Do not f**k with Werner Herzog

From an interview between Jonathan Demme and Werner Herzog at the Museum of the Moving Image, New York, in 2008, available as one of the special features on the 2-disc edition of ‘Encounters at the End of the World’:

Herzog: … I was somehow disconnected from music because a music teacher when I was thirteen forced me to sing in front of the whole class, just wanting to break my back, and I disconnected myself from music … and then when school was over five years later, when I was eighteen, there was this enormous void and hunger for music and that’s how … without any teaching I immersed myself in music with a more ferocious intensity than anyone I knew among my peers.

Demme: How did you deal with that moment when you were being forced to sing?

Herzog: Well, everyone sang a song. At that time there was this stupid idea floating around that everyone had some talent for music or talent for painting, which was kind of ridiculous. And when it came to me I stood up and said “I’m not going to sing”, and then I became obstinate and I said to the teacher “You may do the somersault forwards and backwards, but I am not going to sing.” So they called in the headmaster and they took the class hostage, these bastards took the class hostage, and I could strangle them today if I met them. And from that moment on I seriously planned to burn the school building to the ground at night, which unfortunately I never did … And I said to myself never in my life is anyone going to break my back, it is not going to happen again, that is unique, rather dead than having your back broken again.

Wings of Hope

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Werner Herzog / In category: 2 of 10 / Overall: 2 of 100


On Christmas Eve 1971, just hours after her graduation and attendance at the prom, 17-year-old Juliane Koepcke boarded a LANSA flight to rejoin her father at the biological research post he operated in the jungles of Peru. Koepcke's mother was with her; one of the officially listed 95 victims when the plane (whose mechanics, it transpired, were only experienced in working on motorbikes and whose pilots' licences were not in order) crashed deep in the jungle.

LANSA already had a poor reputation. An earlier crash Cuzco had revealed that 106 people were on board, ten more than the maximum. Koepcke recounts that it was with some trepidation that she took the flight. Due to non-availability of aircraft, only one of two scheduled flights left that day. Herzog remembers that those who did get to fly out seemed relieved. Herzog, you see, was there. He was due to fly out to the jungle to shoot 'Aguirre Wrath of God'. Previous flights while location scouting had brought Herzog into contact with some of the crew members who died that day. Herzog caught a subsequent flight and filming commenced. It later transpired that he and Klaus Kinski were making their first collaboration just "a few rivers away from Juliane as she was fighting for her life".

'Wings of Hope', Herzog says, is a film that lay dormant within him for a long time because of this reason. Despite the coincidence, though, Juliane Koepcke's participation was not necessarily guaranteed. In the seventeen years that had elapsed since the crash, the eminently pragmatic Koepcke had sought anonymity in an attempt not just to live a normal life but to define that life by her work as a scientist and not her unwanted fame as the sole survivor of a disaster that claimed over a hundred lives. She had already evaded unwanted media attention and been the subject of a cheaply and quickly shot adventure film* by the time Herzog approached her.

In the book 'Herzog on Herzog' (ed. Paul Cronin), he describes the circuitous route by which he established contact: through newspaper reports that located her mother's burial in a small Bavarian town, Herzog tracked down the priest who had officiated; according to the cleric, an aunt of Koepcke's lived in a neighbouring village. Herzog approached her and, although she would not consent to any discussion with Herzog, she agreed to pass on his phone number. Herzog recalls:

Juliane called me ... I explained to her that it would be enough for me to talk with her for thirty minutes, not a minute longer, and that of course I would not record the conversation. I also explained that exactly five minutes into our meeting I would offer to withdraw if she wanted me to. So when we met I put my wristwatch on the table and exactly 300 seconds into the meeting I stood up, took my wristwatch, bowed to her and said, "This is the deal. I am withdrawing unless you would like to continue for the next twenty-five minutes." And she took my arm and said, "Sit down and stay we haven't finished yet." ('Herzog on Herzog', p.269)

Perhaps this provenance is in Koepcke's mind early in the documentary when she stands with Herzog in Peru's airport, the director describing his memories of the day he tried to get on Koepcke's flight but was turned away. The day his life was saved by blind chance. He asks Koepcke, "Are you ready to go back, do you dare?" She appraises Herzog evenly and replies that she has no choice - "I've come this far." Juliane Koepcke presents, in 'Wings of Hope', as calm, controlled and unshowy, slightly formal but with a warmth and a hint of humour in her eyes. Her descriptions of her ordeal are precise, vivid and completely devoid of hyperbole. She remains composed whilst describing the darkest of experiences - regaining consciousness to the realisation of her mother's death; the realisation that she was alone in the wilderness; the wound she sustained, festering with maggots - and Herzog respects her dignity, her resolve, her quiet but steely inner strength.

"Juliane is a scientist, very straight-talking and clear-headed, and the only reason she survived her ordeal was because of her ability to act methodically through those absolutely dire circumstances" ('Herzog on Herzog', p.270). And as low-key as her description of events is, there is no doubt hers is an incredible tale of survival. The crash occasioned the biggest search-and-rescue mission that had then been undertaken in Peru. It was called off after ten days. Juliane Koepcke emerged from the jungle two days later. Herzog's understanding of Koepcke's "clear-headed ... methodical" character was behind his decision not to incorporate too much stylisation into the documentary.

It's perhaps ironic, for all that Herzog has a profound personal connection to Koepcke's story, that 'Wings of Hope' is one of his most straightforward documentaries. Examples of his trademark "ecstatic truth" are limited to bookended scenes which speculate as to Koepcke's coping mechanism for the tragedy. These sequences utilize the imagery of dreams, but whereas Herzog has sparked deep psychological insights through similar moments in other documentaries, here they serve more to provide a touch of surrealistic poetry to the narrative framework. The overall effect is fitting. The documentarist is a poet and a man of instinct, his subject a pragmatist and a woman of science. The differences are palpable. It's a testament to the power of Koepcke's story, then, that the film never suffers.

* 'I miracoli accadono ancora' ('Miracles Still Happen', a.k.a. 'Amazon Death Trap'), starring Susan Penhaligon, described by Herzog as "a pretty bad movie".

PERSONAL FAVES: Little Dieter Needs to Fly

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Werner Herzog / In category: 1 of 10 / Overall: 1 of 100



As a documentarist, Werner Herzog has produced a body of work as striking, challenging and original as any of his feature films. This is the man who used cinema (a visual and aural medium) to explore the world of a blind and deaf woman in 'Land of Silence and Darkness'; who, in 'Grizzly Man', crafted the found footage of an egomaniacal narcissist into something powerful, profound and unsentimental; who made the eccentric, quietly subversive 'Encounters at the End of the World' on the Discovery Channel's dime.

