The Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
alcoholic a job tending bar. You're inviting a binge, and it's niggling to cite the reprobate's every intemperate word the morning after. From one angle Sam's story was strictly a matter...
...and the awful possibility exists that someone with a slightly different psychosis--a nutty desire to be notorious, say--has now been me, tieulously tutored in how to proceed...
...It is almost as if Herzog, faced with the impossibility of knowing this country, felt for just that reason that he must somehow at least embrace or surround it...
...his mouth slightly open, delicate in shape, almost feminine...
...It is imponderable, even mystical in a way, because it attempts to see life whole while at the same time respecting its mysteriousness...
...There is no fear nor alarm in his expression...
...Its power comes from the quality of parable about it...
...Divided into three sections--"The Creation," "The Paradises" and "The Golden Age"--it is Herzog's attempt to write his own Book of Genesis...
...At one point an African boy holds up to the camera a pet fox or dog, 16 September 1977:596 and later a German zoologist holds up a lizard the same way while explaining how incredibly tenuous, and singular, the existence of all creatures is in so desolate a region...
...But perhaps that was because holy men are at first often mistaken for fools...
...His eyes are large and liquid...
...In other words, it really was a pilgrimage, an act of faith, a mythical, mystical gesture rather than an attempt to get anywhere in this world...
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...The high-minded critics seemed to argue that newspapers are supposed to be sober and informative, not titillating...
...Other Herzog films give us the same feeling that he is hiking the world over in search of images for the world itself--in search of settings and situations that will allow him to present all of life in microcosm...
...Now that I've seen other Herzog films, I realize how large, central and important a film this one is...
...The first shot we see of the desert has a mirage effect so that the sand seems to lead to the shore of a lake which occupies half the screen in the distance...
...Besides being repeated several times, this shot is interwoven with other watery apparitions--a tortoise swimming in what at first appears to be an ice pool, children standing on a plain that really is covered with the few inches of water that are only an illusion in the mirage, etc...
...Perhaps having the new film to make assuaged his feeling of helplessness before his own impulse to go see an old man reportedly living alone in the path of the volcano Soufriere...
...Contact: Vocation Director, 224 Shore Rd...
...Perhaps some psychiatrist will pinpoint the blown fuse, but I doubt it...
...Furthermore, tabloid sensationalism is dangerous, encouraging Sam to kill more...
...They make it obvious that life matters more, not art...
...At best we can only encompass it, just as Herzog once encompassed the unknown land of Albania...
...We cannot tell where the one landscape ends and the other begins, or even, at first, that there are two...
...Perhaps the most wonderful pilgrimage Herzog ever made, though, was the one to Albania when he was fifteen...
...It is as if Herzog had cast dwarfs in the film's roles so that he could scale down all life, and make the institution, in proportion to the tiny people who inhabit it, represent the entire world...
...Sam's story had a certain zip, but no staying power...
...Although Fata Morgana was not Herzog's first film, it seems to stand in his work as a kind of spiritus mundi, a repository of much of the imagery that appears in the other films...
...His story is like all the...
...Consider Fata Morgana, Herzog's 1971 documentary on the southern Sahara...
...The only thing I still remember with any clarity is a photo of Berkowitz, on the front page of the Times the morning after .the arrest...
...I supose I've got to register at least a mild, formal protest on all three points, but my heart's not in it...
...An attempt at mystification rather than explanation, it is really the opposite of a documentary...
...Although Herzog says that film matters more to him than life, a claim he has backed up by risking his life to make films, the films themselves give the impression of being the mere by-product o f a vision, like poems written down by automatic dictation...
...When its hero is persecuted a t home in Germany, he comes to this country to escape, and thus he gives Herzog the opportunity to envision both Europe and America at once, to see them as a single, continuous culture...
...You liked it or you didn't depending...
...But what they really seemed to dislike was the rawness of the story itself, the appetite for awful detail piled on detail, the shameless posturing of columnists, the sense the tabloids gave of relishing the scariness of it all, having the time of their lives...
...When I first saw Fata Morgana some years ago, having seen no other Herzog work, I took it for a documentary and thought it a pretentious, silly film...
...Because it aims at accounting for all creation, like the Bible it cannot be too explicit...
