Werner Herzog Retrospective: Cobra Verde and The Wild Blue Yonder
The Werner Herzog Retrospective (running for all the weekends of May until the first weekend of June at Cinematheque Manila) continues with two of the German auteur's quintessential films: one features yet again his larger-than-life alter-ego Klaus Kinski and the other is a documentary, kind of.
"Cobra Verde" (1987) marks the fifth and final collaboration of Herzog and Kinski, one of the great director-actor partnerships cinema has ever produced. As with the two's previous works ("Aguirre, the Wrath of God", "Woyzeck", "Nosferatu the Vampyre", "Fitzcarraldo"), the film's main character is someone who's all too willing to drive himself to extremes, for better or for worse. (Aside from the fact that it's the kind of role you couldn't imagine any other actor playing and the kind of film you couldn't imagine any other filmmaker directing.) This time, Kinski is Francisco Manoel da Silva, a barefooted fearsome bandit ("I hate shoes", he declares) in 18th-century Brazil. One time, when he prevents a black slave from escaping from being lashed in a town plaza, he's spotted by a wealthy sugarcane plantation- and slave-owner (Jose Lewgoy) who immediately gives him a job as a plantation overseer (because the one who currently handles the job, he says, is an "idiot"), which Francisco accepts. Everything could have proceeded smoothly and efficiently if not only for the fact that Francisco got all of the baron's three daughters pregnant (!). Enraged, the baron wants Francisco to be dispatched for good. And this he does by sending him on a suicide mission (without the latter being actually aware of the nature of the task, of course): travelling to West Africa to "revive" the slave trade, which entails having to negotiate with a reputedly demented and murderous king (real-life monarch Omanhene Nana Agyefi Kwame II of Nsein;see, only Herzog can do this!). But as with the rest of Kinski's characters in Herzog's films, the word impossible is non-existent in Francisco's vocabulary - and so he's able to successfully trade black slaves with the king (memorably played by a king himself) for rifles.
Herzog's portrayal of slavery during those times is as authentic as it can be. Even if we haven't experienced first-hand the slave-trade era, we can still most certainly feel a gut-punch witnessing those scenes of bondage, hard labor and subjugation onscreen. That's only because the universal feeling of empathy is at work here. Sometimes, we even can't help but feel that Herzog is in fact exploiting the West African natives themselves, in the same manner as the Peruvian Indians in "Fitzcarraldo". That would be an assumption not entirely unjustified, if not only for those remarkable instances where Herzog places the slaves in a state of grace and redemption, like the extended scene of the young girls' choir singing, with glee and confidence reflected on their faces, or their overthrow of the king, or the outlawing of the slave trade itself. And just like "Fitzcarraldo" - or the rest of Herzog-Kinski collaborations - "Cobra Verde" has its ample share of wide-eyed setpieces, some are surreal, some are euphoric, while some are even poignant. But the best one that perfectly brings the film to a resonant summation is no other than the final scene with Kinski himself where, after learning of the abolition of the slave trade by the Portuguese and the subsequent headhunt implemented against him by the British, he goes to the seashore and pushes a boat towards it in an attempt to sail out of the region - but to no avail - as a crippled slave-would-be quietly watches him from a distance, with us not exactly sure if he's rejoicing over or sympathizing with the man's failure. Francisco is certainly not Fitzcarraldo this time who was able to haul a big ship over a mountain against all odds. In that final scene, he's a picture of defeat and helplessness as the silent person behind him, along with tens of thousands of his brethren, is finally gifted with a long-deprived freedom. "The slaves will sell their masters and grow wings" - this is the closing intertitle that flashes over the wide blue sea.
"The Wild Blue Yonder" (2005), Herzog's documentary that utilizes the elements of science-fiction, runs for just about less than 90 minutes. But watching it provides us with an experience that's nothing short of hypnotic and transcendental, strange and mysterious. Just imagine: An alien (portrayed by Brad Dourif in the quintessential Herzog protagonist) leaves his dying home-planet of Andromeda (what's being referred to in the title) and comes to Earth, along with others of his kind (though we never get to see "them" in the film), in the hope of finding it a habitable place to live in. But to his dismay, he discovers that our planet is just as dead, a veritable wasteland, all but decimated and abandoned. Complicating matters is the fact that humans are likewise engaged in a space-travel to look out for a potentially habitable planet - and one of them could be no other than Andromeda itself! And didn't I say that this is a documentary?
Yes, it is. Herzog in fact uses a good amount of a "highly-confidential" NASA footage of space and underwater exploration. But this is where the filmmaker's innovative utilization of image and sound comes in. In a kind of "recontextualization", coupled with a truly otherworldly musical score provided by Dutch cellist Ernst Reijseger and Senegalese singer and instrumentalist Mola Sylla, the images begin to tell a "story" that's both strange and haunting, yet ultimately resonant, in a way that speaks to humankind and the planet that we inhabit. By themselves, the images of the astronauts at work or at rest inside the space shuttle or diving deep into the ocean appear tedious, repetitive and inconsequential. But when placed within the context of Herzog's thematic concerns and technical wizardry, the images pointedly lay bare man's Babel-like folly and ambition, greedily assuming (perhaps without really intending so) that we have the sole privilege on the entire galaxy. Not since Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" has space travel felt so boring and aimless and who would've thought that the men of science who serve as Herzog's interviewees can look and sound so dumb and high on something, just a little below the level of the Three Stooges. "The Wild Blue Yonder" is Herzog's sly way of deconstructing man's never-ending tower towards that unreachable frontier which, perhaps, is just rightful to remain so.
Be it a narrative feature or a documentary, Herzog's films simply never fail to turn our viewing experience upside down.
