Herr Herzog and Ms McGowan

Joint birthday greetings to Werner Herzog …

… for whom the words “maverick” and “genius” might well have been invented;

and to Rose McGowan …

… for whom the phrase “enough to make a priest kick a hole in a stained glass window” almost certainly was invented.

Rescue Dawn

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Werner Herzog / In category: 10 of 10 / Overall: 100 of 100

Okay, maybe this is a bit of a cheat – I’ve already reviewed ‘Rescue Dawn’ on The Agitation of the Mind; back in November 2007, during the blog’s first month of existence – but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed the right film to end the Operation 101010 project on.

The first title I reviewed for Operation 101010, on 20 January 2010, was Werner Herzog’s astounding documentary ‘Little Dieter Needs to Fly’. ‘Rescue Dawn’ is his feature film exposition of the same story. The same narrative perameters apply: German-American Dieter Dengler is driven to become a pilot. He enlists, trains and is sent to Vietnam. He is shot down over Laos, captured, endures inhumane conditions and eventually escapes.

My original piece on ‘Rescue Dawn’ was a mere 240 words, by far the shortest review I’ve posted on the blog. When I wrote it, I felt that Tim’s review on Antagony & Ecstasy said all that needed to be said; his article certainly reflected my feelings on the film. I concluded: “There’s much to admire … And yet … this is Herzog in the jungle. This should be ‘Aguirre’ with planes, ‘Fitzcarraldo’ goes ’Nam. What it is, ultimately, is a dichotomy. It’s simultaneously one of the best things I’ve seen in a multiplex this year and arguably the most ordinary thing in Herzog’s filmography.”

So now, rounding out a bizarre triple-bill that started with ‘Some Like it Hot’ and ‘Seven’, I find myself concluding today’s movie marathon with my first viewing of ‘Rescue Dawn’ since November 2007. And I still maintain that it’s an exceptionally well-made film, with a sterling performance from Christian Bale as Dengler (who starved himself to the kind of skeletal frame he exhibited in ‘The Machinist’) and an excellent supporting turn from Steve Zahn (as Duane, Dengler’s closest friend in captivity). To see Zahn – who usually does smug, wiseass, or smug wiseass – delve into a hitherto unexplored capacity as an actor is a revelatory. Jeremy Davies gives his usual wild-eyed, flapping hands, strangulated syntax Jeremy Davies performance, but I find him less annoying in ‘Rescue Dawn’ than most of his other films.

Peter Zeitlinger’s cinematography, while never quite reaching the mystic/poetic visuals of ‘Aguirre, the Wrath of God’ or ‘Fitzcarraldo’, is never less than evocative. Herzog’s script is focused and direct: ten minutes in, Dengler’s plane is down; less than twenty minutes in, he’s captured; by the half hour mark he’s at a PoW camp and starting to think about escaping. Herzog captures the banal, routines and unpredictable outbursts of violence from the guards that characterize life in the prison camp. He charts the physical depletion of the captives and their desperation in eating grubs and suffering dysentery. He has an ear for their camaraderie and banter, too, but without descending into cliché or jingoism.

(Parenthetically, the ending – which I did find hopelessly jingoistic first time round – I have since learned is depicted pretty much as it happened. So fair dues.)

The escape comes about two thirds of the way into the movie, two groups of prisoners striking out in different directions. The rest of the film follows Dengler and Duane as they trek arduously through the jungle, trying to evade Laotian troops while attracting the attention of the occasional US helicopter or search plane.

‘Rescue Dawn’ is, by turns, exciting, grueling, suspenseful and (finally) cathartic. From most contemporary directors, this would be top-of-their-game stuff – possibly a masterpiece. From Herzog, it’s curiously pedestrian, but it proves that (a) even cinema’s premier maverick can turn in a conventional, mainstream work and (b) Herzog should always be a freakin’ maverick.

The Flying Doctors of East Africa

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Werner Herzog / In category: 9 of 10 / Overall: 94 of 100

Made in 1969, the year after his feature-length debut ‘Signs of Life’, the 45-minute documentary ‘The Flying Doctors of East Africa’ is – even by Herzog’s admission – an impersonal project:

“I was asked to make it by colleagues of the doctors themselves, and though I do like the final result, it is a film that is not particularly close to my heart. In fact I do not even call it a film, it is much more a Bericht, a report.” (Quoted in Herzog on Herzog, ed. Paul Cronin.)

