Long-distance reacharound (aka final wrapup)
Posted by Chris S.
Comin' back around for a wrapup, and only three months late! You'd think I would abandon it by now, but Werner and this festival are big enough to deserve some kind of closure, even if it's done only through fast-fading memories and impressions.
My Best Fiend ruled! How could it not! 90+ minutes of Kinski insanity, narrated in Herzog's soft, soothing voice. Highlights: Kinski's one-man "Jesus" show, and Herzog going into the house (now owned by a settled middle-age couple) he and Kinski once lived in. Telling the current occupants stories of how Kinski burst through a door to throw hot potatoes and cutlery at a reviewer he had invited to dinner. The reviewer, it seems, did not praise Klaus highly enough for his performance. General mayhem ensues. It's all pretty fun. And the end is sardonically heartwarming.
Wings of Hope followed, and was strikingly similar in approach to Little Dieter Needs To Fly. Julianne Koepke was the only survivor in a plane crash over the Amazonian jungle, and she walked three weeks without food to finally find someone who could take her to safety. As Herzog said, she did everything right (her father was a biologist, and taught her about the ways of nature early), and though only a girl of 18 (flying home for her high school prom), she endured a three week trek many "outdoorsmen" would never hold up under, and now comes back to the original crash site to find debris.
Because the sound on the video was kind of low, we all had to crouch in to hear, and there were a lot of muffled gasps as Julianne and her assistants uncovered doors and walls of the plane, rows of seats, all untouched in the intervening years. The jungle above was an unbroken wall once again...20 years later, and no signs that the event had ever happen if flying in from above. While not as emotionally deep as Dieter, this was an excellent bookend, and personally interesting to Herzog because he was scheduled to be on the very flight Julianne survived before it was re-routed. At the very same time that he was shooting Aguirre, Julianne was living it....literally less than three tributaries away!
I ended Saturday early to attend an excellent noise show in which Charlie Draheim fuckin' ruled the roost.
Sunday began yet again with a pair of religion-themed shorts. Christ and Demons in New Spain covered the ways in which Christianity has come to South America, and the ways in which the indigenous people have bent it to their existing belief systems. Although Catholicism is the name of the game here (think worship of saints), the primary saint on display is a curious little fellow named Maximon. He was created by the locals. To show his power and authority as a saint, his icons and statues show him in a white tuxedo and smoking a cigar, in the manner of a South American ranch tycoon. Pilgrims show respect to Maximon by blowing cigar smoke in his face, putting cigarettes in his mouth (is his statue like one of those "smoking monkey" dolls, with working lungs?!), and spitting liquor on him, and on the faithful. We get to see ordained holy people, taking pulls off of liquor bottles, and spit/spraying the devout with this holy booze, like Foster Brook's vision of baptism. Reading "Herzog on Herzog" gave me a bit of background on all this...apparently the Catholic church knows about this, and acknowledges Maximon as a lesser saint, saying that they're basically glad that SOME form of Christianity is being preached, even if it's weird and deformed.
The point of the documentary, as usual, is to show you sights of the world that you've never seen. I don't get the feeling that Herzog really wants to drive home the point that bringing religion to the natives is stupid and unneccessary (though my film-watching companion that morning came to that conclusion on his own), so much as his desire to show us the strange, comedic, tragic, and surreal things that can happen when foreign beliefs are co-opted in haphazard ways. And to show us weird beauty. If he really wanted to drive home the point, there would have been more documentation of what's going on. Instead, only a few title cards here and there illustrate, the most powerful being the one that starts to film: "If Jesus were to return today, would we even recognize him?" In this way, the handheld DV film, lack of historical background, and emphasis upon pockets of society not seen by the more mainstream National Geographic-type "natives in the wild" type films, it would be tempting to say that this flick is the precursor to the Sublime Frequencies DVDs (curated by members of the Sun City Girls, many shot by the members on their own travels). Sublime Frequencies' hook is that they give you few maps or directions as to what's happening...just a pure immersion in the spectacle. In that sense, Herzog's inter-title cards might seem a diversion, but if anything, this film is MORE pure! Sublime Frequencies DVDs come with a few words of background in the liner notes....the inter-title cards, by comparison, seldom have anything to do with the action on screen, confining themselves intstead to quasi-religious homilies ("Oh Lord! Deliver me from the ways of sinful men" and so forth), or immediate reportage on the events being shown ("This is not even the temple! It is a courtyard outside where goods are sold to the faithful"). Without reading the interviews in "Herzog on Herzog," we're given almost no background, which is somehow appropriate. After all, how could you describe this stuff, other than to say that this is every bit as much an alien landscape as Fata Morgana. Although it seemed a so-so entry at the time of viewing, this is one of the films that has hovered heaviest in my mind since then.
