Into the Abyss of Man’s Nature
“There is something like an inexplicable magic of cinema” – Herzog, Grizzly Man
In the late 1970s, a mustached, lanky German filmmaker walked into a restaurant in Berkeley, California and proceeded to eat his shoe. He ate everything but the sole, arguing, “We don’t eat the bones of a chicken”. He had previously made a bet that he would perform such an outrageous spectacle if his up-and-coming filmmaker friend Errol Morris finished his debut film. His eccentricity went beyond what can be seen through his films, constructing the bizarre artistic persona we know as Werner Herzog.
Herzog was born into the approaching demise of Nazi Germany when its culture was largely defined by the fatherless, directionless nation. Film historian Thomas Elsaesser writes in “German Post-War Cinema and Hollywood” that Post-War German Cinema or New German Cinema was “founded on a series of fantasies, all of which are displaced versions of antagonism and competition, oedipal rivalry and over-identification with and around Hollywood” (14). The nation ravaged by two world wars heavily influenced the composition of Herzog’s artistic realm, which dwelled on what film critic Roger Ebert described as “cinematic dystopia”. However, to categorize Herzog as a pessimist is missing the point of his works. His documentaries provide a lens with which we can view tragedies by overlooking the obvious melancholy and placing our attention on the art of the tragedies. Creatively driven by the adversity that was embedded into the era making up his childhood and adolescence, Herzog took visual elements of death and destruction to reveal elements of life and creation.
As its tagline “A Tale of Death, A Tale of Life” suggests, Herzog’s Into the Abyss examines the harrowing interchangeability of life and death, which can result from a single poor, impulsive choice. The film centers around two young convicts, Michael Perry and Jason Burkett, one of whom was given a death sentence for a triple homicide. However, that is the furthest Herzog goes into regarding the details of their misdemeanors. Herzog is more interested in the sentimental aspect of capital punishment and chooses to ignore the social and political frameworks that surround the sensitive issue. In their interviews, Perry and Burkett are placed behind an all-encompassing plastic wall as if they are untamed animals that need to be caged in at all times. Neither inmate comes off as particularly apologetic and Herzog clearly states to Perry within the first ten minutes of the film, “I don’t necessarily have to like you, but I respect you and you are a human being, and I don’t think human beings should be executed. It’s as simple as that”. Herzog, as if he were teaching someone how to ride a bike, prompts the initial kick of the story, and then steps out just as the subjects of his documentaries begin driving the story forward themselves. Most of his interview questions consisted of elaborating various relationships the inmates and the families of victims had with their close ones.
Films like Into the Abyss are generally not recognized in the melting pot of international cinema, composed largely of commercial American counterparts. His films do not make much use of special effects; in fact he refuses to rely on any computer-generated visuals. He chooses to put himself in grave danger, both physically and critically, to provide his viewers with an uncensored account of nature and human being’s nature. The fascination of Herzog’s films stems instead from the triggering of an emotional quake, an emotional quake that reflects both the suffering and triumph of non-fictional people he introduces as fictional characters. Each of Herzog’s films articulates mystical findings on life and death, that the result is almost too surreal to the point that we feel inclined to view them as fiction. The entity of art seems to be associated with creation, an invention of something aesthetic and moving from scratch. This view of art implies that it is a product of an imagination, or in other words, a fiction. It is difficult for most art spectators to label documentaries as art, regardless of their quality, because documentaries are accounts of actual happenings, primarily for the purposes of instruction or historical records. There is barely any creation involved, only additional reconstruction to something that already exists. Herzog’s art, then, comes from his sacrifice of facts to exert more attention on the emotionality of his subjects.
In one scene in Herzog’s earlier documentary Land of Silence and Darkness, a woman is teaching two boys, deaf and blind since birth, how to produce sounds through the use of sonic waves. The sounds she is teaching them are excruciatingly simple like “ooh” and “ah”. The boys, probably in their early teens, continue to make errors. It is one of the many uncomfortable scenes in Land of Silence and Darkness, lasting for five minutes, of otherwise ordinary boys struggling to pronounce the most fundamental phonics. However, the woman perseveres and continues to aggressively adjust their jaws to form them into a specific shape. At the moment one of the boys eventually lets out a clear “ooh”, the spectators become overwhelmed with complete exuberance, resonated through the screen by the subtle but triumphant smile of the teacher. Herzog lingers on these seemingly trivial moments of happiness and uplifts them to a scale that provides vicarious celebration through cinematic projection. More complex than sympathy, this emotional quake is more of a feeling of celebration than a lament.
