A Tale of Two Vampyres

My latest piece at Spectrum Culture is a comparison between F.W. Murnau's seminal Nosferatu and Werner Herzog's 1979 remake starring his greatest on-screen collaborator, Klaus Kinski. Murnau's film is justifiably one of the hallmarks of silent cinema, a masterpiece of editing and framing in which the mere setup and execution of a shot can be as thrilling as the actual monster. But I also confess to preferring Herzog's more laid-back, spiritual take on the same material, replicating much of the original but stretching everything until it emerges vastly different in tone.

My full comparison is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Capsule Reviews: Weekend, Tuesday After Christmas, Into the Abyss, Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Weekend (Andrew Haigh, 2011)

Occasionally a bit precious in its cinematography (one too many woozy shots and obvious visual cues), Andrew Haigh's Weekend is nevertheless a bold, beautiful film that uses the magnificent performances of its leads to confront cinematic complacency and limitations upon homosexuality. Glen (Chris New), the aggressive art student, is defiant about his sexuality in response to the heteronormative society around him, which he convincingly argues is more "in your face" than even the loudest queer. Russell, the shy one, still wrestles with his sexuality, and Tom Cullen captures the feeling of being the odd man out at a party (whether the stranger at a farewell bash or the one gay man among straights) better than just about anyone.

It's impossible to leave the sexuality of the characters out of discussion, as the tenor of their conversations and behavior with each other is informed by the social limitations imposed on homosexuals; by denying the naturalness of their expressions, the outside world makes their private chats more open and frank than heterosexual couples who've been together for years instead of hours. Cullen and New are so effortlessly natural with each other that not only are they believable as a couple, they are two of the few romantic screen pairings one could buy having a life-changing dalliance in just two days. Haigh still has some kinks to work out with his direction, but Weekend announces the arrival of one of the most nuanced, real makers of romance, and in this respect, the sexuality of the lovers in question couldn't matter less.

Tuesday, After Christmas (Radu Muntean, 2011)

If Weekend's naturalism quietly revolutionizes the indie romance, the elegant long-takes and flawless rapport of Tuesday, After Christmas' actors adds new textures to over-familiar adultery dramas. On paper, this film is as clichéd as it gets: a husband in a comfortable family unit risks it all for a fling with a younger, attractive woman. But Muntean and the actors craft realistic interactions—the married couple in the film are husband and wife in real life—that make Paul's quandary agonizing rather than perfunctory. In this modern age of decreasing average shot length, a film like Tuesday, After Christmas reminds us of the dramatic possibilities of simply holding a shot, which prolongs the perfectly ordinary conversations between characters to the point that one almost expects a bomb to go off. Why else would a shot be held so long over (seemingly) nothing? Muntean's long takes allow the actors to add tiny exchanges that make their relationships more real and therefore more meaningful, and the decision Paul must make by that post-Christmas Tuesday promises to be devastating regardless of what we eventually see him choose.

Into the Abyss (Werner Herzog, 2011)

Perhaps the most standard, TV-ready documentary Werner Herzog has ever made, and that includes his early work for German television (which are among his most poetic works). Yet if the film lacks Herzog's usual magic, it also makes for an above-average opinion piece that bluntly voices the director's views on capital punishment while still directly confronting the horror of the death row inmates' crimes. Herzog's use of archival footage and relatively straight interviewing style reveal he'd be a fairly successful "normal" documentarian. Still a major presence in his storytelling, Herzog nevertheless mostly steps back to let the interview subjects speak for themselves, only interjecting to push them on unexpected tangents that end up revealing more than the standard questions would have. Herzog captures the full ugliness of the situation—the two partners in crime blaming each other for the crime that got them incarcerated, the shame and rage the people connected to the perpetrators and victims feel—but it is precisely because he goes for the complete portrait of devastation that his adamant stance against the death penalty carries any weight. But if Herzog does not poeticize this subject, he nevertheless searches for the beauty and humanity in this dark tragedy, and he even finds vague whispers of hope littered among the bodies of the dead murdered by criminal and state alike.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, 2011)

If Into the Abyss leaves out Herzog's style but still makes an impact, Cave of Forgotten Dreams showcases his ability to make poetry of reality but lacks the grounding element that keeps his best work from simply drifting aimlessly. Herzog's speculation of peoples past based on the cave art they left behind broaches ideas of the foundation of all artistic expression and, therefore, communication. But he fails to tie delicate play of light and simulated movement over the beautiful and miraculously preserved cave paintings to the grandiose free association that usually strikes metaphysical pay dirt. Occasionally, Herzog's tantalizing meditations, linking the caves to German Romanticism and Wagner, recall the best of the director's thin but evocative spoken thoughts. But given Herzog's interest in casting these surprisingly sophisticated paintings as not simply the beginning of art in general but proto-cinema itself, it's a shame that the film doesn't feel more resonant throughout.

Plastic Bag

How I have managed to elude Ramin Bahrani's short film Plastic Bag for months baffles me. Bahrani, the greatest newcomer to American cinema, is guaranteed my money for anything he does, and Plastic Bag was conveniently available on YouTube, legally, for free. However I ended up getting distracted, I was reminded at last to finally set aside the time for the 18-minute short upon seeing that Ed Howard posted a review earlier today. Before I could read it, I had to sit down and watch Plastic Bag, and when it was over, I kicked myself even harder for waiting all these months.

Superficially an expansion of the (in)famous bag sequence of American Beauty, one of the dumbest and most vacantly symbolic moments in modern American cinema, Plastic Bag plays like what Sam Mendes and Alan Ball wished they'd said in their film. Where Ball intended the bag sequence as one of the few serious moments in a suburban satire, Bahrani understands the innate humor of following a bag around as it floats through the air, sticks in trees and rolls along a beach. Yet he also delves into the suggestive properties of such an insignificant thing in an indifferent world.

