Encounters at the End of the World

Encounters at the End of the World (2007)

Dir. Werner Herzog

In what might be best termed a Werner Herzog Mondo documentary, our intrepid Teutonic connoisseur of the world’s more offbeat sideshows travels to the final frontier (Antarctica, not space. Probably saving that for the sequel.) Why? Well, a friend of his sent him some footage of under-ice scuba diving, so he figured he’d charter a plane and head South as far as you can go, just kind of check it out, see what’s what.

The charm of the film is its surprising cheerfulness, a welcome break from the unremitting grimness of INTO THE ABYSS and the quiet reverence of CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS. There’s lots of big ideas in here, but they’re nicely balanced by Herzog’s obvious glee at going on an Antarctic adventure and meeting the other strange souls that have been drawn by the same sense of wanderlust. It’s a little unfocused, a little whimsical, and maybe even a little satirical? Certainly, it seems like Herzog is aware that speculating on the potential for insanity in penguins is not a normal thing to do. Does he also see the inherent hilarity in the training required for those who venture into the punishing wilderness, which resembles a conga line of blind people wearing buckets emblazoned with cartoon faces over their heads? I genuinely have no idea, but the movie has a lightness to it which suggests that at least he’s having fun, whatever that means to a guy like Herzog.

Great, now Buckethead's gonna have to sue.

At the very least, there’s significantly more of Herzog’s inscrutable personality here than you find in some of his heavier documentaries. He narrates the whole way through, sometimes expounding upon the beauty and majesty of what he’s seeing, sometimes cheekily expressing his disdain for man-made conveniences, sometimes just sort of free associating, sometimes (I think?) poking fun at himself, other filmmakers (he warns us against expecting cute footage of “fluffy penguins”) and the other weirdos he’s interviewing. In one interview, he cuts a lady’s mic off and starts telling her story himself, over top of footage of her talking. “Basically what she said is…”

It all seems sort of off-the-cusp and even chatty, just a kind of visual journal for Herzog’s Antarctic vacation. But gradually it becomes clear that there’s a little more going on here, subtle tendrils of theme which wind through and gradually ferment into some kind of subterranean implication. The title has a double meaning, obviously; Antarctica is the furthest South you can go and hence literally the “end” of the world, but the title also suggests something a bit more troubling. For all the fun he’s clearly having on and under the ice, Herzog is also aware that Antarctica is the most visible symbol of climate change and the planet’s uncertain future, and as such may also symbolize the literal “end” of the world as we know it. There’s an unspoken suggestion that the philosophical, adaptive oddballs he encounters at the South Pole may represent a new strain of humanity living in a much harsher future climate, and forced to survive without the comforts that we’ve become accustomed to over the course of the last century or two. And Herzog, for one, seems pretty OK with that. He’s always been a restless guy, an obsessive explorer of peculiar experiences. And maybe he figures it’s about time the rest of mankind got onboard, too. If this funny, strange, lyrical film is any indication, it’s gonna be a pretty great ride.

I probably need to get a tattoo of this scene.

Nosferatu The Vampyre

Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)

Dir. Werner Herzog

Written by Werner Herzog

Starring Klaus Kinski, Isabelle Adjani, Bruno Ganz, Roland Topor

Boy, here’s something that sounds pretty good: Werner Herzog, in full-on madman 1979 nightmare mode (by the time the movie premiered, Herzog was already in the jungle for what would become the three-year nightmare of making FITZCARRALDO) directing Kinski in a remake of NOSFERATU which is actually (apparently?) some sort of crazy ass allegory for Nazism. There’s no possible way to screw that up, is there?

Normally when I type that last sentence, I have to follow it by explaining how some joker managed to do exactly that (looking at you, John Boorman in EXORCIST II). But hey, not this time. There literally was no possible way this was not going to be the greatest movie ever and guess what, it is. Herzog delivers the goods in every imaginable way in his take on Stoker’s classic vampire, which sort of remakes NOSFERATU and sort of adapts DRACULA but remains particularly faithful to neither, instead followingly only the wild dictates of Herzog’s strange and wonderful brand of insanity.

Dracula does not respect your personal space.

