The Dark Glow of the 1980s: Sunday Wrap-Up
Posted by Chris S.
Sunday starts pretty much right at the turn of the decade...we ended Saturday with Woyzek, and start Sunday morning with two documentaries of unusual preachers. Huie's Sermon is a real-time 45 minute sermon by the preacher (Huie something-or-other) who inspired the Reverend Cleophus Jones character in the Blues Brothers. The real preacher, however, is in Bedford-Stuyvesant (in Brooklyn), not the south side of Chicago. If anything, the movie treament of the preacher (played by the always-exuberant James Brown) was downright laccadaisical compared with the real Revered Huie! The service starts off lively, but not too noteworthy...essentially recapping the portion of scripture he will be working with. Around the fifth minute, though, it's like you can hear a gear shifting in his head...he's now talking in double-time, growling, puntuating with ecstatic "ha!"s to keep the rhythm. Soon, he's running back and forth through the chapel, shouting with his mic while the organ and drums hit in time with his intensifying cadences. The effect is similar to Saturday's film How Much Wood Would A Woodchuck Chuck, about the auction barker competition: at a certain point, the words and ideas are coming out at such a clip, you can do little more than hang on and catch a line here and there. He mentions Calvin Klein jeans several times, emphasizes the evils of cigarettes, dancing and homosexuality, and gives a very passionate account of noah and the ark, having little to do with whatever portion of scripture he was planning on dealing with. As one viewer remarked, "how does he prepare for these sermons? Is this all written down in advance?" Exhausting and inspiring. While the cameraman stops to reload film (the audio of the sermon continues), shots of the then-ghettoized Bed-Stuy provide the trademark indelible images we demand from every Herzog feature.
Moving from the black "holy roller" style of Rev. Huie, God's Angry Man focuses instead of a very white phenomenon...the televangelist. Gene Scott has been a staple of televised religious programming for decades, and unlike the previous documentary, the preacher himself is part of the scrutiny...not more than a fraction of a TV sermon is shown. Scott is interviewed, as are his parents and others, and Herzog portrays him in a much different light than you would think. It was a staple, almost a cliche, to portray preachers in the 1980s, especially televangelists, as shallow, money-grubbing hypocrites. Well, we do see Scott's incredible money-making abilities, but Herzog paints him as a multi-dimensional human being. Scott is a doctor of philosophy, and is quite candid about several things: that he has to fight with his faith constantly, and that nothing is absolute in his mind (anyone for whom faith comes easily and without conflict has not thought it out thoroughly); that he is a ward of his church, and that he personally owns nothing more than the contents of one bag which he carries with him at all times; and that he is, at his essence, very lonely.
All of this contrasts with the near-volcanic outbursts shown on his show, in which Dr. Gene goes into an apopleptic fit of rage because his congregation has undershot the hour's dollar-raising goal by a mere $600. The way he berates the audience, using words, phrases and gestures that will resound for anyone who has been physically or verbally intimidated by an authority figure (parent, teacher, etc.), has the ability to chill your vital organs. Then, to prove that all is well and that this is a truly Herzogian film, Scott brings out "The FCC Monkey Band," a small assortment of wind-up monkey toys, introduced with an archaic computerized TV screen font that will resound for anyone who spent more than 300 hours playing Space Invaders in the arcade, manages to remind us of everything from Even Dwarfs Started Small to Aguirre. A marvelous character study.
After watching Werner Herzog eat his shoe (and being rather ashamed of ourselves for not thinking to buy and eat some beef jerkey or something while watching), much of the afternoon was given over to the eminent figure of the steamship. Nearly four hours of Fitzcarraldo and the film about the film, Burden of Dreams. This was obviously the collossal core of the day...by comparison, everything else felt like a puff pastry. Although clocking in at a whopping two hours and 37 minutes, I couldn't think of a moment of Fitzcarraldo that did not completely engage me. Kinski begins the film in a maniacal fit of pique, rowing toward the opera house to see Carruso, his favorite opera star, and only gets more gigantic from there. There are a million pieces of scholarly work about this film out there, so I won't really elaborate that much further, but the one thing that really stuck out with this film is something many people have said...it doesn't take long before you start thinking of the ship in terms of some large task or project or ambitious you've had in your life. Your desire to see it go over the mountain, and your elation when it does, is your own desire to go back and spin all your past losses or failures (or even your pyrric victories) into successes. When Fitzcarraldo loses the ship, you feel like YOU'VE lost the ship! The ending is beautiful and surreal, and would be more melancholy (talk about second prize!) if Kinski didn't appear on the screen with such an incredible, proud grin. It's one of those films, like those of the greats (Tarksovsky, Kubrick, Kurosawa, Scorsese), in which the film will probably mean different things to you at different places in your life. A film that can completely enrich your day-to-day experience, just by the very act of having witnessed it, and keeping it in your memory.
