Signs of Life (1968)
"Fritz Lang wrote back, ‘Lotte, it is not possible that there will ever be any decent movies out of Germany.'"
"This he failed as miserably as all others of his kind.”
With the last line of his first film, Signs of Life, Werner Herzog's filmography begins with failure. The “this” miserably failed is a war on the sun declared after a vision of 10,000 windmills snaps our protagonist’s mind. The voice detailing the failure is Herzog’s, 26 years old and already warm and weird though a good four decades from memedom. Already hallucinating grandeur.
“...his kind.” With the benefit of nearly 80 films since then, I assume the “kind” he means are dreamers. As he told Karen Beckman in 2007, “The motive of flight and of the need to fly appear quite many times in my movies: Little Dieter Needs to Fly was some sort of paradigmatic sort of title, yes, there is a man who needs to fly, but yet, like in an ancient Greek drama… you have a man and his dream, and punishment for the dream, and some sort of redemption.” If you spend any time reading about Herzog or listening to him talk, unearned pride in one’s power is kind of his bag. He’s said he “directs landscapes” rather than films them; he was able to keep Baby Yoda a puppet through sheer suggestion. Herzog and the people who occupy his films obsess about dreams, but rarely about the complicated symbolism of dreams. More about the nature of dreaming, how dreaming transcends what seems possible. As A.H. Heiler wrote in his September 1968 New York Times review of Signs of Life, “Werner Herzog…proves to be strikingly effective as a director if not altogether convincing as an allegorist. …as a writer-director in his feature film effort, Mr. Herzog has failed to make his harried hero's case or his parable believable.”
In a story he’s told regularly—to Roger Ebert, to Jonathan Cott, to Jonathan Demme, and published in his 1978 diaristic memoir, Of Walking in Ice—Herzog made the journey on foot from Berlin to Paris to see his friend and French-German cultural luminary Lotte Eisner before her death. It was a feat as impressive as it is pointless, because he believed that by walking he could somehow postpone the inevitable. In 1974, just before the premiere of The Enigma of Kasper Hauser, the German director’s fourth fiction feature, he left, having secured appropriate boots. (“My boots were so solid and new that I had confidence in them.”)
This story will come up again, how he walked all that way through excruciating weather to provide existential ballast to a sinking friend, context and details blurred by Herzog’s self-mythologizing. So it goes with many similarly strange anecdotes, to the point that they’ve transubstantiated into uniquely Herzogian aphorisms, then tropes, then, inevitably, memes. Another thing he makes blanket statements about is how much he can’t stand psychoanalysts, calling them quacks and looking for any opportunity to confuse them for psychiatrists, whom he also can’t stand. He’s said to Jimmy Kimmel once, if I remember correctly, that he has trouble getting many people’s senses of humor because he can’t pick up on irony. He’s said that he never dreams, either. That he physically can’t. Doesn’t offer an explanation, just breathes it into being, another entry into the canon of himself he’s mostly built himself.
He also believes chickens are the most repulsive animals on earth. In a Rolling Stone interview from 1976, Herzog admitted to Jonathan Cott, “I am obsessed with chickens. Take a close and very long look into the eye of a chicken and you’ll see the most frightful kind of stupidity. Stupidity is always frightful. It’s the devil: Stupidity is the devil. Look in the eye of a chicken and then you’ll know. It’s the most horrifying, cannibalistic, and nightmarish creature in this world.” The dancing chicken at the end of Stroszek (1977) bears the signs of a dead culture set to shake forever in limbo, but even in the beginning, in Signs of Life, Herzog hypnotized a chicken with little more than a straight line drawn in chalk, extrapolating the animal’s easily manipulated brainlessness into the plight of the film’s three bored German soldiers.
During WWII, left to guard a munitions depot in a crumbling 15th century fortress on the Greek island of Kos, Stroszek (Peter Brogle), Meinhard (Wolfgang Reichmann), and Becker (Wolfgang von Ungern-Sternberg) grow increasingly desperate to find something, anything, to do with their oppressively serene time. The grim harmlessness of Nazi soldiers messing with a chicken in the Mediterranean sunlight, their uniforms long abandoned or stripped of fascist insignia, suffuses their childish reality with a sort of prelapsarian corruption. The empty depths of a chicken’s eyes whisper of forces biblical. Successively, in Herzog’s second fiction feature, Even Dwarfs Started Small, chickens maim each other, pecking out one another’s eyes and clucking impishly as society falls around them. Whether a harbinger or an avatar, the chicken bobs dimwittedly through the End of History.
