“Aguirre, the Wrath of God” - Werner Herzog (1972)

Werner Herzog, one of the most versatile and creative film directors, has had a remarkably successful career spanning across a number of genres over more than fifty years.  However, I would say one of his greatest works came relatively early on in his career, with his third fiction feature film, Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes, 1972).  This is a historical drama set in 16th century Peru and concerns the activities of some Spanish conquistadors in search of the legendary city of gold, El Dorado [1].  But the film’s subject matter stretches far beyond its overt topic of Spanish conquistadors in South America and extends off into vistas relating to Herzog’s characteristically gloomy view of human existence as a whole.  

You might think that such a film focussed on a pessimistic view of humanity would not attain widespread popularity, but Herzog’s unique cinematic vision led to the fashioning of one of the all-time great films.  Upon its release, ,Aguirre, the Wrath of God quickly acquired cult status, and it is said to have directly influenced subsequent important works, such as Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) and Terrence Malick's The New World (2005).  And over the years, the critical appreciation of the film has only grown [2,3,4,5,6,7].

Actually, the making of Aguirre, the Wrath of God has acquired a somewhat legendary status in its own right [5,6,7].  Herzog took a small film crew to shoot on location in Peru.  But the harsh, life-threatening shooting conditions in the Amazon rainforest and Herzog’s customary extemporaneous shooting style (he often made things up as he went along, which meant that the film had to be shot in narrative sequence) made things almost impossible for the frazzled crew.  In addition, there was the further matter of working with hot-headed lead actor Klaus Kinski, who was characteristically stubborn and maniacally volatile.  Nevertheless, Herzog somehow got a brilliant performance out of Kinski, and in fact this film was the first of five Herzog-Kinski collaborations.  (How Herzog managed to work with the temperamental Kinski over the years is covered in some detail in Herzog’s later documentary film My Best Fiend (1999)).  

Despite these trying and dangerous production conditions, however, the resulting film that Herzog and his team produced was masterful all across the board.  The acting from a diverse collection of actors was excellent, and the cinematography was superb.  Indeed the cinematography fashioned by Herzog and cinematographer Thomas Mauch plays a key thematic role in the film.  Equipped only with a 35mm camera Herzog had stolen from the Munich Film School, they managed to convey the dense imagery of the Amazon rainforest as a symbol of the oppressive and entangling nature of man’s unfeeling natural environment.  Thus Nature, itself, was rendered to be a cruel player/antagonist in this story.  Moreover, because of Herzog’s extemporaneous filming style, skilled post-production work in the editing room on the part of Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus was undoubtedly crucial to the film’s smooth narrative flow.

The story of Aguirre, the Wrath of God is based on a real historical figure, Spanish conquistador Lope de Aguirre (1510-1561), who was active in Spanish colonialist activities in South America during the 16th century.  However, Herzog massaged various facts and events from that era to come up with his own, more streamlined storyline that has many fictional elements.  In particular in Herzog’s version, several separate historical sequences of events have been combined into a single expedition.  So in this (Herzog’s) story, Aguirre is part of an expedition undertaken by Hernando Pizarro, (one of the famous conquistador Pizarro brothers), who,  after the conquest of the Inca empire, led an expedition of several hundred Spanish soldiers over the Andes mountains in order to go down the Amazon river in search of the fabled city of El Dorado.  But, as I mentioned, Herzog’s refashioned story is not so much one concerned with historical accuracy as it is one constructed instead to evoke Herzog’s grim vision.  In fact the expedition depicted here in Aguirre, the Wrath of God can be considered to be Herzog’s vivid nightmare of a willful descent into Hell.

The narrative of Aguirre, the Wrath of God can be viewed as made up of three unequally lengthed sections.  

1.  Descent into the Maelstrom

In 1560 Gonzalo Pizarro (played by Alejandro Repullés) leads several hundred armored Spanish conquistadors and a similar number of Indigenous slaves down a steep mountain path in the Andes towards the Amazon River.  They have heard that somewhere along that river is their hoped-for destination, the legendary city of El Dorado.  The heavily forested path is so steep and narrow that it seems almost impossible for them to make the journey, themselves, not to  mention transport their cannons and provisions, too.  How Herzog and Thomas Mauch managed to film this harrowing sequence must have been a story in itself.  As the single-file descent, which includes equipment accidents and injuries, proceeds, it almost looks as if Mother Nature is enshrouding her new captives in green leafy burial garments.  

When they reach the river, Pizarro, assessing that their slow progress has left them very low on provisions, decides to have a group of forty men take four constructed rafts and go on an advanced scouting mission down the river.  If they don’t return within a week, they will be presumed lost, and the rest of the party will travel back up over the mountains to their main fortress.  For this scouting mission, Pizarro selects Pedro de Ursúa (Ruy Guerra) as the commander and Lope de Aguirre (Klaus Kinski) as second-in-command.   Also assigned are Fernando de Guzmán (Peter Berling) as a royalty representative and Brother Gaspar de Carvajal (Del Negro) to bring religion to the natives.  And accompanying them, surprisingly, will be Ursúa's fiancé, Doña Inés (Helena Rojo) and Aguirre's 15-year-old  daughter, Flores (Cecilia Rivera).

2.  The Ursúa-led Mission

The scouting mission sets off, but one of the four rafts gets stuck in an eddy and is unable to get free.  The others of the group stop and make camp, but they are unable to help their comrades trapped in the whirling eddy.  Then overnight the men on this trapped raft are mysteriously shot and killed. Ursúa wants the dead bodies to be brought back to camp for proper burial, but Aguirre, not wanting to be delayed, conspires to have the raft and bodies destroyed by cannon fire.  Up to now Aguirre’s presence has been relatively minor, but from hereon we see his malevolence coming to the fore.

During the night, the river rises and sweeps away the remaining rafts.  Ursúa has now had enough and orders the end of the scouting mission and that they should all return to Pizarro's group.  But the greedy Aguirre doesn’t accept this and leads a mutiny against Ursúa.  Aguirre gains support among the men for his mutiny by pointing out that Cortes conquered Mexico and achieved wealth and power by staging a mutiny.  When Ursúa tries to thwart the mutiny, he is shot, but not fatally, and Aguirre takes over as the leader.  Inés proceeds to care for the seriously wounded Ursúa.  When she appeals to Brother Carvajal to intercede against Aguirre’s rebellious takeover, he cynically informs her that the Church has always backed the strong.

3.   Aguirre Takes Over

Aguirre has the soldiers elect the indolent Fernando de Guzmán (because the man is a royal ornament) as the new leader of the expedition, and then goes even further and has Guzmán identified as the new imperial emperor.  But of course the swaggering Aguirre is the real man in charge.  In fact the very way that Aguirre swaggers and struts, as performed by Kinski, seems to be an  instrument of control in itself.

