We
are in the midst of a Werner Herzog renaissance.
It’s not sweeping the obligatory blockbusters
from the neighborhood cineplex, of course, but we’re
talking Herzog here: the brooding, eternally curious
auteur who got attention in the 1970s and early
1980s with films like Nosferatu and Fitzcarraldo
and who has more recently shifted his attention
to smaller documentary projects, seemingly for budgetary
reasons. After all, it’s a lot cheaper to
shoot a documentary than it is to make a feature
film, with all its sets and costumes to be made
and its large cast and crew to be paid.
Ironically, it’s
a small-budget documentary that jump-started the
present Herzog renaissance. Grizzly Man,
which examines activist Timothy Treadwell’s
life and eventual death living among grizzly bears
in Alaska, grabbed attention when it appeared in
2005, largely because its implied violence is so
extreme. The opening speech, delivered by Treadwell
on video footage he shot himself (the film is compiled
largely from the video Treadwell took in the last
three years of his life), promises grim mayhem:
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.
As he steps out
of the frame, leaving two grizzlies alone in the
shot, he closes his speech in voiceover: “I
can smell death all over my fingers.”
And like a good
slasher flick, Grizzly Man follows through
on its promise to kill both Treadwell and his girlfriend,
Amie Huguenard. (Treadwell got it exactly right:
at the end of his thirteenth year in the Alaskan
wilderness, he was indeed decapitated and chopped
into bits and pieces, many of which were recovered
from the attacking bear’s stomach after it
was shot to death.) But we don’t actually
see the attack, nor do we hear it, although Treadwell
managed to capture the audio with a video camera
whose lens was covered.
“Jewel,
you must never listen to this,” Herzog advises
Jewel Palovak, Treadwell’s former girlfriend,
after he listens to the tape through headphones.
“I think you should not keep it. You should
destroy it…Because it will be the white elephant
in your room all your life.”
He’s right
about the tape: it is the film’s elephant
as well, and what it holds lies at the heart of
Grizzly Man’s popular success, I
suspect. After all, if the public were simply yearning
to see a good Herzog documentary, why didn’t
it demand that Herzog’s previous project,
The White Diamond, get a wider showing?
(A typical Herzog film, it documented a British
scientist’s obsessive attempt to design a
small air ship that could gently float above the
Amazonian rain forest.)
Whatever drove
audiences to see Grizzly Man, though, the
fact that we know before the film starts that Treadwell
was killed by a grizzly makes the film electric:
his opening monologue becomes Shakespearean in its
tragic, unwitting heft and foreshadowing.
In many ways,
Treadwell is a perfect Herzog subject. Throughout
his career, Herzog has been attracted to fringe
figures who obsessively entertain strange, often
quixotic ideas that strain against the limits posed
by their humanity. “Having myself filmed in
the wilderness of jungles,” Herzog says in
Grizzly Man,
I found that
beyond [Treadwell’s] wildlife film, in his
material lay dormant a story of astonishing beauty
and depth. I 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. But in doing so,
he crossed an invisible borderline.
Trying to cross
those borderlines (by floating over the jungle,
for instance, or – going the other way –
trying to assimilate back into a foreign culture
like the alienated title character in The Enigma
of Kaspar Hauser) is the preoccupying obsession
that drives many of Herzog’s most interesting
characters.
But in at least
a narrow way, Treadwell reminds us of a particular
eccentric linked to Herzog: Klaus Kinski, the volatile,
self-proclaimed nature lover and star of five Herzog
features (as well as the subject of My Best
Fiend, the documentary Herzog made about Kinski
after his death). Like Treadwell, Kinski “badly
wanted to expose himself to wild nature,”
as Herzog tells us in My Best Fiend. And
his argument against Treadwell’s “sentimentalized
view that everything out there was good, and the
universe in balance and in harmony” is in
many ways a continuation of the one he posed explicitly
in My Best Fiend:
Kinski always
says [nature is] full of erotic elements. I don’t
see it so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity.
Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn’t
see anything erotical [sic] here. I would 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; I think they just
screech in pain. 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.
Likewise, near
the end of Grizzly Man as footage of the
bear that may have killed Treadwell and his girlfriend
plays on the screen, Herzog tells us, “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. But for Timothy Treadwell,
this bear was a friend, a savior.”
The parallels
between Kinski and Treadwell become even clearer,
at times. When Treadwell turns vociferously against
the National Park Service, for example, his profanity-strewn
tirade reminds us explicitly of Kinski’s tantrums
that Herzog shows his audience in My Best Fiend.
And Herzog even tells us, in Grizzly Man’s
voiceover, that “I have seen this madness
before on a film set. But Treadwell is not an actor
in opposition to a director or a producer. He’s
fighting civilization itself.”
Moving toward
the edge – of civilization, of sanity, of
simple bodily safety – is something that Herzog
himself does, along with his films’ subjects,
again and again. In Fitzcarraldo, he took
a large steamboat through Amazonian rapids and nearly
capsized it. In La Soufriere, he visited
a volcano on the verge of eruption. In The White
Diamond, he insists that he personally operate
the camera in the air ship’s maiden voyage,
although a flight with an earlier model had resulted
in the pilot’s death. One feels, ultimately,
that Herzog is not merely undertaking a debate with
his subjects but actively pursuing his own exorcism
with them, at times.
In a real sense,
Herzog has become the star of his documentaries:
we see him on camera, we listen to his soft, melancholy
voice narrate and explain the images that flicker
on the screen. He’s not an actor, but more
of an insightful host willing to read his subject
closely and deconstruct its hidden meanings for
his audience.
He has recently
performed as an actor, though, in one of the oddest
forms he has taken yet, appearing as himself in
the 2005 pseudo-documentary, Incident at Loch
Ness. In the Grizzly Man DVD’s
short documentary about its soundtrack, Herzog tells
a musician that all his films have been “after
a deeper truth, an ecstatic truth.” Incident
at Loch Ness, directed by Zack Penn, is about
a decidedly different kind of truth. It’s
a lightweight, tongue-in-cheek film, but Herzog
seems to have fun playing with the questionable
nature of cinematic fact and truth.
Herzog enthusiasts
should rejoice in the director’s unexpected
renaissance. With the recent releases of Grizzly
Man and The White Diamond, the bulk
of his major work is now available on DVD, including
two superb box sets of his earlier films. (One focuses
on his films with Kinski, and it’s indispensable.)
Along with the Criterion Collection’s DVD
edition of The Burden of Dreams, Les Banks’
fascinating documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo,
it’s an impressive library, and it certainly
rivals and even surpasses the collections available
for such significant directors as Bergman, Fellini
and Kurosawa. |