The story of Brando and Francis Ford Coppola colliding in the Philippine mud making Apocalypse Now (1979) is by now a true Hollywood cautionary tale of amok ambition and dangers of trusting in the improv skills of titans: Coppola was losing his Godfather fortune, and sanity even before Brando, who was to play the gone-insane Colonel Kurz, finally showed up, thanks to typhoon season, drugs, malaria, wayward helicopters, Martin Sheen's heart attack, and Dennis Hopper's mania. Brando's arrival--overweight, befuddled, expensive, unprepared--took tears off Coppola's life. The whole grand production ground to a halt while Coppola tried to coax this befuddled overweight wreck into reading the script and coming up with an approach other than just hiding Brando's girth in the shadows.
It dragged on for two years, and wore Coppola's genius down to the point he's never gotten it back (he admits it), and his film choices have tended towards the safely set-bound ever since. Never in a million years would he work with Brando again, let alone bring him back to Philippines in ten years for Apocalypse Now 2. Let this tale illustrate not just the dangers of tropical location shooting and titanic egos, but as testament to the masochistic madness inherent in Werner Herzog's oeuvre: he worked with his Kurz--Klaus Kinski, a dysfunctional madman of titanic ego who made Brando seem a model of jungle professionalism--no less than five times. Such casting is surely indicative of a personality that would have thrived in the madness that consumed Coppola. Kinski starts at the destination Brando could never quite reach. Maybe Coppola needed to be German to find that heart of darkness, maybe then he would have welcomed the miseries on the set of Apocalypse Now as welcome relief from the terrifying existential crisis proffered by German 'sanity.' No other director ever worked with Kinski more than once, just one of the fascinating tidbits we learn when undertaking this gigantic journey.
In Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972)--their first collaboration and the film that put Herzog on the map--Kinski plays a wayward conquistador searching for El Dorado who doesn't just usurp his royal commander on a side trip down the Amazon, he usurps the King of Spain himself, in his mind, and sails ever onward into the jungle, eventually ruling over a raft full of gibbering monkeys after everyone else has been picked off by unseen natives. Insane or now, while the other actors make their marks and look around nervously, Kinski's Aguirre is making friends with the insects, practicing movement by imitating the movements of wind through the fronds. His giant frog eyes dilating and seething and lolling back like a tide of bi-polar narcissism, Kinski is eternally a-trip with the psychedelic madness of the messianic complex, magnetic, tragic, and terrifying; it's almost like he can see us watching him from across time and media formatting. His eyes meet ours and we shiver in our safety shadows.
In addition to the stunning and essential Aguirre, and Fitzcarraldo (1982) and their final collaboration, Cobra Verde (1987), Herzog made two, more locally-filmed, masterpieces with Kinski in 1979: Wocyzek--an adaptation of a German play about a soldier who kills his wife after submitting to mind control experiments--provides the chance for Kinski to bounce off the walls and cave on in himself in high Germanic style. It's also a more effective horror film for my money than Nosferatu, which seems airless and claustrophobic compared to most Herzog films. Though a fantasy-horror, Herzog is unwilling to abandon his beloved docu-realism and uses found settings to replace the dream expressionism the tale so clearly demands (and Kinski's snake fangs are ridiculous). Shot on location in Bavaria and Carpathian towns where centuries of whitewashing have preserved the slate walls of old inns and castle interiors but given them a dead museum air. There's none of that stifling Germanic folksiness when Herzog is outside Europe, though. Put the man on European soil and he drowns in ghosts, the centuries of history strangling him in a noose he cannot film except through terrible period haircuts atop beer-puffed German faces and costumery apparently borrowed from some closed stage play. But Adjani is a great expressionistic Mina in Nosferatu- with her darkened eye rings and pale skin and jet black hair, she seems straight not out of--not just Murnau's original, but Cabinet of Caligari or some ancient lost Fritz Lang Mabuse.