However, viewing Herzog’s films for the emotional connection is inadequate. As T.S. Eliot argues in “Tradition and Individual Talent”, “it is not the ‘greatness,’ the intensity, of the emotions…but the intensity of the artistic process…that counts” (284). Herzog’s artistic process can be summed up by his response to an interview for The Guardian, “I’m not a journalist, I’m a poet. I have a disclosure, an encounter with these people”. He hoped to serve as a mediator between people with aspirations and conditions far beyond the norm and the public, in order get the extraordinary to be heard by the ordinary. Herzog’s process begins as it would for any skilled poet, by taking a simple image and showering it with artistic value. Sometimes the transference of an artist’s vision onto the seed of an image becomes so distorted that the art is no longer recognizable by the spectators. Returning to the ordinary image while still retaining the art is a key step to the process so that the original truth is not lost. Take any avant-garde artist of any medium as an example like Duchamp, Bjork, or David Lynch. While critically acclaimed, their works are strictly categorized as art house because the public fails to see through their dense layers of experimentation, satire, and absurdity. Herzog, for the most part, strips away these extra layers of stylistic elements without having to scale down any intellectual discoveries.
Herzog overtly inserts himself into his films in order to foster constant interactions between multiple expressive forces. Such intertwining of extraordinary beings produces images that celebrate the existence of creativity in underdogs and outcasts who are overlooked in the media. The Land of Silence and Darkness features real people locked in the confines of their linguistic disabilities. Herzog represents their struggles and experiences as a poem, not opting for familiarity and comfort, but instead vacillating between the physical riches of the audible and visible world of the audience and the imagined riches of the silent and dark world of the deaf and blinds. The deaf and the blinds’ daily will to survive operates on their restricted but viable form of communication through tactile language. Of course the process is unimaginably tedious to those who can verbally communicate, but it is also a clear example of the incredible strength of the human condition. Fini Straubinger, a deaf and blind person whose experiences the film revolved around, said “people think deafness means silence, but…it’s constant noise, going from a gentle humming to a droning”. Ironically, silence does not exist for anybody, with or without the ability to hear, nor does it exist in Herzog’s artistic world. His films are constantly lyrical, not just in terms of audibility, but in the way his images reveal a subtlety that would go unnoticed if we blindly recognized that being deaf meant silence, that being blind meant darkness. If The Land of Silence and Darkness claims that our abilities to see and hear are not required in experiencing the riches of the world, it makes us ponder, what is necessary to become complete human beings?
Desires. Desires for images, specifically. For most of the deaf and blinds, there was once a time when they did not have their disabilities and they long to recreate images through memory or if they were born without the privilege of sight and sound, they instinctively know aesthetic images exist. Some critics have judged Herzog’s films for being highly opinionated in that they leave out almost all social and historical implications when dealing with sensitive issues like handicaps and the death penalty. The raw nakedness of his films captures the human condition uninterrupted by familiar contexts. In an interview with Ebert in 1979, Herzog revealed “we live in a society that has no adequate images anymore” (21). We are so infatuated with how images we see in the media are connected to current issues or contain social values that we often overlook the core of natural humanness buried in those images. Of course, television, billboards, movies, and advertisements are so embellished with propaganda and deceptive marketing practices that it is nearly impossible to absorb images in their purest pictorial forms. In fact, contemporary society suffers from excess of images that condition us into dismissing images quickly instead of embedding them into our memories. The way Herzog’s images differ from these processed images rests in the lingering, which holds a shot longer than is comfortable.
Herzog’s Fata Morgana is a sequence of grotesque images of death, especially of animal carcasses lying on the expansive sand dunes of the Sahara. Like the haunting scenes of death, this scene too encapsulates a kind of eeriness that no fictional films are capable of eliciting. Initially, the haunting beauty seems to result from the fact that Fata Morgana is a documentary. But it is Herzog’s strategic clashing of the two genres of the real and seeming that really brings about the discomfort. Most storytellers feel inclined to transform fiction into pseudo-documentary. Ironically, Herzog seeks the opposite effect, turning his documentaries into surreal, imaginative works. People are naturally more attracted to stories that somewhat reflect the truth; why fictionalize the truth and take away the charisma of verisimilitude?
