© Shamoni Sarkar
This year, I saw
and heard Werner Herzog live, twice in two months. Anyone that knows his work
would say at this point: “Isn’t that enough? Wouldn’t writing about a madman
kill his madness, and then what’s the point?” But there is a point. If there weren’t, Herzog himself would not have agreed
to talk about his madness to enthralled audiences in formal settings. If there
weren’t a point, he probably wouldn’t be making films. In director Les Blank’s documentary
Burden of Dreams, his closing words
are “We have to articulate ourselves, otherwise we would be like cows in a
field.”
How does
artistic genius or productivity relate to irrationality, and how exactly can
irrationality be articulated? Is articulation of irrationality not counter-productive? The first time I saw
Herzog was at Amherst College in New England, on March 24th, 2012.
He screened excerpts from Into the Abyss,
his newest documentary on death-row inmates in Texas. While his conversations
with the inmate Hank Skinner were sad and illuminating, I felt that Herzog was
trying to get too much out of Skinner; his questions were too well framed. For
example, he asked Skinner to talk about time and how he related to the whole
idea of the movement of time while sitting in death row. But as soon as he
transitioned to scenes in which he is driving through the Texan countryside, he
did not speak but instead let his camera do the work. But as viewers we could
still sense his presence in the scene, and we knew he was still controlling it.
Even back inside the prison, when he allowed Skinner to do the talking, the
scene was more effective. In a way, when he stepped back, Herzog allowed the
cruel irrationality of his subject blossom. But when he tried to attach too
many words to it, the real feeling went away. In this case, too much
articulation harmed the mysteriously powerful effect Skinner and his setting
already had.
Perhaps because
we were a room full of students at Amherst College, Herzog seemed much more
‘normal’ than what I had expected him to be. Maybe because I was another
immature fan, I expected to see the kind of manic director that made Aguirre: the Wrath of God. In that film,
Herzog sticks with his lead character Don Lope de Aguirre as he leads his men
into the deadly interiors of the Amazon in search of El Dorado (a search that
is ultimately futile). One by one, his men are struck by arrows shot by Indian
tribes from ashore. The last to be struck is Aguirre’s own daughter, and she
falls limply into his arms and dies. He is the last one standing, and as he
surveys the scene of death around him, an army of monkeys climbs onto the raft,
claiming it for their own. Aguirre is deluded by now, but not enough to let go
of his savage ambition. “I am the wrath of God,” he declares to no one, staring
into the distance with mad eyes. He vows to find gold in El Dorado, and
recapture most of the lands of New Spain for himself, to rule like a king. “Who else is with me?” he
asks the dead and the monkeys. As the camera pans around the ruins on the
raft, we hear the music of
Aguirre by the band Popol Vuh, the same music that opens the film as the seekers
of El Dorado climb down a dangerous mountain. The music is hauntingly epic and
lamenting— it laments fallen heroes and the impending death of a dream. In Aguirre, there are many fallen heroes,
and Lope de Aguirre is one of them. In the first scene, the music eulogizes every
one of them. But in the last, it is played for Aguirre only— for what he is and
for what has become of him. It does not pity him, but rather it understands him
and feels sad. Again, Herzog speaks for
Aguirre through music, landscape and images of madness. It is very likely that he
sees something of himself in Aguirre’s irrational but dedicated drive, and so
the film is as much an introspective project as a work of fiction.
So why did I not
see Herzog the crazed director that evening at Amherst College? It was not just
because of the over-articulation in Into
the Abyss, but something about the lecture itself. It seemed that Herzog
had come here to give advice and not to converse. Instead of letting himself
unfold, he again articulated too much. It seemed like he was moderating his own
personality because someone had told him to be safe. However, the advice was
often beautiful, and there were three sentences that I will always remember:
1.
Psychoanalysis was the mistake of the 20th century
2. It is a
mistake to scrutinize the self
3. If your soul
is dark, let it be dark
Although these
three statements befit Herzog, it was difficult for me not to question them. Is
not what Herzog was doing in this lecture, and through the characters in his
films, a form of self-scrutiny? And does not this prove that it is an
unavoidable process for any artist, and perhaps not even a process they have
control over? What exactly did he mean when he said to allow the soul to “be
dark”? Incomprehensible darkness may make up most of the soul, and allowing it
to flourish produces many great things. But is not the basic function of
psychoanalysis to make us aware of
the dark parts of our soul, and not, as Herzog seemed to imply, to get rid of
them? And only once an artist becomes aware of or acknowledges the darker part
of his soul can he begin to articulate himself.
