werner herzog's invisible line

Matt Migliorini ©2011

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Matt Migliorini

Werner Herzog’s Invisible Line:

The Fiction Non-Fiction Boundary

Abstract

The intention of this study is to investigate why a distinction between fact and fiction is difficult to identify in many of, if not all, the films Werner Herzog has made throughout his career. It will argue that Herzog deliberately produces a particular distortion between fiction and non-fiction, and that this is a key component in his quest to produce a more adequate grammar of images.

The dissertation will examine the line that divides fiction and non-fiction through the four chapters: Herzogʼs Grizzly Film-Maker, Dieter and Dieter, The Wild Truth Yonder and Cave of Forgotten Boundaries: Positioning the Sublime. The first chapter will argue that Herzog does make documentaries, offering considerations of authorship and character. The second will contrast two films telling the same story, one a documentary and the other its Hollywood dramatization; exploring their differences and similarities and how the director distorts the truth in both films. Chapter three will discuss the notion of the hybrid film and how performance contributes towards Herzogʼs blurring of the boundaries between reality and fantasy. The final chapter will discuss ideas of the sublime and the manner in which Herzog aims to produce it within his films.

The dissertation will then conclude that it is the a pursuit of the sublime, and a desire for audiences to register his films as sublime, that causes an identification of fiction and non-fiction to become so noticeably problematic.


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Table of Contents

Introduction...

4

Herzogʼs Grizzly Film-Maker (chapter one)...

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Dieter and Dieter (chapter two)...

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The Wild Truth Yonder (chapter three)...

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Cave of Forgotten Boundaries: Positioning the Sublime (chapter four)...

22

Conclusion...

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Bibliography...

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Filmography...

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Appendix...

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Introduction

This dissertation aims to examine the relationship between fiction and non-fiction in a select number of films that have been directed by Werner Herzog over the last fifteen years. The key focus of this undertaking is to identify why the boundary between fiction and non-fiction in his work is so noticeably blurred. Film critic James Bell has made the assertion of Herzogʼs work that, ʻA separation of fact and fiction misses the pointʼ (2009: 28). If, as Bell attests, a separation of these two elements is to miss the point of Herzogʼs work, what then is the function and place of fiction in his documentaries that should arguably contain far more ʻfactʼ than his overtly fictional films?

Brad Prager has noted Herzogʼs own identification of this blurring, highlighting that ʻIn the interview Exploring with Werner, on the DVD of The Wild Blue Yonder (2005), Herzog tells Norman Hill that he does not make documentaries, even though some of his films come quite close; “Itʼs all just movies” he saysʼ (2007: 8). Here Herzogʼs purporting that some of his films come quite close to being documentaries demonstrates that he does acknowledge the existence of the form and that further to this, none of his films are part it, but are just ʻmoviesʼ. What does this mean then when so many of his films can be and clearly have been branded as documentaries?

This project will argue that a number of his films are documentaries, especially when following Griersonʼs famous definition that documentary is simply the creative use of actuality on film (see Cousins and Macdonald 1996: 97). However, Herzogʼs creative use of actuality can also be seen to extend to his feature filmmaking practises, one of the most notable examples of this being his moving a steamboat over a mountain during the filming of Fitzcarraldo (1982). After all, does not all cinema inevitably make use of actuality? All films are created from material components of the physical world, even those that do not film the material world, but use CGI (computer generated imagery) and green-screening are still produced by material technologies. So what then is the creative use of actuality, if not the intersecting of fiction and non-fiction elements? In answering this question it appears that this relationship does not just concern the fiction in the factual based film, but also the fact in the fiction based film.

In his consideration of big budget Hollywood films based on real events such as Titanic (Cameron 1997) and Pearl Harbour (Bay 2001), and the relationship they bear to the documentary mode, Keith Beattie has highlighted that, ʻDepending on what interpreters are read, the meeting of fact and fiction results in either the subversion of documentary claims to authenticity and veracity, or, innovative and productive approaches to documentary representationʼ (2004 :146). Although both films mentioned above can be thought of more as costume dramas than films dealing with documentary representations, they both, like many of Herzogʼs films, are deeply connected to historical facts that they have to deal with. Considering this statement by Beattie, the primary focus of this


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dissertation is to critically analyse the potency of this relationship between fiction and non-fiction in Herzogʼs work; seeking to identify whether the directorʼs disregard that any of his films are documentaries is problematic in receiving them as being rooted in reality. In addition, it will also attempt to underpin an appropriate way in which we might understand why the blurring exists, and furthermore, offer a consideration of the effect it has upon Herzogʼs films and their positioning of the viewer.

In dealing with this, this project will aim to identify the similarities and differences between his fiction and non-fiction films by investigating how both modes of filmmaking work, and considering the extent that they can be thought of as being the same mode of filmmaking, that Herzog would have us believe they are. The six films selected for discussion have been carefully selected so that the ideas and concepts discussed herein can be easily applied to many of, if not all of the directorʼs other films.

The six films will be dealt with over four chapters, with each chapter maintaining a specific focus. All chapters will give some consideration to the nature of Herzogʼs protagonist(s) - fictional or otherwise. Chapter One will examine Herogʼs 2005 film Grizzly Man, a documentary that explores the life and death of Timothy Treadwell. This chapter will discuss Herzogʼs role as director of a non-fiction film comprised largely from Treadwellʼs own footage and will pose questions of authorship around its reading of Grizzly Man as a documentary that contains many examples of fictionalisation.

Chapter Two will investigate Herzogʼs claim that he does not make documentary films, only stories, by considering the relationship between Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1998) and Rescue Dawn (2006). Aiming to unearth the meaning to be derived from the latter being a Hollywood account of the story told in the former - a documentary.

Chapter Three will consider what part fact plays in The Wild Blue Yonder, a film in which Herzog employs the use of NASA footage to construct a ʻscience fiction fantasyʼ. The chapter will then contrast the construction of truth in this film with one of Herzogʼs most recent straight pieces of fiction, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009).

The final chapter will deal with Herzogʼs recurring fascination with sublimity, drawing upon theories of the sublime formulated by philosophers Emmanuel Kant and Edward Burke, and relating them to Herzogʼs latest film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), as well as applying some of its own theories back to Grizzly Man.

Firstly it is important to give some context to Herzog as a director. Herzog first emerges as part of The New German Cinema in the early 1960s alongside other notable film-makers including Wim Wenders and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Since their outset, both Herzogʼs features and documentaries, of which there are currently over sixty, have been concerned with subjects that are


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either, subjected themselves to impossible dreams that appear at odds with reality, or are present in situations far beyond that of typical human experience. This project will argue that this cast of Herzogʼs - typified in the six films selected - contributes greatly to the blurring of the fiction non-fiction boundary, exhibited throughout his filmography.

Secondly, it is necessary to understand Herzogʼs own stance on the documentary form, the most revealing evidence of which Prager has drawn out from Herzogʼs interviews with Paul Cronin, ʻHerzog says that to convey ʻfactsʼ in his films . . . would be the same as looking at a poem by Holderlin about a storm in the alps and proclaiming, “Ah, here we have a weather report back in 1802”ʼ (2007: 6). Considering the attitude Herzog has towards documentary, that to simply convey facts, is almost, if not entirely, to miss the real truth, is key to understanding whether Herzog truly is a great innovator of the documentary, or conversely, whether his freely crossing the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, may be insidious to documentaryʼs primary agenda of representing reality.


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Herzog's Grizzly Film-Maker

The intention of this chapter is to determine the extent to which Grizzly Man can be thought of as a Herzog film, when considering him as an auteur, and the extent to which any distortion between fact and fiction in the film, may trouble this notion . With a career consisting of sixty plus films that share striking similarities both stylistically and thematically, coupled with undeniable levels of personal investment, Herzog is undoubtedly an auteur in the traditional sense as first theorised in the 1950s and early ̒ 60s (see Andrew Sarris 1962). Grizzly Man, however, is perhaps the one film in Herzogʼs filmography that may contain the most evidence to refute such a claim. The main reason for this being that the film is composed around, and largely consists of, footage produced by another film-maker, a factor that instantly brings issues of authorship into question as the film can be thought of as a hybrid made between the two directors: Treadwell and Herzog.

Additionally, Grizzly Man is also a documentary, and documentary itself holds many problems for auteur theory. For instance, how can one author non-fiction events in a distinctive manner without first partially, or entirely as the case may be, rendering the film to some extent into a work of fiction? Is it possible that within the context of auteur theory, there can either be no auteur or no mode of filmmaking branded as documentary, when that branding stands as a signifier for a framework geared towards the denotation of truth and authenticity? This dissertation argues that it is possible for a director to author non-fiction events without distorting their claim to truth, if that director is a part of the formation of the events themselves. For Instance, the films of Nicholas Broomfield, and in some cases, those of Michael Moore, see the directors creating the events of their films through investigative journalism. By comparison, Herzog, even when he does create events, does so with less naturalism than the two aforementioned film-makers because he purposefully manipulates imagery to produce a different kind of truth that will be returned to later.

