Thursday, December 4, 1986
Daily Nebraskan
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"7n iie morning I had reached the
edge of Paris, but it was still a half day
to the Champs Ely sees; I walked there
on feet so tired that I had no more
consciousness left. A man wanted to
walk through the forest and never
appeared again. A man went for a
solitary stroll on a broad beach with
his big dog. He had a heart attack, and
since the leash was wrapped around
his wrist, he was forced to walk on and
on as the dog was very rash and
wanted to run. A man had a live duck
in his shopping bag. A blind beggar
played the accordion, his legs covered
with a zebra-striped blanket below the
knee. The woman beside him was hold
ing the aluminum cup for the money.
Next to them they also had a shopping
bag, out of which peered a sick dog. A
sick dog attracts more money . . . . We
were close to what they call the brea th
of danger."
. Werner Herzog, "Of Walking in Ice"
Werner Herzog creates violent medita
tions. His films embark on voyages of quies
cence, travelers armed with only intensity,
eyes set on something that cannot be com
municated except as movement, and a mad
dance, a catatonic pilgrimage. Because there
is no chance of verbalization, many times the
journey appears absurd, the pilgrimage is
only holy on a deeply personal level, the
motion is fragile or grotesque.
A revealing cross section of films by Herzog
will be shown starting tonight and ending
Saturday at the Sheldon Film Theatre.
Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, now
deceased, and Wim Wenders comprise the
most popular and exciting of the German
New Wave filmmakers, a triumvirate marked
by obsession, intellectual indulgence and, in
Fassbinder and Herzog's case at least, a psy
chotic, self-destructive devotion to cinema.
In Germany, literature is always more than
a book or a poem, music is more than the
transference of the natural musings of the
mind to paper and to instrument and the film
is more than celluloid entertainment.
Literature is of epic proportion, must be
all-inclusive, mystical in attention to detail
and must, in Goethe's words, "feed the soul."
Music, as Wagner saw it, was a madness from
God, epic, comprehensive, mystical.
And Germany produced "Triumph of the
Will," Leni Riefenstahl's deification of Hitler,
a film that came as close to changing the
world as any film in history.
Germany's new wave of filmmakers live
with a dark responsibility, a knowledge of
film's power, a visionary's grasp of art.
Herzog produced his first short film with a
stolen 35mm camera. He had the cast of
"Heart of Glass" hypnotized in order to make
them appear mad. For "Aguirre, Wrath of
God" Herzog hauled his cast and crew of 500
into the heart of a Peruvian jungle. To make
the star of the film, Klaus Kinski, stay on the
shooting site, Herzog held him at gunpoint. In
1874, when Herzog heard that Lotte Eisner,
the conscience of German cinema, was dying,
he walked, in the dead of winter, from Munich
to her bedside in Paris. Herzog adopted Ger
man profligate, ex-mental patient, orphan,
restroom attendant, Bruno S., to play the lead
in "Every Man for Himself ar.d God Against
AH" and "Stroszek" (both will be shown in
the Sheldon retrospective).
Most indicative of Herzog's obsessions is
the short film "La Soufriere," in which Herzog
makes a pilgrimage to the island of Guada
loupe, where a volcano is reportedly near the
point of eruption. Perhaps the fact that the
volcano did not erupt makes the film even
more evocative of Herzog's mythic tempera
ment. That the volcano yet rumbles without
spewing out its very soul is the perfect meta
phor for the director's work.
Herzog's characters, for the most part,
snap internally, explode under the surface of
the film. They and whole scenes explode
under the weight of life, under sorrow and the
injustice of God. In "Even Dwarfs Started
Small" the volcanic image again appears, as
the core of the island where a penal institu
tion full of dwarfs begins a rebellion that
becomes more surreal and more violent as the
film progresses, or digresses. The dwarfs
begin to wallow in their savage revolt, crucify
ing a fellow inmate's pet monkey, setting
foliage afire and smashing pottery. There is
some political message here, but mostly the
themes are in the images and cannot be
separated from them. The themes are the
essential grotesqueness of man, the twisted
helixes of aggression and cruelty that sup
plement our DNA.
It is a pity that Herzog was forced to cancel
his visit to Lincoln as some other obsession
got the best of him. His presence would have
been a creative spark in a barren winter, but
there are still his films, foreboding and
relentless.
See FILM SCHEDULE on 8
Page 7