We begin this particular nightmare with Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz), this time a German estate agent instead of an English solicitor, being sent off to sunny Transylvania by his openly insane boss Renfield (Roland Topor). You know you can relax right away, because Topor is that crazy ass French animator who did FANTASTIC PLANET and wrote the novel that Polanski’s THE TENANT is based on* and he spends most of his time in his movie giggling like a maniac and acting weird. So you’ve got immediate proof that you’re in good hands. That makes it easier to wait as Harker transverses the Romania countryside, encounters traditional peasants and hears worrisome tales about his new client. This being a Herzog movie, it’s all shot on location with what I assume are real Romanian peasants and Gypsies, and honestly I’m kind of surprised he didn’t hunt down a genuine bloodsucker a la SHADOW OF A VAMPIRE (is it too soon to do a remake of that movie which concerns the remake of the movie they make in that movie?). Instead, you’ve got to be content with a typically amazing performance by Klaus Kinski in the iconic rodentious Nosferatu makeup.

Boy, the German version of Coyote Ugly is a little different.

  As impossible as it is to top Max Schreck’s original Nosferatu, Kinski may well come close in his completely inhuman take on the character. Dracula (the copyright had expired, so we don’t have to wink-wink nudge-nudge about someone named “Count Orlok” anymore) has been a monster for so long that he doesn’t make the slightest effort to affect a normal human demeanor, basically coming off as an alien, calculating predator moved by a logic incomprehensible to anyone else. That makes Kinski almost typecasting, and he handily proves that even nearly 60 years after the original NOSFERATU, the character still has the capacity to be completely terrifying. There’s an amazing sequence where a deeply weirded-out Harker refuses to let the count suck the blood from his paper cut, and Dracula responds by leaping at him and basically chasing him into a corner. This is not a creature which is used to being told no, or even having to give the most rudimentary excuses for his behavior; he relates to people about as much as a human might relate to a chicken, and has virtually no patience for pretending otherwise, going through the barest motions with Harker only because he desires to move to Germany and put the moves on Harker’s wife.

In this, the audience can at least relate to his motives, because Harker’s wife Lucy is ridiculously gorgeous Isabelle Adjani, (POSSESSION (1981), THE DRIVER, ONE DEADLY SUMMER) who seems content to hang around in her kitten-infested drawing room and walk moodily on the beach, but who also apparently isn’t above fucking up some errant vampires should the need arise (spoiler: the need arises). The need arises with the arrival of the Count, who waltzes into town aboard a suspiciously deserted ship amid a seething flood of rats (thousands were used in the production) and promptly sets about stealthily eating the entire population.

There is no Smiths song ever written that would not be appropriate playing over this image.

Though the story hews fairly closely to the original NOSFERATU (much more so than it does to Stoker’s Dracula, although the character names remain) it is this section which distinguishes the character and intent of Herzog’s film. From Dracula’s arrival onward, the movie seems to slip into a kind of apocalyptic dream, filled with strange sequences (dozens of coffins paraded through the town square, dancing merrymakers and piles of corpses) and only the barest thread of story. I had heard that this was an allegory for Nazism, with Dracula gradually consuming the locals and taking control of the town. That would be an interesting movie, but I think Herzog is interested in something a little more timeless here, more of an apocalyptic fear of societal collapse. Lucy figures out what’s going on but she can’t get anyone to listen to her, and the sequences of her wandering through the decimated town --gradually realizing that not only is no one going to help her but the situation may already be well beyond help-- are maybe the best portrayal of the Cassandra nightmare ever put to celluloid. To the extent that is is about Nazism, it’s not about the political consequences of that ethos but more an exploration of what it’s like to suddenly find your homeland transformed into something evil and alien and being utterly powerless to understand or stop it.

Drac does not find all this as amusing as Renfield does.

Interestingly, Herzog (not someone I usually associate with female empowerment) chooses to make Lucy the star of the second half of the movie (Van Helsing does appear, which I believe is a change from the original NOSFERATU, but if anything he causes more harm than good) and with John Harker out of commission, she’s got to take bold action against this evil. Adjani is great for this role because she isn’t exactly a Ripley action hero type, but she has a resoluteness and steely determination which makes her feel believably badass in a period-appropriate feminine way. Obviously she’d prefer it if the men handled this, but since they aren’t, someone’s gotta cowboy up, and she’s the only one volunteering. After so many Dracula adaptations with fey, victimized Lucy and Mina (why those two characters have their names reversed here is unclear), it’s nice that this one finally gives her a chance to step up her game while the husband is the sickly victim. Aside from the enjoyable girl-power angle, this change also pleasingly simplifies Stoker’s storyline, narrowing the focus to the timeless love triangle between husband, wife, and Klaus Kinski, and allowing Herzog plenty of space for ambiance and atmosphere.