Aguirre orders a new, larger raft to be built, and his deranged descent into Hell continues.  With precious food supplies running out as they drift downstream, greed, jealousy, and eventually madness begin to take over.  When their raft is approached peacefully by an inquiring Indigenous couple in a canoe, Brother Carvajal has the visitors killed for allegedly insulting God.  The sight of the portly Guzmán gorging himself on their scant food supplies leads to some of the men to secretly kill their new “emperor”.  To the real man in control, Aguirre, this hardly matters.  He simply declares himself to be the new emperor, and he orders Ursúa, whose life up to this point  had been preserved by Guzmán, taken ashore and hanged.  

But the isolation of he group continues, and their attempts to engage with the Indigenous people gets nowhere.  Apart from that one friendly but ill-fated approach by the native couple in a canoe, these people are basically invisible to the invading conquistadors.  But their presence is felt by occasional salvos of lethal arrows that are frequently directed at them from behind bushes and trees.  Gradually, Aguirre’s people are getting picked off one-by-one by an invisible mortal force.

And as crazed desperation sets in, the starving men begin to wonder what is a hallucination and what is real.  Are these silent deadly arrows appearing suddenly from out of nowhere real, or are they imaginary?  At one point they all stare in amazement at a large wooden ship perched in the highest branches of a tall tree.  (To many viewers, this weird image will seem to be an eery foreshadowing of the later Herzog-Kinski movie Fitzcarraldo (1982)).

Eventually everyone besides Aguirre on the slowly drifting raft is dead, even Aguirre’s teenage daughter, Flores, towards whom he had incestuous urges and whom he wanted to make his queen.  The movie ends with the crazed figure Aguirre continuing to rant and rave his mad dreams of power, with the only ones available to hear being a band of monkeys who have boarded the raft.

These closing images of self-destructive greed and madness are so powerful that they linger in the minds of many viewers long after seeing the film.  In fact it is the visual images, rather than dialogues, that are the cinematic keys to Herzog’s greatness.  As mentioned, Herzog tends to make up the spoken words on the fly during the shooting of his films.  The focus of his narrative imagination is the stream of visuals that he has in his mind.  Even principal actor Klaus Kinski, in the role of Aguirre, doesn’t have that many lines to speak in the film.  The key to Kinski’s performance is his physical posturing throughout the film.  Kinski is constantly shown leaning at an angle, but not usually holding onto anything for support.  This leaning posture is suggestive of someone engaged in momentary pondering just prior to some firm, impending negative action.  Thus Aguirre’s visual imagery suggests a man always on the verge of something emphatically contrary.  And that threatening imagery is what we remember about him.

So what is Herzog’s message in Aguirre, the Wrath of God?  I would say it is based on two relatively somber themes that have long underlain his work:

• 
  His concern that so much of European (i.e. Western) civilization has been based on greed and selfish utilitarianism.  This egoistic focus has fuelled exploitative Western imperialism and colonialism across the globe and continues to this day.  It was this that drove Aguirre’s desire to go to any lengths to find and plunder the legendary city of El Dorado.
   
  
• His glum recognition that the natural world, i.e. “Nature”, is devoid of the human values of beauty and harmony that we sometimes attribute to it.
  

In support of my assertions here, I offer the following quotations from some of my reviews of other Herzog films.

• From Lessons of Darkness (1992) [8]:
   
  “The demonic forces that lurk inside the hearts of men seem to be beyond civilized understanding or rational control.  These issues of cruelty and madness are as elemental as fire, itself . . .“
   
  
• From Heart of Glass (1976) [9]:
     
  “Man’s efforts to understand the universe and build a humane civilization are doomed to failure in the face of his own depravity and the incomprehensibly vastness of great Nature. The universe is infinite and brutal, unmindful and unaffected by our puny efforts to find truth and beauty. Our so-called civilisation has tried to tame nature, but it is based on reductionist mechanism and increasingly drives us further away from any chance of harmony within it. “
   
  
• And from Herzog, himself, (from my review of Into the Inferno (2016) [10]):
  
  “I don’t see [the jungle] so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity. It’s just – Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn’t see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away. Of course, there’s a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing. They just screech in pain.” [11]
     
  and
   
  “There is a harmony [in nature] . . . it is a harmony of overwhelming and collective murder.” [12]
  

So I would say that Herzog’s two rather pessimistic notions have been present throughout his work.  And in Aguirre, the Wrath of God, both of these sentiments are on full display and symbolically facing each other – Aguirre, the self-centered and exploitative European, is fighting a losing battle with an even more unfeeling and exploitative force: Nature, itself.  Indeed these two notions have probably been no more vividly and aesthetically expressed than here in Aguirre, the Wrath of God.

★★★★

Notes:

1. “El Dorado”, Wikipedia, (27 August 2021).  
   
2. Peter Bradshaw, “Aguirre, the Wrath of God”, The Guardian, (17 August 2001).   
   
3. Peter Bradshaw, “Aguirre, the Wrath of God - review”, The Guardian, (6 June 2013).    
   
4. Fernando F. Croce, “Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog / West Germany, 1972): (Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes)”, Cinepassion.org, (n.d.).   
   
5. Jeffrey M. Anderson, “Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Herzog's Mad Journey”, Combustible Celluloid, (1999?).   
   
6. Bruce Bennett, “An Infamous Mutiny, A Descent Into Madness”, The New York Sun, (20 October 2006).   
   
7. Roger Ebert, “Aguirre, the Wrath of God”, RogerEbert.com, (4 April 1999)..   
   
8. The Film Sufi, “‘Lessons of Darkness’ - Werner Herzog (1992)”, The Film Sufi, (30 May 2010).   
   
9. The Film Sufi, “‘Heart of Glass’ - Werner Herzog (1976)”, The Film Sufi, (6 September 2008).   
   
10. The Film Sufi, “‘Into the Inferno’ - Werner Herzog (2016)”, The Film Sufi, (11 November 2019).   
    
11. Werner Herzog, “24 Wonderfully Bonkers Werner Herzog Quotes”, (Compiled by Nico Lang), Thought Catalog, (24 April 2013).   
12. from Les Blank’s film, Burden of Dreams (1982), which is about the shooting of Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982).
    

“Wheel of Time” - Werner Herzog (2003)

Werner Herzog, one of the greatest filmmakers, is one of my favorites.  Over the course of his prolific career covering the direction of some twenty dramatic feature films and more than thirty documentary features, he has invariably cast his unique vision across a wide range of subject matter, much of it with an existentialist philosophy tinge.  Thus he often travels to remote locations to observe how people deal with the extreme conditions there.  This is what I find particularly fascinating about Herzog: he is a philosopher with a movie camera.  The Herzog film I will be discussing here, Wheel of Time (2003), which he wrote, directed, and narrated, is very explicitly aimed in this philosophical direction, because it is concerned with the passions and rituals of Buddhist monks.  The film featured cinematography by Peter Zeitlinger and film editing by Joe Bini, and as usual with Herzog films, one gets the feeling that a good part of the film’s story was composed in the editing room.  And also as usual with Herzog films, it was well-received by a range of critics [1,2,3,4,5].

