Ferocious Reality: Documentary according to Werner Herzog

7. Autobiographical Acts

215 7 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ACTS For decades, Werner Herzog has projected a public image of himself as a director frankly opposed to acts of self-exploration, whether imaginative or therapeutic.1 The image serves in part to deflect the once frequently leveled charges of narcissistic self-absorption or “ego mania.” Indeed, Herzog even claims to avoid his own gaze in the mirror. “Let me make it very clear,” he remarks in an interview on the subject of Grizzly Man. “I don’t look at my own navel when I make movies. It’s never a journey of self-discovery. To this day, I don’t even know the color of my own eyes. If I shave in the mirror, I evade my own gaze.”2 Ironically, the emphatic claim to rigorous self-evasion encourages the very questions of psychoanalysis that Herzog wishes to sidestep. At the same time, however, and with even greater persistence, he has also projected an image of himself as a visionary director who creates “inner landscapes” and trains an unflinching gaze on others. When the subject is the filmmaker himself, it seems that Herzog’s maxim (“the poet must not avert his eyes”) is either suspended or conveniently forgotten. And yet, over the years, Herzog has experimented in various forms of self-inscription, often within a single film. The predicament he has created for himself is, essentially, how to look inward without being seen as navel gazing. It is a question of performing autobiography without giving off the appearance of excessive self-regard. His engagement with autobiography provides the ultimate example of this book’s larger argument , that documentary is for Herzog a repudiated mode of filmmaking, to which he nevertheless contributes and thereby works to revise, according to his own agenda. The task here is to identify the autobiographical strategies that he has employed in the context of documentary. None of them have previously been discussed in the Herzog scholarship, where 216 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ACTS the emphasis has typically been put on the feature films and on issues of auteurism and self-reflexivity, which are different from issues of autobiography and self-reflection. Whether or not he is aware of it, Herzog’s approach to autobiography foregrounds some of the very issues of cinematic displacement that literary scholars have found to be most vexing. Elizabeth Bruss, most notably, points to the historical emergence of film as marking in effect the end of autobiography. As Bruss observes, the visual economy of film distinguishes between subjectivity and subject matter and renders that distinction physically as a multiplicity of bodies. In her words, “the autobiographical self decomposes, schisms, into almost mutually exclusive elements of the person filmed ([who is] entirely visible; recorded and projected ) and the person filming ([who is] entirely hidden; [and] behind the camera eye).”3 Proceeding from the idea of the “autobiographical pact,” the perceived identity of the author, narrator, and subject matter of a written autobiography, Bruss confronts the impossibility of such a pact in the cinema, assuming as she does a narrative film, the use of actors, and the physical displacements of technological recording. The idea of film as an autobiographical mode of expression thus appears to jeopardize what she calls the “classical” autobiographical self and its traditional forms of narration. In so doing, however, it also suggests alternative models and expressions of subjectivity, which Bruss, writing in 1980, describes as “an entire culture now irrevocably committed to complex technologies and intricate social interdependencies.”4 Apparently, Bruss was unaware of then experimental work being done in film and video and the discussions it had already engendered among her contemporaries.5 She also makes certain assumptions about filmmaking that don’t necessarily hold, but her larger point does; that is, the medium of film not only undercuts the model of a unified subject but opens up a space for imagining new models of subjectivity and new ways of representing them. The body’s dispersal and plurality in film, which previously appeared to signal the end of autobiography, have since made the cinema a key site for reinventing autobiography under changed historical conditions.6 Herzog exploits the cinema’s profusion of bodies and does so in various ways, almost as if it were a division of labor that can be organized and reorganized, depending on the situation, to meet the changing needs AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ACTS 217 of the filmmaker’s identity in each successive present. Metonymic...