Approaching a Werner Herzog documentary, it's a good idea to put aside any preconceptions of what a documentary is ... or should be. "Cinema verite," Herzog famously declared, "is the truth of accountants." Simply recording events as they happen in front of the camera gives you about as much chance of getting at the truth of something as the doomed penguin in 'Encounters at the End of the World' has of flying to the moon. Although if that penguin did fly to the moon, you can bet Herzog would already be there, as philosophical and unruffled in a space suit as he is mired in the jungle or being shot at during an interview, ready to capture the moment.

Herzog's approach to the documentary form - indeed, to film in general - is to find what he calls "ecstatic truth". There's an example of this not five minutes into 'Little Dieter Needs to Fly', arguably one of Herzog's most compelling documentaries. His subject is German-born American fighter pilot Dieter Dengler. A boy in post-war Germany, haunted and inspired in equal measure by a memory from the war years of an American plane passing so close to his house that for a split second he locked eyes with the man in the cockpit, Dengler emigrated to the US, gained citizenship, joined the air force and was deployed to Vietnam. He had no concept of the geography or the politics of the conflict. He knew nothing - would only realise after harsh circumstances gave him a brutally different perspective - of the sufferings and hostility that were cloaked by the foliage of the jungle.


Dengler's participation in the war lasted for all of one mission. Shot down over Laos, he was captured by the VC. A forced march through the jungle brought him to a prison camp. He slept with his feet locked in place between blocks of wood, his hands shackled to those of the POWs to either side of him. Use of the latrine was a once-a-day luxury. Beaten, emaciated, stricken with dyssentry, men endured their own filth. Their captors evinced ferality but demonstrated an instinctive understanding of how to psychologically demoralise prisoners; break them down; rob them of hope. Dengler, a man for whom the wellspring of optimism evidently never even threatened to run dry, determined to escape. But I'm getting ahead of myself ...

Herzog begins the documentary with the Dieter Dengler of 1997, a Dieter Dengler in late middle age: expressive, affable, a genial host (he opens his doors to Herzog and his crew as if they were old friends) and an interviewer's dream in his candidness and eloquence. Herzog films him driving along an isolated stretch of road in a beautifully preserved 1960s roadster. Dengler pulls up outside of his house, hops out of the car and closes, opens and closes the driver's side door. He does the same thing with the front door to his house. "This may be strange to some people," he says, almost sheepishly, "but to me it's very important, this freedom to be able to open or close a door."

This is the moment of ecstatic truth. As Herzog freely admits in conversation with Paul Cronin, editor of the inspirational Faber film book 'Herzog on Herzog', this was "a scene I created from what he had casually mentioned to me, that after his experiences in the jungle he truly appreciated being able to open a door whenever he wanted to."

And this is where critics of Herzog (yes, such people exist; yes, they're irredeemably lacking in poetry, imagination and a soul) pounce, declaring, "Ah! So he staged that scene. He scripted and directed it. Therefore he is not a documentarist and 'Little Dieter Needs to Fly' is compromised and at least in part a work of fiction."

To such people, I would recommend (a) the immediate acquisition of a life; and (b) the relinquishing of cinema in favour of an interest more suited to their mindset. Trainspotting, maybe. Yes, the door-shutting bit in 'Little Dieter Needs to Fly' isn't a bona fide, documented, totally and utterly unscripted piece of footage. Yes, it was staged. But check out the next scene: Dengler shows Herzog and the camera crew around his house. Every available square inch of wall space is occupied by a painting or a framed photograph. The paintings have a common theme: each of them depict an open door. This bit isn't scripted or staged. See what Herzog's doing? That's right: he's getting to the truth of the matter.

Here's another way he gets at the truth of the matter. He takes Dengler back to Laos.

How many documentaries have you seen where the main participant appears purely as a talking head? Andrew McDonald's 'Touching the Void' springs to mind. The location footage and re-enactments are breathtaking, but ultimately the film is about mountaineer Joe Simpson and the hard decision he had to make regarding his climbing partner, yet we only ever see Simpson against a black background. The distance between Simpson, narrating his recollections in a studio, and the re-enactment cast and crew braving the elements and getting the shots that make the project viably cinematic is all too pronounced.

At the other end of the scale, how many documentaries have you seen where the subject revisits the scene of an emotional or traumatic event, where the camera keeps rolling as said poor unfortunate, emotionally devasted by the renewed cascade of memories, gets all choked up and turns away as the words fail them and the tears start? It's an easy result, a cheap shortcut to the emotional engagement of the audience.

Herzog doesn't do either of these things. He stops short or goes further, depending on your personal reaction to the film.

For all that Dengler is obviously a raconteur, a man who can effortlessly turn a phrase and bring a description to life - for all that the story he's telling is so dramatic that if the film consisted of Dengler facing the camera for two hours and talking without a single edit or bit of archive footage you'd still listen reverently until he'd got through recounting every last detail - Herzog doesn't desist from really getting to grips with the story; really finding his way into the time and the place and the savagery of it.

Herzog not only has Dengler go back to Laos, he has him -

Shit! I can't discuss why 'Little Dieter Needs to Fly' is so maverick a documentary and yet so perfectly Herzog without getting into explicit detail. And if anyone's reading this who hasn't seen 'Little Dieter Needs to Fly', I'd like to think you might want to track down a copy of the film and discover it for yourself without yours truly blurting out the very details that make it so special. Let me just say that Dieter Dengler is the perfect subject for Werner Herzog: he is equally a pragmatist, a poet, a realist and a romantic icon. When he talks about his buddies and his memories, or - in the final sequence - reunites with the pilot who spotted his distress signal and rescued him from VC country, the effect is devastating.

Herzog's documentary has nothing to do with war, troop deployment or US foreign policy. It has to do with the individual. It is essential viewing.

TARKOVSKY RETROSPECTIVE: Mirror

For some reason, when I started out on the Andrei Tarkovsky retrospective, I took to writing italicised plot synopses as preambles to the articles proper. You'll notice there isn't one for 'Mirror'. There's a reason for this: the film isn't about anything.

Well, actually it is. It's about childhood and memory and the intensely personal interplay of the two in Tarkovsky's own life. 'Mirror' was immensely important and meaningful to him. In 'Time Within Time', Kitty Hunter-Blair's translation of his diaries from 1970 - 1986, he repeatedly dwells on the necessity of making it, every reference steeped in the nostalgia of his own past. Even while he's ostensibly busy working on 'Solaris', his thoughts are consumed with making 'Mirror'.

