Light In The Dark: Herzog Underground

"These fragments I have shored against my ruins" - T.S. Eliot, "The Waste Land"

There's an old adage - it's not the artist, but the spirit that moves through the artist who creates. Werner Herzog's latest film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, explores the invisible hand at work in the magnificent Chauvet Cave rock paintings recently discovered in southern France. Painted over 25,000 years ago, the paintings are fragments pointing to a larger whole - our own collective being. As Herzog asks, "Is this their heartbeat or ours?"

Herzog was given unprecedented access to the cave, but was only allowed to bring a crew of four including himself. His choice to use 3D was ingenious - not only is it trendy, but it brings the texture of the paintings alive as if they'd just been freshly baked.

One scientist believes the people who painted the rocks didn't recognize any boundaries between the spiritual and conscious worlds or between creatures like bisons or humans. As Herzog says, they also weren't trapped within history and enjoyed more freedom of thought than us so-called "moderns". Once again, Herzog tackles the impossible and dresses it in rare and provocative attire - another great film by the maestro.

Butterfly Of Hysteria: Klaus Kinski

"Every grey hair on my head, I call Kinski" - Werner Herzog

Anyone would be lucky to have a best 'fiend' like Klaus Kinski. The man had the raw power of Iggy Pop, the ugly beauty of Serge Gainsbourg and the wacked hysteria of a caged King Kong. He could be a gentle butterfly, then flare into a violent demon in the blink of an eye. But he always brought it...at least when working with Werner Herzog. The pair had a relationship that spanned decades, from when they were in their youth, and included six films: Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Nosferatu (1979), Woyzeck (1979), Fitzcarraldo (1982), Cobra Verde (1987) and finally, Herzog's postmortem tribute, My Best Fiend.

A Kinski performance is like watching a bridge trembling immediately before it collapses. The stakes are high and nothing else but the performance is worth considering. As Herzog said, Kinski needed to create a sense of chaos to propel himself into a scene or a role and produce something no one else was capable of achieving. But riding that mad tiger can be devouring and it often turned on him, and by extension, the film. Kinski was notorious for breaking contracts and storming off sets in the middle of production, including Cobra Verde, his last alive with Herzog.

But Herzog and Kinski usually brought out the best in each other. "He is the only person, basically, who ever taught me anything," Herzog has said. Their relationship thrived on pushing one another to the edge - as Kinski says in My Best Fiend, "He's crazy. That's why we work together." Herzog concurs, adding, "The only thing that counted in the end was the result on screen."

"I came into this world in the form of a human, but the sun, the stars, the wind, fire, deserts, forests, mountains, skies, oceans, and clouds were trapped inside me. Do not be sad, Nanhoi [Kinski´s son]. The truth is, I can never die."- Klaus Kinski (October 18, 1926 – November 23, 1991

Fitzcarraldo: Conquistador Of The Useless

"If we're gonna do this...let's do it in style."

Director Werner Herzog's 1982 film - Fitzcarraldo - was based loosely on an actual person - Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald, a Peruvian rubber baron who died at the end of the 19th century. Klaus Kinski delivers a typically intense performance bringing an element of Teutonic sangfroid to his character's dizzying passions. It's a brilliant film and won Herzog the Palme d'Or at Cannes.


Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, or Fitzcarraldo as the natives pronounced it, had a head full of dreams and only wanted to bring the famous Italian opera tenor - Enrico Caruso - to the Peruvian jungle. But first he had to build an opera house...

...and to do so would require loads of cash. Can the end justify the means? Can it ever be acceptable to exploit a native culture or pull a 300 ton boat over a mountain in the name of "civilization"? Herzog thought this was analogous to film making and he adopted Fitzcarraldo's moniker "conquistador of the useless" in his vain pursuit of artistic perfection.



Eventually, the best laid schemes of mice & men are overtaken by events and in an ironic commentary on colonialism, Fitzcarraldo ends up being manipulated by the very natives he thought he had subdued.


But in the end the film gets made, the boat makes it to the other side of the mountain & the show goes on...and on...and on...

Werner Herzog: Ecstatic Truth

I recently watched Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man about the life and death of naturalist Timothy Treadwell. It's a stunning film pitting Herzog's world view of nature as brutish and cruel against Treadwells' more benign one.

"The birds are in misery, I don't think they sing. They just screech in pain."

Herzog constructs a beautiful film about a very disturbing subject. His sympathetic portrait of Treadwell, a guy who obviously had a deathwish, comes from identifying with the young man's humanity by looking beyond his fanaticism and vanity.

As he is in all his films, Herzog is in pursuit of what he has called "ecstatic truth":

"The term 'ecstatic truth' is searching for truth beyond the facts and much deeper than facts; that is something I look out for and Grizzly Man is a very good example of it."

His most recent film Encounters at the End of the World is just as brilliant, but captures nature in a far less brutish mood.

Below is a clip from the 1980 short film, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.