Indeed – to be a little more blunt – it often feels like on of those clunky public information films you’d expect to see lampooned on ‘The Simpsons’ (“I’m Troy McClure, you might remember me from such films as …”). The film documents in po-faced style the work of the Flying Doctors service established in Tanzania by the English surgeon Michael Wood, staffed mainly by volunteers and maintained almost entirely by charitable contributions.

The vital importance of being able to ferry medical staff by air in two hours to remote villages it would take a day to get to by jeep is established quickly, and there’s no doubt that Wood and his team are heroes in the efforts they make and the painfully limited resources they have to cope with.

On the minus side, the interview footage is often stilted. It’s evident that even the otherwise entirely capable and confident Wood is ill at ease in front of the camera. The most wooden interviewee is a nurse who vocalises, word by hesitant word, the difficulty of communication with the natives (in the unreconstructed style of the times, she cringingly refers to them as “these people”).

The outcome of communication problems is, however, serious. A young boy, nil by mouth prior to major surgery, is secretly fed by his parents who mistakenly believe that they are fortifying him. Complications under anaesthetic result in his death. Herzog immediately identifies the key issue as cultural differences:

“The most interesting scenes stemmed from my interest in vision and perception. One of the doctors in the film talks about showing a poster of a fly to the villagers. They would say, ‘We don’t have that problem, our flies aren’t that large’, a response that really fascinated me. We decided to take some of the posters … to a coffee plantation to experiment. One was of a man, one of a huge human eye, another a hut, another a bowl and the fifth – which was hung upside down – of some people and animals. We asked people which poster was upside down and which was of an eye. Nearly half could not tell which was upside down and two-thirds did not recognise the eye … For the locals these five objects apparently just looked like abstract compositions of colours. It was clear there brains were processing images in a different way.” (Quoted in Herzog on Herzog.)

Was this the moment when Herzog’s own doors of perception stood open. “Processing images in a different way.” Is there any better mission statement, over forty years after he made this little seen and seemingly minor work, for what Herzog has tireless striven to achieve in his cinema?

A few more (slightly drunken) thoughts on Stroszek

Maybe ‘The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans’ isn’t Herzog’s first American crime movie. Maybe ‘Stroszek’ is Herzog’s ‘Taxi Driver’. Bruno S.’s title character, a more or less blameless innocent denied even a cathartic last stand when he finally does pick up a gun, has a greater moral claim than Travis Bickle to the title “God’s lonely man”.

The driverless truck running in endless circles from ‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’ is replaced by a driverless truck that circles a few times before its engine catches fire. Whatever snuffed out the American dream has also presided at the death of anarchy.

There’s a fast-talking auctioneer in ‘Stroszek’. Herzog’s auctioneer documentary ‘How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck’ – juxtaposing the English language stuck on fast-forward with the statelier pace of the Amish lifestyle – was made the same year. The way auctioneers’ talk isn’t natural. They’re the dancing chickens of linguism.

Herzog’s snowy compositions of Berlin streets make me think of a Bob Dylan album cover and yet bring Lou Reed’s music to mind.

Stroszek

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Werner Herzog / In category: 8 of 10 / Overall: 91 of 100

‘Stroszek’ is inarguably the most emotionally shattering work Werner Herzog has ever put his name to. It has, infamously, become known as the film Joy Division singer Ian Curtis watched just before he hanged himself. An extreme reaction (although it should be noted that Curtis did himself no favours by listening to Iggy Pop’s Dostoyevsky-inspired slice of miserablism ‘The Idiot’ straight after watching it), but I guess there’s something in that evil soulless fucker of dancing chicken at the end that’s capable of destroying rationalism and convincing you that there is nothing left but the bleak emptiness of despair.

So what compelled Herzog to create this hour and three quarters of bleakness? Some run in with the American studio system that caused him to render that country’s cultural heritage as an act of artistic suicide? Some failure of his own creative vision from which he reeled in self-critical agony? Some personal tragedy so deep and heartbreaking that he was driven to paint ‘Stroszek’ in the harshest and darkest shades of black?

