How I understand Werner Herzog
I have just watched Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, starring Nicolas Cage. Having already seen Abel Ferrara’s original Bad Lieutenant, with Harvey Keitel, I found myself thinking less about the differences between the two films than about what Herzog was doing with Cage.
And I realized that I was watching Herzog do what he has always done. This is now how I understand Werner Herzog…
He treats people and actors rather like wind-up toys. He winds them up, places them in circumstances of his own construction, and lets them go. Then he watches what happens, hoping to capture something extraordinary with his camera.
There is something wonderfully cultured and honest about this approach to filmmaking. Herzog understands that art is something human beings must actually make. One must be willing to become both artist and artisan to see one’s dreams come alive, even if what one creates exists only for a moment, like the performance of a wind-up toy before its spring runs down.
And I think this tells us something about Herzog himself.
Watching Nicolas Cage in Bad Lieutenant, I did not see Herzog attempting to reproduce Ferrara’s film. I saw a director who had found an actor capable of extraordinary performances and wanted to see just how far that actor could go.
Cage is particularly well suited to this sort of filmmaking. He can become grotesque, absurd, frightening, pathetic, and hilarious, sometimes within the same scene. His performances can exceed what ordinary dramatic realism would allow without losing their power.
But Herzog does not need Cage to be realistic. He needs Cage’s performance to be real.
That is the distinction at the center of my understanding of Herzog as an artist.
He does not need to believe that Cage is actually the character he portrays. He does not need to believe that the events depicted in the film could happen as shown. He does not even need to believe that the story itself is particularly important.
He needs to feel that Nicolas Cage is giving him the best performance Nicolas Cage can possibly give him.
And that is enough.
Herzog’s responsibility as a director is to create the circumstances in which that performance can occur. He must recognize the possibilities of the actor in front of him, provide the necessary structure, and then allow the actor to discover something neither of them could have fully anticipated.
This is not simply my imagination of how they worked together. In a 2009 interview with Filmmaker Magazine, Herzog described giving Cage the freedom and security necessary to take his performance into unknown territory. Cage, in turn, described deliberately designing a more extreme performance.
It is a collaboration in which the director winds up the actor, but the actor supplies the extraordinary machinery.
And somewhere in that arrangement, I suspect both men are exorcising their own demons.
Cage does it through performance. Herzog does it through the creation of circumstances and the act of witnessing what happens when another human being surrenders himself to the artistic process.
Herzog does not have to experience what Cage experiences. He gets to watch Cage experience it. He gets to recognize something genuine emerging from a situation that he himself helped construct.
Perhaps this also helps explain Herzog’s enduring fascination with human beings who venture into extraordinary circumstances, often to the point of destruction.
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There was Klaus Kinski, whose performances could seem almost impossible to contain. There were the people Herzog encountered in his documentaries, whose obsessions, ambitions, delusions, and encounters with nature could be as extraordinary as anything he might have invented.
Herzog keeps finding people whose internal machinery he can set into motion or observe already running, and he makes films about what happens.
And behind all of this, I think, is something much older.
Herzog was born in Germany in 1942, into a civilization destroying itself through war. His mother fled the Allied bombing of Munich with her infant son, and Herzog grew up in the mountains of Bavaria under difficult postwar circumstances.
I wonder what such beginnings ultimately do to a person’s understanding of existence.
I can almost hear Herzog speaking about the disease that ate at him: the knowledge, acquired far too young, that he too would someday die and be no more. That everything familiar could disappear. That the homes people built, the worlds they inhabited, and the lives they imagined for themselves could be destroyed.
I do not know whether Herzog would recognize himself in this interpretation. But I can almost hear him explaining it in that extraordinary voice of his, with its mixture of gravity, fatalism, humor, and a seemingly inexhaustible curiosity about existence.
Perhaps this is the disease that I recognize in his art: the knowledge of impermanence, coupled with an irresistible determination to create.
One cannot make oneself immortal simply by wishing to live forever. Nor can one preserve an entire civilization by refusing to acknowledge its vulnerability. But one can construct something. One can assemble people, equipment, locations, lights, sounds, and ideas into an arrangement that produces an experience which otherwise would never have existed.
And if one is sufficiently skilled, one can preserve that experience on film.
This may be the artisan’s answer to mortality.
The filmmaker does not merely dream. He builds the circumstances in which the dream can become real.
That is why I find Herzog’s approach so honest even if not good. He does not need to pretend that his constructions are anything other than constructions. He knows that he is winding up his toys. He knows that he is asking human beings to perform. He knows that the camera is recording something deliberately manufactured.
But something genuine can emerge from that manufacture.
When Nicolas Cage gives Herzog a performance that Herzog himself recognizes as real, the contrivance has produced something that actually exists. For that moment, Cage has created a human experience that Herzog could neither have produced himself nor fully dictated to another person.
He could only make its emergence possible. So this is how I understand Werner Herzog…
He is a man who knows that the spring eventually runs down. The actor stops acting. The director stops directing. The equipment is put away. The people grow old and die, and the world they knew eventually disappears.
But while the spring still has tension, there is work to be done.
There are dreams to be constructed, people to be discovered, performances to be witnessed, and extraordinary things to be brought into existence.
Herzog winds up Nicolas Cage and watches him go crazy because, for a little while, he gets to witness something real that neither man could have made alone.
And perhaps, for Herzog, that is enough.
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