FITZCARRALDO & BURDEN OF DREAMS (1982)
“Loveable” is not one of the words that typically springs to mind when describing Klaus Kinski. For example, in the documentary My Best Fiend, Werner Herzog famously tells of South American tribesmen involved with the production of Fitzcarraldo offering to kill the notoriously petulant actor, to which the director replied, “No, for God’s sake! I still need him for shooting!” And yet as Brian Fitzgerald, the crazy gringo opera enthusiast determined against the odds (and basic common sense) to haul a big-ass steamship up and over a muddy hill from one Peruvian river to another, Kinski actually manages to make obsessive, quixotic insanity appealing, even inspiring. Les Blank does the same for Herzog himself in Burden Of Dreams, a fascinating companion documentary about the outrageously arduous production of the film about Fitzgerald’s outrageously arduous undertaking. Both movies feature half-crazed Europeans determined to bend reality to their will in a brutal, untamed environment (while anonymous, dark-skinned natives do all the heavy lifting), an interlocking double helix of parallel parables about the pros and cons of Western civilization. As critic Paul Arthur notes in an essay comparing Fitzcarraldo and Burden of Dreams, Herzog’s movie champions the white man’s burden, “exuding an almost mystical admiration for the crazed adventurer,” while Blank more or less sides with the native “extras” in the background, preferring their “rhythms of collective effort, of sensuous community, over Eurocentric ideals of heroic individualism”...yet despite all the cultural and philosophical differences between Herzog, Blank and the Peruvian Indians, it is somewhat reassuring to note the common humanity in the fact that pretty much everyone thought Kinski was a hot mess.
AGUIRRE, WRATH OF GOD (1972)
In the opening scene above, the Andes are lined with Spanish conquistadors, ladies of royal carriage, men of God and their trappings, and machinery of war, all of which seem violently out of place among the serene and indifferent mountains. What drives men to try to claim that which should not be disturbed? Why would rational people who sail halfway around the world to search for a new source of power cling so stubbornly and foolishly to the power they left behind? Herzog's movie doesn't have the answer, but the questions he asks are all the more powerful for their plunge into the unknown. Things will continue to go wrong. Claiming ownership and mastery over a hostile environment is quite different from owning or mastering it. Although one man may possess the drive and need to take himself well beyond the norm, the world does not usually bend itself to any one man's will. Herzog will return to this theme time and again.
ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD (2007)
Few among us could ask questions about the strangeness of the natural world with the eloquence of Werner Herzog at the beginning of last year's documentary about Antarctica, Encounters At The End Of The World. Among the seasonal workers and high-concept scientists he finds on the frozen continent, the strangers are us, the viewers. It seems glib to say that the extremes of Antarctica attract people who engage with the extremities of the world, but the people Herzog interviews have, to a person, a way of looking at the world with awe and curiosity that suggests astronauts or high priests marked by their encounters with the unknown. Their experience with the strangeness of the world has given them a strangeness of their own. Or perhaps they already had the strangeness, which led them to seek out the extreme. Either way, Herzog continues his quest to suggest as directly and beautifully as possible that there are more things in heaven and earth, dear reader, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Or mine.
One of the best sequences involves the mandatory survival training required of anyone leaving the base camp for the wilds of Antarctica. The instructors simulate a white-out rescue but placing buckets over the participants' heads and directing them to try to find an outhouse from their trailer using a rope and a human chain. The first one out makes a relatively minor mistake early on and the following cascading series of errors gets everyone far off path and hopelessly tangled. Herzog points out on the commentary track that this is how movies are made, also.
STROSZEK (1977)
Werner Herzog once said, "Perhaps I seek certain utopian things, space for human honour and respect, landscapes not yet offended, planets that do not exist yet, dreamed landscapes." Herzog's films are perfectly suited to a list like this one, none more so than his magical 1977 film Stroszek. Taking the stranger-in-a-strange-land premise and tripling it, Stroszek takes three German outcasts -- a former mental patient (Bruno S.), a skeletal old man (Clemens Scheitz), and a prostitute (Eva Mattes) -- and uproots them to the American heartland. The protagonists move to Wisconsin in order to escape their difficult lives, but it's typical of Herzog's approach that the United States isn't seen as a paradise, but is merely a different kind of strange than the world his characters already know. Mattes is the best equipped to make money for them, and she goes to work as a waitress, but once the trio's finances dwindle, she falls back on prostitution to pay the bills. Meanwhile, Scheitz is too old to work, spending his days wandering the landscape and pondering such ideas as animal magnetism. And there are few opportunities in this small town for an ex-street performer like Bruno, so all he can do is wait for the bank to come and repossess their home, a moment we witness in forlorn long shot as Bruno stands by, helpless. America was hardly a land of opportunity for Bruno and his friends, yet I don't think Herzog is condemning the U.S. in Stroszek. Instead, he seems to be saying that there are some people like Bruno who just don't have the resources to make it anywhere, whether they're in an Old World country of gangsters who are predisposed to pulling apart musical instruments, or a new land of truck stops and dancing chickens.
Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four & Six
Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs, Paul Clark