Er, no. He made it to say sorry to Bruno S. for not casting him in ‘Woyzeck’.

For those not in the know, Bruno S. was the idiot savant street musician whom Herzog cast in the title role in ‘The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser’ (a film whose German title ‘Jeder Fur Sich und Gott gegen Alle’ – ‘Every Man for Himself and God Against All’ – I much prefer). During production, Herzog told Bruno S. that he wanted to make a film of Georg Buchner’s unfinished play ‘Woyzeck’ and would cast him as the lead. Herzog shot ‘Woyzeck’ back to back with his loose but inspired Bram Stoker adaptation ‘Nosferatu – Der Phantom das Nacht’, using the same crew, and quickly realised that ‘Nosferatu’ star Klaus Kinski was better suited to play Woyzeck.

By way of apology, Herzog knocked out the script for ‘Stroszek’ (the similarity of the protagonist’s name to Woyzeck surely no coincidence) in a couple of weeks, and shooting the second half of the movie guerrilla style in America without a permit. But then again, this is Werner Herzog we’re talking about and small matters like getting permission to film have never stopped him. This is only one of many reasons I fucking bloody love the guy so much.

‘Stroszek’ casts Bruno S. as the eponymous man-child, turned loose after two and a half years in prison (the nature of his crimes is never disclosed, but alcohol is categorically blamed for his behaviour). His first act as a free man is to go into a pub and order a beer. Can’t knock him; I’d have done the same myself. It’s while he’s knocking back said beer, however, that he becomes reacquainted with his old girlfriend Eva (Eva Mattes), now turning tricks for a couple of thuggish pimps in some of the most horrible fashions ever to disgrace the 1970s.

Scraping out a meagre living singing in courtyards, Stroszek’s life takes a turn for the once when pimp-boy’s violent behaviour towards Eva quickly transfers itself to Stroszek. Then Stroszek’s elderly neighbour Herr Scheitz (Clemens Scheitz) offers a way out that seems to good to be true: a new life living and working in America with his nephew.

Too good to be true? You can say that again! Stroszek, Scheitz and Eva find themselves in Railway Flats, Wisconsin, a town so bleak and run down it makes Beirut look like the Riviera. Scheitz’s nephew, Clayton (Clayton Szalpinski), runs a dingy garage and is such a poster boy for personal hygiene and sophisticated demeanour that he removes a broken tooth with a pair of pliers and swills his bleeding gums with a can of beer. He has a face like the back end of a pick-up truck and sniggers about the possibility of shagging Eva. Yup, this guy is so déclassé that Cletus from ‘The Simpsons’ looks like Alistair Cooke in comparison.

Stroszek and Eva take out a loan to buy a mobile home, but soon fall behind with the payments. An unctuous type from the bank threatens repossession. Eva starts turning tricks again. Stroszek falls into despair. Things come to a bad end after Stroszek and Scheitz’s attempts at making easy money from a life of crime fail spectacularly. And, brother, do I ever mean spectacularly! If Bonnie and Clyde’s watchword was “we rob banks”, Stroszek and his OAP wingman demonstrate how not to do it by striking when the bank’s closed and robbing the barber’s shop next door for $32 instead. The concept of a getaway doesn’t seem to occur to them.

Granted, Herzog milks moments like these for absurdist humour (likewise a narratively redundant but bitingly funny scene about two feuding farmers and the no-man’s-land strip of dirt that separates their properties), but there’s no humour whatsoever in the denouement, which takes place at a deserted funfair. Stroszek rides a chairlift to nowhere and the dancing chicken keeps on dancing. Herzog has spoken of the idiocy of chickens. The chicken in ‘Stroszek’ goes beyond idiocy. Its meaningless gyrations go beyond a black joke at the expense of Stroszek himself; it stands as a metaphor for cultural emptiness; an epitaph for the clichéd myth of the American dream – something that probably never existed in the first place.

Heart of Glass

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Werner Herzog / In category: 7 of 10 / Overall: 71 of 100

‘Heart of Glass’ (a.k.a. The One Where Herzog Hypnotized His Cast) is a strange, dreamlike fable that makes an interesting companion piece to Herzog’s earlier ‘The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser’. But whereas ‘Kaspar Hauser’ has an enigma (the eponymous man-child) under scrutiny by rationality, science and social mores, ‘Heart of Glass’ depicts a community spiralling somnolently into irrationality until enigma is all that remains.

