Werner Herzog - Finding ecstatic truth in the most extreme circumstances, embracing the world that is both brutal and chaotic: The jungle is Obscene. Everything about it is sinful, for which reason the sin does not stand out as sin

Werner Herzog, Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo, Trans. by Krishna Winston, Ecco, 2010.


"Werner Herzog is one of our most revered contemporary filmmakers, a visionary director who ceaselessly tests the boundaries of art. Fitzcarraldo, his lavish 1982 film about a would-be rubber baron who pulls a steamship over a hill to access a rich rubber territory, was hailed by critics around the globe and won Herzog the 1982 Outstanding Director Prize at Cannes.
The text of Conquest of the Useless emerged as if out of an Amazonian fever dream: the crew's camp in the heart of the jungle was attacked and burned to the ground; the production clashed with a border war; two planes crashed during filming; and Herzog had to unravel the logistics of moving a 320-ton steamship over a hill without the use of special effects.
More than just a journal or diary of the shooting of Fitzcarraldo, Conquest of the Useless is a work of art unto itself, which charts the inner landscapes born of the delirium of the jungle and offers an extraordinary glimpse into the mind of a genius during the making of one of his greatest achievements."

"In 1979, Werner Herzog approached 20th Century Fox to fund a movie, based on a true story, about an overzealous rubber baron who wishes to stage an opera in the middle of the Peruvian Amazon. The producers loved the idea and were about to sign off when the discussion turned to a scene that involved pulling a steamship over a mountainous isthmus, from one river to another. “So you’re going to use a plastic model boat, right?” the backers asked Herzog. The director replied that the camera had to capture “a real steamship being hauled over a real mountain, though not for the sake of realism but for the stylization characteristic of grand opera.” He was met with icy stares, whereupon he realized that he alone would have to raise the money for the film. Over the course of the next two years, through perhaps the most difficult shoot in the history of cinema, he kept a production diary. After he penned the final entry, it sat unread for 20 years. Now, finally, it’s about to be published in book form. Here we present an excerpt from this diary, which will be released on June 30 as Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo. It’s one of the best books we’ve read so far this year, but that’s no surprise because it’s Herzog and everything he does is perfect because he’s perfect. Perfect perfect perfect." - Vice

“The jour­nal entries that make up this dis­arm­ingly poetic mem­oir were penned over the course of the two and a half years it took Her­zog to make his film Fitz­car­raldo, for which he won the best direc­tor award at Cannes in 1982. Herzog’s earthy and atmos­pheric descrip­tions of the Ama­zon jun­gle and the Natives who live there among wild and domes­ti­cated ani­mals in heavy, humid weather con­jure a civ­i­liza­tion indif­fer­ent to the rhythms of moder­nity. The impos­si­ble odds that con­spired to stop pro­duc­tion of the film and the sheer obsti­nacy it took to attempt it in the rain for­est instead of a stu­dio par­al­lel the plot of the film itself: with the help of local Natives, Fitz­car­raldo pulls a steamship over a steep hill to access rub­ber so he can earn enough money to build an opera house in the jun­gle. Her­zog has made over 50 films dur­ing his pro­lific career.” — Donna L. Davey

“The acclaimed director’s diary of his time mak­ing Fitz­car­raldo (1982). From the begin­ning, the film faced more chal­lenges and uncer­tain­ties than most of Herzog’s other movies, and he com­posed a lengthy list that ended with the grim fore­cast that it could “be added to indef­i­nitely.” Film­ing had to start anew after Jason Robards, the orig­i­nal lead and an actor Her­zog came to scorn, aban­doned the project halfway through due to ill­ness, and Mick Jag­ger, set to play the lead character’s assis­tant, had to drop out to go on tour. When film­ing restarted, it was with Ger­man actor Klaus Kin­ski, a rav­ing, unhinged pres­ence in these journals-his volatil­ity so alarmed the locals that they qui­etly asked the direc­tor if he wanted Kin­ski killed. Then there were the night­mar­ish logis­tics of the famous scene where a steamship is dragged over a small hill in the jun­gle, from one river to another. Her­zog insisted that, as the cen­tral metaphor of the film, the event must be recorded with­out any com­pro­mise. (Much of the behind-the-scenes drama is recorded in Les Blank’s doc­u­men­tary Bur­den of Dreams.) Herzog’s jour­nals effec­tively map the director’s dis­lo­ca­tion and lone­li­ness, but they also high­light his unique imag­i­na­tion and the pro­found effect the remote Peru­vian loca­tion had on him. The writ­ing is haunted by what Her­zog came to see as the mis­ery of the jun­gle, a place where “all the pro­por­tions are off.” He slept fit­fully, when at all, and there is a hal­lu­ci­na­tory qual­ity to the journals-the line between what is real and what is imag­ined becomes nearly invis­i­ble. Recorded daily, with occa­sional gaps and frag­ments, Herzog’s reflec­tions are dis­qui­et­ing but also urgent and compelling-as he notes, “it’s onlythrough writ­ing that I come to my senses.“A valu­able his­tor­i­cal record and a strangely styl­ish, hyp­notic lit­er­ary work.” — Kirkus Reviews

“The film­ing of Werner Herzog’s 1982 epic, Fitz­car­raldo, in the Ama­zon­ian depths of Peru seemed myth­i­cally doomed from its incep­tion, some­thing chron­i­cled that same year in the doc­u­men­tary Bur­den of Dreams. The tit­u­lar char­ac­ter, fueled by the vol­canic ego of Klaus Kin­ski, wants to build an opera house in the wilds of Iqui­tos but first must get a 300-ton steam­boat over a moun­tain. The Ger­man director’s per­sonal jour­nal from the marathon two-year shoot offers another angle, and it’s no sur­prise his entries are exquis­itely detailed. Most of his films toe the same fine line – obses­sion and insan­ity – so nat­u­rally, he car­ried Fitzcarraldo’s bur­den.
It’s not explicit if, years later when he decided to trans­late and pub­lish this, Her­zog took a revisionist’s scalpel to his time in Peru. In the pref­ace, he states it wasn’t a day-to-day diary of film­ing but rather “inner land­scapes, born of the delir­ium of the jun­gle.” Through­out Con­quest, Her­zog is repeat­edly dis­gusted by the jungle’s per­ver­sity and silent, seething “mal­ice,” yet strangely amused by its dirty jokes.
Those highs and lows coil as one. For his dry reflec­tions (“When you shoot an ele­phant, it stays on its feet for 10 days before it falls over”) and pangs of jun­gle hatred, there are equally beau­ti­ful scenes, as when Her­zog thinks he feels an earth­quake: “For a moment the coun­try­side quiv­ered and shook, and my ham­mock began to sway gen­tly.” Her­zog and Kinski’s tumul­tuous friend­ship is touched on, but not as deeply as in the great 1999 doc­u­men­tary My Best Fiend. Her­zog mostly ignores the actor’s pro­jec­tile inso­lence on set, though he does move him to a hotel when per­turbed natives offer to kill him.
Else­where, a man chops off his own foot after a snakebite; a Peru­vian gen­eral snaps and declares war on Ecuador; Her­zog slaps an albino turkey; birds “scream” rather than sing, and insects look pre­his­toric; planes crash and limbs are split open. He sounds amaz­ingly calm within these fevered inner land­scapes – per­haps writ­ing was ther­apy – but knows pre­serv­ing his­tory is impor­tant to myth. The crew, vic­to­ri­ous, finally gets the boat over the moun­tain, and Her­zog gets in one last joke. “All that is to be reported is this: I took part.” — Audra Schroeder

“A crazed epic about a rub­ber baron who drags a steamship across an Ama­zon­ian moun­tain range, Werner Herzog’s Fitz­car­raldo (1981) set the bar absurdly high for cin­e­matic real­ism. (There would be no spe­cial effects used.) Per­haps even more hair-raising were the sto­ries that emerged from that shoot, includ­ing Peru­vian bor­der dis­putes, manic rages from actor Klaus Kin­ski and an unfor­tu­nate cin­e­matog­ra­pher for­got­ten overnight on a roar­ing rapids. Les Blank’s doc­u­men­tary of the mak­ing of the film, Bur­den of Dreams, is arguably supe­rior to Fitz­car­raldo itself.
Now comes a third nar­ra­tive, direc­tor Herzog’s pri­vate jour­nals, first pub­lished in Ger­many in 2004 and finally arriv­ing state­side. Con­quest of the Use­less (from a line of dia­logue in the film) adds sig­nif­i­cant details to the big­ger pic­ture, but also stands alone as a com­pellingly gonzo piece of reportage. Shrewdly omit­ting the better-known mis­ad­ven­tures, Her­zog focuses on his own deter­mi­na­tion and lone­li­ness. And why not? It’s a diary. We start in the cush sur­round­ings of Fran­cis Coppola’s San Fran­cisco man­sion, circa the release of Apoc­a­lypse Now. Her­zog toils on his script in the guest room while Sofia plays in the pool. A month later, he’s in Iqui­tos, Peru, observ­ing ani­mals as they eat each other.
As a read, Con­quest flies along—but not because it’s espe­cially plotty. Rather, it gath­ers its kick from the spec­ta­cle of a celebrity direc­tor escap­ing the late-’70s famescape into his own obses­sions. Meet­ings with Mick Jag­ger are far less wild than Herzog’s mor­dant curios­ity at the steamy rain for­est and his vivid descent into what he calls the “great abyss of night.” When a local Peru­vian fears the camera’s theft of his soul, Her­zog tells him there’s no need to worry, but pri­vately admits he’s lying.” — Joshua Rothkopf