The specific subject matter of the film concerns the elaborate Kalachakra Initiation ceremony for Tibetan Buddhists (note that ‘Kalachakra’ is a term in Vajrayana Buddhism that means "wheel of time") that is held every two or three years at a place chosen each time by the Dalai Lama.  This event typically attracts some 500,000 Tibetan initiates and pilgrims from all over Asia who wish to participate in the elaborate rituals over the course of ten days and ten nights.  On this occasion, in January 2002, the chosen place for the Kalachakra ceremonies is very special – Bodh Gaya in Bihar, India.  It was here some 2,500 years ago that Siddhartha Gautama spent seven weeks meditating under the Bodhi Tree (a sacred fig tree there) and reached enlightenment, thereby achieving the status of the Buddha.  Bodh Gaya is also the site of the associated Mahabodhi Temple.

The film begins with some physical shots of the Bodh Gaya area, and then it shows the many pilgrims arriving for the Kalachakra events.  Some of these pilgrims are so devout that they make their jouney to the Kalachakra event entirely on foot, and after every step or so they fully prostrate themselves in obeisance.  Herzog shows some of them reverentially following this practice over all sorts rough terrain, and the whole journey to their holy destination can take many months, even years.  These pilgrims are mostly poor people, but some of them at least bring pup tents in which they can sleep in the temple yards overnight.  The rest of them must just sleep outside in the open.  

The principal activities of the Kalachakra activities fall into three main categories:

• Buddhist teachings and prayers conducted by lamas and monks,
   
  
• The construction and display of the great Kalachakra Mandala, an elaborate symbolic design made out of colored sand that is an important artefact of Tibetan Buddhism [6,7], 
   
  
• The closing initiation ceremonies for the aspirant Tibetan Buddhist monks.
  

Of these activities, a considerable amount of Wheel of Time screen time is devoted to showing the detailed construction of the Kalachakra Mandala.  This is made of loose, colored sand, the tiny individual granules of which must be so carefully placed  that they collectively form an incredibly intricate design.  This takes a number of sand artists manydays to complete. Once completed, the Kalachakra Mandala is seven feet in diameter and displays visual references to 722 deities.  Since the mandala is made only of loose sand, it must be protected from the approach of onlookers and even casual breezes which could disturb it, so it is walled off by a glass partitioning surrounding it.  

But after the mandala’s construction and display to the monks and pilgrims at the end of the usual Kalachakra ceremonies, all the sand of the entire mandala is collected and ritualistically thrown into the river, thereby symbolizing the utter ephemerality of existence.  
 
Just before the halfway point in the film, Herzog takes time out to go off on his own with his own camera and visit another sacred Buddhist site, Mount Kailash in western Tibet.  Thousands of pilgrims come to this 22,000 foot mountain at a specific time every year  (Herzog came in May 2002) to carry out a high-altitude circumnavigation of the peak, which they believe will bring them holy salvation.  The 52 km trek around the peak that the pilgrims take is at an altitude of 18,000 feet, and sadly every year, some pilgrims who are not appropriately acclimatized to these heights die from exhaustion.

At other points in the film we see brief clips of the Dalai Lama speaking in closeup on a few topics.  He is always relaxed and reasonable, and one his more interesting remarks was his comment that all religions carry the same message.  It would be good if more people felt that way.  The Dalai Lama is, of course, the star personage of the Kalachakra Initiation ceremonies, but unfortunately his health at this time was not good, and he was unable to carry out his required, full participation in the ceremonies.  This was naturally very disappointing to the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who had come to Bodh Gaya, as well as to the Dalai Lama, himself.  But he promised to all the practitioners that he would come back there to see them all the following year.

The scene now shifts to another ten-day Kalachakra Initiation ceremony that was held later that year – in October 2002 in Graz, Austria.  This time the attendees are mostly European Buddhists, and the number of participants are in the thousands, rather than the hundreds of thousands.  And  now the Dalai Lama is healthy and fully participating.  Also present is famed Buddhist monk and communicator Matthieu Ricard, who often serves as the Dalai Lama’s translator.

One of the highlights of this section of the film is the showing and description of a Tibetan Buddhist monk and pilgrim, Takna Jingme Sangpo, who, partly thanks to international protests, had recently been released from prison in Tibet after being held there under cruel conditions by the Chinese overlords for 37 years.  Sangpo’s only crimes were apparently his public expression on a few occasions that he supported a “Free Tibet”.  Despite his extreme hardships, Sangpo, is now overjoyed that he now, finally has the opportunity to see the Dalai Lama in the flesh for the first time.

At this Kalachakra Initiation event in Graz, another elaborate Kalachakra Mandala is duly constructed out of colored sand and displayed.  And at the end of these ceremonies, a healthy Dalai Lama performs the ritual act of dispersing the collected mandala sand into the Mur river there.  

Overall, Herzog’s Wheel of Time does provide a lot of information about the Kalachakra ceremonies.  But what lingers most in my mind after watching it is something else that he has captured on film.  And that is the extraordinary religious fervor that you can see silently expressed on all the faces of the vast crowds of pilgrims shown.  These dedicated practitioners are not boisterous; they are not broadcasting. Instead, they are wholly devoted to their spiritual path of seeking total purity and enlightenment.  Herzog does not articulate or discuss this issue.  He directly shows it on a thousand faces.
★★★½

Notes:

1. Walter Addiego, 'Wheel of Time', Film Clips, SFGATE, (22 July 2005).  
2. Dennis Schwartz, “Wheel of Time”, Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews, (n.d.).   
   
3. Ed Howard, “11/8: Wheel of Time; The Flowers of St. Francis”, Only The Cinema, (8 November 2007).   
   
4. Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, “Wheel of Time”, Spirituality & Practice, (2005).   
   
5. Stephen Holden, “With Herzog, Inside a World of Devotion”, The New York Times, (15 June 2005).      
   
6. “Mandala”, Wikipedia, (15 June 2021).   
   
7. “Sand mandala”, Wikipedia, (29 April 2021).   
   

“Into the Inferno” - Werner Herzog (2016)

Over the course of Werner Herzog’s prolific fifty-year career in filmmaking, he has shown himself to be uniquely talented in both the theatrical and documentary arenas.  In both of these genres, he has been extraordinarily creative, and he has consistently produced narrative foci with respect to both of these forms that somehow manage to convey his deeply felt existential perspective. 

In some ways Herzog’s documentary films are perhaps the more remarkable, because many  people would ordinarily expect documentary films to be relatively objective presentations of reality and therefore outside the scope of emotive, personal injections from the filmmaker.  But as I have remarked in other essays, documentary films exist across a wide spectrum, from full “Objectivism” at one end to full “Interactionism” at the other end [1,2,3,4].  And Herzog’s films lie at the Interactionism end of this spectrum [5]:

“Herzog is so much on the Interactionist side of the ledger that his documentary films not only include his personal perspective, but seem primarily to be his own personal essays about the world – he, himself, is an implicit focus of the film, and the “reality” depicted is self-consciously Herzog’s own reality.” 

