"People should look straight at a film... That's the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates. And film culture is not analysis, it is agitation of the mind. Movies come from the country fair and circus, not from art and academicism."
-- Werner Herzog, 1978 interview quoted in
John Sandford's book, "The New German Cinema" (1980)
We knew it was going to be interesting. Seeing "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" (1972) for the first time in 25 years (even though I'd seen it many times before) with Werner Herzog, Ramin Bahrani, Roger Ebert and a Conference on World Affairs Cinema Interruptus audience in Boulder, CO, last week reconfirmed that not only is Herzog a magnificent, instinctive director, but a first-class showman in the carnival tradition, a compelling speaker and storyteller, and a wonderful actor. Some of the wild tales he related to the audience in Macky Hall are, I'm told, also on the director's commentary track of the American DVD of "Aguirre" -- and some I've heard him tell many times over the years, but there's nothing quite like hearing Herzog spin his spiels in the flesh -- even (or maybe especially) when he's a booming voice in the dark.
The voice, and the diction, are essential to his voodoo. No wonder it has inspired YouTube videos in which someone imitates the director reading Herzogian versions of children's books such as "Curious George," "Madeline," and "Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel." ("In truth, children are next door to sociopaths. The smallest girl was Madeline...")
On a CWA panel called "My Obsession," Herzog claimed he was just a normal guy and was visibly appalled by what he later (offstage) deemed the "crazy" effusions of universal love from hand-holding New Orleans singer Lillian Boutté -- a sentimental attitude that moved to him to denounce five-year-old children as monstrous pigs, and 25-year-olds as larger, older pigs. After he launched into a typical diatribe about the evils of psychotherapy, fellow panelist Julia Sweeney facetiously asked him if he had now become a Scientologist. He responded to the effect that he also had little use for Dianetics. (One of my earliest, indelible memories of Herzog was when he came to Seattle with "Woyzeck" in 1979 and said of psychology: "A room illuminated to its farthest corner is uninhabitable." I love the phrase -- and I think it's true about actual rooms -- but I think the surprisingly romantic psychological sentiment is bunk.)
No filmmaker since Alfred Hitchcock has been more effective at mythologizing his "brand" than Herzog, long known in Colorado as the perennial "Wild Man" of the Telluride Film Festival. Indeed, as I mentioned to the CWA audience, most (if not all) of his films are on some essential level about the struggle of Werner Herzog to make the movie you are watching. Certainly "Aguirre" and "Fitzcarraldo" (1982) fall into that category -- and the mesmerizing documentary "La Soufrière: Waiting for an Inevitable Catastrophe" (1977), an impromptu screening of which we arranged on the last day of the Interruptus, when Julia and I held forth on our mutual history with "Aguirre" and Herzog in the absence of Werner and Ramin. (More about that later.)
In the first, two-hour Interruptus session on Monday, we made it through 17 and a half minutes of "Aguirre" itself, as Herzog, Bahrani and members of the audience called out to stop the film at any time for questions or comments. This slow start is not uncommon. (As I recall, when I did "No Country for Old Men" as an Interruptus film in 2008, we made it through only ten minutes of the film the first day -- but that was mostly because I couldn't stop talking about how each image built upon the others.) In a format like this, some setting-up of the film is required, and Herzog kicked off with a long story about the first few shots of the ant-like trail of Spaniards and Indians descending the vertiginous slopes of the Peruvian Andes -- an astounding image that had to be accomplished in one take because there was no way to get nearly 500 people back up the craggy paths of the mountain again.
Also, when the process begins, the audience inevitably wants to try out the rules of the game to see if they really work. People stop the film to ask questions even when they don't really have one, perhaps because they desire acknowledgment or they want to test the power that has suddenly been entrusted to them. Anyway, if you figure that we spent 15 minutes on introductions and explaining the nature of the process, leaves us with 87 and a half minutes of questions and answers for 17 and a half minutes of film. If we estimate that the average question and answer took 3 minutes, that's about 29 interruptions, or approximately one every six seconds (if I did the math right, which I probably didn't). Of course, many of Herzog's remarks were considerably longer, but (as usually happens on the first day) the pace drove many in the audience almost as insane as Klaus Kinski's Don Lope de Aguirre, and you can't really blame them.
