The Essentials: The Films Of Werner Herzog

“Happy People: A Year in the Taiga” (2010)
An intermittently interesting but overall rather ordinary documentary about the seasonal cycle of life amongst the sable trappers of the Siberian Taiga region, we can chalk the unusually PBS-feel of this project down to the fact that Herzog is only its co-director (and in fact, second-billed). Seemingly engaged more as an editing consultant (filmmaker Dmitri Vasyukov originally shot a great deal more footage for a TV project), Herzog also lends his trademark heavily accented voiceover to the film, but otherwise it feels a great deal more anonymous than we’d expect from him, and is quite small-screen in scope. Which is not to say that the power of the subject doesn’t come across—the procedural, observational camera observes the planing of a tree trunk into a canoe or nighttime journey across frozen wasteland with a kind of detached, unmanipulated interest. But the thrust is just less grandiose than we’re used to from Herzog, less allied to epic themes, and occasionally his admiration for the hard-won philosophy of these rugged men rings a little off. He’s by no means dissembling, but there is a slight edge of romanticism to his view of these hard lives as somehow nobler and purer than modern life elsewhere, which is enhanced by the sense we get of Herzog himself never having really interacted with them, just having watched the footage and recorded the narration in a warm studio many miles away. [C+]

“Into the Abyss” (2011)
The feature-length, theatrically released segment of the “On Death Row” series (see below) in which Herzog interviews death row inmates, their families, the families of their victims, correctional officers and policemen involved in the original case, “Into The Abyss” focuses on a triple homicide, and the two men, Jason Burkett and Michael Perry, convicted of the crime. Perry is sentenced to death, whereas Burkett got life imprisonment, and Herzog (whom we hear as interviewer but do not see) is upfront about his anti-death penalty stance. But the film is less polemic than that might imply: Herzog in no way attempts to exculpate either convict, and spends a great deal of time emphasizing the heinous nature of the crime, the awful impact of the killings on relatives of the dead. Indeed, it’s not even really an act of journalism, despite being funded by Investigation Discovery, instead it’s an artist’s exploration of the warring instincts in human nature, and nature overall, between violence and chaos and justice and retribution, in which Herzog’s dogged respect for even the grimmest life emerges from the moral morass. Who else would start an execution documentary with a chaplain relating an anecdote about squirrels and end it with an ex-death house officer talking about hummingbirds? [B+]

“On Death Row” (2012)
Originally four 50-minute-long episodes in the same death row series that was kicked off by the theatrical release of “Into the Abyss,” (followed by four more which aired in 2013), if anything, “On Death Row” is a more fluid, gripping and persuasive examination of the nature of legally-sanctioned execution than the feature that preceded it. Here the individual stories are pared back to the essentials, or rather what Herzog believes those essentials to be, and it makes for deeply engrossing viewing. Herzog mostly lets the camera linger on the subject, whether it’s the victim’s sibling, the investigating officer, the lawyer, or most often and most fascinatingly, the inmate him/herself. And yet the wider themes of justice vs. retribution, punishment vs. crime and circumstance vs. character are not lost, it’s more like Herzog himself becomes so caught up in the stories these people tell to him, to the public and perhaps to themselves, that he largely stays out of the way. This focus on the victims, the perpetrators and those involved in the legal system in their own words makes clear his anti-death penalty stance much more eloquently than an overt manifesto ever could: Herzog is not against killing these men and women because they are good people, but because they are people, whose humanity cannot be denied no matter how inhuman the acts they’ve committed. [A-]

Like a Herzog protagonist, we too cherish a crazy, all-but-unobtainable dream—that one day we’ll have a complete and absolutely comprehensive Herzog retrospective that includes all his TV work and his short films as well as his features. Maybe “Queen of the Desert” will inspire us to track down those more obscure nooks and crannies, but for now, we think we’ve covered all but one of his feature-length films above, both documentary and narrative, for TV and theatrical release, as well as a good few of his shorter-format TV docs. That said, we have been unable to track down 1985’s TV mountaineering documentary “The Dark Glow of the Mountains” at all, which we’re eager to watch especially in compensatory light for his other Reinhold Messner collaboration, the disappointing narrative film “Scream of Stone.”

Elsewhere, Herzog has seven fiction shorts to his name, at least that number again of documentary shorts, with another ten or eleven documentary titles of 45 minutes and upward that we’ve yet to cover, including early TV doc “The Flying Doctors of East Africa,” “Herdsmen of the Sun” and the feature-length documentary on Richard Wagner‘s music at the Bayreuth Festival humbly titled “The Transformation of the World into Music.” Good to know there’s still plenty in store for our next go-round then. Let us know your own favorite Herzogs, especially from the less trafficked reaches of his filmography, in the comments below.

— Jessica Kiang, Oliver Lyttelton, Christopher Bell, Rodrigo Perez, Mark Zhuravsky, Samantha Chater, Kevin Jagernauth.