A couple followup thoughts:

After watching The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, I got into reading the wikipedia page for the real Kaspar Hauser. That dude sounds like a lying bastard. I'll take the Bruno S version any day.

Also, an extension of my Nic Cage thought from earlier: there is a brutally honest and metaphorical truth to be found in a film where Nic Cage plays a famous actor who buys a European castle to save it from decay, goes broke and then takes creatively unfulfilling, miserable, big-money roles to make his money back to live his dream.

Expect me to keep pushing that idea until it happens.

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser: The Liveblog

Hi there, all!

Superbowl weekend. Usually I take two days to make a single post, but with the festivities around this weekend, I would rather get something up quickly. I've been thinking of using this format every now and then, so let's test it out: I will be liveblogging Werner Herzog's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. Never seen it before, but I've blogged about other Herzog films before. Consider this as though I was tweeting these thoughts individually. Here goes something (hopefully!)

• Hoo boy. It's gonna be interesting to do this for a movie with subtitles. All those years of learning to type without looking at a keyboard - finally worth something!
• I like that this film was introduced via scrolling text explaining Hauser's life (discovered not knowing how to speak, not knowing how to walk, no history, no name, etc,). It really lets us get on with the thing - imagine if every movie used the first half of its trailer to rush through the setup before the action began.
• Strange note I realized before starting: there is no trivia page on IMDB, and this is, last I checked, Herzog's highest-rated work on the site. A movie as mysterious as its character...
• Ah, some wonderful still shots of the village, fields, etc. Such a great eye for these little details, and the elegant opera brings the perfect ethereal mood.
• Same goes for the shots of townsfolk looking at Kaspar and the diagetic sounds that have been paired with them.
  
• Bruno S. as a screen presence, is a find. I may have mentioned that in writing about Strozek last week, but there's just something fascinating about him: always nervous and not exactly "endearing," but something a standard deviation removed from that. It's different from the contagious intensity of Kinski or his work with Christian Bale and Nic Cage.
• On the subject of Nic Cage: doesn't his recent off-camera life sound like a Herzog movie? A world famous actor buys a broken European castles with the intention of fixing them up, then goes broke? I hope one of them thinks of making it into a movie.
• It's impossibly endearing when Bruno or the children look off camera. It's like the next words out of their mouths are "What do I do next?"
• I don't think anything has made me smile so much all day as Kaspar making a cat walk on two feet.
• The use of animals in this movie is freaking fantastic. I would say the parallels between Kaspar and the animals is a little heavy-handed, but this movie has some really cool shots of animals. And what is up with that camel!?! What the fuck - is that what they look like?
• I have little to say about this scene where Kaspar is being taught religion except that it is an excellent scene, both in concept and execution.
• This scene trying to explain inanimate objects is better. Go apple!
  
• Yesterday-ish, a couple of people I follow on Twitter were saying that Herzog's movies feature somewhat stilted acting. I propose this: it is not the acting that is stilted, but the situations. The actors in many of his movies are reacting as natural as they can while knowing they've got a camera watching.
• I feel like I've seen something like this before, where someone is corrected but their "misspeak" reveals some kind of truth. Yet, there's still something very moving about this film and its tone.
  
• Helping the dreamlike atmosphere: the untraceable passage of time. I was shocked earlier when it said Kaspar had been in society for two years. Now, he's learned to read music and play some piano, and no one's mentioned how many years it's been.
• I may have to rewatch this movie with the swans in mind - there's a definite motif there, but I've got to focus in on it to see what that's about.
• Oohh, that was actually pretty perfect timing: I was just typing that the second half of this movie loses some of the natural-ness of the beginning, so it's less charming. But then it switches to a story being told by Kaspar.
• Okay, I thought the story about the procession up the mountain through death would be a good ending. Then I thought the story about the caravan led by a blind man would be better. But the actual ending is superb thematically.

I hope this has been as readable as anything. This has been fun writing and watching a truly remarkable film in a lot of ways. Like most of Herzog's films, I can't wait to watch it with commentary sometime (though I have yet to actually listen to the commentaries).

"Thank you all for listening to me. I am tired now."
-Kaspar Hauser

Burden of Dreams and Avatar: For the Love of Jungle

Burden of Dreams, Les Blank's documentary about the filming of Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, is shocking in its hardships and its compassion for Herzog's vision. It's a testament to either Herzog's brilliance or his stubbornness in this project. The film's narrative - of a man determined to beat great forces far out of his reach to accomplish a seemingly benign goal - parallels the story of Fitzcarraldo itself. But with hindsight, it also sharply contrasts with James Cameron's Avatar, its drippy nature-worship still fresh in my memory from less than a week ago.