Perhaps the answer can be found in Herzog’s response to an interview question during the 1982 Cannes Festival conducted by fellow New German Cinema director Wim Wenders. He was asked for his thoughts on the ambiguous future of cinema. Herzog, after removing his shoes arguing, “You can’t answer a question like that with your shoes on”, replied that film would survive despite the emerging influence of commercial television because “film aesthetic is something quite individual”. While cinema locks the audience inside the cinematic realm during the course of the film, television frees us in a “mobile position as a viewer”. Thus, the filmmaker holds the power to manipulate the viewers much more than the television executive, allowing him or her to fabricate a sumptuously particularized reality that makes sense nowhere else but in the minds of the invested viewers, the filmmaker, and the characters inside the film. What is real becomes more vague as we enter the cinematic medium, truth gets lost but in compensation, sublimity gets found. Herzog’s pseudo-reality is constructed not only of the physical setting, but also of the characters’ perceptions of their setting. The landscape shots he frequently incorporates into his documentaries are used, paradoxically, to illustrate his subjects’ interiority.
Herzog’s exploration of two prominent themes or one overriding theme of man versus nature and man versus his own nature is demonstrated in Grizzly Man, a film documenting an American explorer named Tim Treadwell who spent a dozen summers living among the wilderness of an Alaskan bear reserve. Our understanding of this part mad, part visionary individual rests first on an understanding of the world the character resides in and secondly, on a sense of the character’s awareness of his world. Treadwell’s interaction with the bears in the reserve is whimsical and fleeting, as if right out of folktale. Like the protagonist of an ordinary narrative, Treadwell has the external goal of becoming the sole protector of the grizzly bears with the deeper desire of belonging in a community apart from human civilization, which he considered to be indifferent to his needs. This hint of fiction forces the audience to forget the difference between the seeming and the real. His pseudo-documentary approach to delivering the truth allows Herzog to handle his materials as a story as opposed to a non-fiction. Every work of fiction is a bit of an autobiography of the artist and the rest that is not is a biography of others.
The above sentiment describes the mentality of the renowned French New Wave director François Truffaut, who based most of his coming-of-age films on personal experiences and experiences of others he witnessed growing up. Truffaut once called Herzog “the most important film director still alive”, commending him for making films that honestly reflected the bittersweet realities of the human condition. Eliot would combat this approach, claiming in “Tradition and Individual Talent” that “the emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done” (286). In a way, Herzog does this. The legitimacy of Herzog’s approach to documentary has frequently been attacked for branding his works as his and boosting his artistic ego. There is one disputed scene in Grizzly Man when Herzog places himself in front of the camera to listen to an audiotape of Treadwell being attacked and eaten by a grizzly bear. He distressingly tells Treadwell’s friend, “You must never listen to this...You should not keep it because it will be the white elephant in your room all your life”. Initially, his insertion seems out of place and forced, but soon he gently grabs the woman’s hands, which elicits an immediate connection with the friend of the victim. Again, there is a vicarious cinematic experience that invites us to view the victims of such tragedy with humanity and inherent capacity for connection that is dormant in many modern beings. As mentioned before, Herzog has an encounter with his subjects; though not necessarily friends, they are not strangers either. This acquaintanceship enables Herzog to generate conversations and interactions, instead of establishing a passive actor-filmmaker or interview-interviewee relationship. The impersonality exists in that he never passes any judgment onto his subjects, leaving them open for interpretation by the viewers. Despite his active presence, the film reveals almost nothing personal about the filmmaker, letting us ponder about his complex self, hidden underneath the arbitrary self-insertions he makes in his documentaries. The occasional commentaries he does make simply guide our curiosity to speculate his images on a more intellectual level. For example, Grizzly Man does not take on a particularly urgent issue. Herzog takes this easily dismissible subject he felt an obvious attraction towards and ascended it to tell a gripping story of how a metaphorically deceased man, completely isolated from the human world, found life among the grizzly bears of the faraway wilderness through death.
