Echoes from a Sombre Empire (1990)
"The deeper truth of the situation is outside our grasp, but not the facts."
Welcome to 2024 in the Herzblog. Expect so much more Herzbloggin’ in the new year, but until then, enjoy this special year-end post. I’ve done away with my typical self-imposed constraints to, following the Herzog filmography coverage, provide a list of the movies, comics, music, books, and podcasts I loved in 2023, which only occasionally includes the works of Werner Herzog.
A few weeks ago I saw this tweet from podcast host Dasha Nekrasova, who most normal people know from a short stint on Succession. The reason these same normal people no longer know her from Succession, as she was not on the last season, likely had to do with her “controversial” podcast, which I do not listen to, and probably not with the horror film she wrote and directed, which I have not seen. So anyway this tweet does not afford an actual illustrative view of her Christmas tree, despite her caption. What it does reveal is a wall-sized, framed poster of Werner Herzog’s Echoes from a Sombre Empire leaned against the wall in her living room.
Unlike normal people, I became fixated on why. Why this film, a kind of walking tour of the crumbling remains of Jean-Bédel Bokassa’s self-proclaimed, profligate empire in the Central African Republic, led by a reporter, Michael Goldsmith, who nearly died under Bokassa’s reign? Does Dasha have this poster only because she found it aesthetically pleasing? Because she liked the title? Or is it because Dasha loves the film? Because she’s fascinated with historic monsters, with the incessant assertions of pretty much everyone who knew the man that he was a cannibal? For a podcast host who a little over 2 years ago interviewed Alex Jones and took a glowing picture with him that glimmers with sincerity, the perfect font of anecdotal content to get into without thinking too consistently about the material consequences, and hundreds of victims, of such a figure is an African dictator who blew something like a third of his country’s national budget on his coronation ceremony—this fact from A Guide for the Perplexed, but in his recent autobiography, Every Man for Himself and God Against All, Herzog states that Bokassa, in 1977, spent a third of his country’s GDP, not national budget, on the coronation—and also ate people.
Accordingly, from A Guide for the Perplexed:
Bokassa had assumed power after a coup d'etat in 1966, and in 1977 proclaimed himself emperor. He was truly bizarre; the evil sparkling of this incredible character was fascinating to me. …Film allows us to reveal the least understood truths of man. It delves into our fantasies and dreams, in this case our nightmares. Bokassa represented the kind of human darkness you find in Nero or Caligula, and Echoes from a Sombre Empire was an attempt to explore the dark abysses that lie at the heart of man. Some reviews inevitably said the film should have focused more on French foreign policy and history, but it isn’t for me to discuss such things. I leave that to the journalists.
One such journalist was Michael Goldsmith, our ersatz tour guide. In God Against All, Herzog introduces Goldsmith when detailing what happens to a corpse left in the road to rot, an image that has occupied Herzog’s thoughts often and throughout his career as he’s endured, in varying degrees, war-torn countries and the exigencies of such fascinating evil:
At the end of two weeks, all that’s left of him is a stain. That’s how the British African correspondent Michael Goldsmith, who was almost brained by Jean-Bédel Bokassa with a golden scepter, described it to me. Bokassa had just had himself crowned emperor of the Central African Republic. Goldsmith spent several months in the most notorious of dungeons, N’Garagba Prison. But that was long before our 1990 film about Bokassa…
Echoes from a Sombre Empire begins with the director at his desk, reading a letter from Goldsmith and detailing the man’s disappearance in Sierra Leone, portending, at the time of the film’s release, his imprisonment. As Herzog finishes reading the letter, less about the details of Goldsmith’s imprisonment and more about a dream he had, Herzog’s voice moves into voice over and we see, across a shore laced with sharp blockheaded stones and seaweed, an emerging blanket of orange crabs. Goldsmith’s dream is also of crabs insistent on covering everything. Herzog couldn’t help but be literal. When the film ends, on Goldsmith turning away from a chimpanzee smoking a cigarette, disgusted, we’re still unsure of his fate. Both A Guide for the Perplexed and God Against All tell of what became of Goldsmith. From the latter:
After our shoot [for Echoes], Goldsmith was in Sierra Leone during the civil war there, was taken prisoner by a band of rebels, and had occasion to see through his barred window how a shot-up corpse was reduced in the space of two weeks to a nasty stain on the road. After his release, Goldsmith saw the premier of my film Scream of Stone in Venice and died just three weeks later. He only saw our Bokassa film on video.