“I am fas­ci­nated by Werner Herzog’s philo­soph­i­cal approach to life, and what he refers to as ecsta­tic truth. His early film­mak­ing roughly cor­re­sponds to the New Ger­man Cin­ema, a move­ment which sought to acti­vate new ways to rep­re­sent and dis­cuss cul­ture and real­ity. Ecsta­tic truth, as an idea, remains true to this bold and pro­gres­sive ambi­tion, hop­ing to cap­ture a sense of real­ity that goes beyond straight­for­ward empir­i­cal facts, or the con­tem­po­rary con­ven­tions of Euro­pean cin­ema.
Instead, ecsta­tic truth is a kind of spir­i­tual affir­ma­tion that exists between the lines, or behind the super­fi­cial gloss of the on-screen images; and yet it is not spir­i­tual in any the­o­log­i­cal sense, nor does it adhere to any cul­tural set of beliefs. To bor­row a phrase from the title of Alan Yentob’s BBC doc­u­men­tary on Her­zog, it is a truth ‘beyond rea­son’: highly sub­jec­tive and deeply per­sonal.
For me, what is most inter­est­ing about Herzog’s work is that he seeks to find a sense of ecsta­tic truth in the most extreme cir­cum­stances. Per­haps this is the only place it can be found, if it is to exist at all. His films are often struc­tured around char­ac­ters who are in some way at odds with the world, strangers in a uni­verse divested of mean­ing and sur­rounded by ‘chaos, hos­til­ity and mur­der’. It sounds like a very fatal­is­tic, Ger­manic philo­soph­i­cal approach, but I think that to dis­miss it as neg­a­tive or nihilis­tic is to miss Herzog’s point.
The con­cept of ecsta­tic truth ties into a loose cul­tural idea of spir­i­tual enlight­en­ment and indi­vid­ual empow­er­ment, but it is with­out sen­ti­ment or naive ide­al­ism. It is a way of look­ing at the world as both bru­tal and chaotic, but embrac­ing those qual­i­ties in nature for what they are. It accepts that humankind can­not dom­i­nate or con­trol nature as such, but is enthu­si­as­tic about the engage­ment. On the set of Fitz­car­raldo, deep in the jun­gle, Her­zog speaks of the ‘obscen­ity of the jun­gle’, stat­ing that even ‘the stars look like a mess’, and yet, in spite of this, he con­tin­ues to love and admire the nature that sur­rounds him — per­haps ‘against [his] bet­ter judg­ment’.
Ecsta­tic truth does not imply secu­rity or sta­bil­ity, there are no great dis­cov­er­ies and no guar­an­tees of empir­i­cal knowl­edge: in this sense it is a nec­es­sary con­quest of the use­less, a jour­ney with no sign­posts or des­ti­na­tions. It is a con­tin­ual task, under­taken not for the ben­e­fit of mankind but for the ben­e­fit of one­self. And I think that there is some­thing per­versely roman­tic and aspi­ra­tional about Herzog’s approach; in many ways it feels rem­i­nis­cent of Niet­zsche roam­ing the wild moun­tains and find­ing peace in the wilder­ness.
To seek one’s indi­vid­ual sense of truth among the ele­ments is surely as noble a project as any, and many of Werner Herzog’s films seem to be pur­su­ing exactly that kind of philo­soph­i­cal aim: it is an attempt to cre­ate one’s place in the uni­verse, or, as Her­zog puts it, to con­tin­u­ally search for ‘a deeper stra­tum of truth’ about one­self and the wider world.” — Rhys Tran­ter

"Released in 1982, Fitzcarraldo tells the story of a would-be rubber magnate who attempts to haul a steamship over a small mountain in Peru so that he can access an area rich in rubber trees. The infamous Klaus Kinski plays Fitzcarraldo, a European who pushes his crew to the breaking point in this mad quest; the semi-fictional plot was doubled in the real-life production disasters that plagued the movie. Fitzcarraldo dramatizes one of the oldest narrative conflicts, man vs. nature, in an earnest yet completely unromantic way. Fitzcarraldo, the opera-lover who brings ice to the natives, shatters any romantic illusions one might have about the power and majesty of nature in his mad schemes. This theme repeats throughout Herzog’s work, from the conquistador opus Aguirre, the Wrath of God to his outstanding 2005 documentary Grizzly Man. Again and again, Herzog’s films ironize, disrupt, or otherwise show the folly of romanticizing nature. His diary entries from Conquest of the Useless lay these sentiments bare in ways both bleakly poetic and terribly funny.
Take this entry from December 8, 1980: “The jungle is obscene. Everything about it is sinful, for which reason the sin does not stand out as sin.” Here, Herzog provides a succinct antithesis to Rousseau’s concept of the “noble savage.” Herzog’s view of man—de-politicized, that is—seems more Hobbesian, actually. In an entry from April 6, 1981, he writes:
“This morning I woke up to terror such as I have never experienced before: I was entirely stripped of feeling. Everything was gone; it was as if I had lost something that had been entrusted to me the previous evening, something I was supposed to take special care of overnight. I was in the position of someone who has been assigned to guard an entire sleeping army, but suddenly finds himself mysteriously blinded, deaf, and effaced. Everything was gone. I was completely empty, without pain, without longing, without love, without warmth and friendship, without anger, without hate. Nothing, nothing was there anymore, and I was left like a suit of armor with no knight inside. It took a long time before I even felt alarmed.”
Nature seems to nullify Herzog, to void any essential humanity he might have had. His repetition of “Nothing, nothing was there anymore” reminds me of King Lear’s famous lines “Never, never, never, never, never.” Although Lear is weeping over the body of his kind daughter Cordelia, the psychology of these lines surely reflect his own terrible experiences, his own nullified identity of homelessness on the wild heath.
For Herzog, nature is a war, nature will eat you. “Moss grows on lianas, and in the knobby places where the moss is thicker, a leafy plant like a slender hare’s ear grows out of the moss: a parasite on a parasite on a parasite,” he observes. If Herzog is melancholy or mordant in these grim reckonings, he’s also very, very funny. Take this hilarious June 4th entry concerning a giant albino turkey that’s been terrorizing the set:
“The camp is silent with resignation; only the turkey is making a racket. It attacked me, overestimating its own strength, and I quickly grabbed its neck, which squirmed and tried to swallow, slapped him left-right with the casual elegance of the arrogant cavaliers I had seen in French Three Musketeers films who go on to prettily cross swords, and then let the vain albino go. His feelings hurt, he trotted away, wiggling his rump but with his wings still spread in conceited display.”
And yet one senses that Herzog’s humor is a defense against the absurdity of nature, one that derives from an acute awareness that humanity is at once of and apart from nature, and at that by its own definition, its own choice. In a June 2nd entry featuring his nemesis the albino turkey, Herzog details an incident that highlights the essential ugliness of a Darwinian world:
“Our kitchen crew slaughtered our last four ducks. While they were still alive, Julian plucked their neck feathers, before chopping off their heads on the execution block. The white turkey, that vain creature, the survivor of so many roast chickens and ducks transformed into soup, came over to inspect, gobbling and displaying, and used his ugly feet to push one of the beheaded ducks, as it lay there on the ground bleeding and flapping its wings, into what he thought was a proper position and making gurgling sounds while his bluish-red wattles swelled, he mounted the dying duck and copulated with it.”
There we go. We get it all, all the order of nature. Food, sex, death, the whole deal, laid out keenly and with grim humor, neatly compacted into a single, grotesque episode. If these excerpts are any indication of the rest of the book’s trajectory, Conquest of the Useless promises to transcend standard making-of fare. Indeed, Herzog’s book seems nothing less than a profound meditation on the intersection of man, nature, terror, and mortality." - bibkioklept

"Originally published in the noted director's native Germany in 2004, Herzog's diary, more prose poetry than journal entries, will appeal even to those unfamiliar with the extravagant 1982 film. From June 1979 to November 1981, Herzog recounted not only the particulars of shooting the difficult film about a fictional rubber baron—which included the famous sequence of a steamer ship being maneuvered over a hill from one river to another—but also the dreamlike quality of life in the Amazon. Famous faces swim in and out of focus, notably Mick Jagger, in a part that ended up on the cutting room floor, and the eccentric actor Klaus Kinski, who constantly berated the director after stepping into the title role that Jason Robards had quit. Fascinated by the wildlife that surrounded him in the isolated Peruvian jungle, Herzog details everything from the omnipresent insect life to piranhas that could bite off a man's toe. Those who haven't encountered Herzog on screen will undoubtedly be drawn in by the director's lyricism, while cinephiles will relish the opportunity to retrace the steps of one of the medium's masters." - Publishers Weekly

