Werner Herzog: Signs of Life

“Mother, I am far away from everything,” are Kaspar’s first, halting words when a woman places her baby in his awkward arms. Like almost all of Herzog’s characters, Kaspar Hauser is only the most recent of the director’s extraterritorial creatures. Far away from their origins, their seeming inarticulateness is in fact the mark which reveals their childlike nature and their sense of homelessness. All of Herzog’s characters are spiritual infants. Significantly, the derivation of the word “infancy” comes from the idea of the “inability to speak,” and the obsession with language itself is at the heart of Herzog’s work, for it is here that one discovers the line where communication, being, imagination and perception touch, define and color each other.

In June of this year, Herzog flew to the United States in order to film a 45-minute television documentary about the world championship of livestock auctioneers in New Holland, Pennsylvania. “Theirs is like a new language, it’s like the last poetry, the last incantations,” the director told me a few days after the auction. “To me it’s somehow the ultimate of human communication, showing us how far our capitalist system has taken us. It’s very frightening and very beautiful at the same time. One of the auctioneers told me that as a child he would drive in a car and at each telephone pole he’d sell livestock to the poles as they passed by very quickly. Another one trained by reciting tongue twisters: ‘If it takes a hen and a half a day and a half to lay an egg and a half, how long does it take a broken wooden legged cockroach to kick a hole in a dill pickle?”‘

In Signs of Life, a young Greek boy, a little bird in his hand, suddenly says to the hero: “Now that I can talk, what shall I say?” And in Kaspar Hauser, the delineation of the boy’s education simply acknowledges the ineradicable power of preoperational infant thinking and speaking. As an apple rolls down a path, Kaspar says: “The apples are tired, they would like to sleep.” When he has a dream, he tells us: “It dreamed to me.” When he listens to the piano, he says: “The music feels strong in the heart.” And, finally: “Nothing lives in me except my life.”

“Kaspar was between 14 and 17 when he was discovered,” Herzog explains. “Bruno S., who plays him in my film, is 43. I don’t care at all.” Herzog chose Bruno for the part after seeing a documentary made about his life. His prostitute mother had deposited him in an institution for the retarded when he was three years old. Although not retarded, Bruno lived in the hospital until the age of nine, by which time he was psychically maimed for life. Herzog found him living like a bum in a shack, occasionally playing an accordion in backyards. His performance as Kaspar Hauser comes close in intensity to Falconetti’s portrayal of St. Joan in Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. To perform the scene in which he learns to walk, Bruno knelt for three hours with a stick behind his knees until his legs were too numb to stand. Exhausted after filming each shot, he fell immediately asleep.

Herzog’s concern with the extremities of experience is meant to bring to light what Master Eckhart called the scintilla animae — the spark of the soul. The director wants to reveal this light in and by means of his denounced and renounced characters, and at the same time to bring us to an understanding of the birth of the word in the soul that is the light itself. By means of an uncanny admixture of montage, mise-en-scène, music, silence and language (with its hesitations, gaps and distortions), Werner Herzog has fashioned a spiritual and aesthetic program similar to the great magus Giordano Bruno: that of opening the “black diamond doors” within the psyche and of returning the intellect to unity through the organization of significant images.

Herzog made his first short films when he was 19 years old. “I never had any choice about becoming a director,” he says. “It was always clear, ever since I was 14 years old. I converted to Catholicism at 14 — my father was a militant atheist, and it was an enormous battle against my father. It was at that time that, too, I wanted to go to Albania, which was completely closed off to the rest of the world. So I walked along the Albanian-Yugoslavian border. I can’t tell you why I wanted to do this, but Albania was the mysterious country in Europe . . . . I wrote scripts at school and submitted them, but there was a long chain of humiliations and failures, so I decided to work at a steel factory at night to make money to produce my first short films.”

His sense of resolution and determination has become legendary. At the end of 1974, Herzog walked 600 miles from Munich to Paris — it took him three weeks — as a tribute to the great German film historian Lotte Eisner, to whom he dedicated Kaspar Hauser. “She was in a hospital in Paris, and I was afraid she was going to die,” Herzog explains. “And somehow, out of protest, I started to walk, thinking that when I arrived in Paris she would be out of the hospital. And she was. It was just some crazy thought in the back of my mind.

“I’m a friend of hers. But she’s important not only to me personally but to the whole of German filmmaking. You know, she was chased out of Germany in 1934 during the years of barbarism, and she remained the historical and cultural link to the great and legitimate German cinema of the Twenties and Thirties. Filmmakers like myself started from zero — we didn’t have the cultural continuity of France or the United States. And Lotte Eisner witnesses for us that we are legitimate again. She is the only person alive who knows film history in person from Lumiès and Méliès to Eisenstein and Pudovkin and the early Chaplin. She’s like the last surviving mammoth. And when she dies, something unique will be gone forever. It will be the tragic hour of my life.”