Herzog Double Bill

A pioneer of New German Cinema, Werner Herzog has enjoyed creative peaks and overcome commercial troughs to settle on a duel artistic life, operating a ‘one for them, one for me’ strategy that allows him to parlay his work on commercial fare like Rescue Dawn (2006) and Bad Lieutenant (2009) into a slew of personal projects delving into the deepest, darkest recesses of human compulsion. A common thread in Herzog’s work is the exploration of existential, geographical and physical extremes.

From Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972) to Grizzly Man (2005), Herzog presents characters driven by inexplicable desires and consumed by implacable urges that place them outside the bounds of conventional behaviour, ignoring the portents to forge ahead to their doom, swathing their folly in divine purpose. His reputation in Hollywood’s portals of power as a feral merchant of ‘chaos, hostility and murder’ has been rehabilitated in the last few years by a series of remarkable films that guided the syntax of cinema into new and strange directions.

The Wild Blue Yonder (2005)

Billed as a ‘science fiction fantasy’, The Wild Blue Yonder is a difficult film to place within any accepted parameters, taking a fanciful subject and presenting it with such unerring immediacy and plausibility that it feels like a Von Daniken novel adapted by Errol Morris. Carried with admirable gusto by Brad Dourif’s central performance, Herzog delivers a requiem for a dying planet that is at turns playful and earnest.

Dourif is an unnamed alien, an intergalactic refugee from the ‘Wild Blue Yonder’ of Andromeda whose forebears settled on Earth in an attempt to lead the indigenous population in the right direction, occupying roles of influence in government and intelligence agencies. With the Earth now barely habitable, humanity seeks to escape the planet and colonize Andromeda. The Alien must watch in despair from Earth's desolate husk as his home world is ‘adapted’ to humanity’s rapacious demands, delivering an impassioned monologue on the background to such a development.

The Wild Blue Yonder is a remarkable example of taking footage without any apparent connection and from it assembling a narrative arc, expounding grand theories from the sparsest of starting points and utilizing a charismatic actor to unify the disparate elements. The film casually throws out ideas that could provide material for a number of films - from re-examining the Roswell Incident to positing that breeding pigs marked the beginning of the end for humanity.

Dourif delivers a tour de force as the forlorn ET, narrating the ten chapters into which the film is divided with a barely concealed anger and bitterness, railing against our hubris and lamenting the neglect of our most valuable resource. Herzog slyly plays with the nature of truth, presenting us with a number of phoney experts who present their ideas with a veneer of authenticity and conviction that would lead some to believe they were credible sources if viewed outside the context of the film. 

The Wild Blue Yonder is quite unlike anything that has preceded it. A particular highlight is Henry Kaiser’s footage from the base of the ocean, which is used to replicate the conditions of Andromeda. Kaiser captures the manifold life forms that reside there with stunning clarity, detailing an environment so eerie and otherworldly that it outstrips anything the human mind could create, a world where beauty and brutality have learned to co-exist. Herzog’s intentions are as unclear as ever; but whether consciously or otherwise, The Wild Blue Yonder presents an argument for environmental responsibility more persuasive than all the PowerPoint presentations in the world.

Encounters at the End of the World (2007)

Inspired by Henry Kaiser’s underwater footage in The Wild Blue Yonder, Herzog set off to Antarctica at the height of the Austral Summer; keen to understand the sort of person who would live in a place with five months of permanent daylight and determined not to make a mawkish anthropomorphic film about penguins. Herzog travels to the McMurdo research centre, where his romantic notions of Scott and Shackleton are shattered by the base’s prosaic environs, with its modern amenities and resemblance to a construction site. Stifled by the cosy modernity of McMurdo, Herzog sets off into the heart of the planet’s most inhospitable terrain, providing narration in his breathy, mellifluous timbre.

