The Wunderbar World of Werner
In his work, Werner Herzog is completely submerged in a world where situations at the limits of human existence; at points where it is difficult to discern between what is human and what is animal life; where the average, everyday universe is undermined by superstitions, the fantastical, obsessions and premonitions. In Jeder fur sich und Got gegen alle (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, 1975) here is an example of how the distinction between human beings and animals has been eroded because Kaspar (Bruno S) had been kept in complete isolation during his early life, and as a ramification cannot utilize or understand language properly. In Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes ( Aguirre, Wrath of God, 1973) a compulsive quest pits the hero against both the hostility of nature and that of other human groups until he is reduced to an animal-like level and inevitably obliterated.
As well as this exercise in extreme situations, the character of Herzog's film-making is most clearly defined by its awareness of the material world. Frequently nature is depicted in terms of a hostile grandeur - volcanoes, jungles or deserts - whereas human physical world is presented in antithesis to that. The German and Flemish towns that provide the environment in a number of his films are seen as exquisite, unwavering, not touched or ravaged by time, museum-like, but the external world very often is one that is infinitely less dramatic.
Since Herzog began directing in the early Sixties, Herzog has worked on a consistent basis, having made feature films as well as several acclaimed documentaries. Despite his productivity, he is in an important sense not a professional film-maker. Rather like the long, soulful journey through the rise of the West era via South America of Aguirre, Wrath of God, film-making is for Herzog, an obsessional activity designated to test his energy, industriousness and courage. Nowhere could this theory hold more truth, than in his filming of Fitzcarraldo (1982), a laborious Amazon trek. The film's story concerns a heroic, yet eccentric protagonist in Klaus Kinski who dreams of constructing an opera house in the heart of the Amazon jungle.
Herzog's cinema is indeed rooted in the romantic tradition- anti-bourgeois and anti-rational. In maintaining his romantic outlook, it is animated by a spirit of pathos, stressing the beauty and hostility of a naked world, the mystique and insecurity of human existence. Albeit, it is a cinema that is also open to intense critical objections. It can be a subject of debate, and some have deemed his works (present company excluded) the worst of art cinema, and that the films draw upon associations from the traditional established arts to claim a quality that they just don't intrinsically possess.
With that being mentioned, some of Herzog's films are difficult to defend from this type of critique. Herz aus Glas ( Heart of Glass, 1976) for instance - based on a simple story about the disappearance of a formula for making a particular style of glass - it is so rife of long-held shots and seemingly grotesque and inexplicable behavior that the story fails to hold the weight of its treatment, thus resulting in a tiresome and unconsciously funny outcome. In Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (Nosferatu the Vampyre, 1979) the traditional vampire story is treated in an identical fashion, making unavoidable, the ever present precariousness in the horror genre, namely the risk of teetering and ultimately tipping over into the plain ridiculous.
Strangely enough, irrespective of Herzog's preference for historical contexts, one of his most appealing and successful films, Stroszek (1977), has a modern setting. It opens in a milieu more reminiscent of that other Werner, (how could I ever resist an opportunity to plug my hero)? Fassbinder - into an underworld of petty criminals, prostitutes and pushers - before moving to contemporary day America, where an immigrant German worker encounters unlivable hardships. What the film conveys most is how very essential a part innocence plays in Herzog's particular breed of film-making. It is the ability to serve as an 'innocent eye' that allows him to create striking imagery: the simplicity with which the arrival of a mobile home is observed suggests charm, an approachable freshness and the construction of innocent key characters, permits Herzog to enrich the film with the gentlest of humor.
Humor is also alive and well and it peppered the film Wo die grunen Amerisen traumen (Where the Green Ants Dream, 1984), set in Australia and centering on a fictional conflict between big mining interests and Aboriginal customs and traditions.
But how can we not love a man that is willing to remove his shoe and cook it for dinner, and can still come out smelling like roses when he appears as himself in buddy Les Blank's garlic-umentary, Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers (1980)
Herzog revisits his trusted desert setting in an upcoming film,about the life and times of archaeologist Gertrude Bell, Queen of the Desert starring Naomi Watts is due to hit a cinema near you in 2013.
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