Calasso, The Forty-Nine Steps, 12. 17. Roberto Calasso is not only a refined writer and essayist, but is also the director of the Italian publishing house Adelphi, which was the first in the world to deal with the publication of Nietzsche’s entire work according to philologically rigorous criteria, under the curatorship of Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. 18. Calasso, The Forty-Nine Steps, 12. 19. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 64. 20. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 65. At the same time, the conceptual character does not correspond to the archetype, whether it is intended as a Jungian archetype (the innate and predetermined ideas of the human unconscious) or as a Platonic Idea (seen as the pure form of things in the world). The conceptual character is an operator (precisely an intercessor), created within a plane of philosophical immanence, necessary for the development of a certain concept. It is therefore not innate, nor does it aspire to a form of original universality. 21. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 66. 22. Werner Herzog, “Declaration of Minnesota. Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema,” in Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 301. 23. Guy Gauthier also analyzes the distinction between the traveler and the tourist in one of the most representative texts of a documentary theory, Le documentaire, un autre cinéma (Paris: Armand Colin, 2015). 24. Timothy Corrigan, “The Pedestrian Ecstasies of Werner Herzog: On Experience, Intelligence, and the Essaystic,” in Brad Prager, ed., A Companion to Werner Herzog (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 89. 25. Werner Herzog in Grazia Paganelli, Segni di vita. Werner Herzog e il cinema (Turin/Milan: Museo Nazionale del Cinema/Il Castoro, 2009), 100. 26. The idea of exploring the limit of the pilgrim’s body moving in space is also present in the photographic book by Lena Herzog (text by Werner Herzog), Pilgrims: Becoming the Path Itself (London: Periplus Publishing, 2002).

The Conquest of Uselessness as a Practice of Film and Thought

53

27. A festival of art and culture devoted to films, music and theater, which has been held for many years in Milan and surrounding cities. 28. Werner Herzog, “Dell’assoluto, del sublime e della verità estatica,” in Paganelli (Segni di vita. Werner Herzog e il cinema), 178-89. 29. Herzog, “Dell’assoluto, del sublime e della verità estatica”, 185. 30. Herzog, “Dell’assoluto, del sublime e della verità estatica”, 188. 31. Herzog, “Dell’assoluto, del sublime e della verità estatica”, 189. 32. It is striking that the dimension of Streben, of the effort at the limits of the human being that imbues the Romantic spirit and is reflected (though only partially) in the words and gestures of Petit and Herzog, becomes, in Robert Zemeckis’s hyper-technological and dreamlike films, the image of absolute lightness. In The Walk (2015), Zemeckis shoots Petit’s New York undertaking and the last, very long sequence—that of walking on the wire suspended between the two towers—is transformed into the image of filmmaking as a pure image of ecstasy, of the digital technique that allows us to show the moment in which the body loses all real consistency, all physicality. From another point of view, James Marsch’s Man on Wire (2008), an award-winning documentary about the high-wire walk that made Petit famous, is all about the story of the tightrope walker’s gesture, the study and the long preparation that led to the success of the tightrope walker. Marsch adopts the point of view of Petit (who participated in the preparation of the film), reconstructing the gesture through a form of complex storytelling, in which archive images, re-enactments with actors and testimonies chronologically reconstruct the events. The reconstruction of Marsch does not make the effort and tension visible, but transforms them into elements of the story. 33. It is Petit himself who binds together creativity and illegality, that is to say, he binds together the poetic act and the subversion of the rules: “The creator must be an outlaw. Not a criminal outlaw, but rather a poet who cultivates intellectual rebellion. The difference between a bank job and an illegal high-wire walk is paramount: the aerial crossing does not steal anything; it offers an ephemeral gift, one that delights and inspires.” Philippe Petit, Creativity: The Perfect Crime (New York: Penguin, 2014), ePub “A Forethought: Confession of an Outlaw,” 3.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Calasso, Roberto. 2002. The Forty-Nine Steps. London: Pimlico. Corrigan, Timothy, ed. 2014. The Films of Werner Herzog: between Mirage and History. New York: Routledge. Cronin, Paul, ed. 2002. Herzog on Herzog. London: Faber and Faber. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. 1994 What Is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press. Eldridge, Richard. 2018. Werner Herzog: Filmmaker and Philosopher. London: Bloomsbury. Gauthier, Guy. 2015. Le documentaire, un autre cinéma. Paris: Armand Colin. Herzog, Lena and Herzog, Werner. 2002. Pilgrims: Becoming the Path Itself. London: Periplus Publishing. Herzog, Werner. 2009. Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo. New York: HarperCollins, epub. Johnson, Laurie Ruth. 2016. Forgotten Dreams: Revisiting Romanticism in the Cinema of Werner Herzog. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Mittner, Ladislao. 1954. Ambivalenze romantiche. Firenze: D’Anna. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2006. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paganelli, Grazia. 2009. Segni di vita: Werner Herzog e il cinema. Torino/Milano: Museo Nazionale del Cinema/Il Castoro. Petit, Philippe. 1985. On the High Wire. New York: Random House. ———. 2014. Creativity: The Perfect Crime. New York: Penguin.

54

Chapter 3

Prager, Brad ed. 2012. A Companion to Werner Herzog. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

FOUR Filmmaking and Philosophizing against the Grain of Theory: Herzog and Wittgenstein Mihai Ometiță

So far, Werner Herzog has given about eight hundred interviews, through various media spanning print, radio, film, television, and the Internet. One of their leitmotifs is his portrayal of himself as an antiintellectualist, an anti-theorist, and an anti-philosopher. This is a bit startling, since he is known to be proficient in several modern languages, apparently reads Ancient Greek and Latin, and advocates for literature and poetry relentlessly. One may rejoin that the interviews are meant to be taken just as his films: as blurring the line between documenting and fictionalizing. But that would only make the former all the more intriguing. Besides, I do not want to dismiss the filmmaker’s self-portrait simply because it could be partly fictional. I would rather allow myself to add some further brushstrokes to it. To that end, this text resorts to an established philosopher, who may have actually welcomed Herzog’s anti-intellectualist and anti-theoretical posture: Ludwig Wittgenstein. They both attempt to do justice—the former cinematically, the latter philosophically—to what is sometimes called the “human condition,” its quirks and fancies included. And they are both concerned with the trouble we experience in putting up with what there is, with what there may be at hand or before our eyes. 1 The point I would like to make here is that the obstinacy of Herzog’s protagonists to achieve something come what may, and the dogmatism of Wittgenstein’s interlocutors to conceive of something in just one way, are two sides of the same coin. This coin is the unbounded attachment to a theory: 55

56

Chapter 4

one’s exclusive manner of acting upon, or looking at, the world around oneself. The following can thus be taken as a portrayal of some cinematic practices and some philosophical views simply belonging together. FROM HERZOG TOWARD WITTGENSTEIN Among the filmmaker’s statements against intellectualism, one is particularly noteworthy. First, because he reiterates it in many interviews, and second, because although the reiterations are up to three decades apart (e.g., from 1973 to 2002), they are virtually verbatim: I am not an intellectual. I do not belong to the ranks of intellectuals who have a philosophy or a social structure in mind and then make a film about it. Nor do I think that I succumbed to literary or philosophical influences. I can say, for the most part, that I am illiterate. I haven’t read much and am therefore utterly clueless. In my case, making a film has much more to do with real life, with living things, than it has with philosophy. All my films were made without any reflective contemplation, or hardly any. Reflection always came after the film. 2

Whence this striving for self-exclusion from the ranks of intellectuals? On the account in question, intellectualist filmmaking boils down to a bare application of a prefabricated philosophy. The making of a film could indeed be triggered and driven by conceptions of social structures, such as mechanisms of exclusion. But then the film would end up simply sieving, through those conceptions, the “real life” invoked previously. Not that such structures cannot be taken to be real in any sense. It is only that behind or beside them there is always further life, real enough at least to make a camera linger over it. In The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), what may be called the “social exclusion” of a wild child is also the stage setting of a man’s late enculturation—sometimes humiliating, sometimes dignifying. And this so-called passage “from nature to culture” is complicated by this man’s very passage from life, while reporting visions of the Sahara, which he neither visited nor studied. Such bursts of life and death can indeed inform conceptions of social structures. Yet the latter, we are told, are to come after the film, by way of reflection or contemplation. This is one sense in which the filmmaker would be quite clueless. 3 Above and elsewhere, Herzog further pleads for a related sense of illiterate directing. Time and again, he claims to have learned the requisite technicalities of cinema in his early youth from a few pages of a textbook. He disowns any “intellectual theory as to how ‘the narrative’ should work,” and holds that no research into “opera theory” was involved in his coming to direct about twenty opera shows for the biggest opera houses around the world. 4 His recently established Rogue Film School introduces itself more radically: “it is for those who have travelled

Filmmaking and Philosophizing against the Grain of Theory

57

on foot, who have worked as bouncers in sex clubs or as wardens in a lunatic asylum.” 5 The director makes such statements against intellectualism and theory regarding not only the making of film, but also the latter’s reception. In defense of his Ballad of the Little Soldier (1984), a documentary on children sent to war in Nicaragua, he argues that the “intellectuals were simply unable to understand that politically dogmatic cinema is not something I practice. [ . . . ] It does not matter what political content there is when you have a nine-year-old fighting in a war.” 6 Another example: his Echoes from a Somber Empire (1990), a documentary on Bokassa (an apparently insane despot of the Central African Republic) closes with the scene of a monkey smoking in a cage, an addiction she acquired thanks to the zoo guardians. One of Herzog’s interviewers proposes a reading in conspicuously Nietzschean terms: “This human, all too human, ape makes one think of men behind bars, the men imprisoned by Bokassa, and perhaps even Bokassa himself.” Herzog replies immediately: “No, no! That is a Western sickness, always seeing metaphorical connections in everything! Things are clearer for me. They’re simpler. An ape is an ape. A cigarette is a cigarette. And Bokassa is Bokassa.” 7 Now, if Herzog’s posture against intellectualism in the making and viewing of film was meant to hint at the feebleness of philosophizing about cinema and other things, then that posture may be feeble itself. Wittgenstein, for one, would readily embrace what could well be a dictum for philosophizing in his vein: “An ape is an ape. A cigarette is a cigarette.” Indeed, echoing this phrase, he intended to use as a motto for his Philosophical Investigations an excerpt from Bishop Butler: “Everything is what it is, and not another thing.” 8 Herzog’s phrase, no less than Butler’s, captures a central concern of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy with the dangers of assimilating one thing to another. Metaphors and analogies are modalities of doing just that. Of course, assimilation is legitimate and prolific, insofar as it brings to light, regarding one or several of the assimilated things, aspects which could otherwise remain in the dark. But it may be dangerous and confusing, in that it unavoidably adumbrates other aspects which could be significant nevertheless. 9 In our case, to assimilate the monkey smoking in the cage to suffering prisoners would be to mold the scene within the confines of a reading at hand. It would be to focus on a sense of being behind bars, to focus on the trees, as it were, and miss the forest of significance that charges the scene. As a spectator, I may venture to read the scene as an epitome of a decayed culture or civilization. Or as an expression of hopelessness, perhaps even the meaninglessness, of what humans can do. In doing so, however, I would be persistently pressed by the filmmaker to go back, again and again, to the contents of the scene: a monkey, a cigarette, a cage. I could thus realize that I have overlooked the gaze of the monkey,

58

Chapter 4

or the “gaze” of the camera into that gaze. In the end, if I wanted to ascribe an authorial intent to the scene, it should be the minimalist intention that the scene affects me and stays with me, while outperforming and outlasting any of my readings of it. We should remind ourselves that the difficulty, more generally, of advancing the thesis that a film’s reading does justice to the film’s viewing has long been addressed by philosophers from various traditions. In the 1940s, the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty hinted at the intellectual artifacts contained by readings as opposed to viewings of movies, on the basis that, originally, “a film is not thought, it is perceived.” 10 By the same token, in the 1970s, the American postanalytic philosopher Stanley Cavell traced the difficulty back to “the fact that in speaking of a moment or sequence from a film we, as we might put it, cannot quote the thing we are speaking of.” 11 Back to our filmmaker and our philosopher. The first step in bringing Herzog closer to Wittgenstein is propped up by the former’s willingness to approach the latter. In a recent interview, the director says: “I think it was Wittgenstein who talked about being inside a house and seeing a figure outside strangely flailing about. From inside you cannot see what storms are raging out there, so you find the figure funny.” 12 That is a paraphrase of Wittgenstein’s response to the bewilderment of his sister Hermine at his decision to become, after the publication of the Tractatus, an elementary-school teacher. To her, his commitment evoked the employment of a precision instrument for the job of opening crates. 13 The eventual turn in the philosopher’s career may, however, be motivated by the acknowledgment of a need: to try the intellect’s sharpness on the world’s vicissitudes, even if it should end up with dents and cracks. What is more, Wittgenstein also acted as a gardener in a monastery around the same time. He was thus doing, in his own way, something along the lines of what Herzog expects from a filmmaker: to work as a bouncer in a sex club, or as a warden in a lunatic asylum. The scenario which Herzog ascribes to Wittgenstein does not merely indicate their agreement on what to expect from the life of a virtuoso. Their appeal to the scenario is indicative of their shared concern with the hazards of intellectual contemplation, and ultimately of theory. This becomes clearer against the background of the historiographic allusion at stake. For the one inside the house, who looks through the window and has trouble making sense of what goes on outside, is the contemplative protagonist of one of Descartes’s meditations. The protagonist could only hypothesize, as if on basis of theory, that the coats and hats seen through the window are, after all, animated by real people. 14 Herzog dismisses an intellectualist-contemplative approach to filmmaking and film viewing. What would it be to make films, as it were, from behind the window? To lock oneself within a conception of a social structure, to shoot what best confirms it and let pass whatever discon-

Filmmaking and Philosophizing against the Grain of Theory

59

firms it. What would it be to view films in a similar fashion (through a tinted windowpane, for argument’s sake)? To suffer from the purported Western sickness of seeing metaphorical connections in everything. In our case, it could be to succumb to the restless doubt whether, once on screen, an ape remains an ape—or she is turned into something else by some kind of cinematic magic. The counterfactual dialogue between Herzog and Wittgenstein begins to highlight a convergence in their spirits between filmmaking and philosophizing. They expose the perils of self-seclusion within a theory, of submission to one’s own inclination to always take something for something else, and of something else standing alone. And they agree upon the need for a filmmaker and a philosopher to step out of that house. The difficulty in taking such a step is, nevertheless, proportional to the resistance of one’s will to not take it instead, a position we are about to see maintained by Wittgenstein. FROM WITTGENSTEIN TOWARD HERZOG Wittgenstein takes issue with theory more explicly in his later period. He opposes not only philosophical transplants of scientific theories, but also philosophy which is made to look like science. The latter is one of his understandings of metaphysics, either modern and straightforward or recent and incognito. He also opposes philosophical theories about the workings of language, of experienced reality, of interpersonal communication, and so forth. Here, instead of following those intricate avenues, I would rather sketch the ethos which guides Wittgenstein’s following of them. One issue of philosophizing with theories is that it is prone to dogmatism. A theory in the relevant sense is just one among the many ways to approach things which, nonetheless, mostly ends up being meant or taken as a privileged approach, and often as the only one available. However, just like the assimilation of x to y, a theory about x can only highlight some aspects of it, while unavoidably adumbrating others. That need not be a problem, if one remains aware of the clarificatory possibilities and limitations of a theory. But the desideratum of maintaining an awareness can be expressed far more easily than it can be fulfilled. For one’s attachment to a theory does not rise and fall with the assessment of its clarificatory potential. That attachment, which may be part and parcel of intellectualism, is not purely intellectual, but also affective and volitional. Significantly in this respect, the Big Typescript, a collection of remarks which paves the way toward the Philosophical Investigations, contains a little section titled “Difficulty of Philosophy Not the Intellectual Difficulty of the Sciences, but the Difficulty of a Change of Attitude. Resistance of the Will Must Be Overcome.” One passage reads:

60

Chapter 4 As I have often said, philosophy does not lead me to any renunciation, since I do not abstain from saying something, but rather abandon a certain combination of words as senseless. In another sense, however, philosophy does require a resignation, but one of feeling, not of intellect. And maybe that is what makes it so difficult for many. It can be difficult not to use an expression, just as it is difficult to hold back tears, or an outburst of rage. 15

We just obtained two senses in which philosophers may have to let go. In one way, they could acknowledge that a thesis or theory (philosophical or otherwise), despite its possible prominence, was technically senseless. Take Wittgenstein’s reservation toward the Hegelian-inspired phrase: “The Real, though it is an in itself, must also be able to become a for myself.” 16 If this turned out to be senseless, then one’s letting go of it would not amount to a “renunciation.” For no one was, in the first place, in the possession of anything close to a piece of knowledge whatsoever. Nor would it be an “abstinence” from saying something—sensically—but merely an “abandonment” of a string of signs devoid of sense. In another way, philosophers may need to “resign” by dropping a thesis or theory, which could make good sense, and yet proved its limitations. The more difficult it is to drop that thesis or theory, the clearer it would be that the attachment to them was not intellectually disinterested, but affectively laden. This attachment was less a recognition of clarificatory potential, and more a bond of affective attraction. Whence the urge to keep using a certain thesis or theory, despite their proven clarificatory limitations, which can be as overwhelming as the urge to cry or to shout. (If this should substantiate it any further, Wittgenstein’s passage can be read not only as a philosophical fiction, but also as documenting the outcome of an interchange between his mentors Russell and Frege: the latter actually burst into tears when the former proved that his take on set theory contained a paradox.) A way to relax the attachment to such and such a theory would be to counteract the resistance of one’s will to look at things otherwise than through those glasses. Another passage from the same section reads: What makes a subject difficult to understand—if it is significant, important—is not that it would take some special instruction about abstruse things to understand it. Rather it is the antithesis between understanding the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not a difficulty of the intellect, but of the will. 17

It should feel safer now to hold that Herzog would salute this view. At least if we also held to the notion that philosophical and cinematic treatments of a subject do converge, insofar as they exclude beclouding it with theories at hand. The view is reminiscent of the Herzogian plea for a non-

Filmmaking and Philosophizing against the Grain of Theory

61

specialist instruction, on the part of filmmakers, in the technicalities of cinema. A satirical version of the plea is: “I’m delighted to see that people who try to make films and take an academic approach to it fail.” 18 The view also accommodates the Herzogian insistence that the understanding of most cinema, on the part of the audience, has taken and still takes little instruction. A programmatic variant of the insistence is: “Film should be looked at straight on, it is not the art of scholars but of illiterates.” 19 Herzog may further welcome the above contrast between understanding a subject and that which people want to see. The latter was the very thing he struggled with: the tendency of some to see in his scenes various takes on social structures, or to read those scenes altogether as politically dogmatic cinema. He thereby seems to suggest that, because of the readiness to see through the lens of the theorist, the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. Indeed, in a Wittgensteinian vein, he remarks: There is so often a tendency to compare and contrast one film with another just because the stories they tell appear to be similar, but in fact are completely different. This is mainly because many of the critics have such intellectual backgrounds and they are very much accustomed to making such comparisons, categorizations and evaluations. But it is not helpful at all. 20

What remains to be unveiled is how the unaware filmmaker actually puts to work the philosopher’s view that one’s attachment to such and such a theory—to an exclusive manner of approaching the world around oneself—is ultimately an issue of willing, of one’s resistance to seeing or acting otherwise. HALFWAY BETWEEN AGUIRRE AND FITZCARRALDO A task of philosophers, for Wittgenstein, is to leave everything as it is, and instead account for the vagaries of what there is. Philosophizing is not a dream of changing the world in order to make it more appealing to oneself, or to others nearby, as one thinks fit. That burden is nevertheless ascribed by Herzog to some of his protagonists while not, however, endorsing their revolt at the world without reservation. For at least two of his emblematic characters, Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, are bound—that is, narratively destined—to fail essentially. But their failures are so majestic that they affect us and stay with us, thus complicating our possible identifications with the destinies of these characters. Like many of Wittgenstein’s interlocutors, Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo agonize over the inadequacy of their whims in the face of various states of the world. Unlike those interlocutors, the latter set out on Herculean journeys, hoping to adjust the world around them to their own will and

62

Chapter 4

thus counteracting Wittgenstein’s stoic advice. In doing so, Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo belong to a more general Herzogian profile: the conquistador of the useless. CONQUEST OF THE USELESS I: DELIRIUM Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) is the story of a Spanish soldier from the sixteenth century, who takes control over an expedition in South America in search of El Dorado, the mythical land of gold. Throughout their journey, the expedition faces the hostility of the jungle and attacks from locals, who remain a nearly invisible force. I would now like to isolate some pivotal expressions of the protagonist’s determination to lead, by any conceivable means, the expedition to an end. Early on, he scrutinizes the river that the crew is to sail: “No one can get down that river alive.” A comrade murmurs: “I tell you, we can do it. From here it will be easier.” The former retorts: “No. We’re all going to go under.” What seems a proof of vigilance turns out to be a self-fulfilled prophecy. For Aguirre will orchestrate the wounding, and then the hanging, of his superior in charge, in order to remove any constraint upon his whim from someone else’s will. At one point, a subordinate gives a whispering voice to the feeling, widespread by then, that the crew is now being led to perdition, and somewhat on purpose: “I’d rather join the Indians than stay with this madman.” Aguirre hears the whisper and gives the readily followed order: “That man is a head taller than me. That may change.” From then on, the protagonist’s manifestations mark a descent into madness, and an absorption of everyone around into that stone-hearted fate. He glorifies his disobedience to the Spanish crown: “I am the great traitor. There can be no greater! Whoever even thinks about deserting will be cut into 198 pieces. [ . . . ] Whoever eats one grain too many, or drinks one drop of water too many, will be locked up for 155 years.” The purpose of the expedition is not the discovery of El Dorado anymore—if it ever was. Completely composed, Aguirre watches the decimation of his crew by indigenes, and adds, as if to hearten the half-alive: “If we turn back now, others will come. And they will succeed. And we’ll remain a failure! Even if this land only consists of trees and water, we will conquer it! [ . . . ] My men measure wealth in gold. There is more. There is power and fame.” Almost by necessity, these lines lead to his last ones, a bare soliloquy if we exclude the hundreds of tiny monkeys that suddenly invade the raft which is rapidly going adrift: “We’ll stage history as others stage plays. I, the Wrath of God, will marry my own daughter, and with her I will found the purest dynasty the earth has ever seen. Together we shall rule this entire continent. We will endure.” And then, in full

Filmmaking and Philosophizing against the Grain of Theory

63

seriousness and gazing into the camera, he launches the bitter call: “Who else is with me?” For the remaining witnesses of the expedition—mostly the film audience—it turns out that its actual outcome is not much more than sheer delirium. Although extreme, the case remains elucidatory for Wittgenstein’s take on the resistant will to neither see something, nor to act somehow differently than one does. Aguirre, to be sure, is not blinded by a narrowly construed theory. He is nevertheless enchanted by his resoluteness to regard the world, and everyone around him, in just one way: as insignificant means to his purpose. So insignificant, in fact, that his resolve ends up making more sense for him than the state of the world in which we find him. The remaining crew of the raft, hovering between life and death, have come to share the delirium. A black crew member, initially employed as a kind of devil to scare away the “Indians,” starts seeing things which are not supposed to be there: “I see a ship with sails in a tall tree, and from the sterns hangs a canoe.” The same character then ceases to see things which are supposed to be there: “That is no forest [while looking at a forest]. That is no arrow [while looking at an arrow piercing his leg].” The scene brings again into question Herzog’s dictum, which exposes the supposed inability of intellectualist readings of film to put up with the allegedly obvious: “An ape is an ape. A cigarette is a cigarette.” Yet the scene goes one step further. While it visually affirms a forest and an arrow for what they are, that status is aurally denied them by the character suggesting: “This forest is not a forest. This arrow is not an arrow.” Prima facie, it is as if the director says one thing and does quite another. When discussing the reception of some of his scenes, he is at pains to qualify their contents as naked facts. Still, if they are closely seen and listened to, those scenes make us wonder whether, once on film, an ape or an arrow does not somehow turn into something else indeed. There is, however, a way to understand Herzog’s dictum and this last scene as both containing a grain of truth, although in different senses. The dictum acts as an interpretative desideratum: we are to recurrently return to the scene, in order to minimize the possibility of our beclouding of it with readings at hand. At the same time, the scene acts as an acknowledgment that the “forest” we are presented with is, after all, an image of a forest, if only because we cannot literally take a walk through it right now. CONQUEST OF THE USELESS II: DREAMS Fitzcarraldo (1982) is set in the same Amazonian basin, again starring the “monumental, epochal” Klaus Kinski, as Herzog heard him characterize himself in their youth. 21 It is another titanic story, this time of an aspiring rubber baron from the early twentieth century, who out of adoration for

64

Chapter 4

the tenor Caruso yearns for an opera house in the middle of the jungle. The plan to finance the fulfillment of the dream is no less mesmerizing than dreaming while sleeping or awake. In order to enter an area that is rich in rubber but barely accessible, he plans for the transportation of a three-hundred-ton steamship over a mountain. Just like Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo’s determination to achieve his purpose is insurmountable. But the latter does not subject the ones around him to his resolve. He is in need of money to buy a steamship in the first place. And the encouragement from his lover (supposedly all the more encouraging, as it comes from the mouth of Claudia Cardinale) also works to persuade the sponsor they finally meet: “It’s only the dreamers who ever move mountains!” Thus, by the time an official of territorial acquisition asks “Do you really know what you’re doing?” Fitzcarraldo answers: “We’re gonna do what nobody’s ever done.” This simply means, as he suggests to an established rubber baron who is ironically distrustful of the whole plan: “I shall move a mountain.” Aguirre’s delirium and Fitzcarraldo’s dream are nourished by the same modality of willing unassailably. The moral of the first case, if any, would be straightforward: the unassailable will is tantamount to the unreasonableness of wanting to achieve something no matter, constituting a prelude for delirium. The second case is rather puzzling. At one point in the film, a missionary acknowledges the hopelessness of converting Amazonian “Indians”: “We can’t seem to cure them of the idea that our everyday life is only an illusion, behind which lies the reality of dreams.” But the protagonist, who forecasts the live voice of Caruso filling the Amazonian basin, takes the part of the “Indians”: “Actually I am very interested in these ideas. I specialize in opera myself.” Let us add some extra pieces to the puzzle. Fitzcarraldo seems particularly close to Herzog’s heart. Not only does the character inherit a love for the opera from the director, but some of his lines are actually the latter’s diary entries during the making of the movie. 22 Furthermore, Fitzcarraldo’s dream of transporting the steamship over the mountain was Herzog’s heaviest burden in finishing his job. The dream and the job were fulfilled, both in the film narrative and on the film set, with the aid of hundreds of locals. The character’s conquest is, nonetheless, belittled by yet another fulfillment of a dreamed job, this time belonging to the indigenes: after helping with its transport over the mountain, in the movie they surrender the steamship to the devastating rapids of the river. They do so in order to appease the river gods, who would otherwise remain angry at such hubris. Herzog’s closer identification with Fitzcarraldo may give a reason for the latter’s ability, which Aguirre lacks, to turn his unfortunate defeat into a redemptive victory. Fitzcarraldo arranges the selling of the spoiled steamship in order to finance at least one operatic performance. He still gets the chance to smoke a cigar while listening live to Caruso and his

Filmmaking and Philosophizing against the Grain of Theory

65

orchestra, though not in the envisaged opera house, but on the steamship itself, whose wobbly return is glorious nevertheless. 23 This sublimation of defeat into victory is further indicative of the kinship between the director’s persona and that of his character. When pressed to say how, or indeed whether, he can keep going with one of the most grueling film productions of all time, Herzog constantly replied just as Fitzcarraldo could have. The provocation “How can you continue? Do you have the strength, or the will, or the enthusiasm?” would only invite the answer: “How can you ask this question? If I abandon this project, I would be a man without dreams. And I don’t want to live like that.” 24 MADNESS AND NONSENSE Many utterances of Herzog’s protagonists parallel many of Wittgenstein’s interlocutors, insofar as they seem to be candidates for nonsense. Recall Aguirre’s line: “Whoever eats one grain too many, or drinks one drop of water too many, will be locked up for 155 years.” Compare it with Fitzcarraldo’s: “I shall move a mountain.” Such utterances, however, do not exhibit logical impossibilities. For we can well imagine conditions under which these utterances are somehow feasible. Someone found guilty by Aguirre may indeed be imprisoned in a cell, which is to remain locked by force of law, for no less than 155 years. That could magnify the punishment psychologically, if not factually. And someone may indeed succeed in moving a mountain from one place to another, but not at once and not alone with their bare hands. Executive directors of mining companies, at least, tend to find the idea of moving a mountain not so remote from common sense. So the issue is not that we cannot conceive of situations in which these Herzogian lines would seem sound. It is that, in the film-situations in which they are delivered, they do not prima facie look so. They do not, that is, simply work as inhibitors or promoters of action, as warnings proper (“Don’t do that!”) or as genuine promises (“I’ll do that!”). Still, in virtue of their fringing on nonsense, they have a powerful effect upon their audience, in and of the film. Aguirre’s commitments instill unspeakable terror in his subordinates, while Fitzcarraldo’s instill, perhaps, a bit of awe in some of us. 25 Such quasi-nonsensical utterances are quite common among Herzog’s protagonists. Their character type is the incurable dreamer who entertains, with unshakeable certainty, the most peculiar of dreams: the one fringing on madness. This type also hosts some of Wittgenstein’s interlocutors, particularly from his very late work On Certainty. More bluntly than before, nonsense-like utterances are addressed there not only as candidates for unintelligibility, but also as possible symptoms of “madness,” “insanity,” or “craziness.” For instance:

66

Chapter 4 If someone supposed that all our calculations were uncertain and that we could rely on none of them (justifying himself by saying that mistakes are always possible) perhaps we would say he was crazy. But can we say he is in error? Does he not just react differently? We rely on calculations, he doesn’t; we are sure, he isn’t. 26

While this is not the place to entertain the technicalities of Wittgenstein’s very late notion of certainty, it may be worthwhile to notice just one thing. Some utterances are not to be simply dismissed as samples of nonsense or unintelligibility by way of a mechanical test. Namely, by simply checking whether such and such an utterance has a negation which can be validated or not in conceivable situations. On that basis, one would handle the previous case by insisting that there is no room for uncertainty where there is none for certainty. The last quote, however, calls for more: a further exploration of the assumptions and the implications of one’s stance within one’s life. In its last stage, Wittgenstein’s philosophizing thus came to advocate even more radically for patient understanding. That, I take it, is also a plea for his readers to not be too hasty either in drawing conclusions in terms of nonsense, unintelligibility, or gobbledygook regarding expressions, or in projecting diagnoses like madness, insanity, or craziness upon others. This, if I am not mistaken, is also the ethos of Herzog’s filmmaking: to show that what seems reasonable may not be so (as in Aguirre), while what appears to not make sense may make some (as in Fitzcarraldo). 27 ENDNOTES 1. So instead of asking how much truth or fiction there is in Herzog’s self-portrait (as do e.g., Eric Ames, “The Case of Herzog: Re-Opened,” and Brigitte Peucker, “Herzog and Auteurism: Performing Identity,” both in A Companion to Werner Herzog, Brad Prager (ed.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), I am rather interested in the senses in which his postures (even if fabricated and rehearsed) against intellectualism, theory, and philosophy may nonetheless have a philosophical import. 2. Werner Herzog, Werner Herzog: Interviews, Eric Ames (ed.) (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 18 (1973 interview); cf. Herzog, Herzog on Herzog, P. Cronin (ed.) (London: Faber and Faber 2002), 70 (2002 interview). 3. In spite of Herzog’s self-ascribed “cluelessness,” several scholars argue that some of his movies may still be taken to question certain trends of society, as well as certain traits of the cinematic audience. For instance, starting from a comparison between Herzog’s film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and Peter Handke’s play Kaspar, Brad Prager (“Offending the Public: Handke, Herzog, Hypnosis,” Telos 159 (2012): 93-104) finds that they both employ a peculiar strategy to “offend the public.” Herzog would thereby aim at challenging our self-complacency with the fact that we share a language or a culture, as well as at making us wonder whether cinema has not turned us into somnambulistic consumers of movies. 4. Herzog, Herzog on Herzog, 102 and 254 respectively. 5. Werner Herzog, “Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School,” (2009) accessed April 1, 2019. http://www.roguefilmschool.com. 6. Herzog, Herzog on Herzog, 192-93.

Filmmaking and Philosophizing against the Grain of Theory

67

7. Herzog, Werner Herzog: Interviews, 107. 8. Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Vintage Books 1991), 451. 9. Of course, there are more ways of succumbing to over-theorizing intellectualism than giving into the inclination to always assimilate one thing to another. For example, Noël Carroll (“Herzog, Presence, Paradox,” Interpreting the Moving Image [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 285) identifies an anti-theoretical stance which Herzog would share with directors like Stan Brakhage and Terrence Malick in that “the philosophical commitments of these filmmakers can be captured by the title experiential anti-eliminativism,” where eliminativism is defined as “the kind of reductionism that denies the existence of whatever escapes its conceptual scheme or fails to be translatable into the basic terms of its framework.” Wittgenstein too arguably shares this anti-theoretical stance. 10. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Le cinéma et la nouvelle psychologie,” Sens et non-sens (Paris: Nagel, 1948), 104. 11. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Enlarged Edition) (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), ix. 12. Herzog, Herzog on Herzog, 60. 13. Cf. Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 170. 14. Cf. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, translated by J. Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996), Second Meditation. 15. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Big Typescript TS 213: German-English Scholars’ Edition, edited and translated by C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 300. 16. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Some Remarks on Logical Form,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 9 (1929): 162-71. 17. Wittgenstein, The Big Typescript TS 213, 300. 18. Herzog, Werner Herzog: Interviews, 32. 19. Herzog, Herzog on Herzog, 70. 20. Herzog, Herzog on Herzog, 125. 21. See My Best Fiend (dir. Herzog 1999). 22. Cf. Werner Herzog, Eroberung des Nutzlosen (München: Carl Hanser, 2004). 23. Herzog is indeed more generous when it comes to Fitzcarraldo’s, as opposed to Aguirre’s, end. Perhaps it is also due to this provocative generosity that the former production has triggered far more allegations of environmental and human-rights abuse than the latter. For an overview of such allegations, spanning for over three decades, cf. Ames, “The Case of Herzog: Re-Opened.” 24. See The Burden of Dreams (dir. Blank 1982). 25. Adequately, Carroll (“Herzog, Presence, Paradox,” 288) takes such lines to reveal Herzog’s “affection for visionary word salads,” that is, for “word combinations that are wrong but which convey a very definite feeling, indeed a particularly arresting feeling.” Carroll is not the first to highlight the central place of language in Herzog’s filmmaking. Cf. “language, itself, is the main character in most of Herzog’s films” (William Van Wert, “Last Words: Observations on a New Language,” The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, Timothy Corrigan (ed.) (New York: Routledge Van Wert 1986), 55). 26. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Über Gewissheit / On Certainty, edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, translated by D. Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), §217. 27. Thanks to Cristi Bodea, Andrei Gorzo, Babrak Ibrahimy, Oskari Kuusela, Luana Stroe, Christian Ferencz-Flat, and the editors of this volume (for comments on previous drafts), to members of audiences at the ICUB-Humanities research seminar in Bucharest and at the conference Philosophy of Film, Without Theory held in York (for discussions on my related presentations), and to Rupert Read (for steady interchanges on Wittgenstein and Herzog). The writing of this text was supported by a fellowship at the Research Institute of the University of Bucharest (ICUB).

68

Chapter 4

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ames, Eric. 2012. “The Case of Herzog: Re-Opened.” A Companion to Werner Herzog, Brad Prager (ed). Oxford: Blackwell. Blank, Les, dir. 1982. The Burden of Dreams. Flower Films. Carroll, Noël. 1998. “Herzog, Presence, Paradox.” Interpreting the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cavell, Stanley. 1979. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Enlarged Edition). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Descartes, René. 1996. Meditations on First Philosophy. John Cottingham (tr). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herzog, Werner, dir. 1972. Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre, the Wrath of God). Werner Herzog Filmproduktion. ———. 1974. Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser). Werner Herzog Filmproduktion. ———. 1982. Fitzcarraldo. Werner Herzog Filmproduktion. ———. 1984. Ballade vom kleinen Soldaten (Ballad of the Little Soldier). Werner Herzog Filmproduktion. ———. 1990. Echos aus einem düsteren Reich (Echoes from a Somber Empire). SERA Filmproduktion and Werner Herzog Filmproduktion. ———. 1999. Mein liebster Feind (My Best Fiend). Werner Herzog Filmproduktion. Herzog, Werner. 2002. Herzog on Herzog. Paul Cronin (ed). London: Faber and Faber. ———. 2004. Eroberung des Nutzlosen. München: Carl Hanser. ———. 2009. “Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School.” Accessed April 1, 2019. http:// www.roguefilmschool.com. ———. 2014. Werner Herzog: Interviews. Eric Ames (ed). Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1948. “Le cinéma et la nouvelle psychologie.” Sens et nonsens. Paris: Nagel. Monk, Ray. 1991. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. London: Vintage Books. Peucker, Brigitte. 2012. “Herzog and Auteurism: Performing Identity.” A Companion to Werner Herzog. Brad Prager (ed). Oxford: Blackwell. Prager, Brad. 2012. “Offending the Public: Handke, Herzog, Hypnosis.” Telos 159: 93104. Van Wert, William. 1986. “Last Words: Observations on a New Language.” The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History. Timothy Corrigan (ed). New York: Routledge. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1929. “Some Remarks on Logical Form.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 9: 162-71. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1969. Über Gewissheit/On Certainty. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (eds). D. Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (trs). Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2005. The Big Typescript TS 213: German-English Scholars’ Edition. C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue (eds and trs). Oxford: Blackwell.

FIVE Nature and Natural Meaning in Grizzly Man Marc Furstenau

Werner Herzog’s vision of the natural world—what we could call his “philosophy of nature”—is well known. He bluntly and famously states it during an interview in Les Blank’s documentary Burden of Dreams (1982), an account of the troubled and difficult production of Herzog’s own film, the historical fantasy Fitzcarraldo (1982), a fictional recounting of a nineteenth-century rubber baron’s obsessive desire to bring culture to a natural world (where he presumes there is none) by building an opera house in the Amazonian jungle. 1 To realize his mad plan, he has a steamship, carrying all the construction supplies, tools, and materials, dragged over a mountain and into the valley on the other side that is otherwise inaccessible by boat and where he wants to build his empire. Rather than simulating the event, the way one may in a film, Herzog had a real ship dragged up and over a mountain, a nearly impossible task that he oversees, creating for himself the same ordeal as that faced by his main character. Insofar as this film is about the challenge of contending with the natural world, of overcoming the enormous obstacles of mountainous jungle terrain, in order, perhaps vainly, to achieve a human goal, Herzog feels obliged to recreate the challenge in reality, to represent as realistically as possible the enormous difficulty posed by nature that his character faces. It is one of the many films in which he stages human action, the effort to establish human values, in opposition to the material intransigence of nature. Engaged in this mad pursuit, Herzog appears in Blank’s film, standing in the Peruvian jungle, struggling with this almost impossible task, marshalling the combined strength of his cast and crew 69

70

Chapter 5

as well as the local indigenous community in order to achieve in fact what he is recounting in fiction. He looks wearily out on the wild natural profusion, and offers a stark and severe account of what he sees. Taking a close look at what’s around us, there is some sort of a harmony, it is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. . . . [W]e have to become humbled in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth, and overwhelming lack of order. Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it. I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment. 2

It is a vision of nature that is at the heart of almost all of Herzog’s films. The natural world for Herzog, manifested most plainly in the jungle, in the untrammeled growth of wild vegetation and the ceaseless struggle between wild beasts, and between human and nature, is essentially chaotic, meaningless, without order or sense. In an uncaring universe, one has to be on guard. The natural world is full of dangers, and nature is characterized by a total (murderous) indifference to us and our fate. Yet, and because it is indifferent, nature is not to be hated or feared, but respected, acknowledged for the force that it is, accommodated and even loved as a force—such love, though, always and properly mitigated by our “better judgment.” The deliberate ambiguity of Herzog’s vision—the horror he feels mixed with his love for nature, the sense of its meaninglessness mingled with a feeling that it is willfully malignant, even murderous—is not uncommon in the history of thinking about the natural world. Nature can indeed confound our ability to derive any obvious meaning from it, creating for some a deep sense of alienation from nature, and, in others, a profound wish to be subsumed by it, to be restored to some sort of original state, before the advent of a culture, which seems to limit and even suppress our natural capacities and freedoms. So separate from the human realm of value and significance, the natural world can seem fearsome, and images of an awesome, inscrutable, ineluctable nature recur in some major currents of modern philosophy. Herzog’s vision of nature seems derived from some of the more austere and grim accounts that have been provided by philosophers, perhaps especially in modern German philosophy. Herzog sounds very much like, for instance, Arthur Schopenhauer, whose vision of nature is particularly stark, and with whom we can productively compare him. “There is something surprising,” says Schopenhauer, “indeed almost terror-inspiring (Schaudererregendes) about the infallibility of the laws of nature.” 3 Searching for the appropriate imagery, he quotes St. Paul, Romans 8.22: “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together.” 4 In a similarly pessimistic

Nature and Natural Meaning in Grizzly Man

71

mood, and seemingly inspired by the same dark Biblical vision, Herzog, contemplating the jungle in Burden of Dreams, declares that “nature here is vile and base . . . I see fornication, and asphyxiation, and choking, and fighting for survival, and growing, and just rotting away. Of course, there is a lot of misery, but it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing, they just screech in pain.” 5 Herzog has nevertheless (and again like Schopenhauer) a deep and abiding affection for the natural world, but this affection is always accompanied by an intense dread. He seems to share with Schopenhauer a deep ambivalence about nature, which seems so devoid of value, a vast realm of misery and pain, so at odds with, and perhaps inevitably confounding, any human attempt to impose value, to create meaning, to escape the all-encompassing willfulness of an inexorable nature. This is inevitably a moral question. In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, her idiosyncratic but important contribution to moral philosophy, Iris Murdoch considers the visions of philosophers like Schopenhauer, who possesses what she describes in him as an “irrepressible empiricist gaiety [which] is in tension with his nihilistic hatred of the ordinary world (the fallen scene, everywhere visible) and his cosmic sense of nature as destructive (we are nothing).” 6 Yet, as Murdoch notes, Schopenhauer “is also tenderly aware of the animals (and plants) and loves and venerates nature.” 7 In

Figure 5.1. Burden of Dreams. Herzog interviewed by Les Blank, in the Peruvian jungle, while filming Fitzcarraldo. Screen capture by author.

72

Chapter 5

this stark dichotomy, which she argues he is not capable of resolving, Murdoch sees what she describes as “the outrageous simplicity of Schopenhauer’s picture.” 8 This simplicity is manifested in Schopenhauer’s positing of a natural “Will.” Despite what can sometimes seem like a compassionate vision, Murdoch argues, Schopenhauer’s philosophy is deeply nihilistic, or at least it closes off the possibility of a genuine account of human agency, offering instead a kind of stoicism that is adopted by others in the post-Kantian tradition. Schopenhauer is influential, Murdoch argues, affecting many subsequent thinkers on the question of moral value, including—importantly—Ludwig Wittgenstein, who also adopts a fact/value distinction and who segregates value questions, such as those concerning morality, from considerations of a supposedly distinct factual or natural realm. Against the efforts of human thought, Wittgenstein, too, sees nature as a separate force. “Schopenhauer posits a superhuman cosmic will, Wittgenstein simply speaks of an alien will.” 9 Wittgenstein, like Schopenhauer, rejects Kant’s Categorical Imperative. But, Murdoch writes, although both regard morality as an attitude (since the world cannot be altered) Schopenhauer has quite a lot to say about morality (especially about compassion and justice) whereas Wittgenstein suggests his views by his silence. Both postulate a world of facts (or entities) independent of human will, but neither explain “will” sufficiently to make clear why this world must be assumed. The segregation of the factual world allows in both cases a stoical morality which verges towards mysticism. 10

According to Murdoch, Schopenhauer at least seems to glimpse a possibility of moral theory that would not depend on our utter separation from the natural realm, yet he falls back on a deterministic picture, which Wittgenstein avoids. “What Wittgenstein indicates by a silent nod, is stated by Schopenhauer as a distinction between phenomenal and noumenal deriving from Kant. Schopenhauer accounts for our helplessness by a theory of determinism. Wittgenstein simply decrees it and wisely does not tangle with determinism.” 11 For Schopenhauer especially, the concept of Will remains an obscure one, effectively relegating philosophical questions that may have answers, even if they are difficult to find, to the realm of the unanswerable. “Schopenhauer does not explain how the Will relates to ideas, or ideas to particulars. His metaphysical substructure is kept clear of value while at the same time establishing value’s place.” 12 It is limited to the human realm, starkly contrasted to the natural, but ultimately governed by it. Schopenhauer, Murdoch says, imagines “reality,” the very ground of our world, of our conceiving our world, “as a ruthless powerful cosmic force, the Will to Live, and the world as we know and experience it as a causally determined construct of phenomena brought about by (us) subjects through our perceptions, that is objectified ideas of

Nature and Natural Meaning in Grizzly Man

73

the Will.” 13 His view summed up in the title of his most famous work, The World as Will and Representation. From this he derives his account of nature. Nature is brutal, unforgiving, mindlessly willful, but seems to offer an attractive alternative to the complexities and ambiguities of human culture. Nature, as Schopenhauer himself says, “never lies, but is always straightforward and open . . . What it says is: The death or life of the individual is of no significance. It expresses this by the fact that it exposes the life of every beast, and even of man, to the most insignificant accidents without coming to the rescue.” 14 A similar kind of vision, I suggest, inspires Herzog in his filmmaking. It is perhaps on its most acute display in his 2005 documentary film Grizzly Man, where Herzog tells the story of just such a terrible and insignificant accident, offering, in effect, and as the lesson of that story, a philosophical vision of the distinction between the human world of culture and of value on the one hand, and the world of nature, of brute, natural fact on the other. Herzog recounts what he sees as a struggle with the great mindless will of nature, a tragic story of a fatal desire to be subsumed and even destroyed by nature, a desire that Herzog argues should be resisted, but which also seems, dangerously, to tempt even him. Timothy Treadwell, the main subject of his documentary portrait, was a self-styled amateur naturalist and advocate for the Alaskan grizzly, the “grizzly man” of the title. He had spent thirteen summers living among them in Katmai National Park, a remote peninsula on the southwest coast of the state, before he and his companion, Aime Huguenard, were attacked, killed, and partially devoured by a bear. Before they were killed, though, Treadwell amassed, over several years, close to a hundred hours of video, shot with a consumer-grade digital camera. Some of this footage is included in Herzog’s film, and what we see is astonishingly intimate footage of the bears and a remarkable and truly informative representation of their natural behavior and their complex world. In many ways it confounds our understanding of such animals, at times seeming to elicit a genuine sympathy, while at others seeming so profoundly remote. Herzog edits and arranges this footage in order to analyze the sort of vision that is on display and to contrast it with his own, although the contrast is not always so clear. The picture that Herzog presents in the film is of a man who had decided that the only way to escape the complexities and frustrations of the human world was to live in an idealized nature, in the company of wild animals, whose simplicity was a kind of respite. Discovering, of course, that he would still and necessarily be estranged from their world, he finally offers himself up to them, to be devoured, presumably as an act of consummation. At least, this is the theory that emerges in Herzog’s film. Treadwell never states his motive clearly, and although he seems to court death, he also describes proudly how he has survived, and for so long, in such close proximity to the bears. But Herzog can only see (and rightly, in some respects)

74

Chapter 5

a failure by Treadwell to understand his relation as a human being to the natural world of bears. Yet he has a sincere sympathy for Treadwell, with whom he in fact shares a similar understanding of nature and our relation to it. The difference is only one of attitude. Over the course of the film, through his careful presentation and interrogation of Treadwell’s footage, and with interviews and a voice-over, Herzog develops a clear argument, effectively blaming Treadwell for his and Huguenard’s death. Their fate, the tragic accident of their death, is presented as the result of Treadwell’s inattentive embrace of nature, of his failure to acknowledge its murderous indifference, his sentimental expectation that nature would come to their “rescue,” when in fact, as Herzog suggests, and as Schopenhauer puts it, “nature exposes its organisms, constructed with such inimitable skill, not only to the predatory instincts of the stronger, but also to the blindest chance . . . it declares that the annihilation of these individuals is indifferent to it . . . It says this very distinctly, and does not lie.” 15 It is this brutal truth—or truthfulness—of nature, nature’s willful and pitiless honesty as Herzog understands it, that he methodically contrasts with what he sees as Treadwell’s mistaken faith in the goodness and harmony of the natural world, and specifically his false hope for something like a genuine communion with the bears. In conversations about the film, Herzog often repeats his view of nature, which he insists is in stark contrast to Treadwell’s. “He considered nature to be wondrously harmonious,” Herzog has said, “but for me, the world is overwhelmingly chaotic, hostile and murderous, not some sentimental Disneyesque place.” 16 In his insistence, though, on what he presents as a more clear-eyed attitude toward nature, Herzog risks succumbing himself to the simplicity of a vision like Treadwell’s, which is the same “outrageous simplicity” that Murdoch finds in Schopenhauer, to which Murdoch seeks a more subtle alternative. In fact, Herzog obscures the actual similarities of his vision with Treadwell’s, who was so unhappy with the human world that he allowed himself (but also Huguenard) to be devoured by a bear, which he could see as the only possible means of complete escape. While Treadwell seems, as Herzog suggests, to imagine a protective, natural harmony, he may in fact have seen the same murderous force that Herzog describes, but was drawn to it, with a desire to be destroyed by it, rather than, as Herzog does, to willfully resist it. Herzog seems deeply ambivalent about nature, and his inability to clearly resolve that ambiguity in this film is manifested in his representation of Treadwell. While Treadwell’s vision is an especially simplistic one, it is not obvious that we have necessarily to accept Herzog’s alternative, or that Herzog’s alternative is so different in the end. We can see Herzog wrestling with what he seems in many ways to share with Treadwell, a sense of the radical indifference of nature, but also its simplicities, the rejection of the complex values of the human world for the brute facts of the natural realm. What

Nature and Natural Meaning in Grizzly Man

75

this film offers, then, is an opportunity to consider the concept of nature as it has been elaborated and has come to function in our thinking about the relation between fact and value, and especially our relation with animals, understood in some respect as the avatars of the natural world. It invites us, in turn, to consider documentary cinema, as a significant form for the evaluation of facts as recorded by the camera, through what has for so long been understood as the natural, or quasi-natural process of photographic representation, or visual representation more generally. Debates about documentary cinema, about documentary representation, are ultimately about the imposition of a value—a moral and a formal value—on the facts recorded or recounted, about the kinds of judgments that can or should be made about the events and individuals that are represented. Our understanding of documentary cinema could be informed, in this respect, by placing these debates in relation to those in modern moral philosophy. This film in particular raises a question that is at the heart of such philosophy, the sort of distinction traditionally posited between the human realm of value and the natural world of fact, which is presented to us in the complex encounters that Treadwell has with the bears, and Herzog’s efforts to understand the nature of those encounters. To this end, I want to place Herzog’s film in the context of Murdoch’s illuminating account of the project of moral philosophy, and her proposal for a solution to the naturalistic dilemma that is at its heart. Murdoch’s approach to the moral question in philosophy is to reject the too simplistic distinction between what are thought of as two incommensurate realms. She begins her consideration by arguing that a “misleading but attractive distinction is made by many thinkers between fact and (moral) value.” 17 She explains what she finds “misleading” about this distinction: This move . . . in time and as interpreted, may in effect result in a diminished, even perfunctory, account of morality, leading (with the increasing prestige of science) to a marginalisation of “the ethical.” (Big world of facts, little peripheral area of value.) This originally well-intentioned segregation then ignores an obvious and important aspect of human existence, the way in which almost all our concepts and activities involve evaluation. 18

For Murdoch, of course, such evaluation cannot be understood to take place anywhere but in the natural world in which we find ourselves, and which we share with other creatures, with which our values must be understood to be continuous. Despite what Murdoch calls the “attractive aspect” of Schopenhauer’s ethic, though, despite his attempt to ground ethics in the everyday and the contingent, in the material realm of the natural, from which we may distinguish ourselves but to which we are necessarily connected, she argues that the “chief stumbling block is his concept of Will as fundamental, all-determining and (qua neutrally relent-

76

Chapter 5

less) evil.” 19 This Will radically undermines a Kantian notion of human freedom, and, while establishing some common sympathy with the natural world, with plants and animals, has the effect ultimately of tragically condemning human effort to the immutable deterministic laws of nature (which are “terrifying,” Schaudererregendes, or literally “shudder-inducing”), a thought that is too easy to give in to—a thought that Herzog seems himself willing to give in to, even as he condemns Treadwell for doing so. It is an attractive idea, though, as Murdoch admits. Schopenhauer “shows himself to be, as we too may sometimes be, rather in love with determinism, with amor fati, with the stoical, or relaxing, idea that ‘it must be so.’” 20 In this “mood,” she says, Schopenhauer “parts company with common-sense and demeans or diminishes the human individual . . . ” 21 Murdoch offers some suggestions about the legacy of such thinking. “One might compare Schopenhauer’s relentless damaging allpowerful Will with Derrida’s concept of archi-écriture: another mystifying postulation, effecting the removal of the individual.” 22 All such concepts tend to require a subordination of the individual to some mysterious force, given whatever name, which delimits or even fully determines what we may and may not do, often even giving us what can only be a false sense of agency. Indeed, “agency” is detected elsewhere, outside us. Quoting Schopenhauer, she writes, “As egoistic Will is the main driving force of human activity, nature ‘implants an illusion in the individual’ so that what is good for the species appears as good for the self.” 23 This is, as Murdoch argues at length, too simplistically reductive a view of the matter, so that human action is nothing more than a manifestation of the inhuman Will of nature. But, for Murdoch, the human being is distinguished from nature insofar as we are capable precisely of evaluating it, this being the source of any agency that begins in questioning and judgment—and no other or more mysterious force apart from us. This does not make us any better or worse than other creatures (in fact, all creatures possess this capacity to some degree or other), but it is a difference, and an important one, on the very basis of which moral thought becomes possible at all. Indeed, it is our ability to evaluate our very situation as natural entities ourselves, as animals like any other animal, as thoroughly embedded within and dependent upon the natural world, our natural environment, that gives rise to the possibility of moral thought. It is in this very significant respect that our “values” derive directly from the “facts” of our natural existence, so that no simple distinction can be made between them. Our very sense of ourselves, and our sense of how we should behave and comport ourselves, is derived largely (or only?) from our observations of nature, of the way we see other animals and organisms contend also with the fact of the natural environment. Our imaginative engagement with nature and its denizens is extensive, rich, and complex, a manifestation of our irreducible embeddedness in the natural, material world. But it is our very capacity to reflect imagi-

Nature and Natural Meaning in Grizzly Man

77

natively and creatively about such matters that gives us the impression of our difference––even our radical alienation—from the natural realm. For someone like Schopenhauer, a vision of the natural world emerges that is so starkly and frighteningly different from our world as to be beyond our capacity to fully grasp it, which we can only ever see as a world of constantly impending threat and mortal danger. Pursuing this notion of the ever-present possibility of “accident,” Schopenhauer writes: “Look at the fish carelessly playing in the still open net; the frog restrained by its laziness from the flight which might save it; the bird that does not know of the falcon which soars above it; the sheep which the wolf eyes and examines from the thicket. All these, provided with little foresight, go about guilelessly among the dangers which threaten their existence every moment.” 24 This is in fact the attitude that Treadwell seems to want to achieve, submitting to an amor fati, becoming one with nature by submitting to its fatal contingency—appreciating and even admiring the bears’ ability to kill, swiftly and without thought, but also the prey’s blithe willingness to be killed—achieving the simplicity of the beast but with the consequent risk that he faces the same blind threat faced by the beast. However, what Schopenhauer obscures, and what Herzog fails to understand, in such an account is the imaginative capacities of even the fish, frog, bird, and sheep, which have at least the capacity to become aware of and possibly avoid the threats arrayed against them. The fish is not “careless,” the frog is not “lazy.” These categories, indeed, seem inapplicable. They are alert, and their alertness will be manifested in elaborate behaviours that allow them, more often than not, to escape the dangers. We, as humans, are similarly alert, and possess an even more robust capacity to imagine ways of avoiding the danger. This does not, as Treadwell seems to think, limit and constrain us (although it may), but rather provides us with the means to contend with the world, and in fact links us to and establishes a more genuine continuity with the natural world and the other animals in it than the idealized one he sought. Herzog, too, seems to accept a vision like Schopenhauer’s, and distinguishes himself from someone like Treadwell only by being more resolute in his acknowledgment of it, and his unwillingness to be simply destroyed by it, resisting the Will of nature rather than falling fatally in love with it. Schopenhauer’s vision—a version of which seems to be accepted, in some form, by both Herzog and Treadwell—is an attractive one, and still a very powerful one, but at its heart, it is a simplistic one, obscuring our more complex relation to nature and the natural world—indeed the complexity of the other animals’ attentive attitude to the world, which we find ways of imaginatively emulating. Schopenhauer seems unable to fully appreciate the complexity of the animal attitude, indeed denying them the possibility of even possessing one. Still, there is something in Schopenhauer’s vision that Murdoch prefers to even more insistent views

78

Chapter 5

on the radical contingency of existence, as evidenced in the natural world, in so far as he even gave some thought to animals, and to our being connected, if only in the most basic way, to natural cycles. Schopenhauer, who read widely in the Buddhist tradition, imagined the Will of nature sometimes in a more benign form, as ultimately part of a great circle. “If now the all-mother sends forth her children without protection to a thousand threatening dangers this can only be because she knows that if they fall, they fall back into her womb where they are safe; therefore their fall is mere jest.” 25 This is where Schopenhauer shows the possibility—the imaginative possibility—of a deeper connection to nature. It is here that the “jest,” the game, becomes the possible basis for our imaginative play with the natural world and with all the organisms in it, with whom we share a common world, not limited to the so-called “phenomenal” world that separates us from them. For the most part, this idea is taken by Schopenhauer in the pessimistic direction, or, as Murdoch notes, by later thinkers in the direction of the ominous or the comically tragic: “The idea of the ‘game’ is sinister in the work of Heidegger, frivolous in that of Derrida.” 26 There are two possible paths, though, in Schopenhauer. Murdoch continues: “Schopenhauer (we may say to ‘save’ him) has two pictures in mind. One is that we may through our reverent sympathy with the rest of creation, at least, whatever we may do with the insight, realise that we are just contingent short-lived mortals. The other is that of our doing something with the insight by disposing of our ego.” 27 He, and others, are more tempted by the second. We, Murdoch argues, should pursue the first. She describes Schopenhauer’s “attachment to determinism, his promotion of the all-powerful Will which condemns us to endless fruitless strife. We are cheered to learn that we are all endowed with instincts of compassion, but dashed to be told that we cannot change our imprinted character. Liberation through art (Ideas) is mentioned but not explored.” 28 It is just such a route of liberation, through art, through ideas, that Murdoch, the philosopher but also the artist, sees as the only inevitable route if we are willing to explore it, rather than giving in to the desire for the extermination of the ego (for Schopenhauer), or the death of a self (for Heidegger), or endless signifying play (for Derrida). Deliberate, creative work with ideas, with the creation of art and with the products of our imagination, is just what will allow us to follow through on the insight of our intimate relation to the natural world and all the organisms in it. Both Herzog and Treadwell accept, in different ways, a version of the first picture offered by Schopenhauer: we see it in Herzog’s cold wilfulness, and in Treadwell’s desire for death itself. While Herzog does not submit fully to the fatal indifference of nature, and recoils from Treadwell’s deathly desire to be consumed by nature, he imagines, as Schopenhauer seems sometimes to be suggesting, that the Will of nature must and can only be met by as hard a willful response in return. Human will is

Nature and Natural Meaning in Grizzly Man

79

determined and structured by natural Will, which means only an eternal struggle, the kind that Herzog so often represents in his films, and even recreates in the making of his films, exemplified perhaps most acutely (and dangerously, for him and others) in Fitzcarraldo. While Herzog does not submit to the more fatal version of a philosophy like Schopenhauer’s, he is also blind, it seems, to the kind of more expansive imaginative possibilities that, as Murdoch shows, can in fact be found in Schopenhauer. Herzog is similarly constrained, even as an artist, in extending his imagination to the other animal, and in fact only goes as far as Kant, viewing animals as “senseless sub-beings.” Treadwell goes too far in his sympathy for the animals, and, while grasping our continuity with them, fails to understand the very significant differences as well as the dangers. As represented in the film, Treadwell seems, like Schopenhauer, to yearn for the destruction of ego, a destruction that he can imagine only at the hand of the mindless and all-determining Will of nature, effectively offering himself (and Huguenard) up to the bears. The jungle (here, the forest of Alaska) is his crucible, is which is forged a new relation. For Herzog, the same jungle, the same forest, is where he can test his own will against nature’s. The difference is that he wants to survive. Strictly speaking, it is not quite a crucible, but an ordeal nonetheless from which he emerges chastened, having confronted a realm that he understands to be at odds with his efforts of sense-making as an artist and a documentary filmmaker. Herzog’s argument with Treadwell, then, is not only about how to properly conceive of nature and the natural world. Grizzly Man is also and importantly a self-conscious reflection on documentary filmmaking. The form that Herzog’s argument takes is as important as the argument itself, and the film is notable as a kind of posthumous dispute with another and alternative cinematic vision. Treadwell was not only a selfdeclared protector of the grizzly, and of the other animals in the park where he lived for so long, but also a filmmaker himself who was engaged in a project very much like Herzog’s own. However, according to Herzog, his approach to filmmaking was, like his attitude toward nature itself, fatally flawed. Herzog’s view of Treadwell’s filmmaking efforts is, however, ambiguous, and he admits that what Treadwell managed to do is significant on its own terms. Before he died, Treadwell created a remarkable record on video of the wilderness in which he had been living, and of the bears that are its most significant inhabitants. The footage is fascinating and revealing in ways that such representations of the natural world, and especially of wild animals, so often are, and Herzog recognizes this by giving it such prominence in the film. By creating such a record, and by giving it some form by attempting to adequately represent animals in their natural habitat, much can be discovered (or obscured) about animals. In any case, cinematic representations of animals are very popular and resonate deeply with audiences. The English philosopher