And Herzog’s recent Into the Inferno (2016) is another representative example of this approach.  This is a film about volcanoes, and as he often seems to do, Herzog has traveled around the world assembling visual footage and then assembled it all into a fascinating narrative.  Volcanoes, perhaps because they symbolize for him Nature’s unfathomable wrath, have always been a fascination for Herzog, and he has focused his lens on them in several productions, going back all the way to his La Soufrière (1977), a short documentary about the La Grande Soufrière volcano in Guadeloupe in the Gulf of Mexico.

Indeed Herzog’s pessimism about the nihilistic nature of the natural world is a theme that runs throughout his oeuvre.  Consider these representative past opinions expressed [6,7]:

“I don’t see [the jungle] so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity. It’s just – Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn’t see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away. Of course, there’s a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing. They just screech in pain.”

and

“There is a harmony [in nature] . . . it is a harmony of overwhelming and collective murder.”

Of course, Herzog doesn’t focus exclusively on his own obsessions, and here in Into the Inferno, there is also coverage of vulcanology, which is mostly provided by volcanologist  Clive Oppenheimer, who is frequently shown giving his account of the various volcanoes that Herzog and his crew visit.  In fact we might say that Oppenheimer provides a more down-to-earth Objectivist perspective that counterbalances Herzog’s.  And we might also assume that some aspects of this film were inspired by Oppenheimer’s book on volcanoes, Eruptions that Shook the World (2011) [8].  Herzog had earlier met Oppenheimer when he filmed a volcano sequence and some volcanologists on Mount Erebus in Antarctica in connection with his documentary film Encounters at the End of the World (2007).

But apart from looking at volcanoes as wondrous, and often disastrous, natural phenomena, Herzog is interested in the various ways volcanoes have affected the belief systems of human cultures living in their vicinities.  So we pass back and forth in this film between the objective phenomena side and the underlying human belief side with respect to these terrifying events.  And as we proceed, Into the Inferno’s coverage of all this material is artfully presented in six distinct sections.

1.  Introduction
The film begins on Ambryn Island, Vanuatu, in the South Pacific, where we are introduced to very primitive natives who have strong religious beliefs about volcanoes.  Herzog also introduces the viewer to general volcanology, Clive Oppenheimer, and the term ‘pyroclastic flow’, which refers to a fast-moving current of hot gas and lava that moves off from a volcanic eruption.  In this context reference is made to Katia and Maurice Krafft, two enthusiastic and pioneering French volcanologists who loved to photograph volcanic eruptions up close, but who were killed on one of these occasions in 1991 by an overpowering pyroclastic flow.

2.  Indonesia 
The scene now shifts to Indonesia, home of the greatest number of active volcanoes in the world.  There at Lake Toba, they visit the Babadun Observatory, which is devoted to sophisticated monitoring of volcanic activity in the area.  They also learn about a number of native beliefs and rituals, some of which are concerned with making ritual offerings in order to appease angry sea gods.  These rituals and monuments are not just of ancient origin – Herzog and his crew visit a bizarre and very large Catholic church in the shape of a nesting bird that is still under construction.

Again the volcano is a symbol of divine anger towards humanity.  In this regard Herzog observes,

“Of all the volcanoes in Indonesia, there is no single one that is not connected to a belief system”.

3.  Ethiopia
In Africa, an area that has always fascinated Herzog, they visit the Afar Region, which is a unique geological area that is 300 feet below sea level and is lined with volcanoes.  This is also the hottest place on the planet.  But here the focus is on anthropology, since it is believed that the first homo sapiens lived here some 100,000 years ago.  Oppenheimer spends some time talking to University of California, Berkeley, Professor Tim White, who is an enthusiastic on-site investigator of this topic.

4.  Iceland
In Iceland, the total landmass of which is volcanic, they visit the Westland Islands.  There they discuss the famous Laki eruption of 1783.  The wide extent of this eruption and the eight-month period over which the eruption lasted had extensive worldwide impact on the climate and make this one of the most important volcanic eruptions in human history.

5.  North Korea
The most interesting part of the film for me, though, was the segment in North Korea.  There Herzog goes to see Mount Paektu on the Chinese border.  This mountain, which has a history of volcanic activity, has been adopted by the North Korean government as a symbol of power and dominance, and its image is extensively employed in government propaganda.  There on the mountain Herzog shows a group of uniform-clad students looking over the crater’s edge and robotically praising in unison the mountain’s unconquerable power. 

Herzog offers little explicit commentary here, and he pretty much lets the government spokesmen (who have presumably been assigned to him) speak for themselves.  But their robotic praise of government propaganda platitudes attest to the government’s despotic control of all social discussion.  In North Korea, there are no international phone lines or public electronic communication media connected with the outside world.  And there are no newsstands and no advertising – only public postings of government announcements.  Herzog comments:

“But in all this display of the masses, I find an underlying emptiness and solitude.”

6.  Vanuatu (again)
We finally return to Vanuatu and visit Mount Yasur on Tanna Island.  There the primitive natives have established a new cargo-cult god, who they fervently believe was created by a volcano and who protects the local people from Nature’s angry vicissitudes.  This god is a mythical American GI, named John Frum, who is believed to have descended from the clouds to their island.  Access to and information about the god Frum is possessively controlled by the secretive local chieftain, Isaac.

In the end we come back to the local clan-head of the primitive tribe who had been interviewed at the beginning of the film.  He relates how terrified he was when he once looked down at a lava lake and  wondered if it would one day sweep over all of the natural world.  In fact, he concludes morosely, he thinks in the future that all the world’s volcanoes will collectively erupt together and destroy everything.


These parting words reflect Herzog’s generally pessimistic view about nature – that it is a world dominated by brute power and destructiveness and that it holds no quarter for the wishes and aspirations of any living things.  And this somber message is enhanced by Herzog’s measured and reflective articulation of it in voiceover.

This irresistible potency for annihilation is apparently what inspires and fuels the drive of the despotic North Korean government, and that particular segment of the film which explores their fascination for such a nihilistic metaphor was particularly compelling.

In general, we might observe that the Herzog side of Into the Inferno’s narrative provides a  somewhat disturbing cataloguing of the many different ways that a mysterious and destructive natural phenomenon, the volcano, has been used as a cultural instrument.  And interestingly,  this instrument is used to further various social aims in human societies that are unrelated to the phenomenon evoked.

Nevertheless, there is beauty and wonder in Into the Inferno, too, and this is partly embodied by the enthusiastic volcanologists and other scientists who strive to learn more about the natural world and man’s origins in it.  And in addition, there is also the fascinating imagery of the lava flows and eruptions, themselves.  These have a haunting effect on the viewer which lingers in the mind long afterwards.

