Fata Morgana (1971)
"The quest for new images, adequate images, is something that is essential...at least for me."
Over the past couple months I’ve been haunted by one line in Herzog’s memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All, a single island unto itself in a paragraph of minutiae. “I avoid contact with fans,” he says, then mentions that he watches reality TV because a “poet” must not look away.
Has he watched The Golden Bachelor? Am I a fan or a poet? What is Harmony Korine, a “fan” whom Herzog speaks of regularly? Has he shown Herzog AGGRODR1FT? What about Crispin Glover, a “fan” who has done whole audio commentaries with Herzog? What is this Herzblog, if not fandom forced into poetry. I use punctuation like a poet, both rigorously and annoyingly.
I’ve thought a lot over several weeks since turning 40 about the tone of the DVD commentaries between Werner Herzog, Crispin Glover, and Anchor Bay curator/collaborator Norm Hill for Even Dwarfs Started Small and Fata Morgana. I find them hard to listen to, let alone return to. In the silence, however minute, between something Glover says and Herzog’s response it’s like I’m hearing my fears of artistic inadequacy made ominously manifest. When Glover, clearly inspired by Herzog—maybe stultified around him—poses a question or theory, Herzog responds dismissively, even frustrated, like Glover doesn’t quite get it. Or like, as if there actually are right and wrong questions, Glover has asked a wrong one.
Comparatively, Herzog will be much more willing to follow Hill’s lines of thought—which are typically about the making of the movie, experiential, more than about any unifying dramatic or thematic concept—than he is to entertain Glover’s, which treat Fata Morgana, Glover jumping in with brain bulging to begin picking at Herzog’s oeuvre via laborious theories veiled as heady questions, as the thematically conceptual and laborious movie it ostensibly is. Herzog responds with “no.” No, that’s not what he was thinking. No, that wasn’t planned. No, it’s not a documentary, but “like a science-fiction film with windows into a different world, windows of a vision that you have.” No: chastising a fan for his eagerness, begging a potential poet to abandon academic thought.
Still, as is normally the case when I make judgments based around my own autophagic insecurities, that’s not how Crispin Glover remembers any of it.
Norm Hill had organized my [Big Slide Show] in Seattle. I spoke with him about my interest in Herzog’s work. I had also met Herzog in 1990 at the Venice Film Festival because the publicist for the film he was there with was the same publicist for a Jersey [sic] Skolimowski film I had acted in that was only released in Poland and France. I had told the publicist how much I admired Herzog’s films and he arranged a dinner that was just me and Herzog and the publicist and a woman the publicist knew. Herzog was very easy to talk to and it was a great dinner…
Years later Norm Hill…invited me to do a number of commentaries for the DVDs with himself and Herzog... It is something I am very proud of in my career to have done. Years later in 2005, when I premiered [his film inspired by Herzog’s work] What is it? at Sundance, coincidentally Herzog was premiering Grizzly Man and I went and saw his premiere and he came and saw What is it? and was incredibly supportive and has been very kind. I am very grateful to him for that.
At one point, Glover points out how a rock in the south Saharan desert looks like the kneeling, desperately defecating camel from Herzog’s previous film, Even Dwarfs Started Small. Herzog laughs, agreeing that it does. I relax. It feels like a great tension has been lifted.
Fata Morgana is the third film to come from Herzog’s sojourn to Africa at the end of the 1960s, but much of its footage was filmed before heading to Lanzarote, the Canary Island where he’d make Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970). That film, Herzog has spoken of before, exists in the aftermath of Fata Morgana’s disastrous shooting, and so bears a certain pall of freewheeling apocalypse—”probably my most radical work,” he says in his autobiography—as if greeting death in the desert opened up the pores of Herzog’s disturbing allegory once he made it to the volcanic island.
“Disastrous” may be an extreme way to describe the making of Fata Morgana, especially because it resulted in a completed film and Herzog would go on to almost die frequently throughout his life. But of the many occasions in which the director has described his time traveling throughout the salt flats of Chott el Djarid, the mountains of the Algerian desert, the southern Sahara and through Cameroon, then into Bangui in Central Africa, Herzog speaks of mindnumbing heat, of days-long sandstorms, of nearly perishing of thirst, of avoiding civil war in Nigeria only to get stuck in the early weeks of an “abortive coup d'etat” in Cameroon, where Herzog’s crew of four were “arrested because [cameraman Jörg] Schmidt-Reitwein had the bad luck of having a name similar to that of a German mercenary the authorities were looking for,” as he retells in A Guide for the Perplexed. “We had been in the desert for three months,” he states with the weight of it feeling like a lifetime longer.