That’s good, because although it does have a literal story to anchor it, NOSFERATU: THE VAMPYRE is more a brooding meditation on dread than aggressive horror movie. As you might imagine, Herzog isn’t interested in capturing a bunch of bloody effects scenes or “boo!” moments so much as he is interested in capturing the strange details that grow out of the grotesque. The film begins with footage of real mummified corpses (in Guanajaunto, Mexico; Herzog never let a few thousand miles keep him away from a big idea), but where other directors might use corpses to evoke our squeamishness and our fear of death, Herzog is more philosophical. His camera lingers, probes, finds something more complex. It’s not about our revulsion of death, but about the entropy, about the helplessness epidemic engenders. The loss not of life but of hope. The collapse of systems. Dracula is not a seducer; he is a desirer, a symbol of a burning need that can never be satiated, a hole so deep it might swallow the whole world. That’s Herzog’s horror, the horror of a universe filled with want which nevertheless mercilessly winds down to nothing.

This is a really weird episode of  What Not To Wear, but still not the weirdest.

But there’s also a perverse beauty in that kind of horror, and it’s kind of a beautiful movie. Strange, cold, and dark, but also peppered with iconic imagery and, I think, a very slight, very deep black humor. The film’s final epilogue (to my knowledge, completely exclusive to this version of the story) is even a little more wicked than I expected from Herzog, a blatant sucker punch but delivered with what I think might be the lightest hint of a malicious grin. Evil may not be vanquished, but indeed, what would be the fun in that? Herzog’s love affair is living in the strangeness of the evil world, not destroying it. In that sense, this film (his only [fictional**] horror film until MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE in 2009) is sort of a love letter to the grotesque, the perverse, the creeping stagnation that gnaws on the heart of all hope and dreams. Without that, what would there be to make movies about?

*Wikipedia: 1989 --With Henri Xhonneux [Topor] co-writes the screenplay for the film Marquis, loosely based on the life and writings of Marquis de Sade. The cast consisted of actors in period costumes with animal masks, with a separate puppet for de Sade's anthropomorphised "bodily appendage."

** INTO THE ABYSS could hardly be more of a horror movie, but alas, it’s all real.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2013 CHECKLIST!

• LITERARY ADAPTATION: Yup, although it's closer to Murnau's version.
• SEQUEL: No
• REMAKE: Yes, of Murnau's 1922 film of the same name
• HAMMER STUDIOS: No
• SPAGHETTI NOCTURNE: No
• MORE (PETER) CUSHING FOR THE PUSHING? No
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: Nobody slumming, but Kinski, Adjani and Ganz are all well-known.
• BOOBIES: No, actually, I don't think so. Weird for a European film.
• DECAPITATIONS OR DE-LIMBING: No
• ENTRAILS? No
• CULTISTS: No
• ZOMBIES: No
• VAMPIRES: Oh yeah.
• SLASHERS: No
• CURSES: No
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS? No
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: Mid, fairly successful film at the time.
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: Not even touching this one.

Into the Abyss

Into the Abyss (2011) aka Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life
Dir. Werner Herzog
Written by Werner Herzog
Starring Werner Herzog “and Jason Burkett” according to the Netflix description. Claiming a multiple-murderer (and not even a very famous one) as a “star” seems kind of iffy in my opinion, and even weirder because he’s one of two murderers who get about equal screen time but his partner isn’t credited as a star. WTF Netflix, did Burkett have a better agent or something?

As we know from our past experiences with the wily German weirdo Werner Herzog, the only thing you can ever trust him to do is surprise you. I was prepared to be surprised upon seeing his second documentary of 2011 (following the fantastic CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS), because I knew it was supposed to be a movie about the death penalty, but then I heard that it was (as the name implies) Herzog’d away into a movie about the relationship humans have with death, particularly from the perspective of condemned death row inmates who know they’re about to die. But of course, the crafty German outwitted me again and double-faked me out by making a movie which actually isn’t about either of those things. I think it may actually be about life. I was gonna say that his next film will be a fluff piece about pregnant women which will actually be about death, but honestly that seems too obvious now. It’ll probably be a documentary about civil war reenactors which is actually about the tax code or something.

