The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth

INTRODUCTION

Framing Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog is not a director who calls upon others to speak on behalf of his films. There are few filmmakers who reflect so eloquently and at such length on their own work; Herzog’s extensive interviews with Paul Cronin in Herzog on Herzog (2002) were antedated by a long history of public self-representation over the course of which it became increasingly clear that he was a director who could intelligently elucidate his background, his films and his filmmaking practices, and that he was someone who took pleasure in doing so. Alternating between pensive and polemical, Herzog over time surpassed both Klaus Kinski and Bruno S. as his own most compelling protagonist.

Given the specific contours of the character he created for himself – of his personal stylisation – it comes as no surprise that he declares himself a competent mesmerist. Anyone who has watched Burden of Dreams (1982), the documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo (1982), or his later film Grizzly Man (2005) will likely find themselves hypnotised by the sound of his voice. To some it seems sage, to others paternalistic, and to some it is just quintessentially German. He is found everywhere in his own films such as in My Best Fiend (1999), where he has the last word in his relationship with the notoriously rambunctious Kinski, or in Wheel of Time (2003) in which he shows that he is undaunted by a personal audience with the Dalai Lama. However, all of this articulate self-presentation can be problematic. Because of his omnipresent commentary – because he has been more than happy to supply philosophy to accompany his cinematic poetry – Herzog casts a long shadow over most attempts at interpretation and critique.

Writing about Herzog offers a special challenge in that one is writing about a subject who has made clear his overall distaste for scholarly analysis. Occasional academic observations that suggest, for example, that Herzog’s technique does not measure up to his material have done little to mitigate the impression that his films offer something superior to the debates that attend them. His own reflections on his artistic choices, coupled with his comments on the pitfalls (and the banalities) of academic enquiry, have lent support to the sense that when one writes commentary about Herzog’s ‘ecstatic’ works, one has committed the error of – in the words of one critic – tap dancing in church (see Peucker 1984: 193; citing Jan Dawson). In other words, Herzog’s films seem to obtain a height from which scholarly, analytic prose can only detract. At the same time, however, accepting the position that Herzog’s works should be received with reverent silence, as though we ourselves were under hypnosis, or with only those analytic tools that have been supplied by the director himself fails to do justice to his body of work. His films, like all works of art, benefit from scrutiny and analysis, even if such scrutiny and analysis originate from within scholarly discourse.

For Herzog, filmmaking, unlike criticism, is a physical, athletic endeavour. He has indicated that one of the problems with academic writing is that it is not physical, or as he puts it, it lacks pain (see Herzog’s comments on this in Overbey 1974/5: 73; Bachmann 1977: 7–8; O’Toole 1979: 41; Cronin 2002: 101–2). This latter claim is of course something that any scholar who has sat for a long time knows not to be the case; there is, regrettably, no genuine abstraction of the body where writing is concerned. When asked at a later date about such comments, Herzog clarified that his intention was to assert that filmmaking was not cerebral but instead that it ‘comes from your thighs’. He then added: ‘it’s not literature, it’s not academia, it’s something else’ (SL ch. 19; 1:20:39). Throughout his works, one finds a fascination with bodily exertion, not only in his films about sports – specifically those that take activities such as climbing, ‘ski-flying’ and even bodybuilding as their subjects – but also in the way his films are photographed. Herzog and his experienced cameramen rely on athleticism in their placement of the camera; the body is integrated into the work, as it would be in the act of sculpting or painting.

One sees traces of such physicality particularly in films such as Even Dwarfs Started Small (Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen, 1970) and Aguirre, Wrath of God (Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes, 1972), films in which the camera seems to reach into the scene and probe around, searching fearlessly or ‘mercilessly’ (as Herzog likes to say) for the truth within a given shot or sequence. Just as the artist who produces such sequences includes the body in the equation, so too should the critic who studies them. For this reason, one of the chief concerns here is to address the role of sense perception or of ‘aesthetics’ as bodily experience in Herzog’s works. The issue is not simply that the films are aesthetic in that the sounds and images in them are pleasing to the ear and the eye – this would misunderstand what is meant by the term. It is rather that the sense experience (the aesthetic experience) and the physical, athletic one are interrelated; Herzog’s films ultimately attempt to include the human body in that which transpires on the screen regardless of whether such inclusion happens through the movement of the camera or by way of the music on the soundtrack. Despite the many cerebral and philosophical statements Herzog has made about the politics of his films – regarding their positions on war, the effects of colonialism or the unpleasant vagaries of German history – Herzog ultimately makes his choices based on the sensual effects of cinema over and above any conscious regard for his films’ potential or perceived politics.

