COBRA VERDE (1987)

Bruce Chatwin's historically-inspired novel The Viceroy of Ouidah has a story worthy of a swashbuckling adventure from the golden age of Hollywood. It tells of a poor farmer who became a bandit only to be exiled to a foreign land where he overthrew a mad tyrant. Chatwin published his novel in 1980, long after the golden age. By then, it was a subject worthy of Werner Herzog, and a different kind of film resulted. Herzog predictably cast Klaus Kinski as the hero, which signalled that the character, the Brazilian bandit Francisco Manoel de Silva aka "Cobra Verde," would hardly be a hero. Whether Herzog's script and Kinski's performance reflects Chatwin's text, I can't say. I can say that, were that Chatwin's character, Hollywood would have whitewashed him into a more romantic, swashbuckling figure. Herzog presents him warts and all as an amoral rather than romantic figure.

Silva is no "social bandit" or revolutionary, no rallying point for the poor. Rather, Herzog shows him witnessing a mass whipping of prisoners in a public square with indifference. When one of the prisoners breaks loose, Silva stops the man in his tracks, basically telling him to go back and take his medicine. He impresses a wealthy plantation owner who doesn't know Silva's bandit identity. He hires Silva as his foreman, only to grow furious when the new man impregnates his half-caste daughters. Only then does Silva reveal himself as Cobra Verde. Rather than have him killed outright, the planter and his cronies give him a new job. They send him across the Atlantic to Africa to purchase slaves from the Kingdom of Dahomey. The trade has lapsed for many years and the king is rumored to be mad. No one really expects Silva to make good or even return alive. Once again they have underestimated their man.

Against the odds, Silva revives the trade, exchanging men for rifles and taking residence in an abandoned fort. The Brazilians weren't kidding about the king, however, and Herzog warms to the challenge of having someone on screen crazier than Kinski. The king demands to see Silva, but the trader demurs, insisting that he must always have one foot in the ocean -- he must stay on the coast. The king's men simply kidnap him; respecting his obligations, they fill a jar with sea water and stick his foot in it. At court, the king asks after the health of his peers, the crowned heads of Europe, then asks why Silva has gathered a fleet of several hundred thousand ships to invade his country, and why Silva has poisoned his pet.

Silva has a lucky escape and joins a conspiracy to replace the king with a bug-eyed, perhaps equally mad yet more compliant relative. Now at last Silva is the kind of rebel you would expect to see in a swashbuckler. He is tasked with training an army of topless women, the men of the land having proved unreliable. He shows them how to fight with spears and ferocity. This is where most people will put in a screencap of Kinski grimacing and brandishing a spear. Thanks to them, I don't have to; google it if you like.

An army of bare-breasted Amazons is a natural Herzog subject, and as in all his pictures there are plenty of sidewise glances at small details that make scenes more real (animals) or more weird (crippled people). He manages an impressive level of human spectacle in the Amazon scenes and the scenes at the king's court, where skulls are the popular design motif. He might be accused of objectifying the Africans as savages had he not established Silva as no more than a savage himself. If anything, Herzog objectifies humanity as savage or, at best, pitifully grotesque. There's something uncomfortably exploitative in his having Kinski attended in the film's final scenes by a handicapped man who walks more like an ape than a man, propelling himself with strong arms while withered legs drag behind, but by now you also understand that the grotesque is a reality principle for Herzog. Addressing slavery, Cobra Verde slightly resembles Jacopetti & Prosperi's Goodbye Uncle Tom in its gruesome pretensions of objectivity. To many it will seem cold if not hateful. Kinski's character has no arc of development, learning or enlightenment. Like many a movie gangster, Silva simply rises until he falls, without really enjoying his rise in the ways that endeared gangsters to guilty moviegoers. Silva does remarkable things but barely counts as an interesting person. Instead of rebelling against injustice, he embraces it at the first opportunity and arguably embodies it. This is Herzog at perhaps his most misanthropic. It's a legitimate worldview, but few will like it.