Rather than foreground the film in context, Herzog follows along as Goldsmith revisits Bokassa’s lavishly disintegrating palace, speaking to family members and government officials, to bystanders and victims and lawyers, interspersed with archival footage of Bokassa’s coronation and lengthy (and second) public trial, where he was condemned to death. Both are incredible spectacles couched within the nightmare of Goldsmith’s recollections; Herzog captures these fleeting and irreplaceable images with zeal. Also from God Against All:
The ceremony, with costumes and gilded coaches, was a remake of Napoleon’s coronation. A North Korean army band played Viennese waltzes in a specially built arena that resembled Versailles. Bokassa had seventeen wives and fifty-four children that he acknowledged. He had made his favorite, a four-year-old, a field marshal, and the little fellow slept in his fantasy uniform on a velvet podium next to the throne.
Mostly, the big question that hangs over the film is whether or not Bokassa actually ate human flesh. It becomes a kind of running line Goldsmith is careful when crossing throughout his interviews. To be expected, denial runs rampant amongst family members confronted with the absurdity of Bokassa’s cruelty, but just as often Goldsmith speaks to people who outright confirm it. Yup, he was a cannibal. Yup, we saw what this demon did. In A Guide for the Perplexed, Herzog provides his own incontrovertible take:
After speaking to so many people who had stories about Bokassa, I quickly realised that when there is so much hearsay about a single man or event—when you hear the same stories from so many different people—speculation condenses into something factual. We have to believe it. The deeper truth of the situation is outside our reach, but not the facts. Bokassa was a cannibal. …When the French paratroopers who assisted in deposing Bokassa opened up the huge refrigerators in his palace, they found half of one of the emperor’s ministers frozen solid. The other half had been eaten during a banquet.
Maybe Dasha has this poster because she ironically loves that Bokassa was a maniac, which seems to almost always transubstantiate—she’s a trad-Cath, so she knows what that means—into unironic love. This is the way of a successful podcaster. But if I’m wrong and instead she genuinely loves Herzog’s films and this one in particular, finding it as I do a unique entry in his filmography due to how it flirts with “utility” by beginning with a call to action for Goldsmith’s safety but then succumbs to the banal horror of its images when Goldsmith can’t bear to watch a primate suck on a cig while stuck for the rest of its life in the decrepit cage of Bokassa’s ruined zoo, perhaps the most depressing image in all of Herzog’s films, a punchline to a ghostly reverie—well then welcome to the Herzblog, Dasha. Tragedy is at our doors. Please subscribe and tweet about me.
Now onto part two. Inspired by, and format largely stolen from, a year-end post from Seth Simons’ wonderful newsletter, Humorism—a deep dive into labor and related ethical issues in the world of comedy—I realized that this is my blog, and so if I want to use it to publish a litany of mostly-non-Herzog-related opinions about what I loved over the course of 2023, I can do that. Here’s me doing that.
Movies
Here are my 10 favorite movies with a U.S. release date in 2023. I’ve included my (slightly edited) Letterboxd reviews so I don’t have to do any more work. Writing is work.
Afire (Christian Petzold)
What’s there to share but grief when everything’s burning down? Or maybe that’s an excuse for love and growth and empathy—grief the illusion of all three. Or maybe it doesn’t matter how you get on the other side of all that sadness and loneliness and loss, as long as you do. Or maybe you’re just a solipsistic asshole.
Asteroid City (Wes Anderson)
Always been a question whether Anderson could keep pace with the popular conception of Anderson that’s become obligatory, but goddamn. When Edward Norton’s playwright states that the play/movie is “about infinity,” later one realizes this is true. The artifice of Anderson’s movies, a rigor that’s only gotten more rigorous, is more than ever a sign of deeply felt artistry and vision and singular imagination. The gap between his movies and his name as synecdoche for a kind of visual symmetry has become a dry, gaping chasm. Does he notice this, or think about this, or look back on his movies with clarity? Can’t tell. Will every one going forward be about the movie writing itself? Creating itself? Sure! Likely forever.
Beau Is Afraid (Ari Aster)
I relate to this film because there has perhaps been no greater force in my life than guilt. Not even love.
Godland (Hlynur Pálmason)
guy obsessed with Werner Herzog: wow this is giving me big Aguirre vibes
guy obsessed with Werner Herzog and the album Stateless by Dirty Beaches: oh shit oh fuck
Godzilla Minus One (Takashi Yamazaki)
Echoes of a somber empire, a validation of life, a grotesque transcendence of an epochal Weenie. Awe as driving force behind any hope that we’ll learn anything from the atrocities that have become so genetic they are now sci-fi iconism.
John Wick Chapter 4 (Chad Stahelski)
Eh, just read my lengthy review at Paste.
Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese)
Dave took me to see this at the Hollywood Theatre for my birthday. Only got up to pee once, but it was during a tonally important scene. Learned my lesson there.
Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan)
70mm Hollywood Theatre on my 7th wedding anniversary, this movie about a man who cucked all his best friends, accompanied by a fear of time that we’ll never escape, that only seems to grow with each year, feed itself until it consumes everything. What is essential about creation… that it’s hard and annihilating and always subsumed by its own effort?
Pacifiction (Albert Serra)
🎵 I wear my sunglasses at night, so I can, so I can
Watch you weave then breathe your story lines 🎵
Luxuriant and dreadful, as so obviously intended, what with all the music full of dread. If we must accept that the world will never learn from anything, ever, and that paradise will be inevitably decimated, might as well wait for death in an as unfussily beautiful place as any. Loved everything about this, even when obligatory, even when unreadable, and especially when downright goofy. That De Roller’s big climactic monologue happens while his loyal goon falls asleep could not better define the grasp Serra has on this lovely and powerfully somnambulant shit.
The Plains (David Easteal)
In every place I've ever lived I've fostered a friendship forged during a car commute—a strange but special bond vaguely shaped by chance, the common need to pass vast liminal distances while occupied enough to not lose one’s mind, occupation, and proximity of residences. Like the director, I've usually been the one to get the ride. In this role you share music, vent about work, vent about the meaninglessness of your life, vent about feeling unappreciated, muse about better lives, reminisce about better times, talk about news maybe, tease the limits of each other’s senses of humor, test the listlessness of each other’s values, occasionally stop for happy hour, and somehow that's enough. You listen. And in the vast flatness of everything around your incredibly small life, you marvel at how it's come to be that you've spent seemingly so much time with a person only because you work in the same building, or for the same company. You wonder how two people can survive the merciless repetition of existence together. You give the driver your attention, buy them a beer if you can. A movie about that bond, told during that commute. Anyway.
Music
As a lapsed music critic, I’m no longer all that plugged into new artists and albums, but these 13 rose from the fray when I wasn’t concentrating on trying to “get into” R.E.M.
Animal Collective :: Isn’t it Now? (Domino)
Beirut :: Hadsel (Pompeii)
Califone :: villagers (Jealous Butcher Records)
Carly Rae Jepsen :: The Loveliest Time (604 / Schoolboy / Interscope)
En Attendant Ana :: Principia (Trouble in Mind)
Eluvium :: (Whirring Marvels In) Consensus Reality (Temporary Residence)
Everything but the Girl :: Fuse (Buzzin’ Fly; Virgin Records)
JPEGMAFIA/Danny Brown :: Scaring the Hoes (AWAL)
Liturgy :: 93696 (Thrill Jockey)
Maria BC :: Spike Field (Sacred Bones Records)
Mary Lattimore :: Goodbye, Hotel Arkada (Ghostly International)
Tim Hecker :: No Highs (Kranky)
Wednesday :: Rat Saw God (Dead Oceans)
Comics
In the past few years I’ve returned to collecting comics, gravitating to a few artists and writers. The following series either began, continued throughout, or ended in 2023.
20th Century Men (Deniz Camp, Stipan Morian, Aditya Bidikar)
Clobberin’ Time (Steve Skroce, Bryan Valenza)
Fantastic Four (Ryan North, Ivan Fiorelli, Brian Reber)
Little Monsters (Jeff Lemire, Justin Nguyen)
Punisher (Jason Aaron, Jesus Saiz, Paul Azaceta, Matt Hollingsworth)
Saga (Brian K. Vaughan, Fiona Staples)
Star Trek (Collin Kelly, Jackson Lanzing, Mike Feehan)
Transformers (Daniel Warren Johnson, Mike Spicer)
Vanish (Donny Cates, Ryan Stegman, JP Mayer, Sonia Oback, John J. Hill)
Weird Work (Jordan Thomas, Shaky Kane)
Books
These are just all the books I read this year. I’m not a very fast reader. I really enjoyed them all, and have vowed to continue reading books in 2023.
Academ’s Fury, Book Two of the Codex Alera series (Jim Butcher)
Bad Luck and Trouble, a Jack Reacher novel (Lee Childs)
Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell)
Cursor’s Fury, Book Three of the Codex Alera series (Jim Butcher)
Every Man for Himself and God Against All, which I wrote a whole review and blog post about already (Werner Herzog)
Furies of Calderon, Book One of the Codex Alera series (Jim Butcher)
The Housekeeper and the Professor (Yōko Ogawa)
Nothing To Lose, a Jack Reacher novel (Lee Childs)
VALIS, re-read (Philip K. Dick)
Podcasts
I spend immense amounts of my time listening to podcasts, absolutely annoying Rebecca by never hearing anything she says because I always have a bud in one ear. These are the podcasts I listen to every week, or have been devouring in big batches. They are mostly about movies and video games and, now that I’ve turned 40, American history.