Nope, didn't get this one. Supposedly it's allegorical, but I'm not sure what two blind dwarfs hitting each other with sticks over a dead pig symbolises. Maybe the commentary, with Herzog and Crispin Glover, will illuminate it. Although Glover's incoherent liner notes don't give me confidence that he'll have anything to contribute. Don't think I'll rewatch it for a while. On to something lighter, like Woyzeck...
Thursday, 28 June 2007
The Enigma of Kasper Hauser/Herzog (1974)
The legend of Kaspar Hauser is well-known in Germany, and has a continuing resonance. A young man was discovered in the town square of Nuremberg, barely able to walk or speak, carrying a note. He wasn't able to say where he'd come from, and it was later established that he'd been imprisoned in a basement for many years. He became a curiosity, especially to the educated and fashionable, who attempted to deduce theories of natural behaviour and intelligence from this specimen. The Romantic fallacy of the child of nature was indulged in Kaspar.
The idea of the 'holy fool' has existed for centuries - the most famous literary example being in Lear - and still appears in culture now. Forrest Gump is the most recent successful example of the genre, but Peter Sellers in Being There was a precedent. The thesis is that our civilisation has led us away from natural truths, and simple people, detached from society and unaffected, are closer to them than we are. It's attractive, but no more true than the pastoral fallacy.
Herzog plays with the story, and puts Kaspar at the centre of it. People react to him, revolve around him, he is the physical and moral centre. The effect of this is not just that we sympathise with him, but that we see his views as correct and those of society as frivolous or absurd. Kaspar endures religious, social and intellectual tests, and subtly rejects or subverts them, to comic effect. Most amusing is the logician, who rejects Kaspar's alternative answer to his conundrum, then ties himself in knots justifying it.
Throughout, Kaspar has great dignity, and this is due not only to Herzog's script and direction, but to the extraordinary performance by Bruno S. Rarely has there been such a coincidence of experience between character and actor, especially to such an extreme - Bruno had been kept in brutal institutions for more than 23 years; this was, Herzog said, his story.
Herzog is using the convention of the fool to lampoon society's absurdities, turning the examination of the freakish outsider inside-out, so that we are being examined, but the subtlety of his work exceeds others. For example, Kaspar's life as we know it is defined by paper documents. There are four of them, at the beginning and the end of the film: the one on which he is forced to practise writing his name, the anonymous letter he holds in his hand in the town square, the anonymous letter he has at his fatal assault, and the history of his life written by the old town clerk.
All of these documents have analogues in our lives - the signature that defines our identity, our birth and death certificates, and the story of our existence, as written by a third party, that is what is left to posterity. The joke at the end, that the curiosity of Kaspar is explained by the shape of his brain and his liver, is at how history is told, how our lives will be remembered. The clerk is writing down notes throughout the film, and trriumphantly has the answer at the end - this is the story people will read, but it's not Kaspar's story, which is the one Herzog has told.
Kaspar Hauser is closer to The Elephant Man than to either of the films mentioned above - I've no doubt Lynch acknowledges the debt. But whereas in the Elephant Man the contrast between the grotesqueness of Merrick's appearance and the refinement of his character highlights the prejudice in favour of beauty in society, Kaspar's exclusion by his ignorance of social conventions, making him little more than the circus freak that Merrick once was, condemns society's superficiality.
Herzog apparently does a very good commentary on this DVD, which I'll watch some time.
IMDb
The idea of the 'holy fool' has existed for centuries - the most famous literary example being in Lear - and still appears in culture now. Forrest Gump is the most recent successful example of the genre, but Peter Sellers in Being There was a precedent. The thesis is that our civilisation has led us away from natural truths, and simple people, detached from society and unaffected, are closer to them than we are. It's attractive, but no more true than the pastoral fallacy.
Herzog plays with the story, and puts Kaspar at the centre of it. People react to him, revolve around him, he is the physical and moral centre. The effect of this is not just that we sympathise with him, but that we see his views as correct and those of society as frivolous or absurd. Kaspar endures religious, social and intellectual tests, and subtly rejects or subverts them, to comic effect. Most amusing is the logician, who rejects Kaspar's alternative answer to his conundrum, then ties himself in knots justifying it.
Throughout, Kaspar has great dignity, and this is due not only to Herzog's script and direction, but to the extraordinary performance by Bruno S. Rarely has there been such a coincidence of experience between character and actor, especially to such an extreme - Bruno had been kept in brutal institutions for more than 23 years; this was, Herzog said, his story.
