Echoes from a Sombre Empire

I think this is one of my favourite Werner Herzog documentaries. One of the best 98 minutes I’ve spent in my life.

The final scene has Michael Goldsmith, the journalist who was tortured under Bokassa’s regime, touring a zoo where Bokassa reputedly threw prisoners to the lions and crocodiles. The zoo employee showing him around asks for a cigarette from Goldsmith, only to give the cigarette to a caged chimpanzee, who smokes it as though he’s done it his whole life. By this point, Goldsmith has interviewed dozens of Bokassa’s relations, employees and prisoners and heard (re-heard, more likely) countless stories of the atrocities committed by Bokassa. It is only when he sees the chimp smoke, though, that he turns to the camera and says:

Werner, I can’t stand this anymore. Can you turn it off now?

Michael, I think this is one of the shots that should hold.

You promise that this will be the end shot — it will be the last shot in the film?

Yes, I promise.

And indeed it was.

The choices of music for the film were also brilliant. In one of the opening scenes, Goldsmith visits Bokassa’s lounge in his mansion in France. It’s filled with opulent-looking furniture and the walls are covered with a bizarre combination of photos of him looking emperor-like, of Napoleon, and Vietnam War-related memorabilia. The accompanying music for this scene is some Shostakovich chamber music, forcing us into an interpretation of the lounge as displaying a sinister and twisted personality.

But the ‘best’ choices, in my opinion, were the Schubert selections. The scenes of pomp and circumstance, grotesque when seen in the context of the film, were accompanied by the Andante con moto from Schubert’s E flat major piano trio. The melancholy of that music, when juxtaposed against the ‘artificiality’ of the pomp and circumstance and our knowledge of what was going on ‘beneath’ those ornate costumes and elaborate processions, creates an intense atmosphere of tragic irony.

The final scene with the smoking chimpanzee has another Schubert excerpt, this time from his Notturno. It has that paradoxical quality of vain yet optimistic endeavour that is so typical of Schubert. Perhaps without the music, it would be difficult to understand why Goldsmith suddenly declares that he ‘can’t stand it anymore’. The music seems to give us the empathy with which to understand Goldsmith’s psyche. How it does so is a fascinating philosophical issue, but since I’ve spent the whole morning watching Echoes and writing about it, I think it’s about time I get back to Tolman.

Herzog on Herzog: Final Excerpts

Before the book goes back to the library. On the emphasis of ‘story structure’ in Hollywood films:

I am just a storyteller who knows if a good story is working or is not, and who writes so fast he cannot afford to think about the structure of the writing. There is such an urgency of telling the tale that inevitably it creates its own structure. Hollywood films might have some ‘structure’ to them, but they have scripts that press the right buttons at the right time, which is essentially filmmaking by numbers. There is a great production and distribution system in Hollywood, something we in Europe should be envious of… But you hardly ever find a really good story any more, a deficit that is known to most of the people who work out there. I see the role of the film director as being akin to that of a storyteller at the market in Marrakech who has a crowd standing around him.

More Herzog on Herzog

On “the inadequate imagery of today’s civilization”:

I have the impression that the images that surround us today are worn out; they are abused and useless and exhausted. They are limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution. When I look at the postcards in tourist shops and the images and the advertisements that surrounds us in magazines, or I turn on the television, or if I walk into a travel agency and see those huge posters with that same tedious image of the Grand Canyon on them, I truly feel there is something dangerous emerging here. The biggest danger, in my opinion, is television because to a certain degree it ruins our vision and makes us very sad and lonesome. Our grandchildren will blame us for not having tossed hand-grenades into TV stations because of commercials. Television kills our imagination and what we end up with are worn-out images because of the inability of too many people to seek out fresh ones.

[...] Look at the depiction of Jesus in our iconography, unchanged since the vanilla ice-cream kitcsh of the Nazarene school of painting in the late nineteenth century. These imgaes alone are sufficient proof that Christianity is moribund.

I suspect he exaggerates the impact of images because he himself is highly sensitive to images, much more so than normal people (as one might expect). Later on in Herzog on Herzog he explains that he can never attend live concerts because he will be so mesmerised by the movement of the bassist’s hands that he will not listen to the music. I’ll have to think more about the notion of “worn-out images”, but prima facie I don’t see how it means anything over and above having been watched by too many people. But how many is too many? Why can an image be watched by too many people? Why is it somehow bad for images to be watched by a large number of people? Why would having too few new images be bad for our imagination? Didn’t Herzog himself, as a child growing up in the ruins of WWII, claim to have had great fun playing games of imaginary scenarios in all the empty houses and such? Are the images in modern, diverse cities simply superifically different, and do not offer as much rein to the imagination as those empty houses?