However, for all that I've read 'Time Within Time' and have a slightly-better-than-average working knowledge of Tarkovsky's family history and working life, I must confess that 'Mirror' doesn't mean much at all to me.

Werner Herzog once described the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard as "intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film". Of Tarkovsky himself, the Bavarian maverick had this to say: "[he] made some beautiful films but he is, I fear, too much the darling of the French intellectuals, something I suspect he worked a little bit towards". I'm very much inclined to agree with Herzog on the evidence of 'Mirror'. Every frame of it screams "art film".

As a viewing experience, I find 'Mirror' too insubtantial in its construct and enigmatic in tone - and deliberately so - to engage with it on any level. It never coheres, either narratively (which in itself is no big deal: Tarkovsky was never big on narrative anyway) or in terms of the kind of internal logic which lends, say, David Lynch's 'Mulholland Drive' a sense of structure and completeness in and of itself even though individual set-pieces may be baffling and the denouement less a conclusion than an ouroboros.

I wonder how much Lynch is influenced by Tarkovsky. In its weirder moments, 'Mirror' puts me in mind of Lynch's erratic genius - particularly Tarkovsky's conjuration of a rural environment in which the commonplace is suddenly disturbed by a burning barn, a chicken killed for the pot becomes a statement on the loss of innocence, and gusts of wind through long grass seem mysterious and portentous. He also seems to have influenced Hideo Nakata: the best scene in the film (a black-and-white dream sequence) conjures an image that suggests Sadaka in 'The Ring' has Russian ancestry.

These are images redolent of bad dreams and proof positive of Tarkovsky's ability to achieve a sense of the dream-like on screen. Elsewhere, though, 'Mirror' is curiously flat, Georgiy Rerberg's cinematography bland in comparison to Vadim Yusov's work on 'Ivan's Childhood', 'Andrei Rublev' and 'Solaris'. It's an irony coloured darker by the compromised circumstances in which Tarkovsky made virtually all of his films, and one I'd rather not dwell on. I want to like 'Mirror', believe me. I want to find in its pastoral reveries an evocation of childhood that is timeless and universal, one that acts as a corollary to the too-soon-ended childhood depicted in his first film. But I'm afraid I find 'Mirror' an artily self-conscious and inscrutable film and the irony remains that Tarkovsky's most personal film - the one closest to his own life - is also his most lifeless.

Postscript to the Herzog-fest

Hans A. over at Quiet Cool has posted an absolutely spot-on review of Herzog's slab of gothic poeticism, 'Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht'. It's one of the best pieces of writing I've come across on this mysterious, chilling, beautiful and unforgettable film.

The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner

This is one of Herzog's finest documentaries, in the top tier alongside 'Little Dieter Needs to Fly' and 'Grizzly Man'. Like those films, it is defined by the person it's about. Like those films, it could only have been made by Werner Herzog.

The title itself is pure Herzog: 'The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner'. Kind of makes it sound like a documentary about woodwork, doesn't it? You'd be forgiven for thinking that the "great ecstasy" of the title referred to a particularly well-honed chisel or a piece of the finest mahogany. Nothing of the kind; the great ecstasy of our titular woodcarver is, in fact, ski-jumping. Which is mentioned absolutely nowhere in the title. Carving, which is, features in exactly one (very short) scene, just after the opening credits, and is never referenced again.

Like I said, pure Herzog.

'The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner' documents Walter Steiner's participation in ski-jumping championships in 1973 and 1974, in which he outclasses all and sundry. And not by hair's-breadth distances, either. In his most spectacular jump, Steiner covers 179 metres at a speed of 140mph, 10 metres in excess of the previous best. His landing is awkward, however, and he falls and goes tumbling. Helped up, Steiner seems self-conscious in the presence of the cameras and hurries away, weaving unsteadily. There is some speculation as to whether this is the end of his career as a ski-jumper. However, he proves the doomsayers wrong and completes another jump the same day. In this emotional and gripping sequence, Herzog captures the athlete's moment of crisis. He also captures his passion, his introspection and his quiet humanity.

More so, perhaps, than any other subject, films about sport - documentary or otherwise - depend to a degree greater than their actual quality or success as examples of film-making upon the audience's interest in the sport in question. Herzog is deeply passionate about ski-jumping ("I literally grew up on skis," he recounts in 'Herzog on Herzog'). Me, I've always been more interested in movies and music and literature than sport; short of occasionally watching the snooker, I'm not a sports fan at all. I had no knowledge of or interest in ski-jumping before I saw 'The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner'. And yet I find it compelling; fascinating.

This is due entirely to Herzog's decision to film the jumps at speeds of between four and five hundred frames per second (as opposed to the normal speed twenty-four frames per second). The resulting footage is slo-mo to the extreme. A jump of just seconds' duration, Steiner's momentum almost a blur, is replayed as a heart-stopping, awe-inspiring, visually poetic journey of a minute or more. 'The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner' is full of these kind of shots, Steiner seeming to hang in the air, body inclined so far forward as to be almost parallel with his skis, trees and the snow-carpeted landscape drifting beneath him, the sky his witness.

This is not the documentary form as an exercise in realism. There is nothing of Cinéma Vérité here. Instead, 'The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner' is arguably the first instance of Herzog the documentarist striving for what he would later describe as "ecstatic truth". The sight of Steiner flying through the air in poetic and ethereal slo-mo is blatantly not realistic - speed is critical to momentum and distance covered and therefore a critical part of ski-jumping - but the grace of the man in flight, the emphasis on the magnitude of the jump itself, the look on his face (the great ecstasy of the title): this is the truth Herzog seeks. And finds.

Werner Herzog's most maverick moments

In no particular order, and the only criteria being that I can't imagine these being attributable to any other film-maker, these are my ten favourite, most quinessential Herzog moments:

1) 'Aguirre, Wrath of God' - with the project doomed if its lead actor departed the jungle location, Herzog responded to Klaus Kinski threatening to pack up his things and board the next boat leaving for civilisation by assuring him that he had a rifle and nine bullets; eight of them would be in Kinski before he reached the first bend in the river, the ninth he would save for himself. Kinski decided to stay and finish shooting the film.

2) 'La Soufriere' - a Caribbean island's on the verge of destruction when a live volcano suddenly goes off the seismic scale. The islanders depart. The politicians and the police depart. The scientists measuring the volcano's activity depart. What does Herzog do? Round up a couple of cameramen and fly out there!

3) 'Fitzcarraldo' - shucking off the money men's suggestion that the film's centre-piece be achieved using a model boat in a greenhouse, Herzog has his cast and crew haul an honest-to-god steamship over a freakin' mountain!

