So Sharp, So Tender — German Director Werner Herzog
It is hard to watch Herzog’s films without crying.
He has filmed the moments when human beings are most like human beings.
In those moments, when people are most fully human, you see their stunned pauses. It is not that their inner convictions have collapsed; rather, Herzog’s questions have seized them, forcing them to summon a greater strength in order to break through their own shells. Then they fall apart, or break into a smile of ecstasy. That is usually when I begin to cry.
Because Herzog has midwifed them. So sharp, so tender. From the outside, Herzog delivers what lies further inside the inside of these people: something they had never explored, something difficult to put into words.
Their astonishment is only natural. Who could expect a stranger to enter so easily into the wilderness of one’s inner life? With only a softly spoken question, a follow-up determined to dig deeper, Herzog illuminates the shadowed depths, allowing people to become aware of their own profundity, and of their indestructible life force.
The Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute has curated the program “Anti-Blood: A Selection of Sports Films,” featuring two of Herzog’s documentaries, The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner and The Dark Glow of the Mountains. In them, we see Herzog use slow lateral tracking shots to film a ski jumper, and distant, fixed long shots to capture extreme mountaineers. In moments of individual crisis, joined to incomparable beauty and solitude, Herzog once again delivers that obsession with life that only surges forth at the height of approaching death.
Herzog once said that the definition of the human being is formed in the process of struggle.
That is to say: your struggle and combat reveal what a human being can be. No one is not a mass of chaos, until, for the sake of something that cannot be otherwise, they refuse to let go; only then do they suddenly become dimensional and abundant. The more self-forgetfully and obsessively you live into yourself, the more you expand the definition of “human.”
In The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner and The Dark Glow of the Mountains, you can see them living out the limits of controllability, crossing beyond the boundaries of their own language, living with such freedom and openness. Rather than seeing them as madmen who break the rules, it may be better to see them as saints who follow an inner voice.
Through the narrative arrangement and frame formed by Herzog’s voice-over and sequences of editing, we can see how Herzog reads the landscape of their souls from their repeated actions. What moves me most about Herzog’s documentaries is the reverence with which he approaches the mystery of human beings. Through what is visible, he presents the invisible essence within, revealing the mythic archetype of every life.
Herzog seems to remind us again and again: every action is an echo of the heart.
What Herzog investigates is not only their hearts, but ours as well. This forms the driving force behind his documentary filmmaking. He wants to pursue the question: are the forces that propel them toward risk also buried deep within us? Does the thing that summons them also lie in wait inside our own bodies? Herzog is concerned with the bloodline connecting human beings to one another—different forms of the same essential obsession with life. It is like that long shot in The Dark Glow of the Mountains: the mountain peak is not the focus of the gaze. Instead, the camera moves continuously from right to left, crossing ridge after ridge, and those endless rugged lines together form a single undulating, complete horizon.
The definition of the human is created together by those who came before, those alive now, and those who will arrive in the future.
That such keen insight, such courage and perseverance in facing the abyss, such generous love and trust can exist in this world. In those silent moments, one cannot help but become aware of Herzog behind the camera: so wise, sincere, compassionate, and humble. He allows people, after their pauses, to say in ecstasy: let the heart run freely through this world, let it go wherever it wants to go, knowing that it will reach the end of the world. It does not matter whether the world is round or flat; for me, this world is infinite.