"In the summer of 1979, the director Werner Herzog found himself in the Peruvian river-port city of Iquitos preparing for “Fitzcarraldo,” a period epic starring Jason Robards and Mick Jagger that he planned to shoot in the rain forest. Two and a half years later, he was still there, struggling to finish. Robards and Jagger had long since quit, rendering their footage unusable. Locals had set fire to the filmmakers’ camp; the crew fled waving white flags. Robards’s replacement, the German actor Klaus Kinski, had proved so difficult that two Indian chiefs who witnessed his behavior approached Herzog and helpfully offered to murder him. Another member of the filmmaking team had gone completely insane, grabbed a machete and taken hostages. By then, surrounded by bugs and snakes and rooting pigs, beset by injuries and chronically, critically short of money, Herzog apparently found nothing particularly outlandish in what was happening, so consumed was he by a film that all reason suggested he should have abandoned several crises earlier. “I live my life or I end my life with this project,” he said.
“Fitzcarraldo” — which Herzog did indeed finish — has endured long and well in the hearts not only of movie lovers but of connoisseurs of production disasters, partly because the film itself seems to mirror the story of its making. It’s a half masterpiece, half folly about a gesture both grand and grandiose — an attempt by a would-be impresario (Kinski) to build an opera house in the wilds of Peru, a venue he imagines might someday showcase Enrico Caruso. This desire necessitates the deployment of hundreds of Indians to haul an immense ship up a steep mountain ridge, a Sisy­phean metaphor that’s no less effective for being so explicit.
The movie and its making are both fables of daft aspiration, investigations of the blurry border between having a dream and losing one’s mind. So it’s no surprise that in some ways, the back story has lingered longer than the story. The trials of “Fitzcarraldo”have already been the subject of one superb documentary, Les Blank’s “Burden of Dreams,” and a book by the same name (edited by Blank and James Bogan). And Herzog himself returned to analyze his combustible relationship with his leading man — “Every gray hair on my head I call Kinski” — in his 1999 documentary, “My Best Fiend.”
To those fragments of illumination we can now add “Conquest of the Useless,” a compilation of Herzog’s journals from June 1979 to November 1981, translated by Krishna Winston. (It was first published in Germany in 2004.) In the preface, Herzog warns us that the entries we’re about to read do not represent “reports on the actual filming” but rather “inner landscapes, born of the delirium of the jungle.” Cinephiles may groan, as I did, upon discovering that he means it. Anyone hoping for a definitive or even comprehensible account of the making and near unmaking of “Fitzcarraldo”is going to be sorely disappointed by the unadorned, barely annotated materials presented here.
As the curtain rises, we find Herzog at the home of Francis Ford Coppola, where he is staying while he races to finish the script. It feels appropriate, since Coppola’s own journey into jungle madness, “Apocalypse Now,” has just made its debut at Cannes. We anticipate a moment of baton passing, one world-class filmmaker handing some sort of cursed amulet of obsession to the next. It doesn’t come. “Apocalypse Now”is never mentioned. Nor do we find out what Coppola’s role, if any, in the future of “Fitzcarraldo” was intended to be. Nor do we learn what exactly has brought Herzog to his doorstep.
It never gets easier. Important figures arrive, then vanish, sometimes identified by first names only, their jobs, roles and relationships to Herzog mentioned only in passing a hundred pages later, or never. A book that cries out for interstitial explanations offers almost none, and the few that do appear only make matters worse. “Eight months expunged, as if I wished they had never happened,” Herzog interjects after an October 1979 entry. “A year of catastrophes, personal and related to my work.” Two paragraphs later, we pick up in July 1980, with no further light shed on those work-related catastrophes, although they presumably had some bearing on the story we’re vainly attempting to piece together.
We realize things are going wrong with Robards only when Herzog abruptly refers to the actor’s “appalling inner emptiness” (which he seems to have diagnosed after Robards told him he didn’t want anyone shooting at him). And we sense his admiration for Jagger, who works uncomplainingly, photographs Jerry Hall in rain-forest chic for Voguein his spare time and remains game even when a monkey bites him. But the diaries rarely record a specific conversation, dispute or personal encounter. Nature enthralls Herzog; people, less so. There is an awful lot about cows, dogs, lizards, moths and fist-size tarantulas, and anyone who has seen Herzog’s recent documentaries “Grizzly Man” and “Encounters at the End of the World” will recognize his singular ability to evoke the beauty and ruthless savagery of the natural world. But more workaday concerns only hum distantly in his head. “I went through the daily reports,” he writes, “and was devastated to see how little we have accomplished.” Absorbed as he is by thoughts of beetles and ostriches, that news, almost two years into his labors, actually surprises him.
But the befogged internal swirl of Herzog’s mind becomes an improbably apt vantage point from which to view the history of “Fitzcarraldo.” For all his maddening opacity (“Time is tugging at me like an elephant, and the dogs are tugging at my heart”), Herzog renders a vivid portrait of himself as an artist hypnotized by his own determined imagination. Occasionally he leaves the jungle, but he never really leaves it behind. He stops in New York in December 1980, anthropologically observing the dazed mourners in Central Park after John Lennon’s death while fretting about unsigned contracts. In England, he visits the set of “The Shining” and meets Stanley Kubrick, but the two men, each trapped in his own nightmarish production, don’t really connect. Back in Peru, he gets a telegram from Munich warning that his mother may die. Someone steals his under­wear. He records all this with the same benumbed neutrality. Nothing reaches him — not other people, not the punishing weather or tribal hostilities or delays, not even his notoriously loony star. (“No one will ever know what it cost me to prop him up, fill him with substance and give form to his hysteria,” Herzog writes of Kinski, concealing the full story even from his diary.)
As time wears on and Herzog becomes a man whose “life seems like a stranger’s house to me,” the entries convey a rootlessness and dislocation — geographical, spiritual, emotional — so profound that barely a pretense remains that “Fitzcarraldo” is about anything but his own fervent determination. “I am 38 now,” he writes, “and I have been through it all. My work has given me everything and taken everything from me.” The words read less like a declaration than a suicide note. Nearly three decades later, it’s unclear what’s more remarkable — that Herzog finally got his ship up the mountain, or that he managed to come down the other side more or less intact." - Mark Harris

“My life seems like a stranger’s house to me,” writes Werner Herzog late in Conquest of the Useless, less a straightforward diary of 1979-81, when he was working on Fitzcarraldo, than a series of “inner landscapes, born of the delirium of the jungle.” The film tells the story of the title character (played by Herzog’s frequent collaborator Klaus Kinski), a man who dreams of opening an opera house in a remote corner of Peru; to avoid treacherous rapids and natives alike, Fitzcarraldo opts to drag all of his equipment, including an enormous steamship, over a mountain rather than sail around it. It’s classic Herzog—a relentless, obsessive dreamer refusing to bow down to the savagery of nature, the laws of physics, or common sense.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the story of making the film is as insane as its plot. Filming in the jungle, Herzog faces military coups, financial collapse, no contact with the outside world, terrible food, lice, quicksand, piranhas, numerous cast and crew deaths, poisonous snakes, tarantulas, self-amputations, and attacks by indigenous tribes. “The powers of heaven are powerless against the jungle,” he remarks. Sleep doesn’t come easy in the midst of all this, either—Herzog feels trapped in “labyrinths of weariness with no escape,” and notes that he doesn’t “know what real sleep is anymore; I just have brief, strenuous fainting spells.”
Other people are also problematic. Many of the natives that make up the majority of his crew and cast turn out to be drunks, thieves, and liars; his other associates include “the biggest crooks imaginable” as well as “the gangly young bookkeeper from the city, whose mere presence is death to any meaningful thoughts.” His actors aren’t much better, with the exception of Mick Jagger, whose part was written out after production was shut down (Herzog simply felt that he could not be replaced). The director was less kind towards American Jason Robards (who was originally slated to play Fitzcarraldo) and the Italian-German actor Mario Adorf, calling them “cowards, whose real problem stems from their appalling inner emptiness.” Adorf especially falls under the director’s harsh scrutiny; Herzog calls him “a whiner, a stupid star full of posturing who cannot stand it that the Indian extras are sometimes more important than he is, the famous actor. Furthermore, he is simply cowardly, sneaky, and dumb, high-decibel dumb.”
When Robards bolts for America, Herzog briefly considers playing the role of Fitzcarraldo himself, as his “project and the character have become identical”—that is, the quest of a madman. In the end he calls in his “best fiend” Klaus Kinski, who erupts into childish tantrums and tirades from the moment he arrives, including one on his first day during costuming, when someone touches his hair: “Not even my hairdresser is allowed to touch my hair, Kinski screamed.” Herzog admits in his journal that one of Kinski’s main problems is his “inadequate supply of human compassion and depth,” and some Indians, who have had enough of his outbursts, offer to kill him. Herzog convinces them that that won’t be necessary, otherwise the film would never be completed.
If you’ve seen any of the films which Herzog narrates or appears in, two things will stand out about him: his hypnotic voice, with its mellifluous German accent, and his inimitable syntax, word choice, and use of metaphor. In fact, it’s difficult to read Conquest of the Useless without hearing it in his slow, unmistakable speech patterns. Whether describing in great detail the unimaginative plot of a Spanish comic book called Texas 1800 or the infinite happenings in the jungle, he renders everything in the same beautiful, dry style. Often the subject matter can be pathetic or gruesome: “I saw a dog, the saddest of all; he was swaying on his feet, moving in a sort of hunched-over, squirming reptilian fashion. On his back and shoulders he had open ulcers, which he kept trying to bite, contorting his head and body.” Yet it can also be gracefully tender: “The people’s gestures are unfamiliar, gentle and lovely; they move their hands like orchestral conductors in time with a soft, shy melody that emanates cautiously from the depths of the forest, like wild creatures that emerge from the sheltering leaves now and then to go down to the rivers.”
Sometimes Herzog juxtaposes thought after thought, jamming them up against another as if to recall them later, with no care as to how they fit together: “The lookout point at Tres Cruces. Casting propellers. The business with the dolphins. Striking teachers locked themselves into the church ten days ago and are ringing the bells. At the market I ate a piece of grilled monkey—it looked like a naked child.” It’s his almost throwaway observations, though, the ones which aren’t linked with anything specific about the making of the film, which stand out as tiny pieces in the tapestry of Herzog’s experiences: “I saw a crippled young woman in shorts climbing into a tree with crutches”; “On the back of a motorcycle a pole was fastened horizontally with a dozen live chickens attached by their feet, and also a tied-up hog. Their heads were dragged in the dust kicked up by the rear tire”; “Very early in the morning the cripples bathe at the beach.” He even somehow manages to see a number of films while in the jungle: “Because of the strike there was a large rally today on the Plaza 28 de Julio, with speakers shouting and gesticulating the way Mussolini did in the thirties. I went to the movies and saw a film in which a madman wanted to exterminate the race of blacks, but three muscular athletes stopped him.”
Conquest of the Useless is a fascinating account of one of the world’s greatest living filmmakers, one who refuses to compromise in the least, and who puts himself through hell to get his films made. Herzog basically sums up the pursuit early in the account: “A fairly young, intelligent-looking man with long hair asked me whether filming or being filmed could do harm, whether it could destroy a person. In my heart the answer was yes, but I said no.” - Scott Bryan Wilson