As for Kinski, he may finally have been getting too old for this shit. He gives a mostly sullen performance, albeit one appropriate for the character, and this is probably just what Herzog wanted from his longtime collaborator and "best fiend." You feel for him, however -- the actor, not the character -- as Herzog has him struggle to drag a boat off a beach while the tides punish him and the human quadruped watches. Sympathy isn't what Herzog wants, however. If you can sit through a picture without needing to sympathize with anyone -- I'm such a person myself so don't take this as a rebuke -- you may well be impressed with the epic rigor of Herzog's historical vision. It is quite a show and I was duly impressed, but if you finish the film with a shrug or a scowl, I can't really blame you -- and Herzog might not, either.

Werner Herzog's STROSZEK (1977)

Welcome to Werner Herzog's America. Your tour guide is Bruno Stroszek (Bruno S.), an ex-con street musician with a prostitute for a girlfriends and her erstwhile pimps hassling him. His life in Berlin is wretched apart from his occasional musical ecstasies, so when his eccentric (a redundant term in Herzog's world) neighbor Herr Scheitz decides to move to the U.S. to live with a cousin, Bruno and his girlfriend Eva (Eva Mattes) decide to try their luck in the land of the free. From New York they travel to Railroad Flats, Wisconsin, where Bruno becomes a mechanic and Eva becomes a waitress. Expecting too much too soon, they buy a prefab house and furnish it on credit, but can't keep up payments on their small salaries. Before long Eva is hooking again and Bruno loses his house. He and Herr Scheitz embark on a criminal spree, robbing a barber shop. The old man is nabbed at the very next stop, a grocery store, but the cops ignore Bruno in another aisle. With a frozen turkey in tow he lights out for the territory in a stolen tow truck, his trail ending in a tourist trap and a final ascent into the hills on a chair lift. There is, of course, also a dancing chicken, and another that plays a miniature piano.

The journey of Bruno S(troszek)

1. Berlin

2. The Empire State Building

3. Somewhere in Wisconsin

On the Anchor Bay commentary track, Herzog attempts to explain his typical compulsive inclusions, observing that he instantly saw the sideshow chickens as a metaphor without really knowing what they stood for. The great man is perhaps being disingenuous here, since the juxtaposition of the barnyard creatures imitating human entertainment and the consummation of Bruno's failures probably wouldn't seem that mysterious to the moviemakers or moviegoers of the olden days of silent cinema. Herzog's sensibility has often struck me as being about a century behind the times -- and that's often a good thing. That archaic sentimentalism marks Stroszek as an oldschool play for pathos, with Mr. S. (an authentic crank whom Herzog had first cast as Kaspar Hauser) as the sort of grotesque everyman -- paradoxically a universal figure because he's so particular but not generic -- that used to be commonplace in silent comedy above all.

Like many a pathetic hero, Bruno is humiliated by bullies like this allegedly authentic pimp and ex heavyweight boxer.

Herzog's approach to America, his quest for authentic locations, his readiness to recruit ordinary people for bit parts without even asking for their names, all remind me of the old Mack Sennett approach to guerrilla filmmaking. But Herzog eschews the Keystone quest for the belly laugh in search of the extreme, almost self-parodying pathos of someone like Harry Langdon. The director is clearly driven to make his film both funny and sad as an expression of his own grim compassion for the world's outsiders and misfits. Stroszek is on some level Herzog's satire of Charlie Chaplin's more optimistic Mutual short The Immigrant -- a denial of America's redemptive potential for every newcomer. The fault lies not with America (Herzog is more insistent on that point in his commentary) but with ourselves, if we're damaged goods like Bruno and Eva, but Stroszek isn't interested in blaming its characters for their failures, or anyone for anything. Herzog accepts America, Germany, the world and its people as they are; he practically wallows in it all. But his audience can have it both ways because Herzog is technically an unsentimental filmmaker. He doesn't cue your emotions with music, and his star is an undemonstrative personality. The grotesquerie on display in Stroszek may merely amuse or it may arouse the compassion Herzog probably intends -- but that seems to be up to each viewer.

While not really a statement about America, Stroszek boasts indelible images of the country in the 1970s, a place and time I recognize in cinematographer Thomas Mauch's images even though I've never been anywhere near Wisconsin. Herzog is clearly inspired by a certain drab tackiness that now signifies the first stage of national decline, and his film is as much a document of that moment as any American-made film. His empathetic portrayal of a loser isn't exactly alien to the American cinematic sensibility of the era, either. Bruno never speaks a word of English in the picture, if memory serves, but in many respects Stroszek qualifies as an honorary American film from one of the nation's peak movie epochs. It may not have quite enough plot for some viewers, but I imagine Herzog would happily echo Mark Twain in warning that anyone seeking a plot will be shot.