Pat Hoy, a lecturer at New York University, stated in his essay interpreting Black Swan that Nina’s freedom found in death “is a strange kind of symbolic freedom known only to art, and the myth, and the psyche” (4). Likewise, Herzog transforms Treadwell’s story into art. His story reveals a collision of two idealisms: nature as benevolence and nature as malevolence. Treadwell’s death was the result of his attempt to embody the both the light and the dark that exists in his surrounding. The tragedy exists not in his death, but in man’s incapacity to materialize the duality of nature. The only entity powerful enough to house the tumult of this everlasting fight for coexistence is the realm of art. Artists, with their ability to manipulate and reconstruct art, are quite possibly the most courageous and powerful individuals; constantly providing the public with fresh images that force us to face and come to terms with the enigma that is neglected in our own world.
Morbid, of course, but it is often the morbid materials that offer a much brighter light, once carefully extracted from the abyss of darkness. Just take a look at Herzog’s interiority. I guarantee you will find a shoe.
Works Cited
Eliot, T.S. "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Writing the Essay (2012): 281-86. Print.
Elsaesser, Thomas. "German Post-War Cinema and Hollywood." (1993): n. pag. Web.
Fata Morgana. Dir. Werner Herzog. Perf. Lotte Eisner and Eugen Des Montagnes. Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, 1971.
Grizzly Man. Dir. Werner Herzog. Perf. Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard. Lions Gate Films, 2005.
Herzog, Werner. "Images at the Horizon." Interview by Roger Ebert. 17 Apr. 1979: n. pag. Print.
Hoy, Pat C. "Black Swan's Triumphant Demise." New York. 1 May 2013. Reading.
Into the Abyss. Dir. Werner Herzog. Perf. Richard Lopez and Michael Perry. Creative Differences Productions, 2011.
Land of Silence and Darkness. Dir. Werner Herzog. Perf. Fini Straubinger. Referat Für Filmgeschichte, 1971. DVD.
Room 666. Dir. Wim Wenders. Perf. Michelangelo Antonioni, Werner Herzog, Jean-Luc Godard. Antenne-2, 1982.
In the late 1970s, a mustached, lanky German filmmaker walked into a restaurant in Berkeley, California and proceeded to eat his shoe. He ate everything but the sole, arguing, “We don’t eat the bones of a chicken”. He had previously made a bet that he would perform such an outrageous spectacle if his up-and-coming filmmaker friend Errol Morris finished his debut film. His eccentricity went beyond what can be seen through his films, constructing the bizarre artistic persona we know as Werner Herzog.
Herzog was born into the approaching demise of Nazi Germany when its culture was largely defined by the fatherless, directionless nation. Film historian Thomas Elsaesser writes in “German Post-War Cinema and Hollywood” that Post-War German Cinema or New German Cinema was “founded on a series of fantasies, all of which are displaced versions of antagonism and competition, oedipal rivalry and over-identification with and around Hollywood” (14). The nation ravaged by two world wars heavily influenced the composition of Herzog’s artistic realm, which dwelled on what film critic Roger Ebert described as “cinematic dystopia”. However, to categorize Herzog as a pessimist is missing the point of his works. His documentaries provide a lens with which we can view tragedies by overlooking the obvious melancholy and placing our attention on the art of the tragedies. Creatively driven by the adversity that was embedded into the era making up his childhood and adolescence, Herzog took visual elements of death and destruction to reveal elements of life and creation.
As its tagline “A Tale of Death, A Tale of Life” suggests, Herzog’s Into the Abyss examines the harrowing interchangeability of life and death, which can result from a single poor, impulsive choice. The film centers around two young convicts, Michael Perry and Jason Burkett, one of whom was given a death sentence for a triple homicide. However, that is the furthest Herzog goes into regarding the details of their misdemeanors. Herzog is more interested in the sentimental aspect of capital punishment and chooses to ignore the social and political frameworks that surround the sensitive issue. In their interviews, Perry and Burkett are placed behind an all-encompassing plastic wall as if they are untamed animals that need to be caged in at all times. Neither inmate comes off as particularly apologetic and Herzog clearly states to Perry within the first ten minutes of the film, “I don’t necessarily have to like you, but I respect you and you are a human being, and I don’t think human beings should be executed. It’s as simple as that”. Herzog, as if he were teaching someone how to ride a bike, prompts the initial kick of the story, and then steps out just as the subjects of his documentaries begin driving the story forward themselves. Most of his interview questions consisted of elaborating various relationships the inmates and the families of victims had with their close ones.
