Magic Hours (22 page)

The documentary subject of
The White Diamond
(2004) is Dr. Graham Dorrington, a British researcher who wants to photograph the wildlife in the jungle canopy of Guyana from an experimental low-flying zeppelin of his own design. An archetypal Herzogian figure—the dreamer plagued with bad luck—Dorrington is haunted by the death of a cinematographer friend, killed a decade ago in one of his earlier zeppelins. Although the death was an accident, Dorrington cannot forgive himself. When Dorrington finally gets up into the canopy, a scene most
filmmakers would have chosen to shoot as a moment of glorious transfiguration, Herzog uses it to create a monster-movie fresco: tree frogs with huge paddle-sized suckers on their long fingertips; millipedes covered in seemingly weaponized spikes; an evil-looking and empty-eyed sea-green lizard.
The White Diamond
becomes truly remarkable, however, with the introduction of Mark Anthony Yhap, a diamond-mining roughneck whose bizarrely moving predicament all but hijacks the film midway through. (There is also a long sequence involving a rooster.) Released shortly before the publicity-hoarding
Grizzly Man, The White Diamond
is among the most beautiful and unusual documentaries ever made, and it is something akin to a crime that it is not at least as well known. On this point Herzog agreed, saying, “
The White Diamond
simply has more depth than
Grizzly Man
.”

Given that Herzog had made a film about the first Gulf War, and given that, on the evidence of
Grizzly Man
and
The White Diamond
alone, his documentary powers have never been more burnished, I asked whether he had any interest in making a film about the second Gulf War?

“No,” he said quickly. “That is something Americans are doing. And there are very, very good films emerging. And all of the sudden I hear cries of, ‘Move away from
cinéma vérité
!'
Cinéma vérité
is the accountant's truth, cinema's answer of the Sixties. Look out now for different voices for imaginative films. And they are coming in throngs.” In 2006, Herzog was honored with an Outstanding Acheivement Award at a documentary film festival known as Hot Docs. Eight years ago, he said, only six films were submitted to the festival. “All were shown and all got an award. This year sixteen hundred films were submitted, and one hundred were selected. And there are formidable films there. They are coming from all over the place. I am not alone anymore.”

I asked if that was a good feeling.

“Oh, sure. Thank God! But it's not because I raised my battle cry. It's because there is now such an incredibly momentous assault on our perception of reality as immense and of the same magnitude as firearms confronting the medieval knight. But all this is not that interesting. Neither facts are that interesting nor is reality that interesting. Somehow in all of this we are still capable of finding some illumination, some truth, some place where we step out of ourselves, where we are ecstatic, where we have an ecstatic, visionary realization.”

When I wondered if Herzog had plans for another documentary, he shrugged and said it was impossible for him to anticipate what his next documentary would be. By way of illustration he brought up
Grizzly Man.
“When I came across Treadwell's story, I knew, simply knew, that it was big, really big, and I had to tackle it and I had to do it no matter what. I started to watch Treadwell's footage, and that resulted in nine days of editing. And then I shot my half of the film. And while I was editing that, I wrote the commentary, recorded the commentary, and did the pre-mix. But we didn't have music yet, so I had to wait until I had the musicians together and record the music and then mix that into the film. But in principle, from the day I received Treadwell's footage until the delivery of the film took twenty-nine days.”

Although Herzog has spent years making certain films, he rarely takes more than a few days to write a script;
Woyzeck
(1979) was shot in eighteen days and edited in four. “That's how films should be made,” Herzog told Roger Ebert. “That was perfect.” Nonetheless, less than a month to make a film as nearly perfect as
Grizzly Man
struck me as almost impossible to believe. It
was
possible, Herzog said. “I saw it so clearly. There was not one moment of thinking.”