On the Big Screen: CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS (2010)

If any director working today has a good old-fashioned Mondo movie in him, it's Werner Herzog. The tempestuous Teuton shares the genre's omnivorous eye for the bizarre and its often pretentiously dyspeptic temperament. He also has the classic Mondo instinct for winging it and finding excuses to throw disparate elements together. Nothing in his newest documentary shows that so well as its postscript, in which Herzog departs from the 32,000 year old Chauvet cave to visit a nearby artificial biosphere, warmed by a nuclear power plant, where albino alligators are being cultivated. Herzog closes the film with a speculation that the alligators' new environment may spread to encompass the cave, so that someday the alligators' descendants may wonder, as we do now, what the Chauvet cave paintings were all about. He goes so far as to equate modern-day humans with albino alligators in our essential incomprehension of the paintings' meaning to their painters. Herzog puts on a good show, but all his formidable bluster can't cover the fact that, once he'd heard about the alligators, he just had to have them in his movie about cave paintings, and he'd figure out a way to explain their inclusion later.

In America, Herzog is probably better known as a documentarian than for his epic features of the 1970s and 1980s. Given his cartoonish accent and his globetrotting proclivities, he's our modern-day Jacques Cousteau, or maybe a real-life Steve Zissou. But he also remains a pictorial genius and a postmodern primitive who synthesizes classical narrative cinema and the pre-Hollywood model of the cinema of attractions. He can tell stories, but his first impulse is always to show us something amazing, whether it's the Iraqi oil fields burning or Klaus Kinski dining alone. It was an inspired decision to let him have a 3D camera and enter the Chauvet cave to show us the oldest-known artwork by human beings.

Image from The New Yorker magazine website.

Discovered only in the 1990s, the cave paintings were preserved after a long-ago rockslide sealed the original entrance. To protect the precious pictures from the ravages of tourism, access is strictly limited, and those limitations are part of the genius of Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Herzog has an unparalleled opportunity to work, but he's also under extraordinary constraints. He can only bring three crewmembers down with him, they can film usually only for an hour at a time, and they cannot step off the pathways the preservationists have installed. Under these conditions the director behaves himself. Faced with the mystery of what can be seen on the other side of an overhang which features the only human representation at Chauvet (a woman's rear end), he ultimately contrives a pole which he can extend out to the other side while remaining on the walkway. Herzog is nothing if not a problem solver.

He also makes the best use of 3D that I can imagine. The technology still has its limitations; compositions in depth can still look a lot like layers of transparencies rather than figures in actual space. But Herzog plays to the technology's strengths -- he may even have discovered strengths hitherto unknown. He'll give you what you expect, directing a scholar to brandish a spear at the camera. But what he excels at is the close-up examination of texture, the interplay of light and shadow on contoured surfaces. He believes that the Chauvet painters exploited the contours of the cave walls for effects (hence the necessity of 3D) and wants to convince us that the paintings are not just the earliest human pictures but the earliest moving pictures. As he presents them, you can almost buy his argument. You can believe that the multiple legs on the creatures are meant to represent movement, and you can believe that they might have been part of a presentation in which select images were illuminated by torchlight one at a time in narrative fashion. That's really more my idea than Herzog's, but his ideas get you thinking. In any event, his close-up in-depth shots of the paintings are extraordinary, as are the panning shots that try to catch the paintings in full.