Anyway. INTO THE ABYSS revolves around the story of a triple homicide in Conroe, Texas which resulted in the conviction of two teenagers - Jason Burkett and Michael Perry. Perry was given the death sentence, while Burkett got life in prison. Herzog interviews both, along with an assortment of family members, police, and various colorful tangentially related characters.

The weird thing about all of this, really, is how sort of normal it all is. In most ways, it’s a fairly straightforward telling of this particular pathetic story of pointless violence and ruined lives. Herzog never appears on-screen, narrates infrequently, and generally interviews the cast of characters you’d expect to be involved in any made-for-TV doc about this week’s headline-grabbing murder. The movies it most reminded me of was Joe Berlinger (BLAIR WITCH PROJECT 2: BOOK OF SHADOWS)’s excellent series of docs about the West Memphis 3, PARADISE LOST. Those short documentaries are gripping, insightful, and I suppose its worth mentioning that they played a large role in exonerating 3 innocent kids who had been railroaded by Satanic Panic paranoia into being convicted for a crime it seems impossible for them to have committed. ABYSS actually very closely mirrors the construction of those films, which are known for utilizing real police video, crime scene footage, interviews the the families, the accused, and the locals in conjunction with poetic images and evocative music* to create a document which informs, moves, and challenges the viewer to try and discern the truth. The PARADISE LOST trilogy is pretty great, and Herzog copies their moves expertly. He lays out the story with the simplicity and elegance you’d expect, and probes the fact with what at times seems like almost journalistic keenness. Except, he’s not a journalist. He’s Werner Herzog. So you know he’s not just going to make a documentary telling the story of a crime from ten years ago in some one-cow redneck purgatory in Texas. What the fuck is he up to?

Herzog attempts to connect to normal human beings by talking about Baywatch.

Herzog himself, in a way, is what makes this unusual. He’s so obviously out of place in this world of trailer parks, ubiquitous gun ownership, and “thank you Jesus”es that he brings out weird things in his interview victims. I’m not saying I think they’re being disingenuous, I just think the off-putting nature of suddenly being psychologically probed by this deadpan German nutball shakes them out of their scripted roles on the subject. They’ve all seen this drama unfold on TV countless times, they know how it plays out. But I’m betting most of these folks wouldn’t have suddenly waxed poetic about, say, the heartbreaking natural beauty of a bird in flight had they not been prompted by the romantic tenor of Herzog’s questions.

It would be easy to see this as a bad thing: Herzog is such an outsider here that getting people to perceive him as a kindred spirit with whom to share their mundane daily reality is a virtual impossibility. For better or worse, these people are acutely aware that they’re talking to someone way outside their usual experience, and that he’s making some kind of artsy Euro-documentary on them. It’s probably not the best way to infiltrate this community looking for the hidden truth which has eluded other researchers. Is either of these boys actually innocent? Everyone interviewed knows they’re gonna end up in a movie theater, so they’re not especially inclined to turn over rocks for him and reveal the squirming rot underneath this otherwise merely pathetic community.

But if it means Herzog is unlikely to trick someone into revealing their hidden crimes to him, it compensates by shaking them out of their stupor and putting them in a position where they may be asking themselves things they haven’t ever had to before. It opens them up to talk about their lives as they imagine them, as they perceive them, and in some cases almost certainly the way they wish them. Herzog doesn’t really care about the literal truth, nor does he make any effort to pursue it. But he’s very interested in the emotional truth, something which I suspect most of these people had never really been given the chance to ponder in this manner. The result is that interviewees are caught oddly off-guard by their own emotion, seeming frequently not to suspect how deeply sad they are until it suddenly, unexpectedly, bubbles up from below to answer some seemingly benign question. I’m not sure they could reveal this side of themselves to a fellow Texan, armed with the same cultural norms and expectations. But with an incomprehensible German maniac asking seemingly unrelated questions about their tattoos and favorite sports teams, all bets are off, their guard comes down, and suddenly it can all spill out.    

And over here is where they found the dessicated corpse of your last shred of hope for humanity

    To get to this, though, Herzog first has to carefully lay out all the pieces of this drama for us so we have some context. And sweet Zeus, they are some fucking depressing pieces. This movie is a bigger heartbreaker than double fried twinkie with sugar lard filling. It begins by hinting at the horror we’re about to explore through what we’re told is the actual police footage of the crime scene, which may genuinely be among the most chilling film images I’ve ever watched. The hand-held camera ominously pans around a fancy suburban home, but something is wrong. The TV is burning but no one is around. A half - rolled pan of cookies --cookies!!-- is sitting on the counter, but no one seems to have come back to finish it. Then the camera notices the blood. Splattered up to the ceiling by the front door. Then a long bloody trail through the house out into the garage. Where there’s a god damn bloody teddy bear sitting forlornly on the red-spattered concrete. That’s right. A mother fucking teddy bear, in defiance of all logic, reason and decently.

