Werner Herzog's twelve pages in the spring issue of ' The Paris Review' are a selection of episodes from his upcoming book 'Conquest of the Useless', a diary he kept during the making of the film 'Fitzcarraldo' in the early eighties. The entries he offers here focus entirely on the weird and overheated state of his already somewhat melancholy imagination as it endures the suffocating effects of the Peruvian jungle in which 'Fitzcarraldo' was filmed. It is fevered, surreal, seductive, claustrophobic, hallucinatory, and malignant. Its opium-inflected quality recalls the atmosphere of 'The Ancient Mariner' and the films of Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch; its amorality is akin to that of Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'. Herzog's jungle is a negative matrix from which each episode emerges whole but strangely wrong, inverted and sinister, like a freak in a jar. Every object and every act partakes of the one condition, that of a mind turned inside-out and experiencing itself as its environment, a mind colonized by visions, not imagined, but actual visions, rendered hyperreal by their unfamiliarity. The pig grown huge "like a whitish grub", the cable hissing in the wet mud, the turkey copulating with the beheaded duck, the poisonous snake, the melted lizard, the dead baby, the molding leather, the shards of broken glass, the dripping leaves and sluggish whirlpools and stopped clocks are all faces of that "obscene, explicit malice of the jungle". It is an artist's nightmare, the imagination stunned, overwhelmed, and exceeded by reality. It is also a director's nightmare - what he describes is an experience of psychic suspension in which things take place without reference to him, including personal recollections, thoughts and actions - he is really outlining a sort of diabolical movie in which he has been haplessly cast without, critically, the guidance of a director. The writing is taut, compressed, intense; it manages to convey a sense of delirium without becoming overworked or decorous. On the contrary, it maintains, for the most part, an air of documentary exactitude. It is also hypnotically beautiful, and perverse: "Tumors form on the trees. Roots writhe in the air .... caterpillars crawl toward me from all directions, brainless but unstoppable." If these incredible pages are anything to go by, the book should be stunning. It comes out on June 30th.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Werner Herzog 'Conquest of the Useless'
Werner Herzog's twelve pages in the spring issue of ' The Paris Review' are a selection of episodes from his upcoming book 'Conquest of the Useless', a diary he kept during the making of the film 'Fitzcarraldo' in the early eighties. The entries he offers here focus entirely on the weird and overheated state of his already somewhat melancholy imagination as it endures the suffocating effects of the Peruvian jungle in which 'Fitzcarraldo' was filmed. It is fevered, surreal, seductive, claustrophobic, hallucinatory, and malignant. Its opium-inflected quality recalls the atmosphere of 'The Ancient Mariner' and the films of Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch; its amorality is akin to that of Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'. Herzog's jungle is a negative matrix from which each episode emerges whole but strangely wrong, inverted and sinister, like a freak in a jar. Every object and every act partakes of the one condition, that of a mind turned inside-out and experiencing itself as its environment, a mind colonized by visions, not imagined, but actual visions, rendered hyperreal by their unfamiliarity. The pig grown huge "like a whitish grub", the cable hissing in the wet mud, the turkey copulating with the beheaded duck, the poisonous snake, the melted lizard, the dead baby, the molding leather, the shards of broken glass, the dripping leaves and sluggish whirlpools and stopped clocks are all faces of that "obscene, explicit malice of the jungle". It is an artist's nightmare, the imagination stunned, overwhelmed, and exceeded by reality. It is also a director's nightmare - what he describes is an experience of psychic suspension in which things take place without reference to him, including personal recollections, thoughts and actions - he is really outlining a sort of diabolical movie in which he has been haplessly cast without, critically, the guidance of a director. The writing is taut, compressed, intense; it manages to convey a sense of delirium without becoming overworked or decorous. On the contrary, it maintains, for the most part, an air of documentary exactitude. It is also hypnotically beautiful, and perverse: "Tumors form on the trees. Roots writhe in the air .... caterpillars crawl toward me from all directions, brainless but unstoppable." If these incredible pages are anything to go by, the book should be stunning. It comes out on June 30th.
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Superb wording that makes me want to run to the bookstore and reserve my copy. I can not get "freak in jar" out of my mind all day! You have true talent. I look forward to every new post you write.
ReplyDeleteDear Anonymous, you are really, as a famous wise man once said, TOO kind!
ReplyDeleteHerzog, of course! The most physical of them all...which other director would pull a ship across the jungle just to make a movie out of it? Spielberg, of course! Yeah right. The idea that nature is basically your enemy (no "new age" mumbo-jumbo here, with "mother nature" nurturing human beings), as repeated in his movie " Grizzly Man" many years later, is even more refreshing when read against the background of pseudo-spiritual California. "Fitzcarraldo" is a great film that only the great Klaus Kinsky could play, and only the great Herzog could direct. After all, can we name ONE other director who ate his one shoe, in public?
ReplyDeleteYes, Grizzly Man! I thought of that film as I was writing this post. But tell me about the shoe incident, before I start arguing on behalf of nature and hold California's spiritual 'traditions' up to the light ...
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