Films like Into the Abyss are generally not recognized in the melting pot of international cinema, composed largely of commercial American counterparts. His films do not make much use of special effects; in fact he refuses to rely on any computer-generated visuals. He chooses to put himself in grave danger, both physically and critically, to provide his viewers with an uncensored account of nature and human being’s nature. The fascination of Herzog’s films stems instead from the triggering of an emotional quake, an emotional quake that reflects both the suffering and triumph of non-fictional people he introduces as fictional characters. Each of Herzog’s films articulates mystical findings on life and death, that the result is almost too surreal to the point that we feel inclined to view them as fiction. The entity of art seems to be associated with creation, an invention of something aesthetic and moving from scratch. This view of art implies that it is a product of an imagination, or in other words, a fiction. It is difficult for most art spectators to label documentaries as art, regardless of their quality, because documentaries are accounts of actual happenings, primarily for the purposes of instruction or historical records. There is barely any creation involved, only additional reconstruction to something that already exists. Herzog’s art, then, comes from his sacrifice of facts to exert more attention on the emotionality of his subjects.
In one scene in Herzog’s earlier documentary Land of Silence and Darkness, a woman is teaching two boys, deaf and blind since birth, how to produce sounds through the use of sonic waves. The sounds she is teaching them are excruciatingly simple like “ooh” and “ah”. The boys, probably in their early teens, continue to make errors. It is one of the many uncomfortable scenes in Land of Silence and Darkness, lasting for five minutes, of otherwise ordinary boys struggling to pronounce the most fundamental phonics. However, the woman perseveres and continues to aggressively adjust their jaws to form them into a specific shape. At the moment one of the boys eventually lets out a clear “ooh”, the spectators become overwhelmed with complete exuberance, resonated through the screen by the subtle but triumphant smile of the teacher. Herzog lingers on these seemingly trivial moments of happiness and uplifts them to a scale that provides vicarious celebration through cinematic projection. More complex than sympathy, this emotional quake is more of a feeling of celebration than a lament.
However, viewing Herzog’s films for the emotional connection is inadequate. As T.S. Eliot argues in “Tradition and Individual Talent”, “it is not the ‘greatness,’ the intensity, of the emotions…but the intensity of the artistic process…that counts” (284). Herzog’s artistic process can be summed up by his response to an interview for The Guardian, “I’m not a journalist, I’m a poet. I have a disclosure, an encounter with these people”. He hoped to serve as a mediator between people with aspirations and conditions far beyond the norm and the public, in order get the extraordinary to be heard by the ordinary. Herzog’s process begins as it would for any skilled poet, by taking a simple image and showering it with artistic value. Sometimes the transference of an artist’s vision onto the seed of an image becomes so distorted that the art is no longer recognizable by the spectators. Returning to the ordinary image while still retaining the art is a key step to the process so that the original truth is not lost. Take any avant-garde artist of any medium as an example like Duchamp, Bjork, or David Lynch. While critically acclaimed, their works are strictly categorized as art house because the public fails to see through their dense layers of experimentation, satire, and absurdity. Herzog, for the most part, strips away these extra layers of stylistic elements without having to scale down any intellectual discoveries.
Herzog overtly inserts himself into his films in order to foster constant interactions between multiple expressive forces. Such intertwining of extraordinary beings produces images that celebrate the existence of creativity in underdogs and outcasts who are overlooked in the media. The Land of Silence and Darkness features real people locked in the confines of their linguistic disabilities. Herzog represents their struggles and experiences as a poem, not opting for familiarity and comfort, but instead vacillating between the physical riches of the audible and visible world of the audience and the imagined riches of the silent and dark world of the deaf and blinds. The deaf and the blinds’ daily will to survive operates on their restricted but viable form of communication through tactile language. Of course the process is unimaginably tedious to those who can verbally communicate, but it is also a clear example of the incredible strength of the human condition. Fini Straubinger, a deaf and blind person whose experiences the film revolved around, said “people think deafness means silence, but…it’s constant noise, going from a gentle humming to a droning”. Ironically, silence does not exist for anybody, with or without the ability to hear, nor does it exist in Herzog’s artistic world. His films are constantly lyrical, not just in terms of audibility, but in the way his images reveal a subtlety that would go unnoticed if we blindly recognized that being deaf meant silence, that being blind meant darkness. If The Land of Silence and Darkness claims that our abilities to see and hear are not required in experiencing the riches of the world, it makes us ponder, what is necessary to become complete human beings?