Mühlbeck, foreman at a glass factory upon which the town’s economy is dependent, dies and takes to his grave the secret of the factory’s prized “ruby glass”. Production ceases. The workers stand around idle. The factory owner and the town elders fret. A mystic, Hias (Josef Bierbichler), descends from the mountains and prophesizes disaster. The torpor that besets the town drains its inhabitants of their humanity.

‘Heart of Glass’ opens with a series of landscape shots, mist drifting across the countryside. Not a word is spoken until about six minutes in, when a quasi-philosophical voiceover murmuringly accompanies the eerily beautiful shots of the natural world. It sets the tone. The dialogue in ‘Heart of Glass’ is deliberately artificial, like listening to a poem being recited over the images.

The images, pace anything Herzog puts his hand to, are often extraordinary. An early scene has Hias crouched in front of a mountain pass, portentously delivering his first prediction. Behind him, shrouded in mist, two bridges precariously span the ravine. Two people will cross, he tells his glassy-eyed audience, one on each bridge; one will be a liar, the other a thief. The camera drifts upwards. Two indistinct figures ghost across the bridges. No further clue is given to their identity.

The first time I saw ‘Heart of Glass’, it frustrated the hell out of me. Paced slower than an arthritic snail on mogadon, elusive and inconclusive in equal measures, I tried to hard to find meaning in the film, searching each frame for clues, symbols, recurrent imagery. The ending fucked with my head as well. A sort-of denouement at around the one hour ten minute mark is abandoned almost as soon as it’s introduced; Hias is made a pariah; retreating back into the mountains, he narrates a story about a forgotten society on a barren island who believe the world is flat until one of their number, having spent decades staring out to sea, begins to doubt. Their story is left as open to interpretation as that of the glass factory and the community it supported. The film ends.

Subsequent viewings have led to me to hazard a guess that ‘Heart of Glass’ is actually a film about the loss of meaning; about ennui, both social and spiritual. Either that, or it’s a zombie film without flesh-munching, action scenes or a Tom Savini cameo. Your guess is as good as mine.

Asked by Paul Cronin in his book Herzog on Herzog whether the whole hypnosis angle was a gimmick, Herzog had this to say:

“Everyone but the lead character – the only clairvoyant one amongst them – was hypnotized before playing their scenes. I stress that the hypnosis was for reasons of stylization and not manipulation. I certainly did not want a bunch of performing puppets for the film. For years people have accused me of wanting to have more control over actors in my films. In the context of what we were doing in ‘Heart of Glass’, I assure you that as a director I would have been much better off having actors who were not in a trance.”

The White Diamond

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Werner Herzog / In category: 6 of 10 / Overall 70 of 100

‘The White Diamond’ opens with a potted history of aviation, before settling into the story of Graham Dorrington, an aeronautical designer who –

No, scratch that. Potted history of aviation, my ass! This is a Werner Herzog film. ‘The White Diamond’ opens with a skilful collage of archive footage depicting mankind’s earliest attempts to get off the ground, often ending in disaster, with Herzog calling time on his oblique history lesson at the point where “the real future of aviation was thought to be the airship. Like the roads now filled with automobiles, the skies would be full of airships.”

This opening section fades out with images of the Hindenburg descending in a coruscation of flames. And on this sobering note, the film settles into the story of Graham Dorrington, an aeronautical designer who pioneers a sort of mini-airship for use in scientific research above the jungle canopies of Guyana.

At first, Dorrington seems an atypical Herzog protagonist. There’s a boyish enthusiasm in his to-camera discussions of the work he’s involved in; he’s passionate but never obsessive. He comes across as too good-natured to embody the kind of crazed jungle-bound undertakings that Herzog portrays elsewhere in his filmography. Put it this way: if ‘The White Diamond’ were a feature and not a documentary, Dorrington would be played not by Klaus Kinski but Stephen Fry.

Gradually, though, Herzog works his way towards the tragic and defining event of Dorrington’s career; the event that still haunts him, that throws its shadow across a decade of his life and over the current project.