80

Chapter 5

Mary Midgley has noted this. Midgley, like Murdoch, undertook to dissolve the fact/value distinction, and has considered, as part of this, the relation between human and non-human animals, in her very important but largely overlooked work, Beast and Man. 29 As Midgley notes, filmed records of animals can provide the basis for significant and informative comparisons, in ways that, importantly, emphasize a fundamental continuity between humans and other species. “People welcome seeing how animals behave, either directly or on film, in just the same way in which a man who had begun to practice, say, mathematics or dancing on his own would welcome seeing others who were already doing it, though differently.” 30 As part of the larger argument that she will make about the source of human value in nature and the natural world, the world of supposedly remote “fact,” Midgley describes the “value of animal comparisons,” which, as she says, are the kind of, and perhaps one of the most important, comparisons that we make, and that are at the basis and the very origin of our capacity to understand, to judge, to evaluate and then to grant value to the world. In this respect, our concept of understanding—or trying to understand—an animal, whom we see either directly or on film, depends on a simple point about what understanding is, which I think has come home to the public much more quickly than it has to the theorists. Understanding is relating; it is fitting things into a context. Nothing can be understood on its own. Had we known no other animate life-form than our own, we should have been utterly mysterious to ourselves as a species. And that would have made it immensely harder for us to understand ourselves as individuals too. Anything that puts us in context, that shows us as part of a continuum, an example of a type that varies on intelligible principles, is a great help. 31

Treadwell’s video footage, at the very least, does just this: it provides information about the broader context of animal life, and presents us with the opportunity to make informative comparisons, to see how bears live, to see, to some admittedly limited degree, what a world of bears is like; it does this in ways that allow us to reflect upon our own world and upon the relations between the two while simultaneously recognizing what is also so different. Treadwell himself is engaged in this very undertaking. In a great deal of the footage, we see and hear Treadwell, often speaking directly to the camera, in carefully scripted and prepared performances, often in rather cliché form, as Herzog notes, but also in a more personal, spontaneous and even confessional mood, as if he were recording his thoughts in the form of a video journal or diary. While Herzog effectively allows us to see the footage to some extent on its own terms, he also makes important formal and conceptual interventions. He has carefully edited selected portions of the video, which together amount to about an hour, making up the larger part of the film,

Nature and Natural Meaning in Grizzly Man

81

which runs, with credits, for 104 minutes. 32 He has added a voiceover narration and conducted interviews with various people who knew Treadwell, or had had some contact with him during his time in Alaska. Alternating between the selected portions of the original footage and the interviews, and offering a wry and questioning commentary in the voiceover, Herzog has created a formal combination of a “found-footage” film and a traditional expository documentary. With the means that this structure offers, Herzog subjects Treadwell’s video, his representations of the wilderness and of wild animals, and his speculations about them, to a kind of formal and conceptual analysis and critique. Herzog endeavors to reveal not only the limitations in Treadwell’s thinking about nature, but also the shortcomings of his filmmaking efforts. Indeed, these are intimately bound together as problems for Herzog, and Treadwell’s adventures, among the bears and with the camera, offered Herzog an opportunity to explore both, as the basis for his critical rejoinder to Treadwell. Despite his criticisms, though, Herzog has expressed a deep and genuine admiration for Treadwell’s efforts with the camera. “It would be easy to denounce Treadwell,” Herzog has said, because of the games he played with danger, and his sporadic moments of paranoia, as well as the posture he had of an eco-warrior, but we have to separate his occasionally delusional acts as an individual from what he filmed, which is powerful indeed. I think everybody who has an instinct about cinema would acknowledge there is something out of the ordinary and of great depth in Treadwell’s footage. 33

It is among the first things about Treadwell to which Herzog draws our attention in the film. “What Treadwell intended,” he says, in his voiceover narration of the opening sequence, “was to show these bears in their natural habitat. Having myself filmed in the wilderness of jungle, I found that, beyond a wildlife film, in his material lay dormant a story of astonishing beauty and depth.” 34 As a record of Treadwell’s thoughts about the natural world and about wild animals, and as truly enlightening documentary evidence about the complex behavior and intricate social lives of the bears, the video footage is valuable on its own terms, and Herzog recognizes and acknowledges this fact. He presents the footage as evidence of Treadwell’s formal and conceptual efforts to represent the natural facts of the lives of the grizzly bears, while also implying, at the same time, that Treadwell did not truly appreciate the value of the footage he was shooting, or really know what to do with it. 35 It is then one of Herzog’s goals to reveal (perhaps immodestly, as many have charged) what is only “dormant” in Treadwell’s footage, and to make the film that Treadwell, even with his sincere intuitions, simply was not able to make. 36 Despite his sympathy for Treadwell, and despite his acknowledgment of Treadwell’s clear intentions, Herzog sets out to put the foot-

82

Chapter 5

age to rather different use, and he reaches, in the end, conclusions very different from Treadwell’s. What Treadwell was incapable of representing—but which Herzog sees as latent or “dormant” in much of the footage he shot—is the terrible but beautiful indifference of nature, the signs of which, had he been more attentive, if he had not been blinded by his sentimentality, he might have seen, and been spared thereby from the terrible accident that befalls him and Huguenard. In Herzog’s view, despite the abundant evidence that Treadwell is in fact gathering with his own camera, Treadwell seems unwilling or unable to see the truth of the world around him, as Herzog says explicitly in his voiceover narration. “Once in a while Treadwell came face to face with the harsh reality of wild nature,” he says, describing a scene when Treadwell discovers the severed paw of a young bear. As Herzog explains, “Male bears sometimes kill cubs to stop the females from lactating and thus have them ready again for fornication.” Such discoveries seem to have confounded Treadwell, or elicited in him a false and sentimental kind of sorrow which Herzog counters with a dispassionate naturalistic account, a description of the unthinking and unfeeling processes of nature, which Treadwell seemed unable to grasp, as Herzog argues in voiceover. “This did not fit in with his sentimentalized view that everything out there was good and the universe in balance and in harmony.” By contrast, Herzog says, reiterating his basic view, “I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder.” This terse statement of his opposition comes late in the film, though. Herzog’s criticism of Treadwell had, to this point, been more implicit, his attitude more sympathetic, as he tries simply to tell Treadwell’s story, and to explain what led to its tragic conclusion. It is, though—and this is the core of Herzog’s argument— Treadwell’s very sentimentality that made the tragedy inevitable, the sad but fitting end to Treadwell’s story, the only possible end to the story of a man who sought to become a grizzly, who sought entry to the world of bears, to establish a more profound sympathy with a non-human animal species, a sympathy that, for Herzog, is a necessary impossibility. In this film, what we may describe as his critical documentary portrait of Treadwell, Herzog raises some of the most basic questions about the very idea of nature, as I have been arguing, about the traditional philosophical distinction between nature and culture, and about the even more basic distinction between fact and value. As such, Herzog is effectively posing what is arguably the central question of modern philosophy, specifically as it has contended with the traditional problems of morality or ethics, which have had to be addressed within the context of an increasingly naturalistic account of the world and of the entities in it, including ourselves. As we have become more naturalistic in our philosophical accounts, the concept of nature seems, paradoxically, to have become more confounding. “Concepts such as nature,” as Midgley has

Nature and Natural Meaning in Grizzly Man

83

observed, “which seem to combine reports of fact with judgments of value, have worried moral philosophers.” 37 Yet, for Midgley, their worry is misplaced, and the relation between fact and value can be described according to a basic continuity; or, we may see how any account of facts, at least in most cases, is the basis for and the origin of our thinking about value. As Midgley says: “Calling something natural is sometimes just reporting that it happens; but usually it is also making a suggestion about how to treat it.” 38 Value—human, social, moral—is the result of a process of reasoning from natural fact. Fact and value are, for Midgley, necessarily continuous. Yet, as Midgley argues at length, there is often a quite powerful desire, especially in modern philosophy, to establish a strict distinction between the natural and its putative opposite, the cultural, a desire, that is, to keep fact and value separate. With the progressive dispelling of any supernatural aspect of reality, the steady scientific disenchantment of our concepts of nature, modern philosophers have struggled to connect an increasingly value-less account of nature with the value-laden realm of human culture. A concerted philosophical effort has been made to distinguish between brute natural facts and human cultural meaning and value, but it has proved difficult to make this distinction. For Midgley, though, “we can indeed only understand our values if we first grasp the given facts about our wants.” 39 For her, and also for Murdoch, values—our thinking about what we want—can only be determined if we begin with an understanding of our own natural status, our origins in and our dependence on the natural world, the facts of that world, the deep continuity that characterizes the relation between the natural world and the human, cultural world. Yet this is not always as easy as it may seem, and there is very often a strong sense of our distance, if not profound alienation, from nature, and an accompanying sense that it is only to culture that we must look for a realm of value, independent from and necessarily in opposition to what is so often thought of as a realm of merely brute facts, necessity, contingency, all of which constitute a base and uncaring (value-less) nature. While Midgely argues that values derive from our grasping at facts and that it is the primary natural fact of human existence and of our own basically natural constitution that must solely determine the elaboration of any moral framework for the satisfaction of our wants, most modern accounts of human subjectivity and of morality are based in a separation of the human and the natural, a severing of the connection between value and fact. “Moral philosophers,” as Midgely notes, “made great efforts to discredit all reasoning that assumed this connection.” 40 As part of that effort, and as I have just implied, nature can come to be conceived as a force in opposition to human effort and value, or, as in Schopenhauer, a force determining in some direct and contingent way our very capacity to think about value. In most accounts that seek to establish a distinction between a mindless nature and a purposeful human culture, a contrasting notion of a kind of natural

84

Chapter 5

purpose, or a natural meaning, often creeps back in. It is often as if nature affects an attitude of indifference, as though it willfully disregards human values, reducing human efforts to insignificance. As Midgley notes, pursuing the line of thought that Murdoch later develops, what she calls the “as-ifness of purpose language . . . is strangely hard to avoid. New entities are therefore invented to be cast as designer. Schopenhauer’s Will to Live and Bergson’s Elan vital, popularised by Bernard Shaw as the Life Force, have been favoured candidates.” 41 Herzog himself seems to have this same difficulty in avoiding the language of purpose, and seems to accept the existence of some sort of conceptual entity as the driving force of nature which he struggles against. He has documented this struggle to find the means for an adequate representation of nature throughout his career as a filmmaker in both his fiction and non-fiction films, a struggle with filmmaking itself that is often presented as an instance (perhaps an exemplary instance) of the human effort to discover or establish value in a natural world that seems to possess none. It is this basic and stark distinction that structures his recounting of Treadwell’s story in Grizzly Man, and which leads him to posit a vision of an indifferent and uncaring natural world in contrast to Treadwell’s faith in a natural harmony and goodness. His rejection of Treadwell, though, derives from this attribution of some basic, but alien, purpose in nature—a purpose that he conceives to be in opposition to human purpose. Against Treadwell’s sentimental positing of a basic “goodness” in nature, Herzog proposes a murderous hostility. In both cases, though, it is indeed a purpose that is discovered, which is either to be affectionately embraced or warily avoided. Of course, and as Midgley argues, there is no “purpose” in nature, as Darwinian evolutionary theory has more or less convincingly shown, at least not in the simplistically personified sense that both Herzog and Treadwell, in their own way, propose. 42 I would argue—and despite the language of purpose to which Herzog so often has recourse—that what we find in so many of his films, and especially in Grizzly Man, is an acknowledgment, perhaps implicit, of the origin of human value in natural fact, an acknowledgment that is manifested in Herzog’s own filmmaking practices and in his very strategies as a filmmaker. While Herzog’s argument against Treadwell is presented explicitly in his voiceover, where he often describes the precise nature of his objections to Treadwell’s sentimental views about wilderness and wild animals, it is also implicit—and perhaps more subtly powerful—in his formal manipulations of Treadwell’s video footage, in his effectively turning Treadwell’s own filmmaking efforts against him. In this respect, the film is not only about nature and the natural world, but about the very fact of documentary film itself, and Herzog opposes not only Treadwell’s sentimental philosophy of nature but what he sees as his equally sentimental attitude as a documentary filmmaker.

Nature and Natural Meaning in Grizzly Man

85

Of course, the two questions intersect. It is worth considering what the relation might be—for there certainly is a relation—between what I am calling Herzog’s philosophy of nature and his approach to documentary filmmaking in what we may well call his philosophy of film. Herzog’s approach to documentary filmmaking in particular is where we may find the possibility of reconciling some contradictions in his thinking. Herzog is himself a kind of moral philosopher, concerned deeply with the relation between fact and value. Or, we may say, the fundamental problems addressed in abstract fashion by moral philosophers are presented in practical terms to the filmmaker, and especially to the documentary filmmaker. As such, Herzog has confronted the problem perhaps more directly than most other filmmakers, making it a theme, or a central formal aspect, in almost all his work. Moving effortlessly between fiction and non-fiction, he is concerned specifically with the value that is inevitably applied to the facts that may be recorded by the camera and the microphone. He is explicitly concerned, as announced in the subtitle to his famous “Minnesota Declaration,” with “Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema.” The “Declaration” is the most well-known statement of his objections to what he calls Cinéma Vérité, to a direct or observational cinema, to what he presents as the mistaken idea, as he puts it, that “truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest . . . Cinéma Vérité confounds fact and truth.” 43 Its failure, he seems to suggest, is in its unwillingness to acknowledge that facts do not speak for themselves, that on their own they do not possess any value other than that which we impose on them. It is to assume, in contrast to Herzog’s vision of nature, that there is a value in the natural world, inherent in the fact of the world, that may somehow express itself simply through the “honest” gesture of filming or recording the world. As sympathetic as Herzog can often be, though, his film is finally an indictment of Treadwell, whose increasingly reckless behavior, based in what Herzog insists is a mistaken and sentimental view of the natural world and of the nature of wild animals, led ultimately, and, according to Herzog, inevitably, to his and Huguenard’s death. As such, and as I am suggesting, the film raises more generally the basic philosophical distinction between fact and value, a debate that Herzog effectively enters. We need not simply accept Herzog’s philosophy of nature, though— and I have indicated where his thinking about the natural world may go wrong. It is, however, important to see how it is largely consistent with the general thrust of most modern philosophy, at least since Kant, and as manifested in the influential visions of Schopenhauer, who directly influenced, among many more, such otherwise very different figures as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Derrida. It is also important to contrast such visions with the sorts of alternatives that have been proposed, most importantly by Mary Midgley, but also by Iris Murdoch. Both Midgley and Murdoch are significant, if largely neglected, philoso-

86

Chapter 5

phers, who place imagination at the center of their visions and who argue that it is that faculty that allows us to indeed reason from the facts of nature and to elaborate more complex moral visions. Herzog, too, insists on the indispensable role that imagination plays in the elaboration of what we may even want to call the moral visions that he offers in his films. It is “fabrication and imagination and stylization” that he offers as the means for realizing any documentary vision, understood implicitly in such an account as a kind of careful, formal reasoning from the facts of nature to claims for value. If we can think of Herzog as a philosophical filmmaker, for whom the medium is the means, and perhaps the most effective means in the modern era, for the consideration of some of the most basic and most intractable philosophical questions, then this may be his most philosophical film. It is perhaps most interesting insofar as he raises the specific problem of inter-species communication, which he presents as part of the more general problem of value in the natural world. Herzog is asking what it is to be able to communicate, and whether there are strict barriers, an “invisible borderline,” the phrase that is repeated several times in the film, between species, a line that prevents meaningful communication between, for example, humans and bears, and which thereby reveals some more fundamental truth about communication itself, about the human condition, and our relation with animals and the natural world. For Herzog, Treadwell is seeking the impossible. It is, he says, “as if there was a desire in him to leave the confinements of his humanness and bond with the bears. Treadwell reached out seeking a primordial encounter. But in doing so, he crossed an invisible borderline.” That “borderline”— between human and animal, but more generally between culture and nature—has become an especially significant concept in modern thought, either to be accepted and insisted upon, policed and patrolled, or rejected in the hope of finally crossing it, of escaping our “humanness,” to establish bonds with entities that have been understood to be on the other side of that border, forever isolated, separated by the lack of a common means of communication. These are what John Durham Peters calls “horizons of incommunicability,” those “abysses of communication” that he says are so common, that are “part of what it means to be modern.” 44 Stories of encounters at such horizons, of meeting those with whom we cannot communicate, have proliferated. “Harrowing scenes,” he says, “in which people come face-to-face with creatures with whom they can have no communication have multiplied enormously in twentieth-century life and thought.” 45 Grizzly Man presents us with a particularly vivid and tragic instance of such a scene, and indeed a harrowing one. Treadwell dreams of contact with, genuine communion and communication with, an inhuman other, with the animal, his dream leading (inevitably, Herzog argues) to his and Huguenard’s death.

Nature and Natural Meaning in Grizzly Man

87

What we are invited to do, with what is presented to us in the film, is in some interesting ways compared to what Treadwell is trying to do as he seeks to understand the bears with whom he lived for so long—and it seems to me that this is the most important gesture that Herzog makes in the film, or the most interesting thread to follow in any analysis of the film. As Mary Midgley notes, “whether, and how far, interspecies communication works for feelings and emotions is an empirical question. On the whole, it does. That it does, is not surprising given our evolutionary relationship, and the fact that it could be quite dangerous to misconstrue the behaviour of creatures outside one’s species, and quite convenient to read it.” 46 For Midgley, it is important to avoid any false distinction, any binary opposition, according to the familiar term of art, between nature and culture, to assume that either one or the other is a more privileged realm, or that one or the other is more or less scrutable. Quite simply, as she puts it, “culture is natural.” As she insists, “nature and culture are not opposites at all. We are naturally culture-building animals. But what we build into our cultures has to satisfy our natural patterns of motives.” 47 Culture, she says, “has to come from somewhere, and there is no supernatural being called Society to impose it. Society is past and present people. And they have to have natural motives for inventing the customs they do invent.” 48 This is not to deny, as she admits, that “animals can have feelings that are a complete mystery to us.” There is indeed something like an “invisible borderline,” as Herzog would have it. “Interspecies sympathy certainly encounters some barriers,” Midgley acknowledges. “So does sympathy between human beings. But the difficulties arising here cannot possibly mean that any attempt to reach out beyond the familiar lit circle of our own lives is doomed, delusive, or sentimental.” 49 In fact, Treadwell’s desire to enter a world of bears is, as we learn over the course of the film, the apparent result of his having encountered so many barriers to sympathy with his fellow human beings, even with those close to him. It is notable, as Herzog observes, that Huguenard, who had willingly accompanied Treadwell, is effectively absent from his film, except for one significant instance toward the end. When she does appear, it is in a fashion that reveals much about Treadwell’s attitudes to animals, human and non-human, and something about the camera as an instrument of representation and as a particular technical means available to investigate and come to know something about the world and about others. In the first of the three scenes with which Herzog concludes his film, he offers what we might describe as a formal counter-gesture, subtly altering the effect of a familiar and particularly powerful technique that Treadwell employs—the close-up—seeking to reveal what he sees as the deep flaw in Treadwell’s thinking about nature and about filmmaking. “Very late in the process of editing this film,” Herzog says, in voiceover, “we were given access to Treadwell’s last video-tape. Here

88

Chapter 5

he may have filmed his murderer.” We see a large, mature grizzly bear, fishing for salmon in a shallow creek, with Treadwell behind, sitting quietly on a flat stone, observing the bear’s efforts. Then, after a cut, what appears to be the same bear is seen rolling and diving in the water of a deeper pool. What may look playful, though, Herzog says, is likely desperation. It is late in the summer, and the bear is probably searching, he suggests, for the last salmon carcasses at the bottom of the lake. The bear that finally attacked and killed Treadwell and Huguenard was, it turned out, quite old, and may well have been only and desperately looking for food before entering hibernation (it was captured, destroyed, and examined). If this is indeed the bear that Treadwell filmed, on his last videotape, we are given a glimpse into the complex confluence of factors that would have led it to attack, allowing us, perhaps, to understand what happened. We are also given some insight into Treadwell’s motivations, as we see him make some important formal decisions while filming the bear, now sitting quite quietly on the side of a small berm. Below the bear, crouching, is Huguenard, whom we see for the first time in the video footage (Figure 5.2), and whose presence is both sudden and disconcerting, not least as a result of seeing her so close to the wild animal. She and the bear are framed in a startling and suggestive composition, both objects of Treadwell’s gaze, and, at first, of equal compositional interest. She turns, and after everything we have been told about her, including her fear of bears (all the more remarkable that she accompanied Treadwell), there seems to be an expression of deep apprehension on her face, emphasized when she looks, briefly, directly into the camera, meeting our eye but also addressing Treadwell. She then ducks down, to the right, and Treadwell’s camera moves slightly to the left, tilting up. His concern is with the bear, and he immediately zooms in, removing Huguenard from our view, framing the bear’s face tightly, which now fills the screen, in an extreme close-up (Figure 5.3).

Nature and Natural Meaning in Grizzly Man

Figure 5.2. by author.

89

Amie Huguenard in the initial framing with the bear. Screen capture

Figure 5.3. The zoom-in to an extreme close-up of the bear. Screen capture by author.

This is, we may say, an indication of his relative lack of interest in Huguenard, compared with what has been presented as an almost fantastic obsession with the bears. 50 The camera is revealed as the means, for Treadwell, through which he might know, or try to come to know, an otherwise inscrutable creature, with whom such encounters are so rare (and, as emphasized so often in the film, dangerous, even reckless, to seek out). Indeed, Treadwell intuitively uses the close-up, which we might describe as the most epistemologically significant cinematic technique. As Karen Lury has noted, the close-up, and especially the extreme close-up, “may encourage certain feelings, and even a way of ‘knowing’ (or a belief that something is knowable) in the audience.” 51 She considers the use of the close-up as an important formal technique in the cinema but also in various television genres. “In drama, game shows, sports

90

Chapter 5

programmes, music video and documentary,” she writes, “there is a constant return to the human face, often not just in the form of head-andshoulders shot but as an even more intimate framing, where the face fills the screen.” 52 Here of course, Huguenard’s human face is removed from the framing, and it is the bear’s that fills it. Treadwell presumably intended to present the bear as worthy of such formal investigation. It is a way for him and us, his imagined audience, to know, or to believe we can know, the bear. For Herzog, though, the close-up, on a non-human animal’s face, reveals nothing, or, it reveals what we cannot know. As he narrates the scene, in voiceover, he says, “what haunts me is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears, and this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food.” Yet, and despite what Herzog says, there is a considerable amount of sympathy elicited in this shot—if only as an effect of this particular and particularly powerful technique—and I feel as though I am indeed being granted some, admittedly limited, partial, incomplete insight into what is otherwise a “secret world of bears.” For Treadwell, Herzog says, as he continues his voiceover narration, “this bear was a friend, a savior.” We are supposed to acknowledge the irony here, yet, as the camera reveals, we can at least see, and perhaps understand, what led Treadwell, so fatefully and recklessly, to try to move beyond the “familiar lit circle” of his own life, into some stranger, less visible world. A strange world, indeed, but granted even some limited insight into it, as we watch how all these animals behave on film, we learn something more about our own. ENDNOTES 1. Fitzcarraldo is loosely based on the story of Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald, who’d made a fortune in rubber in Peru, and had a boat dismantled, and carried over a mountain as part of his exploration of the region, charting routes to transport his goods. About the film, in an interview in Paul Cronin’s collection, Herzog has said, “I actually consider Fitzcarraldo my best documentary” (240). See Paul Cronin, ed., Herzog on Herzog (London: Faber and Faber, 2002). While the film is critically praised, there has been controversy about the dangerous conditions of production. 2. Werner Herzog, interviewed in Les Blank, Burden of Dreams (Flower Films, 1982). Also cited by Wilson in the present volume. 3. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I, trans. and ed., Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, Christopher Janaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 158. The original, and quite striking, formulation in German is: “Die Unfehlbarkeit der Naturgesetze hat, wenn man von der Erkenntniß des Einzelnen, nicht von der der Idee ausgeht, etwas Ueberraschendes, ja, bisweilen fast Schaudererregendes.” My translation, which differs from the standard translations, being rather more literal, is: “The infallibility of the laws of nature, when considered from the knowledge of the particular rather than from the [general] idea, is somewhat surprising, indeed, sometimes almost terrifying.” Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als

Nature and Natural Meaning in Grizzly Man

91

Wille und Vorstellung. In Arthur Schopenhauers sämtliche Werke, Erster u. Zweiter Band Herausgegeben von Dr. Paul Deussen (München 1911), 158. 4. Quoted in Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Allen Lane, 1992), 32. 5. Werner Herzog, interviewed in Les Blank, Burden of Dreams (Flower Films, 1982). 6. Murdoch, Metaphysics, 70. 7. Murdoch, Metaphysics, 70. 8. Murdoch, Metaphysics, 32. 9. Murdoch, Metaphysics, 32. 10. Murdoch, Metaphysics, 33. On his rejection of the Categorical Imperative see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6. 422. Cited in Murdoch. 11. Murdoch, Metaphysics, 33. 12. Murdoch, Metaphysics, 33. 13. Murdoch, Metaphysics, 32. 14. Quoted in Murdoch, Metaphysics, 70-71. 15. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. II, trans. and ed., Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, Christopher Janaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 473. 16. Quoted in Paul Cronin, ed., Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), 371. 17. Murdoch, Metaphysics, 25. 18. Murdoch, Metaphysics, 25-26. 19. Murdoch, Metaphysics, 65. 20. Murdoch, Metaphysics, 67. 21. Murdoch, Metaphysics, 67. 22. Murdoch, Metaphysics, 67. 23. Murdoch, Metaphysics, 67. 24. Schopenhauer, “On Death”; quoted in Murdoch, 71. 25. “On Death”; quoted in Murdoch, 71. 26. Murdoch, Metaphysics, 72. 27. Murdoch, Metaphysics, 72. 28. Murdoch, Metaphysics, 73. 29. It has, though, discovered more readers over the years, and it was well reviewed when published. See, for example, Stuart Hampshire’s review, “Human Nature,” in the London Review of Books, 1, no. 1, (October 25, 1979. He says that she “clarifies, not only the confusions of sociobiology, but also some other superstitions about the relations between beast and man.” Published originally in 1978, Beast and Man was reissued, by Routledge, in revised form in 1995. In the “Introduction to the Revised Edition,” Midgley notes that many of the philosophical problems that she addressed and sought to resolve in the original publication remain entrenched. “Looking at the book today,” she says, “I wish it had become more out of date than it seems to have become.” She admits, though, that, “Of course it contains mistakes and some things in it look odd—for instance, the unsuspecting use of the masculine nouns and pronouns. (What changes in our language can we expect the next decade to bring? It would save us all a lot of bother to know in advance.)” Midgley, Beast and Man, xxvi. For her earliest published thought on the matter see Mary Midgley, “The Concept of Beastliness,” Philosophy 48 (1973). 30. Midgley, Beast and Man, 17. 31. Midgley, Beast and Man, 17 (emphasis in original). In a later book, published in 1983, which presents her argument in more condensed form, she makes a similar point. Tracing the relatively recent origins of an interest in non-human animals and the concept of animal welfare, Midgley says, “People in general have perhaps thought of animal welfare as they have thought of drains—as a worthy but not particularly interesting subject. In the last few decades, however, their imagination has been struck, somewhat suddenly, by a flood of new and fascinating information about

92

Chapter 5

animals. Some dim conception of splendours and miseries hitherto undreamt of, of the vast range of sentient life, of the richness and complexity found in even the simplest creatures, has started to penetrate even the least imaginative. . . . Animals have to some extent come off the page. With the bizarre assistance of TV, Darwin is at last getting through. Town dwellers are beginning to notice the biosphere.” Mary Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter: A Journey Around the Species Barrier (Penguin, 1983), 1314. 32. Herzog has told the story of how he found out about Treadwell, and how he came to have possession of the video footage, several times, in various interviews. He offers some of the most specific details in an interview with Cynthia Fuchs, shortly after the film was released in 2005. “It was a chain of lucky coincidences,” he says. “I was at the office of Erik Nielsen, [a producer] who works a lot for Discovery Documentary and National Geographic.” During their meeting, Nielsen thinks he sees Herzog looking at something on his desk, where there is a copy of an article about Treadwell. Nielsen says, “‘Read this, it’s a fantastic story we’re doing.’ I read it and returned right away to his office and asked who was directing it, and he said he was ‘kind of’ directing it. I just stared him in the eye, and I said, ‘No, I will direct it’ [laughs].” See Werner Herzog, interviewed by Cynthia Fuchs, in Eric Ames, ed., Werner Herzog: Interviews (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2014), 156 33. Cronin, Herzog, 367. 34. Herzog acknowledges his affinity with Treadwell, as a filmmaker, but also, it must be said, in the temptation to submit to the overwhelming and potentially fatal forces of nature, animal and otherwise, having, as he says, himself filmed in jungle. Filmmaking is closely bound together with this temptation, for Herzog. As Blank’s recounting of the filming of Fitzcarraldo shows, Herzog has long been willing to put himself (and others) at risk in the wild settings where he has made many of his films, perhaps susceptible to the very desire for which he condemns Treadwell. Many of Herzog’s films involve his creating various kinds of natural ordeals to which he submits, and he has taken some very real risks, most notably, perhaps, in his short documentary film La Soufrière: Warten auf eine unausweichliche Katastrophe / Waiting for an Inevitable Catastrophe (1978). 35. There are several instances when Treadwell seems to have inadvertently captured some compelling imagery, often long shots of, for instance, tall stalks of wild grass moving in the wind, while simply positioning his camera for the more routine narrative accounts he provides in his direct addresses to the camera. Herzog suggests that Treadwell failed to see the value of such imagery, but of course we cannot know what would have made it into the finished film that Treadwell was imagining, raising very interesting questions about intention and design which are not directly addressed by Herzog. 36. Among the most critical accounts of Herzog’s imposition of his cinematic vision at the expense of Treadwell, is Seung-Hoon Jeong and Dudley Andrew, “Grizzly Ghost: Herzog, Bazin and the Cinematic Animal,” Screen 49, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 1-12. “Treadwell’s video,” they argue, with a vague mixture of Deleuze and Lacan, “is the uncontrollable outside, lodged inside the film, a trace of the Real which Herzog tries vainly to envelop in his well-formed film language” (8). See also Ned Schantz, “Melodramatic Reenactment and the Ghosts of Grizzly Man,” Criticism 55, no. 4 (Fall 2013): 593-615. Schantz approaches the film from a quite different perspective, but also admonishes Herzog. 37. Midgley, Beast and Man, 169 (emphasis in original). 38. Midgley, Beast and Man, 169. 39. Midgley, Beast and Man, 170. 40. Midgley, Beast and Man, 170. Murdoch, like Midgley, has also made this observation, and endeavored to articulate an alternative to the tendency in modern philosophy to insist on this separation. “A misleading but attractive distinction is made by thinkers between fact and (moral) value. Roughly, the purpose of the distinction (as it is used by Kant and Wittgenstein, for instance) is to segregate value in order to keep it

Nature and Natural Meaning in Grizzly Man

93

pure and untainted, not derived from or mixed with empirical facts.” See Murdoch, Metaphysics, 25. 41. Midgley, Beast and Man, 87. 42. But see her careful and detailed discussion of the relations between the concepts of instinct, nature, and purpose. As she says, “the notion of purpose is not itself a fishy one. It can be misused, but properly handled it is a valuable and necessary tool.” Most of modern philosophy, though, she argues, is a catalogue of various misuses of the notion. Midgley, Beast and Man, 78-79. 43. Werner Herzog “The Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema,” in Paul Cronin, ed., Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Faber and Faber, 202), 476. Herzog never really defines what he calls Cinéma Vérité in specific terms, nor does he really associate it with the work of particular filmmakers or a filmmaking movement. He does not trace it back to the work of Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, who in fact coined the term, or who are at least the main figures to whom that term is attached, and which they applied to their film Chronique d’un été / Chronicle of a Summer (Argos Films, 1960). He seems, instead, to mean what has come to be called direct or observational filmmaking, most popular in the United States, but in other countries, including Canada, and especially at the National Film Board. 44. John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 227. 45. Peters, 227. 46. Midgley, Beast and Man, 337. 47. Midgley, Beast and Man, 28. 48. Midgley, Beast and Man, 274. 49. Midgley, Beast and Man, 338. 50. It is worth noting that Herzog has slightly, but very significantly, altered the formal structure of the original footage here, in ways that can, I think, be distinguished from his treatment of the footage in other parts of the film. Herzog’s alterations are achieved mainly by editing. The sequence, which seems to consist of a single shot, contains, in fact, three shots. Or, what was likely filmed by Treadwell as a single shot (although the original unaltered footage would have to be consulted to confirm this) is edited by Herzog into three shots. The first, which is very brief, only about three seconds, seems in fact to be from the end of the sequence, after Treadwell had zoomed, but in which we can still see the back of Huguenard’s head, and the fleece cap she is wearing. Then there is a cut, to the original framing, with Huguenard in the foreground and the bear in the background, and the zoom to the close-up of the bear, now framed so that we can see its entire head, shoulder haunches, and the foliage of the bushes behind it. Then there is a second cut, to the extreme close-up, which raises a potentially very important question, whether Treadwell himself had zoomed in further, or if this is a magnification, by Herzog, after the fact, of the original shot. 51. Karen Lury, “Closeup: Documentary Aesthetics,” Screen 44, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 105. 52. Lury, 102.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ames, Eric, ed. 2014. Werner Herzog: Interviews. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Blank, Les, dir. 1982. Burden of Dreams. USA. Flower Films. Cronin, Paul, ed. 2002. Herzog on Herzog. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 2012. Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Faber and Faber. Hampshire, Stuart. “Human Nature.” Review of Beast and Man, by Mary Midgley. London Review of Books, 1, no. 1 (October 25, 1979): 12-13, 16. Herzog, Werner, dir. 1978. La Soufrière: Warten auf eine unausweichliche Katastrophe / Waiting for an Inevitable Catastrophe. Germany. Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

94

Chapter 5

Herzog, Werner. “The Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema.” In Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, edited by Paul Cronin. London: Faber and Faber, 2012, 476-77. Jeong, Seung-Hoon and Dudley Andrew. “Grizzly Ghost: Herzog, Bazin and the Cinematic Animal.” Screen 49, no.1 (Spring 2008): 1-12. Lury, Karen. “Closeup: Documentary Aesthetics.” Screen 44, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 101105. Midgley, Mary. “The Concept of Beastliness.” Philosophy 48 (1973): 111-35. ———. 1995 (1978). Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature. Revised Edition. London: Routledge. ———. 1983. Animals and Why They Matter: A Journey Around the Species Barrier. Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1992. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. London: Allen Lane. Peters, John Durham. 1999. Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rouch, Jean and Edgar Morin, dirs. 1960. Chronique d’un été / Chronicle of a Summer. France. Argos Films. Schantz, Ned. “Melodramatic Reenactment and the Ghosts of Grizzly Man.” Criticism 55, no. 4 (Fall 2013): 593-615. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I, trans. and ed., Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, Christopher Janaway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1911. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. In Arthur Schopenhauers sämtliche Werke, Erster u. Zweiter Band Herausgegeben von Dr. Paul Deussen. München. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1961. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. Pears and B. McGuinness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

SIX Reflections from the Abyss: Herzog’s Philosophy of Death M. Blake Wilson

“If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Speaking to Lotte Eisner, expatriated German filmmaker Fritz Lang remarked, “Gradually, and at times reluctantly, I have come to the conclusion that every human mind harbors a latent compulsion to murder.” 1 In the world of another German filmmaker, Werner Herzog, everyone and everything is capable of committing murder: animals in the jungle murder each other, humans murder each other, humans murder non-human animals, and (apparently) animals murder humans. For Herzog, these deaths correspond with the abyss, a frequent metaphor in his lexicon. In reference to his 2011 nonfiction film Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, A Tale of Life, Herzog remarks that “Into the Abyss could have been the title of several of my films,” and that “Walter Steiner, Fini Straubringer, Reinhold Messner, Timothy Treadwell and the men on death row are somehow all part of the same family. They belong together.” 2 Wherever I look, he says, “I seem to be peering into a dizzying, dark abyss.” 3 Herzog has gazed into eyes of a bear, the heart of a volcano, the caves at Chauvet (a literal abyss, containing some of the earliest known works of art), and, of course, the viewfinder of a camera. The abyss is also found in the hell of Sartre’s “other people,” observable by gazing into the eyes of the murderer: what looks back are, according to Herzog, “the deepest, darkest recesses of what lies in us all.” 4 Because death is one of his favorite subjects, and the abyss of death one of his favorite metaphors, this chapter probes Herzog’s philosophy of 95

96

Chapter 6

death, which reaches its apogee in his late-career non-fictional films Into the Abyss and Grizzly Man. Into the Abyss tells the story of a pointless triple-murder killing spree which ends with the execution of murderer Michael Perry. In the more well-known film Grizzly Man, Herzog presents the backstory and camera work of grizzly researcher Timothy Treadwell, who, along with his girlfriend Amie Huguenard, was killed by one or more bears in Alaska’s Katmai National Preserve. It is at the interstices of these films that Herzog confronts several philosophically challenging questions about death, moral responsibility, and justice; in particular, he questions the possibility of justifying a variety of human and non-human deaths caused by other human and non-human animals. But Herzog never seeks to justify the retributive impulse that typically follows an act of murder, and he almost universally refuses to judge his subjects even when they have committed horrible crimes. Drawing upon these films and others, his production diaries, and his interviews, this chapter seeks not only to understand how Herzog frames some of the moral problems related to killing and death in terms of questions about responsibility and punishment, but how they are further related to moral problems entailed by his own insistence on ecstatic truth and his concomitant disparagement of the accountant’s truth. In particular, this chapter examines Herzog’s framing of truth (both the ecstatic and accountant’s) in Grizzly Man from the perspectives of contemporary journalistic accounts of Treadwell’s story as well as from those found in scientific and popular studies of bear attacks in general. I hope to shed some light upon the filmmaker’s understanding of death and its truths not only within the context of his art but also within the larger context of life itself. HERZOG’S TAXONOMY OF DEATH In Burden of Dreams, Les Blank’s documentary about the making of Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo, Herzog famously looks directly into Blank’s camera and says, “Taking a close look at what is around us, there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder.” Decades later, in the YouTube advertisements for his Masterclass film school, the director (who has consistently urged filmmakers to read books or steal cameras or do anything but attend film school), states, “It’s like death staring at you when you look at a camera.” Because considerations of space preclude a comprehensive taxonomy of Herzog’s treatment of the subject of death, the following paragraphs show that even a casual acquaintance with his most well-known works reveals his fascination with the death or near death of human beings and a variety of nonhuman animals, and that he typically frames these deaths in distinctively philosophical ways.

Reflections from the Abyss: Herzog’s Philosophy of Death

97

In two of his non-fiction films, Into The Inferno and La Soufriere, volcanos threaten humans with death; in the latter, Herzog wanted to visit the sole man who stays behind on a soon-to-erupt volcanic island because he wanted to find out “what kind of relationship towards death he had.” 5 The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner is, in Herzog’s words, “a film about the fear of dying and overcoming the fear of dying.” 6 The epigraph of Little Dieter Needs to Fly is “And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it, and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them. Revelation 9:6.” In Little Dieter’s ‘sister’ film, Wings of Hope, a woman barely escapes death when she falls two miles to Earth from her disintegrated airplane while still strapped to her seat. From One Second to the Next is a ‘public service announcement’ about texting drivers who kill themselves or others, and Encounters at the End of the World features a deranged penguin on a death march. His fictional films do not stray far from these themes. Aguirre is left to die with his monkeys on his raft, while the titular foundling in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is murdered and no one is brought to justice for the crime. Heart of Glass is full of death and murder. It is not quite correct to say that that Klaus Kinski’s vampire Nosferatu ‘murders’ his victims, but they become (like him) the ‘undead’ until he himself is either murdered and annihilated (as shown in the film’s final scenes). In Woyzeck, the title character murders his love interest Marie, and then drowns himself. Stroszek commits suicide. In Cobra Verde, Kinski’s character murders his boss, becomes an outlaw, and dies on the beach. In My Son My Son, What Have Ye Done, Herzog tells the highly stylized story of Mark Yavorsky, a matricidal young man who slew his mother with a prop sword. A jury determined he was guilty of murder, but then found him not guilty by reason of insanity. He was released from a prison for the insane after a short commitment. As an actor, Herzog’s character Zec is shot in the head by Tom Cruise’s title character in Jack Reacher. Even when he serves as executive producer of Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary The Act of Killing, he lends his name to a film about mass killings in Indonesia in the 1960s. Finally, and this arcane fact is either totally pointless or incredibly revealing, Herzog’s tattoo depicts the figure of Death (as a wide-mouthed skull) wearing a tuxedo and singing into an old-fashioned microphone. Death also loomed large even during the production of two of his best-known fictional films. In Every Night The Trees Disappear, Alan Greenberg’s diaristic account of the creation of Heart of Glass (1976), the reader is struck by the artistic depiction of fictional death and the abyss in the film’s scenario (written by Herzog) but also in Greenberg’s detailed account of how actual, non-fictional death seems to seek out Herzog and his crew. 7 Although Fitzcarraldo is a rarity in Herzog’s filmography because of its depiction of only a single (fictional) death, the story of its filming is particularly bloody and full of actual human and non-human death. The very first page of Conquest of the Useless, Herzog’s filming

98

Chapter 6

diary, describes the story of Fitzcarraldo as a vision that seized hold of the author “like the demented fury of a hound that has sunk its teeth into the leg of a deer carcass.” 8 In perhaps one of his most penetrating interviews, Herzog strikingly connects his creation of the film—the completion of which becomes the Sisyphean burden of his dreams—with his own death: Every day in the jungle, I thought, this could be the last roll of film I ever shoot. And when you have to ask yourself that question in your work every day, then you do something sensible with it. When this feeling of death isn’t there, then the film material has no value either. No, it’s not that it has no value. Rather, the film has a different value. If you’re sitting in a prison cell, and the next morning you’re going to be put in front of a firing squad, and before that you’re handed a pen and a last piece of paper, and you write a letter to your wife or to your brother or to your mother or to anyone—this piece of paper has a different quality, a different value. 9

As he stated in an interview, “There’s always been a certain feeling of death in the cinema.” 10 Of course, Herzog does not film actual death, and the filming of actual death is prohibited by a taboo self-imposed upon many (but not all) filmmakers. 11 Instead, he lives through its actuality over the course of his filmmaking in order to bring death’s story to the screen. However, Herzog philosophically says, “I don’t have any kind of death-wish. On the contrary, I just know what I’m doing and what I’m trying to accomplish. And what I have to do when there’s no alternative. Our civilization attaches great importance to physical life. But all that is not so important.” 12 He comes closest to putting this credo upon the screen and before his audience in one of his most popular works, the 2005 nonfiction film Grizzly Man. GRIZZLY MAN: DEATH AND THE CINEMA So I will be like a lion to them, like a leopard I will lurk by the path. Like a bear robbed of her cubs, I will attack them and rip them open; like a lion I will devour them—a wild animal will tear them apart. -Hosea 13: 7-8

From Herzog’s perspective, Grizzly Man is “a glimpse into the deep abyss of the human soul.” 13 For this film, Herzog positions himself very closely to several human and non-human deaths. He visits and films the ‘scene of the crime,’ the place in the Alaskan forest where Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard were killed and partially eaten by a bear (or bears), and where the animal (or animals) themselves were killed. He films his conversation with the coroner in the morgue where Treadwell and Huguenard’s remains were examined, interviews the unfortunate collectors of those remains (who are also the killers of what are presumed to be the ‘responsible’ bears), and, in the film’s most intense moments, listens and

Reflections from the Abyss: Herzog’s Philosophy of Death

99

reacts to a recording of Treadwell and Huguenard’s deaths. But the footage shot by Herzog only accounts for approximately 20 percent of the screen time: the majority is footage shot by Treadwell himself. It is through Treadwell’s video, Herzog explains, that he “discovered a film of human ecstasies and darkest inner turmoil. As if there was a desire in him to leave the confinements of his humanness and bond with the bears, Treadwell reached out, seeking a primordial encounter.” 14 In the footage underlying Herzog’s introductory narration, we see Treadwell literally reaching out and touching the nose of a subadult bear. According to Treadwell’s diegetic narration of his own footage, touching the bear is a “a challenge and you have to remain cool in the challenge, in the moment. If you don’t,” he whispers, “you’re dead. They can kill. They can bite. They can decapitate.” 15 Herzog and his audience cannot fail to be astonished by this intercourse between species, constituting, as it were, a potential near-death experience for Treadwell. What Herzog calls the “inexplicable magic of cinema” also occurs when Treadwell’s videotape reveals foxes running into and through Treadwell’s attempt to ‘direct’ his video. It also occurs in accidental footage, the ‘empty’ moments when Treadwell was not in the picture. Herzog, obviously enamored with this footage, intones that Treadwell “probably did not realize that seemingly empty moments had a strange, secret beauty. Sometimes images themselves developed their own life, their own mysterious stardom.” 16 Herzog mounts this defense of Treadwell as a filmmaker in spite of the fact that much of Treadwell’s footage can be seen as a series of video selfies with himself foregrounded and his erstwhile subjects—the bears—in the background, and only rarely does his footage lack his voice or image. When it does, it is indeed just as beautiful as Herzog claims. At one point, Treadwell finds a bear cub’s severed paw and gnawed skull, evidence of a desperate sow cannibalizing her offspring. 17 Although he accepts this is as ‘natural,’ he clearly believes it is ‘wrong.’ 18 For Treadwell, the calamitous lack of rain and the death of one of his beloved fox kits is also ‘wrong.’ Herzog, in a riposte to this sentimental view of nature, responds that “the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder.” 19 Statistically, Treadwell and Huguenard’s deaths were the first in Katmai Park and National Monument, and their bear-caused double killing was the first in the history of Alaska. Due to the film’s powerful narrative and Herzog’s popularity, Grizzly Man has become the most well-known version of the story. But is it an accurate telling, or is it the product of Herzog’s well-known ‘stylization’ in pursuit of the so-called ‘ecstatic truth’ of filmmaking? 20 There is a sizable literature on bear attacks in general and the Treadwell/Huguenard deaths in particular, and some of this literature suggests that Herzog did not create a merely stylized version of the events (to which he would, presumably, admit) but a mislead-

100

Chapter 6

ing and even “Hollywoodized” version (to which, we might assume, he would not). This claim requires a bit of unpacking. Nick Jans, a wildlife writer and photographer, published a second edition of his 2005 book on Treadwell after Grizzly Man’s release. This edition, published in 2006, features a new introduction which includes reactions to the film and its portrayal of Treadwell. Expecting the film to sugarcoat the underbelly of Treadwell’s soi disant eco-warrior heroism, Jans was surprised that the film “presented a disturbing vision of a man teetering on the edge of sanity, then plunging into self-destructive madness as his world unraveled,” which finally presents his death as “suicide by bear.” 21 Jans did not know Treadwell, but the out-of-control lunatic on the screen “was not,” he writes, “the man friends and foes alike had described to me.” 22 Jans reports that critics and supporters alike thought that Herzog had mispresented Treadwell, who, contrary to the film’s narrative arc, was not sliding into despair or experiencing suicidal ideation. They deny that he was “increasingly paranoid” (Herzog’s actual words as narrator) or unhappy. “Yet Herzog’s artistic vision,” he writes, “a product of artful editing and selection, is widely accepted as reality.” 23 Addressing the scenes where Treadwell seems obviously manic and a “certified wacko,” Jans lays the blame squarely at Herzog’s feet for slicing and dicing Treadwell’s footage to create the director’s own story, “regardless of original content.” 24 The Alaskan community who knew Treadwell objected to Herzog’s (re)arrangement of Treadwell’s footage which, they claim, made him seem “increasingly delusional, volatile, and suicidal.” 25 Jans concludes by finding it ironic that as an Alaskan, he finds himself “defending Timothy against the Hollywood version of his story, which seems an impressionistic blend of docudrama and reality, rather than a documentary in its purest sense.” 26 What to make of this claim that Herzog ginned up a ‘Hollywood’ (i.e., fictionalized) version of this tragedy? Jans does not write from the perspective of a film critic (or philosopher of film for that matter), operating from the ‘inside’ and ‘in’ on Herzog’s conceptualized stylizations and distinction between accountants’ truths and ecstatic truths. It is a journalist’s perspective, who in turn is reflecting the perspective of the Alaskans who actually knew Treadwell, a community steeped in the ways of the bear and how to survive alongside them. Herzog’s explanation of his philosophy of ecstatic truth would probably go over their heads, leaving the director perceived as precisely the type of Hollywoodized theoretician he so much wants to discredit. Jans unwittingly stumbles onto Herzog’s game when he concludes that Herzog’s exaggeration has led to something other than a ‘pure’ documentary. This leads to the very real possibility that for anyone other than Herzog himself and his fans and commentators, ecstatic truth is a slight of hand for making an entertaining film at the expense of truth. The result is that Herzog and academics ‘get’ the film’s ecstatic truth, but everyone else (including the Alaskan

Reflections from the Abyss: Herzog’s Philosophy of Death

101

wilderness community featured in the film) is incapable of rising above the accountant’s truth. Despite Herzog’s attempt to distance himself from theory and his outright disparagement of it, his own concept of ecstatic truth ironically becomes the esoteric motto of the academics he purports to despise. Herzog has potential responses to these claims. “I found it ridiculous,” he said in an interview, “that everyone thought Treadwell was so courageous.” Minimizing Treadwell’s putative bravery, he then describes how he himself moved slowly toward a huge sleeping bear during the filming of Grizzly Man until he was within thirty feet of the animal. He later regrets this, characterizing his actions (and Treadwell’s) as “a gross transgression and outright stupidity, not because it was dangerous but because it was disrespectful. Don’t love the bear,” he admonishes, “Respect the bear.” 27 Of course, Herzog has the artist’s right to creatively reimagine any narrative “for the sake of a new perspective,” 28 and because they are his films subject to his re-presentation of reality, it is his creative right, in accord with Richard Meran Balsam’s statement that “The purely factual film is somewhat of an impossibility,” to direct our attention to a narrative of his choosing. 29 Compare this with Herzog’s claim that Treadwell’s viewers can clearly see that his footage is not “faked. These were real bears,” says Herzog, “and every moment that Timothy spent close to one could be his last.” 30 The film is perhaps best known for the scene where Herzog, wearing headphones, listens to the audio recording of the mauling and death of Treadwell and Huguenard while Jewel Palovak, Treadwell’s friend and owner of the tape, watches him intently. Herzog famously tells her to destroy the tape, and he makes the decision not to include it on the film’s soundtrack. There are several reasons why Herzog might have chosen not to play the tape in the film. Filmmakers—some of them, at least— operate under an implied taboo against showing actual death. Does the same taboo prohibit the sounds of actual death? Several films (such as socalled mondo films including Mondo Cane and Faces of Death) violate this taboo, and Herzog comes dangerously close to violating it himself when he is filmed while listening to this recording. In this sense, the Treadwell/ Huguenard tape is like the Zapruder film, an accidental artifact documenting actual death. But millions of people have seen the film of Kennedy’s assassination, while very few have heard Palovak’s tape (which, incidentally, she did not destroy but placed into a bank vault). 31 Humans were not the only beings to die in Grizzly Man’s Grizzly Maze: two bears were also killed. Definitionally, the killing of a bear is ursicide, the killing of a human being by another human being is homicide, and the killing of oneself is suicide. However, there is no word that refers to the killing of a human by a non-human animal. In the next section, I ask what might at first appear to be purely rhetorical questions about these types of death, but which, I hope, shed some light on some of the

102

Chapter 6

deeper moral issues probed by the film and the events depicted in it: first, was it ‘wrong’ for the bear(s) to kill Treadwell and Huguenard, and second, was it wrong, in turn, to kill the bear(s)? BEAR 141 MOTIVES There is a tendency to anthropomorphize bears in general and the bear or bears that killed Treadwell and Huguenard in particular. As Jans writes, “It’s tough to tell what’s on a bear’s mind and confirm the original motive.” 32 After Bear 141 is killed, Jans writes, it is “the prime suspect in a double homicide.” 33 As it turns out, this animal has a history—for a human, we would call it a ‘record’—of intimate contact with humans. During the cleanup after the notorious Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, workers discovered that the bears at Katmai made themselves readily visible to human observers and therefore easily photographed. A tourist trade ensued, bringing more bear and wildlife researchers and more human/bear encounters. 34 Captured by tranquilizer dart, inspected, and ear-tagged, Bear 141 was tattooed and released in May 1990. He was twenty-eight years old and in good health when he was slain after Treadwell and Huguenard were killed in 2006. Contrary to Herzog’s narrated suggestion that the bear was an interloper and unknown by Treadwell, Jans argues that it is “almost certain” that Treadwell had known this animal for years. 35 Describing how bears such as 141 are anesthetized and relocated, Erin McCloskey offers a phenomenological account of bear subjectivity. “We can,” she writes, “only imagine what animals may experience during or remember during these experiences. Surely they must recognize at the time of being darted that they are being followed or attacked in some manner by humans. They feel the dart hit and then feel themselves begin to lose consciousness.” 36 For example, Alaska’s Bear 99 was darted into unconsciousness in 2005. When it awoke in a different place than where it lost consciousness, feeling the effects of the drugs and wearing a tracking collar, it “should have made a negative association with humans and avoided them from then on at all costs.” However, the bear did not subsequently avoid humans, and it eventually tracked down and killed a thirty-six-year-old female jogger. In response, Bear 99 was shot and killed at the scene of its ‘crime.’ 37 The bear attack literature also offers examples of victims who, postattack, show the bear a kind of trans-species mercy by pleading for the life of the transgressing animal. In 1999, outdoor outfitter Chris Widrig was attacked by a grizzly. The bear bit into his skull and cracked his hands “like chicken wings.” His companions saved his life by shooting at the bear until it ran off. Widrig required two hundred stitches, acquired a metal plate in his skull, and lost his sight in one eye. But he did not want

Reflections from the Abyss: Herzog’s Philosophy of Death

103

the bear hunted down and executed. He pleaded with wildlife officers to forego their standard protocol requiring that the bear be exterminated. Like a victim begging to spare the life of their assaulter, still alive yet facing the condemnation of death, Widrig claimed it would be pointless to kill a mother bear defending her cubs. The plea for grace was heard and the bear’s life was spared. 38 Treadwell’s own book, Among Grizzlies: Living with Wild Bears in Alaska, was written with Jewel Palovak. It reveals the same voice and affect we see and hear in the film. In the book, Treadwell reflects the tendency of bear literature to anthropomorphize bears, subjectivize their experiences, and treat them as potential recipients of human grace. Like his videos, the book depicts Treadwell’s close encounters with bears, and he makes repeated adumbrations about his death at their claws and paws. He often surmises that certain bears are angry with him, but unlike humans, he writes, “brown grizzlies don’t hold grudges.” 39 When a women is killed by a bear in Anchorage, he expresses his sympathy for the victim’s family and friends, and is reminded again “how quickly and efficiently a grizzly can kill. I’d only have to make one mistake and I’d meet with a similar fate.” 40 He continues to be “riled up about the murder of bears throughout the world.” 41 As stated earlier, there is no English word that specifically describes the killing of a human being by a non-human animal. Typically, this type of killing is considered an accident or it is expressed in purely causal terms. But “accident” seems woefully inadequate for describing what occurs when a non-human animal kills a human being, and Treadwell and Huguenard’s deaths were no accident: it was an intentional killing as much as a bear intentionally kills salmon for food or a cub of its own species when it is starving. But the killings in Grizzly Man suggest that the bear or bears involved commit murder, and Herzog has famously said that the animals of the jungle murder one another. For Herzog, this means that the inhabitants of the jungle are not killing for food or survival or reproduction; rather, they are killing simply to kill and perpetuating acts of what humans understand to be murder. By this logic, nonhuman animals murder humans, and murder demands a response. Is this what happened when the bear(s) killed Treadwell and Huguenard? We know that these animals, like all the bears in the Grizzly Maze, were ravenously fattening themselves up for winter hibernation, and we know that Bear 141 and the other subadult were not killed in response to their perceived statuses as killers, but because they charged the park rangers who investigated Treadwell and Huguenard’s disappearances. In other words, they were not executed for their assaults on Treadwell and Huguenard, but killed in self-defense by law enforcement officers.