Still, I find the process endlessly fascinating and rewarding. But let's be honest about one thing: There are such things as stupid questions. After going through this process for years, I'm still appalled by the narcissism of those who don't think before they open their mouths. When somebody makes an observation and caps it with the non-question, "Was that intentional?" -- it's really just a way of showing off, a way of saying, "Hey, I noticed something and I want you and everyone in this room to know that I noticed it. That is all." (My favorite instance of this phenomenon was at the World Premiere screening of Alan Rudolph's "Choose Me" at the Seattle International Film Festival in 1984, when someone in the crowd asked the director if he "intended" to place all those melodramatic movie posters on the walls of Rae Dawn Chong's apartment to comment on an adulterous scene. Rudolph pretended not to know what in the world the questioner was talking about. Posters? What? Where?)
As it turned out, Herzog was expert at making something worthwhile from even the most nonsensical or ill-thought-out questions. Take the one about the long, hypnotic, out-of-focus shot of the muddy river rapids, churning and splashing and bubbling (accompanied by eerie Popol Vuh music Herzog later re-used for "The Great Ecstasy of the Sculptor Steiner"), which slowly comes into focus. Indeed, it follows a similarly long shot (in focus) of the undulating brown waters. "Stop!" said a member of the audience who observed that the shot was out of focus. "Was that intentional?"
"Probably not," Herzog said. He likes to go into a location and capture it in many different ways (including shots of the actors just sitting around on the set, not knowing the camera is rolling, that are used in the finished film) -- and, in this case, because they were in such a remote part of the jungle they didn't have the luxury of looking at dailies. Herzog said he probably noticed the shot in the editing room, liked it, and chose to pair it with the other river shot.
Minutes later it happened again. Aguirre is seen in medium close-up, standing in the rain, on a raft floating down an Amazon tributary. A voice in the crowd observes that there are drops of water on the lens: "Was that intentional?" This time, Herzog is perhaps a little irritated, replying simply that they're on a raft in the middle of a river and it's raining. It's fairly likely that water is going to get on the lens in such circumstances.
At this point I have to wonder whether someone who is asking if something so obvious is intentional is doing so intentionally. And by that I mean, what does someone really hope to learn by asking it? It's clear neither of these shots were included by mistake, after all. At some point, Herzog looked at the shots and made a conscious decision to put them in the movie. Otherwise they wouldn't be in the movie. (Think of this as a corollary to the Scorsese epigram above: "Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out." It is also a matter of what is in the movie and what is out.)
What made the second day's final question so bad was not only its literalism ("That cannon would not have exploded when it fell because the ammunition... blah blah blah"), but its redundancy. Herzog had already addressed the exploding cannon on the first day, explaining how he had the pyro-technicians set off a charge when it fell because it provided more dramatic visual interest (he liked that the destruction of one of the Spaniards' absurdly heavy and ineffective weapons also split a tree -- both man and nature paying a price for this intrusion upon the landscape) and because the explosion punctuates the end of the opening section of the movie, marking a change in its rhythms.
That was the first time Herzog talked about it. You know that sinking feeling when there's time for just one more question and it's a dud? That's what I felt, until Herzog snatched the question from the jaws of mundanity, set it aflame and whipped it into a blazing finish. He began by reiterating his lack of interest in realism -- historical or otherwise. "If facts were all that mattered then the Manhattan telephone directory would be the Book of Books," he said, employing a phrase I think I remember him using in the early 1980s. All the names and addresses and phone numbers are there, but they tell us nothing about the people who are listed. What are their dreams? Are they crying themselves to sleep on their pillows each night?
It was a triumphant finale.
* * * *
More Herzogian wit and wisdom elicited by images from "Aguirre, the Wrath of God":
Of course, Herzog had plenty of stories about the raging evil madness of Klaus Kinski, many of which are chronicled in "My Best Fiend" (1999), but he had plenty of contempt left over for other members of the cast, such as this fat, loathsome man (a producer) who plays the stooge "Emperor of El Dorado" (a bloated cousin of Sam Jaffe's infantile Peter the Great in Josef von Sternberg's "The Scarlet Empress"?). He kept eating the company's mangoes, so Herzog decided to sit him on a cannon and actually film him eating mangoes. An audience member wondered about the phallic significance of the barrel, but Herzog dismissed it as the viewer's projection, not his.
