As planned, I've taken a couple of weeks break from my Herzog immersion and been either in the pub or watching slightly more mainstream fare. The Christmas season does take over one's life whether one likes it or not, I'm afraid.
Well, I've finally had a few days to chill out in isolation and psych myself up for more German arthouse cinema so fingers crossed I can get back into the swing of talking about all this mad crazy stuff.
PRECAUTIONS AGAINST FANATICS
So, things start off with something very similar to the last session's short film Last Words, in that we get a bunch of people talking to camera and not making a great deal of sense. Here we get what seem to be young stable hands talking about providing security for a racetrack's horses. Then an insane old man begins walking into the frame to tell the young men to go away but they do their best to ignore him. This eccentric gentleman gets his own turn to talk, of course, and we learn that he's just a punter who has decided he knows all there is to know about horses just because he watches a lot of horse racing.
Or is something else going on?
As I'm coming to realise, nothing feels quite as it seems with Herzog's work. It probably is exactly as it seems, but he manages to create an unsettling atmosphere of uncertainty, which is clever.
The young stable hands don't act completely sane themselves and proceed to repeat certain things just like the subjects of Last Words did and often go off on tangents about flamingos or how their bold chests mean they're trustworthy. As the film went on (the last short in this blog series) I tried to fathom, again like Last Words, what was going on. My theory is that nobody's behind the camera. I think the director asked these people to rehearse their dialogue or simply record their personal thoughts alone, which is why the crazy old man keeps walking into frame unchallenged and addresses the camera.
There's a deep level of irony to all this when you begin to realise that the people providing security against "fanatics" (horse fanatics? I wasn't entirely sure. Perhaps zoophiles. Who knows) aren't perfectly clear of mind and stable (no pun intended) either.
But whereas Last Words was quite eerie and lightly disturbing, Precautions Against Fanatics is very funny and I'm starting to think that some of Herzog's work has since inspired a lot of modern television sketch comedy.
THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSER
What surprised me the most about The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser was that at first I assumed the mannered mise-en-scène compositions were inspired by Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon but, to give Herzog credit, he beat Mr Kubrick to it by one year. But while Herzog's camera setups and the way he positions his actors brings to mind paintings of the period in the same way that Barry Lyndon does, the cinematography isn't so stylised and lush, instead keeping to the simple lighting techniques of Aguirre, the Wrath of God.
Herzog seems to like treating his fiction work like documentaries and his documentaries like fiction. Or, possibly more accurately, he likes to make documentaries about living subjects but if they've already passed on he'll jolly well write a script and film his documentary with actors instead, thereby unintentionally creating a fictional feature.
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is no different.
Actually, even though I'm most likely exaggerating the reality of Herzog's methodology, a lot of modern documentaries are doing this, much to my chagrin.
Anyway, the film starts off with the titular Kaspar sat on a floor carpeted with hay in a bare, stone-walled cell. He's been locked-up in here all his life by his adoptive father who apparently can't afford to raise him properly. This concept was probably quite novel back in 1974 but, much to our grief and horror, this sort of thing does actually happen, only more for purposes of rape or simply for the pleasure of keeping another human being locked-up against their will.
But we only witness the last day or so of Kaspar's incarceration before a man, presumably his captor, carries him out into the wilderness. It's during these scenes in the countryside that we get our first taste of music, the delayed appearance of which is very stirring and reminded me of the similar technique used in Fata Morgana. When that music suddenly swells into our ears after a long period of relative silence it's like we're able to breathe again after being submerged underwater.
I don't know if this is a technique used consciously by Herzog and his team but, well, it certainly seemed to have that effect on me.
To cut a long story short Kaspar is released into a town and looked after and properly raised by a community unsure of the boy's background, mental state or intentions. And I use the term "boy" loosely as, even though I think Kaspar is meant to be in his teenage years, the actor Bruno Schleinstein clearly is not, which makes certain scenes (including one where he shares a bath with a child actor as though he were one himself) rather odd.