104

Chapter 6

BEAR 141’S CULPABILITY There is a popular theory in the bear attack literature claiming that Bear 141 is ‘innocent’ of all charges because of mistaken identity or because it has a ‘defense.’ It is, of course, a crime for humans to kill bears without a permit, to kill them out of season, or to kill a sow with cubs unless it is justified by self-defense. 42 Interestingly, bears can also assert this defense (or have it asserted on their behalf), and there are detailed accounts where ‘aggressive’ bears are not shot or trapped because their ‘aggression’ was provoked by surprise. 43 If these facts can be ascertained, a bear has a defense against their execution, and the facts of a particular case can serve to mitigate their punishment in much the same way that a human’s punishment can be mitigated by facts suggesting reduced culpability because of what lawyers call an ‘imperfect’ defense (i.e., an explanation that does not amount to a legal justification). Bear expert Stephen Herrero suggests that there are also levels of culpability based on a bear’s perceived treatment by humans. When a grizzly bear mother with cubs is confronted by a person at close range, Herrera writes, the bear makes a decision to charge which is influenced by the ‘personality’ of the bear. “Is she a particularly aggressive mother or is she tolerant? Her personality interacts with her past experience. What outcomes has she experienced when confronted with people or other bears in the past? What is the nature of the environment in which the present encounter is occurring? Are there ready routes of escape for the cubs and herself?” 44 These questions are remarkably similar to kinds of questions asked during the penalty phase of a capital murder trial, where a jury must decide whether to condemn a murderer to death, or grant them the ‘mercy’ of life in prison because the answers to these types of questions tilt toward reduced culpability and the mitigation of the harsher penalty. These questions are irrelevant if the bear in question did not commit the ‘offense’ in the first place. Mike Lapinsky speculates that the younger bear, the nameless subadult killed along with Bear 141, actually killed Treadwell and Huguenard after it was threatened by Treadwell’s sudden appearance from a tent as it wandered into the camp. 45 According to Lapinsky, a smaller bear would have struggled with Treadwell to kill him, whereas a larger bear (such as 141) would not. This is a plausible account of the killings due to the length of the attack documented on the tape. According to this theory, the smaller bear then fled when Bear 141 arrived to feed upon the bodies. 46 McCloskey suggests that bears rarely predate upon humans, but will kill when they are surprised in order to neutralize a perceived threat such as the sudden appearance of a human being. After they have killed, they ‘discover’ a dead body and consume it as if they had stumbled upon carrion. 47 Discussing the Treadwell/Huguenard killings in particular, McCloskey makes the same claim as Lapinsky:

Reflections from the Abyss: Herzog’s Philosophy of Death

105

although Bear 141 had human remains inside of him, he may have only been a scavenger of carrion and not a killer. 48 Consequently, and contrary to the narrative presented by Herzog, Bear 141 may be ‘not guilty’ of murder. 49 Two questions remain: first, whether Bear 141’s killers murdered him, and second, how to resolve the persisting problem of classifying the killing of a human by a non-human animal. CAN HUMANS MURDER ANIMALS? CAN ANIMALS MURDER HUMANS? Piers Beirne argues that theriocide is the proper term for the killing of animals by humans, and that such killing can be normatively evaluated in terms of its moral justification. Recognizing that human beings have created classifications of homicides based on the killer’s intent, mental state, and potential defenses (primarily, the defense of self or others), Beirne’s neologism brings these same classifications (which serve to reduce allegations of murder to lesser offenses such as manslaughter or even provide a complete defense, such as self-defense, to any wrongdoing) to the realm of killings of non-human animals by humans, which can be legal or illegal, justified or not. Beirne argues that the moral evaluation of human-on-non-human animal killing is still developing, and leaves the question of whether a person can murder a non-human animal unresolved until we have settled the larger question of whether such animals qualify as persons in possession of inviolable rights. 50 Herzog has made repeated claims that non-human animals murder each other, that humans murder non-human animals, and that nonhuman animals murder humans. Is he correct, or are these mere ecstatic elaborations upon killings that lack the normative implications involved in claiming that one creature murders another? Beirne’s innovation raises another question about nomenclature: it appears that there is no English word that applies specifically to the killing of a human being by a non-human animal. Although such killings are initially treated as homicides, and the location of the deaths are treated as forensic crime scenes by law enforcement officers, these types of deaths are no longer considered homicides at the point where the killer turns out to be non-human: only deep within Herzog’s ecstatic abyss do such killings constitute murder. But the killing of a human by a nonhuman animal still deserves its own classification. I suggest, until warranted by further interest or research, that the killing of a human being by a nonhuman animal be christened vivicide. 51 As Beirne shows, the word homicide, meaning “the killing of one human being by another,” derives from the Latin homo (man) and cædere (to cut, strike, kill or murder). 52 This also forms the construction of words such as patricide (the killing of one’s own father) and, of course, ursicide, where the -cide subroot connotes a killing

106

Chapter 6

by a human being. The Latin vivi means “living,” and may at first blush may be too broad: vivicide might then include the killing of any living thing, such as plants, by any other living thing. 53 However, and despite the etymological fact that it literally includes experimentation upon all living things, the word “vivisection” has come to mean experimentation upon live nonhuman animals. Although not perfect by any means, vivicide comes closest to properly framing the deaths of Treadwell and Huguenard and others as “the killing of a human being by a nonhuman animal.” Like Beirne’s theriocide, the normative determination of whether any particular vivicide is justified or not remains opaqued by both law and morality in the realm of the accountant’s truth. It may, however, be ecstatically true that certain vivicides constitute murder. So, we might ask: what is a bear’s life worth? Speaking from the accountant/scientist perspective, bear expert Herrero writes, “if we killed all bears, the ecosystem would lose diversity, [but] not collapse.” From this perspective, bears are not critical for the functioning of their respective ecosystems. But we keep them, he says, “because they are a part of nature and because of what they do for the human mind, body, and soul.” 54 This is because “No other animal in North America drives our imagination as does the great bear.” 55 In its depictions of death—both human and non-human—Herzog’s film drives this imagination even further. A DIFFERENT KIND OF ANIMAL—GAZING INTO THE ABYSS Perhaps unsurprisingly, death draws considerable attention from philosophers as well as filmmakers. Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example, makes the incredible statement that “Fear in the face of death is the best sign of a false, i.e., a bad, life.” 56 It is derived from Russian novelist and philosopher Leo Tolstoy, whose Christian approach to the questions of life and death concludes that persons who fear death are those who do not embrace life. Of course, the trial and death of Socrates (one of philosophy’s most enduring ‘teaching moments’) is anchored by this attitude toward death and the penalty of death. Finding himself on the wrong side of the powerful elite in Athens, Socrates was tried, convicted, condemned, and executed for the ‘crimes’ of corrupting the youth and denying the existence of Athens’ official religion, and his story endures as one of the two most well-known examples of the immorality of capital punishment—the other, of course, is the story of Jesus Christ. In his “Letter to Menoeceus,” ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus argues that “death is nothing to us”—it cannot be good or bad—because sense experience is required to know what is good or bad, and in death we are deprived of sense experience. His statement that death is nothing to us “because when we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is

Reflections from the Abyss: Herzog’s Philosophy of Death

107

present, then we do not exist” is probably the most well-known perspective on death among all of the ancient Greek thinkers. Like Aristotle before him and Wittgenstein twenty-two centuries later, Epicurus thought that happiness was the goal in life, and that fear of death (whether one’s own or that of others) distracted one from seeking happiness. Herzog, I think, shares this perspective toward death to some extent. What he clearly does not share, however, is Kant’s claim that societies are duty-bound to execute murderers, and that we take part in their crime should we fail to execute them. Kant famously writes: But whoever has committed murder, must die. There is, in this case, no juridical substitute or surrogate, that can be given or taken for the satisfaction of justice. There is no likeness or proportion between life, however painful, and death; and therefore there is no equality between the crime of murder and the retaliation of it but what is judicially accomplished by the execution of the criminal. 57

In our era, contemporary philosopher Matthew Kramer also justifies the death penalty, arguing it serves a ‘purgative’ function which ends the existence of supremely evil people who have committed supremely evil crimes. Kramer’s purgative rationale maintains that some deeds are so repellant that they ‘spoil’ the lives of the persons who commit them. Communities, aware of the existence of this person in their midst, are also spoiled by their presence (even if imprisoned) and remain ‘defiled’ unless and until they terminate that person’s existence. 58 These brief philosophical approaches to death frame Herzog’s Into the Abyss (2011), a non-fictional film about four killings: three of the killings are murders committed by Michael Perry, and the fourth is the execution of Perry himself by the State of Texas, which occurs just ten days after Herzog films his interview with Perry in prison. Herzog only briefly addresses his opposition to capital punishment in the film (which, unusually, lacks his characteristic narration), but the film’s press release and his subsequent interviews reveal a far more detailed and nuanced opposition. Unexpectedly, he finds that he produced a “life-affirming film,” an interpretation that escaped him during production and only revealed itself during editing. 59 Unlike the “extra” footage in Grizzly Man, which in all likelihood would have ended up on the cutting-room floor had Treadwell lived, the crime scene footage from Abyss is not aesthetically pleasing and lacks any pretense to taste or artistic direction. It constitutes part of the forensic evidence of Perry’s guilt. But like Treadwell’s footage from Grizzly Man, Herzog is fascinated by the directorial choices of the crime scene cameraperson, who at one point dwells on images of stillraw cookie dough laid out on baking sheets: Perry, it turns out, murdered his victim while she was baking. We are invited to insert Perry and his crime partner Jason Burkett into the scene. This “dead footage,” Herzog might claim, is the real cinéma vérité, with a forensic and all-too-real

108

Chapter 6

undergirding, the product of an unprofessional camera operator (undoubtedly a police officer) documenting the visceral trail of a human life in the form of droplets of blood on the floor and walls of a suburban kitchen. The genealogy of the film’s title is traced to Nietzsche: “If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” 60 Like Herzog, Nietzsche also worries about punishment and revenge: his Zarathustra tells us to “mistrust all in whom the drive to punish is strong.” Again, like Herzog, Nietzsche is wary of proposing a justice system that provides rationalizations and justifications of punishment, including the kinds of retributivist punishments proposed by Kant and Hegel in particular. 61 But Herzog is, of course, primarily a storyteller and not a moralist, and he admits that he has no interest in understanding causes or explanations of his subjects’ motivations: he is, in his own words, “intrigued” by their crimes. But these crime narratives are not mere stories: they are vehicles for Herzog to align his moral compass with both a Nietzschean skepticism of institutionalized justice as well as contemporary political movements opposing the death penalty. This alignment is revealed in Herzog’s Director’s Statement which, as part of the press release publicity for the film, contains the following manifesto: I am not an advocate of the death penalty. I do not even have an argument, I only have a story, the history of the barbarism of Nazi Germany. The argument that innocent men and women have been executed is, in my opinion, only a secondary one. A State should not be allowed—under any circumstance—to execute anyone for any reason. End of story. There is a sense of solidarity with the inmates concerning their appeals and legal battles in order to have their execution delayed or transformed into a life sentence. 62

Here, he publicly pronounces his opposition to capital punishment, but the film does not wholly succeed in communicating it. Yes, Perry’s crimes are monstrous, and yes, Perry may not be a monster, but the description of his execution and death by a witness (the daughter and sister of one of his victims) is almost banal in its uneventfulness. Due to this scene and others, including interviews of aggrieved family members who were filmed holding large photographs of their deceased loved ones, the film does not easily reflect Herzog’s opposition to the death penalty. Perhaps this should not surprise Herzog’s more devoted viewers: if Into the Abyss was interpreted as a political polemic against capital punishment, it would be reduced to a political film in light of the fact that capital punishment is a political issue in the United States, and Herzog tends to avoid this kind of obvious politicization in his work. 63 Here, Herzog does not argue that the prosecutor or jury or judge were unjust or unfair, or that defense counsel was inept, or that structural biases have condemned

Reflections from the Abyss: Herzog’s Philosophy of Death

109

Perry to death and coconspirator Burkett to life in prison. It is not Herzog’s attempt to produce a film like Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line, which prompted the retrial and subsequent exoneration of Randall Dale Adams, who was on death row for the murder of a police officer; unlike Herzog’s film, Morris offers what may be called a happy ending. Because Herzog’s film ends with the death of Perry, and due to Herzog’s commitment not to politicize the film, Abyss comes dangerously close to justifying Perry’s execution and therefore supporting capital punishment in the United States. According to Louise Tyler, films about capital punishment have this tendency. They tend to legitimize it “by referencing it to our most basic cultural ideology, good versus bad, where good always prevails.” Speaking indirectly to Into the Abyss, she continues, “American culture is uncomfortable with ambiguous or unhappy endings.” 64 This, Tyler writes, “is a radical departure from most foreign cinema,” where “happy endings are never guaranteed and evil sometimes prevails over good.” 65 Despite this, the film offers what Herzog claims to be a kind of therapeutic value. “By staring into the abyss,” Herzog says, “somehow I’m able to encourage them (to talk).” 66 He has remarked that staring into the camera is like staring into death. Are his murderer subjects looking into the abyss when they look into his camera? No. Herzog, in fact, is referring to his own practice of staring into their abysses. With his physicality (“the way I sit and hold my head”) and the attention he pays with his eyes (“holding eye contact”), he gives with his eyes, he stares into the abyss of his subject. He uses this legerdemain to draw out testimony the way a skilled prosecutor extracts a confession from a murderer foolish enough to take the stand in his own defense. This, in fact, occurred during Herzog’s interview with death row inmate James Barnes, who confessed to two further murders during his interview. “I immediately,” says Herzog, “handed copies of the tapes to the authorities.” 67 It would be unusual for Herzog (or anyone else) to claim that the murderers in his film should not be punished, but he claims that the fact that they “ended up on death row is irrelevant, because even if both men had gotten away with life in prison, I would still have been intrigued by their crimes.” 68 This, I think, is doubtful: a film and TV series about murderers serving life sentences is hardly as much of a draw as programs about murderers on death row, and a program featuring an interview with a condemned man who is executed only ten days after his interview is even more of a draw. It is Perry’s imminent death, and Herzog’s gaze into its abyss, that makes this film both haunting and deeply moving. Like Perry, Grizzly Man’s Bear 141 is also permanently and forever incapacitated and specifically deterred from killing again. The bear’s death could be justified by the same rational for Perry’s death: the animal is dangerous, unfit to live, and defilingly evil.

110

Chapter 6

It is doubtful that Herzog made Into the Abyss as a cautionary tale to deter young men from committing senseless murders, and, despite its underlying ecological theme, it is unlikely that Herzog made Grizzly Man because he wants to educate the public about ‘saving the bears.’ 69 But the films are similar in that each provides proximate first- or second-person accounts of death: in Grizzly Man, both Herzog and the coroner describe what they heard (or witnessed) on the recording of Treadwell and Huguenard’s death, and in Into the Abyss, the daughter/sister of the victims describes what she saw as a witness to Perry’s death. Although it is clear that bears killed Treadwell and Huguenard, it is less clear who killed Michael Perry. We say that the state killed him, but that is, of course, only metonymically (and not literally) true: Perry was killed by the person who injected him with the poison that first anaesthetizes him, then sedates him, and then causes his heart to stop. It is also only metonymically true to say that ‘nature’ killed Treadwell and Huguenard. Were it literally true, then ‘victims’ of animal-caused death died of ‘natural causes,’ and that is clearly not the case with these types of deaths. Unlike J. A. Baker’s spiritual transformation into a peregrine falcon, described in exquisite detail in The Peregrine 70 (one of the books Herzog recommends for students of his Rogue Film School), Treadwell’s attempt at a transhumanism of human and bear is a fantastic failure: he fails to become any more or less of a bear than its meal, satisfying what Herzog calls a bear’s “half-bored interest in food.” He ends up another conquistador of the useless whose only redemption is his footage—the film in itself. Perry is another conquistador who has failed to produce anything approaching the value of Treadwell’s bear videos, and whose abyss is far deeper and violent than it is merely useless. The description of Treadwell and Huguenard’s mauling and death has such a deep and emotional impact upon Herzog and his viewers because of the unimaginable pain that they must have experienced. Compare this to the pain felt by Perry’s victims and then the death of Perry himself. Perry undoubtedly unleashed great pain upon his victims, their friends and families, and his community, yet probably experienced none when he died. Like the guillotine, lethal injection is purported to be painless except for the momentary insertion of a hypodermic needle, which is claimed to be the last pain felt by the condemned. Although this kind of “regulated, ‘painless’ execution process [is] suitable to a ‘civilized’ society,” support for it is based upon what Judith Randle calls “fear, vengeance, and disregard for criminal lives which is generated by mediated and politicized images of remorseless, incorrigible, mutant wrongdoers.” 71 But, as Elaine Scarry observes, it is pain that makes us sentient and allows us to be empathetic toward the pain of others. “Intense pain,” she writes, “is also language-destroying: as the content of one’s world disintegrates, so the content of one’s language disintegrates; as the self disintegrates, so that which would express and project the self is robbed

Reflections from the Abyss: Herzog’s Philosophy of Death

111

of its source and its subject.” 72 Pain, she continues, “does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.” 73 There is no way to know what kinds of pain are felt by bears, or whether Perry experienced any when he died, but as Giovanni Aloi observes, “Pain intrinsically calls for empathy. If an animal ‘screams,’ then the assumption is that their pain is similar to ours. We clearly establish a sympathetic link with the animal based on formal analogies and assumptions.” 74 Grizzly Man and Into the Abyss emerge not only as narratives of actual death but meditations upon the experience of pain, an unpleasant sensation that is nevertheless necessary for human and bear alike to lay equal claim as sentient creatures. REFLECTIONS FROM THE ABYSS And we Spectators, always everywhere Looking at all of that never beyond! It fills us too full. We set it right. It disintegrates. We set it right again And we disintegrate too. Eighth Elegy, Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke 75

Reading and rereading Rilke’s elegy, I draw somewhat closer to understanding why Herzog plies his trade with dark journeys into the abysses of pain, murder, and death—and I say this despite (or perhaps in spite of) my critical stance toward his ‘Hollywoodized’ depiction of Treadwell as well as his potential failure to make Into the Abyss comport with his principled stance against the death penalty. Together with him on these journeys of success or of failure, we are the spectators in Rilke’s poem, always everywhere looking at that or it—the non-fictional deaths of Treadwell, Huguenard, the bears, Yavorsky’s mother, Perry’s victims, and Perry himself, as well as the fictional deaths brought about by, among many others, Stroszek’s suicide and Aguirre’s drowning—yet we remain unable to see beyond what is captured by the camera’s aperture and the microphone’s diegetic sounds, whose source is visible onscreen as Perry’s voice and the bears’ grunts and growls. Like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, who was himself too full of his love and wisdom, we are abysses filled too full of its dark counterpart: death. As auteur, Herzog leads us in our failed attempt to set it right: all beings disintegrate, and we, the

112

Chapter 6

spectators of these spectacles of disintegration, set it right again through the technological acts of editing and unlimited digital playback only for ourselves to disintegrate again, with each viewing, alongside Treadwell and Huguenard and the bears and Perry and his victims. Herzog, I think, uses the abyss of death to force us to ask about life’s worth, giving the same answer Nietzsche provides in response to Anaximander’s question “What is your existence worth?” ( . . . ) And if it is worthless, why are you here? [ . . . ] Look how your earth is withering, how your seas are diminishing and drying up; the seashell on the mountaintop can show how much has dried up already. Even now, fire is destroying your world; some day it will go up in fumes and smoke. But ever and anew, another such world of ephermerality will construct itself. Who is there that could redeem you from the curse of coming-to-be? 76

As our earth withers and our seas dry up and our cities are consumed by fire and smoke, we should be grateful that Herzog calls on us also to answer Anaximander’s question, and that he has journeyed toward and gazed into so many abysses and so many deaths, “where the Lessons of Darkness continue.” 77 ENDNOTES 1. Lotte Eisner, Fritz Lang (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 111. 2. Paul Cronin, Werner Herzog A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 414. 3. Ibid. 4. Cronin, Guide, 415. 5. Ibid., 162. 6. Werner Herzog: Interviews, ed. Eric Ames, “Revolver Interview: Werner Herzog,” by Daniel Sponsel and Jan Sebenig (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 138-139. 7. Alan Greenberg, Every Night the Trees Disappear: Werner Herzog and the Making of Heart of Glass (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2012). For this film, Herzog infamously hypnotized his cast, and the hypnotist’s name is Dethlessen. Greenberg mishears his name as “Death Lesson.” At one point during the filming, a priest asks Greenberg how he wants to die. Peacefully, Greenberg responds, because “a violent death . . . would really fuck things up.” Greenberg, Every Night, 26. 8. Werner Herzog, Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo (New York: Ecco Press, 2010), 1. 9. Ibid., 65. 10. Werner Herzog: Interviews, ed. Eric Ames, “Werner Herzog,” by Edgar Reitz (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 123. 11. Vivian Sobchack, “Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten Propositions on Death, Representation, and Documentary,” in (ed) David LaRocca, The Philosophy of Documentary Film (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017), 125. 12. Werner Herzog: Interviews, ed. Eric Ames, “Fitzcarraldo: A Conversation with Werner Herzog,” by Bion Steinborn and Rüdiger Von Naso (Jackson: The University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 64. See also Laurie Ruth Johnson, Forgotten Dreams: Revisit-

Reflections from the Abyss: Herzog’s Philosophy of Death

113

ing Romanticism in the Cinema of Werner Herzog (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2016) for further discussion of the death wish in Herzog and his films. 13. Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, 367. 14. Grizzly Man (2005), 00:04:21. 15. Grizzly Man (2005), 00:05:42. 16. Grizzly Man (2005), 00:40.23. See also Furstenau (this volume) for a discussion of this footage. 17. The bear skull in this scene is remarkably similar to the cave bear skull that figures prominently in Herzog’s hugely successful 2010 non-fiction film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams. According to bear expert Stephen Herrero, “Bears began as small-bodied carnivores but eventually became large-bodied omnivores. The cave bear Ursus spelaus, which has been called le moins carnivore de Carnivores et le plus ours de Ours—the least carnivorous of Carnivores, and the most bearish of bears—exemplified this trend.” Stephen Herrero, Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance, Revised Edition (Guilford CT: The Lyons Press/Globe Pequot Press, 1985, 2002), 145 (citation omitted). 18. Although he witnesses it in the film footage, in his 1997 book he claims to have never seen a cub killed by a male bear, which he calls “infanticide,” although he is aware that is it a “natural factor of bear behavior.” Timothy Treadwell and Jewel Palovak, Among Grizzlies (New York: Ballantine, 1997), 152. 19. Grizzly Man, 01:10:53. 20. See contributions to this volume by, e.g., Moore and Novak. 21. Nick Jans, The Grizzly Maze: Timothy Treadwell’s Fatal Obsession with Alaskan Bears (Plume: New York, 2006), xii. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., xiii. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., xiv. 26. Ibid. 27. Cronin, Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, 371-372. 28. Greenberg, Every Night, 14. 29. Richard Meran Balsam, “Nonfiction Film: The Realist Impulse,” in Film Theory and Criticism eds. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press), 583-584. 30. Mike Lapinsky, Death in the Grizzly Maze: The Timothy Treadwell Story (Guilford CT: Falcon/The Globe Pequot Press, 2005), 15. 31. Recordings purported to be the Treadwell/Huguenard death tape are available on the Internet. I have not listened to them and their authenticity is disputed. Detailed descriptions of the contents of the tape by those who have heard it are provided onscreen by several Grizzly Man subjects and included in Jans, The Grizzly Maze, and Lapinsky, Death in the Grizzly Maze. 32. Jans, The Grizzly Maze, 235. 33. Ibid., 119. 34. Lapinsky, Death in the Grizzly Maze, 6, 27. 35. Jans, The Grizzly Maze, 129-130. 36. Erin McCloskey, Bear Attacks (Auburn, WA: Lone Pine Publishing, 2009), 99. 37. Ibid., 98-100. 38. Ibid., 109-112; see also Herrero, Bear Attacks, 12-13. 39. Treadwell and Palovak, Among Grizzlies, 62. 40. Ibid., 104. 41. Ibid., 169. Treadwell claimed, with no proof, that grizzlies were being poached in Katmai. 42. McCloskey, Bear Attacks, 195. 43. Herrero Bear Attacks, 39; see note 37. 44. Ibid., 189. 45. Lapinsky, Death in the Grizzly Maze, 144. 46. Ibid., 169.

114

Chapter 6

47. McCloskey, Bear Attacks, 121-122. 48. Ibid., 124. 49. This seems rather quaint to we moderns, but trials to determine an animal’s guilt were common in Hellenic Greece (see Plato, Laws, 873-874, which also provided for trials of inanimate objects that killed a human being) and late medieval Europe. See E. P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (London: William Heinemann, 1906). 50. Piers Beirne, “Theriocide: Naming Animal Killing,” International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy (2004, Vol. 3, No. 2, 49-66). A novel approach claiming that animals ought to be considered legal persons is found in Visa A. J. Kurki’s A Theory of Legal Personhood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 51. I am grateful to philosopher Robert Francescotti for this suggestion. 52. Beirne, “Theriocide: Naming Animal Killing,” 54. 53. Beirne rejects the overbroad terms “zooicide” and “animalicide” for the same reason. 54. Herrero, Bear Attacks, 247. 55. Ibid., 248. 56. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-1916, 2nd Edition (ed) G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 75. 57. Immanual Kant, Metaphysics of Morals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), sec 6.333. 58. Matthew Kramer, The Ethics of Capital Punishment: A Philosophical Investigaton of Evil and Its Consequences (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 59. Cronin, Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, 423. 60. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil in (ed) Walter Kaufman Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: Modern Library, 1968), sec 42. Although Herzog is fond of this second sentence of Nietzsche’s famous aphorism, it ought to be read in its entirety. The first sentence is “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” 61. See, e.g., Jean-Christophe Merle, German Idealism and the Concept of Punishment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 62. “Into the Abyss: A Tale of Life, a Tale of Death.” Accessed June 14, 2019. http:// ff.hrw.org/sites/default/files/INTO%20THE%20ABYSSPressKit.pdf. 63. See Tyler Tritten’s essay in this volume. 64. Louise Tyler, “Crime and Punishment/Self versus Other: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in European and American Film,” in (eds) Austin Sarat and Christian Boulanger, The Cultural Lives of Capital Punishment: Comparative Perspectives (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 143. 65. Ibid., 144. 66. Cronin, Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, 417. 67. Ibid., 420; see also Herzog’s interview with Barnes in season one, episode one of Herzog’s On Death Row television miniseries. 68. Ibid., 415. 69. Grizzly Man is not, for example, “Blackfish for bears.” See Jennifer L. McMahon, “Cinematic Consciousness: Animal Subjectivity, Activist Rhetoric, and the Problem of Other Minds in Blackfish,” in (ed) David LaRocca, The Philosophy of Documentary Film (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017). 70. J. A. Baker, The Peregrine (New York: New York Review Books, 2005). 71. Judith Randle, “Capital Punishment in the United States,” in (eds) Austin Sarat and Christian Boulanger, The Cultural Lives of Capital Punishment: Comparative Perspectives (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 95. 72. Ibid., 35. 73. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 4.

Reflections from the Abyss: Herzog’s Philosophy of Death

115

74. Giovanni Aloi, “Beyond the Pain Principle,” in (eds) Charlie Blake, Claire Molloy, Steven Shakespeare, Beyond Human: From Animality to Transhumanism (New York: Continuum, 2012), 57-58. 75. Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies (public domain). 76. Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Marianne Cowan (New York: Gateway, 1962), 48. 77. Werner Herzog, “Minnesota Declaration,” in (ed) David LaRocca, The Philosophy of Documentary Film (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), 380. Thanks to Visa Kurki, Robert Francescotti, Chris Turner, Adam Westbrook, Piers Beirne, and the anonymous reviewer of this book. I would also like to thank the many students in my Capital Crimes and the Death Penalty course at Cal State Stanislaus who, having watched, studied, and responded to Into the Abyss and On Death Row, have broadened my understanding of how these films—and Herzog’s claims about them—can be understood and interpreted. I am grateful for ‘bear talk’ with Brad Ryan (Conservation Officer [retired], New Mexico Department of Game and Fish) and Stephanne Payne (WildlifeHuman Attach Response Training: http://wildlifeattack.com). Finally, my thanks to Powell’s City of Books (Portland) and Smith Family Bookstore (Eugene), whose small but rewarding sections entitled “Bears” led me to discover many of the sources I discuss in this chapter.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aloi, Giovanni. 2012. “Beyond the Pain Principle,” in Charlie Blake, Claire Molloy, Steven Shakespeare (eds). Beyond Human: From Animality to Transhumanism. New York: Continuum. Baker, J. A. The Peregrine. 2005. New York: New York Review Books. Balsam, Richard Meran. 1979. “Nonfiction Film: The Realist Impulse.” Film Theory and Criticism. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (eds). New York: Oxford University Press. Beirne, Piers. 2004. “Theriocide: Naming Animal Killing.” International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy. 3, no. 2, 49-66. Cronin, Paul. 2014. Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Eisner, Lotte. 1977. Fritz Lang. New York: Oxford University Press. Evans, E.P. 1906. The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals. London: William Heinemann. Greenberg, Alan. 2012. Every Night the Trees Disappear: Werner Herzog and the Making of Heart of Glass. Chicago: Chicago Review Press (originally published as Greenberg, Alan. 1976. Heart of Glass. München: Skellig). Herrero, Stephen. 1985, 2002. Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance Revised Edition. Guilford CT: The Lyons Press/Globe Pequot Press. Herzog, Werner. 2010. Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo. New York: Ecco Press. Herzog, Werner. 2017. “Minnesota Declaration.” David LaRocca (ed). The Philosophy of Documentary Film. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Jans, Nick. 2006. The Grizzly Maze: Timothy Treadwell’s Fatal Obsession with Alaskan Bears. Plume: New York. Kant, Immanual. 2010. Metaphysics of Morals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kramer, Matthew. 2011. The Ethics of Capital Punishment: A Philosophical Investigaton of Evil and Its Consequences. New York: Oxford University Press. Lapinsky, Mike. 2005. Death in the Grizzly Maze: The Timothy Treadwell Story. Guilford CT: Falcon/The Globe Pequot Press. McCloskey, Erin. 2009. Bear Attacks. Auburn, WA: Lone Pine Publishing.

116

Chapter 6

McMahon, Jennifer L. 2017. “Cinematic Consciousness: Animal Subjectivity, Activist Rhetoric, and the Problem of Other Minds in Blackfish.” David LaRocca (ed). The Philosophy of Documentary Film. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Merle, Jean-Christophe. 2009. German Idealism and the Concept of Punishment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1968. Beyond Good and Evil. Walter Kaufman (ed). Basic Writings of Nietzsche. New York: Modern Library. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1962. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Marianne Cowan. New York: Gateway. Randle, Judith. 2005. “Capital Punishment in the United States.” The Cultural Lives of Capital Punishment: Comparative Perspectives. Austin Sarat and Christian Boulanger (eds). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Reitz, Edgar. 2014. “Werner Herzog.” Werner Herzog: Interviews. Eric Ames (ed). Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Rilke, Rainer Maria. 1978. Duino Elegies, trans. David Young. New York: W.W. Norton Co. Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain. New York: Oxford University Press. Sobchack, Vivian. 2017. “Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten Propositions on Death, Representation, and Documentary.” The Philosophy of Documentary Film. David LaRocca (ed). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Sponsel, Daniel and Sebenig, Jan. 2014. “Revolver Interview: Werner Herzog.” Werner Herzog: Interviews. Eric Ames (ed). Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Steinborn, Bion and Von Naso, Rüdiger. 2014. “Fitzcarraldo: A Conversation with Werner Herzog.” Eric Ames (ed). Werner Herzog: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Treadwell, Timothy and Palovak, Jewel. 1997. Among Grizzlies. New York: Ballantine. Tyler, Louise. 2005. “Crime and Punishment/Self versus Other: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in European and American Film.” The Cultural Lives of Capital Punishment: Comparative Perspectives. Austin Sarat and Christian Boulanger (eds). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1979. Notebooks 1914-1916, 2nd Edition. (ed) G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

SEVEN Fake News and Ecstatic Truths Alternative Facts in Lessons of Darkness Kyle Novak

The apocalyptic tone of Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness (1992) is set by an epigraph attributed to Blaise Pascal: “The collapse of the stellar universe will occur—like creation—in grandiose splendor.” What follows is a grandiose display of destruction as the documentary opens with footage of the bombing of Baghdad in the first Gulf War and then focuses almost solely on the massive Kuwait oil fires that followed. The only exceptions are two depictions of mothers who describe the torture and abuse their children suffered during the war. The sounds and images of the film are horrifying, and in exceptional (even for Herzog) fashion, the film leaves viewers with almost no explanations or context. 1 As usual, Herzog himself provides some narration, but he gives us no information about the actual setting of the film, the events of the war itself, or the politics surrounding the war. Instead, he speaks as an alien visiting another planet in the solar system and describes firefighters who are featured through the film as “creatures” who find life without fire unbearable. 2 Given the film’s unusual portrayal of the war and the oil fires, a brief recap might be helpful for readers who are unfamiliar with the events. In August 1990, Iraq invaded the small nation to its south, Kuwait, following a dispute over oil production around the border. The invasion was condemned by the international community and the United Nations (UN) placed sanctions on Iraq. Meanwhile the U.S. began assembling an international coalition and moving troops and material to the region. A UN Security Council resolution, which was given Congressional approv117

118

Chapter 7

al in the U.S., authorized the use of force against Iraq in Kuwait if it did not withdraw by January 15, 1991. Iraq offered to withdraw if its claims to drill in the region were respected, but the U.S. refused and said that accepting the offer would signal a “reward for aggression.” On January 17, the U.S. began bombing the Iraqis, averaging two thousand sorties per day for forty-two days. George H. W. Bush ordered a ground invasion on February 23 and the Iraqi military was in retreat three days later. News outlets reported on what became known as the “turkey shoot” on the “Highway of Death,” in which fleeing Iraqi vehicles were bombed and thousands of soldiers and civilians were killed. The next day, Bush declared an end to hostilities and a ceasefire was reached on February 28. 3 The oil fires shown in the film were started by the fleeing Iraqi army. Between six hundred and seven hundred oil wells were ignited in the retreat. The final fire was not extinguished until November and it is estimated that a billion barrels were burned, which—by 2019 standards—is nearly equivalent to worldwide consumption over a ten-day period. 4 The smoke plumes from the fires impacted weather patterns in the region for several months. People in the area, including coalition soldiers, were affected by what became known as “Gulf War Syndrome,” which was characterized by cognitive and muscular problems. Readers in the U.S. will likely be unsurprised to learn that reactions to the conflict varied widely. Some praised the cooperation among the international community and the speed at which the war was resolved while arguing that Saddam Hussein’s aggression had been met with a just response. However, others argued that the war was an unnecessary use of force since the Iraqis had offered to withdraw from Kuwait. The philosopher Noam Chomsky called the war a spectacle and pointed out that the rhetoric of curbing aggression was hypocritical given the U.S. had invaded Panama in a war of aggression just a year earlier. 5 Whether or not the war was justifiable, it was undoubtedly an environmental catastrophe which caused the death of approximately twenty-five people. 6 For those reasons, readers will also likely find it unsurprising that the reactions to Lessons of Darkness were also—to say the least—mixed. The film was well-received in the U.S. as an eye-opening change from the news-cycle CNN coverage that provided most Americans with their understanding of the war. 7 However, it created an uproar at its Berlin Film Festival premiere. Herzog said the audience spat on him while calling the film authoritarian and an attack on decency. He was accused of “aestheticizing” the horrors of war. Yet he responded characteristically by taking to the stage and calling out: “You cretins! Did not Dante do the same with his Inferno? Or Goya with his paintings?” Audiences were not the only ones who found Herzog’s portrayal of the war and destruction distasteful. In the intervening years, a number of academics have written critically of both the film and Herzog’s approach

Fake News and Ecstatic Truths: Alternative Facts in Lessons of Darkness

119

to the aesthetic and the obscene in general. A notable critic, Roger Hillman, charged Herzog with channeling the political vision of the infamous Nazi propagandist, Leni Riefenstahl, through his juxtaposition of Richard Wagner’s music with scenes of destruction in Lessons of Darkness and La Soufriere (1977). 8 But others, such as Lutz Koepnick, have argued that Herzog’s aesthetic should be viewed as a confrontation with, rather than endorsement of, twentieth-century history and conflict. 9 The issues that the film raises about the relationship between aesthetics and the obscene are certainly interesting and much has been written on the topic. 10 However, my line of inquiry will not center on the film itself, but on the fascinating episode which followed its release. TRUTH: ACCOUNTING AND ECSTASY At another film festival, Herzog announced that the quote attributed to Pascal at the beginning of the Lessons of Darkness was a fake. The words, he said, were his own invention which could not have been spoken better by Pascal himself. 11 Here we have another question that might interest philosophers who are concerned with ethics: do documentarians have a responsibility to tell the truth? It might strike some of us as immoral for a filmmaker to intentionally fabricate part of a documentary, especially one concerned with a topic as serious as war. In addition to the questions around Herzog’s ambiguous aesthetic, commentators have debated the ethics of Herzog’s use of (mis)representation. 12 However, as philosophers, we can—without losing sight of ethical questions—see an epistemological (the area of philosophy concerned with the nature of knowledge) question about truth itself. If we consider the apparent absurdity that Herzog volunteered to reveal his fabrication to the public, then it is clear that the episode does not reveal a simple falsehood or lie. Instead, it invites us to look at Herzog’s vision of truth, and in doing so we have an opportunity to examine both the meaning of truth and our relation to truth through the media we encounter. For Herzog, truth has two different meanings and filmmakers must often choose between one or the other. In 1999 he articulated his vision of truth at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota with the legendary film critic Roger Ebert. Herzog subtitled the statement “Lessons of Darkness” and it became known as the “Minnesota Declaration”: an attack on what Herzog calls “the truth of accountants” and a defense of “ecstatic truth.” Herzog differentiates the two truths by drawing a distinction between facts and truth. Filmmakers who purport to show just-the-facts may indeed show us facts. But according to Herzog, in doing so they produce only the accountants’ truth and also unwittingly create a set of norms around the facts they depict. He warns that “Fact creates norm, and truth

120

Chapter 7

illumination.” The “deeper” and “poetic, ecstatic truth” which creates illumination “can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” With, for example, the quote from the beginning of Lessons of Darkness, Herzog claims that the audience enters this realm of ecstatic truth in a way that they could not if they were given only the facts. For him, it seems to be the case that sometimes there are alternative facts which help us discover the truth. 13 ALTERNATIVE FACTS Many readers will no doubt recognize the phrase “alternative facts.” It was infamously used by Kellyanne Conway, an advisor to President Donald Trump, two days after his inauguration. At the previous day’s press briefing, Trump’s White House Secretary Sean Spicer claimed the attendance at Trump’s inauguration was larger than at any other inauguration. His statement was quickly disproven, but when Conway was asked to explain why Spicer had made an obviously false claim she defended him on the grounds that he had used “alternative facts.” 14 The phrase was widely criticized throughout the press and along with “fake news” it spread throughout popular culture as a reminder of the Trump administration’s willingness to flippantly lie to the public and the press. But back to Herzog: could we say that his ecstatic truths amount to alternative facts? Or, to paraphrase an interviewer for the German publication Der Spiegel, does Herzog simply lie to his audience? 15 When Herzog was asked whether he lies to his audience, he responded in a way that might not seem much different from how Conway defended her use of alternative facts. He claimed that his use of “imagination, stylization, and invention” is not a lie but rather an intense deeper truth, because it elevates the audience by producing a sense of awe that could only come from something totally new. In her exchange with the NBC reporter Chuck Todd, Conway made a similar move by suggesting that Spicer’s statement—regardless of whether it was really true or false—was so insignificant that the attention it received from the media was more telling about the media than the statement. Conway asserted that what the response to the alternative fact revealed was a “mainstream media” system bent on discrediting the new administration and their supporters before they had even been given a chance to act. Before we pursue a comparison of the two further, it is worth noting that the Walker Art Center saw a connection between them after Conway’s exchange with Todd. The Walker wrote to Herzog about his “Minnesota Declaration” and “invited the celebrated filmmaker to reconsider his influential manifesto in light of concepts around truth making headlines today—notably ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake news.’” Herzog re-

Fake News and Ecstatic Truths: Alternative Facts in Lessons of Darkness

121

sponded to the Walker with an addendum to the declaration which reaffirmed his earlier statements. Two of his points stand out: 1. Facts cannot be underestimated as they have normative power. But they do not give us insight into the truth, or the illumination of poetry. Yes, accepted, the phone directory of Manhattan contains four million entries, all of them factually verifiable. But do we know why Jonathan Smith, correctly listed, cries into his pillow every night?” 2. The argument of rearranging facts constituting a lie points only to shallow thinking and the fetish of self-reference. 16

Again, Herzog claims that facts do not give us truth, and his second point suggests that he does not even think that using alternative facts amounts to lying. I imagine that at this point some readers find both Herzog’s and Conway’s claims absurd. Common sense would say that if we stick to the facts then we have truth and if we get the facts wrong we have a falsehood. But if we intentionally misrepresent the facts with an “alternative fact,” then we have a lie. This view of truth is known to philosophers as the correspondence theory of truth. For Bertrand Russell, one of the theory’s most well-known proponents, “truth consists in some form of correspondence between belief and facts.” Beliefs are what our minds judge to be the case and facts are whatever is the case in the world outside our minds. When our beliefs match the facts then we have truth. 17 On this theory, if we believe Werner Herzog once ate his shoe and Werner Herzog really did eat his shoe, then we have a true belief. 18 If we believe that Herzog did not eat his shoe, then we have a false belief. If we believe that Herzog did eat his shoe, but we claim that he did not eat his shoe, then we have committed a lie. Using the correspondence theory, it is obviously the case that affirming the facts gives us truth while affirming alternative facts or falsehoods gives us lies. However, it would seem that for Herzog, the correspondence theory of truth only reaches the level of the accountant’s truth. But should we take that to mean that his defense of ecstatic truth is a defense of lies or a defense of liars like Conway? On the contrary, I think that Conway remains easy to dismiss whereas Herzog points us toward a deeper albeit unconventional form of truth. To illustrate this, let’s see what ecstatic truths both Herzog and Conway express. In the addendum to the “Minnesota Declaration,” Herzog gives some examples of art which he thinks express ecstatic truths. He cites Shakespeare, who wrote: “The most truthful poetry is the most feigning.” And he refers to Michelangelo’s Pieta. “Notice,” Herzog writes, “that Jesus taken from the cross is a man of 33, but his mother is only 17. Does Michelangelo lie to us? Does he mislead us? Does he defraud us? He just shows us the innermost truth about the Man of Sorrows, and his mother, the Virgin.” Like Shakespeare or Michelangelo, Herzog hopes to create

122

Chapter 7

an experience through art that would not be possible with simple factual representation or the so-called truth of accountants. And he certainly succeeds with respect to how different the experience of Lessons of Darkness is from CNN coverage of the war. However, his approach may seem to put him in the camp of propogandists who manipulate facts to produce an emotional response from the audience. But Herzog differs from propagandists in that he is honest about his lies. In the interview with Der Spiegel, he claims that the fabrication in his films “is not intended to deceive or mislead or defraud you.” Not only does he admit when he invents something in his movies, he seems delighted to reveal that information—as if letting us in on the secret is necessary for us to have a complete experience of ecstatic truth. Now let’s turn to Conway. She implies that alternative facts may be falsehoods, but she says that the truth they reveal is a “mainstream media” bent on discrediting her, the Trump administration, and Republican voters. Could it be—using Herzog’s terms—that her rearrangement of facts shows us the ecstatic truth of a corrupt media apparatus? In a sense, she is correct that the media often criticizes Republicans, and Todd is critical of her in the exchange. But her claim is ridiculous in that the media’s criticisms were in response to a proven lie. 19 And she only further discredits herself by suggesting that the criticism of her lies made her a victim. Thus, unlike Herzog, who made an invention only to reveal it later for the sake of creating a powerful artistic experience through film, Conway clearly commits herself to deception in order defend and justify her dishonest employer. In itself the only truth Conway’s claim revealed was that she and the administration she serves are shamelessly dishonest. However, I think that the episode does illuminate something deeper about the nature of truth itself if we look at it in the context of the broader media landscape at the time. Trump’s inauguration was followed by a nationwide conversation about the role of the press and the importance of objective reporting and the facts. Specifically, the “mainstream media”—the establishment centrist or ostensibly non-partisan outlets in the U.S.—made it their mission to hold Trump accountable. The Washington Post adopted the dramatic slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” and set up a fact-checker to record the president’s false or misleading statements. Then, the legendary Dan Rather urged journalists to end the convention of calling false statements “falsehoods” and to call Trump out on his lies. Soon after, the New York Times created their own list of “Trump’s Lies.” 20 The message was clear: by holding Trump accountable to the facts, the press would be the defenders of the truth and democracy against the lies of the corrupt and authoritarian administration. Although the message from the press is compelling in that Trump is certainly a liar, Herzog helps us see that there is more to media than exposing “lies” with “facts.” Recall that in his “Minnesota Declaration,”

Fake News and Ecstatic Truths: Alternative Facts in Lessons of Darkness

123

he tells us that fact creates norms. The term “norms” is difficult in that it has a number of uses, but it may become a bit clearer if we think of the distinction philosophers make between normative and descriptive statements. The former are claims about how the world ought to be, while the latter are claims about how the world is. For example: “One ought not tell lies” is a normative statement in that it tells us we shouldn’t lie, but it doesn’t say anything about whether anyone is or isn’t a liar. In contrast, the statement “He is a liar” is descriptive because it tells us that the person in question lies, but on its own the statement does not tell us whether the person should or should not lie. Norms themselves are bit more complicated in that they are more than just statements and they involve both our understanding of how the world is and how it ought to be. To use another simple example: in North America, people are expected to drive on the right-hand side of the road. Almost everyone, in fact, drives on the right-hand side. Therefore, doing so is a norm. If we take Herzog’s claim seriously that facts create norms, then it would seem that the way we understand the world to be is important because it determines how we think the world ought to be. But things get interesting when we consider a statement like: “The mainstream media is critical of Donald Trump.” That statement is presumably uncontroversial because as I showed earlier, the media is explicit about their intent to criticize the president when he lies. And the norm that we are expected to adopt is that the media is honest and should be trusted while the administration is dishonest and should not be trusted. However, conservative media outlets have used the same fact to create a norm for millions of Americans where any accountability of the president should be dismissed as an unfair attack from a dishonest media. Our question, then, is how is it that the same fact can produce two norms which are incompatible with one another? To be clear, the question is not meant to imply that the second norm may be legitimate. As I argued above, the norm is not compelling because it simply functions to deflect legitimate criticism of the government. But the fact that the norm exists at all suggests that what we mean by truth is something greater than a correspondence of beliefs to facts. To pursue our question we turn to a philosopher who focuses on the questions surrounding our relationship with truth and media. THE DESERT OF THE MEDIA The philosopher, media theorist, and cultural critic Jean Baudrillard was one of the most influential and controversial thinkers of the late twentieth century. Perhaps not coincidentally, there are many similarities between Baudrillard and Herzog. For example, Baudrillard begins his Simulacra and Simulations (1981) with the enigmatic quote:

124

Chapter 7 The simulacrum is never that which conceals truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true. -Ecclesiastes 21

Of course, the book of Ecclesiastes does not contain those lines, but they do set the tone for the rest of the text, much like the invented quote at the beginning of Lessons of Darkness. Like Herzog, Baudrillard was known for his tendency to provoke and to craft unique narratives around political events and cultural artefacts. One of his best known works also dealt with the Gulf War and the problem of the media. The book advanced the provocative thesis for which it is titled: The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991). Baudrillard’s claim that the Gulf War did not happen seems absurd on its face and just before the war he even called it a “stupid gamble” to suggest that it could not happen when all the evidence said that it would. 22 However, his claim was less about the actual events that happened in the war than it was about the American public’s relationship to the war. Unlike World War II or Vietnam, which affected the whole society and cost the lives of tens or hundreds of thousands of soldiers, most Americans had no direct relationship to the Gulf War and its impact was negligible. Statistically speaking, Baudrillard observes that out of the approximately five hundred thousand soldiers who were deployed, more would have died in traffic accidents had they stayed home than were killed in the war. 23 Because the war itself was not experienced in any meaningful way by most Americans, it existed primarily through the coverage provided by television on CNN. For Baudrillard, the Gulf War did not take place in the sense that it was first and foremost a type of televised spectacle. Even though Saddam and the Iraqis posed no real threat to the coalition and the actual conflict only lasted a couple of days, there was nonstop coverage of the situation in the seven months leading up to it. It was presented with a serious tone of fear and uncertainty as the first challenge to the peace that was supposed to follow the end of the Cold War. The disconnect between the actual situation and the way it was portrayed signaled that the media’s portrayal was really a farce. 24 This was especially evident in situations such as one broadcast where CNN reporters who were supposed to be covering the action from the front admitted that they had been sitting inside and getting their information from CNN! 25 For Baudrillard, the event or non-event of the Gulf War was not simply an isolated scandal but was symptomatic of the larger system where a public understands reality primarily through its relationship with the media. On the surface, the main problem may seem to be that sometimes the media does not provide accurate or truthful information to the public. However, Baudrillard goes a step farther and claims that we cannot even

Fake News and Ecstatic Truths: Alternative Facts in Lessons of Darkness

125

ask the question of whether the media is truthful or not because our primary experience of the world is through the media. We exist in what he calls a hyper-reality where reality and truth are established by our relationship to the media with no necessary relationship to anything else. Although Baudrillard’s argument may seem extreme or even hyperbolic, there is a literal sense in which it must be correct that our individual worldviews are primarily created by the media we consume. We may take a critical approach to that media and fact-check, but in most cases that simply involves looking to competing media outlets and deciding which claims are most compelling. For example, the only reason we know that Conway and Spicer lied was that media outlets presented evidence that their claims were false. Granted, in some cases it would be possible for each of us to go out in the world to directly fact-check the claims we hear. But the sheer volume of information in the world and the rate at which things happen means that any type of political worldview could only be formed through media. Additionally, there is a sense in which Baudrillard’s stronger claim is correct. We cannot even attempt to question whether media is truthful or not because the narratives created by media shape the course of world events regardless of whether we believe them and regardless of whether the narratives are grounded in any reality or actual state of affairs. While this may seem to apply to outlets which are intended to create misinformation to protect the powerful, such as Fox News or Trump’s Twitter feed, it also applies to the outlets I mentioned earlier which purport to stand for integrity and objectivity in reporting. Baudrillard’s claim is not that reputable media outlets occasionally make mistakes. His argument seems to take Herzog’s position one step further. The reported facts don’t just incidentally create norms as Herzog claims. Instead, reporting is intended to create the norms that produce our hyper-reality whether or not there are facts to support those norms. Baudrillard’s look at CNN’s coverage of the Gulf War is just one example that supports his argument. To illustrate how the reputable media can ignore facts but still produce norms that change the course of world events, we need not even look beyond U.S. and Iraq relations. In 2003, the U.S. led by George W. Bush invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein. As a justification for the war, the administration falsely claimed that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD). For the most part, mainstream media supported the administration’s narrative. About a year after the invasion, none other than the New York Times admitted to publishing false or unsubstantiated claims about WMD on numerous occasions in the lead-up to the war. According to the Times, these publications were the result of journalistic failings throughout the organization: reporters’ only source of information was oftentimes people in Iraq who were “bent on regime change.” Editors failed to challenge the reports, and priority was given to the hottest “scoops” rather than measured

126

Chapter 7

assessments. 26 While not wholly responsible, the media played a crucial role in starting the war which killed hundreds of thousands of people, destabilized an entire region of the globe, and still has not been fully resolved after seventeen years. Those events show us that the power of the media comes from creating narratives and norms rather than relaying facts or countering alternative facts. But to further illustrate what Baudrillard can tell us about Herzog and truth, we need to look at an ambiguity in his thinking. TRUTH AND LIES IN A NON-REFERENTIAL SENSE There is an apparent contradiction to Baudrillard’s position. By clarifying it, we can see how his position is both helpful and flawed. His claim that we cannot ask whether media is truthful rests on his claim: there is no truth, but the simulacrum is true. The simulacrum refers to the images which the media produces, and those images constitute our hyper-reality. Even if we grant Baudrillard’s view of hyper-reality, it is an apparent contradiction for him to claim that there is no truth and then to claim that the simulacrum is true. But we can understand this apparent contradiction to be terminological if we revisit the term truth. When Baudrillard says that there is no truth, he means that there is no truth as correspondence. We form beliefs based on our mediated experience of hyper-reality rather than on an immediate experience of reality itself, so it is not possible to say whether our beliefs correspond to whatever is the case in the world outside our minds. Therefore, it is not possible for there to be a truth in terms of correspondence. But if truth cannot mean correspondence, then what does Baudrillard mean when he says the simulacrum is true? Baudrillard’s view of truth comes from Nietzsche, who also rejected the correspondence view of truth. For Nietzsche, truth as correspondence would require us to be able to know the world as it exists independent of ourselves. That is, we would need to possess a universal god-like perspective. However, our beliefs are always mediated through our senses and our limited particular perspectives. Nietzsche asks: “What does man [sic] actually know about himself? Is he, indeed, ever able to perceive himself completely, as if laid out in a lighted display case? Does nature not conceal most things from him—even concerning his own body—in order to confine and lock him within a proud, deceptive consciousness.” 27 Given that we cannot even know ourselves, Nietzsche thinks it would be hubristic for us to claim to know the world as it really is. Accordingly, the meaning of truth and the value we place on it must refer to something other than knowledge of the world independent of ourselves. Humans, Nietzsche observes, create concepts by categorizing things and then assigning them words. While the concepts do not tell us

Fake News and Ecstatic Truths: Alternative Facts in Lessons of Darkness

127

anything essential about the world, they serve as a sort of metaphor or illusion by which we can make sense of things. For example, physical money is nothing more than pieces of metal or paper, but by being stamped or printed with a certain set of signifiers, it becomes a metaphor for value itself. Because money is what we all recognize as valuable, it determines what goods and services we can access and the types of lives we can lead. Therefore, such metaphors are extremely useful because they give us a way of understanding the world that we can communicate to one another and agree upon. For Nietzsche, knowing truth or speaking truthfully, then, just means using the agreed-upon metaphors. 28 The claim that truth is metaphor rather than correspondence may seem a bit cynical or relativistic at first, but I think it is appropriate. Truth is important insofar as it refers to an understanding of the world that we agree on. If we agree that something is a fact, then we communicate that we have a shared understanding of it. But when someone presents an admitted “alternative fact,” we know they are lying. Or as Nietzsche puts it: “The liar is a person who uses the valid designations, the words, in order to make something which is unreal appear to be real.” 29 On Nietzsche’s understanding, truth remains an important concept but only insofar it refers to our shared understanding of the world. Baudrillard’s apparent contradiction makes sense in a Nietzschean framework. There is no truth (as correspondence), but the simulacrum is true in that it is the understanding of the world we share through our experience of the media. Baudrillard’s position is helpful for two reasons. First, it shows why, like Herzog, we might want to be skeptical about appeals to facts. In contrast to the way the media presents themselves, we can see that they are not merely reporters of the facts and that the narratives they create do not even necessarily reflect facts. Second, we have an answer to the question above as to how the same fact can seemingly create two incompatible sets of norms. The creation of incompatible sets of norms around the same fact is explainable if facts flow from norms and not the other way around. That is to say, we start with how we desire the world to be and that informs how we think the world is. We do not start out as tabula rasa or blank slates who have a pure experience of the world and then develop our norms from that experience. If the latter were the case, then our shared experience of the world would produce a shared set of norms rather than the competing and incompatible sets that we do see. However, the existence of competing sets of norms reveals the limitation of Baudrillard’s thinking. It is worth noting the aim of Baudrillard’s project. Although he is more pessimistic than many other media theorists, his main insight is that our relationship to media is a way for those who produce media to exercise power over those of us who consume it, but at the same time the ability to question the media presents an opportunity to deny the “truth” that the media produces. 30 The problem with Baudrillard’s prescription

128

Chapter 7

in relation to his theoretical framework is that while he wants to question media, he also claims we cannot even ask whether media is true or not. As we’ve seen, it would be impossible to determine whether media is true in the sense that it corresponds to mind-independent reality. Baudrillard seems to mean that we also cannot even challenge the media as the set of norms and metaphors we agree upon; but the fact that there are competing sets of norms necessarily means that we can question media. It may be that Baudrillard’s pessimism was more warranted in the early nineties when CNN could broadcast the president’s call for war and there were not many ways to counter that pro-war “truth” with a competing anti-war narrative. But both then and in 2003 there was a dissident media and anti-war protests. Furthermore, the New York Times’ mea culpa along with the broader revelation of misleading reporting in the lead up to the Iraq War shows that media narratives can be criticized and corrected when they are mistaken. Today, with the competing truths proffered by different media groups it is clear that there is not a uniform hyper-reality and so those truths can be called into question. But if truths are sets of norms and metaphors that do not necessarily correspond to anything, then on what basis could we or should we challenge truth? In other words, how can we avoid relativism and say that one truth is better than another if they are both just metaphors at the end of the day? TRUTHS BEYOND FACTS A popular criticism of thinkers like Nietzsche or Baudrillard is that because they reject truth in the traditional sense, they can offer nothing but a sort hopeless relativism where we can only assert either what our whims arbitrarily dictate or what we decide is in our own self-interest. This criticism is ironic because figures like Trump or the Bush administration prove—regardless of whether we agree with Nietzsche or Baudrillard—that powerful actors can get away with doing precisely that. In Baudrillard’s case at least, because the simulacrum is the only truth and it is produced by powerful actors in government or media, there is not much hope to resist or question that truth. However, we can accept Nietzsche’s critique of truth and share Herzog’s suspicion of facts without reaching such a cynical or pessimistic conclusion. To do that, we must briefly reconsider the concept of the simulacrum. For Baudrillard, the “truth” of the simulacrum signifies the loss of traditional truth and reality. But for Gilles Deleuze, a contemporary of Baudrillard who was also greatly influenced by Nietzsche, the simulacrum does not mean truth has been lost. Instead, it reveals that there never was truth in the traditional sense. 31 For Deleuze, this is a cause for celebration rather than despair because truth as correspondence is only a “recognition” or a rediscovery of what already is. 32 The problem, again,

Fake News and Ecstatic Truths: Alternative Facts in Lessons of Darkness

129

is that asserting what is reasserts norms which function to protect the status quo and the interests of the powerful. Thus, in order to challenge norms, we need to question what is and ask what could become. And to do that, we need to shift our thinking away from how the world is independent of us and instead think about the relationship between our lives and the world. The importance of the media, then, is not whether it provides facts but what it can tell us about the things that impact our lives. There are two likely objections to the Deleuzian perspective of the media. First, if we do a wholesale critique of norms, don’t we risk discarding the good norms along with the bad? And second, if we turn away from asking what is and instead ask about how things impact our lives, then don’t we risk falling into a sort of relativism where—like corrupt politicians—we simply affirm what we think is beneficial for us and dismiss anything that isn’t? For both objections, the problem seems to be that if we cannot resort to truth or norms then we lose any standard by which to evaluate claims and the media we consume. The response to those concerns is that in the absence of truth as correspondence there is still a standard to guide our thoughts and actions. The standard is life itself as a modification of Nietzsche’s will to power. On Deleuze’s understanding, the will to power does not mean a will to dominate. Power is more akin to “force” in the sense of something that can produce an action. The will to power is the underlying principle of all life where each living thing acts on its environment and reacts to other forces in the environment. Our power is how we make evaluations and either affirm or deny our situation and what happens to us. 33 According to Lee Spinks, Deleuze modifies the will to power to make life itself the standard for political or moral considerations. That means we should not evaluate something in terms of truth or falsity, but in terms of how it affirms or inhibits the continuation, self-determination, and diversity of life. 34 In more concrete terms, when a president advocates the removal of certain groups of people or places bans on who can enter the country we should understand those limitations on how people can live their lives. Similarly, when the media promotes sanctions on countries meant to cause starvation or when commentators agitate for war with Iraq, Iran, or North Korea, we can evaluate the norms they’re promoting in terms of how those norms would destroy life if enacted. Thus, we have a standard by which we hold those in power accountable without deferring to received facts or truth as such. We have been using truth in the sense of the truth of accountants, which refers to accepted facts or “what is” that also bring norms with them. But where does that leave Herzog’s ecstatic truth? Consider the language that Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Herzog use around truth. Nietzsche says that truth is “a sum of human relations that have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding.

130

Chapter 7

Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions.” 35 Like Deleuze, he speaks of truths as things we recognize, but only insofar as they remind us of what already is. They do not show us anything new. Herzog describes the news coverage of the Gulf War in similar terms. He says: “We have all watched so many horrific things on the news that we have become totally—and dangerously—inured to them.” 36 Such accountants’ truth produces recognition without revealing anything new. However, he adds that “The stylization of horror in Lessons of Darkness means that images penetrate deeper than the CNN footage ever could.” 37 An ecstatic truth illuminates something that we previously didn’t see. Lessons of Darkness is sparse on facts but it is full of truths. It shows us the unrecognizable inferno, the devastation of bombing, and the horror of a mother witnessing her child being tortured. It is those truths and the lessons of darkness they provide which we need to consider when we’re faced with facts or their alternatives. ENDNOTES 1. Herzog’s Into the Wild Blue Yonder (2005) uses a similar approach, although there he takes a few more liberties in fictionalizing the narrative and, moreover, his subject matter is not political or as sensitive as the subject matter of Lessons. 2. For a detailed study of the film itself, see Mathew Gandy, “The Melancholy Observer: Landscape, Neo-Romanticism, and the Politics of Documentary Filmmaking.” In A Companion to Werner Herzog, edited by Brad Prager (Wiley-Blackwell Companions to Film Directors 4. 528-546: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). 3. Ramsey Clark, The Fire This Time: U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf (International Action Center, 2002), xxxvii-xl. 4. “Daily Global Crude Oil Demand 2006-2020 | Statistic,” Statista, accessed December 18, 2019, https://www.statista.com/statistics/271823/daily-global-crude-oildemand-since-2006/. 5. Noam Chomsky, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda, 1st edition (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1997). 6. “Appendix—Iraqi Death Toll | The Gulf War | FRONTLINE | PBS,” accessed April 26, 2019, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/appendix/death.html . 7. Paul Cronin and Werner Herzog, Herzog on Herzog: Conversations with Paul Cronin, 1st edition (London: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 244-245. 8. Roger Hillman, Unsettling Scores: German Film, Music, and Ideology (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005). 9. Lutz Koepnick, “The Sound of Ruins.” In German Postwar Films: Life and Love in the Ruins, 193–208. Studies in European Culture and History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 10. For a recent overview of the various charges made against Herzog for aestheticizing the political, see Richard Eldridge. Werner Herzog: Filmmaker and Philosopher (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 21-25. 11. Lars-Olav Beier, “Werner Herzog’s German Comeback: Cinema Legend Heads Berlinale Jury,” Spiegel Online, February 11, 2010, sec. International, http://www. spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/werner-herzog-s-german-comeback-cinema-legendheads-berlinale-jury-a-677080.html. 12. Eldridge (2018) again includes a brief discussion of the criticisms made against Herzog for misrepresenting or erasing politics and history from his films, 168-173.

Fake News and Ecstatic Truths: Alternative Facts in Lessons of Darkness

131

13. “Werner Herzog Reads His Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema,” accessed November 25, 2018, https://walkerart.org/magazine/ minnesota-declaration-truth-documentary-cinema. 14. “Conway: Press Secretary Gave ‘Alternative Facts,’” NBC News, accessed December 1, 2018, https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/video/conway-presssecretary-gave-alternative-facts-860142147643. 15. “Interview with Director Werner Herzog: ‘I Am Clinically Sane,’” Spiegel Online, February 12, 2010, sec. International, http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/ interview-with-director-werner-herzog-i-am-clinically-sane-a-677631.html. 16. “Werner Herzog Makes Trump-Era Addition to His Minnesota Declaration,” accessed December 1, 2019, https://walkerart.org/magazine/werner-herzogminnesota-declaration-2017-addendum. 17. Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, 2nd ed., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), ch. 12. 18. Herzog really did eat his shoe after losing a bet to the documentary filmmaker, Errol Morris. The occasion was featured in Les Blank’s documentary, appropriately titled Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980). 19. Photographs showed that the crowds were clearly smaller for Trump’s inauguration and the Washington Transit Authority released the following tweet showing ridership: “Metro Ridership: As of 11am, 193k Trips Taken so Far Today. (11am 1/20/ 13 = 317k, 11am 1/20/09 = 513k, 11am 1/20/05 = 197k) #wmata,” (@wmata, January 20, 2017). 20. David Leonhardt and Stuart A. Thompson. “Opinion | President Trump’s Lies, the Definitive List.” New York Times, June 23, 2017, sec. Opinion, https://www.nytimes. com/interactive/2017/06/23/opinion/trumps-lies.html. 21. Jean Baudrillard, Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 166. 22. Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. Paul Patton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 28. 23. Ibid., 69. 24. Parallels between Herzog’s and Baudrillard’s critical perspectives of the coverage of the war are also noted in Nadia Bozak’s “Firepower: Herzog’s Pure Cinema as the Internal Combustion of War.” CineAction, no. 68 (2006): 18–25. 25. Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, 2. 26. “From the Editors; The Times and Iraq,” New York Times, May 26, 2004, sec. World, https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-the-times-andiraq.html . 27. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” in The Nietzsche Reader, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson and Duncan Large (Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 115. 28. Ibid., 117. 29. Ibid., 115. 30. David J. Gunkel, “Media,” in The Baudrillard Dictionary, ed. Richard G. Smith (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 124. 31. Sean McQueen, Deleuze and Baudrillard: From Cyberpunk to Biopunk (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 21-22. 32. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (1968; repr., Columbia University Press, 1994), 135-136. 33. Ibid. 49-54 34. Lee Spinks, “Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844-1900),” in The Deleuze Dictionary, ed. Adrian Parr, 1st edition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 178-180. 35. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” in The Nietzsche Reader, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson and Duncan Large (Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 117. 36. Paul Cronin and Werner Herzog, Herzog on Herzog: Conversations with Paul Cronin, 244-245. 37. Ibid., 245.