Burden of Dreams is, obviously, just completely fucking insane, as befits a production of that magnitude. Hearts of Darkness seems like the whining of a pampered student by comparison! It's played in less hysterical tones than Eleanor Coppola's, but despite the mannered narration by Maureen Gosling, the atrocities pile up much higher. When Herzog starts jabbering his cack about the sheer hellish miasma of nature, and how all the world is based on fornication and evil, you laugh, but you also realize that if you had gone through what he had gone through over the past four years, you'd probably be mumbling some pretty gooned-out platitudes yourself.
After that, all but a few faithfuls went home, and rightly so. The core curriculum was finished...all from here was basically extra credit. The Dark Glow of the Mountains was an acceptable documentary about the mountain climber Reinhold Messner. A few shots were nice, and about halfway through, Messner gives a few monologues that finally engage the imagination, but for the most part, this felt like it was done to fulfill a contract. Beacuse much of what Messner was doing could not be followed with a film crew (they themselves barely survived!), you get the feeling of someone walking around the side of a house, coming around the other side, behind the garage, and coming back and telling you that they just walked around the entire perimeter of the state of Texas. Uh huh....so you say. At this point, I realized that most of what I was going to see from here on would probably have to be re-watched fresh another time. They were all standing in the very large shadow of a steamship sitting halfway up on a mountain.
Where The Green Ants Dream, on the other hand, was, to me, the first fully-qualified failure in the Herzog canon. This movie typified the changeover that so many artists and musicians and creative thinkers made in the 80s: there's a sudden narrowing of focus, an obviousness of message, a flatness of picture. I don't know technical terms to describe it, but it feels like an '80s picture by a classic '70s director. Scorsese made this shortcoming work when he did After Hours: it felt contrained and sugary, but at least managed to breathe some fire. Green Ants is not so much all style, no substance, but mediocre style and simple substance, basically a Midnight Oil song come to life.
An impossibly gangly Australian employee for a mining company is asked to be liason between the company and a group of aborigines who are trying to stop a series of explosions on their sacred lands. They say these are the lands wehre the green ants dream...if the ants are awakened, it will be the end of the world. There are horrible, cliched scenes in which the aborigines are wined and dined in town, bought fancy watches which they cannot get to stop beeping (oh dear, technology is so IRRITATING, gosh!), ride on elevators which invariably break down ("I swear, this has never happened before," says the contrivedly flustered mining company boss - it happens not once, but TWICE, for crying out loud), and finally stand up and say passionate (but incomprehensible) things in front of an Australian court, which inevitably rules in favor of its own interests.
Make no mistake, there are some lovely images here. We see a group of aborigines camped in an aisle of a supermarket, around a place where a sacred tree once stood. There is an old woman who suspect that her long lost doggie has gotten lost in the mines. She sits outside the entrance with a chair, an unbrella, and an open can of dog food, waiting endlessly. And the final scene, in which the mining employee/liason walks out into the desert to start a new life (he's "seen the light" of course) is beautiful enough to remind us of Fata Morgana. The thing is, they're all done in the service of a very one-dimensional and obvious "cause" movie. I'm not saying the cause isn't legitimate...it is pretty rotten the way the aborigines have been treated by the comparatively recent inhabitants of Australia. I'm just saying that these topics could have been turned into something that dealt with more universal human truths, or could have held some elements of character ambiguity. It couldn't have been more different from Herzog's '70s work - it felt like Jodorowsky's Tusk...visually striking, sure, but micromanaged down to drek by imeciles and well-wishers. I know this isn't the last we hear of Werner in the 1980s, but it's already a bad sign of things to come.
I'm glad Geoff Guy stayed on to watch The Ballad of the Little Soldier with me, because I'm pretty sure I couldn't have endured it myself! A relentlessly sad documentary about the Mesquitos in Central America, who planned on joining the Sandinistas on the frontlines, but who ended up being pretty much decimated by them instead. Their armies consisted largely of platoons of children, ages 9 to 11 (a time when their trainers say "they can be most effectively wiped clean and taught the perfect art of war." "Brainwashed, in other words," quips one of Herzog's crew. "Yes, exactly, brainwashed."). Old women of the village tell of the Sandinistas stealing every single item of value from their house...even cooking utensils, and others talk in graphic detail of their children and parents being killed before their eyes. When they speak to the child soldiers, the children speak of revenge for the murder of family members. When asked if they realize that the Sandinistas have children in their army as well, the children say they know, and they don't care, though their eyes tell a different story.
