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May 25, 2006

Burden of Dreams

Fumble in the Jung-le

By Andrew

I am unfamiliar with nearly all forms of psychology, but in discussing German director Werner Herzog, this might be excusable. The man seemingly defies them all. Not only does Herzog defy psychology, he hates it. "I have a metaphor: If you illuminate your house with strong lights to the very last corner, the house becomes uninhabitable. And it's the same thing if you try to illuminate a human being to the last crevices of his or her soul—these human beings become uninhabitable."¹

As in his critique of psychoanalysis, Herzog films let metaphors do the talking. Nevertheless, one cannot deny there's a man behind the metaphorical curtain, and Les Blanc's 1982 documentary Burden of Dreams stands as proof. Blanc's film follows the folly behind the making of Herzog's epic, Fitzcarraldo, also released in 1982, for which Herzog contended with actor's illnesses, rock star's touring schedules, and border conflicts, all deep, deep, deep, within the Amazon jungle. Fitzcarraldo follows an insanely ambititious rubber-tree magnate's efforts to haul a 350 ton steamboat over a mountain. Burden of Dreams reveals that Fitzcarraldo's drive is matched only by that of Herzog himself. "I should not make any more movies," Herzog tells us, in a particularly frazzled moment. "I should be locked up in an insane asylum."

Despite this momentary moment of doubt, Herzog has made many, many movies since - and they still often put his sanity to question. In the case history of Herr Herzog, Burden is but one folder. Others might include Herzog's ego-trip down memory lane, My Best Fiend [1999], a documentary self-portrait chronicling the director's love/hate relationship with actor Klaus Kinski; or perhaps the amusing frivolity of Incident at Loch Ness [2004], a mockumentary that grabs Herzog's mystique firmly by the horns and manages to shake out a few laughs in the process. More than any of these, however, it is Burden of Dreams that puts the director and his methods most firmly in focus, putting not only his sanity to question, but his artistic methods as well.²

As I've said, Herzog has made many, many films.³ I haven't seen even half of them, so it's hard to characterize him in fell swoops. I would think it fair to say, however, that the notion of fell swoops is apt: a signature of Herzog's style is that aforementioned grand sweeping metaphor. I recall that in a scene from My Best Fiend, Herzog marvels at a movie poster for Fitzcarraldo, and recalls the film's Boat Vs. Mountain plot. "What a great metaphor," he says (I paraphrase). "I still am not sure what it means."

In Herzog's films, it is primarily through metaphors that the filmmaker's dreams take on any real meaning. Despite his disdain for psychoanalysis, Herzog's unique dreamery brings to mind old-school psychologist Carl Jung.⁴ To Jung, our dreams signified metaphors of some primordial essence; in analyzing them as such, he often forsook science for art. For this reason, I get the sense that Jung informs a lot of Pop Psycholgy pap, especially dream interpretation, in which our sleeping dreams are reduced to especially vague — and sometimes silly — life lessons.

Burden of Dreams hints that Herzog may sometimes choose his metaphors as meticulously as a Jungian chooses meaning for a dream.⁵ If even just to tease Herzog, it's fun to run some of his metaphors back through the ringer of pop psych dream interpretation. In Fitzcarraldo, Herzog gives us the image of a boat being pulled over a mountain, from one river to another, deep in the Amazonian jungle. Within a dream, a mountain is said to signify determination and ambition. Meanwhile, the boat represents a transition from one thing to the next. The jungle? Its wild inhabitants, insects, birds, lizards, fish, deer, all living together — a "harmony of collective murder," Herzog calls it — signify inhibited drives and repressed feelings of guilt.

As Pop Psych wisdom would have it, "To dream that you are in a movie theater, indicates that you are attempting to protect yourself from your emotions and/or actions. Viewing them on a movie screen projects them onto another person and thus makes those feelings/actions distant. You may be protecting yourself from experiencing them." Burden of Dreams documents how Herzog, for all his metaphors, is projecting his own ambitions and dreams onto the screen.

Unlike the subject of psychoanalysis, who merely interprets a dream, Herzog endeavors to see his dreams through into reality. When he gets big ideas, they are going to happen. What does it say of a man who endeavors to film his wildest dreams? Herzog might not want too much light in his house - but if you don't watch where you're going, someone's going to get hurt. The problem is, when big ideas happen, when an individual's ambition and drive take precedence over others, someone invariably suffers for it.