The director’s lack of enthusiasm for political and scholarly critique is rooted in an elevation of the sensual, physical and corporeal above the verbal, and this same distaste extends to his overall suspicion of rhetoric and of certain modes of reasoning. One need not look very far to find moments in Herzog’s films that express ideas along precisely these lines. His distrust for rationalisation leads him into outright ridicule, and one might take, as an example, the Professor of Logic depicted in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle, 1974). The figure is a caricature of a nineteenth-century logician. The professor (Alfred Edel) explains to Kaspar (Bruno S.) a logician’s paradox (the one traditionally referred to as the Cretan paradox) in which someone is asked to adduce what single question he or she could put to a liar and a ‘truth-teller’ encountered at a crossroads that would yield an honest answer about the two directions of a forked path. Kaspar answers intuitively that a proper result could be obtained by asking if either one of the two, the liar or the truth-teller, were a tree-frog. One would thereby know which of the two was a liar. By presenting us with Kaspar’s naïve though indisputable response, the credibility of the logician is undermined, and the lack of creativity in his reasoning becomes evident. The same can be said of the diabolical doctor in Woyzeck (1979), Herzog’s adaptation of Georg Büchner’s nineteenth-century drama. The medical researcher there exploits his patient in the name of science and progress, objectifying him and feeding him a diet of nothing but peas for no apparent reason other than to see how far the poor soldier can be pushed. Both Woyzeck’s doctor and the Professor of Logic come across as scathing parodies of ‘scholars’.

However, Herzog’s own analytic reflections on his work are themselves neither wholly un-academic nor un-scholarly. His resistance to scholarly efforts to diminish his poetic films by way of prosaic analysis often comes across in a philosophical language of its own. While he is not consciously drawing on philosophical traditions and certainly comes by his conclusions honestly, there are undoubtedly strains of German philosophy throughout his remarks. To take one example, the German philosopher and sociologist Theodor Adorno also distrusted what he described as the pervasive philosophical ‘jargon’ that obscures the true object of enquiry. Adorno, like Herzog, insisted on a sphere of autonomy for aesthetics. His position valued what he described as the ‘truth-content’ (Wahrheitsgehalt) of art over any form of overt political engagement. As with the ‘ecstatic truth’ that Herzog often evokes, Adorno suggested that works of art be judged according to whether they direct our gaze beyond the realm of ideologically mediated experience, experience that has been co-opted by industrial capitalism.

Adorno’s specific interest was in the problem of ‘reification’, which refers to a phenomenon whereby all things under conditions of capitalism become objects of exchange. This means that most things and ideas, even those that would claim to be called art, have difficulty making Western culture hear anything it does want to hear about itself. According to Adorno, one of the virtues of real ‘Art’ – something that is not easy to come by – is that it might, if only for a time, resist becoming an object of commercial exchange like the design on a T-shirt or a postcard. Though Herzog takes this sort of position less often today than he did during the 1970s, he once frequently spoke of our culture in terms of its lack of ‘new images’. The issue for him can be understood as similar to that which appears in Adorno’s work: the same images are constantly produced and reproduced, and it is increasingly difficult for art to offer our commodity-producing culture something ‘new’. One should not mistake Herzog for a Marxist or for any other, similar revolutionary ideologue, yet in Les Blank’s short documentary film Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980), Herzog recommends waging ‘holy war’ against television shows such as Bonanza (1959–73). More recently he stated that ‘our grandchildren will blame us for not having tossed hand-grenades into TV stations’ (Cronin 2002: 66).