Every once in a while, actors in "Aguirre" will stop and stare into the camera -- breaking the fourth wall, if you will. In one scene, Herzog recalled directing a native woman to look directly into the lens, while the men behind her were gazing out of frame. "I don't know why I asked her to do that," Herzog said, "but I think it was the right thing to do." I like this method of creation. Sometimes you've just got to do what you've got to do.
This richly complex composition, which leads the eye around the frame without an obvious focal point, prompted someone to remark on Herzog's painterly eye -- a characterization he rejected. "There are no aesthetics in my films," he said. I hope he didn't mean it literally. He may not have been trying for a painterly arrangement (though he did allow that the image somewhat resembled "a still life"), but any time you put a frame around something, you can't keep aesthetics out. Herzog said he does find it very easy to know where to place the camera, and that when he gathered everyone together here, he found the spot quite rapidly.
I had intended to ask him about what he thought of the Pandoran jungle of "Avatar," but without mentioning the title he volunteered his opinion as we lingered on this shot: "Today's films are cowardly," he said with disgust. "They do not venture into the jungle to photograph it. They create it all in a computer and make cartoons."
Somebody else remarked again on the portrait-like sensibility of this shot, and again Herzog proudly embraced photography -- the actual arrangement of physical objects in space -- over painting. He did mention, however, that he posed the two background figures. The man on the right is awkwardly learning to pray over the graves of his comrades who have been given a "Christian burial."
How many takes to get this shot? Once again: one. Herzog pointed out the way the jungle comes right down to the river. There was no way to get the raft back upstream for a second take.
The good part of Francis Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" (1979), made not long after "Aguirre" was released in the U.S. in 1977, owes much to Herzog's jungle epic -- in atmosphere and sometimes particular images. For all the malevolent mayhem of Kinski, at least Herzog had that face and that Richard III posture to work with (though the voice in the German version is actually looped by someone else). When Coppola got all the way upriver all he found himself with was a fat, bald Brando and a non-ending.
You may recall the downed B-52 from a deleted scene ("Monkey Sampan") included with the DVD of "Apocalypse Now Redux" (2001). By the time this ship and canoe appear in "Aguirre" (the crew built it up in the tree), the delirious Spaniards are no longer capable of distinguishing between what is taking place before their eyes and what is inside their heads. As a gesture of thanks, Coppola secured American distribution for another Herzog masterpiece, "The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser" aka "Every Man For Himself and God Against All" (1975).
31 Comments
Thank you so much for this. "Aguirre" is one of my most favorite films, and Werner Herzog is a director that I greatly admire.
It's hard to say with a movie like "Aguirre," but I enjoy it for its realism (Herzog's insistence on the voodoo of location and getting the shot in reality -- no CGI jungles, or steamboats either) and its surrealism. Herzog does not let reality dominate his films, because that would be inhibiting to a filmmaker.
I love the use of Herzog's camera as well: we are firmly there, on the river and within the jungle, with these doomed men. We anticipate and dread the horrors of native attacks, drowning, fighting and usurpation, but simultaneously, we are not affected by them, which gives us a foothold over these men and allows us to see them for who they are. I feel as if we are seeing the events transpiring on the screen both objectively and subjectively: we, too, are on the raft, but we are not among Aguirre's men.
I've rarely felt such a strong feeling like this in other movies -- I'm sure this viewing of the film applies to many others -- and it only seems appropriate that this film's final shot firmly pulls us away from the raft where the insane Aguirre plots his treachery, but not without giving us one last, dizzying look.
Jim, this is some first-rate coverage working on three levels: a reportage of the symposium you attended; an appreciation of the great Herzog; and a subtle, personal reminiscence of AGUIRRE. It's really a fascinating piece I plan on sharing with others.
I've never been to a shot-by-shot analysis before, and I confess that after reading this I feel a little intimidated by the process. Forgive me if I seem obtuse, but if you're not going to discuss the author's intent in a shot, then what, exactly, would be a good question to ask (other than technical questions)?
The difference is all in the question itself: "Was that intentional?" is an entirely different question than "What was your intent?" I still don't see any reason to have asked about the water on the lens (which is a pretty common effect -- like lens flares -- whether intentional or not). But it's always smart to avoid yes or no questions in a discussion of this sort. So, while the visual rhythms of the out-of-focus rapids shot seem (in context) quite clear (and I remember thinking so when I first saw the movie in 1977 at age 19), a more courteous and provocative question might have been even simpler: "Why does this shot remain out of focus for so long?" Herzog, fortunately, has a gift for answering the question people should have asked rather than the one they actually did. Otherwise, he could have just said, "No."
You know, in theory Interruptus sounds cool, but I don't think I could deal with all the inane interruptions. It sounds like it could be torture. Is that intentional?
It certainly can be torturous, but it is fascinating when the director is actually there to comment on their work. What I find even worse than the bad questions Jim pointed out (and Jim, I'm especially glad to see you call the bad-question-askers out in your piece! Bravo!) are the questions that have nothing to do with what is on screen. Questions such as, "How much did the film cost to make" or (the non-question) "I've read that you listened to hundreds of hours of bird sounds for this film." If the director is sitting in the same room, why on Earth would anybody ask about something that could be answered so easily with a little research?! My favorite part of the first day's screening was the crowd revolting against the woman who who said "Can I ask how sturdy those rafts were?" immediately after the presenters asked the crowd to hold off on questions.
Sensational stuff, Jim. How I wish I was there (and at that NCFOM screening). And so hilarious too.
"any time you put a frame around something, you can't keep aesthetics out." - Wow.
I sure hope there are some videos of the even t somewhere for us to see!
Your colleague, Roger Ebert, has described a great movie as one that you can't bear to not see again before you die. When I think of such movies, I always think of Aguirre first. Every time I watch it, I appreciate something new. I had read or heard Herzog discuss his creation of its soundtrack and how he would insert certain bird calls to create tension. I then went back and watched it again under the assumption that nothing was source audio, which it likely was not. The audio is very subtle, but effectively comments on the action. You criticized Avatar's visuals, but how about its inability to create an ambiance with sound?
I think that what is appealing about Aguirre, that most films lack, is that they are artistically immersive. Many perfectionist filmmakers you will find yourself searching the frame for meaning, trying to find significance in the smallest of details. Herzog's films, on the other hand, do not try to force the material into a preconceived vision. It allows the viewer to decide what they find interesting about a given shot or moment. My favorite example is from his version of Nosferatu. There is a shot inserted into the movie of a bat flying in slow motion. It is probably just a piece of stock footage that he decided to insert, but the shot lingered in my mind for months until I realized what had struck me about it. The amount of light necessary to shoot a bat in such slow motion would take enormous quantities of light. The menacing creature flapping its wings had to be in intense agony, very similar to the film's titular character. I doubt that was something that Herzog expected audiences to gain from the image, but he instinctively knew that something was interesting about the shot that belonged in the film. My point is, after watching a Herzog film, you sort of feel like you have been through a creative process yourself. It is similar to seeing something beautiful from a unique perspective and even though you don't have a camera to capture it, you feel like just by acknowledging its existence, you have took part in creating something.
I liked this except for the unnecessary and empty swipe at a masterpiece, Apocalypse Now. What does Brando's being fat and bald have anything to do with anything? He works in that film. His presence works. And the ending was an ending. I'd think you of all people wouldn't require a conventional ending. The story was done. The point had been made. The mission was over.