"This is what “a beautiful, fresh, sunny morning” was like for Werner Herzog during the Sisyphean miseries that plagued the shooting of his Amazonian epic “Fitzcarraldo” (1982): one of two newly hatched chicks drowned in a saucer containing only a few millimeters of water. The other lost a leg and a piece of its stomach to a murderous rabbit. And Mr. Herzog realized, for the umpteenth time, that “a sense of desolation was tearing me up inside, like termites in a fallen tree trunk.”
These and other good times have been immortalized in “Conquest of the Useless,” Mr. Herzog’s journal about his best-known filmmaking nightmare. Already published in German as the evocatively titled “Eroberung des Nutzlosen” in 2004, this book, translated by Krishna Winston, seemingly recapitulates some of Les Blank’s film “Burden of Dreams,” the 1982 documentary that captured the “Fitzcarraldo” shoot in all of its magnificent, doomy glory. When he spoke to Mr. Blank, Mr. Herzog used the phrase “challenge of the impossible” to describe his heroic, arguably unhinged struggle to complete his film.
But “Burden of Dreams” never penetrated Mr. Herzog’s rogue thoughts, at least not in the way his own mesmerizingly bizarre account does. That’s understandable: Mr. Blank could concentrate on such external diversions as hauling a steamship over a hill in the Amazon rain forest, which was the pièce de résistance of Mr. Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo” scenario.
The observations to be found in “Conquest of the Useless” are much more private and pitiless, as Mr. Herzog finds evidence of an indifferent universe wherever he turns. With the same bleak eloquence that he brings to narrating his nonfiction films (and what voice can match Mr. Herzog’s for mournfully contemplative beauty?) this book describes the exotica of the jungle. Obsessed with the bird, animal and insect worlds as a way of avoiding the human one, Mr. Herzog keeps a steady record of the perverse spectacles he encounters.
It’s always personal: fire ants rain down upon him spitefully. Hens treat him diffidently. A cobra stares him down. Amazingly Mr. Herzog becomes so emotionally involved with a “vain” albino turkey that in a moment of pique he slaps the bird “left-right with the casual elegance of the arrogant cavaliers I had seen in French Musketeer films.” Perhaps that offers some measure of just how intensely and anthropomorphically Mr. Herzog can interact with his surroundings.
Even inanimate objects (“has anyone heard rocks sigh?”) become part of the drama recollected in these pages. So a broom “is lying on the ground as if felled by an assassin.” A book leaves Mr. Herzog feeling so lonely that he buries it. No event from daybreak (“the birds were pleading for the continued existence of the Creation”) to nightfall (“the universe’s light simply burns out, and then it is gone”) is anything but fraught. In this context one man’s plan to haul a steamship overland between two rivers becomes as reasonable as anything else.
As “Conquest of the Useless” reveals, Mr. Herzog is as canny about the film world as he is about the natural one. And he knows that he needs both to sustain him. Still, he sounds happiest while living in self-imposed exile from those who control his film’s financial destiny. And he is scathing about any collaborators who do not share his love of risk-taking.
Jason Robards, originally cast in the title role, becomes an object of scorching derision because he seems fearful of the jungle. To Mr. Herzog, cowardice is a particularly despicable sin.
The book speaks bitterly about the “appalling inner emptiness” of Mr. Robards in ways that make it no surprise that Mr. Herzog soon replaces him. And “Fitzcarraldo” also loses Mick Jagger, for whom Mr. Herzog has far higher regard, once it becomes clear that making this film will take years. In a diary that spans two and a half years and details assorted calamities, Mr. Herzog eventually becomes more comfortable when his old nemesis, the tantrum-throwing madman Klaus Kinski (who starred in Mr. Herzog’s “Aguirre, the Wrath of God”) steps in.
Although “Conquest of the Useless” provides a hypnotic chronicle of the film crew’s daily progress, it inevitably heats up when Mr. Kinski arrives. No malevolent tarantula in the rain forest can match this volcanically hot-tempered actor for entertainment value. And the Kinski presence brings out the best in Mr. Herzog’s invective. Complaining constantly about his star’s divalike behavior — Mr. Herzog predicts there will be trouble when the steamship becomes more important to the film than its leading man is, and of course he’s right — Mr. Herzog is nonetheless invigorated by collaborative conflict.
Still, he perfectly understands a discreet question asked by some of the local Indians: Does Mr. Herzog want this raving, screaming, fit-pitching actor taken off his hands? In other words, should the Indians kill him? By this point in “Conquest of the Useless” that inquiry seems plausible: Mr. Herzog has described the constant deadly peril of jungle life, at one point citing the deaths of two Indians within three pages. And the loss of one shrieking blond European might not be such an aberration.
But Mr. Herzog would, as ever, prefer a surprising observation to an obvious one. He decides that the Indians must find the Herzog tenacity much scarier than the Kinski operatics.
Any book by Mr. Herzog (like “Of Walking in Ice,” his slender volume about a 1974 walk from Munich to Paris) turns his devotees into cryptographers. It is ever tempting to try to fathom his restless spirit and his determination to challenge fate. Among the oddly revealing details in “Conquest of the Useless” is Mr. Herzog’s description of the gift from him that most delighted his mother: sand, which she liked to use for scrubbing. As he suffers through the travails described in this book, he is very much his mother’s son." - Janet Maslin

"Werner Herzog is famous for his cinematic depictions of obsessives and outsiders, from the El Dorado-seeking Spaniard played by Klaus Kinski in his 1972 international breakthrough, "Aguirre: The Wrath of God," to Timothy Treadwell, the doomed bear-worshiper of his 2005 documentary, "Grizzly Man." Herzog's own reputation as an obsessive, not to mention daredevil and doomsayer, was solidified by "Burden of Dreams," a documentary chronicling Herzog's trials while filming "Fitzcarraldo" in the Peruvian jungle in 1981.
"Conquest of the Useless: Reflections From the Making of 'Fitzcarraldo' " comprises Herzog's diaries from the three arduous years he worked on that movie, which earned him a best director award at Cannes in 1982 yet nearly derailed his career. It reveals him to be witty, compassionate, microscopically observant and -- your call -- either maniacally determined or admirably persevering.
"A vision had seized hold of me . . . ," he writes in the book's prologue. "It was the vision of a large steamship scaling a hill under its own steam, working its way up a steep slope in the jungle, while above this natural landscape, which shatters the weak and the strong with equal ferocity, soars the voice of Caruso."
Around this vision Herzog fashioned a script about an aspiring rubber baron who yearns to bring opera to the Amazon, a dream requiring him to haul a steamship over a mountain from one river to another to gain access to the rubber. When Herzog meets with 20th Century Fox executives to discuss his plan, he says they envision that "a plastic model ship will be pulled over a ridge in a studio, or possibly in a botanical garden."
"I told them the unquestioned assumption had to be a real steamship being hauled over a real mountain, though not for the sake of realism but for the stylization characteristic of grand opera," he writes, adding, "The pleasantries we exchanged from then on wore a thin coating of frost."
As "Burden of Dreams" made clear, "Fitzcarraldo" turned into a metaphor for itself: Herzog and his protagonist shared the same impossible goal. The jungle shoot became famous for its calamities, including Herzog's arrest by local authorities; the departure of the original star, Jason Robards, after he fell ill with dysentery; a border war between Peru and Ecuador; plane crashes; injuries; problematic weather; and an increasingly dejected crew.
"Conquest of the Useless" fills in the gaps of that account and shows what makes Herzog so compelling as an artist, particularly in his nonfiction films: his acute fascination with people and nature.
In the city of Iquitos, he writes: "Every evening, at exactly the same minute, several hundred thousand golondrinas, a kind of swallow, come to roost for the night in the trees on the Plaza de Armas. They form black lines on the cornices of buildings. The entire square is filled with their excited fluttering and twittering. Arriving from all different directions, the swarms of birds meet in the air above the square, circling like tornados in dizzying spirals. Then, as if a whirlwind were sweeping through, they suddenly descend onto the square, darkening the sky. The young ladies put up umbrellas to shield themselves from droppings."
The book is also filled with terrifically funny and precise renderings of the creatures that inhabit the film crew's two jungle camps -- ants, bats, tarantulas, mosquitoes, snakes, alligators, monkeys, rats, vultures, an albino turkey and an underwear-shredding ocelot. "For days a dead roach has been lying in our little shower stall, which is supplied with water from a gasoline drum on the roof," Herzog writes in an entry dated "11 July 1979." "The roach is so enormous in its monstrosity that it is like something that stepped out of a horror movie. It lies there all spongy, belly-up, and is so disgusting that none of us has had the nerve to get rid of it."
He can spend a full page describing a daylong rainstorm and its aftermath, providing simple, telling details: "The tropical humidity is so intense that if you leave envelopes lying around they seal themselves." He offers memories from his unusual early life (he grew up in a remote Bavarian mountain village) and engrossing recaps of weird stories people tell him. The effect is spellbinding.
He can be scathing - the "people in Satipo were like vomit - ugly, mean-spirited, unkempt, as if a town in the highlands had expelled its most degenerate elements and pushed them off into the jungle" - and sensitive, as when cinematographer Thomas Mauch tears open his hand and undergoes surgery without anesthesia: "I held his head and pressed it against me, and a silent wall of faces surrounded us. Mauch said he could not take any more, he was going to faint, and I told him to go ahead." (What Herzog does next to soothe Mauch is both hilarious and moving.)
Herzog replaced Robards with Kinski, his lead from three previous films, who presented a new set of problems. As Herzog showed in his extraordinary 1999 film about Kinski, "My Best Fiend," the guy was intolerable. Herzog is stoic in the face of Kinski's hours of "uninterrupted ranting and raving," calling him an "absolute pest" in an "Yves St. Laurent bush outfit." Representatives of the Indians who serve as extras matter-of-factly offer to kill him.
Herzog, of course, isn't exactly easygoing. He comes across as impatient and wants to do everything himself, right now. And his admiration for nature is overshadowed by his nonstop declarations about its malevolence -- the sun is "murderous," mists are "angry," the jungle has "silent killing in its depths." (In "Grizzly Man," he says that "the common character of the universe is not harmony but hostility, chaos and murder," so we know his sentiments haven't changed.)
As the months in the jungle pass, delirium sets in. "There are widely divergent views as to what day of the month it is," Herzog writes. The engineer hired to help guide the ship over the ridge quits. But Herzog carries on, and the tone of the diaries shifts from dreamy to nightmarish: "No one's on my side anymore, not one person, not one single person. In the midst of hundreds of Indian extras, dozens of woodsmen, boatmen, kitchen personnel, the technical team, and the actors, solitude flailed at me like a huge enraged animal."
For decades Herzog has declared his resistance to introspection; he claims not to know the color of his eyes, since he detests looking into mirrors, and is outspoken about his contempt for psychoanalysis. So his vulnerability here is noteworthy. "At night I'm even lonelier than during the day," he writes. "I listened intently to the silence, pierced by tormented insects and tormented animals. Even the motors of our boats have something tormented about them."
It's hard to know how to read such hyperbolic sentiments, especially given his dry wit. When, after months of trying, he finally gets the ship over the ridge, bringing "Fitzcarraldo" near completion, how does he feel? The book's sardonic title says it all." - Lawrence Levi