Following this was a 17-minute short titled Pilgimage. Silent footage (some from Bells from the Deep!) of people walking on pilgrimages. No interviews, just people walking and aching and praying and devoting. Horrible "cosmopolitan world music" plays overhead (think Last Temptation of Christ soundtrack at its worst. "Ahh ahh ahhhhhhhhh!" goes the melodramatic tenor). Okay, but didn't leave much of an impression.
Next, Invincible, Herzog's first return to feature films in well over 10 years (and his first REAL full-on film sinec Cobra Verde in 1987), and the first one that seemed to look and feel like a regular '90s hollywood film...big set pieces, "Pro" costumes, crisp picture and camera-work, totally "union" all around. A fine (nominally "true", though a lot of liberties were taken with important details) little story about Zishe Breibart, a Jewish man who is strong, lured away (by the promise of money, fame, and the chance to make a difference) from his farm to be a Jewish strong-man (dressed as an Aryan strong-man) for the then-emerging Nazi party. Tim Roth plays Erik Jan Hanussen, an oily "mystic" who can use power of suggestion to make real burns appear on women's hands via hypnosis, and who keeps Zishe at his post even when Zishe begins to realize just what side he's on. Roth's calculatingly reptilian performance gives off sparks when rubbed against Finnish strongman Jouko Ahola's open-faced and guileless Breibart...it's like having Kinski and Bruno S. in dual lead roles!
However, despite some interesting conflicts, a good story, a few amazing images, and some very tender moments, this movie was not quite as satisfying as I had hoped. Zishe's death (ironically, due to infection from a rusty nail which he is too proud to get treated) adds a cruel twist to the story, but the final departure is pretty sappy. There's a lot right and very little wrong with this film, but I still can't figure out why the negatives win out in my head. Might require a re-watching.
"Ten Thousand Years Older": Less said the better. The most openly preachy flick on the fest since "Where the Green Ants Dream." Pretty much the same premise.
Wheel of Time: This is the point where one starts to get a little worried about Herr H. After several disappointing/underwhelming flicks in a row, you start to wonder if he might be "losing it." This film did little to assuage that fear. Herzog himself said he didn't feel qualified enough to film a convergence of the world's Buddhists, but was asked to by the Dalai Lama himself. Unsurprisingly, the film does what many of Herzog's films do...ignore the main specatacle in favor of peeking into corners, running over to that strange man all by himself, talking to random people with all the selectivity of grabbing a beer in a bar and starting a conversation with the guy on the stool next to you. The main story is conspiculous mostly by its absence...by seeing every point except the main one (other than documenting the meticulous creation of the beautiful and complex sand Mandala by the Dalai Lama and his upper-echelon servants), we infer the nature of the festival. Rather than focus on the point everybody is looking at, Herzog focuses on the 500,000 people looking *at* that point, in hopes that we'll look over there as well. It reminds me a bit of Hunter S. Thompson's gonzo method of covering the '72 elections (in "Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail"), where the wealth of accumulated details that are not directly related to who voted for might provide you a richer look into the inner workings of the machine (off topic, but I just saw something the other day where George McGovern said of Thompson's book "It was the most truthful, and least accurate, account of the campaign ever written.").
Here, however, that tactic doesn't work so well. I can't help but wonder what the Dalai Lama thought of the final product. A decent enough film, but we get the feeling at this point that the director is starting to lose focus of his ambitions.
Next is The White Diamond, and I'll be frank here...this is one of those ones that got lost in the booze and outside conversations. People came over, beer and wine was drunk, and converstaions flared up. I have no idea what happened, except that it happened in digital video again, and there were a few breathtaking shots of waterfalls and birds that totally captivated one exuberant festival-goer. Still on the "get-to" pile for a re-evaluation, I'm afraid.
Then, yep, Grizzly Man. You already know...this is a fabulous film. This is Herzog in his finest form in years. Street-editing taken to new heights. The sometimes heavy-handed and preachy director finding a great balance in the life of Timothy Treadwell, painting him neither as a moron nor a saint, but a beautiful and tragic alloy. It also elicited lots of laughter and incredulaous noises...what other documentary EVER...EVER!?!?! has had the director chime in to say "here is where I disagree with the views of my subject"?!?!? I mean, that never happens!! Herzog is like "Timothy is wrong here...nature is all death and fornication, not cuddly Disney sentiments." Fuck!! That's a very heavy thing to lay on a person, esp. when the person you disagree with is brutally dead. Throughout, Herzog captures an array of Errol Morris-ian subjects, friends or associates of Treadwell, and expertly cuts them into the existing footage of Tim's forest adventures. He finds the beauty in the unscripted moments, when the camera is left on but nobody is around - moments like this are right in the Herzog tradition of Heart of Glass or Aguirre.