Ergo, the decision to use Werner Herzog as the voice of the bag is a stroke of genius: no other filmmaker has more consistently focused upon the imposing endlessness of the world around the speck of an ambitious protagonist than Herzog, and no one has been as darkly funny in the process. His unique cadence, in which words slur together slightly as if being rushed out of the mouth even as Herzog draws out every last syllable in sostenuto tones, is fatalistic but deadpan, creating a depressing narration but also one filled with laughs.

The bag speaks of taking its first breath when a grocery clerk pulls the flattened bag open to fill it with groceries. The woman who buys the food grabs the bag, which comes to view her as his Maker, and takes her stuff home. There, she continues to reuse the bag as a means of recycling, and the bag speaks of the pure ecstasy of carrying her lunch and other items, bordering on sexual desire when she puts ice in the bag and rests it on a sore leg. Then, she starts using the bag to hold dog food and, finally, to pick up the dog's crap before tossing it in the trash.

The landfill where a garbage truck takes the bag is endless, stretching over hills teeming with seagulls as bulldozers try in vain to compact the refuse. The bag speaks of being pecked by the monsters who take pieces of it until they realize that the bag is not food. Several types of creatures do this to the bag in its journey to return home, poking holes in the thing but never fully destroying it.

Through Bahrani's lens, the sight of a plastic bag being endlessly pecked and experiencing moments of blissful flight and excruciatingly dull stillness when the wind dies becomes a poetic view of life itself. Everything is sunny and wondrous at the onset of being, only for maturation and moving into solitary life to bring the hardship of feeling as if the world casually steals pieces of you. Worse, it has no reason to do so, no way to use those bits it strips from the flesh and soul. The bag enjoys a moment of happiness when it enters into a midair "dance" with a red bag, but in an age where half of marriages end in divorce, the wind blows the two apart. At last, our hero makes its way to the Pacific Trash Vortex to be with its kind, only to pine for its Maker until it cannot relate to the other trash. Bahrani -- and maybe even Herzog -- paints life as the combination of fleeting moments of bliss and a sense of discomfort that nags whenever the good moments pass, and they always pass so quckly. Maybe that's bleak, but the director achieves a more beautiful rumination of life by choosing exclusively neither optimism nor cynicism.


The subtlety of Bahrani's direction also allows him to deal with environmental and economic messages. He tracks the bag through the outside world through alternating shots of nature and post-industrial decay. The press material for the film places it in the "not-so distant future," and the sights of suburban rot the bag passes by speak to a dying world where the pollution of humans may be the inheritor to mankind. The only human ever shown is the woman who bought the groceries, but the effects of humanity on the world are plainly evident. The bag, itself trash that could kill one of the animals that pecks at it if something swallowed the whole bag, rolls through abandoned homes possibly foreclosed upon during the economic crisis and finds not one but two massive areas coated with non-degradable garbage. At the same time, nature surivives, and the bag's spoken views on its surroundings, which displays a peevishly human view of nature as an obstacle, are contrasted with the beauty of Bahrani's high-definition imagery, capturing blue skies and green foliage in brilliant clarity. Mankind may be circling the drain like the garbage in the trash vortex, but nature will survive, and its beauty is mesmerizing in the background.

What amused and affected me the most was the Freudian streak running through Bahrani's narrative. The first person who has any use for the bag, just as the first person to care about us, is his "mother," who creates an expectation for life that life cannot live up to. Eventually, she sends him packing to go into the world, and for all the bag's adventures, it can never stop thinking about its maker/mother, even drowning itself (literally) in its own kind to try to forget about her. In the end, it cannot, and it throws itself outside the vortex, only to get caught on a rock and be left to float for eternity to be gently nibbled at by fish. But the bag finally sobers up a bit and accepts the beauty of what's in front of it. Still, it has one complaint for the mother that abandoned it and provided the basis of a life of searching: "I wish you had created me so I could die."

In 18 minutes, Plastic Bag manages to be funny, bleak, thought-provoking, emotive and poetic. It is the fourth significant work by Ramin Bahrani, and the fourth great movie. Plastic Bag contains as many memorable images as any feature I've seen this year, from the gorgeous, lilting sky ballet between the two bags to a shot of the main bag floating through the ocean by jellyfish that do not look so different from the flimsy but endurable plastic. Bahrani's direction normally recalls the other great modern North Carolinian, David Gordon Green, only with a clearer deference to Abbas Kiarostami than Terrence Malick. Yet it is this short film that breaks him fully of even the slightest dependence on any other director. The comparisons to American Beauty are as meaningless as the scene in Mendes' movie that prompts the juxtaposition: this is art, symbolic yet emotive and expressive, stylistic but aesthetically spare. Once again, I am reminded that a short film in the hands of a master can be vastly superior to the full-length products of the less-talented.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans

The release of every new Nicolas Cage feature brings with it a question: will we be getting the Nicolas Cage of actorly fearlessness -- the one who will go to any lengths for his character in films like Adaptation, Leaving Las Vegas and Bringing Out the Dead -- or the Nicolas Cage who looked at the paycheck and not the script, who is just as fearless but in all the wrong ways. You know, the Cage who will thunder such choice lines as "HOW'D IT GET BURRRRRNNNED?!" like William Shatner's mentally deficient, incestuous lovechild.

With Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans, Werner Herzog's kind-of, sort-of, not-even-remotely remake/sequel of Abel Ferrara's 1992 opus, the answer to that question is "yes." Cage's Terrence McDonagh roams the streets of a post-Katrina New Orleans looking for any means to distract him from the back pain he suffered in an uncharacteristic display of heroism, as much a junkie as the suspects he questions in the case of murdered African immigrants. Were this anyone else's movie -- and I promise that it couldn't possibly be -- Terrence might be a symbol of the U.S. government's appalling reaction to the hurricane, his stance as the lawman who ignores the law cruising uncomfortably close to the hysterical reactions to looting and the Bush administration's despicable inaction. And perhaps, in some way, it is; in response to my recent review of Aguirre and my brief discussion of the warped colonial microcosm Herzog created, Ed Howard (author of the estimable blog Only the Cinema) remarked that political readings of Herzog's work are too narrow, that the auteur cares for the endless contradictions and mysteries of humanity itself and not the petty ways in which it is expressed. He's absolutely right, but I don't think we should be so quick to dismiss potential political explorations within his corpus; one should not use them as a bedrock for criticism of the man, but politics are one way that the ideas and dreams of mankind are exhibited.

