Herzog-Kinski and The Burden of Dreams

Werner Herzog is the kind of madman I can get behind. (For that matter, so is Klaus Kinski.)

Herzog was part of the New German Cinema, which was marked by younger filmmakers working on shoestring budgets but tackling large ideas and drawing a distinct influence from the French New Wave. This era of film is a bit of a blind spot for me, as I've only seen some films by Herzog and Wim Wenders. Rainer Werner Fassbinder's films have been on my agenda for some time, specifically World On A Wire (1973). I'll get there someday.

My wife got me the Herzog-Kinski DVD set for my birthday this year. Ever since then I've been stuck, because I kept waiting for that chance to go back and do Aguirre, The Wrath of God, followed by Cobra Verde, followed by Fitzcarraldo, in order to get back to alphabetical order again.

But then I felt compelled to pick up Burden of Dreams, which is a documentary about Herzog's struggles in making Fitzcarraldo, much like Hearts of Darkness is a documentary about Francis Ford Coppola's adventures in making Apocalypse Now. As soon as I bought Burden of Dreams, I screwed up everything.

In an effort to get back on track, I'm watching the whole Herzog-Kinski set in the order Herzog filmed them, squeezing in Burden of Dreams after Fitzcarraldo, and combining them all here. That's not exactly alphabetical order, but that is seven films in all, people. I'm Herzog-Kinski crazy! (And if I don't get through them all at once, I might never blog again.)

First, Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972) —

Aguirre, The Wrath of God is the first collaboration between Herzog and Kinski, and in many ways sets the tone for the DVD set. None of Herzog's films are particularly easy to watch, but the ones with Kinski really tap into insanity.

Various stories and legends date to the production of Aguirre, with tales of Kinski and Herzog threatening each other with firearms, and at least one incident when Kinski fired a gun into a tent full of actors and crew members, shooting off someone's finger.

Aguirre is second in command on a small expedition to find El Dorado. In short order, he usurps command of the expedition by encouraging a mutiny, then naming a fat patsy, Don Fernando de Guzman, as the new "emperor" of El Dorado.

Ah, but Don Fernando gets to like his power, and Aguirre can't have that. Aguirre and his men also can't have Don Fernando eating all the food and throwing the expedition's only horse off the raft (it swims to shore). The film is a slow burn as Aguirre slowly takes over and quietly lets his madness loose.

The first time I watched Aguirre, maybe a year or two ago, I was struck by how Herzog got such a muted but maniacal performance out of Kinski, who was famously explosive. Here, he's under control, but just barely. Off-camera, the two were a volatile mixture, but on camera, they somehow made great films together.

Aguirre was shot entirely in English, which sort of gives me a weird choice when I watch. Do I let it go in Herzog's native German and disregard the bad looping, or do I watch it in English, as it was shot, and enjoy mouths synched to dialogue? I chose the latter. If Herzog shot it in English, then it was meant to be viewed in English by English speakers. One day, if I learn German, I'll go back and watch it that way.

For the record, I've noticed a bizarre tendency toward animal cruelty depicted in Herzog's film. Aguirre is no exception. Pushing the horse off the raft? That's brutal and savage behavior. Seeing the horse standing on the shoreline, watching the raft as the men float away...it's heartbreaking. But I'm a softie. For some reason, the shot with the monkey at the end (Kinski literally throws it into the river) doesn't bother me nearly as much as the horse. I don't know why I feel this way. I can't tell you everything.

Second, Nosferatu, Phantom Der Nacht (1979) —

Betcha didn't know Herzog and Kinski teamed up for this 1979 remake of the F.W. Murnau vampire masterpiece, didja? All those people doing remakes (and those decrying remakes, for that matter) in the 21st century could learn much by looking back on the remakes of the previous century. This one, however, is entirely in German, and isn't exactly Herzog's best film, so most Americans don't even know this one exists. (I didn't until I put this one on my Amazon Wish List two years ago.)

Herzog is pretty faithful to the Murnau adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel (what does that even mean?). Seeing Herzog's take actually makes for a neat comparison to Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 adaptation of Dracula, and really serves as a nice bridge — a kind of missing link between the Hammer Films series of Dracula films and Coppola's. (Read: A quality film popping up amid a series of B-movies.)

Kinski's vampire makeup seems great. The ear prosthetics look pretty good, and his fangs are fine, but his fingernails...

...is he wearing Bugles on his fingertips?

Oh, before I move on, you should know that Bruno Ganz plays Jonathan Harker here. When Ganz was young, and especially in this film, he looks a lot like Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men. See?

(Ganz, at left, German.)

(If Harker had one of these, Nosferatu wouldn't have fucked with his woman.)

Who is Bruno Ganz? You might know him as Hitler:

The third film in the set is Woyzeck (1979) — 

This is Herzog's very low key film based on an incomplete morality play by German playwright Georg Büchner, who died before finishing the script. The film centers on a hapless soldier who is a victim of poor leadership, abuse, and dishonesty. He also earns money by participating in experiments — you know, like a grad student.

Woyzeck has a child out of wedlock with Marie, who loses interest in him and entertains (somewhat ambiguously) a hunky drum major — not like college, but like military instead. Woyzeck gets wind of this and confronts her, but...you know what? I'm giving too much away here. I will say that the animal cruelty thing comes back here. Some guy slaps a monkey on the head really hard around 2/3 of the way through. It's a bizarre scene.

Woyzeck is another Herzog-Kinski collaboration in which Kinski depicts a character who is unstable at the outset and subsequently falls apart. Kinski spoke at length about his experience making the film immediately after Nosferatu. More madness, but not more of the same. That's what I'm finding is the strength of this collaboration — all the shades of madness laid out together like some macabre palate.

That brings us to Fitzcarraldo (1982), which is my favorite Herzog film —

Here, Kinski plays Fitzcarraldo, an opera lover so passionate, so irrational, that he decides to bring opera to the rainforest. He's convinced that this goal is worthwhile, and that people — not just the natives, but his opera-loving bourgeois acquaintances — will come if he just built a magnificent place. He's like a Christian missionary crossed with Ray Kinsella from Field of Dreams. 

Among other things, I think of the Santa Fe Opera House when I watch Fitzcarraldo. Outside Santa Fe, out there in the high desert, away from everything, there's this opera house where my wife used to work. She spent a summer stock season there in the costume shop. Since then, we've seen two movies — Crazy Heart and The Tao of Steve (odd double-feature) — that prominently depict the Santa Fe Opera. Anyway, when I visited her, we never made it out there, but many, many other people came out — and from miles away. People will come. So to whatever madman had the idea to put an opera house in the middle of the desert, I'll say this: you were right.

Fitzcarraldo, on the other hand, had a jungle to deal with, as well as a string of terrible circumstances that amount to a combination of bad luck and bad planning. Even the premise sounds waaaay more ridiculous than building an opera house in the desert. Opera in a city in the jungle? Funded by rubber harvesting? What are you, crazy? Don't answer that.

I mean, just look at that movie poster. Klaus Kinski, hair everywhere, blank stare into the distance, pointing at a boat that men are attempting to drag up a mountain. The Sisyphean parallels are obvious, and much has been written paralleling the two stories.

I watched Fitzcarraldo on Netflix, but I can't recall how I arrived at the film. I just heard about this film about a crazy man who tried to haul a boat up the side of a mountain to save time going down a river and then up another river. There's a point in South America where two rivers come within a few hundred yards of each other, and nearby is a sizable piece of land on which unclaimed rubber trees grow. Fitzcarraldo sets out to claim them, make money from them, and build his opera house. He concocts a plan to drag a boat up a 40-some degree incline, over land mind you, and get it to the other river so they can get to the rubber.

The cinematography, in combination with that Popol Vuh soundtrack, just captivated me. (Popol Vuh also did the soundtrack for Aguirre, The Wrath of God, Nosferatu, and Cobra Verde, as well as Heart of Glass, so if you're into Krautrock soundtracks, here you go.) Listen to the Popol Vuh tunes and tell me you can't draw a straight line from that to the post-rock wanderings of Explosions in the Sky. It's gorgeous, soaring stuff.

I actually found myself wondering whether the film would have an ending at all, or whether the whole thing would fall apart, as Herzog's ambition parallelled Fitzcarraldo's in many ways. Herzog has written and spoken extensively on the troubles he faced while making the film — and much has been written by fans, scholars, and critics lauding Fitzcarraldo.

I've never enjoyed watching someone fail (okay, that's a lie — I love watching sports teams fail if I can't stand them). But in this case, Fitzcarraldo's journey and the collapse were so painstakingly orchestrated that I couldn't look away. I still can't. The sheer operatic ambition of it all just breaks my heart and I can't help but connect to about a million other things in my life and tip my cap to Fitzcarraldo for trying and to Herzog for succeeding, because even in spectacular failure, Fitzcarraldo's got my respect, and Herzog definitely earns it here.

I suppose the reason why Fitzcarraldo is my favorite is in the madness. We're not watching a cruel, sadistic madman, or a jealous soldier coming apart, or a bloodsucking killing machine, but the kind of madness that comes from reaching too far with no apprehension and expecting nothing but success. Hubris is a form of madness, I think. That's Fitz.

I'm inserting Burden of Dreams (1982) here, as it seems fitting to watch a documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo immediately after watching it.

Herzog was 37 — my age at the time of this writing — when he made Fitzcarraldo. What have I done with my life? Yikes.

I'd heard that Jason Robards was originally cast as Fitzcarraldo, but didn't know much else about the production. I didn't know, for instance, that Robards got dysentery and couldn't continue with filming, and I didn't know that Mick Jagger was originally Fitzcarraldo's sidekick in the film, but couldn't continue with the picture because of his commitments to some rock band recording their 1982 album Tattoo You. Enter Klaus Kinski again to save the day, and Herzog starts over filming from scratch.

Behind the scenes, the film production was just as fascinating as the film itself (if not more). Rumors plagued the production — locals thought Herzog's crew would do one or more of the following:

1) Rape and murder everyone.
2) Dig a canal and sever a portion of an isthmus so that it maroons everyone on a man-made island.
3) Rob everybody and leave.

So Herzog wasn't just faced with the logistical issues of making a full-length motion picture in the middle of the Amazon jungle in the late 1970s, but he also faced political issues and general mistrust from the locals. Oh, and then Robards and Jagger dropped out of the picture. 

I look at Burden of Dreams in much the same way as I see Lost in La Mancha, the documentary of Terry Gilliam's failed attempt to film Don Quixote. Of course, Herzog succeeds while Gilliam didn't, and the two stories are so different, but a large-scale film production is a large-scale film production. Seeing them struggle to make something that looks so effortless on screen is fascinating.

I was hoping to see some document of the Herzog-Kinski relationship in Burden of Dreams, but I'm nearly 35 minutes in and so far, nothing. They appear to have gotten along swimmingly. Of course, with about an hour left in the film, that could change.

In one scene, we see Herzog and his assistant director working with locals — non-actors — and filming a couple hundred of them approaching in canoes. They're smiling, giggling, awkward, and completely screwing up the shot by looking directly into the camera and smiling. Of course, Herzog's insistence on shooting everything during "magic hour" doesn't help matters. 

He's often accused of doing things "the hard way" on purpose, but he's got this vision and he's undeterred and doesn't want to hear excuses. He'd be a great boss, I'm sure. 

He even hired prostitutes for his film crew, to keep them from co-mingling with the natives after so many months of filming. He knew it would present serious cultural problems, so he found Dominican hookers. I'm not sure what to make of all that.

"I don't even miss him," Herzog says in reflection on his collaboration with Kinski — one of the bonus features on Burden of Dreams. He's got a point, that their collaboration spanned five films, but Kinski did hundreds of movies and Herzog more than 50 himself. 

"I don't have dreams," he says moments later. Then how does he know what dreams look like? He frequently refers to events of dreams, the visuals of dreams, etc. Well, maybe he's not having sleeping ones, as he says. But he's been a busy, busy man trying to visualize what they might be.

The final film in the Herzog-Kinski collaboration is called Cobra Verde (1987) — 

Cobra Verde is the last collaboration between Herzog and Kinski. Prior to owning this set, I'd never seen this one — just heard and read about it. Kinski is Cobra Verde, a bandit who is hired by a sugar plantation owner to oversee his slaves. Instead, Cobra Verde impregnates all of the plantation owner's daughters. Yeah, he's virile.

As punishment, he is sent to Africa to resuscitate the slave trade — a certain death mission. He succeeds somehow, and then leads a revolt against the local king, a brutal man who preaches death to the white man. He leads a revolt by amassing an army of women — who are more brave than their male counterparts. He also fathers more than 60 children. Hello!

Cobra Verde is a pretty film with gritty subject matter, and the last narrative film in the Herzog-Kinski set. This DVD apparently comes from a pristine transfer of the source, with only a few flecks and scratches. The toughest part of watching this film is the soundtrack. You get the German 5.1 track, a German 2.0 track, and an English 2.0 track. 

Kinski and several of the other actors spoke most of their lines in English, while many of the other actors spoke whatever their native language was (much like Sergio Leone's Italian westerns, which were often shot in Spain). So if you want to watch the film in English, you don't get 5.1. But if you want to watch badly synched German, you can have 5.1. I don't get it. The film sits in this weird gray area between languages, which would be fine if the English track was in 5.1 also. It's a minor quibble.

Finally, My Best Fiend finishes the collection. This documentary about the Herzog-Kinski relationship is the perfect cap to this marathon (and the DVD cover says a lot):

Watching all the films in one week has been pretty grueling. Of all the films, my favorite is Fitzcarraldo for its sheer audacity of spirit, but Aguirre is a close second. I love Herzog's work and admire him very much, but too many of his films in rapid succession can be quite heavy on the soul. I look forward to watching something a bit lighter soon.