Short Films by Werner Herzog – DVD Review
Most of the protagonists of these feature films and many of his documentaries are men going to the very edge of their existence, taking massive risks and in the process discovering, and pushing to the limit, the power of their potential as human beings. However, while still making important and brilliant work (such as the astonishing and lyrical Gulf War meditation Lessons of Darkness), he has been seemingly somewhat dormant in the past decade or so.
This year, however, Herzog has reestablished himself as a cinematic force to be reckoned with, releasing no less than three documentaries in the past few months: The White Diamond, about an explorer flying over the Amazon in a self-built flying machine, not only to break new ground in exploration but to assuage his grief at the death of his best friend in a previous expedition; The Wheel of Time, following the pilgrimage of Buddhists to the site of Prince Siddhartha’s enlightenment; and the brilliant and chilling Grizzly Man, a portrait of nature enthusiast and amateur filmmaker Timothy Treadwell, whose obsessions and delusions of intimacy with his adopted bears, led to him and his girlfriend being mauled to death.
Now on DVD, we have the opportunity to see three early short documentaries made during Herzog’s creatively fertile period in the 70’s, in the collection Short Films by Werner Herzog, recently released by New Yorker Video. In the DVD liner notes, Herzog remarks that he makes no distinction between his documentaries and his fiction features. Indeed, the term “documentary” seems an inadequate, if not inaccurate, description of these works.
Herzog, in these films, is not simply documenting reality; he shapes it, and imbues it with as much artistry and force of personality (Herzog usually narrates and often appears on camera) as any of his dramatic films. All three of the films included on this DVD, although dealing with very different subjects, all feature people pushing themselves to the limits of their endurance, and in two of the films, stare death directly in the face.
The Great Ecstasy of the Sculptor Steiner (1975) is a fascinating and visually stunning portrait of champion ski-jumper Walter Steiner. Despite the title, we only see Steiner actually sculpting in the first scene; the rest of the film focuses on his other vocation of ski-jumping. The film features many beautiful slow-motion shots of Steiner soaring through the air. Steiner’s chosen sport is especially dangerous, since other than adjusting the length of the track used to gain speed for the jumps, it is impossible to control one’s motion, and we often see Steiner falling after his jumps.
Herzog’s enthusiasm and dogged endorsement of Steiner is evident throughout, both from his onscreen commentary, and the lyrical scenes of Steiner’s motion. The fact that Herzog refers to Steiner as a sculptor rather than as a ski-jumper reflects Herzog’s view that Steiner is not a mere sportsman, but an artist who is as much a sculptor of space and speed as he is a sculptor of wood.
How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck (1977) documents the World Championship of Livestock Auctioneers in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, best known as Amish country. It is a fascinating study of language and the movement of capital. The auctioneers make avant-garde art of the English language, describing the cattle for sale and navigating the transactions and secret bidding signals, speaking with dizzying rapidity, and each with their unique style.
In the liner notes, Herzog remarks that his dream is to cast these auctioneers in a fifteen-minute version of Hamlet. The auctioneer’s speech goes beyond words and meaning to the outside observer; they become a hypnotic sort of music, the cadences becoming rather like a religious incantation.
La Soufriere (1977) documents an impending volcano eruption on the small Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, and specifically the refusal of two of the island’s inhabitants to leave, despite the mass evacuation of the island, and the warnings that the island would surely be destroyed. One of the men is remarkably sanguine, and ready for his seemingly inevitable demise, reasoning that life on this island is all that he has known, and can really live nowhere else. He reasons that death sooner or later must come to us all, and he might as well be in the position to choose the conditions for its occurrence.
As intriguing and strange as these portraits are, even more remarkable and mordantly humorous are the circumstances surrounding the making of the film itself, which is documented here. The film’s subtitle, “Waiting for an Inevitable Catastrophe,” perfectly captures the experiences of Herzog and his crew. The small crew, including celebrated cinematographer Ed Lachman, risked potential death from both the impending eruption (which everyone was assured would be 100 percent certain), and by shooting scenes at the mouth of the volcano, which emitted toxic gases.
The film’s subtitle proved to be an ironic one, since the eruption never occurred. It was adventures such this which gave Herzog the reputation of an obsessive risk taker, buttressed by such films as Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, about the making of Fitzcarraldo. Herzog, however, swears in the liner notes that he has very rarely put the lives of himself and his crew at risk as he did here.
Short Films by Werner Herzog is a welcome release, and a reminder that Werner Herzog remains one of the world’s most skilled and fascinating filmmakers.
