Passive Wrath
This might be a wee bit spolierish, but, felt like typing something...
So I just watched Aguirre: The Wrath of God yesterday here in Berlin, on a tiny TV in the Institut's mediothek. No english subtitles this time. I was able to gather much of the dialogue, but not nearly all of it, which made for a very interesting read of the film this time around. I was reminded very quickly of Sam Fuller's The Big Red One. In The Big Red One (which is perhaps most notable, unfortunately, for its casting of both Mark Hamill and Robert Carradine in non´ridiculous roles) the characters that continue to survive battles through World War II become empowered by their non-deaths. A crucial aspect of the film is how there is a kind of deification that occurs in certain-death type situations for the people that don't day. It's something that I haven't seen captured in any other WWII films.
With Herzog's journey-into-death film, a similar thing occurs - the members that survive the longest gain a sort of mythic status. And, of course, Aguirre himself find that he has in fact, as the Leader of the Living, become a god. He utters somethign to the extent of "we shall endure" towards the end - it is this endurance is the foundation for his deification.
What makes Aguirre especially interesting to me is that I read it as implicating the West's relationship with madness. Especially as a German film. Heidegger wrote that madness can be seen as a means of escape from ideology (using the example, primarily, of Friedrich Höldrelin (and incidentally, man, its fucking great having a keyboard (other typos aside) that has the umlaut vowels so handy)), but Herzog shows that madness does not lead to any sort of better place. When Aguirre is the only one left alive on the raft, with a veritable fuckload of monkeys, I think one can interpret that infestation (and that infestation is set up brilliantly earlier in the film with a shot of a mouse carrying its young away from a nest) of a lesser ape as demonstration that madness is path leading downwards, not upwards.
Incidentally, the best Kinksi glare out there, for me, is actually in Herzog's Woyzeck, right at the end.
So I just watched Aguirre: The Wrath of God yesterday here in Berlin, on a tiny TV in the Institut's mediothek. No english subtitles this time. I was able to gather much of the dialogue, but not nearly all of it, which made for a very interesting read of the film this time around. I was reminded very quickly of Sam Fuller's The Big Red One. In The Big Red One (which is perhaps most notable, unfortunately, for its casting of both Mark Hamill and Robert Carradine in non´ridiculous roles) the characters that continue to survive battles through World War II become empowered by their non-deaths. A crucial aspect of the film is how there is a kind of deification that occurs in certain-death type situations for the people that don't day. It's something that I haven't seen captured in any other WWII films.
With Herzog's journey-into-death film, a similar thing occurs - the members that survive the longest gain a sort of mythic status. And, of course, Aguirre himself find that he has in fact, as the Leader of the Living, become a god. He utters somethign to the extent of "we shall endure" towards the end - it is this endurance is the foundation for his deification.
What makes Aguirre especially interesting to me is that I read it as implicating the West's relationship with madness. Especially as a German film. Heidegger wrote that madness can be seen as a means of escape from ideology (using the example, primarily, of Friedrich Höldrelin (and incidentally, man, its fucking great having a keyboard (other typos aside) that has the umlaut vowels so handy)), but Herzog shows that madness does not lead to any sort of better place. When Aguirre is the only one left alive on the raft, with a veritable fuckload of monkeys, I think one can interpret that infestation (and that infestation is set up brilliantly earlier in the film with a shot of a mouse carrying its young away from a nest) of a lesser ape as demonstration that madness is path leading downwards, not upwards.
Incidentally, the best Kinksi glare out there, for me, is actually in Herzog's Woyzeck, right at the end.
1 Comments:
I'm going to have to watch Aguirre, even though I now know how it ends, at least vis a vis monkey rafts.
Woyzeck is great for kinda-sorta German speakers since the dialog is minimal and in the artfully simple, clipped style of the original play. It's also a fun way to learn how to speak in the third person singular to your social inferiors. Er ist ein guter Mensch, aber er hat keine Moral!
In Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog explicitly makes the connection to his earlier cinematic explorations of madness. It's an interesting perspective at least because it gives a very German treatment -- at least a very German-filmic one -- to Timothy Treadwell, whose ambitions and failings seem so quintessentially American in many respects.
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