Werner Herzog speaks.
Germany was reborn as a blandscape, its rebuilt cities resembling American middle-class suburbs punctuated with bits of Baroque and Gothic architecture. As for Germany's neighbor and partner in the Reich, Austria, one could write a history of Austrian culture in the 20th century with the title From Arnold Schoenberg to Arnold Schwarzenegger, duly noting that both of these iconic figures wound up in California.
Werner Herzog is also a Californian now, but he has spent much of his career as a re-animator of deep, old currents of German culture via the young art of film. Together with R. W. Fassbinder and Wim Wenders, he is one of the leading directors of the movement known as New German Cinema, which began to emerge in the 1960s. In contrast to Fassbinder's corrosive social commentaries and Wenders' rock-influenced Americophilia, Herzog has been the most traditionally German in his concerns, even while requiring six continents to make his films. All the while he has been building his own legend as an outsized, daredevil personality-a superman of cinema.
Or has he? "Most of what you've heard about Werner Herzog is untrue," states Paul Cronin on the first page of Herzog on Herzog. "More than any other director?the number of false rumors and downright lies disseminated about the man and his films is truly astonishing." According to Cronin, Herzog is just a modest, pleasant and humorous fellow with a remarkable artistic gift. This book is both an editor's attempt to set the record straight and a director's commentary on his own life and work.
It turns out, however, that many of those crazy stories about Herzog are true, or at least partly so. Yes, he did threaten to shoot Klaus Kinski on the set of Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Yes, he did eat his own shoe as a result of losing a bet to Errol Morris (this tasty event is recorded in Les Blank's short documentary Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe). Yes, he did grow up in a remote mountain village and made his first phone call at the age of 17. Yes, he did hypnotize the cast of Heart of Glass. Cronin asserts that "he didn't put anyone's life at risk while making Fitzcarraldo," but if Herzog's account of the shoot is accurate, the crew sustained a veritable emergency room's worth of life-threatening injuries. And yes, he did throw himself onto a cactus after the making of Even Dwarfs Started Small-his way of apologizing to his Lilliputian cast for the pain he had put them through.
Another of Cronin's debatable assertions is that "his work is not in the tradition of the German romanticists." Herzog himself drops a hint in this direction, though only while complaining about the simplistic ways in which foreigners categorize his work. The evidence suggests otherwise. Some of his best-known films-The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Woyzeck, Nosferatu-clearly draw on German Romantic images and themes. Nosferatu, his remake of the F. W. Murnau vampire classic, boasts landscapes out of Caspar David Friedrich and music by Wagner. And his characterization of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser could have come straight from Rousseau: "Kaspar's story is about what civilization does to us all, how it deforms and destroys us by bringing us into societal line?this stultifying and staid bourgeois existence."
Less obviously, his Latin American epics (Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo) revive romanticism by displacing it geographically. The Spanish megalomaniac chasing after El Dorado and the Irish adventurer dragging a ship over a mountain, are consumed by their obsessions in a way that would have made Nietzsche or Wagner proud. German themes that would once have found expression in the Alps are played out in the Andes instead, by Europeans of other nationalities.
Fortunately, once the actual interviews start, Cronin asks intelligent, sensible questions, lets his subject talk and stays mostly out of the way. The book proceeds chronologically, which for the most part makes it easy to follow, although more stringent editing would have been helpful. For instance, on page 135 Cronin says, "We talked earlier about how German Romanticism may or may not have influenced your work," even though the subject has barely been mentioned up to this point. And Cronin's hands-off approach isn't always fruitful. When he says to Herzog, "Many critics seem to have found themes running throughout your work over the years," it would be nice to know the identity of some of those critics and the nature of some of those themes.
But these are minor objections, simply because a book in which Werner Herzog does 90 percent of the talking is not going to be dull. Two main themes emerge from his rambles: the importance of craftsmanship (as opposed to some vague notion of "art") and filmmaking as a physical, even athletic discipline.
For a director who hails from the world of the "art film"-that melange of brooding characters, elliptical storytelling and subtitles that embitters the popcorn of American moviegoers-Herzog's approach is remarkably non-intellectual. At one point he calls himself an "illiterate" and says that his "ideology is simply the films themselves and my ability to make them." He insists on the necessity of being open to chance and the inspirations that brings. The extreme conditions under which Fitzcarraldo was shot "would inevitably create situations that nobody had foreseen and so would bring life to the film." Finally, he claims that he is not an artist. "Rather, I am a craftsman and feel very close to the medieval artisans." (Not mentioned is the fact that the Romantics also honored and idealized the traditional craftsman.)
Why does he feel so close to them? Because they "had a true feeling for the physical materials they were working with." Not only does filmmaking require that kind of physical instinct, it makes demands that would tire a decathlete. Herzog goes through the catalogue of injuries and hardships sustained by himself and his assistants like a soldier proudly enumerating his war wounds. Strewn through the text are broken bones, arrow wounds, even a frozen mustache (sustained on the terrifying Argentinian peak of Cerro Torre). Furthermore, Herzog insists on the superiority of walking over other forms of travel: "The volume and depth and intensity of the world is something that only those on foot will ever experience."
Herzog's detractors bring a variety of charges against him. The most common are probably egomania and eccentricity. "Werner Herzog is so busy making his myth that he no longer bothers to make movies," says the critic Dave Kehr. Others consider his films' intellectual underpinnings too flimsy a support for their grandiose images. He's been accused of estheticizing violence and taking a superficial approach to social and historical contexts. But this is just what we might expect from a director who avoids intellectualism and elevates craftsmanship above all.
Whatever your views, Herzog on Herzog will give you the most complete look at its subject's life and work that currently exists in English. It's also an engrossing record of the glories and tribulations involved in making movies. And it's an account of how cinema-an art form without deep roots in the past, which experienced a great efflorescence in Germany during the liberal Weimar period-gave German artists an opportunity to start over, and the chance to inspire the world once again.