Werner Herzog

Filmmaker and Philosopher

Richard Eldridge

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781350100152
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350091689
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Film Direction & Production

Werner Herzog has produced some of the most powerful, haunting, and memorable images ever captured on film. Both his fiction films and his documentaries address fundamental issues about nature, selfhood, and history in ways that engage with but also criticize and qualify the best philosophical thinking about these topics. In focusing on figures from Aguirre, Kasper Hauser, and Stroszek to Timothy Treadwell, Graham Dorrington, Dieter Dengler, and Walter Steiner, among many others, Herzog investigates the nature of human life in time and the possibilities of meaning that might be available within it. His films demonstrate the importance of the image in coming to terms with the plights of contemporary industrial and commercial culture. Eldridge unpacks and develops Herzog's achievement by bringing his work into engagement with the thinking of Freud, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, Hegel, Cavell, and Benjamin, but more importantly also by attending closely to the logic and development of the films themselves and to Herzog's own extensive writings about filmmaking.

1

Introduction: Images and Contemporary Culture

Think about the dancing chicken in Stroszek, which people never forget, even if they have no memory of anything else in the film.

—WERNER HERZOG (CRONIN, 236)

I first saw a number of Werner Herzog films during the late 1970s in Chicago—Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), Heart of Glass (1976), Stroszek (1976), and Nosferatu (1979)—at showings at Facets Multimedia, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Doc Films at the University of Chicago. My attention was called to these films by the rich Chicago film review culture, including Gene Siskel at the Chicago Tribune, Dave Kehr at the Chicago Reader, and, especially, Roger Ebert, Herzog’s friend and interlocutor at the Chicago Sun Times. I remember in particular the sustained shot of the rapids of the Rio Urubamba near the beginning of Aguirre as wondrously and mysteriously transfixing, affording a sense of nature as suffused with a self-developing power that surrounded human life, eluded definite comprehension, and yet was somehow captured by the camera’s extended perfect attention. This affordance of obscure sense was repeated in the shots of the fog flowing through mountain passes in Heart of Glass and Nosferatu, as well as by the extraordinary shot in Stroszek of the repossessed trailer being towed to the right out of the frame, leaving only the vast Wisconsin prairie emptily filling the entire field of view of both Stroszek and the viewer. In each case, I immediately knew these shots and the films that housed them were something extraordinary—paradigm instances of the powers of art—and I have now been thinking about these filmic achievements—as well as viewing further films and teaching some of these central ones, especially Aguirre—for some forty years.

As a result of these initial experiences and continuing history, as well as of the fact that I am a working philosopher, this book is substantially different from much contemporary academic film theory. Herzog has himself criticized academic film study sharply:

Academia stifles cinema, encircling it like a liana vine wraps round a tree, smothering and draining away all life. Construct films, don’t deconstruct them. Create poetry, don’t destroy it. Whenever I encounter film theorists, I lower my head and charge. … You would learn more about filmmaking during [a long] journey [on foot] than if you spent five years at film school. Your experiences would be the very opposite of academic knowledge, for academia is the death of cinema. Somebody who has been a boxer in Africa would be better trained as a filmmaker than if he had graduated from one of the “best” film schools in the world. All that counts is real life. (Cronin, 178, 213)

This sharply critical stance on Herzog’s part extends in particular to academic studies of his own films:

On the table in front of us is a pile of academic articles about my films that you brought over for me to look at. The minute you leave here today, it will all be thrown into the trash. The healthiest thing anyone can do is avoid that impenetrable nonsense. My response to it all is a blank stare, just as I respond to most philosophical writings. I can’t crack the code of Hegel and Heidegger; it isn’t the concepts that are alien to me, but I get my ideas from real life, not books. When I hear the kind of language used by zealots and film theorists, Venetian blinds start rattling down. (Cronin, 177)

Although I have read and learned from both film theory in general and Herzog film scholarship in particular, I also significantly share Herzog’s worries about these bodies of work. But note two things about Herzog’s critical remarks: (1) they imply some acquaintance with Hegel, Heidegger, and philosophy more broadly (acquaintance that most contemporary film scholars lack) and (2) Herzog emphasizes the importance of poetry and literature, for him and for life in general, as he goes on to mention Goethe and Bulgakov, and elsewhere Hölderlin, Büchner, Virgil, Kleist, and Homer, among others, as figures who have mattered to him.

Unlike many film scholars, I approach Herzog’s films not only from initial and sustained experiences of conviction in their achievements, but also out of a sense I share with him of the urgency of the problems of human life they address. As a result, this study is more personal and less diagnostic, skeptical, and driven by a counter-Herzogian politics of representation than many studies are. Of course some films strike me as less successful than others, often those such as Queen of the Desert (2015) or Salt and Fire (2016) that are comparatively more plot-driven than much of Herzog’s work. Even here, however, there are entrancing images at moments—the salt desert in Salt and Fire, the Wadi Mujib Gorge in Queen of the Desert—that are worth thinking about, especially in relation to Herzog’s work as a whole. At the same time, while more appreciative than skeptical, and prepared also to stay fairly close to Herzog’s (often self-consciously stylized) self-presentations in his many written texts, conversations, and commentaries, my encounters with Herzog are also shaped by my having ready to hand a set of philosophical vocabularies (Freud, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hegel, Cavell, and Benjamin) for engaging with Herzog’s work. The result is a set of elaborations that set these philosophical vocabularies in mutual interaction with Herzog’s work. The films as I read them do not merely illustrate one or another bit of philosophy. Instead they take up, develop, and worry at the problems of human life that motivate the philosophies, as the films think creatively and in images about exactly what these problems are and how to address them. They make various philosophical thoughts more plausible and available in experience, while at the same time modifying and inflecting them in various ways through images. In any case, there is no tenable ideal of perfect scientific exactness in the description of human life or filmic art. If we focus on nothing but movements of molecules, then agency and distinctively human life disappear from view. If a film’s images were perfectly translated into an exact binary code (as happens in digital filmmaking) and that code then scrutinized for its significance, we would learn nothing. Film, like art in general and like human life, is made for attentive apprehension and emotional engagement.

