Ferocious Reality: Documentary according to Werner Herzog by Eric Ames (review)

This title appears as Volume 27 of "Visible Evidence," edited by three prominent scholars of documentary film. The great achievement of Eric Ames is that his book does full justice to that series, as well as assuring lively debates across two further significant contexts—Herzog and the New German Cinema, viewed 30 years after the death of Fassbinder, and Herzog's documentaries as a key facet of his work-in-progress oeuvre. While it would have been arresting to find this director among early volumes in the series (in the late 1990s), the documentary has since achieved an altogether different genre status, and Herzog's ongoingly idiosyncratic place in it should be assured.

Proceeding in a broad arc, from issues of embodiment to questions of subjectivity, the study focuses on a couple of films in each chapter. Exemplary is the very close reading of Fata Morgana in Chapter Two (Moving Landscapes), followed by a great analysis of the parodic tone of La Soufrière. Alongside the texts of Bill Nichols and Michael Renov, central to secondary literature on the documentary, Ames frequently draws fruitfully on Schechner's notion of "performance." "If documentary film can be understood as performance, how does this affect its relation to the archive?" (262) Performance, not least via an exploration of theatricality, becomes perhaps the ultimate key to understanding documentary as conceived by Herzog. (Even "theatricality" becomes problematic with the prominent role of Herzog's voice-overs, given the plausibility and unflappability of his vocal timbre.) For Ames, discussion of "reenactment [ . . . ] in documentary theory [ . . . ] has too often been framed in narrow and mostly ahistorical terms" (181). Such pronouncements express a clear view of implications beyond this project and are always backed up: "The practice of reenactment comes from a history of performance, to which the documentary film is indebted, even though this history tends to go unnoticed by film-specific accounts" (184).

Herzog's films continually refuse to be bound by Nichols's description elsewhere of documentary as a "fiction (un)like any other." The interrelationship between "fact" and fiction, across genre borders, needs re-assessment with each new film of Herzog. Thematically and stylistically, Ames keeps returning to Fitzcarraldo as a kind of Ur-film, but otherwise the feature films are (quite properly) largely elided, while rarely constituting an altogether different category. In Chapter Six (Reenactments), Rescue Dawn and Little Dieter Needs to Fly are explored as feature film vis-à-vis documentary; further investigation along these lines is needed within individual films (e.g. documentary aspects of Aguirre). Key concepts used by Ames challenge contexts beyond their norm; "baroque" and "allegory"—the latter particularly fertile— are not staples of documentary studies. His original insights—e.g., Herzog as "a different kind of political filmmaker" (152), or Land of Silence and Darkness as haptic cinema (21)—have far-reaching ramifications for Herzog as auteur, and for documentary more generally.

The haptic opens up a broader approach to Herzog and the senses than was long adopted by a scholarship sharing the director's quest for images that had never been seen before. One of the most welcome features of Ames's book is its pursuit of music and sound, especially as integral to the title of Chapter Three (Ecstatic Journeys). Yet this is also where, like Herzog's Jonathan Harker, we still have much to do. "The believer's interaction with the unseen image" in Bells from the Deep is deemed to be "the actual subject of the film" (94). Yet surely the acoustic mirage of the sunken city of Kitezh is what transmits to the pilgrims on the ice, and by the end of the film (with a differently framed ringing of bells), to us as viewers. Wings of Hope combines many of the categories generated by Ames's study, with music as the catalyst. Over footage of the jungle in the final frames, the sound of Wagner's Rheingold Prelude signals the filmmaker...