While there are connections between Herzog’s interest in pursuing the truth of art, a truth that exceeds the mediated boundaries of our everyday world, and Adorno’s antipathy toward reification, it may also be accurate to speak of a link between Herzog’s ideas and those of Adorno’s rival, Martin Heidegger. Heidegger was the philosopher Adorno had in mind when he criticised ‘jargon’, yet there are affinities between philosophical tendencies in Heidegger’s work and some of the key principles or recurring motifs found in Herzog’s films. Heidegger was fascinated above all else by ‘authenticity’, and because of Herzog’s interest in authenticity, as well as his proclivity for making sweeping statements that seem to exceed the specific historical and political contexts in which they are made, Herzog and Heidegger have now and again been read alongside one another (see, for one example, Staskowski 1988). There is a basis for comparison of this sort – their interests intersect – yet Heidegger writes in a wholly different era and context, and Herzog’s cinematic creations have their own, distinct ideological valences (ones that are attended by their own, distinct problems). Heideg-gerian readings of Herzog, though they may properly isolate some degree of overlap in their discourses, remain only individual, possible readings.

One evident affinity between the two concerns the philosophies of language they share, or their valorisation of the prolonged silences when a sense of something larger than our everyday world appears on the horizon of consciousness. Evidence of this can be seen, for example, in Grizzly Man when Herzog champions Timothy Tread-well’s filmmaking by noting the improvised, glorious scenes when only bare nature appears on the screen. Moments in which silences communicate most powerfully are presented as prone to interruption by everyday uses of language, or the talk that is part and parcel of human communication and which Heidegger described as ‘chatter’ (Gerede). Herzog’s disenchantment with language is discussed by both Noël Carroll (1985) and by Brigitte Peucker (see 1986b), who note that Herzog’s films suggest an unseen realm beneath the veil of experience, and that for him, daily, prosaic language is understood as that which interferes with our openness to a comparably untarnished world. One could certainly do far worse than to use Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser to illustrate the philosophy of language one finds in Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927). Ironically enough, Heidegger was one of the most technical writers in the Western tradition, and when he wanted to present a glimpse of a world beyond language, he turned to poetry such as that of Friedrich Hölderlin, who could express ideas less analytically. For his part Herzog attempts both roles, that of the poet and the philosopher.

Though it has been rightly asserted that connections between Herzog and the history of German thought such as those mentioned above are tenuous, Herzog irrefutably concerns himself with the search for something less mediated and more authentic than the everyday life-world we inhabit. Perhaps for this reason he has argued repeatedly against cinéma vérité, or filmmakers’ attempts to depict the world ‘as it actually is’, claiming that such attempts are entirely without vérité and that cinema of this sort ‘plows only stones’ (Cronin 2002: 301). Some say that the search in Herzog’s work is not for capturing everyday life in its rawest form, but rather for the opposite: the sublime. This is to say that it is a search for that which exceeds language’s capacity to express it. Brigitte Peucker has described Herzog’s work – predominately the early, feature films – as engaged in a ‘quest of the sublime’ (1984). Language, to speak at least of prose rather than of poetry, is unlikely to evoke the sublime insofar as language is always already part of our everyday world; it is always profane, and only an earthly tool by which we name earthly things. Although Herzog often uses poetic language, starting or ending most of his films with poetic epigraphs (usually ones that he has written himself), and he has compared himself on occasion with certain poets, he seems to believe that language in general should take a backseat to the images and music in his films. Herzog takes this position not because visual and aural experience as such is more important to him, but because aesthetic heights, or the contact with something ‘new’ is less likely to come about through the medium of prose.

The moment that an aesthetic event takes place, or that we see something upon the screen that exceeds our ability to assimilate it into the archive of what we have already seen and heard, are arguably the glimpses of ‘ecstatic truth’ in his films. As did Adorno, for whom the term ‘truth-content’ described the extent to which works of art – usually Modernist works of art such as those by Kafka or Beckett – would compel viewers or listeners to confront their fleeting revolutionary potential, Herzog too speaks of his works as containing ‘truth’. This truth, as Herzog describes it, seems best explained through its contrast with banal truths, or that which he has referred to as ‘the accountant’s truth’. Herzog makes this difference plain in his ‘Minnesota Declaration’, a manifesto written in Minneapolis in 1999 in which he asserts that cinéma vérité reaches a merely superficial truth, ‘the truth of accountants’, but that ‘there are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and that there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth … [this] is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylisation’ (Cronin 2002: 301). Not only is Herzog uninterested in depicting the world as it generally appears to us, but he is striving for an aesthetic height akin to that attainable by poetry. As a director, he is not reporting, but rather poeticising or rendering the world ecstatic. This capacity to transfigure reality is, in Herzog’s view, what separates the poets from the accountants. In one of the clearest illustrations of the distinction, Herzog says that to convey ‘facts’ in his films – as do, for example, ethnographic documentaries – would be the same as looking at a poem by Hölderlin about a storm in the alps and proclaiming, ‘Ah, here we have a weather report back in 1802’ (Cronin 2002: 252). Checking art against the facts, or imagining that art is the facts, is an insult to art’s ecstatic potential.

The term ‘ecstasy’ is traditionally associated with something like a stupor or a state of wordlessness (one may be thrown into ecstasy by passion, astonishment or fear). Hamlet, for one, is accused of being in ecstasy when he sees his father’s ghost, and John Locke suggests that ecstasy may be something akin to ‘dreaming with the eyes open’ (1894: 299). To think in terms of this latter definition, one might treat all visits to the cinema as ‘ecstatic’. Perhaps Herzog, owing to his overall distrust for language, takes pains to provoke or induce a state of wordlessness in his viewers, and his cinema – in its ecstatic mode – is meant to combat the deformations and distortions that accompany apparently ‘reasonable’ discourses. Other definitions of ecstasy, however, emphasise how the mind, under the power of a dominant idea, becomes insensible to the objects that surround it. Ecstasy names, in other words, a state of rapture during which the body is incapable of sensation because the soul is otherwise occupied with the contemplation of divine things. Despite the fact that Herzog is a filmmaker who is always engaged with the body and the senses, ecstasy is a term that denotes the denial of one’s sensing body.

Is ecstasy, then, the moment when thought is denied (when one cannot reason owing to one’s state of rapture), or is it the moment when the body is denied (when one cannot sense owing to one’s state of rapture)? Because of this dual implication, the term ‘aesthetic’ has been called upon to highlight how Herzog’s films are intended to take viewers beyond the constraints of reasoned articulation – hypnotised, for example, by the plunging waterfalls at the beginning of Heart of Glass (Herz aus Glas, 1976), we mirror its enraptured actors – while at the same time his films always already involve the body in such experiences. It is through the senses, or aesthetically, that we are meant to become insensible. Insofar as Herzog’s cinema is tactile or haptic, perhaps even more than that of others because of his persistent focus on athleticism, because of the physicality of their camerawork, and because of performances such as those of Kinski, the ecstasies that attend his films – the deliberate abandonments of the body – are induced by way of our bodies.

Not to be confused with ‘attractiveness’ or ‘good taste’, the category of the ‘aesthetic’ here corresponds to an alternative to the everyday world in which we live, the one that is ostensibly deformed by prosaic language. It is a reminder that things could be otherwise. In this way, the ‘truth’ with which aesthetics provides us is truth only insofar as it negates the dissimulations associated with other rational truths. Herzog’s art, therefore, aims to reveal that the world around us is mere false appearance, and for better or worse – whether it is in the service of mystification or critique – his films contain the utopian suggestion of an ‘outside’. Such a position accurately describes the director’s cinematic approach, yet in conceptualising this study, I did not want to place myself in the position of iterating Herzog’s beliefs about the role of art and about his vocation as an artist. In many cases, when writing about his films, I have indeed attempted to explore their ecstasies, or the aesthetic and quasi-revelatory heights they achieve. Whether one connects such heights to an intuition of the beautiful (that, as Immanuel Kant would say, one has the sense that a project or plan of nature is being recalled in the very contours of the world depicted in the work) or, if one connects them with the sensation of sublimity (the idea that the images and sounds depicted exceed our ability to properly comprehend them, owing either to their grandeur or their dynamism), there is indeed something that can be described as an ‘ecstasy’ in many of Herzog’s films. One should acknowledge this and properly laud it, yet reality, history and other terms associated with accountability should also be made to haunt these ecstasies. The experiences of beauty and sublimity that one may experience upon viewing his films should be held up against other kinds of truths (rather than being seen as truth’s only mode) in the interest of asking whether the terms, aesthetic ecstasy and truth, do not periodically challenge and undermine one another. My intention, now and again, has been to permit myself to work against the grain of Herzog’s ideas, disentangling the ecstasies from the truths where called upon to do so.