Herzog is using the convention of the fool to lampoon society's absurdities, turning the examination of the freakish outsider inside-out, so that we are being examined, but the subtlety of his work exceeds others. For example, Kaspar's life as we know it is defined by paper documents. There are four of them, at the beginning and the end of the film: the one on which he is forced to practise writing his name, the anonymous letter he holds in his hand in the town square, the anonymous letter he has at his fatal assault, and the history of his life written by the old town clerk.
All of these documents have analogues in our lives - the signature that defines our identity, our birth and death certificates, and the story of our existence, as written by a third party, that is what is left to posterity. The joke at the end, that the curiosity of Kaspar is explained by the shape of his brain and his liver, is at how history is told, how our lives will be remembered. The clerk is writing down notes throughout the film, and trriumphantly has the answer at the end - this is the story people will read, but it's not Kaspar's story, which is the one Herzog has told.
Kaspar Hauser is closer to The Elephant Man than to either of the films mentioned above - I've no doubt Lynch acknowledges the debt. But whereas in the Elephant Man the contrast between the grotesqueness of Merrick's appearance and the refinement of his character highlights the prejudice in favour of beauty in society, Kaspar's exclusion by his ignorance of social conventions, making him little more than the circus freak that Merrick once was, condemns society's superficiality.
Herzog apparently does a very good commentary on this DVD, which I'll watch some time.
IMDb
Monday, 25 June 2007
Little Dieter Needs to Fly/Herzog (1997)
Another brilliant documentary from Werner Herzog. One more, he finds an engaging subject and lets him tell his story, but again Herzog's skill lies in drawing it out, and the composition.
Dieter Dengler was a USAF pilot in Vietnam, and was shot down over Laos in 1966. He was captured by Laotian forces, and held in a prison camp on the Laos/North Vietnamese border for 6 months. He escaped with another American, who was murdered in a skirmish with locals, and eventually managed to get west towards the Thai border, where he was spotted and rescued by US forces. He now lives up in the mountains in California, where he feels free, although the persisting influence of his experience is evident in his hoarding of emergency supplies under the house.
His story is extraordinary, and Dieter is a remarkable man - highly articulate, funny, resolute. Herzog takes him to various places to reenact his history - the town in Germany where he grew up during the war, the Laotian jungle where he was shot down, and even gets him to portray himself running through the jungle with his captors.
Herzog intercuts archive footage discretely and relevantly, including that of Dieter's press conference after his rescue and some rehabilitation. It's plain that he was exceptionally articulate and engaging even then, and 30 further years of being treated as a war hero would have helped him polish the story.
Herzog's use of music is subtle and complementary - one recurring theme is Dvorak's New World Symphony (Dieter left Germany aged 18 to go to the New World)
Dengler died in 2001, aged 62.
Rescue Dawn, a dramatized film of Dengler's story directed by Herzog and starring Christian Bale, will be released soon. Bale is making a habit of playing starvation victims, it seems.
IMDb
[edit] For the sake of SpoutBlog , the Mark Kermode interview, during which Werner Herzog was randomly shot at, and hit:
Herzog interview
Dieter Dengler was a USAF pilot in Vietnam, and was shot down over Laos in 1966. He was captured by Laotian forces, and held in a prison camp on the Laos/North Vietnamese border for 6 months. He escaped with another American, who was murdered in a skirmish with locals, and eventually managed to get west towards the Thai border, where he was spotted and rescued by US forces. He now lives up in the mountains in California, where he feels free, although the persisting influence of his experience is evident in his hoarding of emergency supplies under the house.
His story is extraordinary, and Dieter is a remarkable man - highly articulate, funny, resolute. Herzog takes him to various places to reenact his history - the town in Germany where he grew up during the war, the Laotian jungle where he was shot down, and even gets him to portray himself running through the jungle with his captors.
Herzog intercuts archive footage discretely and relevantly, including that of Dieter's press conference after his rescue and some rehabilitation. It's plain that he was exceptionally articulate and engaging even then, and 30 further years of being treated as a war hero would have helped him polish the story.
Herzog's use of music is subtle and complementary - one recurring theme is Dvorak's New World Symphony (Dieter left Germany aged 18 to go to the New World)
Dengler died in 2001, aged 62.
Rescue Dawn, a dramatized film of Dengler's story directed by Herzog and starring Christian Bale, will be released soon. Bale is making a habit of playing starvation victims, it seems.
IMDb
[edit] For the sake of SpoutBlog , the Mark Kermode interview, during which Werner Herzog was randomly shot at, and hit:
Herzog interview
The White Diamond/Herzog (2004)
Werner Herzog is surely the most interesting and intelligent filmmaker alive. This is a beautiful, stimulating film, of great wit, depth and awe.