The film takes no sides, merely reporting what is seen as they go from village to village (Herzog came to Central America thinking he was in support of the Sandanistas, but left with a much different opinion). The most indelible image comes at the beginning, as a child in uniform holds a rife, a radio nearby. The song on the radio sounds like it is sung by a child of a similar age, and the boy sings along, his voice lower, harmonizing with the ecstatic song on the radio. The boy knows the song by heart, but can put no enthusiasm into singing along...he is doing little more than exercising a part of his brain that remembers song lyrics and melody, so that at least part of his mind will not have to dwell on the fact that he is in a jungle training camp wearing fatigues and brandishing a rifle 2/3rds as long as he is. The 5-6th generation graininess of the dub I received further adds to the "smuggled out of the training camp" vibe of the whole thing. Lock of the razor blades for this one, folks.
That's it for weekend one! Please come back and look for more recaps starting this Friday at 7:00, with Herzog/Kinski's final collaboration, Cobra Verde. This weekend will cover 1987 to the present, ending with Grizzly Man and a 1979 documentary about Herzog called I Am My Films.
Congratulations to everyone that won in the raffles this weekend. The rest of you are still eligible to win, even if you aren't present during drawing. And most of all, I would like to thank all of you who came out to see movies....the only thing better than watching this many great films in a row is watching them will fellow film lovers. Humongous thanks and gratitude has to go to Adam Witt, Mike Knapp, Geoff Guy, Les Henderson, Brian Collins, Mike McPadden, Jamillah James, Miss Julie Fabulous, Shylo Bissnet, Brian Sobolak, Peter Cavagnero, Nicole Chambers, Matt Silcock, Mike Slater, Del Dunsmore, Bob Young, and Wendy McClure for enriching the experience a thousandfold.
I might post a few more tidbits this week if I think of anything else, or get any random trivia worth noting, so keep watching just in case. Otherwise, see you in four days!
Sunday starts pretty much right at the turn of the decade...we ended Saturday with Woyzek, and start Sunday morning with two documentaries of unusual preachers. Huie's Sermon is a real-time 45 minute sermon by the preacher (Huie something-or-other) who inspired the Reverend Cleophus Jones character in the Blues Brothers. The real preacher, however, is in Bedford-Stuyvesant (in Brooklyn), not the south side of Chicago. If anything, the movie treament of the preacher (played by the always-exuberant James Brown) was downright laccadaisical compared with the real Revered Huie! The service starts off lively, but not too noteworthy...essentially recapping the portion of scripture he will be working with. Around the fifth minute, though, it's like you can hear a gear shifting in his head...he's now talking in double-time, growling, puntuating with ecstatic "ha!"s to keep the rhythm. Soon, he's running back and forth through the chapel, shouting with his mic while the organ and drums hit in time with his intensifying cadences. The effect is similar to Saturday's film How Much Wood Would A Woodchuck Chuck, about the auction barker competition: at a certain point, the words and ideas are coming out at such a clip, you can do little more than hang on and catch a line here and there. He mentions Calvin Klein jeans several times, emphasizes the evils of cigarettes, dancing and homosexuality, and gives a very passionate account of noah and the ark, having little to do with whatever portion of scripture he was planning on dealing with. As one viewer remarked, "how does he prepare for these sermons? Is this all written down in advance?" Exhausting and inspiring. While the cameraman stops to reload film (the audio of the sermon continues), shots of the then-ghettoized Bed-Stuy provide the trademark indelible images we demand from every Herzog feature.
Moving from the black "holy roller" style of Rev. Huie, God's Angry Man focuses instead of a very white phenomenon...the televangelist. Gene Scott has been a staple of televised religious programming for decades, and unlike the previous documentary, the preacher himself is part of the scrutiny...not more than a fraction of a TV sermon is shown. Scott is interviewed, as are his parents and others, and Herzog portrays him in a much different light than you would think. It was a staple, almost a cliche, to portray preachers in the 1980s, especially televangelists, as shallow, money-grubbing hypocrites. Well, we do see Scott's incredible money-making abilities, but Herzog paints him as a multi-dimensional human being. Scott is a doctor of philosophy, and is quite candid about several things: that he has to fight with his faith constantly, and that nothing is absolute in his mind (anyone for whom faith comes easily and without conflict has not thought it out thoroughly); that he is a ward of his church, and that he personally owns nothing more than the contents of one bag which he carries with him at all times; and that he is, at his essence, very lonely.