However, if I were to truly delve into Herzog's mind -- a terrifying prospect, but something a viewer must do with all of his films as they are so inexorably tied to his skewed perspective -- I would indeed expand the scope: Cage, clearly kneeling at the altar of Herzog's insane muse Klaus Kinski, is so unhinged that he becomes a force of nature. When those levees broke, water wasn't the only thing they unleashed upon New Orleans. McDonagh, who sees hallucinations of dancing souls and exerting an inexplicable control over those with whom he crosses paths. Katrina, it seems, set loose the white devil, master and slave to powders that have replaced old voodoo concoctions.

The thought of Werner Herzog directing a police procedural likely doesn't leap out at the average filmgoer as much as Nicolas Cage in a role that promises utmost hyperbole, which is a shame. If more people knew about the director, the prospect of him even nominally approaching such a plot-heavy genre as "crime drama" is funnier than anything Cage has ever done. Indeed, Bad Lieutenant takes so many left turns that the fleeting moments where it actually plays the genre straight are as uproarious as the rest of the film, which departs not only from any identifiable genre trappings but reality itself.

This is a film where a police detective rips out an elderly woman's oxygen hose to get information out of her caregiver. This is a film that cuts from a moment of rivalry between police officers to a shot of an alligator nearby. This is a film where that isn't the only cutaway to a reptile: it opens on a shot of a snake slithering through the fetid waters flowing in the city streets and features an extended sequence between Terrence and a pair of imaginary iguanas (singing iguanas, no less, and not of the computer-animated variety). "Who but Cage could regard an iguana sideways in a look of suspicion and disquiet?" asked Roger Ebert in his review of the film; "You need to keep an eye on an iguana. The bastards are always up to something." With all respect, Roger, I think the iguanas might be the ones casting glances at him.

Herzog has crafted here his finest and most inexplicable comedy since his great Stroszek, though even the broad brushstroke of comedy might still be to restrictive a label for this film. Herzog has directed numerous operas in his career, primarily the works of Richard Wagner (he even directed Lohengrin one year at Bayreuth, king of the opera/classical music festivals), and Bad Lieutenant is certainly outlandish enough for the stage. Unlike the serious-minded opera of Wagner, Bad Lieutenant recalls the comedic German opera of the singspiel, particularly semi-dramatic works like Beethoven's Fidelio (which also features a rescue in a cell and, even more incidentally, was once directed by Herzog).

As is nearly always the case with Herzog's films (at least on the first go), I'm not entirely sure what to make of it, yet I'm in love with its delirium. Herzog packed his cast with performers who are no strangers to going above and beyond the call of duty -- Jennifer Coolidge, Brad Dourif, Val Kilmer(!) -- yet they seem to recognize that any attempts to approach Cage's mania would simply melt the film stock and give reserved but no less entertaining performances. Cage's, though, is his finest in years, his best since Lord of War if not his otherworldly turn in Adaptation: he is a star going nova, yet he also has his moments of lucidity and deduction, and we can see that he can be a good cop -- in a memorable early scene and the only one to completely work as a straight piece of cop drama, he displays a keen insight into interrogating suspects without forcing guns to their heads. The original Bad Lieutenant was no standard police drama, what with its deliberately suffocating Catholic guilt fogging over the narrative, and Herzog manages to sidestep the genre without using any of Ferrara's themes or techniques; as he did with his other, wonderful recent foray into American cinema, Rescue Dawn, Herzog displays just enough respect (or tolerance) for a rigid genre to dabble in it for a few moments before subverting everything in his path, not out of discontent and irascibility but through the simple nature of his being. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans is a portrait of its titular city via its rampaging demon, giving its darkly humorous, endlessly quotable script an undercurrent of sadness: for once, the man who could dominate the world around him is not the hero of Herzog's focus but a tragic victim.

Aguirre: The Wrath of God

When people learn that I hope to become a film critic after I graduate college, they immediately ask me what my favorite film is. I'm not entirely sure why, as the sort of people who ask me this question -- typically adult family friends -- are the sort who invariably tell me that they only go to the cinema once a year, and four times out of five the last movie they saw involved Jesus in some capacity, though in a lot of those films he just kind of hangs out (har har, gallows humor). Yet it's a question I never fully know I have the answer to, because in my warped head I feel the need to differentiate between "favorite" and "best." For example, having only seen Rules of the Game and Persona twice apiece, I would not hesitate to list them as two of the 10 best films I've ever seen, yet combined I haven't watched them as many times as I sat down with Sin City over the course of a single, bizarre weekend. For me favorites aren't the films I've watched the most times but the ones I love so much that I save for occasions when I might watch them wholly without distractions, for I respect and revere them that much.

Occasionally, though, I find a middle ground between the two interpretations, films that I view as high art but can also watch with the same exuberance as I do a popcorn movie. As a budding auteurist, I typically find these films among the corpora of certain directors. Martin Scorsese, Billy Wilder, even -- to the extremely limited extent to which I've seen his work and my reservations about all his films I've watched -- Jean-Luc Godard come to mind. But, for me, no one makes high art as visceral and immediate as Werner Herzog. It doesn't matter that many of his movies are in another language and thus require more concentration, nor does their inherent loopiness and warped inner logic and coherence; his quest for the "ecstatic truth" is as exciting now as it was when he moved out of directing shorts for German television into making full-length fictive and documentary films 40 years ago.

