The Twilight World by Werner Herzog

It is not really surprising that one grows trust - issues after fighting 5 years of intense war.

So when Hiroo Onada, a Japanese officer on an endless guerrilla mission on the island of Lubang in the Philippines, is informed that Japan has surrendered and the conflict is over, he does not believe it and creeps even deeper in the jungle to continue the fight. For thirty more years...

Initially consisting of four soldiers, over the years the squad is reduced to a single person. One soldier surrenders in the fifties and walks out of the jungle. Two others are killed by Philippine troops trying to oust them out of the forest. Only Onada keeps eluding all tentative of contact in the decades following the end of WW2. 

Onoda will remain hidden until 21 February 1972, when Norio Suzuki, a young world-traveller, onto whom the soldier has stumbled in the forest, convinces the old man to come out of his hiding . 

His is the story told in The Twilight World, the latest book by famous cinematographer Werner Herzog. Herzog has a penchant for exceptional characters, especially so if they are hidden, lost or trapped in the jungle. Suffice to remember his movies or documentaries featuring Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, Dieter Dengler and Juliane Koepcke. And now with his recent novel, the Twilight World, he has added to these Hiroo Onoda. 

The title of the book sounds even more dramatic in the original German: "Das Dämmern der Welt, like in the operatic word "Götterdammerung", a slow darkening, a closing out of the light, a creeping darkness preceding a full black-out. 

When on tour in Tokyo in 1997, Herzog shocks his hosts, by preferring a meeting with the jungle rescapee instead of with their Emperor. According to the German, He and Onoda, both jungle - aficionados, connect easily and have long discussions. The soldier tells his story and the 100-page novel is Herzog interpretation of it. While clearly irenic in intention, the author sides with the loner; the point of view in the narrative is the one of the warrior. The peaceful inhabitants of the island, who fear the ghost in the forest are rarely mentioned, their perspective is omitted. 

One can either mock or pity Onada for wasting away 30 years in the jungle. But the truth is more complex. Over the decades American war planes and warships kept flying over or passing the island. Unbeknownst to him, they are enroute to the next battlefields, the Korean and then the Vietnamese. Refusing to surrender, the old Japanese remains a danger for the isolated local civilians he encounters on the fringe of the jungle. And it is rather unfair from Herzog that he tells about the death of the two companions of Onada, killed in ambushes by Philippine soldiers and not about the 30 farmers the Japanese officer kills over the years, stealing their food and destroying their crops. 

As long as one of the belligerent parties decides to continue the fight, and there is always one who does, the fight continues. 

That is also Onoda's statement in a sentence that might be a blurb for a book on Human History. 

"The truth is that War is never over. Only the locations of the battlefields change"

“Conquest of the useless: reflections from the making of Fitzcarraldo” by Werner Herzog

For T.C. Murr

What writing style fits mad endeavors? What format functions well to relate chaos? After finishing “Conquest of the useless: reflections from the making of Fitzcarraldo”, I came to the conclusion that it must be the journal, or at least the journal of such a genius as is the film director Werner Herzog.

Most of us are acquainted with Herzog and his stupendous movies. Aguirre, Nosferatu, Cobra Verde and more recently Bad Lieutenant, are part of our collective film-o-graphic memory. And although the German moviemaker’s reputation has in the past decades slowly moved from pure Art house to that silver lining of mainstream appreciation, there is no doubt that he will never be of the boring mass. Iguanas and jiving dead bodies are just not everyone’s cup of tea.

Herzog is both the last and the apex of a generation of moviemakers who forsake the studios to go out in the world to capture both the truth and a poignant story. No gimmicks, no card board settings, no digital corrections or mock – up’s. Only true images, true settings and true emotions. For what is less known to the larger public is that Herzog is a documentary maker first. It is well worth to get out of your couch to get a view of such reportages as “The great ecstasy of woodcarver Steiner”, “Bells from the deep” or “Grizzly Man” to understand how Herzog creates his movies both in his inner eye and on the silver screen.

