In November 1974, Werner Herzog received a most distressing phone call. Lotte Eisner, the beloved doyenne of German cinema, was dying. Part film historian, part published critic, part heroic preservationist, and part muse to the filmmakers struggling to piece together the broken shards of German culture left in the wake of the Nazis, Eisner was a legendary figure in Herzog’s eyes, and had inspired him to persevere through a decade of near-poverty as a struggling director. Now, at seventy-eight years old, she was deathly ill and not expected to survive.
Herzog was in Munich, Eisner in Paris, and their mutual friends implored the thirty-two-year-old director to fly to France post-haste so that he might say his goodbyes while there was still time. But Herzog would have none of it. “This must not be,” he remembered thinking. “German cinema could not do without her now. We would not permit her death.” And so, suddenly afire with what he once called in another context “the fervor and woe of pilgrims and prayers and hopes,” Herzog made a momentous decision: he would set out from his apartment in Munich and walk the five-hundred miles to Paris “in full faith, believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot.”
Days stretched into weeks as he trod alone through the winter sleet, sometimes breaking into barns or empty cottages to survive the cold nights and taking only a single detour, “to the town of Troyes, because I wanted to walk into the cathedral there.” Finally he arrived exhausted at Eisner’s Paris apartments to find her “still tired and marked by her illness,” but recovering against all odds. She would live nine more years, until at last, “when she was nearly blind, could not walk or read or go out to see films,” she called Herzog back to Paris and told him, “Werner, there is still this spell cast over me that I am not allowed to die. I am tired of life. It would be a good time for me now.” Herzog recalls that, “Jokingly I said, ‘OK, Lotte, I hereby take the spell away,” and three weeks later Lotte Eisner died.
The life of Werner Herzog is filled with such stories — tales of deep spiritualism that continually invite a resolutely non-dogmatic but nevertheless palpably Christian interpretation. The Left habitually ignores this, preferring to revel in their shallow image of Herzog as a reckless, half-mad darling of the godless art-house circuit, a sort of Colonel Kurtz with a camera. The truth is that he’s more akin to a Bavarian Flannery O’Connor, deeply devout and honest even while telling stories featuring characters who are anything but. Like the monks and prophets of old, Herzog is that rare man who implicitly trusts his own soul-stirring religious impulses and allows them to take him where they may. Viewed with this in mind, his fascination with stories of chaos and darkness — stories like Grizzly Man — become not celebrations of madness, but a sane and noble search for God in a fallen world.
The man who would one day become fascinated with the story of Timothy Treadwell seemed to attract dark Fate from the very beginning: days after his birth in Munich in 1942, an Allied bomb fell on the neighbor’s house, the shockwave shattering windows and spraying his cradle with glass. Divorce ensured his father was largely absent from his life, but his mother moved the family to the country and kept Herzog and his two brothers fed and clothed by smuggling essentials over the border from Austria. He grew affectionately close to both mother and brothers during an idyllic childhood played out amongst the ruins and poverty of postwar Bavaria:
I did not know what a banana was until I was twelve and I did not make my first telephone call until I was seventeen. Our house had no water-flushed toilet, in fact no running water at all. We had no mattresses; my mother would stuff dried ferns into a linen bag, and in winter it was so cold I would wake up in the morning to find a layer of ice on my blanket from frozen breath. But it was wonderful to grow up like that. We had to invent our own toys, we were full of imagination. . . kids in the cities took over whole bombed-out blocks and would declare the remnants of buildings their own to play in where great adventures were acted out. . . It was anarchy in the best sense of the word. There were no ruling fathers around and no rules to follow.
From an early age, Herzog was a child of solitude and daydreams. “I was very much a loner. . . I would lie back on the floor with a book and read for hours no matter how much talking and activity was going on. Often I would read all day long, and when I finished, I would look up to discover that everyone else had left hours ago.” When he was eleven, a traveling projectionist came to his rural school and screened a pair of 16mm films for the kids. The magic and illusion of the medium captivated the quiet boy. “From the moment I could think independently I knew I was going to make films. I never had a choice about becoming a director.”
At fourteen, in a sudden titanic burst of religious passion, Herzog converted to Catholicism, immersing himself in the intricacies of the Holy Mass and the Catechism. Over time he was increasingly unable to reconcile the dogma with the reality of life around him, and he eventually fell out of the Church. Yet his films have never escaped this early, quixotic preoccupation with God, creation, and the meaning of existence. “To this day,” he says, “there seems to be something of a distant religious echo in some of my work. . . I am good with religious subjects and feel I understand them.”
Culture was the other great force shaping his early life and thought. He yearned for Germany to return to the “the bosom of the civilized world” after the privations its people suffered first at the hands of the Nazis and then of the country-splitting Communists. “I had the increasingly strong feeling that Germany was an extremely godforsaken country,” he remembers. “What, I asked myself, was actually holding it together? What was capable of binding the country together again until it was reunited in the distant future? I felt that the only things we Germans were held together by were our culture and language, and for this reason I truly felt that it was only the poets who could hold Germany together.”
As a young teen he wrote several movie scripts and “submitted various proposals to producers and TV stations,” but when he took a meeting with a producer at seventeen and got laughed out of the room with, “Aha! The kindergarten is trying to make films nowadays!”, he realized that if he was going to be a director, he would have to make it happen himself. He immediately established “Werner Herzog Filmproduktion,” and for the next fifteen years ran his entire moviemaking business out of a one-bedroom apartment in Munich, armed with a camera stolen from the local university. “There was no clear division between private life and work,” he says.