Within Herzog’s oeuvre there is ample commentary that tells us what exactly the director means for his films to mean. There are his numerous written works, the extensive book of interviews with Paul Cronin, as well as several commentaries accompanying the DVDs of his films. The question remains, however, whether readers and critics are obliged to let the surfeit of material entirely proscribe discourse about the films. This is a study of a single director’s work, and as such his personal vision could never be reasonably excluded from enquiry. Yet there are other roads to travel through his films, some of which are addressed fleetingly in his own comments, and some are dispensed with wholesale. While my interest in particular is in that which constitutes ecstatic truth – what specifically within the frame and in its margins makes Herzog’s films ‘ecstatic’ – I also have other concerns: how do the director’s aesthetics simultaneously draw from and abandon certain traditions within visual history?; what is the relationship between his work and other tendencies in cinema?; and, how do we understand his films in relation to questions about Germany, history and national identity?

Fact and fiction

At one of Herzog’s public appearances, I was surprised to hear the director reveal that where possible he prefers to fabricate and stage material in his documentaries. This inclination violates most of the written and unwritten rules of documentary filmmaking, and even the most unconventional documentary filmmakers such as Nick Broomfield, Ross McElwee and Kirby Dick would likely avoid deliberate fabrication in this sense. By contrast, Herzog is proud to say that one cannot even call his documentaries ‘documentaries’ because he stages, invents and scripts dialogue for them. In one interview Herzog explains that in the case of his film Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997), much of the film is stylised, or rehearsed; Dieter was telling stories and, according to Herzog, he went into details that were totally uninteresting, so the director had no compunction about stopping everything and rehearsing the story with him in order to get details he believed would be more fascinating for the audience. Herzog says: ‘I rehearse and I shoot six times over, like in a feature film … And sometimes I create an inner truth. I invent, but I invent in order to gain a deeper insight’ (Davies 2006). In his rejection of accountants’ truths, Herzog has made clear that he holds adherence to accuracy or factuality in contempt. Whether or not this is a useful distinction for us as viewers, Herzog has often said that he prefers not to differentiate between his features and his documentary films. In the interview Exploring with Werner, on the DVD of The Wild Blue Yonder (2005), Herzog tells Norman Hill that he does not make documentaries, even though some of his films come quite close; ‘It’s all just movies’ he says.

There are of course some apparent differences between the features and the ‘documentaries’: the feature films frequently ‘look like’ feature films; Cobra Verde (1987), Scream of Stone (Cerro Torre: Schrei aus Stein, 1991) and Invincible (2000), to take some examples, are all shot in 35mm, while many of the ‘documentaries’ are shot in 16mm, Super 16 or High Definition Video. I have not opted to make much of a distinction between features and documentaries in the chapters that follow, integrating readings of the two types of films with one another. Regardless of whether one distinguishes them, Herzog’s comments reveal that he is somewhat Nietzschean in his relationship to the truth, by which I mean that he seems to feel truth is something found less in the world than in the work of art. Gilles Deleuze’s observation about Orson Welles seems to apply to Herzog as well: referring mainly to the film It’s All True (1942), Deleuze writes that for Welles, ‘the true world does not exist, and, if it did, [it] would be impossible to describe, and, if it would be described, would be useless, superfluous’. He adds that ‘the true world implies a truthful man, a man who wants the truth, but such a man has strange motives’ (1989: 137). So it is with Herzog as well. Those who would bother with truths other than the aesthetic ones that inhere in the works themselves are mere stocktakers or accountants; they are managing inventory. As Ed Lachman, one of his cinematographers, once pointed out, Herzog will lie to get to the truth (Peary 1984: 252). Moreover, an aesthetic lie is at the basis of the work: that which makes it art and not ‘the world’ is its truth.