Along the way Herzog encounters all manner of striking scenes that repudiate the Disneyfication of nature and highlight the creeping homogeneity that is eroding our planet’s diversity - the Teutonic fatalist in Herzog comes to the fore as he details the cruel realities of a landscape that is brimming with life above and beneath the surface. The ultimate rebuke to those who seek to dull nature’s sharp edges and manipulate it for their own ideological purposes is the sight of a penguin breaking from its group, heading towards the mountains and certain death without any apparent motive.

‘Everyone who’s not tied down falls to the bottom of the planet,’ says William Jirsa, a linguist at McMurdo. Herzog meets a succession of ‘professional dreamers’, restless, obsessive souls who must keep moving, searching for something in the stillness and silence they failed to find elsewhere. There is the driver who was accused of kidnapping a child in Guatemala, the plumber whose fingers signify he belongs to the Mayan royal bloodline, the Iron Curtain refugee who is always packed to leave at a moment’s notice and the woman who travelled to Peru in a sewage pipe. That such stories are commonplace tells us much about those who are drawn to Antarctica.

Herzog laments the dilution of our adventurous spirit, how our innate curiosity and desire for personal glory has transmuted into fatuous pranks and ludicrous record attempts, using footage of Shackleton performing an unconvincing recreation of his quest on a soundstage to illustrate this adulteration. Encounters at the End of the World is a celebration of those hardy souls who remain on the fringes, enduring the hardship out of a desire to mitigate human damage and gain a deeper understanding of their surroundings.

‘It’s a horribly violent world,’ says Sam Bowser, a biologist studying life beneath the ice. We are treated to the full majesty and menace of the primordial environment that the Tetrapods clambered to the surface to escape. Equally primal is Mount Aribus, whose lava lake sends jets of magma shooting above the crater rim. A dedicated team studies the volcano, risking their health and sanity in an attempt to understand her awesome power and potential impact on humanity.

What is abundantly clear in Encounters at the End of the World is just how precarious our existence is, that if we wish to escape the fate of the dinosaurs or humanity in The Wild Blue Yonder, we must respect nature and fear its capacity to inflict catastrophic damage. Herzog’s ambivalence is unmistakable; he shrinks from the sunlight but marvels at the callous configuration of it all, but even this most lugubrious of voices sees that it isn’t all chaos, hostility and murder.  

Trash Humpers, Enter the Void and the Sensory Shocker

As the horror genre slides ever deeper into a formulaic torpor, two arthouse darlings may just have struck upon a whole new way of disquieting audiences - the sensory shocker. Genre purists aside, most would agree that the essence of horror is the ability to elicit fear, revulsion, panic, discomfort and uncertainty. Regardless of content, it is the emotional response that counts. In an attempt to rouse a jaded audience from its cine-literate ennui, Harmony Korine and Gaspar Noé have resorted to technical extremism in their war on convention, hijacking the means of production to initiate the next leap forward. In doing so, they have upset their staunchest defenders and added grist to their detractors’ mill - Noé’s Enter the Void (2009) was pilloried by critics at its Cannes premiere, and Netflix - the ultimate arbiter of taste and bastion of decency - refused to distribute Korine’s Trash Humpers (2009) due to its objectionable content. But the rancour of tastemakers only serves to vindicate their stylistic radicalism and bolster their resolve to further push the envelope. Both Trash Humpers and Enter the Void are designed to repel a generation weaned on high-concept spectacle, sanitized remakes and sniggering plagiarism masquerading as deconstruction - the medium itself is a weapon against the middlebrow, revelling in discomfort, occupying a cinematic hinterland populated by the damaged and abandoned.

Like fellow agent provocateur Lars Von Trier, Korine and Noé take pleasure in goading, even berating, their audience; testing the limits of its tolerance and forcing them to confront some unpleasant truths. Indeed, the sensory shocker philosophically has its roots in the Dogme ‘95 movement, which was a reaction against cinema’s growing profligacy that propounded a ‘year zero’ akin to punk rock - but alas turned out to be more of an elaborate prank against credulous critics than a creative revolution. Though their methods differ wildly, Korine and Noé share Dogme’s aesthetic intransigence; presenting ideas with an implacable purity of purpose, untainted by concessions to popular taste and sentiment. In Korine’s sly primitivism and Noé’s baroque solemnity we see this unwillingness to adulterate their vision in the face of critical derision and public rejection. In an industry that seems content to churn out an endless stream of mediocrity, Enter the Void and Trash Humpers only serve to highlight the Hollywood machine’s paucity of ambition and dearth of innovation.