Herzog's world is not thoughtful. It is reactive, lined with thorns, and frequently blown through by ill winds. One of his most striking films,
The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner
(1974), about competitive ski jumping, gives us replay after replay of ski jumpers landing badly, their scissoring skis explosively shed, followed by a final image of unconscious jumpers sliding to gentle stops in the snow. Just as often, though, Herzog's ski jumpers succeed. Action is neither rewarded nor condemned but rather enacted within a vacuum emptied of everything but its potential poetry. No filmmaker is better at evoking the curious beauty of our indifferent universe.

What is surprising, in light of this, is how tender Herzog can be—but it is a cunning tenderness. One of his first documentaries,
Land of Silence and Darkness
(1971)—Herzog's favorite of his films—opens with the voice of its deaf-blind subject, an elderly woman named Fini Straubinger, who went blind at fifteen and deaf at eighteen as the result of a nasty fall. “When I was a child,” she says over a blackened screen, “before I was like this, I watched a ski jumping competition. And one thing keeps coming back: those men going through the air.” Herzog archivally obliges Straubinger's memory with gorgeous silent footage of ski jumpers soaring off their slopes and alighting upon the snow with physics-defying lightness. But this is not Straubinger's memory; it is Herzog's. In fact, he wrote the lines for her. Straubinger did not mind, believing that the sequence was representative of her experience, whatever the literal content of her few remaining sighted memories was.

Later in the film, Straubinger and some of her deaf-blind friends visit a zoo, where they play with a recalcitrant monkey. The monkey, who undoubtedly has a greater awareness of the fact it is being filmed than most of Herzog's deaf-blind subjects, reaches out and yanks the lens's casing off Herzog's camera. This is
a moment many filmmakers would have elided, but Herzog keeps it in, as though reminding us of his camera's presence. Herzog's films are filled with similar breaches, both explicit and implicit, and viewed in the aggregate his work becomes a way of thinking about mediation: between viewer and image, between fact and fiction, between the real and the unreal.
Grizzly Man
may be Herzog's best-known (and most commercially successful) film, at least of recent years, but it is also his most straightforward and unmediated, which is to say, his least representative.

In
Little Dieter Needs to Fly
(1997), Herzog's astonishing documentary about the escape and survival of a German-American pilot named Dieter Dengler from a Pathet Lao prison camp in 1966, Herzog shows us Dengler entering his San Francisco home, whereupon he opens and closes the front door several times before entering. “Most people,” Dengler explains, “don't realize how important it is, and the privilege that we have, to be able to open and close the door. That's the habit I got into, and so be it.” Dengler did not actually have this habit. In fact, it was Herzog's idea. While it embodied a real feeling Dengler had, it was not a real activity. Assigning to Dengler an activity he did not engage in is what Herzog has called “the ecstatic truth,” wherein literal accuracy cedes its ground to emotional accuracy, a subjective realm entered through manipulation and fabrication. Consider a disquieting sequence later in the film, in which Herzog takes Dengler to the Thailand-Laos border, hires a group of Thai villagers to tie Dengler up, and runs the former captive through the jungle much as he had been run through the jungle three decades before. “Uh oh,” Dengler says, as his feels the binds bite around his wrists, “this feels a little too close to home.” Herzog narrates, “Of course, Dieter knew it was only a film. But all the old terror returned, as if it were real.” Here the manipulation is blatant, if profoundly unsettling. Later, when Dengler uses a Thai villager to
reenact a notably awful story involving Dengler's stolen engagement ring and the Viet Cong's machete-based method of dealing with theft, the villager becomes visibly upset. Dengler notices and hugs the man. “Don't worry,” he tells him. “It's only a movie.” It is as though Dengler, in simply telling his own story, has become the filmmaker.

