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As part of the extensive program presented by the 7th Annual Planete Doc Review Film Festival, founding director, Artur Liebhart, brought master filmmaker, Werner Herzog, to this year's event in Warsaw, Poland. Along with Michal Chacinski, a prolific Polish translator, film critic and reporter for TVP Kultura, I had the distinct privilege of co-hosting Herzog's master class. A handful of Herzog's films played in a special program during opening weekend, and Against Gravity, Leibhart's distribution company, released a boxed set of fifteen of Herzog's documentaries for Polish audiences (cover, pictured).
Werner Herzog is a consummate storyteller and he held forth in front of an enraptured crowd of about 300 film students and professionals. He needed very little prompting when talking about the craft to which he's been dedicated for over 40 years--that of making revolutionary cinema. Whether one wants to label film works of his fiction, nonfiction, documentary, or experimental, the bottom line is that his milieu consists of a fiercely distinctive artistic vision.
There is an expansive canon of material written about the director. Yet, what Herzog insists on emphasizing about his life's work are not the apocryphal stories of traversing erupting volcanoes or waging battles with Klaus Kinski in the middle of the jungle, but his own robust, and very personal, storytelling aesthetic. Although he has partnered with some of the top cinematographers, editors and actors over the years, and is a crack technician himself, he does not really rely on the "crafts" of cinema to create his stories. Instead, his inspiration always comes from the vision of the particular film itself, thus making him one of the truly "visionary" filmmakers of our day.
While we talked about his "rules" for what he will, and will not, allow on his sets, he also emphasized that what he relies upon the most from his collaborators is "a balance of physicality, intuition and perspective." He loathes the traditional trappings of a large-scale production: "I want to be the only one between the actors or subjects and the technical crew--camera, sound, lights. It's my privileged position." The antithesis of the megalomaniacal risk-taker his detractors insist on labeling him, Herzog claims he is an extremely economical director and brings intense focus to bear on the work, to the benefit of those both in front of, and behind, the camera. As well, he insists on allowing anyone on his set, including subjects and actors, to contribute to the creative vision. He believes this is part and parcel of a good director's job, for the director is the one who truly sets the timbre of a production, its essence and its energy. He admits that this process is still ineffable to him to this day. (Me, Herzog and Chacinski in Warsaw.)
"I'm thoroughly professional and quite good at assessing and evaluating risks. Contrary to the opinion in the media, I'm not a reckless filmmaker. But, when a risk is inevitable, face it, be professional, and go straight through it." When I asked him about the "adventure of discovery" in making his unique kind of cinema, I got a bit of the famous Herzog heat: "Adventure is a dangerous word to use in my presence. I am not at all interested in understanding myself. I do not want to go on 'adventures' or 'discover my inner boundaries.' That's all new-age bullshit. I just can't stand it. As a storyteller, I immediately know there's something big, a story I have to tell no matter what. Not 'no matter what' in risk to one's life, but to come back with a film." He denies his films have anything to do with him personally and are not meant to be self-reflective. "I've always tried to avoid self-portraits. I don't want to self-analyze and I do not want to know who I am." (Pictured, Herzog in 1982 in Peru during the filming of Fitzcarraldo.)
Although closing in on 70, Herzog has much to impart to a new generation of filmmaker. Obviously, he has kept up with the latest trends in filmmaking and knows quite well the vagaries of sustaining a film career in the current independent marketplace. He's been doing just that for a very long time and has always been an independent's independent. But as only someone who has worked for most of his career on film can point out, he believes that too many nonfiction filmmakers today are profligate with their shooting, recording literally hundreds of hours of footage just because they can. He displays very little patience for the "spendthrift" ways in which this burdens the post-production process. "Out of tons of mediocre footage come mediocre results. It's a dangerous way to shoot, allowing a lack of focus, a lack of discipline." He has a consummate producer's practicality; for most of his career he has worked with very limited resources and support, financial or otherwise. He places great value on what resources he does have, always working with great urgency whether he's writing, shooting or in the editing process, believing "this urgency gives a story its power."
Herzog's overriding mission is to pull an audience into the magic of something "very, very strange, something that looks familiar but becomes unfamiliar." He will create this dystopia any way he sees fit, going so far as to tailor the beginnings and endings of his films with anything he wants to use from his creative arsenal--whether it's fully scripting a "nonfiction scene" as he did for the ending of Echoes From a Somber Empire (1990), or allowing the vital "documentary truth" to come through in an acting performance from Bruno S. "Openings and endings are very important. How do you greet your audience in the cinema; how do you dismiss your audience out into the street? Things have to be ambiguous and stunning. The incredible becomes natural. You have to have that in you to make films, to leave the audience in an elevated status. . . . I do not do these things to 'cheat' the viewer. But my understanding of the truth is something that nothing can fully describe, not religion, not philosophy, not mathematics. It is vague by its very nature. Documentary is too fact-oriented, as if 'the facts' constitute the truth. They do not. That is my approach and I like it when other filmmakers do this. We are not the surveillance cameras in the airports, banks, supermarkets, nor are we meant to be the proverbial 'files on the wall.' Pick up a camera and be a filmmaker!" (Pictured, film still from the final scene in Echoes From a Somber Empire.)
Despite these quixotic imperatives from Herzog, he is an exceedingly practical filmmaker and he talked about the importance of the producer/director relationship. From the inception of his career, he has been the producer of most of his own films out of necessity and deeply understands the value of money and how it's spent. "You need to understand what's going on. You have to know the nature of money--it is cowardly and stupid. You have to maneuver and mislead, but always deliver on budget. The director is the one who is really responsible for that." But when working with a producer, he says that it is vital to try and create a strong dynamic that, somehow, pushes the film itself into the foreground. "You have to keep the momentum and you need to work with producers who bring a sane wavelength to what you're trying to do. Otherwise, it's trouble. This process needs a lot of perseverance."
Something that alarms Herzog greatly these days is "the lack of useful imagery" by media makers. But instead of talking about cinema as it pertains to this particular issue, Herzog's cri de coeur is that hardly anyone reads anymore. "More and more young people do not read, not one single book. They can't express five coherent sentences. This is an evolution that is very dangerous. I want to say to those who want to make films: read, read, read, read, read, read. If you do not read, you will never be a good filmmaker. This is a prerequisite to the craft more than anything else. It's dangerous for our civilization to abandon reading at such a scale. You lose the world watching TV or being on the Internet. Reading books will save the world." Herzog has created what he calls The Rogue Film School, a handful of weekend seminars led by him at varying locations. The website claims that, "The Rogue Film School will not teach anything technical related to filmmaking. For this purpose, please enroll at your local film school." However, his courses do come with a hefty mandatory reading list, which might include Virgil's Georgics, 1000-year-old Icelandic poetry, and various selections from Ernest Hemingway and Rabelais. He also includes The Warren Commission Report, the full transcript of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy. Herzog claims it is "an incredible piece of literature, containing wild storytelling and imagination."
And with that, at my urging, Herzog read out loud, in a voice that is now imitated the world over, the prologue and epilogue from his book, Conquest of the Useless, a wild recitation of one man's fevered and unleashed imagination.
(Pictured, Herzog and Artur Liebhart, May 2010.)
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