Everyone must
have darker shades in themselves that they cannot or choose not to explain, and
these are the parts we would call irrational. What makes artists act on their irrationality? Herzog is
also known to have eaten his own shoe, and plotted to kill his lead actor Klaus
Kinski, who plays the role of Aguirre (incidentally Kinski too hatched his own
plot to kill Herzog). Do even these irrational tendencies somehow make his
artistic personality more whole, or are they just the childish, self-indulgent
behavior of a man that believes he is entitled to it? It is too much to say
that as an artist, his irrational self is more powerful or extreme than a
regular person’s, or that it is in any way special. But perhaps his self-awareness,
or his compulsion to act and to make is stronger.
Burden of Dreams is about the making of Fitzcarraldo, another Herzog film about
a man driven by unreasonable desire. Fitzcarraldo wants to pull a boat overland
from one river of the Amazon to another, so that he can construct an opera
house on the other side. The project is threatened from the beginning. For the
shooting of the film, Herzog actually wants to perform this action of pulling a
boat overland— a stunt that apparently carries a 70% risk of causing casualties.
“I don’t want to live in a world where there are no lions or no people like
lions,” he says at one point.
Herzog knowingly
risks not only his own safety but also that of his crew, and he cannot quite explain
why. In apophthegm 154 in Beyond Good and
Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche writes, “everything absolute belongs to pathology”.
Nietzsche’s absolutes are “evasion” and “joyous distrust”— tendencies that make
a person go against norms. To embrace these tendencies is a sign of health—
bodily as much as mental health. A strong, powerful person will find that his
body and mind are in tune with a common urge— the urge to make, destroy and
digress. By becoming Fitzcarraldo and
filming against the wishes of nature, Herzog is putting himself to the test
physically as well as mentally, and he is willing to take himself to the
extreme. Irrationality is as much a bodily experience as an intellectual
one.
There are
irrational compulsions, inspiration, self-knowledge, and risk-taking, but to
produce a complete body of work, something has to bring these together, or it
would be too simple. For Nietzsche, sensuous experience could blossom into
intellectual activity, provided the person maintains a “cruelty of the
intellectual conscience and taste”. Then artistic conscience too must be
relentless and cruel so that it can acknowledge lack of knowledge, darkness and risk, to show what can be learnt
from these things, and ask even more questions. So the artistic conscience is
what stretches uncertainty to its limits to show what is beyond.
The second time
I heard Werner Herzog was at the Whitney museum in New York, where he spoke
more substantively about his own artistic process. He talked about the
importance of craftsmanship in every kind of creative activity, and the value
of study and technique. “I have always tried to decipher signs”, he told us. He
reads “signs” in music and painting and learns from them. Making movies allowed
him to learn from the world, putting together images, sounds and words. He may
not know why he chooses the stories that he does, and he cannot quite explain
much of his behavior as a director, but he knows for sure that his work is not
fruitless. He does not work to come to some sort of conclusion or find answers,
but to learn more and more about the possibilities of his craft— a process of
learning that is most probably infinite. For Nietzsche, a real artist must be
rigorously inquisitive, have complete faith to form, and pursue the
unintelligible without guilt.
However, like
the intellectual conscience, guilt too brings discipline to the spirit. Aguirre
and Fitcarraldo do not feel guilt and drive themselves to ruin, but Herzog
their creator does feel guilt. Maybe
he even feels guilty on their behalf. He eventually completes Fitzcarraldo, but his later words betray
something resembling guilt. Talking to Les Blank about the extent to which he
had taken himself and his crew, he says, “No one can convince me to be happy
about it when I am finished.” At most public appearances, he is a sort of role
model or example to emulate, and so he is probably required to present a nice,
easy version of himself. He must
not seem too crazed among impressionable young people or interviewees who help
keep him in the public eye. But more importantly, he talks to students, museum
visitors and documentary filmmakers because it forces him to keep evaluating
his work so that he knows where to take it next. It helps him to stay
productive.
So why did it
bother me that Herzog articulated too much in Into the Abyss, or advised too much at Amherst College? Possibly
because I didn’t want him to censor himself; I wanted to see a mad artist in
the flesh. But then I realized how childish this was. It is more likely that
his innate irrationality is deeper and more complicated— to the extent that it
affects the way he looks at life and his relationships with people. So I would
never see an artist’s madness so
easily in the space of two hours. To see Herzog ‘in the flesh’, I would have to
go back to his films, and I would find the irrationality in the faces, in the
landscapes and in the music. I would see the cruelty of his intellectual
conscience. But I will still never be able to separate the real man from the ‘nicer’
man, because maybe they need each other and so will co-exist, separately and
together.
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