132

Chapter 7

BIBLIOGRAPHY “Appendix—Iraqi Death Toll | The Gulf War | FRONTLINE | PBS.” Accessed April 26, 2019.https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/appendix/death.html. Baudrillard, Jean. 1988. Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. Edited by Mark Poster. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 1995. The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Translated by Paul Patton. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Beier, Lars-Olav. 2010. “Werner Herzog’s German Comeback: Cinema Legend Heads Berlinale Jury.” Spiegel Online, February 11, 2010, sec. International. http://www. spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/werner-herzog-s-german-comeback-cinemalegend-heads-berlinale-jury-a-677080.html. Bozak, Nadia. 2006. “Firepower: Herzog’s Pure Cinema as the Internal Combustion of War.” CineAction, no. 68 (2006): 18–25. Chomsky, Noam. 1997. Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda. New York: Seven Stories Press. Clark, Ramsey. 2002. The Fire This Time: U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf. International Action Center. NBC News. 2019. “Conway: Press Secretary Gave ‘Alternative Facts.’” Accessed December 1, 2019. https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/video/conway-presssecretary-gave-alternative-facts-860142147643. Cronin, Paul. 2003. Herzog on Herzog: Conversations with Paul Cronin. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Statista. “Daily Global Crude Oil Demand 2006-2020.” Accessed December 19, 2019. https://www.statista.com/statistics/271823/daily-global-crude-oil-demand-since2006/. Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. 1968. Reprint, Columbia University Press. ———. 2006. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson. 1962. Reprint, New York: Columbia University. Eldridge, Richard. 2018. Werner Herzog: Filmmaker and Philosopher. Bloomsbury Academic. “FROM THE EDITORS; The Times and Iraq.” The New York Times, May 26, 2004, sec. World. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-the-timesand-iraq.html. Gandy, Matthew. 2012. “The Melancholy Observer: Landscape, Neo-Romanticism, and the Politics of Documentary Filmmaking.” A Companion to Werner Herzog. Brad Prager (ed). London: Wiley-Blackwell. Gunkel, David J. 2010. “Media.” The Baudrillard Dictionary. Richard G. Smith (ed). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hillman, Roger. 2005. Unsettling Scores: German Film, Music, and Ideology. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. “Interview with Director Werner Herzog: ‘I Am Clinically Sane.’” Spiegel Online, February 12, 2010, sec. International. http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/ interview-with-director-werner-herzog-i-am-clinically-sane-a-677631.html. Kellner, Douglas. 2004. Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime. Stuart Allan and Barbie Zelizer (eds). Psychology Press. Koepnick, Lutz. 2008. “The Sound of Ruins.” German Postwar Films: Life and Love in the Ruins. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. McQueen, Sean. 2016. Deleuze and Baudrillard: From Cyberpunk to Biopunk. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Metro. “Metro Ridership: As of 11am, 193k Trips Taken so Far Today. (11am 1/20/13 = 317k, 11am 1/20/09 = 513k, 11am 1/20/05 = 197k) #wmata.” Tweet. @wmata (blog), January 20, 2017. https://twitter.com/wmata/status/822482330346487810?ref_src= twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E822482330346487810&

Fake News and Ecstatic Truths: Alternative Facts in Lessons of Darkness

133

ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Ffortune.com%2F2017%2F01%2F22%2Fdc-transit-statisticsinauguration%2F. Russell, Bertrand. n.d. The Problems of Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spinks, Lee. 2005. “Nietzsche Friedrich (1844-1900).” The Deleuze Dictionary. Adrian Parr (ed). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. “Werner Herzog Makes Trump-Era Addition to His Minnesota Declaration.” Accessed November 25, 2018. https://walkerart.org/magazine/werner-herzogminnesota-declaration-2017-addendum. “Werner Herzog Reads His Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema.” Accessed November 25, 2018. https://walkerart.org/magazine/minnesotadeclaration-truth-documentary-cinema.

EIGHT The Great Ecstasy of Werner Herzog: Truth, Heidegger, Apocalypse Ian Alexander Moore

οὐ γὰρ εἰς πειθὼ τοὺς ἀκροωμένους ἀλλ᾽ εἰς ἔκστασιν ἄγει τὰ ὑπερφυᾶ. The extraordinary does not persuade the audience—it makes them ecstatic. (Pseudo-)Longinus

For decades now, the German filmmaker Werner Herzog has been promoting the idea of ‘ecstatic truth’ as opposed to ‘cinéma vérité’ or to what he mockingly calls ‘the truth of accountants.’ For Herzog, ultimate truth lies deeper than what we can represent objectively or propound propositionally. It lies deeper than the realm of facts and the world of everything that is the case. Truth in its deepest sense is illumination, revelation, an unveiling of what ordinarily lies hidden or even, paradoxically, a disclosure of what must remain hidden as such. As Herzog puts it, drawing tacitly on the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s interpretation of the Greek word for truth: A-lētheia is [ . . . ] a form of negation, a negative definition: it is the notconcealed [das nicht Verborgene], the manifest, the truth. In the linguistic way of thinking of the Greeks, it thus signifies an act of unveiling. This is related to the cinema, where an object is set into the light and then a latent, not yet visible image is conjured onto celluloid, where it first must be developed, then unveiled. 1

Far from merely reproducing the visible, however, Herzog makes and moves images to disclose the invisible, to reveal truths that are literally ecstatic, standing out beyond what is otherwise accessible. (Compare here the Greek ἔκστασις, from ἱστάναι, ‘to make to stand,’ and ἐκ, ‘out.’) Yet 135

136

Chapter 8

this revelation cannot occur unless we, as viewers, are transported beyond the everyday realm. We too must stand outside of ourselves. Herzog aims to make us ecstatic. In what follows I will first analyze portions of Herzog’s rare programmatic speech “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth” (§1). I will then show how Heidegger’s own understanding of truth, especially as it relates to works of art, prefigures and illuminates many of Herzog’s ideas (§2). Next I will turn to several scenes in Herzog’s films to show how he puts his theory to work. I will first discuss the ethereal ski-jumps in Herzog’s early documentary The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (from 1974) (§3). Then I will examine his use of Richard Wagner’s music at the beginning of Lessons of Darkness (from 1992) and Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World (from 2016) (§4). I will conclude with a few words on the significance of ecstatic truth in our purportedly ‘post-truth age’ (§5). 1. HERZOG ON ECSTATIC TRUTH On June 3, 2007, following a screening of his 1992 film Lessons of Darkness before a Milanese audience, Herzog delivered a mostly improvised speech with the title “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth.” It was, he relates, the first time he “sought to settle” such matters theoretically, rather than just enact them practically in his films. 2 The epigraph for the speech, which is the same as the one Herzog uses for Lessons of Darkness, should give us an initial sense for what Herzog means by sublimity and ecstatic truth. (The long-vexed concept of the Absolute he leaves for others to develop.) The epigraph reads: “The collapse of the stellar universe will occur—like creation—in grandiose splendor. / — Blaise Pascal.” Now, while rather Pascalian in spirit, the quote is, in fact, a fabrication. Read every word of Pascal’s corpus and you will not find it. Herzog notes this in his speech, even admits it in advance. But it is of little concern to him. For such an objection would touch only the truth of literary scholars. It says nothing about the power and function of the quote within the context of a film devoted to displaying the desolation of the Gulf War. How to capture that war? How to carry your audience from their cozy living rooms and comfortable theaters into the devastation it wrought? Not, Herzog explains, by the mind-numbing repetition of eight-second clips bookended by bourgeois news commentary. 3 What we need, rather, is a series of images that become seared on our psyches—nay, burned into our very being. We must see that there is more to war than body counts and monetized property loss (which, incidentally, have done little so far to prevent war’s recurrence). We must see that there is something spectacular, something sublime about the effects of war (which, inciden-

The Great Ecstasy of Werner Herzog: Truth, Heidegger, Apocalypse

137

tally, is not the same as promoting it). Only, here, the experience of dynamic sublimity does not elevate us rationally, as was the case for Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgment. Here, it casts us out of our commonplace complacency into the monstrous indifference of the cosmos and the monstrous indifference that human beings are capable of. Herzog is our contemporary Virgil, guiding us through the gates of Hell. As the Inferno sublimates horror to save our souls, Lessons of Darkness stylizes the aftermath of the Gulf War to show its truth and the truth of all war, and perhaps, to thereby provoke us save our planet before all of it resembles the burning oil fields of Kuwait. Herzog uses various devices to convey the import of this truth, or better to convey us to its otherwise hidden domain. He takes a single, eleven-minute shot of the otherworldly world aflame. He films firemen mysteriously reigniting an oil plume, and in the voiceover chalks it up to madness rather than the sensible decision to burn the oil before it joins other nearby fires. Herzog uses music from the requiem Mass to commemorate the loss of the oncelivable earth. And he finds himself compelled to “reinvent Pascal, as it were.” 4 Herzog’s pseudo-Pascalian epigraph does indeed prepare us for grandeur. What we are about to witness is no ordinary occurrence. It is “an event of cosmic dimensions, a crime against creation itself.” 5 It is, in short, an apocalypse. (Note that, by ‘apocalypse,’ I mean not just destruction, but, literally, ἀπο-καλύπτειν, ‘un-convering’ or ‘re-velation,’ hence a synonym of Greek ἀ-λήθεια, truth as ‘un-concealment.’ As Wycliff’s Bible renders a passage from First Corinthians, “ech of ȝou hath a salm, he hath techinge, he hath apocalips or reuelacioun” [14:26]). In Herzog’s words, With this epigraph I elevate [heben] the spectator, before he has even seen the first frame, to a high level, from which to enter the film. And I, as the author of the film, do not let him descend from this height until it is over. Only in this state of sublimity [Erhabenheit] does something like a deeper truth or illumination become possible, one that is rather inimical to the factual. Ecstatic truth, I call it. 6

The problem, however, is that the epigraph seems merely instrumental. I get the feeling that Herzog concocted it for shortness of time. He does, after all, admit that he used it “not from theoretical, but rather from practical, considerations.” 7 But if other quotes from other authors could have done just as well (even if, as Herzog remarks cheekily, “Pascal himself could not have said it better” 8), then ecstatic truth would seem to be less about the content, history, and empirical verifiability of what is said than about the quote’s pragmatic effect on the audience. In the spirit of William James, truth would be whatever works best. This is, no doubt, one aspect of what Herzog means by ecstatic truth. But we should not thereby rule out any inherent connection between

138

Chapter 8

what we can say factually about a statement and that statement’s ecstatic service. As Herzog acknowledges, “Sometimes facts so exceed our expectations—have such an unusual, bizarre power—that their inherent approximation to the truth seems unbelievable.” 9 At any rate, there is more to ecstatic truth than the justification of factual dissimulation: “The cinema [ . . . ] can register very different, much deeper layers of truth, and that’s what we have to work on.” 10 Herzog accordingly has little interest in traditional accounts of truth. This is due in no small part to his lack of interest in reality itself: “What moves me has never been reality, but a question that lies behind it.” Take, for example, Thomas Aquinas’s well-known correspondence theory: veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus, “truth is the adequation of thing and intellect,” or, more loosely, “truth occurs when mind matches reality (or reality matches mind).” 11 When I say ‘my copy of Conquest of the Useless is lying on the table,’ you, English reader, should have no trouble understanding these words. But at this point there is no truth or falsity. What you still need to do is look and see whether my book is actually lying on the table. If it is, then your intellectual apprehension of my claim has lined up with the way things are; the mental statement is true. If not, there is a disconnect between thought and reality, and the statement is false. Herzog, in contrast, is after “a deeper stratum of truth—a poetic, ecstatic truth, which is mysterious and can only be grasped with effort; one attains it through imagination, stylization, and craft.” 12 Truth, for him, is not—or at least not primarily 13—what happens when I “say, of what is, that it is, and of what is not, that it is not” (to cite Aristotle’s definition from the Metaphysics). 14 Nor is it accessible by “pure rationality” or within “the confines of [ . . . the] human essence.” 15 Indeed, if truth exceeds reality, if it is sur-real, and if it is not an object we encounter nor an occurrence within the world but a revelation about the world that occurs to us—then perhaps we shouldn’t even say ‘truth is.’ In any case, if we are to describe ecstatic truth, rather than just to facilitate it through film, we require another language, another grammar, and another philosophy, something different from Aristotle’s bequest and much of the Western metaphysical tradition more broadly. 16 Unfortunately, Herzog does not provide much of an account of ecstatic truth beyond what I have already discussed. His concerns are predominantly practical and experimental, even if he is guided by profound philosophical insight. We will have occasion to examine his filmic enactment of truth in the third and fourth sections of this paper. For now, let us turn to a philosopher who spent much of his life reflecting on the essence of truth. Although Herzog is cagey about his philosophical influences, 17 and ostensibly baffled by Heidegger’s abstractions, 18 Heidegger’s work can nevertheless help to shed light on Herzog’s own project. I should note that I am not especially interested in proving influence here (al-

The Great Ecstasy of Werner Herzog: Truth, Heidegger, Apocalypse

139

though I find it hard to conceive of another source for Herzog’s etymological derivation of ἀλήθεια, ‘truth,’ from ἀ-λήθη, ‘un-forgetfullness’ or ‘un-concealedness’). 19 What matters is the idea of ecstatic truth and whether it transports us. 2. HEIDEGGER ON TRUTH AND ART Before we delve into Heidegger’s account, you should know that he also uses fabrication to prepare his audience for ecstasy. Take the following example, in which he addresses his readers directly: When you attempt to think, heed beforehand and incessantly the state of affairs which the following word ventures to name: ἐν τῇ ἀρχῇ ἦν καὶ μένει ἡ Λήθη – τῆς Ἀ-ληθείης πηγή “In the beginning concealment (the sheltering) was and remains the source of unconcealment.” Wenn ihr versucht, zu denken, achtet zuvor und unablässig den Sachverhalt, den das folgende Wort zu nennen wagt: ἐν τῇ ἀρχῇ ἦν καὶ μένει ἡ Λήθη – τῆς Ἀ-ληθείης πηγή “Im Anfang war und bleibt die Verbergung (die bergende) der Unverborgenheit die Quelle.” 20

It might seem, at first blush, that Heidegger is citing one of the classics of Greek antiquity here. He does, after all, tend to introduce gnomic sayings of other authors with the singular ‘word’ (compare the English expressions ‘word of mouth,’ ‘in a word,’ and ‘word to the wise’), and Heidegger’s italics (underlining originally) might suggest quotation. However, the opening words of the Greek, together with the very word ‘word,’ should remind us of one of the most famous lines in the New Testament, especially if we retain the original syntax in translation: Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, Im Anfang war das Wort, “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1). Heidegger not only attunes his readers to the key of Greek wisdom here. He sets his claim to Biblical orchestration. Millennia of commentary on the opening of John’s gospel resound in Heidegger’s pseudo-quotation. “Surely,” as Yeats once put it, “some revelation is at hand.” In comparison to John, Blaise Pascal is a child. Werner Herzog would be proud. But what exactly is Heidegger’s quote saying about truth, or, perhaps more fittingly, revealing about revelation? 21 Let’s return to our earlier example from Aquinas and assume for the moment that truth is nothing other than the correspondence between a statement and its object. In order for the statement ‘my copy of Conquest of the Useless is lying on the table’ to be true, the book must reveal itself as I have described it, namely as lying on the table. My statement, in turn, must let the book be seen in the way it shows itself, in its revelation as so lying. The claim brings the book’s own self-showing to the fore. Before a statement can match a thing, then, the thing must uncover itself and the statement must discover the thing in the way it uncovers itself. Hence before there is adequation

140

Chapter 8

there must be discovering and uncovering, or in short ἀ-λήθεια, truth as un-concealment. The correspondence theory of truth is derivative. Yet even the excavation of this layer of un-concealment does not reach truth’s foundation. We must dig deeper and ask how beings can be discovered at all. Earlier in his career, in Being and Time, for example, Heidegger replies in a transcendentalist vein: We project the space in which beings can show up for us. We are the source of truth, or rather we are like Jesus: We are the truth (John 14:16), inasmuch as we disclose the Being of beings, both what they mean and what they can be. Accordingly, to the extent that we are the condition for this possibility, always already climbing beyond beings toward their Being, we can call Heidegger’s early understanding of truth transcendental. To the extent that we stand out from all the things we encounter within the world, we can call Heidegger’s early understanding ecstatic. Truth, at bottom, is transcendental ecstasy, which in turn serves as the source for all other conceptions. Thus, on Heidegger’s early account, there is no truth without the transcendentally ecstatic human being. Herzog would presumably balk at such manifest subjectivism, despite the ecstatic strains of Heidegger’s doctrine, and despite, as we will see, their resonance with some of Herzog’s own work. Unlike Heidegger, Herzog has no trouble with acknowledging a world devoid of people, as we can witness especially in recent films such as Encounters at the End of the World (2007), Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), and Into the Inferno (2017). For the director, “one thing is clear: we are only fugitives on our planet.” 22 Heidegger’s later conception, however, for example in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” will be more congenial, even if he still hesitates to imagine a time before or after human beings. With the notion of transcendental ecstasy, we only seemed to be at the basis of truth; in actuality we are caught up in a more abyssal event of truth that far exceeds our own projective powers. Indeed, such an event is what first empowers us to act at all. This, the profoundest of all truths, not only opens up the world of beings; it does so by taking a stand in and with respect to particular beings. Truth, in other words, sets itself to work in various ways: in the activity of state-founding, for example, in the institution of religion, or— and this is most relevant to our concerns here—in the work of art. Genuine works of art are sites of truth’s occurrence. Here I cannot fully develop Heidegger’s complex account of the origin of the work of art. Suffice it to say that, whenever truth sets itself to work in an artwork, there are always two elements at work. There is the ‘world’ of the work, which is the domain of meaning, of manifestness, of the constitution and revelation of everyday relations. But there is also the ‘earth,’ which is the domain of withdrawal, of mystery, of insuperable hiddenness at the heart of things. Originally, these two domains are not incompatible; the presence of one does not extinguish that of the other.

The Great Ecstasy of Werner Herzog: Truth, Heidegger, Apocalypse

141

They are, to be sure, in strife. But this is the strife of Heraclitus, where tension defines all things, like the bow and the cithara. In terms of truth, what we have in the work of art is an un-concealment (ἀ-λήθεια), i.e., the world, which does not leave behind concealment (λήθη), i.e., the earth, but sees the earth as proper to the world’s very essence. To recall Heidegger’s words from the beginning of this section, “In the beginning concealment (the sheltering) was and remains the source of unconcealment.” When we bear all this in mind—when we preserve the work as such and stand within the truth it manifests—we undergo nothing less than ecstasy, in the literal sense of the word. What occurs is nothing less than, as Heidegger puts it, “the ecstatic releasement [ekstatische Sicheinlassen] of the existing human into the unconcealment of Being.” 23 Typically, however, we fall prey to the norms and customs of our society, becoming blind to our original openness and the revelatory character of truth. But it is not so easy to gain back our sight. For, the Western metaphysical tradition, ranging from Plato all the way to Nietzsche, has (predominately) forgotten the ‘aletheic’ truth of Being in favor of correspondence. According to Heidegger’s diagnosis, it suffers from Seinsvergessenheit, or an ‘oblivion of Being.’ (In passing, I might note that, on the surface, this claim is patently absurd. Ontology has been an indispensable field of philosophy ever since antiquity, and what is ontology if not a wakeful analysis of Being? If, however, we recall that philosophers have long conceived of Being as substantive presence, and not as an event of ἀλήθεια, then Heidegger’s claim begins to gain purchase. It reveals a truth that transcends the factual. It is, in Herzog’s vocabulary, ecstatic.) Yet, despite Heidegger’s interventions, we face an even greater threat today by the reign of planetary information and communications technology, which aspires to have all knowledge digitally stockpiled and ready for immediate transmission and unambiguous translation. The benefits of such technology are immeasurable. As an ideology, though, it threatens not just the oblivion of ἀ-λήθεια, but the oblivion of its metaphysical oblivion, the loss of even a trace of ecstatic truth. Like Jorge Luis Borges’s library of Babel, or, even worse, Willard Quine’s reduction of it to binary notation, every truth worth knowing—and indeed every truth besides—is or will be contained in the cloud, fully expressible in ones and zeros. This, here, is the Morse code of Being, the smart-phone-book of all possible truth, accounting run riot. Herzog’s work, like Heidegger’s before him, is nothing if not the relentless attempt to prove something more than this, some truth beyond informatics and mundane facts. In order to appreciate how he does so, let us turn to a few examples from his films.

142

Chapter 8

3. TRUTH AS THE TIME OF ECSTASY In a 1982 interview with the German magazine Filmfaust, Herzog recapitulates his theory of ecstatic truth, and then adduces his film The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner as a seeming counterexample: “There of course I filmed a very normal or ordinary event, which I didn’t influence: namely, a ski jump competition.” And yet, despite this, “it’s not cinéma vérité. There are stylized elements.” 24 Herzog’s forty-seven-minute film about ski-flying is, in other words, no run-of-the-mill sports documentary. Or it is not only that, as we do in fact see some of the typical features of the genre: a sequential narrative, for instance, about the struggles and record-breaking success of Swiss ski-flier Walter Steiner during the 1974 competition in Planica, Yugoslavia. We also see Herzog, in the guise of an enthusiastic on-the-grounds commentator looking directly at the camera with mic in hand, reporting on the events in real time and vying with the crowds for on-the-spot interviews with his subject. This would do little to justify the film’s title, though, much less tell us anything about the man. The great ecstasy of woodcarver Steiner? Hardly. Fortunately, there is more to the film than sensationalist, data-driven reportage (although we find plenty of this, too: “the greatest ski-flyer there ever was,” “flew ten meters more than the current world-record,” “head struck the ground at 140 kilometers per hour,” etc.). 25 We also witness scenes of Steiner alone, solitary against the motionless alpine landscape, or explaining the approach of his craft—and here I mean not merely his jumping techniques, which we learn very little about, or the way he waxes his skis: I mean his ostensibly unrelated work as a woodcarver. In the second scene of the film, Steiner is holding a small wooden figurine of what looks like a dancer. He spins it slowly, inspecting it up and down, perhaps with some degree of admiration. We then see the image of a woman’s face, carved from a log, before cutting to Steiner hewing away pieces of a tree trunk with chisel and hammer. There is a large concavity at the base of the trunk that Steiner is planning to carve into a bowel. He explains, almost caressing the wood, that it is as though an explosion had happened in the trunk there, but one whose energy and tension had not yet been released. It will presumably fall to Steiner’s craft to free these forces and reveal the hidden image beneath. This description can serve as an analogy to Herzog’s own project in the film (to say nothing, for the moment, of serving as an analogy to Steiner’s ski-flying). As Steiner the woodcarver (or, more literally, imagecarver or Bild-schnitzer) chisels away at the wood to draw out the figure from within, so Herzog cuts through the fabric of the factual to disclose the ecstatic truth that underlies it. The director does so by, among other things, harnessing images that capture our deepest longings and deepest modes of being, and by connecting these images to the primeval power of

The Great Ecstasy of Werner Herzog: Truth, Heidegger, Apocalypse

143

storytelling. 26 We can see this in the sublime, slow-motion shots of Steiner’s jumps and in the tale that situates them. Fairly early on in The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, Herzog qua reporter explains that the film took its point of departure from the marker at which the slope levels out; the point, in other words, at which ‘landing’ would be like jumping off a building onto a flat surface hundreds of feet below. This is, Herzog says, the “limit at which ski-flying begins to become inhuman.” Herzog goes on to track and film the dangers Steiner faces as a ski-flyer—a ski-flyer who is, in effect, too good for the ramp available to him. The cinéaste records Steiner’s reservations about the situation and his outrage at the irresponsibility of the organizers and the greediness of the crowd, who want to see a world-record despite, or rather because of, Steiner’s dance with death. But their inhumanity is not the same as Steiner’s. What Herzog is alluding to with his comment about the limit at which ski-flying begins to become inhuman is not just danger to the physical body, but the opportunity to be more than we usually are or realize. In such moments we “step outside all we are as human beings, and become like the medieval mystics [ . . . ], experiencing faith and truth in an ecstatic, visionary form.” 27 Herzog proceeds to show how this desire for transcendence animates Steiner’s activity. A couple scenes later, we see Steiner, alone again, his head down. We hear a recording of his voice narrating his childhood dreams of flying as though in slow motion. At the end of the documentary, after Steiner is caught smiling on the first-place podium, we hear his voice again, beginning to tell a story about once caring for a raven. We cut to Steiner, by himself yet again, looking down, as he continues his story. As a child he nursed an unfledged chick until it could fly, at which point he presumably released it into the wild. However, the raven would not completely leave his side. It would follow him home on his bicycle and wait for Steiner to feed it. Perhaps owing to the food he gave it, the bird kept losing more and more feathers. Eventually the other ravens tormented Steiner’s pet to the point where he could no longer bear to see it, so Steiner shot his raven. Finally, we cut to an extreme slow-motion clip of Steiner in flight. Several seconds after he lands, a text appears on top of the moving image of him slowing down. The text comes from Robert Walser’s 1914 short story “Helblings Geschichte,” which Herzog neither notes nor cites accurately. 28 The filmmaker replaces the name of the eponymous narrator Helbling with Steiner, making it seem as though Steiner had himself spoken these words. I should be all alone in this world, I, Steiner, and no other living being. No sun, no culture, I naked on a high rock, no storm, no snow, no streets, no banks, no money, no time and no breath. Then I wouldn’t be afraid any more. 29

144

Chapter 8

Whatever the import of this alteration may be, the quote finely captures the ecstatic aspirations of Steiner the ski-flier, who is willing to risk everything to attain something that, in Herzog’s words, “is more significant than the individual.” 30 By using slow-motion, Herzog shows how there is a part of us that seems to stand suspended, outside time, if only for brief moments or in the twinkling of an eye. He shows us that Steiner was able to realize his dreams, becoming, for a while, like the healthy raven he had only been able to imagine; becoming, for a while, other than he was. Or perhaps it is as Heidegger presents it: We are always already outside ourselves; we just, for the most part, fail to acknowledge this. Steiner then would be showing us that we are more than bare life. We stand out from everything this world has to offer, we ek-sist. This is the truth of human existence. And Herzog, for his part, is the one to capture it. 4. TRUTH AS THE EVENT OF APOCALYPSE If The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner presents a transcendental truth about the human being’s inner existential ecstasy, other films in Herzog’s oeuvre disclose events of truth with epochal implications. One way in which this occurs is through the use of highly charged classical music. In this section I will examine the apocalyptic role that the Prelude from Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold plays at the start of two of Herzog’s films: the already discussed Lessons of Darkness (1992), and the more recent documentary about the Internet, Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World (2016). 31 Although the score is the same, the revelation at hand is in each case different. On one side, we have the twilight of the inhabitable earth; on the other, the dawn of a new technocratic age. Both, nevertheless, mark historical shifts whose ultimate significance we can only imagine. In §1, we saw that Herzog fabricated a quote from Pascal in order to elevate the audience, prepare them for revelation, and make it such that “they are instantaneously immersed in the cosmic.” 32 (“The collapse of the stellar universe will occur—like creation—in grandiose splendor.”) But it is not only the quote that has cosmic import. Even before its words appear on the screen, we hear eight double basses droning subdued octave E♭s. Four measures later bassoons enter on the fifth, and eventually, one by one, eight French horns come in, playing and repeating Das Rheingold’s first leitmotif: an arpeggiated E♭ major chord, starting on the tonic and continuing up the overtone series to the fifth (B♭), the octave (E♭), and the third (G) (figure 8.1). Within the context of the opera and the tetralogy of Der Ring des Nibelungen as a whole (of which Das Rheingold is the first part), this music represents primordial, pristine nature, moving cyclically like waves lap-

The Great Ecstasy of Werner Herzog: Truth, Heidegger, Apocalypse

145

Figure 8.1. Figure 8.1. Primordial nature as leitmotif (arpeggiated E♭ ♭ major chord). From Das Rheingold.

ping against a shore. From the music alone, we would expect to go on to hear the pentatonic motif of Rhine waves (figure 8.2), which marks the rousing of consciousness; we would next expect to hear Flosshilde’s premonition of a rape of the Rhine gold and thus a violation of nature as such (figure 8.3), which resounds darkly in C minor (the relative of E♭ major) and contains the Rhine maidens’ first half step (previously they had been singing anhemitonic pentatonic scales); we would expect, finally, to hear the dissonance of the thief Alberich’s music and the roiling of Rhine waves (see figure 8.4 for the latter). We would, in other words, expect to hear the complexity and creative chromaticism that break the natural order of the E♭ major chord and drive the drama. Instead, as the initial chord is still resounding, we are confronted with “a planet in our solar system” that looks more like Mars than Mother Earth. We see a fireman against a backdrop of flames signaling with three slices of hand against throat to cut off the apparently useless water hose that has been spraying into the fire. (Meanwhile, we hear Herzog’s voice over the music providing less a clarification than another layer of obfuscation: “The first creature we encountered tried to communicate with us.”) Then, as if on cue, the music stops. The music of the Prelude in the film thus suggests not so much the beginning of cosmic development as its end: the long return to nature after the crime humanity has committed against it—after the crime, perhaps, of humanity as such. It is like the final conflagration of the fourth opera in Wagner’s tetralogy, Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods), whose music will later ring out in the film with words superimposed from the Revelation of John. 33 Only, in Lessons of Darkness, it is not just the gods who burn up. All life passes through the fire of purification, and humans, too, are found wanting. Herzog does film people working heroically and at great risk to put out the flames. But he also envisions—and stages—a deeper truth in the film. The penultimate chapter, titled “Life without Fire,” begins with the sound of oil gushing from the earth. Herzog narrates what we see, as though just coming on the scene himself: “Two figures are approaching an oil well. One of them holds a lighted torch. What are they up to?” As one of them flings the torch toward the plume (see figure 8.5), Herzog asks, “Are they going to rekindle the blaze?” One second later, the geyser

146

Chapter 8

Figure 8.2. Figure 8.2: The waves of the Rhine (first five notes of the E♭ ♭ major scale). From Das Rheingold.

of petroleum ignites, like some perverse Pillar of Fire with no People to guide. The two figures turn away from it and walk off camera. Meanwhile, Herzog muses, “Has life without fire become unbearable for them?” We then cut to another scene, where a group of five men, clad in red and “seized by madness, follow suit.” Finally we cut to a close-up of a firefighter (or pyromaniacal doppelgänger?) with a cigarette between his lips and a grin on his face, and pan right to see a second one, also smoking, who nods in satisfaction. Over this scene, we hear Herzog’s voice explaining, “Now they are content, now there is something to extinguish again.” At this point the accountants would scoff. This isn’t at all what’s going on, they’d say, the firemen are just doing their jobs, and quite well at that. Sometimes, to prevent fuel sources from making contact, it becomes necessary to burn one of them up, to fight fire with fire, as those engaged in the profession the world over will tell you. But, we should ask in reply, is Herzog really presenting his interpretation as fact? Or isn’t it obvious that he is concocting an absurdity to reveal something more significant? What Herzog is trying to convey is the madness of our race: our desire to build only so as to be able to destroy, to destroy only so as to be able to build. Statistics alone cannot capture this passion (no doubt one reason Herzog gives us so little historical background in the film). It runs deeper than who did what, when, and where. It runs deeper than particular misdeeds. It even runs deeper than biology. Given our current capabilities, the Gulf War will be but a shadow of what is to come, unless, that is, we learn from Herzog’s lessons of darkness. We need not, as yet, echo the words of the Psalmist and the Evangelist: “I am so weary of sighing; O Lord, grant that the night commeth” (as the final chapter of the film is titled). 34 We need not, as yet, sing along with the whole stanza from the fourth movement of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony, which we hear near the film’s ending: O little red rose! Man lies in greatest need! Man lies in greatest pain! I would indeed rather be in heaven! O Röschen roth! Der Mensch liegt in größter Noth!

The Great Ecstasy of Werner Herzog: Truth, Heidegger, Apocalypse

147

Figure 8.3. Figure 8.3: Flosshilde’s warning (in C minor). From Das Rheingold.

Der Mensch liegt in größter Pein! Ja lieber möcht’ ich im Himmel seyn!

Even if the night cometh when all will be obliterated, it is still day, and there is work still to be done. Whereas Lessons of Darkness confronts us with a vision of cosmic holocaust, Lo and Behold confronts us with the advent of a technology whose global hegemony has only just begun. Our utter dependence on the Internet may lead to comparable catastrophe, but this is not the main thrust of Herzog’s project. Rather, he is investigating a medium that has done more to revolutionize the world for humans than nearly anything before it. The challenge Herzog faces as a chronicler is how to mark such a shift, especially when we still stand in its midst. By now we can expect that the solution will not lie in the presentation of a mere litany of facts (although we occasionally get figures whose scope compels a sort of mathematical sublime: “Today if you would burn CDs of the worldwide data flow for one single day and stack them up to a pile, this pile would reach up to Mars and back”). Yet we may need some other form of litany, as the film’s opening chapter suggests. Such a litany would perhaps be of the order of Wagner’s Bühnenweihfestspiel, where the stage, or in this case the scene being filmed, is consecrated by the festive performance of a Gesamtkunstwerk, a ‘total work of art.’ In any event, Herzog does begin his film with Wagner, and there is much talk of sacredness. 35 As was the case in Lessons of Darkness, Lo and Behold starts with the familiar E♭s of the double basses from Das Rheingold. But the music continues far beyond what the filmmaker allowed in his earlier documentary. We do not quite get the dissonance of the opera’s first scene, but we do eventually hear the roiling of the Rhine and the brewing of something momentous. In the meantime, Herzog takes his viewers to the campus of the University of California at Los Angeles, where a “shrine” has been constructed to commemorate the 1969 birth of the Internet. We see a

148

Chapter 8

Figure 8.4. Figure 8.4: The waves made turbulent (arpeggiated E natural diminished seventh). From Das Rheingold.

man (computer scientist Leonard Kleinrock) coming toward us through a pastel-painted, fluorescent-lighted corridor. As the man approaches, he gestures to the side, inviting us to “enter this very special place.” We follow him through a door that opens onto a similarly styled room, while he explains, “We are now entering a sacred location. It’s the location where the internet began. It’s a holy place.” He goes on to describe one of the computers that made it all happen, and then recounts the story of the Internet’s first message. The system was meant to transmit the word ‘login’ to Stanford, but—lo and behold—only ‘lo’ came out before it crashed. A fortuitous incident, to be sure, but in its Biblical and prophetic power, this inaugural message stands on par with some of the greatest of history, such as Samuel Morse’s first telegraph, “What hath God wrought.” Kleinrock, for his part, compares this first message of the Internet with what the lookout on Columbus’s ship must have recorded when spotting the New World. “That document and this document,” he declares, “have at least the same equivalent importance.” In 1492, no one could foresee the ultimate implications of Columbus’s voyage. In 1969, in 2016, in the current moment, no one can foresee the ultimate implications of the Internet. Whether it will prove to be “the spirit of evil” (as one of Herzog’s interviewees later claims in the film), or the panacea for all our ills, is still far from clear. What is clear is that this is an event of epoch-making proportions, and we would do well to meditate on it if we are to survive, and indeed not just to survive: if we are to exist as beings capable of ecstasy and truth. The opening chapter of Herzog’s documentary promotes such meditation. His use of Wagner gives warning to those with ears to hear, even as it signals the promise of a new frontier. 5. ECSTATIC TRUTH OR POST-TRUTH? A VERY BRIEF RESPONSE, IN CONCLUSION From early in his career to the present day, Herzog’s cinematic work has aimed at revelation rather than record keeping, rapture rather than reproduction, truth rather than fact. This might make him vulnerable to the charge of relativism, or worse yet, ‘post-truthism,’ especially in light of

The Great Ecstasy of Werner Herzog: Truth, Heidegger, Apocalypse

149

Figure 8.5. Figure 8.5 Lessons of Darkness. Screen capture by author.

the company the director tends to keep: Wagner, always, but also, as I have tried to argue, Heidegger, even if I cannot prove this ‘factually.’ But ecstatic truth is not about abandoning facts, which, Herzog never tires of saying, have their normative and necessary force. Nor is it about manipulating facts for self-serving deception. As Herzog recently put it in the wake of ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake news,’ “The argument of rearranging facts constituting a lie points only to shallow thinking and the fetish of self-reference.” 36 Rather, ecstatic truth is about disclosing a domain that exceeds and makes possible everything propositional. Manipulation is permissible only when it serves this transcendental purpose. ENDNOTES 1. Werner Herzog, “Vom Absoluten, dem Erhabenen und ekstatischer Wahrheit,” speech delivered in Milan, Italy on June 3, 2007, https://www.wernerherzog.com/ complete-works-text.html; “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth,” trans. Moira Weigel, Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 17, no. 3 (Winter 2010): 11 (trans. mod.). 2. Ibid., 2. 3. Werner Herzog, A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin (London: Faber & Faber, 2014), 293-294. 4. Eric Ames, ed., Werner Herzog: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 113. See also ibid., 110; and Herzog, A Guide for the Perplexed, 297. 5. Herzog, “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth,” 2. 6. Ibid., 1 (trans. mod.). 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 9 (trans. mod.). 10. Ames, ed., Werner Herzog: Interviews, 114.

150

Chapter 8

11. De veritate, Article 1, Question 1; Summa theologiae, First Part, Question 16, Articles 1 and 2. 12. Herzog, “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth,” 9 (trans. mod.). 13. Herzog, like Heidegger, does not use the word ‘truth’ consistently. Sometimes he reserves it solely for the deeper layer of Being which only ecstasy can reach; in such instances he contrasts truth with claims pertaining to the realm of facts. Sometimes, however, he uses truth as a general term with different, often layered specifications, such as ‘superficial’ or ‘shallow’ (which he links with the ‘factual’) and ‘deep’ (which he links with the ‘ecstatic’). 14. Metaphysics, 1011b25. 15. Herzog, A Guide for the Perplexed, 288. 16. Cf. Ames, ed., Werner Herzog: Interviews, 137. 17. “Werner Herzog in Conversation with Paul Holdengräber. Was the 20th Century a Mistake?,” February 16, 2007, Celeste Bartos Forum, New York Public Library (transcript available at: https://www.nypl.org/sites/default/files/events/herzog021607. pdf). 18. Herzog, A Guide for the Perplexed, 177. 19. A similar etymology does, admittedly, appear in the Byzantine Greek-language lexicon Etymologicon magnum seu magnum grammaticae penu, ed. Friderici Sylburgii, editio nova correctior (Lipsiae apud Io. Aug. Gottl. Weigel, 1816), s.v. Ἀληθὲς, but its prominence (or notoriety) is due to Heidegger. Another striking parallel is Herzog’s 1974 text on photos of Jean Renoir, titled “Warum ist überhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr Nichts?” (Why are there beings and not rather Nothing?), KINO 12 (MarchApril 1974): 21-28. Here Herzog’s German is identical to Heidegger’s own idiosyncratic rendering of the question as initially posed by Leibniz in French: “Pourquoy il y a plustôt quelque chose que rien?” What makes it distinctive is the capitalization and hence nominalization of the indefinite pronoun ‘nothing’ (nichts, rien). For Heidegger’s translation see “Was ist Metaphysik?,” in Wegmarken, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1976): 122 et passim. For Leibniz see “Principes de la Nature et de la Grace, fondés en raison,” §7, in Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ed. C. I. Gerhardt, vol. 6 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1885), p. 602. Richard Eldridge also notes and briefly builds on the connection between Herzog’s and Heidegger’s etymologies. See Werner Herzog: Filmmaker and Philosopher (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 17-21. Brad Prager uses the Renoir text to draw a contrast between Heidegger and Herzog: whereas, for Heidegger, Leibniz’s question provides an opening for thought, for Herzog, it “serves a reminder of the universe’s indifference.” See The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (London: Wallflower, 2011), 13. 20. Martin Heidegger, Auszüge zur Phänomenologie aus dem Manuskript “Vermächtnis der Seinsfrage” (Jahresgabe der Martin-Heidegger-Gesellschaft 2011-2012), 94. 21. In what follows I draw from Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, 19th ed. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993), §44; Einleitung in die Philosophie, ed. Otto Saame and Ina SaameSpeidel, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2001), §§21 and 28; “Vom Wesen der Wahr heit,” in Wegmarken, 177-202; and “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” in Holzwege, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1977), 1-74. 22. “Tell Me about the Iceberg, Tell Me about Your Dreams,” Roger Ebert interviewing Werner Herzog, in Herzog by Ebert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 127. 23. Heidegger, “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 55. 24. Ames, ed., Werner Herzog: Interviews, 72-73. 25. For more on this contrast see Gregory A. Waller, “‘The Great Ecstasy of the Woodsculptor Steiner’: Herzog and the ‘Stylized’ Documentary,” Film Criticism 5, no. 1 (1980): 26-35. 26. Cf. Herzog, A Guide for the Perplexed, chapter 3. 27. Herzog, A Guide for the Perplexed, 117-118. 28. The larger context of the story doesn’t seem to fit either. See Robert Walser, Selected Stories, trans. Christopher Middleton and Others (New York: Vintage, 1983),

The Great Ecstasy of Werner Herzog: Truth, Heidegger, Apocalypse

151

32-43, and, for discussion, Brad Prager, “Werner Herzog’s Companions: The Consolation of Images,” in A Companion to Werner Herzog, ed. Brad Prager (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2012), 1-2. Heidegger, for his part, also takes passages out of context to suit his own philosophical ends. Compare, especially, his citation of Plato’s Phaedrus in “Was ist Metaphysik?” with the original (279a). In Heidegger, Wegmerken, 122. 29. I take the translation here from Herzog, A Guide for the Perplexed, 119. 30. Ames, ed., Werner Herzog: Interviews, 139. 31. Herzog also uses the Prelude later on in Lo and Behold (chapter 7, “Internet on Mars”), as well as in Nosferatu and in Wings of Hope. For Herzog’s “homeopathic” deployment of other music from Wagner (“Only the spear that cut the wound can also heal it”), see Lutz Koepnick, “The Sound of Ruins,” in German Postwar Films: Life and Love in the Ruins, ed. Wilfried Wilms and William Rasch (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 193-208 (esp. 201-207); for the use of Wagner more broadly in Herzog’s documentaries between 1976 and 2000, see Laurent Guido, “Dans les ‘abysses du temps.’ Echos wagnériens dans l’œuvre documentaire de Werner Herzog,” Décadrages 25 (2013): 37-59. See also Herzog’s 1994 documentary on the Bayreuth Festival, titled The Transformation of the World into Music, as well as his own operatic stagings of Lohengrin, The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, and Parsifal. For Herzog’s relation to opera more generally, see Lutz Koepnick, “Archetypes of Emotion: Werner Herzog and Opera,” in Prager, ed., A Companion to Werner Herzog, 149-67. 32. Herzog, A Guide for the Perplexed, 292. 33. The music comes from “Siegfried’s Funeral March” in Act III. The words are from the King James Version of Revelation 9:1-2 and 6. All of this takes place in the film’s seventh chapter, whose title also comes (with Herzog’s modifications) from the same book (9:2). Meanwhile we behold images of smoke and fire, lakes of glistening and burning oil, the charred earth. I might also note two other parallels, if only to highlight the film’s musico-apocalyptic continuity. Earlier in the film (chapter 3, “After the Battle”), Herzog plays the Prelude to Wagner’s final opera Parsifal. Two chapters later (“Satan’s National Park”), Herzog again quotes from the Book of Revelation (16:18-20), this time to Arvo Pärt’s contemporary setting of the Stabat Mater. 34. See Psalms 6:6 and John 9:4 in the Lutherbibel and the King James Version. Note that the title Lektionen in Finsternis (Lessons of Darkness) is a translation of Leçons de ténèbres, the French Baroque musical genre drawing on the Lamentations of Jeremiah for Tenebrae services. 35. This is not to deny other aspects of Herzog’s cinema, such as Brechtian alienation and satirical farce. See, for example, Incident at Loch Ness (2004). 36. “Werner Herzog Makes Trump-Era Addition to His Minnesota Declaration” (https://walkerart.org/magazine/werner-herzog-minnesota-declaration-2017-addendum).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Anonymous. 1816. Etymologicon magnum seu magnum grammaticae penu. Ed. Friderici Sylburgii, editio nova correctior. Lipsiae apud Io. Aug. Gottl. Weigel. Ames, Eric. 2014. Werner Herzog: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Aquinas, Thomas. S. Thomae de Aquino opera omnia. Available at: https:// www.corpusthomisticum.org/iopera.html. Aristotle. 1924. Metaphysics. Edited by W. D. Ross. Oxford: Clarendon Press,. Cronin, Paul. 2014. A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin. London: Faber & Faber. Eldridge, Richard. 2018. Werner Herzog: Filmmaker and Philosopher. London: Bloomsbury. Guido, Laurent. 2013. “Dans les ‘abysses du temps.’ Echos wagnériens dans l’œuvre documentaire de Werner Herzog.” Décadrages 25 (2013): 37-59.

152

Chapter 8

Heidegger, Martin. 2011-2012. Auszüge zur Phänomenologie aus dem Manuskript “Vermächtnis der Seinsfrage.” Jahresgabe der Martin-Heidegger-Gesellschaft. Heidegger, Martin.1977. “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes.” In Heidegger, Holzwege, edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 1-74. Frankfurt: Klostermann. Heidegger, Martin. 2001. Einleitung in die Philosophie. Edited by Otto Saame and Ina Saame-Speidel. 2nd ed. Frankfurt: Klostermann. Heidegger, Martin. 1993. Sein und Zeit. 19th ed. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993. Heidegger, Martin. 1976. “Was ist Metaphysik?” In Heidegger, Wegmarken, edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 103-122. Frankfurt: Klostermann. Heidegger, Martin. 1976b. “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit.” In Heidegger, Wegmarken, edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 177-202. Frankfurt: Klostermann. Herzog, Werner. 2007. “Vom Absoluten, dem Erhabenen und ekstatischer Wahrheit.” Speech delivered in Milan, Italy on June 3, 2007. Available at: https://www. wernerherzog.com/complete-works-text.html. Translated by Moira Weigel as “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth.” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 17, no. 3 (Winter 2010): 1-12. Herzog, Werner. 1974. “Warum ist überhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr Nichts?” KINO 12 (March-April 1974): 21-28. Herzog, Werner. 2017. “Werner Herzog Makes Trump-Era Addition to His Minnesota Declaration.” June 19, 2017. Available at: https://walkerart.org/magazine/wernerherzog-minnesota-declaration-2017-addendum. Herzog, Werner, and Roger Ebert. 2017. “Tell Me about the Iceberg, Tell Me about Your Dreams.” In Roger Ebert, Herzog by Ebert, 124-127. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Herzog, Werner, and Paul Holdengräber. 2007. “Werner Herzog in Conversation with Paul Holdengräber. Was the 20th Century a Mistake?” February 16, 2007. Celeste Bartos Forum, New York Public Library. Transcript available at https://www.nypl. org/sites/default/files/events/herzog021607.pdf. Koepnick, Lutz. 2012. “Archetypes of Emotion: Werner Herzog and Opera.” In A Companion to Werner Herzog, edited by Brad Prager, 149-67. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Koepnick, Lutz. 2008. “The Sound of Ruins.” German Postwar Films: Life and Love in the Ruins. Wilfried Wilms and William Rasch (eds). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1885. “Principes de la Nature et de la Grace, fondés en raison.” Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. C. I. Gerhardt (ed). Berlin: Weidmann. (Pseudo-)Longinus. 1853. ΠΕΡΙ ΥΨΟΥΣ. In Rhetores graeci, ed. Leonardi Spengel, vol. 1, pp. 243-296. Lipsiae, sumptibus et typis B. G. Teubneri. Prager, Brad. 2011. The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth. London: Wallflower. Prager, Brad. 2012. “Werner Herzog’s Companions: The Consolation of Images.” A Companion to Werner Herzog. Brad Prager (ed). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Scruton, Roger. 2017. The Ring of Truth: The Wisdom of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung. London: Penguin Books. Wagner, Richard. 1985. Das Rheingold. Full score. New York: Dover. Waller, Gregory A. 1980. “‘The Great Ecstasy of the Woodsculptor Steiner’: Herzog and the ‘Stylized’ Documentary,” Film Criticism 5, no. 1 (1980): 26-35. Walser, Robert. Selected Stories. Translated by Christopher Middleton and Others. New York: Vintage, 1983.

NINE The Film Artist as Discoverer of the Marvels of Everyday Life: a Kracauerian Reading of Werner Herzog Christopher Turner

In his preface to Theory of Film, Siegfried Kracauer describes the first time he saw a film, as a young boy. Dazzled by what he had just witnessed, he hurries home to record his experience in writing, titling his nascent account Film as the Discoverer of the Marvels of Everyday Life. More than a half century later, Kracauer writes that I remember, as if it were today, the marvels themselves. What thrilled me so deeply was an ordinary suburban street, filled with lights and shadows which transfigured it. Several trees stood about, and there was in the foreground a puddle reflecting invisible house façades and a piece of the sky. Then a breeze moved the shadows, and the façades with the sky below began to waver. The trembling upper world in the dirty puddle—this image has never left me. 1

While Kracauer is often thought of as an exponent of realism, 2 it is clear from his own words here that what initially intrigues him about film is how it transfigures the ordinary, turning a dirty puddle into a magic mirror whose image indelibly imprints itself on the young boy’s imagination and inspires a life-long fascination with the marvels discovered in and through film. Earlier in the preface, Kracauer summarizes his conception of the filmmaker as follows: “The film artist has traits of an imaginative reader, or an explorer prompted by insatiable curiosity.” 3 The filmmaker imaginatively transfigures ordinary reality and, driven by in153

154

Chapter 9

satiable curiosity, creates indelible images that transform our experience and understanding. In so doing, the filmmaker responds to a deep need that has increasingly come to characterize modernity: the need to overcome boredom. In an early text from the 1920s, Kracauer begins a meditation on boredom by noting that “People today who still have time for boredom and yet are not bored are certainly just as boring as those who never get around to being bored. For their self has vanished—the self whose presence, particularly in this so bustling world, would necessarily compel them to tarry for a while without a goal, neither here nor there.” 4 Two common approaches to boredom are here critically contrasted as failures to get around this problem: neither those with leisure who breathlessly pass their time moving from one exciting adventure or project to the next nor those too busy working to have time for boredom escape the fate of being boring. Busy-ness as a way to overcome boredom is itself entirely predictable, channeled in a variety of ways by popular culture and consumerism, and thus boring. The way beyond boredom requires that we tarry without a goal, neither entirely here (in the everyday world of facts and ordinary experience) nor there (lost in fantasy, in planning for the future, in dreams), but somewhere in-between, in the realm of images that transfigure how we see what is already around us but simultaneously out of sight. Cinema redeems an otherwise intolerably boring everyday life. Kracauer approvingly cites Gabriel Marcel’s dictum: “ . . . to me who has always had a propensity to get tired of what I have the habit of seeing—what in reality, that is, I do not see anymore—this power peculiar to the cinema seems to be literally redeeming.” 5 In what follows, I will show that the films of Werner Herzog are animated by the same impulse. Herzog creates marvels that reveal a reality we no longer see anymore precisely because we have become so used to seeing things in certain, habitual ways, that is, to not seeing what is really there but only a travesty of it: a series of mere facts, further instances of what we always already take ourselves to know. Examining Herzog’s films in light of Kracauer’s film theory, I hope not to explain but to explore Herzog’s work as an attempt to capture and document the marvelous reality that is concealed by the regimented, atomized, and boring superstructure of everyday life in contemporary society. THE DECLINE AND FALL OF ADEQUATE IMAGERY A specter haunts us today: the specter of adequate imagery. In an interview with Paul Cronin, Herzog provocatively claims that As a race we have become aware of certain dangers that surround us. We comprehend, for example, that nuclear power is a real danger for mankind, that over-crowding of the planet is the greatest of all. We

The Film Artist as Discoverer of the Marvels of Everyday Life

155

have understood that the destruction of the environment is another enormous danger. But I truly believe that the lack of adequate imagery is a danger of the same magnitude. It is as serious a defect as being without memory. What have we done to our images? What have we done to our embarrassed landscapes? I have said this before and will repeat it again as long as I am able to talk: if we do not develop adequate images we will die out like dinosaurs. 6

Herzog’s linking of adequate imagery and memory echoes Kracauer’s description of his fateful first encounter with film as a boy. Adequate imagery preserves memory; in contrast, “worn-out, banal, useless and exhausted images” 7 destroy our sense for the marvelous and ultimately make it impossible to remember anything, since under their spell, nothing really happens anyway but repetition of the ever-same. Herzog’s equation of the looming extinction of adequate imagery with the threat of nuclear annihilation and environmental catastrophe should not be read as hyperbolic but as pointing to the interconnection between these different registers of what is a common threat: we face extinction because we are now at risk of no longer being able to imagine anything but what is already there in front of us, the merely factual and our ordinary lives spent in its midst, in other words, an intolerable status quo that has us on the precipice of extinction and yet oblivious, unable to see how different things could be since, indeed, we cannot even perceive how different things are from what we have made of them. 8 If we could learn again to really see the marvels all around us, if we could again explore our world rather than simply travel from work to home to commodified forms of recreation, we might then see how our boring lives and frustrated attempts to find excitement are the flip-side of a way of life that is not merely self-defeating but threatens the extinction of all life on Earth. 9 Herzog detests academic interpretation of his work and excoriates attempts to articulate common threads in his films. His antipathy rests on a false dichotomy on both sides of the issue: either practical experimentation or theoretical pre-fabrication by the filmmaker, and either openminded engagement by the viewer, unencumbered by scholarly comparisons and citations, or a rigid imposition of fashionable, though vacuous, intellectual categories by the critic. I take Herzog at his word that he comes to his work with no pre-formulated theoretical straightjacket, but this hardly entails that there are no common threads throughout his films. Such threads emerge immanently from out of his material and his approach, and need not be there in advance, the result of careful calculation. Likewise, in interpreting his work, I neither need be illiterate nor an academic specialist on film theory, but can fall somewhere between these two extremes. Herzog’s attempt to recover, to discover, or to re-discover the marvelous via a practice of exploration and experimentation is framed by its opposition to an already existing and predominant ethos of adherence to

156

Chapter 9

facts, which he has characterized as “accountant’s truth.” While I began this chapter by treating the issue as unique to modernity, it goes much farther back. Indeed, we can find an exemplary instance of Herzog’s approach and his exasperation with the mundane valorization of the factual in an author who has expressed Herzog’s own views as Herzog himself once claimed to express Pascal, that is, in a manner better than the original. Near the beginning of The Metamorphoses of Apuleius (also known as The Golden Ass), one of the greatest stories ever told, we find the following story about story-telling, with themes already familiar to us here: boredom, the marvelous, skepticism and suspicion for the basis of supposed facts, and a defense of fantastical story-telling that illuminates why fiction reveals a deeper truth than world-weary pseudo-realism. A bored traveler on a long journey overhears two men talking just ahead, one telling a marvelous tale and the other listening incredulously. After the skeptical listener suggests that the story is obviously a pack of lies, the traveler, overhearing what was said, comes to the defense of the story-teller as follows: Well, after I heard that—I am a man with a craving for anything new and unheard of, as a rule—‘Would you mind sharing your story,’ I say, ‘with me? It’s not that I’m nosy, but I do like to know the alpha and the omega or, at any rate, as much as I can. And besides, the elegant entertainment of travelers’ tales will smooth the rough and rutted way up the ridge that we’re now climbing.’ 10

The skeptic, however, wants no more of such stories and in exasperation attempts to scold the traveler: “Come on!” he says. “A lie like that is no more true than some man’s claim that by some wonder-worker’s magical mumblings streams leap back to their source, the sea is bound motionless, the winds breathe their last and die; the sun is arrested in its course, the moon has its dew distilled, the stars are plucked from the sky; daylight is taken away, and the nighttime long prolonged.” Now, in response to this sober objection, the traveler replies to each of the other two, the story-teller and the skeptical listener, in words that would not be out of place in Herzog’s mouth: “Now listen here!” I say. “You—you who just told the first part of your story—please don’t be too exasperated, or too diffident, to finish weaving the rest of the web of your tale.” Then I turn to the other one. “And you—with your ears blocked up, stubborn as a mule, you refuse to swallow what may yet be shown to be true and spit it out. Heaven help us! Such warped and distorted calculations! You are not so worldly-wise as you think, if you believe that all those things must be accounted lies that seem to be novel at first hearing or alien to your experience at first sight or, at any rate, too hard and high above the grasp of your rational thought.” 11

The Film Artist as Discoverer of the Marvels of Everyday Life

157

We here see in nuce a defense of fiction as revealing deeper truths through illumination of the marvelous, while ‘worldly-wise’ reference to factual reality is dismissed as obstinate close-mindedness. What I would like to propose is that Apuleius has provided us with a key for understanding Herzog’s film work, and that Herzog’s opposition to the worship of the factual is rooted in a similar concern for preserving the marvelous, an enchantment that, paradoxically, helps us to keep our eyes open and not simply see around us mere repetitive instances of what we already know. Far from wishing to deceive us by aestheticizing horrors and mystifying a historical understanding of the world in which we live, Herzog aims to instill in us a childlike sense of wonder as we experience the world, to free us from the pernicious socialization into the realm of ‘worldly-wise’ facts that inhibit or block genuinely experiencing the world as it is: unfolding, full of mysteries, puzzles, surprises, and real dangers. As André Fischer has noted, “On the flipside of Hollywood films that want to claim their factual foundations in order to be more convincing, lies Herzog’s fictional documentary practice which, by means of fabrication, wants ‘to reveal a hitherto unnoticed or overlooked facet of reality’.” 12 Likewise, Herzog notably stands apart from Spielberg, Pixar, and Disney, who might also claim to be engaged in awakening a sense of child-like wonder in the face of the world’s mysteriousness. Unlike these mainstream Hollywood imagination factories, Herzog’s films treat of poverty, mental illness, exploration of remote wilderness, liminal experiences in general but death-defying feats and confrontations with death in particular. These are not topics generally treated in Hollywood films aimed at a young audience. TOWARD THE UNFAMILIAR IN THE FAMILIAR In his Theory of Film, Siegfried Kracauer argues that our ordinary experience of the world is characterized by blind spots due to habit and prejudice. ‘Blind spot’ is a bit too soft, though, since here we regularly fail to see or know what is right in front of us, or what we have frequently encountered. He classifies such phenomena into three categories, and in each case notes how film can work against this impulse to ignore or misconstrue our own lived experience. First, there are unconventional complexes: “The motion picture camera has a way of disintegrating familiar objects and bringing to the fore . . . previously invisible interrelationships between parts of them. These newly arising complexes lurk behind the things known and cut across their easily identifiable contexts.” 13 Second, there is “refuse”: “Many objects remain unnoticed simply because it never occurs to us to look their way. Most people turn their backs on garbage cans, the dirt underfoot, the waste they leave behind. Films have no such inhibitions.” 14 Third, most importantly and yet para-

158

Chapter 9

doxically, there is “the familiar”: the many things we have become so accustomed to that “they cease to be objects of perception. . . . In fact, we would be immobilized if we focused on them.” 15 The rooms in our house or apartment, the streets we walk down every day, our workplaces, even the people around us and our relationships to them, would all be ‘familiar’ in this sense. According to Kracauer, films redeem what has become so familiar to us as to recede into oblivion: “[Films] alienate our environment in exposing it. . . . The way leads toward the unfamiliar in the familiar . . . ” 16 Let’s now turn to a consideration of how Herzog’s films turn our attention toward the unfamiliar in the familiar. In so doing, we will find a similar concern for preserving the marvelous in the face of boredom and ‘worldly-wise’ obstinate factuality. In Land of Silence and Darkness, we meet Fini Straubinger, who is both deaf and blind, and a number of her friends. Near the beginning of this film, Fini’s friend asks her to “Tell us what you know.” 17 As Frau Straubinger narrates the story of how she became blind and deaf, and of her life as a blind and deaf person, we apprehend a world at her fingertips that lies beyond our experience and, as Fischer perceptively notes, “refers us to the limitations of our own experience.” 18 We may be familiar with deafness and blindness, or at least believe that we are, but in watching the blind and deaf as Herzog captures their stories and experience, our familiar experience recedes in the face of unexpected insights, which function to illuminate the unfamiliar in the familiar. The common misconception, for instance, that the deaf cannot hear anything or that the blind exist in a kind of darkness is dispelled by those who actually live this experience. A friend of Straubinger’s reveals what it feels like to be deaf: “People think deafness means silence, but that’s wrong. It is a constant noise, going from a gentle humming through some cracking sounds to a steady droning, which is worst.” Similarly, regarding blindness, Straubinger’s friend reveals that “It isn’t total darkness. You often see all kinds of colors: black, gray, white, blue, green, yellow . . . it depends.” Life as a blind and deaf person seems to rule out in advance the possibility that one could attend a banquet with friends and recite a poem that references painting, and yet we see Frau Straubinger recite a poem she has composed to illustrate how she would represent her condition if she were a painter, and her friends are able to hear and understand her through their sophisticated sense of touch. Indeed, in this film, an entire mysterious world of rich tactile impressions is conveyed visually and through conversation that those of us with healthy eyes and ears can hardly imagine. In the words of André Fischer, “as she [Frau Straubinger] is able to express these visions they become accessible in their strangeness. Aimed to express the way a deafblind person experiences their fate, Fini’s inner vision distorts our visual sense and makes us see an appearance of something we have no access to, but that is nevertheless real.” 19 Herzog challenges us to imagine the

The Film Artist as Discoverer of the Marvels of Everyday Life

159

unimaginable, to experience an unfamiliar reality that our own familiar experience inhibits, which is often dismissively regarded as hellishly isolated. In Even Dwarfs Started Small, Herzog fictionalizes an inmate uprising at an institution for little people. As with Land of Silence and Darkness, Herzog’s subject matter is a marginalized group, whose delirious Saturnalia in this case cannot conceal the profoundly political source of their suffering, the injustice done to them by a society that seems to have no place for them other than to shuffle them out of sight and impose a prison-like condition upon them for the crime of failing to be ‘normal.’ For example, consider the following moment, illustrated in Figure 9.1, in which the little people clearly articulate the grounds of their protest to their warden. In this moment, we discover that the inmates of this asylum have something in common with the rest of us, that their experience and ours is linked by a common thread: they live in a sanitized and administered environment in which they are disciplined and kept in line through fear of adverse consequences, while acting as they are supposed to does not seem to lead to the results they have been promised. Most Americans, with paltry savings, heavy debt burdens, and authoritarian workplaces

Figure 9.1. Even Dwarfs Started Small. Screen capture by author.

