The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1973)
"Ski flying isn’t just an athletic pursuit; it’s also spiritual, a question of how to master death."
“There is flight in my imagination,” Werner Herzog told Karen Beckman at Philadelphia’s Slought Foundation in 2007, “…there is something beyond our physicality, something that is not in our bodies.”
He remembers Walter Steiner vividly, because he seems to remember everything vividly, as a friend and record-holding ski flyer, beloved to Herzog because Steiner “became some sort of an embodiment of my own dreams. Somebody who physically does and steps outside of me and materializes in someone else whom I love very dearly. Because he flew. He flew instead of me.”
When discussing The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, Herzog does what he tends to do when recalling any documentary of his about flight: project his dreams like specters over the acts of the dreamers he documents. In that same conversation with Beckman, Herzog says, “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.”
Punishment for dreams in Herzog’s films are often mortal—pain, imprisonment, torture, usually death—because he mostly dreams about transcending his mortality. The flesh is a cage worth wiggling from, and so forth. This is nothing if not obvious in Woodcarver Steiner, wherein little of the film is spent addressing woodcarving. Most is in thrall to cave-mawed men ejected slow-mo into the air and then suspended in flight while Florian Fricke’s ambient clouds and teeming krautrock build below.
Brad Prager, in a chapter called “Madness on a Grand Scale” in The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth, considers those consequences for seeking such spiritual heights. “The ecstasy depicted in the film has, however, a dark side,” he writes. “The other side of Steiner’s vitiating, life-affirming endeavour is an existential drive towards death. Herzog is drawn to this artist-athlete because the longing for great heights carries the burden of a world-negating vision.”
Hoo boy, “a world-negating vision”! We all know Herzog can’t deny a world-negating vision. From A Guide for the Perplexed:
...in 1973, I saw the Swiss ski flyer Walter Steiner—the best of his generation—compete at Oberstdorf in Bavaria, where he jumped so far that he landed only 30 feet short of the flat. I had finally encountered the living embodiment of my dreams, someone who could move like a bird. It was almost as if it were me flying out there.
On the next page in the book, Herzog immediately confronts the issue inherent in imposing himself on his documentary, explaining that for Woodcarver Steiner, the rules of the network funding and airing the documentary program (“The German television network in Stuttgart had a series called Grenzstationen [Border Stations]...”) meant Herzog had to have his face in front of the camera. It may feel like retconning, but up until that point, he’d never done so.
Because after The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, Herzog became so much more than a spectator in his so-called “documentaries.” When Steiner repeatedly flies dangerously close to the limits of the ski jump facilities, Herzog openly worries about Steiner, partly blaming what he claims is the tension of the crowd, but mostly betraying his own feelings, especially when so many people aren’t swarming there to worry about Steiner’s corpus but to see him either do something incredible or crash and burn.
Prager also emphasizes Herzog’s clear bias, how the director “communicates an overall sense of reverence for his subject.” Though “Herzog becomes a sportscaster of sorts…he rapidly undermines the expectations of [the sports documentary] in that his sportscaster’s demeanour borders on an excess of earnestness.”
Prager goes on:
…The Great Ecstasy of the [sic] Woodcarver Steiner has been described as a ‘stylised sports documentary’. While the concept has been employed elsewhere to describe the effort to make things or, typically, a biography, conform to a particular style, …both Herzog and the scholarship about his films have used the term to refer to a mode of formal irony specific to Herzog. It suggests an effort to draw attention to the medium itself, such that the viewer does not forget he or she is watching a film, rather than seeing ‘life’ or ‘reality’ transpire.
What may be ironic about that “formal irony” is that Herzog would likely agree that his presence draws attention to the constructed nature of his documentaries, but would disagree that his presence further distances his documentaries from the truth of his subjects. Again from A Guide for the Perplexed:
When I finished The Great Ecstasy, I came to understand that if a film needed a voiceover commentary, it would be best that I spoke it myself; it’s more credible that way. I have the feeling my presence can give a film a certain authenticity… I realized there was value in me being the chronicler of events and presenting my own viewpoint on things. My work is never anonymous, and these days [c. 2014] I would feel alienated from a film if I didn’t record the voiceover myself…
It’s nearly impossible to imagine, in 2024, that Herzog once kept himself out of his pictures, but leave it to Jonathan Rosenbaum to call out Herzog’s potential solipsism back in 1977. In his review for Woodcarver Steiner from his Monthly Film Bulletin, he cuts to the quick of Herzog’s whole schtick:
The fascination inherent in observing ‘deranged’ individuals has, of course, a long and venerable tradition behind it, much of which has little to do with art, visionary or otherwise. The curious aspect of Herzog’s work is that it focuses this fascination in such a way that the director himself is seen as an exotic creature — a sort of holy fool who somehow ‘finds’ his strangeness rather than constructs it — and the view is invited to ‘gaze over his shoulder’ at the results.