4) 'Heart of Glass' - deciding that a dream-like atmosphere best suits this tale of a glass-works going out of business and causing the fiscal ruination of the town dependent on it, Herzog puts his cast under hypnosis.

5) 'Little Dieter Needs to Fly' - recreating Dieter Dengler's capture by the VC, Herzog eschews a simple "talking heads" account of the incident from Dengler himself, and spurns the docu-drama route of restaging key points of the narrative in a very polite, formal, more-tea-vicar BBC kind of way. Instead, he takes Dengler back to the jungle, handcuffs him, and has some big bastards shove him heavy-handedly through the foliage. Result: best documentary of the last two decades.

6) 'Even Dwarfs Started Small' - realising he would be putting his vertically-challenged cast through the ropes, he agreed that after the shoot was over he'd jump into a cactus field. The dwarfs did their scenes. The shoot concluded, Herzog threw himself happily into a field full of cactii.

7) 'The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser' - jettisoned any attempt at historical verisimilitude by casting mid-40s street musician Bruno S, as the 16-year-old Kaspar Hauser.

8) 'Woyzeck' - playing the hapless and much-put-upon soldier, Klaus Kinski decided that the opening sequence would benefit from the actor playing his drill sergeant giving him a real kicking. Herzog, making no attempt to dissuade either performer, filmed said kicking.

9) 'Stroszek' - ended this blackly comic tale of alienation and failure (yes, I know I just used "blackly comic", "alienation" and "failure" in the same sentence; trust me on this) with an interminable shot of a dancing chicken that so affronted DoP Thomas Mauch that Herzog had to explain the image thusly: "This is something very big. It looks unobstrusive when you see it with the naked eye in front of you, but don't you see that there is something big about it, something beyond what we are?" Mauch's response is unrecorded, but he filmed the chicken.

10) The Minnesota Declaration - declared war on Cinéma Vérité, describing at as "a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants".

Conquest of the Useless

Can we agree that 'Fitzcarraldo' is Herzog's magnum opus, the most perfectly Herzogian thing in his filmography, and all the proof that one needs regarding the lengths the man is prepared to go in order to realise his vision?

We can? Thank you.

'Conquest of the Useless' (subtitled Reflections from the making of 'Fitzcarraldo') comprises Herzog's diaries, spanning June 1979 to December 1981, and documents the trials, tribulations and tendencies of its director to go native. Early entries see Herzog as Francis Ford Coppola's guest ("Coppola ... is displaying a strange combination of self-pity, neediness, professional work ethic, and sentimentality") while he labours on the script and deals with the moneymen:

"The unquestioned assumption is that a plastic model ship will be pulled over a ridge in a studio, or possibly in a botanical garden ... I told them the unquestioned assumption had to be a real steamship being hauled over a real mountain, though not for the sake of realism but for the stylization characteristic of grand opera. The pleasantries we exchanged from then on wore a thin coating of frost."

This is on page five. By page six (24 June 1979) we're in the jungle. It's not until page 117 (6 January 1981) that Herzog gets the first shot of 'Fitzcarraldo' in the can. 'Conquest of the Useless' is a very different beast to the usual "making of" text. Herzog's extended pre-production and location scouting in the jungle occupies nearly the first half of the book. He dwells less on the film project, writing instead of what he sees around him, of the indigenious population he meets, of lives the way they are lived in the most primitive of surroundings. When he writes of these things he is equal parts documentarist, participant and poet. In his prose as in the images of his films, Herzog brings to life landscapes and people most of us will never encounter, never see with our own eyes; but his account never feels as if it is being written on our behalf (Paul Theroux, great writer though he is, typifies this tendency), nor that he is playing up local colour for its own sake. Herzog is a poet of the extreme because, for him, the extreme is ordinary. Put him in a normal, ostensibly civilised scenario and he codifies it as something alien - evidenced by his slightly surreal depiction of San Francisco in the early entries.

Oh, did I say somewhere in that last paragraph that Herzog shot the first frame of 'Fitzcarraldo' in January 1981? Let me rephrase that. He shot the first frame of 'Fitzcarraldo' Version 1.0. Several weeks' worth of footage were shot with the original cast - Jason Robards as the eponymous would-be rubber baron, and Mick Jagger as his demented henchman - some of which remains, such as Fitzcarraldo's belltower declaration that he will build his opera house, and is featured in the documentary 'My Best Fiend'. It is interesting to speculate how 'Fitzcarraldo' starring Robards and Jagger would have turned out (the belltower scene suggests it could have been inspired and cringeingly embarrassing in roughly equal parts), but it wasn't to be.

Robards emerges as almost terrified by the jungle and appalled at the lack of creature comforts (though we have to remember that these are the perceptions of a man for whom the extreme is second nature; I'd probably have shared some of Robards' opinions). It's clear Herzog had no liking for him, even before Robards absconds, citing medical concerns, and damn near scuppers the production. Herzog's take on Jagger is undecided, admiring him for mucking in and driving fellow cast and crew members to their accommodation, then despairing of him for gloating over how much money he can get for some photos of a bikini'd Jerry Hall taken on set. Herzog sees this as the commercialisation of his vision and isn't happy about it.

After Robards departs, Herzog and co. resolutely remain in the jungle, clinging to what is left of the production. Two months later, Klaus Kinski takes on the role and filming resumes. Anyone who has seen 'My Best Fiend' will know that Kinski was Herzog's muse, nemesis and alter ego all rolled into one. They were bound together by a creative imperative, the fruitfulness of which was only equalled by its antagony. Their previous tropical collaboration, 'Aguirre, Wrath of God', culminated in Herzog forestalling Kinski's announced departure mid-shoot by threatening to empty a rifle into him. Both men must have known 'Fitzcarraldo' would be round two.

Put it this way: the fucking steamship enjoyed plainer sailing!

And yet Herzog is remarkably fair when he writes about Kinski. Sure, there are the expected tantrums, arguments and bouts of egomania, but equally Herzog writes of Kinski like a brother. This aspect of the latter half of 'Conquest of the Useless' proves as affecting as it is compelling. But what really makes the book such a wonderful and unmissable read is that the film, the ship, the crazed actor, the lunatic logistics or the director himself never force their way to the front of the narrative; the real star of Herzog's memoir is the jungle.

La Soufriere

This is the kind of project that, as Paul Cronin points out in his superb and life-affirming book 'Herzog on Herzog' (Faber & Faber, 2002), cemented Herzog's "public persona as a risk-taking madman".