Treadwellʼs footage that contributes a largely to Grizzly Man was shot in the wild among grizzly bears that he thought himself to be protecting. The film opens with Treadwell addressing the audience and explaining his role as friend to the bears and declares himself a kind warrior in possession of specialist skills that allow him to live among them. During this scene, a caption appears telling us of his death in 2003, and it is soon revealed that he and his girlfriend were killed by a bear. Alongside more of Treadwellʼs own footage, the rest of the film takes the form of a series of interviews conducted by Herzog. Although the film contains footage from both film-makers, ultimately this is Herzogʼs film; Treadwell is both Herzogʼs subject and, to a significant extent, subject to himself. However, some moments in the film appear to us as untouched by Herzogʼs directorial role, and it is for this reason that the question of authorship is particularly problematic.


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The meeting of fact and fiction in Grizzly Man is not primarily constructed by Herzog to the same extent that it is in every other film to be examined in this dissertation. Instead it issues from Treadwell himself and is further obscured by Herzogʼs treatment of him and his story. Treadwell constructs a persona that Herzog describes as ʻTreadwellʼs action-man modeʼ, differing from the Treadwell we see in other sections of the film. Through his manipulations and omissions, Herzog crafts a film that contains a clearly defined narrative with a protagonist whom undergoes a process of characterisation akin to a number of characters from his other films, both real and fictional.

In one scene, Treadwell becomes enraged, and Herzog describes his having witnessed this kind of madness on a film-set before. This remark made by Herzog can be interpreted in two or three ways. The first is that the behaviour exhibited by Treadwell here is like that of an actor having a tantrum on-set, as can be seen in Herzogʼs My best Fiend (1999) in which Klaus Kinski shouts like a madman on set of Fitzcorraldo. If this is the case then Herzog is implying that here, Treadwell is a man and has departed from his character. The second reading that can be made is that Treadwell is behaving in a manner similar to a number of his characters that also display this kind of behaviour. Consequently, Herzog renders Treadwell as being, not the actor departing from his character, but rather the actor acting his part in a Herzog film. A third interpretation is that, like Kinski, Treadwell is inescapably Herzogʼs subject regardless of whether heʼs in character or not. Treadwell is in fact none of these; he is not even on a film-set that Herzog likens him being on. Instead, Treadwell is merely a man venting his anger in front of his own private camera. It is the tension exhibited in this moment however, the tension between Treadwell the man, and Treadwell the Herzog subject that allows Herzog to create a blurring between reality and fiction (or perhaps more appropriately between the fictional-reality of a previous experience held Herzog, and this one). As Thomas Austin has noted,

Throughout the film, Treadwellʼs mode of self-presentation oscillates between the confessional and intimate style of a video diarist and the more obviously performative register of a would-be television presenter, asserting his familiarity with the animals and his own endangermentʼ (Austin 2008: 52).

While, as Austin highlights, many of Treadwellʼs addresses to the camera are delivered in a performative manner, the moment discussed above clearly falls into his former category of the intimate video diarist. It is hard to imagine that the footage we see in this moment was intended for use in one of Treadwellʼs media projects. Instead, its filming more likely functioned simply to provide a frustrated Treadwell with a point of catharsis. It is the authoritative power of Herzogʼs voice and his privileged position in directing a kind of cinematic ghost - the image of Treadwell (see Jeong and Andrew 2008) - that allows him to alter the scene into one so befitting an addition to his filmography.

This scene perfectly highlights the unbalanced nature of the dual authorship between the two film-makers. Here when Treadwell is expressing his anger,


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Herzogʼs voice is overlaid and takes precedence; the volume of Treadwellʼs voice is reduced and cannot be heard above Herzogʼs voice-over, and it is this that literally removes the capacity for us to focus upon Treadwellʼs speech. Throughout Grizzly Man, Herzog provides a commentary of Treadwell and his story through voice-over. This kind of off-screen sound has been considered in great depth by Michel Chion in his discussion of the voice in cinema, in which he deliberates, ʻWhen the acousmatic presence is a voice . . . we get a special kind of talking and acting shadow which we attach the name acousmêtreʼ (1999: 21). The acousmatic presence mentioned is a sound issued from an unseen source. The voice of Herzog in Grizzly Man and in many of his other films can therefore be branded as a kind of acousmêtre; while certainly not a traditional acousmêtre, as many audiences members will know that it is the voice of the director, he is still exploiting the authoritative powers it attributes.

Chion summates, ʻThe acousmêtre is all seeing, its word is like the word of God: “No creature can hide from it”ʼ (1999: 24). Indeed, here even the diseased Treadwell cannot hide or relinquish Herzogʼs acousmatic presence. Further to the privileged position Herzog situates himself in over Treadwell through his being the true director, it is arguable here that we process Herzogʼs descriptions and project them onto our understanding of Treadwell due to the authority that Chion informs us is held by the acousmêtre. Therefore it is also arguable, that, although Herzogʼs voice-over maybe his factual opinion, he is to an extent fictionalising our interpretation of Treadwell. If not fictionalising, he is at the very least altering our understanding of a reality filmed by Treadwell, by masking the pure form and state of his footage.

However, as stated above, the key constituent of fictionalisation in the film can be seen to be the self-imposed duality constructed by Treadwell himself. The filmʼs opening in which he declares himself a kind warrior, is clearly the act of a man attempting to create a mythic version of himself. However, this myth also becomes factual; Treadwell really did create this version of himself and this duality was a part of his reality. To what extent then is his own fictionalisation actually fictional? In asking this a second question arises of, how does this false identity constructed by Treadwell in Grizzly Man feed into the rest of Herzogʼs body work and possibly offer an example of Herzogʼs distorting the line between fiction and reality?

In answer to the first question, the kind warrior persona/the action-man mode Treadwell branded himself with is fictional to a great extent according to evidence provided by Herzog in the film. For instance, the film details the absence of poachers Treadwell adamantly insisted were a prevailing danger to the bears. In answer to the second question, Treadwell is in many ways the prototypical Herzog protagonist in that, like many of his characters, Treadwell holds many affinities with the director himself. Austin notes how,


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Much like Treadwell, Herzog repeatedly presents himself in the role of male adventurer. For instance, in addition to filming in remote locations and extreme conditions, from the Amazon to the Sahara, he has performed a number of feats of endurance and risk-taking which (whether or not intended as such) are readable as acts of self-dramatization (2008: 55).

Alongside his own similar self-dramatisation, Herzog has always constructed or chosen characters that too exhibit a kind of duality that makes them viewable as more than just men (for the vast majority of his subjects are men). Considering this element that runs writhe throughout Herzogʼs work and is prominent in Grizzly Man, it is important to note Herzogʼs own approach to truth and authenticity in his films. On the one hand, as stated in this dissertationʼs introduction, Herzog denies he makes documentaries. However, he is undeniably fascinated with the incorporation of the real into both his fictional and non-fictional films (see Brad Prager 2007: 10). The tension between reality and its recorded representation that appears so close to life but is never actually real, has arguably been the cornerstone of audiencesʼ fascination with cinema since its advent, and Herzogʼs blurring of the fiction-reality boundary plays strongly on this fascination. Roger Scruton has argued,

It is only because of their absolute life-likeness - their absolute truth to the ways things appear - that these [cinematic] images exert their fascination . . . Before the imagination can arrive at its truth, it must pass through the world of fictionʼ (Cited in Murray Smith 2005: 579).

The world of fiction Scruton mentions can be interpreted as the fiction of the false reality that any cinematic image produces. This dissertation argues that it is Herzogʼs upping the anti, as it were, in making this tension between the real and its always somehow fictional re-presentation noticeable, that plays the greatest role in the directorʼs pursuit for delivering new images that Prager has drawn attention to,

. . . in the film, Werner Herzog Eats his Shoe . . . Herzog issues a warning, ʻOur civilisation doesnʼt have adequate images, and I think a civilisation is doomed or is going to die out like the dinosaurs if it does not develop an adequate language of adequate images. . . . and thatʼs what Iʼm working on - a new grammar of images (2007: 10)

From this statement, the question arises, has Herzog achieved a new grammar of images unique to his films? While this is a challenging question to answer, partially due to the fact that a concrete answer probably does not exist, it is arguable that if Herzog has not created an entirely new grammar of images, then he has at least produced unique work that inspires awe. Awe and the sublime being two of the most distinctive components to run through Herzogʼs filmography, must be viewed as integral to his efforts here.


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It requires little to convince one that Treadwell is an awe-inspiring subject, whose relation to a particular part of the world, was, and through Grizzly Man is, beyond the experience of the typical viewer. Importantly it is because Treadwell was a real man that awe may be felt by Herzogʼs audience. Although awe may be felt by audiences confronted by fictional films, here wonder and fascination might not exist had Treadwell been an entirely written character. In the film the reality of his extraordinary life is marked by his death, and in particular the scene in which Herzog listens to the sound recording of Treadwellʼs death that will be returned to in the final chapter.

David Bordwell has asserted that the positioning of a climax that is a non-fictional death in a film produces a particular affect on its audience (paraphrased from Austin citing Bordwell 2008: 56). In Grizzly Man this impact is awe that the man we see throughout the film, actually lived and died among bears. Herzogʼs subject in the next chapter also evokes awe due to his actual near death experiences.


