Mountains, war, vocation: three by Herzog

Central to the ongoing thematic concerns of Werner Herzog’s cinema is the question of vocation, of what activities, often wildly ambitious, seemingly pathological or downright peculiar, call out to certain, often-eccentric individuals, giving their lives a sense of almost divinely inspired purpose. It’s one of the things that allows the not un-eccentric Herzog to connect to so many subjects he might otherwise feel unable to relate with, from the tyrannical conquistador in Aguirre: Wrath of God (1972) to the delusional would-be bear savior Timothy Treadwell in Grizzly Man (05).

Legendary mountain climber Reinhold Messner—whose ‘My Quest for the Yeti,’ much to my friends’ amusement, occupies a permanent spot on my bookshelf—is surely not a guy Herzog would find completely simpatico, given the filmmaker’s outspoken aversion to all things New Age. But Messner possesses at least one characteristic with which Herzog’s in complete alignment: a fierce impulse to test both the limits of human endurance and the benevolence of nature. And it surely scores points in Messner’s favour that he openly acknowledges the loopiness of his pursuit, calling the desire to climb mountains a “degeneration” of the human psyche.

Herzog’s ‘The Dark Glow of the Mountains’ (85) profiles Messner before and after he and Hans Kammerlander’s unprecedented excursion over a pair of 8000-metre high Himalayan peaks. The strength of Messner’s resolve is beyond doubt—he confesses that he has only four toes left, the remainder presumably lost to frostbite. He continues to climb even after the death of his brother on a previous ascent. Herzog clearly reveres Messner’s obsessiveness, something Messner refers to as a form of creativity. Yet one of the most fascinating moments in the film comes when Herzog questions Messner about what else he could imagine doing with his life besides climbing. Messner confesses that he’s love to walk, without itinerary, “until the world stops.” Herzog, off-camera, admits to maintaining precisely the same fantasy: “I like the idea of just disappearing, walking away, turning down the path and carrying on until there is no path to follow. I would like to have huskies with leather saddle bags and just walk and walk until there is no road left.”

This desire to slip away into the infinite is beautifully mirrored by the camerawork: the tracing of majestic peaks in the upward gaze of a pilgrim, circling a full 360º as if to announce full enclosure in this forbidding environment; the tracing of a narrow, equally jagged crevasse with its rushing waters frothing far below; the static image of Messner and Kammerlander slowly vanishing into a field of rock and snow. Not that every scene in ‘The Dark Glow’ is composed solely of reverie and awe. There’s a sublimely comic interlude where Messner gets this unusually expressive massage from one of his porters, a little guy wearing giant mirror aviator shades, who dances his hands all over Messner’s head while Messner goes on about something I couldn’t concentrate on for doubling-over in laughter.

‘The Dark Glow’ can be found on New Yorker’s Herzog Shorts Vol. 2, a nice collection of relatively obscure works, and a package for which I have only one, albeit sizable, complaint. ‘The Dark Glow’ has no subtitles! Instead it offers supremely lame English-language dubbing over of both the narration and Messner and Kammerlander’s comments. Anyone familiar with Herzog’s distinctive oratorical style will surely be distracted by this, though if for some reason the original German soundtrack was unavailable I guess I’m just grateful to be able to see the film at all, as well as the other two others featured here.

‘Ballad of the Little Soldier’ (84) begins with the image of a child in a jungle singing merrily along to ‘La Niña de la mochila azul,’ a Mexican ranchera playing on a portable cassette player. He’s also wielding what if I’m not mistaken is an AK-47. Co-directed with Denis Reichle, who was himself a soldier in the German national militia at the age of 14, this investigation into the proliferation of Miskito child resistance fighters in Nicaragua seems at first blush the most didactic work in Herzog’s oeuvre.

But while Herzog’s sober voice-over strives to educate viewers on the plight of the Miskitos, who allegedly suffered tremendous losses at the hands of Sandinistas, leaving countless children without parents and hungry for justice, ‘Ballad’ clearly divorces itself from any polemical arguments for or against the Sandinista cause. It’s a truly heart-rending, nerve-wracking film—with Herzog himself apparently filming under fire—that, like Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (64), reveals just how disturbingly devoted children in warfare can be. Robbed of family, familiar with death yet regarding their future as something altogether abstract, they lack the sort of fear that can paralyze adults in certain decisive moments.

