Ferocious Reality: Documentary according to Werner Herzog

5. Cultural Politics

147 5 CULTURAL POLITICS “The Case of Herzog” In recent years, Herzog has frequently revisited certain political concerns of his earlier work, including the charges of environmental and human rights abuse that were leveled against him throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the most famous incident being Herzog’s altercations with indigenous Peruvians during preproduction of Fitzcarraldo, a concern that received wide attention at the time, both in print and on film.1 The various rumors, allegations, and stories that circulated in the press became known in West Germany as “The Case of Herzog.” Filming in a remote location near the contested border of Ecuador, Herzog ventured into a political jungle filled with rival factions, each with a certain interest in the area, including multiple different native councils, intertribal organizations, religious missionaries, social scientists, political activists, oil and lumber companies, federal ministries, and government soldiers. The preparations for and production of Fitzcarraldo have been chronicled at length from many different and often conflicting perspectives .2 Only the briefest summary will have to suffice. In 1979, while negotiating with certain members of the Aguaruna community in the northwest of Peru, “Herzog found himself in the middle of an internal power struggle between members of the community in favor of working for the film and an inter-tribal group fighting for control over Indian affairs in that area. When Herzog refused to negotiate solely with this latter group, rumors of persecution of the Indians began to spread. The stories got sensational press, in Peru as well as in Europe” and the United States.3 The various charges leveled against Herzog—though alleged and meant to provoke controversy—offer a sense of the chaos that preceded 148 CULTURAL POLITICS the film’s production. They include violations of native sovereignty, attempted bribery, slave labor, breach of contract, gun running, armed intimidation, and false arrest and imprisonment (with support from local police and military forces). In the words of his most outspoken critic in Germany, Nina Gladitz, who also accuses Herzog of “fascism” and compares him with adherents of the Third Reich, “Herzog’s behaviors can in no way be distinguished from the policies of an occupying power that corrupts the natives in order to secure and expand its sphere of influence.”4 In his defense, Herzog maintains that he was a convenient target for various organizations whose previous resistance against larger forces of political, economic, and cultural domination had proved to be ineffective. Although the controversy would mark his fall from grace in the eyes of many film viewers, his visibility in the international press as a celebrated young German filmmaker now became a liability. In this case, ironically, it was the director who accused his critics of fabricating stories, inventing evidence, and producing false witnesses (not the other way around). Amnesty International cleared him of all charges concerning human rights violations, but the accusations and suspicions of abuse have stuck to the director ever since. In a way, the case of Herzog has never closed. Or rather, it has been reopened again and again—not by historians of German cinema, most of whom later ignored Herzog, whether out of disdain or embarrassment, but rather by the filmmaker himself. He is, understandably, sensitive to the stigma that attached to him as a result of this controversy, and he responds to it in his films as well as in interviews.5 This movement of reopening characterizes much of his endeavors since Fitzcarraldo, especially (but not exclusively) his work in documentary.6 As I will show, Herzog appropriates documentary conventions and forms of truth telling and puts them in the service of reenacting and thereby reworking his own cinematic past. My key examples are The White Diamond and the lesser-known short Ten Thousand Years Older. The project begins much earlier, though, with the film he made immediately following Fitzcarraldo, namely, Ballad of the Little Soldier. Each of these films rehearses certain stock situations of cultural encounter, which also refer back to the entangled legacies of Herzog and Fitzcarraldo. The result , I suggest, is a form of double rehearsal that conducts politics via CULTURAL POLITICS 149 performance. It is a familiar move in the context of performance studies, but the idea of “doing politics” in this sense has yet to be explored in Herzog’s documentaries. The topic of colonialism, by contrast, is well-trodden ground in the Herzog scholarship, particularly with regard to Aguirre...