What makes a legend?
The last time the Royal Festival Hall was used for a speaking event it was earlier this summer for Buzz Aldrin.
On Saturday night, they opened up the space for Werner Herzog. Aldrin might have been the second man on the moon, but Herzog embodies a pioneer spirit – a need to reach out of the self, and test the boundaries of just about everything – that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the achievements of the astronaut. As part of the Intelligence Squared ‘Legends Live’ series, he confirmed that a large part of his greatness as a film director is his supreme ability to mythologize himself.
In conversation with Paul Holdengräber, Herzog led us through a series of slides, readings and film excerpts. He began by describing the art of conversation, and then culture more generally, as the ‘agitation of ideas’. He returns to the violence and upheaval of nature repeatedly in his work, and the newly published diary of his making of FITZCARRALDO - more a ‘fever dream’ than a journal – finds him in perpetual struggle with the obscenity of the environment around him. At one point he despairs that he is ‘hopelessly irreconciled to nature.’
This is not merely anti-nature writing though, and he has shown many times – particularly in his films GRIZZLY MAN and ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD – that he is beholden to the beauty of the world. But he is aware that it is a terrible beauty.
He showed us slides of the Dutch artist Hercules Seghers, contorted and grotesque primitive landscapes blown up to gigantic size on the stage, and then the opening of AGUIRRE, WRATH OF GOD, and it’s beautiful but vertiginous descent down Macchu Picchu, a shot which crazed star and 'pestilence' Klaus Kinski wanted to occupy with his face alone.
He talked about the importance of experiencing landscape on foot, so that ‘the world reveals itself to you’, recounting his secular pilgrimage on foot from Munich to Paris where film critic and supporter Lotte Eisner was in hospital with cancer.
With this gesture he vowed that she could not die, that his walking would not let her die, and that she would be better and out of hospital by the time he got there. She survived and lived for another eight years. He recorded the experience in his other major published work OF WALKING IN ICE.
Throughout the night, with typical Herzogian evasion, he continually enforced the power of his own beliefs and his conviction never questioned, though he conceded that most of what he holds dearest is ineffable.
He is not someone who takes himself too earnestly, though he is often deadly serious. His diary of the making of FITZCARRALDO is called THE CONQUEST OF THE USELESS after all. And in the clips of him during the making of the film, after he has survived two plane crashes, natives he had employed have been shot with 6-foot-long arrows, and he has withstood drought and flood in order to drag a boat over a mountain, the look in his eyes is one of a defeated man, albeit one who has been defeated in his greatest moment of triumph.
I came away from the evening with a number of leads to hunt down: the translation of the medieval EDDA he recommended, the original manuscript of which he held in his own hands after it had been returned to Iceland from Denmark on a destroyer with two submarines accompanying it, half the population turning out for its arrival into Reykjavik, drunk the lot of them, their jubilation a testament to the power of poetry.
Strangely, he also made me want to watch Chelsea play, describing how taken he had been by the movement of West Ham’s 18-year-old no. 26, Joe Cole, playing Arsenal at Upton Park some years ago. Who else would praise the intelligence of the England football team in their appreciation of working empty space, singling out Wayne Rooney for particular praise as a genius of movement – 'a bison crossed with a viper'.
Then there was his compelling explanation of the formation of the Neolithic menhirs at Carnac (the primal bedrock of FITZCARRALDO), the importance of ecstatic truth versus verité, even how Fred Astaire’s ‘insipid’ face didn’t impinge upon the cinematic genius of ‘Swing Time’.
There were also preview clips of BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS (a hilarious scene featuring a pale Nic Cage, a bloated Val Kilmer and two psychedelic lizards) and the David Lynch-produced MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE.
In fact, David Lynch is one of the only other people in cinema who I think would fit the billing of this LEGENDS LIVE series. Like Herzog he understands the importance of preserving his mystique and not giving much away, and if he has to, doing so by misdirection.
Herzog occupies that strange place of the ‘cult mainstream’, where the outer fringes bow into the centre, revitalising the everyday and making sure we all reconsider our place in a world which he finds unsustainable, but not without hope, even if we aren’t a part of its future.
If you want to spend more time with Herzog grab any of his films, but also Paul Cronin's superlative book HERZOG ON HERZOG, which is the closest most will get to speaking with the man if you don't get to catch him live.