Fata Morgana was a difficult film to make, but I learnt how to wrestle something creative from a bad set of circumstances and came up with something clear, transparent and pure.
Schmidt-Reitwein died in August, at 83 (or maybe 84) years old. Along with Thomas Mauch, Schmidt-Reitwein helped develop the tone and oil-painter-at-the-end-of-the-world aesthetic of Herzog’s earliest films, shooting, after this, Land of Silence and Darkness, Handicapped Future, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Heart of Glass, The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner, La Soufriere, Woyzeck, Nosferatu, Where the Green Ants Dream, Wodaabe, Echoes from a Sombre Empire, Bells from the Deep, and the 2001 short Pilgrimage.
The other cameraman who helped Herzog define his work in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s was Thomas Mauch, cinematographer for The Flying Doctors of East Africa who joined Herzog and Schmidt-Reitwein on Lanzarote to film Even Dwarfs Started Small. That film, in many ways, catered to Mauch’s sensibilities, shot on 25mm to accentuate the small figures against the wide, disfigured landscapes of the island. But even then, Herzog knew how to use them. As he says in Guide for the Perplexed:
[Schmidt-Reitwein] has a strong feeling for darkness and contrast, threatening shadows and gloom, I suspect in part because he experienced prison and darkened dungeons himself. Just after the Berlin Wall went up he was caught smuggling his girlfriend out of the East and placed in solitary confinement for several months…
…For a while, Schmidt-Reitwein and I shared an apartment in Munich and planned to establish something like a late-medieval guild, with workshops and apprentices. Thomas Mauch, who shot Signs of Life, Aguirre, and Fitzcarraldo, is the cameraman I would go to when I needed something more physical and spontaneous, images with more innocent vitality to them. He has a phenomenal sense for the rhythm of what is unfolding before him. Sometimes there were difficult choices about which of these two fine cameramen to work with on particular films, but I think I made the right decisions over the years.
Herzog is a humble guy, generally, but his confidence in himself is borderline nihilistic—thanatotic maybe, in how it’s so attached to the bone-deep belief that he would die young. “I was deeply convinced that I wouldn’t live to my eighteenth birthday,” he writes in Every Man for Himself and God Against All. “The result was that I began making films of which I could assume they would be all that is left of me. Why not dare to find forms that had never existed?” This means a movie starring only little people. It means capturing mirages in the Sahara, and all of the misery and discovery that requires.
In Fata Morgana, Herzog retells myths he built from the scraps of his endurance and ego. Separated into three parts (Creation, Paradise, and The Golden Age, in that order), Lotte Eisner narrates the translated Mayan creation myth, the Popul Vuh—first by Herzog and then subsequently by Amos Vogel—over what Herzog would describe as “the embarrassed landscapes of our planet.” On the commentary, with Crispin Glover and Norm Hill he remembers:
There is so much absurdity that you encounter in the desert, so much strange remains of civilization. It’s so bleak, it’s not really scenic… it’s primordial, it’s sad. Something about creation could be wrong.
He’s being kind of a shit, because the images he finds are scenic—so much of the film is grasping at illusions of magnificence, magnified by the rarity of the experience and the fearlessness with which he came across all of them. There is no text in the film, beyond its title, that contextualizes the mirages he and his crew—him and Schmidt-Reitwein, but also geophysicist and mountain climber Hans Dieter Sauer (who “had already crossed the Sahara several times”) and photographer Gunther Freyse—stumble upon in the middle of nowhere. It looks like a bus is picking up a few riders somewhere in the achievable distance, and Schmidt-Reitwein can grab it with a telephoto lens; not Herzog, nor Eisner’s voice, explain that the car is not actually there. That no one knew where the car was really—”maybe twenty or a hundred or three hundred miles away”—nor if that car even existed, though it had to. Mirages are like hallucinations, but you can’t film hallucinations. Instead, like the film’s opening and repeated glimpse of a commercial jet ascending into the intoxicating, blurry Munich air (a pre-desert awakening), there is no impressed intent in Herzog’s images beyond intuited function. He confirms this in A Guide for the Perplexed:
The opening sequence was filmed at Munich airport one hot summer’s day and is comprised of eight shots of eight different aeroplanes landing one after the other, starting early in the morning. The hotter the air became, the more the heat shimmered and distorted the images. Eventually something visionary sets in—like fever dreams—and it remains for the rest of the film…I had the feeling that audiences who were still watching by the sixth or seventh landing would stay to the end of the film; the opening sequence lays out the challenge of what is to come. The first three minutes allow viewers to acclimate themselves to Fata Morgana’s unusual tone.
