A Documentary is Just a Feature Film In Disguise: An Interview with Werner Herzog

Around the time Tom Waits simultaneously released his albums Alice and Blood Money, he was regularly asked why he was putting out two titles at once? His common reply: “If yer gonna fire up the griddle, you might as well make more than one pancake.” Werner Herzog seems to have taken a cue from Waits (it’s not hard to imagine the two getting along) with the release of his first two productions in the United States since 1978’s Stroszek. The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, a madman’s delusional romp and bayou fever-dream that revolves, reeling, around Nicolas Cage’s highly entertaining—even genius—performance, came out last month. It was followed yesterday by the release of My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, based on the true story of an adult son who kills his aged mother, running her through with a sword at the neighbor’s house before retreating back home across the street where a day-long stand-off with the police ensues.

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"Bad Lieutenant": Aesthetic Interrupted

“…I’m not doing the prequel to Aguirre: the Wrath of God, OK? Let me put it that way!”

These were the kindest words Abel Ferrara had to say about Werner Herzog’s upcoming Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans when asked in a 2008 Filmmaker interview about that unapproved reimagining of Ferrara's 1992 cult classic, released in a special edition DVD late last month. The original film depressingly contemplates Catholicism’s uniquely potent cycle of guilt, shame, forgiveness, and redemption by following Harvey Keitel’s anonymous titular character through an explosive on-the-job spiritual crisis that leaves him flailing through a deadly and delusional self-righteous blindness: perceive slander (often imagined), accuse, rage, repeat. Ferrara's creation remains one of the most aptly (un)named characters in cinematic history.

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A Proper ALIEN Resurrection

Above: A Ridley Scott “money shot” from Alien's 7-minutedialogue-free introduction: beginning, middles, and end through the corridors of the Nostromo (film set) in a fluid 60-second single take.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences only got it half-right for Alien in 1980. To say that Ridley Scott’s commercial breakthrough was robbed of its Oscar for Best Art Direction/Set Direction is a pathetic understatement not only about the film in its own right, but also about the film within the history of moving-image arts. Alien did deservedly win Best Effects/Visual Effects for integrating elaborate spaceship models and grotesque creature puppetry believably into the film as a whole. Accordingly, the uncannily disturbing beast earned its place in the pantheon of movie monsters. It has actually proven so hard to look past its horrors that ‘The Alien’ is regularly acknowledged as the primary factor that immortalized the film. Yet independent of ‘The Alien,’ Scott’s vision of the future is one of the great achievements of hyper-realistic film design, released in the summer of 1979 during one of the most pivotal transitional periods between big-screen theatrical movie-viewing experiences and small-screen home-video viewing experiences. As it has become increasingly likely for a movie’s ultimate destination to be the small screen, attention to detail is less of a priority. Even if designers do commit to a high level of detail, statistically fewer viewers have an option of seeing it, based on resolution alone.

Alien is a great example of the importance of seeing movies on big screen. For any director reliant on frequent long-takes, compositions naturally become less didactic: greater scope in field-of-vision grants greater freedom to the explorative viewer’s eye. For a filmmaker like Scott, compositions are so enlarged that it is as if the audience is looking at the film through a microscope. Though Scott’s cutting is relatively quick given the film’s many scenes of action, viewers are capable of catching glances of its very DNA, almost subliminally. I have probably viewed Alien 20 times, yet below are a few details I glimpsed for the first time at a screening at New York's Film Forum’s brand new print of Alien (screening in honor of the film’s 30th Anniversary (July 10th-16th).

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Cold Love: Dario Argento's Guide to Getting It On

Above: Making love by proxy in CAT O' NINE TAILS

Holding its own against the grisliest and most eye-catching of Argento’s graphic on-screen murders, CAT O' NINE TAILS (1971) also showcases a stunningly artificial sex scene which ranks among the most subversive and blackly comic depictions of human passion in cinema history. Seemingly influenced by meticulously staged magazine advertisement photography, the below stills do justice to the uncannily frozen quality of pristine shallowness that overlays the interaction…I don’t think I’ve ever seen hairstyles do so much acting before or since. In 'The Future' (i.e., any present whose technological developments are at the turning-point of decadently outpacing their usefulness to the very culture that created them), this is what all sex will be like...

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The Light Phantasmagoric: Dario Argento's "The Mother of Tears"

Argento’s newest, The Mother of Tears (2007), suffers a dearth of atmosphere compared to many of Argento’s earlier films (I would use 1977’s Suspiria—the first in a 30-year-long trilogy that Mother bookends—as the cut-off point for his earlier works). This fact might lead viewers to wonder if Argento is getting a tad generic in his old age. Luckily, the nebulous Italian Horror category (I won’t trip down the pitfall of calling it a proper genre though I would defend that the system produced films with a strong vein of recognizable similarities) is a uniquely odd bedrock foundation from which to atrophy into the generic while still maintaining interesting passages.

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The Fearful Symmetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Salò"

Above: Drawn and quartered

In the Cinema of Bad Sex, has there ever been an entry more monumental than Salò? Italian poet, director and cultural heretic Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notorious lamination of the Marquis de Sade’s fantastically cruel The 120 Days of Sodom atop the all-too-actual bedlam of Fascist Italy’s final days has only grown in infamy since its 1975 completion. Its controversial premise: four perverted and powerful Libertines-the Duke, the Bishop, the Magistrate, and the President—kidnap 9 young men and 9 young women from a village and take them to a secluded palace to exploit their bodies and beings over the course of several days filled with sexual humiliation, torture, rape and ultimately wholesale murder. Thanks in part to the very censorship and banning that aimed to suppress it, as well as years of tantalizingly limited home media availability that at one time spurred on collectors to pay upwards of $2000 per out-of-print disc, Salò, recently back in print in the United States through the Criterion Collection, may be more monumental than ever. The monument, of course, would be a phallic obelisk, its presence visible for miles even though the majority of its physical bulk remains unreachable no matter how much time you spend around it. Monolithic. Impermeable. Yet in practical terms, ultimately of questionable civic or social utility. Ultimately just taking up space.

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Werner Herzog: Conquistador of the Useless at the End of the World

Above: The seal-whisperers in ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD

“I have always thought of my films as really being one big work that I have been concentrating on for forty years,” Werner Herzog stated in Paul Cronin’s interview compilation Herzog on Herzog (2002 UK release with a revised edition in the works). It is a sentiment he has repeatedly expressed in numerous interviews over the course of his career, all the while incorporating images from his global travels into a collective, life-long gesamtkunstwerk that has charted the cultivation and maturation of his thoughts and visual expression over a period of decades. For that matter, the man has averaged an output of more than a movie a year since 1968. What the hell have I accomplished this year?

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