In 1993, testing a prototype of Dorrington’s mini-airship, the internationally renowned wildlife photographer Dieter Plage flew above the Sumatran rainforests. His camera became entangled in the canopy and, while trying to retrieve it, Plage fell from the airship. The fall killed him. When Dorrington eventually discusses the event, and the “heaviness” he feels over Plage’s loss, Herzog captures the moment sensitively; his camera is never a voyeur.

Plage’s death makes Dorrington trepidacious when it comes to the maiden voyage of his new airship, not least because he has two candidates eager to test it out and never mind the potential dangers. One – of course – is Herzog himself. The other is Marc Anthony Yhap, one of the indigenous populace who congregate to assist and/or observe. Herzog finds in Yhap the soul of a fellow poet. (The title comes from Yhap’s description of the airship.) The eminently laconic Yhap waxes lyrical about taking off in the airship, drifting slowly and peacefully all the way to Europe to be reunited with his family.

If the kinship between Herzog and Yhap is tangible, the slowly developing friendship between Dorrington and Yhap is poignant and forms the human centre of the film. The final scenes, bathed in the ecstatic truth that Herzog ceaselessly strives for, has Dorrington take Yhap up in the airship. The indigent’s delight is, if not an exorcism of sorts, then certainly a counterbalance to the weight Dorrington has been carrying around since Plage’s terrible accident.

Another moment of ecstatic truth – approaching, in this case perhaps, a spiritual truth – comes when Herzog’s cameras, lowered painstakingly, penetrate a hitherto inaccessible cave behind the Kaieteur Falls which provides roosting for innumerable white-tipped swifts. Call it legend, call it superstition, but the locals believe that said cave is holy, that whatever is discovered in there should never be made public. Herzog, respectful of their beliefs, opts to keep the footage under wraps.

“By dint of declaration the so-called Cinéma Vérité is devoid of vérité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants,” Herzog wrote in his gauntlet-throwing Minnesota Declaration. “Filmmakers of Cinéma Vérité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts. Tourism is sin and travel on foot a virtue.” He’s absolutely right. And here he proves that the absence of the image can be just as revealing and ecstatically true.

Even Dwarfs Started Small

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Werner Herzog / In category: 5 of 10 / Overall: 69 of 100

The late ’60s found Werner Herzog, just one feature film (‘Signs of Life’) and a handful of shorts into his prolific career, in Africa where, along with filming the commissioned 45-minute film ‘The Flying Doctors of East Africa’, he start shooting footage for what would become ‘Fata Morgana’. His original concept – which he returned to nearly forty years later with ‘The Wild Blue Yonder’ – was to structure the film as a document made by alien visitors who discover that Earth is a ruined landscape.

“… I decided to scrap this idea. The mirages that had taken hold of me and the visionary aspects of the desert landscape were so much more powerful that any single idea for the film I had previously had, so I junked the story, opened my eyes and ears, and just filmed the mirages of the desert.”

If this recollection sounds transcendental, the reality was quite different. Herzog, renowned for making films of visionary genius in the most inhospitable conditions imaginable, had a harder time than usual. The man who manoeuvred his way through military blockades during ‘Fitzcarraldo’ on a forged permit document and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of chutzpah didn’t fare so well on ‘Fata Morgana’. He and his small crew found themselves arrested on several occasions, incarcerated in overcrowded cells, mistreated. It wasn’t in the happiest frame of mind that he started work on his next picture ‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’*.

“When I returned to Lanzarote to start shooting ‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’ I was full of bitterness, affected by sickness and the film became a more radical film than I had originally planned. ‘Aguirre’ looks like kindergarten against this one. Somehow I had the feeling that if Goya and Hieronymus Bosch had the guts to do their gloomiest stuff, why shouldn’t I?”

Radical, definitely. ‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’ is a film that divided audiences of the time, particularly in Germany where Herzog was denounced as a fascist. Released during a period of widespread revolts and riots, Herzog’s critics claimed that the film satirised the revolutionary spirit instead of celebrating it.

“I told these agitators that the film had absolutely nothing to do with the 1968 movements, that they were blinded by zealousness and that if they looked at the film twenty five years down the line they might just see a more truthful representation of what happened in 1968 than in most other films.”

Read the above sentence a couple of times. There’s something of a dichotomy in that statement. Herzog is saying that ‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’ is not about the political and social chaos of 1968 – by extension, therefore, it is neither an allegory nor an overtly political work – however, viewed in retrospect it provides a more accurate commentary on the social and political climate it was born out of than many other, explicitly political, films of the time.

Or, I guess, you could just look at it as a movie about some dwarfs who go apeshit and revel in total anarchy. The nominal plot – the film offers little in the way of narrative; it’s more a collage of increasingly bizarre scenes – has Hombre (Helmut Döring) first observe and then participate in a destructive and cathartic day of rebellion while a nameless bureaucrat (Pepi Hermine) tries to cling on to his seat of power while impotently calling for order. The location is some kind of institute or facility. It doesn’t matter which. Take it as a microcosm: for the Germany of 1968, for the Britain of 1977, for the world of today. Works just as well in each case.

Works equally well – nightmarishly so, in fact – if you take everything literally. That way you’ve got only one of two films (to the best of my knowledge) that feature an all-dwarf case – the other being Sam Newfield’s 1938 western ‘The Terror of Tiny Town’ – and certainly the only film whose all-dwarf cast gleefully commit acts of arson and vandalism, throw themselves at or on top of moving vehicles, flick through pornographic magazines, stage a mock religious ceremony with a crucified monkey and laugh themselves hoarse at a camel as it takes a dump.

“… a rumour went round that to get the dromedary on its knees so long I cut its sinews. Very quickly I learned … that you can fight a rumour only with an even wilder rumour. So immediately I issued a statement that actually I had nailed the dromedary to the ground.”

‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’ is one fucked-up piece of cinema, even by Herzog’s standards. It’s a joyous hymn to irresponsibility, a slap in the face to audience expectations and a fuck-you two decades before the term was even coined to political correctness. If Alejandro Jodorowsky had made ‘A Clockwork Orange’ from a script by Salvador Dali, the end result couldn’t have been any weirder.

* ‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’ was released before ‘Fata Morgana’ as Herzog was initially hesitant about whether ‘Fata Morgana’ would find an audience.

(All quotes in italics are taken from Herzog on Herzog, edited by Paul Cronin.)

Mini Herzog-fest

It’s Werner Herzog’s 68th birthday today, so what better occasion to contribute a few more of his idiosyncratic and inimitable titles to Operation 101010? The next three days will constitute a mini Herzog-fest; I’m putting all of the Herzog DVDs I own but haven’t reviewed yet in a box and pulling out three at random. Look out for the first review in a few hours.

To get things underway, though, here’s some words of wisdom from the Bavarian maverick himself, as quoted in the indispensable Faber & Faber book Herzog on Herzog (ed. Paul Cronin):

“I have often spoken of what I call the inadequate imagery of today’s civilization. I have the impression that the images that surround us today are worn out; they are abused and useless and exhausted. They are limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution. When I look at the postcards in tourist shops and the images and advertisements that surround us in magazines, or I turn on the television, or if I walk into a travel agency and see those huge posters with that same tedious image of the Grand Canyon on them, I truly feel there is something dangerous emerging here. The biggest danger in my opinion is television because to a certain degree it ruins our vision and makes us very sad and lonesome. Our grand-children will blame us for not having tossed hand-grenades into TV stations because of commercials. Television kills our imagination and what we end up with are worn-out images because of the inability of too many people to seek out fresh ones.”

The Wild Blue Yonder

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Werner Herzog / In category: 4 of 10 / Overall: 58 of 100

There’s a scene in Tim Burton’s ‘Ed Wood’ where the eponymous wannabe director is looking through some reels of stock footage with a cutting room buddy. He speculates that you could make an entire movie using them.

This, apart from a few original scenes which feature Brad Dourif basically ranting to camera, is pretty much what Herzog has done with ‘The Wild Blue Yonder’. Except where Ed Wood’s footage is strictly B-movie B-roll, Herzog got his from NASA.

