www.harpers.org/TheSecretMainstream.html
Sources Of that time, there is still much we do not know. Although answers exist to the basic questions--how they fought (viciously), how they governed (variously), how they worshipped (combatively)--there are those among us who warn that no real comprehension of twentieth- and twenty-first-century civilization is attainable, much less advisable. But those who attempt to hold knowledge back can only lose ground. What caused this remarkable civilization's collapse is now generally understood. There are controversies, naturally, about the precise nature of its collapse, foremost of which is the extent to which this civilization destroyed itself. Most of us believe that, given the way its constituents lived, the annihilation was inevitable, even if the overwhelmingly thorough nature of the annihilation was not. We need not delay ourselves debating these issues yet again. It is here that the recent discovery of the films of Werner Herzog provides us especial aid. The extraordinary circumstances of the Herzog archive's survival have been amply celebrated and documented elsewhere, but that does not mean we can forget how objectively precious these films are. An entire civilization's most popular art form also proved to be one of its least durable. The expected deterioration of their film stock took most of the earliest films, and the fragile nature of their digital storage systems, which was apparently unanticipated, resulted in the loss of many of the rest. The relatively few films that have survived do not always provide the most culturally revealing portholes through which we can today peer. We all exalt in the survival of Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress (1958), but the cultural significance of Carpenter's Escape from New York (1981) has proved difficult for many of us to articulate (though it does have its champions). The work of Werner Herzog presents a different case, as it offers us the only instance of a single filmmaker's entire corpus surviving until our time. His numerous films--so heterogeneous in technique, genre, and breadth--scarcely seem the work of one man. Indeed, some of us have doubted that they are the work of one man. Thankfully, we have been able to put such fanciful conjecture to rest. Unfortunately, that is where our agreement concerning Herzog's work ends.
hen you think about people 400 years from now trying to understand civilization today, I think they will probably get more out of a Tarzan film than out of the State of the Union address by the President that same year. Would they be seen as damage inspections of a civilization at horrifying odds with nature and itself? as documents so fiercely visionary they often come within millimeters of insanity? Herzog himself has explored this question, using a similar science-fictional conceit to frame several of his ostensible documentaries, the genre in which he has done his most singular and protean work. Fata Morgana (1970) is nominally a film about mirages in the Sahara Desert, and its narration, read by the German film historian Lotte Eisner, offers long recitations from a Mayan creation myth: "Therefore the creatress and the creator essayed once more to build living beings, to make moving creatures." Early in the film, a long tracking shot offers some windblown orange dunes, across which sail tiny whirlwinds of sand--a bizarre, almost Martian vision. The film has been called "a cosmic pun on cinma vrit," and Herzog has said that his "plan was to go out to the southern Sahara to shoot a kind of science-fiction story about aliens from the planet Andromeda, a star outside of our own galaxy, who arrive on a very strange planet. The idea was that after they film a report about the place, we human filmmakers discover their footage and edit it into a kind of investigative film."
This conceit, barely evident in Fata Morgana itself, announces itself more clearly in Herzog's other "science fiction" films, namely Lessons of Darkness (1992), which features putatively "alien" narration over apocalyptic footage of the oil fires in Kuwait ignited by retreating Iraqi forces at the end of the first Gulf War; and Wild Blue Yonder (2005), which stars Brad Dourif as an embittered alien narrating the story of an unwelcome Earthling mission to his home planet over actual--and hilariously mundane--footage of NASA astronauts floating around their space-shuttle living quarters. Fata Morgana marked Herzog's first overt confounding of the feature film/documentary boundary. Like Lessons of Darkness and Wild Blue Yonder, it is not a narrative film, but neither is it strictly factual. Rather, it uses factual images to tell a fictional story the images do virtually nothing to suggest. Like his late countryman W G Sebald--who admired Herzog's work and referred to it in his equally fact-blendered fiction--Herzog makes stylized use of the factual and, through its valence with the invented, pours "the facts" from their test tube of the verifiable. This is what gives these films their grandeur and brilliance as well as an occasional undertow of unease. At the German premiere of Lessons of Darkness, Herzog claims to have been spat upon for its contextless, highly aestheticized images of an entire ecology dying in a fiery, petroleum-fueled Revelation. A brief but notably grisly sequence, furthermore, presents us with a deranged Kuwaiti woman whose sons were tortured and killed in front of her, and an unforgettable pan of the still-bloody implements within a Republican Guard torture chamber. The matter is quickly dropped, and although Herzog later introduces us to a young boy who was left mute after a beating by Iraqi soldiers, he is clearly more interested in beautiful images of flaming oil wells than in testaments of human suffering. Thus there arises, in some viewers at least, the sense that Herzog has made these "documentary" films under false pretenses. The rulers of Kuwait agreed, and when they realized Herzog was not making a film about the heroic men and women fighting Kuwait's oil fires, as he had initially claimed, but rather something of his own devising, they expelled him from their kingdom. An artist can respect the backfield of fact before which every human being stands and choose not to address those facts. We know, after all, that the tortured Kuwaitis are not actually aliens. Herzog's conceit does not undermine their suffering, for what conceit, short of outright denial, could? Any art form that incorporates the experience of real people will inevitably result in accusations of distortion. The question is not whether Herzog has shaped his subject matter but why. Herzog's films were most widely discussed during the 1970s and early 1980s, when the antipodes of film criticism, with Film Quarterly in one hemisphere and Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris in the other, had less ocean between them than do their rough equivalents today. At that time, Herzog was typically linked to the New German Cinema, which grew out of the poisoned artistic lacunae of Nazism, or to some greater notion of European cinema as a whole. In many ways, Herzog has outgrown, and even outlasted, such categorizations. This is to say nothing of his films themselves, which, however difficult to classify, tend to be fairly straightforward. Indeed, Herzog often hurls into the last few minutes of his films some wizardly curveball. Stroszek (1976), for instance, ends with a several-minute-long sequence of a dancing chicken. A favorite Herzog gambit is to give his characters lengthy concluding speeches that have little apparent connection to anything else in the film. Herzog refers to such devices as "moments of special intensity when suddenly you hear something that rails against the most basic rules you are accustomed to." He assumed the name Herzog, or "duke," as a totemistic way of protecting himself from what he has called "the overwhelming evil of the universe." Herzog has claimed that his solitary wanderings in the mountains on the Albanian border at age fourteen made him into a filmmaker. A fifteen-page encyclopedia entry on filmmaking gave him "everything I needed to get myself started," and a pilfered 35-mm camera from t...
|
http://csua.com/feed/