Then we move on to the police footage of the body dump. I admit that I’m not a trained law-enforcement professional, but is is normal police procedure to film these crime scenes in the dead of the night and then to zoom in and focus on hauntingly poetic details like kid’s tennis shoe just barely visible through the trees or a woman’s manicured hand --complete with wedding ring-- floating near the surface of the murky water? Because fuck that. If you put those shots in one of those tedious found footage horror movies they have now, I would laugh at how ridiculously overwrought and unbelievable it was. Come on guys, don’t you think the forlorn tennis shoe and the bloody teddy bear is laying it on a little thick? But here it’s real.

And that’s all before we talk to the killers, the hopeless illiterate redneck alcoholic townies, the also-imprisoned father of one of the boys, the cops who shot roughly six or seven hundred thousand rounds at the escaping suspects’ car, bodies, and surrounding buildings, and the brother of one victim and sister and daughter of the other two. That’s sister and daughter. Both. That’s right, this poor girl lost her mom and her brother in one day. But wait, it gets worse. It wouldn’t be so bad, she says, if she hadn’t just lost her father 6 months earlier. And even that wouldn’t have been so bad if he hadn’t been a priest who was going to officiate her wedding. But even that wouldn’t have been so depressing if he hadn’t died horribly in a train accident. Which also killed her other brother. And the family dog. And the family DOG. The. family. dog.

That’s pretty fucking depressing, you might be thinking. Well fuck you, you don’t know what depressing is, jack. For a true pro at being depressing like this chick, that shit barely registers. It’s the equivalent for you and me of discovering that the leftover Chinese food we were planning on eating has spoiled, or at worst a particularly underwhelming sequel to a decent movie, maybe JURASSIC PARK 3 level. No, to really get nice and depressing she’s also got to point out that this was all after her one uncle had OD’d on fucking heroin, another had hung himself, a third shot himself because he was dying of cancer, and I think she mentioned that a fourth went on to direct ATLAS SHRUGGED PART 1, might be wrong about that one its hard to remember things with all this crippling, stupefying depression and whatnot. It was right at this point that I suddenly started to wonder if this was actually some kind of weird German misery porn joke, kind of a companion piece to that (mock?)umentary where Werner Herzog and the dumpy bald guy who wrote X-MEN 2 get menaced by the Loch Ness monster.** Or maybe something along the lines of Lars Von Triers’ Bjork-torturing misery-porn comedy masterpiece DANCER IN THE DARK, but one-upped by presenting it as a real story. 

These three movies came out the same weekend, which in a complete coincidence also coincided with the highest annual rate of people weeping uncontrollably until they gouged their own eyes out.

I don’t think it is, but it’s definitely possible to reach a breaking point on the misery here, after which you’re either going to turn if off and go kick a puppy, or just end up burning out and becoming a bit distanced from things. Of course, it’s right around this point that Herzog switches gears again, moving away from telling the story and instead trying to probe all of those involved as to what it all means. And one of the most admirable things the film seems to suggest is that it’s unreasonable and foolhardy to really draw *any* kind of specific meaning or lesson from any of this. It’s all a confusing tangle of stupidity, randomness, pain, and confusion that resolutely refuses to draw itself into any kind of patronizing moral. Even the facts of the case beg some incredulity. There are clearly major parts of this story missing, but then again the more you learn the less sense any of it seems to makes. Not in a West Memphis Three “this railroading justice system made a case which everyone bought even though it makes no sense!” kind of way, more in a way which suggests how incomprehensibly complicated and nebulous the world is, and how strongly it resists our attempts to pin it down into a clear, coherent narrative. That’s why Herzog seems so disinterested in probing the facts of the case the way, say, Erroll Morris might do. Life itself is way too unfathomable to make it possible to try and distill an honest narrative from it. To try and make it into a reassuring morality fable with clear action and consequences would be dishonest -- all that we can really do is ask how it affects us, personally.. And that’s what Herzog does.