It is here that something interesting comes into the picture, so to speak, with respect to Herzog’s documentary work. He has recently received attention for being a revolutionary documentarian who breaks open the cinematic frame. To borrow an idiom from Jacques Derrida’s The Truth in Painting (1978), one can assert that the frame that sets the work apart from the world out of which it emerges is an illusion; there is no real division between the world and the work, the frame just provides a useful pretence. From Herzog’s perspective, if film is going to break new ground it has to function in a way that forces a reflection on the utter falsity of the divide. Herzog welcomes this total infiltration because there is a freedom in surrendering documentary film’s claims on ‘truth’. Documentary is, in that sense, no truer than fiction. Not only in Little Dieter Needs to Fly, but in a film such as The White Diamond (2004) Herzog abandons the pretence of capturing the real world on film and instead captures poetic truths he feels are inspired by the world. Among other examples from that film, Mark Anthony Yhap gives a rehearsed speech about seeing the whole world in a drop of water – a drop of water that is in actuality a drop of glycerin – and Herzog has a staged conflict with Graham Dorrington, the ‘protagonist’ of the film, one that they shot and re-shot five or six times. Not only is Herzog’s position Nietzschean in that it regards art as a lie that is truer than the truth, but his position also willfully contradicts the premise that the cinematic frame can be set apart from the world of fabrications out of which it emerges.

While the staging of scenes is significant, there are other ways that the frame is ruptured in Herzog’s work. On more than one occasion Herzog has noted that the Minnesota Declaration was partly inspired by seeing hardcore pornography in a Minnesota hotel room (Cronin 2002: 239). There was, Herzog says, more truth in that type of film than in traditional documentaries (by which he presumably means cinéma vérité). The link between the beliefs espoused in Herzog’s Declaration and by this observation has to do with the question of what transpires beyond the frame or what is and what is not a ‘performance’. While there are, of course, numerous elements of explicit pornography that can be described in terms of performance, there is frequently an element of physicality in such films that is not quite captured by that term. There is, one could suggest, the ‘fact’ of the contact between bodies and of bodily functions, which appears to exceed the boundary defined by the term ‘performance’. Even this facticity, of course, may be an illusion, and filmmakers such as Catherine Breillat will, in a film such as Sex is Comedy (2002), display how this apparently real corporeality can itself be a fabrication. Yet this fact, for the most part, strikes the spectator as having a certain brutal honesty; such films reveal the bodies in them to be flesh rather than artifice, simulation or artistic conceits. In other comments about pornography, Herzog has said that the only film he could see making without any dialogue or music would be a pornographic film, ‘where you would only need the gasps and the shrieks and panting’ (Cronin 2002: 257). His comments reflect a faith in a physicality that cannot dissimulate in the same way that written text or language does. Part of our relation to hardcore images stems not from the proximity of our gaze to the subjects’ bodies, but from the apparently actual and intimate physicality taking place on the screen – an effect on which Herzog’s own films rely. They give us the sense that we may be witnessing something ‘real’ rather than mere artifice. We engage in the fantasy that the film’s frame is bending beneath the weight of the real, material conditions under which it was produced.

In a general sense, this observation concerning pornography is also about the pleasure in blurring the distinction between performance and documentation. Part of our fascination with the film Fitzcarraldo, for example, is enhanced by the knowledge of Herzog’s ‘dangerous’ relationship with Kinski, as well as the knowledge of the steamship-hauling excesses associated with the film’s production, excesses of which almost every viewer is now conscious. Likewise, some of the pleasure in watching Aguirre, Wrath of God, comes from the knowledge that there were real dangers, such as Kinski being forced to act at gunpoint, taking place outside of the film’s frame (a story now acknowledged to have been an exaggeration). On this score, Herzog has supplied an abundance of extra-textual material, including journals from the making of Fitzcarraldo (entitled The Conquest of the Useless), the book of that film and numerous interviews in Burden of Dreams. In addition to all that, the DVD of Burden of Dreams now comes with a commentary track in which we are presented with the unique circumstance of a director providing insight into a film about the making of his film. Herzog’s own documentaries are likewise enhanced by similar knowledge. For example, there is a pleasure in knowing that the men crawling across the ice searching for the lost city of Kitezh in Bells from the Deep: Faith and Superstition in Russia (Glocken aus der Tiefe – Glaube und Aberglaube in Rußland, 1993) were actually drunks from a tavern whom Herzog had paid to look as though they were listening intently to the frozen surface of the water.