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Dieter and Dieter

This chapter will examine the two films, Little Dieter Needs to Fly (Little Dieter) and Rescue Dawn, the former being a documentary in which Herzog explores the experience Dieter Dangler had escaping from the Vietcong during the Vietnam War and his subsequent, remarkable journey through the jungle. Rescue Dawn is Herzogʼs dramatisation of Dieterʼs story made in conjunction with Pathé and Twentith Century Fox, in other words, a Hollywood-made account of the same story. The aim of this chapter is to inspect the credibility of Herzogʼs claim that he does not make documentary films, by comparing the key differences and similarities between these two films. During this comparison it will also give strong consideration to Herzogʼs statement that,

. . . for me, the boundary between fiction and ʻdocumentaryʼ simply does not exist; they are all just films. Both take ʻfactsʼ characters, stories and play with them in the same kind of way. I actually consider Fitzcarraldo my best ʻdocumentaryʼ (Cronin 2002: 240)

If the statement above is to be believed, why then has Herzog chosen to make a dramatisation of Little Dieter with Rescue Dawn? This dissertation argues that although both films employ the same ʻfacts, characters and storiesʼ Herzog does not ʻplayʼ with them in the same kind of way. Instead one lends itself strongly to the documentary mode and the other firmly situates itself within the practices of classical narrative storytelling. This said, just as it is possible to think of Fitzcarraldo as a documentary, it is also possible to configure Rescue Dawn as being, in some ways, more a documentary than Little Dieter, a point that will be returned to later.

Little Dieter both starts and finishes with scenes designed by Herzog. The film opens with the real Dieter entering a tattoo parlour under the pretence that he is considering getting a tattoo of death. Of this scene Prager has said, ʻDieter does not get the tattoo, and Herzog admits to Cronin that Dieter never considered getting the tattoo, it was all part of the filmʼs stylisationʼ (Pager 2007: 154). Similarly the film closes with a scene orchestrated by Herzog in which Dieter proclaims his love of airplanes whilst walking through a field that is covered with them. In the film, Dieter tells the camera that it was his idea to bring us here, however in his interviews with Cronin, Herzog declares that, ʻIt was my idea to have him look around at all the planes and exclaim what a haven for pilots this isʼ (Cronin 2002: 266). What then can we make of Dieter as a subject, if he is so willing to have the telling of his story directed and even dictated? On a basic level, just like Treadwell, Dieter is inescapably a character distorted by Herzogʼs filmmaking.

Despite its many points of stylisation, this dissertation argues that Little Dieter is still a documentary film. It contains interviews, stock footage, stills and recreations; all longstanding documentary techniques. Along with his


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constructed scenes, where the film blends facts with fiction is in Herzogʼs hyperbole, of which Prager has pronounced that,

Our understanding of the subjectʼs inner life is complemented if not thoroughly framed by what Herzog tells us about him. He makes observations such as: ʻ[Dieter] seems to be normal, but he is not.ʼ . . . Much of the portrayal of his post-traumatic stress comes to us by way of Herzogʼs own hyperbole (Pager 2007: 155).

The exaggerated and, at times, highly questionable and ambiguous statements Herzog makes about his subjects, are one of the key techniques he employs in blurring the boundary between fiction and reality. It is the absence of Herzogʼs literal voice and other documentary techniques therefore that, by comparison, most render Rescue Dawn as a feature film. In Rescue Dawn, Herzog cannot and does not overlay his interpretations of Dieter. Arguably however, the filmʼs integrity and treatment of the authenticity of Dieterʼs story suffers from what maybe a greater threat, one in which every single shot, every line of dialogue has been created by Herzog, who claims that fact and fiction to him are invisible.

Rescue Dawn sees Herzog directing Hollywood actor, Christian Bale, as Dieter. In the film we follow Dieter from his mission briefing, to his being shot down, through the rest of his ordeal of imprisonment and escape through the jungle. Another fundamental difference between the story in Rescue Dawn and Little Dieter, is that Rescue Dawn focuses exclusively on the telling of events in the present tense. Little Dieter however contains numerous historical details that provide a context to Dieterʼs story, both before he was shot down and up to the making of the film over twenty years later. If Herzog does not see the line between fact and fiction, then he at least sees the difference between a type of documentary mode and that of classical narrative storytelling.

Rescue Dawn at one hundred and one minutes long, is a story beyond filmic documentation in the true presence of real-life events. The only way to make such a film would have been to capture it as it happened, an undertaking that given the nature of the environment and unknowable circumstances would have been impossible. What Little Dieter does that Rescue Dawn cannot, is to use the documentary format to tell a complex story economically via the subjects ability to simply tell it to the camera directly. At seventy minutes long, Little Dieter provides far more information than the significantly longer Rescue Dawn.

Where the two films coincide is in their notable signifiers of authenticity. While we can never truly know what it was like for Dieter actually being in such an extreme situation, his accounts in Little Dieter provide some insight. However, Herzog has revealed that,


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We were very careful about editing and stylizing Dieterʼs reality. He had to become an actor playing himself. Everything in the film is authentic Dieter, but to intensify him it is all re-orchestrated, scripted and rehearsed (Cronin 2002: 265).

As with Treadwell, Herzog manages to render his real-life subject into a kind of actor, only here he does it directly and in collaboration with his subject. What then is the difference between Christian Bale playing Dieter, and Dieter playing Dieter? Are they both not authentic Dieter? One key difference can be drawn out of Bill Nichlosʼ argument that,

The difference between direction toward the world and a world can be illustrated by imagining ourselves in relation to a room. In fiction, we look in upon a well-lit room, overhearing what occurs inside, apparently unbeknownst to the occupants (1991: 112).

In Little Dieter we are situated in the world and Dieter tells his story, scripted or not, to the camera directly. In Rescue Dawn we are situated in a world, well-lit in which the characters are not aware of their audience. Where then is the blurring of the boundary between fiction and reality in Little Dieter?; it is in Herzogʼs stylisations and insistence that cinema cannot convey the truth, but a truth. A view that Nichols shares in his declaration that,

Documentaries do not present the truth but a truth (or, better, a view or way of seeing), even if the evidence they recruit bears the authentic trace of the historical world itself (Nichlos 1991: 118).

However, while this may be the case with all of Herzogʼs films, (documentary or otherwise) Herzog also believes that cinema can produce a truth greater than the truth; a truth that he outlines in his ʻMinnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinemaʼ saying,

There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization (cited in Cronin 2002: 301).

Here it is possible to question the validity and intention of Herzogʼs notion of the ʻecstatic truthʼ; is Herzog simply attempting to theorise his own truth in which his filmmaking practices perfectly fit the criteria? This dissertation argues that he is not. Herzog is not interested in presenting stories containing images of things as they are. Instead he blurs the fiction-reality boundary to produce something new and unseen. For instance, in Little Dieter, Herzog often chooses to overlay music that bears seemingly no relation to the image on screen, or even to Dieterʼs story at all; its only similarity being that like Dieter, it has a strange and unknowable relationship to the landscape. Herzogʼs decision to employ this music may be mysterious and elusive, but it is the truth of his film. It is


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undeniably true that he purposefully chose to use this music in conjunction with the image because he felt it produced a more transparent version of truth.

Just as Herzog ultimately divorced Treadwell from the socio-political context of his mission as caretaker of the bears through his use of voice-over, in Little Dieter he removes Dieter from the context of the Vietnam War. Instead, what Herzog chooses to focus on with both of these men, is their relationship with what we can consider as the sublime. Again, it requires little arguing to convince one that these two men have experienced events far beyond that of usual experience, and it is this that Herzog is undeniably fascinated by.

To what extent then is Herzog distorting the truth in order to deliver a truth, his truth; a truth perhaps that appropriates or engenders some kind of relation to sublimity? Is the truth in Rescue Dawn the same truth as that of Little Dieter? Certainly the two films contain a number of similarities that may suggest that it is. However, Rescue Dawn adheres to the principles of verisimilitude integral to the production of classical Hollywood realism, whereas Little Dieter takes many steps away from conveying a realist impression of Dieterʼs experience due to Herzogʼs manipulations.

For example, for the most part, non-diagetic music featured in Rescue Dawn differs greatly to that of Little Dieter. In Rescue Dawn the music provides some narrative agency to the the charactersʼ plight, where in Little Dieter it is completely divorced from the context of Dieterʼs story. Additionally, the documentary contains a number of techniques more commonly associated with feature filmmaking. For instance, Little Dieter fits into the exception Nichols has noted in his statement that,

Although there are several recent counter-examples of note, most documentaries neglect the traditional forms of fictive subjectivity (flashbacks, visualized memories, slow motion, anticipations, fantasy, visual representations of altered states of mind such as drunkenness or reverie, dream and so forth) (Nichlos 1991: 120).

Little Dieter contains all of the tradition forms of fictive subjectivity Nichols highlights; Rescue Dawn by comparison does not. For instance, in Rescue Dawn we are never alerted to Dieterʼs dreams or hallucinations but through Herzogʼs exposition and directing of Dieter, we are in Little Dieter.