The set-up is that Dr Graham Dorrington, an aeronautical engineer, wishes to build a balloon in order to float above a jungle canopy and film the wildlife below. Dorrington is haunted by guilt over a previous expedition in Indonesia 10 years before, when a noted wildlife cinematographer crashed his balloon into a treetop canopy, and fell to his death from it. This expedition to Guyana is partly his attempt to atone, in his own mind, for the mistakes made in that tragedy.
Dorrington is highly enthusiastic and engaging, and also very articulate, about his ambitions, regrets, and his spiritual search. One of Herzog's distinctive methods is to find interesting subjects, then let them tell their tale, and Dorrington is a very good narrator - obsessive, vulnerable and humorous.
The co-star of the film, apart from Herzog himself, who is always present as narrator or off-screen participant, is Marc Antony, a local with a mischievous smile and wit, who labels the ballon the white diamond (one of the principal industries of Guyana is diamond mining, and Marc Antony was a miner) He represents the spirituality of Guyana, but also a Rastafarian indolence, and Herzog indulges him. He knows the local herbs which can have medicinal properties, which is one of the justifications for the expedition - biologists consider the jungle canopy to be one of the last unexplored habitats in the world, which may well yield useful pharmaceuticals, not to mention previously undiscovered flaura and fauna.
The expedition is to a waterfall in the jungle, behind which is a cave that is home to over one million swifts. Although they manage to film into the cave, a sight no human can previously have seen as it requires being suspended from a rope beside the falls, Herzog respectfully doesn't show this footage, as a local tribal leader says that the myths about the cave are potent in the local culture, and to expose the reality is to destroy a little bit of that. This is a typical Herzog touch, putting himself into the story, engaging with the indigenous culture, and maintaining himself as the gateway to a mystery. He does something similar in Grizzly Man, when he films himself listening to a recording of Treadwell's death, but daren't play it to the audience. It's a little bit of gamesmanship.
There are some remarkable shots in the film, notably of the falls as viewed through a suspended raindrop, and the closing shot of a million swifts flying into their cave behind the falls.
My enjoyment of this film, which was immense, was slightly altered by my mistaken belief, due to a misreading of a post before I saw it, that the Graham Dorrington might have been acting (someone had said that a secondary character was a bullshitter, but I didn't know then which character it was) This meant that I was watching some of the most affecting scenes, of him relating the death of his previous colleague, on a dual level, uncertain whether it was a true revelation or a performance. As Herzog is known for tricks like this, blurring the distinction between factual documentary and storytelling, it pays to be wary. But, having researched it since, it appears that Dorrington is genuine, although he does admit that some of the things he said on camera were scripted, and the argument with Herzog was a set-up - it didn't feel convincing on screen, it was just a pretext to allow Herzog to be in the balloon for the first flight. No matter, that didn't substantially alter the veracity of the film, or the visual impact of it.
Graham Dorrington Interview
London to Brighton/Paul Williams (2006)
Nasty, British and short, but better than I was expecting, this taut gangster thriller pays off, even though the ending was predictable, thanks to a sharp script, slick editing, and some good performances.
Kelly, a prostitute, and Joanne, an 11 year old runaway, hurriedly escape from London to hide in Brighton after an incident in which a man has died. They are pursued by Derek, a pimp, who has been sent to find them under threat of death by Stuart Allen, a notorious gang boss. There is a sense of seedy menace throughout, and it felt a bit like Mike Leigh directing The Long Good Friday. It's hard to avoid cliche in this sort of film - the emotionless and efficiently brutal gang boss, for example - but the theme of child prostitution pushes this into uncomfortable viewing.
The redemption of the ending was a bit pat, but the performances, particularly of Georgia Groome as Joanne, raised the film above the average.
IMDb
Kelly, a prostitute, and Joanne, an 11 year old runaway, hurriedly escape from London to hide in Brighton after an incident in which a man has died. They are pursued by Derek, a pimp, who has been sent to find them under threat of death by Stuart Allen, a notorious gang boss. There is a sense of seedy menace throughout, and it felt a bit like Mike Leigh directing The Long Good Friday. It's hard to avoid cliche in this sort of film - the emotionless and efficiently brutal gang boss, for example - but the theme of child prostitution pushes this into uncomfortable viewing.
The redemption of the ending was a bit pat, but the performances, particularly of Georgia Groome as Joanne, raised the film above the average.
IMDb
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