In “Fitzcarraldo”, starring the infamous Klaus Kinsky and the lovely Claudia Cardinale, Herzog recounts the story of Brian Fitzgerald, an obsessed Opera lover whose dream it is to build an Opera House in the middle of the Amazon jungle. To acquire the necessary funds, Fitzgerald develops a business scheme which should bring him a fortune: he plans to bypass the dangerous Pongo de Mainique rapids on the Peruvian Urubamba river, who hamper a shipping liaison between Manaus and the Rubber fields, by hauling a boat over land to another nearby free flowing river. Ambitious enough, but unfortunately the only suitable small strip of land over which the ship has to be moved is not only primeval jungle but also a steep hill.

Fitzcaraldo, as the Indians call him, will embark on his impossible enterprise, and with a monomaniacal rage tear his boat over the jungle mountain. A work of immense folly, requiring unprecedented resources and even human sacrifices. All for the sake of Opera. Art has effectively replaced God in this man’s mind.

Now to capture realistically on film what his main personage wants to do, Herzog has no other option than…to pull a ship over a jungle mountain in the middle of the Amazon.

With poor financial backing, filming in the middle of the jungle, in a region on the brink of war, with hundreds of unruly indigenous extras, huge engineering challenges, sickness, accidents, floods and revolting and mad actors, Herzog films his movie

And while Herzog’s endeavor appears to be as monomaniacal as Fitzcarraldo, it is his journal which shows the truth.

The journal appears to be a real journal with numerous dated entries. Each entry describes something Herzog witnesses. Images, micro-scenes. A spider for instance.

A spider big as a hand, hidden in his shoe, feeling like a sock. Or a dying kitten, attacked by chicken, half –eaten by the chicken. A dead child. A sad mongrel of a dog. A woman nursing a pig, a woman nursing a dog. A drown man. A drown man washed out of his shallow grave by the rising river. A drunk man lying on the ground, a drunk woman sprawled on the ground showing her private parts. Mud. Rain. Heat. The river rising, the river dropping, “click”. A freed Anaconda slipping into the grass. “click”. Another frame “click” and another frame.

Werner Herzog thinks in pictures, in images, in “Bilder”. You imagine him framing the scenery between his hands, thumbs and indexes touching. Click, camera switched on, recording. He said it. “Ich woltte dabei sein”, I wanted to be there “mit eine Kamera”.

Images, like cinema stills, framed realities jotted down in his journal, a whole book full, page after hallucinating page. Herzog is a visual artist, he thinks, dreams, fantasizes in pictures, cinematic stills, nearly no movement, just a bit, to show it is real, details, his eyes catches details, details which hide heart-breaking stories, hint at parables expose worlds…

Images, not stories is how I remember all his movies. The Bat flying towards us in “Nosferatu”; the rats in the street in the same movie; Aguirre standing on his raft, chasing the small apes; A boat in the jungle, pulled over a mountain. A man standing with his back to an approaching bear.  An iguana. Kaspar, the abused mystery child, exposed at the market. The ecstatic open mouth of the ski-jumper Walter Steiner…The narrative, if any, is forgotten. Images remain.

Aguirre, my first Herzog movie, seen with my Dad in a small cinema in Ivory Coast. I was thirteen year old. An epiphany. A receptivity for Art awakened. An understanding; a connection with the Artist. No need for story…images, just images… the brown flowing river, the forbidding shore of the jungle that slips by, the abandoned villages…the trapped conquistador. The movie touched a nerve. Even that young I recognized that river, that Amazon jungle, that erotic exuberance of Life. I’ve been there, I have seen it, felt it. I understood Herzog’s movie in a way which surely was beyond my age.

Werner Herzog, inheritor of Lotte Eisner’s demonic genius…His journal like a pointillist painting, every entry a dot, a speck on a large canvas that slowly emerges, a canvas depicting human folly, inhuman endeavor and a master – director, icy calm amidst a mayhem and a chaos, he is directing in the name of his Art.

What a book ! What a man ! 

Le Bateau Ivre

still from "Aguiire " by Werner Herzog

Is there a more fitting illustration for the first lines of the "bateau ivre" than the raft in Herzog's "Aguirre" ?

Comme je descendais des Fleuves impassibles,
Je ne me sentis plus guidé par les haleurs :
Des Peaux-Rouges criards les avaient pris pour cibles
Les ayant cloués nus aux poteaux de couleurs.

J'étais insoucieux de tous les équipages,
Porteur de blés flamands ou de cotons anglais.
Quand avec mes haleurs ont fini ces tapages
Les Fleuves m'ont laissé descendre où je voulais...

Arthur Rimbaud