To contextualise: a Caribbean island is being evacuated as a live volcano rumbles and growls and emits noxious fumes in the background. Scientists, logging extreme siesmic activity, are already packing up their equipment and preparing (to put it bluntly) to get the fuck out of Dodge. The island's main township, nestling pretty much right under the volcano, becomes a relic, a memorial, even though opinion as to how long it still has left is uncertain; perhaps only days. Word filters out, however, that one particular individual is refusing to leave. Do you:

(a) shake your head and think dumb fucking guy;

(b) secretly admire the man, finding something self-destructively romantic about his courage/stubbornness/foolhardiness [delete as applicable];

(c) rope in a couple of cameramen, fly out to the island and see if you can get an interview with him or failing that document the death of a deserted community?

If you answered (a), you're normal. If you answered (b), you're normal but you've got the soul of a poet. If you answered (c), you're Werner Herzog. Dragging DoPs Jorg Schmidt-Reitwein and Ed Lachman along with him, our man goes exploring while the volcano foments above him.

He finds a ghost town, but one that still bares traces of occupation: abandoned buildings, their air conditioners and (in at least one instance) TVs left running. Traffic lights continue to operate. The police station is deserted. "It was a comfort to us not to have the law hanging around," Herzog muses, sounding like a film-making bandit. At large in a town that is otherwise the province of animals roaming wild - some of them starving; even dying - Herzog captures eerily poetic shots of abandonment, emptiness, the evidence of a society. Society's clutter takes on a surreal, even slightly macabre element, once that society has withdrawn.

Leaving the silent streets behind them, Herzog, Schmidt-Reitwein and Lachman drive across country, towards the volcano. Let me just repeat that. Towards the mother-loving volcano! Demonstrating a belated approximation of common sense, they beat a hasty retreat as toxic gases drift their way ... Or maybe not. The wind changes and they merrily head straight back!

Shortly afterwards, they find the gentlemen who spurned the evacuation. He's in the company of two other guys and an heroically unconcerned cat. "I am waiting for my death," the man states, without a trace of melodrama or self-aggrandizement; "where would I go anyway?" It's a sentiment his companions echo. All three profess to being unafraid of death. Herzog cuts straight from his interview with them to a shot of the volcano, its roiling vapours beginning to subside.

In what is both the most comic and poignant moment in 'La Soufriere', Herzog intones "The volcano did not explode." His voiceover takes on a borderline regretful timbre. "Never before in the history of vulcanology were signals of such magnitude measured and yet nothing happened." As Wagner booms with magnificent irony on the soundtrack (Siegfried's Funeral March from 'Gotterdammerung'), Herzog admits the film's denouement must perforce be an embarrassment: "a report of an inevitable catastrophe that did not take place".

How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck?

Subtitled Observations on a New Language, 'How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck?' is a documentary on a cattle auctioneers' world championship that took place in New Holland, Pennsylvania in the mid-70s. As such, it contains long passages of portly Texan or mid-western types with twangy accents talking very fast. Very fast indeed. So fast that although there's no doubt that actual words are involved the overall effect, certainly for the uninitiated (and by the uninitiated I mean anyone who has never bid on a head of cattle), is that of complete gibberish. But gibberish that carries its own rhythms, its own musicality.

Basically, what an auctioneer does is call the opening figure then work it up incrementally - according to bids that may be placed in the form of a raised hand, a lifted auction catalogue or piece of paper, the drumming of fingertips on the leg, or even a movement of the eyes - until a final bid is made, whereupon the sale is confirmed. I've only ever sat in on an auction once, and that was for used cars in Derby in England. Which is a long way from cattle country, and the auctioneer spoke a lot slower. True, all the words ran into each other - "Whaddamahbidonthisnicelittlemotoranyonestartmeatahundredcanahgeddahundred" - but you could still make out what he was saying and how fast he spoke was modulated by how fast and competitive the bidding was.

The contestants in 'How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck?' (the championship was adjudicated at a live auction, each participant getting little more than three minutes to do their thing) seem to reel off sequences of incrementally increasing figures, deeming a sale made almost at random, while the bidders appear almost to be struggling to keep up! Sheer speed of verbal delivery emerges unambiguously as their raison d'etre. "Fascinating and rather frightening," is how Herzog describes it in his typically calm and reflective voiceover. He speculates as to how church liturgies came about, clearly drawing a parallel but making no bones that the liturgy of the auction room is the language of commerce.

In the film's most humane scenes, Herzog juxtaposes the rampant commercialism of the auction house with a nearby Amish community, finding in their rejection of progress, conflict and competitiveness a lifestyle that, though anachronistic, is entirely laudable. Even for a documentary made thirty years ago, though, this is something of a statement of the obvious. Likewise Herzog's meditations on the hypnotic qualities or the musicality of the auctioneer's art: it's almost a striving to impose meaning when the film says all it needs to by simply recording the motor-mouth absurdity of its subject. It helps that Herzog has one of the most calm and reassuring voices a documentarist has ever been blessed with. Whether he expresses himself in German or English, he speaks with a measured, precisely modulated diction. He speaks slowly.

You might consider Werner Herzog crazy for making a 45-minute film about men who talk unrealistically fast in order to sell cows, most of the dialogue of which is incomprehensible, but it's his subjects - with the possible exception of the eventual winner, the rather personable Steve Liptae - who come off as the crazy ones in comparison.

Herzogiana

It's Werner Herzog's 67th birthday today and given some of the lunatic enterprises he's undertaken in the name of cinema - including flying into an evacuated Caribbean island to film its potential destruction by volcano, and not one but two journies into the heart of darkness with fellow Germanic crazy person Klaus Kinski - it's nothing short of miraculous that he's made it this far.

To celebrate, it's Herzog weekend here at The Agitation of the Mind. I'll be looking at some of his short films, considering his most maverick moments, and burying my head in the newly published 'Conquest of the Useless', Herzog's diaries from the making of 'Fitzcarraldo'. And as soon as the sun is over the yardarm, I'll be cracking open a beer and drinking to the continued good health of one of cinema's most original and inimitable talents.

In an interview last year with Alan Yentob on BBC1, Herzog corrected Yentob's reference to him as "a German". He is, as he pointed out, Bavarian. With this in mind, and my apologies if I've mangled the dialect, Ois Guade zu Deim Geburdstog, Herr Herzog.

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser

The original German title of Werner Herzog's 'The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser' is


which translates as 'Every Man for Himself and God Against All'. I prefer this original title. It's apposite for a study in social hypocrisy and exploitation, even if it does make the film a harder sell!