So the rest of the movie is Herzog probing those involved for meaning -- asking them not what happened, but how it changed them, what it means to them. There’s a horror story here as well, of course, but one with a little more nuance than the pathetic, dismal facts of the case. Most movingly, Herzog speaks to Jason Burkett’s father, a stunningly articulate guy, himself incarcerated, whose haunted eyes reveal even more than his impassioned words how deeply guilty he feels for the role his own fucked up fathering played in turning his son into a killer. There’s also an amazing interview with a former death row captain named Fred Allen who snapped and walked off the job for reasons even he can’t quite put into words. Herzog begins the film by mentioning that he doesn’t believe in the death penalty, but this is the only section which really directly addresses that topic. Perry and Burkett killed three people, but this bearded middle-aged workman sitting in a spacious Texas living room helped to kill 127. They were all legal, government-sanctioned deaths, he was just doing his job and even tried to do it as humanely as possible. But the horrible psychological scars all that killing left on him are obvious. We’re rightly repulsed by Perry and Burkett’s senseless and remorseless murders, but of course as a society we’re equally willing to decide who does and does not deserve to live, and equally dispassionate about killing people we decide we want dead. We can also be equally capricious. There’s no reason to believe Burkett and Perry were anything other than equally guilty, but Burkett’s deadbeat dad tearfully talked a jury out of the death penalty for his son. Perry didn’t have anyone as eloquent making a plea on his behalf, and so he died. Herzog makes no explicit commentary on any of this, but he doesn’t need to.  

The face of a killer.

Sometimes Herzog’s interviewees open up with remarkable and unexpected humanity and passion. Not always, though. Most horrifyingly, Herzog talks to a cheerful, somewhat pretty young lady in a spacious suburban home who turns out to be Jason Burkett’s wife. Oh, that’s funny, they didn’t mention he was married when he got arrested, and I don’t see how he could have met someone and gotten married in pris.... oh. “I never thought I’d be someone who would marry a guy in prison!” giggles this horrifying woman who was just writing letters to incarcerated multiple-murderers for no reason, definitely not because she’s a kinky psycho.*** There’s a deeply uncomfortable part where she describes holding Burkett’s hand, gushing that he ‘completely covers me, taking complete control and never letting me go!’ Isn’t that sweet? You can almost hear the boom operators grinding their teeth. She chipperly brushes off any question of Burkett’s guilt, all she’s interested in is getting as many babies as possible out of him. That’s right, babies. “I want fifty children,” the incarcerated multiple murderer quips. Thank God they’re separated by glass and men with guns and there’s no possible way for that to happen, right?

This leads most horrific camera zoom-out in cinematic history, and the viewer leaping to his or her feet and shouting, “Don’t you dare fucking tell me what I think you’re going to tell me, you devious sadistic kraut bastard!”

So yeah, it’s a horror story, but in Herzog’s hands it also becomes much more. It’s about, I believe, how we react to death, and how bringing more death into the world --regardless of the reason-- changes us and changes the world itself. In the prologue to the film, Herzog talks to a prison chaplain about how he deals with administering religious rites to men who are about to be killed. The guy tearfully explains that he focuses on life, and especially his appreciation of nature, instead -- leading Herzog to hilariously deadpan “tell me about an encounter with a squirrel.” It’s a funny line, but he means it sincerely and really, is it any more ludicrous than all the death and pain brought about because two teenage rednecks wanted to drive a red sports car? Life itself is absurd, but we have to celebrate it anyway, because the alternative... well, the alternative is documented all too well herein. In a world too arbitrary and strange to make much sense of, all you can really do is get out there, watch some Werner Herzog movies, try to be nice to people, and make sure to encounter a squirrel or two.

*In Herzog’s case, that music is by ROMAN POLANKSI: WANTED AND DESIRED composer Mark Degli Antoni. In Berlinger’s, it’s Metallica. But you got to remember, that was the 90s so I swear to you that it seemed emotionally powerful at the time. And hey, turns out Antoni was the keyboard player for Soul Coughing, so they got the 90’s alt rock thing going here, too.

**Really. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0374639/

***Think about that the next time you’re not getting laid.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011)

Dir. Werner Herzog

Starring a bunch of rocks with animals painted on them, featuring some boss cave bear skulls, with special appearances by albino alligators, crystal formations, and Frenchmen.