Just as Little Dieter contains more examples of fictive subjectivity, Rescue Dawn despite its classical narrative progressions, contains a number of more documentary-like instances in its portrayal of Dieterʼs experience. This is not to say that Rescue Dawn uses documentary techniques, it does not, however what it does that Little Dieter does not, is remove many of Herzogʼs typical manipulations from its frame and sound. For instance, in Rescue Dawn, we are aligned with Dieter in his ordeal from an observational standpoint that conveys a more immediate and knowable experience, one that is linear and adheres to the laws of causality. As Rescue Dawn editor Joe Bini suggests in Imagine: Werner


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Herzog: Beyond Reason (BBC 2008), deciding which film is really the documentary easily becomes confusing. In considering this confusion, Gregory Currieʼs discussion of film and reality is relevant. Currie states,

ʻ. . .that the closer the experience of film watching approximates to the experience of seeing the real world, the more effectively film engenders in the viewer the illusion that he or she is actually watching the real worldʼ (1996: 326).

It is for this reason that Rescue Dawn details a more realistic series of events. However, this does not make it anymore a documentary than any other Hollywood period drama, and certainly not more so than Little Dieter.

To return to the two filmsʼ use of music, they are a few times very similar in their employment of scores geared towards creating an emotional relationship between viewer and image. For instance, in both films, Herzog uses the same piece of stock-footage that displays the bombing of villages in Vietnam from an airplane. In Little Dieter this image is coupled with a soft string piece that displays Dieterʼs horror of remembering the war. In Rescue Dawn however, it is matched with a gentle piano and synth score that is highly reminiscent of music more familiar with Hollywood films. Neither film, however, opts to simply match this image with its actual sounds of fire, explosions and destruction. This decision (although not just applicable to the work of Herzog) can be seen as another example of his blurring the boundary to produce a truth, rather than the truth. In his discussion of the function of film music, Jerrold Levinson argues that,

A criterion of nondigetic music having a narrative function, and thus being attributable to a narrative agent, could thus [be that] the music makes something fictionally true - true in the story being conveyed - that would not otherwise be true, or not to the same degree or with the same definiteness (Jerrold Levinson 1996: 259).

When following Levinsonʼs observation here, in both scenes mentioned above, Herzog can be seen to be using music to produce a fictional truth within the image - one that emanates sadness from the context Dieterʼs story, but also reveals the sorrow to found within the images themselves. This is perhaps as clear-cut example as any, in which his manipulation clearly hits upon a truth more truthful than that that may have been produce by the raw image and sound. Indeed, the role of music in Grizzly Man also often takes on a similar function in that Herzogʼs choice of score reconfigures an audienceʼs relationship to Treadwell. Herzogʼs transformation of the relationship between reality and fiction in an attempt to produce a truth that may transcend reality itself (see Cronin) is perhaps never more problematic and overt than in his 2005 film, The Wild Blue Yonder that will be discussed in the next chapter.


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The Wild Truth Yonder

This chapter will examine Herzogʼs 2005 film, The Wild Blue Yonder, offering a reading of it as the pinnacle text from his filmography in which he most deliberately manipulates the line between reality and fantasy, fiction and non-fiction. It will also consider his 2009 film, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (Bad Lieutenant), as a seemingly overt fiction film. The reason for dealing with these two films together is that they are antithetical within Herzogʼs work; providing insights into his own understanding of the boundaries he purports not to see. First let us deal with The Wild Blue Yonder.

The Wild Blue Yonder sees an Alien from the planet Blue Yonder, describe the story of his raceʼs journey to Earth, and their failed attempts at integration on our planet. In the film, Herzog employs an array of stock footage in the telling of his story, including early films detailing primitive forms of aviation, and archival NASA footage. This chapter will argue that although Herzog explicitly declares the film to be ʻa science-fiction fantasyʼ through the use of an inter-tile at its beginning, that it is in fact a hybrid film that can be thought of as both fiction and non-fiction to a significant extent. Ohad Landesman has declared that,

In the hybrid film . . . it is the viewer who ultimately determines the mode of engagement with the object at stake, sizing things up and settling the balance between fiction and reality (2008: 42).

This dissertation falls into agreement with this statement - proclaiming that, ultimately, whether Herzogʼs film here is documentary or fiction is decided by how the viewer opts to engage with it.

In The Wilder Blue Yonder, despite his manipulations and uses of stylisation, Herzog never attempts to link the imagery of his subject-matter with their true referents. Although anti-referential at times due to his narration altering our relationship to both Dieter and Treadwell, the imagery in the three films discussed so far bear explicit connections to a geographic and historical context that is denied in The Wild Blue Yonder. By contrast, the viewer of The Wild Blue Yonder is somewhat freer in adopting a stance towards Herzogʼs use and choice of imagery. Scenes during which we are told we are seeing sights from another planet, while at times otherworldly - mainly due to Herzogʼs use of music - are clearly just snippets of footage from some unknown diving exhibition. Therefore, regardless of his decontextualization of the imagery, it is never difficult to re-contextualize it to some extent due to our pre-existing capacities for identifying images. Whether we choose to however, is the reason for this particular filmʼs construction.

During the film, the more apparent scenes that have been staged; those in which the Alien outlines his story, are shot using a kind of performative documentary register. The Alien looks straight into the camera and recalls his ordeals with big bodily gestures and large facial expressions. Here Herzog


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exploits the documentary mode to tell his story, and renders it more fantastical than had it been produced as a classically realised feature film. This is due to the fact that, as with Treadwell and Dieter, Herzog uses the camera to produce a character whose extraordinary experiences are told directly to the audience; drawing upon the amalgamation of his previous films in which fact has often been stranger than fiction. Thomas Elsaesser has asserted, ʻ. . . Herzog is “a director who heightens the documentary stance to the point where it becomes itself a powerful fiction”ʼ (cited by Eric Ames 2009: 58). This dissertation supports Elsaesserʼs observation that Herzog heightens documentaryʼs stance as one undoubtedly upheld by The Wild Blue Yonder. Here the director is using documentary footage toward the end of creating ʻa fantasyʼ.

To support this assertion further, it is arguable that the moments of actual documentary footage become the more fictitious elements of the text. The men and women in space, although clearly real people and not actors, merely become figures in Herzogʼs story. He is thus attempting to fictionalise these kinds of images with their links to the real, through his presentation of them as being part of his own staged events. In this way these images become truer to The Wild Blue Yonderʼs story than they actually are when set against Herzogʼs employment of documentary techniques used to deliver the filmʼs real fictional elements. At one point the Alien even provides his justification for telling his story to the camera. At another, when images of ʻThe Blue Yonderʼ are on screen, he exclaims, ʻAnd I can take in these images raw, just as they were recorded by the camera . . . this was home to me.ʼ This sentence is revealing because it demonstrates Herzogʼs awareness of the possibility of ʻraw imagesʼ, something he seldom exhibits in his own films. Indeed, the images we are being told are raw, are constantly under the supervision of Herzogʼs re-contextualization of them.

The effect Herzog aims to achieve with The WIld Blue Yonder is, as Prager highlights, ʻ. . .to attain a view of the world as a spaceman would see it, a vision of Earth that he tried to achieve with both Fata Morgana and with Lessons of Darknessʼ (2007: 118). In doing this, however, Herzog shifts our perception of our own planet, to the view of another. Again, it is more than apparent that Herzog has little interest in ʻrawʼ images or a view of the world as it is, or at least as it appears to be. Instead, he once again produces a film in which images and characters are divorced from their true context. This is epitomised in the film through his use of interviews with a number of scientists and physicists, who appear to be real scientists outlining real aspects of their work. However, Herzog does not include any instigation of who these men really are in the film, they are simply referred to as ʻthe scientistsʼ and ʻa brilliant mathematicianʼ. Although they appear to be actual scientists, explaining highly complex concepts, whom Herzog no doubt could have filmed himself in straight cut interviews, they could also simply be actors. In no other Herzog film is there an identification between character and actor so difficult to discern than here.

To return to the Alienʼs performance, the kind of performance he gives is one that can be found throughout the directorʼs oeuvre. It is over the top, raw but


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fantastical, and yet convincing due to its tactility. Herzogʼs camera employs long takes and sees the Alien interacting physically with his environment; kicking the dirt on the floor. With the exception of a few of his documentary subjects, Herzogʼs collective cast are performers. Treadwell performs to his camera, as does Dieter, as does Dieterʼs acting double, as does the Alien, and so do the Astronauts in the NASA footage. An important question becomes, why does Herzog brand the film ʻa science-fiction-fantasyʼ?; is not all science-fiction fantasy by default? As the Wild Blue Yonder proposes, perhaps it is not. After all, the footage from NASA is not fictional until Herzog positions it as part of his filmic fantasy. It is due to his inclusion of documentary archival footage that The Wild Blue Yonder is not just a piece of science-fiction; only becoming a kind of ʻfantasyʼ due Herzogʼs own fantasising over such images of the real.