★★★½

Notes:

1. The Film Sufi, “Interactionism”, (label), The Film Sufi.      
2. The Film Sufi, “‘Where to Invade Next’ - Michael Moore (2015)”, The Film Sufi, (19 August 2019).
3. The Film Sufi, “‘SiCKO’ - Michael Moore (2007)“, The Film Sufi, (10 February 2010).
4. The Film Sufi, “‘Avatar’ - James Cameron (2009)”, The Film Sufi, (16 May 2010).
5. The Film Sufi, “‘Lessons of Darkness’ (1992)”, The Film Sufi, (30 May 2010).
6. Werner Herzog, “24 Wonderfully Bonkers Werner Herzog Quotes”, (Compiled by Nico Lang), Thought Catalog, (24 April 2013).   
7. from Les Blank, Burden of Dreams (1982), which is about the shooting of Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982).
8. Clive Oppenheimer, Eruptions that Shook the World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (2011).

“Happy People: A Year in the Taiga” - Werner Herzog and Dmitry Vasyukov (2011)

Werner Herzog’s documentary film Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (2011) is his adaptation of Dmitry Vasyukov’s four-hour mini-series of the same name that was made for Russian television.  It concerns the lives of some animal trappers in the small Siberian town of Bakhta on the Yenisei River.  Vasyukov’s original film was apparently an ethnographic record of these people over the course of a year, and we could say that Herzog’s recompilation of this material is similarly ethnographic. But Herzog is one of those documentarians, most commonly found in Europe, who incorporates his or her own personal perspective into what is presented. In Herzog’s case it is usually a matter of adding his singularly existentialist tone to the account, the focus of which I have commented on previously [1]: 

“[Herzog] is fascinated with people who live at the extreme edges of human existence and who are exploring or experiencing what it is like to step beyond the boundaries of our comfortable civilized world.”

Here in Happy People, we are dealing with animal trappers whose home base in Bakhta is so remote that it can only be reached from the outside by helicopter or boat (and that latter option is closed off in the winter when the Yenisei River is frozen over).  From there, these trappers head off in the winter into further isolation – the Siberian wilderness where for months at a time they will be alone and cut off from any assistance as they search for their prey.  These are the kind of people that fascinate Herzog.

However, there is a subtlety to the way Herzog presents his extreme subjects.  There is little in the way of any doctrinaire disquisition describing Herzog’s point of view.   Instead, Herzog often lets the visual images tell much of the story, which is sprinkled with his characteristically quiet and even-toned, but oddly emphatic, voice-over commentary [2]. 

The film has four parts, corresponding to the four seasons, and its opening section is in the Spring. We are introduced to the town of Bakhta situated on the 5,500km long Yenisei River, which in their region of central Siberia has been frozen over during the winter and is just starting to turn to slush. Given the town’s relative isolation, the residents of the town are mostly self-sufficient. The indigenous Ket people, who now only number about 1,500, are shown carving their own canoes out of large tree trunks, an ancient skill.

For the most part, though, the people shown are ethnic Russians, and there is a particular focus on one sturdy animal trapper, Gennady Soloviev.  These people build their own huts, make their own skis (an essential transportation device), and concoct their own mosquito repellent (smelly, but also essential). 

They do all their work with basic hand tools  – axes, wedges, saws, and wood planes.  They don’t have power tools.  But they do have guns.  The trappers, though, mostly catch their prey by hand-crafting elaborate, camouflaged traps, at the center of which are steel leg-hold traps.  So their hunting and trapping practices have been largely unchanged over the past hundred years.

All this hand-craftsmanship not only makes these trappers self-sufficient, it gives them an acute sense of their own self-sufficiency, at least for the case of our center of focalization, Gennady Soloviev.  And the self-sufficiency gives them a sense of freedom and independence.  They can go out into the forests and do whatever they want, unencumbered by the restrictions of conventional society.  This is what presumably makes them “happy people”.

There might be a suggestion here that the trappers out there in the wilderness achieve some kind of mystical oneness with Nature, and that it is the source of their “happiness”.  But I would say no, and I don’t think Herzog would look at things this way, either.  Nature, for Herzog, is not something with which one can achieve oneness.  During the filmmaking of his Fitzcarraldo (1982) in the South American jungle, Herzog had this to say about Nature [3,4]:

“I don’t see [the jungle] so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity. It’s just – Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn’t see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away. Of course, there’s a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing. They just screech in pain.”
. . .
“There is a harmony [in nature] . . . it is a harmony of overwhelming and collective murder.”

In fact what the trappers treasure is their independence.  But they are not in a state of oneness with their surroundings, and instead what they participate in is this seething maelstrom of “collective murder”.  Their prey, which are  primarily sables that they capture, kill and eventually sell for the valuable fur, are their primary adversaries.  And the trappers delight in the psychological bounty of their conquests over their helpless adversaries.

Even their faithful hunting dogs, which are their only companions when the trappers are out there in the wildness, are not seen as equal comrades.  For example, in order to train his young hunting dogs not to steal the bait from the traps he sets, Soloviev puts them in a painful leg-hold trap for some time, so that the dog will come to see the trap as a source of misery and pain.  The dog is thus not seen compassionately and is merely seen by the trapper as another tool to be used in his work.

In fact I doubt that happiness is a mental state that Herzog sees as primary in connection with these trappers.  The word “happy” in the name of the film was something that Herzog inherited from Dmitry Vasyukov’s mini-series, and he was probably forced to continue with it.  Herzog, himself, has expressed, even relatively recently, a disconnection from the idea of happiness [5]:

 "I have never been one of those who cares about happiness. Happiness is a strange notion. I am just not made for it. It has never been a goal of mine; I do not think in those terms.”

It is something else that Herzog has always seen in the people he has chosen as his subjects to film.  It is a sense of existential loneliness and personal struggle with the world, itself.  Even forty years ago in his documentary The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1974) about a death-defying sky flier, Herzog has his protagonist say near the end of the film [6]:

   “I should be all alone in this world
    Me, Steiner and no other living being.
    No sun, no culture; I , naked on a high rock
    No storm, no snow, no banks, no money
    No time and no breath.
    Then, finally, I would not be afraid anymore.”

The final section of Happy People: A Year in the Taiga covers the winter season, when the trappers set out alone in search of their kill.  They are in their chosen world of self-satisfying struggle.

There are almost no women shown in this film, although the trappers, including Gennady Soloviev, are apparently married and have families.  And so there seems to be no place for love in the ego-dominated taiga world shown in this film.  That is an essential aspect of true happiness that is missing here.
★★★

Notes:

1. The Film Sufi, “Encounters at the End of the World - Werner Herzog (2007)”, The Film Sufi, (9 August 2009).   
2. See: The Film Sufi, “Lessons of Darkness (Lektionen in Finsternis) - Werner Herzog (1992)”, The Film Sufi, (30 May 2010).    
3. from Les Blank’s documentary Burden of Dreams (1982) about the shooting of Fitzcarraldo (1982).  
4. See also: Werner Herzog, “24 Wonderfully Bonkers Werner Herzog Quotes”, (Compiled by Nico Lang), Thought Catalog, (24 April 2013).   
5. Werner Herzog and Paul Cronin, Herzog on Herzog: Conversations with Paul Cronin, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, (2003).
6. Werner Herzog, “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth”, Moira Weigel (trans.), Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Third Series, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Winter 2010), pp. 1-12.