The subject of today's review is Aguirre: The Wrath of God, his fourth narrative feature and, for many, his magnum opus. Herzog's unique and overpowering visual style can be most easily glimpsed in three scenes across his entire narrative filmography: the madcap but tragic finale of Stroszek, the image of the boat pulled manually up a mountain in Fitzcarraldo, and the breathtaking opening shot of Aguirre. As the electro-orchestral strains of Krautrock band Popol Vuh gently waft through the ears, Herzog starts with an establishing shot of a mountain, zooming in until we see a line of European conquistadors working their way down an indiscernible path that is so steep the ant-like procession appears to be walking down a sheer cliff wall. With any other director I might have assumed this some sort of camera effect or at least the product of a keen placement, but with Herzog I simply accept that these men, carrying with them their women in carriages on their backs, are truly there, truly made to scale such an impossible path.

They move down the mountain laden with goods and slaves, conquerors of the Incans now searching for El Dorado. The leader, Gonzalo Pizzaro, knows that he cannot continue to lead a thousand Spaniards and natives through the jungle, so he sends an expedition of 40 men to raft down the Amazon for a week and to return with news of what they find. Pizzaro places Don Pedro de Ursúa (Ruy Guerra) in charge, with Don Lope de Aguirre (Klaus Kinski) as his second-in-command.

Herzog immediately establishes these people as a doomed convoy, dragging cannons through the mud, bearing velvet-lined carriages containing the lavishly dressed Inez, Ursúa's mistress, and Aguirre's daughter Florés. These characters' clothes look as though Herzog looted the costume department of a local theater, yet he makes them more real than just about any period piece I've seen. When Akira Kurosawa started production on his masterpiece Seven Samurai, he instructed his actors to wear their costumes home, to break them in instead of simply showing up and putting on shiny gear that would expose the artifice. Herzog, either directly or simply through the ordeal of the agonizing shoot, employs a similar method: the conquistadors wear half-armor and the leaders are clad in the gaudy pomp of European nobility, yet the armor is tarnished with scrapes, buffs and dirt, the the bright shirts dulled by the gallons of sweat poured into them from the oppressive humidity of the jungle. Their hair is unkempt, their beards scraggly; these are real people losing themselves in the vast, unchanging terrain.

As it was in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the jungle of Aguirre is a primal force, a beautiful yet foreboding landscape that seemingly bears an ill will toward its invaders. One of the four rafts snags in an eddy. When the rest make their way back in the morning to rescue its occupants, they find nothing but corpses, yet the bodies contain no signs of a typical Indian attack. The rest of the rafts are lost when the river rises 15 feet in the night, taking with them the expedition's food supply. Like the ocean in Jaws, the jungle surrounds these men on all sides, unchanging and without haven. If the expedition does happen upon a village or a possible place of shelter, they shell it preemptively. The waters of the Amazon constantly rage, reflecting the broiling turmoil within.

Without forcing the metaphor, Herzog uses this oddball horror to comment upon the nature of imperialism. When Ursúa decides to return to the main camp, Aguirre stages a coup and presses those he does not kill on a whim further downriver. He writes a treasonous decree declaring the expedition's independence from the crown of Phillip II and sets up one of the men, Guzman, as a puppet emperor. In doing so, he effectively creates a new imperialist power -- he calls Guzman the "Emperor of El Dorado" -- even as he fashions the group into a sort of colony, complete with a leader installed to do the bidding of the imperial leaders. Ursúa, the de facto symbol of Spanish rule, is placed on a farce of a trial, but Guzman surprises his master by "pardoning" the convicted Pedro. However, Guzman proves to be as destructive a force as Aguirre, using his invented title to hoard any of the meat and fruit the conquistadors collect, feasting while the men count out their last kernels of corn. When a horse on the raft starts thrashing around, he orders it thrown overboard, and the men must watch as several hundred pounds of meat swim away from them.

Herzog's oeuvre directly concerns dreams and the line that separates them from reality, so it should surprise no one that Aguirre contains numerous oneiric scenes and imagery, yet Herzog simply inserts the impossible into the frame -- a wooden ship nestled in a tree like the ruinous product of European expansion and production reclaimed by nature, natives poking through the brush of the river banks peering at the raft, a man executed mid-sentence with such speed that his severed head can finish what it was saying -- and the effect is more jarring than if he used all sorts of camera techniques to leap between reality and fiction. The combination of Herzog's rich, saturated color palette and Popol Vuh's ethereal soundtrack only enhances the haunting and sinister nature of the jungle.

Of course, when discussing this film, all roads lead to Kinski. The director met Kinski as a young, struggling actor and was drawn to Kinski's explosive persona, but the two never collaborated until Herzog cast him as Aguirre. Forget for a moment that Kinski was genuinely unbalanced. Set aside what you might know of Aguirre 's troubled shoot and the nearly fatal tension between the director and star and look only at what's on-screen: no one, no one, could portray madness so convincingly: he lopes about the crew lolling his head like a wounded orangutan. Does Aguirre have a game leg, or is it just his method of psychological warfare? There is madness in his bright blue eyes, fueled by greed and religious insanity. When the mistress discusses Aguirre's growing instability to the priest, he solemnly dismisses her concerns, saying that "for the good of our Lord, the Church was always on the side of the strong." He knows that following Aguirre is folly, but he sees no other alternative. Besides, he looks forward to converting any natives, though when he explains that the Bible contains the word of God to one, he has the native killed when the poor man takes it literally and holds the book to his ear and remarks that he cannot hear anything.

In the film's warped climax, Aguirre stands alone on the circling raft, the other occupants slain by arrows from unseen assailants. At last driven into full insanity, he proclaims himself the "Wrath of God" and announces his intention to marry his dead daughter to create a pure blood line for his new dynasty. The jungle acknowledges the sick rule of this simian tyrant, showering him with tiny, chattering monkeys to serve as his subjects and knights. This ending, as with the rest of the film, is Herzog at his finest, making an epic out of peanuts, one every bit as affecting and grand in its own way as its clearest disciple: Apocalypse Now.