The final short on the disc is ‘Precautions Against Fanatics’ (69), a wonderfully bizarre, 11-minute film sculpted like an avant-garde poem. There is a man—perhaps a precursor to Treadwell—who’s appointed himself a guardian of racehorses. He demonstrates his capabilities by karate chopping pieces of wood. There is another man, older, moustahced, with one arm tucked inside his clothing, who says only he understands the horses and demands that the first man should go away. Which of these is the real guardian of the horses is a genuine mystery, though I must say I never sensed the horses were in any grave danger.

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: a masterful, hallucinatory pageant brimming with sensuality, colour, natural beauty, mustaches

Great myths and folktales endure not on account of their universality—which is beyond question—but on the capacity of our finest storytellers to render them vividly, to renovate them according to changing modes of expression, to bring a personal voice to them, and endow them anew with vivacity. Such stories speak of the business of living in terms that transcend the limits of reason, thus, in 1964’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Tini zabutykh predkiv), when one man is suddenly driven to slay another, when a tormented, lonesome lover allows himself to be carried writhing down rapids on a spindly raft of lumber, or when that same lover, now physically wounded, scavenges the forest at night hoping to be enveloped by death as a means to finding himself once again in his lover’s embrace, the events feel like the opposite of mere artifice. They resonate as more truthful than what we generally refer to as realism.

But then Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors—the artistic breakthrough of Sergei Parajanov, a Georgian born to Armenian parents who had the decidedly mixed fortune to find himself forging a career within the Soviet film industry—has its finger on the pulse of myth like few other films. The slaying of the man is followed by an enigmatic flash of red horse silhouettes; the lover on the raft captured in a long, unbroken, rapturous camera sweep (which can't help but look forward to numerous like images from Werner Herzog); the search in the forest constructed from close-ups of faces seemingly floating through a web of trees, cheeks brushed by branches with near-palpable sensuality. The tirelessly adventurous camerawork, care of the great Yuri Ilyenko, a writer/director in his own right, is somehow at once delirious and precise, full of low, creeping angles where foliage brushes the lens and breaks up the frame; of careening flights through the collective rituals of Carpathian village life; of scenes that at times resemble some hallucinatory staged anthropological documentary. More than four decades after the fact Shadows still feels vibrantly exotic, a thing set apart, its particular poetry uncorrupted by the rest of the world’s culture of movies.

Shadows, set in the early 19th century, is based on the book by Ukrainian writer Mikhaylo Koysyubinskiy and functions as a carefully detailed window into the daily life of the Hutsuls, the highland people who for centuries have inhabited the Ukraine, as well as the northern extremity of Romania. The film is a sumptuous pageant of traditional costumes, religious rites and iconography, strange, powerful music made with impossibly long trumpets, and a dazzling array of elaborately groomed moustaches. At its narrative centre is an ebullient variation on Romeo and Juliet: Ivan (the deeply haunted Ivan Mikolajchuk) and Marichka (Larisa Kadochnikova) grow from a childhood characterized by bloodshed and blissful interaction with nature to an adulthood characterized by harsh weather, hard work, adultery, sorcery, drunkenness and betrayal, all the time concealing a forbidden love that slowly plunges into morbid obsession, though finally proving itself to be even stronger than mortal life.

The man at the helm of all this was reaching the height of his talents and would subsequently feel the wrath of governmental forces bent of punishing such vision as unacceptably decadent. While still young, Parajanov showed great affinity with music and painting, and both mediums heavily inform the sensibility at work in Shadows, which possesses a compelling, lyrical fluidity broken by flutters of striking frozen images, as well as a richness of colour and is heightened by the movement of elements and animals. This dialogue with other mediums is but one of numerous cinematographic ingredients unmistakably mirrored in the contemporaneous films of Andrei Tarkovsky, especially 1962’s Ivan’s Childhood, and it comes as no surprise to discover that Parajanov and Tarkovsky were great, mutually admiring friends who shared similar difficulties with Soviet censorship and even died of the same disease. Like Ivan’s Childhood, Shadows fixates engagingly on horses, water and trees, and its soundtrack seems always to return to a motif of voices calling out names into vast landscapes. Unlike that of Tarkovsky however, Parajanov’s approach is gifted with a willful, buoyant naïveté and effervescent sense of freedom, moving effortlessly between broad symbolism and an uninhibited, textured emotionality.