The final thoughts on this film mirror my thoughts on Herzog in general...he can't ever be counted out. As soon as you think he's begun to lose it, he comes back twice as hard with a real stunner. Because he's completely fearless (both physically and intellectually), he sometimes bullies himself into dead ends, but sometimes those long tunnels of inquiry bring about marvelous treasures, of which Grizzly Man is one. Rent, buy, borrow NOW.
After that, we ate pizza, drank wine, and watched a 1979 documentary about Herzog, in which he is hilariously diffident to the interviewer, unable or unwilling to engage any of the (perfectly decent, if slightly rote) questions before him. Between shots of his classic films, and behind-the-scenes footage while filming Stroszeck, the air gets tenser and tenser as the interviewer asks that question that always signals a disastrous interview: "Well, what do YOU want to talk about?" The totally oranged-out faded print gave a nostalgic, old-photos-in-dusty-albums vibe that capped off the fest in reverent style.
Thank you all for reading, contributing to this blog, contributing to the festival by your attendence, and especially engaging the subject matter with me, whether it was for one film or a sizeable portion of the event. It is no exaggeration to say that this was one of the most tremendously life-altering events I've ever had, and a huge portion of that comes from sharing it with each and every one of you. I'd list you all, but I threw away the remaining raffle tickets during winter cleaning, and I'm afraid I'd miss somebody, but you know who you are. You made it 1000x more fun, and made all the hard work and money drain reap unbelieveable rewards.
Coming up next: probably something more manageable. In the Stiff-Legged canon, this is *my* Fitzcarraldo, so I think I may have to recharge with something shorter, easier to acquire, and...dare I say...trashier! Stiff-leg lifers will remember that Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street were also day-long mini-festivals in the past...that's the direction I'm thinking right now. Friday the 13th, or maybe zombies, or '70s/'80s "Hot Dog" movies or something.
But after that....? KUROSAWA.
You heard it here first.
Comin' back around for a wrapup, and only three months late! You'd think I would abandon it by now, but Werner and this festival are big enough to deserve some kind of closure, even if it's done only through fast-fading memories and impressions.
My Best Fiend ruled! How could it not! 90+ minutes of Kinski insanity, narrated in Herzog's soft, soothing voice. Highlights: Kinski's one-man "Jesus" show, and Herzog going into the house (now owned by a settled middle-age couple) he and Kinski once lived in. Telling the current occupants stories of how Kinski burst through a door to throw hot potatoes and cutlery at a reviewer he had invited to dinner. The reviewer, it seems, did not praise Klaus highly enough for his performance. General mayhem ensues. It's all pretty fun. And the end is sardonically heartwarming.
Wings of Hope followed, and was strikingly similar in approach to Little Dieter Needs To Fly. Julianne Koepke was the only survivor in a plane crash over the Amazonian jungle, and she walked three weeks without food to finally find someone who could take her to safety. As Herzog said, she did everything right (her father was a biologist, and taught her about the ways of nature early), and though only a girl of 18 (flying home for her high school prom), she endured a three week trek many "outdoorsmen" would never hold up under, and now comes back to the original crash site to find debris.
Because the sound on the video was kind of low, we all had to crouch in to hear, and there were a lot of muffled gasps as Julianne and her assistants uncovered doors and walls of the plane, rows of seats, all untouched in the intervening years. The jungle above was an unbroken wall once again...20 years later, and no signs that the event had ever happen if flying in from above. While not as emotionally deep as Dieter, this was an excellent bookend, and personally interesting to Herzog because he was scheduled to be on the very flight Julianne survived before it was re-routed. At the very same time that he was shooting Aguirre, Julianne was living it....literally less than three tributaries away!
I ended Saturday early to attend an excellent noise show in which Charlie Draheim fuckin' ruled the roost.