Going in, I knew the Fitzcarraldo shoot was difficult. Jason Robards and Mick Jagger, original stars in the picture, had to leave with the film 40% completed. Robards was replaced by probable lunatic Klaus Kinski. Herzog insisted that the film's centerpiece, a boat being dragged over a mountain, be a real boat. Couple those factors with filming in the dense Amazonian jungle, and you have the recipe for a turbulent ride.

It's a surprise, then, that the film barely focuses on most of these things. Instead, most of Burden of Dreams is mostly concerned with the Native extras and their relationship to the film. The personnel issues with this film boggle my mind. There's political issues, propaganda and forces the crew to relocate. A few extras get shot with arrows, and everyone involved risks their lives bringing the boat over the mountain.

Bringing the steamship over the mountain is the issue that makes the film blur the line between fiction and reality. Herzog's insistence - several years into this project already - that the boat must overcome a 45 degree slope is absurd (his engineer prefers they flatten it to 30 degrees; Herzog insists this would ruin the power of his film's "central metaphor."). This is even after the film crew clears some forestation and discovers that the ground is feet-deep with watery mud. Their bulldozer, a luxury the film's protagonist doesn't have, is a second-hand purchase that breaks down frequently. It requires that fuel must be flown into the forest and shipped down river, and it burns more gas because it cannot get traction on the mud.

Before seeing Burden of Dreams, I was already lukewarm on Avatar (and I still am; new perspective doesn't affect the good things about it). Its central message is that nature is to be revered, like a god or goddess. It's slammed into our heads in the following ways:

• in order for blue people to enter adulthood and fly dragons,they must create a bond
• an impassioned speech about how killing a creature in self defense is "a sad thing"
• a montage of its protagonist learning to become one with nature
  
• another impassioned speech: Sigourney Weaver about why shooting missiles at a big tree is bad
  
• another montage: people crying at a big tree that has been shot with missiles
  

So James Cameron wants you to know: nature is a beautiful thing to be revered and loved. Also, it might be a good idea to build your civilization around it.

Except Cameron's "nature," is mostly computer generated, shot in LA and New Zealand. The message rings false on the surface to anyone who's so much as had a dog growl at them, but then begins to slide into heinous idiocy when you have real-life examples of films that actually have to film in nature (the storied production of Apocalypse Now being another example). All coverage of the creation of Avatar focuses on its computer generated effects (check Wikipedia), and its resulting film is a ham-fisted screed about the wonders and beauty of plant life.

In some ways, it is an absolute wonder that technology to do this exists at all. Burden of Dreams features a scene showing the crew filming, over and again, a large group of Native Americans canoeing toward the protagonist's ship. Sometimes, one of the extras would be in a wrong position; often they had only two hours a day (golden hour!) to film this sequence. It took days. The resulting footage in the final film is astonishing, but brief compared to the time it took to get it right. Avatar's computer-generated nature is just plain easier. But "easier" doesn't require the same kinds of sacrifice as the old approach to film making.

At one point, Herzog shares his impression of the jungle (edited):

Kinski always says it's full of erotic elements. I don't see it so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity. It's just - Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn't see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and... growing and... just rotting away. Of course, there's a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they - they sing. They just screech in pain. [...] 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.

Notably in the film, this monologue is intercut with shots of the creatures around him. The death of a bird feeding the bugs, a frog breathing rhythmically on a tree, etc. It shows the true natural world, and in its way, is beautiful in its continual cycles. When he says that "[he loves] nature... but against [his] better judgement," it shows a level of self reflection impossible for a director whose greatest successes are in the realm of big-money special effects demos (which is not meant as an insult to James Cameron; his films require an entire skillset Herzog doesn't have).

The main takeaway I got from Burden of Dreams was probably unforeseeable by its subjects and creators. There was an entire era of film making that has been lost with the advent of CGI effects that look so realistic you can almost imagine they're real. I don't demand that every film's production is the equivalent of pulling a plastic spork through the palm of your hand, but there is something great to be said about the arts and entertainments that are completed despite setbacks that are seemiingly impossible. And that's also not to imply that CGI special effects work is not fraught with its own challenges (though I doubt anyone at ILM has ever been shot with a freaking arrow), and I definitely don't mean to imply that challenging on-location filming is dead (The Hurt Locker, for one). But there's a point now where a film's very production and its methods for coming into existence can clash fully with its deliberate. Or when the a focus on special effects can lead to a director completely missing the point of a film's source material (as Ebert points out in his review of The Lovely Bones). It's all a matter of hard-earned self-awareness, something Burden of Dreams illustrates fantastically.