Herzog, for me, serves as a signpost on the road to realization, his films and the mythology he works within, a kind of password to that half-remembered clarity lately lacking in my aesthetic life. I can hypnotize myself if only for a short while whenever I take on one of his captured dreams and whether it be a feeling of joy from the recognition of what he calls ‘ecstatic truth’, or whether it be merely the relief from solitude that such shared remembrances bring: it is to my life a basic necessity. The signposts appear sparsely, in art and out. No matter how long I may stand before an uninspired masterpiece this same spark will not show, it has no patience for theory nor authority. Even if this realization is nothing but a charade of the subconscious, or a tick of the superego, I still obey. Herzog by any other name would still be Herzog.
Once, Herzog was merely endearing. He was an adventurer with stimulating tales to tell, and though he could steady his camera and squeeze a shot out, the finished product was often nothing more than a memento. His longtime editor had a similar disdain for the product and would lash out at him about the quality of material she had to work with. It is very easy to understand how to many, Herzog’s films are tedious endeavors elusive of any particular value. Likewise it is just as easy to give him a pass because someone like Roger Ebert has nothing but praise to bestow upon him. I find it challenging to pierce the grammar of filmmaking employed in something like Fritzcarraldo or Aguirre, Wrath of God; it almost wants you to underestimate it, and refuses to hold your hand.
Although film literate, Herzog sets his scenes with only the most tacit concern for stylization, letting the story direct itself in the ebb and flow that he sees fit. Filmmaking to him is ‘athletics over aesthetics’, and it is crucial for the life force of the film that one feels embedded in the story due in part to the tacit understanding that Herzog himself is embedded, that things are really happening and the camera is protruding into the drama. The screen is not a frame, or not merely a frame, it is a conduit to another world, a world of inner landscapes that depict our dreams, our ‘ecstatic truths’ that go so often unspoken and unaccounted for. Verisimilitude is not the aim, historical accuracy is not aim, and neither is stylization: the aim is to make dreams worthy of dreamers. That’s it. If a character’s costume inexplicably changes between shots, so be it. If the wake of the camera’s boat circling a raft appears due to the effort to capture a shot, so be it. If these sorts of things affect your experience, then Herzog’s films are not for you. His films come from a neurotically earnest place, a hyper-realm that has no time for the usual hang-ups of filmgoers. That Herzog claims to have no ironical sense of humour speaks volumes for the approach he has and his penchant for serious drama (though not entirely without a sense of humour as is apparent from some of the great wry observations made in his documentary voice-overs).
In His Minnesota Declaration, Herzog made the distinction between fact and truth in film, issuing the notion of ecstatic truth. As he states, cinema has the power to depict not merely the accountant’s truth, the truth of real world documentation, but of our dreams of the world, and that the proper manipulation of facts can agitate an ecstatic truth realization that would have not existed otherwise. He says that it is up to the poets to provide us with adequate images, and this is so urgent nowadays as we are overwhelmed by the saturation of the mundane, and with so many avenues for communication set before us we remain victims of greater solitude. Our understanding remains dumbfounded and art is needed to reacquaint ourselves with our dreams. It is a beautiful bit of dreaming in its own right, and for this and for the imagery of his films, I write this.
Up until this point I have seen the following of his works: Fritzcarraldo, Aguire: Wrath of God, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Rescue Dawn, Grizzly Man, Encounters at the End of the World, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. I have recently finished the entirely engrossing ‘Herzog on Herzog’, and have bought the Herzog/Kinski boxset. My idea of Herzog is admittedly vague; a more thorough examination of his oeuvre will hopefully remedy this.
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