Sunday began yet again with a pair of religion-themed shorts. Christ and Demons in New Spain covered the ways in which Christianity has come to South America, and the ways in which the indigenous people have bent it to their existing belief systems. Although Catholicism is the name of the game here (think worship of saints), the primary saint on display is a curious little fellow named Maximon. He was created by the locals. To show his power and authority as a saint, his icons and statues show him in a white tuxedo and smoking a cigar, in the manner of a South American ranch tycoon. Pilgrims show respect to Maximon by blowing cigar smoke in his face, putting cigarettes in his mouth (is his statue like one of those "smoking monkey" dolls, with working lungs?!), and spitting liquor on him, and on the faithful. We get to see ordained holy people, taking pulls off of liquor bottles, and spit/spraying the devout with this holy booze, like Foster Brook's vision of baptism. Reading "Herzog on Herzog" gave me a bit of background on all this...apparently the Catholic church knows about this, and acknowledges Maximon as a lesser saint, saying that they're basically glad that SOME form of Christianity is being preached, even if it's weird and deformed.
The point of the documentary, as usual, is to show you sights of the world that you've never seen. I don't get the feeling that Herzog really wants to drive home the point that bringing religion to the natives is stupid and unneccessary (though my film-watching companion that morning came to that conclusion on his own), so much as his desire to show us the strange, comedic, tragic, and surreal things that can happen when foreign beliefs are co-opted in haphazard ways. And to show us weird beauty. If he really wanted to drive home the point, there would have been more documentation of what's going on. Instead, only a few title cards here and there illustrate, the most powerful being the one that starts to film: "If Jesus were to return today, would we even recognize him?" In this way, the handheld DV film, lack of historical background, and emphasis upon pockets of society not seen by the more mainstream National Geographic-type "natives in the wild" type films, it would be tempting to say that this flick is the precursor to the Sublime Frequencies DVDs (curated by members of the Sun City Girls, many shot by the members on their own travels). Sublime Frequencies' hook is that they give you few maps or directions as to what's happening...just a pure immersion in the spectacle. In that sense, Herzog's inter-title cards might seem a diversion, but if anything, this film is MORE pure! Sublime Frequencies DVDs come with a few words of background in the liner notes....the inter-title cards, by comparison, seldom have anything to do with the action on screen, confining themselves intstead to quasi-religious homilies ("Oh Lord! Deliver me from the ways of sinful men" and so forth), or immediate reportage on the events being shown ("This is not even the temple! It is a courtyard outside where goods are sold to the faithful"). Without reading the interviews in "Herzog on Herzog," we're given almost no background, which is somehow appropriate. After all, how could you describe this stuff, other than to say that this is every bit as much an alien landscape as Fata Morgana. Although it seemed a so-so entry at the time of viewing, this is one of the films that has hovered heaviest in my mind since then.
Following this was a 17-minute short titled Pilgimage. Silent footage (some from Bells from the Deep!) of people walking on pilgrimages. No interviews, just people walking and aching and praying and devoting. Horrible "cosmopolitan world music" plays overhead (think Last Temptation of Christ soundtrack at its worst. "Ahh ahh ahhhhhhhhh!" goes the melodramatic tenor). Okay, but didn't leave much of an impression.
Next, Invincible, Herzog's first return to feature films in well over 10 years (and his first REAL full-on film sinec Cobra Verde in 1987), and the first one that seemed to look and feel like a regular '90s hollywood film...big set pieces, "Pro" costumes, crisp picture and camera-work, totally "union" all around. A fine (nominally "true", though a lot of liberties were taken with important details) little story about Zishe Breibart, a Jewish man who is strong, lured away (by the promise of money, fame, and the chance to make a difference) from his farm to be a Jewish strong-man (dressed as an Aryan strong-man) for the then-emerging Nazi party. Tim Roth plays Erik Jan Hanussen, an oily "mystic" who can use power of suggestion to make real burns appear on women's hands via hypnosis, and who keeps Zishe at his post even when Zishe begins to realize just what side he's on. Roth's calculatingly reptilian performance gives off sparks when rubbed against Finnish strongman Jouko Ahola's open-faced and guileless Breibart...it's like having Kinski and Bruno S. in dual lead roles!
However, despite some interesting conflicts, a good story, a few amazing images, and some very tender moments, this movie was not quite as satisfying as I had hoped. Zishe's death (ironically, due to infection from a rusty nail which he is too proud to get treated) adds a cruel twist to the story, but the final departure is pretty sappy. There's a lot right and very little wrong with this film, but I still can't figure out why the negatives win out in my head. Might require a re-watching.
"Ten Thousand Years Older": Less said the better. The most openly preachy flick on the fest since "Where the Green Ants Dream." Pretty much the same premise.