Desires. Desires for images, specifically. For most of the deaf and blinds, there was once a time when they did not have their disabilities and they long to recreate images through memory or if they were born without the privilege of sight and sound, they instinctively know aesthetic images exist. Some critics have judged Herzog’s films for being highly opinionated in that they leave out almost all social and historical implications when dealing with sensitive issues like handicaps and the death penalty. The raw nakedness of his films captures the human condition uninterrupted by familiar contexts. In an interview with Ebert in 1979, Herzog revealed “we live in a society that has no adequate images anymore” (21). We are so infatuated with how images we see in the media are connected to current issues or contain social values that we often overlook the core of natural humanness buried in those images. Of course, television, billboards, movies, and advertisements are so embellished with propaganda and deceptive marketing practices that it is nearly impossible to absorb images in their purest pictorial forms. In fact, contemporary society suffers from excess of images that condition us into dismissing images quickly instead of embedding them into our memories. The way Herzog’s images differ from these processed images rests in the lingering, which holds a shot longer than is comfortable.
Herzog’s Fata Morgana is a sequence of grotesque images of death, especially of animal carcasses lying on the expansive sand dunes of the Sahara. Like the haunting scenes of death, this scene too encapsulates a kind of eeriness that no fictional films are capable of eliciting. Initially, the haunting beauty seems to result from the fact that Fata Morgana is a documentary. But it is Herzog’s strategic clashing of the two genres of the real and seeming that really brings about the discomfort. Most storytellers feel inclined to transform fiction into pseudo-documentary. Ironically, Herzog seeks the opposite effect, turning his documentaries into surreal, imaginative works. People are naturally more attracted to stories that somewhat reflect the truth; why fictionalize the truth and take away the charisma of verisimilitude?
Perhaps the answer can be found in Herzog’s response to an interview question during the 1982 Cannes Festival conducted by fellow New German Cinema director Wim Wenders. He was asked for his thoughts on the ambiguous future of cinema. Herzog, after removing his shoes arguing, “You can’t answer a question like that with your shoes on”, replied that film would survive despite the emerging influence of commercial television because “film aesthetic is something quite individual”. While cinema locks the audience inside the cinematic realm during the course of the film, television frees us in a “mobile position as a viewer”. Thus, the filmmaker holds the power to manipulate the viewers much more than the television executive, allowing him or her to fabricate a sumptuously particularized reality that makes sense nowhere else but in the minds of the invested viewers, the filmmaker, and the characters inside the film. What is real becomes more vague as we enter the cinematic medium, truth gets lost but in compensation, sublimity gets found. Herzog’s pseudo-reality is constructed not only of the physical setting, but also of the characters’ perceptions of their setting. The landscape shots he frequently incorporates into his documentaries are used, paradoxically, to illustrate his subjects’ interiority.
Herzog’s exploration of two prominent themes or one overriding theme of man versus nature and man versus his own nature is demonstrated in Grizzly Man, a film documenting an American explorer named Tim Treadwell who spent a dozen summers living among the wilderness of an Alaskan bear reserve. Our understanding of this part mad, part visionary individual rests first on an understanding of the world the character resides in and secondly, on a sense of the character’s awareness of his world. Treadwell’s interaction with the bears in the reserve is whimsical and fleeting, as if right out of folktale. Like the protagonist of an ordinary narrative, Treadwell has the external goal of becoming the sole protector of the grizzly bears with the deeper desire of belonging in a community apart from human civilization, which he considered to be indifferent to his needs. This hint of fiction forces the audience to forget the difference between the seeming and the real. His pseudo-documentary approach to delivering the truth allows Herzog to handle his materials as a story as opposed to a non-fiction. Every work of fiction is a bit of an autobiography of the artist and the rest that is not is a biography of others.
