Precautions Against Fanatics (1969)
"You can see me, you have to see me."
Before heading to Africa—where he’d film everything that would comprise The Flying Doctors of East Africa, Even Dwarfs Started Small, and Fata Morgana—Herzog made this improvised, 11-minute short in a “racetrack on the outskirts of Munich.” Shot by Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein and edited by the OG Herzog-hater Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus, as well as starring notable German actors and assorted media personalities, the director ensures us in A Guide for the Perplexed that, though you may only find it slightly amusing, at the time it was made all the audiences loved this shit:
…it’s a bold short in its narrative structure and has a strange humour to it, though that might not be immediately evident to those who don’t understand German. At the time audiences roared with laughter because all the people in the film are celebrities, like director Peter Schamoni, actor Mario Adorf and the sensational Serbian goalkeeper Petar Radenković…
Radenković, still alive today at 89 years old, is Herzog’s ideal human character, a man he describes excitedly as “a loose cannon, a real eccentric who during a game would spot a duck at the side of the field and run after it.” I suppose that’s interesting. I’m sure his coaches weren’t happy about it.
An early glimpse of his worldview coming into being from the primordial muck, Precautions Against Fanatics is basically Herzog’s first foray into fucking around with the documentary form. Shot like a man-on-the-street TV news special, Herzog assumes the viewer, unless informed otherwise, will take as fact what they’re shown, trusting that the way in which they’re afforded information confirms the journalistic truth of the images themselves. As we’re introduced to a series of folks who claim, and don’t, to work officially for the racetrack, a waddling, one-armed old man—a good foot shorter than almost everyone he chastises—enters each frame to yell at the interviewee and the camera crew. “You have to go away, you’re ruining it all.” All of these men claiming to train and exercise and protect and even dope the horses? The baby-faced kid who laments his insufficient hands but who believes it is his duty to defend the gentle horses from raving fans? They are frauds and that kid is a liar and he’s breaking everything. Only this one-armed man, this dapper chode, is real. He yanks gratuitously on a horse’s reins to demonstrate.
Soon this man becomes the punchline to every scene. When he’s not around we’re thinking, “Where is the one-armed man who yells at everyone?” And just as we think he’ll never show, he suddenly appears, yelling at everyone. His voice and embarrassed grin begin to resemble the smallest dwarf’s from Even Dwarfs Started Small, the man who nearly dies laughing at the sight of a desperate, shitting camel.
“I’m here and I can’t do anything else,” another guy admits directly into the camera. The guy then states concrete facts about the image we’re absorbing: Here is a horse, and here, pointing to the bottom of the screen, is the floor, and here, pointing to the side of the frame, is the wall. You can take these simple statements as an expression of existential malaise, or as a literal explication of the reality of the film. In Precautions Against Fanatics, that man only exists to do exactly what he’s doing, which in this case is to stand there next to a horse. This man technically does not exist outside of this scene, outside of standing next to this horse. He can’t do anything else.
So it goes, soon after, with the one-armed old man. From above, god’s-eye view, the audience looks on the man, made to seem even shorter. We have to see him because we can. And that can be as far as we interrogate reality in Herzog’s film—exploring what is the literal image, and what is the truth of the image, neither one justifying the other, but just existing. And deserving to be captured because of that.
There isn’t much more to it; the short film exists because Herzog got some free 35mm colour film stock from Kodak. The only other thing he says about Precautions Against Fanatics in A Guide for the Perplexed is a comment on the survival of the stock:
…it had been returned to [Kodak] after apparently having been exposed to extreme heat in Africa and was also long beyond its expiration date…They gave me about ten rolls only after I signed a letter of indemnity stating they had warned me it was unusable and weren’t responsible for the results. I gladly took the stock and shot the film not knowing if I’d end up with anything…We lost not a single frame, though the colours are a little off, which gives the images a strange quality.
Kodak gave Herzog the stock. That’s all. Perhaps this encouraged Herzog to trek to Africa to make Flying Doctors and Dwarfs and Fata Morgana, confident the film could survive the harsh climates he knew he’d endure, or maybe not. Perhaps the 11-minute proto-Guest ensemble prank exists only for itself, for the doing of it, the results meaning more or less nothing. Sometimes you just have to make the thing, regardless of whether or not it means anything. Sometimes you have to write the post.
You can watch Precautions Against Fanatics at this site.