Stroszek

I have seen films more bizarre than Werner Herzog's 1976 opus Stroszek, but none perhaps that are odder. I would scarcely call it an avant-garde film -- in fact, it's one of the most realistic movies I've ever watched -- but any movie that ends with a policeman saying over radio, "We've got a truck on fire, can't find the switch to turn the ski lift off, and can't stop the dancing chicken. Send an electrician" is going to require a certain willing mindset. Herzog cast his second muse, Bruno S., in the lead role, and for once it's really true what they say: you couldn't have made the film without him.

Herzog first spotted Bruno in a documentary for German television concerning Berlin street musicians and plucked him to play the lead in his superb The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. Though the part normally could call for a young man in his early 20s, Herzog's casting of this 41-year-old factory worker was a triumphant one, as Bruno's horrific past gave an edge to the role of a child who'd been abused then neglected and finally set loose to a world in which he couldn't assimilate.

Stroszek takes it one step further: Herzog builds the entire narrative around the real Bruno's past. Bruno S. was born to a prostitute in 1932 who beat him and sent him to an institution for retarded children. Even worse, this was in the era of the Nazis, who experimented on the children in these facilities (called Ausschusskinder, or "the discarded children"). At 9, he made his first escape attempt, and spent 23 of his first 26 years in various institutions and prisons. The Bruno of this film -- I will make this distinction now, as after a time the two become one and the same -- is released from prison with a warning from one of the officers to stop drinking. Immediately, he heads to the pub.

Bruno returns to his apartment, filled with pianos and accordions and glockenspiels and takes to the streets with his wares, singing darkly humorous tragicomedies while playing his various instruments simultaneously. Take just one look at this shaggy, drunken street urchin and you'll see the persona that Tom Waits has built an impressive career upon trying to imitate. Bruno doesn't play for money, he plays because playing gives him comfort. At the pub, he gives a prostitute a shoulder to cry on after she suffers abuse from her pimp. The pimp becomes jealous, and he terrorizes the both of them. Equally fed up with their lives in Berlin, Bruno and Eva decide to accompany Bruno's eccentric, elderly neighbor Scheitz when he moves to Wisconsin to live with his nephew.

When they reach their destination, Bruno gets a job working for Scheitz's nephew -- who, incidentally is a fully tanned All-American instead of anything approximating German; Herzog used locals for his local roles, presumably to aid his style of seeking the "ecstatic truth" as well as a ploy to distract people from his lack of any shooting permits -- at an auto shop, while Eva works as a waitress. With the extra money Eva saved up from her prostitution, the band buys a 1973 Fleetwood mobile home. Life is sweet.

For a time, anyway. Bruno doesn't speak a word of English and never learns, perhaps because the real Bruno's mental illness and disability are reflected in this version. He knows enough though to understand that the papers he and Eva so happily signed for that mobile home will entail payments, and, sure enough, a polite bank representative, all the more excruciating in his sweetness, comes calling. And if Herzog really booked non-professional actors, then Scott McKain is almost as impressive a find as Bruno himself; McKain is so good, so darkly funny, as the bank official that had he not appeared in one of the strangest movies ever made with the most unpredictable director around, he'd have at least broken into some sort of cult status.

The eventual tragedy of Stroszek makes itself plain early in the film: this strange trio is simply too mismatched, too unsure of what they expect from America other than "America-ness," to stay together. As Bruno smiles and nods through his day job, Eva must turn tricks once more to make the cash for the house payments. Scheitz, meanwhile, researches and tries to detect via a sort of radar animal magnetism (not sexual attraction, mind you; the original definition concerning a magnetic fluid flowing through animate beings). Eva initially sleeps with Bruno out of gratitude for his kindness, but his drunken, depressed ramblings eventually drive her away, and at last she runs off with some truckers to Vancouver.

What makes Herzog so different -- and so great -- is that he doesn't tell us how to feel about all this. He regards the misery of this sordid crew with neither derision nor pity. Instead, he looks upon them as curious and fascinated by these weird characters as we are. Herzog was vilified -- perhaps rightly so -- for using Bruno S. in his films and using so much of Bruno's private life in his two leading roles, but Herzog states in his commentary that he did not use Bruno so much as Bruno used him. I don't know what the hell he's talking about, but there's certainly a hint of street wisdom in Bruno's eyes: before Eva leaves, he confronts her for shutting her door to him and holds up a jumbled wooden sculpture. "This is a schematic model of how it looks inside Bruno," he says in his usual third person, "They're closing all the doors on him." He rails against the forces weighing down on them and how terrible life in America is. "They don't kick you here," Eva chides. "No, not physically," Bruno retorts, "Here, they do it spiritually."

I would suspect that what Herzog meant by his comment is that Bruno's performance is so raw, so personal, so unashamed in its honesty that it borders on being off-putting: we're used to actors, the sort of people who want to make sure that people like me italicize the word "actor" because their characters have FEELINGS and PATHOS and damn it they're going to tell us what they are! O.K., that's beyond harsh, but even the best acting by people who do everything they can to get inside their roles is still acting; Bruno is simply Bruno, too odd to be real yet obviously an actual person. I got my copy of the DVD in a box set from Anchor Bay (which I highly recommend along with their collection of the Herzog/Kinski collaborations), and the inside of the cover shows a French poster with the title La Ballade de Bruno. I find this a more appropriate title, as this strange but linear tale is very much the lyrical story of Bruno's life, shot in Herzog's trademark verité style to emphasis its reality. It had been a while since I last saw the film and I forgot some of the plot details and most of the lines, but I remembered Bruno, and this latest viewing only cements him in my memory.