160

Chapter 9

might very well find themselves wishing for the courage to do just what the little people do in this early film by Herzog: spontaneously institute a veritable Saturnalia. This seemingly unfamiliar way of life, as a little person in a remote asylum, turns out to be a cipher for contemporary life in the totally administered society. Herzog has often noted how much of himself he sees in his film subjects, how he empathizes with them and sees them as iterations of himself. 20 In his films, he evokes this same response in us, and one of their most marvelous qualities is their ability to present what seems to be alien and unfamiliar to us in such a way that we recognize that we are actually, in reality, on a deeper level, already quite familiar with the unfamiliar. We have simply been conditioned to forget this as we have learned to stop truly seeing what is in front of us. Herzog puts this familiar-in-the-unfamiliar back in front of us in such a way as to compel our recognition of it. What we do with our recognition of the unfamiliar is up to us. Herzog is fond of noting that his “films are not ideological constructs.” 21 Yet we should not take this to mean that his films lack politically progressive potential. Indeed, as Randall Halle incisively points out, The potential of cinema, the cinematic potential to open up new worlds, to create visions unimagined by the spectator, to give the spectator a sense that there is more in the world than that which comprises their province and tastes, need not appear as a threat. And in this function, rather than reproduce stigmatization, Herzog’s films can acquire a progressive potential. The cinematic potential to reveal the uncommon as grandiose can actually serve a more libratory [sic] function than a didactic cinema based in a political common sense. A cinema of political common sense risks offering only a confirmation of what the spectator or critic already knows of the world, while a cinema of ‘uncommon’ sense can excite through the potential of film to reveal to us a world we do not know. 22

DISCOVERING PHYSICAL REALITY According to Herzog, “what moves me has never been reality, but a question that lies behind it.” 23 Experience with reality here connotes for Herzog a loss of that which is mysteriously at work in reality, a covering over of a deeper reality by the superficial facts that supposedly constitute everyday reality. Yet how are we to distinguish between obstinate delusion and ecstatic revelation? Is it simply a matter of the putative authority of a given speaker, writer, or artist? If so, how can we be sure that we are not unwittingly allowing enthusiastic delusions into our conception of ecstatic truth and its revelation? Herzog is objecting that explaining reality by means of factual information explains away the mystery at the heart of reality, and impoverishes experience. Here we should briefly

The Film Artist as Discoverer of the Marvels of Everyday Life

161

note that German has two words for ‘experience’ that are not equivalent. As Miriam Hansen argues, Even in its ordinary usage, the German term Erfahrung—with its etymological roots of fahren (riding, journeying, cruising) and Gefahr (danger, peril)—does not have as much of an empiricist connotation as its English counterpart, inasmuch as it stresses the subject’s precarious mobility rather than a stable position of perception vis-à-vis an object. Benjamin, theorizing the conditions of possibility of Erfahrung in modernity, had linked its historic decline with the proliferation of Erlebnis (immediate but isolated experience) under the conditions of industrial capitalism; in this context, Erfahrung crucially came to entail the capacity of memory—individual and collective, involuntary as well as cognitive—and the ability to imagine a different future. 24

The kind of experience designated by Erfahrung might, strangely enough, also be revealed by digging a little deeper into the etymology of the English term ‘experience,’ which in its radical sense, formed from the Greek prefix ex- and the verb peiran, can mean ‘what emerges from trying one’s fortune or taking a chance.’ It is this sense of experience, as a risky process of discovery that navigates danger, which etymologically connects the English word ‘experience’ to, for example, the words ‘piracy’ and ‘pirate.’ When something is explained, it is no longer experienced (erfahren) but merely lived through (erlebt). That which is mysterious, which does not ‘perfectly fit into a story,’ is a danger to the explanatory impulse, for which everything has a place and should be in its place. The mysterious, extraneous, and digressive threaten formalistic requirements of a story’s structure and economy but reveal the story as constructed, as an attempt to construct meaning from disparate elements. In other words, mystery and what does not fit are a kind of ‘reality check’ on the artificial conventions of storytelling and reveal gaps or excesses in the story’s fabric. They are an irruption of what Kracauer would call ‘physical reality’ or the ‘material dimension’ into the film as artificially and intentionally structured. Herzog wants to allow these ‘disruptions’ and even privilege them, since they are essential to the discovery (rather than mere contrivance) of stories. To find a story means uncovering, but not explaining away, a mystery. It means finding a place for what does not seem to have a place. Discovery removes the (abstract-scientific) cover that veils things and reveals them to be singular mysteries, enigmas. Herzog’s mode of discovery does not lead to explanation but to revealing the mysterious, uncovering the mystery hidden beneath the abstract subsumption of something to an already given and understood concept. We think we already know what something is, and Herzog shows us that we have ignored or overlooked the essential mystery which that thing is. All we know is what we have done to things, mutilat-

162

Chapter 9

ing them by converting them to fungible objects in an ongoing project of worldwide scientization and quantification, and yet we think we know what things are. Herzog reacquaints us with the irreducible and mysterious singularity of things, dis-covering their conventional veils and releasing the underlying mystery in potent imagery that we experience. As with Aeschylus, so with Herzog we must suffer into truth. Anything else is mere classification and categorization, the arranging of archival materials in the world-museum, the extraction of raw materials for commercial exploitation, transaction. While filming Fitzcarraldo, Herzog claims to have learned an important lesson about truth, one which should further clarify the elusive reality we are attempting to articulate here. As Herzog tells the story, I hired a surveyor, who furnished the Machiguengas with a precise map of their homeland. That was my part in their truth: it took the form of a delineation, a definition. I’ll admit, I quarreled with the surveyor. The topographic map that he furnished was, he explained, in certain ways incorrect. It did not correspond to the truth because it did not take into account the curvature of the earth. In such a little piece of land? I asked, losing patience. Of course, he said angrily, and pushed his water glass toward me. Even with a glass of water, you have to be clear about it, what we’re dealing with is not an even surface. You should see the curvature of the earth as you would see it on an ocean or a lake. If you were really able to perceive it exactly as it is—but you are too simple-minded—you would see the earth curve. I will never forget this harsh lesson. 25

Herzog here learns a lesson that ancient Greek sculptors and architects were already familiar with: in many cases, perceiving things as they truly are is impossible due to the limitation of our sense-organs. In such cases, the artist must anticipate this and correct for it by introducing necessary distortion so that we perceive not exactly what it is, since our organs are inadequate, but a kind of simulacrum (this also holds for logos and dialectic, whose analogues occur in Plato as iterations of an eikōs logos or eikōs mythos: how to speak truth to those unprepared to hear it unvarnished). Another version of this tragic insight is the standard mythological trope that humans cannot ‘handle’ direct perception of the divine, since to experience its full presence destroys them, but instead must see a distortion of the divine, a metamorphosed disguise, rather than the god’s real form. To connect this to Herzog and another famous story from antiquity: like Menelaus’ net, Herzog’s films are devised to trap and pin down the Protean manifestations of the marvelous, to compel that which cannot be seen as it is to assume visible form as signifying flux. To put this in terms of modernity, or in non-theological terms, we could interpret this story by Herzog in light of an unsettling story told by Rainer Maria Rilke in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge of a certain Nikolai Kuzmich. 26 Rilke describes Kuzmich, the neighbor of his protagonist, as someone who experiences a kind of temporal epiphany after he

The Film Artist as Discoverer of the Marvels of Everyday Life

163

precisely calculates the number of seconds he has left to live. Kuzmich is dizzied by the wealth of present moments left in his life and realizes that he is both incredibly wealthy (in terms of time) but also incredibly careless in squandering his capital. All of his efforts to ‘save time’ only reveal how relentlessly time is slipping away from him. One night, in a kind of delirium, he directly experiences the passage of time and, like a seasick sailor, begins to stagger around his room any time he tries to stand up. From that moment on, Kuzmich must remain bedridden in order to avoid intense vertigo. Likewise, each one of us faces a similar breakdown in the face of the disintegration of modern life, an experience of abyssal transience. Kracauer’s film theory, according to Hansen, “seeks to theorize film as a paradigmatic mode of experiencing, of encountering and discovering, the world in the wake of and beyond that historic crisis [i.e., of modernism, the breakdown of traditional belief-systems and ideologies].” 27 Herzog’s films allow this experience to manifest itself before us, bringing us to the epiphanic threshold of a direct experience of the disintegration of meaning in modernity. We are to learn how to maintain our ‘sea legs,’ as it were, so that we do not end up like Nikolai Kuzmich. DIFFERENT DIMENSIONS OF REALITY IN KRACAUER AND HERZOG According to Siegfried Kracauer, “What we want . . . is to touch reality not only with the fingertips but to seize it and shake hands with it. . . . Yet there are different realities or dimensions of reality, and our situation is such that not all of these worlds are equally available to us. Which of them will yield to our advances? The answer is, plainly, that we can experience only the reality still at our disposal.” 28 On my reading, Herzog explores these “different realities or dimensions of reality” (for instance, severe disability, serious mental illness, poverty, exploration of remote areas and wilderness, fantasy) in order to, as an explorer, see “which of them will yield to our advances.” 29 If it is true that we can only experience the reality at our disposal, then Herzog aims to open this experience and reality up to different dimensions, and thus to broaden and deepen an experience that has otherwise been gravely impoverished under the spell of what Kracauer calls ‘abstraction.’ Kracauer argues that physical reality eludes us because of “the habit of abstract thinking we have acquired under the reign of science and technology. . . . [things in the physical world] are all the more elusive since we usually cannot help setting them in the perspective of conventional views and purposes which point beyond their self-contained being.” 30 For example, we have a common and conventional view of what mental illness amounts to: a chemical imbalance in the brain caused by a combination of environmental and genetic factors. This is an abstraction from the qualitative dimen-

164

Chapter 9

sions of mental illness. Films such as Grizzly Man or Stroszek show us the qualitative source and physical reality of mental illness, uncovering a deeper layer of reality and experience occluded by prevalent scientism. 31 It is one of Herzog’s great merits not to romanticize the different dimensions of reality his films dis-cover. Richard Eldridge has noted that “Herzog’s films . . . give us access to a separate reality where space and time acquire a strange new dimension.” 32 Citing Luis Buñuel, Kracauer imposes a demand on filmmakers: “I ask that a film discover something for me.” 33 What is film supposed to discover? Kracauer claims that films “assume three kinds of revealing functions. They tend to reveal things normally unseen, phenomena overwhelming consciousness, and certain aspects of the outer world which may be called ‘special modes of reality.’” 34 These revelatory aspects of film are crucial for a Kracauerian reading of Herzog, though I can here only sketch their significance. 35 We find an analogue for this element of Kracauer’s film theory in one of Paul Cronin’s interviews with Herzog, where, describing a segment of his discussion with a Bangladeshi cosmologist, Kamal Saiful Islam (for Film Lessons), titled ‘Fantastic Landscapes and the Algebraization of Unthinkable Spaces,’ Herzog recounts that I projected small details of fantastic landscapes in paintings by Altdorfer, Hercules Segers, Grünewald and Leonardo da Vinci and spoke about landscapes of the mind in cinema, while Kamal Saiful Islam proved that there are spaces unthinkable for our minds yet which can be conclusively proven algebraically; for example, a bottle which has only an inside, but definitely no outside. He spoke of the future directions that cinema might move in, proving the existence of objects and images that are impossible for us to imagine today. It reminded me of what people thought during the time of Columbus. They were scared to travel to the other side of the earth because they thought they would hurtle down into empty space. Today, every schoolchild can tell you why this is not so, why the force of gravity keeps us on the ground regardless of where we travel. Similarly, a cinema may be created in the future that is just as inconceivable to us today as basic gravitational physics was to the contemporaries of Columbus. 36

Herzog’s quest for seemingly impossible and inconceivable imagery throughout his career can be seen as an attempt to realize, in the present, this hope for a cinema of the future. ‘Things normally unseen,’ direct experience of which would overwhelm our sensory organs, appear again and again in Herzog’s films, often accompanied by music (ranging from Wagner to Tuvan throat singing to psychedelic Krautrock) deliberately aiming to elevate us into a heightened state of aesthetic receptivity, to prepare his audience for encounters with the cosmic and the sublime. In Into the Inferno, for instance, we witness the bubbling and cracking of molten lava (Figure 9.2).

The Film Artist as Discoverer of the Marvels of Everyday Life

165

In each case, we are taken on a journey in which we discover the material flow of physical life and rouse it from its dormancy, as though film allowed us to awaken a slumbering reality, allowed us to see what would otherwise pass us by obliviously. And what is it that these images of nature, awakened from slumber, would communicate? Richard Eldridge aptly remarks that “Mind and nature call or speak to one another through these images, without plot. . . . it is both possible and important to discern something in nature to which we might resonate inchoately, if we are to have any hope of avoiding disasters that stem from unchecked egoism and instrumentalism.” 37 Eldridge helpfully reminds us that for Herzog images are potentially salvational. The stakes are our continued existence on a habitable planet Earth. In a similar vein, according to Siegfried Kracauer, “Film renders visible what we did not, or perhaps even could not, see before its advent. . . . We literally redeem this world from its dormant state, its state of virtual nonexistence, by endeavoring to experience it through the camera.” 38 Kracauer’s thesis provides a useful interpretive tool for understanding Herzog’s films. Herzog explores different, hidden, overlooked dimensions of reality, ones that are recalcitrant to scientific-technological quantification and its prevalent abstractions, and in doing so redeems the physical world from its dormant state (as raw material for human endeavors and as backdrop for historical drama). His films offer relief from one kind of alienation, our alienation from adequate images, from the discovery of the marvelous above, around, and below us, while at the same time alienating us from another kind, the otherwise prevalent scientific-technological abstractions under whose spell we are enthralled, and whose consequence is to deprive our lives of mystery and its discovery.

Figure 9.2. Into the Inferno. Screen capture by author.

166

Chapter 9

CONCLUSION: KEEPING IT REAL Herzog’s films, in contrast, puncture prevailing abstractness, do not attempt to tie everything up into a meaningful whole, and thus dwell and tarry in what Kracauer called physical reality or the material dimension, providing us with relief from our abstraction-alienation. The ‘reality’ they reveal shocks us out of complacency, as Herzog himself was shocked when he experienced an intrusion of ‘reality’ into his own version of this everyday somnambulant life in southern California: A couple of years ago, I came to grasp how confusing the concept of reality has become, in a strange way, through an incident that took place on Venice Beach in Los Angeles. A friend was having a little party in his backyard—barbecued steak—it was already dark, when, not far away, we heard a few gunshots that nobody took seriously until the police helicopters showed up with searchlights on and commanded us, over loudspeakers, to get inside the house. We sorted out the facts of the case only in retrospect: a boy, described by witnesses as around thirteen or fourteen years of age, had been loitering, hanging around a restaurant about a block away from us. As a couple exited, the boy yelled, This is for real, shot both with a semi-automatic, then fled on his skateboard. He was never caught. But the message [Botschaft] of the madman was clear: this here isn’t a videogame, these shots are for real, this is reality. 39

Reality is dangerous, and reminds us of how fragile we are, how easy it is to fall asleep at the wheel of our life-vehicle, and one way to know we’ve encountered it is to be shocked, to have our illusions of safety and security punctured by a reminder that “this here isn’t a videogame.” 40 Herzog’s films, akin to Socrates’ conception of himself as a gadfly and of philosophical practice as an art of productive goading, aim to wake us up to the ‘for real’ lurking behind our experience as we sleepwalk through everyday life on our way to the next world war, nuclear annihilation, and/or environmental catastrophe, a collapse that will most likely not occur in grandiose splendor but might rather feature a chorus of whimpers. Near the conclusion of his monumental Theory of Film (and echoing language from the Preface, which was cited at the beginning of this essay), Kracauer describes the filmmaker in words that could serve very well to characterize Herzog’s overarching project over the last fifty-plus years: The film artist has traits of an imaginative reader or an explorer prodded by insatiable curiosity. . . . he is ‘a man who sets out to tell a story but, in shooting it, is so overwhelmed by his innate desire to cover all of physical reality—and also by a feeling that he must cover it in order to tell the story, any story, in cinematic terms—that he ventures ever deeper into the jungle of material phenomena in which he risks becom-

The Film Artist as Discoverer of the Marvels of Everyday Life

167

ing irretrievably lost if he does not, by virtue of great efforts, get back to the highways he left.’ 41

If there is one thing we can say with confidence of Herzog, something which presumably even he would agree with, it is that he has spent his life venturing deep into jungles, both real and metaphorical. His attempts to discover and redeem reality required running the risk of getting lost. Yet he has always managed to find his way back again ‘by virtue of great effort.’ Perhaps in pondering common themes in his films and tracing them back to Siegfried Kracauer’s conception of film as the redemption of physical reality, we might do the same. ENDNOTES 1. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), xi. 2. Cf. J. Dudley Andrew’s “Siegfried Kracauer” in his The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 106-133, and for a more recent and nuanced treatment see Tyson Wils, “Phenomenology, Theology, and ‘Physical Reality’: The Film Theory Realism of Siegfried Kracauer,” in: Ian Aitken (ed.), The Major Realist Film Theorists: A Critical Anthology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 67-80. 3. Kracauer, Theory of Film, x. 4. Siegfried Kracauer, “Boredom,” in: The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. by Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 331-334. 5. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 304. 6. Paul Cronin (ed.), Werner Herzog A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Girous, 2014). 7. Cronin (ed.), Werner Herzog A Guide for the Perplexed, 81. 8. André Fischer suggestively notes that “The lack of adequate images is in itself a problem of great proportion and urgency because the images at our disposal do not express and reflect our existential disposition as human beings in this world. Herzog draws the analogy to generally acknowledged political problems facing humanity (energy, environment, nuclear power, overpopulation) to emphasize the crisis of our collective imagination that he is describing” (italics mine), in André Fischer, “Deep Truth and the Mythic Veil: Werner Herzog’s New Mythology in Land of Silence and Darkness,” Film-Philosophy 22.1 (2018), 40. 9. According to Fischer, “What Herzog means by adequate images is the productive use of our imagination that enables us to justify our worldly existence. In Herzog’s view, failing to make use of this capacity means, eventually, nothing less than the extinction of the human species” (“Deep Truth and the Mythic Veil,” 41). This is right but risks over-aesthetizing the existential stakes, which are also literally a matter of life and death: our failure to properly imagine existential threats (that is, their inadequate presentation in Hollywood as spectacle and backdrop for formulaic pseudo-heroic action) such as the mass proliferation of nuclear weapons or climate change and impending mass extinction, our failure to register the direness of what threatens us, is also challenged by Herzog in films such as Lessons of Darkness. 10. Apuleius, The Golden Ass, trans. by Joel C. Relihan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007), 4. 11. Apuleius, The Golden Ass, 4-5. 12. Fischer, “Deep Truth and the Mythic Veil,” 48. 13. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 54. 14. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 54. 15. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 55.

168

Chapter 9

16. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 55. 17. Herzog, Land of Silence and Darkness (1971), 04:28. 18. Fischer, “Deep Truth and the Mythic Veil,” 52. 19. Fischer, “Deep Truth and the Mythic Veil,” 54. 20. Cronin (ed.), Herzog A Guide for the Perplexed, 161. 21. Cronin (ed.), Herzog A Guide for the Perplexed, 38. 22. Randall Halle, “Perceiving the Other in the Land of Silence and Darkness,” in A Companion to Werner Herzog, ed. by Brad Prager (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 500. 23. Werner Herzog, “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth,” trans. Moira Weigel, Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 17, no. 3 (2010), 8-9. 24. Miriam Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California, 2012), xiv. 25. Herzog, “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth,” 3-4. 26. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurid Brigge, trans. by Michael Hulse (London: Penguin, 2009), 49. 27. Hansen, Cinema and Experience, 255. 28. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 297. 29. As Gertrud Koch puts it, “Herzog engages the mentally ill as the industrious image-copiers of the world, and depicts the blind as the seers, whose gaze should touch us. To be sure, this self-representation not only hides behind the mask of fiction, but disguises itself through the position of he who presents the sights, who mediates the initiation into higher truths like a priest, who exorcises the false gods of the graven images. The alternation between fictional and documentary footage is part of the Herzogian aesthetic in which the artist is not at all a radical subjectivist, but a privileged interpreter whose fiction reflects the rays emitted by its haloes back onto reality” (Gertrud Koch, “Blindness as Insight: Visions of the Unseen in Land of Silence and Darkness,” in The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, ed. by Timothy Corrigan [London: Routledge, 2014] 81-82). 30. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 300. 31. For more on scientism, see a recent blog post on the American Philosophical Association’s website: https://blog.apaonline.org/2018/01/25/the-problem-withscientism/. A recent book I translated is also of interest for a critique of scientism: Markus Gabriel’s I Am Not a Brain: Philosophy of Mind for the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), in particular “The discovery of the universe in a monastery,” 99-102, which takes on a recent popular instance of what I’ve termed ‘prevalent scientism’ here: Neil deGrasse Tyson’s remake of the science education television show Cosmos. 32. Richard Eldridge, Werner Herzog: Filmmaker and Philosopher (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 29. 33. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 46. 34. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 46. 35. For more on this, see Antony Fredriksson’s contribution to this volume. 36. Cronin (ed.), Herzog A Guide for the Perplexed, 225-226. 37. Eldridge, Werner Herzog, 70-71. 38. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 300. 39. Herzog, “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth,” 6-7. 40. See in this regard Eldridge’s discussion of ‘reality’ in ‘everyday life’ in Werner Herzog, 20-21, where he notes that the cumulative effects of technological advances today, such as the internet and social media, necessitate that “the question of what ‘real’ reality is poses itself constantly afresh” (21). 41. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 302-303.

The Film Artist as Discoverer of the Marvels of Everyday Life

169

BIBLIOGRAPHY Andrew, J. Dudley. 1976. The Major Film Theories: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Apuleius. 2007. The Golden Ass. Indianapolis: Hackett. Cronin, Paul (ed.). 2014. Werner Herzog A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Eldridge, Richard. 2019. Werner Herzog: Filmmaker and Philosopher. London: Bloomsbury. Fischer, André. “Deep Truth and The Mythic Veil: Werner Herzog’s New Mythology in Land of Silence and Darkness.” Film-Philosophy 22.1 (2018), 39-59. Gabriel, Markus. I Am Not a Brain: Philosophy of Mind for the Twenty-First Century, trans. by Christopher Turner. 2017. Cambridge: Polity. Halle, Randall. 2012. “Perceiving the Other in the Land of Silence and Darkness.” In: A Companion to Werner Herzog, ed. by Brad Prager. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Hansen, Miriam. 2012. Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2010. “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth.” Trans. by Moira Weigel. Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 17, no. 3. Koch, Gertrud. 2014. “Blindness as Insight: Visions of the Unseen in Land of Silence and Darkness.” In: The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, ed. by Timothy Corrigan. London: Routledge. Kracauer, Siegfried. 1995. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1960. Theory of Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rilke, Rainer Maria. 2009. The Notebooks of Malte Laurid Brigge. Trans. by Michael Hulse. London: Penguin. Wils, Tyson. 2016. “Phenomenology, Theology, and ‘Physical Reality’: The Film Theory Realism of Siegfried Kracauer,” in: The Major Realist Film Theorists: A Critical Anthology (ed. by Ian Aitken). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

TEN Werner Herzog and the Documentary as a Revelatory Practice Antony Fredriksson

In an interview with Paul Cronin, Werner Herzog states: “The word ‘documentary’ should be handled with care because we seem to have a very precise definition of what the word means” (Cronin 2002, 238). Although Herzog himself is skeptical toward theoretical definitions of the concept, and although he is reluctant to outline any concise methodology for his own work in film, I hope to show that a closer look at Herzog’s work will reveal some prominent features of what we call documentary film. I will discuss how Herzog’s films are helpful for our understanding of situations and occurrences in which our habitual life is challenged and put into question. Sometimes the world reveals to us how it is to be understood in stark contrast to our habitual ways of seeing, our ingrained preconceptions and our rationality. The cinema of Herzog can be consulted as a helpful guide in order for us to understand the phenomenology of our revelatory encounters with the world. 1 Herzog’s reluctance toward the categorization of documentary is to be understood against the backdrop of a certain tradition within documentary film. He speaks of cinéma vérité as the ”accountant’s truth” and continues: ”Through invention, through imagination, through fabrication, I become more truthful than the little bureaucrats” (Cronin 2002, 240). As a contrast, Herzog often speaks of an “ecstatic truth” as something that his films aim to reveal. In this sense, “truth” is not a purely epistemological or ontological concept for Herzog as it refers to a certain (ecstatic) quality of experience. This sentiment is reminiscent of the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, which aims at describing the structures of subjective 171

172

Chapter 10

experience. Herzog has a similar goal: not to impose a theory or his acquired knowledge on the world, but rather to investigate how we experience the world. In this chapter, I will make a connection between Herzog’s intuitive distinction between the accountant’s truth and ecstatic truth, and the phenomenological tradition within philosophy. There is a clear connection in that phenomenology deals with that which reveals itself: it is a way of practicing philosophy that does not presuppose reality and truth. They are achieved through an engagement with the world and action within the world, rather than through objective and neutral observation. MerleauPonty describes this change of direction in epistemology as follows: “The precise and completely determinate world is again first presupposed, certainly no longer as the cause of our perceptions, but rather as their immanent end” (2012, 33). Truths are in this sense not given in the world: they are not established through neutral observation, but through participatory action. Traditionally, documentary film builds upon a similar tension between neutrality and engagement—truth through neutral documentation of facts as opposed to truth as something achieved through engagement. What Herzog refers to earlier as cinéma vérité is vague, since it is a term that is often used confusedly. In order to understand Herzog’s polemical remark, Bill Nichol’s explanation of what he calls the observational mode of documentary film is helpful. Nichols writes: The observational mode stresses the nonintervention of the filmmaker. Such films cede ‘control’ over the events that occur in front of the camera more than any other mode. Rather than constructing a temporal framework, or rhythm, from the process of editing as in Night Mail or Listen to Britain, observational films rely on editing to enhance the impression of lived or real time. In its purest form, voice-over commentary, music external to the observed scene, intertitles, reenactments, and even interviews are completely eschewed. [Erik] Barnouw summarizes the mode helpfully when he distinguishes direct cinema (observational filmmaking) from Rouch’s style of cinema verité (1991, 38).

The confusion concerning cinéma vérité has in this sense to do with a discourse between different movements within documentary cinema. Diane Scheinman explains how cinéma vérité, a style of documentary filmmaking invented by French filmmaker Jean Rouch, actually came about as a criticism of the idea of “neutral” documentation. In his filmmaking, Rouch acknowledges that the camera’s presence entails a transformation of any given situation. In this sense, Rouch also acknowledged that the camera is never neutral, its presence always has an influence on the human subjects in the scene. Describing the context in which the term gained its significance, Scheinman writes: “Stylistically, the film [Jean Rouch’s, Chronique d’un été, France 1960] was inspired by the ideas of

Werner Herzog and the Documentary as a Revelatory Practice

173

Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov who, in the 1920s, wrote about kino pravda (film truth), suggesting that the camera recorded life and therefore led to a ‘cinema of truth.’ Rouch in contrast, felt the camera provoked the behavior of those in front of the lens, resulting in a ‘truth of cinema’” (1998, 194). The later form of Rouch’s cinéma vérité is much closer to the style of Herzog than the “observational mode” that Nichols describes, or Vertov’s idea of recorded truth. Rather than neutrally observing them, Herzog is a director who does not shun away from engaging with his subjects, even to the point that he quite clearly manipulates them in order to tease meaning out of them. The truth that he portrays is, in this way, not there from the start and his films are not accounts of facts. Herzog’s work stands in contrast to a veridical tradition in both documentary film and theory in which film is considered as a means of establishing facts and true descriptions of the world. As I will show throughout this chapter, this ingrained idea of the documentary as a veridical representation of the factual is in itself a distinctively vague construction. This opens up a philosophical question: If we do not consider the documentary to be an epistemological category of veridical representations, what then makes a film documentary? I will dig deeper into this question through a reading of some of Herzog’s films, and connect this discussion to the work of some prominent phenomenological thinkers, including Merleau-Ponty and Bernhard Waldenfels. What I will propose, as an alternative to the understanding of the documentary as a veridical form of representation, is the notion of revelatory practice. This concept has a long, and partly forgotten, history in film theory. In his book Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition (2008), Malcolm Turvey rehabilitates this concept that he finds in some of the earliest film theories of Siegfried Kracauer, among others. As I will show, this idea of film as a revelatory practice will have a distinct meaning when we are concerned with documentary film. My proposition is that it stands for images that bring out the contingent and ephemeral, the world as it is, independent of our preconceptions. The contrast here between the veridical and the revelatory can be summarized in this quote by phenomenologist theologian Gabriel Marcel, who writes: It is not the flower which tells me its name through the medium of the botanist; I shall be forced to see that the name is a convention, it has been agreed to give that particular name to the flower in which I am interested. By that convention we slip out of the realm of being properly so called, and all that we shall learn will be what one can say about the flower if we leave out the one important thing—the singularity which forced my attention, or which, in other words, spoke to me. (2001, 14)

174

Chapter 10

Marcel emphasizes the encounter with the singular flower—what it reveals of itself in that encounter—despite all of our nominal ways of defining it, and how these encounters appeal to our attention. Toward the end I will examine the role of attention as a foundational faculty for the arts of photography and documentary depiction. When we pay attention to how the world looks, we might sometimes be surprised. We might perhaps be reminded that we are too set in our ways of seeing, and that the world can reveal things unknown, or as Stanley Cavell remarks: “how little we know about what our relation to reality is, our complicity in it” (2005, 16). I claim that this revelatory capacity of film and photography, its ability to show us things that we have failed to pay attention to due to our habitual ways of seeing, is the foundational aspects of documentary aesthetics in Herzog’s films. In order to arrive at this conclusion, I will examine how documentary depiction adheres to our experience, without falling back on a generic epistemological framework. This requires an explanation of how an image with a pictorial content can represent phenomenal qualities of perception. How can depiction show how we see, how we attend to the world and lived life, as it unfolds? My examples that will serve as a backdrop for this discussion are the documentary films of Herzog. I will specifically discuss scenes from some of his lesser known films La Soufrière: Waiting for an Unavoidable Catastrophe (1977), Echoes from a Sombre Empire (1990) and White Diamond (2004). NARRATIVE FORM AND THE CONTINGENCY OF SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE How can art then represent our phenomenal qualities of subjective experience, if it only reproduces representations of our perceptions, after the fact? In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty articulates an answer to this question by analyzing a certain tendency in history-writing. He refers to the perspective of Fabrice, the protagonist in Stendahl’s La Chartreuse de Parme, who “wanted to see the battle of Waterloo as one sees a landscape, but he only found confused episodes” (2012, 380). The perspective of a soldier in the battle of Waterloo—which was also part of Stendahl’s own personal experience as a veteran of several campaigns in the Napoleonic wars—is not that of a disengaged observer who can distinguish causal relations and tie together the different stages of the battle from an observational perspective. Neither can the lived and engaged perspective in the moment of the battle discern a past, present and future that led to the battle that eventually led to the fall of the Empire. Rather, the soldier’s first-person experience consists of a chaotic and confused perception of disengaged occurrences. Merleau-Ponty points out how a

Werner Herzog and the Documentary as a Revelatory Practice

175

lived experience, in the midst of an unfolding situation, is not to be conceived as historical, nor comprehensible to the subject as a part of a narrative, and is thus not even an event from the perspective of the experiencing subject, since to call something an event means that one understands the succession of a past, a present, and an aftermath. When things unfold, the subjects involved do not act with certainty regarding the outcome. Merleau-Ponty writes: “He [the historian] only presents us with a representation, he does not reach the battle itself, since, at the moment that it was taking place, the outcome was still contingent and is no longer contingent when the historian recounts the battle” (2012, 380). That is, the contingency of lived life experience evades history, narrative, and representation. Usually this temporality of narrative is considered to be an advantage for the arts. History-writing, literature, and film are able to give us a perspective from which we can understand the connections between a past, a present and a future. The contingency that comes with the present moment in the first-person perspective is overcome in representations that portray a temporal dimension, and provide us with an observational view that can reveal developments in which things and events present themselves, as if we were detachedly looking at the succession in that event like it was a landscape that spreads out in front of our gaze. However, there are also aesthetic movements within cinema that regard the radical contingency and open-endedness of lived life experience as something that film should be able to communicate. One clear example is Robert Bresson’s method of making films in which the actors did not actually know the script or the story of the film they were shooting. Bresson attempted to describe a similar sense of contingency that Merleau-Ponty found in Stendahl’s novel, by using several unorthodox methods. For example, Bresson did not use schooled actors, but amateurs that he sometimes picked up on the street on a whim. He never gave a script to the actor, but instead read the lines from behind the camera for the actor to repeat automatically. All this is done in order to place the actor in a state of unknowing (Bresson 1977, 1-4). The Bressonian actor does not know what part they play in the unfolding event, they do not act with clear intentions because they do not know the result of their actions or what kind of developments await in the future. In the same way, lived life experience does not come with a script. If film is to describe lived life experience, this contingency has to be expressed somehow. This is the sentiment Merleau-Ponty calls the modern: “There is the improvisation of automatic writing and there is that of La chartreuse de Parme. One of the grandeurs of modern thought and modern art is to have loosened the false lines which tied valuable work to the finished work. Since perception itself is never finished, since it gives us a world to express and think only through these partial perspectives . . . ” (1973, 56).

176

Chapter 10

Herzog is a filmmaker who embraces this counter-current in his understanding of the medium of film. He writes: “To experience a certain climate of excitement of the mind. This is what ultimately creates films and nothing else” (Cronin 2002, 16). When this is the aim, the challenge will become how to translate this experience of excitement to images and sounds on film. In The Prose of the World Merleau-Ponty articulates this kind of process as follows: Given an experience, which may be banal but for the writer captures a particular savor of life, given, in addition, words, forms, phrasing, syntax, even literary genres, modes of narrative that, through custom, are already endowed with common meaning—the writer’s task is to choose, assemble, wield, and torment these instruments in such a way that they induce the same sentiment of life that dwells in the writer at every moment. (48)

This transition from lived experience to art is then, in the case of filmmaking, a challenge in which the director translates how he sees to a visual language that communicates to the audience the quality of that experience. This cannot simply be done by just showing what he saw during the specific moment that he felt a certain sentiment: what he saw has to be accompanied by some way of communicating how he saw. Herzog’s film productions are often tied together with his life-projects. They are not screenplays rendered into a final product in the form of film. Rather, Herzog’s films are like diaries of adventures that he has taken upon himself to complete, as part of engaging with questions that the world addresses him with. He writes: “I have tried to give my screenplays a life independent from the films they help me give birth to and not make them mere cookbooks with recipes that need to be followed during the film’s production” (Cronin 2002, 14). Thus, the films of Herzog do not follow a preconceived formula: they leave room for uncertainty, contingency, and open-endedness. Herzog’s biographical anecdotes portray several accounts of how he investigates filmmaking without a camera by taking on real-life challenges in a way that hopefully reveals parcels of hidden meanings that require an effort to be discovered. What he calls “ecstatic truth” stands in contrast to the “accountant’s truth” that he sees as the predominant mode of mainstream documentary film. For example, in 1974, after receiving a call from his friend who told him that his mentor, film-critic Lotte Eisner, was terminally ill, Herzog ritualistically walked nine hundred kilometers during wintertime from Munich to Paris. 2 Herzog understood that this onerous existential predicament could not be addressed in a lighthearted manner: as described in the film Selfportrait (1986), Herzog believed that he could somehow prevent the disease from taking Eisner’s life by making the long journey by foot. In an interview, he states “it was clear to me that if I did it, Eisner wouldn't die" (in Lars-Olav Beier 2010). It is hard to

Werner Herzog and the Documentary as a Revelatory Practice

177

believe that Herzog’s self-made ritual could have the power to cure Eisner. Whatever the case, Eisner lived on for another eight years. It is from these experiences, the result of challenging the habitual way of living and the rational and causal understanding of the world, that the material for Herzog’s films is accumulated. The films originate from the contingency of lived life experience, a contingency that has to be encountered by breaking with a pre-determined habitual pattern of life. Instead of proficient use of film technology or theoretical underpinnings concerning dramaturgy, narrative and directing, Herzog describes walking as one of the primary methods to master filmmaking. “I make my films on foot,” (Selfportrait 1986) he exclaims. When asked about how he would organize an education for students of filmmaking, he proposes an entry exam that would consist of every candidate taking upon themselves to complete a journey by foot from, for example, Madrid to Kiev, a distance of some five thousand kilometers. Walking and writing down one’s experiences in a notebook during the walk would amount to the entrance exam for the film school. He writes: “I would be able to tell who really walked the distance and who had not. While you are walking you would learn much more about filmmaking than if you were in a classroom” (Cronin 2002, 15). 3 This can be called Herzog’s method of filmmaking, but as a method, its aim is exactly to embrace a certain openendedness, by putting oneself in a position in which habitual patterns become broken. In this way the art of filmmaking is, for Herzog, an art of discovering novel meanings through opening oneself toward novel experiences. As John Gardner puts it: “Art is as original as it is precisely because it does not start out with a clear knowledge of what it means to say” (2000, 13). Therefore, the translation from lived life experience to art cannot be achieved through a set theory or method because it is always in some sense an experiment that could possibly fail: “What constitutes poetry, depth, vision and illumination in cinema, I cannot name” (Cronin 2002, 10). LA SOUFRIÈRE: WAITING FOR AN UNAVOIDABLE CATASTROPHE The characteristics that I have described earlier—the open-endedness, the contingency, and the engagement, present in Herzog’s films—make him stand out in contrast to the mainstream tradition of documentary film. A clear case of such an anomaly in relation to the generic logics of documentary film production is his 1977 short documentary La Soufrière, a film about an event that did not happen. Herzog’s interest for making this film came about when he read an article about a man who lived on the slopes of the active volcano La Soufrière on the island of Basse-Terre, Guadalupe. All signs of volcanic activity pointed toward an upcoming eruption of the magnitude that probably would destroy all life on the

178

Chapter 10

island. Still, the man in the article was set on staying despite the impending catastrophe. Initially, it was the fatalistic attitude of this man that triggered Herzog’s attention: “I knew I wanted to talk to him and find out what kind of relationship towards death he had” (Cronin 2002, 148). The production of La Soufrière put Herzog in a paradoxical situation. In his own words, he did not know if the island would be blown apart while he and his film crew, consisting of cameramen Ed Lachman and Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein, were shooting the film (Cronin 2002, 148). In the end, the eruption did not take place. Without any clear explanation and against all odds, the volcano returned to a less active phase and the catastrophe was avoided. The whole premise for making the film was initially that the volcano was about to erupt. When it did not erupt, the backstory of the film dissolved. The climax of an unavoidable catastrophe that is offered already in the title of the film never arrives. However, we are still left with a puzzling film, which perhaps is more memorable than the many films and news coverages about volcanoes that actually did erupt. In this sense, the expected narrative, a film about a catastrophe, has to be renegotiated, and we, as the viewers of the film, become witnesses to this re-negotiation. Our expectations are led astray as we are presented with the uncertainty of natural phenomena. Yet, there is something miraculous about that which did not happen. Most obviously, it is a miracle that Herzog, his crew, and the couple of men they encountered on the island were left alive. The resulting film was something completely different from what both Herzog and the viewers, mislead by the dramatic title of the film, expected. It is not a narrative with a beginning, a dramatic turn, and a solution, rather the film shows a constant uncanny present, which is impregnated with a mood of impending doom. Even the natural life on the island reacts to this atmosphere. The animals flee the slopes of the volcano, donkeys enter the streets of the abandoned city of Basse-Terre, snakes swim into the sea to drown and the birds have left the island in an eerie silence. The only break from this haunting present is a short recapitulation of a similar event, the eruption of Mount Pelée on Martinique in 1902, which became one of the worst volcanic disasters of the twentieth century. The main character of the film presents a contrast to this mood. He does not seem to care about the threat from the volcano that has made the authorities evacuate the population of the whole island. In their first encounter, Herzog finds the man sleeping peacefully in the heat caused by the heightened activity of the volcano. He seems completely unfazed about the situation. The man sleeps calmly in a situation of complete uncertainty. We are presented with an enigma: how can this man sleep calmly in a situation that is so completely open-ended? How can he not care about what will follow?

Werner Herzog and the Documentary as a Revelatory Practice

179

In La Soufrière the main character presents an attitude that does not connect with the factual circumstances that are there to be detected. He says, “I am at peace with myself and what’s inside me, I have nothing, nothing at all, and I am waiting for death.” It is unclear if he simply has given up or if he is broken down by the poverty and neglect that he has encountered. But there is a tone of calmness in his voice and the fact that he is sound asleep reveals that he actually has achieved at least some of the peace with himself that he claims to have. Herzog carries an ambivalent attitude toward the situation on the island. When it becomes apparent that the volcano actually will not erupt, it is as if he understands how stupid and embarrassing his entire plan has been from the beginning. He says in the film, “There was something pathetic for us in the shooting of this picture, and therefore it ended a bit embarrassing.” In hindsight, he understands how lucky he was to escape an actual eruption: ”Everything that looks so dangerous and doomed ultimately ends up in utter banality” (Cronin 2002, 148). When we think about the example of La Soufrière, it goes against the grain and challenges our preconceptions in several ways. First, it is a story that has rarely been told. Documentary films and news coverage about volcanos that fail to erupt do not fit the narrative structure that the media usually rely on. Second, this surprising and uncanny turn is something that Herzog obviously did not expect himself and he makes it into a part of the film to portray this unaccountability of natural events. He does not shy away from showing the embarrassing conflict between his intentions of making the film and the reality of how things played out. Third, the attitude of the man sleeping calmly in the unnerving atmosphere of the abandoned island goes against our preconceptions of how one would act in this situation of an impending catastrophe. These events hint at a reality beyond our preconceptions that does not adhere to our rational understanding and categorization. WHITE DIAMOND In a similar way, in the film White Diamond some of the central scenes revolve around this question concerning the non-accountability of truth. We follow aeronautical engineer Graham Dorrington on his and Herzog’s joint venture into French Guiana, where they are about to shoot the natural life in the canopy of the jungle. They have constructed a light airship for this task that can move quietly and calmly so that the animals in the treetops can be filmed in their habitat without being startled. This project is haunted by Dorrington’s earlier experiences of a similar mission that went horribly wrong as one of the cameramen was killed in a crash due to a malfunction of the airship, which was also designed by Dorrington.

180

Chapter 10

On location in French Guiana, the initial mission of filming the canopy from the airship proves to be more difficult than expected. There are several technical failures and the airship does not perform well in the uncertain weather of the rainforest. Due to the troubles, Herzog’s attention starts to shift from the initial task to other interesting things that the situations present. A magnificent waterfall becomes a character of its own in the film. According to a native myth, there is a treasure hidden behind the waterfall. Herzog attempts to film the mass of water close up, by dangling a cameraman from a nearby rock. He even conducts some makeshift experiments by sending balloons toward the fall in order to calculate how they react with the air-currents. If the balloons would survive the experiment without being sucked in by the fall, Herzog thinks he could perhaps send the airship to film the fall in close-up. The experiment with the balloons fails, and the idea is abandoned. However, the cameraman, Michael Wilk, claims he got some footage from behind the waterfall as he dangled from a rope. Herzog makes this supposed footage of the hidden place into a moral question: the native guide expresses that it would be inappropriate to reveal what the hidden place of their mythology actually looks like, and Herzog heeds his wish and deletes the footage. The most dramatic scenes in the film, constituting some of the most astonishing in all of Herzog’s work, are of swifts flying in and out of the waterfall. The birds can access the mysterious cavities behind the fall, whereas we, as the viewers, cannot. Herzog builds up this curiosity and wonders about the myth of the waterfall only to deny us access to what is actually there. As a backdrop, this mystery makes the spectacular scenes of the flock of swifts flying in front of the cascading water even more dramatic. Towards the end of the film, Dorrington and Mark Anthony, a Rastafarian diamond-miner who works as a carrier for the mission, discuss the mystery of the swifts and the waterfall in a scene. They both lie down on a ledge looking down into the cascades of the mass of water. Dorrington talks about the mystery of perception. He recounts an anecdote according to which the natives of New Zeeland met the arrival of Captain Cook and his ships with complete ignorance. The explanation for this ignorance was that the natives did not have a concept for the huge sailing vessels, and due to this lack of earlier experience, they could not perceive these alien objects. From this, Dorrington goes on to explain the perception of the swifts. Due to their completely different life form (in comparison to ours), Dorrington explains that their perception has to be unimaginable for us. The fact that they fly in rapid speed and make sharp turns entails their perception has to be essentially different from ours. There are several layers in the scenes that playfully address the question concerning the accountability of truth. The swifts seem to have access to another kind of truth: they have different perceptual abilities, and

Werner Herzog and the Documentary as a Revelatory Practice

181

they can access places that are not accessible to man. This resonates with the Cook anecdote in which the alien ships are imperceptible due to lack in the natives’ earlier experience. It is an encounter with the alien and mysterious, the world as it is shows itself without explanation and verification before our habitual preconceptions domesticate it. This perceptible yet mysterious aspect of reality is a prime example of Herzog’s ecstatic truth. He aims at taking us to the borders of what is conceivable, the moments when the ineffable starts to become meaningful without yet being clearly delineated in linguistic form. As David P. Nichols paraphrases Merleau-Ponty: “The world speaks to us with a ‘gesture’ that precedes our linguistic possibilities and yet pokes through our meaning structures” (Nichols 2019, 6). ECHOES FROM A SOMBER EMPIRE As a final example, I want to consider one more documentary scene by Herzog which made a significant impact on me: the ending of Werner Herzog’s film Echoes from a Somber Empire (Echos aus einem düsteren Reich, Werner Herzog, 1990). The film follows journalist Michael Goldsmith in the Central African Republic. Goldsmith had earlier spent time in the region during the rule of notorious dictator Jean-Bédel Bokassa. The film tracks down memories and historical facts about the Bokassa regime with Goldsmith as a guide. The film ends in a rundown zoo in the Central African Republic. One of the animals in the zoo that catches Herzog’s attention is a monkey addicted to nicotine. It is not only the actual scene that fascinates me, but also what Herzog tells us about the scene and what his commentary tells us about documentary depiction: In the decrepit zoo we found one of the saddest things I have ever seen: a monkey addicted to cigarettes thanks to the drunken soldiers who had taught it to smoke. Michael Goldsmith looks at the ape and says something like, “I can’t take this any longer” and tells me I should turn the camera off. I answer back from behind the camera, “Michael, I think this is one of the shots I should hold.” He replies, “Only if you promise this will be the last shot of the film.” While this dialogue and my use of the animal was a completely scripted invention, the nicotine-addicted monkey itself was not. There was something momentous and mysterious about the creature, and filming it in the way I did brought the film to a deeper level of truth, even if I did not stick entirely to the facts. To call Echoes from a Somber Empire a “documentary” is like saying that Warhol’s painting of Campbell’s soup cans is a document about tomato soup. (Cronin 2002, 242)

When we see the smoking monkey in a rundown zoo in Herzog’s film, we have a very limited understanding to fall back on. The film sequence takes us to a place and presents us with a situation that is hard to ima-

182

Chapter 10

gine. It is not clear what this image means. However, it has an impact. It is unnerving and provocative. It makes us uncomfortable and sad. It reads us. It puts us in this state because it shows something unknown to us. Up until the ending scene, the film has been a description of Bokassa’s eccentric, brutal and sadistic regime. Goldsmith bears witness to torture and even cannibalism, and he himself was imprisoned and tortured at the hands of Bokassa. Still, the smoking monkey stands out as something that even he, a seasoned journalist, cannot bear. The monkey and the sad fact that it has picked up the habit of smoking changes something within Herzog; it reads him and informs him about something concerning the whole theme of the film that he did not understand from the start. Of all the atrocious facts that they have encountered together with Goldsmith during the shooting, this situation is the most devastating. ATTENTION AND THE REVELATORY The kind of revelatory moments that I have discussed are what philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels refers to as pathos. The revelatory is something that challenges the self. Only through this process of facing that which stands in contrast to our habitual ways of seeing can we construct what we call self. Waldenfels writes: “The ownness without which nobody would be him- or herself can only come about because of an openness to the alien which nevertheless evades us” (2011, 28). Once we are faced with the alien, we are drawn to go beyond ourselves. And it is exactly these kinds of situations that potentially also help us understand ourselves and the ways in which we view the world. Waldenfels relates this alien aspect to our faculty of attention. This understanding of the workings of our attention can be related to the context of documentary film. In the phenomenological tradition, Merleau-Ponty talks about attention as a “natural miracle” (2012, 29), and, in the same vein, Bernhard Waldenfels relates attention to the concept of pathos, which signifies that “something is done to us which we do not initiate” (2011, 46). In Merleau-Ponty’s and Waldenfels’ understanding, attention is able to reveal things that break with our previous knowledge and our habitual ways of seeing. Attention is in this sense unlike rationality that helps us categorize and make order in our perception; rather, it breaks through already established orders. Attention can connect us to alien or unknown visual elements that interrupt our habitual ways of perceiving the world. What this phenomenology of attention means for the theory of film is that it introduces a new emphasis. The fact that a film recording can grasp what filmmakers sometimes cannot themselves grasp is something extraordinary, and it speaks against the veridical idea that the film camera would be an instru-

Werner Herzog and the Documentary as a Revelatory Practice

183

ment that automatically accounts for the factual. The camera also helps us see the uncanny, contingent, and enigmatic features of our visual world, i.e., the world as it is before any nominal order is introduced. With this, we return to Herzog’s distinction between “the accountant’s truth” and “ecstatic truth.” In an interview on the TV show The Colbert Report, Herzog elaborates on his idea of truth that is beyond facts, he says: “You see, if I were only fact based . . . you see, the book of books then, in literature, would be the Manhattan phone directory. Four million entries, everything correct. But it (flies) out of my ears and I do not know: do they dream at night? Does Mr. Jonathan Smith cry in his pillow at night? We do not know anything when we check all the correct entries in the phone directory. I’m not this kind of a filmmaker” (in David Zahl 2011). In this way, the ecstatic truth is something that reveals the phenomenal world— how a certain person experiences the world, how s/he sees the world— whereas the accountants truth only states what one sees. The scenes that I have discussed tell me something I perhaps did not know previously. They reveal something of the world regardless of my projections and interpretations. To quote Kracauer when he talks about the close-up as a cinematic technique: “Such images blow up our environment in a double sense: they enlarge it literally; and in doing so, they blast the prison of conventional reality, opening up expanses which we have explored at best in dreams before” (1997, 48). In accordance with Kracauer, I would put the scenes in Herzog’s films among those which “blasts the prison of conventional reality.” But, in the case of the documentary, it is not fiction, imagination, or dreams that alter our optical and direct visual world. Rather, the scenes portray a visual and perceptible reality that goes against the grain of our preconceptions as well as our intellectual assumptions about the world. This is in line with Kracauer when he writes: “All these things are part of us like our skin, and because we know them by heart we do not know them with the eye” (55). Kracauer points out how film can bring us into contact with elements that “certainly go far in defying our habits of seeing” (49). In the case of the documentary image, the opposite of our “habits” of seeing is not another metaphysical reality, but our way of seeing beyond (or in spite of) the habitual. It is not another non-visual world, or even a different visual world. That which is beyond the habitual are events in which we are attuned to the present world—to our perception—rather than to our preconceptions or our thinking. This requires a cinema that can capture events as they unfold, and not merely after the fact. As Malcolm Turvey points out, the classical tradition within film theory understood this revelatory capacity of photography as stemming from the photograph’s ability to aid the eye in seeing invisible things (2008, 5). In my examples, the revelatory proficiency of documentary film does not present us with the invisible—it does not make the invisible visible— rather, it connects us with what actually is there to see. Siegfried Kra-

184

Chapter 10

cauer makes a similar point when he writes about the unseen as “blind spots of the mind.” With this he refers to our cultural and habitual ways of seeing that do not permit us to acknowledge what is there in front of our eyes, that which “escapes our attention in everyday life” (1997, 53). In these cases, however, it is obvious though that we are not talking about something invisible, but something that can be seen if we can get past our set ways of seeing (cf. Turvey 2008, 123). The scenes from Herzog’s films exemplify the intricate way in which documentary film can aid us in this task of getting past our established conventions of seeing. On this view, the documentary image builds upon an idea that emphasizes our engagement in actively re-establishing our ways of seeing and knowing, beyond our fixed and predetermined knowledge. The smoking monkey, the sleeping man on the slope of the active volcano, and the flight of the swifts in the waterfall do exactly this. Although I know that the scenes are to some extent scripted and that they are made possible through interventions, Herzog’s editing and manipulating of the scenes still shows me something beyond the manufactured. This could be understood as a paradox. If we think of the essence of the documentary as a kind of mold in which more intervention means less neutrality (less realism) and less intervention means more neutrality (more realism), it will be hard to comprehend what goes on in these scenes. This is what the examples actually tell us: there is little room for neutrality in this discussion. Herzog’s interventions are not neutral; they are fabrications, even deceptions. But, as for the smoking monkey, the man on the slope of the volcano, and the swifts, they are not figments of Herzog’s mind and neither are they neutral representations. For Herzog, it is bewildering to encounter the monkey, and the presence of this bewilderment engages my perception of the scene. Or, to make this point stronger: precisely because I get the sense that this particular element of the scene—the smoking monkey—cannot be made up, it appeals to me and engages me. The smoking monkey does not address me in a neutral way: if it were neutral, it would not address me at all. Neutrality does not aptly describe what makes this scene documentary. At last, we arrive at a genuine difficulty when we try to understand what the term “documentary” stands for. My proposition is that it stands for images that bring out the contingent and ephemeral, the world as it exists independent of our preconceptions. Here we are at the core of this difficulty, since the world is never “independent of our preconceptions.” Our conceptions give form to the world and still, without our conceptions, it is not formless. Merleau-Ponty begins his last book with this same pivotal philosophical question when he writes: “This is the way things are and nobody can do anything about it. It is at the same time true that the world is what we see and that, nonetheless, we must learn to see it.” (1968, 4)

Werner Herzog and the Documentary as a Revelatory Practice

185

ENDNOTES 1. This publication was partially supported within the project of Operational Programme Research, Development and Education (OP VVV/OP RDE), ‘Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value,’ registration No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_003/0000425, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic. 2. The walk to Paris did not become a film, but a book, Of Walking in Ice (1980), in which we find Herzog’s diary posts from the journey. The text is written in present tense and contains Herzog’s first-person experiences: what he sees, hears and smells during the journey through Germany and France. It is a set of impressions without any real structure that binds them together to a narrative arc. 3. See also LaRocca’s contribution to this volume for a further discussion of Herzog’s therapeutic use of walking as a practice for filmmakers.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Beier, Lars-Olav. 2010. “Walking Himself into Intoxication,” Spiegel, Deutschland, February 5, 2010. www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/werner-herzog-s-germancomeback-cinema-legend-heads-berlinale-jury-a-677080-3.html. Bresson, Robert. 1977. Notes on Cinematography. Translated by Jonathan Griffin. New York: Urizen Books. Cavell, Stanley. 2005. Cavell on Film. William Rothman, ed. New York: State of New York Press. Gardner, John. 2000. On Moral Fiction. New York: Basic Books. Herzog, Werner. 1980. Of Walking in Ice. Translated by Martje Herzog and Alan Greenberg. New York: Tanam Press. Herzog, Werner and Cronin, Paul (ed.). 2002. Herzog on Herzog. London: Faber and Faber. Kracauer, Siegfried. 1997. Theory of Film—The Redemption of Physical Reality. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Marcel, Gabriel. 2002. The Mystery of Being II: Faith and Reality. Translated by G. S. Fraser. Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1973. The Prose of the World. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Routledge. Nichols, Bill. 1991. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Albany: Indiana University Press. Nichols, David P. 2019. “Introduction,” in David P. Nichols (ed.), Transcendence and Film: Cinematic Encounters with the Real. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Scheinman, Diane. 1998. “The Dialogic Imagination of Jean Rouch: Covert Conversations in Les Maîtres Fous,” in Barry Keith Grant and Jeanette Sloniowskiy (eds.). Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Turvey, Malcolm. 2008. Doubting Vision—Film and the Revelationist Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Waldenfels, Bernhard. 2011. Phenomenology of the Alien. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Zahl, David. 2011. “Werner Herzog on God, Phone Books, and Albino Crocodiles”. Mockingbird, June 17, 2011. http://www.mbird.com/2011/06/herzog-on-god-cavesand-albino-crocodiles/.