The above sentiment describes the mentality of the renowned French New Wave director François Truffaut, who based most of his coming-of-age films on personal experiences and experiences of others he witnessed growing up. Truffaut once called Herzog “the most important film director still alive”, commending him for making films that honestly reflected the bittersweet realities of the human condition. Eliot would combat this approach, claiming in “Tradition and Individual Talent” that “the emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done” (286). In a way, Herzog does this. The legitimacy of Herzog’s approach to documentary has frequently been attacked for branding his works as his and boosting his artistic ego. There is one disputed scene in Grizzly Man when Herzog places himself in front of the camera to listen to an audiotape of Treadwell being attacked and eaten by a grizzly bear. He distressingly tells Treadwell’s friend, “You must never listen to this...You should not keep it because it will be the white elephant in your room all your life”. Initially, his insertion seems out of place and forced, but soon he gently grabs the woman’s hands, which elicits an immediate connection with the friend of the victim. Again, there is a vicarious cinematic experience that invites us to view the victims of such tragedy with humanity and inherent capacity for connection that is dormant in many modern beings. As mentioned before, Herzog has an encounter with his subjects; though not necessarily friends, they are not strangers either. This acquaintanceship enables Herzog to generate conversations and interactions, instead of establishing a passive actor-filmmaker or interview-interviewee relationship. The impersonality exists in that he never passes any judgment onto his subjects, leaving them open for interpretation by the viewers. Despite his active presence, the film reveals almost nothing personal about the filmmaker, letting us ponder about his complex self, hidden underneath the arbitrary self-insertions he makes in his documentaries. The occasional commentaries he does make simply guide our curiosity to speculate his images on a more intellectual level. For example, Grizzly Man does not take on a particularly urgent issue. Herzog takes this easily dismissible subject he felt an obvious attraction towards and ascended it to tell a gripping story of how a metaphorically deceased man, completely isolated from the human world, found life among the grizzly bears of the faraway wilderness through death.
Pat Hoy, a lecturer at New York University, stated in his essay interpreting Black Swan that Nina’s freedom found in death “is a strange kind of symbolic freedom known only to art, and the myth, and the psyche” (4). Likewise, Herzog transforms Treadwell’s story into art. His story reveals a collision of two idealisms: nature as benevolence and nature as malevolence. Treadwell’s death was the result of his attempt to embody the both the light and the dark that exists in his surrounding. The tragedy exists not in his death, but in man’s incapacity to materialize the duality of nature. The only entity powerful enough to house the tumult of this everlasting fight for coexistence is the realm of art. Artists, with their ability to manipulate and reconstruct art, are quite possibly the most courageous and powerful individuals; constantly providing the public with fresh images that force us to face and come to terms with the enigma that is neglected in our own world.
Morbid, of course, but it is often the morbid materials that offer a much brighter light, once carefully extracted from the abyss of darkness. Just take a look at Herzog’s interiority. I guarantee you will find a shoe.
Works Cited
Eliot, T.S. "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Writing the Essay (2012): 281-86. Print.
Elsaesser, Thomas. "German Post-War Cinema and Hollywood." (1993): n. pag. Web.
Fata Morgana. Dir. Werner Herzog. Perf. Lotte Eisner and Eugen Des Montagnes. Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, 1971.
Grizzly Man. Dir. Werner Herzog. Perf. Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard. Lions Gate Films, 2005.
Herzog, Werner. "Images at the Horizon." Interview by Roger Ebert. 17 Apr. 1979: n. pag. Print.
Hoy, Pat C. "Black Swan's Triumphant Demise." New York. 1 May 2013. Reading.
Into the Abyss. Dir. Werner Herzog. Perf. Richard Lopez and Michael Perry. Creative Differences Productions, 2011.
Land of Silence and Darkness. Dir. Werner Herzog. Perf. Fini Straubinger. Referat Für Filmgeschichte, 1971. DVD.
Room 666. Dir. Wim Wenders. Perf. Michelangelo Antonioni, Werner Herzog, Jean-Luc Godard. Antenne-2, 1982.