"Stroszek" - Werner Herzog (1977)

Werner Herzog’s Stroszek (1977) is in my view one of the great films, but it has a difficult-to-categorize nature that has always made it a challenge for many viewers and as a consequence has led to its neglect.  Nevertheless, the film’s peculiar nature is precisely what makes it both an important work and a revelatory element of Herzog’s oeuvre.  The key idea here concerns the nature of expressionism.

Some people view Stroszek as a tragedy, while others see it as a comedy (an offbeat comedy, to be sure).  Others see it as a whimsical quasi-documentary on rural America.  Still others go further and see it as a more profound condemnation of American materialism.  The root cause of this viewpoint panoply can probably be credited to Herzog’s cinematic style, which delivers its expressionistic rendering in a unique fashion.

Expressionism, as I have outlined before [1], is a mode of artistic expression that externalizes the emotional state of the artist’s perspective onto the physical characteristics of the world in view.  The entire world is not presented “objectively” in a realistic fashion, but is instead shown in a subjective, often angst-filled, fashion that has the suggestive characteristics of a nightmare.  A celebrated example of expressionist art is Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream” (1893) [2], which shows a world distorted with anxiety. 

Although expressionistic presentations have always been with us, the idea of Expressionism as an identified art movement took off in early 20th-century Germany, where it was quickly extended to the newly emerging film industry [1].  These early German Expressionist filmmakers shot their films entirely in the studio, where they could exercise full control over every aspect of their emotionalized external environments, including the use of carefully staged camera angles and lighting.  Since then, there has been a wide range of expressionistic films made all over the world, with the idea of an emotionally distorted external environment being a common feature.  But these films have essentially been fictional dramas.  Documentary films, which are presumably intended to present an objective view of reality, have been assumed to be out of the Expressionistic scope – that is, until Werner Herzog came along.

Herzog has been a leading figure in modern Expressionistic filmmaking, notably with his hypnotic features – Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970), Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), Heart of Glass (1976), and Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979).  But Herzog has also made documentary films that are often coloured with expressionism (sometimes including dramatic recreations of what is thought to have happened), too, such as Fata Morgana (1971) and Lessons of Darkness (1992).  These films demonstrate that Herzog is always interested in a higher form of truth than objectivist documentary truth.  He is interested in the truths that we feel in our innermost being, the reality of which we cannot deny.  Into this mix we have to find a place for Herzog’s ambiguous Stroszek, which has a documentary flavor to it, but which is a fictional cinematic narrative with an Expressionistic stamp on it. 

In fact an intended documentary film lies in the background of how Stroszek came to be made.  The gifted documentary filmmaker Errol Morris became interested in the story of serial-murderer Ed Gein, who had horrifically captured the imagination of the American Midwest with his bizarre chain of grisly murders in the late 1950s (Gein’s character was the inspiration for the story and film, Psycho (1960)).  Morris, who was at the beginning of his career and had not yet made a single film, did extensive background research on Gein and managed to rope in Herzog to collaborate with him on a film about Gein.  In this connection Morris had arranged to meet Herzog in Gein’s hometown, Plainfield, Wisconsin, to investigate a cemetery there and to discuss their project.  Herzog showed up in Plainfield for the meeting, but Morris didn’t, and the two of them soon had a falling out, leading to Herzog’s withdrawal from the project (Morris’s Ed Gein film was never made).   However, while Herzog was staying for a few days in Plainfield, he became fascinated with the area’s people and local culture and decided to make a film there [3].

Herzog had the idea of building his film’s story, the script for which he wrote in four days, around his favourite actor, “Bruno S.” (Bruno Schleinstein), who had starred in Herzog’s earlier The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974).  Bruno Schleinstein was not a professional actor, and his personal story is key to the narrative artistry of both The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and Stroszek.  Born in 1932 and abandoned as a baby to an orphanage, Schleinstein was subject to severe and repeated beatings as a child and spent 23 years (from age 3 to 26) in German mental and correctional institutions [4].  Because of the brutal circumstances of his upbringing, the boy developed an instinctively withdrawn (but still attentive) personality that was taken to be a sign of mental retardation.  Nevertheless, the boy taught himself how to play some instruments (piano, accordion, glockenspiel) and eventually managed to support himself as a street musician.  Herzog decided to base the lead character in Stroszek on Bruno Schleinstein’s real persona and then to create a cinematic imagination of what it would be like for this person to go to live in the American Midwest.

In order to ground his film in narrative authenticity, Herzog recruited most of the actors for Stroszek from ordinary local people he had encountered in Berlin and Plainfield, Wisconsin, and these people simply had to play themselves [5].  Although the overall story does have a basic narrative structure, the convincing spontaneity of the acting makes me suspect that a number of the scenes were extemporaneously crafted on the fly by Herzog and his actors.  This is what gives the film an aura of cinema-verite reality that evokes the feeling of watching a documentary.  Perhaps in some sense one is indeed watching a partial documentary when one sees Stroszek.

The story of Stroszek recounts the experiences of three down-and-out Germans who decide to join up and move to America:

• Bruno Stroszek (played by Bruno S.) is essentially a portrayal of the real Bruno Schleinstein.  He is a street musician who has just been released from prison for some misdemeanours arising  from his tendency to drink too much alcohol. He is basically the same open-hearted character that Bruno S. played in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.
   
• Scheitz (Clemens Scheitz) is an eccentric old neighbour of Stroszek who dreams up the plan of moving to America.  In real life, Clemens Scheitz, who was born in 1899, was a self-taught pianist.  His curious appearance and screen personality attracted Herzog’s eye, and he also appeared in Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), Heart of Glass (1976), and Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979).
   
• Eva (Eva Mattes) is an abused young prostitute down on her luck.  Eva Mattes, who was a onetime partner of Herzog, did have some previous acting experience, including some roles in films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

The film’s narrative comprises three acts – (1) Problems in Berlin, (2) Early Happiness in Wisconsin, and (3) Dissolution and Collapse.

1. Problems in Berlin
At the outset Bruno Stroszek is released from prison and sternly warned by the warden to stay away from the bottle.  But Bruno immediately goes to a bar and runs into an old acquaintance, the prostitute Eva, who is being severely bullied and threatened by her two pimps (aka souteneurs).  Bruno offers Eva a haven in his apartment, but the cruel pimps go there to beat her up and Bruno, too.  Bruno’s neighbour, Scheitz, suggests that the three of them run away from their squalid lives in Berlin and move to the U.S., where his nephew can arrange for them to have jobs in his small town in Wisconsin.  Scheitz is clearly an eccentric old man and refuses to travel by plane, so they have to buy passenger tickets for sea travel.  Bruno and Eva, who are destitute, have nothing to lose and accept the offer.  But they need money for the tickets, so Eva calmly runs out to a local construction site and sells her body for cash to some Turks who are working there.  Then they travel to New York City.