            When Werner Herzog makes a documentary, you better believe he’s found something you’re not that interested in and that he’s going to turn it into a film you’re fascinated by. A big part of it is his eclectic fascination and love of unusual topics, talents, and people, and the obvious enthusiasm with which he presents his subjects. But the other part of the appeal is Herzog himself, who is equal parts philosopher, artist, deadpan comic, and German weirdo. His films are intensely interested in his subjects, and yet they feel like deeply personal statements from this inscrutable man at the same time. Somehow, even though he doesn’t talk a lot about himself, the films seem reflective of his own unique perspective, loves, fears, and obsessions. I believe he’s written and narrated all his documentaries since ECHOS FROM A SOMBER EMPIRE in 1990, and that fact alone makes them a subjective experience from the point of view of a very curious individual. Sure, I want to watch the fuck out of some 3D cave art, but if I have to choose between David Attenborough’s lightly informative prattle and Werner Herzog’s quasi-mystical philosophical musings, it’s an easy choice. Whatever the topic, you bet hearing Herzog’s voice over is gonna make it infinitely weirder and more interesting.

Among what I’m certain are many areas of philosophical agreement and professional respect between Herzog and Michael Bay, both have expressed their distaste for the proliferation of 3-D films and both immediately made their next film in 3-D. While TRANSFORMERS 3-D is still awaiting final cut approval from the Dark One, Herzog has taken his shot at 3-D by turning it on the dimly-lit walls of Chauvet caverns in France, where exist the oldest known paintings in the world. While Herzog and James Cameron may never see eye-to-eye on this 3-D thing, anyone who experiences CAVE it in 3-D has to see immediately that this was the occasion to use it, if ever there was one. You’ve seen these images before; there aren’t really all that many and most of the major ones qualify as pop art by this point. But what you haven’t ever seen is how stunning they look in their natural state. There’s a reason it’s worth it to go see the Paul Gauguin exhibit at the National Gallery until Sunday (http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/gauguininfo.shtm). There’s a reason my pulse quickened when I got to see an exhibit of the original art of Dr. Seuss. You can see these images, easily, online, often in insanely high resolution. But when you see the texture, the layers, the whole dimensions of an image, it comes alive in an entirely different way. It suddenly puts you in touch not just with an image, but with the whole piece as a physical object. It connects you with the artist’s hand and movement, with the fact that you’re looking not at some lines on paper, but a physical link between two people across space and time.

And here, the people on the other end of that link happened to live some 30,000 odd years ago. Herzog uses his 3-D camera to explore these surfaces that they traversed, trying to imagine what they thought, how they moved, what it meant. He’s reverent but probing, examining and reexamining each little line with an almost erotic intensity.

It’s not lost on Herzog that these humans lived lives which are almost completely unknowable to us at this point. Some tantalizing clues remain, even through the gap of tens of thousands of years – but it’s like trying to get to know someone from three random items picked from all their possessions through their whole life. A ballpoint pen, a high heel, a copy of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” with an inspirational message from an irritating relative written on the inside. You can use these items to get a sense of time and place, the kind of resources that might have been available, maybe the basic things which might have been important. But you don’t want to know that. You want to know the person. Who they were, what they loved, how they thought, what they aspired to, what they dreamed of.  Herzog turns to scientists who can speculate on what kind of tools they might have had, what their basic routines might have been like, but it’s all a tease. He wants to know their souls. And if art is indeed the expression of a human soul, he’s picked a subject which might tantalize us with the earliest known glimpse into the human heart, rather than the human brain. This may well have been the birth of the human soul, that subtle but staggeringly important line between Cro-Magnon man, who created art, and Neanderthal Man, who created tools, but not culture. Both were still alive at this time, incidentally, living side by side in these valleys and caves. Imagine that. A second species of humans walking amongst our early ancestors. Were they humans in the sense that we are today? Can we say that Cro-Magnon man definitely was, because of the clearly abstract quality of the icons they left behind? Is that the line which measures humanity? If so, looking at these early but already rich expressions of that human soul are about as close as we can get to identifying the spiritual difference between man and beast, if indeed there is one. 

