Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)

Sabtu, 28 Mei 2011

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, 2010)

It is almost as if the paintings were waiting for the film to get made. The Chauvet Cave in Southern France suffered a cave-in several thousands of years ago, blocking its entrance and effectively preserving the paintings and everything else inside from deterioration caused by the elements and the natural course of time. For several decades since its discovery, the paintings have only been enjoyed through photographs and replicas, considering that entry to the cave have been limited to a few individuals. That is until Werner Herzog and his crew of three were granted unprecedented entry to film the interior of the cave. Cave of Forgotten Dreams is that result of the unlikely marriage of fate and genius.

Instead of merely treating the paintings as isolated works of art, Herzog posits that the paintings are prehistoric prototypes of cinema, explaining that the position of the paintings, the way they were painted, where they were painted, the possible sources of light in the cave allude to an illusion of movement and to a possible fantasy. Herzog’s hypothesis immediately removes the cave paintings from a position of trite curiosity into something more immediate and relevant. The paintings have turned into products of our conspirators in dreaming. They are evidence of something intrinsically shared with the prehistoric men. Herzog turns these anonymous people from the distant past into relatable characters with hearts and souls that are kindred to ours.

Herzog does not completely settle inside the cave. Instead, he frequently flies away, curiously focusing on the people around the film: their dreams, their inadequacies, quirks and past lives. Although separated by differing priorities and millenniums, there’s a connection that’s established between the subject of the film and his erstwhile subjects, and hopefully, the audience. In one scene, Herzog forces this connection, staging an ominous silence inside the cave, keeping his guides, his crew, and himself in a prayerful stance listening to a supposed communal heartbeat. Ernst Reijseger’s powerful score not so much swells but creeps into the middle of that shared contemplation, turning Herzog’s orchestrated meditation with that filament of humanity he strives to define into some sort of graceful sequence which it is ostensibly not.

The most beautiful thing that Herzog committed to in Cave of Forgotten Dreams is to expand it into something quite larger than it should be. The use of 3D for example is not for mere spectacle. Instead, it is a necessary tool to create that illusion of being inside the cave, of witnessing the actual contours of the cave walls instead of seeing a flat representation of those contours, of experiencing the movement of the painted animals instead of only imagining motion. Considering that the cave paintings and the cinema they aspire to be are all tools that utilize illusions to function as tools to approximate reality, 3D serves as a companion piece to this illusion-building by requiring the approximation of space and depth as essential to not only experience the wonders of the cave but also to understand Herzog’s claims.

That Herzog does not rely solely on hard facts and historical accuracy is what makes Cave of Forgotten Dreams so immeasurably fascinating. After all, what we see in the cave paintings are only minute facets of the immense world that the prehistoric man could have lived in and exploited. We can only watch in awe, dream connections and relations. Yet, we can never be exactly sure. We can only speak and feel from the very little that we know and the very vast that we can imagine. The documentary, as most documentaries do, places us in a comfortable position of looking at and into the subject. Thus, when the film moves into its postscript, with Herzog suddenly placing the audience as the subject for possible interpretation and interpolation of albino alligators that came from the probable future, the tables are turned, and the effect is nothing short of sublime.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans (2009)

Jumat, 05 Februari 2010

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans (2009)

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans (Werner Herzog, 2009)

Produced in present-recession American and set in post-Katrina New Orleans, Werner Herzog's The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans is strangely one of the funniest films I have seen in recent memory. Under Herzog's crazed vision, New Orleans is given an exciting personality. It is a city that is at once coming to grips with a prolonged melancholy and suffering, struggling with an ever-growing frustration of being alienated socially and economically from the rest of the United States, and parading an unlikely carefree enthusiasm. It is a city that is externally atrophied, with its structures crumbling and its citizenry seemingly paralyzed by the floods. However, beneath the uninspiring facade is a dormant energy that reveals itself in infrequent moments of ecstatic madness. Herzog's New Orleans is simply a city that is delightfully two-faced: corrupted and moral, where the desperation is conveniently masked by an unwavering religious faith; and impoverished and promising, where the money generated by an underground economy betrays the obvious penury.