2.  Early Happiness in Wisconsin  
After sightseeing in New York City and looking out at the huge wonders of the new country from the top of the Empire State Building, they buy a used car and drive to Railroad Flats, Wisconsin (this is fictitious name Herzog chose for Plainfield, Wis.).  Much of this act is devoted to the depiction of Midwestern small-town local colour, as Scheitz, Bruno, and Eva settle in to their new surroundings.  Only Eva can speak English, so she has to translate and explain to Bruno and Scheitz what she hears.

American Midwesterners are not cosmopolitan, but they are customarily open, friendly, and easygoing; and Herzog captures this characteristic behaviour perfectly by having his local actors  play themselves. Bruno begins working as an assistant in the auto workshop of Scheitz’s’ nephew Clayton (played by Plainfield local Clayton Szalpinski).  Eva gets a job as a waitress at a local truck stop.  Soon  they buy, on credit, a spacious mobile home and begin to celebrate their new happiness.  However, Bruno, who has led a life of misery, is a fatalist and worries that their joy will be short-lived.

3.  Dissolution and Collapse
Soon enough a courteous bank officer visits the trailer and tells them they are seriously behind on their credit payments.  Eva does her best by selling herself to truck drivers who pass through the truck stop where she works.  But Eva is getting bored and, to Bruno’s anguish, is no longer willing to sleep with him.  Eventually she decides to leave with some truck drivers and thereby abandon Bruno and Scheitz. 

Without Eva’s extra income, Bruno and Scheitz cannot meet their credit obligations.  The courteous bank officer comes again and gets the now inebriated Bruno to sign a document that he cannot even read authorizing the repossession of their mobile home.  Bruno and Scheitz are now homeless, penniless, and desperate. Scheitz, who is always addled with offbeat theories, asserts that they are victims of some vast conspiracy against them, and he grabs a rifle and gets Bruno to join him in a proposed bank robbery.  Finding the bank closed, they steal $32 from the barbershop next door and then mindlessly go to a 7-Eleven shop to buy groceries.  The police come quickly to the store and arrest Scheitz, but they don’t notice Bruno, and he gets away.

Now comes the memorable last fifteen minutes of the film, which almost constitute a separate narrative act.  Bruno goes back to the auto workshop with the rifle and his stolen frozen turkey and steals the tow truck there.  Then he hits the road.  We have no idea where he is going, and probably he doesn’t, either. After driving for some time and with his truck engine overheating, he stops in a small mountainside town and chats at a café with a German-speaking businessman.  Afterwards Bruno goes out and sets his truck autonomously circling in a parking lot.  Then he crosses the road and enters a temporarily unoccupied tourist shop that features an odd arcade of coin-operated “games” featuring dancing live chickens and rabbits, and also a ski chairlift that runs up the local mountainside.

Here Bruno sets some of the animal games in operation and then throws the switch launching the chairlift. Still with his rifle and frozen turkey in hand, Bruno hops into a moving chair and is the lone rider as it goes up the mountain.  Bruno’s truck finally blows up and catches fire. The police show up and struggle to deal with an out-of-control situation – a truck fire, a runaway ski lift, and the cacophony of dancing chickens.  The final shots of the film dwell on the mindlessness of the dancing animals trapped in their arcade cages.

Because of the naive and eccentric behaviour of the central characters Stroszek and Scheitz, there are many people who label the film Stroszek as a comedy.  I do not see it that way; to me the film is a presentation of the absurd – the intrinsic irrationality of human existence. Thus, continuing The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser’s theme, Herzog in Stroszek also

“metaphorically explores our own existential and unaccountable thrownness into a world beyond our understanding” [6].

The way Herzog conducts this exploration here is intriguing, because he does not present the American context in a distorted fashion.  In this connection, it is interesting to compare Herzog’s portrayal of America with those of other foreign film directors who came to the United States to make a movie, such as Michelangelo Antonioni (Zabriskie Point, 1970), Milos Forman (Taking Off, 1971), Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas, 1984), and Sergio Leone (Once Upon a Time in America, 1984).  Herzog’s portrayal of America is, to me, the most accurate and authentic of all.  And yet, Herzog still injects his expressionistic perspective.

How does Herzog do this?  How does he present the world realistically and yet employ Expressionism?  Remember that Expressionism normally portrays the external world with attributes from the perspective of the emotive onlooker.  This usually means that the external world is shown to be distorted from what would normally be considered to be objective reality. But in Stroszek, an objective, normal world is presented to abnormal-to-the-viewer characters in the film.  These abnormal characters (e.g. Stroszek and Scheitz) see the normal world in expressionistic terms.  We, the viewers, gradually come to see this “normal” world from the expressionistic vantage point of those characters, too.  When Herzog closes the film with shots of the dancing chickens, the images are to a certain extent mundane but also expressionistically horrifying.  And as I have mentioned earlier [6],

“Herzog is known to despise and fear chickens, and they must represent something overwhelmingly repulsive to him. Their relentlessly spasmodic movements and their often fierce, mindless savagery conjure up a sense of meaningless animal brutality.”

The animals in the game arcade were innocent, but their limited horizons meant that they had no understanding of their circumstances and the machines they were parts of.  Similarly, the limited horizons of Bruno, Scheitz, and Eva prevented them from successfully operating in the complex world around them.  And so, too, the American people around our protagonists were also innocent, but they were parts of a bigger competitive, capitalist machine that noone really fully understands. Thus today, for example, an essentially innocent population of voters, suffering from the same kind of limited horizons as Bruno, can elect a fascist despot who threatens to bring about the destruction of the entire civilized world.

This was Herzog’s melancholy lament in Stroszek. We are all cogs in this huge, incomprehensible machine.  Where are we going in this vast, mad, out-of-control vehicle?
★★★★

Notes:

1. The Film Sufi, “Expressionism in Film”, The Film Sufi, (28 June 2008).   
2. Edvard Munch, “The Scream”, (1893), Artsy.net.  
3. Mark Wickum, “Production Notes”, Stroszek, Anchor Bay Entertainment, Inc. (2001). 
4. Roger Ebert, “Stroszek”, RogerEbert.com,  (7 July 2002).   
5. Marilyn Ferdinand, “Stroszek (1977)”, Ferdy on Films, (2007).    
6. The Film Sufi, “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser - Werner Herzog (1974)”, The Film Sufi, (11 March 2010).  

“Rescue Dawn” - Werner Herzog (2006)

Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn (2006) covered the same territory as his earlier outstanding documentary film, Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1998), but now in a fully dramatized format. The subject matter concerns the extraordinary and true experience of German-American Dieter Dengler, who was captured as a prisoner of war in the US-Viet Nam War and somehow managed to survive the horrific conditions of that experience.

As always with Herzog, there is a fascination here with doom and profound existential loneliness, which is why he is a master of expressionistic horror cinema, both in the fiction and documentary film genres. In many of those cases, Herzog places his characters in an expressionistic environment where the threatening antagonistic element is even difficult to identify.  Often the protagonist exhibits extraordinary resolve in the face of these daunting circumstances.