Bruno's remark concerning the subtler cruelty of America, combined with Eva returning to prostitution and that iconic (with Herzog's oeuvre at least) shot of the mobile home being taken away in an auction just as speedily as it was driven to our merry band at the start, as if to say, "Easy come, easy go," can easily suggest a blistering attack on the American Dream. Herzog denies this in the commentary and suggests that the film is a "loving eulogy to America," and I'm sure that in that crazy head of his this is somehow a nicer thing to say (a word of advice to Herzog neophytes: always circle his statements cautiously, as attacking them head-on is suicide). I agree that the film is not expressly a commentary on America, as its characters are so strange and ill-fitting that criticizing a country for being unable to house them is unfair. However, one cannot ignore the brilliance of these scenes, and even if only a part of the film addresses the hollow promise of the American Dream it still remains one of the more memorable takedowns of that hallowed lie.

Herzog sees the film as more of a black comedy, though, and that's readily apparent in the final 10 minutes or so, during which the film turns from a sort of Herzogian road movie into outright farce. With Eva and the mobile home gone, Scheitz loses his mind and declares the whole thing a conspiracy, and he takes the now-fully alcoholic Bruno to rob the bank. Only the bank is closed, so they run across the street and take $30 from the barber shop. As they use the money to buy groceries, cops bust Scheitz but fail to notice Bruno, who makes off with a frozen turkey and Scheitz's shotgun.

Of the final moments, I shall say little. That bit of dialogue I posted at the start tells you everything you need to know about the ending, as well as the rest of the film. Suffice to say, it must surely rank as one of the finest scenes in Herzog's career, if not his absolute peak. Regarding the dancing chickens, Herzog calls them a "great metaphor" but professes he does not know of what. I'll crib from Ebert, who got me into Herzog in the first place, and say that the chicken represents us and that we all, in effect, dance for money. Bruno's terrible past has left him unable to function within any normal society, and his solution seems less tragic when one considers the sort of life he'd lead if he stayed in his current situation. In a perverse way that only Herzog could pull off, there's a sort of loving darkness to the whole thing.

With his performance here Bruno S. could have guaranteed an impressive niche in film; he certainly couldn't play any old role that came down the pipe, but there had to be at least some intellectuals and cineastes out there clamoring for something new from this fascinating figure. Perhaps it's best that he didn't though; his collaborations with Herzog rely so completely on Bruno's own story that to go back to that well once more would fully lapse into exploitation, and he couldn't bring the same intensity and charisma to a role that actually required acting. I don't mean to cast aspersions, but Bruno's honest is what made him interesting; besides, I don't know that hiring a man who already displayed a tendency to refer to himself in the third person to play other people is entirely healthy. Bruno never acted again, but he continues to paint and sing, someone who has no place in this world but makes his own in his art. That is the sadness, and the joy, of Stroszek, one of the greatest works of the most daring director in cinema.

Werner Herzog Documentaries and Shorts Vol. 1

As strange as Werner Herzog's feature-length films are, his shorts are often weirder. Freed of the necessity of at least some narrative, Herzog often sort of bounds around for 15-20 minutes focusing on a single, abstract theme. Not that this makes them bad of course; if anything, I miss the mash-up of all sorts of weirdness instead of a lingering gaze on one object. However, the first volume of Herzog's short films (available for instant watch on Netflix) contains two of his more interesting documentaries. Unfortunately, it also contains perhaps his worst.

The Great Ecstasy of the Sculptor Steiner



At only 45 minutes, The Great Ecstasy of the Sculptor Steiner seems an unlikely choice for one of Herzog's best films, but it sparks such rare and audible awe in the director I must include it. His previous films (among them Aguirre, Fata Morgana, and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser) were considered masterpieces--and they are--, but they lacked that spark of wild passion, though at the time few knew of the laborious toll of Aguirre's shooting and the drive it took to make it. But this elegant, beautifully shot - how did he get some the angles he did?- documentary on ski-jumping, a sport Herzog loved, for a TV station turns out to be one of his most personal works.

He starts out barely covering an also-ran named Walter Steiner, some no-name who's probably just happy to be there. Then he jumps and, as Herzog so rightly dubs it, he is no longer watching jumping but flying. Steiner is so far out of everyone's league that he has to shorten his run and even start lower than the other contestants, just so he won't fly into the very bottom of the slope and kill himself.

In his spare time Steiner is a woodcarver; he's a gentle soul who usually responds to Herzog's queries with some mumbled nonsense. The only time he gets really passionate is when he pleads with the ski judges to shorten the run so he can land "responsibly." For him ski-flying is life, but he knows that landing too far down could kill him or injure him permanently. When you get right down to it, Steiner is an Icarus who knows his limitations.

Herzog's films, be they fictional or documented, generally deal with people whose boundless dreams are either dashed or cruelly perverted by the harsh wave of reality. But Steiner is a man whose can literally soar over what we would think impossible; for once someone's dream beat the real world, and the world looks pettier for it. If people in the early 70s believed that Herzog was an arty, self-absorbed intellectual (as one review from the Times suggested), the pure joy of this film showed just how much he loved his craft. It's short, but it's oh so sweet.

How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck



This, sadly, is not one of his best films. Woodchuck focuses on the world of cattle auctioneering by traveling to New Holland, Pennsylvania to cover the World Livestock Auctioneer Championship. Now, I was surprised at the apparent abundance of deaf-blind people populating Germany and nearby areas in Land of Silence of Darkness, but this takes the cake. Not only is there an auctioneering championship, but they subdivide into chapters? Is there a World Real Estate Auctioneer Championship? Frankly that concept alone is more interesting and terrifying than anything Herzog might bring up in the film.