Terence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage), the film's titular bad lieutenant, didn't start out bad. An asshole maybe, but bad, no. The film opens inside a flooded prison. A sea snake swims its way inside a locked cell, occupied by a forgotten prisoner. Terence and his partner Stevie Pruit (Val Kilmer) enter, talking about some stuff that their superior forgot while evacuating the building during Katrina's onslaught. A nonchalant conversation about their various indiscretions lead to the discovery of the hapless prisoner who desperately plead, to the two cops' twisted delight, to be let out before he drowns. After jokingly equating the prisoner's life with the expensive underwear his girlfriend bought for him, he suddenly jumps into the murky flood waters, and saves the prisoner, to the ample surprise of his partner (and probably Herzog's audience), who thought he had Terence all figured out as corrupt to the core. The heroic act becomes the impetus to a string of events. Terence gets diagnosed with a perpetual back ailment, causing him to walk with his shoulders automatically hunched to his head, to be completely dependent on illegal drugs, and to live his life with a devil-may-care attitude.

He also gets promoted to lieutenant and later on, gets assigned to solve a case of the massacre of a family of Senegalese immigrants. The police procedural aspect of the film is more of a frame for Terence's descent to corruption. Instead of meticulously mapping out the details of the police investigation, Herzog concentrates on depicting more interesting Terence's side-trips: to his girlfriend (Eva Mendes), for an easy lay; to the clubs, to stalk on youngsters who may be bullied for free drugs; to his dad and his stepmother, just for the reminder of the possibilities and probabilities of his fate; to his bookie, to haggle a failed bet in the hopes of reversing that fate by sheer luck. The case, by force of narrative, takes its own shape, intertwines itself with Terence's personal life, leaving the hapless lieutenant to have no choice but be bad, selling his soul and his badge to the very people he is tasked to eliminate, allowing himself to be a hostage of his own desperation. By film's end, after the unstopping and unbelievably entertaining descent of Terence to the lowest depths of human amorality, we get a sense of a world where corruption is not a decision but a phase, where the environment humanity struggles in, more than its own un-seldom decisions to transgress its self-made codes of propriety, is the primary mover for us to forget ourselves in order to simply survive.

Survival is what drives humanity. It is also what drives the rest of the world. This shared thirst to perpetuate ourselves in our environment becomes that inherent link we have with nature. Herzog's film is so conscious of this link that he often deviates from his narrative to simply observe animals: the swimming snake that opens the film; the colorful pet fish in the room of the murdered child; the crocodile by the highway; the imagined iguanas. These creatures' sudden spotlighted presence, while at first befuddling, creates an awareness that humanity, with its ongoing businesses in fixing its own affairs, does not exist within a vacuum. The similarities, like the cold-bloodedness or the predatory predispositions, are pushed forward, allowing us a sizable glimpse and a more-than-believable rationale as to why Terence is required to lose moral perceptions in order to persist. The proposition that I am making, that it is not us but circumstance that dictates our capacity for evil or even the theory that the concept evil is only a human invention, is admittedly cynical, one that has been conveniently drowned with Herzog's confidently unconventional directorial approach or Cage's effectively over-the-top portrayal of Terence.

Herzog's intent is clearly not to take corruption seriously, and this is where Herzog deviates from Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant (1992), where corruption is unflinchingly depicted as dirty and scary. When Terence suddenly appears from behind the door, with an automatic shaver on hand and chin and eyes twitching from exhaustion and lack of sleep, and proceeds to remove the oxygen tubes from an old woman, while extorting from the old woman's attendant the location of the lone witness to his case, the disgust over the reprehensible act is buried by the ludicrousness and ridiculousness of the attempt. The joke continues as Terence rationalizes his dastardly deed with an accusation that America is in such bad state because of rich old women like her victim. The wisdom of his retort is both humorous and enlightening. Humor is essential in driving the point. Again, after a sudden shoot-out where a drugged Terence is salvaged from death and debt by his shady new friends, the discomforting pact is punctuated by insanity when he insists that his friends shoot the dead man because "his soul is still dancing," and indeed, we see the man's soul break-dancing. Herzog's filmmaking is as over-the-top, as self-consciously hilarious, as his actor's portrayal and it works, it works wondrously.