There’s some basic scientific mumbo jumbo, but Herzog's quest is to try and look into the spirit of humans over a gap of 30,000 years. Everywhere he looks, he finds signs of human playfulness and seriousness, of personality – from thousands of years in the past and from the people all around him today. Some dullard American scientist suggests that archeology is no longer an adventurous, outdoor activity, but rather a painstaking chore of dirt farming and computer modeling. Herzog, with his typically inscrutable deadpan wit, cuts to a bearded, slightly insane looking scientist with the suitably badass name Wulf Hein (I think his on-screen title may actually be “adventure geologist”) gamely dressed in his recreation of Aurignacian period fashion and playing his heart out on a recreation stone-age flute. If they had flutes, they had music, and now you have to wonder what they played. Significantly, he notes that the flute is in the right key to play “The Star Spangled Banner,” which he coyly demonstrates. Did some Stone-Age flautist pick out that tune 30,000 year ago, not realizing that ancestors separated from him (or her) by an incalculable span of time would attach their own meaning to it? Herzog doesn’t have to say it aloud to know you’re pondering it. 

Man, Hall and Oates did not age well.

He can’t help but be interested in modern spirits too – he includes a bit where he asks a pony-tailed scientists about his former job as a circus performer, and an interesting but irrelevant tangent about a master perfumer who literally uses his nose to look for hidden caves (what the fuck, that guy gets to go inside the cave but I don’t?) – but it’s the ancient ancestors who are the star of the show, and Herzog does everything he can to try and help you see through their eyes (the crews’ ever-moving lights and shadows hint at the way the paintings must have been originally experienced by torchlight), listen with their ears (during a long quiet stretch where the crew stand perfectly still and let the otherwise imperceptible audio of the cave become the star) feel with their hands (through his penetrating use of 3-D) and even smell with their noses, thanks to our friend the master perfumer cave-smeller. I’d bet my life there’s a deleted scene where he talks to some hunter or chef about the taste of raw cave bear meat. He wants us to have every possible tool to try and imagine their lives, their minds.

But as much as it is tantalizing to imagine, the more you think about it the more alien and mysterious it becomes. They might be humans, but trying to understand them is like trying to imagine what a baby is thinking. Not because they were primitive, but because their context and way of thinking about the world is just so entirely unknown and unknowable.  Just to put it in modern language would probably destroy any truth you might find. In a way, this is a perfect companion piece to another excellent, poetic documentary from Europe, 2010’s INTO ETERNITY. That one is ostensibly about the nuclear waste repository being stuck at the very bottom abandoned copper mine in Finland, but actually it’s just as much about communicating across an unimaginable amount of time for a human being. You see, once we store that nuclear waste, it’s going to be dangerously radioactive for 100,000 years.

Yes, 100,000.

Meaning that we have a responsibility to communicate to our ancestors 100,000 years in the future that this site is dangerous and must never be opened. It goes without saying that no human sociological structure has ever survived that long (or even come close) and neither will this current one.100,000 years from now, any tiny remnant of our current human societies is likely to be as mysterious and unknowable as the cave paintings are to us. Perhaps just as primitive. If the human soul has evolved from ancient paintings of horses to the music of Lady Gaga in a mere 30,000 years, imagine what our ancestors in the year 102,011 CE will wonder about our wants, out dreams, our values, our souls. Our minds can’t comprehend that span of time and space in human terms. Maybe someday millennia from now, a descendant of Werner Herzog will be reverently ultra-3-D-smell-o-visioning the few remaining copies of O magazine and trying desperately to imagine what kind of humanity he shares with people that far removed from himself. He won’t really be able to know, but maybe it means something just to imagine. Anyway, hopefully he’ll get the hint that he should stay the fuck out of caves in Finland, regardless of the primitive art he might find down there.

As it is, modern-day Herzog is always a worthwhile watch. Here, more than perhaps anything else he’s ever done, he’s committed to arming us with as many tools as possible to fuel our imaginations, and challenging us with perhaps the ultimate question about the nature of the human soul. This would be a stunning documentary were it a purely visual piece alone (Herzog is showman enough to structure his film in a way which organically escalates the power of the paintings and the way we get to see them, and he effortlessly utilizes Ernst Reijseger’s stunning score to great effect) but the heart of the film is that this beauty and mystery is being explored by this particular Baywatch-referencing German oddball. It puts a human face on the mystery of humanity itself, and makes it seem all the more remote, and yet all the more vitally compelling.

Coda: here is a picture of an albino alligator.

As inscrutable German metaphors go, this one is pretty unexpected.

For reason I can confidently say I don’t entirely understand, Herzog also chooses to end his film with this image. I think he may be meditating on the inevitable evolution of humans from one thing to another, with the single thread of our common humanity uniting us but still allowing for startling distance between our minds, if not our souls. But possibly not, I’m open to suggestions.