This, I suppose, is the true burden of the Burden of Dreams. In the making of Fitzcarraldo, Herzog does not have to bear this burden alone; in some ways, he does not have to bear it at all. To lug his boat across a mountain, Herzog enlists the labor of a cast of hundreds of Peruvian Indians, some of whom trekked miles on foot for a role in Herzog's picture. Les Blanc's camera lingers over their constant daily labor, carrying this, building that, at the behest of Herzog via a translator. The work they do may be better or worse then their normal lives, but no matter: Herzog's very ability to order them around as little more than walking, talking props unearths some ethical questions about international inequity that Herzog never really considers.⁶

Of course, any director will bark orders to extras. Herzog could be the nicest person the Indians ever met; that doesn't change the institutional arrangements of the world he lives and works in. It's just I can't imagine an Indian director ordering around a cast of hundreds of Germans. Indigenous filmmakers don't have access to the type of financing Herzog does. While Herzog's film takes conquest as a primary metaphor, it's unconcerned with the real stuff that involves: political, social and economic dimensions. This is asking Herzog to make a film he was never making to begin with; but that's the sort of film I am interested in, and it leads me to ask why he makes the films he does.

The man may shrink at the light of psychoanalysis - what is he afraid of, a search light? Maybe he's wary that our Jungian analysis will reduce his serious dreams to one of those silly life lessons. Fair enough. But assuming our Pop Psych is right, for just a moment, what feelings/actions might be Herzog trying to keep distant in his monomaniacal movie-making? What is Herzog trying to protect himself from? I venture that Europe might have something to do with it (and I'm sure the Godard of Notre Musique would agree). Apparently, to dream of Europe indicates a long journey that will end in financial gain; this might find parallel in Herzog's trips to discuss Fitzcarraldo with his financial backers, recalled in Burden of Dreams. Dreams embody our experiences; no matter where one travels, the social and economic implications of a dream are inescapable. It is unfortunate that in Herzog's dreams these implications largely remain unconscious ones, aside perhaps from a few laments that the "authentic Indians" will one day be wiped out by the encroaching modern world.

In his recent documentary Grizzly Man [2005], Herzog profiled the life of Timothy Treadwell, a man who spent his summers living with, and eventually dying at the hand of, Alaskan grizzly bears. The documentary is masterful in its ability to treat Treadwell with all due respect; many scenes that might have played for cheap laughs in the hands of a less capable director gain instead an incredible poignancy. Nor is the documentary fawning either; Herzog's general hostility towards nature seemingly allows him to ponder what might have drove Treadwell out of society into the wild in the first place - the very sort of psychoanalytical bit that Herzog hates.

After viewing Burden of Dreams, Herzog's bellicose pathos towards Treadwell makes much more sense: the two are kindred spirits. Grizzly Man may suggest a way to approach Herzog himself. The beauty of Herzog's images demand all due respect, as does Treadwell's passion. We must give him the benefit of the doubt. At the same time we must inevitably question what stuff Herzog's dreams are made of. In many ways, his dreams become so grand or so peculiar, their meanings are not all that clear; what is clear from Burden of Dreams, as he stumbles from image to image, is somtimes he has little control over them. Metaphors are beautiful places to hide, but the world does not run on metaphor alone. If only it did! Mybe then, we would all be lucid screener, er, dreamers.

Notes:

¹ Stop Smiling, Issue 25, 2006. Via Looker.
² The insanity bit, admittedly, is probably overblown, especially if Herzog can play it for laughs in Incident at Loch Ness
³ These include dozens of documentary features and shorts, rarely seen but due out soon in a six-DVD set available on the man's website.
⁴ Keep firmly in mind my disclaimer about my knowledge of psychology as you read on; this review is as just as much my fumble in the Jung-le as Burden of Dreams is Herzog's.
⁵ Herzog's commentary track on the Stroszeck DVD hints at the same thing.
⁶ Not to mention basic questions of safety. An engineer, for example, warns Herzog that his boat-pulling scheme could cost six or seven people their lives; Herzog goes ahead and does it anyway. An Indian extra falls flat on his back, laying still, and for a moment we gasp; Blanc lets the shot linger until someone comes and helps the extra up, whatever harm done left to our imagination as the narrative continues. The injury scene might actually just be a scene from Fitzcarraldo, but Les Blanc edits it like its real (or so it struck me on my first viewing). The engineer sequence might also be an embellishment on Blanc's part, I'm not sure.

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