What, then, are the problems of human life that Herzog’s films take up? —One way to begin thinking about this question is to think about Freud’s account of the impulses and powers that inform human life in general, impulses and powers that set up a constitutive tension between the irrepudiable pursuit of pleasure and its standing frustration. Herzog notoriously scorns psychoanalysis, remarking that “in its magnitude the catastrophe of psychoanalysis is comparable to the Spanish Inquisition. That is to say, the Inquisition wanted declarations of beliefs, and light shined into every last corner. They even wanted to weed out the Muslim elements that were still floating around, hiding in Spain. Psychoanalysis is exactly as bad.”¹ While this remark may be aimed accurately enough at a conception of psychoanalysis according to which the analyst is a detached, perhaps violent, discoverer of hidden secrets through the use of expert techniques, it fails to touch more philosophically sophisticated alternative conceptions of psychoanalysis, such as that of Jonathan Lear, according to which the analyst helps to cultivate in the analysand the skill of hearing tensions and ambivalences that mark the analysand’s life.² In any case, the idea that human life is marked by constitutive tensions can scarcely be plausibly denied. In Civilization and Its Discontents, the most culturally oriented statement of his mature philosophical anthropology, Freud offers his sharpest description of the constitutive tension between impulses that seek pleasure and the satisfying discharge of energy, on the one hand, and standing sources of frustration, on the other.

What do [human beings] demand of life and wish to achieve in it? The answer to this can hardly be in doubt. They strive after happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so. This endeavour has two sides, a positive and a negative aim. It aims, on the one hand, at an absence of pain and unpleasure, and, on the other, at the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure. … As we see, what decides the purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle. This principle dominates the operation of the mental apparatus from the start. There can be no doubt about its efficacy, and yet its programme is at loggerheads with the whole world, with the macrocosm as much as with the microcosm. There is no possibility at all of its being carried through; all the regulations of the universe run counter to it.³

Freud goes on to list the sources of suffering that continuously frustrate the pursuit of happiness as one’s own body with its liabilities to illness and breakdown, the hostile and dangerous external world, and frequently hostile, jealous, and competitive fellow human beings.⁴ As available strategies for coping with these sources of suffering, Freud lists (i) intoxication, (ii) asceticism, (iii) sublimation in work, (iv) indulgence in art and fantasy, (v) reclusion, (vi) love, and (vii) the pursuit of beauty⁵—a fair enough list, where, unfortunately, no strategy offers much promise of continuous success. The pursuit of love in particular, according to Freud, is haunted by aggressive instincts and the general impossibility of loving one’s neighbor.⁶ Pleasure-seeking impulses, described as the affair of the id, continually bump up against the requirements and norms of common social life, themselves internalized as commands of the superego or agency of inhibition. “The price we pay for our advance in civilization,” as Freud puts it, “is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt.”⁷ No human life is one perpetual progress, smooth and bright, and inhibition and unresolved antagonisms are the costs of living within the walls of society and of peace.

Perhaps worse yet, often enough people, and especially people in advanced industrial-consumer societies, undertake to navigate life’s constitutive tensions inaptly, particularly when they primarily seek the practice-external goods of wealth and power, rather than enjoying the inherent goods that are internal to activities. Or as Freud puts it, “it is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement—that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.”⁸ Most consumer goods are goods, and, as Jon Elster remarks, “most consumption satisfies needs that no one need be ashamed of having,”⁹ especially the more one’s life is troubled by genuine scarcity. In addition, one should not underestimate the pluralized possibilities of life, the widened spheres of individual liberty with careers significantly open to talents, and the increased availability for many of relative freedom from desperate want that liberal and commercial modernity affords. Nonetheless, it is also difficult to avoid noticing the high incidences of vulgar egoistic-material competitiveness, low-grade depression, drift, and desperate escapism within advanced industrial-commercial life, as getting and spending we lay waste our powers.

Once upon a time, the terms of apt comportment in life were settled by tradition rooted in immediate necessities owing to scarcity. Authoritative accounts of these terms were provided by heroic literary traditions (Homer, the Icelandic Edda), by systematic philosophies rooted in comprehensive metaphysical cosmologies (Plato, Aristotle, Stoicism, Skepticism, Eudaimonism), or by religions. As Pierre Hadot usefully characterizes the educational programs of the Ancient-Hellenistic philosophical schools:

The individual was to be torn away from his habits and social prejudices, his way of life totally changed, and his way of looking at the world radically metamorphosed into a cosmic-“physical” perspective. … By ignoring unnat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Images and Contemporary Culture
• 2. Nature
• 3. Selfhood
• 4. History
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint