Salient. Official Newspaper of Victoria University of Wellington Students Association. Vol. 40 Number 4. March 21 1977
Dreams of Purify
Dreams of Purify
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Werner Herzog.
The proper, or pure form of any particular art has always been the subject of much investigation, The question boils down to technique. Almost as long as film has existed, man has tried to discover how the available technical means can create a meaning or effect unique to that art. By the 1920s, montage—the juxtaposition of one shot with another to achieve a result which superceded the power inherent in each separate shot—was thought to be the method by which film achieved purity. It was visual and it communicated beyond words, thus it was distinct. Montage was not the product of hybrid but of solely filmic properties.
Furthermore, it allowed man to dominate space and time as never before. This was the crux, for the strength of art was seen in the way it formed its own reality in order to reflect back on life. Life's reality is defined in temporo-spatial terms beyond our control. Film's greatest freedom from this restriction lay at the very heart of its power. Anything which threatened to tie film to reality was therefore seen as a debasement.
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The desert: Fata Morgana.
The advent of talking-pictures was anticipated as such, because speech (sound and the body making it) implied a biological relationship independent of man's creative faculty. Film would revert to being a mere recording device. Speech, in fact sound generally, the purists claimed, must only used where its relationship to the visual image was man-made and served man's purpose.
Werner Herzog's Fata Morgana is a fascinating resolution of this conflict. Narration aside, both the music and the words within the film act as a single coherent entity. They are the aural element, standing in counterpoint and with equal importance to the visual image. The narration is imposed on this duality, providing signification at the point of synthesis which flows back into the sound and image and assists in the mutual transcendence of each.
The breathtaking combination of German oratorios and long tracking shots through the desert is the best example. There is nothing in the songs requiring this or any other image, and vice versa. The two elements are artificially related. That they do relate is incontestable, that each brings to the other a sublimity beyond the scope of either acting alone is also incontestable. Neither our watching nor our listening takes precedence: our reaction lies between the effect of the two.
Over this Herzog has laid an extraordinarily rich creation myth, whose gist is that none of the creatures of this world, least of all man, is capable of fulfilling the gods will. For this ineptitude (mark that) man is destroyed in the flood. Immediately we are presented with a paradox. Man created the myth which belittles him. Man created the beautiful music we are listening to. And man created the film by which all this is conveyed. Yet in these creations ineptitude is the last thing we think of. The narrative does not contradict everything else in the film, it allows us deep understanding. In a filmic metaphor, man is to nature what sound is to image.
Herzog has said that his films go beyond words, that like dreams they reveal something incomprehensible to our logical modes of thinking. In other words, they present paradoxes such as the one I have just suggested.
Much later we get documentary-type footage of various people explaining the fauna of the desert. Their speeches are left untranslated. From this we can infer that what they are saying is unimportant and jump straight to the essence of the scenes: words, even when observing strict fidelity to the moving mouth, have an artificial nature which makes them ultimately nonsensical. Although those people are telling us about things, we recognise they are simply obeying the compulsion to communicate, a thing far more important than the actual content. An understanding of German would not alter this. Herzog's dogmatic insistence on bringing us back to them, of matching the visually and aurally uninteresting, heavily underlines the point. The paradox of the desert sequences here receives non-aesthetic expression. In a similar way, Leonard Cohen's songs are annoying only because we get caught up in the familiar words. As sounds they are exactly right.
We are several times told: "In Paradise, you call hello without ever seeing anyone." This is not the voice of a cynic. Paradise is the accepted place where paradoxes don't exist. The only way this can happen is for each individual to lose his concept of other individuals, to be absolutely alone. Vet only through those others do we have any sense of separate identity. I cannot say "I am me," without implying "I am not you." So the paradox is inescapable. In Paradise, alone, we must continue to call out. The filmic aspect reflects this: we "call" but we don't "see." In Paradise, the aural and the visual are in discord and create nothing.
Herzog is not suggesting futility. Quite the opposite. This paradox is inherent in our life. Beyond words, beyond meaning, it is the fountainhead of all beauty, all truth, all faith. The mere fact that we can live with it attests to this. It is not Paradise we seek, it is Life.
Thus we have film's full potential: the ability to explore the profoundest level of man's experience. Because film alone incorporates space and time in complete subervience to man's will and imagination, its powers of presentation and evocation are the broadest of all the arts. However, this does not make it the greatest art. If perfect expression brings man face to face with his God, what is the result? Does Fata Morgana prove its maker a prophet of film, or is it the wax and feathers of a new-found Icarus? Significantly, of the three divisions in the film-Creation, Paradise, the Golden Age-it is to Creation we feel most drawn....