ELEVEN On Experience and Illumination: Werner Herzog’s Dialectical Relationship with Society Stefanie Baumann

On April 30, 1999, at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Werner Herzog asserted, “There is something ultimately and deeply wrong about the concept of what constitutes fact and what constitutes truth in documentaries in particular.” 1 Even if he is usually much more interested in images and sounds than in concepts, this one, or more precisely the constellation of the notions of fact, truthfulness, and the artistic agency of expressing the real is for Herzog of such importance that it would drive him to write his well-known “Minnesota Declaration.” 2 Despite the apparent disjointedness of the text and the opaque character of some of the aphorisms, this manifesto draws a clear dividing line between contrasting ideas of truth: on the one hand, Herzog’s own conception of “poetic” or “ecstatic” truth that “can be discovered only by not being bureaucratically, politically and mathematically correct” 3; and on the other hand, the notion of factual accuracy, the “truth of accountants” as defended by the representatives of what Herzog calls “Cinéma Vérité.” 4 According to Herzog, those advocates of factuality ground their conception of veracity in general (and of documentary filmmaking in particular) in a unidimensional, flat idea of truth resulting from an allegedly unmediated, objective representation of reality. This approach prevents them from perceiving the very complexity of truth: they are unable to acknowledge and unfold its “deeper strata.” These strata are not a matter of right or wrong, but of particular configurations that stimulate a genuine spiritual experience. While Herzog conceives authentic truthfulness as a sub187

188

Chapter 11

jective encounter with something unique, factual truth is for him the mere result of a tedious registering of superficial information. “If facts had any value,” Herzog stated in an interview with Paul Cronin, “if they truly illuminated us, if they unquestionably stood for truth, the Manhattan phone directory would be the book of books. Millions of established and verifiable facts, but senseless and uninspiring. The important truths remain unknown.” 5 Yet for Herzog, the problem of relying mainly on factual truth does not only lie in the flatness and dullness of the result. More importantly, the problem is that it pervades society as a whole by generating a unilateral and inflexible perception of reality. This is because “[f]acts create norms,” as Herzog states in the fourth point of the “Minnesota Declaration.” Rather than transcending the appearance of the world in its immediacy, the conventional documentaries advocated by the “accountants” block the process of imagination by always (re)producing the same benchmarks and fixed values. In doing so they not only shape a standardized perception of reality, but also subtly endorse a common-sensical worldview, which implicitly exhorts spectators to believe in its unquestionable validity and behave in conformity with the norms of the existing society. In this way, such documentary films confirm the world, as it is, as ineluctably given. Herzog’s challenging statement can thus be understood as more than yet another pretentious self-staging by an eccentric artist. The problem he evokes does not concern only what is to be considered as true and the way truth-content is to be deciphered from the reality in question and presented on screen; rather, he also shows how this underlying idea of truth and its application through documentary formats is entangled with the political element of perception and its effects on society. THE IDEOLOGICAL IMPRINT OF HEGEMONIC FACTUALITY: HORKHEIMER AND ADORNO Even if Herzog does not refer to any particular intellectual tradition, his critique of the notion of factual truth and its societal impact resonates in several ways with the critical theory of Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer. The two philosophers also deplore the authoritarian, normative agency of facticity, and consider the hegemonic claim for veracity attributed to modern science by positivistic currents to be highly problematic. But their critique goes much further than Herzog’s affirmative statement: they not only criticize the limitations of such truth claims, but also thoroughly problematize the very notion of the factual. Hence, a fact is for them not simply objective information to be registered, categorized, or processed through scientific methods; it is neither as neutral as it seems, nor immediately given. Quite to the contrary, the very idea of

On Experience and Illumination

189

factual data as independent, isolated tokens, dissociated from their historical development and their actual function in society is itself an outcome of the instrumental rationality characterizing the disenchanted world. “Modern science, as positivists understand it, refers essentially to statements about facts, and therefore presupposes the reification of life in general and of perception in particular,” writes Horkheimer in Eclipse of Reason. “It looks upon the world as a world of facts and things, and fails to connect the transformation of the world into facts and things with the social process. The concept of ‘fact’ is a product—a product of social alienation; in it, the abstract object of exchange is conceived as a model for all objects of experience in the given category.” 6 Just as the idea of a detached, neutral science, working independently from the society in which it is embedded, conceals its active role in the conservation of the status quo, the very concept of fact reflects the principle of the division of labor that pervades every layer of society. This is not to say that the objective world does not exist, that factual knowledge has no value at all, or that all knowledge is necessarily subjective and relative. Quite the contrary. But the objective realm is neither ahistorical nor untouched by actually existing socioeconomic relations, and becomes an ideological presumption if it is not understood dialectically in relation to the historical developments of the very society in question. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the separation between the objective and the subjective as two independent, autonomous spheres— the objective being the neutral, actual real, and the subjective, the realm of intuition, humor, opinions and individual biases—is thus to be approached critically as a reflection and continuous reproduction of the generalized process of reification, rather than a simply accepted presupposition of the production of knowledge. What comes to the fore is that this division not only affects the organization of society in its totality, but also shapes the self-understanding of its members: it relegates the subject to the position of a passive receiver of information, a mere consumer of knowledge. For the recognition of something as a fact presupposes an underlying classificatory scheme through which it can be grasped and categorized as such. Instead of actually experiencing a particular object or situation, one is to identify it as a specific case within pre-given categories. Thus, in this logic, only what fits into the grid can be acknowledged. Subjective experience is replaced by the operation of detecting characteristics and classifying them into a prearranged order. “In positivism, a historical condition of the mind is documented which no longer knows experience and, consequently, both eradicates the indictments of experience and presents itself as its substitute—as the only legitimate form of experience,” writes Adorno. “The immanency of the system, which virtually isolates itself, neither tolerates anything qualitatively different that might be experienced, nor does it enable the human subjects adapted to it to gain unregimented experience. [ . . . ] The regimented experience pre-

190

Chapter 11

scribed by positivism nullifies experience itself and, in its intention, eliminates the experiencing subject.” 7 This loss of the capacity to experience exacerbated by the development of a modern, rationalized, capitalist society, leads to what Horkheimer and Adorno call the “administered world” 8—a world, Herzog would say, of accountants. It generates individuals that subject themselves to the prevailing value-structure of society. Leaving no space for subjective experiences of the objective world, the idea of a detached sphere of facts appears as indubitable truth and therefore acquires an authority that apparently can no longer be challenged. THE ADMINISTERED SOCIETY AND ITS AGENTS: THE CULTURE INDUSTRY The uncritical belief in what is presented as objectively real—the neglecting of the mediatedness of all things through society and its historical becoming—is thus fully in the service of the conservation of the existing societal order. Rather than generating awareness or appealing to critical thinking, this type of factual, detached knowledge functions like any other commodity and thus obliterates the complexion of the object as such. For “[t]he curiosity which transforms the world into objects is not objective,” Adorno writes, “it is not concerned with what is known but with the fact of knowing it, with having, with knowledge as possession. This is precisely how the objects of information are organized today. Their indifferent character predestines their being and they are incapable of transcending the abstract fact of possession through any immanent quality of their own. [ . . . ] They may never be broadened out in any way but like favorite dishes they must obey the rule of identity if they are not to be rejected as false or alien. They must always be accurate but never true.” 9 Furthermore, the unflinching argument of factuality comes with a claim “to be realistic”—the “overvalued realism” (überwertiger Realismus) 10 omnipresent in the mass media and ruling over political and positivist discourses—which tends to suppress independent, non-conformist ideas and utopian thinking. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the idea of factual truth indeed creates norms, and these norms pervade the whole of society through the omnipresence of the products of the culture industry. Whether it is in the dissemination of information in the news, the vulgarization of scientific knowledge, or the normalized way through which reality appears in feature films, television series, novels, and other products aimed to entertain, the “cult of fact” 11 infiltrates the consciousness of people and sustains the reigning reality principle. Instead of subverting the status quo in the very element of perception and problematizing its intrinsic ideological purposes, the products of the culture industry pro-

On Experience and Illumination

191

mote a unilateral, conventional, “culinary,” 12 and uncritical reception that leaves its underlying premises untouched. By adhering to the same logic of reification, the same principle of separating the objective from the subjective realm, and the same conformist ethos, the different formats of the culture industry converge in a unified image of reality which sticks to established forms. In sum, they constitute a harmonized representational system of societal standards that leaves no space for singular experiences or dissident thoughts. As Horkheimer and Adorno write in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Through its inherent tendency to adopt the tone of the factual report, the culture industry makes itself the irrefutable prophet of the existing order. With consummate skill it maneuvers between the crags of demonstrable misinformation and obvious truth by faithfully duplicating appearances, the density of which blocks insight. Thus the omnipresent and impenetrable world of appearances is set up as the ideal. Ideology is split between the photographing of brute existence and the blatant lie about its meaning, a lie which is not articulated directly but drummed in by suggestion. 13

The problem with the products of the culture industry, especially with those that are based on indexical images, is that their clichéd imagery worms its way into reality through their very appearance as immediate. Hence, these stereotyped images not only override the unicity of things by transforming them into clichés, 14 but also turn into models to follow in a world which appears as an impenetrable, opaque, and hermetic system. Rather than inciting the individuals to rely on their own capacities, the normalized culture industry imposes an authoritarian scheme of identification and signification that provides patterns for every situation. The persisting antagonisms, frictions, and conflicts of reality are thereby concealed under an ideological veil of coherence. In this system, truth takes on the form of neutral, apolitical facts (though easily instrumentalized for political purposes), while everything that is connected to the subject and its experiences is relegated to the private sphere. This is why the dialectical philosophy of Horkheimer and Adorno, through an immanent critique of society, aims first and foremost to penetrate the appearance of unity in order to unfold its inner conflicts and disclose the irrational tendencies inherent in the fully rationalized apparatus. And this is also why the utmost condition of a genuine artwork is for them its double constitution as social fact and autonomous creation: its subversive force lies precisely in its resistance to the dominant social order by not fitting into its systematic structure, while still being part of it. Contrary to the products of the culture industry, which are closely tied to the logic of capitalism and its ideology, genuine artworks only follow the injunctions of their material, and thus constitute the outside of society.

192

Chapter 11

It is this outside that the thinkers of the early Frankfurt School tried to rescue, this other of society that does not fit into its overarching reality principle and its reliance on facts and identities. HERZOG AND THE ADMINISTERED SOCIETY Herzog’s hostility toward the “accountants,” his assault on the restrictive norms and values of society and the standardization of perception through commercial formats is, as with Horkheimer and Adorno’s critical philosophy, closely linked to the idea of recovering the possibility of uniqueness and genuine experience. By emphasizing the complexity of the idea of truth—a singular, irreducible truth which is to be unfolded in its disparate, sensuous, and intelligible dimensions rather than being simply registered and classified—Herzog intends to break through the ideological straitjacket of conventional forms and their ascribed meanings. For him too, it is precisely the other of actual society, its uncategorizable outside, that provides access to this truthfulness which does not fit into an objectifying schema. However, as already mentioned, Herzog’s “Minnesota Declaration,” as with his other writings and statements, is certainly not an attempt to take part in an intellectual debate. Contrary to other filmmakers of his generation, such as Alexander Kluge, who worked closely with Adorno and Horkheimer and refers explicitly to their critical theory in his theoretical views, Herzog neither makes recourse to theories in order to corroborate his intention nor aims to seriously conceptualize his perspective. Rather than formulating a thorough critique, he insolently declares a “holy war” against the standardized formats of the culture industry. 15 In terms of articulation, Herzog could not be further away from Horkheimer and Adorno’s subtle dialectical thinking. His choice of words often seems to confirm the impression that he would be more interested in the self-mythologizing of his own personae as nonconformist artist and free spirit than in serious, critical reflection. Also, his Wagnerian idea of an artwork, shown by his grandiose use of music and the solemn comments which sometimes appear in his films seem to be far from Adorno’s preference for Schönberg’s conceptual compositions, Picasso’s abstract paintings, or Beckett’s minimalist theatre. Nevertheless, something in Herzog’s position touches upon the concerns of the thinkers of the early Frankfurt School, and it does so much more delicately through his cinema than in his public appearances or his writing. In order to challenge the “cult of facts” inherent to many mainstream documentary formats, he purposely amalgamates conventionally separated realms. This is not only the case in Herzog’s refusal to accept the notorious division between fiction and documentary, 16 but also in the way he approaches factual realities in his own ‘documentary’ films. In

On Experience and Illumination

193

most of them, he is himself the narrator, never trying to hide his strong German accent or his characteristic voice, thus providing an explicitly subjective access to the objective world. Rather than giving a neutral account of the respective situation through an impersonal voiceover, as is often the case in more classical documentary formats, he combines different sorts of narrations, including factual elements, poetical meditations, apparently anodyne details and personal impressions. In La Souffrière (1977) for instance, Herzog’s documentary on the “unavoidable catastrophe” (the eruption of the eponymous volcano in Guadeloupe) forecast by scientific experts and which finally did not occur, it is precisely that which is usually not taken into account in the report or transmitted through the media that interests him: the calm fatalism of those who stayed despite everything, the silence reigning in a city abandoned by its inhabitants, the beauty of the landscape and its apocalyptic, melancholic feel. And his “scientific” documentaries, such as Encounters at the End of the World (2007) on the different research communities in Antarctica or Into the Inferno (2016), which follows the volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer to the volcanoes in Indonesia, Iceland, Ethiopia, and North Korea, are more about Herzog’s personal encounters with the people involved and his impressions about the cultural, social and political environment in which the research is set than about scientific knowledge and approved facts. The scientists themselves are not only shown as obsessive researchers, but also as curious dreamers, admirers of science-fiction stories, or private rock stars. Instead of determining and isolating a particular phenomenon of research, Herzog’s films mingle together a wide range of interrelated occurrences and objects, and emphasize the imaginary dimensions they reveal. Hence, multiple dimensions are interwoven to affect, contradict, or divert one another and thus complexify the topics instead of didactically explaining them. Through eclectic forms and constant deflections of the focus, Herzog subverts the hegemonic claims for truthfulness which are predominant in conventional documentary formats not by ignoring the factual or opposing to it a purely fantastic world, but by entrenching objects in the multiple constructions through which they acquire a meaning. Suspending the question of their factual accuracy, Herzog emphasizes instead their thought-provoking potential and the peculiar experiences with which they are associated. Concomitantly, the ideas that come up reflect back on the society in which they appear. For what comes to the fore through aesthetic means is that the perception of an object as factually given—as indubitable fact—is not an evident, automatic operation, but itself formed by the social, geographical and political surrounding. What constitutes an object depends on the way its perception is shaped in a particular societal context, just as this perception depends on the historically developed constitution of the object. To say it with Horkheimer’s words: “The facts which our senses present to us are socially preformed in two ways: through the historical

194

Chapter 11

character of the object perceived and through the historical character of the perceiving organ. Both are not simply natural; they are shaped by human activity.” 17 Herzog’s films unfold, through his own subjective perspective, a panoply of different mediations through which objects are approached and experienced. One of these mediations is the actual process of filming, through which those factual objects appear in their dramatic, anodyne, strange or familiar dimensions. Rather than explaining them, this reveals their enigmatic resistance to assimilation. Herein lies their political potential, not in their manifest content revealing a hitherto unknown truth, but in the way they formally and topically enlace divergent sensuous and intelligible facets and thus challenge established ways of seeing. Bringing together aesthetic, political and social aspects of objects and situations— dimensions that are usually kept separate in the products of the culture industry—Herzog reconfigures the habits for viewing reality. Therefore, he does not ignore the more conventional forms he wants to challenge with his filmic production, but makes perceptual standards appear in another light. For example, his “apocryphal documentary” 18 Lessons of Darkness (1992) inherently refers to the media coverage of the First Gulf War. Herzog’s seemingly otherworldly and completely decontextualized images, which are embedded in a kind of mystical, dystopian narration, contrast starkly with the indifference of the neutral reports about the mere factual in the news, even if those are also flavored with spectacular images. While the latter have become stereotypical representations of military devices and distant suffering, Herzog’s provocative, apocalyptic vision of the calamity pushes his spectators to find a different approach. Without a doubt, the images of slowly burning oil fields in Kuwait, devastated landscapes, and strange machines and vehicles produce a certain unease when they are combined with pompous music. Their overbearing aesthetic quality seems to deflect attention from the political, human and ecological catastrophe to which they bear witness. 19 Yet in Herzog’s montage they are juxtaposed with other images: highly pixelized media footage, disturbingly unspectacular sequences showing a collection of torture instruments and short interviews with victims—again, not sensation-seeking accounts, but dialogues through which the impossibility to assimilate what happened comes to the fore. Even if those rather discreet scenes are clearly overshadowed by the infernal views of black smoke, huge fires and massive machinery, they are not suppressed. Instead of explaining the incommensurable muteness of those who were traumatized by the war, Herzog makes their voicelessness contrast starkly with the overwhelming aesthetic dimension of the images in this lofty, apocalyptic spectacle of manmade destruction. It is a spectacle so impressive that some of the firefighters seem unwilling to end it as they enthusiastically spark the flames anew after having extinguished them.

On Experience and Illumination

195

Rather than being socio-critical in the sense of the artworks that Adorno calls (and condemns as) realistic or committed, that is, by transmitting, explicitly or not, a particular political message, 20 Herzog’s films, especially his earlier productions, express the dialectical relation between societal norms and their inherent politics of perception on the one hand and the subject’s particular way of experiencing the surrounding world on the other. The subversive forms he uses for that purpose are, as Eric Ames puts it, “neither politically oriented nor politically inert.” 21 For even if they do not address social and political issues frontally by directly criticizing specific situations or taking on an activist stance, neither do they avoid contemporary society and its inherent violence. Indeed, notwithstanding Herzog’s extraordinary penchant for sublime landscapes, intense soundtracks, original storylines and unique characters, the “ecstatic truth” he seeks is not the archaic variety found beyond contemporary society, in a kind of authentic natural state, but a singular, illuminating moment occurring in, through, and in spite of it. 22 The world he evokes is always in one way or another marked by the historical development of society and its numerous material and immaterial traces; it is never an ideal, untouched, authentically natural place. Even the remote desert in an experimental film like Fata Morgana (1971) is riddled by strange objects and outdated machines; just as the isolated world of the nomadic Woodabee (Herdsman of the Sun, 1989) is not devoid of the traces of their precarious and impoverished social condition, which forces them to find food on an enormous waste dump. Similarly, the deep Amazonian jungle in Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) not only bears witness to the “overwhelming indifference of nature” 23 which humans try to challenge, but also to the colonial exploitation of the forest and the indigenous population. A pure, natural state devoid of societal contamination cannot be found in any of Herzog’s films. The mediatedness of nature and culture, of human civilization and the environment in which it is settled, as well as that between individual life and societal domination, is always present. At the same time, characters do not lose their singularity, nor is the beauty of the landscapes diminished. They are both unique and products of a historically developed society. OBSTINATE OTHERNESS: HERZOG’S CHARACTERS Rather than homogenizing the storyline, the setting, the characters, and the editing according to a logic which subordinates the details to a preestablished idea, Herzog’s films keep the antagonisms and frictions of reality alive. Hence, Fitzcarraldo’s charming but quixotic vision of carrying a steamboat over a mountain in order to build an opera house in the middle of the Amazonian jungle relates both to his personal failure in the

196

Chapter 11

capitalist world and his refusal of its values on the one hand, and his own exploitation of the indigenous population for the sake of his vision on the other (Fitzcarraldo, 1982). The same is true for Reinhold Messner’s risky ascent of two summits in the Gasherbrum massif without returning to the base camp (The Dark Glow of the Mountain, 1984). Herzog shows him as a fascinating, determined, and at the same time humble and very human mountain climber; he appears as both a hero who does not surrender in the face of danger and as an obsessive outsider constantly in a “conquest of the useless” who describes himself as probably mentally disturbed. Herzog’s film provides stunning, contemplative images of the mountain landscape, while not concealing Messner’s dependence on the numerous porters carrying his heavy equipment and supplies. The film shows them both as a nameless, hard-working crowd and as a community with particular rituals and beliefs that remain hermetic to Messner and his partner, even if the two mountain climbers treat them respectfully. Their presence in the film suggests that the condition of possibility of Messner’s particular adventure, of his own escape from the utilitarian values of society, is precisely the generalized context of exploitation of late capitalism. This connection between the singular way of being of his protagonists and the socio-political context transpires in many of Herzog’s films in one way or the other. The exceptional individual is always mediated by the historically developed society, just as the latter is challenged by the personal experiences of the unique characters. Rather than providing escapist visions of authenticity, they are constellations of the complex nexus of society. The uniqueness and complexity of many of Herzog’s characters and settings is indubitably one of the most distinctive marks of his films. Because they are excessively stubborn, audacious, unworldly, or eccentric, or because they are handicapped, nonconformists or “beings incapable of being used,” 24 as Deleuze puts it, or simply because they take their dreams more seriously than the reality principle would allow, the protagonists in Herzog’s films are all, in one way or another, outsiders who reflect on society from its margins. Nevertheless, it is not the problematic situation of exclusion as such that is at the center of the films. Instead of considering his characters through the lens of society, its conventions and virtues, he shifts the focus to their own singular way of being and experiencing. For Herzog avoids presenting his characters as nasty criminals, eternal victims, or as symptoms of decadence. He does not idealize or romanticize them either. Rather, far from appearing as innocent, pure, or heroic protagonists, they bear a peculiar awkwardness, vehemence and unwieldiness, all of which makes it difficult to identify with them. They simply do not signify anything other than themselves, while their singularity remains all the same closely related to the society from which they emerge. Irreducible to types, they elude categorization, thwart identitarian attributions and thus frustrate conventional expecta-

On Experience and Illumination

197

tions. As Thomas Elsaesser puts it: “Subjectivity in Herzog is in fact nothing other than the effect of a resistance to signification.” 25 Or, to say it with Timothy Corrigan’s words, “[i]n a world where vision and sensibility have been corrupted by status-quo notions of truth, Herzog’s outcasts are entirely inaccessible to the prejudices of society.” 26 This is particularly visible in his version of the Kaspar Hauser story (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, 1974). Brought up in a kind of cellar without any direct contact with society, Kaspar Hauser is unable even to walk when he is finally taken to the village. None of the cultural codes are familiar to him: he is the outsider par excellence, and will always remain a stranger to society despite the numerous efforts to integrate him. This is palpable in the reactions of others: his thinking appears naïve and incorrect to the “cultivated community,” as most prominently shown in the scene in which a logician tests his intellectual capacities. The clerics interpret his lack of faith in God as an immature affront against authority, and his dreams and stories remain mysterious to those he tells them to. But it is also manifest in his own physical and mental state. Until the end of the film, Kaspar Hauser talks in a very peculiar and broken way, using his own idiosyncratic grammar and odd way of articulating perceptions and ideas. 27 When he addresses his fellow humans, he does so in a particularly blunt but inoffensive manner and rarely looks them in the eye. However, while to a certain extent he resists assimilation, he does not rebel against the conventions he is forced into: he neither protests when confined to the local prison, nor when exhibited as an exotic object of curiosity among other “abnormal” people, nor when introduced into the aristocratic high society which wants to adorn itself with his celebrity as poor child of nature. However, he never fully satisfies the expectations of those who induct him into social life, where he continues to express a certain uneasiness. Hence, his singularity resists not only assimilation, but also his subjection to the projections of others. He neither fits into the scheme of the savage good-for-nothing—he is too harmless and too curious an object of humanistic ambitions—nor into that of the “greatest mystery” of all as he is presented at the fair. His aspect and attitude are not really spectacular enough. As for the idea of him incorporating a sort of untouched purity, this also seems inappropriate, as his behavior is too rough to conform to the bourgeois idea of innocence. What comes to the fore through Kaspar Hauser’s irreducible, obstinate otherness are the multiple forms of social violence inherent in the futile attempts to transform him according to a predetermined idea of what he should be and should represent. Ironically, it is after his death that society triumphs after all: his autopsy actually reveals certain anatomical anomalies, which allegedly allow for the assessment of his unique condition according to scientific knowledge and the subsumption of his case under its categories. It is this constellation of enlightened society in the nineteenth century, itself divided into different social classes and representatives of the

198

Chapter 11

diverse fields of competence, and the exotic outsider who remains enigmatic despite the good (or bad) will of those who try to facilitate his integration, that expresses a certain truth content of the film. It is a truth that cannot be grasped through rational categories alone, but one that manifests itself through the subversive aesthetic experience of the film. For this truth does not reveal itself in terms of the language of society: it transcends the latter’s hegemony by alluding to a potential other and hinting at a different perceptible register of meaning. Through this truth transpires the fact that the exoticism of the one is dialectically related to the normality of the others, or, as Alan Singer puts it, “however exotic the look of the films, they always return us to the knowledge that such otherworldly exoticism is no less a product of culture than the cultural norms it belies.” 28 Rather than promoting imaginary and fantastic worlds in which genuine authenticity would be possible, Herzog’s films unfold the challenging potential of singularity in the very core of society. The “new images” he provides reconfigure the factual and social world without reconciling its inherent antagonisms or obstructing the heterogeneous mediations through which meaning is distilled. Herein is revealed the images’ utopian potential, which does not lie in a political message, nor in the collection of data contradicting established facts, nor in escapist visions of untouched nature, but in the subversive force of Herzog’s constellations. ENDNOTES 1. Eric Ames, Ferocious Reality: Documentary According to Werner Herzog (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 1. 2. Accessible on Werner Herzog’s website (https://www.wernerherzog.com/ complete-works-text.html), accessed on November 9, 2018. 3. Paul Cronin, Werner Herzog A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin ((New York: Farrer, Straus and Giroux, 2014), pp. 288-289. 4. As Eric Ames notes, Herzog is referring to American observational cinema rather than to Jean Rouch’s experimental approach to documentary film which he highly appreciates (see Ames, Ferocious Reality, p. 9). See also Paul Cronin’s discussion of Herzog’s use of the term in Cronin, Werner Herzog A Guide for the Perplexed, XXXIXXXIII. 5. Cronin, Werner Herzog A Guide for the Perplexed, 288. 6. Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (London: Continuum, 2004), 56. 7. Theodor W. Adorno, “Introduction” in T. W. Adorno, et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, trans. G. Adey and D. Frisby (London: Heinemann, 1976), 5758. 8. Horkheimer and Adorno introduced the term “administered world” in a radio debate with Eugen Kogon under the title “Die verwaltete Welt oder: Die Krise des Individuums.” published in Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften Bd. 13: Nachgelassene Schriften 1949-1972, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1989), 122-42. 9. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Schema of Mass Culture” in ed. J. M. Bernstein, The Culture Industry. Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London: Routledge Classics, 2001), 6198, 85-86.

On Experience and Illumination

199

10. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Erziehung-Wozu?,” Theodor W. Adorno. Erziehung zur Mündigkeit, ed. Gerd Kadelbach (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), 105-19 (translation by the author) 11. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (1947), ed. G. S. Noerr, trans. E. Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 119. 12. The expression stems from Bertolt Brecht. 13. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of enlightenment, 118. 14. As Adorno writes in “Culture Industry Reconsidered”: “The colour film demolishes the genial old tavern to a greater extent than bombs ever could: the film exterminates its imago. No homeland can survive being processed by the films which celebrate it, and which thereby turn the unique character on which it thrives into an interchangeable sameness.” The Culture Industry. Selected essays on mass culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein, 98-106, 103. 15. In Les Blank’s short documentary film Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980), Herzog states: “If you switch on television, it’s just ridiculous and it’s distractive. It kills us, and talk shows will kill us. They’ll kill our language. So we have to declare holy war against what we see every single day on television, commercials. I think there should be real war against commercials, real war against talk shows, real war against Bonanza and Rawhide.” 16. Herzog explicitly declares: “The line between fiction and documentary doesn’t exist for me. All my films, every one of them, take facts, characters and stories and play with them in the same way. I consider Fitzcarraldo to be my best documentary and Little Dieter Needs to Fly my best feature. They are both highly stylized and full of imagination” (in Cronin: Werner Herzog. A Guide for the Perplexed, 289). 17. Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew O’Connell et al. (New York: Continuum, 2002), 188-251, 200. 18. Ames, Ferocious Reality, 66. 19. Regarding Herzog’s connection of pompous music with sublime images in Lessons of Darkness, see Matthew Gandy, “The Melancholy Observer: Landscape, NeoRomanticism and the Politics of Documentary Filmmaking,” in Brad Prager ed., A Companion to Werner Herzog (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 528-546. 20. Committed art, as Adorno understands it, aims to denounce political issues through artistic means, and thus uses the artwork for transmitting a political or ideological message. By committing to a specific cause, those artworks adopt the very logic of the society they aim to criticize rather than resisting to it through their own constitution. For instrumentality is that which vitiates the reality that the artwork seeks to resist. For Adorno, a genuine artwork acquires its importance as such when it is not reduceable to a manifest meaning, because the way in which its form and content interrelate is necessarily fundamentally different from discursive logic. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Commitment” in New Left Review 87-88 (September/December 1974): 7589. 21. Ames, Ferocious Reality, 151. 22. Contrary to interpretations that view Herzog’s films as an expression of the Heideggerian concept of authenticity (see for instance Brigitte Peuckert, “Herzog and Auteurism: Performing Authenticity,” in Brad Prager ed., A Companion to Werner Herzog (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 35-57), I consider his films to constantly mediate singularity through the historically developed society and vice versa. 23. Herzog repeatedly uses this expression, e.g. in Les Blank’s documentary “The Burden of Dreams” (1982) about the filming of Fitzcarraldo and in his own film Grizzly Man (2005). 24. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 184. 25. Thomas Elsaesser, “An Anthropologist’s Eye: Where the Green Ants Dream,” in Timothy Corrigan ed., The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History (London: Routledge, 2014), 133-56, 144.

200

Chapter 11

26. Timothy Corrigan, New German Film:. The Displaced Image, Revised and extended edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 131. 27. According to Timothy Corrigan, Kaspar Hauser’s idiosyncratic way of speaking reflects his particular way of experiencing his environment. While societal language restricts his sensuous access to the world by subjecting it to established codes, his peculiar expressions open up a possibility for recovering his experience: “Transformed into a kind of poetry to match his perception, language can act as a liaison between Kaspar and the natural world and hence a means of reestablishing the connection that language originally deprived him of.” In New German Film: The Displaced Image, Revised and extended edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 136. 28. Alan Singer, “Comprehending Appearances: Werner Herzog’s Ironic Sublime,” in Timothy Corrigan ed., The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History (London: Routledge, 2014), 183-205, 197.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adorno, Theodor W. 1974. “Commitment.” New Left Review 87-88 (September/December 1974): 75-89. Adorno, Theodor W. 2001. “Culture Industry Reconsidered.” In The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. J. M. Bernstein (ed). London: Routledge Classics. Adorno, Theodor W. 1971. “Erziehung-Wozu?” Theodor W. Adorno: Erziehung zur Mündigkeit. Gerd Kadelbach (ed). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Adorno, Theodor W. 1976. “Introduction.” The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, trans. G. Adey and D. Frisby. London: Heinemann, 1976. Adorno, Theodor W. 2001b. “The Schema of Mass Culture.” In The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, edited by J. M. Bernstein. London: Routledge Classics. Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. G. S. Noerr (ed). E. Jephcott (trans). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ames, Eric. 2012. Ferocious Reality: Documentary According to Werner Herzog. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Corrigan, Timothy. 1994. New German Film: The Displaced Image. Revised and extended edition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cronin, Paul. 2014. Werner Herzog A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin. New York: Farrer, Straus and Giroux. Deleuze, Gilles. 1997. Cinema 1: The Movement Image. H. Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (trans). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2014. “An Anthropologist’s Eye: Where the Green Ants Dream.” The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History. Timothy Corrigan (ed). London: Routledge. Gandy, Matthew. 2012. “The Melancholy Observer: Landscape, Neo-Romanticism and the Politics of Documentary Filmmaking.” A Companion to Werner Herzog. Brad Prager (ed). Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Horkheimer, Max. 2004. Eclipse of Reason. London: Continuum. Horkheimer, Max. 2002. “Traditional and Critical Theory.” Critical Theory: Selected Essays, Matthew O’Connell (trans). New York: Continuum. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. 1989. “Die verwaltete Welt oder: Die Krise des Individuums.” Gesammelte Schriften Bd. 13: Nachgelassene Schriften 1949-1972. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (ed). Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag. Peucker, Brigitte. 2012. “Herzog and Auteurism: Performing Authenticity.” In A Companion to Werner Herzog. Brad Prager (ed). Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.

On Experience and Illumination

201

Singer, Alan. 2014. “Comprehending Appearances: Werner Herzog’s Ironic Sublime.” The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History. Timothy Corrigan (ed). London: Routledge.

TWELVE Herzog’s Philosophy of Masculinism Will Lehman

While Werner Herzog has famously rejected the idea that his oeuvre has been informed by any kind of underlying philosophy, his work reveals a complicated and oftentimes conflicted set of fundamental guiding values and principles that reflect the filmmaker’s particular understanding of the nature of the universe and (a) man’s place in it. In this chapter, I will show that, at the heart of Herzog’s work and at the core of his carefully manicured public image lies a philosophy of masculinism, which I will define, in a rather narrow sense, as the exaltation and promotion of the personal attributes and patterns of behavior that have traditionally been subsumed under the term “manliness” 1 and which Herzog often describes in terms of the heroic. Of course, the constellation of traits that constitute “manliness” has evolved over time, and at any given moment it varies not only between cultures but within them. 2 For the present discussion, I will limit myself to those traits associated with masculinity that currently pervade Western culture and which Herzog unabashedly champions: courage, strength, independence, rationality, and the ability to control emotion. 3 One could argue that these traits are not masculine per se, or more specifically, that they are not exclusively, or even primarily, the domain of men. Indeed, there is a wealth of scholarly research showing just that. 4 But Herzog’s Weltanschauung does not appear to register this possibility, such that his preoccupation with masculinity nearly blinds him to female protagonists. As with any filmmaker whose career spans over fifty years, it is impossible to approach Herzog with a monolithic lens or to distill his cosmology to a few keywords. Thus, it is not my goal here to embark on a Fitzcarraldian project of bringing a definitive order to the chaotic jungle 203

204

Chapter 12

of the divergent threads of masculinism that form the substrate of much of Herzog’s public narrative. I will instead delineate the main tenets of his masculinist philosophy by examining his image in the media and his self-portrayal in his interviews and some of his documentaries. 5 Herzog’s public persona is shaped to a large extent by things that he is said to have done, many of which are actually true. For readers unfamiliar with the filmmaker, their first introduction to him is often through a movie review in a newspaper or on the Internet. These reviews nearly always start with a reference to Herzog’s German nationality and his strong accent, which not only establishes him as someone exotic, but also calls to mind, at least in the Anglo-American context, some of the stereotypes we associate with Germanness, among which are brutality and obsessiveness that borders on madness. Before proceeding to the actual movie review, the writer typically mentions a few of the seemingly crazy things the filmmaker has done, such as walking from Munich to Paris to save a dying friend, eating his own shoe to settle a bet, plotting to kill Klaus Kinski, being jailed and beaten while filming in Cameroon, or risking his life (and the lives of his crew) to document the Miskito uprising against the Sandinistas. 6 Invariably, the reader also learns that Herzog managed to pull a steamship, without any modern machinery, over a Peruvian mountain. 7 The motivation to build Herzog up as a real-life superhero is understandable, given the need to keep the readers convinced of the magnitude of what they are reading. To allude to the fact that, as Herzog himself has said, no one makes films completely alone, would only serve to diminish our awe of the filmmaker’s accomplishments. Besides the descriptions of clearly masculine-gendered exploits, reporting about Herzog continually uses gendered terms to describe his persona. Some lack any hint of restraint: The Telegraph and the Boston Herald, for example, refer to Herzog as a “man’s man,” 8 and the popular website Mental Floss, following Herzog’s own wording, 9 calls him a “bad-ass.” 10 Other terms commonly used to describe Herzog in the public media are eccentric, self-styled, daring, and genius, all of which can refer to women, but are much more often used to describe men. 11 What we can conclude from this fact is that the words themselves, due to the patterns of their usage, connote a sense of masculinity, and that writers who use them to describe Herzog are, consciously or unconsciously, bolstering the explicitly masculine public image that Herzog has curated through a carefully scripted narrative that he delivers in nearly every interview and public statement. The academic literature about Herzog is, not surprisingly, more critical in its assessment of the filmmaker’s relationship to masculinity. Chris Wahl, for example, has highlighted Herzog’s penchant not so much for actually being, but rather for styling himself as “an ultra-tough Germanic lone wolf.” 12 Other scholars such as Laurie Ruth Johnson, Lúcia Nagib,

Herzog’s Philosophy of Masculinism

205

and Matthew Gandy, have noted, with some dismay, the conspicuous absence of female “heroes” in Herzog’s films. 13 Yet this absence should not be taken, most scholars agree, for the blatant misogyny seen in some threads of masculinist discourse. 14 Johnson articulates this most clearly. For her, Herzog is only guilty of paying a “lack of attention to issues of gender. . . . [I]f you have the ability to be a survivor, and to engage nature in a struggle to live,” this matters more to the filmmaker “than any sociological or political points.” 15 Herzog is aware of the dearth of women in his work, to which he responds: “As to the question of why there are so few women populating my work, I can offer only a vague response, which is that the characters in my films are somehow reflections of myself, so most are men. Let’s say no more on the matter, though let me add here, if it even needs to be said, that I’m very fond of women.” 16 I would agree that Herzog is not openly misogynist, but I would not go so far as to say that he is somehow neutral about “issues of gender.” While it is true that he has never denigrated women as such, he certainly has been critical of trends that he sees as too feminine. In Encounters at the End of the World, for example, Herzog is openly disgusted by the fact that someone would defile the rugged and dangerous Antarctic with such “abominations” as an aerobics studio and yoga classes. In a later interview, Herzog laments that the original studio executives, apparently unable to convince him to remove that reference, dumped the project at a significant loss because, in the filmmaker’s words, “they didn’t want to insult the housewives who might be watching.” 17 Herzog’s distaste for what he perceives as insufficiently masculine is expressed most clearly in his interviews with Paul Cronin, and his targets are most often men. In a very telling passage in Werner Herzog A Guide for the Perplexed, the filmmaker lashes out at men who fail to meet his standard of masculinity: Allow me to vent here about the prevalent image of masculinity in mainstream Hollywood films, which seems to be post-pubescence, actors like Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt. Where are the manly men of times gone by? The last one standing is Clint Eastwood, who hails from the likes of Bogart, Brando, Bronson, John Wayne, Richard Widmark and Gary Cooper. Collective female dreams have shifted significantly over the years, and today this kind of hero seems to be out of fashion, but I have no interest in the boymen. Things will eventually revert to the manly men. Today hardly anyone has a beard, but I predict that within a few years most men will be wearing them. 18

I think it is safe to say here that Herzog is not just championing the socalled tough guys of old, he is fetishizing them, offering them as more appropriate objects of sexual desire than the “boymen” of today. More importantly, the passage reveals a lack of honest reflection on Herzog’s part. He seems to be remembering these “heroes” only in their later incar-

206

Chapter 12

nations, as dignified older men, forgetting that in their teens and twenties they were merely dashing, young, and mostly hairless actors, not significantly different from young male actors today. 19 Herzog’s fascination with the beard reflects the fact that gender is conveyed not only by people’s behavior, i.e., their public performance of gendered actions, but also by their appearance. As Raine Dozier has argued, when “sex characteristics do not align with gender, behavior becomes more important to gender expression and interpretation. When sex characteristics become more congruent with gender, behavior become more fluid and less important in asserting gender.” 20 When determining whether someone is manly enough for his tastes, Herzog may favor one or the other criterion. For the old guard actors, he is clearly relying on their behavior, their performance of gender on the screen, in granting them “real men” status. (It should be noted here that none of them actually wore a beard, except Clint Eastwood, and only on occasion.) For others that he wishes to welcome to the club of heroes, he seems to rely on physical characteristics exclusively. Such is the case with his friend and fellow director John Waters, who is one of the most visibly and unabashedly gay filmmakers alive today. As proof that he doesn’t understand “irony” (although a better word choice would have been “subtlety”), Herzog makes the improbable claim that he had been Waters’s friend for forty years before it occurred to him that the flamboyant director of the films featuring the actor and drag queen known by the stage name “Divine” might actually be gay, saying that he is “unable to distinguish a gay man from a straight man unless he shows up in drag and make-up. For me, a man is a man.” 21 In the case of Waters, Herzog ignores behavior, the “performance,” which has never been particularly manly, and focusses instead on purely physical signifiers of manhood: a deep voice (ignoring its tone), a mustache (overlooking that it is razor thin), and a suit (disregarding that it is often pink). 22 In the case of Timothy Treadwell in Grizzly Man, Herzog takes a slightly different approach, nominally nodding to Treadwell’s professed heterosexuality in his commentary, while featuring in his careful selection of Treadwell’s footage the latter’s oftentimes strikingly effeminate mannerisms, his previous work as a florist, and even his wish that he actually were gay so that he could get easy sex at truck stops. Here it becomes clear that Herzog is not nearly as blind to the signifiers of sexuality as he claims. Rather, it seems that for Herzog, a hero’s sexuality is subordinated to other signs of manhood. With Treadwell, the clean-shaven, boyish face, the soprano voice and dramatic intonation, and his doting over young foxes and dead bumble bees all become insignificant in light of his fearless obsession with the deadly bears that essentially became a “suicidal gesture.” 23 One performance that the filmmaker cannot abide, however, is the display of cowardice. “Cowards have never impressed me,” Herzog says, referring to his decision, when the time came to eat his shoe, to consume

Herzog’s Philosophy of Masculinism

207

an ankle-high Clarks desert boot instead of something easier like a light track shoe. 24 While continually alluding to his own bravery, as well as his deep emotional connection to the raw athleticism of filmmaking, he is quick to attack signs of what he considers weakness. For example, he refers to the BBC who filmed an incident in which Herzog was shot as “miserable cowards,” simply because they wanted to call the police. He likewise insults the oil well firefighter Red Adair for being too meticulous, bureaucratic, and dependent on machinery and precaution. As for aspiring filmmakers who complain about finding adequate funding or film crews who refuse to have direct contact with cockroach filth? Cowards and wimps. 25 Many of the physical signifiers of masculinity that Herzog overtly celebrates are connected to formative experiences in his youth. His fascination with real (i.e. non-steroid-induced) muscles, for example, can be traced back to his childhood hero Siegel Hans, a “brave, daring young chap with rippling Mr. Universe muscles,” who inspired in Herzog an awe that he is still “unable to understand today.” 26 This fixation leads Herzog to openly admire people like Mike Tyson (“a person of absolute violence and madness”) and Jessie Ventura (“a real badass”). 27 Another badge of manhood that inspires the filmmaker is calloused hands, which, since making Into the Abyss, he mentions frequently. In this film, Herzog interviews a young man named Jared Talbert, an acquaintance of the two perpetrators of the triple murder that is the subject of the film. Herzog starts the interview by asking Talbert, a self-described felon who has only recently learned to read while sitting in jail, to recount a fight in which he had been stabbed with a long screwdriver and then decided to go to work instead of the hospital. Herzog then asks Talbert to show his calloused hands to the camera and asks him a few leading questions to get him to agree to Herzog’s assertion that he is a “working man.” In the context of the film, this is a minor scene, but it is clear that Herzog has staged it in order to promote his own vision of what true manliness looks and feels like. In his Cronin interviews, Herzog spends an inordinate amount of time praising Talbert, with a special emphasis on drawing similarities between the Texas tough guy and the filmmaker himself. Talbert’s callouses, irrelevant in the film but important in the bigger context, serve as the first point of intersection, as they immediately remind Herzog of the callouses that he had worn so proudly as a young welder in Germany and that now allowed him and Talbert to speak “working man to working man.” 28 The second point of connection, oddly, is Talbert’s only recently overcome illiteracy. “Jared is truly heroic, the best of the best. I have always been fascinated by the eloquence of illiterate people,” 29 Herzog tells Cronin, artfully ignoring that fact that Talbert is no longer illiterate. What fascinates Herzog about illiteracy is that it represents a kind of authenticity, unspoiled by modern culture and uncorrupted by academics, which allows for a “genuine intelligence” 30 that

208

Chapter 12

Herzog refers to in the film when he tells Talbert: “You have to be much smarter than the others . . . ” As the only New German Cinema filmmaker who didn’t go to film school, Herzog famously likes to claim that he is himself illiterate in a certain sense: “[Film] is not the art of scholars but of illiterates. You could even argue that I am illiterate.” 31 Through his connection to Talbert, Herzog is thus able to associate himself with heroism without claiming it directly. It is interesting to note that the filmmaker also connects himself with Timothy Treadwell (Grizzly Man) as a “fellow illiterate of filmmaking,” suggesting that it was Treadwell’s lack of training that made him a great filmmaker whose work could never be produced by a Hollywood studio. 32 Still, for Herzog, Treadwell’s courage and singlemindedness are not quite enough to bring him into the hero’s camp, at least not without a little help. Herzog likes to point out that Treadwell was a “failed actor,” but by taking control of Treadwell’s disorganized footage, Herzog is able to “give him a chance to be a real hero, and even [give] him the most glorious soundtrack possible.” 33 Again, Herzog positions himself as the true hero redeeming Treadwell posthumously within his film. There are numerous other examples in his documentaries in which Herzog draws an explicit connection between the protagonist’s heroic action and his own biography. Little Dieter Needs to Fly, for example, is about fellow German immigrant Dieter Dengler, who as a young man joined the US Air Force and was shot down over Laos in 1966. The film chronicles his death-defying escape from a makeshift Viet Cong prison, a deadly trek through the jungle, his eventual rescue, and finally his hero’s welcome. The film begins with a biblical quote: “And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it, and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.” A few moments later, as we watch Dengler maneuver his classic ’48 Buick up a winding road, Herzog’s voiceover starts. “Men,” he says, “are often haunted by things that happened to them in life, especially in war or other periods of great intensity.” The first chapter title appears on screen shortly thereafter: “1. The Man.” By now, it is clear to the viewer what the film will be about: Men—what they are like and how they are supposed to act. Early in the film, we are brought into Dengler’s mountainside California home, adorned with myriad images of open doors and covertly packed with almost a ton of emergency food supplies, evidence not only of his abiding trauma, but also of his survivalist ingenuity. More interestingly, he has a large model airplane hanging from his ceiling and another on his deck out back, dangling high and giving the image of flying over the deep valley below. Herzog’s decision to focus on the airplanes is not just incidental to Dengler’s story. It is an homage to a decidedly masculine technology of domination. 34 In Dengler’s case, the dream of flying is not based on some naive, romantic notion of conquering the sky as the ultimate expression of personal freedom. It is a masculine impulse, born

Herzog’s Philosophy of Masculinism

209

of his experience of “locking eyes” with a fighter pilot who was bombing his childhood village in Germany, to dominate others as he himself had been dominated. Herzog goes out of his way to support Dengler’s disavowal of any ill-will toward the people he was bombing, stressing in his voiceover the abstracted nature of killing from above. But Dengler’s later refusal, even under torture, to sign a statement condemning the American “imperialist aggression” belies Herzog’s effort to cast Dengler’s participation in the bombing of civilians as an unfortunate but unavoidable result of his obsessive desire to become a pilot. For Herzog, the refusal to sign is admirable not so much for the colonialist worldview that it demonstrates, but because it signifies Dengler’s unshakable loyalty, courage, resilience, and honor. In other words, it is proof of his manliness. Dengler resists Herzog’s attempt to label him a “war hero,” though, insisting that “only dead people are heroes.” Herzog’s effort to cast Dengler as a hero is ultimately successful, however, as Dengler’s death shortly after the film’s theatrical release gave Herzog time to add footage of Dengler’s honor guard burial at Arlington National Cemetery to the film’s DVD release. Thus, just as he has done with Treadwell, Herzog is able, with the help of the US Air Force, to posthumously make Dengler into the hero he never wanted to be. In doing so, he carefully crafts the narrative to suit his purpose. In his public statements, Herzog maintains that Dengler died of Lou Gehrig’s disease, having “battled the disease like a warrior.” The reality is much more nuanced. While it is true that Dengler suffered from ALS, he did not ultimately die of the disease per se, but rather he took his own life after the disease had left him so debilitated that he was no longer able to walk or even speak. 35 This tragic fact complicates not only Herzog’s depiction of Dengler as an unbreakable spirit, but also the film’s opening biblical quote. Indeed, Dengler’s suicide can be seen as a direct challenge to Herzog’s rather uncomplicated portrayal of the nature of heroism, and as such, it is simply ignored by the filmmaker. In 1998, the same year Little Dieter was released, Herzog released a made-for-tv documentary about another daring jungle escape, this time about a now-grown German woman who at age seventeen had not only miraculously survived the midair breakup of a small airliner over the Andes and a two-mile plummet into the jungle below, but also managed to navigate through the jungle to find help at an Indian village. In Wings of Hope, Herzog takes Juliane Koepcke back to the jungle (as he had done with Dengler), where they examine the remains of the doomed airliner and retrace Koepcke’s route to eventual rescue. This film represents a welcome disruption from Herzog’s pattern of documenting remarkable male achievement, yet it still codes the protagonist in male gendered terms. Her survival of the initial crash, which killed her mother and everyone else on board, is a miracle, Herzog says, but her subsequent escape was “sheer professionalism,” complemented by a “dogged will-

210

Chapter 12

power” that she “must have inherited from her father,” whom the filmmaker describes as a rugged adventurer who arrived in South America as a stowaway and trekked across the entire continent to build a zoological station in the jungle. While extoling Koepcke’s knowledge of the jungle, navigation skills superior even to his own, and her utter lack of mortal fear, he mercilessly ridicules the inept actress who, in an earlier film, depicts Koepcke as a scantily clad, overly feminine girl who grows attached to cuddly baby monkeys and is terrified by every possible danger in the jungle. In contrast, Koepcke is strong, determined, and notably emotionless in her description of her ordeal. Throughout the film, Herzog goes to great lengths to highlight Koepcke’s aptitude for, and success in, the natural sciences, a field traditionally dominated by men. Her co-footing with men is further strengthened by the short shrift Herzog gives to Koepcke’s husband Erich, who is always present during filming to give Koepcke emotional support but almost completely absent in the finished film. The few times he appears, always without voice, his passivity stands in contrast to Koepcke’s taking charge. In the airport, he stands idly by while Koepcke talks with Herzog. In the jungle, he seems bothered by the flies that Koepcke hardly notices. When Herzog briefly mentions Erich’s profession, it is only to say that he is, “like Juliane,” a biologist. In other words, Juliane is the standard against which Erich is compared, not the other way around. Given the way that Herzog consistently stages and describes Koepcke in masculine terms, albeit without ever using the word “hero,” it is by no means a stretch to conclude that the filmmaker is interested in Koepcke’s odyssey despite her being a woman rather than because of it. Furthermore, the film is not just a tribute to a rugged woman who overcame the trappings of femininity, but also to Herzog’s own masculinity, which becomes apparent as the filmmaker discusses at length the fact that he had not only barely avoided being on the exact same doomed flight as Koepcke, but had also, during the pre-filming of Aguirre, the Wrath of God, been trudging through the same jungle just a few miles away as Juliane fought for her life. For all the heroic self-positioning Herzog engages in, there are other, more subtle ways in which Herzog asserts his own masculinity in the form of dominance over his protagonists. In both Little Dieter and Wings of Hope, Herzog takes his protagonists back to the scene of their trauma and has them reenact it. Under Herzog’s direction, Dengler is tied up with his hands behind his back and marched through the jungle by armed “guards,” and Koepcke is made to drudge her way, barefoot, down a muddy creek. This is not merely to give the audience some kind of authentic experience, since the reenactment is so obvious. Herzog claims that, by returning them to the site of their injury, despite the fact that both said they were not completely comfortable with the idea, they were able to dig into a “deeper reality.” 36 Naturally, he is trying to evoke

Herzog’s Philosophy of Masculinism

211

some “real” emotion from his subjects for the sake of the camera, but the technique is basically mimicking a common (though often ineffective) PTSD treatment, where trauma is “mastered” by re-experiencing it in a controlled, safe environment. 37 Herzog’s technique is similar in The White Diamond, in which the director performs a kind of talk therapy on Graham Dorrington, who is consumed by guilt for his role in the death of the German documentary filmmaker Dieter Plage. This “therapy” seems to work, inasmuch as Dorrington is able to deal with his grief (by allowing himself to cry) without being devoured by it. Herzog seems to enjoy playing the part of the therapist, who is able to uncover “deeper realities” in his subjects in ways that they, without his guidance, cannot. He is not willing, however, to allow anyone to dominate him in the same way: “I would rather jump off the Golden Gate Bridge than visit a psychiatrist,” he says. “Self-scrutiny is a strong taboo for me.” 38 There are a great many other examples, all worthy of further study, of ways in which Herzog manages his public image by overtly expressing or covertly encoding his particular version of masculinism, which could be summarized as a celebration of the signifiers and performance of manliness—often his own—without any explicit misogyny or homophobia. Some of the more noteworthy examples are his performances as an actor in other people’s productions, which include such serious characters as a cruel and domineering father in Harmony Korine’s Julian Donkey Boy and a murderous gang leader in Christopher McQuarrie’s Jack Reacher. The most interesting of his external roles, however, are those in which he makes comedic appearances, as a bunny-murdering German gambler in Zak Penn’s The Grand or an elder alien in the television series Rick and Morty who, in an obvious reference to Herzog’s own reputation, derides “the humans” for building their entire culture “around their penises.” Thus it seems that Herzog is, after all, capable of critical self-reflection, albeit expressed through comedy rather than psychotherapy. But, for better or worse, this is not going to lead Herzog to rethink his worldview. As he tells an interviewer for The Daily Beast, “I’m not one of those people who reinvents himself all the time . . . I’m not someone like Madonna.” 39 ENDNOTES 1. This definition builds on the distinction that Ferrel Christensen draws between masculism and masculinism. For Christensen, the former is primarily linked to the promotion of men’s rights and interests, whereas the latter refers more specifically to the glorification of masculinity. Ferrel Christensen, “Masculism,” in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 562. 2. Todd W. Reeser, Masculinities in Theory: An Introduction (Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2010), 2-3. 3. Mary Vetterling-Braggin, Femininity, Masculinity, and Androgyny: A Modern Philosophical Discussion (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982), 6.

212

Chapter 12

4. Selwyn Becker and Alice Eagly, “The Heroism of Women and Men,” American Psychologist 59, no. 3 (2004): 163-178. It should be noted here that the idea that these socalled “masculine” traits are not exclusive to males is hardly new. In the Republic (504A), for example, Plato’s Socrates names four cardinal virtues: courage (andreia), wisdom, self-control, and justice, all of which are attributed to both men and women when formulating the guardians of his utopia. See Walter Duvall Penrose, Postcolonial Amazons: Female Masculinity and Courage in Ancient Greek and Sanskrit Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 44. 5. I have chosen to focus on documentary because this is the mode where Herzog most directly articulates his personal worldview. 6. A typical example is Hadley Freeman, “The Dark Comedy of Werner Herzog,” The Guardian, March 5, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/mar/05/wernerherzog-cave-of-forgotten-dreams. 7. In actuality, this feat was accomplished with the help of a bulldozer, but most media accounts fail to mention this, despite Herzog’s own admission that the biggest part of the physical work was done by his imported Caterpillar. 8. Jonny Cooper, “Why Werner Herzog Is the Ultimate Man’s Man,” The Telegraph Online, September 1, 2014, (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/the-filter/11062276/ Why-Werner-Herzog-is-the-ultimate-mans-man.html) Stephen Schaefer, “BERLIN Diary: Day Two,” The Boston Herald Online, February 9, 2015, https://web.archive.org/ web/20150209235822/http://www.bostonherald.com/entertainment/movies/ hollywood_mine/2015/02/berlin_diary_day_two. 9. Jen Yamato, “The Tao of Werner Herzog,” The Daily Beast, November 3, 2015, https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-tao-of-werner-herzog-im-not-someone-like -madonna. 10. Erin McCarthy, “15 Weird and Awesome Werner Herzog Facts,” Mental Floss, February 15, 2015, http://mentalfloss.com/article/61635/15-weird-and-awesome-werner-herzog-facts. 11. A thorough search of published books and scholarly articles (using Google Books and Google Scholar) shows that these words are used to describe men, on average, three to ten times as often as they are used to describe women. 12. Chris Wahl, “I Don’t Like the Germans. Even Herzog Started in Bavaria,” A Companion to Werner Herzog, ed. Brad Prager (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 248. 13. Laurie Ruth Johnson, Forgotten Dreams: Revisiting Romanticism in the Cinema of Werner Herzog (Rochester: Camden House, 2016), 112. Lúcia Nagib, “Physicality, Difference, and the Challenge of Representation: Werner Herzog in the Light of the New Waves,” A Companion to Werner Herzog, ed. Brad Prager (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 60. Matthew Gandy, “The Melancholy Observer: Landscape, Neo-Romanticism, and the Politics of Documentary Filmmaking,” A Companion to Werner Herzog, ed. Brad Prager (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 543. 14. It should also be pointed out that, to his credit, Herzog consistently refrains from objectivizing or idealizing women, both of which tendencies often serve as adjuncts to the masculinist discourse. 15. Johnson, 113. 16. Paul Cronin, Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Faber and Faber, 2014), location 3307, Kindle. (Further references to this text are by location number). 17. Ibid., 1958. Here, Herzog undermines his own narrative of non-misogyny, and we see that, even though he may be “very fond of women” in general, there are certain traits (not working outside the home) and behaviors (doing aerobics or yoga) that he clearly despises. The fact that these traits and behaviors are disproportionately associated with women suggests a sort of hostility that cannot be brushed away with a blanket claim of “fondness.” 18. Ibid., 3314. 19. Interestingly, it seems that Herzog’s prediction of the return of facial hair has largely come true, and even the “boymen” that he specifically names, Leo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, have started sporting facial hair.

Herzog’s Philosophy of Masculinism

213

20. Raine Dozier, “Beards, Breasts, and Bodies: Dong Sex in a Gendered World,” Gender and Society 19, no. 3 (2005): 297. 21. Cronin, A Guide for the Perplexed, 1264. 22. It should be noted that there Herzog, in stark contradistinction to a great many others with masculinist tendencies, does not appear to be homophobic at all, which is also evidenced by his assessment of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the openly gay German director whose creative genius Herzog describes, in strictly masculine terms, as “unstoppable, roughly hewn and ferocious” (Cronin, A Guide for the Perplexed, 1226). 23. Johnson, 164. 24. Ibid., 3624. 25. Ibid., 6767, 5598, 4738, 4397. 26. Ibid., 1097. 27. Ibid., 6513 and 6141. It is worth mentioning here that Herzog’s romanticized and grossly simplified image of the “absolute violence” of Mike Tyson is largely repudiated by the boxer himself in the last few years in documentaries such as Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth (2013). As someone who readily associates manliness with the production and consumption of meat and who claims that he feels most alive while “eating a steak” (Ibid., 7980), Herzog chooses to ignore the fact that Tyson has been a practicing vegan for several years. 28. Gavin Haynes, “Werner Herzog Is One Lucky Filmmaker,” Vice, April 30, 2012, https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/3bem8k/warner-herzog. 29. Cronin, A Guide for the Perplexed, 7816. 30. Ibid., 2639. 31. Paul Cronin, Herzog on Herzog (London: Farber and Farber: 2002), 70. 32. Quoted in Desson Thomson, “Examining the ‘Grizzly’ Details,” The Washington Post, August 9, 2005, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/ 08/05/AR2005080500316_2.html. 33. Cronin, A Guide for the Perplexed, 6833. 34. Robert Hemmings, “Modernity’s Object: The Airplane, Masculinity, and Empire,” Criticism 57, no. 2 (2015): 283-308. 35. Sam Whiting, “Sense of History Drives Writer to Tell POW Tale,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 30, 2010, https://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/article/Sense-ofhistory-drives-writer-to-tell-POW-tale-3180178.php. 36. Cronin, A Guide for the Perplexed, 6118. 37. Rosemary K.M. Sword and Philip Zimbardo, “Why Reliving Your Trauma Only Goes So Far,” Psychology Today, December 22, 2012, https://www.psychologytoday .com/us/blog/the-time-cure/201211/why-reliving-your-trauma-only-goes-so-far. 38. Cronin, A Guide for the Perplexed, 6790. 39. Jen Yamato, “The Tao of Werner Herzog.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY Christensen, Ferrel. 2005. “Masculinism.” The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cooper, Jonny. 2014. “Why Werner Herzog Is the Ultimate Man’s Man.” The Telegraph Online, September 1, 2014. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/the-filter/11062276/ Why-Werner-Herzog-is-the-ultimate-mans-man.html. Cronin, Paul. 2002. Herzog on Herzog. London: Farber and Farber. ———. 2014. Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Faber and Faber. Dozier, Raine. 2005. “Beards, Breasts, and Bodies: Dong Sex in a Gendered World.” Gender and Society 19, no. 3 (2005): 297-316. Eagly, Alice and Selwyn Becker. 2004. “The Heroism of Women and Men.” American Psychologist 59, no. 3 (2004).

214

Chapter 12

Freeman, Hadley. 2011. “The Dark Comedy of Werner Herzog.” The Guardian, March 5, 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/mar/05/werner-herzog-cave-offorgotten-dreams. Gandy, Matthew. 2012. “The Melancholy Observer: Landscape, Neo-Romanticism, and the Politics of Documentary Filmmaking.” A Companion to Werner Herzog. Brad Prager (ed). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Haynes, Gavin. 2012. “Werner Herzog Is One Lucky Filmmaker.” Vice, April 30, 2012. https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/3bem8k/warner-herzog. Hemmings, Robert. 2015. “Modernity’s Object: The Airplane, Masculinity, and Empire.” Criticism 57, no. 2 (2015): 283-308. Johnson, Laurie Ruth. 2016. Forgotten Dreams: Revisiting Romanticism in the Cinema of Werner Herzog. Rochester: Camden House. Luciano, Lynne. 2002. Looking Good: Male Body Image in Modern America. New York: Hill and Wang. McCarthy, Erin. 2015. “15 Weird and Awesome Werner Herzog Facts.” Mental Floss, February 15, 2015. http://mentalfloss.com/article/61635/15-weird-and-awesomewerner-herzog-facts. Nagib, Lúcia. 2012. “Physicality, Difference, and the Challenge of Representation: Werner Herzog in the Light of the New Waves.” A Companion to Werner Herzog. Brad Prager (ed). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Penrose, Walter Duvall. 2017. Postcolonial Amazons: Female Masculinity and Courage in Ancient Greek and Sanskrit Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reeser, Todd W. 2010. Masculinities in Theory: An Introduction. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell. Schaefer, Stephen. 2015. “Berlin Diary: Day Two.” The Boston Herald Online, February 9, 2015. https://web.archive.org/web/20150209235822/http://www.bostonherald. com/entertainment/movies/hollywood_mine/2015/02/berlin_diary_day_two. Sword, Rosemary K. M. and Philip Zimbardo. 2012. “Why Reliving Your Trauma Only Goes So Far.” Psychology Today, December 22, 2012. https://www. psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-time-cure/201211/why-reliving-your-traumaonly-goes-so-far. Thompson, J. Kevin and Guy Cafri. 2007. The Muscular Ideal: Psychological, Social, and Medical Perspectives. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Thomson, Desson. 2005. “Examining the ‘Grizzly’ Details.” The Washington Post, August 9, 2005. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/05/ AR2005080500316_2.html. Vetterling-Braggin, Mary. 1982. Femininity, Masculinity, and Androgyny: A Modern Philosophical Discussion. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield. Wahl, Chris. 2012. “I Don’t Like the Germans. Even Herzog Started in Bavaria.” In A Companion to Werner Herzog, edited by Brad Prager, 233-255. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Whiting, Sam. 2010. “Sense of History Drives Writer to Tell POW Tale.” San Francisco Chronicle, July 30, 2010. https://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/ article/Sense-of-history-drives-writer-to-tell-POW-tale-3180178.php. Yamato, Jen. 2015. “The Tao of Werner Herzog.” The Daily Beast, November 3, 2015. https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-tao-of-werner-herzog-im-not-someone-likemadonna.