Herzog is famously disparaging toward the work of Jean-Luc Godard -- once saying that there was more pure cinema in kung-fu movies -- but Cave of Forgotten Dreams finds him expressing Godard-like skepticism about the communicative power of images. What can the Chauvet paintings really tell us about the people who painted them? Not much, really. Other evidence tells us that the cave wasn't used as a human dwelling. Did it serve some ritual role? One piece of evidence, a bear skull mounted on an altar-like rock, is suggestive but insufficient. The point Herzog returns to constantly is that we simply can't know for certain what Chauvet was all about, or what forgotten dreams inspired the painters. That radical uncertainty only seems to inspire him to peer more deeply into each image, as if to reproduce for us the effect he and the researchers claim to have experienced, the feeling that they were interrupting works still in progress. Given that some of the paintings reportedly juxtapose images created centuries or millennia apart, it could be argued that Herzog does continue the original painters' work by filming them and suggesting additional layers of meaning. New dreams can be superimposed on the old and forgotten -- but what will the albino alligators make of all this? The irony of it all, which the director probably appreciates, is that the alligators may someday commune with the cave paintings with less restraints than Herzog had, and if they have the mental means, they'll confront the paintings with fresh eyes, long after Herzog's own dreams have been more completely forgotten. For us, here and now, Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a look into an abyss of history that may inspire dreams of history looking back.

MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE? (2009)

Overshadowed by a higher-profile project, a quasi-remake of The Bad Lieutenant, this is Werner Herzog's other American film of 2009, and a David Lynch production at that. It pretty much delivers on whatever expectations might come with that combination. It's "inspired by a true story," and in an interview included on the DVD Herzog expands on the meaning of that term. There is a true story of an acting student who played mythical matricide Orestes and then killed his own mother. Herzog and co-writer Herbert Golder, who initiated the project, used that incident and some of the personal details of the killer's life as a framework for their own speculations on the factors driving a man to murder. The killer is a free man today and Herzog met him; he relates feeling acute disquiet on discovering that the man had an Aguirre: The Wrath of God poster in his trailer-park home. That discovery may have inspired the director to film part of the new picture back on some old Aguirre locations in Peru, once he decided that Pakistan, where the real killer had a deformative experience, was just slightly too dangerous for location shooting. As if to compensate for that compromise, Herzog, along with star Michael Shannon and producer Eric Bassett, decided to do some clandestine filming in the volatile Uighur region of China. That footage also serves, arguably, as an intrusion of the real killer's madness on the fictional madness of Brad McCullum, Shannon's character. It's unclear whether the fictional character is ever supposed to have been in a Muslim country, though he tells his doomed kayaking buddies in Peru that he intends to become a Muslim as a way to stunt his internal development. The Uighur footage could easily represent the killer's pilgrimage to an Islam of his own imagination, though his practice seems to extend only to occasionally calling himself "Farouk." Otherwise, he has a fraught relationship with God, whose face he sees on a Puritan Oatmeal can and whose voice he hears on a recording of "I Was Born to Preach the Gospel And I Sure Do Love My Job."

"Some people act a role; I play a part." Brad McCullum (Michael Shannon) muses on matricide on stage (above) and at his flamingo-cluttered home.

The film's tag is "The Mystery Isn't Who, But Why," but don't let that leave you thinking the mystery gets solved. Instead, Herzog's point seems to be the irreducibility of a madman's mind to one decisive influence, a key to all the mysteries in his head. There's no Rosebud to help us here. We can see an apparently obvious influence of the Orestes myth, which is instantly complicated by Brad's girlfriend (Chloe Sevigny) taking the role of Clytemnestra, Orestes's mother. But Orestes isn't quite a perfect fit. Brad insists on wearing an inappropriate poncho-like garment he picked up in Peru that actually makes him look more Biblical than Greek. Considering his role in a fatherless household and his problematic relationship with God, Brad could be a Jesus figure in some neglected nook of his noodle. That possibility emerges most alarmingly when he invades a naval hospital, desiring to visit "the sick in general." On the other hand, he may also see himself as a baby ostrich like the birds his homophobic uncle (Brad Dourif) raises. Flightless or ungainly birds are the dominant animal motif of the picture, as both Brad and his suffocating mother (Grace Zabriskie) are obsessed with flamingos. Something can be read into everything shown here, but too much shouldn't be read into anything. Everything's a factor for such a vulnerable mind, but such a mind isn't the sort of puzzle where all the pieces fit.

My Son, My Son, is the pilgrimage of a wandering mind to Peru, China and points unknown.