"The 64-year-old German filmmaker Werner Herzog has long been as famous for his statements about film and culture as he has been for his actual movies. In speech and in writing, he inclines to aphorism rather than argument, issuing dicta with a hermetic self-containment bordering on the inscrutable. The 300-page Herzog on Herzog (2002) reads this way, as does his 12-point “Minnesota Declaration”, an impromptu manifesto delivered at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis in 1999. Herzog’s aphorisms teeter between the visionary and the bizarre, as these two points of the “Declaration” attest:
5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.
10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn’t call, doesn’t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don’t you listen to the Song of Life.
Herzog has become an object of cinematic fascination in his own right. Director Les Blank has made two documentaries starring his colleague: Burden of Dreams (1982) follows the making of Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, and Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980) features Herzog cooking and devouring a leather boot while delivering pronouncements on the near-extinction of imagination, the need for artistic daring, and the difference between fact and truth. The collective word count of Herzog’s pronouncements about art and culture probably exceeds the words spoken by his characters onscreen (despite a prolific 55-film career). A master of elegant strangeness, Herzog has profited by this canny ability to expound and practice an artistic philosophy.
Once again, Herzog has managed to have his shoe and eat it, too. In Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo, Herzog publishes the diary he kept from 1979 to 1981 while shooting (or, more often, waiting to shoot) his acclaimed film about a bombastic anti-hero in the Brazilian jungle. Thanks to Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, the plagued history of Fitzcarraldo already holds a notorious place in filmmaking mythology: assistants died; actors became injured and ill; some of the local extras plotted to kill hot-blooded star Klaus Kinski. Typically, Herzog took these incidents as cosmic portents, telling Blank: “The trees here are in misery. The birds here are in misery – I don’t think they sing; they just screech in pain.” The essence of the jungle is “fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away”.
A darling of cineasts and prize committees, Werner Herzog is savvier than the humorless neurotic he sometimes plays on-screen and in his journals. He is fully aware of the cartoonishness of his morose Weltanschauung, but seems to relish situating himself at the juncture of comedy, melodrama, and nihilism. Of Conquest of the Useless’s 320 pages, this sort of vague cosmological pessimism probably accounts for some 50. The book finally shifts from being very funny (though we are never sure whether Herzog is an accomplice or an object of our laughter) to slightly dull.
That said, Conquest of the Useless is a singular book, so strong at many points that it could be read and appreciated by someone who had never seen a single Herzog film. In Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, Herzog says: “Our civilization doesn’t have adequate images… That’s what I’m working on: a new grammar of images.” Without them, he says, we are doomed to “die out like dinosaurs.”
In contrast with this “new grammar of images”, Herzog sets the false images offered by television and advertisements. These “kill us” and “kill our language” because they lull instead of provoke, working within a familiar spectrum of wonder, desire, and repulsion. Herzog’s films can be interpreted as antidotes to this deadening complacency, and the countless strange moments in Conquest of the Useless as yet another curative, this time through the medium of language.
The book’s images of grotesque surrealism arrive abruptly amidst more mundane descriptions of weather or squabbling actors. In a sudden, peculiar flash they suggest whole worlds abutting Herzog’s, yet with utterly different codes of behavior, stores of knowledge, and interpretations of reality. In “Iquitos” a tiny boy named Modus Vivendi earns a living playing the violin at funerals. Children steal a bit of sound tape from Herzog’s crew and tie it between two trees, so tight that the wind makes it “hum and sing.” At festivals men shoot each other with bows and arrows, the recipient catching the shaft midair before it hits its mark. A large moth sits on Herzog’s dirty laundry and “feasts on the salt from [his] sweat.” In the crew’s shipment of provisions they order kilos of arrow-tip poison, which serves as local currency. “For a spoonful of this black sticky mass, you can get yourself a woman to marry, I was told in a respectful whisper by a boatman as he cleaned his toes with a screwdriver.” Such surprises exemplify the newness to Herzog’s “grammar of images”, a newness that is not simply indicative of their shock value but illustrative of a voracious curiosity about how other beings survive, and sometimes enjoy, their passage through the world.
In Conquest of the Useless, Herzog may have stumbled across the genre to which his writing is best suited. The journal form provides an inherent structure, in which seasons change, personalities clash and reconcile and clash again, and budgets dwindle. All Herzog has to do from time to time is log the current conditions of all these factors, and the drama writes itself. This single linear structure is steady and comprehensible enough to accommodate a great deal of eccentricity and divagation, and the reader never feels mired in the wash of surreal imagery and quasi-philosophic musing. With entries averaging three or four paragraphs, few feel overstuffed with detail.
When Herzog simply shows what’s there, the result is breathtaking, and even a reader unacquainted with Herzog’s work could imagine why Francois Truffaut called him “the greatest film director alive”. What spoils some of these images, however, is Herzog’s occasional habit of glossing or interpreting them for us. This can result in cringe-worthy purple prose: “In its all-encompassing, massive misery, of which it has no knowledge and no hint of a notion, the mighty jungle stood completely still for another night, which, however, true to its innermost nature, it didn’t allow to go unused for incredible destruction, incredible butchery.”
Fitting this “grammar of images” into an argument or philosophy is often misguided. Herzog’s attempts at articulating a convincing credo fail, but his rendering of the world’s strange particulars achieves the “ecstatic truth” which for him is both the aim and the content of art. Herzog scholars will perhaps read Conquest of the Useless with the goal of supplementing their understanding of his astonishing films. Doing so risks overlooking the value of Conquest as a work of art itself. The pleasures of the word are different from the pleasures of the camera. Herzog’s strange and original voice, by mediating a place and mood through language rather than footage, provides yet another new grammar by which imagination speaks." - Laura Kolbe

"WERNER HERZOG’S 1982 film, “Fitzcarraldo”, was inspired by a would-be rubber baron who hauled a boat over a Peruvian mountain to harvest an inaccessible forest of rubber trees because he wanted to build an opera house in the jungle. Fired by the image of “a large boat scaling a hill under its own steam” while the voice of Enrico Caruso soars above the landscape, Mr Herzog insisted, when he came to make the film, on duplicating the exploit with a real steamship, only on a steeper gradient. And when, halfway through shooting, the actor playing Fitzcarraldo had to leave the set, Mr Herzog started from scratch, this time directing his old friend and enemy, Klaus Kinski, in the role—an extreme sport if there ever was one.
The film the two of them made is a sweet, funny ode to eccentricity that is nothing like their first collaboration in the Peruvian jungle, the nightmarish “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” (1972). That sweetness comes through in “Conquest of the Useless”, Mr Herzog’s memoir of making “Fitzcarraldo”, when the director’s good nature never fails him, even during an eyeball-to-eyeball encounter with a boa constrictor. “Stubbornly confronting each other, we were pondering the relatedness of the species. Both of us, since the relatedness was slight, felt sad and turned away from each other.”
These moments, when the film-maker looks into the eyes of lizards or a bad-tempered albino turkey, set the tone for his relations with all of creation, including his crew, to whom he is unfailingly kind. A gifted writer, Mr Herzog alternates poetic prose descriptions with accounts of his fevered dreams, though the distinction between the two is not always clear. He also has a sharp eye for grotesque detail: “At the market I ate a piece of grilled monkey,” he writes at the outset of his journey. “It looked like a naked child.”
Initially shocking, these sights serve to inspire some of the more enigmatic metaphors of the film. After an episode in which an umbrella is blown out of his hand by the wind, only to land in the river with the handle sticking up, the director writes it into the film, where it appears as a relic of a murdered missionary sent as a warning to the expedition by the fierce Jivaro Indians. Fitzcarraldo responds by bombarding the invisible enemy with yet more Caruso.
Opera, Mr Herzog argues, makes the most outlandish events beautiful by transforming the world into music and reducing it to its bare emotional essentials. “That’s what opera and the jungle have in common,” he concludes; a metaphor that sums up the craziness of Mr Herzog’s epic film and his memoir about making it." - The Economist