It's this initial portion of the film where Kaspar is being questioned about himself by the local authorities that reminded me a lot of Steven Spielberg's style, especially some very similar moments that are mirrored in Amistad. The way in which multiple actors are speaking at once and interrupting one another has the same pace and fearlessness of a Spielberg directed scene. You get that clash of styles: the busy interaction of stage acting combined with the precise, blocked-camera setup of a motion picture. I like this stuff, it's brave and clearly requires much rehearsal (although I can't confirm this happens in either filmmaker's work).
Kaspar goes on to become a literal sideshow freak due to his mysterious upbringing, but only so he can earn a living and contribute to the community which has taken him in. This circus subplot is fortunately limited to only one scene, so the whole film avoids descending into a hellish Elephant Man-esque meditation on exploitation.
The main focus of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is, instead, this fresh, unprejudiced mind clashing with a society stifled and regimented with rules and beliefs. Kaspar constantly comes up against opposition as his uncluttered mind sees and understands things in a way that his "peers" do not. They disagree, but Kaspar has little interest in winning them over or being accepted. He is who he is and things are what they are. You can label him and the world around him but you can't change what he and they are.
That's where the film becomes a beautiful tragedy. Bad things do happen to Kaspar but his real sadness doesn't come from physical pain or strife, instead it comes from the utter emptiness and meaningless of life beyond his cell. He describes dreams where the people of the world are walking up a steep hill in thick fog with Death waiting for them at the top; and a tribe of native people being led through the Sahara Desert by a blind man. Kaspar is painfully aware that, even with all the things in life we find to distract ourselves or pass the time or control each other with, we are all simply waiting to die.
Which he does, seemingly to his great relief.
THE GREAT ECSTASY OF WOODCARVER STEINER
Which leads me nicely into the documentary of the evening, which follows the experiences of a young ski jumper (apparently what he does is "ski flying" but to avoid confusion I'll refer to it as jumping) who seems constantly to be seeing through time to his own certain death from the sport he chooses to make a living out of. Actually he doesn't die prematurely, in fact I think he's still alive as of 2014, but that doesn't stop the boy's morbid fatalism from becoming the central theme of the piece.
The mindset of a sportsperson is clearly very fascinating to Herzog, who enthusiastically interviews Walter Steiner after each jump he and his crew film. He wants to hear and understand Steiner's thoughts and feelings as they come to him, which he gets the very bare bones of as, in my opinion, sportspeople don't think very much while they're on the job, which is why I find sport punditry quite baffling. The whole point of sport is to be in the moment, to remove thought from a process and to rely on instinct and body reflexes. Things happen so fast in sport that there really is no time to make a logical, rational decision about anything - which is why a person trains for a sport rather than just reading a book and running out onto the pitch (or, in this case, inrun). But many people, including Herzog, will insist the contrary and find those who lead a life of physicality interesting. I don't, so my interest here is not so much in Steiner's motivations but in Herzog's.
Steiner seems modest and innocent, quiet and sombre, tortured and unsure, but when you see the crowds cheering below him as he flies through the air, or the attractive young women swooning near him in the background of certain shots, the fans asking for autographs and, rather ironically, film crews following him around you realise that, beyond all his personal soul-searching, doubting and threatening to quit, maybe Walter likes the attention and adulation he receives and that's why he keeps doing it.
His motivations are perhaps just as undiagnosed as those of the people watching him. Why do people flock in their hundreds and thousands to watch sporting events? The reason is: expectation. I get the feeling that even though some spectators say they admire the skill and technique of a sport, which is fine, I believe that it's mostly about the expectation of something happening and not the event itself. Will the person they support win? Will they lose? Will there be an accident? Will there be disagreements with the judge, umpire or referee? Will money be won (by both player and pundit)? Will records be broken? Will careers be ended? Will careers be started? All these questions are answered eventually, often within seconds, and the ultimate point of all this expectation is clear after the furore of the event is over and everyone has gone home.
There is none.
NEXT UP: STROSZEK
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