The film defines itself as it creates itself, and from the desert is birthed both ruins and children who lift snow-white desert fox pups aloft by the scruff, staring into the camera for what feels like much too long. “In Paradise, you cross the sand without seeing your shadow. There is a landscape even without deeper meaning.” The voiceover details cosmic cycles, of draft creations failing and gods and demigods trying again, and again, caught up in contradictory or obsolescing goals and whims and whatever else. Meanwhile, the windscarred remains of planes and the foundations of incomplete buildings, the skeletons of earth movers that haven’t moved in decades meaningless in retrospect, all this gives way to ever elusive sights, like the pimp playing drums, or the languorous dolly shot of an Algerian military camp soundtracked to Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne,” or the second dolly shot soundtracked to a Leonard Cohen song that goes from industrial decay to become a sweeping vista of the same flamingoes first seen in The Flying Doctors, which becomes more sine waves of Saharan dunes, so that by the end of the song—of imaginings that contain power in their mutability, lost forever to time except for here, where they build up only because the director was moved to include them through the misery of making this thing—I can’t help but be deeply touched by an overwhelming accumulation of near-spiritual imagery.
(It’s not all Leonard Cohen. Blind Faith’s “Sea of Joy” does play over moments with the Dogon people amongst cliffs and waterfalls in the south Sahara. Regardless, Herzog claims that he filmed many of these scenes with the song playing in his head.)
Some images become clearer and more understandable when a particular piece of music is playing behind them. They don’t physically change, but their inner qualities are exposed and new perspectives opened up. Music is able to make visible what is latent; it reveals new things to us, helps shift our perception and enables us to see deeper into things. We perceive what we would otherwise be oblivious to. (from A Guide for the Perplexed)
By attempting to see the unseen, Herzog is not unearthing the meaning behind the physical realm but literally seeking new sights, “wrestl[ing] images away from this forbidding world,” as he claims to Glover and Hill. “I am not afraid.”
In his new autobiography, Herzog describes his long working relationship with Walter Saxer, “a young Swiss from St. Gallen,” as well as a producer and production chief on Aguirre, among many treacherous projects. According to the director, he first encountered Saxer on Lanzarote when preparing for Even Dwarfs Started Small. “He ran a small hotel on the island and helped us find the car that was to drive around and around in circles.”
But then there’s this, from, per usual, A Guide for the Perplexed:
The man wearing goggles with the reptiles was from Switzerland and had clearly been out in the sun too long. He owned the little hotel where we stayed during the shooting of Even Dwarfs Started Small; at the time it was the only one on the island, inconceivable now when you see what the place has become after the infection of tourism.
That’s all he says about that man, who must have been the same young Swiss, Walter Saxer, he calls “indomitable” in Every Man for Himself and God Against All. No, A Guide shows no sign it’s the same man with whom Herzog shared so much more than just what we find in Fata Morgana, which are basically as he describes: a few woozy moments with a delirious man in extremely alien-looking goggles ranting about biting lizards. Then again, for as much as Herzog says of Saxer in his autobiography, he doesn’t mention there that Saxer is also the goggled man in Fata Morgana.
Is that man Walter Saxer? It must be. But the only way to really be sure would be to ask the man himself. Which would require him interacting with a fan.
Sources:
Foster, Simon (2012, July 23). “CRISPIN GLOVER ON WERNER HERZOG". Screen-space. http://screen-space.squarespace.com/features/2012/7/23/crispin-glover-on-werner-herzog.html
Glover, Crispin and Werner Herzog and Norm Hill. Audio commentary. Fata Morgana. Dir. Herzog. Shout Factory, 2014. Blu-ray.
Herzog, Werner (2022). Every Man for Himself and God Against All (M. Hofmann, Trans.). Penguin Press, 2023.
Herzog, Werner, and Paul Cronin. Werner Herzog : A Guide for the Perplexed. London, Faber & Faber, 2014.