Herzog’s ice age
Slate has a brief but valuable piece on Werner Herzog’s forthcoming documentary, which you can read by clicking here. The film’s called “Encounters at the End of the World” — but it seems to me that that could have been the title of almost all the Herzog films. To wit:
- “Aguirre, Wrath of God” — in which would-be conquistadors run up against the savagery of the undeveloped new world (a nice riposte to the quaint green notion that nature is bucolic and enriching, when those of us who grew up in it know that when it’s not boring it’s deadly)
- “Grizzly Man” — in which an intrepid naturalist deep in the wild finds himself literally consumed by his passion
- “Lessons of Darkness,” which blends CNN footage and Herzog-shot footage of the burning oil wells of Kuwait into a science-fictional vision of the rapacities of humankind and the destructive force of a wounded environment
- “Even Dwarfs Started Small” — which features a group of deranged dwarfs evidently far cut off from civilizing forces convene chaos onto their benighted habitat
- “Fitzcarraldo” — in which a mad visionary is ultimately defeated in his quest by the unrelenting realities of the Amazonian jungle and a treacherously independent river
I could easily go on. The Herzog films that don’t star an extreme exterior location are concerned with an extremely bizarre interior condition; par example: the two films featuring Bruno S., an odd and mentally limited man whose ineffable motivations perfectly match with Herzog’s interests. Bruno is either a very bad actor, an idiot savant who is utterly convincing in his stunted abilities, or simultaneously both; he is also eminently watchable in “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser,” where he is perfectly cast as a strange man released into polite society with utterly no suitable training for the experience.
According to Slate, here’s the narrative of the new Herzog film, which I await with relish:
It’s a loosely bound collection of miscellany filmed at the McMurdo Station, a 1,000-person settlement of researchers in Antarctica, during the five-month “austral summer” of round-the-clock sunlight. Herzog was sent to Antarctica by the National Science Foundation with carte blanche to make whatever movie he wanted—all he could tell them for sure was that it wouldn’t involve penguins. What he returned with is a lyrical group portrait of McMurdo’s motley crew of scientists, technicians, and lifelong travelers—men and women whom one local labels “professional dreamers” and whom those of us who live on more populated continents might affectionately call “crackpots.”
You see the recurrent theme: extreme environment is met by crackpot theorists.
For those who care about these things and will be lucky enough to be in Los Angeles next February, Herzog will be speaking (as well as performing a concert of some sort) as part of the UCLA Live spoken word series. Here’s the link. I will be there.