Saraiya on Herzog on Herzog
Herzog on Herzog is not quite a direct transcript of a series of interviews with Werner Herzog, the famed German director. Paul Cronin, Herzog's interviewer and editor of the work, states in the introduction that while all the words are theoretically Herzog's, anything that does not relate to a film has been spliced. Furthermore, he writes: "Over the course of our lengthy talks we would often repeatedly touch on the same subjects from different angles, and so Herzog's answers have been compiled into single responses which has sometimes resulted in lengthy responses to very short questions. 'You should let the readers know this,' Herzog told me. 'I sound so talkative in the book, but I'm really not that garrulous.'" And Herzog's introduction to the book is simply this sentence: "Facing the stark alternative to see a book on me compiled from dusty interviews with all the wild distortions and lies, or collaborating—I choose the much worse option: to collaborate."
A strange way to frame truth for a narrated biography of a director of "documentaries," but then again, I guess that's Herzog. Part of the intention of this bizarre (auto)biography is to set the rumors of Herzog to rest, to explain his directorial oddities — he hypnotized his cast in one of his films and cast a 40-year-old man with a history of abuse as a 16-year-old mentally impaired boy in another — but throughout the book the truth flutters out of reach. The reader is left wondering whether to accept Herzog's words as scraps from the table of a genius or to reject increasingly impossible-sounding tales as a bizarre and eccentric man's nostalgic memories.
Herzog describes a "moment of revelation" in a Fu Manchu film that distinguishes for him the moment between truth and cinema: "In this film a guy is shot and falls sixty feet from a rock, does a somersault in mid-air and then a little kick with his leg. Ten minutes later the exact same shot appeared in another gun battle, and I recognized it because of this little kick. They had recycled it and thought they could get away with it. I spoke to my friends about this and asked them how it was possible the same shot had been used twice. Before this moment I thought it was some kind of reality I had been watching on screen, that the film was something like a documentary. All of a sudden I could see how the film was being narrated and edited, how tension and suspense were created, and from that day on cinema was something different for me."
As Herzog meanders through his life's story, he first casually and then insistently returns again and again to the tension between the "accountants' truth" versus the actual truth — a recurring diatribe against cinéma vérité. As he says, he uses film to take the viewer out of the "accountants truth" into a more moving or more touching realm — what he calls the realm of poetry, "which inevitably strikes a more profound chord than reportage." He recounts a night where he was jet-lagged and watching television; he turned off a Discovery-channel-style animal documentary, which he found to be insipid and fluffy, and turned instead to hardcore pornography he found on another channel. He argued that the "porno" was more real; "the naked truth," he says — pardon the pun. To him, the "accountants' truth" reaches only the most banal level of understanding.
To further this end, he deliberately and openly fabricates certain details in the material he presents; even when there is a basis of fact to go off of. In the film Land of Darkness and Silence, for example, he films a deaf and blind woman about her daily routine; the entire production of the film took only three hours of shooting and about $30,000 and is hailed as one of his best works. But there is a reason why whenever the word "documentary" appears in the work, it's in quotes — Herzog actually wrote a chunk of the woman's dialogue and had her read it as if it was her story. He constructs a truth for her that could have been her story, but isn't in fact, and though he argues that she had no compunction against reading what he had written, it sits uncomfortably with those of us that have a more conventional definition of truth.
Herzog elaborates on this when talking about The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, a quasi-historical film based on the life of a 16-year-old who mysteriously appeared in Nuremberg in 1828 after apparently being imprisoned in some way for his entire life. As a result, he can barely speak or walk and has no notion of contemporary society. Though there are certain facts that Herzog retains, he throws out and rewrites parts of Hauser's history to make it approach the "higher" truth: "There is a much more profound level of truth than everyday reality, for example in the dreams that Kaspar talks of, and it is my job to seek them out. As I said, when it comes to storytelling, 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 characters rather than through anecdotes that may or may not be based on historical fact. Only the most basic elements of Kaspar's life as we know them are contained within the film and the rest is invented or simplified." To play young Hauser, Herzog hired Bruno S., a 40-year-old actor with a tumultuous past. Herzog insisted on hiring Bruno S., and said that the film was almost as much the brutalization ofb the actor who played Hauser, as it is about the story itself. Like so much of Herzog's work, the truth impinges on the story — or does the story impinge on the truth?
"All films to me are just films," Herzog states with a certain finality. Herzog's understanding of truth led him to do truly groundbreaking work playing with the blurred boundary between the two. As he says himself, "I have never made a distinction between my feature films and my 'documentaries'. For me, they are all just films…" In one of his other soapboxes in the interview — his rejection of formal film training and themes and schools of work —he demonstrates the utter simplicity of his work. "I just write a story," he says. Herzog on Herzog is an insightful look inside the mind of a director, a director who thinks of cinema in a radically different way from what we usually view.
I found this particular story of Herzog's to be an interesting juxtaposition to his thoughts on truth. In his films, truth and fact are not always equal, and the real truth is a strangely experienced phenomenon. In filming Fata Morgana, which according to Herzog means "mirage," Herzog went to the African desert to film and related this tale: "In the desert you can actually film mirages. Of course, you cannot film hallucinations which appear only inside your own mind, but mirages are something completely different. A mirage is a mirror relfection of an object that does actually exist and that you can see, even though you cannot actually touch it. It is a similar effect to when you take a photograph of yourself in the bathroom mirror. You are not really there in the reflection but you can still photograph yourself. The best example I can give you is the sequences we shot of the bus on the horizon. It is a strange image; the bus seems to be almost floating on water and the people seem to be just gliding along, not really walking. The heat that day was beyond belief. We were so thirsty and we knew that some of the buses had supplies of ice on board so right after we stopped the camera we rushed over there. But we could not find a single trace of anything. No tyre tracks, no tracks at all. There was just nothing there, nor had there ever been anything there and yet we had been able to film it. So there must have been a bus somewhere – maybe 20 or 100 or 300 miles away – which was visible to us because of the heated strata of air that reflected the real existing image."
I'm not sure if the rest of us would have experienced the mirage this way, but for Herzog, the truth is always stranger than it seems, and harder to find than it appears.