'The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser' is based on historical events. In 1828, a young man was found on the streets of Nuremberg carrying a letter addressed to the captain of the city's cavalry regiment. The letter, unsigned, stated that Kaspar had been instructed in reading and writing and wanted to join the cavalry. It transpired he could write nothing beyond his name and his vocabulary was limited. What little he could explain indicated he'd spent his life chained up in a cellar. The council initially housed him in a gate tower under the care of a jailer; later, he took up residence with schoolteacher Friedrich Daumer. Public interest in Kaspar turned him into a celebrity-cum-sideshow freak. A much-debated conspiracy theory had him as the hereditary prince of Baden, swapped at birth with a dying baby so the Countess von Hochberg could ensure her son Leopold's ascension to the throne. (Historians have deemed this nonsensical.) Rumours continued to fly when Kaspar was the victim of an apparent attack with a razor in 1829. He died of a stab wound in 1833. His epitaph fuelled the legend: "Here lies Kaspar Hauser, riddle of his time. His birth was unknown, his death mysterious."

Even the most cursory research on Kaspar Hauser (Wikipedia provides a good overview) reveals inconsistencies in his story of a lifetime's incarceration. Historical accounts show him as vain and quarrelsome. It has been suggested, plausibly, that the wounds he sustained from the "attacks" were self-inflicted. A film approaching the Kaspar Hauser story from the perspective that he was a fraud would be a fascinating project.

Herzog, however, considers the legend. And this makes 'The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser' doubly fascinating. Herzog, certainly in his documentaries, pursues what he calls "ecstatic truth". Which is not the same as factual truth. Before this article gets bogged down in semantics, I'll let Herr Herzog himself explain:

"There is a much more profound level of truth than that of everyday reality, for example in the dreams that Kaspar talks of, and it is my job to seek them out ... I am interested in the verifiable historical facts up to a point. But I much prefer to evoke history through atmosphere and the attitude of the characters rather than through anecdotes that may or may not be based on historical fact." (Herzog on Herzog, p. 113). That would be a moral minefield for most directors; for Herzog it's a mission statement.

The most controversial aspect of "ecstatic truth" in 'The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser' is the casting of Bruno S. Kaspar was thought to have been born in 1812, making him 16 when he turned up in Nuremburg. Bruno S. was 42, a self-taught musician whom Herzog had seen in a documentary about street performers in Berlin. I'm not sure what the right word is to describe Bruno S. without sounding patronising. Beaten so severely as a child that he temporarily lost the ability speak, his formative years spent in care homes, institutions and prisons, there remained about him, however, a curious sense of child-like innocence. This single piece of casting is Herzog's masterstroke: Kaspar, if his story is taken at face value, was a boy who had no childhood. Herzog has him played by, essentially, a man-child.

Herzog approaches the material not as the enigma of the English title - no speculation is given to Kaspar's identity or that of his guardian (an eerily shadowy figure in the early scenes) - but as a study of how society behaves towards Kaspar. The authorities question him (his non-response to stimuli is tested by feigned sword parries and a candle flame). The church tries to convert him (when it's established that he has no concept of God, the curt response is "he'll just have to have faith"). Children treat him almost as a plaything, encouraging him to recite nursery rhymes. Labourers mock him, deriving much hilarity from his fear of a chicken. The town council, concerned at how much he's costing them, happily exploit him. A visiting nobleman considers "adopting" him.

Only Daumer and his wife seem interested in Kaspar as a person. And even Daumer's academicism leads to an unfortunate invitation: a professor is summoned to test Kaspar's intellect. This he does by posing a logic question: there are two villages, one whose inhabitants speak only the truth, while the other lot tell only lies; meeting a person at a crossroads between villages, what is the one question that can determine which village they're from? It is of course, "Would you answer no if I asked you if you came from the liars' village?" (The answer forces the liar into a double negative that betrays him.) Kaspar posits a different question: "Are you a tree-frog?" The simplicity is brilliant: the liar perforce has to say that he is, therefore proving himself a liar. The professor rubbishes Kaspar: "Your question describes, it doesn't deduce", adding - in what for me is the film's key line - "In logic and mathematics we do not understand things. We reason and deduce."

Herzog's Kasper Hauser is a metaphor for honest, unpretentious simplicity in a world defined by social strictures and scientific enquiry (the closing scenes have a group of surgeons remove and probe Kaspar's brain while a clerk chortles over the potential importance of his report on the autopsy). The Kaspar Hauser of Herzog's film may be the legend, but there's not a trace of hagiography or 19th century conspiracy theory in sight; instead, by eschewing mere facts, Herzog posits some probing questions about the human condition.

Fata Morgana

'Fata Morgana' is a film in three parts (entitled "The Creation", "Paradise" and "The Golden Age") which consists of footage shot in the African desert. Such commentary/narration as there is comprises readings from the sacred Mayan text 'Popol Vuh'. As well as landscapes, townships and abandoned military and industrial machinery, Herzog and his small crew (four men including the director) come across indigenous people as well as a smattering of eccentric westerners including a schoolteacher who instructs her charges in German. The sentence they're learning when Herzog films them is "Blitzkreig ist Wahnsinn".

'Fata Morgana' is hypnotic and, appropriately for a film whose very title means "mirage", hallucinatory. There's no adequate way of writing about it. More than any other film I think I've seen, 'Fata Morgana' exists on its own terms, refuses to define itself, and is its own achievement.

Here are some images, punctuated with Herzog's own words:


The first scene of the film is made up of eight shots of eight different airplanes landing one after the other. I had the feeling that audiences who were still watching by the sixth or seventh landing would stay to the end.

All the machinery ... was part of an abandoned Algerian army depot. I liked the desolation and the remains of civilization that were out there.

It was as if I woke up after a night of drunkenness and experienced a moment of real clarity. All I had to do was capture the images I saw in the desert and I would have my film.

Maybe more than any other films I have made it is one that needs to be completed by the audience, which means all feelings, thoughts and interpretations are welcome.

Encounters at the End of the World

The great thing about Werner Herzog (or rather, one of the many great things – great and weird and wonderful – about Werner Herzog) is that he doesn’t really adhere to any set definition of what cinema is, its construction or what it should do as an art form. He simply gets on with making his kind of cinema. And Herzog makes unique films. There aren’t many directors of whom you can say this – Powell and Pressburger for their romantic excesses; Ozu, at the other end of the spectrum, for his calmness and classicism – but Herzog’s films look different to other directors. Isolate just a few frames from virtually anything he’s made and it would immediately be apparent that those few frames were from a Herzog film. A film nobody else could have made.

