August 24–31, 2000
movies
Screen Picks
The week in repertory film, video and TV.
The Werner Herzog Collection
($14.98-$19.98 VHS, $29.98-$34.98 DVD)
It’s a sad, strange fact that, apart from his appearance as one of the ghostly faces in What Dreams May Come, Werner Herzog’s has been almost totally absent from American screens for most of the last decade. Inarguably one of the most influential directors of the 1970s — without him, those Blair Witch kids would still be looking for financing — he’s been if not forgotten at least set to one side, perhaps because his values are so out of step with the current vogue in filmmaking. The simple camera movements, the outlandish acting, the disinterest in any emotion that isn’t extraordinary, all the traits of Herzog’s films contradict the vogue for movies that are either self-referential genre pieces or sugar-coated, navel-gazing naturalism.
This brings us around to The Werner Herzog Collection, Anchor Bay’s massive reissue project, five films strong with plans for several more. (Upcoming releases include Cobra Verde and Aguirre: The Wrath of God next month, and The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser, Stroszek and Heart of Glass next year.) The crown jewel of the series thus far is Fitzcarraldo, a pristine transfer of Herzog’s jungle epic. It’s impossible not to see the director reflected in Klaus Kinski’s half-mad entrepreneur, so obsessed with bringing opera to the Amazon that he concocts a scheme to drag a steamboat over a mountain in order to make the money to do so. Majestic in scope even on the small screen (although a theatrical reissue would be nice), the film is surprisingly restrained in its first hour; even Kinski holds back.
Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the newly issued Woyzeck. An 80-minute adaptation of Georg Büchner’s expressionist play fragment, the film begins with Kinski, a lowly, abused soldier, being drilled and assaulted until he can no longer stand. (According to Jim Knipfel’s liner notes, the abuse was, at Kinski’s insistence, for real.) While Eva Mattes won an acting award at Cannes for her performance as Woyzeck’s unfaithful wife, the film — shot in 18 days immediately following the completion of Nosferatu — seems like an excuse for Kinski to try on different varieties of submission and rage; any connective tissue that might humanize his character (or even render him comprehensible) is dispensed with.
Nosferatu, meanwhile, uncomfortably tilts between genre storytelling and poetically creepy imagery. With his head shaved, skin painted white, and fangs which look like bleached-out candy corns, Kinski’s Dracula is uniquely vulnerable, more like the Elephant Man than the Prince of Darkness. There’s a desperation and a pathos to him that no performance of the "I never drink… wine" school has ever touched. Unfortunately, too much of the film is taken up with Bruno Ganz and Isabelle Adjani flitting about, and the transfer is often grainy and even overexposed. (One curious note: Nosferatu, like Fitzcarraldo, was actually shot in English, that being the only common language the actors could speak. Though the German-dubbed version is preferred, both DVDs contain the English-language version as well. It’s interesting for about five seconds, before you realize you’re in danger of destroying whatever mystique the films might hold.)
Though the Fitzcarraldo DVD’s audio commentary once again gives Herzog a chance to dispel the perception (fostered in part by the making-of documentary Burden of Dreams) that the title character’s exploitation of Peruvian Indians was duplicated by the film crew, he’s still legendary for his difficult productions, which is what makes My Best Fiend (reviewed here a few weeks ago) so fascinating. As hoped, the DVD allows you to bypass the English dub job and opt for a subtitled German version. (Several scenes are still in English anyway.) Given the extent to which the documentary is taken up with the utter madness of Herzog and Kinski’s relationship, the guttural snarl of the German language seems far more appropriate to carry the message.
Via Dolorosa
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"It’s a long-held preference, what you might call a habit of mind: putting words into other people’s mouths." Departing from that confession, playwright David Hare proceeds to speak his own words (and not a few of them) for the next 90 minutes, and while he may not give Judi Dench a run for her money, he’s got Nicole Kidman beat cold. Hare, whose wife is Jewish, though he is not, went to Israel in 1997 looking for material, but what emerged is a sometimes-baffled Englishman’s view of the centuries-old conflicts and contradictions which govern the land. The central question, as he puts it, is "Stones or ideas?" Is it more important what you believe, or where you live? There are no real answers, of course, nor would you expect any. But apart from Palestine, Joe Sacco’s brilliant piece of comic-book reportage, Via Dolorosa is the most vivid recreation I’ve seen of the current situation, and what it’s like to be an outsider looking in on something you will never truly understand.