If The Wild Blue Yonder can be seen as the apex of Herzogʼs obscuring the indivisible line between fiction and reality, Bad Lieutenant is perhaps his most contemporary piece of forthright fiction. The film sees Terrance McDonagh (Nicholas Cage) solve a murder case in New Orleans. This is also arguably Herzogʼs film that lends itself most heavily to a classification of genre, it being a crime film that contains many Film Noir tropes including the whore with the heart of gold, and the streetwise, and at times morally questionable, detective. What then makes Bad Lieutenant, a Hollywood film starring one its most popular actors, Nicholas Cage, an identifiably Herzog film? Firstly, the protagonist once again holds many affinities with both the director himself and many of his characters. Heʼs a man with impossible dreams, or more appropriately, delusions; he believes that he can be both drug addicted, gun wielding cowboy - as he is described in the film - and a good police detective devoted to solving a homicide case. While during the narrative he is reprimanded for attempting to balance his seemingly impossible lifestyle, at the filmʼs close, he ultimately succeeded in all his apposing endeavours. Like McDonagh, Herzog too has achieved many feats that seem impossible, and has at times himself been known to undertake actions that could be deemed Bad in his efforts towards realising them. As Hadley Freeman writing for The Guardian has summarised at length,

Perhaps it is because . . . Werner Herzog has, over the years, during working hours, been shot at, hauled a steamboat over a mountain, threatened to kill his leading man, thrown himself on a cactus, informed the Greek military that he would kill anyone who got in the way of his filming, been caught in the middle of a South American border war, taken a film crew to the lip of a volcano, and once, on camera, ate his shoe, he has a reputation for, let's say, reckless eccentricity (5 March 2011).

Where one can interpret Bad Lieutenant as contributing towards Herzogʼs blurring of the boundaries is in its distinctiveness as a film by the auteur that shares common themes with his other works. While its diegesis may not blur the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction, Bad Lieutenant contributes to the


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distortion of these elements created in Herzogʼs filmography as a whole. One of the most striking similarities to be drawn out is Cageʼs performance is that it vividly recalls Herzogʼs work with the actor Klaus Kinski. While it is more apparent that Cage is acting his part, Kinskiʼs performances in the five films he and Herzog made together disturb distinctions between character and actor. As can be seen in My Best Fiend, Kinski was a man with a furious temper, one that Herzog exploits through his directing of Kinski to the point that his intense, physical performances become hyper-realistic, the rage and exhaustion he often exudes being his genuine state of being under Herzogʼs direction. Like Kinski, Cage and many of Herzogʼs characters, fictional or otherwise, deliver highly intense performances, something that is due to all of them being unwilling to yield to realityʼs apparent laws. Just as Treadwell thought he could live with bears, or Dieter walk barefoot through the jungle, or Fritzcarrlado (Kinski) and Herzog himself believed they could move a ship over a mountain, McDonagh too chooses to bend reality into a kind of fantasy, one that becomes more real than the constraints of the reality it apposes. Treadwell did live among bears for thirteen years, Dieter did walk through the jungle, Herzog did move a ship over a mountain, and McDonagh does catch the killer.

If they all bare such striking resemblance in their presentation, how then can we so discernibly separate Herzogʼs fictional and nonfictional characters?; especially given that, as has been covered in all three chapters so far, Herzog fails to code his documentaries as documentaries? An answer may be found in Noel Carrollʼs discussion of non-fiction film and postmodern scepticism in which he outlines that,

. . . the distinction between fiction nonfiction film and fiction film cannot be grounded in differences of formal technique, because, when it comes to technique, fiction and nonfiction film-makers can and do imitate each other . . . (1996: 286).

The notion that film-makers can and do employ both non-fiction and fictional techniques freely as and when they choose, is unquestionably the case with Herzogʼs work. What Carroll then goes on to propose, is that we can identify non-fiction through its responsibility to producing imagery indexed as accurate to the world we live in; a responsibility fiction need not respect (paraphrased 1996: 287). What Carroll is considering is a kind of identification of verisimilitude. In Bad Lieutenant we can tell that Terrance is fictional, not only because he shows no acknowledgment of being filmed, but also due to a number of other contributing factors. Firstly, he is coded as a Noir protagonist, and secondly he is played by an extremely well known actor (arguably an icon of contemporary Hollywood). The verisimilitude set-up by The Wild Blue Yonder is less solid. We know that the Alienʼs story is not true due to its fantastical nature, however we are able to identify many of the people featured in the film as being ʻrealʼ people.

The verisimilitudes set-up in Rescue Dawn and Little Dieter are not the same. In Little Dieter one assumes that what is being portrayed on screen is real due to


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its connection to documentary, however, it is less realistic in terms of producing a didactic account of events than Rescue Dawn maybe (see chapter two of this dissertation). What verisimilitude does Herzog then create through his manipulations that he claims can attain a deeper strata of truth in a film like Little Dieter or Grizzly Man? The answer is one that negates responsibility as a documentary film. The appearance of something being true or real in any of Herzogʼs films, fictional or otherwise, is always obscured by the directors desire to produce a greater truth.

In the film I am my Films: A Portrait of Werner Herzog (Keusch, Weisenborn 1979) Herzog declares that he is his films. Following this, the figure of Herzog himself becomes of even greater importance to understanding his blurring of fiction and non-fiction. In the final chapter we will continue to probe Herzogʼs claim that his films are able to produce a truth greater than the truth through his manipulations.


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Cave of Forgotten Boundaries: Positioning the Sublime

This final chapter will consider the function of the sublime in Herzogʼs films in more detail. Alongside making some relation to films mention so far, this discussion will take Herzogʼs latest film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Cave), as an additional film around which to relate ideas of the sublime in his filmmaking practices, arguing that it is his fascination with the sublime, that leads the director to freely cross between - and perhaps either not see and or otherwise choose to ignore entirely - the fiction non-fiction boundary. This chapter will also briefly touch upon Herzogʼs employment of 3D technology in delivering the Cave and the effect this plays in positioning the viewer to respond to the film as a whole.

Cave is for all its intents a documentary that on a basic and fundamental level functions to show an audience the oldest paintings in human discovery; these not being open to the public for exhibition. Large sections of the film are made up of the camera simply moving over the paintings, accompanied either by non-diegetic music, Herzogʼs own voice-over, or commentary by one of the figures in the film talking about the paintings. Instantly this film aligns itself with the sublime due to the extraordinary nature of its content. The paintings are dated at over thirty-two thousand years old and offer an audience the chance to witness a lost remnant of prehistoric culture.

The director himself in a question and answer session exclaimed, ʻSeeing the images is complete awe. Nothing but aweʼ (Herzog: 2011 see Appendix). In the film, Herzog outlines how he knows the paintings are authentic and that this lead to his being comforted about being there to film them. As with Dieter and Treadwell, the awe felt by Herzog here, and perhaps that felt by his audience too, is only so inspired due to the paintingsʼ authentic context; were they not really painted by prehistoric man, they would not evoke awe.

In identifying what the sublime actually is and considering how can we relate it to Herzogʼs film, it is useful to draw upon the theories of eighteenth century philosophers, Emanuel Kant and Edmund Burke, both of whom wrote at length on what can be thought to constitute the sublime. Taking this as its final line of enquiry, this dissertation will identify the sublime as key to producing an understanding of Herzogʼs disturbing of the line between fiction and non-fiction. Further more, it will also proclaim that it is possibly the sublime that may engender a new grammar of images that the director has sort to produce.

In her reading of Kant, Mary A. McCloskey notes that,

. . . as Kant sees it, it is the state of mind in which we contemplate what we perceive which is ʻsublimeʼ rather than the starry heavens or the wild tiger which makes demands on our higher powers to be exercised with mastery . . .(1987: 95).


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By this Kant means that it is not the subject itself that is sublime, but our perceptive relation to it. Following this reading, the paintings seen in Cave are not sublime, but rather the manner in which we take them in maybe. This begs the question then, under what conditions does the state of oneʼs mind need to be in so that the sublime can be contemplated? Continuing her discussion, McCloskey attests,

We can and do find . . . scenery beautiful. What more do we have to do for it to count for Kant as a judgement not of the beautiful, but of the sublime? We have to find it fearful but yet not be afraid of it. Kant says, ʻThe sublime is what pleases immediately by reason of its opposition to the interest of sense.ʼ, that is, it pleases because it is fearful. (1987: 99-100)

This at first seemingly contradictory conclusion reached by Kant, of judging something as being fearful that does not produce fear, is also one pronounced by Burke (see Burke 1990: 121). Following this criteria, the relationship one may appropriate to Herzogʼs subjects fit with Kantʼs and Burkeʼs theory of judging the sublime. In all of the films considered in the project, elements are present that can be considered to evoke fear - living among wild bears, crashing a plane in war time Vietnam, being a homicide detective in a violent neighbourhood, crashing onto a hostile alien planet and finally, exploring a cave that the Herzog is quick to describe as eerie,

And you look around into the darkness, and behind you itʼs all dark, and once or twice I had the feeling somebody was watching me. Itʼs a strong feeling that the first explorers had. They speak about it every day. (Herzog 2011: see Appendix)

Through his manipulations however, Herzog is able to reduce these extreme situations of danger into something that need not be feared by an audience. Just as with all of his films, in Cave, he employs music that renders the imagery before the viewer into that of a film divorced from its true referential context. This project argues, however consciously, that non-diegetic music in Cave and the five other films that have been examined produce for the viewer a persistent knowledge that, as Herzog outlines, his films are ʻjust moviesʼ. Were the images of the Chauvet cave conveyed on screen in the lingering silence of the cave that the film briefly highlights, perhaps it would too firmly situate some viewers inside the cave; itself a claustrophobia inducing space containing deadly gases.