It is a horror truism that storytellers can conjure up all manner of beasts and apparitions, but the ultimate figures of terror are the marginal and powerless - the lonely motel owner, inbred redneck, angry teenager, etc. With Trash Humpers, indie cinema’s idiot savant could be said to have taken the genre back to its heyday - which ran approximately from Psycho (1960) to Halloween (1978) - in his belief that the real monsters are in our midst. A twisted amalgam of Man Bites Dog (1992) and Cannibal Holocaust (1980), Trash Humpers has the feel of a grisly VHS artefact retrieved from a crime scene, or the home movies of a sociopathic family. Its utter lack of technical refinement immediately removes the viewer from any accepted norms of presentation; refusing to meet them half way with its worn, washed out ‘video nasty’ visuals, intermittent bursts of static, frame rolls, on-screen functions, murky sound, sudden cuts and blackouts. Trash Humpers is a consciously ugly, wilfully amateurish, malformed cousin of Gummo (1997) that exemplifies Korine’s abiding love for jetsam in all its forms.

We learn that the film’s eponymous gang derives pleasure from simulating sex with garbage receptacles - or ‘trash pussies’ - but their identity is never explained. The lack of exposition makes them all the more menacing. Whether they are young people masquerading as old people or vice versa, the gang’s appearance comes across as a parody of youth culture, satirizing our stultifying obsession with the latest fad or affectation. No doubt to avoid claims that these characters are nothing more than conduits for his iconoclastic agenda, Korine strives to lend them a dimension. One gang member avers that he can ‘smell the pain’ of suburban Nashville and another implores God to guide her, but Korine draws the line at taking a stance, neither portraying them in a sympathetic light or castigating their actions. The film’s erratic tone has a disorientating effect - the banal, ludicrous and horrific mingle to the point that the distinction becomes irrelevant, lulling us into accepting their excesses by largely excluding the world beyond. It is only in the fractured snippets of everyday life occurring around them that we begin to get a sense of the gang’s complete isolation from the mainstream of society.

The gang meets a variety of classic Korine eccentrics that serves to mitigate their abnormality and place them in a social context, bolstering Korine’s assertion that you don’t need to look very far to find the detritus of a society built on the principles of predacious consumption and heedless self-gratification. Trash Humpers is a broadside against rampant consumerism, a treatise on the nature of obsolescence - the gang is openly hostile to any symbol of youth and vitality, destroying dolls and toys while idolizing the discarded and useless to the point of erotic frenzy. They have transferred their affections to the yielding contours of plastic and steel, wallowing in a world of kitsch certainties. Trash Humpers mercilessly slaughters sacred cows and busts taboos, from the narcissistic attention seeking of ‘reality’ TV and YouTube, to our voyeuristic obsession with celebrity, to our retreat into cultural inertia and gleeful juvenilia. Korine has created a set of monsters that hold a mirror up to the folly of a society slowly drowning in its surfeit - a new kind of predator spawned by our greed, feeding on the by-product of our abundance.

Gaspar Noé’s excoriating oeuvre explores the overlap between sex and violence - lust and revenge are equated in films like I Stand Alone (1998) and Irreversible (2002) - and the visceral intractability of human impulse. Coming from the opposite end of the technical spectrum as Trash Humpers, Enter the Void has been described as a ‘psychedelic melodrama’ and a ‘metaphysical thriller’. From its seizure-inducing titles, this is an attack on the senses. Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) and his Sister, Linda (Paz de la Huerta), live in Tokyo, eking out a living as a small-time drug dealer and a lap dancer respectively. Seen from Oscar’s point of view, Oscar and his friend, Alex (Cyril Roy), discuss the Tibetan Book of the Dead on their way to a club called The Void, where Oscar is to transact a drug deal with Victor (Olly Alexander), whose mother he has an ‘arrangement’ with. As Oscar enters the tenebrous environs of the club, police swarm into the building. Oscar flees to the bathroom and hides in a stall, where he is shot after refusing to give himself up. His breathing ebbs, his vision blurs, all sound recedes and his heartbeat slows to a halt. His spirit rises from his body and hovers above the scene - much in the manner of the post-shootout scene in Taxi Driver (1974). Devoid of form, Oscar observes those he has left behind from his existential no man’s land.