Having only seen Aguirre and Nosferatu, Grizzly Man, and Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and At the Top of the World before diving into this set, I'll confess I've found nearly everything he's done to be, in parts, boring, his obsessions with dreams gradually becoming a kind of knee-jerk raison d'être for his continued docu-wandering, albeit in a good way, because it's boring for a point -- no film ever opened a viewer to a cosmic heightening without first frustrating his ADD ego into abeyance. So I agreed to review this massive collection as some kind of masochistic indulgence and truly it's been a long, soul-warping awe inspiring yet deeply troubling, at times maddeningly boring, 25+ hours of jungles and paranoia. Sometimes opening out on vast expanses, sometimes shrinking into claustrophobic tedium best endured with one ear on a cell phone.
Second hurtle: I've always been put off by some of Herzog's more jokey titles, especially Even Dwarfs Started Small and Little Dieter Needs to Fly, not to mention the subject matter, the former seeming exploitative, the latter masochistic (as an ex-POW recreates his tortures on location in moments recalling William Devane's demonstrations to his wife's boyfriend in Rolling Thunder) and yet at the same time boisterous, very original, and life-affirming. Dwarfs could pass for something Alejandro Jodorowsky or a drunk Bunuel, filmed in black and white it's a bit like the end of Over the Edge stretched to feature length with little people playing the kids.
And Little Dieter Needs to Fly turns out to be a deeply moving true story of the only POW pilot ever to escape his captors and be rescued in all of the Vietnam war. Shot down over Laos and held prisoner for two years, suffering terrible tortures at the hand of the Viet Cong until he made a great escape through the uncrossable jungles, with Herzog in tow, Dengler revisits the locations, and in one great scene puts his forgiving arm around a former torturer, the look in that guy's eyes is so profound it almost makes the whole war worthwhile. A bit like Herzog himself fused with William Devane in Rolling Thunder, Dengler is a bit larger than life via his sheer gratitude to be free and continual fascination with planes and food and the joy of being able to open doors.
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As Herzog's camera follows, Dengler talks us through his ordeal in modulated perfect flow of English, cascading over the rocks and trees. He never seems to need to take a breath. Through it all, Herzog--bastion of sanity begging to be eroded by the fertile fecund jungle--watches and learns of nature's bloody initiation that opens the gate to wonder, the vision of horsemen angels and Death rolling towards him through the clouds, signaling his death approaching. As Dengler goes on, one realizes he's a great writer --it's all facts and recreations, no wasting time with describing emotions or feelings, and when he mentions his dreams and hallucinations they're described in the same matter-of-fact style, and through that one discovers the root of Herzog's genius. Physical reality is just the eventual manifestation of the unconscious, twisted up as we are, raw and full of mysteries. Herzog eventually filmed a more dramatized version of the story, Rescue Dawn (2006), starring Christian Bale, but it's Dieter that perhaps packs more punch for being such a gentle, forgiving film in image and speech, conveying at the same time such deep horrors and inhumanities on both sides.
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Another example of this unique documentary approach is the 50 minutes Lessons of Darkness (1992), which shows the horrors of Kuwaiti oil fires in the weeks after the (first) Gulf War, the oil blackening the sky and pillars of flame illuminating everything in all directions. Letting the faces of Kuwaitis and the amniotic droning of the music and his infrequent moments of enigmatic narration guide our response only, as it were, the precipice. At the end, when having extinguished most of the fires and capped the wells, Herzog doesn't concern himself with getting to the rationale behind their bizarre actions, only narrates them, looking for his own answers to, like all his questions, the nature of dreams, madness:
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"Two figures are approaching an oil well.
One of them holds a lighted torch.
What are they up to?
Are they going to rekindle the blaze?
Has life without fire become unbearable for them?
Others, seized by madness, follow suit.
Now they are content
Now there is something to extinguish again."
My own favorite moments in these films all star Herzog himself either onscreen or off narrating, as when he's driven to deep crazy distraction by the delays and` tantrums of his wild-eyed star in the behind-the-scenes footage on the set of Fitzcarraldo (from Burden of Dreams) --shown in My Best Friend (1999)--or when he goes on and on about the misery of the jungle, how the birds don't sing but scream in pain, how the jungle is evidence god hates his creations, it's prehistoric: "There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment."