Wheel of Time: This is the point where one starts to get a little worried about Herr H. After several disappointing/underwhelming flicks in a row, you start to wonder if he might be "losing it." This film did little to assuage that fear. Herzog himself said he didn't feel qualified enough to film a convergence of the world's Buddhists, but was asked to by the Dalai Lama himself. Unsurprisingly, the film does what many of Herzog's films do...ignore the main specatacle in favor of peeking into corners, running over to that strange man all by himself, talking to random people with all the selectivity of grabbing a beer in a bar and starting a conversation with the guy on the stool next to you. The main story is conspiculous mostly by its absence...by seeing every point except the main one (other than documenting the meticulous creation of the beautiful and complex sand Mandala by the Dalai Lama and his upper-echelon servants), we infer the nature of the festival. Rather than focus on the point everybody is looking at, Herzog focuses on the 500,000 people looking *at* that point, in hopes that we'll look over there as well. It reminds me a bit of Hunter S. Thompson's gonzo method of covering the '72 elections (in "Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail"), where the wealth of accumulated details that are not directly related to who voted for might provide you a richer look into the inner workings of the machine (off topic, but I just saw something the other day where George McGovern said of Thompson's book "It was the most truthful, and least accurate, account of the campaign ever written.").
Here, however, that tactic doesn't work so well. I can't help but wonder what the Dalai Lama thought of the final product. A decent enough film, but we get the feeling at this point that the director is starting to lose focus of his ambitions.
Next is The White Diamond, and I'll be frank here...this is one of those ones that got lost in the booze and outside conversations. People came over, beer and wine was drunk, and converstaions flared up. I have no idea what happened, except that it happened in digital video again, and there were a few breathtaking shots of waterfalls and birds that totally captivated one exuberant festival-goer. Still on the "get-to" pile for a re-evaluation, I'm afraid.
Then, yep, Grizzly Man. You already know...this is a fabulous film. This is Herzog in his finest form in years. Street-editing taken to new heights. The sometimes heavy-handed and preachy director finding a great balance in the life of Timothy Treadwell, painting him neither as a moron nor a saint, but a beautiful and tragic alloy. It also elicited lots of laughter and incredulaous noises...what other documentary EVER...EVER!?!?! has had the director chime in to say "here is where I disagree with the views of my subject"?!?!? I mean, that never happens!! Herzog is like "Timothy is wrong here...nature is all death and fornication, not cuddly Disney sentiments." Fuck!! That's a very heavy thing to lay on a person, esp. when the person you disagree with is brutally dead. Throughout, Herzog captures an array of Errol Morris-ian subjects, friends or associates of Treadwell, and expertly cuts them into the existing footage of Tim's forest adventures. He finds the beauty in the unscripted moments, when the camera is left on but nobody is around - moments like this are right in the Herzog tradition of Heart of Glass or Aguirre.
The final thoughts on this film mirror my thoughts on Herzog in general...he can't ever be counted out. As soon as you think he's begun to lose it, he comes back twice as hard with a real stunner. Because he's completely fearless (both physically and intellectually), he sometimes bullies himself into dead ends, but sometimes those long tunnels of inquiry bring about marvelous treasures, of which Grizzly Man is one. Rent, buy, borrow NOW.
After that, we ate pizza, drank wine, and watched a 1979 documentary about Herzog, in which he is hilariously diffident to the interviewer, unable or unwilling to engage any of the (perfectly decent, if slightly rote) questions before him. Between shots of his classic films, and behind-the-scenes footage while filming Stroszeck, the air gets tenser and tenser as the interviewer asks that question that always signals a disastrous interview: "Well, what do YOU want to talk about?" The totally oranged-out faded print gave a nostalgic, old-photos-in-dusty-albums vibe that capped off the fest in reverent style.
Thank you all for reading, contributing to this blog, contributing to the festival by your attendence, and especially engaging the subject matter with me, whether it was for one film or a sizeable portion of the event. It is no exaggeration to say that this was one of the most tremendously life-altering events I've ever had, and a huge portion of that comes from sharing it with each and every one of you. I'd list you all, but I threw away the remaining raffle tickets during winter cleaning, and I'm afraid I'd miss somebody, but you know who you are. You made it 1000x more fun, and made all the hard work and money drain reap unbelieveable rewards.
Coming up next: probably something more manageable. In the Stiff-Legged canon, this is *my* Fitzcarraldo, so I think I may have to recharge with something shorter, easier to acquire, and...dare I say...trashier! Stiff-leg lifers will remember that Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street were also day-long mini-festivals in the past...that's the direction I'm thinking right now. Friday the 13th, or maybe zombies, or '70s/'80s "Hot Dog" movies or something.
But after that....? KUROSAWA.
You heard it here first.
posted at 9:00 AM
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