(Klaus Kinski is a man defeated (above) and Brad Dourif is an alien disillusioned (below) in Werner Herzog's "Cobra Verde" and "The Wild Blue Yonder", respectively)
"Cobra Verde" (1987) marks the fifth and final collaboration of Herzog and Kinski, one of the great director-actor partnerships cinema has ever produced. As with the two's previous works ("Aguirre, the Wrath of God", "Woyzeck", "Nosferatu the Vampyre", "Fitzcarraldo"), the film's main character is someone who's all too willing to drive himself to extremes, for better or for worse. (Aside from the fact that it's the kind of role you couldn't imagine any other actor playing and the kind of film you couldn't imagine any other filmmaker directing.) This time, Kinski is Francisco Manoel da Silva, a barefooted fearsome bandit ("I hate shoes", he declares) in 18th-century Brazil. One time, when he prevents a black slave from escaping from being lashed in a town plaza, he's spotted by a wealthy sugarcane plantation- and slave-owner (Jose Lewgoy) who immediately gives him a job as a plantation overseer (because the one who currently handles the job, he says, is an "idiot"), which Francisco accepts. Everything could have proceeded smoothly and efficiently if not only for the fact that Francisco got all of the baron's three daughters pregnant (!). Enraged, the baron wants Francisco to be dispatched for good. And this he does by sending him on a suicide mission (without the latter being actually aware of the nature of the task, of course): travelling to West Africa to "revive" the slave trade, which entails having to negotiate with a reputedly demented and murderous king (real-life monarch Omanhene Nana Agyefi Kwame II of Nsein;see, only Herzog can do this!). But as with the rest of Kinski's characters in Herzog's films, the word impossible is non-existent in Francisco's vocabulary - and so he's able to successfully trade black slaves with the king (memorably played by a king himself) for rifles.
Herzog's portrayal of slavery during those times is as authentic as it can be. Even if we haven't experienced first-hand the slave-trade era, we can still most certainly feel a gut-punch witnessing those scenes of bondage, hard labor and subjugation onscreen. That's only because the universal feeling of empathy is at work here. Sometimes, we even can't help but feel that Herzog is in fact exploiting the West African natives themselves, in the same manner as the Peruvian Indians in "Fitzcarraldo". That would be an assumption not entirely unjustified, if not only for those remarkable instances where Herzog places the slaves in a state of grace and redemption, like the extended scene of the young girls' choir singing, with glee and confidence reflected on their faces, or their overthrow of the king, or the outlawing of the slave trade itself. And just like "Fitzcarraldo" - or the rest of Herzog-Kinski collaborations - "Cobra Verde" has its ample share of wide-eyed setpieces, some are surreal, some are euphoric, while some are even poignant. But the best one that perfectly brings the film to a resonant summation is no other than the final scene with Kinski himself where, after learning of the abolition of the slave trade by the Portuguese and the subsequent headhunt implemented against him by the British, he goes to the seashore and pushes a boat towards it in an attempt to sail out of the region - but to no avail - as a crippled slave-would-be quietly watches him from a distance, with us not exactly sure if he's rejoicing over or sympathizing with the man's failure. Francisco is certainly not Fitzcarraldo this time who was able to haul a big ship over a mountain against all odds. In that final scene, he's a picture of defeat and helplessness as the silent person behind him, along with tens of thousands of his brethren, is finally gifted with a long-deprived freedom. "The slaves will sell their masters and grow wings" - this is the closing intertitle that flashes over the wide blue sea.
"The Wild Blue Yonder" (2005), Herzog's documentary that utilizes the elements of science-fiction, runs for just about less than 90 minutes. But watching it provides us with an experience that's nothing short of hypnotic and transcendental, strange and mysterious. Just imagine: An alien (portrayed by Brad Dourif in the quintessential Herzog protagonist) leaves his dying home-planet of Andromeda (what's being referred to in the title) and comes to Earth, along with others of his kind (though we never get to see "them" in the film), in the hope of finding it a habitable place to live in. But to his dismay, he discovers that our planet is just as dead, a veritable wasteland, all but decimated and abandoned. Complicating matters is the fact that humans are likewise engaged in a space-travel to look out for a potentially habitable planet - and one of them could be no other than Andromeda itself! And didn't I say that this is a documentary?
Yes, it is. Herzog in fact uses a good amount of a "highly-confidential" NASA footage of space and underwater exploration. But this is where the filmmaker's innovative utilization of image and sound comes in. In a kind of "recontextualization", coupled with a truly otherworldly musical score provided by Dutch cellist Ernst Reijseger and Senegalese singer and instrumentalist Mola Sylla, the images begin to tell a "story" that's both strange and haunting, yet ultimately resonant, in a way that speaks to humankind and the planet that we inhabit. By themselves, the images of the astronauts at work or at rest inside the space shuttle or diving deep into the ocean appear tedious, repetitive and inconsequential. But when placed within the context of Herzog's thematic concerns and technical wizardry, the images pointedly lay bare man's Babel-like folly and ambition, greedily assuming (perhaps without really intending so) that we have the sole privilege on the entire galaxy. Not since Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" has space travel felt so boring and aimless and who would've thought that the men of science who serve as Herzog's interviewees can look and sound so dumb and high on something, just a little below the level of the Three Stooges. "The Wild Blue Yonder" is Herzog's sly way of deconstructing man's never-ending tower towards that unreachable frontier which, perhaps, is just rightful to remain so.
Be it a narrative feature or a documentary, Herzog's films simply never fail to turn our viewing experience upside down.
(Klaus Kinski is a man defeated (above) and Brad Dourif is an alien disillusioned (below) in Werner Herzog's "Cobra Verde" and "The Wild Blue Yonder", respectively)
Comments