Without a single Rosebud and the closure such a key would promise, My Son could well be a frustrating experience for many viewers. The police procedural framework, with Willem Dafoe as the straight man in charge of negotiations, creates dramatic expectations that the eventual anticlimax probably deliberately disappoints. Almost by nature, given the collaborators, the film is digressive and gratuitous, and some of Herzog's gimmicks, like making characters stand still instead of freeze-framing to represent time standing still for Brad, simply don't work. The coda, in which a small boy discovers some of Brad's legacy, clarifies matters not a bit, nor is it meant to. The best I can suggest is that the peculiar discovery begs interpretation by the boy himself, and could mark the beginning of an accumulation of mental associations that might leave the boy as mad as Brad someday. Or it could mean no such thing. This is a movie that insists on each viewer drawing his own conclusions. That may be unsatisfactory, but I was stimulated by the challenge, at least, and I found Herzog's imagined reconstruction of the clutter of a deranged mind somewhat convincing.

* * *

An interesting accompaniment to Herzog's study of symbolism and psychosis on the First Look DVD is Ramin Bahrani's short exercise in anthropomorphism, Plastic Bag, for which Herzog voices the title character. Strange as it may sound, this narrative of the endless life and adventures of a creature separated from and searching for its "Maker" would make an even better companion piece for Toy Story 3. As Herzog drones on teutonically bemoaning his plight (had he directed this himself, only Kinski could have done the voice), Bahrani dares you to disbelieve, but his epic visuals tell a different, eloquently more plausible story. The one-two punch of Plastic Bag and My Son, My Son makes this DVD, at the very least, one of the most interesting things you could watch this year.

WOYZECK (1979)

As if aspiring to become the German Roger Corman, Werner Herzog took advantage of his locations from Nosferatu the Vampire and the availability of Klaus Kinski to whip together a relative quickie based on an unfinished literary classic. Because of its literary origins, Woyzeck is bound to mean more to German audiences than to the rest of us, but there's enough universality to the story to make it accessible to everyone.

As imagined by Georg Buechner, Woyzeck seems to be an archetypal victim, a "little man" oppressed by everything around him. Brutalized by his superior officers, patronized and mocked by his Captain, experimented upon by the local doctor, cheated on by the mother of his child, bullied and cuckolded by the alpha-male drum major, he breaks down under the incessant pressure, struggling to please and be all things to all people until he can't take it any more.

Playing against type (at least the typecasting of our imagination), Kinski incarnates the universal victim. This is established during the opening credits, when the camera focuses on him struggling to do push-ups while the booted feet of an unseen officer repeatedly stomp on him. He spends the entire film in a state of unfocused agony, his face like a medieval woodcut of allegorical despair. You would believe that he's a man on a bad diet -- the doctor has convinced him to subsist for months entirely on peas, though he might soon graduate to mutton. And this being Kinski, you have no problem believing that he's going mad -- you might only ask "going mad?" But there's clearly a process of deterioration going on as Woyzeck struggles to articulate ill-digested ideas from his superiors while suffering from worsening delusions. In time the very earth is telling him to kill, and he obeys.

Herzog was working on the fly and on the cheap here, but his ascetic style is well-suited for such a place. Many of the scenes are single long takes, as when Woyzeck barbers the Captain and tries to defend himself from the charge that he lacks virtue. One classic Herzog bit is the performance of a "learned horse" in a local carnival. Getting it all in as few shots as possible makes obvious the extent to which the beast's apparent intelligence results from his master's manipulation. We're clearly meant to compare this with Woyzeck's fumbling efforts to obey orders, conform, or absorb the ideas of those around or above him.

The big moment when Herzog attempts to make a virtue of his low budget is the climactic murder scene. The director either has no means to pull off stabbing effects or no desire to do so. Instead, the camera remains focused on Kinski's grisly mask of a face as he "stabs dead" repeatedly into a body below the camera frame, at first seeming confused that he hasn't killed with one blow, then getting into the rhythm of the attack. We're back to the most fundamental horror, left to our own imagination of what Woyzeck has wrought.

If the film seems to end abruptly (and it's only 80 minutes long), that's because Herzog apparently quit where Buechner's play stops. Other hands have attempted to finish the story in different forms (there have been other plays, an opera, and a Tom Waits musical), but Herzog is satisfied to leave us with a corpse and a vanished Woyzeck --perhaps illustrating the complete disintegration of his protagonist. He's told what he wanted to tell. Modern audiences might demand more victims, but by 19th century aesthetic standards Woyzeck does more than enough, and in the film the horror doesn't multiply by body count but through a metastasis of madness in Kinski's face.