From Herzog on Herzog

Notable quotes.

In response to “What are your views on film schools?”:

It has always seemed to me that almost everything you are forced to learn at school you forget in a couple of years. But the things you set out to learn yourself in order to quench a thirst, these are things you never forget.

[...]

Actually, for some time now I have given some thought to opening a film school. But if I did start one up you would only be allowed to fill out an application form after you had travelled alone on foot, let’s say from Madrid to Kiev, a distance of about 5,000 kilometres. While walking, write. Write about your experiences and give me your notebooks. I would be able to tell who had really walked the distance and who had not. While you are walking you would learn much more about filmmaking than if you were in a classroom… academia is the very death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion.

On the mysterious ‘something else’ (that is not happiness) he seems to be after:

One aspect of who I am that might be important is the communication defect I have had since a young child. I am someone who takes everything very literally. I simply do not understand irony… Let me explain by telling a story. A few weeks ago I received a phone call at my apartment from a painter who lives just down the street from me. He tells me he wants to sell me his paintings, and because I live in the same neighbourhood, he says he wants to give me a good real on his work. He starts to argue with me, saying I can have this painting for only ten dollars or even less. I try to get him off the phone, saying, ‘Sir, I am sorry but I do not have paintings in my apartment. I have only maps on my walls. Sometimes photos, but I would never have a painted picture on my wall, no matter who made it.’ And he kept on and on until all of a sudden he starts to laugh. I think: I know this laughter. And he did not change his voice one bit when the painter announced that it was my friend, Harmony Korine.

[Then comes another anecdote about another prank played on him by a friend.] When [the second prankster] called as the personal assistant he did not change his voice, but I took them as two different people. That is how bad my communication defect is. I am just a complete fool. There are things in language that are common to almost everyone, but that are utterly lost on me.

And compared to other filmmakers — particularly the French, who are able to sit around their cafes waxing eloquent about their work — I am like a Bavarian bullfrog just squatting there, brooding. I have never been capable of discussing art with people. I just cannot cope with irony. The French love to play with their words and to master French is to be a master of irony.

I find the above passage intriguing, because much of the appeal of his movies to me lies in their heavy metaphors. It would seem that he constructs heavily metaphorical films without being entirely aware of what metaphors he has included. This fits in with his explanations of why he did this or that in his films — they often have a lot to do with how he ‘feels’ about the film rather than clear, explicit reasons.

In response to “How do you feel about ‘customizing’ your films to fit television schedules?”:

Those who read own the world, and those who watch television lose it.

On why his films are more popular overseas than in Germany:

Germany is just not a country of cinema-goers. It has always been a nation of television viewers. The Germans have never liked their poets, not while they are alive anyway.

The following story about picture perception is intriguing, if true:*

One of the doctors in [The Flying Doctors of East Africa] talks of showing a poster of a fly to the villagers. They would say, ‘We don’t have that problem, our flies aren’t that large’, a response that really fascinated me. We decided to take some of the posters… to a coffee plantation to experiment. One was of a man, one of a huge human eye, another a hut, another a bowl, and the fifth — which was put upside down — of some people and animals. We asked the people which poster was upside down and which was of an eye. Nearly half could not tell which was upside down, and two-thirds did not recognize the eye.

On the final midget-laughing-at-camel scene in Even Dwarfs Started Small, about which a rumour spread that Herzog had cut the the camel’s sinews to get it to kneel for so long:

…I learned something that was to come in useful years later when I made Fitzcarraldo: that you can fight a rumour only with an even wilder rumour. So immediately I issued a statement that actually I had nailed the dromedary to the ground. That silenced them. Of course, in reality the creature was a very docile and well-trained animal whose owner was standing about two feet outisde of the frame giving it orders. He was trying to confuse the dromedary by constantly giving it conflicting orders by hand: sit down, get up, sit down, get up. And in despair the animal defecated, something which looks absolutely wonderful on screen.

More excerpts to come as I work my way through this fascinating, if sometimes implausible, biography.

*Herzog has so many fantastic stories that I can’t help but be a little sceptical.