Herzog gets emotional in “Into the Abyss”

Werner Herzog remains one of the true originals in world cinema, a filmmaker who began as a teller of bleak tales about madness and social alienation, and then became a busy documentarian crafting “ecstatic truth” (read: his slant on real events). He qualifies as one of the few arthouse filmmakers that the average plugged-in American viewer might have heard of, and in the last few years he has indeed traded quite often on the deadpan, eccentric persona he has fashioned in his documentaries.

His latest, Into the Abyss, is different from his recent work in that, while it depicts a colorful, dangerous environment, it is laden with raw emotion and finds Herzog stating his central message very early on, in an interview he conducts with one of the film’s central figures, Michael Perry, a young killer on death row in Texas.

The film has been likened to In Cold Blood, and the crime that serves as its pivot is even more trivial than the one in the Capote classic. In 2001, Perry and another young man broke into a house to steal a red Camaro and wound up killing the mother of an acquaintance in order to steal the car. They later encountered the acquaintance and his friend, and killed them in the woods, again to cover up their theft of the Camaro.

Though Herzog has ordinarily avoided assigning a specific message to his work — and of course there are several “messages” in this film — here he states at the outset in his first (and only interview) with the young man on death row, “I don’t think human beings should be executed.”

The film’s structure is thus contested by the fact that he introduces a message right at the outset, and then much later in the film cleverly elides the principal event in the narrative, namely the execution of the young man on death row. He accomplishes the latter by including a clip in the last third of the film in which the event is referred to in the past tense by one of his talking heads (one of the victims’ relatives who attended the execution), thus alerting the viewer to the jump in chronology.

These stylistic deviations from the norm ensure that Into the Abyss cannot be a thriller, and yet Herzog still toys with that form by using a foreboding musical score by Mark Degli Antoni (with David Byrne on guitar) and probing, handheld camerawork that seems to signal grisly discoveries (that, of course never come). Herzog uses the story of the murders to do several things, most successfully sketching a portrait of a community where life is cheap and crime is commonplace.

Most of the people he speaks to know people in prison, or have lost relatives or friends to violent crime — the most jarring instance has a murder victim’s daughter offering a laundry list of the sad and violent ways her family members have died in the preceding six years.

The film resembles the work of onetime Herzog student Errol Morris (Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line), since it as much about America as it is about a specific crime. The Rashomon-like prism through which Herzog views the crime is intended to show that the matter of who committed the murders — both young men deny they pulled the trigger on any of the three victims — is secondary to the after-effects and the fact that several states in the U.S. feel that killing a murderer will somehow “compensate” the relatives of the victims and deter future criminals. (Herzog answers both arguments in the film.)

The striking thing about the film is that it is Herzog’s most touching picture in some time. He has never used Spielbergian devices to manipulate his audience — for the most part we have experienced wonder and fascination at the unusual locations and situations he has spotlighted in his documentaries, or studied the “mad” protagonists in his fictions, from a comfortable remove.

Into the Abyss removes those screens, and for the first time since select scenes in Grizzly Man (and mind you, he’s made six films since that arthouse hit), Herzog takes the time to study individuals feeling sorrow. I am the very last person who’d want to get into a discussion about the “race for the Oscars,” but the emotional component of this film is so strong that one wonders if it will net Herzog a Best Documentary award — if not, no harm done, because the Academy Awards rarely reflect true quality and are more often than not a popularity contest.

Not that Herzog hasn’t acquired that kind of popularity in the last few years. His eccentric onscreen persona has made him a crowd pleaser on both Conan and The Colbert Report. These “rollicking” appearances (where he plays along with the host’s image of him as a wild and crazy German filmmaker) put me in mind of the moment in Les Blank’s Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, in which he acknowledges that a filmmaker has to play a “clown” to attract the public to his film:



Herzog’s documentaries have all been works of quality and depth, but perhaps Into the Abyss resonates so deeply not only because it tells such a serious tale, but because it is the work of a very serious filmmaker.

*****

A few clips from the film are available online, but a key one, of Herzog discussing with Michael Perry the fact that only a healthy prisoner can be executed in the U.S., is available at Herzog’s site.