Woyzeck defines grim. Herzog's archaic sensibility guarantees an authentic-seeming experience of the seedy side of the 19th century, and the Czech town he filmed in is a completely convincing location. The soundtrack combines recognizable period classics with the astringent dance music of a string band of presumably authentic period instruments. Eva Mattes as Woyzeck's woman won an award at the Cannes film festival and earned it by telling a group of children what is probably the bleakest fairy tale ever told. Kinski seals the deal with an intensely physical, choreographed performance. Contrary to his wild reputation, his every move here seems carefully thought out for dramatic and artistic effect. As the Captain says of Woyzeck, running through creation like a razor as he does, he's bound to cut someone. Herzog and Kinski alike are very sharp here. Score another one for the Albany Public Library with this addition to its foreign film collection.

AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD (Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes, 1972)

Lope de Aguirre may have been the first European in the Western Hemisphere to rebel against his mother country. He declared himself Prince of Peru in 1561 in defiance of the King of Spain, after leading a mutiny against an expedition on the Amazon river. According to the Wikipedia account of his career, Aguirre was more successful in his exploits than he is portrayed as being in Werner Herzog's landmark film. Learning that actually only reinforces the core of madness in Herzog's chronicle: why shouldn't Aguirre dream of glory in a time and place where some such dreams actually came true?

Even so, the odds were against Aguirre. Herzog enforces this impression by going on location for what proved to be a typically hellish shoot. He put his cast in the jungle and on the river, and they convey convincingly that they've undergone an ordeal. On one level, Herzog is a cinematic primitive. His approach is hardly different from the days of silent movies; he finds a spectacle and films it. But if that approach still works, why change? Herzog's virtue in our time is his ability to demonstrate time and again that it is still possible to discover spectacle in the real world and equally possible to make cinematic spectacle out of nearly pure raw material. Aguirre's opening shot of the expedition trekking over an Andean mountain pass is as epic in scale and scope as anything concocted on a soundstage or a computer, and more so once the sheer reality of it sets in. Herzog's commitment to authenticity keeps the film grounded as the characters sink into delusion. When two characters toward the end deny in the depths of their delirium that they haven't been shot with arrows, that it isn't raining out, etc., Herzog shows the truth (except about the arrows, that is).

Until the end, Herzog seems to follow the true story fairly closely. Aguirre participates in a mutiny against the commander of an Amazon expedition, but does so in the name of an associate whom he proclaims as Emperor of the Amazon. This fat fellow enjoys a privileged existence, but Aguirre seems to be the real power, and emerges as such when the slob succumbs during the river journey. The tawdriness of this ambition is demonstrated as the "emperor" pigs out on fish and fruit while his men subsist on carefully-rationed corn and the emperor's horse threatens to run amok on the raft until he orders it dumped into the river. Aguirre is the true visionary, or at least the true lunatic, but what else are you to conclude when Klaus Kinski plays him? Kinski employs what I learn to be an authentic limp in an intensely physical performance. The actor often phoned in his work, but Herzog always goaded him into giving his all. Aguirre may be Kinski's best-known, maybe even best role. I haven't seen as much of Kinski as some have, but if someone wants to make the case I'm prepared to believe it. This isn't the sort of movie with a plot that suffers from being given away, so here's the final scene of the film, as provided by a thoughtful YouTube member, featuring Kinski at the end of his tether.

History tells us that Aguirre and his daughter did make it to the Atlantic, that he did accomplish some of the things he fantasizes about here, and that he finally killed his girl himself rather than let her be taken prisoner and suffer the fate worse than death at the hands of loyalists. Since we don't see Aguirre die in the film, Herzog may work from an assumption that the man will make it, but his point about imperial madness or delusions of grandeur in the face of implacable nature seems to be made one way or the other. That point, which requires seeing Aguirre as a sort of self-defeating figure in his overreach, might actually be undermined if we got a more accurate account of his adventures in which the government gets him in the end. As it is, there are other film versions of the Aguirre story, though the others don't seem to be widely known in the U.S. I'd be interested in seeing Carlos Saura's El Dorado for comparison's sake, but movie history has most likely already given its verdict on the best Aguirre movie.