Kantʼs criteria for judging the sublime continues,

Further, he implied that the sublime can, if it is to be successfully incorporated [into fine art], only be represented as beautiful. . . . He believes that the sublime, like diseases and the devastations of war, must be represented as beautiful if it is to be satisfactorily incorporated into fine art (McClowsky 1987: 104)


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While this project makes no assertions that Herzogʼs films constitute fine art, in the films that have been examined the director has arguably, through his manipulations and staging or events, imbued his work with a strong sense of beauty. While this is a value judgement it is one that has been frequently professed critically. The music employed in Cave stands out as a key example of Herzogʼs re-contextualizing of imagery. Here the paintings are both paintings on a cave wall, made millennia ago, and 3D images in Herzogʼs film. Thus, this project argues that the music renders them as more beautiful than they may have been in the silence of the cave and further enables the viewer to take up a position of awe.

The cinema screen itself here can be viewed as a kind of manipulation; the paintings on the screen are far smaller in scale than those in Herzogʼs film. Burke proposed that,

Greatness of dimension, is a powerful cause of the sublime. For certainly there are ways, and modes, wherein the same quantity of extension shall produce greater effects than it is found to do in others. Extension is either in length, height, or depth. . . . length strikes least . . . I am apt to imagine likewise, that height is less grand than depth (1990: 66).

Herzogʼs decision to film the cave in 3D produces notably greater depth than had he shot it on standard film.

Again Herzog has deliberated a need for authenticity, outlining, ʻMy primary goal was to show it . . . as the painters of these images experienced it physically when they were there thirty-two to thirty-five thousand years ago (Herzog: 2011 see Appendix).

Here this project disagrees with Herzog. If the aim of the film was to show the cave to an audience as it were for the painters themselves, the film would not seek to produce the awe that it does through Herzogʼs stylistic choices. For the original painters, surely, the cave was not a spectacle of awe in the same way it is for us. To accurately craft an impression of the cave as it was for prehistoric man would be to attempt to produce the truth that we know the director has previously been uninterested in. Instead the film see him continuing to produce a truth, the truth in which we can only look back, as Herzog in the film puts it, ʻacross the abyss of timeʼ, and it is this that allows the viewer to register the film as being connected to the sublime as it constitutes what Kant refers to as being ʻMathematically sublime.ʼ McCloskey explains that,

Kant draws a distinction between what is ʻmathematicallyʼ and what is ʻdynamicallyʼ sublime. The first is that which is so great in size that it seems to be, or is, immeasurable, and the second is that which is so powerful or exerts such might, that it will, or that it can, overcome us (1987: 98).


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In the example of Cave the sublime is, to follow Kant, so great in size that is becomes immeasurable; thirty-two thousand years being such a vast period of time that it is difficult to possess a true understanding of it. Herzogʼs other films discussed herein however, bear more towards being dynamically sublime, each demonstrating strong aspects of Herzogʼs world view that he describes in Grizzly Man as, ʻChaos, hostility and murderʼ. In fact, every film he has ever made in someway can be directly connected to death. Herzogʼs narratives have often been permeated or punctuated by thematic concerns of death and pain. Considering pain and the sublime, Burke wrote,

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger . . . or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling (1990: 36).

To follow Burke here, through their inclusions of death and pain, all of Herzogʼs narratives are primed as sources of the sublime. Burke continues,

. . . When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience (1990: 36-37).

This assertion is supported by nearly all of Herzogʼs films. In Grizzly Man we are invited by Herzog to gaze upon Treadwellʼs life with delight. Here it is worth quoting Herzogʼs final judgement of Treadwell in the film, at length.

ʻTreadwell is gone. The argument how wrong or how right he was disappears into a distance, into a fog. What remains is his footage. And while we watch the animals in their joys of being, in their grace and ferociousness, a thought becomes more and more clear: that it is not so much a look at wild nature as it is an insight into ourselves, into our nature. And that to me gives meaning to his life and to his death.ʼ (Prager quoting Herzog 2007: 87)

Regardless of this being Herzogʼs opinion, it provides a way for us to view Treadwell thatʼs not the stripped down reality of a man who was violently killed by a bear due to his own disillusionment. In Cave, Herzog also provides a modified blueprint through which an audience can understand the subject of his film through its ʻpost scriptʼ section. In this final section of the film, Herzog goes to an indoor sanctuary that contains approximately three-hundred crocodiles located forty-miles from the cave near a nuclear plant that has resulted in some of the crocodiles being albino. Of this section Herzog has explained that,


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Itʼs pure science-fiction, but of course related to the film. How do we see images that were made 32,000 years ago? How would an albino crocodile see images by human beings? Very, very strange, and for me a very deep question . . . (Sight and Sound April: 2011)

This being the same question Herzog poses through voice-over nearing the end of the film, here provides a vantage point from which we may understand it, he states, ʻnothing is real . . . are we not all just Albino Crocodiles staring into the abyss?ʼ The implication being that we are as able to understand the cave paints to the same extent that a crocodile can understand our own culture, but that does not mean we should not look. This is certainly a manipulative stylisation that Herzog is once again imposing through a kind of poetic, philosophical hyperbole. However, it is through these styilisations, to be found throughout his filmography, that allow the consumer of his work to assume a position in which they can view his subjects, as Herzog no doubt does, as being sublime due to their being fearful but beautiful; to be witnessed from a safe, stylised distance.

Considering this we can theorise that Herzogʼs blurring of the boundary between fiction and non-fiction is necessary in creating a position for his audiences to perceive the sublime in his work. Moreover, it is possible that if a deeper strata of truth is attained by Herzog in his films, that it is due to his positioning the spectator in this way; enabling an audience to judge something as sublime perhaps becomes an underpinning truth in his work. Indeed, Herzog did not pull a boat over a mountain for the sake of it, he did it so that his audience could marvel at his having done so. But it is not enough to simply show something magnificent, as Kant claims, ʻit has to be beautifulʼ. A prime example of the sublime in Herzogʼs work is the moment in Grizzly Man in which Herzog listens to the audio recording of Treadwell being killed. With Herzog having chosen to omit the audio from his film, Prager notes,

Our only connection to it is through watching Herzog listen to the attack. He describes very vaguely what he is hearing and then tells Jewl Palovak, who own the tape, ʻyou must never listen to this . . . (2007: 90).

This moment in which Herzog makes the decision to omit the audio of Treadwellʼs death, functions to keep the true moment of Treadwellʼs death away from the audience. Herzog has proclaimed, ʻit was clear to me we are not doing a snuff movie . . . it occurred to me instantly, you have to respect the privacy and the dignity of an individual death (cited in Prager 2007: 90).ʼ This may be the case, however this dissertation argues that by omitting the only true representation of Treadwellʼs death, Herzog is in a far better position to keep the fearful nature of the situation at a safe distance from his audience that may allow them to judge the film from the perspective of the sublime. It is a scene in which fear, pain and death are present but not potent enough to evoke real fear in the spectator. It could also be argued that it is beautiful.


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Conclusion

The aim of this dissertation was to discuss the noticeably disturbed boundary between fiction and non-fiction present throughout Herzogʼs career; intending to identify and provide some understanding as to why such a distortion is so obviously apparent.

Having examined the relationship the six films dealt with in this project bear to Herzogʼs notion that he does not see a difference between fact and fiction, we can conclude that a separation of the two does indeed miss the point as James Bell declared. Instead, the point of Herzogʼs films is that we can share in a view of the sublime afforded by them. Something that is made more potent by, and in some cases created by, his blurring of the fiction non-fiction boundary as proposed in the last chapter. However, this does not mean that his films are ʻjust moviesʼ as Herzog would have it. This dissertation has deliberated that Grizzly Man, Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Little Dieter Needs to Fly are all unquestionably documentary films due to their subjects being explicitly from the world and not part of the creation of a world, as is the case with Bad Lieutenant, The Wild Blue Yonder and even Rescue Dawn. Despite the fact that the latter three films all seek to create knowable worlds and convincing characters that feed into the profile of Herzogʼs other characters, the three protagonists are all played by professional actors, performing in feature films that have been scripted.

If as Karen Cooper has mused, ʻ. . . [Herzogʼs] created a genre thatʼs all his ownʼ (cited by J. Hoberman 1996: 375), this genre is one strongly concerned with sublimity. As Hoberman observes, ʻJust as such films [Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Heart of Class] have strong documentary elements, his documentaries are subjective, poetic and difficult to classifyʼ (J. Hoberman 1996: 375) Alongside the nature of his subjects, already primed for an evocation of the sublime as has been outlined, the noticeable incorporation of fictional and non-fictional elements into all of Herzogʼs film are attributable, as Hoberman claims, to the directorʼs subjective standpoint, in which he often produces poetic hyperbole through voice-over or character dialogue that manipulates our relationship to the imagery on screen.

It can therefore be concluded that if Herzog has created a genre all of his own - an assertion that is certainly not permissible entirely - he can almost undoubtedly be viewed as an auteur. If his sixty plus films do constitute a kind of genre, it is perhaps the relation the director bears to his subjects that stands as the genres strongest thematic thread alongside his fascination with sublimity; the two never really being able to be divorced from one another completely. As has been exemplified through this dissertation, Herzog is always highly present in any of his films and never seeks to be invisible: a position classical assumed of the directorial role in the feature film. In this way he transcends the notion of the auteur and his declaration that he is his films is given credence; not only containing authentic marks of his personality, his films are part of his personality


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and life experience to a drastic extent. This assertion has provided yet another way of understanding why his distortion of fiction and nonfiction is so potent, as the director himself not only carries out the role of the director, but often performs the role of director for his camera.