Here is the official trailer:

Werner and Errol talk filmmaking... and strange images

There are few things better than listening to Werner Herzog talk, but one of them has to be him chatting with his one-time “protégé” (and the man he ate a shoe for), the great documentarian Errol Morris. Here they are last week, doing a sort of mutual interview onstage at the current Toronto Film Festival. They discuss their love of each other’s movies, unusual reading matter, “madness in the landscape” (take a guess who introduces that subject), and their friendship:

…and God Against All: Deceased Artiste Bruno S.

I am a deep disciple of the work of Werner Herzog, but every so often his films hit a disturbing note because the viewer becomes aware that the person onscreen may or may not be aware of how they are being used in Herzog’s strange and brilliant film world. This is most prominent in his documentary study of the blind and deaf, Land of Silence and Darkness. And it also is the case with the two very raw starring performances he got from street musician and all-around strange person Bruno S., who died this week at the age of 78. Bruno did seem aware of what was going on, but the emotional changes his characters go through have an incredible resonance that comes from the actor’s own deep perception of his character’s situation and how it mirrored his own real life.

Bruno was an incredible personality onscreen, as Herzog used him pretty much for what he was — a bright and imperturbable person who apparently suffered some mental and/or emotional disability. His obits this week noted the exact nature of that disability, and it is indeed as sad as the fate his characters confront in his two films with Herzog. Born Bruno Schleinstein, it is reported that his prostitute mother used to beat him as a little child, which made him temporarily deaf. He was committed to an asylum during the Nazi era, and was the subject of experiments conducted on mentally disabled children.

The savvy that Bruno showed onscreen, despite his handicap, was perfectly showcased by Herzog who starred him first in The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser (1974), which was released in Germany as “Every Man for Himself and God Against All.” Bruno was the perfect incarnation of the real-life figure who lived his whole life in a cellar and then emerged to innocently experience the world as an adult. Herzog wrote Stroszek (1977) expressly for Bruno S., and it is one of his masterpieces: the story of an unusual street musician who leaves Germany with a prostitute (the wonderful Eva Mattes) and his landlord, only to land in Wisconsin, where they are as alien and alienated as the dancing chicken seen in the film’s indelible final scene.

As a tribute to this unusual and extremely earnest and sincere performer, here is the trailer for a documentary made about him in 2003 (without English subtitles). This is the only feature he was in since the Herzog duo:



Here Bruno confronts logic in the guise of Kaspar Hauser:



A gorgeous scene from Stroszek that shows both what a great writer Herzog is and also what a fine actor Bruno was. Here he discusses those people who “hurt you with a smile”:



And because we should end on an up note, here is a scene from the same film in which Bruno lets loose on his chosen instrument, the glockenspiel. This is how he earned his living since the Herzog films many years ago, along with art he made that was indeed exhibited in galleries:



A final, newer clip of Bruno singing and playing:

A Funhouse clip becomes homework (!) as the show hits its 16th anniversary

I have had some extremely nice and unusual things occur as a result of doing the Funhouse cable-access show since October 1993 (we turn 16 this month, babies!) and have been very gratified to see the number of visitors to this blog increase slowly but surely with each week.

Having worked on access for a while now, and never (ever) being aware of how many people are watching at any time, I do find the “counters” on Internet sites to be a pleasant development. Thus, I’ve been very happy to find that the most popular original clip I’ve put up on YouTube has been a segment from my interview with Jane Birkin, which has so far gotten 74,000 hits. I’m usually pleased to get a few dozen hits on the more obscure items, a few hundred on the “cult” material, and a few thousand on some of my favorite interviews, but there are wide smiles derived from getting 13,000 viewers on the Gena Rowland phone interview clip, 28,000 for Tura Satana (the first interview I ever “found” in a place I didn’t put it on the Net; I do like citation/plugs for the Funhouse site or blog to go with postings of the material, folks!), and 50,000 for Stella Stevens (when you’re talking about why Jerry Lewis snubbed you, everyone listens). Another * very* gratifying YouTube moment was receiving a positive comment on a segment from my Leos Carax interview from a film fan in Moscow, Russia.

And now, I have to extend my thanks to the very cool teacher “Ms. Loughlin” for having assigned her class to watch the video I had posted of scenes from Les Blank’s terrific short documentary “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe." I had no idea this was going on until earlier today, when I saw comments that had been posted last month. It seems that Ms. Loughlin, who seems like a dream of a prof, told her students about Werner Herzog, and in particular the time he lost a very odd “bet” he had made with Errol Morris (who, when you think about it, had nothing to lose with the bet: all he had to do was make a feature film, which became the absolutely perfect Gates of Heaven, or not — no consumption of any footwear was required of him).