It's true, I don't think "Apocalypse Now" amounts to much of a movie, dazzling though it is in parts, but my references here were to famous -- now near-legendary -- events in the making, mythologizing and marketing of the picture: 1) As documented in "Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse," Coppola was so horrified by Brando's bloated appearance when he showed up on location (compare to the sculpted visage of Kinski) that he considered suing him (for fraud?) and feared his fat image would ruin the film; and 2) Coppola screened the picture at Cannes as a "work-in-progress," and was quite open about his struggle to find an ending. "Apocalypse" has been released with several different endings in various formats. See this Wikipedia entry: http://j.mp/9a7l2l
Though I completely agree with Herzog ("If facts were all that mattered then the Manhattan telephone directory would be the Book of Books") I have to admit that, the first time I saw the film, Spanish as I am, it was a bit hard for me to overlook that Lope de Aguirre was played by Klaus Kinski. Strong (very strong) face, blond hair and blue eyes, this guy could not be any more German.
However, would the film have been more "effective" if starred by a mediterranean-looking actor (and spanish-speaking for that matter)? Hell no, or at least it wouldn't have helped the effect Herzog was looking for.
My point is, here's a decision (casting Kinski) that it's utterly against historical realism, and yet it only works for the benefit of the film. When I got over the awkward-looking Aguirre, I loved the movie for what it was, and now I can't imagine any other human being, alive or dead, playing Aguirre.
Jim: Echoing others, I want to thank you for this detailed report. It's great stuff.
Here in Washington, DC, I've certainly sat through my share of Q&As with directors in which someone stands up with a "question" that's actually an observation, sometimes without even attempting to throw a perfunctory question mark at the end to give even the illusion of wanting to learn something from the director. (In reality, the person is hoping the director will say: "You're brilliant. That was exactly my intent and no one else has noticed that before. Let's have coffee.")
The "Is that intentional?" thing is tricky. Yes, it's should be a different question than "Was that your intent?" but it's obvious that's what some people mean. And in a group setting I'd almost prefer the quick sloppy question to a longer one when the person is simply trying to see if the director had some grand design for what happened or whether it was some kind of happy accident. As to whether directorial intent matters, or to what degree, well, that's a larger debate.
A question for you though ...
I think it was in Ebert's piece about this seminar that it was mentioned that Herzog said something about composition and/or symbolism. I'm curious if that sucked the life out of the room, or if it should have. That is, I presume that most cinephiles would attend such a seminar hoping not for trivia and gossip (stories of Kinski beating his wife) but for a peek into the director's mind to understand what Herzog sees when he looks at his film and what Herzog feels he's saying with it. (Not to imply that has to become the official definition. The finished film is the film, regardless of intent.) Anyway, just curious.
Oh, one more thing. You're quite right that many of Herzog's films seem to be about his struggle to make them. That struggle has been romanticized, and yet sometimes I wonder if it should be. Sure, the struggle speaks to Herzog as a filmmaker, creator, person, etc. But in the end the film must be the film. If the legendary struggles of making these films erodes over time, will audiences 30 years from now spot that struggle when watching Aguirre? Without those outside-the-frame legends, is Aguirre less great? In 2040, might James Cameron's Avatar be remembered as a film about the director's struggle to make it, cowardly though Herzog finds it? I wonder ...
In the case of "Aguirre" or "Fitzcarraldo" (among others), it's not outside-the-frame.
Andrew: Actually, only sort of. Yeah, it's romantic to say that the struggles are all within the frame. But let's not pretended that all the legend-creation and myth-making by and about Herzog in relation to the film's shoot (all of which is outside the frame) doesn't have a significant impact on what we see inside the frame.
Yes, there's evidence of struggle within the frame, too. But show this film alone to someone who has never heard of Herzog, who has never seen another of his films and I suspect that you won't hear that it's about the director's struggle to make it.
Just saw "Agguire" for the first time a few months ago. I enjoy dissecting a film, but I was pleased to find that his hypnotic shots were mesmerizing for reasons that seemed to defy analysis. (My analysis at least -- the insights in this post are good)
Similarly, just seeing his "Bad Lieutenant," I can't for the life of me describe why the lizard scene works.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I can't imagine how hard it would be to analyze the movie with the director himself, who makes no secret of his disdain for analysis of any kind.
I think it's pretty easy to explain why the iguana scene works (it's hilarious?). But if you've seen the movie, you don't really need to.