Following Stella Bruzziʼs assertion that,

It is perhaps more generous and worth while to simply accept that a documentary can never be the real world, that the camera can never capture life as it would have unravelled had it not interfered, and the results of this collision between apparatus and subject are what constitutes a documentary - not the utopian vision of what might have transpired if only the camera had not been there (2000: 7)

It is possible to summate that if documentary can never capture life as it is, that Herzogʼs decisions to blur an identification between fact and fiction is justified in attempting to produce a more adequate account of a truth, rather than pursing the truth that is ultimately unobtainable.

Further more Bruzzi declares, ʻInstead, documentaries are performative acts whose truth comes into being only at the moment of filmingʼ (2000: 7). As has been deduced, performance fulfils a key role in Herzogʼs mixing of fiction and non-fiction; delivered by actor or subject, they are all integral to his pursuit of a deeper strata of truth that this dissertation has identified as a pursuit of the sublime for his audience.

In finally concluding how we might understand Herzogʼs blurred boundary, it is useful to return to Griersonʼs definition of documentary, with Nicholsʼ statement,

To remind viewers of the construction of the reality we behold, of the creative element in John Griersonʼs famous definition of documentary as ʻthe creative treatment of actualityʼ undercuts the very claim to truth and authenticity on which the documentary depends. If we cannot take its images as visible evidence of the nature of a particular part of the historical world, of what can we take them? (2001:24)

As this dissertation has demonstrated, in Herzogʼs films we can take his images as those that produce a truth that allows the viewer to perhaps attain a position in which to view the sublime. This truth only being available through manipulation that can only ever take steps away from the true authenticity of the images. Further more, it is arguable that if film were able to represent the world as it is, that these images would be comparatively inadequate against those that comprise Herzogʼs filmography that have sought a deeper strata of truth and arguably constitute a new grammar of images; a grammar that demands the inclusion of both reality and fiction, but in which an identification between the two truly misses the point.


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Bibliography

Ames, Eric (2009) ʻHerzog, Landscape, and Documentaryʼ Cinema Journal Vol.48 (Winter) pp. 49-69

Austin, Thomas (2008) Rethinking Documentary: New Perspectives, New Practices Berkshire: Open University Press

Beattie, keith (2004) Documentary Screens: Non-fiction Film and Television Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan

Bell, James ʻThe Wild Bunchʼ Sight and Sound September 2009, p. 28

Burke, Edmund (1990) A Philosophical Enquiry: into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful Oxford: Oxford University Press

Bruzzi, Stella (2000) New Documentary London and New York: Routledge.

Carrol, Noël (1996) ʻNon-fiction film and Postmodern Skepticismʼ in Bordwell, David and Noël Carrol (eds.) (1996) Post Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press

Chion, Michel (1999) ʻThe Acousmêtreʼ in The Voice in Cinema trans. Claudia Gorbman New York: Columbia University Press pp. 16-29

Cronin, Paul (2002) Herzog on Herzog New York: Faber and Faber

Currie, Gregory (1996) ʻFilm, Reality, and Illusionʼ in Bordwell, David and Noël Carrol (eds.) (1996) Post Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press

Freeman, Hadley ʻThe Dark Comedy of Werner Herzogʼ The Guardian 5 March 2011

Herzog, Werner, Q and A session at the Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge, 23 March 2011 (unpublished).

Jeong, Seung-Hoon and Andrew, Dudley (2008) ʻGrizzly Ghost: Herzog, Bazin and the Cinematic Animalʼ Screen Vol.49 (Spring), pp. 1-11

Landesman, Ohad (2008) ʻIn and out of this World: Digital Video and the Aesthetics of Realism in the New Hybrid Documentaryʼ in Studies in Documentary Film Vol. 2 pp. 33-45

McCloskey, Mary A. (1987) Kantʼs Aesthetic London: The Macmillan Press

Nichols, Bill (1991) Representing Reality Indiana: Indiana University Press


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Nichols, Bill (2001) Introduction to Documentary Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indian University Press

Prager, Brad (2007) The cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth London: Wallflower

Sarris, Andrew (1962) ʻNotes on Autuer Theory in 1962ʼ in Braudy, Leo and Marshall Cohen (eds.) (1999) Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings Oxfard and New York: Oxford University Press

Smith, Murray (2005) ʻFilmʼ in Gaut, B and D.McIver Lopes (eds.) (2005) The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics London: Routledge, 2nd edn

ʻWerner Herzog: Beyond Reasonʼ Imagine BBC Television, 1 July 2008

Wigley, Samuel ʻOut of the Darknessʼ Sight and Sound April 2011, p. 28


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Filmography

Aguirre, Wrath of God Werner Herzog (1972) Germany

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans Werner Herzog (2009) USA

Cave of Forgotten Dreams Werner Herzog (2010) Canada, Germany, France,

USA, UK

Fata Morgana Werner Herzog (1971) Germany

Fitzcarraldo Werner Herzog (1982) Germany, Peru

Grizzly Man Werner Herzog (2005) USA

Heart of Class Werner Herzog (1976) Germany

I am my FIlms: A Portrait of Werner Herzog Erwin Keusch, Christian Weisenborn (1979) Germany

Lessons of Darkness Werner Herzog (1992) Germany, France, UK

Little Dieter Needs to Fly Werner Herzog (1998) Germany, France, UK

My best Fiend Werner Herzog (1999) Germany, Finland, USA, UK

Pearl Harbour (2001) Michael Bay

Rescue Dawn Werner Herzog (2006) USA

Titanic (1999) James Cameron

The Wild Blue Yonder Werner Herzog (2005) Germany, France, Austria, UK


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Appendix

Transcript of Q and A session with Werner Herzog at the Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge, 23 March 2011

Interviewer: What was your first impression of the cave?

Werner Herzog: Well to tell you the truth, I was surprised by things that I didnʼt expect to see at all. I had an idea what was inside the cave. I had seen two photo books by Jean Claude, the archaeologist. Of course all of it was focused on the paintings. I was completely and utterly surprised by two things. The first, the beauty of the cave, the stalactites and stalagmites, and crystal cathedrals, and underlying curtains of concretions that were formed after tens of thousands of years of dripping water. I had no idea how beautiful the cave would be. There were also skeletal remains in the cave. Thatʼs the first thing you stumble upon, the vertebrae, ribcages, skulls of cave bears. Then you see footprints of cave bears, fairly fresh looking footprints, and you know that these footprints date back tens of thousands of years. The cave bear is a species that went into extinction twenty thousand years or so ago. Itʼs completely stunning to see it all. The skulls that were patiently being covered with dripping water over tens of thousands of years, had formed some sort of a layer of porcelain over them, and it looked like a strange mask of a bear skull. So that was the first thing, complete surprises. And then seeing the images is complete awe. Nothing but awe. In a way I knew what I was going to see, but you cannot elude the moment where you are confronted with them. Thereʼs also a freshness to everything, as if it was done yesterday. And you look around into the darkness, and behind you itʼs all dark, and once or twice I had the feeling somebody was watching me. Itʼs a strong feeling that the first explorers had. They speak about it every day.

I took my binoculars, and I knew that if I blew at the charcoal in the cave, it would blow away. It had sat there as delicate as that for thirty thousand years.

WH: Of course yes, and you can see it through your binoculars, but the kind of cameras we had wouldnʼt register it. What was really remarkable was that the discoverers of the cave, from the first moment, did the right thing. They brought huge rolls of sheet plastic and crawled along this plastic. They immediately understood that there was an incredible time capsule that had sealed off the cave. In fact, I really tried very hard to have the discoverers of the cave in the film, but they declined. Of course theyʼre in litigation with the French government ever since the discovery of the cave. In a way they are the tragic figures of this entire discovery. In a way I think they overrated their possibilities. At the very beginning they thought they had a copyright of these images. But of course, copyright expires after a certain amount of years. They were suing for co-ownership of any sort of commercial venture. In fact they are now putting down their foot in legal terms, issuing a warning that whenever I go to screen the film to audiences in a commercial way they would reserve their rights of


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property in this film. So itʼs very tragic. They have lost every single lawsuit and every single appeal. At the moment what is going on there is litigation, no sorry, there is arbitration, the French Ministry of Culture has named together with them an independent person who would do the arbitration. What I just wanted to point out, was an unbelievable discovery of something which is one of the biggest discoveries in the history of human culture. And meeting these three discoverers is pervaded by an air of tragedy. I really like them a lot and we had a wonderful rapport, and I tried so hard to have them in the film, but they would not want to jeopardize their legal position - whatever in their mind was going on - they declined to be in the film. They would have been very good guides in the cave.

You mentioned that your father was an archaeologist...

WH: No, my grandfather, Gudolf Herzog.

What do you think your grandfather would have thought of this film?