Herzog's ecstatic truth finds its way into his feature films as well.
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
fictionalizes the real story of an eponymous young man who turned up in a nineteenth-century German town with scarcely any speech and no experience with the outside world, for he had been kept chained in a cellar, by unknown parties, for the first two decades of his life. In the role of Kaspar, Herzog cast a nonprofessional actor, the incomparable Bruno S., who was in actual fact a prostitute's son who had spent twenty-three years in various mental institutions, where he was often beaten and kept in deep isolation. In
Stroszek
(1976), the story of a luckless German street musician who travels to the American Midwest to improve his life, and fails miserably, Herzog uses Bruno S. again. The film's most disturbing scene involves Bruno S.'s character being beaten by pimps in his apartment, which Herzog chose to film in Bruno's actual apartment. This sequence, Herzog has admitted, “pains me so much because it was probably the kind of treatment that had been doled out to him for years when he was a child.” (Bruno S. told Herzog right before they shot the scene, “I'm going to be a good soldier, and I've been hurt much worse before.”) Two other sequences offer equally startling but far less brutal ecstatic truths: a scene in which Bruno talks to his prostitute girlfriend about life in America (under the Nazis, Bruno says, they beat you and cursed you, but in America, “They do it ever so politely, and with a smile”) was improvised, reflected what Bruno S. himself felt upon first trip to the United States, and results in what
is perhaps the most moving, intimate moment in the film. For another sequence, Herzog flagged down two Wisconsin deer hunters and asked them if they would agree to be filmed while one of his elderly German actors spoke to them in German. They agreed, and Herzog turned on his camera. After listening for a few moments to this strange little German discuss the power of “animal magnetism,” the deer hunters look at each other, laugh, get into their car, and quickly drive away. Herzog never saw the deer hunters again. It is one of the funniest sequences in any of Herzog's films.

For
Aguirre: The Wrath of God
(1972), a violent, troubling film about a breakaway expedition of Spaniards searching for El Dorado along the Amazon river while gradually going mad, Herzog filmed on the Amazon river with a cast and crew who nearly went mad. The reality of the shoot constantly intrudes into
Aguirre
's story. When the raft he was filming on developed a mouse infestation, Herzog filmed the mice. When part of the raft was in danger of being sheared off by low-hanging branches, Herzog scrambled for his camera, captured the collision, and incorporated it into the film, which ends with the megalomaniacal Aguirre (played by the megalomaniacal Klaus Kinski) coming to grief on a raft crawling with spidery little monkeys. The end of
Aguirre,
Herzog says in the film's DVD commentary, is “so strange and so real at the same time.” While Aguirre wanders about his raft, his comrades dead, his mind slipping past the final checkpoints of sanity, he delivers a mad speech—parts of which Herzog says incorporate an equally mad speech delivered by the Zanzibari revolutionary John Okello—while the monkeys skitter around him. After pointing out in the commentary that it was nearly impossible to choreograph the monkeys (and Herzog received dozens of monkey bites to prove it), Herzog says, with a laugh, “You just have to follow the monkeys.”

In
Fitzcarraldo
(1982), Herzog again tells the story of a dreamer searching for salvation in the Amazon. Fitzcarraldo's doomed quest to bring opera to the Amazon requires dragging a 340-ton ship over a mountain in order to reach another, inaccessible river; Herzog naturally decided that he would actually drag the ship over the mountain. The film thus becomes an allegory of itself. Herzog spent three years in the jungle making
Fitzcarraldo
and in the process had to deal with scrapping everything halfway through when his original star, Jason Robards, fell ill with dysentery and was forbidden by his doctor to return to Peru; plane crashes; a border war between Peru and Ecuador; Herzog's arrest (twice) by the authorities; several crew members' injuries (including one man chainsawing off his own foot after being bitten by a poisonous snake); and attacks by hostile Indians (one of which resulted in two members of the production undergoing eight hours of surgery). When the time came to recast
Fitzcarraldo
's leading man, one might have expected Herzog to opt for an actor with peace at the center. Herzog, however, cast the miracle of ill temper that was Klaus Kinski,
⁴
even though Herzog knew Kinski “would freak out” and “go totally bonkers” in the jungle. Kinski did not disappoint.