At its most effective, ‘The Wild Blue Yonder’ juxtaposes scenes of the earth seen from space, scenes of astronauts floating gracefully in zero gravity and scenes of divers exploring far beneath the Antarctic ocean. The depths of space and the depths of the sea cohere aesthetically in a tone poem of wondrous images given added meaning and poignance by Ernst Reijeseger’s strange, haunting and beautifully otherworldly score.

And if that had been the entirety of Herzog’s approach – a wordless poem of visual imagery and music – ‘The Wild Blue Yonder’ might have emerged as one of the oddest and greatest works by a man who has produced more odd and great cinema (the oddness and the greatness often inextricably intermeshed) than most. It could have been considered the concluding part of a loosely connected trilogy following ‘Fata Morgana’ and ‘Lessons of Darkness’.

Like ‘Fata Morgana’, it is an exploration into the uniqueness of the image. Like ‘Lessons of Darkness’, it postulates itself as a science fiction fable documenting the alien qualities of planet Earth as if through the perspective of a visitor from another world.

Only here, Herzog makes this aspect literal. He gives us a wild-looking Brad Dourif as the alien, raging at the folly of mankind. He recounts a story about Roswell, alien spores, a mission to the outer fringes of the galaxy and the discovery and planned colonisation of the Dourif alien’s home planet (the “wild blue yonder” of the title). Which all sounds very ‘X Files’/Arthur C. Clarke/Peter F. Hamilton, except that Herzog clearly doesn’t give a flying fuck about traditional (or even recognisable) sci-fi tropes. The Dourif scenes are so completely random and out of character with the deep space/deep sea footage that it’s tempting to wonder if Herzog had basically sold whomever stumped the budget on the sci-fi angle and then decided, with po-faced solemnity, to completely and utterly take the piss.

It’s a curious film, ‘The Wild Blue Yonder’. It’s quite definitely a Herzog film. Minor Herzog, but still intriguing. Get through the Dourif scenes (he has one or two moments that are moderately entertaining, but his verbiage becomes white noise after a while) and you’ll be rewarded with visuals and music that are genuinely haunting.

The Region 2 DVD I watched features a half-hour documentary, ‘A Requiem in Space’, about Reijeseger’s vision of the music, his collaborative approach with Herzog and the musicians he engaged, which is pretty much worth the rental price on its own. It clarifies some of the ideas behind the film and provides a fuller appreciation for Reijeseger’s ethereal score.

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Werner Herzog / In category: 3 of 10 / Overall: 40 of 100

Nicolas Cage is the new Klaus Kinski.

Yes, you read that right. As Lieutenant Terence McDonagh in Werner Herzog’s magnificently unhinged crime thriller ‘The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans’, Cage gives the kind of performance that not only sends you spinning back in time a couple of decades to recall his dementedly inspired heyday in the likes of ‘Raising Arizona’, ‘Vampire’s Kiss’ and ‘Wild at Heart’, but dredges up cinematic memories of the classic, borderline insane Herzog/Kinski collaborations. Indeed, it’s easy to claim McDonagh as Aguirre with a badge and gun, Fitzcarraldo with a yen for zydeco instead of grand opera. Like Aguirre, he enters the film absolutely fucking way off base of normal and just plunges headlong into a downward spiral of his own creating from there. Like Fitzcarraldo, he has a prostitute girlfriend and an aching desire, born of genuine romanticism, to strive towards a better life for them. Only whereas Fitzcarraldo does it with a rust-bucket old boat and the help of an indian tribe, McDonagh uses a gun and the dubious association of a drug dealer.

Reading back over that last paragraph, I notice that I’ve used “magnificently unhinged”, “dementedly inspired” and “borderline insane” in one sentence. This would normally be evidence of extremely sloppy writing and I’d stop right now and do a stringent editing job. But this is Werner Herzog we’re talking about – moreover, Werner Herzog tapping into Nicolas Cage at his most uninhibited (with Cage in turn drawing from the well of lunacy that fuels his director) – and anything less than gushing, aureate, over-the-top screeds of purple prose seems somehow inappropriate. Besides, it says everything you need to know about ‘Bad Lieutenant’ that the weirdest part of the aforementioned sentence is the proximity of “crime thriller” to “Werner Herzog”.

But enough of the etymology already! What about the film? How does Herzog fare with thrilleramics? What’s with the Bavarian maverick helming a remake?