Structurally, Enter the Void echoes Film Noir in its non-linear narrative and use of multiple flashbacks - indeed, one of the film’s primary inspirations was said to have been Robert Montgomery’s 1947 film of Raymond Chandler’s Lady in the Lake, which was shot entirely from the point of view of its protagonist. Noé recreates each stage of being with a keen eye for detail. The twittering subconscious and fractured perception of the scenes in which we occupy Oscar’s corporeal form perfectly captures his chemically impaired state; while the blurry, flickering photography and throttled sound of the ethereal scenes play like a cosmic Nickelodeon film, alternating frame rates for maximum unease. The scenes from Oscar’s past are shot from over his shoulder, as if, removed from his physical form, Oscar is watching them back in an attempt to make sense of his life. Jean-Andre Carriere and Kikuo Ohta’s production design is a work of staggering bravura, a feat not seen since Blade Runner (1982), and the visual effects may well come to be regarded in the same light as Doug Trumbell’s ground-breaking work on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Tokyo is transformed into a decadent theme park, a garish Day-Glo maelstrom where all earthly pleasure can be purchased, a repository of turpitude where everything is out of kilter. Enter the Void is a film for which the use of the term stylized is not pejorative. The film dispenses with the condescending travelogue feel of Lost in Translation (2003), gawping in wonderment at the neon metropolis. This version of Tokyo is a simulacrum on which to dramatize man’s gluttonous death wish.

Enter the Void is a dizzying journey into the heart of corruption; a world where individual freedom is conflated with self-annihilation, whose citizens are engaged in a desperate quest for endless sensation, sheltering from its iniquities in a torrent of narcotics and meaningless sex. Like Korine, Noé doesn’t shy away from charting the bleakest recesses of the human psyche - Oscar is a composite of our failings; a greedy, self-serving Sybarite who leaves a trail of debris in his wake. There is a palpable sense of disgust for, and queasy fascination with, the mechanical act of copulation; Noé presents a series of deeply joyless sex scenes from which he defies the observer to derive any kind of erotic thrill. That Noé is able to maintain our interest in such a downcast setting over the course of the film’s lengthy meditation is a testament to his skill as a storyteller. Noé navigates the labyrinth and stares into the abyss, but Enter the Void ultimately veers away from the brutal nihilism of Irreversible - the film seems willing to envisage a renewal of humanity’s beleaguered spirit. Enter the Void has astounding ambition and intellectual curiosity, dealing with concepts and ideas that most mainstream films would shrink from for fear of alienating or confusing its audience - after all, nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the public. Noé harnesses a myriad of techniques to realize his vision, creating an amazing yet horrific landscape that lingers long in the memory. It will be interesting to see how their peers respond to the gauntlet thrown down by the originators of the Sensory Shocker.

American: The Bill Hicks Story (2009)

When he died from pancreatic cancer in 1994, Bill Hicks entered the pantheon of pop culture martyrs. These ephemeral beings that shone so bright, these fallen idols sacrificing body and soul for their art, form the basis for a Cult of Death that has becomes a lucrative industry. We all know the names of these saintly, ill-fated figures whose gifts were as much a blessing as a curse. Their work and, perhaps more importantly, their image looms large in the collective imagination. They have become shorthand for those seeking authenticity or distinction.

