Werner Herzog, Timothy Treadwell, and ‘Grizzly Man’

Here’s the final installment of Leo Grin’s fascinating essay on film director Werner Herzog:

As stated earlier, in his teen years Herzog had a deeply affecting flirtation with Catholicism that has echoed down throughout his life. “I have always thought of my films as really being one big work that I have been concentrating on for forty years,” he says. “The characters in this story are all desperate and solitary rebels. . . They know their rebellion is doomed to failure, but they continue without respite, wounded, struggling on their own without assistance.” Herzog maintains, and I agree, that when the history of his career is written Grizzly Man “will be a centerpiece” of his canon. But it was only after many viewings that it occurred to me (a veteran of eight years of Catholic grade school) that one of Grizzly Man’s chief virtues is that it’s a supremely decent film, acting as a kind of extended novena for the lost soul of Timothy Treadwell.

I doubt there are other directors working today that you’d use the word novena to describe their work.

My dim memory of the movie was that it treated Treadwell far more sympathetically than he deserved. His foolishness cost him not only his life but the life of his girlfriend’s and brought all kinds of sorrow to their families. But this essay is more generous to Herzog than I am and might make the movie worth a second viewing.

My links to these essays, though, are intended to bring attention to a director who insists on his own vision. Not unusual, you say, most, if not all, movie directors are megalomaniacs and you might be right. But it sounds like Herzog is mining a seam that’s unlike any other. While he may not be a conservative – I have no idea of what his politics are and don’t really care – what he finds valuable are the things that last.

More Werner Herzog

Here’s the next installment of Leo Grin’s essay on Werner Herzog. (More about my growing infatuation with the filmmaker.)

“Is the ecstatic truth actually a religious term?”

That question was posed to Werner Herzog a few weeks ago in an interview with the German broadsheet Die Zeit (The Time). Those of you who tuned in last week know that ecstatic truth is Herzog’s way of describing the poetic, transcendent heights of illumination to which his films aspire. “Yes, there is something of that there,” Herzog replied, “something of late medieval mysticism.”

However, he immediately provided a caveat, one that should warm the cockles of conservative hearts everywhere: “But I want to get away from the religious, from the mystical,” he stressed, “because it leads all too quickly to the cloudy waters of the New Age, which is the most horrific thing you can possibly imagine in the spiritual realm.” And then, the coup de grace: “And this is something you see in a film like Avatar, by the way.”

So in Hollywood, to tout conservative views is to be considered an outsider, a maverick, a wild man:

When he made Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997) — a documentary about Dieter Dengler, a German-born American fighter pilot who was shot down and tortured during the Vietnam War, only to stage an amazing escape — the Left noticed that the usual anti-American propaganda was nowhere to be found. “The film was generally very well received by American audiences,” Herzog says, but adds that “Inevitably I was asked why I did not denounce American aggression in the Vietnam War and why the film made no political statement.” Herzog’s reply to this pressure was to double down, raise more money outside of the system, and make Rescue Dawn (2007), a fictional treatment of the exact same story starring Christian Bale as Dengler.

Werner Herzog, you see, is no slave to political correctness, no lap-dog for the media, and not at all on board with the hippy-dippy attitudes of the Hollywood Left. He saw in Dieter Dengler a man who, in his words, “had all the qualities that make America so wonderful: self-reliance and courage, a kind of frontier spirit.” That was what counted, and no amount of disparagement was about to deter him from portraying Americans at their best.

Next week, Grin takes a closer look at the only film of Herzog’s I’ve ever seen, Grizzly Man. I remember the movie as an unsparing look at a mis-guided, foolish, obsessed man; I’ll be glad for the chance to re-visit it.

Werner Herzog is Breaking Out All Over

Hey, wasn’t I talking about Werner Herzog just the other day? I was! Now everyone’s talking about him. Well, at least two other people are.

First up is Leo Grin, over at Big Hollywood, who discusses Herzog’s conservative tendencies:

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.

This is part 2 in a series; I can’t wait for more.

Next is The Wall Street Journal’s A.J. Goldmann who talks movies with Herzog at the Berlin Film Festival:

At 67 years old, the enfant terrible of New German Cinema, best known for “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” and “Fitzcarraldo,” has become a grand old man of film, his hair (or whatever is left of it) a distinguished gray. For a director whose work so often deals with destructive obsession and the eternal struggle between man and nature, Mr. Herzog was unexpectedly soft-spoken and deliberate.

His movies continue to exert a strong influence on younger generations of filmmakers, from Francis Ford Coppola to Larry Clark, and many of his works, including his six collaborations with the actor Klaus Kinski, have gained cult followings. But one could hardly call him an obsessive film buff. “I love to watch films, but I’ve never been a compulsive moviegoer,” he told me.

Fascinating stuff. I’ve seen only Grizzly Man and liked it but after reading these two articles, I’ll have to see what else of his I can find. (Though his recent Bad Lieutenant doesn’t really appeal to me.)

In a world of over-the-top, special effects laden blockbuster movies, it’s refreshing to know there’s someone out there still fiercely pursuing his singular vision about things that really matter to the human heart.

Going Rogue at Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School

Laszlo Brauning, a wannabe film director, steals a page from Werner Herzog and forges credentials to get into Herzog’s film seminar. Brilliant:

Next came the challenging part. Although I had gotten in, I soon learned that this would not be the twelve-student atelier that I had envisioned, but rather a fifty-person lecture. The weekend seminar would cost a whopping $1,450 that I didn’t have, and after raising money for my feature I had no stomach to roll out another campaign.

At this point I asked myself: What would Werner Herzog do?

Well, not only does the Rogue Film School’s syllabus include forging shooting permits, but I also heard Herzog once say he stole a 35mm camera from the Munich Film School because he “had a natural right to take it.” It seemed like he was telling me to forge my way into his film school.

Brauning’s caught, but not until near the end of the seminar. Herzog may not respect the property rights of others but you’d better respect his.