The visionary picture narrator Werner Herzog turns eighty today.
You don’t need a thousand extras for a monumental film. Werner Herzog, in the opening scene of “Aguirre – the wrath of God”, was enough for about forty men who descended a steep mountain in single file as Spanish conquistadores: It is one of the most visually powerful shots in German film history, in 1972 it blew all expectations of a small author’s film . Even if Herzog was one of the first of those “young filmmakers” who benefited from the Film Funding Act, he was an outsider. The manageable funding and television funds were ideal for small contemporary subjects. But drama about a mad commander on a quest for El Dorado’s gold? “I had nothing to do with the political cinema that was prevalent at the time,” the director later recalled. “I took my bearings from the German silent films of the 1920s.”
This continuity was recognized immediately: when Lotte H. Eisner, the great film critic of Weimar cinema, saw Herzog’s “Signs of Life”, she showed it to Fritz Lang, who was very impressed by it. Because Herzog did everything to continue this visually stunning cinema that Germany had lost.
Werner Herzog was thirty when he realized this ambition with his third feature film. $370,000 was estimated, a third of which went to the star. The director found his ideal actor in Klaus Kinski, a chronically under-challenged genius who shared his visions and repeatedly made his life hell. “My dearest enemy” he later called his actor and opponent in a film portrait.
In addition, there is a romantically colored realism. In the nature images, Herzog’s cinema also opens up to the documentary. And his film crews sometimes live through the real dramas – most extreme probably a year later with “Fitzcarraldo”. Again Kinski played a madman in the jungle, but this time a whole ship was towed over a mountain.
Today Werner Herzog is eighty years old, including seventy-four titles in his filmography, including short, documentary and essay films. Ironically, it is probably precisely the immense variety of his work that still makes him the best-known unknown of German cinema. Internationally respected like hardly any other director in this country, the artist, who has been based in Los Angeles for years, has remained a stranger in his homeland. It didn’t make it any easier for him that his main theme, the search for the sublime, for borderline experiences and growing beyond one’s own self, is deeply rooted in German cultural history. The shadows that the ideal of art of the Nazi era cast on this misused term seemed too long.
Outsiders are the heroes
In fact, Herzog’s broken feature film heroes are mostly outsiders, which perhaps also explains the greater popularity of his work in the USA: From the soldier who went mad in his early work “Signs of Life” and its namesake in the migrant story “Stroszek” to “Kaspar Hauser”, “Woyzek” and “Fitzcarraldo” to the bandit “Cobra Verde”. Even the final entry in this series, the controversial showman drama Invincible, deserves a second look.
In his documentaries, too, Werner Herzog has always pushed the limits of human imagination. Here, too, his style differs radically from the dogma of verism, which is still often upheld in the demanding world of documentary film. In 1992, the performance of Lessons in Darkness at the Berlinale caused an uproar, sparked by the connection between recordings of the burning oil fields in Kuwait during the first Iraq war and Wagner music.
“The Cave of Forgotten Dreams”, one of his greatest recent achievements, resulted in 30,000-year-old cave drawings in 3D format. Impossance and intimacy, the superhuman and the all-too-human. Much of this is already laid out in the magnificent sketch by Aguirre. In the end, the leader outlived all his followers and subordinates. His confused mind, however, seems unbroken: he commands a pack of great apes on his raft. In fact, you probably don’t even need forty extras for a film of impressive size. You need a close-up of Klaus Kinski from a slightly lower angle with the fire in his eyes that he shares with his director.
And will the cinema endure as the ideal setting for these visions? In conversation, Werner Herzog pleads for the immortality of art: “Let’s say, as long as mankind per se has a future on this planet – which is doubtful – the moving image will survive with some certainty, I have no doubt about that. But more importantly than moving images, cinema, I believe storytelling has a longer lifespan. Because that’s an achievement we’ve earned over thousands of decades.”
