Werner Herzog goes his own way, both artistically and geographically.
With "Encounters at the End of World," his documentary about Antarctica that opened at the Tivoli on Friday, Herzog is likely to have become the first director to make a feature film on all seven continents of the Earth.
Herzog, 65, is notorious for the physical challenges he presents to himself and his crews.
In "Encounters," the filmmaker climbs into an active volcano. For "Fitzcarraldo," he hired a native tribe to drag a steamboat over a mountain in the Brazilian rainforest. During the filming of "Echoes of a Somber Empire," he was imprisoned by rebels in the Central African Republic.
Herzog has said that an apprentice filmmaker needs physical labor and life experience more than academic study.
To raise money for his first film, the German-born Herzog worked as a rodeo hand in Mexico and smuggled televisions across the border into Texas. Or was it handguns?
It's hardly surprising that Herzog is indifferent to critics. Yet he dedicated "Encounters" to Roger Ebert, the influential critic of the Chicago Sun-Times. During a recent phone interview, I asked him why.
"Because he is a soldier of cinema, like I am," Herzog said.
Last year, Herzog attended Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival in Champaign, Ill. Fittingly, between films I spotted Herzog eating lunch with the student volunteers instead of the many academics and civic boosters who had gathered for the event.
Herzog often narrates his documentaries and, even in English, he comes across as both erudite and dryly funny. Yet when I tried to start our phone interview with small talk about his prodigious workload, he said with a very Germanic terseness: "Let's not waste any time."
When I raised the hot topic of truth and falsehood in documentaries, he said that he didn't consider any of his films to be documentaries (even though at least half of them are generally listed as such).
And when I asked him how global warming is affecting Antarctica, where he spent six weeks profiling the philosophical oddballs who work there, he said he didn't want to get drawn into a political discussion.
Yet the fate of the planet is clearly on his mind. He has said that "our civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness," and in "Encounters," that metaphor is literalized in the contrast between the polluted human encampments and the mysterious undersea realms.
A recurring theme in Herzog films such as "Aguirre: The Wrath of God" is that nature punishes those who attempt to conquer it. In "Encounters," he says matter-of-factly that "the end of human life on this Earth is assured."
Yet Werner Herzog soldiers on, documenting the wild places and untamed spirits before they are all gone.
Joe Williams
stltoday.com
20th July 2008