But anyway, 30-something years later, you can’t blame Roger Ebert for not quite getting all the facts right. Following a screening of Herzog’s Invincible in 2004:
Ebert: The story that I love is that when you finished your first film, you put it in a knapsack on your back and you walked from Germany to Paris to give it to Lotte Eisner.
Herzog: No, that is not...
Ebert: Didn't you really do that?
Herzog: Actually, with Signs of Life, my first film, I sent it by mail and she actually saw it and she sent it to Fritz Lang, saying, “Finally they have cinema again in Germany.” He liked the film but the story of the walk to Lotte is kind of different…
Herzog goes on to tell the actual story, that it wasn’t his 1968 debut film he carried with him, that he actually didn’t carry a film with him at all. “And I was absolutely convinced—I am not superstitious—I was totally absolutely convinced that while I was walking from Germany to Paris to see her, she would not have a chance to die, I wouldn't allow her to die, I didn't want her to die, it was too early,” he says to Ebert. He describes his Lazarus-friendly magic in the same way he might describe the smoothness of a chicken’s brain:
Eight years later, she must have been 90 years—nobody knows exactly how old she was because she started to cheat from 75 on…I think she celebrated her 75th birthday a couple of times. And very casually, we were having tea, and she said to me, nibbling on a cookie, she said to me, ‘Listen, listen to me, I'm almost blind, I cannot read any more, I cannot see any more films, I cannot walk any more, I'm tired of life’--she actually even said it ‘sucked’ and she was saturated of life, and she said to me, ‘but there's still this spell on me, that I must not die’ and I said to her very casually, ‘The spell is lifted,’ and two weeks later she died. And she died at the right time then, it was good, it was good to die then. So I didn't carry a print on my back.
So I didn’t carry a print on my back. So Signs of Life wasn’t the enchanted talisman Herzog hefted to the bedside of his important friend. But you can’t blame Ebert for conflating legendary tales, especially when Herzog casually describes his debut film as so good Eisner sent it to Fritz Lang as proof that German cinema wasn’t dead post-WWII. To Jonathan Demme in 2008 at the Museum of the Moving Image, Herzog told yet another version of the story:
A man like Fritz Lang could not believe that German cinema would ever emerge again. Lotte Eisner sent him a letter, and she said, ‘I saw Signs of Life...’ That was my first film that was shown here in New York, for example. She said to him, ‘...There is a film you must see. It's called Signs of Life, by a young man....’ Fritz Lang wrote back, ‘Lotte, it is not possible that there will ever be any decent movies out of Germany.’ That was somehow the mood of the time. It was more a question of perseverance, of continuing making films and bringing them to audiences. Within seven, eight, ten years, the audiences here in America and in other countries started to accept us.
People (like me) transfixed by the filmmaker’s oneiric iconism help by filling in the blanks where Herzog leaves ideas open, by remembering stories in the light of destiny. Of entelechy. As if the man’s purpose is to show us that which this world has hidden, cinema being the natural medium for such revelations: the way in which one can span vast geographical distances, touch faraway corners of the world, walk from Berlin to Paris to save a woman’s life. In Signs of Life, his crazed dreamer has power, but wields it pathetically. Which is maybe an indictment of “his kind”; like he’s said before, dreamers always get theirs.
Watching Signs of Life today, close to 20 years after I first watched it on a small computer monitor at my receptionist job in downtown Chicago, in the visibly shorter Wabash building next to the Sears Tower when it was still called that, I get it a lot more. I’m seduced like a chicken at the behest of chalk by the sensuousness and vitality in even Herzog’s first film, how enchanting it is and how long the film's main theme and music has lived in my head. What degree of warmth that can suddenly unearth from the gap between decades, how this film can bring to mind immediately the receptionist area, the way staff greeted me or didn’t on their way in, the whiffs of the first pot of coffee I started and the lingering antibacterial spray care of that night’s cleaning crew. The nervousness of taking a break to interview Phil Elvrum on the phone, standing outside in the street and absentmindedly staring up at the Sears Tower to distract myself from the conversation’s lack of flow, me this ambitious and amateur, unpaid music critic out of his depth in the presence of artists he’s loved, never once feeling like I’ve earned the right, whatever that means. The unscratched itch of being stoned because I knew my job meant next to nothing, and coinciding with the emergence of Netflix’s original DVD-borrowing service, soldering Signs of Life to David Gordon Green’s George Washington in my head., the relief of being able to watch movies at my desk to pass the time. 20 years… where’s that gone?