We’ve all read the biographies and seen the sanitized Hollywood biopic and we think we know them; because so much of their lives reside in the public domain. They will never fall prey to the inducements that have halted many a promising artist; they will never grow stale, complacent or repetitive, they will never become grotesque parodies of their former selves.

Hicks’ brief life has been so thoroughly pored over that it seems inconceivable any new facts can emerge in ‘American’. Is it merely a hagiography, a public relations exercise endorsed by those who wish to brand him the Ultimate Outsider?

The most striking feature of ‘American’ is its visual style; various photographic techniques are used to create a unique backdrop, stylishly animating the content of the interviews. Still images are brought to life and localities recreated, given a depth of focus by raising the subject from the background, somewhat in the manner of a pop-up book. Consequently, ‘American’ has a vivid playfulness that sets it apart from the staid, humourless format of so many retrospectives, capturing the essence of Hicks’ sardonic worldview.

The most remarkable thing about Hicks’ upbringing is just how prosaic it was, he grew up in a comfortable suburban home with Southern Baptist parents. But Hicks was possessed of an inventive mind that saw how ripe for parody his home and school life was. He began to do stand-up at the age of fifteen; comedy was a means of escape, saving him from the drab respectability he dreaded. His lifelong love/hate relationship with Los Angeles began with a brief, frustrating move there, whereupon he succumbed to the loneliness and uncertainty that is the city’s default setting.

It was on his return to Houston that his work underwent a marked change, due in no small part to his entree into the world of heavy drinking and hallucinogenic drugs. His stage presence became more confrontational, his material darker, he started dressing in black and perfected the ‘Kinison scream’. As a consequence, some of his earlier fans deserted him and he was no longer asked to perform on TV. Ignored in his own country, Hicks was embraced by audiences in Canada and Britain, where his coruscating attacks on American foreign policy chimed with popular sentiment.

Of course, all of this is common knowledge to anyone who has read Cynthia True’s ‘American Scream’, or the panoply of other biographical works that have sprung up in the years since Hicks’ demise. ‘American’ presents no real new information, but it does offer a fascinating document of Hicks’ development as an artists and a person, charting his passage from a lovable teenage comic doing impressions of his dad to a prophet of doom kicking against the spiritual malaise of the hoi polloi, the hypocrisy of the religious establishment, the poltroonery of the political class and the cupidity of Corporate America. The home movie footage shows a different side to Hicks, outlining just how carefully cultivated his on-stage persona was, he is relaxed and personable, a world away from the ‘man in black’ he was renowned as.

Hicks’ credo was ‘love not fear’, something that is often forgotten by those who dismiss him as an ‘angry’ comic. There was always a motive behind his ire, something that set him apart from contemporaries like Sam Kinison. Fanciful as it may sound, Hicks’ ultimate ambition was to share what he’d learned from his drug experiences, which he believed had set something free and put him on the path to nirvana. The mystical bent of his later material is informed by his drug experiences, providing a perspective that is aeons ahead of the blandly observational shtick that prevailed on the circuit. This insight instilled in him a state of oneness with the universe, but put him at odds with audiences seeking more pedestrian fare.

He saw through the reactionary bluster of the Reagan/Bush years, with its adoration for the military-industrial complex and veneration of flag and fatherland. He wanted his audiences to be able to see that they were being misled, imploring them to evolve with him. But his call went unheeded; America rejected his vision; he was viewed as a renegade for speaking out against the first Gulf War.

Like Richard Pryor before him, Hicks refused to be browbeaten, to adapt to the demands of television executives and movie producers.  He explored subjects comedians usually shied away from or dealt with in a facile manner. He travelled to the darkest recesses of the subconscious, challenging preconceptions with purity and profundity. 

Was Bill Hicks ahead of his time? He’s still ahead of his time.

We need Bill Hicks more now than ever. Heaven only knows what he would have made of the madness that has ensued in his absence.

‘American’ is the definitive portrait of man whose impact on the development of comedy is incalculable.