THIRTEEN Herzog’s Post-Tragic Aesthetic A Kierkegaardian Perspective Anthony Eagan and Simon Thornton

WILDERNESS MONOLOGUES Against the backdrop of the verdant Alaskan wilderness, a man with thinning blond hair cuts imposingly into the frame of his own video recording. He takes a few steps, turns, and squats dramatically before addressing the camera with pseudo-scientific bravado, declaring that he is “in the prime cut of the big green.” Just behind him, two male bears, whom he has named Ed and Rowdy, languidly graze along the meadow. Sporting sunglasses despite the dull gray light of the afternoon, he elaborates on the danger of his own situation. “If I show weakness, if I retreat, I may be hurt, I may be killed. I must hold my own if I’m gonna stay within this land. For once there is weakness they will exploit it, they will take me out, they will decapitate me, they will chop me into bits and pieces . . . I’m dead.” He turns and quickly glances at the bears, withholding a smirk, before saluting the camera lens with a single theatrical fingertip. “So far, I persevere . . . I persevere.” After another pause, he includes the proviso that he is a “kind warrior,” gentle like a flower and non-invasive. Then, suddenly returning to his former mood of romantic endangerment, he adds the further qualification that, if challenged, “the kind warrior must, must, must become a samurai.” Smirking more deeply now, as if immensely satisfied by his string of clashing metaphors—and simultaneously revealing his own comic obliviousness with respect to the indisputable truths he has nevertheless articulated—he at once asserts his 215

216

Chapter 13

intention to serve and protect the bears while also betraying a desire to master them. Almost giddy with the performance, he stands and strides out of frame again, and we are left with an image of Ed and Rowdy, still grazing and still blissfully unaware of their alleged savior’s quixotic incongruities. The man’s name is Timothy Treadwell. Soon, one of the bears he has sworn to protect will maul him to death. The comic contradictions in Treadwell’s situation become apparent within these first few moments of Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005). The most obvious and essential contradiction involves Treadwell’s patent misrelation to the very circumstances he describes with such rhetorical flourish. Fancying himself a gentle-samurai-flower among the bears, he is clearly intellectually aware that in fleeing from the emotional frustrations of society, he has voluntarily placed himself into one of the most physically dangerous situations imaginable. However, it is apparent to the spectator that the hazards he has listed in his monologue do not register with him at the more fundamental level of instinct or existential significance. In addition to his tone of voice, which betrays his childlike sense of righteous valor, the very fact that he has turned his back to the nearby bears suggests a detachment from the realities of his own endangered existence. Indeed, as Eric Ames has pointed out, our witnessing of Treadwell’s theatrically emphatic comments concerning the danger of his own situation throughout the footage presented in Grizzly Man is dramatically charged by the knowledge that “Treadwell is in fact dead and that he was actually killed in much the same way that he describes and, to some degree, anticipates.” 1 One might say that there is a very real gap between the factual accuracy of his discourse and the fantastical, dramatic turn of his self-understanding. From the Kierkegaardian perspective, situations such as this are comic because the individual in question thinks he has “achieved the highest” when in fact he is revealing his own absurd misrelation to the idea that constitutes his obsession. 2 Rather than feeling besieged by the perpetual dangers of his environment, Treadwell becomes giddy at the thought of the violence that will, in point of fact, eventually befall him. He seems more like an actor playing a role than an actually existing human being confronting a real threat. As a result, it becomes clear that what he wishes to classify as heroism and benevolent courage is in fact mere psychosis and foolhardy self-satisfaction. Fascinatingly, this discrepancy between his mood and the content of his speech is intensified toward the end of the prolonged opening shot we have just discussed. A moment before he exits the frame, Treadwell drops his head in sham-reverence. He pauses silently, blows a kiss to the bears, and then suddenly exclaims, “Love you Rowdy. Give it to me baby. That’s what I’m talkin’ about. That’s what I’m talkin’ about. That’s what I’m talkin’ about . . . [pause] . . . I can smell death on my fingers.”

Herzog’s Post-Tragic Aesthetic: A Kierkegaardian Perspective

217

Cutting away to a shot of a larger group of bears in a similar meadow, Herzog interrupts the theatrical moment with his signature deadpan voiceover. He explains that Treadwell “went to remote areas of the Alaskan peninsula, believing he was needed there to protect these animals and educate the public.” Herzog informs viewers that during the course of his final five years, Treadwell collected some one hundred hours of footage, the edited contents of which will comprise the substance of the film we are about to see. Hidden behind the innumerable scenes of Alaskan wildlife, says Herzog, there is lying dormant within the footage an astonishing story of “human ecstasies and darkest inner turmoil . . . As if there was a desire in him to leave the confinements of his humanness and bond with the bears, Treadwell reached out seeking a primordial encounter.” In his pursuit of this ecstatic desire, however, Treadwell crossed what Herzog terms “an invisible borderline.” Ignoring his actual circumstance as a physically limited human being subject to the obvious forces of a purely brutish domain, Treadwell’s failure to heed this borderline will eventually lead to his entirely preventable demise at the claws of a ravenous bear. In an utterly disturbing fashion, the fantasy role Treadwell dreamed up for himself will reach its fruition with his meaningless death. Everything that happens in the film, including his violent end, revolves around a piece of fantastical nonsense. In the long conclusion of Herzog’s 1972 masterpiece, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, a seemingly altogether different sort of fool performs his own monomaniacal soliloquy against a backdrop of intensely wild and fecund nature. Having just ordered the decapitation of a fellow conquistador who plans to desert their mission to find the fabled El Dorado, Don Lope de Aguirre stalks the charred grounds of an Amazonian village, which he and his men have recently ravaged and burned. Amid the onset of madness and the increasing dissent of his starving men—and refusing to acknowledge the imminent devastation of his entire expedition in the face of disease, famine, skirmishes, and folly—Aguirre, self-proclaimed Emperor-God of the imaginary El Dorado, declares: “I am the great traitor; there can be no greater.” With implicit reference to the freshly decapitated mutineer, he warns the remaining men of the punishments he will issue against those who entertain notions of desertion, or against those who overindulge in even one grain of corn or a single drop of water. Slouching and stalking the ground almost drunkenly, Aguirre wraps himself around a tree trunk for support and then looks upwards to the crowning foliage of the jungle. The handheld camera tracks nearer until reaching an extreme close-up of Aguirre’s tortured face, and we watch as he continues his delusional tirade. “If I, Aguirre, want the birds to drop dead from the trees, then the birds will drop dead from the trees.” He pauses and stares directly into the camera. “I am the wrath of God. The earth I pass will see me and tremble. Whoever follows me and the river

218

Chapter 13

will find untold riches, whoever deserts.” As he trails off, his face begins to twitch with ire at the mere thought of such defiance. The comic contradictions in Aguirre’s situation become fully explicit within these climactic moments of Aguirre. The most essential contradiction involves Aguirre’s obvious misrelation to the very circumstances he describes. Fancying himself the manifestation of God’s indecipherable wrath, the ultimate traitor against human reason and hierarchy, he inadvertently reveals his own mistaken calculation in supposing his powers to be accumulating when they are in fact declining. He is presumably aware—at least intellectually—that in continuing to follow the course of the river, his expedition will only meet with more hunger and fatigue, more suffering and violence, and more destruction. However, believing the outcome to be fated by the omnipotence of an inscrutable force, and fleeing ever more intensely the trappings of human society, he has voluntarily abandoned himself to the chaos of the jungle as a vindication of suffering. It is apparent to the spectator, and presumably to his own men, that Aguirre entertains the wildly mistaken conviction that the destructions nature wreaks are expressions or reflections of his own will; and one can safely say that there is a very real gap between the madness of the situation and the control Aguirre attributes to his own sense of defiant leadership. In Kierkegaardian terms, this demonic rebellion against what is patently rational and beneficial develops when the individual in question unreflectively enhances the quantity of suffering in an effort to highlight the potency of his own feeling of disfavor at the hands of fate. 3 He mistakenly believes that his tenacity toward the acquisition of suffering individuates him, and thereby he inadvertently demonstrates a simple inability to repent, accept blame, turn back, or admit fault or wrongheadedness. In pushing forward freely into damnable but avoidable circumstances, the demonic individual effectively smothers the psychological burden of agency and accountability—those otherwise irrefutable elements of individuality which are accompanied by the task of upholding ethical standards and general accountability. In this regard, Aguirre is an archetypical demoniac. Despite all the evidence accentuating the ongoing folly of his enterprise, and in fact because of it, Aguirre takes each new blow to be an indication of his own torment, and thus a right to further rebellion against reason and reversal. As Kierkegaard’s pseudonym AntiClimacus puts it, in a manner that has striking resonance for understanding Aguirre’s escalating mania, the demonic individual “has convinced himself that this thorn in the flesh gnaws so deeply that he cannot abstract himself from it, and therefore he might as well accept it forever, so to speak . . . so now he makes precisely this torment the object of all his passion, and finally it becomes a demonic rage.” 4 At first glance it may seem that Timothy Treadwell and Don Lope de Aguirre are utterly different sorts of individuals: whereas viewers may

Herzog’s Post-Tragic Aesthetic: A Kierkegaardian Perspective

219

harbor some sympathy for Treadwell’s utopian ecological vision, while acknowledging that he drastically misunderstood what that vision may require, Aguirre courts no sympathy, only disgust. 5 Upon closer examination, however, some remarkable similarities become apparent. 6 In the scenes we have just described, for instance, each man performs a sort of wilderness confessional, a plein air monologue which exposes the deeply misguided and delusional subjectivity he entertains. Each man, ultimately alone within and against the forces that shape him, presumes to have the capacity to assert his will over the expressly intractable hardship of nature, and as such each is caught in a ludicrous confusion about the capacities of human agency. Each man presages and even seems to glorify his own demise. Each is so deceived as to believe that no authority, be it intelligent or insentient, fluid or mechanical, can act as a limit to his will. And each crosses what Herzog calls an invisible borderline, and in so doing creates his own unnecessary downfall through intensified contradiction between freedom and fate, inner life and outward experience. THE ESSENCE OF TRAGEDY To gain a more technical grasp of just how similar Treadwell’s and Aguirre’s situations are, and to see why both figures are archetypically comic—quintessentially lacking in awareness of life’s tragic conditions, dramatically misaligned with the given actuality in which they operate, and, like Quixote, so emboldened by illusion as to mistake fortune and misfortune—it will be helpful to turn now to Kierkegaard’s theory of tragedy. This theory will serve as an aesthetical counterpoint to the types of failure Treadwell and Aguirre exhibit in the respective films which portray their quixotic forms of madness. The category of the tragic is a recurring preoccupation in Kierkegaard’s authorship. Perhaps the most sustained and decisive discussion of it appears in his early work, Either/Or, in an essay titled “The Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected in the Tragic in Modern Drama.” Significantly, the essay is authored by the aesthetically-oriented, fictitious pseudonym whose identity is designated by the single letter “A.” 7 Broadly speaking, “A,” the aesthete, embodies a romantic life-view that consists in a commitment to overcome, through the beautiful and interesting pleasures of art, his characteristically modern feeling of subjective alienation. This commitment involves not only appealing to art in search of some reharmonizing aesthetic experience, but also includes the poetization or romanticization of nature, immediacy, and eroticism themselves. Fredrick Beiser has captured the essence of this romantic project well: commenting on the romantic poet Novalis, he writes: “It was Novalis who first declared the radical romantic manifesto in the striking sentence: ‘The world must be romanticized.’ To romanticize the world is to give it back

220

Chapter 13

its meaning, magic, and mystery, which had been lost through the growth of modern culture.” 8 In this respect, “A” seems to share much with Treadwell and Aguirre. 9 They are all in various ways, and at different levels of selfawareness, engaged in attempts to romanticize the world; creatively to project meaning and enchantment where meaning is perceived to be lacking and disenchantment reigns. Crucially, however, all three figures unwittingly reveal the misguidedness of this common enterprise in their various attempts to complete the task of re-enchantment. In contrast to Treadwell and Aguirre, though, the hyper-reflective and undeluded aesthete of Either/Or manages to acknowledge the essential and permanently tragic human condition haunting his desire for aesthetic fulfillment. Despite his efforts to leverage some sort of enchantment, he remains undeceived by his own wishes. Ultimately, as we intend to show, it is Treadwell’s and Aguirre’s respective lack of awareness of the essential and permanent tension between agency and fate that makes them quintessentially comic figures. The folly which these men exemplify rests in their mutual inability to grasp the contradictory, tragic structure of human life (in which what is inherited and what is self-inflicted cannot be disentangled). On Kierkegaard’s view (via the aesthete), this inability is one of the fundamental misperceptions inherent to the viewpoint of our modern age. In the picture he creates, the worst and most patently foolish way to attempt to avoid a tragic outcome is by ignoring the fact that tragic elements apply to one’s own given situation. The aesthete’s discussion of tragedy contains two major aims relevant to our present purpose. First, it has a descriptive element, pertaining to the question of what relevance tragedy can have for modernity. He stipulates that tragedy may have been more appropriate for the Ancient Greeks than it is for audiences of his own time. In so doing he asks how the essential features of tragedy might be carried forward to meet the demands of a more alienated, more disenchanted, more individualized audience. Specifically, with respect to the dynamic central to the ancient tragic form—namely, the dramatic collision between the heroine’s apparent freedom and her apparent fate—the aesthete wonders how the important differences between antiquity and modernity might be taken into consideration. Second, the aesthete’s discussion has a normative aim in pursuit of which he seeks indirectly to re-orient the modern subject, whom he suspects is afflicted by certain distinctively spiritual pathologies. He correlates these two aims by alluding to the fact that a tragic drama suitable for modern audiences could prove to foil, if not the modern pathology proper, at least some of the unsavory symptoms which arise from it. It is not a coincidence, of course, that an age which recognizes no greater authority than human reason has no room for tragedy; but, precisely so, skillful tragedy should work toward the re-development of our sense of a force greater than the merely human intellect.

Herzog’s Post-Tragic Aesthetic: A Kierkegaardian Perspective

221

Tragic drama artistically portrays an insight into the ambiguity of our free contribution to heinous outcomes, where this ambiguity triggers the phenomenon of guilt. Consider, for example, Sophocles’ interpretation of the Oedipus myth in Oedipus the King. On the one hand, having performed the crimes of patricide and incest, Oedipus cannot claim innocence; yet, on the other hand, these two unspeakable crimes were perpetrated inadvertently. Indeed, Oedipus directed his whole life against fulfilling the prophecy that these events would befall him vis-à-vis his bloodline, and he was ignorant of his true circumstances and parentage when he killed a man and later married a woman. Is he guilty or not guilty? According to the aesthete, ancient tragic characters such as Oedipus embody a strange ambiguity in which the distinction between their energies toward freedom and practical agency, and their subjection to and suffering under the machinations of fate, becomes blurred. For the spectator at a performance of Oedipus the King, for instance, it is difficult—if not impossible—to discover how much ethical guilt legitimately accrues to Oedipus, since it was his deepest wish to avoid his prophesied downfall. For “A,” the aesthetic ambiguity between suffering and action, innocence and guilt, is essential to tragic drama. He insists that “Tragic action contains an element of suffering, and tragic suffering an element of action; the aesthetic lies in their ambiguity.” 10 If the personal responsibility is absolute, then tragedy has no aesthetic appeal, since Oedipus’s actions would then be placed wholly within the ethical domain. If, on the other hand, the suffering is absolute, then the same applies, since the crimes Oedipus enacts would be understood as unequivocally beyond his control. In the former case, he would be unsympathetic and purely evil; in the latter, he would be as devoid of agency and depth as a leaf in a gale. But if, as in the case of Oedipus, the elements of suffering and action, fate and guilt, cannot easily be disambiguated, then tragic drama gains its distinctive aesthetic interest. In modernity, “A” argues, we have become virtually incapable of appreciating the aesthetic ambiguity of action that tragic drama should portray. Correspondingly, we are practically incapable of understanding the significance this appreciation might have for spectators of tragic drama at a cognitive and existential level. This is because “the present age . . . automatically makes the individual responsible for his life.” 11 We moderns no longer believe in fate, predetermination, or the impingements of familial inheritance and the established order, any one of which renders the action in ancient tragic drama particularly ambiguous. Rather, the modern individual has become thoroughly divided from the causal world of necessity and “substantial determinants.” 12 The political and scientific advancements of the Enlightenment, and the crisis of epistemology and authority characterizing the modern age more generally, have been accompanied by a yet more ambitious and meticulously conceived vision of subjective freedom, of the individual as self-governing, self-

222

Chapter 13

regulating, and autonomous. The result is that the ostensibly free modern subject, although embedded within social and cultural institutions, and determined biologically, physically, and morally by a causal chain of persons and events, nevertheless sees herself as retaining a capacity for rational self-governance and Pelagian freedom, whereby she can reflect upon herself, qua subject, in abstraction from any inherited conditions. The aesthete’s point is that modern individuals (artists, philosophers, and laypersons alike) seem to have eradicated all sense of the ambiguous and doubt-inducing balance between deed and suffering that gives rise to the true tragic collision. “So it goes with the individual . . . when he, perhaps extracted from the womb of time laboriously enough, wants to be absolute in this enormous relativity.” 13 The ostensible freedom of the modern autonomous subject has been set apart decisively from the conditions of life that have comprised it, both from within and from without, and that continue to shape it. Yet it is precisely in light of this misguided achievement that Kierkegaard’s pseudonym wishes to return our attention to the essential requirements of tragedy; for not only does the possibility of tragic collision remain strong in every modern individual’s life, but also does our conviction that we have overcome this possibility reflect a borderline comic misapprehension which, from an aesthetic point of view, only the tragic perspective can diagnose and redirect. The clearest indication of this failure, in his eyes, can be seen in the poor quality of most modern tragic drama. In such aesthetically impoverished works, “The hero stands and falls entirely on his own deeds” where, based on his own theory of tragedy, “A” is licensed to conclude that “It is . . . surely a misunderstanding of the tragic when our age endeavors to have everything fateful transubstantiate itself into individuality and subjectivity.” 14 This is precisely why Kierkegaard’s pseudonym argues that “our age” is trending more toward the comic. In his words, “The comic consists in subjectivity’s wanting to assert itself in pure form. Every isolated person always becomes comic by wanting to assert his accidentality over against the necessity of the process.” 15 In particular, the comic is reflected in individuals who confuse or ignore the distinction between what lies within the domain of subjective agency and accountability, and thus ethics, and what circumstances and events delimit and condition the possibilities at hand. Failing to observe the ambiguous interplay between suffering and deed, a character such as Timothy Treadwell or Aguirre poetically (hyper-romantically) distorts the substantial determinants constitutive of his existence, as though they are mere occasions for his inspiration, and thereby becomes incapable of distinguishing between the mechanisms of the natural, external world and the projections of his own will and inner life. For, from the aesthetic point of view, when a tragic sense of life is forgotten, all that remains is the comic: an absurd situation which reveals our relation to nothing.

Herzog’s Post-Tragic Aesthetic: A Kierkegaardian Perspective

223

The comic, that is to say, appears when an individual does not heed the tragic material that life provides in such abundance. Our modern failure to take up the tragic perspective leaves open the possibility of a tragic collision heightened to the point of comic paradox, as witnessed in cases where an individual’s subjectivity runs amok, straying into fantasies that appear from the perspective of the spectator as foolishly misguided or demonically charged. One of Herzog’s special qualities as an aesthetically oriented witness to human nature lies in his ability to create artistically powerful films in which the individual is revealed to embody the absolute failure of any tragic recognition. On this interpretation, the “invisible borderline” crossed by Treadwell and Aguirre alike is the borderline beyond which the tragic sense of life is overlooked or ignored and each individual believes he can assert his subjective and misguided passion so purely that the otherwise recalcitrant universe will be overwhelmed by his vision alone. TIMOTHY TREADWELL Timothy Treadwell’s lack of existential awareness with respect to his own situation is at times astounding. He is incapable of disambiguating theater from reality. Truly, Treadwell’s whole enterprise in Alaska seems to be guided by an unacknowledged and perhaps unconscious desire to create the conditions for a magnificent martyrdom, a final theatrical gesture aimed at redeeming the failures, dissatisfactions and frustrations that continually plagued his life. In his subterranean longing for tragic significance, paradoxically, he negates the genuine tragic power of nature and the substantial determinants of his life and foolishly chooses to enter a difficult—not to mention, dangerous—milieu in order to assert his disaster-glorifying subjectivity. This is a form of quixotism, as we are about to see. It is the quintessence of a comic misrelation. Toward the end of Grizzly Man, a few days before his death, in what should have been a truly decisive moment for him, Treadwell films an old male bear—which, not coincidentally, is most likely the very same creature that eventually killed him. The bear swims and submerges himself repeatedly in a lake, working awkwardly toward the depths in search of food. It is late in the season, during the period when bears attempt to fatten up for the long hibernation ahead. As we watch the grizzly struggling for his meal, Herzog provides an insight that was lost on Treadwell. “So late in the season, the bear is diving deep for one of the few remaining salmon carcases:” a sign of his hungry desperation. Yet despite what might have been obvious to more scientifically astute observers, or even to a merely circumspect and cognitively stable layperson, Treadwell not only decides to stay on in the wilderness, but also to continue living in deliberate and perilous proximity to this and other ravenous beasts. Re-

224

Chapter 13

gardless of whether or not this specific bear is Treadwell’s killer, the risk involved in the situation Treadwell perennially immerses himself within has become intensified to the point of extreme danger. “Of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed,” Herzog observes in one of the concluding scenes, “I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature.” It is this very indifference, this primitive and heartless impulse of animal survival that Treadwell never brought himself to acknowledge in all his years of living in the midst of it. Its immensity glows behind Treadwell in every staged scene of pseudo-scientific swagger, like a sun he finds too bright to glimpse but which he mistakenly presumes will obligingly backlight his persona. In his self-proclaimed role as bear-savior, Treadwell seems to have reflected himself out of the practical necessities incumbent on him within his chosen milieu. This is his comic self-contradiction at its most acute and schizoid: he longs for a tragic death, but, since tragedy entails the unwanted blows of necessity, this longing preemptively eradicates the tragic condition and proves that he lacks the tragic sense of life; he knows he is endangered, but he distances himself aesthetically from an existential grasp of violence and demise. It is as though he believes he can die on camera and still live on to reap the benefits of such mock-heroism. With the camera as his truest companion—the literal lens through which he witnesses himself—Treadwell confuses the world of theater with the world of actuality, the notion of observation with the notion of existence, where every self-glorifying thought he articulates with such histrionic enthusiasm only serves to reveal the lack of content behind the words that he speaks, and only intensifies his purely aesthetic and detached relation to the bears. This is most clearly exemplified in a different scene Treadwell filmed just a few days before his death, at the very spot where he would be killed. The sun is shining now, and Treadwell is standing in a place he has named the Grizzly Maze. He faces the camera. “Honestly, camping in grizzly country is dangerous . . . It is the most dangerous camping, the most dangerous living in the history of the world, by any human being. I have lived longer with wild brown grizzly bears . . . than any human on earth. Any human. And I have remained safe. But every second of every day that I move through this jungle . . . I am right on the precipice of great bodily harm or even death. And I am so thankful for every minute of every day that I found the bears, and this place, the Grizzly Maze.” He steps directly toward the camera in a surge of overflowing pomp and vanity, pointing a finger at his own lens. “But let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen, there is no, no, no other place in the world that is more dangerous, more exciting than the Grizzly Maze. Come here and camp here. Come here and try to do what I do. You will die. You will die here. You will frickin’ die here . . . I found a way. I found a way to survive with them. Am I a great person? I don’t know. I don’t know . . . And I love

Herzog’s Post-Tragic Aesthetic: A Kierkegaardian Perspective

225

these bears enough to do it right. I’m edgy enough and I’m tough enough.” As he concludes, Treadwell steps out of the frame, repeating “Never giving up the maze. Never. This is it, this is my life. This is my land.” On top of all the other contradictions we see in this maniacally egocentric discourse, Treadwell’s final comment is immensely revealing. It is at once a total fallacy and a violation of everything he has claimed to stand for. First, this land Treadwell speaks of as his is government land protected by the National Park Service, and Treadwell is camping there illegally; second, and more crucially, this last, possessive, off-screen outburst indicates the permanent misrelation between what Treadwell says about his mission for the bears and the inner image he holds of himself, which he cannot help but betray repeatedly, and which is revealed to be the true driving force behind his strange life and death. 16 As a result, Treadwell’s attempt to redeem his futile life and preserve his name for posterity as a hero and martyr comically backfired: we find in Treadwell’s story no trace of heroism or martyrdom, but only an absurd sadness in the realization that human and animal life were meaninglessly squandered. As Marthe Robert said of Quixote, so may we say of Treadwell: “He marks the end of an age—the old [tragic] order—that feeds his hunger for the absolute, and he heralds something which is not a new order but an unbridled individualism that by its very nature slips to the extremes of anarchy.” 17 According to Kierkegaard’s theory of tragedy, pain arises when we paradoxically inherit a free choice between two or more equally unwelcome options and thus through our own volition are forced to bring about some terrible outcome. Treadwell, however, unheedful of his own exhortations concerning the dangers of his situation, remains definitively incapable of tragic pain. He creeps closer and closer to death through his own succession of misguided and schizophrenic choices. In his own refusal to heed the surplus of clues regarding the reality of the external domain, he is solely responsible for the terrible outcome of his own death. He has inherited nothing of the situation which imperils him—he has brought it entirely upon himself. Therefore, he can have no tragic recognition of his own overwhelming contribution to the bad ending that is in store for him. This is what makes Treadwell archetypally comic from a Kierkegaardian perspective. 18 He created for himself, freely, through his overflowing subjectivity, an apparently inevitable fate: thus his ending is, to him, a happy one. It is what he desired. Crucially, though, Treadwell’s self-understanding entails no recognition of folly. He could have escaped this “fate” at any moment, if only he had allowed the reality of his situation to temper his unrestrained, narcissistic aspirations. In his utter blameworthiness as agent, he has miscalculated the potency of his subjective, inward, imaginative life, and this miscalculation has blinded him to the always-latent collision between

226

Chapter 13

freedom and necessity that is the ambiguity of human experience, and which makes all properly oriented and undeceived experience heroic. This much seems to be confirmed by Sam Egli, the helicopter pilot who “assisted in the clean-up after Treadwell’s and Huguenard’s deaths.” As Brad Prager recounts, noting that “[Egli] clearly feels the tragedy [sic] was avoidable”: Egli says: ‘Treadwell was, I think, meaning well, trying to do things to help the resources of the bears, but to me he was acting like he was working with people wearing bear costumes out there instead of wild animals. Those bears are big and ferocious, and they come equipped to kill you and eat you and that’s just what Treadwell was asking for. He got what he was asking for—he got what he deserved, in my opinion.’ This last remark seems cruel, yet Egli is hardly alone in thinking this way. 19

Because Treadwell attempted to assert his subjectivity in pure form, attempting to change the whole world while in fact failing to see that it was himself who needed changing, watching his clear path toward death is “tantamount to gazing into an abyss of the ridiculous.” 20 DON LOPE DE AGUIRRE Like Treadwell, Aguirre seems incapable of distinguishing the theatrical from the real, and thus of differentiating between human production and the productions of nature. His sort of fantasy represents the other extreme of the aesthetic viewpoint which treats the sensual world of our temporal unfolding as mere theater. As we have seen, Timothy Treadwell became paradoxically comic by essentially willing his own tragic end; the same may be said of Aguirre. However, whereas Treadwell’s mistake escalated into deepening folly because he never viscerally absorbed the notion that tragedy is not merely heroic but also final and real for the character who lives out the experience, Aguirre’s mistake exists because he cannot distinguish between historical necessity and individual freedom, and thus he confuses the latter for the former. In Aguirre’s spiritual weakness and oversensitive interpretation of the unyielding environment—that is, in his exaggerated investment in the inscrutable forces of time and nature, as though they are reflections of his own subjectivity— he comically personifies himself as fate, the very wrath of an omnipotent God. This explains why his specific brand of subjective excess is paradoxically geared towards suffering and violence rather than guardianship and self-sacrifice. Aguirre seems to conceive of the river he travels as an unstoppable, irreversible flow driving him to his inevitable outcome. Of course, the contradiction is as ridiculous as Treadwell’s, since, like Treadwell, he freely decides to immerse himself continually in this force of nature that so clearly will organize his farcical end.

Herzog’s Post-Tragic Aesthetic: A Kierkegaardian Perspective

227

In the scenes following the first “wrath of God” rant mentioned above, the expedition, now severely diminished in number, is back on the river. Several of the men hungrily eat bits of the weeds fished from between the raft’s dilapidated logs. The sun beats down. Everyone is delirious. Suddenly, arrows and spears from the concealed shores of the jungle pour in, as if from jungle itself. Amidst the onslaught, and deaf to the plaintive but sound counsel of Brother Gaspar de Carvajal, Aguirre remonstrates absurdly that the expedition cannot and must not be abandoned. They push on with the river, which has become deep and torpid. Time passes. The distinctions between imagination and reality become more confused, even for the film’s viewers. The men catch sight of a wooden ship suspended in the branches of a tree, but in their hallucinatory state, it is unclear to them (and us) whether the ship is real or illusory. More members of the expedition die by the arrows which rain in from the native shores—and Aguirre’s daughter, who had been the only remaining woman on the expedition, dies along with them. As the raft floats aimlessly down the tributary, strewn with dead bodies and now overrun by monkeys, Aguirre makes a concluding petition to the air: When we reach the sea, we’ll build a bigger boat and with it we’ll sail north and take Trinidad away from the Spanish crown. From there we’ll go on and take Mexico from Cortez. What a great betrayal that will be. We will then control all of new Spain, and we will stage history as others stage plays. I, the wrath of God, will marry my own daughter and with her found the purest dynasty ever known to man. Together, we will rule the whole of this continent. I am the wrath, the wrath of God! Who else is with me?

The only creatures within earshot, however, are the pestering monkeys. Like Treadwell, Aguirre is voracious for the substantial determinants that will secure his downfall. He lusts after some sort of suitable external recognition of his deluded self-estimation. When such recognition is not forthcoming, he seeks to extract it through tyranny, blackmail and reckless bravado, effectively rendering its value null and void. This voracity constitutes his central comic contradiction, since true substance is comprised of those elements of life which are not freely chosen by a fiat of the autonomous will. True substance emerges from those causes and materials and historical influences which the true tragic hero or heroine seeks to overcome, not embrace in imaginative lassitude and depleted intellectual resourcefulness. One cannot leap off a cliff and, falling, exclaim, “Look what fate has done to me.” By consistently playing the role of demonic insurgent, Aguirre willfully overemphasizes the fated influence of the natural milieu, taking the flow of the Amazon to be both the figurative and literal expression of his own inevitable long-suffering dynasty. It is only appropriate, therefore, that in the final shot of the film, as Aguirre drifts alone down the river on

228

Chapter 13

a raft built according to his own orders and strewn with bodies of men for whose death he is responsible, Herzog’s audience perceives Aguirre’s true role as historical nonentity. In his helmet and breastplate and royal purple shirt, Aguirre resembles nothing more than an actor upon a moveable and impermanent stage. Devoid of compassion for his companions, devoid of any sense of reality, detached from the set upon which he stands, and seemingly convinced that this, indeed, is the stage where history is produced, Aguirre amounts to a mockery of his own ambitions. As Herzog’s camera floats upstream and begins to circle around the raft in a subversion of his signature “Kinski spiral,” the director provides us with a lasting, formal image of the vortex that is Aguirre’s comic futility, a depiction of the absurd nothingness that constitutes his true relation to what is inherited, natural, and inevitable. “Herzog’s circle, the 360-degree pan,” Prager writes, “suggests a lack of forward motion, but we should also note that such circles can be said to contain an abyss at their center . . . The idealism, the grand vision of Aguirre, like that of many of Herzog’s other protagonists, has as its basis an unbridgeable gulf. The difference between the protagonist’s vision and reality is embodied in the abyss that lies between the circle’s perimeter and its centre.” 21 Prager’s insightful point here echoes a passage from an earlier piece on Herzog’s filmmaking, written by Kent Casper and Susan Linville, entitled “Romantic Inversions in Herzog’s Nosferatu”: The objects of nature (and desire) become Janus-faced, revealing a demonic aspect that can lead the hero into the abyss of illusion and madness, into a phantom reality that thwarts and mocks the quester’s movement. . . . In these tales, the trajectory of narrative desire tends toward an ironic circle, [potentially] trapping the hero in solipsistic selfimaging. . . . It is this romantic mode of representation, paralleling in many respects the patterns of English Gothic tales, that so fascinated cinematic expressionism and that can be seen as constituting a narrative model for Nosferatu. 22

No tragic recognition remains open to Aguirre, for the distinction between desire and reality, suffering and deed, freedom and fate, has effectively been erased. By making himself responsible for everything, Aguirre becomes responsible for nothing; by casting himself as the wrath of God, he becomes the slave of his own intellectual and emotional detachment. He disintegrates the power of subjective agency through his wildly misconceived deployment of it, and any properly tragic pain or guilt that might have accrued and served as a corrective to his folly has become transfigured into an epic illusion of historically and divinely decreed violence. Indeed, he falls into the abyss of illusion and madness, into a phantom reality that thwarts and mocks the true notion of a quest.

Herzog’s Post-Tragic Aesthetic: A Kierkegaardian Perspective

229

A POST-TRAGIC AESTHETIC For men so immersed within the indisputable realities of nature, both Aguirre and Treadwell betray alarming detachment from possibility and actuality, respectively. Their comic incongruities emerge from the mistaken belief that the wilderness is merely a theater for their individual nightmares and dreams. As a result, both men believe they are portraying themselves as brave and groundbreaking leaders, indifferent to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, when in fact they are revealing themselves to be foolish and blind madmen. They romantically yearn for that which their romantic yearning itself occludes. In highlighting this sort of contradiction over and over again, Herzog’s finest films seem to reflect back to us our own modern tendencies toward detachment from reality, monocular vision, monomania, and the misrelation of our inner lives to their outer manifestations. Perhaps it is the case that modern individuals, in Herzog’s view, repeatedly fail to recognize that tragedy is not merely an aesthetic category but also a fundamental category of the shared human experience: namely, as that ambiguity which grounds us but does not necessarily define us. ENDNOTES 1. Ames, Eric. Ferocious Reality: Documentary According to Werner Herzog. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, 245. 2. See, for example, Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling: Dialectical Lyric. Edited and Translated by Edna H. Hong and Howard V. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983, 84-85. 3. Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes de Silentio is especially fond of Shakespeare’s portrayal of Richard III for this very reason. See Fear and Trembling, 105-106. 4. Kierkegaard, Søren. The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening. Edited and Translated by Edna H. Hong and Howard V. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980, 72. 5. In addition to the seemingly wide-ranging differences between Aguirre and Treadwell as protagonists, it is worth commenting on the fact that there is an obvious generic difference: Aguirre is a fictional film (albeit, loosely based on historical events), whereas Grizzly Man is a documentary. The first thing to note here is that, as Eric Ames has put it, Herzog himself “declares the line between fiction and nonfiction to be blurred throughout his work. Most commentators follow suit, noting how his documentaries are staged and how his fiction films involve documentary elements” (Ames, Ferocious Reality, 4). Part of what is at stake in Herzog’s effacement of the line between fiction and nonfiction in general is his prioritization of what he calls “ecstatic truth” over “the truth of accountants,” where the former is no better captured by documentary evidence than by surreal fiction. 6. It is worth noting here that Herzog himself believes that “Timothy Treadwell eventually comes to resemble Aguirre” (Prager, Brad. The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth. London: Wallflower Press, 2007, 21). 7. Although Kierkegaard would distance himself from the pseudonym’s aesthetically oriented and observationally detached stance toward experience, it is clear that Kierkegaard himself would nevertheless broadly agree with the theory of tragedy the aesthete presents. After all, the tragic, understood aesthetically, has all of the major

230

Chapter 13

elements which the more existentially engaged or more religious pseudonyms will treat as the groundwork for properly oriented selfhood. In The Sickness unto Death, for instance, written by the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, the contradictory elements constitutive of self-conscious experience that we are about to describe (freedom and necessity) are incorporated into his presentation of the human being as a spiritual entity, relating equally to each incompatible pole of the contradiction. Thus, although we are dealing in this essay with what we call a post-tragic aesthetic, the ideas that emerge should be understood as highlighting something akin to the reality of an existing human being’s pathos. 8. Beiser, Fredrick. The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003, 20. 9. Herzog’s own relation to German romanticism has been the subject of much scholarly debate. Laurie Ruth Johnson is perhaps the most prominent champion of the view that Herzog’s films can be read as part of the (extended) tradition of German romanticism. She suggests that Aguirre is a “tragically romantic” film, and that “Aguirre’s Imperialist desires could be read as expressions of how a reactionaryromantic yearning for a more powerful future nation whose politics have the pull of aesthetic spectacle can end as a psycho-topographic excursion trapped in an endless, doomed present” (Johnson, Laurie Ruth. Forgotten Dreams: Revisiting Romanticism in the Cinema of Werner Herzog. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2016, 136-37). And she writes that “Grizzly Man is German romanticism deferred, romanticism as remembered by psychoanalysis . . . a romanticism that looks inward in order to gain insight rather than to escape, a romanticism that may embrace insane suicidal gestures, but in an unflinching and ultimately realistic way” (Ibid., 161; 166). By contrast, Eric Ames, in his study of Herzog’s documentaries, has emphasized Herzog’s “antiromantic” vision of nature as “the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder” (Ames, Ferocious Reality, 3). (See also Brad Prager’s The Cinema of Werner Herzog, Introduction and Ch. 3, and Peucker, Brigitte. “Werner Herzog: In Quest of the Sublime,” in K. Phillips (Ed.) New German Filmmakers: From Oberhausen through the 1970s. New York: Friedrich Ungar Publishing, 168-94.). It is not our aim to arbitrate this dispute. This much we think is clear, however: Herzog exhibits an ambiguous relationship to the neo-romantic (Treadwell) and proto-romantic (Aguirre) heroes that he so often chooses as the subject matter of his films. On the one hand, he is unyielding in his explicit and implicit criticisms of these protagonists; yet, on the other hand, those criticisms are always tempered by an admiration of, and even obsession with, their boldness. Herzog at once “deifies” and “satirizes” protagonists like Aguirre and Treadwell, as Prager has put it (Prager, The Cinema of Werner Herzog, 26). Above all, although he repudiates romantic conceptions of nature, Herzog may nonetheless appear neo-romantic in that, as with “A,” his aesthetic endeavours are guided not by a pursuit of the beautiful, but rather of the interesting. As Matthew Gandy has put it, “In [his films], Herzog reveals a certain contempt for ‘ordinariness,’ the soft comforts of modernity are eschewed for a harder and more ‘authentic’ mode of being” (Gandy, Matthew. “The Melancholy Observer: Landscape, Neo-Romanticism, and the Politics of Documentary Filmmaking,” in Brad Prager (Ed.) A Companion to Werner Herzog. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 540). For more on the aesthetic concept of “the interesting” and Kierkegaard’s relation to it, see Eagan (2019). 10. Kierkegaard, Søren. Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, Part I. Edited and Translated by Edna H. Hong and Howard V. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987, 150. 11. Ibid., 144. 12. This term “substantial determinants,” along with several other terms the aesthete employs, is borrowed from Hegel. It is important to note, however, that despite the shared terminology, the aesthete’s theory of tragedy is very different from Hegel’s. Whereas Hegel proposes a collision between two goods, or two ideals, which ultimately need to be reconciled—in the case of Antigone, for instance, the incompatible demands of family and state—Kierkegaard’s theory of tragedy proposes an essential and

Herzog’s Post-Tragic Aesthetic: A Kierkegaardian Perspective

231

permanent irreconcilability between the subject’s irrefutable sense of moral freedom and her irrefutable awareness of causal nature. As we have been showing, Kierkegaard’s tragedy pertains to the psychological phenomena of guilt and doubt that arise from our inability to overcome the mind-bending contradictions between freedom and fate, inner life and outer experience. 13. Søren Kierkegaard. Either/Or, 145. 14. Ibid., 144. 15. Ibid., 142. 16. In this connection, Prager has noted that “Treadwell never produced evidence of poaching and the one time that his organization, Grizzly People, produced a photo of a poacher, it was later learned that this was a photo of a viewing guide from the lodge who happened to be carrying his rifle. The guide in the photo threatened to sue, and the pamphlet with the offending image was pulled” (Prager, The Cinema of Werner Herzog, 86). 17. Robert, Marthe. The Old and the New: From Don Quixote the Kafka. Translated by Carol Cosman. University of California Press, 1977, 138. 18. While the sense in which we are suggesting that Treadwell is a comic figure is technical, Eric Ames is undoubtedly correct to note that in Grizzly Man, “Herzog’s treatment of [the] material is in equal parts clinical, excessive, macabre, and tinged with morbid humor” (Ames, Ferocious Reality, 243). Brad Prager has provided a similar estimation of Aguirre: “Much of [Aguirre’s] tone is overtly comic, and it is likely for this reason as much as for its cinematography that it has retained a following” (Prager, The Cinema of Werner Herzog, 29). Here, we are contesting Matthew Gandy’s reading which maintains that “For Herzog, there is a tragic inevitability to the Treadwell story: a death foretold through his delusional attachment to a conception of nature that does not exist” (Gandy, “The Melancholy Observer,” 538). While we do not presume to know Herzog’s own view of the matter, for us the point is that Treadwell’s demise was entirely preventable, and thus not tragic in any technical sense. In Treadwell’s story, rather, we see a sad but nonetheless comical “delusional attachment to a conception of nature that does not exist.” This arises from Treadwell’s failure to take up a properly tragic perspective on his own situation. 19. Prager, The Cinema of Werner Herzog, 86. 20. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 253. 21. Prager, The Cinema of Werner Herzog, 33. 22. Casper, Kent and Linville, Susan, “Romantic Inversions in Herzog’s Nosferatu,” The German Quarterly, Vol. 64, No. 1, Focus: Literature and Film (Winter, 1991), 18.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ames, Eric. 2012. Ferocious Reality: Documentary According to Werner Herzog. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Beiser, Fredrick. 2003. The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Casper, Kent and Linville, Susan, “Romantic Inversions in Herzog's Nosferatu,” The German Quarterly, Vol. 64, No. 1, Focus: Literature and Film (Winter, 1991), 17-24. Eagan, Anthony. 2019. Voracious Hermeneutics: On Kierkegaard’s Concept of the Interesting. Ph.D. Diss, University of Sheffield. Gandy, Matthew. 2012. “The Melancholy Observer: Landscape, Neo-Romanticism, and the Politics of Documentary Filmmaking,” in Brad Prager (Ed.) A Companion to Werner Herzog. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 528-546. Johnson, Laurie Ruth. 2016.Forgotten Dreams: Revisiting Romanticism in the Cinema of Werner Herzog. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1980. The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening. Edited and Translated by Edna H. Hong and Howard V. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

232

Chapter 13

———. 1983. Fear and Trembling: Dialectical Lyric. Edited and Translated by Edna H. Hong and Howard V. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1987. Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, Part I. Edited and Translated by Edna H. Hong and Howard V. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Peucker, Brigitte. “Werner Herzog: In Quest of the Sublime”, in K. Phillips (Ed.) New German Filmmakers: From Oberhausen through the 1970s. New York: Friedrich Ungar Publishing, 168-94. Prager, Brad. 2007. The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth. London: Wallflower Press. Robert, Marthe. 1977. The Old and the New: From Don Quixote the Kafka. Translated by Carol Cosman. University of California Press.

FOURTEEN Werner Herzog on Circles, Chickens and Impotency Tyler Tritten

“If you truly love film, I think the healthiest thing to do is not read books on the subject.” 1 If there is any truth in this quote from Werner Herzog, then my reading of his films, particularly of the two early films Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen [Even Dwarfs Started Small] (1970) and Stroszek (1977), begins from a healthy place, but ends in an unhealthy one. I have been watching and re-watching Herzog films for many years and yet I had never read an interview from him nor a book, philosophical or biographical, until I committed myself to writing this chapter. In the eyes of the academic film critic, then, my viewings were likely naive and full of blind spots. In Herzog’s eyes, however, the unread eyes for which his films were apparently intended, my viewings were “healthy,” though that is quite another thing than “better” and “more insightful.” Unsurprisingly, after doing some research, I was pleased to have a fair number of suspicions confirmed and others troubled, and in still other cases something entirely new was revealed. Also unsurprisingly, I am now no longer in a position neatly to demarcate which elements of my reading of Herzog fall into which category. I will begin, however, by noting something I can decidedly say I did learn about Herzog and which resonates very deeply with my own sympathies, namely, that he is, in some sense of the term, which remains to be specified, “apolitical.” In other words, I must first dispel the misconception that Herzog’s work is fundamentally, overtly, and intentionally political, even if it is derivatively, implicitly or unintentionally political, at least in the eyes of many astute viewers. Before turning to my primary thesis, then, that Even Dwarfs and Stroszek 233

234

Chapter 14

share the same essence, because both concern the impotency of the powerless through a dramatization of the cyclical and the repetitive motion of chickens, I must first begin by showing that these films, like all of Herzog’s films, can, and perhaps even should, be viewed as not principally political. 2 PRELIMINARY REMARKS AGAINST A POSSIBLE MISCONCEPTION Political correctness is of little concern to Herzog, who remarks, “I have never been into using the medium of film as a political tool,” and, speaking in reference to critics of Even Dwarfs, adds that “there were very few reviewers and journalists who were not wildly into revolutionary jargon at the time”—i.e., shortly after student riots in the late sixties 3—“and who did not put ridiculous political demands on filmmakers.” 4 I will speak more about Herzog’s idiosyncratic form of a principled “apoliticism” with explicit reference to Even Dwarfs later, but for now I would like to corroborate that there is indeed an apolitical tendency in Herzog. When asked the following question about Aguirre, Der Zorn Gottes [Aguirre, the Wrath of God] (1972)—“What about the suggestions from several critics that the film is some kind of metaphor of Nazism, with Aguirre inevitably playing the role of Hitler?”—he responds, “I can answer that question only by saying that in Germany a great many writers, artists and filmmakers are very much misunderstood because their work is seen explicitly in the light of their nation’s history.” 5 In response to another politically inclined question about Aguirre, he rebuffs, “No, the film is not about the history of colonialism.” 6 Even with reference to a later documentary, Lessons of Darkness (1992), he is asked, “Did the bureaucrats criticize you for not identifying Kuwait?” Herzog’s reply: There was just no need to name Saddam Hussein and the country he attacked. And you know, even if people are watching Lessons of Darkness in 300 years’ time, it still would not be important for them to know the historical facts behind this film. Lessons of Darkness transcends the topical and the particular. This could be any war in any country. The criticisms of the film in Germany come down to this: if you do not make a black-and-white political statement you are on the side of the devil, a point of view that is clearly overly simplistic and stupid. 7

These quotations repudiate criticisms that seem to be only politically motivated as well as readings of his films as exclusively or fundamentally political, but these quotations alone can neither corroborate the claim that the whole of Herzog’s filmography is in some sense intended to be apolitical, nor do they suggest that Herzog is personally apolitical, nor do they provide a clear idea of the exact sense in which he or (certain of) his films are apolitical. 8

Werner Herzog on Circles, Chickens and Impotency

235

Addressing these issues in order, comments he has made concerning the TV documentary Ballad vom kleinen Soldaten [Ballad of the Little Soldier] (1984) indicate that, to his mind, he has never made an expressly political film. When it is suggested that Ballad is probably his most political work, he interjects, “May I correct you: it is about children who are fighting in a war, not a film about the Sandinistas or Somoza. [ . . . ] The film is not ‘political.’” 9 Later pressed with the question, “Do you feel that at least some of your films are ethnographic or anthropological in any way?,” he elaborates, “They are anthropological only in as much as they try to explore the human condition.” 10 He continues, “But I never think in terms of strict ethnography: going out to some distant island with the explicit purpose of studying the natives there. My goal is always to find out more about man himself.” 11 Although there are many ways of being political apart from ethnography, he does make this remark in relation to what was alleged to be his most political piece. It also means that Herzog has attempted to distance himself from political interpretations of works spanning three different decades, from the seventies to the nineties, in addition to repudiating a political interpretation for films, a documentary, and a TV documentary. The cumulative evidence, then, suggests that the inference to the best explanation would be to espouse the notion that Herzog is simply not interested in making a “political” piece. That is, at least, apparently never his express intention, although it bears reiterating that this does not mean that he is not interested in the human condition and its struggles and conquests, only that this ethical concern is not always—and perhaps even ought not to be—sequestered by the political. Herzog is certainly not blind to systemic injustice, but he may not be convinced that the solution to systemic and political problems is itself something systemic and political. Or, he may suspect that systemic and political injustices are symptomatic of a flaw in the human condition and so to treat a problem politically is to treat only a symptom and never the source of the problem itself. These are at least two possibilities that would rescue his apoliticism from irresponsibility, and would show why he, or anyone else, perhaps even ought to be apolitical. Political interpretations of Herzog, however, are not entirely ubiquitous, as there have been a few commentators who have stressed the apolitical impetus to Herzog’s work, even if they were not so brash as to employ the term ‘apoliticism.’ As Richard Eldridge has argued, “His interests in filmmaking are on the whole more existential, ontological, and transfigurationally normative than they are descriptive, sociohistorical, and oriented toward local political problems.” 12 Herzog rather surmises, Eldridge insists, that “we stand in need of finding ourselves—of a radical reorientation of our thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and interests—rather than in need of more piecemeal reforms within accepted frameworks of orientation and concern.” 13 If political apparatuses aim only at revisionist amelioration of fundamentally flawed systems, then

236

Chapter 14

real rebellion should perhaps not be political rebellion but rebellion against the political. Another commentator, Matthew Dandy, elaborating on the increasingly acceptable view of Herzog as a modern Romantic, 14 explains that “it is a characteristic feature of romanticist aesthetics to emphasize the role of the individual human subject rather than their cultural or political context,” 15 whereby “cinema becomes a testing ground for the limits of human experience.” 16 This means that political themes could not only be permitted, while still recognizing a film as apolitical, but even required for an apolitical purpose, although only as an artifice that serves as nothing more than a means to be transcended. If, in Herzog, one finds “the occlusion of political or historical import,” 17 then, I would argue, that it is because this blockage serves as the artifice, as Dandy also spies, for “an eschatological fantasy of redemption that eschews the possibilities for progress.” 18 Progress is surely a social and political category rather than a feature of the human condition. Even were the fact of social and political progress not an item of dispute— although, of course, it is—it would still remain far from certain that this advancement would correspond to our ethical progress as individuals or to the actualization of our humanity. In fact, if social and political progress were only to occur in a compulsory way through governmental apparatuses externally imposed upon individuals and societies, then social and political progress could just as easily and just as likely correspond to a kind of barbarism, which, as Herzog is keen to show, stills leaves us at a stage of animality and still leaves us as less than human. That political elements are present in Herzog’s films does not mean the films are political, as, in fact, political elements may be present only in order to be occluded, transcended, or critically separated from an eschatological vision of human nature that exceeds the confines of social and political progress. As Dandy declares, “The pervasive separation of Herzog’s ‘pure cinematic vision’ from its cultural and political context serves to subvert the scope of critical interpretation.” 19 What about Herzog the individual person, though, rather than Herzog the filmmaker? Is Herzog political when not acting as writer and director? I offer quotes that would suggest a negative answer. First, when interviewer Paul Cronin mentions that Herzog has attempted to walk around the borders of West and East Germany, Cronin suggests to Herzog that “your walk suggests that it was something like a political act.” Herzog succinctly replies, “Not explicitly, no.” 20 First, while Herzog seems to allow that the act may yield political consequences and political responses, he seems equally to imply that were one to reduce this walk to a political act, then one would also be blind to its deeper meaning. Second, one can even find Herzog condemning what many, or at least we ‘moderns,’ take to be the political act par excellence: voting.

Werner Herzog on Circles, Chickens and Impotency

237

I have never liked the kind of numerical democracy in voting. . . . In medieval times when, if a group of monks were against some innovation or a reform of monastic life . . . and only a couple of them had the feverish ecstatic knowledge that these changes had to be made to advance the cause of faith, then out of the enormity of their wish and their insight these two would simply declare themselves the melior pars—the ‘better part’—and would win the ballot. It makes sense to me: the intensity of your knowledge and insight and your feverish wishes should decide the battle, not strength in numbers. 21

This remark—reminiscent of Socrates’s objection to “casting the deciding vote” in the Laches and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s insistence in The Social Contract that the general will is not equivalent to the popular vote—helps to demarcate more precisely in what sense Herzog may be apolitical, and in what sense he is not, insofar as the veracity of insight and the fervor of conviction can, and maybe should, be political, even if he is not entirely on board either with politics as parliamentary procedure or with making films that openly campaign for certain policies and platforms. 22 Perhaps, then, one might distinguish the “melior pars” of politics, which would be based on “epistocracy,” 23 from its organizational and institutional part. This, at least, is something for which I will argue in this essay. In other words, I take this to be a mandate of principle rather than a simple “perhaps,” i.e., rather than just a possibility. Surely, one can be apolitical in one’s actions, whether in filmmaking or in affairs not intrinsically related to one’s work, but this may mean no more than that one’s intentions were never to politicize, i.e., to make an explicit political statement or to effect some concrete political change. None of this excludes, however, that actions or films may still address political topics as well as historical, 24 sociological, and ethnographical themes. It also does not mean that actions or films that lack this as their explicit aim may not contain unconscious and/or subterranean political elements or that even decidedly apolitical or even antipolitical actions can nevertheless contain political ramifications. As Matthew Dandy has argued, even if there are political elements in Herzog’s films, as a neo-Romantic this is not the most profound aspect of them. Political themes undoubtedly make an appearance in Herzog’s films (including the two to be thematized in this chapter), but it would be unwise to read these films as primarily (let alone exclusively) and intentionally political pieces. In short, Even Dwarfs is not primarily and principally about student revolts against fascism and their apparent failure, just as Stroszek is not primarily and principally a critique of American capitalism.

