Werner Herzog is having an unfortunate moment. This was painfully evident Thursday night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where the filmmaker, on the eve of his 72nd birthday, sat on stage facing a completely packed audience, books strewn at his feet like an undergraduate cramming for a final exam. From the moment he entered stage right, there was hooting and hollering. Every time he opened his mouth, there was laughter.
This is the strange thing about Herzog at this point in his career. The cult of worship around his work is stronger than ever, but it’s hard to discern if it’s really even about the work at all. He’s similar to David Lynch in this respect. Both are enigmatic artists who are equally admired and lampooned for their idiosyncrasies, and a mass audience, having trouble engaging with work that strays from normative modes of cinematic pleasure, meets their seriousness with giggles.
Not that Herzog is completely unaware of how he is now perceived or that his films are devoid of comedy. This is a man who once ate a shoe. It’s that his work exists in a more complicated zone outside clearly defined binary oppositions. There is no other artist like Werner Herzog, so there is no easy way to process what is happening on screen. To treat it all as comedy, we as a popular culture have made Herzog into a meme — that funny (and foreign) voice, reading stupid children’s books and cartoons. During his appearance at BAM, the biggest applause from the audience came when he announced that he had just filmed a cameo for the final season of the NBC sitcom “Parks and Recreation.”
Herzog is so serious, so foreign, that he is treated as comedy. Which is a shame, because there is no better time than right now to catch up on what he’s been doing for over 40 years. During the conversation at BAM, following a clip from “Land of Silence and Darkness” (1971), Herzog said something that was interesting while discussing a scene at the beginning of the film that he apparently fabricated: “Facts do not constitute truths.” People laughed, as if it was bizarre for Herzog to admit that he made something up in a documentary. But the bridge between fiction and nonfiction is something Herzog has been exploring throughout all his work, and has become a more prominent theme among a wider range of artists in recent years. That the truth might be false is hard pill for people to swallow, and that documentary is a slippery genre, and always has been, is typically met with confusion.
But maybe there is hope yet. At one moment during the public conversation, Herzog ruminated on a narrative that runs through much of his work. “A man has a dream,” he said, “and when he fulfills it he is punished for it, only to be redeemed at the end.” Hopefully, Herzog won’t have to wait that long for his own artistic redemption.
As part of a series on the filmmaker Les Blank, BAM will be screening “Fitzcarraldo,” and Blank’s documentary on the making of that film, “Burden of Dreams,” on September 6. “Herzog: The Collection,” a box set containing his most well-known work on newly remastered Blu-Ray discs, is out now via Shout Factory.