I suppose that the message (and I'm stretching here), is that people don't just aspire to be doctors and spacemen. I can attest to that: when I was two years old I thought the most fascinating thing in the world was that tank that drove up every day to take the garbage. In fact, up until I was five I wanted to be a garbage man when I grew up. Look, I was a toddler, all right? Stop laughing. These men have wanted to be auctioneers since they were children, and for them this is the highlight of their lives. In that way it's an interesting commentary on what motivates different people, and how people can fill any job with spirit and vigor, but the simple fact of the matter is that you can't tell the difference between the speed-talkers and it gets boring and repetitive. In the end this is far and away the weakest thing I've ever seen with Herzog's name on it. It's one of only two (the other being Even Dwarves Started Small) that I have no desire to watch again, though I might at least gives Dwarves another go to try to get it.

La Soufrière



At 30 minutes, this is the shortest of the three documentaries, but it's incredibly interesting and (unintentionally) hilarious. In 1977 Herzog learned that the island of Guadeloupe had been evacuated because a volcano was about to erupt. Everyone left, except for one man. Well of course that tripped a flag in Herzog's head, so he gathered a crew and flew to Ground Zero to ask the man about his philosophy on death.

Herzog arrives to a strange land; people literally ran from their homes to get off the island, and they've left behind eerie remains. Doors swing open, revealing uneaten meals and still playing televisions. Pets remain tethered or pinned in their owners' homes or roam the streets. One can't help but look at the village as a sort of living Pompeii, uncovered ruins that somehow still work and breathe.

Herzog came to island to find one man, but discovered three. In interviews with these people, Herzog peers into man's acceptance of death and his belief in God. One man in particular looks at Herzog like an alien when the director asks him why he stayed. None of the men has a death wish, but they welcome their deaths and, like the best of Herzog's subjects, they make you stop and think. However, one man does relent when he thinks of his family and asks to return with Herzog.

But the documentary gives way to hilarity at the end when the volcano doesn't erupt at all. Even Herzog admits to some embarrassment over the matter, but quite rightly rallies around the subjects he observed. In them he found fascinating ruminations on the philosophy of death, voiced in rather direct terms in opposition to Herzog's usually cryptic prose. This is the only documentary of the bunch where time worked against it. Ecstasy was perfectly paced, while Woodchuck tested patience even at 40 minutes, but this one spends half its time letting Herzog ruminate over volcanoes and death and such, and it only gets to the people themselves in the last 10 or 12 minutes. Though they still get their points across, I would have liked to see a bit more of them.

Land of Silence and Darkness

Werner Herzog got his start in the 60s making short documentaries and narrative films for television, finally producing feature-length work at the start of the next decade with the infinitely bizarre Even Dwarves Started Small, a film I was going to review but just couldn't find the words to describe it (perhaps some day I'll give it another go). But Land of Silence and Darkness is the first proper, full-length documentary in the director's oeuvre, and it contains just about all the flourishes and technique Herzog would use in his docs for the next 38 years.

Over the course of its 81-minute running time, Herzog explores the world of the deaf-blind, those utterly cut off from the world around them. But even Herzog's documentaries need a protagonist, and he centers his journey around Fini Straubinger, a deaf-blind German woman, as she travels to various meetings and care facilities for others like her. The title of the film derives from an early speech from Straubinger, in which she likens her attempt to help and communicate with other deaf-blind people as a journey through the "land of silence and darkness." However, earlier she mentions that he hears a constant humming and she sees colors and light, however abstract and formless it may be. Also, she never speaks with such lofty poeticism again, leading one to believe Herzog may have fed her the lines.

This willingness to embellish, even to outright lie, is what makes Werner Herzog the most audacious filmmaker alive today, if not ever. His gleeful admission of his own manipulation will certainly put a number of people off his documentaries, but when you hear his explanations for them, you cannot help but love the man. Herzog claims to seek what he deems "ecstatic truth," in essence the deeper themes of life buried under the banalities of human existence. Therefore, he finds someone out there just a little bit off from the rest and lets them dig for that tuth. Occasionally, he pitches in his own shovel.

Yet for all his flourishes, it's Herzog's probing camera that really gets to the bottom of his messages. His footage here is unsettling because he zooms in on his subjects faces, peering into their sightless eyes for what seems like an eternity. Is he being exploitative? Does he think that by staring into those eyes long enough we'll jump into their heads? It's never easy to tell with the man, though I don't think I'd call him exploitative. Hell, if I won't call him exploitative for Even Dwarves Started Small I sure won't toss out the term here. Personally, I think his direction here is meant to unsettle; he's staring as intently as the blind people and, on a surface level, he sees about as much.

Of course, one can never stop at the surface level with Werner Herzog. The message here is one of loneliness and isolation. Sure, Straubinger attends a small gathering of the community where they catch up on old times, but she mentions how difficult it is to organize such a meeting because everyone must bring translators who stay with their wards at all times. Straubinger and the rest of the community communicate with their hands, speaking by tapping and stroking their fingers in the palms of the "listener." I found this method fascinating; it's far more complex than the hand communication Anne Sullivan used with Hellen Keller. At some point I began to see their fingers as tiny dancers moving along palms with grace and beauty. Shortly after, I began to wonder if perhaps I've been watching too much Herzog lately.

Not everyone responds to communication, though. In one of the most upsetting scenes, Herzog sets his camera in front of a 22-year old man named Vladimir Kokol for an agonizing number of minutes. The poor soul sits on the floor blowing raspberries and forcibly hitting himself in the head with a small ball. If Herzog's earlier lingerings were meant to see what his subjects see, then he clearly is having a hard time figuring out Kokol. Unlike Straubinger and her friends, Vladimir has been deaf-blind from birth; not even Fini knows what goes on inside his head. We then see him being taken into a shower after a lifetime of hydrophobia; after all, how do you explain a shower to someone who can never know the definition of water?

The film ends with a pair of equally disturbing images. On the one hand is a man in his mid-40s, who did not lose his senses until he was 35. He could read and write, but when he lost his sight and hearing he completely withdrew from the world. Fini tries to communicate with the hand patterns, but he recoils from her touch as if it burns him. He walks away from the group to a tree, which he gently caresses. Finally, the film ends with the man, his mother, and Fini's translator walking inside, leaving Fini sitting as contentedly on the bench as she was with others around her.