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I myself hate the jungle, but I share Herzog's abiding love for the magnetic charisma inherent in many forms of megalomaniacal insanity, messianic complexes in charismatic geniuses are the gasoline that fuels all the great artistic engines. I've followed such people off many a cliff, so part of me admires the way Herzog never falls in after them, only scales patiently, even tortuously, down the ravine with his crew. Herzog also has the rare gift, like a first class anthropologist, of being able to make friends with any and all indigenous peoples he encounters. He gets the indigenous tribes of Peru to act in Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, and the Aborigine elders in Where the Green Ants Dream (1984). The latter stars Bruce Spence as a geologist who comes to fall in with the mystic moods of the Aborigines blocking his mining encroachments on their sacred spot, home of the green ants, of whom Herzog makes a great image parallel with the inscrutable movements and stillness of the elders. Few but the 'out there' directors have successfully captured the dreamtime aspects of the Aborigine culture (only trippy directors like Peter Weir in Last Wave and Nicolas Roeg in Walkabout), but Herzog seems so removed he doesn't even condemn the white encroachers, just illuminates the roots of the British Commonwealth mythology, of the ancient principles of land ownership declared by the first settlers. At least they try to appease and be fair as possible, with the Supreme Court doing it's best to incorporate the tenets of Aborigine dreamtime into valid testimony. The best scenes involve the elders' visit to the nearby city, where we see through their eyes (but without overstating) how elevators, traffic, and dinner tables are like an alienating alternate universe where man places himself at the service of machinery rather than vice versa.
That ability to find the uncanny alien element in both cultures is a fine example of Herzog's rare gift, the kind of instant rapport only anthropologists and true artists have, the freedom from judgment that prizes one belief over another, the freedom to step outside the 'taken for granted' aspects of consensual reality, to bridge the chasm between modern (white) society and indigenous tribes, at least long enough to make a film, and a few friends (or depending on whom you ask, aid in destroying the tribes he films through barbaric exploitation).
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Maybe this desire to subject himself and his crew to the most inhospitable filming environments imaginable has something to do with being German, a country after all, that are the great losers in the European colonizing of the third world. When the lines were drawn after World War Two, the English kept most of their colonies, the Dutch had their South Africa, the French North Africa and Papa New Guinea, and the US got Hawaii and any undeclared country they could topple. Germany got nothing, of course, but the advantage is that now they don't owe the third world anything, they suffer no inpouring of third world refugees, or immigrants from lands they've pillaged and drained. In fact they fought the same people--the British, French, American and Dutch--that are they key oppressors of the third world. Part of it also may be the realization that though his films may destroy aspects of the lives he seeks to film, he's filming about that destruction, so at least it's on record, a kind of catch-22 of posterity.
In the end it's this ambivalence that makes Herzog endure. His narration in the documentaries makes no plea for tolerance or recycling, he doesn't try to understand if there's a valid reason Dieter Dengler was bombing Laos or being starved by his captors; he doesn't judge the oil workers lighting the gushing untapped oil back up after working so hard to put it out; he doesn't judge the mining company finally winning the right to blast the green anthills apart. He knows how to recognize any judgment as his own prejudice or that of others; the camera finds its own poetry and truth when free of imposed meaning's blinders, and in these jungles and hellish landscapes, Herzog is like an astronaut letting his camera find some unknown new planet, bringing a gold record of Wagner's "Siegfried's Funeral March" along for company as he gamely and steps into the pyre, refusing to judge the flame as it consumes him. Get this set, then and wade in to there with him. As your screaming ego melts down around you, you will see the light at the end of the dark tunnel, and if you keep melting you will see the dark at the end of the light tunnel, and within that darkness, the heart no Coppola could catch.