Let’s go further. Werner Herzog doesn’t really adhere to any set definition of the documentary, either. On the face of it, this ought to be simple. Documentary: a non-fiction film that documents a specific subject. Hence “documentary”. Hell, you can even incorporate fictional scenes – from historically accurate re-enactments to pure supposition – and call it a “drama-documentary”. Easy to define, yet remarkably flexible in the approaches one can take. You can make documentaries that use only music and/or landscape. You can have one that’s just a blue screen with a voice-over. You can be subjective or objective. You can call it a documentary but deliver a polemic (anything by Michael Moore) or a work of propaganda (Riefenstahl’s ‘Triumph of the Will’).

Yet when Werner Herzog makes one, you might as well throw away the word documentary because no matter how flexible, how unconstrained in terms of cinematic language or construction, it’s still a definition. And definitions don’t work with Herzog, even here where ‘Encounters at the End of the World’ is ostensibly one of the Bavarian director’s more accessible works.

I say accessible because it’s not obtuse (or baffling) as ‘Fata Morgana’, not as impressionistic as ‘Lessons of Darkness’, and not as emotionally devastating in its search for what Herzog terms “ecstatic truth” as ‘Little Dieter Needs to Fly’. In a nutshell, and Herzog himself sets this out in his typically dry voice-over at the start, this is what ‘Encounters at the End of the World’ is about:

Inspired by the stunning underwater photography of his friend Henry Kaiser, Herzog travels to McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica under whose gargantuan ice floes Kaiser’s footage was shot. Herzog meets scientists, engineers and eccentrics and determines that he doesn’t want to make “another film about penguins”.

In fact, it’s more easy to categorise what ‘Encounters’ isn’t about. It’s not about global warming, climate change or mankind’s impact on the planet, even though the way Herzog films the wreckage of a helicopter or a juggernaut trundling through the shanty-like buildings that comprise McMurdo makes an environmental point as effectively as anything in ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ or ‘The 11th Hour’. It’s not about the nature of the research carried out there, even though Herzog gives over chunks of screen time to talking heads whose expositional verbiage threatens to become white noise. It’s not about how you have to be a little bit crazy to work at McMurdo, even though Herzog unblinkingly films a woman contorting herself inside a piece of hand luggage, and two middle-aged scientists with electric guitars throwing shapes against the implacable expanse of the ice fields. And it’s not about penguins, even though the most memorable shot in the film features one.

Ah, yes: the penguin. Despite his disparaging voice-over, Herzog can’t avoid them and penguins totter inevitably into his film. An interview with ecologist David Ainley, in which Herzog blandly eggs the scientist on to a discussion of penguin sexuality (apparently a form of prostitution has been observed on the floes), segues into footage of a lone penguin breaking from its comrades and tottering off in the wrong direction. Ahead, hundreds of miles of nothing, rising to massive glacial peaks. Herzog’s camera frames the frozen wasteland, the penguin receding to a tiny dot as it wobbles off to almost certain death.

I started this blog because of Werner Herzog. He was the subject of my first half dozen or so posts and more than a few subsequently. I’d be lying if I said writing about his work was easy. You can talk about the visuals – few film-makers have ventured as far afield as Herzog and come back with such a striking testament to the danger as well as the grandeur of the natural world. You can talk about the inspired lunacy of some of his projects. You can mention opera, rivers, flight, deserts, grizzly bears and now a suicidal penguin … but you’d just be writing lists of things at that point.

Towards the end of the film, Herzog speculates as to what aliens, arriving on earth long after the disappearance of the human race, would make of the remains of McMurdo; what questions they would ask. They would probably find the answers if they stumbled across Herzog’s filmography – or at least start asking the questions that mattered. In its own demented way, that lone penguin says something about the human race that’s equal parts poignant, pathetic and haunting.

New Year's resolutions

First and foremost, a Happy and Prosperous New Year to all.

Here’s to a 2009 that gives us better news (enough with the ‘credit crunch’ doom and gloom, already; I’m convinced this any-minute-now recession would evaporate and the economy take an upswing if only the media would shut the fuck up about it) and better movies.

Here on Planet Agitation, I think I’ve just about got myself into a writing discipline that balances work on my novel-in-progress (about 22,000 words completed thus far) with new material for the blog. And with a few dirt-cheap January sale DVD acquisitions, I won’t be short of things to write about.

My aim is to post at least two articles a week (although I’m giving another shout to anyone who wants to contribute anything: any and all cinema related musings to opentosuggestions.neil@lycos.co.uk, please), with the weekend article given over to Personal Faves. Next up: cinema’s finest claymation double-act.

Later this month, on January 22nd to be exact, I’ll be celebrating the birthday of one of my favourite actresses – the oft underrated Diane Lane – by kicking off a three-day Diane-Fest (or a four-dayer if I can get hold of a copy of ‘The Big Town’ by then).

In February, the Second Annual Hitch-Fest will include ‘North By Northwest’ from the Personal Faves list. File under ‘fest’ during the following months these luminaries: Werner Herzog, Luis Bunuel and Pedro Almodovar; not to mention, during the latter stages of ’09 the obligatory Third Annual Dirk-Fest.

Just let me recover from this hangover and deal with going back to work tomorrow, then it’s back to business …

Grizzly Man

Werner Herzog has always been drawn to characters driven by obsessiveness and madness, as his six-film relationship with Klaus Kinski (himself not the most well-adjusted of individuals) testifies. ‘Aguirre, Wrath of God’ and ‘Fitzcarraldo’, both born of this collaboration, are films of almost operatic grandeur. But Herzog has also proved a clear-sighted documentarist.

(Um, when I say "clear-sighted", what I mean is Herzog goes hell for leather getting to the emotional and aesthetic truth of his subject - and if that means staging a few scenes, then fuck it, that's exactly what Herr Herzog will do. We'll return to this subject when ‘Little Dieter Needs to Fly’ crops up on the personal faves list.)

In ‘Grizzly Man’, Herzog finds a real-life subject the equal of any of his fictive protagonists. Timothy Treadwell spent thirteen summers in the "grizzly maze" of Alaska’s Katmai National Park, often directly contravening the regulations on camping and non-interaction with the wildlife. He shot over 100 hours of video footage, focusing as much on himself as on the bears.

Reviews of the film trot out the same descriptions of Treadwell: "environmentalist", "troubled loner". Herzog’s documentary also shows him as a lachrymose sentimentalist ("I love you," he croons to the bears, whom he gives babyish names like ‘Mr Chocolate’); a paranoid fantasist (encountering a team of photographers on a wildlife shoot, he immediately decries them as poachers; a smiley face graffiti'd on a rock engenders a flight of paranoia that would be funny if ‘Grizzly Man’ were a work of fiction) and a rampant egomaniac (he deems the Katmai National Park "my land" and declares himself "a kind warrior").