238

Chapter 14

TWO SYNOPSES: EVEN DWARFS STARTED SMALL AND STROSZEK These two films share numerous themes and dramatic elements in common. Both depict, at least prima facie, images of impotency insofar as they each dramatize an inability to break cycles. Both end in failed revolt— although it may prove difficult to identify that against which they are revolting. Both films employ shared images—the circling of machines (trucks and a ski lift) and animals (primarily chickens)—to dramatize life cycles from which one is unable to break free. Of course, it is not only these two films in Herzog’s corpus that seem obsessed with the cyclical. Aguirre not only ends with Klaus Kinski’s main character floating around in apparent circles on a raft on a river in the middle of uninhabited wilderness in solitude—floating pointlessly and without direction or terminus—but one could argue that the whole film is but a depiction of boredom by means of showing the viewer (this viewer in particular) nothing but boredom and boring wandering. In the documentary Mein Liebster Feind [My Best Fiend] (1999), Kinski explains how, during one scene in which he was doing nothing but standing on this raft, he was able fluidly to turn himself around in a circle by beginning with his legs crossed. Or, to give a discursive example rather than an image, note Herzog’s commentary in Grizzly Man (2005) that nature is not harmonious but something that eats itself. Perhaps also in Aguirre, Kinski’s character was not merely wandering in circles in nature, but as nature. It should not be surprising that certain tropes, like the tragedy of a revolution or rebellion one knows will fail, seem to appear in many of Herzog’s films: I have always thought of my films as really being one big work that I have been concentrating on for forty years. The characters in this huge story are all desperate and solitary rebels with no language with which to communicate. Inevitably they suffer because of this. They know their rebellion is doomed to failure, but they continue without respite. 25

Unlike Aguirre, Even Dwarfs and Stroszek do not tell the story of the cyclical failing of a conqueror, because both of these films’ protagonists are not conquerors and, more importantly, because there is a sense in which their revolutions were not acts of sheer futility. Herzog has expressed that he brought “feelings of anger and bitterness” 26 into Even Dwarfs that stemmed from complications during the filming of the TV-movie documentary The Flying Doctors of East Africa (1970), which appeared the same year as Even Dwarfs. At that moment, Herzog was trying to break from his own destructive cycle: “I saw the whole film like a continuous nightmare in front of my eyes and wrote it all down. [ . . . ] I was full of bitterness, affected by sickness and the film became a more radical film than I had originally planned.” 27 If, as I will argue, this film is both tragedy and comedy, then, assuming that the final

Werner Herzog on Circles, Chickens and Impotency

239

product is more radical in the sense of being darker than originally planned, the film may best be described as something like comedy turned tragedy. It is not appropriate to provide a perfectly linear synopsis of Even Dwarfs. Although it is action-packed, ultimately not a lot actually happens, as the film itself begins at the end. In other words, everything that does take place throughout the course of film only serves to return the viewer to the point of origin, to the comical despair of a useless revolt. The film’s narrative, then, is circular at best or simply without movement at all, at worst. That the film starts with its end only immediately to circle back to the beginning of the narrative is significant not only because this is the first instance of cyclicality but, more importantly, because this immediately marks the film as a tragedy: one knows the outcome in advance. The film begins with mugshots being taken. One of the dwarfs, Hombre, is even holding an oversized (for him) sign backwards that then has to be turned in a circle—“Umdrehen! [Turn it around!]”—to be placed right side up, an element that is already comic and tragic at the same time. Intermittently shown between these mugshots are shots of chickens pecking at the feathers of dead chickens, a hinting at the cause of the dwarfs’ own downfall: their revolution consisted as much in self-torment as it directed its energies outward against its apparent oppressor. After this opening scene, the film moves to the beginning of the narrative, although here too one finds the dwarfs already involved in a revolt against their own: another dwarf who is the director of their communal home. One is never shown how the rebellion started, but the viewer is thrown into its midst. In this sense, like a circle itself, this film has no true beginning and end. In this first act of rebellion, Hombre, the smallest amongst the dwarfs, is repeating, almost compulsively, “Feste, feste! [Seize him, seize him!],” which, after the director threatens to call the police, transitions to “Ja, ja, Polizei. [Yeah, yeah, police],” as he laughs incessantly. Hombre’s constant laughing and compulsive repetition of phrases recurs throughout the film, sometimes repeating “Ja, ja, schönes Gesicht. [Yeah, yeah, beautiful face]” and, in one case, after finding pornography in the director’s bed quarters, “Ja, ja, schönes Boobs. [Yeah, yeah, beautiful boobs].” Because these repeated phrases are themselves repetitive of something Hombre has heard another person say, he functions as a kind of parrot. The dwarfs’ rebellion is far from organized. It lacks any real aim other than rebellion itself. The results are frequent moments of distraction when they torture each other. They steal a shoe from one of their comrades who tries to follow them through a doorway to get it back, but she cannot open the door because she cannot reach the doorknob. This causes her to repeat the useless action of pushing on the door. They continue to torture each other when they force Hombre and the one without a shoe into the director’s bedroom, where they insist that these two must treat

240

Chapter 14

the room as their honeymoon suite. This is all done for their own bemusement so that they have something at which to laugh. When in the honeymoon suite, Hombre repeatedly tries to jump onto the bed before finding something to use as a step. Again, because the world is disproportionately large, his efforts are useless and repetitive, but humorous— at least for the other dwarfs spying on them. In conjunction with this scene, Herzog shows a chicken wandering aimlessly without really knowing what to do with the dead mouse it carries in its beak. On another occasion they pester two other dwarfs who are wearing goggles or blinkers that hinder their vision. These two, who seem to have no cognizance of the fact that a rebellion is even taking place—which might also be an indication that the revolt is only for the sighted rather than the hearing, since there is no discursive aspect to it, no explicable demands and aims––are, as the others quietly sneak up on them, surrounded. The rebels prance around the pair delicately until one slips and the pair then chases away their tormentors by repetitively swinging their sticks wildly, unsure if the others are still around. It is to be surmised that these two, who wander around and beat things with their sticks to test them, are “scientists” of sorts. Here, commentator Brad Prager wonders if Herzog may be suggesting that “science has blinkers on and therefore chooses to look away from social problems.” 28 After another shot of a dead chicken, Herzog turns the camera to a mother pig who has died; the piglets are still feeding at this sow’s teats without care. Near the climax of the rebellion at a later point in the film, the two blinkered dwarfs are again wildly swinging their sticks, fearful that they are again being hazed by the others near the dead pig, but missing the obvious and not yet realizing that the animal is even there. Finally, there is yet another scene in which these two flail their sticks wildly once again, but they are unknowingly attacking each other. This event is observed by Hombre, perched triumphantly upon a stationery motorcycle, the apparent conqueror of that which goes nowhere. No longer focused on the director of the commune nor still focused on tormenting each other, the dwarfs steal a car only to drive it in circles and chase it around. They will later repeat this event, but with a truck. After a while, the driver evacuates the still-moving car and climbs onto the top of the automobile as it is still motoring along in a perpetual circle with the others chasing it in celebration as if a great victory has been won. Returning to the building where the director is holed up, the agitators find that Pepe (perhaps the instigator of the resistance) is tied to a chair. The agitators taunt the director from outside, proclaiming, “When we behave nobody cares, but when we don’t, everybody remembers.” During this time, the car is still moving in circles, though none of them are even there to see it. It has been running long enough, in fact, to have worn a circle into the ground, which, though rutted by the movement of the truck, is now directing the movement of the truck in a kind of self-

Werner Herzog on Circles, Chickens and Impotency

241

automatization. (Perhaps this is akin to the movement of the political machine?) Likewise, the rebellion now has its own life, as the origin of the movement and the apparent aim of freeing Pepe is forgotten. The uprising, perhaps like the anonymity of governmentality, now adheres to its own unknown law; it cannot divert from its circle and the economy of self-destruction. While it seems the dwarfs were rebelling against the director, it is never quite clear what unjust transgression ignited the rebellion. To my mind, it seems clear that the dwarfs are struggling with their own nature and with a universal human condition at least as much as they are struggling with their contingent social condition. Driving a truck in a circle as they drove the car, one dwarf is riding on a rug they have attached to the back that drags on the ground. The others again give chase. Here, however, the camera shot is from the center of the circle so that the shot also moves in a circle, involving the viewer in this nauseous repetition of the same. Meanwhile, a healthy chicken still voraciously pecks at the dead and nearly cannibalized body of its fellow fowl. The now-abandoned truck is also pictured going in circles in lengthy reoccurring shots in which nothing happens. In a couple of scenes of interest to Prager, the dwarfs engage in cockfighting and parade around a small monkey they have bound to a crucifix. Prager, who tends to offer political readings of Herzog’s film, comments that this is a “satire of bourgeois rituals,” 29 just as they had made a satire of marriage earlier. Prager is not wrong in the particular, even if he misses the point of the whole—I am unsure to what extent he recognizes that the ‘essence’ of the film may not be political. It is at least true to say that the dwarfs have become iconoclasts, smashing plants and windows as well as mocking, to their view, useless bourgeois and Christian rules and rituals. Mercifully, this action-packed film (in which nothing ever really happens) comes to a close—but not to an end. In the final scene, Hombre the parrot is laughing uncontrollably at a genuflecting camel. This camel seems neither able to lay (surrender) nor to stand (resist), hovering repetitively between both in perpetual limbo. Eventually, it evacuates its bowels. 30 Hombre’s laughter starts to run out of steam and becomes a cough instead, but as Hombre gains a second wind there is one last awkward utterance of “Fest! [Seize!],” which are the first words we heard him say earlier in the film. If dwarfs started small, it seems they end just as small. The revolution has no vanguard, no agency, and no aim; it is pure automatization. It only revolves without ever moving anywhere different than where it started. The rebellion was its own end. Was their rebellion, then, destruction for destruction’s sake, even if the system, the rules and regulations under which they live, was not actually destroyed? If they burned it all to the ground and yet everything remained, then was it only a futile rebellion of the impotent? Is anything more to be gleaned from laughing at

242

Chapter 14

one’s own laughter, when the joke has long since been forgotten? Is modern tragedy comical or is modern comedy tragic? Is a ‘pure’ laughter possible that is significant in its own right, without having to change anything? Is revolution good for its own sake despite the fact that it only ever revolves and never evolves, despite the fact that most of its violence is perpetuated on itself? If these are Even Dwarfs’s questions, then, to a remarkable degree, they will also prove to be Stroszek’s questions. If this is the case, then it is surely because these are precisely Herzog’s questions, who, as it turns out, may be neurotically making and remaking the same film over and over again: filmmakers can suffer from Ohrwurm (“ear worm”: a catchy tune that one cannot get out of one’s head) as much as musicians. Is Stroszek, Herzog is asked, a “critique of American capitalism?” 31 Herzog’s repudiation is lengthy but worthwhile. I wanted to make Woyzeck [1979] and had promised Bruno that he could play the title role. [ . . . ] It was clear to me that it was Kinski who should play the part, so I immediately called Bruno to let him know. [ . . . ] It was very clear that it had meant a lot to Bruno to be in the film, and I felt so ashamed and embarrassed that out of the blue I said, ‘[ . . . ] By Saturday you will have the screen play. And I will even give it a title now which sounds like Woyzeck. It will be called Stroszek.’ [ . . . ] I delivered it on Saturday. I still think it is one of my best pieces of writing and one of my finest films. 32

Finally answering the actual question, Herzog explains, So the idea of in some way writing a critique of capitalism just did not enter my head. [ . . . ] The film does not criticize the country; it is almost a eulogy to the place. For me Stroszek is about shattered hopes, which is clearly a universal theme, and it would not really matter if they had moved from Berlin to France or Sweden. 33

Although it was personally motivated, Stroszek was not politically motivated, even if it nevertheless engages in a critique of capitalism and Americanism. Had the film actually taken place in Sweden, then the film may indeed have been played out differently, perhaps by exposing a lack of racial diversity rather than exposing the harms of capitalism. The primary theme is not the critique of American capitalism so much as it is an investigation of what Bruno S. (Schleinstein, both the main character in the film and the actor who played him) can reveal about the universal human condition, a condition apparently as equally American as it is Swedish, German, or African. In fact, the film itself, which is arguably as much documentary as fictional narrative, employs Bruno’s own first name for his character (also done for his female counterpart, Eva Mattes), recounts events from Bruno’s own life 34 such as his circulations out of mental and penal institutions, 35 and recreates similar traumas. 36 Filming took place in his real Berlin flat and at his real neighborhood bar. The

Werner Herzog on Circles, Chickens and Impotency

243

props include his own piano and other instruments with which he plays some of his own songs (he was a self-taught musician and painter), and the dialogue even includes Bruno’s own speech idiosyncrasies such as his insistence on speaking in the third person. Moreover, Herzog recounts how some sequences in America were spontaneously shot in one day without permits, including the scene where the main characters arrive on a boat “like real European immigrants” and when Herzog straps himself onto the hood of the car to film them driving in the city. 37 A scene in which Bruno’s and Eva’s older cohort, played by Clemens Scheitz, discuss animal magnetism in German with two non-German-speaking hunters approximates Scheitz’s own thoughts on the matter. The two hunters were also unpaid actors who just happened to be on site. 38 Finally, concerning scenes in the truck stop, Herzog simply asked the owner if they could shoot Eva pouring coffee to real customers. 39 As documentary-like as this film is, it is decidedly not true to life insofar as the real Bruno did seem, to some degree, to have broken from his earlier cycles. In this case, perhaps unsurprisingly, real life turns out to have more of a happy ending than those depicted in many of Herzog’s own ‘realist’ films. Stroszek begins in earnest with Bruno sounding his bugle from his cell, exclaiming, “Denn der Bruno, der geht jetzt in Freiheit. [The Bruno, who now goes into freedom.]” Bruno’s natural speech patterns, including speaking of himself in the third person, signals that his character is one without any real autonomy. Before being released, Bruno is chastized by one of the authorities about his history with alcohol, to which Bruno responds by wondering aloud whether he will then come back to prison, adding, “Es läuft in Kreise. [It goes in circles.]” Expectedly, the first thing he does after his release, luggage still in hand, is order a beer at his local pub, “Bier Himmel [Beer Heaven].” While at the bar, he sees Eva, a prostitute he knew, who is hit by one of her two pimps. Shortly thereafter, still in sight of the two pimps, Bruno shows compassion and has Eva sit with him. He announces to her, “I am starting a new life today anyway.” He takes her to his home, from which he has been absent for many years, and humorously remarks how the stains on his piano will not come out. In other words, he is noticing that nothing has really changed. Inaugurating the start of a disturbing cycle, Bruno returns home one day to see the pimps waiting and staring him down in the stairwell of his apartment building. Although he has no interaction with them, in the next scene he sees Eva back with them in a restaurant. In the following scene, however, the pimps are violently dragging her up the stairwell back to Bruno’s apartment, complaining that she cannot make enough money. They proceed to trash Bruno’s apartment, destroy his accordion and dump trash onto Eva. Bruno (and the neighbor who is visiting) can only watch until the pimps leave, at which point he consoles and cares for Eva. The very next day the pimps return when Bruno is home alone, and they degrade him by making him prostrate on top of his piano,

244

Chapter 14

placing bells on his head and derrière. Distressed, Bruno seeks counsel with a doctor whom he knows and who is affectionate to Bruno. The doctor shows him a premature baby that, despite being so small and fragile, has such a strong grip that it can suspend itself from the doctor’s fingers, yet it is unable to hold up its own head. Bruno returns home to find Eva has returned again, but now quite badly beaten. She says they should go away somewhere and she promises never to run away from him again. Eva, Bruno, and Bruno’s neighbor decide to go to Wisconsin, where the neighbor has a cousin who can accommodate them and where Bruno can work in the cousin’s mechanic shop and Eva at a truck stop. To finance their trip, Eva prostitutes herself independently. Once in Wisconsin, they purchase a mobile home—equipped with a TV that Bruno, despite not understanding English, watches frequently— but, unsurprisingly, they are unable to keep up with payments. To remedy the situation, Eva, who has never slept with Bruno and does not even sleep in the same bedroom with him, starts prostituting herself to the truckers where she works. Bruno comes to see her one day and catches her in the act in one of their trucks. She tells Bruno to get lost because she is leaving with the truckdriver for Vancouver. The bank forecloses on their mobile home, putting it and their belongings up for auction. Bruno and the neighbor attend the auction; however, they are seemingly unaware of what is happening until the new owner drives off with their home. With no real options, Bruno and his neighbor from Berlin drive into town with guns, steal money from the register of a barbershop only to— hilariously—go across the street to the supermarket to buy things with the stolen cash. While Bruno is paying for a frozen turkey inside, police arrest his old neighbor outside of the store. Bruno then eventually drives to a small native American town, where he spends the last of his cash at a restaurant and shares a table with an American who happens to speak some German. This permits Bruno to tell this stranger of his woes. He returns to the truck in the parking lot, places the frozen turkey and gun on the ground, and drives in circles around them. Still moving in circles and again toting the turkey and gun, he leaves the truck behind. He crosses the street and enters a truck stop arcade, which includes coinoperated machines featuring a ‘dancing’ chicken in one machine/cage and a miniature piano-playing/pecking chicken in another. By depositing the coins, Bruno starts the music that causes the chickens to dance and peck at the piano. Bruno then boards a ski lift with the turkey and gun. After riding the loop a few times, with intermittent shots of the chickens dancing and playing, a shot is fired. Bruno is dead and the circling truck has come to a stop, but the ski lift is still running with Bruno aboard and the chickens still dancing and pecking. One commentator, Rembert Hüser, observes that in seeing the chickens in a box, “while watching a feature, we suddenly switch to the docu-

Werner Herzog on Circles, Chickens and Impotency

245

mentary mode,” 40 which is appropriate given the other documentary-like elements mentioned earlier. Hüser glosses on the use of chickens for this purpose: “The chicken, the epitome of undecidability insofar as it is associated with the chicken and the egg circular reference dilemma, paradoxically becomes a marker of authenticity.” 41 In other words, what one sees in Stroszek is not a narrative, but the raw suffering and the real plight not just of people like Bruno but, presumably, of the human condition. We are all like Bruno, and not merely Americans, Germans or Swedes. Life too does not seem to follow the logic of a narrative, with a distinct beginning, middle, and end. As Hüser surmises, “Herzog’s found chicken does not promise a new beginning, nor does it promise closure. It simply does not stop.” 42 ON TRAGEDY, COMEDY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF CHICKENS Traditionally, the circle, that without beginning or end, has been the image of eternity. This is why a wedding ring, for example, which is supposed to symbolize eternal love, is round. In Herzog, however, the cyclical is rather the shape of impotency. If beginning and end are the same, then nothing changes, no movement really occurs and novelty never appears. In other words, Herzog capitalizes on the ambivalence of circles as well as that which exists between the etymologically related notions of consuming and consummation. If consummation names the act by which something is made complete or whole, which circles always are, Herzog nevertheless sees only self-consumption, i.e., cannibalism, self-torment and self-destruction. Herzog also uses circles to indicate tragedy, namely, that in which the ending is given or already known in the beginning. But, unlike Greek tragedy, modern, apparently meaningless tragedy is not redemptive, but it is something in the face of which the only appropriate response is laughter. Modern tragedy, at least Herzogian tragedy, is thus comedy, i.e., tragedy in which no grand meaning is revealed. If, as Alan Alda’s character in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) says, “comedy is tragedy plus time,” then for Herzog the element of added time is not as significant. One might think here of a couple of Herzog’s last lines in Incident at Loch Ness (2004), a comedic, mockumentary-style film in which two of the main characters presumably die after having been attacked by the Loch Ness Monster. Referring to their deaths, he states in perfect deadpan, “It was a tragedy.” Very shortly thereafter, offering an answer to the question as to what truly happened and in contrast to what he stated at the beginning of the film, Herzog remarks, “The truth of this film was not ecstatic, but it seemed vulgar and pointless.”

246

Chapter 14

Herzog’s films are not political films but tragic comedies or comical tragedies, because the only response to political impotence, futility, or to a voiceless, self-consuming nature, is to laugh. As Herzog explains, [Even Dwarfs] was made in 1968 and 1969 at the height of the student revolt, and several over-zealous left-wingers told me my film was fascistic because it showed a ridiculous failed revolt with dwarfs. They insisted that when you portray a revolution you have to show a successful revolution, and as Even Dwarfs does not do this, for them it was clearly made by a fascist. I actually find the film very funny; it has a strange comic effect, even though I ache when I laugh. In a way, the revolt of the dwarfs is not a real defeat because for them it is a really good, memorable day; you can see the joy in their faces. [ . . . ] Anyway, I told these agitators that the film had absolutely nothing to do with the 1968 movements, that they were blinded by zealousness and that if they looked at the film twenty years down the line they might just see a more truthful representation of what happened in 1968 than in most other films. 43

Laughter at the tragic (and political rebellion seems decidedly tragic for Herzog), is a particular kind of laughter: laughter that makes one ache. It is an uncomfortable laughter, but it is not laughter done in vain, but only in response to the vain and empty or the ‘vulgar and pointless.’ The revolt of ‘vain laughter’ is not a ‘real defeat’ because its aim was never to accomplish something. It always knew it had no aim and no real agenda. Laughter, pure laughter, is ‘properly useless,’ the only real revolt against annexation into economies and their logic of means and ends, origins and consummations, striving and accomplishment, strategy and victory, beginning and end. What is the object of this laughter though, other than itself, as Hombre does at the end of Even Dwarfs or as happens to people when they simply cannot stop laughing once they have started? In short, the comical object, in Herzog, is disproportionality. The proportionate fits a scheme and order. It submits to law and measure. It is useful. The disproportional, however, is not fitting and departs from the norm; it is useless, properly useless (just as a good philosopher, like Socrates, for whom the Athenian State had no use, should be). In Herzog’s words, The dwarfs in the film are not freaks, we are the dwarfs. They are well proportioned, charming and beautiful people. If you are only two feet tall that means the world around you is totally out of proportion. Just look around us: the worlds of commerce and consumer goods have become such monstrosities these days. For the midgets, even door knobs are huge. 44

Dwarfs are not funny, because they are actually, as Herzog notes, “well proportioned,” but the world is funny, just as, perhaps, those “overzealous agitators” who accused Herzog of fascism are disproportionate

Werner Herzog on Circles, Chickens and Impotency

247

and thus the proper objects of comical ridicule and mockery. 45 In this sense, Herzog’s films do indeed contain political elements, but they are still not political films. Politics is too serious; politics does not laugh or, at least, it does not know pure laughter. 46 Hombre’s laughter in the last scene of Even Dwarfs, laughter at the absurdity of the world, both of nature and, in this film, of culture, “it is laughter per se; laughter can go no further than this.” 47 If the disproportional evokes laughter, then Herzog’s means of evoking laughter is by presenting viewers with the disproportionality of the beastly and animal . . . and then showing how the human being is quite comparable and proportional to it. The human being is comical and thus to be laughed at. In Stroszek, Herzog insists that his own crew was “disgruntled,” wondering if they “were really going to shoot such shit [the chickens] after spending so much time on this stupid film.” 48 While Herzog sees “a kind of bottomless stupidity” in chickens, “the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creatures,” 49 he also finds them, and other animals, comical. How to resist stupidity? Laugh at it. Take the following anecdote from Herzog. Years ago I was searching for the biggest rooster I could find and heard about a guy in Petaluma, California, who had owned a rooster called Weirdo [ . . . ] I went out there and found Ralph, son of Weirdo, who weighed an amazing thirty-two pounds! Then I found Frank, a special breed of miniature horse that stood less than two feet high. I told Frank’s owner I wanted to film Ralph chasing Frank—with a midget riding him—around the biggest sequoia tree in the world, thirty metres in circumference. [ . . . ] Unfortunately Frank’s owner refused. He said it would make Frank, the horse, look stupid. 50

Frank would have looked stupid but hilarious. Whether the disproportionality of capitalism, America, overzealous agitators, fascists, animals, dwarfs, or nature, Herzog plays with disproportionality for comedic effect in order to produce a “laughter per se,” a pure laughter, as the only antidote to the gravity of modern tragedy and the human being’s disproportionality, its impotency to change its condition. This condition, the human condition, is the most laughable, as the human being is all too proportionate to the disproportionality of the animal. Pure laughter, tragic laughter, is thus a laughter that makes one ache. While much has been written on Herzog’s use of chickens and the futility of the cyclical and failed revolts, my account is different because I do not regard Herzog’s dramatizations of failed revolts to be principally and primarily political. Herzogian revolt is not fundamentally a response to social oppression, but a revolt against nature and human nature, against our own animality. Herzog criticizes the proportionality between the human being and the animal, the beastliness of the human, without short-circuiting the critique at the level of social and political organiza-

248

Chapter 14

tion. Such a critique would miss the primary phenomenon—“a truth deeper than the ‘truth of the accountants,’ an ecstatic truth which is not unconditionally subject to the exterior accidentality of the ‘facts’” 51— namely that the human condition, though situated in a social condition, is not reducible to a contingent social condition, as this form of critique typically tries to find solutions in the same domain in which the problems it wishes to treat have emerged. In other words, politics is convinced that there are political solutions to political problems. Politics is, unsurprisingly, blind to the possibility that it is politics itself that is the problem and so never a solution. Herzog is therefore less interested in the vicissitudes of social organization than he is in the very difference between the human and the animal. As Prager contends, Herzog enacts an “unflattering comparison between humanity and its animal counterparts”; 52 they are all too proportionate, the human all too animal and the animal all too human. As Brad Vitiello remarks, with reference to Echoes of a Somber Empire (1990), “Far from observing the Africans like insects, Herzog shows insects, crabs, or monkeys silently staring at the pointless parade of mankind.” 53 This truth between humans and animals, namely, that we are all too proportionate to the beast, who may rather be the one observing our inhumanity, Vitiello insists, is not a social and political fact, but an ‘ecstatic’ truth that truths and all such facts. “Beyond the salutary decolonization from the principal arrogance of the Western gaze, Herzog pursues . . . dehumanization” 54 and “this loss of the human point of view is the central motif of Echoes from a Somber Empire [ . . . ] more than in any other film of Herzog’s since Even Dwarfs Started Small.” 55 Culture, history, social structures and politics are but Herzog’s edifice, that which is required only in order to be transcended, in order that our bestiality and barbarism 56 might be revealed by shattering this artifice. If animals play a special role for Herzog, i.e., for the revelation of the truth of humanity, then none more so than chickens, who more than monkeys, camels, rabbits and horses confront us with our own stupidity and impotency. As Laurie Ruth Johnson contends, “The image of the stupidity of the chicken is much more likely a projection screen for the stupidity . . . of the human.” 57 Moreover, the chicken is not just vapid, but without hand (Hand), making it impotent; it is impossible for the handless to act (hand-eln), to hand-le any affair. The chicken, the handless, suggests the inescapability of a repetitive or cyclical, and ultimately impotent, movement in a way no other animal can. Even the meandering movement of the pecking chicken seems unable to straighten itself out into a line in which beginning and end no longer coincide, which would be the image of real action or useful revolt. In the line, something different can result at the end that is not tragically synonymous with the beginning. Chickens, however, cannot walk straight but only seem to circumambulate. Chickens are impotent to enact real change, real progress or

Werner Herzog on Circles, Chickens and Impotency

249

real revolt, but they—and it is really we who are these chickens—are hilarious. ENDNOTES 1. Paul Cronin (ed.), Herzog on Herzog (London: Faber & Faber Limited, 2002), 163. 2. This claim does not mean that there are no political elements present in some (or maybe even most) of Herzog’s films, only that his films are not principally and explicitly intended as political, i.e., Herzog’s first and motivating aim is not to make a political statement. Indisputably, political elements do frequently appear in his films, and not always merely incidentally and accidentally, but that is not sufficient to deem his films “political,” although I would also grant that it is not, on its own, sufficient to deem them “apolitical” either. 3. In May 1968, student revolts, largely aimed against capitalism and colonialism, began at the Sorbonne in Paris, but eventually spread to the working class. 4. Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 56. 5. Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 93. 6. Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 212. 7. Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 246. 8. What the last quote might do, however, despite its rejection of a “black-andwhite” view, is to buy into the same false dilemma. Herzog may be read to imply that if his films are not designed to make a political statement, then they are not political at all. This would be a gross hyperbole. Surely, a film can make a political statement or be open to political readings, even if that was not the director’s intention, and yet still not be a chiefly political film that has a political agenda as its primary, most profound or even intended aim. One way of avoiding this false dichotomy, though, is to delimit the claim by stressing its qualifiers. The claim is that Herzog’s films are not primarily political, though they may still include many political elements, and that they are never merely or exclusively political in nature, as the films’ stated aims are not to make intentional political statements, though many might still quite legitimately see such statements when they view his films. What I do think Herzog would like to assert without qualification is that his films could be stripped of their political elements— because in thirty years nobody will even need to understand a film’s historical, social and political context—and still have something meaningful and humane to say, even something universally pertinent to the human condition, but that his films cannot be stripped of their comedic and human elements and have much to say at all. This point, while still contentious, is certainly much more defensible. 9. Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 190. 10. Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 213. 11. Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 214. 12. Richard Eldridge, Werner Herzog: Filmmaker and Philosopher (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 171. 13. Eldridge, Werner Herzog, 172. 14. See, for instance, Laurie Ruth Johnson’s Forgotten Dreams: Revisiting Romanticism in the Cinema of Werner Herzog (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2016). 15. Matthew Dandy, “The Melancholy Observer: Landscape, Neo-Romanticism, and the Politics of Documentary Film-Making,” in A Companion to Werner Herzog, ed. Brad Prager (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 529. 16. Dandy, “The Melancholy Observer,” 530. 17. Dandy, “The Melancholy Observer,” 535. 18. Dandy, “The Melancholy Observer,” 536. 19. Dandy, “The Melancholy Observer,” 543. 20. Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 278. 21. Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 118.

250

Chapter 14

22. One should think here of the well-known dictum against the “tyranny of the masses” or Plato’s suggestion in Crito that “we must not consider at all what the many will say of us, but what he who knows about right and wrong” (Plato, Laches. Protagoras. Meno. Euthydemus. (Loeb Classical Library), trans. W. R. M. Lamb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 48a) or Alain Badiou’s account of “tyrannie du nombre [tyranny of number]” (Alain Badiou, Peut-on penser la politique? (Paris: Seuil, 1985), 68.). 23. The term “epistocracy” has been taken from Jason Brennan’s book, Against Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). It has been noted that one of the first objections to epistocracy is the problem of deciding who knows and who does not (and thus deciding who gets to vote and who does not). This too, of course, ought to be decided by the knowledgeable. I, probably not unlike Herzog himself, have no suggestion for a program or political tactic that would ensure that or how this could be the case. In fact, it may be that this is precisely why one ought to take a distance from politics, because it is not just that such a mechanism does not exist in fact, but it may be that such a mechanism could not possibly exist in the domain of politics in principle. Ethics, however, operative at an individual rather than social level, may be another case. 24. As Brad Vitiello contends of Echoes of a Somber Empire (1990), this setting allows a peculiar facet of the traumatic memory to come into expression, namely its ‘floating’ in a sort of mythic past disjointed from the chronological thread of the survivor’s biography and from any anchoring in a historical background: Goldsmith’s story is “removed from history and politics . . . ” (Brad Vitiello, “Portrait of a Chimpanzee as a Metaphysician: Parody and Dehumanization in Echoes from a Somber Empire” in A Companion to Werner Herzog, ed. Brad Prager (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 553). Or, just two pages later and more incisively, he bluntly declares, “History, apparently, has little or no place in his films: the historical perspective—meant both as res gestae and as film narrative—is something he has always deliberately neglected.” (Vitiello, “Portrait of a Chimpanzee,” 555). What an astounding claim about a filmmaker so enamored by document, ethnography and shooting on-site! 25. Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 68. Bruno S., the actor who plays the main character in Stroszek, also exemplifies one who suffers because unable to communicate. According to Herzog, Bruno did not speak pure German, or even grammatically correct German, but rather a dialect from the suburbs. It was hard to get him to speak not just in Hochdeutsch—proper German—but also as if he were discovering language for the first time (Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 121). 26. Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 52. 27. Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 55. 28. Brad Prager, The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 58. 29. Prager, The Cinema of Werner Herzog, 57. 30. “Of course, in reality the creature was a very docile and well-trained animal whose owner was standing about two feet outside of the frame giving it orders. He was trying to confuse the dromedary by constantly giving it conflicting orders by hand: sit down, get up, sit down, get up. And in despair the animal defecated, something which looks absolutely wonderful on screen” (Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 60). 31. Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 142. 32. Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 142-143. 33. Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 144. 34. “[S]ome scenes were improvised; for example, when Bruno speaks to Eva Mattes about his solitude and pain as a child in an institution, when he wet his bed and was forced to hold his bed-sheet up for hours until it was dry or he was beaten. That really happened to him” (Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 143). 35. He was the unwanted son of a prostitute who beat him at the age of three until he lost speech, giving her an excuse to put him in a mental institution. He passed in and out of various institutions for the next twenty-three years.

Werner Herzog on Circles, Chickens and Impotency

251

36. “With Bruno you always see true suffering on the screen. His character in the film is very close to the real Bruno, and even today it is difficult for me to watch some scenes of the film. The sequence in the apartment when the two pimps beat Eva Mattes up and throw Bruno over the piano” (Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 143). For more on the apolitical role of trauma in Herzog, one should turn Vitiello’s excellent article, “Portrait of a Chimpanzee as a Metaphysician,” as he there shows how Herzog’s notion of trauma is qualitatively different than the kind of trauma depicted in Claude Lanzmann’s documentary film Shoah (1985). “While the director of Shoah is interested in the existential repercussions of history and politics, Herzog’s fascination with trauma seems to be part of his search for the sublime and for the ecstatic surpassing of ordinary perception [ . . . ] trauma attracts him [ . . . ] and enables the overcoming of history, ‘facts’” (Vitiello, “Portrait of a Chimpanzee,” 554). Occupying an even more radical stance, Vitiello announces, “trauma in Herzog’s films is the occasion for a flight from history . . . Herzog seems to have no interest in the political implications of the situations he portrays, as long as they provide the conditions for the access to some form of ecstatic experience.” (Vitiello, “Portrait of a Chimpanzee,” 554). 37. Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 145. 38. Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 146. 39. Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 147-148. 40. Rembert Hüser, “Herzog’s Chickenshit” in A Companion to Werner Herzog, ed. Brad Prager (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 447. 41. Hüser, “Herzog’s Chickenshit,” 447. 42. Hüser, “Herzog’s Chickenshit,” 448. 43. Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 55-56. 44. Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 56. 45. Even Dwarfs is mentioned in a piece by David Church, “Freakery, Cult Films, and the Problem of Ambivalence,” which argues that classical exploitation cinema is “one of the institutions that replaced the traditional freak show.” (David Church, “Freakery, Cult Films, and the Problem of Ambivalence.” Journal of Film and Video 63, no. 1 (Spring 2011) (University of Illinois Press). https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/ jfilmvideo.63.1.0003, 5). He surely intends to lump Even Dwarfs into this genre, which “affectionately portrays freaks as metaphors for social or psychic forces other than disability itself.” (Church, “Freakery, Cult Films, and the Problem of Ambivalence,” 7). To offer but one point of rebuttal, I would point out that there are no “normal” people or “normally sized” people at all in Even Dwarfs, which means that their “freakish” stature is decidedly not juxtaposed to the “normal” and “normative.” There is, of course, a juxtaposition, but it is that of the obscenely sized monstrosity of the world, both social and physical. As Church himself implores, “The challenge . . . is to rethink disability as a defiant and transgressive trait without routinely typing it as a stigmatizing signifier of otherness.” (Church, “Freakery, Cult Films, and the Problem of Ambivalence,” 15) If this is not what Herzog has attempted to do in Even Dwarfs, i.e., to expose not a particular difference between groups or classes of people but a universal difference, namely, one between the humane and the barbaric, between humanity and animality, then I cannot imagine to know what Herzog has hoped to accomplish in this film. 46. Of course, political satire is quite common, with numerous late-night shows dedicated to this comedic form of politics. Some shows, e.g., South Park, unashamedly mocking both the left and the right, might verge on using comedy as a means of critiquing the political as such in much the same way that Quentin Tarantino critiques all violence by caricaturizing violence. Those shows, however, that are intentionally humorous but also take themselves seriously as a real news platform only use comedy as a means to certain political ends. There is a great difference, then, between the use of comedy, which annexes it into a political agenda, and the properly useless enjoyment of comedy, which can transport one beyond political structures entirely. 47. Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 57. 48. Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 99.

252

Chapter 14

49. Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 99. 50. Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 99. 51. Vitiello, “Portrait of a Chimpanzee,” 552. “The Minnesota Declaration” can be found here: https://www.wernerherzog.com/complete-works-text.html. 52. Prager, The Cinema of Werner Herzog, 59. 53. Vitiello, “Portrait of a Chimpanzee,” 559. 54. Vitiello, “Portrait of a Chimpanzee,” 559. 55. Vitiello, “Portrait of a Chimpanzee,” 560. 56. Eldridge suspects that Herzog “is worried that the forms of political and cultural organization in which anyone might take pride might be nothing other than vehicles of barbarism” (Eldridge, Werner Herzog, 173). 57. Johnson, Forgotten Dreams, 158.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Badiou, Alain. 1985. Peut-on penser la politique? Paris: Seuil. Brennan, Jason. 2017. Against Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Church, David. “Freakery, Cult Films, and the Problem of Ambivalence,” in Journal of Film and Video 63, no. 1 (Spring 2011) (University of Illinois Press). https://www. jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jfilmvideo.63.1.0003. Cronin, Paul (ed.). 2002. Herzog on Herzog. London: Faber & Faber Limited. Dandy, Matthew. 2012. “The Melancholy Observer: Landscape, Neo-Romanticism, and the Politics of Documentary Film-Making,” in A Companion to Werner Herzog, ed. Brad Prager. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Eldridge, Richard. 2019. Werner Herzog: Filmmaker and Philosopher. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Hüser, Rembert. 2012. “Herzog’s Chickenshit,” in A Companion to Werner Herzog, ed. Brad Prager. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Johnson, Laurie Ruth. 2016. Forgotten Dreams: Revisiting Romanticism in the Cinema of Werner Herzog. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Plato. 2017. Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. (Loeb Classical Library), trans. William Preddy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Plato. 2017. Laches. Protagoras. Meno. Euthydemus. (Loeb Classical Library), trans. W. R. M. Lamb. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Prager, Brad. 2007. The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth. London: Wallflower Press. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1997. ‘The Social Contract’ and Other Later Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vitiello, Brad. 2012. “Portrait of a Chimpanzee as a Metaphysician: Parody and Dehumanization in Echoes from a Somber Empire,” in A Companion to Werner Herzog, ed. Brad Prager. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Index

academic analysis, 1, 2, 3, 7, 11, 16; pseudo-, 7; stifling cinema, 11 accident, 73, 77, 82 accountant's truth, xiii, xvii, 6, 15, 95, 119, 121, 129, 135, 146, 155, 182. See ecstatic truth Adorno, Theodor W., 188–191, 192, 195 Aeschylus, 161 Aguirre, The Wrath of God (film by Herzog), xiii, 21, 23, 28, 33, 36n14, 38, 49, 62–63, 195, 210, 217, 227, 234, 238 de Aguirre, Don Lope, 226–229 Alaska, 99 alētheia, xix, 33, 48, 49, 135, 137, 138, 139, 141, 150n19 alienation, 165, 166 alien, the, 180, 182 Aloi, Giovanni, 110 Altdorfer, Albrecht, 164 alternative facts, xix, 120, 121, 122, 127, 148 Ames, Eric, 2, 66n1, 67n23, 92n32, 112n6, 195, 198n4, 216, 229n5, 230n9, 231n18 Among Grizzlies: Living With Wild Bears in Alaska (book by Timothy Treadwell and Jewel Palovak), 103, 113n18 amor fati , 76–77 Anaximander, 111–112 Andrew, Dudley, 92n36, 167n2 animal (non-human), 70, 71, 73, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 85, 86, 87, 89, 91n31 animality, 236, 247, 247–248, 251n45, 252n56; bears. See bears; camels, 241, 250n30; chickens, xxi, 234, 238, 239, 241, 244–245, 247, 247–249;

crabs, 247–248; crows, 50; foxes, 99; horses, 247; insects, 247–248; monkeys, 32, 57, 62, 97, 181–182, 184, 209, 227, 241, 247–248; parrots, 239, 241; pigs, 240; turkeys, 244 Animals and Why They Matter: A Journey Around the Species Barrier (book by Mary Midgley), 91n31 anti-learning, 13 apocalypse, 137, 144–148 apolitical, xxi, 233, 234–236, 237, 241, 242, 246, 246–247, 247–248, 249n2, 249n8, 250n24, 251n36, 251n46; political correctness, 234, 246; voting 237, 250n22–250n23 Apuleius, 155, 157, 167n10–167n11 Aquinas, Thomas, 138, 139 archi-écriture (Derrida), 76 Aristotle, 106, 138 art, creation of, 78 artwork, 140–141, 147 attention. See perception Ballad of the Little Soldier (film by Herzog), 57, 235 Balsam, Richard Meran, 101 Barnouw, Erik, 172 Baudrillard, Jean, xix, 123, 124–126, 126–128, 128 Bear Attacks (book by Erin McCloskey), 105 Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance (book by Stephen Herrero), 113n17 bears, 71, 73, 79, 80, 81, 86, 87, 89, 98–112; attacks by, xix, 99, 102, 103; Bear 141, 102, 103, 104, 109; Bear 99, 102 Beast and Man (book by Mary Midgley), 80 Being, 140, 141, 150n13

253

254

Index

Beirne, Piers, 105, 114n50; theriocide, concept of, 105 Bells from the Deep (film by Herzog), 48 Benjamin, Walter, 161 Bergson, Henri, 83 Beyond Good and Evil (book by Friedrich Nietzsche), 114n60 Bible: I Corinthians 14:26, 137; Hosea 13:7-8, 98; John 1:1, 139; John 9:4, 146, 151n34; John 14:16, 140; Lamentations of Jeremiah, 151n34; Psalms 6:6, 146, 151n34; Revelation of John, 145; Revelation of John 9:12 and 6, 151n33; Revelation of John 16:18-20, 151n33 Blank, Les, xiv, 2, 5, 12, 69, 92n34, 96, 131n18, 199n15 Bogart, Humphrey, 205 boredom, 153–154 Borges, Jorge Luis, 141 Brando, Marlon, 205 bravery, 206–207 Brecht, Bertolt (theory of alienation), 151n35 Bresson, Robert, 175 Bronson, Charles, 205 Buchka, Peter, 2, 15 Buddhist tradition, 79 Buñuel, Luis, 164 Burden of Dreams (film by Les Blank), xxiin13, 2, 4–5, 12, 67n24, 69, 71, 96 Burke, Edmund, xviii, 21, 24, 25, 28–29, 36n15, 36n16, 36n17, 36n18, 36n19, 36n21 Burkett, Jason, 107, 108 Burns, Ken, 8 Bush, George H. W., 117 Bush, George W., 125 Calasso, Robert, 44–45, 46 Campbell, Joseph, 15 capital punishment, 107, 108, 110 Captain Cook, 180 catastrophe, 147 Cave of Forgotten Dreams (film by Herzog), xiii, 113n17, 140, 212n6 Cavell, Stanley, 58, 174 La chartreuse de Parme, 174, 175 Chauvet, caves at, 95

Chomsky, Noam, 118 Chronique d’un été / Chronicle of a Summer (film by Morin and Rouch), 93n43, 172 Cinéma Vérité, xx, 33, 47, 85, 93n43, 107, 135, 142, 171, 172–173, 187 circles, xxi, 228, 238, 240–241, 243, 244, 245 close-up, 32, 87, 89, 93n50, 145, 180, 183, 217 Cobra Verde (film by Herzog), 97 Columbus, Christopher, 148, 164 the comedic, 223, 229, 238–239, 242, 244, 245, 245–246, 246–247, 249n8, 251n46; Aguirre, the Wrath of God and 218, 219, 220, 231n18; Grizzly Man and, 216, 219, 220, 225, 231n18; laughter, 239, 240, 241–242, 245–246, 247; Søren Kierkegaard and, 222; stupidity, 247, 248; contradiction and, 216, 218, 224, 225, 226, 227, 229 communication (inter-species), 86, 87 contingency, 77, 83, 174–177 Conway, Kellyanne, 120, 121, 122, 125 Conquest of the Useless (book by Herzog), xviii, 40, 46, 50, 51, 51n4, 61–62, 63, 97, 112n8, 138, 139 Cooper, Gary, 205 Corrigan, Timothy, 2, 17n4, 47, 196 Cosmos (television documentary series), 168n31 cowardice, 206 The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (book by E.P. Evans), 108 Cronin, Paul, xv, xvii, 2, 11, 90n1, 112n2, 130n7, 131n36, 154, 164, 171 culture, 73, 82, 83, 87 culture industry, 190–191, 192, 194 cyclical, 234, 238, 238–239, 240–241, 242–243, 244, 245, 247; automatization, 240–241, 241; repetition, 239–240, 241, 248 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 164 The Dark Glow of the Mountain (film by Herzog), 49, 195 Darwin, Charles, 91n31 Darwinian theory, 84

Index daydreams, 10 death, 95–112, 157, 178, 179; actual, cinematic taboo against, 101; of animals, 50, 101, 105; of humans by animals (vivicide), 105 Death in the Grizzly Maze: The Timothy Treadwell Story (book by Mike Lapinsky), 113n30, 113n31 Deception, 148 Deleuze, Gilles, xix, 10, 15, 128, 129, 196 delirium, 62, 63, 64 Demme, Jonathan, 2 the demonic : Don Lope de Aguirre and, 218 Dengler, Dieter, 9, 49, 208–209, 210 Derrida, Jacques, 76, 78, 85 Descartes, René, 58 Determinism, 72 digital camera, 73 Dionysian, 21, 32–33, 33–34, 35–37, 36n32 documentary film, 73, 75, 79, 84, 85, 171–173, 174, 176, 177, 179, 181, 182–184; documentary, 81; observational, 172, 175; revelatory, 171, 173, 174, 182, 183 Dorrington, Graham, 211 dream, 63–65, 65 dreams, collective, 14 Dreams and Burdens (book by Peter Buchka), 2 Eastwood, Clint, 205 Ebert, Roger, xiii, 119 Echoes from a Somber Empire (film by Herzog), 57, 181–182, 248, 250n24 ecstatic truth, xvii, 3, 6, 15, 16, 21, 24, 25, 26, 27, 33–35, 38, 47, 95, 119, 121, 129, 135, 135–138, 140, 141, 142, 142–143, 144, 148–149, 150n13, 171, 174, 180, 182, 187, 195, 197 Eisner, Lotte, 95, 112n1 Either/Or (book by Soren Kierkegaard), 219 elan vital , 84 Eldridge, Richard, xiv, xxiin4, 16n2, 52n10, 130n10, 130n12, 150n19, 164, 165, 168n32, 168n37, 168n40 Elsaesser,Thomas, 196

255

Encounters at the End of the World (film by Herzog), 97, 140, 192 The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (film by Herzog), xiii, 56, 66n3, 97, 197 Epicurus, 106 essay films, 1–2, 14 essayism, 14–16 ethics, 75, 82, 119, 222, 250n23 The Ethics of Capital Punishment: A Philosophical Investigaton of Evil and Its Consequences (book by Matthew Kramer), 114n58 Even Dwarfs Started Small , 159, 237–238, 238–242, 246, 248, 251n45 Every Night the Trees Disappear (book by Alan Greenberg), xxiin19, 97, 112n7, 113n28 existence, human, 75 existence, radical contingency of, 77 experience, 160–161, 161, 187, 189, 191, 192, 195, 195–197 F for Fake (film by Orson Welles), 52n11 Faces of Death (film), 101 fact/value distinction, 72, 75, 76, 79, 82, 83, 85, 119, 121, 122–123, 125–126, 127–129 facticity, critique of, 187–191, 192 facts, 135, 137, 147, 148, 150n13, 154, 155, 157, 160 fake news, 120, 148 falsehoods, 119, 121, 122 falsity, 138 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, xiii, 213n22 Fata Morgana (film by Herzog), 28, 195 femininity, 205, 206, 210 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 41 fiction,. See also storytelling, narrative 183 Film Lessons (event), 39, 164 film theory, 10 Fischer, André, 157, 158, 167n8–167n9, 167n12, 168n18–168n19 Fitzcarrald, Carlos Fermín, 90n1 Fitzcarraldo (film by Herzog), xiii, 21, 23, 28, 33, 35, 38, 49, 50, 63–65, 69, 79, 90n1, 92n34, 97, 162, 195; making of, xvii, 40, 42, 97

256

Index

The Flying Doctors of East Africa (film by Herzog), 238 Forgotten Dreams: Revisiting Romanticism in the Cinema of Werner Herzog (book by Laurie Ruth Johnson), xviii, xxiin16, 112n12 “found-footage” film, 81 French New Wave, 12 Friedrich, Caspar David, xviii From One Second to the Next (film by Herzog), xvii, 97 Fuchs, Cynthia, 92n32 Gandy, Matthew, 130n2 gender: appearance of, 206, 207; performance of, 206 Germanness, 204, 211 Gesamtkunstwerk. See Wagner Godard, Jean-Luc, 12 Goethe, J. W. von, 7 Gosling, Maureen, 2, 5 The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (film by Herzog), 37, 50, 97, 136, 142–144 Grizzly Man (film by Herzog), xiii, xix, 21, 22–23, 28, 31, 33, 35n2, 36n25–36n27, 36n31, 73, 79, 84, 86, 95, 98–112, 163, 206, 208, 216, 223, 238 The Grizzly Maze: Timothy Treadwell’s Fatal Obsession with Alaskan Bears (book by Nick Jans) 100, 102, 113n21 Grünewald, Matthias, 164 the Gulf War, 117, 124, 125 Halle, Randall, 159, 168n22 Hampshire, Stuart, 91n29 Hansen, Miriam, 160, 162, 168n24, 168n27 Heart of Glass (film by Herzog), xxi, 7, 97 Hegel, G.W.F., 108 Heidegger, Martin, xiii, xix, 35, 78, 85, 135, 136, 138, 139–141, 144, 148, 150n13, 150n19, 150n28 Heraclitus, 140 Herdsman of the Sun (film by Herzog), 195 Herrero, Stephen, 104, 106, 113n17

Herzog, Elizabeth, xxi Herzog, Werner. See throughout,: As actor, xiii, 97, 211; As auteur, xvii, 111; as his own commentator, 11; and parody, 11, 12; and quietism, 7, 14; fabricated quotations by, 137, 139, 144; heterosexuality, 206; film stylizations of, 32, 33, 47, 85, 99, 119, 120, 129, 137, 138, 142; “Minnesota Declaration”, xv, xvii, 9, 33, 47, 48, 85, 93n43, 115n77, 119, 120, 121, 122, 187–188, 192; “On the Absolute the Sublime and Ecstatic Truth”, xv, 49, 135, 136–138; opposition to critical interpretation of work, xiii, xv; opposition to death penalty, 108 Hillman, Roger, 118 Hollywood, 99–100, 100, 111, 157, 167n9, 205, 207 homophobia, 211, 213n22 homosexuality, 206, 213n22 Horkheimer, Max, 188–189, 190–191, 192–194 Huguenard, Aime, xx, 73, 74, 79, 82, 85, 86, 87, 89, 93n50, 95, 98, 99, 101, 103, 104, 110, 111 humanistic sublime, 2, 15–16 hyper-reality, 124, 125, 126, 128 I Am My Films: A Portrait of Werner Herzog (film by Christian Weisenborn), 2, 6 I Am My Films, Part 2: Thirty Years Later (film by Christian Weisenborn), 2 identification, 61, 64 ideology, 141 illiteracy, 207 illumination, 135, 137 image, 135, 136, 142 imagery, 154, 155, 164, 167n8 imagination, 78, 79, 85, 86, 138 impotency, 234, 238, 241, 245, 247, 248–249. See also uselessness Incident at Loch Ness (film by Zak Penn), 151n35, 245 indifference, 136, 150n19 ineffable, 180 inhumanity, 143 inner landscapes, 9, 10

Index instinct, 93n42 intellectualism, 56, 57, 58, 63 Internet, 144, 147–148 Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, A Tale of Life (film by Herzog), xix, 95, 107, 108–110 Into the Inferno (film by Herzog), 97, 140, 164, 192 Into the Wild Blue Yonder (film by Herzog), 130n1 Islam, Kamal Saiful, 39, 164 James, William, 137 Jans, Nick, 100, 102 Jeong, Seung-Hoon, 92n36 Jesus, 106, 140 Julian Donkey Boy (film by Harmony Korine) 12.17 Jung, Carl, 15 jungle, 69, 70, 81, 92n34; escape from, 208–210 Kant, Immanuel, xviii, 21, 24, 25, 27, 72, 85, 92n40, 107, 108, 136; Categorical Imperative, 72; freedom, notion of, 75 Katmai National Park (Alaska), 74 Kierkegaard, Soren, xxi, 218, 219–220, 222, 225 kino pravda, 172 Kinski, Klaus, 7, 9, 27, 31, 63, 97, 204, 228, 238, 242 Kleinrock, Leonard, 147–148 Kluge, Alexander, xiii, 192 Koch, Gertrude, 168n29 Koepcke, Juliane, 209–210 Koepnick, Lutz, 118, 151n31 Korine, Harmony, 211 Kracauer, Siegfried, xx, 153, 153–154, 157, 161, 163–164, 165, 166, 167, 167n1, 167n3–167n5, 167n13–168n16, 168n28, 168n30, 168n33–168n34, 168n38, 168n41, 173, 183 Kramer, Matthew, 107 Land of Silence and Darkness (film by Herzog), 7, 158–159, 167n8, 168n17, 168n29

257

Lang, Fritz, 95 Lapinsky, Mike, 104 LaRocca, David, xi, 16n2, 16n3, 17n6, 17n22, 18n32, 18n41, 185n2 laws of nature, 76 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 150n19 Lessing, Gottfried Ephraim, xvi, xxiin9 Lessons of Darkness (film by Herzog), xviii, xix, 28, 117, 118, 119, 121, 129, 130n1, 136, 144–148, 151n34, 167n9, 194, 234 “Life Force” (Bernard Shaw), 85 Little Dieter Needs to Fly (film by Herzog), 97, 208–209, 210 Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World (film by Herzog), 136, 144–148 Longinus, 21, 24, 26–28, 36n11, 38, 135 Lury, Karen, 93 Madonna (performer), 211 The Mandalorian, xiii Marcel, Gabriel, 154, 173–174 manliness. See masculinity masculinism, xx, 203 masculinity: eating meat as a sign of, 213n27; facial hair as sign of, 205–206; physical signifiers of, 207, 208, 211; violence as sign of, 207 McCloskey, Erin, 102, 104 McQuarrie, Christopher, 211 meaning, natural, 83 Menelaus, 162 mental illness, 157, 163; madness, 62, 65–66 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 58, 172, 174, 175–176, 180, 182, 184 Messner, Reinhold, 95 metafilmmaking, 2, 3, 7 The Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass) (book by Apuleius), 155 Metaphysics of Morals (book by Immanual Kant), 114n57 metaphilosophy, 2, 3 metaphor, 57 Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (book by Iris Murdoch), 72 Midgley, Mary, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 91n29, 91n31, 92n40, 93n42

258

Index

misogyny, 205, 211, 212n17 Mittner, Ladislao, 41, 51n8, 52n9 the modern, 175 Mondo Cane (film), 101 moral philosophy, 71, 72, 75 Morin, Edgar, 93n43 Morris, Errol, xiv, 131n18 Morse, Samuel, 147 Morse code, 141 murder, 95, 103 Murdoch, Iris, 71, 72, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 84, 85, 92n40 music: Krautrock, 164; Leçons de ténèbres , 151n34; litany, 147; Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony , 146–147; opera, 50, 56, 64, 65, 151n31; requiem Mass, 137; Stabat Mater (set by Arvo Pärt), 151n33; Tuvan throat-singing, 164; Wagner. See Wagner My Best Fiend (film by Herzog), 238 My Son My Son What Have Ye Done (film by Herzog), 97 mystery, 160, 161 myth, 180–182 narrative, 174–177, 178, 179 National Film Board of Canada, 93n43 National Geographic, 92n32 nature, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 81, 82, 83, 87, 93n42, 165, 217–218, 218, 223, 224, 225, 226, 228, 238, 246, 247; nature concept/idea of, 74, 82; nature indifference of, 74, 78, 82, 93; nature philosophy of, 69, 84, 85; nature vision of, 70; nature will of, 73 necessity, 83 New German Cinema, xiii Nichols, Bill, 172 Nielsen, Erik, 92n32 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xxi, 8, 13, 21, 30, 33, 34, 35, 36n29, 36n30, 36n32–34, 37n52, 37n56–38, 38, 48, 85, 95, 108, 111–112, 126, 127, 128, 129, 141; Beyond Good and Evil, 95, 108; Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, 111–112; The Birth of Tragedy, 21, 30, 32, 34; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, xviii, 42–45, 108, 111; will to power,

129 nonsense, 65–66 normative vs. descriptive statements, 122 norms, 119, 122, 123, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129 Nosferatu (film by Herzog), 97, 151n31 Notebooks 1914-1916 (book by Ludwig Wittgenstein), 114n56 The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (book by Rainer Maria Rilke), 162 Novalis, 219 observational (direct) cinema, 85, 93n43 Oedipus the King (tragedy by Sophocles), 221 On the High Wire (book by Philippe Petit), 40 Palovak, Jewel, 101, 103 Pascal, Blaise, xiii, 117, 119, 136, 137, 139, 144, 155 pathos , 182 Penn, Zak, 211 Perception, 172, 174, 175, 180, 182, 183, 184; Attention, 173–174, 177, 180, 182–183; habitual ways of, 171, 174, 176–177, 180, 182–183 The Peregrine (book by J.A. Baker), 110 Perry, Michael, 95, 107, 108, 109–110 Peru, 10 Peters, John Durham, 86 Petit, Philippe, 39–40, 41, 51, 51n3, 53n32 Peucker, Bridgette, xiv, xxiin3 phenomenology, 171–172, 174, 182 Phenomenology of Perception (book by Maurice Merleau-Ponty), 174 The Philosophy of Documentary Film (book by David LaRocca), 112n11 Pilgrimage (film by Herzog), 48 Plato, xxin2, xxiin6, 114n49, 141, 150n28, 162 post-Kantian tradition, 73 poverty, 157, 163 Prager, Brad, 130n2, 150n19 psychology, 8, 14, 15

Index psychotherapy: as treatment for PTSD, 210–211; Herzog's aversion to, 211 Quine, Willard Van Orman, 141 Randle, Judith, 110 rationality, 171, 176, 179, 182 realism, 153, 155, 184 reality, 72, 82, 138, 154, 157, 160, 163–164, 166–167, 168n40 reification, 188–189, 190 relativism, 127, 128, 129, 148 Renoir, Jean, 150n19 Rescue Dawn (film by Herzog), xiii, 49 revelation, 140, 144, 148, 160, 164, 173 Rick and Morty , 211 Riefenstahl, Leni, 118 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 111, 162, 168n26 Rogue Film School, 3, 5, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16n1, 110 Romanticism, xviii, 41, 219, 220, 228, 230n9, 236, 237 Rouch, Jean, 93n43, 172 Russell, Bertrand, 121 Scarry, Elaine, 110 Schantz, Ned, 92n36 Scheinman, Diane, 172 Schleinstein, Bruno, 242, 242–243, 250n25, 250n34–251n36 Schopenhauer, Arthur, xvi, xxiin10, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 83, 84, 85, 90n3 Scientism, 163, 168n31 Seghers, Hercules, 164 Shaw, George Bernard, 84 simulacra/simulacrum, 124, 126, 127, 128, 162 Singer, Alan, 197 slow-motion, 142 Sobchack, Vivian, 112n11 Socrates, 106, 166 Sophocles, 221 La Soufrière (film by Herzog), 92n34, 97, 118, 177–179, 192 Der Spiegel , 120, 121 Spielberg, Steven, 157 Sports, 142 St. Paul, 70

259

Stanford University, 147 Steiner, Walter, 50, 95, 142–144 Stendahl, Marie-Henri Beyle, 174, 175 Storytelling, 142, 161 Straubringer, Fini, 95 Stroszek (film by Herzog), 163, 237–238, 238, 242, 242–244, 247 subjectivism, 140 subjectivity, 218, 222–223, 223, 225, 226 sublime humanistic, 2, 15–16 sublime, 21, 23–33, 35, 36n6, 36n11, 36n14, 36n15, 36n16, 36n21, 36n22–36n23, 37, 136, 137, 142, 147; sublime humanistic, 2, 15–16 suicide, 206, 209 tabula rasa , 127 Taiga, 10 Talbert, Jared, 207 technology, 141, 147 theory, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62; theory vs. practice, 137 Theory of Film (book by Siegfried Kracauer), 153, 157, 166, 167n1 The Thin Blue Line (film by Errol Morris), 108 To the Limit and Then Beyond It The Ecstatic World of Filmmaker Werner Herzog (film by Peter Buchka), 2 Tolstoy, Leo, 106 tragedy (see also comedic), 238, 238–239, 242, 245, 245–246, 246, 247, 248; Søren Kierkegaard’s conception of, 219–222, 225, 229n7 The Transformation of the World into Music (film by Herzog), 151n31 Treadwell, Timothy, xix, 9, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87, 92n32, 92n34, 92n35, 93n50, 95, 98–112, 206, 208, 209, 223–226; as eco warrior, 81, 100; death tape, xix Truffaut, François, xiii Trump, Donald, xix, 120, 122, 123, 128 truth, 171–173, 176, 179, 180, 181, 245, 246, 248, 251n36; Aristotle on, 138; enactment through film, 138; event of, 140, 141; post-truth, 148; sur-real, 138; transcendental, 140, 144, 148; veridical, 173, 182; truth as

260

Index

correspondence, 121, 126, 127, 128, 129, 138, 162; truth as metaphor, 126, 127 Turvey, Malcolm, 173, 183 Tyler, Louise, 108 Tyson, Mike, 207 Tyson, Neil DeGrasse, 168n31 University of California at Los Angeles, 147 uselessness (futility), 239, 239–240, 241, 246, 248, 251n46. See also impotency value, 69, 72, 85, 87, 93 Ventura, Jessie, 207 Vertov, Dziga, 172 video, 79, 80, 84, 87 Virgil, 137 voice-over narration, 56, 74, 80, 81, 82, 84 volcanos, 7, 14, 95, 177–178, 179, 184 Wagner, Richard, 118, 144, 145, 147, 148, 151n31, 151n33, 164; Bühnenweihfestspiel, 147; Das Rheingold , 144–145, 147; Der Ring des Nibelungen , 144; Lohengrin (staged by Herzog), 151n31; Gesamtkunstwerk, 147; Götterdämmerung , 145; Parsifal (staged by Herzog), 151n31; “Siegfried’s Funeral March”, 151n33; Tannhäuser (staged by Herzog), 151n31; The Flying Dutchman (staged by Herzog), 151n31 Waldenfels, Bernhard, 182 walking, 9–10, 13, 15, 47–41, 177 Walser, Robert, 143 war, 136–137, 146

Wayne, John, 205 Weisenborn, Christian, 2, 3, 6, 11 Weiskel, Thomas, 15 Welles, Orson, 42 Wenders, Wim, xiii Werner Herzog: Filmmaker and Philosopher (book by Richard Eldridge), xiv, 52n10 Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (film by Les Blank), xiv, 2, 131n18 Werner Herzog: Interviews (book by Eric Ames), 92n32 What is Philosophy? (book by Deleuze and Guattari), 45 White Diamond (film by Herzog), 179–180, 211 Widmark, Richard, 205 Wilderness, 157, 163 will, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 73, 75, 76; will, human, 78; will, natural, 76, 77, 78, 79 Wils, Tyson, 167n2 Wings of Hope (film by Herzog), 97, 151n31, 209–210 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, xv, xviii, xxiin7, 55, 57, 58, 59–60, 61–62, 63, 65, 65–66, 72, 85, 92n40, 106 women, xx; as heroes, 205, 210; lack of in Herzog's films, xx, 205. See also femininity The World as Will and Representation (book by Schopenhauer), 74 Woyzeck (film by Herzog), 242 Wycliff’s Bible, 137 Yavorsky, Mark, 97, 111 Yeats, William Butler, 139 Zapruder (film), 101 Ž iž ek, Slavoj, 4, 5

Contributors

Stefanie Baumann is senior researcher at CineLab/IFILNOVA (Nova Institute of Philosophy/New University of Lisbon), where she coordinates the working group “Thinking Documentary Film” and conducts a research on the philosophy of documentary formats through the critical theory of the early Frankfurt school. She obtained her PhD in philosophy in 2013 and has taught philosophy, aesthetics and contemporary art theory at University Paris VIII (Paris, 2007-2010), Ashkal Alwan (Beirut, 2013), ALBA—the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts/University of Balamand (Beirut, 2012-2015) and the Maumaus Study Program (Lisbon, since 2016). Patrícia Castello Branco is a Senior Researcher at CineLab/IFILNOVA (Nova Institute of Philosophy/ New University of Lisbon). She is coeditor and founder of Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image and she has authored several essays exploring the connections between film and philosophy, including “An Eco-Posthuman Reading of Avatar,” “The Physiological Sublime in Klaus Kinski’s Aguirre,” and “Pure Sensations: From Abstract Cinema to Digital Image.” Daniele Dottorini is associate professor in Film Studies at the University of Calabria (Italy), where he also a film programmer and critic. His main interests revolve around film theory and the cinema of the Real. He is film programmer for the Festival dei Popoli in Florence and has organized several retrospectives on contemporary documentary. He is editor of the review Fata Morgana and member of the editorial board of Filmcritica and Sentieri selvaggi. Included among his books are Per un cinema del reale: Forme e pratiche del documentario italiano contemporaneo (Udine 2013), the Italian edition of the writings on cinema by Alain Badiou (Del Capello e del Fango. Riflessioni sul cinema, Cosenza 2009), and monographs on the cinema of David Lynch, James Cameron, and Jean Renoir. Anthony Eagan works at the Santa Fe Institute, where he studies the aesthetics and epistemology of complexity theory. Antony Fredriksson is a researcher at the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value, University of Pardubice. His areas of interest include aesthetics, phenomenology, philosophy of perception, film and philosophy, attention, intersubjectivity, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Ludwig Wittgenstein. He has taught philosophy at Åbo Akademi University, University of Helsinki and the Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki. His most recent work focuses on existential questions concerning the faculty of 261

262

Contributors

attention, including the articles: “The Alien World, Attention and the Habitual,” Phänomenologische Forschungen, 2/2018 and “The Art of Attention in Documentary Film and Werner Herzog,” Film-Philosophy, 22.1/ 2018. Marc Furstenau is Associate Professor of Film Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. He is the editor of The Film Theory Reader: Debates and Arguments (Routledge, 2010) and co-editor of Cinema and Technology: Cultures, Theories, Practices (Palgrave, 2008). He is completing a book, The Aesthetics of Digital Montage, supported by TECHNÈS, a research project on the history and theory of film technology. He is currently co-editor of the Canadian Journal of Film Studies. David LaRocca attended Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School, conversed regularly with Paul Cronin during the composition of Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, and authored several pieces on Herzog’s work. LaRocca is the author, editor, or coeditor of eleven books, including The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman, The Philosophy of War Films, The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth, and The Thought of Stanley Cavell and Cinema: Turning Anew to the Ontology of Film a Half-Century after The World Viewed. He has held visiting research and teaching positions at Binghamton, Cornell, Cortland, Harvard, Ithaca College, and Vanderbilt. Will Lehman is associate professor of German and Spanish and head of the Department of World Languages at Western Carolina University. His main research interest is in German cinema, with a focus on Werner Herzog. He has given several public lectures about the filmmaker and has published an essay about Herzog’s imagery of Native Americans in A Companion to Werner Herzog (2012) and an article about Herzog’s relationship with Klaus Kinski in A New History of German Cinema (2012). Ian Alexander Moore is a faculty member at St. John’s College (Santa Fe) and Associate Editor of the journal Philosophy Today. He is the author of Eckhart, Heidegger, and the Imperative of Releasement (SUNY, 2019), editor of Reiner Schürmann's Neo-Aristotelianism and the Medieval Renaissance (Diaphanes, 2020), co-editor of Jean Wahl’s Transcendence and the Concrete (Fordham, 2017), and translator or co-translator of books by Martin Heidegger, Eugen Fink, and Peter Sloterdijk. He has published articles and book chapters on medieval and continental philosophy, as well as on the literature of Cormac McCarthy. Kyle Novak is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at the University of Guelph in Ontario. He holds and MA in philosophy from the University of Toledo and a BA in philosophy and religious studies from the University of North Dakota. His research interests are in twentieth and twentyfirst century continental philosophy and political theory. He is actively publishing on Gilles Deleuze and his article “Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism Against Speculative Realism” recently appeared in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy.

Contributors

263

Mihai Ometiță is a Junior Researcher at the Research Institute of the University of Bucharest and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at New Europe College—Institute for Advanced Study (Romania). He is working on various topics in philosophy of language, mind, and action in conjunction with philosophy of film. His PhD is from University of East Anglia (UK) and his Research MA is from University of Groningen (The Netherlands). He co-edited Wittgenstein and Phenomenology (Routledge 2018), contributed to Colours in the Development of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy (Palgrave Macmillan 2017), and is a Romanian translator of Wittgenstein. Simon Thornton is a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Humanities and Social Change at the University of California, Santa Barbara Tyler Tritten is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Gonzaga University. He has published on a wide range of authors and themes in nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century European philosophy. He is particularly interested in possibilities for speculative ontology which he explores in his monograph The Contingency of Necessity: Reason and God as Matters of Fact (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). His article “Lars von Trier: The Impossibility of the Good as a Work,” was published in The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory. Christopher Turner is assistant professor of philosophy at California State University, Stanislaus. His research focuses on both ancient philosophy and twentieth century Western Marxism, and he also translates German philosophy. He has published a number of articles, including “Under Adorno’s Spell: Bann as Central Concept Rather than Mere Metaphor” (New German Critique). His latest translation is Peter Sloterdijk’s What Happened in the 20th Century?: Towards a Critique of Extremist Reason (Polity, July 2018). M. Blake Wilson is assistant professor of criminal justice at California State University, Stanislaus. He writes about the intersections between philosophy, law, film, music, and literature. He has contributed to The Man in the High Castle and Philosophy, The Who and Philosophy, and Blade Runner 2049 and Philosophy, and his work has appeared in journals such as The Philosophical Journal of Conflict and Violence and Polémos. His book, A Philosophy of Criminal Justice, will be published by Trivent Publishing in 2020.