The rupture of the frame in Herzog’s work has traditionally been cast in terms of the search for something new, for ‘new images’. In Wim Wenders’ film Tokyo-Ga (1985), Wenders interviews Herzog at the Tokyo Tower. The film and Herzog’s inclusion in it would be a starting point for a study in contrasts between the two filmmakers. Wenders looks at Japanese popular culture, from plastic sushi models to appropriations of Mickey Mouse, in order to explore this empire of signs as would Roland Barthes or Jean Baudrillard. Herzog has something different on his mind. On camera, he explains to Wenders that there are few images left, and that one would have to work like an archeologist with a shovel to find something new in this ‘insulted landscape’. Rather than linger on everyday culture, as Wenders does, Herzog says that he would do anything to address the problem of adequate images. He says he would climb 8,000 meters, go with NASA on Skylab, or go wherever else would be necessary. The comments are similar to those he makes in Werner Herzog Eats his Shoe, in which he asserted that we will become extinct as a civilisation if we fail to produce ‘adequate images’. In that film, Herzog issues a warning:

Our civilisation doesn’t have adequate images, and I think a civilisation is doomed or is going to die out like dinosaurs if it does not develop an adequate language or adequate images. I see it as a very, very dramatic situation. For example, we have found out that there are serious problems facing our civilisation, like energy problems, or environmental problems, or nuclear power and all this, or over-population of the world. But generally it is not understood yet that a problem of the same magnitude is that we do not have adequate images, and that’s what I’m working on – a new grammar of images.

While such claims speak to anxieties about reification, about the profusion of television, postcards and everything else, they do not speak to the fundamental concern in his films with the difference, or lack of one, between fiction and truth. To uncover this one has to scrutinise more closely Herzog’s interest in capturing something authentic in his films. Herzog finds it important that the ‘real’ makes its way into the frame of his fiction films, whether in the form of the native Amazonians who bring the ship over the mountain in Fitzcarraldo, the shyness and curiosity of the African actors in Cobra Verde, or the ostensibly authentic behaviour of the Jewish performers in Invincible. Herzog breaks the frame by suggesting at one and the same time that what we are seeing is both staged and not staged, or by showing us both the consequence of his mastery as a manipulator alongside something that is undeniably ‘real’.

Along these lines, however, one should be careful not to confuse that which is ‘real’ – the authentic elements that creep into his films, those aspects that he believes cannot be ‘faked’ – with a need to be explicitly political. His goal is not to use the real world, its ethnographically or historically determined facts, to underscore his positions. Politics is something Herzog sets aside as a simulacra, something that can only distract from or diminish aesthetic ecstasies. Whatever baggage his discourse of authenticity carries with it, Herzog would rather his ideas were treated as though they exceeded politics. Although he has spoken about things such as the division of Germany, wars and Central American history, Herzog seems to feel less his political obligations than his obligation as an artist to reveal poetic truths. While some artists strive for greater relevance, Herzog strives to make his work autonomous, a goal he achieves with only varying degrees of success. As he found in the case of Ballad of the Little Soldier (Ballade vom kleinen Soldaten, 1984), which inspired a strong antipathy from the left and assertions that he had allowed himself to act as a tool of the Reagan-era right, or in the case of Lessons of Darkness (Lektionen in Finsternis, 1992) after a screening of which Herzog was booed by 1,500 angry Berliners who also were criticising him from the left, his works often take a political position even if he had intended to create something apart from politics. It is, of course, precisely due to his distaste that he becomes embroiled in conflicts of this sort; Herzog means to pique those who think in narrow political terms and thus creates the conditions in which he plays the role of the provocateur.

Inner visions

There are limits to what Herzog would depict in the name of achieving aesthetic ecstasy. For example, his second film, Game in the Sand (Spiel im Sand, 1964), depicts an act of violence involving a rooster, and Herzog has kept this film from public view, claiming that he may well destroy it before he dies. Herzog seems to feel, however, that his chief obligations are not ethical as much as they are obligations to articulate our collective dreams. Part of his self-understanding as an artist who transcends the sphere of the political – his separation of aesthetics from politics – comes from the idea that he has special access to a social unconscious. In this regard, his famous fascination with landscapes becomes a central concern. This element of his work is discussed particularly in chapter three, but I wanted to remark on it here as it may aid in constructing a more detailed portrait of what it is precisely that Herzog believes himself to be articulating on our behalf. From his first feature film, Signs of Life (Lebenszeichen, 1968), which begins with a shot of a car driving through a winding mountain landscape, through to Wheel of Time, in which the sand mandala constructed by the monks in that film is meant to provide an image of an inner landscape, Herzog has insisted that landscapes are always already within us. He explains: ‘For me a true landscape is not just a representation of a desert or a