The Essentials: The Films Of Werner Herzog

“Scream of Stone” (1991)
It’s hard to remember now, but Herzog went through a relatively fallow period in the early ‘90s—he was as industrious as ever but, following the dissolution of his fruitfully ferocious relationship with Klaus Kinski (who’d die in November 1991), it felt like the films, often made for TV, lacked the urgency and relevance and focus of his best work, and were certainly more mutedly received. “Scream of Stone” is perhaps the nadir of that period—it’s not terrible and the mountain climbing scenes are good-to-excellent, but unfortunately they only make up the last twenty minutes or so in any real way. All the rest is the uninteresting maneuvering between old clichés: an experienced climber and a hot-shot rookie who thinks he knows better. The acting is creaky, aside from a low-key Donald Sutherland turn as the TV journalist along for the ride and Brad Dourif cameoing as a fingerless Mae West-obsessed climber, and the uninvolving love triangle subplot, along with a wacky role for a pompous TV producer later on feels wholly misjudged. Of all Herzog’s many projects, this is the one he’s come closest to disowning, and you can see why. Still, a pity, because working with famed mountaineer/explorer Reinhold Messner on a story that involves an intractable rivalry to conquer an unclimbable peak sounds like it ought to be some sort of Herzog boss-level bonanza—which just makes the anodyne drama it is all the more disappointing. [C]

“Lessons of Darkness” (1992)
Running a brief 40 minutes long, Werner Herzog’s burning-oilfields-in-Iraq doc is like a spiritual sequel to the 1974 doc “Fata Morgana,” but whereas that documentary tends to drag, this largely silent tone-poem takes on a hypnotic and meditative quality with shot after shot of burning oilfields raging on and shooting towards the heavens, like a soot-black devil created from mankind’s contempt for the planet and disregard for one another. Eco-advocates need only point to this doc to illustrate the hazards of war and global disasters, but that doesn’t really seem to be the aim of the film’s literally alien-seeming standpoint. And even this slender, pared-back film contains at least one amazing “ecstatic truth” moment: a rare voiceover from Herzog, that posits because they are “consumed by madness,” the firefighters relight one of the oil shafts they have put out. It’s a moment that a casual observer might draw an entirely different, and more prosaic conclusion from, but in Herzog’s Wagnerian worldview it provides the occasion for him to wonder, “Has life without fire become unbearable for them?” [B]

“Bells from the Deep” (1993)
Ever in pursuit of his “ecstatic truth,” Herzog occasionally plays a little fast and loose with the idea of documentary in its strictest terms, and “Bells from the Deep,” his study of mysticism, faith and superstition in rural Russia is a good example of that. On the surface it’s a portrait of the faith healers, exorcists, priests and prophets that command the faith of thousands, and the people who follow them, portrayed with curiosity but an admirable absence of judgement, whether they’re telling folk tales of hearing the bells from an underwater village, or going into religious hysteria when touched by a sorcerer, or indeed, claiming to be Jesus reincarnated (one of his main subjects operates as a sect leader in Russia to this day). There’s a deep absorption to Herzog’s almost anthropological treatment of his subjects here that is slightly tempered when its discovered afterwards that some of the “pilgrims” were local drunks Herzog paid to roll around on the ice, and some of the folk hymns the Siberian nomads sing are in fact not spells to ward off evil, but love songs. It certainly makes for a magnetic, eerily bewitching hour of filmmaking, and Herzog believes the sleight of hand is justified, but we’re not quite so sure. [B-]

“Little Dieter Needs To Fly” (1997)
Before there was Christian Bale and “Rescue Dawn,” there was “Little Dieter Needs To Fly,” a documentary about Dieter Dengler, like Herzog, a German expat who immigrated to the U.S. from WWII-decimated Deutschland, to fulfill his dreams of being of being a pilot. Joining the Air Force and eventually being allowed to fly by the time Vietnam rolled around, Dengler was shot down on his first mission over Laos, was captured, tortured and held hostage in a POW camp, before he miraculously escaped. His harrowing and seemingly impossible tale of survival is one in a million, and it’s no wonder Herzog—who clearly saw Dengler as a kindred spirit—filmed the story twice, also turning his experience into a feature-length drama ten years later as a tribute to Dengler who passed away in 2001. A grueling tale of punishment and survival, some of which Herzog makes Dengler relive by taking him back to Laos and Thailand to recount his ordeal, ‘Little Dieter’ is also an absorbing and hopeful document about the will to live and the strength to endure despite apparently insurmountable odds. [B+]

“My Best Fiend” (1999)
Two decades after the latter’s death, the relationship between Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski, who starred in five of the director’s films, still dominates any discussion of Herzog’s career. They arguably brought the best out in each other professionally, but their relationship could most generously be described as “fiery”—in his autobiography, Kinski called the director “a miserable, hateful, malevolent, avaricious, money-hungry, nasty, sadistic, treacherous, cowardly creep.” In his tribute to his frenemy, Herzog, naturally, claims that the literary description was partially his idea, while also admitting that he seriously plotted to kill the actor more than once. “My Best Fiend” is an oddity—in places perhaps it’s among Herzog’s most self-revelatory, moving work, as he pays tribute to a man he clearly misses greatly, even as he shows footage of Kinski ranting and raving to a terrifying degree. But it’s also oddly self-serving—a case of history being written by the winner, or at least by the last man left alive, it feels distinctly one-sided, and you sense that Kinski would be rather withering about the project. And then possibly try to set you on fire. Still, you’re left in awe of the actor’s talent, and his madness, which was undoubtedly Herzog’s aim with the project. [B-]