"Werner Herzog spent over five years in and out of the jungle forests of Peru in order to make a movie about being in the jungle forests of Peru and in the process hauling a 320-ton steamer over the mountains from the Rio Camesea to the Rio Urubamba. Conquest of the Useless is the journal Herzog kept during the production of the movie.
If you have lived in the Amazon jungle for any time at all, maybe you can figure out the whys and wherefores of this weird movie script. I have not and - after reading Conquest - I think I'll stay at home, in bed.
Mosquitoes, snakes, scorpions, biting midges, lizards, floods, drought, noisy parrots, boas, chuchupes, mad Indians, mad pigs, mad movie-makers, broken arms, broken backs, and Mick Jagger. (Seriously. He was part of the scene until Herzog finally wrote him out of the script.)
Outside of the accidents and beasties of the rain forest, there is the eating of maggots: "fat yellowish whitish maggots bigger than cockchafer grubs, with dark, sturdy heads. They squirmed on the men's hands before the men ate them, slurping as you slurp oysters."
Suddenly they came over to me, and before I knew what was happening, I had three of those writhing creatures in my hand as a gift. They gave me to understand I should try them, and stared at me intently in happy anticipation.
"They are supposed to be especially tasty when you roast them over a fire briefly, and they are also supposed to be unusually high in protein and fat."
Did he eat them or not? Dear reader... I leave it to you to read Conquest to find the answer to this fraught question. And let me assure you, you have nothing to lose. For this is about the most wonderful exotic journal I have ever come across, next to, perhaps, those of Lewis & Clark, Captain Cook, and, perhaps, that of Mick Jagger himself.
The strange landscape becomes the movie, the movie becomes the journal, and the wild river wildly fits into the lunacy of the whole project. Imagine it: Herzog decides to make a picture about this mountain boat-hauling routine. Meanwhile, Les Blank drops in to make a movie about Herzog making a movie. Did someone come along behind Blank to make a movie about making a movie about making a movie about hauling a boat? We are not told here.
Herzog is offered a fine location to do the whole schmeer in San Diego, California. But being Herzog, he would never ever do something so plain-assed simple. No, he has to go off the muggy wastes of Amazonia, hire thousands of extras, deal with a river gone crazy, crazy actors too, to a country - Peru - also looney (continual fear of invasion from Ecuador: one of those brouhahas that has legs, has gone off and on for two hundred years.)
Herzog is there too, he says, at war with "the useless." Which may lie leering near his hut on a moonless night:
Outside in the darkness four thousand frogs are crying for a savior. The frogs have lowly thoughts and carry on lowly research. I wish a taxi would come and take me somewhere.
"There is a tugging at me like an elephant, and the dogs are tugging at my heart... Abel Gance talked to me for a long time about his idea for a fifteen-hour film on Columbus, which he wants to pass on to me, now that he has seen Aguirre. He says he is ninety, and it is too much for him. Half seriously, half jokingly, he said that he would like to die here, if that were acceptable."
We drank red wine to that, straight from the bottle, and he remarked that he did not take anything seriously, he took everything tragically.
Not seriously, but tragically. Yes.
After a series of broken arms, dislocated shoulders, snake-bites, arrows from Indians, slides, trees falling, storms, infections, swellings, life-threatening illnesses, lunatic outbursts, machete fights... finally the actor Klaus Kinski organizes a delegation to come to Herzog's hut. Herzog is "calmly watching the river flow by. I interrupted their preamble, pointing out that I was perfectly calm, much calmer than everyone else out here, so what did they want to say?"
They wanted to talk me out of hauling the ship over the mountain, protect me from my own insanity --- they did not use that term, but their meaning was obvious. They asked whether I could not revise the script so that Fitzcarraldo did not have to pull the ship over the mountain.
I said that we had not really tried towing the ship yet, and I attempted to buck them up in their faintheartedness.
This nut project. And this nut, Herzog, by the majesty of his screwy vision, drags all these people - hundreds, thousands - friends, family, associates, investors, Indians, Peruvians, Germans... drags them into this lorky project, so that it becomes their project, so much so that they come to him, to try to talk him out of this screwy idea, in that land of trees and monkeys and bugs and soldiers and Indians and egomaniacal actors and whores and fighting drunks and paranoiacs: to talk him out of this project, because he is mad to have even conceived it, and, even worse, is madder yet.... no?... to keep on so that they will too (maybe) have to go ahead and do it with him and go mad too.
It is the way power works, no? There he is, our modern-day Maximilian, there in the director's chair, assuming his own power, swaying his followers into thinking they too can be part of this screwy world of visionaries, those who dare to haul massive boats over massive peaks before the camera (the very one he stole from the Munich Film School; it was his right... he told them).
And it worked: they bought into his cracked idea, had to watch as the world they thought they were creating slowly spun apart. The demand of destiny; the demand of history.
Herzog's vision is surely not unlike Aguirre's... and it takes chutzpa to hold this shit together. (Sometimes we are blinded by a disastrous vision.) Maybe Herzog is visionary, but then, maybe, he is nothing more than a stupendously good chronicler of the fits and the starts of humanity: "Large green lizards are rustling in the leaves. Fish leap out of the water as if they actually belonged to the clouds in the sky. It is only through writing that I become myself."
At the other end of the camp someone is hammering a board, and the sound comes back in a hollow echo from the forest. The forest does not accept these sounds. Last night there were thousands of winged creatures hovering around the lamps, raging in wild swarms like spherical catastrophes around the lightbulbs. One could eat only with the light switched off.
"In the morning, by the boat landing, where a more powerful lamp has been installed, there were piles of wings on the ground, like a snowdrift. Everywhere spiders have spun their webs under the roof, near the electric light, and with such a surfeit of prey they cannot attend to every captured gift; they have taut bellies, as plump as cherries." - ralphmag.org

"In the long history of troubled movie productions, Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo stands in an honored place alongside Apocalypse Now and Heaven’s Gate. The story of Herzog’s literally Sisyphean determination to push an actual, multi-ton steamboat over a mountain between two rivers—as does the hero of the film (played by Klaus Kinski)—has been told before by documentarian Les Blank in Burden of Dreams. There Herzog appeared in familiar gaunt and monkish guise, cursing the “fascism of nature” and apparently pushing his cast and crew to the brink of insanity. (Kinski, of course, maintained a second home on the brink of insanity.) However, Blank only saw half the story. Conquest of the Useless, now available in a superb translation overseen by Herzog, tells the rest. But it’s not simply the director’s side of the story, it’s also the story of the first, abandoned production a year earlier, with Jason Robards in the title role and a cast that included Mick Jagger and Mario Adorf.
Herzog never makes life easy on himself, repeatedly hurling himself into the most hostile locations—Antarctica, the Sahara, rims of live volcanoes—and dragging his terrified casts and crews along with him. “The powers of heaven are powerless against the jungle,” Herzog writes early on, and his memoir is filled with signs of nature’s cruel surrealism: rivers that rise and fall 30 feet overnight, carrying away half the set; unidentifiable beasts and reptiles, all malevolent; and an adopted monkey nicknamed “Tricky Dick Nixon.” One loses count of the loathsome, life-threatening specimens Herzog shakes out his shoe each morning. And his actors are no better: Robards is dismissed as a hypochondriac, Adorf as an egomaniacal schemer, and Kinski throws one blitzkrieg tantrum after another. Injuries are plentiful, and despite on-set medical improvisation, the climate often prevents them from healing. If that weren’t enough, Indian extras are distracted by attacks by other tribes, and dampness and extreme heat wreak havoc with equipment.
We can debate whether Fitzcarraldo made it all worthwhile, but this book certainly does, capturing as it does Herzog’s Germanically exacting but exquisite use of English, and his lyrically fatalistic worldview, redeemed as always by his immense capacity for wonder and horror." - John Patterson