Ah yes, that’s the big question. I remember a couple of years ago when word of the project first filtered out. Cage had just racked up the unholy trinity of ‘The Wicker Man’, ‘Ghost Rider’ and ‘Next’ (the fact that fucking ‘Ghost Rider’ was the best of the bunch says it all!). Herzog was riding higher as a documentarian than a feature film director, having just released the immaculately well made but curiously un-Herzogian ‘Rescue Dawn’. The original ‘Bad Lieutenant’ was barely 15 years old and still firmly lodged in the cineaste’s consciousness courtesy of it constituting (a) the last truly great movie on Abel Ferrara’s CV and (b) the last truly great Harvey Keitel performance. There seemed no need at all for a remake.

I’ve read reviews that dismiss any comparisons between Ferrara’s film and Herzog’s as negligible. Herzog himself has stated that the ‘Bad Lieutenant’ part of the title was foisted on the film by the producer and that ‘Port of Call, New Orleans’ (a title I much prefer) is a stand-alone movie. There has also been talk that ‘Bad Lieutenant’ could function as a loosely collective title for any movie, set anywhere, which basically takes a morally compromised cop as its starting point and does its own thing from there. Maybe the much-mooted big-screen ‘Sweeney’ adaptation could benefit from the idea: ‘The Bad Detective Inspector – Port of Call, London’. Obviously, you’d need to cast Tom Hardy, reunite him with ‘Bronson’ director Nicolas Refn Winding and have him freak out whilst hallucinating Viking hoards before he knees some blagger in the face and announces “you’re nicked, tinkerbell” in order to recapture the sheer weirdness of what Cage and Herzog conjure from the material but, you know, it could work.

Ultimately, William M. Finkelstein’s script cleaves to only a couple of story beats from Ferrara’s film – the B.L. sexually coercing a young woman in return for looking the other way to a minor misdemeanour; the B.L.’s burgeoning gambling debts – but the scenes it references are so memorable it’s difficult not to entertain the earlier movie as a frame of reference. All told, it’s for the best that Herzog was in the director’s chair: with anyone else helming, the results would probably have been a weak retread. Herzog, however, makes it his own. He shoots post-Katrina New Orleans as an alien landscape. Alligators and iguanas lend POVs as essential and intriguing as those of any of the main characters. If you can imagine ‘Fata Morgana’ getting mixed up in the editing room with a James Ellroy adaptation, that should give you some idea – but only an idea, mind – of the bizarre delights of ‘Port of Call, New Orleans’.

It’s probably redundant to warn that this film isn’t for everyone. There will be plenty who approach it expecting an industry standard crime thriller and start getting seriously freaked out round about the time the iguanas come into and most likely hit the off button the moment someone’s soul starts dancing. (Yes, you read that right as well.) But Herzog’s flaunting of genre requirements is made clear pretty quickly. There’s a scene where McDonagh and his equally loose cannon partner Stevie Pruit (Val Kilmer) haul someone in and question them. You know the kind of interview room scene. You’ve seen it a million times. Enclosed room, no windows, tape recorder running if the interviewee’s lucky, rolled up phone book in the face if they’re not. This is how Herzog does it: the interview room has a window; you can see traffic passing outside; the tension generated by Pruit’s unpredictable behaviour around the suspect is drained away very quickly as McDonagh sends Pruit outside and sits down to have a fairly genial conversation with the interviewee. The dialogue ceases to matter. Ditto the plot ceases to matter. The passing of traffic outside becomes somehow mesmerising, akin to the driving sequence in Tarkovsky’s ‘Solaris’. The denouement dares the laughable in deconstructing what a cop thriller should be. Herzog risks howls of derision, confident as only someone of eccentric genius can be that his audience are in on the joke.

And yet in the darkest, craziest scenes of ‘Port of Call, New Orleans’, Herzog and Cage go plunging into the abyss together, all out, balls to the wall, hell bent and no safety net. The end result is as memorable as anything either of them have done; a movie as unconventional as it is entertaining. I mentioned James Ellroy earlier and I meant it. I’d bloody love to see Herzog direct ‘The Big Nowhere’ or ‘White Jazz’. With iguanas.