More Encounters With Werner Herzog

It is a total misreading of the sequence that Bill Jirsa (the linguist) does not care that possibly during our conversation a language has died.

I had to cut him off and summarize his travails with academia, as this was a highly complex story which went on and on for about forty minutes. The next following sequence with the computer expert and traveler Karen Joyce I had to cut short as well, and give only some taste of her way of exploring the world, as she went on non-stop for about two hours - without ever making a full stop or a comma in her tales. There was literally no chance during editing to ever get out of her most wonderful stories. I love both of them dearly, and they have forgiven me that my film's total running time had to be under two hours.

No one is a phony in my film. They are most fascinating human beings, and I wish I could have them as friends forever, even though our encounters were so brief.

Read Roger Ebert's Journal and Werner Herzog's Full Comment

There's a discussion on Roger Ebert's online journal prompted by Herzog's Encounters at the End of The World between Ebert and art critic Daniel Quiles.

What the discussion reminds me of is how easily it is to read more--or more accurately, what we want to read--into a film and filmmaker than is there. Take this bit from Quiles writings:

In "Encounters," it is the highly skilled masters of their languages (the scientists) who are idealized, while the professional adventurers of McMurdo, who labor in miserable conditions at high salaries to fund globetrotting excursions for the rest of the year, are bores and phonys, akin to the buffoon running around the world breaking Guinness Book records.

Hearkening back to the Kubrick connection I made in a previous post, it would be easy to see the horrific demise of Private Pyle in Full Metal Jacket as a damning of the Marine's training. The entire first half is so disturbing that a cousin once recounted sneaking into the film as kid and having to literally vomit at the end when Private Joker kills the sniper.

Reading into the film that Kubrick is anti-war or pro-peace would be, and is, too simplistic. Otherwise my cousin's reaction--who at 13 had already seen his share of war films, and in 1987 would have had no emotional connection to the Vietnam War Era--wouldn't have been so extreme.

Herzog's own comments just reaffirms my belief that Herzog isn't as dismissive of people as many would think. As a filmmaker, he's going for a level of complexity that goes beyond what most documentaries, at least in the modern context, dare to go for.

Even as he packs Encounters with amazing images of exotic wildlife, he's not romanticizing nature or trying to attribute human traits. What traits he does link between humans and animals in the wild are traits shared by all life. And as he's interviewing people, Herzog appears to be looking at his subjects with a level of objectivity that forces us to really think about what they are saying. Again, not assigning some traits to the scientists and then to the laborers, but finding traits tha both share in common.

He allows contradiction to enter the discussion. Note where Herzog cuts off the discussion with the Guiness Book "buffon." Herzog only cuts after the man mentions how beautiful and desolate Antarctica is. The man's quest for inane records (like rolling the farthest) maybe silly, but even he's able to see Antarctica as more than just another place to break a world record. Although the topic of discussions are different, in many ways, he's no different than the Eastern European who, by always carrying his emergency pack, has never escaped Eastern Europe. They're both ironic figures.

The danger as a viewer is to allow our own biases, or reading, to elevate some subjects above others and to look for what seperates a linguist from a Guinness world record holder, than to find what connects them. Even if that connection may lead us to make some disturbing revelations.

Encounters with Werner Herzog

As a staff--well partial staff, Dan's on Vakay and Elizabeth was hard at work on the Fall Workshops--and with one our board members Ashley Epting we headed over to Landmark Midtown Art Cinema to catch Encounters at the End of the World.

Of Herzog's work, I've only seen Rescue Dawn. Herzog is another one of those directors who I know I need to see more of his catalog. But just from those two films, it's obvious that Herzog is interested in not only man's physical relationship with his environment, but man's psychological connection as well. It raises the question of do men adapt to their surroundings, or do men find surroundings that allow the most prominent aspects of their personality to thrive?

As expected, Herzog encounters scientists who are studying everything from the constantly changing nature of Antarctica's landscape to the life cycle of penguins and seals. Yet, he also has run ins with the support staff, who interestingly, have degrees and backgrounds almost as diverse as the actual scientists themselves. A heavy machinery operator is a philosopher, a former banker drives a 67,000 lb bus and a linguist runs the greenhouse.

What the banker, philosopher and linguist all have in common is that they're adventurers on some level. People who crave the new. At least, that's what they say. Herzog hints that for some, they're running away from the overwhelming confines of civilization. He then flips that and hints that many of the hallmarks of civilization are replicated in the wild. When a penguin becomes disoriented and wanders off towards the mountains, where it will surely die, it's obvious from both Herzog's narration and what he's shown us before, that he's linking the behavior of the people he's interviewing with their environment.

At one point, Herzog interviews a man from Eastern Europe who escaped in the days when Communism was still in effect. It's been several decades, and the man is still always prepared to escape. His always packed bag includes a tent, cooking utensils and a portable raft. When the man tries to recount how he escaped Eastern Europe all those years ago, he can't find the words and is on the verge of tears. Herzog tells him he doesn't have to continue and the man looks grateful when Herzog lets him off the hook.

As with Rescue Dawn, Herzog demonstrates a sense of humor that I would personally label Kubrickian. Like Kubrick, Herzog likes finding the absurd and the contradictory in humans. Although, since this is a documentary, Herzog can more directly point to and comment on that absurdity. In voiceover, he cuts into the linguist's story about how he wound up in Antarctica saying that the linguist's story was too long and complicated. And Herzog asks the question of why smaller creatures like ants are much like humans and keep insects to milk, but chimps, who are closely related to humans don't. He then cuts to a watercolor image of a chimp looking stoically at the sunset. As he pulls back, he reveals that the chimp is sitting on the back of a goat, as if the chimp was a cowboy.

Gabe, who has seen quite a few Herzogs, calls him misanthropic. Since I haven't seen enough of his work, I can't quite say if I agree or disagree. But, I have to say so far, I don't find Herzog so. He seems to be like Kubrick, who apparently can come off as cold, calculating and a bit anti-human on film, but in person is described as child like in his ability to revel in any and every topic that man is connected to.

I'll probably never get around to it, but I'd love to watch Rescue Dawn and then Full Metal Jacket just to see what interesting connections come up. I have sneaking suspcion I'll find two films and two filmmakers that compliment each other on multiple levels.