"Conquest of the Useless, the altogether appropriate title given to the journals Werner Herzog kept while making his most famous film in the Peruvian rainforest, weighs in at just over three hundred pages. Dense with the soakage of the jungle -- "Nothing ever gets properly dry here, shoes, clothing. Anything made of leather gets mildewed, and electric clocks stop" -- the pages of Conquest seem to weigh more than the pages of most books. As in one of Herzog's slow-moving films, life comes across as a dark, viscous current through which people arduously wade: remember Kasper Hauser trying and failing to learn to walk as his father kicks the back of his feet, or Hombre, the bashful, good-natured midget in Even Dwarfs Started Small attempting unsuccessfully to climb onto a bed from every side, a spectacle which Herzog's tenacious, unblinking camera refuses to let go of for a full two and half minutes. In the jungle, ordinary men become like dwarfs. The simplest tasks are protracted interminably, are transfigured into epics of non-consummation. Time itself seems distended.
This is quite as it should be, since Fitzcarraldo (1982) is a film all about heaviness. It is a film about standing up to gravity, and about what happens when you do. To summarize the plot without making it sound like a Russian proverb on futility is a challenge. In order to access a plentiful rubber territory, Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald ("Fitzcarraldo" to the natives), a ruthless yet big-hearted Irishman living in turn-of-the-century Peru, has to haul a steamship over a mountain. He succeeds! And yet he still doesn't get his hands on all that rubber. On the other side of the mountain the Indians who helped him drag the boat, believing they are making a sacrifice that will banish the evil spirits that have plagued them from the beginning of time, release it into the Pongo de Muerte (the Rapids of Death) with Fitz asleep on board. His dream of building an opera house in the rain forest and inviting his hero Caruso to perform on the opening night is scotched, or at least this is how things stand at the film's end.
In making the film, Herzog really did haul a 340-ton steamship over a mountain, flying in the face of 20th Century Fox, who had hoped he would settle for pulling a model ship over a ridge in the San Diego botanical gardens. Herzog was having none of it and employed seven hundred Campa Indians to move the ship via an elaborate pulley system. The spirit both of the film and of these journals is captured when he describes a rare moment of serenity after he and two of his crew members climb the lookout platform they have built at the highest point between the two rivers: "We were all alone with the jungle, floating gently above its steaming treetops, and I was no longer afraid at the thought of hauling a huge ship over the mountain ridge, even if everything in this gravity-ridden world seemed to argue against it."
It seems inadequate to say that during the making of Fitzcarraldo everything that could possibly go wrong did. Everything that couldn't go wrong somehow managed to go wrong as well. Not since King Lear -- not since The Book of Job -- have so many things gone wrong in so short a time. Most of the really spectacular catastrophes we already know about from Les Blank's 1982 documentary Burden of Dreams, that Ring Cycle of mishap and misadventure. Pre-production had been underway for several months in Santa Maria de Nieva, Peru, when Herzog, sensing an imminent threat from the Peruvian military, which was just then gearing up for a small border war with Ecuador, decided to pull his crew out of the jungle. On December 1, 1979, armed Aguaruna Indians -- aggravated by the encroachments of oil companies and government-subsidized Peruvian settlers -- surrounded Herzog's camp and told those remaining to leave immediately. As the camp burned to the ground, the last crewmembers fled down the Rio Maranon , waving white flags from their canoe.
Before things got better for Fitzcarraldo, they got worse. After several months Herzog found a new location -- 1,500 kilometers south, on the Rio Camisea -- and at last began shooting. Forty percent of the film had been completed when Jason Robards, the actor playing Fitzcarraldo, contracted amoebic dysentery and was forced to return to the US, where his doctors forbade his return to Rio Camisea. Because of the delay this caused, Mick Jagger, who was playing Fitzcarraldo's sidekick, Wilbur, dropped out to tour with the Rolling Stones. Herzog would have to find a new lead man, write Jagger's character out of the script (according to Herzog, Jagger was "irreplaceable"), and start over from the very beginning. Inviting disaster, Herzog now chose to lead into the china shop of his exhausted, increasingly mutinous cast and crew the incendiary, egomaniacal, tantrum-prone bull that was Klaus Kinski, with whom Herzog had made three previous features. True to form, Kinski raved and foamed and sputtered his way through the film. At one point an Indian chief soberly offered to murder him. Herzog appreciated the gesture, but declined.
What Conquest lets us in on is the small catastrophes endlessly visited upon Herzog and his crew. It reveals the apparently limitless capacity of a man -- I am tempted to say, of Man -- to absorb disaster, and then to go on absorbing it: about halfway through Conquest the reader begins to feel as though, rather than reading a journal kept by Werner Herzog, he is watching a film starring Buster Keaton, so incessant, so unlikely, so ingenious are the mishaps that beset him. This is a Werner Herzog film: you expect mishaps to occur.
But what about this?:
Yesterday at four in the morning, while it was still dark, W. [Walter Saxer, the film's producer] shook me awake to tell me that in half an hour a plane would be leaving for Lima. Still groggy with sleep, I jumped into my clothes, then into one shoe, then the other. But there seemed to be a sock bunched up in the shoe. I reached in to pull it out, and suddenly instead of a sock I was holding a tarantula, as big as my fist and hairy.
Or this?
Our monkey escaped from his cage and is stealing things from the set table when no one's there. He's taken possession of almost all the forks. This morning he stole the milk bottle used by Gloria's little daughter, and Gloria [Saxer's Peruvian wife], saw him out in the bushes sucking on the nipple until the bottle was empty. She's convinced the monkey will rape the baby, and she wants him shot before he does so.
And yet, as Churchill said of the drink, Herzog can fairly claim to have gotten more out of the jungle than the jungle got out of him. After all, he came away with Fitzcarraldo. However grim things become in Conquest there remains a virile, clear-eyed relish to the tone with which the author chronicles his experience. Indeed, it is interesting to observe how many of the vignettes collected here are quietly inflected with Herzog's sense of his own defiant struggle against hostile external circumstances. He writes, "In the concourse at the airport [in Iquitos] a wounded hummingbird was fluttering along the polished floor, unable to get into the air. When it stopped moving, the shoeshine boys nudged it with their toes, and it glided in crazed, whirring paths along the ground." Later, deep in the jungle, we get: "The dog was chasing the helicopter the way dogs sometimes chase a moving car, even though the draft from the rotor almost knocked it to the ground and was kicking up gravel at him. Then, at a slight distance, the dog lifted one leg and pissed in the direction of the helicopter." You can't help the feeling that Herzog, were he a dog, would have done the same.
Herzog courts difficulty not for its own sake but because it repays his attentions. He seems to produce his best work when everything is going wrong. Difficult or unusual circumstances, he has claimed, bring life to a project: "without the outside world to react to," his films are "killed stonedead." And Herzog has had his share of difficult or unusual circumstances: having his entire cast hypnotized (as in Heart of Glass), choosing a lead man who has never acted and has spent most of his life in prisons and psychiatric institutions (The Enigma of Kasper Hauser), or shooting an entire film, the majority of which takes place on a small raft drifting down the Amazon, with a single camera (Aguirre, The Wrath of God). In fact, Herzog once remarked that Fitzcarraldo was his greatest documentary, by which he presumably meant that the film is as much a record of its own chaotic making as it is a work of deliberate and premeditated art. Because of his intense identification with the film's protagonist - "Why shouldn't I play Fitzcarraldo myself?" he writes in his journal shortly after Robards's departure: "I would trust myself to do it because my project and the character have become identical" - Herzog was able to canalize his own setbacks and frustrations directly back into the film that caused them.
Herzog's views about filmmaking cannot be separated from his views about the world at large. One of his core beliefs as a director -- that if you work under difficult circumstances you will create stranger, more vital films than you would otherwise -- is also a belief he holds about life. The severe affliction suffered by so many of Herzog's characters -- the dysphasic Kasper Hauser, utterly deprived of human contact for the majority of his life; the god-fearing, paranoid-schizophrenic Woyzeck; the traumatized prisoner of war, Dieter Dengler -- is always presented as a means by which these characters achieve what Herzog calls "a radical human dignity." Not that difficulty exists in Herzog's films solely to be overcome: that would be far too weightless a vision of the universe. Rather, difficulty is justified by the way it reveals a person's capacity to bear it. Without it, the people in his films would not have become the people they are.
In this respect, the deaf-blind Fini Straubinger, from the early documentary Land of Silence and Darkness, is one of the most exemplary Herzogian figures and a distant spiritual cousin of Fitzcarraldo. Straubinger, who lost her sight and hearing as a teenager, volunteers for the League of the Blind and spends her time organizing social events and paying visits in an effort to strengthen ties within the deaf-blind community. It is slow work, to say the least. Many of the people she meets have ceased entirely to communicate with others; some have never communicated and clearly never will. But Straubinger remains undeterred. "I'm like you," she says, or signs, emphatically, as a kind of last resort, to those who are totally unresponsive. Gradually, however, we realize that she could be addressing anyone, deaf-blind or otherwise. Like the attempt to pull a steamship over a mountain, Straubinger's efforts to communicate, her refusal of limitation, take on qualities representative of all humanity.
The effect of Land of Silence and Darkness might be compared to the experience of traveling in a country where one doesn't speak the language: fervently attentive to every gesture, every facial expression in our effort to understand what's going on, we realize, by comparison -- and rather sadly -- how little attention we pay to other people at home. It is difficult not to feel as though we have taken life too much for granted: the simplest things -- taking a shower, going for a walk in the country, shaking hands -- become startling and mysterious when performed by a person who can't see or hear, as though we were witnessing them for the first time.
This desire to restore to us a sense of the world's mysteriousness, so bound up with his representation of struggle and affliction, is one of the fundamental impulses behind Herzog's work. He is always trying to get us to recognize the strangeness of ordinary things, to startle us out of our accustomed ways of seeing. One of his favorite ways of doing this is to demonstrate how arbitrary these accustomed ways of seeing are. Discussing another early documentary, The Flying Doctors of East Africa, Herzog tells the following story:
One of the doctors in the film talks of showing a poster of a fly to the villagers. They would say, "We don't have that problem, our flies aren't that large . . . We decided to take some of the posters the doctors used for instruction to a coffee plantation to experiment. One was of a man, one of a huge human eye, another a hut, another a bowl, and the fifth -- which was put upside down -- of some people and animals. We asked the people which poster was upside down and which was of an eye. Nearly half could not tell which was upside down, and two-thirds did not recognize the eye. One man pointed to the window of the hut, for example.
Herzog is fascinated by such moments of visual misprision, which occur throughout his films. Few ideas have meant more to him over the years than the idea that images can be fruitfully misconstrued. Several of his films -- Fata Morgana, Lessons of Darkness, The Wild Blue Yonder -- are comprised of footage that is deliberately belied by a narrating voiceover.
The same principal of visual transposition finds its greatest expression in The Enigma of Kasper Hauser, a film based very loosely on the life of the actual Kasper Hauser, who appeared one day in Nuremberg in 1828, having spent the first seventeen years of his life in solitary confinement. He was unable to walk, had almost no understanding of language, and could speak only a few sentences. Like Fitzcarraldo and Fini Straubinger, Herzog's Kasper has trouble accepting the incommensurability of his imagination with the world. "Why is everything so hard for me?" he asks his well-meaning yet conventional mentor, laboriously enunciating each word, two years after arriving in the town. "Why can't I play the piano like I can breath?" But Kasper's incessant struggle with life cannot be separated from the vitality of his perceptions. In one of the film's greatest scenes, the mentor figure, Professor Daumer, and the local vicar, Fuhrmann, are trying to correct Kasper's eccentric notions of causality. To demonstrate that, contrary to Kasper's belief, apples don't have lives of their own and are subject to man's will, Daumer announces he will roll one down the path and asks Fuhrmann to stick out his foot to stop it. Daumer, however, throws the apple slightly too hard, and it bounces over the vicar's foot. "Smart apple!" Kasper exclaims in delight. "It jumped over his foot and ran away!"
By virtue of Kasper's skewed commentary this apparently banal image of an apple skimming down a garden path is suddenly defamiliarized. The moment shows how Kasper is actually looking at and responding to the world, whereas his pompous benefactors are working backwards, retreating from experience into abstraction, using the world simply as a means of supporting what they already know about it. Herzog is at his most interesting not when he shows us new landscapes -- as in La Soufriere, Encounters at the End of the World, and his other exotic documentaries -- but when he gives us new eyes with which to look at the things we thought we already knew. When we watch Kasper observing the apple it feels as though Herzog has achieved what he once described as his artistic goal: "to take cinema audiences back to the earliest days, like when the Lumiere brothers screened their film of a train pulling into a station. Reports say that the audience fled in panic because they believed the train would run them over."
Fitzcarraldo, Straubinger, Kasper, and even the Herzog of Conquest, however different their individual circumstances, are all embodiments of the same principle: the refusal to accept any disjunction between what can be imagined and what can be achieved. Usually such a refusal has tragic consequences, for there is a gulf between human aspiration and ability. Herzog is not blind to this dour insight -- so many of his films end in failure and defeat -- and yet he celebrates the impulse to transcend our limitations as noble in itself, regardless of what follows. In his films, the ability to see the world as something other than what we've been told it is -- as a place where boats move over mountains or apples follow their own will -- is already a kind of victory." - Giles Harvey