All of this contrasts with the near-volcanic outbursts shown on his show, in which Dr. Gene goes into an apopleptic fit of rage because his congregation has undershot the hour's dollar-raising goal by a mere $600. The way he berates the audience, using words, phrases and gestures that will resound for anyone who has been physically or verbally intimidated by an authority figure (parent, teacher, etc.), has the ability to chill your vital organs. Then, to prove that all is well and that this is a truly Herzogian film, Scott brings out "The FCC Monkey Band," a small assortment of wind-up monkey toys, introduced with an archaic computerized TV screen font that will resound for anyone who spent more than 300 hours playing Space Invaders in the arcade, manages to remind us of everything from Even Dwarfs Started Small to Aguirre. A marvelous character study.
After watching Werner Herzog eat his shoe (and being rather ashamed of ourselves for not thinking to buy and eat some beef jerkey or something while watching), much of the afternoon was given over to the eminent figure of the steamship. Nearly four hours of Fitzcarraldo and the film about the film, Burden of Dreams. This was obviously the collossal core of the day...by comparison, everything else felt like a puff pastry. Although clocking in at a whopping two hours and 37 minutes, I couldn't think of a moment of Fitzcarraldo that did not completely engage me. Kinski begins the film in a maniacal fit of pique, rowing toward the opera house to see Carruso, his favorite opera star, and only gets more gigantic from there. There are a million pieces of scholarly work about this film out there, so I won't really elaborate that much further, but the one thing that really stuck out with this film is something many people have said...it doesn't take long before you start thinking of the ship in terms of some large task or project or ambitious you've had in your life. Your desire to see it go over the mountain, and your elation when it does, is your own desire to go back and spin all your past losses or failures (or even your pyrric victories) into successes. When Fitzcarraldo loses the ship, you feel like YOU'VE lost the ship! The ending is beautiful and surreal, and would be more melancholy (talk about second prize!) if Kinski didn't appear on the screen with such an incredible, proud grin. It's one of those films, like those of the greats (Tarksovsky, Kubrick, Kurosawa, Scorsese), in which the film will probably mean different things to you at different places in your life. A film that can completely enrich your day-to-day experience, just by the very act of having witnessed it, and keeping it in your memory.
Burden of Dreams is, obviously, just completely fucking insane, as befits a production of that magnitude. Hearts of Darkness seems like the whining of a pampered student by comparison! It's played in less hysterical tones than Eleanor Coppola's, but despite the mannered narration by Maureen Gosling, the atrocities pile up much higher. When Herzog starts jabbering his cack about the sheer hellish miasma of nature, and how all the world is based on fornication and evil, you laugh, but you also realize that if you had gone through what he had gone through over the past four years, you'd probably be mumbling some pretty gooned-out platitudes yourself.
After that, all but a few faithfuls went home, and rightly so. The core curriculum was finished...all from here was basically extra credit. The Dark Glow of the Mountains was an acceptable documentary about the mountain climber Reinhold Messner. A few shots were nice, and about halfway through, Messner gives a few monologues that finally engage the imagination, but for the most part, this felt like it was done to fulfill a contract. Beacuse much of what Messner was doing could not be followed with a film crew (they themselves barely survived!), you get the feeling of someone walking around the side of a house, coming around the other side, behind the garage, and coming back and telling you that they just walked around the entire perimeter of the state of Texas. Uh huh....so you say. At this point, I realized that most of what I was going to see from here on would probably have to be re-watched fresh another time. They were all standing in the very large shadow of a steamship sitting halfway up on a mountain.
Where The Green Ants Dream, on the other hand, was, to me, the first fully-qualified failure in the Herzog canon. This movie typified the changeover that so many artists and musicians and creative thinkers made in the 80s: there's a sudden narrowing of focus, an obviousness of message, a flatness of picture. I don't know technical terms to describe it, but it feels like an '80s picture by a classic '70s director. Scorsese made this shortcoming work when he did After Hours: it felt contrained and sugary, but at least managed to breathe some fire. Green Ants is not so much all style, no substance, but mediocre style and simple substance, basically a Midnight Oil song come to life.