Now, I'm almost certain this was Herzog's work. I'm not saying that Fini requires someone by her side at all times, but the image it creates is so powerful that he must have sent her assistant in the house to capture it. It paints a terrifying portrait of solitude, one in which being surrounded by people is truly no different to being totally alone. Herzog doesn't run the image with words, but I get the feeling he wants us to think of our own lives. Surely we've all been to at least one party in our lives where we seem to know no one there. Some people thrive in such an environment, but others --like me-- retreat, preferring to stand round the fruit punch, that unofficial sun around which the planetary bodies of the awkward orbit. Do we feel any more a part of these parties than those who cannot see or hear them?

For the last two months I've been on a rampant Herzog kick. After finally watching Aguirre: The Wrath of God, I immediately became a fan, and I've since blown through the majority of his feature-length films and a few of his shorts. In Herzog I see perhaps the most realistic of directors, ironic considering his disdain of verité. Yet I believe he has the ability to cut to the very core of the human condition, to seek out extraordinary people and view them with indifference if not outright cynicism and therefore show their accomplishments for what they really are (some hold up, others, like Timothy Treadwell, are exposed as fools). For that reason, Land of Silence and Darkness stands as a minor anomaly. It still teaches us something, but Herzog gives in to sympathy for perhaps the only time in his career; if The Great Ecstasy of the Sculptor Steiner showed Herzog at last fully awed by one of his subjects, Land gives us a compassionate Herzog, and the result ranks as one of his finest documentaries, eclipsed only by Little Dieter Needs to Fly.

Rescue Dawn

I don't know why I never saw Rescue Dawn in theaters. I've always enjoyed war films, but for whatever reason I missed out. Then when I got into Herzog's work, I put off renting this because I was afraid of something so commercial from such a visionary and iconoclastic director. Yet, as it so often does, curiosity got the better of me and I popped in a copy to watch Herzog sell out to the masses on the commercial and critical successes of his recent documentaries.

Instead, what I got was a wholly original and quintessentially Herzogian war film that manages to subvert both the war and the prison/escape genre, ridding them of nearly all of the contrivances and banalities and instead forging a story of simple survival. You can tell you're in for a special ride from the very beginning, when Herzog plays that famous stock footage of Agent Orange being dropped on villages, but slows it down and focuses in such a way that it seems...different somehow. More menacing.

A fictive expansion of Herzog's incredible and subtly moving documentary Little Dieter Needed to Fly, Rescue Dawn is indeed a dramatized version of the trials of Dieter Dengler, the first man to escape from a Viet Cong POW camp. Yet in many ways, this dramatization often feels more real than the actual documentary. No wonder, since Herzog made both; he's always blurred the line between fact and fiction in both his narrative work and his documentaries, and his attempt to fill in the cracks in Dieter's story he left out in deference to his fellow prisoners paints an utterly convincing portrait of men broken by captivity and one man's ability to rally them.

However, Herzog never glorifies their violence, as he never does. This is simply a story of a remarkable man's will to live and his unflinching belief in his adopted country (Dieter was born in Germany but joined the U.S. Air Force for citizenship and for a chance to fly). When he arrives in the POW camp, an Vietnamese officer who speaks fluent English tells him that if he signs a piece of anti-American propaganda condemning the U.S. for bombing Indochina. Dieter responds that he never wanted to go to war but refuses to attack the country that "gave [him his] wings," even in an anonymous piece of rhetoric.

Dieter is then thrown in with the other prisoners and tortured in a variety of ways that stress the terrifying ordeals without ever glamorizing the acts like so many gory films today. In the camp, he meets the other 5 prisoners, 2 of whom are also American. Jeremy Davies plays "Eugene from Eugene, Oregon," a frightfully emaciated man who's gone mad in captivity. When Dieter immediately begins planning an escape, Gene warns that he'll tell the guards, because he's bought into their false promises of impending release. Steve Zahn stretches his chops as Duane, who, like Gene, has been broken, but in differing ways.

The escape plan Dieter cooks up is rather ingenious and all the more intriguing because we know it's true. It's daring and precisely calculated and works even when it doesn't go according to plan. However, in a darkly ironic (and purely Herzogian) twist, escape is the easy part. When Dieter first arrived in the camp, he mocked the flimsy bamboo cells and boasted he'd escape that night. "Don't you get it?" replied Duane, "The prison's the jungle." The jungle, a recurring setting in Herzog's work, indeed becomes a labyrinthine and unconquerable foe in the film's second half as Dieter and Duane attempt to flee to...wherever, really.

Another director may have exploited the horrors the pair face in their trek through the wilderness, but Herzog presents it with the same cold detachment of the rest of the film. Bale really proves himself in these passages, sporting a look of pure determination as he implements his survival skills to make fire, camouflage, and find food.

Some complain that the final scene, in which Dieter is triumphantly reintroduced to his station, as overly patriotic. We live in cynical times, indeed. First of all, this actually happened, so calling it a Hollywood-style "happy ending" is ridiculous; and second, Dieter's pragmatic non-speech deflates the bombast his superiors try to place on the situation. Sure, it's more upbeat than the endings of Herzog's other work, but I fail to see why he has to completely change the outcome of Dieter Dengler's life just to adhere to the auteur theory.

Ultimately, the only flaws I spotted were in the beginning, in the sequence where Dieter flies and ultimately crashes his plane. Herzog has never used special effects before, and it shows. Also, the bit where Dieter stops to drink from a puddle, you know that when the camera tilts back up with him that he'll be surrounded. However, these are minor flaws in an otherwise stellar and original work.

If this is what Herzog looks by 'going Hollywood,' then I can't help but be excited. All those who might worry that he sold out have nothing to fear; Rescue Dawn is pure Herzog, and it belongs on the short list of great films about a war which has already been documented in a number of timeless classics.