What's In the Hearts of Men

Last week I had the opportunity to meet one of my idols. An opportunity I totally balked at, of course, because I couldn’t come up with anything to say to him. Anything other than to tell him that a recent episode of Metalocalypse referenced Fitzcarraldo, and Cary Jones fed that to me. Anything that came straight from my heart, from what I really felt, would sound too gushing to be sincere. ‘Werner Herzog you are the most brilliant filmmaker, the most daring creative force walking this planet. Everything you say about cinema is exactly what I feel.’ He even left Jonathan Demme a little star struck in the clip I’ve linked to. The only fitting tribute to Werner Herzog and his grand cinematic vision was a totally unintentional one. While we assembled to hear a man who has moved mountains for movies (and boats across them) a man who has grappled with humanity’s alienation from the earth, God, and his own often alien society, another man, (less poetically the second of the day) scaled the exterior of the 52 story Times Building where we waited in the basement auditorium. I would climb a building for Werner Herzog, but I chose three glasses of free wine instead.

As usual everything Herzog said was the perfect combination of bananas, brilliance and poetry. He told Demme “I know what’s in the hearts of men.” Then he told a story about recording interviews for Wild Blue Yonder wherein he entered a room full of astronauts who seemed a bit standoffish. He looked around and then told them about growing up in the mountains of Bavaria and how he became very adept at milking cows. Every since then he could always pick out a man who could milk a cow by looking at his face. He pointed at one man and declared ‘you, sir, know how to milk a cow!’ which was true. He told Demme that to be a filmmaker you must know what is in the hearts of men, and know what frightens them.

Of most interest to me were his thoughts on what is becoming a running theme of this blog. Herzog declared “If you don’t understand how to collaborate you’ll never understand the real essence of moviemaking.” Werner Herzog is a poet (and I don’t bestow that lightly or without a bit of irony, however it cannot be denied that the man has a way with language and a sense of drama like none other) of singular vision, and he makes more than liberal use of the poetic license that comes along with the title. Nevertheless, no matter how much truth is stretched, no matter how much embellishment is added or midgets enlisted to portray the human struggle, Herzog is a man who has worked intimately with some great and famously difficult artists in their own right, Klaus Kinski being the most famously infamous. During his talk with Demme, Herzog told of his collaboration with musician Florian Fricke (until he discovered New Age music later in life, and Herzog let him go his own way, b/c that kind of music is not to Dear Werner’s liking) and his years working with Peter Zeitlinger, a cinematographer on nearly 10 (or possibly 17—Herzog said that number but I can’t corroborate that) films. Filmmaking is an art that involves the most amount of industry and consequently the most cooperation between artists of varying fields. Where collaboration can dilute an artistic vision, where it can corrupt what makes something special about an idiosyncratic visual artist or author, as Herzog states, to truly be a filmmaker you must be someone who will allow collaboration to broaden a vision. Great directors or writers or editors to blossom under the pressures of cooperation by focus most on their strongest skills, relying on what makes their vision singular and what that brings to an artistic endeavor as massive as a move. Despite, or perhaps because of his passion for music, when working with a great musician Herzog told Demme that he sits in the same room as someone like Fricke, but just to inhabit the space, to feel the creativity, but was adamant that ‘his world is his world’ and Herzog stays, in the same room, but in a world of his own. Rather than controlling another’s vision, Herzog finds inspiration in chance and the things that ‘fall into his lap.’

Ostensibly the night was in celebration of the launch of The Museum of the Moving Image’s new web resource, the Moving Image Source. When Demme posed a question about YouTube (‘too small and quick’ for Herzog’s liking) and upped his hipster cred by name-dropping Dan Deacon, Herzog paid delightful tribute to my former employer. Herzog declared that with the launch of the Moving Image Source, “all of a sudden the web gains significant depth... the web was so shallow and uniformed now you can use it to go to the deep bottoms of the unknown in cinema.”

video from The Film Panel Notetaker