Little Dieter Needs to Fly provides some backstory material concerning how Dengler came to America from Germany at the age of 18 and his attempts to satisfy his passion of becoming a pilot, which eventually led to his enlisting in the US Navy. But Rescue Dawn omits any such background information and starts with Dengler’s assignment to an aircraft carrier squadron in late 1965, where he was assigned to participate in the clandestine US bombing missions over Laos [1].  Throughout the film the focalization is exclusively on Dengler.  On an early bombing mission, his plane was shot down and crashed in the jungle.  Dengler had no time to bail out and wound up crashing with the plane, but somehow he survived the crash.

He is quickly captured and tied up by Pathet Lao guerillas, who first beat and torture him and then force-march him over some distance across the Laotian terrain to reach a jungle prison camp run by the guerillas but under the command of the North Vietnamese army. There he discovers that he has some fellow inmates: two other Americans and three Thais [2]. They have been prisoners for some time – some of them for more than two years -- and it is immediately evident from their emaciated condition and demoralized, neurotic behaviour that the conditions of confinement are unbearable. Dengler tells them he intends to escape, but his fellow prisoners advise him that survival prospects outside in the jungle are even worse than in the prison. In any case, survival would be impossible before the rainy season commences, which is months away. 

So Dengler bides his time and schemes. He craftily uses a filed nail to pick the prisoners’ handcuff locks in preparation for their planned future breakout, which can only be carried out at a specific moment in just the right circumstances.  As time passes, conditions become worse.  There is apparently a drought, and the prison staff are suffering from lack of food, too.  The prisoners are reduced to eating worms [3].  One of the Thai prisoners who could understand the Laotian language overhears the prison guards discuss their intentions of returning to their home villages in order to find food for their families.  To enable them to leave the prison, they plan to take the prisoners out into the jungle the next day and kill them all, making it look like there was a  rebellion, so that there will be nor further need for prison guards.  So Dengler and the prisoner decide to carry out their planned escape immediately. 

With careful timing, Dengler and fellow prisoner Duane Martin steal the guards’ guns, shoot most of the guards, and then head off into the jungle. The other prisoners move out in other direction [4].  Dengler’s plan is for himself and Martin to build a raft and float down tributary rivers that lead into the Mekong river and eventual safe haven in Thailand. But they soon find this won’t work and barely avoid getting swept to crashing death over a waterfall. In the meantime they out of food, are getting eaten alive by insects and leaches, and are suffering from malaria. When they finally stumble into a Laotian village and kneel down before the residents begging for food, one of the frightened villagers runs up with his machete and beheads the kneeling Duane Martin. Dengler goes berserk at the horror, and amazingly, the villagers run away temporarily.  This gives Dengler just enough time to escape into the jungle again. 

Finally, and very luckily after 23 days in the jungle, Dengler was able to signal an overflying US plane, and a helicopter was brought in to rescue Dengler by dropping a rope and lifting him to safety. The final scenes show the emaciated Dengler being attended to by US healthcare workers and then being triumphantly welcomed back in front of his Navy shipmates.

As confirmed by the information provided in Little Dieter Needs to Fly, the material provided in Rescue Dawn is not exaggerated and is carefully based on fact [5]. It’s interesting to compare the two films in terms of the degree to which they convey reality. After all, every film is necessarily an interpretation of reality by the narrative creator, and here we have two narratives that were created by the same auteur about the same subject and sequence of events but in different formats [6]. Of the two, Rescue Dawn is more concrete, and it instantiates in real, physical imagery what is only more or less talked about in a schematic fashion in Little Dieter Needs to Fly. Yet, for me, the documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly is more horrifying and ultimately more disturbing.  Even though the awful events outlined orally in the documentary are given instantiated, physical presence in Rescue Dawn, the viewer’s empathic feeling of horror can be even worse when he or she imagines it, as one must do when watching the documentary. Also, Herzog's overall tone in Little Dieter Needs to Fly has more sombre overtones. 

Rescue Dawn’s immersion of existential loneliness in the real, physical world also points to why it is superior to Life of Pi (2012).  Both films involve an isolated young man in a savage environment who must rely on his own will and resources in order to survive.  Both films demand and evoke belief in a potential positive outcome in the face of near impossible odds.  But Rescue Dawn’s reality-based grounding make us believe more than do the artificial contrivances of Life of Pi.

Note that the presentation of Dieter Dengler as an amazingly resourceful and relentlessly positive personality in Rescue Dawn is confirmed by what is shown in Little Dieter Needs to Fly.  So Christian Bale’s generally congenial and upbeat portrayal of Dengler in Rescue Dawn is not just a Hollywood softening of brutal conditions – Dengler was really like that. In general, the acting performances are very good, particularly that of Steven Zahn as the prisoner, Duane Martin. But Herzog did choose to omit some scenes from the final cut of Rescue Dawn that were particularly gruesome, such as the occasion when a North Vietnamese commander peremptorily cut off the beringed finger of a Laotian villager so that he could return the stolen ring to Dengler [7].

Nevertheless, Herzog went to considerable length to portray reality, as he saw it.  The filming was done in Thailand, so that the actors could experience the true native bush of Dengler’s ordeal. This contributed to the authentic sense of a claustrophobic and impenetrably clogged jungle that Dengler had to pass through. Herzog even had his actors undergo massive weight losses so that they were truly emaciated when filmed in the prison [8]. There are no subtitles offered for the Laotian language spoken in the film – the (non-Laotian) viewer must make out of what is spoken in those exchanges in just the way that the protagonist Dengler had to do.

Despite the killing, the pain, the anguished suffering, and the hopeless brutality of war, Rescue Dawn comes off as surprisingly positive.  Dengler was one of only a handful of soldiers to escape and survive a Vietnamese POW camp.  But Herzog is a poet, and this is not a typical war film.  The music by Klaus Badelt offers a further haunting and reflective counterpoint to what goes on visually.
★★★ 

Notes:

1. For further information about Dengler’s experiences, see the review of Little Dieter Needs to Fly: http://www.filmsufi.com/2012/06/little-dieter-needs-to-fly-werner.html.
2. In Little Dieter Needs to Fly, there were four Thai inmates, but for pragmatic reasons Herzog decided to reduce the number in Rescue Dawn to three.
3. Christian Bale actually did eat the worms shown in the film.
4. The fates of most of them were never known. 
5. But some of specifics concerning the depiction of prison inmate Eugene Debruin have been challenged, and Herzog has accepted that this characterization was probably an unintended misrepresentation.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_DeBruin.
6. In both cases the story told to us is based on the story that Dieter Dengler told to himself and then told to others.
7. This event is mentioned in Little Dieter Needs to Fly, and it was something that afterwards evidently haunted Dengler all his life.
8. For Christian Bale this must have been a real roller coaster ride in dieting.  He had lost 27 kilograms in preparation for his performance in The Machinist (2004), then put on 45 kilograms to bulk up for his next performance in Batman Begins (2005).  Then he had to go back down again.