Well thatʼs hard to imagine because my grandfather was very close to my heart but he was also remote because the time I knew him he was already in the darkness of insanity. As I mentioned before to you, he made exclamation marks in books, underlined important passages. He was an avid reader of course, and at the end he underlined every single word from the beginning to the end of a book. I loved him not only as an archeologist, I loved him as a man. Heʼs been my point of orientation forever. When he became insane my grandmother, who was a wonderful, strong woman, said, “Only over my dead body, this man will be put into a lunatic asylum. I have lived with him all my life happily and nobodyʼs gonna take him out of the house.” He was troublesome. He would pack all his belongings, he would fold up his suits, his shirts into suitcases, and put the furniture on top of each other to have it ready because he was afraid he would be deported and the trucks would come. My grandmother, every single morning would unpack things and put them back into the shelves. He didnʼt recognize her anymore, and he would say madam to her. He didnʼt recognize that she was his wife. One day my grandmother told me, that one day he dressed very formally in his best suit, and after eating his soup, he folded up his napkin very carefully, then he put his fork and spoon and then he bowed to her, and he said “Madam, if I were not married already I would ask for your hand.” So, thatʼs my grandfather for me. The other side is that he was an archeologist. Iʼm very fond of his work, and Iʼve been ever fond for the look into the abyss of time and into all the fantasies that are evoked by this gap of time. And this archeological view to look deep into the strata of things in a way cis a fascination that comes from my grandfather.

Is there, for you, a similarity between archeology and filmmaking?

WH: I cannot give you a straight line in between the two. In a way yes metaphorically Iʼm trying to look deep into the human condition, and Iʼm trying to look deep into time, into the recesses of time, and I try to understand what was


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going on in this cave so many millennia ago, and I tried to figure out what constitutes humanness. I mean modern humanness because apparently, as it was found out, we still do have some small percentage of Neanderthal men in us. And Neanderthal men had no culture as we would define it; no figurative representation, no religion, no music. Well we do not know, maybe they sang, maybe they did some drumming. But we do not have any evidence so far of musical activity like with Homo sapiens / sapiens in the Swabian Jura where they found eight flutes, fragments of flutes, and the most stunning thing is they are pentatonic. So itʼs what we still have until today.

For the archeologists, the two distinctive things about the Chauvet cave are first that the art itself is so accomplished, of all the ice age art, and it is the earliest. Where does it come from? It seems to jump up from nowhere. Film is at quite an accomplished stage, but it jumped up into its present form, in archeological terms, in the twinkling of an eye. So I just wonder Werner, we donʼt have to say [of the cave art] “Well it came from somewhere else,” perhaps it came of itself.

WH: Well we do not know, and we do not know whether there are other caves out there which are even older, dating back into older times, and we do not see any evolution there. And the stunning thing is that from us to Lascaux, which is only twelve, thirteen, fourteen thousand years, is a much shorter distance than from Lascaux to Chauvet, which is some seventeen or eighteen thousand years further into the recesses of history. So alone this is is unfathomable for us and beyond understanding. And I would be cautious about the findings of how much DNA weʼve got from Neanderthal men. I do believe itʼs only preliminary findings. It remains to be seen how much they will be substantiated because DNA extraction from Neanderthal remains is still kind of sketchy. But letʼs assume this will be substantiated by future research, it is not so farfetched to imagine that there was fornication between Neanderthal and Homo sapiens. Yes letʼs assume we do have some DNA of Neanderthal men in us, but it seems to be a fairly small amount, so it seems to be evident that it is modern human culture, the modern human soul, that awakened in this area of southern France, or maybe even Swabian Jura. And how does it awaken, and why does it awaken, and how much are we, so to speak, still the same? In a way, we are the same symbolic representations, the first signs of religious beliefs, the first signs of clear evidence of music, clear evidence of things that constitute the modern human soul. For me it was always interesting, what is it that distinguishes us from the cow in the field, and what distinguishes us from Neanderthal men? That has always been a question for me that is far beyond what I have done in this film about Chauvet cave. And of course, completely stunning to see, yes these were our real ancestors. Although they lived in an environment where almost every animal that we see that they painted is extinct by now, there is no mammoth, there is no wooly rhino, there is no cave bear, there is no cave lion, almost all the big ones do not even exist any more. And still we see the footprints, and we see the dust, the little pieces of dust, so itʼs a totally fascinating place.


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What does distinguish us from the cows in the field?

WH: Storytelling, for example. Religion, I doubt that cows believe in Jesus. Neanderthal men? Well I do not know, I can only speculate. Poetry, song, I donʼt know.

Can you tell us the story of how you came to use 3D on this film, and what have your experiences been with 3D as a format?

WH: Well 3D was an immediate idea by Erik Nelson, the producer of the film, with whom I have done Grizzly Man and the film in Antarctica, and this film. I was always a skeptic, and I still have a position of being a mild skeptic of 3D. The moment I saw the cave without any camera, I was not allowed to bring anything with me just to have a look. I wanted to see what kind of light would we need and how would we move in there; it was immediately evident that it had to be in 3D because all the drama of the formation and the niches and bulges that had been utilized by the artist for expressive purposes. It was also clear that I was probably the only one ever to be allowed to film in there, so I knew it had to be 3D and it makes complete sense to see this film in 3D. Although yesterday I was told that some of the media people saw it in 2D and they were quite pleased with the film. They thought it was so wonderful to imagine a third dimension. I have never seen it on a big screen in 2D, of course Iʼve seen it on little monitors during editing, but it never occurred to me that the film might function in 2D as well. Of course the primary goal was show it as you experience it when you are physically there. Show it as the painters of these images experienced it physically when they were there thirty-two, thirty-five thousand years ago. Editing, and making a film with a very tiny crew with hardly any time, whoever does a film in 3D is kind of exhausted by the magnitude of the apparatus. We had to be completely reduced, we had to be fast. We could only put the camera in the position along this metal walkway. So what? Itʼs whatever I really wanted to show I could show. Itʼs not only filming, it is also a question of editing. Iʼve seen one film in 3D not too long ago, Avatar. Avatar, in quite a few moments, uses editing in a way as action films are shot. Chop. Chop. Chop. When you look in 3D, it takes a time, letʼs say Iʼm jumping close to your face. When I do that I have to move close to your face, and then my perspectives change. But when you cut in 3D you cannot absorb it quickly enough and before you have absorbed it the next cut is coming. Editing is not understood yet in 3D. Itʼs completely confusing. Editing in three-dimensional movies has to learn its lessons, Iʼm certain about it. A lot of mistakes are being done. I was aware that editing required a lot of patience. Thereʼs long shots, thereʼs a lot of patience need for these; thereʼs a lot of settling in to what you see and then you can move close, then itʼs perfectly alright. And settling in does not only mean settling in in terms of visual perspectives. It also means settling in in your mood, in your perception, settling in musically. Music settles you in a certain mood and then you can cut. Music prepares the soil for you to settle into the next shot. So itʼs a very complex sort of thing, itʼs not just editing. It is an inner flow, it is a parallel, separate, second story that happens inside an audience.


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Is that the same for 3D, or different for 3D?

WH: I think it is different with 3D. We do not have enough expertise yet, I mean, we had enough 3D films already early on in the fifties, but in the fifties you would not see the kind of action film editing that you are seeing nowadays. I do strongly believe that we need to look into new ways of editing when we are dealing with 3D. And besides Iʼm not such a great advocate of 3D anyway. Yes it was the right thing to do it in this film but the film Iʼm finishing right now is not in 3D, and the next five films will not be in 3D, and the previous sixty are not in 3D. And even if I had the money to do them all over again I wouldnʼt do it in 3D.

The artists who created this art, did they know they were being artists, did they know they were being expressionistic?

WH: They didnʼt leave diaries. Yes, of course your observation is correct, like I explained in the film, when you see the arc, this dramatic landscape which looks like a stage out of a Wagner opera, romanticism does not belong to the romantic poets and musicians alone. It must have been something dormant inside of us throughout the ages. And of course expressionism, stylized expressionism, is not the property of the twentieth century, it is the property of Homo sapiens / sapiens back in Paleolithic times, back there. Thatʼs the only thing I can say, of course we have no idea what they were thinking, what there perceptions were. We just do not know.

How do you understand their handprints in the cave?

WH: Well nobody knows. None of the scientists have a clear explanation. The strange thing is that there are two clusters of palm prints. Why is it palm prints? And apparently it was one person. I think there is quite some evidence now, and in some of these palm prints you see the crooked finger, apparently the person broke his little finger. And itʼs crooked and shows in some of these palm prints and in some other places. We have no clear idea. What is significant though is that these palm prints are fairly early into the cave. The archeological, Paleolithic opening of the cave, which was fairly wide, is not very far from these palm prints so they must have been visible for those who walked into the cave, in some fairly dim light but still visible. All the rest of whatever there is in terms of painting is made deep in the recesses of the cave where it was definitely and completely dark at the time. Of course you have full palm prints, and full hand prints, positive prints and one negative hand print I think; the only one in the cave which is at the end with the end credits. We donʼt know but I had the feeling I should leave my palm print as well. So there is some sort of an impulse, at least I felt it in me and I abstained from doing it.

I read that Neanderthals scattered flower petals over the graves of their dead, I thought that was very modern.


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WH: Of course thereʼs a revision now on of which constitutes a Neanderthal and their sophistication. I think they were much more sophisticated than we would think. But whether they put flower bouquets on their dead bodies we donʼt know.


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werner herzog's invisible line

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