The Holy Mythmaker

Where, oh where has Werner Herzog gone? During the '70s, hardly a year passed without one of the German director's movies slipping into the theaters like a tab of LSD dissolved in the drink of an unsuspecting viewer. I swallowed them all. Lushly visionary, they imprinted on my retinas (and my impressionable mind) with psychedelic potency.

I still enjoy a flashback recall of the vertiginous opening of "Aguirre, The Wrath of God"--the conquistadors and their Indian porters descending by footpath out of the clouds down a sheer wall, the silence broken only by an occasional stone clattering into the abyss. Later in the film, there was the memorable vision of Klaus Kinski as Aguirre, the camera whirlpooling around him on a jungle river as he floated on a raft surrounded by dead men and screeching monkeys. Above, in the branches of a towering tree rested a full-size Spanish galleon. Here was the madness and the beauty of dreams, all crystallized in one swirling shot. Garcia Marquez could write this sort of thing on a piece of paper in the privacy of his study; Herzog could film it out there in the world! He created spectacle on the scale of a Cecil B. DeMille, but as might have been staged by Todd Browning, the director of "Freaks" (and not so coincidentally, one of Herzog's favorite auteurs).

Along with Rainer Marie Fassbinder and Wim Wenders, Herzog was part of that great '70s flood of what has come to be called the New German Wave. Fassbinder whipped up rich, historically urgent melodramas, Wenders concocted American-influenced, spiritually hungry adventures, but Herzog's cinema were the most radical of the lot. He shot myth as much as movies. It was as if his ultimate ambition was to film the first seven days of the Book of Genesis, allowing the primordial elements--rivers and deserts, oceans and jungle, the sun and the moon--as strong a point of view as humans. Herzog's unabashed love for remythologizing the world, his trust in the volatilities of the unconscious and his pleasure in the power of spectacle alarmed many German leftists. Folks get nervous around Germans with a thing for myth. Herzog simultaneously mocked the perfectibility of man, while exulting in his endless dreams and visions. "Civilization," he says, "is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness."

Given his stature, fecund mind and productivity--Herzog has made 11 features and 34 documentaries since 1962--I find it deranging that his last major theatrical release was "Fitzcarraldo" back in 1982. Since then, there have been a few features and plenty of brilliant documentaries, but they have been hard to find, even if you live in a major city. An era in which eager exegetes rhapsodize about the philosophical underpinnings of "The Matrix Reloaded" is not hospitable to a true genius who disdains explication. "Film should be looked at straight on," Herzog has said, "it is not the art of scholars but of illiterates." Fortunately, we are now blessed with an extraordinary book of interviews, "Herzog on Herzog" (340 pages. Faber and Faber. $16), ably conducted and compiled by Paul Cronin, which should not only refire a movie lover's interest in Herzog, but proves beyond a doubt that the director's own life would make one hell of a Werner Herzog movie.

Despite Cronin's assertion in the introduction that "most of what you've heard about Werner Herzog is untrue," this book's ostensible goal of dispelling the myths that have grown up around Herzog like vines in the Amazonian forest is happily subverted when it becomes clear that the original apocrypha are to be replaced with equally outlandish tales. The deepest truths, Herzog emphasizes in these interviews, are not toted on the ledgers of clerks.

But for the crazy fun of it, let's begin with a few rumors, shall we? By themselves, unqualified and unrebutted, they suggest that Herzog is a most remarkable presence. Such lore does not accumulate around mere accountants. Nor does it cling to even the ostensibly brave visionaries of Hollywood. Herzog, for instance, is said to have supervised the volcanic actor Klaus Kinski from behind the camera with a rifle. Untrue, says the director. He did, however, threaten to shoot Kinski (who was also his best friend and alter ego) if the actor fled the production of "Aguirre," deep in the Peruvian jungle, as he was in the process of doing. "He had enough instinct to understand this was no joke or hollow threat," Herzog slyly confesses, "and screamed for the police, even though the next outpost was 300 miles away." The distance between legend and fact in this example is impressively small.