Like Herzog living out the dream of flight vicariously, I too project my dreams of success and recognition in the critical writing community onto stalwarts of the form, like Rosenbaum. He flew instead of me—and he is not much of a fan of Herzog’s. Still, in his doubt, and as I wrestle with my own, Rosenbaum lights on Herzog’s future surface-level memedom long before that was an actual reality Herzog would need to ceaselessly confront:
Despite such ravishing and apparently ‘pure’ achievements as the beginning and ending of Aguirre, Wrath of God and the beautiful slow-motion ski-jumps in The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, the present vogue for Werner Herzog as a ‘visionary’ artist is in some respects a curious phenomenon.
Harsh, maybe, especially for an obsessive like me who found that obsession through the “‘pure’ achievements” he alludes to, but I think Rosenbaum’s review gets to the heart of why I’ve bound myself to the director’s work.
With Fricke’s score synced almost too well to images of men soaring above crowds like terrified gods, there is no distance, no metaphorical bridge to cross, no irony between the sumptuousness of the ski flyers captured with painstakingly glacial grace—”five cameramen and special cameras on either side of the ski ramp that could shoot in extreme slow motion, like four or five hundred frames a second”—and the experience Herzog intends, which is to feel, however briefly, Steiner’s ecstasy. Whereas Rosenbaum sees Herzog’s fascination with Steiner as further distancing, foregrounding Herzog’s own perspective at the expense of whatever natural connection one could form with Steiner, I see a director who, as he did with cinematographer Jorg Schmidt-Reitwein on Land of Silence and Darkness, attempting to grasp a few moments of unbridled empathy. Just because he flies instead of us doesn’t mean we can’t search for meaning in his moments of freedom, stretched into a small oblivion.
Back in 2009, on the cusp of becoming an indie publishing darling heralded by such Ur-darlings as Miranda July, Tao Lin was a prolific blogger (sigh) who codified a kind of blogging language that we can now judge appropriately, with time and experience, as mostly empty and dismissive of the actual text he’s muddling over. For Fanzine, a publication that folded in 2019, Lin once wrote this long paragraph about The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner as part of a piece on three of Herzog’s short documentaries from around the same time:
The first documentary was about the world championship of ski-jumping. People with skis went down a giant ramp on the top of a mountain. The ramp curved up and the people went into the air and then after a while landed more than 100 meters away, near the bottom of the mountain. The documentary showed many people falling when they landed. Then it focused on one ski-jumper named Steiner who seemed much better than anyone else. It showed him at the world championship talking about how he was afraid he would jump too far and hurt himself by landing in an unsafe area. He said he was afraid because other ski-jumpers who weren’t as good as him were jumping around 140 meters and the mountain was only designed to let jumpers jump around 165 meters. Then he jumped 169 meters, landing beyond where measurements were taken, causing the contest organizers to shorten the ramp to stop him from jumping too far. On his second jump he “handicapped” himself by starting even lower on the ramp than it had been shortened, something no one had done before, and then jumped something like 179 meters and hurt himself. His head was bleeding. He said the Yugoslavian judges should have shortened the ramp a lot more. Then he jumped again, while injured and with an even shorter ramp length than before, and went 166 meters. The farthest other people were jumping, using the entire ramp, was something like 140 meters. Steiner was so much better than anyone else that it probably seemed funny to most people instead of impressive.
Beyond an abundance of factual errors, Lin is simply recalling what he saw, drawing a direct line between the film and watching it, but unable to translate any emotional weight or honesty, and mostly tonally uninterested in exploring the film on any level beyond describing what happens with the casual jargon of obligation and the yawning anticipation of being labeled a generational talent.
Because what are we doing here if not what Lin so cleanly avoids? In writing about a film, aren’t we trying to draw the reader closer to it? If we can’t fly, then maybe we can take some solace in the flight of others—pull strength and beauty and the extremes of the human condition from it in threads and clumps and dollops.
Herzog again, from A Guide for the Perplexed:
Ecstasy in this context is something you would know about if you had ever been a ski jumper. You can see it on the flyers’ faces as they sweep past the camera, mouths agape, with their extraordinary expressions. Ski flying isn’t just an athletic pursuit; it’s also spiritual, a question of how to master death.
The majority of us will never have been a ski jumper. This is all we can do to touch, for the briefest moments, some of that ecstasy.
Watch The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner on Youtube, or on Tubi, or on a variety of other streaming services. Like many of Herzog’s early documentaries, it’s not hard to find.
Sources:
Herzog, Werner, and Paul Cronin. Werner Herzog : A Guide for the Perplexed. London, Faber & Faber, 2014.
Lin, T. (2009, February 11). “Three Documentaries by Werner Herzog”. Fanzine. http://thefanzine.com/three-documentaries-by-werner-herzog/
On the Ecstasy of Ski-Flying: Werner Herzog in Conversation with Karen Beckman [DVD]. (2008). Philadelphia, PA: Slought Publications.
Prager, B. The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth. London, Wallflower Press, 2007, pp 22-26.
Rosenbaum, J. (2021, July 1). “The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1977 review)”. jonathanrosenbaum.net. https://jonathanrosenbaum.net/2021/07/the-great-ecstasy-of-woodcarver-steiner-1977-review-tk/