![]()
Another example of this unique documentary approach is the 50 minutes Lessons of Darkness (1992), which shows the horrors of Kuwaiti oil fires in the weeks after the (first) Gulf War, the oil blackening the sky and pillars of flame illuminating everything in all directions. Letting the faces of Kuwaitis and the amniotic droning of the music and his infrequent moments of enigmatic narration guide our response only, as it were, the precipice. At the end, when having extinguished most of the fires and capped the wells, Herzog doesn't concern himself with getting to the rationale behind their bizarre actions, only narrates them, looking for his own answers to, like all his questions, the nature of dreams, madness:
One of them holds a lighted torch.
What are they up to?
Are they going to rekindle the blaze?
Has life without fire become unbearable for them?
Others, seized by madness, follow suit.
Now they are content
Now there is something to extinguish again."
My own favorite moments in these films all star Herzog himself either onscreen or off narrating, as when he's driven to deep crazy distraction by the delays and` tantrums of his wild-eyed star in the behind-the-scenes footage on the set of Fitzcarraldo (from Burden of Dreams) --shown in My Best Friend (1999)--or when he goes on and on about the misery of the jungle, how the birds don't sing but scream in pain, how the jungle is evidence god hates his creations, it's prehistoric: "There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment."
I myself hate the jungle, but I share Herzog's abiding love for the magnetic charisma inherent in many forms of megalomaniacal insanity, messianic complexes in charismatic geniuses are the gasoline that fuels all the great artistic engines. I've followed such people off many a cliff, so part of me admires the way Herzog never falls in after them, only scales patiently, even tortuously, down the ravine with his crew. Herzog also has the rare gift, like a first class anthropologist, of being able to make friends with any and all indigenous peoples he encounters. He gets the indigenous tribes of Peru to act in Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, and the Aborigine elders in Where the Green Ants Dream (1984). The latter stars Bruce Spence as a geologist who comes to fall in with the mystic moods of the Aborigines blocking his mining encroachments on their sacred spot, home of the green ants, of whom Herzog makes a great image parallel with the inscrutable movements and stillness of the elders. Few but the 'out there' directors have successfully captured the dreamtime aspects of the Aborigine culture (only trippy directors like Peter Weir in Last Wave and Nicolas Roeg in Walkabout), but Herzog seems so removed he doesn't even condemn the white encroachers, just illuminates the roots of the British Commonwealth mythology, of the ancient principles of land ownership declared by the first settlers. At least they try to appease and be fair as possible, with the Supreme Court doing it's best to incorporate the tenets of Aborigine dreamtime into valid testimony. The best scenes involve the elders' visit to the nearby city, where we see through their eyes (but without overstating) how elevators, traffic, and dinner tables are like an alienating alternate universe where man places himself at the service of machinery rather than vice versa.
That ability to find the uncanny alien element in both cultures is a fine example of Herzog's rare gift, the kind of instant rapport only anthropologists and true artists have, the freedom from judgment that prizes one belief over another, the freedom to step outside the 'taken for granted' aspects of consensual reality, to bridge the chasm between modern (white) society and indigenous tribes, at least long enough to make a film, and a few friends (or depending on whom you ask, aid in destroying the tribes he films through barbaric exploitation).
In the end it's this ambivalence that makes Herzog endure. His narration in the documentaries makes no plea for tolerance or recycling, he doesn't try to understand if there's a valid reason Dieter Dengler was bombing Laos or being starved by his captors; he doesn't judge the oil workers lighting the gushing untapped oil back up after working so hard to put it out; he doesn't judge the mining company finally winning the right to blast the green anthills apart. He knows how to recognize any judgment as his own prejudice or that of others; the camera finds its own poetry and truth when free of imposed meaning's blinders, and in these jungles and hellish landscapes, Herzog is like an astronaut letting his camera find some unknown new planet, bringing a gold record of Wagner's "Siegfried's Funeral March" along for company as he gamely and steps into the pyre, refusing to judge the flame as it consumes him. Get this set, then and wade in to there with him. As your screaming ego melts down around you, you will see the light at the end of the dark tunnel, and if you keep melting you will see the dark at the end of the light tunnel, and within that darkness, the heart no Coppola could catch.