An impossibly gangly Australian employee for a mining company is asked to be liason between the company and a group of aborigines who are trying to stop a series of explosions on their sacred lands. They say these are the lands wehre the green ants dream...if the ants are awakened, it will be the end of the world. There are horrible, cliched scenes in which the aborigines are wined and dined in town, bought fancy watches which they cannot get to stop beeping (oh dear, technology is so IRRITATING, gosh!), ride on elevators which invariably break down ("I swear, this has never happened before," says the contrivedly flustered mining company boss - it happens not once, but TWICE, for crying out loud), and finally stand up and say passionate (but incomprehensible) things in front of an Australian court, which inevitably rules in favor of its own interests.
Make no mistake, there are some lovely images here. We see a group of aborigines camped in an aisle of a supermarket, around a place where a sacred tree once stood. There is an old woman who suspect that her long lost doggie has gotten lost in the mines. She sits outside the entrance with a chair, an unbrella, and an open can of dog food, waiting endlessly. And the final scene, in which the mining employee/liason walks out into the desert to start a new life (he's "seen the light" of course) is beautiful enough to remind us of Fata Morgana. The thing is, they're all done in the service of a very one-dimensional and obvious "cause" movie. I'm not saying the cause isn't legitimate...it is pretty rotten the way the aborigines have been treated by the comparatively recent inhabitants of Australia. I'm just saying that these topics could have been turned into something that dealt with more universal human truths, or could have held some elements of character ambiguity. It couldn't have been more different from Herzog's '70s work - it felt like Jodorowsky's Tusk...visually striking, sure, but micromanaged down to drek by imeciles and well-wishers. I know this isn't the last we hear of Werner in the 1980s, but it's already a bad sign of things to come.
I'm glad Geoff Guy stayed on to watch The Ballad of the Little Soldier with me, because I'm pretty sure I couldn't have endured it myself! A relentlessly sad documentary about the Mesquitos in Central America, who planned on joining the Sandinistas on the frontlines, but who ended up being pretty much decimated by them instead. Their armies consisted largely of platoons of children, ages 9 to 11 (a time when their trainers say "they can be most effectively wiped clean and taught the perfect art of war." "Brainwashed, in other words," quips one of Herzog's crew. "Yes, exactly, brainwashed."). Old women of the village tell of the Sandinistas stealing every single item of value from their house...even cooking utensils, and others talk in graphic detail of their children and parents being killed before their eyes. When they speak to the child soldiers, the children speak of revenge for the murder of family members. When asked if they realize that the Sandinistas have children in their army as well, the children say they know, and they don't care, though their eyes tell a different story.
The film takes no sides, merely reporting what is seen as they go from village to village (Herzog came to Central America thinking he was in support of the Sandanistas, but left with a much different opinion). The most indelible image comes at the beginning, as a child in uniform holds a rife, a radio nearby. The song on the radio sounds like it is sung by a child of a similar age, and the boy sings along, his voice lower, harmonizing with the ecstatic song on the radio. The boy knows the song by heart, but can put no enthusiasm into singing along...he is doing little more than exercising a part of his brain that remembers song lyrics and melody, so that at least part of his mind will not have to dwell on the fact that he is in a jungle training camp wearing fatigues and brandishing a rifle 2/3rds as long as he is. The 5-6th generation graininess of the dub I received further adds to the "smuggled out of the training camp" vibe of the whole thing. Lock of the razor blades for this one, folks.
That's it for weekend one! Please come back and look for more recaps starting this Friday at 7:00, with Herzog/Kinski's final collaboration, Cobra Verde. This weekend will cover 1987 to the present, ending with Grizzly Man and a 1979 documentary about Herzog called I Am My Films.
Congratulations to everyone that won in the raffles this weekend. The rest of you are still eligible to win, even if you aren't present during drawing. And most of all, I would like to thank all of you who came out to see movies....the only thing better than watching this many great films in a row is watching them will fellow film lovers. Humongous thanks and gratitude has to go to Adam Witt, Mike Knapp, Geoff Guy, Les Henderson, Brian Collins, Mike McPadden, Jamillah James, Miss Julie Fabulous, Shylo Bissnet, Brian Sobolak, Peter Cavagnero, Nicole Chambers, Matt Silcock, Mike Slater, Del Dunsmore, Bob Young, and Wendy McClure for enriching the experience a thousandfold.
I might post a few more tidbits this week if I think of anything else, or get any random trivia worth noting, so keep watching just in case. Otherwise, see you in four days!
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