My favorite parts in "Bad Lieutenant" (which is becoming one of my all-time favorite movies) are the two conversations between Cage and Mendes about the "silver spoon." There's so much happening in both of those scenes, and somehow, considering the material, they fill me with such goodwill.
I wonder what Herzog thinks of LOTR, films that combine both adventurous set-seeking and CGI to create its images.
Nice work, Jim, as usual. Completely agree about the narcissism that motivates many of the questions from audience members, and it's the main reason why I detest such things, informative and amusing as they can be.
As for Aguirre, it's a wondrous film in many ways and quite wryly and bitterly funny as well. Humor is one element that might be secondary in Herzog's oeuvre but I'm not sure it's ever completely absent.
You'd think while reading this you guys were sitting in a room assembling the Dead Sea Scrolls. Why start off an article with a nice quote about how films have no place in academia and then begin an in-depth writing about a pompous activity (shot by shot analysis) that comes straight out of the halls of academia?
What's inherently pompous about shot by shot analysis?
I don't know. Why do you think Herzog would travel to Boulder and consent to participate in such a thing, spread over four hours and two days?
I suspect I would have been annoyed by those people if I were there, too. That said....
You knew the audience and the tone of the better than I obviously do, but it's possible that many of those people were simply there to learn about something (filmmaking) that they didn't know much about. Hence what you felt were stupid questions.
I noticed you didn't give them the benefit of the doubt. Was that intentional?
Yes. By the time the second "Was that intentional?" question was asked, there was no more room for "benefit of the doubt" because the question was stupid and pointless (and, thus, discourteous to everyone in the auditorium) beyond any doubt. Herzog handled it beautifully, though, and no one's sensibilities were wounded. Still, in educational settings in particular, I advocate thinking before one speaks. It happens so rarely in public these days...
OK, I gotcha.
Maybe next year you guys should kick things off by announcing, "Everything you see on the screen in every single movie you watch was intended to be that way!!!"
What I said at some point was pretty much what I said in this post: If it's in the movie, somebody chose to put it in the movie. Does it matter, then, whether something was done intentionally if Herzog decided to use it and not use something else? As the Coens said about the box in "Barton Fink": Once you have the answer to that question, where does it get you? In other words, why not take a moment to consider: Is that really the question you want to stop the movie to ask?
My favorite thing about Herzog is you can't add anything to the end of his name. "Herzoggian" or "Herzogesque" just sound lame. There can only be one Herzog!
Well, maybe that's not my favorite thing.
I almost wanted to lose my job and buy a new car so I could drive to Boulder and be in the audience.
Since I kept my job and didn't buy a new car, I'm opting for an at-home verion of the interruptus that I've done with a few movies. While you can't get immediate answers from the director always, but sometimes you have to make due. It's fun to watch a movie once, and then watch it again; this time bit by bit, going forwards and backwards, looking at details and noticing new things.
Looking back on "Aguirre, the Wrath of God", I remember the naturalness of it. Despite the fact that the actors were speaking in German, it seemed pure and lived-in. It gave me the sense that I was really watching something from another time. The jungle, the river, the dirt, the expanse of the sky, the lack of sheen; all of these things drew me into a world very unlike my own.
Awesome as usual, Mr. Emerson.
Your comments on Apocalypse Now's "non-ending" inspired me to write an entry on my blog describing how I've always felt the film SHOULD have ended: http://tinyurl.com/y74drrx
In short: Willard kills Kurtz, walks out of the temple, stands at the top of the steps overlooking the natives, the natives gaze back up at him, cut to black.
I had to giggle at the dumb questions people ask. My wife and I saw MY SON, MY SON WHAT HAVE YE DONE at Toronto this year, and afterward Herzog answered some questions from the audience. Even though Herzog had repeated said that, even though David Lynch was listed as executive producer, he had absolutely no imput in the movie. Sure enough, the first question was whether the little person in one scene was part of Lynch's imput in the movie and noted it was definitely Lynchian. Herzog simply said that he had obviously made a movie with dwarves in it before and it was in fact a Herzogian moment. As for the "intentional" question, one lady commented that the performances were clearly overacted and overly melodramatic, was that intentional?
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