Herzog never entirely calls it either way, though. True, he accuses of Treadwell of "crossing the line" during an expletive-ridden rant about the Katmai National Park authorities; but he also delights in the (almost accidental) visual poetry of some of Treadwell's footage. Herzog is too much of a film-maker, too much of a crazed adventurer himself, not to appreciate Treadwell's commitment. He's also too intelligent, too much of a realist, not to recognise Treadwell's naivety.

That Treadwell was killed by a bear is not so much irony as inevitability. A native Alaskan, interviewed by Herzog, advocates "Our people have lived with the bears for 700 years - they stay away from us, we stay away from them." A jolting cut from Treadwell’s childish musings to footage of two grizzlies locked in combat reinforces the point: these are huge, powerful animals that kill for food. Respect them, yes, but don’t try to play with them.

When another interviewee assets that Treadwell got the death "he deserved", it sounds harsh. By the end of the documentary, you realise it’s simply a statement of fact. "This is not a nature film," Herzog says at the outset. Very true. ‘Grizzly Man’ is a study in madness and just as compelling as if Kinski were in the lead role.

Interrupting the Shyamalan-a-thon ...

... which, frankly, I’ve been procrastinating over. I watched ‘Signs’ last weekend and have been implementing blogging-avoidance strategies ever since – and with only the pompous seriousness and house-of-cards twist of ‘The Village’ on the horizon, my motivation isn’t just ebbing but doing a pretty good impersonation of a fully-fledged drought.

But, still … interrupting the Shyamalan-a-thon:

Kudos to the BBC for last night’s ‘Imagine’ documentary on Werner Herzog. A joy to see Alan Yentob, who frequently puts himself at the centre of the programme (he all but elbowed the – admittedly reclusive – Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami out of the picture in last week’s programme), getting put in his place by the great director. “As a German living in Hollywood – ” Yentob begins, only for Herzog to correct him on two counts: he’s Bavarian and he lives in LA, not Hollywood. There is a difference.

The documentary itself was a bit scattershot, trying to reference too many of Herzog’s films (he’s made over 50) during its 60-minute running time; nonetheless, a through-line emerged of Herzog as a chronicler of the extreme, be it extreme conditions of filming (‘Aguirre: the Wrath of God’, ‘Fitzcarraldo’) or extreme personalities (Timothy Treadwell in ‘Grizzly Man’; Klaus Kinski in every film he made for Herzog); a man whose themes, concerns and images resonate down a four-decade filmography; a man attuned to the physicality and landscapes of the locations he shoots.

The payoff was fantastic, Herzog recounting a legendary incident during the filming of ‘Aguirre’: with ten days of principle photography remaning, Kinski, in one of his archetypal bouts of mania, had packed his belongings and was ready to zoom off in a speedboat. Herzog assured him he’d be shot before he reached the first bend in the river.

Dispelling the myth that he’d spent the film directing Kinski from behind a shotgun, Herzog recalled, “I didn’t have a gun in my hand when I told him this, but he knew I meant it.” (Incidentally, Herzog speaks in a very precise manner, his tone of voice always reasoned and calm; there is not a trace of hyperbole about him.)

Yentob, briefly speechless, responded, “And you seem like a gentle man.”

“I was very gentle with Kinski,” Herzog replied, “I gave him a choice. I would not have shot him without giving him a choice.”

Wunderbar! A large glass of Riesling was raised to Herr Herzog at chez Fulwood last night.

Retail therapy

Indulged myself in HMV this afternoon: 7-disc set box set of the Martin Scorsese-produced documentary series 'The Blues', the 6-DVD Billy Connolly Ultimate Box Set Collection (my favourite comedian after Bill Hicks) and a 14-disc set of films by Alfred Hitchcock, the latter a snip at £25.

So, with a total of 27 new discs in the collection, and the Werner Herzog box set still unexplored beyond 'Even Dwarfs Started Small', my only quandry was what to watch first.

Then, logging onto the net and my homepage opening to today's news round-up, I learned of the recent death of Suzanne Pleshette, a much underrated actress probably best known for her TV work.

One of her best known big-screen outings was in Hitchcock's 'The Birds'. Fobbed off with a lesser role while the significantly less talented but (crucially) blonde Tippi Hedren bagged the female lead, the brunette Pleshette famously commented "The blonde he gives a mink, I get a housecoat." As pithy a summarising comment on Hitch's choice of leading ladies as I've ever heard.

I'll be watching 'The Birds' tonight and raising a glass of tempranillo to Ms Pleshette's memory.

The Hitch-fest starts tomorrow.

Coming attractions

Between my order for the Dario Argento box set finally arriving and my partner buying me the second Werner Herzog box set (featuring 'Even Dwarves Started Small', 'Fata Morgana', 'The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser', 'Heart of Glass' and ' Stroszek'), I've got plenty of films to write about.

But between moving house and an imminent mini-break in Scotland for the New Year (Hogmanay with the Scots - methinks some drinking is going to be done), I've not had the chance to watch them, or to update this blog.

Normal service will be resumed (hopefully) during the second week of January.

In the meantime, here's hoping everyone had a Merry Christmas; and my best wishes for a Happy New Year.

Rescue Dawn

I don’t really need to write about ‘Rescue Dawn’. Tim’s review on Antagony & Ecstasy nails it.

Herzog’s source material – the plight of German-American pilot Dieter Dengler, shot down over Laos, imprisoned by the non-Geneva-Convention-friendly Vietcong and forced to survive inhospitable jungle conditions after he escapes – is something the director has already dealt with in his astounding documentary ‘Little Dieter Needs to Fly’.

True, re-approaching the story as a Hollywood-backed (and therefore decently budgeted) feature film means that Herzog can tackle it on a much broader canvas. And what he delivers is a compelling, well-made, brilliantly-acted slice of mainstream film-making.

But, as Tim pointedly asks, Who the holy fuck wants Werner Herzog to be a consummate professional?

If all this sounds like I’m gearing up to give ‘Rescue Dawn’ a slating, that’s not the case. There’s much to admire: it’s pacy, graced with terrific performances (Herzog manages to elicit a performance from Steve Zahn that doesn’t involve goofing around and being a wise-ass – and that’s saying something!), and is refreshingly non-judgemental in its observational portrayal of the VC, lifting the film far beyond the usual ‘grunts and gooks’ characterisations that typify American productions of this ilk.

And yet … and yet … this is Herzog in the jungle. This should be ‘Aguirre’ with planes, ‘Fitzcarraldo’ goes ’Nam. What it is, ultimately, is a dichotomy. It’s simultaneously one of the best things I’ve seen in a multiplex this year and arguably the most ordinary thing in Herzog’s filmography.