"It turns out that Werner Herzog isn't just one of the world's pre-eminent filmmakers, but an accomplished writer with an idiosyncratic and pungent style.
"Conquest of the Useless" is a recollection of his backbreaking three-year effort (1979-81) to make "Fitzcarraldo" in the wilds of Peru. If a mere human had written it, it would be called a diary, but the filmmaker says it's an "inner landscape, born of the delirium of the jungle."
"Fitzcarraldo" is about an Irish schemer, played by the incendiary Klaus Kinski, who wants to build an opera house in the Amazonian jungle. For a key scene, the filmmaker had a real ship pulled over a real mountain.
Working on location in Peru was hellish indeed, as documented in Les Blank's "Burden of Dreams" (worth watching before you dive into the book). This wasn't even the first time Herzog pitted himself against the Peruvian rain forest; he was there in 1972 to make "Aguirre, the Wrath of God," another famously troubled production starring Kinski (yes, there's a theme here).
As the book makes abundantly clear, this isn't the jungle promoted by organizers of eco-tours: It's a place of absurdity, cruelty and squalor; of incompetence and grotesquery; of poisonous snakes and insects from a fever dream; of Indians armed with poisoned arrows and Indians who craftily use the media. Hazards abound: greedy officials, deranged actors and drunken helpers.
Herzog is obsessed with the animal world: doomed chickens and pigs, cats who torment lizards, three-legged dogs. There are crumbling river banks, erratic supply lines, iffy communications with the outside world and an unstopping succession of sicknesses and injuries.
Herzog's observations are sharp. What transpires in the jungle, combined with his native astringency, moves him to a curdled poetry, to ecstasies of loathing and disgust. An early passage:
"Our speedboat is stranded with gasket failure. The boatman forgot to take along spare parts and tools and is now waiting for a miraculous intervention that might revive the engine. Sweat, storm clouds overhead, sleeping dogs. There is a smell of stale urine. In my soup, ants and bugs were swimming among the globules of fat. Lord Almighty, send us an earthquake."
Herzog's cinematic penchant for visual surprises has its equivalent here in a strategic use of non sequiturs:
"Growing restless, I had gone outside to see whether the river was still there. At night the rivers have a fever. Yet onions are lying on the table." This is a familiar Herzogian touch, also used effectively in "Of Walking in Ice," his account of his 1974 journey on foot from Paris to Munich.
The Peruvian wilds are the filmmaker's muse, his nemesis, his inferno. Well into the book, he remarks on the jungle's everlasting "travails" of decay, death and birth, which leads to dark musings (this passage turns up again, almost verbatim, in Herzog's 1999 artistic manifesto, the Minnesota Declaration):
"Life in the sea must be pure hell, an infinite hell of constant and ever-present danger, so unbearable that in the course of evolution some species - including Homo sapiens - crawled, fled, onto some clods of firm land, the future continents."
Much of Herzog's focus here is intensely physical, but he is also an imaginative cultural observer. Aghast at a libretto from which the "most blatantly unbelievable passages" have been deleted, he defends opera in a way that speaks directly to his films. The fantastic "appear(s) in opera as the most natural, thanks to the powerful transformation of an entire world into music. And the Grand Emotions in opera, often dismissed as over the top, strike me on the contrary as the most concentrated, pure archetypes of emotion, whose essence is incapable of being condensed any further. They are axioms of emotion. That is what opera and the jungle have in common."
Regarding Kinski - pure ranting egomania - let's just say that Herzog gets some payback here for the remarkably nasty treatment he received in the actor's autobiography. (For more details on their complex relationship - they made five movies together - see Herzog's documentary "My Best Fiend.")
In an epilogue, Herzog revisits Peru 20 years later. As expected, all trace of the filming is gone, but he finds in the jungle "the same seething hatred, wrathful and steaming, while the river flowed by in majestic indifference." - Walter Addiego

"Today the bat was still there.Someone had neatly laid a strip of toilet paper over it.It was dead, its position unchanged.I left it there and did not use the sink, not out of disgust or hygienic considerations but out of an unarticulated sense of respect.One of my favorite words in Spanish has always been murciélago, bat.My life seemed like an invention to me, with its pathos, its banalities, its dramas, its idling. (152)
I have recently developed an intellectual crush on Werner Herzog, which began with Encounters at the End of the World and an admiration of his facility for, for lack of a better word, normalizing the imagery — pulling gorgeousness back from the edge of sentiment, and then elevating the prosaic with a shot of the sublime.I have also developed a crush on his accent; the way he pronounces the word "focus" in particular is a snippet of music, which gets stuck in my head but which I can't replicate in written form.
Herzog's writing is like that too.I know I like it; I can point to passages that work perfectly, little seamless creations that function like eggs, or leaves, the craftsmanship and then the simplicity; lyrical bits, insights, and then a short complainy passage about trooping into the jungle to poo.But it's the same as explaining why a joke is funny: once the explanation succeeds, the joke no longer can.
A cautious melancholy hangs over the whole place, like places remembered from childhood that have changed in the meantime. (283)
Let me try it from another angle.I listened to Herzog telling Leonard Lopate in his melodically stern way that Conquest of the Useless is not a filming diary or a behind-the-scenes look at his troubles with giant ships and Kinski's tantrums — disappointing, since that's my favorite kind of book, plus Herzog teased me with an anecdote about los indios offering to assassinate Kinski for him, and then Herzog described the memoir as a journal of dreams and dreamlike events, which is my least favorite kind of book.I bought it anyway, because Herzog called himself prouder of his writing than of his filmmaking.I trusted him, and I trusted myself to read along in his accent in my head.
The risk paid off.I loved the book, and I don't even like a good portion of Herzog's non-documentary features — Aguirre has now put me to sleep three times — but I admire him for making them, because I think I now understand how impossible they all seem, even more so than the average feature, and how important he has made it to execute grand ideas no matter how outlandish.Maybe this is what he meant by dreams, in fact — or that the one informs the other.
If my mentioning that the book, in only a few sentences, turns Mick Jagger from an archetype into an awesome-sounding guy you wouldn't mind getting stuck in traffic with doesn't convince you, perhaps a couple of short quotations might illustrate why Herzog is now my famous boyfriend.Or perhaps that evidently Herzog trained himself to keep his journals in writing so teeny that he required a jeweler's loupe to read it later.Or that his first language is not English.
Our little monkey was wailing in his cage, and when I approached, he looked and wailed right through me to some distant spot outside, where his little heart hoped to find an echo. (106)
In the evening with a larger group to a Chinese restaurant.We were in a sort of separate niche, as were the other guests in the place. There were eleven of us, ten, that is, plus me.I was the primary number.I wanted to steal away into another era, quietly and without creating a commotion. (142)" - Sarah D. BuntingWerner Herzog, Of Walking in Ice: Munich - Paris 23 November - 14 December 1974 (Free Association, 2007)
"In the winter of 1974, filmmaker Werner Herzog made a three week solo journey from Munich to Paris on foot. He believed it was the only way his close friend, film historian Lotte Eisner, would survive a horrible sickness that had overtaken her. During this monumental odyssey through a seemingly endless blizzard, Herzog documented everything he saw and felt with intense sincerity. This diary is dotted with a pastiche of rants about the extreme cold and utter loneliness, notes on Herzog's films and travels, poetic descriptions of the snowy countryside, and personal philosophizing. What is most remarkable is that the reading of the book is in continuity with the experience of watching his films; it's as if, through this walk, we witness the process in which images are born. Although he received a literary award for it, this introspective masterpiece has lingered out of print since 1979. Beautifully designed and emotionally impressive, Of Walking in Ice is the first in a color-coded series of remarkable yet long-forgotten titles being republished by Free Association."

Interview by S. James Snyder


Excerpt


Read it here