Herzog simply leaves no room for remorse or introspection, because there is nothing to be remorseful for. Contrary to popular belief, corruption is an fact the act of fate, while nobility is the choice. Animals, programmed only to survive the longest, are all victims and agents of fate, such as a crocodile that wanders too far into the highway and is ran over. We, however, have the choice to forgo survival and sacrifice. We are reminded of our perceived nobility and when that reminder comes, all one can do is reminisce, laugh and move on. Terence, in the end of the film, is reminded of that noble act that preluded his deterioration when the prisoner he rescues from the flood, now a hotel bellboy, recognizes him despite the effects of cocaine that he has been consuming, as the cop that gave him another chance at life. The two end up in an aquarium, with a giant glass separating them from the fish. What ultimately separates humanity from the rest of the world is that we are, although we may often choose to forgo of it, have the capacity for nobility. That Terence McDonagh, the baddest of bad lieutenants, has exercised such capacity for nobility, no matter how long ago that was or how spontaneous the decision was, expresses that important distinction men have from the the rest of this wild fog-eat-dog world.

Rescue Dawn (2006)

Minggu, 13 Januari 2008

Rescue Dawn (2006)

Rescue Dawn (Werner Herzog, 2006)

Men are insatiable beasts. It is normal for us to have an innate tendency to push our natural boundaries and reject the limitations that have been imposed on us. Filmmaker Werner Herzog is not interested in man's plain insatiability but in a more defined and refined context of such normal human characteristic. He is interested in men whose desire to break natural limitations has reached the point of obsession. Herzog's cinematic heroes and anti-heroes are not only insatiable beasts, they are also stubborn to the point of exhaustion, insanity and death. Yet despite Herzog's heroes eccentric approach to this most peculiar of human characteristics, they still remain painfully familiar, uncomfortably similar to even the most normal of us. Don Lope de Aguirre with his maddened need to penetrate the South American jungle (Aguirre, the Wrath of God, 1972), Brian Fitzcarraldo with his self-imposed defiant task of building an opera house deep in the jungles of Peru (Fitzcarraldo, 1982), Dr. Graham Norrington with his resilient bids to build a hot-air balloon to navigate above the canopies of the Paraguayan jungles (White Diamond, 2004), and Timothy Treadwell with his foolish and fatal attempt to live with a family of grizzly bears (Grizzly Man, 2005) are only a few of Herzog's subjects that evidently stray from what is considered as norm but are still distinctly and definitely human, not mere caricatures of extreme eccentricities.

Another is Dieter Dengler, German-born pilot for the United States air force who was shot down from his plane, made prisoners-of-war, eventually escaped and rescued. Dengler is the subject of Herzog's earlier documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997). Herzog's rare effort in big-budgeted Hollywood filmmaking Rescue Dawn is a fictionalized version of Dengler's plane crash and succeeding capture, torture, and imprisonment for many months by Laotian communists. The typically uncompromising director has been accused by many of his fans and critics of having succumbed to blockbuster mentality as Rescue Dawn seems to cling on tired plot conventions and indulge in what feels like pro-American yet anti-war didactics, the current fad in American cinema nowadays. I disagree with that assessment since in the grander scheme of things, Rescue Dawn is that infrequent Hollywood-funded movie that exceeds both commercial and artistic expectations.