...His purpose, he says, was to prevent her from dying, not by getting there to see herin he could have done that better by planembut simply by the self-assertion and self-sacrifice of the walking...
...The making of a film is sometimes, I suspect, the pretext for a pilgrimage, as when Herzog stopped in the middle of editing one film to rush off to Guadeloupe and do another...
...A lot of that sense of comprehensiveness and ineomprehensibility we get from Herzog's work is concentrated in Fata Morgana...
...Yet because Herzog's subject was really all of life, not just the desert, he wanted his record of the desert to gesture beyond itself, to include whatever is not part of living in the desert as well as whatever is...
...We've seen Sam's face before, although no one seemed to mention it...
...In his films his approach to life seems very much the same...
...In order to accomplish this, Herzog wrested from his desert imagery the opposing symbolism of water...
...In Dwarfs, for instance, a procession of the rebels at the institution is photographed to the accompaniment of a kind of tribal music, and in Fata Morgana as a real tribal procession passes in a similar shot, the same music occurs...
...His latest film, Stroszek, circumscribes two civilizations the way Fata Morgana circumscribes desert and ocean...
...kept to himself," "soft-spoken," "just an average sort of guy...
...08221...
...Sam's elusiveness ought to generate a sense of mystery, but it doesn't...
...Commonweal: 597...
...That there should be a forbidden country right in Europe is what fascinated him...
...W e l l . . . there was something gaudy and crude about the whole Sam hoorah...
...But Herzog is equally capable of undertaking such obsessed journeys without the worldly justification of filmmaking, . . . . . . . . . . When he heard his sponsor and long-time friend Lotte Eisner was dying in Paris, for example, he immediately set off on foot, walking all the way from Germany to Paris on back roads...
...But a lot of criticism I've seen had the appearance of plain dislike masquerading as disapproval...
...They seem to be peripheral faults to me, peculiar to the case...
...If you strip away all the carnival hoopla which surrounded Sam's last three months at large, he was just another nut with a gun...
...There was a high-minded, even priggish note to some of it, as if fascination with Sam were somehow coarse and frivolous, like a taste for Ko]ak, Harold Robbins, the cuisine of McDonald's...
...only a mild interest in what comes next...
...The first el two parts) COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...others--"a loner...
...By making the place where they meet mysterious and unobservable like this, the film both creates a kind of visual unity and at the same time forces us to stand outside of it...
...Like these dwarfs, Herzog's filmmaking starts small--a very low budget, a minimal crew, non-professional actors, etc.--but comes to stand for something larger than usual instead of smaller...
...He goes off to remote comers of the world to make his films--Peru, the Cameroons, Wisconsin--and the films are often about people traversing a landscape...
...The film ends, moreover, with a solarized dissolve from aerial photography of marshlands (perhaps along the edge of Lake Chad) to aerial photography of parched desert fiats...
...and there is no question the rights of any less-loony, more trial-likely defendant might have been seriously prejudiced...
...and once he got there, unable to enter, he hiked through Yugoslavia and Greece all around Albania's borders as close as he could get, peering into this land of mystery...
...She survived...
...It is a bag of myths on which he can draw...
...One wonders whether Herzog didn't feel that he could confront life all the better by coming here, to a desert where life just barely hangs on at all...
...In the journey to Albania there is a strange mixture of comprehensiveness and incomprehensibility that is found in Herzog's films as well...
...Linwood, N.J...
...That was the very reason he went...
...In Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970), set in a barren landscape not unlike the desert, there is an institution for dwarfs where the inmates are staging a rebellion...
...In a zany scene in Fata Morgana workers at a modern trailer camp in the desert clown before the camera, waving as if they were trying to guide it somewhere, and the scene in Stroszek where the immigrant from Germany has his new mobile home delivered has much the same feel to it...
...Again, the impulse was a pilgrim's, not an explorer's, for Herzog knew he couldn't get into Albania once he arrived...
...This fellow is in another world...
...If he is a monster, he's a monster of indifference...
...no amusement...
...So they said...
...TRAVELING MAN 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN Wemer Herzog is given to pilgrimages...
...The type is too familiar...
...no defiance...
...From one angle Sam's story was strictly a matter of taste...
Vol. 104 • September 1977 • No. 19