The clip had already received a boost in views when Conan O’Brien had mentioned the shoe-eating incident while interviewing Herzog one night (which, of course, I found out about way after it happened). Now Ms. Loughlin’s class has not only watched the clip, they took time to comment publicly on how crazy he is, and how he has a “cool accent.” They did use the word “respect” too, which is completely awesome — as a diehard fan of Herzog, I would have to admit that the notion of “insane” behavior has been part of Herzog’s public persona at various times (usually when he was working with his “best fiend,” of course), he does indeed possess the very coolest of accents, and deserves busloads of respect from those of us who love the cinema, and even those who don’t care about it at all, but simply admire a dedicated artist.

So, I salute you, Ms. Loughlin, whoever and wherever you are, for teaching young folk about Herzog and his strange experiments to “play the clown,” but also convey the message that television can rot the mind (bad television, that is). I had a few teachers who inspired me like you are doing with your students, and I’ve never forgotten them. You are providing, to quote the mighty Herzog, “a good example.”

In case you’ve never seen the short, here is my abridgement of it — and full credit goes, of course, to filmmaker and copyright owner Les Blank!

Werner Herzog film retro in NYC (with clips)

I’ve spent the last three nights at the Film Forum downtown hypnotized by the work of Werner Herzog. The FF is doing a comprehensive retro of Herzog’s documentaries, providing the East Coast U.S. premieres (I’m not certain if these films have ever played the U.S. at all, but I’m certain several of them have never played NY and the surrounding environs before). Herzog may be best known for his crazed collaborations with Klaus Kinski, but his documentaries have taken up the bulk of his filmmaking career, and have kept him perpetually busy for the last four decades.

He has perfected his own specific style of non-fiction filmmaking in the last few years, providing his own English-language narration, to the effect that all of the individuals in his films, if they do not speak English to begin with, speak Werner-speak, a richly energetic and wonderfully inflected brand of our native language (think of it as the ultimate auteur statement, the kind of thing that Welles did when he would dub the bit actors in his later films).

His best-remembered films are all concerned with a journey, and eroding sanity in one form or another. I’ve seen films that are not “Herzogian” in any blatant fashion — tonight’s Jag Mandir was a straightforward chronicle of a very large performing arts celebration in India, that carried the filmmaker’s signature only in the duration of the shots and the rather idiosyncratic framing (medium shots for images of complicated physical action that would be best viewed in a very wide longshot). These hypnotic Herzog works are absolutely sublime, but the ones that the viewer will best able to recall and gab on about at some future time are those that deal with this notion of journey/erosion of sanity.

A TV-funded portrait, Death for Five Voices, offers the perfect Herzog protagonist, long-dead Carlo Gesualdo, a Prince who moonlighted as a classical music composer and committed a wholly Shakespearean murder (offed his wife and threw her on a monk’s stairs), had a perfectly amazing obsession (a briefly mentioned bit about a prehistoric disc containing a code — still unbroken to this day — that gave --- terminal insomnia, as he spent all hours of the late night trying to break the cipher), and just enough juicy details (did he die of the infected wounds caused by the nightly beatings he demanded from his servants?) to make the film unforgettable. All this sublime debauchery Herzog depicts with utter seriousness, punctuating the proceedings with Gesualdo’s gorgeous and centuries-ahead-of-their-times compositions, performed by classical quintets.

Herzog is the very last of a dying breed of cinematic adventurer. He curiously fuses F.W. Murnau and Frank Buck, at times has displayed the pugnacious genius of Norman Mailer and at others has betrayed a tremendously fragile and wistfully nostalgic view of civilization. To pay tribute to him, I offer a few minutes from the Les Blank short “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe,” the documenting of the peculiar incident in which Herzog made good on a bet he made with Errol Morris: if Morris actually finished his first feature, Gates of Heaven, Herzog stated he would eat his shoe (Morris was known for not completing his projects to that point). The film is a record of a stunt, but a stunt that Herzog was fully in control of — he uses the situation to make some very pointed remarks about American visual culture, the “clownish” lengths to which a filmmaker must go to promote his work (citing the great Orson as an example; this would be around the time of those Dean Martin roasts….), and praising Morris’ perfectly timeless Gates as a decisive work on “late capitalism” in America (the film is indeed one of the best-ever depictions of the American Dream in practice, and in a shambles).


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