Heartless (2009)

Youth and subculture are perennial lightning rods for the delicate sensibilities of polite society, with each transmutation serving to stir the fear and suspicion that first rumbled onto the silver screen with the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. The ‘Chav Horror’ motif that was used to grisly effect in ‘Eden Lake’ seems to be developing into a sub-genre of its own, with the tracksuited ‘yobs’ as our very own version of the demented rednecks in American ‘backwoods terror’ flicks. On the surface, ‘Heartless’ sounds like just this kind of ‘Daily-Mail-reader’s-wildest-imaginings-come-to-life’ endeavour, with its marauding gangs of ‘hoodies’ terrorizing communities, gang disputes spreading beyond their traditional boundaries and ominous tower blocks housing all manner of iniquity. But this is more than a crass exploitation film, channelling tabloid outrage for a quick buck.

Jamie Morgan (Jim Sturgess) is a timid photographer born with a heart-shaped birthmark on his face. When not dodging the taunts of scornful youths, Jamie documents the neglected margins beyond the gentrified centre, rummaging through the detritus for pictorial inspiration. On one such excursion he comes into contact with a gang that is vastly different from the ones he regularly encounters, fleeing before he can investigate further. His foreboding proves to be well-founded when the gang kills his mother before his very eyes. Jamie’s despair at the morally bankrupt world around him leads to a meeting with Papa B (Joseph Mawle), who offers him a life free from ridicule, in exchange for assisting him in the creation of his Kingdom of Horror.

‘Heartless’ presents a hyper-stylized urban dystopia that bears as much relation to modern London as ‘Blade Runner’ did to Los Angeles in 1982; positively Dickensian in its portrayal of squalor. But this is by no means a criticism; the expressionistic lighting and gothic mis-en-scene of its doom-laden inner-city backdrop is so visually arresting that it compensates for any lack of veracity. The world presented in ‘Heartless’ is a landscape of the mind, an abstract plain filled with apocalyptic dread, the product of a rudderless subconscious, a fevered imagination seeing monsters lurking around every corner. Music is a useful adjunct to this, with David Julyan’s stirring collection of original songs articulating Jamie’s mental state like a running commentary.

The film’s unremitting grimness is countervailed to some extent by a dose of good old-fashioned British whimsy from the likes of Ruth Sheen and Eddie Marsan, adding to the ‘Mike Leigh meets John Milton’ feel that prevails. Sturgess brings an intensity and poignancy to the role of a man who must indulge in the corruption of the world to be accepted by it; a loner hiding behind the comfort of the camera lens like Mark Lewis in ‘Peeping Tom’ and sitting in his room plotting vengeance like Travis Bickle in ‘Taxi Driver’. Jopseh Mawle strikes a sinister note as the infernal Papa B. Though he serves as little more than a plot device delivering expository dialogue, he takes to the role with considerable élan, not falling into the trap of rehashing the typical Faustian tack of portraying him as a sybaritic sophisticate. Noel Clarke - the designated voice of ‘the kidults’ - makes a brief appearance as Jamie’s neighbour and reformed gangster, AJ; adding ‘street’ credibility to proceedings but little else.

The friendship between AJ and Jamie is something that could have been developed further; they appear together in a couple of scenes before AJ disappears, as does much of the cast as the film progresses. Which is the strongest indication that none of what transpires in the film is occurring outside the confines of Jamie’s head. From the stagey streets to the gaps in logic, ‘Heartless’ has the gaudy unreality of a vivid nightmare; like a Lynchian portrait of suburbia transposed to the decaying metropolis, there are elements that appear off kilter.

‘Heartless’ is certainly a cut above what currently passes for horror; writer/director Phillip Ridley clearly understands that the best horror is cerebral, dabbling with social, moral and philosophical issues while evoking an eeriness that is more effective than all the gore in the world. The film’s ultimate message is that horror is all around us; that Hell is human construct, a repository for our worst impulses and appetites, that we create the monsters and set these elemental conflicts in motion. ‘Heartless’ is that rarest of creatures; a British horror film that isn’t in thrall to whatever high-concept brutality is in vogue Stateside