Still. What I remember most are the windmills.
Doing his ritualistic soldier-like rounds, or maybe just going on a hike and climbing the rise of a hill, Stroszek comes upon a field of thousands and thousands of windmills. He flips out, firing his rifle at the windmills, literally quixotic. His arms shoot out in sad, hiccuping gestures. Soon he collapses as Meinhard half-heartedly tries to console him. Zither ringing, cinematographer Thomas Mauch—a frequent Herzog collaborator we’ll encounter more and more—slowly pans across the landscape to see what set Stroszek’s mind on fire. One long shot is barely able to contain the activity.
Herzog doesn’t offer much of an explanation for Stroszek’s freak, though echoes of The Shining before The Shining make Stroszek seem like a victim of isolation, inactivity, purposelessness. But I don’t think Herzog would think so. I think he’d blame it on the windmills. Bruce Chatwin, a writer and journalist and life-long friend of Herzog’s, called the vista of windmills a “deranged landscape,” a vision so transformational it pulls apart a young, ordinary guy’s brain. And rather than tease in on Stroszek’s face, examine the pain of his psyche splitting, we give ourselves to the same vision.
Herzog’s said he tends to avoid close-ups because he wants the viewer to understand the environment his characters inhabit, to viscerally intuit the scope of the world we're witnessing. We barely see our guy Stroszek at all in the film's final 20 minutes, once he’s announced his war on the sun and tried to kill his friends, only glimpsing his fireworks displays and tripping over the bloated corpse of a donkey he shot. The dreamer’s punishment for his dreams, for waging war with the heavens, is futility. Anonymity.
I like to think that Herzog’s films are attempts to reconcile the forces of nature with the forces within each of us. Literally: I like thinking that. It’s brought me a lot of comfort in times of grief, and depression, and dread. Life feels precarious, often on a very personal level, and there in that ineffable space I’m holding my breath.
Maybe it’s ironic that I’m so invested in a filmmaker and artist whose worldliness and courage is the soul of their work. Because I’m a coward. Exponentially so and not for any reason or due to any traumatic event, as heights grow increasingly deadly in my dreams, sea levels deeper but flooding my house in particular, car crashes and plane crashes and aging flesh stinking up more and more of my headspace. I still shudder when I think about being on the top floor of Pioneer Place Mall (where the movie theater is actually) because you wait in line for tickets next to the barrier for a four-story drop. I’m shuddering writing that, trying to remember how many floors this mall has. I wasn’t always like this. I wasn’t always afraid of being punished.
So I lean into these films, showing me things I only dream of seeing in person, if that’s even possible anymore. What does Herzog think about fear? Does he? Can writing a blog grow me a spine? Maybe we’ll find out next week in Herzog’s follow-up to Signs of Life, about an island of dwarfs falling to anarchist revolution. Unless I can find an English translation of 1969’s The Flying Doctors of East Africa—I haven’t really looked too hard yet, to be honest.
Watch Signs of Life for free (with ads) on Freevee, Plex, and Tubi.
Sources:
Cott, J. (2018, June 25). Rolling Stone. Rolling Stone. https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/werner-herzog-signs-of-life-69852/
Ebert, R. (2005, August 28). A conversation with Werner Herzog | Interviews | Roger Ebert. Roger Ebert. https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/a-conversation-with-werner-herzog
Image, M. O. T. M. (n.d.). Moving Image Pinewood Dialogues: JONATHAN DEMME AND WERNER HERZOG. http://www.movingimagesource.us/files/dialogues/3/41964_programs_transcript_html_304.html
Sorrento, M. (2020, September 15). Spectacle and the Deranged Landscape – Werner Herzog by Joshua Lund, and Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin - FilmInt.nu. FilmInt.nu. http://filmint.nu/werner-herzog-by-joshua-lund-nomad-review-john-duncan-talbird/
Times, N. Y. (1968, September 26). From Germany, “Signs of Life.” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1968/09/26/archives/from-germany-signs-of-life.html