Though it deals in symbols and mysticism, it needs to be emphasized that Shadows is grounded in feelings and experiences of tremendous immediacy. In the end, Ivan’s story is simply that of a man who even after settling into a potentially happy, normal life with a sexy, loving wife, can’t quite shake off the grips of the one that got away. It’s what distinguishes a film like Shadows from ones we think of as fairy tale flicks, delighting viewers with its folkloric spectacle and archetypical imagery while penetrating those murkier, very adult feelings locked up inside us. Parajanov wasn’t able to make many films during his life, but the legacy of Shadows and its follow-up The Colour of Pomegranates are alone enough to cement his place among the most important filmmakers of cinema’s first century.

Ivan's Childhood: the special pleasure of genius not yet fully formed

Though sometimes underappreciated by the director’s admirers as a less mature work, one predating his soon-to-be realized aspirations toward a very particular formal and philosophical rigour, Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1962 film Ivan’s Childhood deserves to be seen and re-seen for perhaps these very same reasons. A film about the corruption of innocence, it is in fact characterized by the endearing innocence of its approach, one expressing a budding director’s youthful enthusiasm for staging images of simple (if enigmatic) lyrical beauty that contrast the story’s underpinning theme of the tragic toll of war on man and nature. Tarkovsky would go on to make films far more ambitious, audacious and personal than Ivan’s Childhood, but none of them that possess quite the same affecting charm.

Since this was Tarkovsky’s first film after leaving film school, and since the project didn’t originate with Tarkovsky (he inherited it from another director who’d been ushered off the film, while the script was an adaptation of Vladimir Bogomolov’s novel) Ivan’s Childhood can be seen as a sort of bridge linking Tarkovsky’s apprenticeship within the approved vocabulary and ideology of the “thawed” but still restrictive post-Stalin Soviet film industry to the deeply idiosyncratic, unabashedly complex and poetic body of work that would come to distinguish Tarkovsky as one of the world’s most distinctive, dazzling and, for some, frustrating filmmakers. Watching it today in Criterion’s lovingly packaged and supplemented new DVD release, we can see the film as a beguiling and fascinating artifact of a certain moment in history.

However, the moment in which Ivan’s Childhood is set takes us back more than a decade and a half before the film’s year of release. Its titular character (played with striking polarities of unadulterated awe and rugged, preternatural confidence by Nikolai Burlyaev) is a 12-year-old scout working for the Soviet military during the closing chapters of World War II. Ivan’s family has been murdered by Nazis, violently hurling him into a world of adult grotesqueries to which he has adapted all too well. He used to talk in his sleep, he tells a grown-up comrade, but now he lacks rest, and is nervous all the time. He’s made strong alliances with Russian field commanders and is considered a valuable asset. He’s threatened at certain points with being transferred to a military school and angrily protests the idea, saying he’s more useful at the front. His superiors must agree, since Ivan’s childhood will continue to be spent on the peripheries of combat, and will in fact never progress to manhood proper.


For those familiar with the imagery of his subsequent work, Tarkovsky’s most obvious contributions to the story of Ivan’s Childhood are the film’s multiple dream/memory sequences: the beatific mother walking along the beach, the cart spilling apples which are muzzled and chewed by dewy horses, the rustling of leaves as they brush past Ivan’s naked skin and the otherwise absent sunlight and clean water. With these digressions, Tarkovsky takes a technique so basic to storytelling and brings it to an impressive level of multiple meanings and cinematic textures. Yet really, the bleak realistic scenes in the film are equally evocative and lulling in their frequently vertical imagery: the flares that fall like stars, the dangling nooses, the tall, spectral birch trees, the crashed plane and a memorable kiss shared over a trench that gradually doubles in our imagination as an abyss.

It should also be said that it’s here in Tarkovsky’s feature debut that his influences are presented most nakedly. He produces interesting variations on the stylistic flights found in previous Russian war films, such as The Cranes Are Flying, certain deeper compositions echo those of Orson Welles and Ingmar Bergman, and the film’s scenes of hushed, crouched movement in dark water pleasingly recall Ugetsu, the most famous work by Kenji Mizoguchi, one of Tarkovsky’s few confessed idols. Rather than make Ivan’s Childhood feel derivative, these references function as a sort of starting point for Tarkovsky’s directorial journey.

Criterion’s package includes an illuminating half-hour commentary by Tarkovsky scholar Vida T. Johnson, who co-authored the terrific book The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue, placing special emphasis on Tarkovsky’s use of other art forms such as music, literature and painting in the development of his style and content. There are also interviews with cinematographer Vadim Yusov and the now middle-aged Burlyaev, who tells a great little story about Tarkovsky’s osmosis-like way of instructing his actors. As well, a handsome booklet includes a poem by Tarkovsky’s dad and essays by Tarkovsky and Dina Iordanova.