Instead of a living room we had an editing room, and I would sleep there too. I had no secretary, no one to help me with taxes, bookkeeping, contracts, screenplay writing, organization. I did absolutely everything myself; it was an article of faith, a matter of simple human decency to do the dirty work as long as I could. . . It dawned on me that organization and commitment were the only things that finished films, not money.
An article of faith. . . A matter of simple human decency. Critics who fancy Herzog as a postmodern Euro-artiste far too hip and cool to give credence to such notions understand very little about the man or his passions.
From the beginning, Herzog determined that he would only work using 35mm “feature film” stock, the only format with enough breadth and depth to capture the transcendent imagery coursing through his fertile, cosmic mind. He raised the money to do this by taking odd jobs and winning small monetary prizes at film festivals for his shorts and scripts. Somehow, attending film school and “learning” how to make a movie never entered his consciousness. “I just felt it would be better to make a film than go to film school,” he says. “It is not technicians that film schools should be producing, but people with a real agitation of mind. People with spirit, with a burning flame within them.”
Sensing instinctively that Germany was too small a backdrop for his filmic visions, Herzog developed the notion that traveling, and specifically walking long distances on foot, carried with it a profound spiritual quality. “The volume and depth and intensity of the world is something that only those on foot will ever experience,” he thought, and so he began to travel whenever possible, not as a tourist but as an adventurer in the classic sense, treading fearlessly wherever his heart and soul led.
He learned English while on scholarship in Great Britain, then went to Greece, Crete, and Egypt, eventually journeying along the Nile into Sudan. At twenty-two he accepted a scholarship that brought him to the U.S., a country whose self-reliant, God-fearing, Blind Side citizenry impressed him deeply. After spending time in the States he made his way down to Mexico, where he learned Spanish and worked as a two-bit border smuggler and rodeo rider. (He was so terrible at the latter job that the Mexicans nicknamed him “El Alamein,” after one of the greatest German defeats of WWII). “My time down there was quite banal and partially miserable too,” Herzog admits, but “it was ‘pura vida,’ as the Mexicans say, ‘pure life’. . . I thank God on my knees that after America I did not go straight back to Germany.”
The later career of Herzog is now the stuff of legend. He shot film in the Sahara, the Ivory Coast, Uganda, Cameroon, the Congo, and the Canary Islands, surviving African rainstorms, sandstorms, civil war, prisons, rat-bites, malaria, and blood parasites. Herzog’s early pictures were not particularly popular in Germany, and so he embarked on a conscious attempt to achieve international success with an English-speaking film. Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972) was a tragic, haunting, delirious conquistador adventure tale set in the deepest jungles of South America, and in addition to making Herzog a name to remember among foreign audiences, it began his fruitful yet often infuriating partnership with the gifted (and genuinely half-mad) actor Klaus Kinski.
A seminal figure in what was called the German New Wave, Herzog became known for fiction films and documentaries featuring “ruined people in ruined places” — strange protagonists poised far out on the razor’s edge of life. “I never look for stories to tell,” he says, “rather they assail me.” Cinematic ideas often come to Herzog in feverish daydreams fraught with meaning, though he can’t begin to explain why or to what purpose. “What constitutes poetry, depth, vision and illumination in cinema I can’t name,” he once said. “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.”
To discover and share these epochal moments of humanity, to tease them out of ordinary reality and onto a movie screen, to illuminate the faded fingerprints of God found on even the strangest and most forsaken parts of his creation — that is the mission of Werner Herzog.
One experiences, maybe only five or six times during a lifetime, the incredible feeling that illuminates and enlightens your own existence. It might happen while reading a text, listening to a piece of music, watching a film or looking at a painting. And sometimes — even if centuries are being bridged — you find a brother and instantly know that you are no longer alone. . .
If I find one person who walks out of a cinema of 300 people after watching one of my films and does not feel alone anymore, then I have achieved everything I have set out to achieve.
Conservative movie lovers have in Herzog a filmmaker who is neither a pretentious “artist” (a word he despises) nor a reckless madman, but a solid, sane craftsman who’s spent a lifetime painfully painting a bizarre Sistine Chapel filled with passionate and transcendent images that remind us of what it means to be human.
Of course, being a director who respects the fiery “agitation of mind” which lies at the heart of religious faith brings him into inevitable conflict with the lemmings of collectivism, atheism, and political correctness who dominate not only modern Hollywood but the Arts in general. Unlike many of us conservatives, though, the non-political and non-dogmatic Herzog has never shirked from a fight with that insidious worldview.
Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers: Werner Herzog’s defiant stands against the ideological bullies of the Left, and how those experiences prepared him to take on the multi-faceted story of Grizzly Man.
Previous posts in the series “Werner Herzog, Timothy Treadwell, and Grizzly Man“
FURTHER READING and VIEWING
Herzog on Herzog by Paul Cronin: A fascinating, book-length interview with the master director that goes into depth about his films, life, philosophy, and craft. There’s no better single book on Herzog than this.
On Walking In Ice by Werner Herzog: Herzog’s account of his epic long walk from Munich to Paris in 1974 to visit the dying Lotte Eisner, told through the diary he kept during the trip. Often drifting into prose poetry and what I called above “feverish daydreams,” it offers a strange and wonderful peek into the mind of a lonely pilgrim filled with “fervor, woe, prayers, and hopes.”
Herzog video interview with Charlie Rose: filmed a year ago during his press tour for his new book of diaries Conquest of the Useless: Reflections on the Making of ‘Fitzcarraldo’, this is a potent twenty-minute introduction to Herzog’s personality.
Herzog audio interview with Elvis Mitchell: Herzog talks to the former New York Times film critic about his life and career, with an especial focus on his newest film Bad Lieutenant: Port of New Orleans (2009) starring Nicholas Cage. Contains some discussion of Timothy Treadwell and Grizzly Man.
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