It starts with a factoid about the American air force secretly bombing select areas in the Laos-Vietnam border before showing a clip of villages exploding from the point of view of someone in the bomber plane. It's a wonderful clip made remarkable in the context Herzog makes use of it. While the clip visually details destruction that is both brazen and atrocious especially in a post-Vietnam War context, it is used in the film to showcase the alluring grace and beauty in flight. The endless jungles and the villages that dot the green landscape are lorded over from such vantage point above. The explosions in gorgeous slow motion are like flowers blossoming against the hostilities of nature down below. With that, Herzog gives you a glimpse of rationality behind Dengler's obsession. Flight is a potent drug against the world and its malignant and often persistent hold on humankind.

So when Dengler's plane is shot, he forgoes escaping from the crashing plane as advised by his superiors, and instead crashes with it. He emerges from the fiery remains of his plane, is greeted with gunshots by the villagers and chased into the depths of the Laotian jungle. Herzog, at once, confirms Dengler's determination and stubbornness thus assuring this fictional version of Dengler a rightful place in the director's pantheon of quirky characters. Dengler then explores the jungle while trying to evade the Laotian searchers, utilizing every bit of survival tip he learned from the videos being shown to them before the mission. You get a feeling that Herzog acknowledges this new locale not merely as a hostile setting for Dengler's capture and eventual escape but also as hindrance to Dengler's unshakable object of obsession. In the jungle, he is grounded, vulnerable to nature's hold and whims. Most fascinating however is how Dengler reacts to this misfortune, with untainted optimism and a surprising hint of joviality. Dengler, as portrayed by Christian Bale in what feels like his most interesting performance wherein he doesn't have to brood or possess an aura of suffering, is immensely likable with his contagious positivism. This is the apparent delectable conceit in Herzog's Hollywood flick: a man is tortured and imprisoned in a foreign prison camp in the middle of a jungle yet he doesn't sulk in predictable misery as some of his co-prisoners do and instead survives for that glint of hope of being rescued.

Rescue Dawn is immensely watchable because of the relationships this typical Herzog hero earns from his new environment. Herzog gets most of the psychology correct: the way Dengler worries about shitting his pants while he's being tied to the ground; or the complex acquaintances he commits with his co-prisoners, all of whom are complicated individuals with various motivations and expectations in life. Herzog also acknowledges the concept of time, in a way that his characters do get thinner (most of his actors lost thirty to forty pounds during the duration of filming), and the relationships they have become more intricate (in a way that late in the movie, these prisoners would have been so emotionally attached to each other to the point of intimate physical gestures and choice of hallucinatory subject). Pitted against these factors is Dengler's initial obsession of resuming flight. Such is the rationale behind Dengler's unmatched hopefulness: that what trumps the challenges of hostile nature, the tortures of his captors, the persistence of time, the differing impulses of his companions, and Maslow's complete hierarchy of needs is this one towering endeavor, to be given back his wings and retain that human trait of insatiability, stubborn and near-insane as it is.

Perhaps, the most evident of Hollywood's influence in this distinctly Herzog work is the fact that it is undoubtedly a triumphant picture, one that ends with an inspirational speech by the rescued Dengler. In this regard, Herzog seems to have rewarded the obsession he has sufficiently explored (often with different outcomes, as in the case of the protagonists of Aguirre, the Wrath of God or most recently Grizzly Man) in his vast filmography with acceptance and a sense of heroism. It's an awkward conclusion considering that Dengler's motivation is hardly one that would merit overwhelming pontification by America's top pilots: his first mission is a failure having been shot and crashed his plane in the middle of the jungle, his allegiance to America rests primarily on the nation's ability to give him wings, and nowhere in the film did Herzog portray Dengler as sincerely nationalistic (he even jokes around the saying "to die for our country," obviously pertaining to the sense that his obsession trumps his love for America thus preferring not to die for country but to live to fly). Yet there he is in the middle of a cheering mob, delivering a speech to cap a film that details his obscene attempts to regain his undying need for flight from the temporary clutches of the Southeast Asian jungles. In that sense and awkward as it is, that final speech feels rightfully fitting. He is after all in the company of his peers, who most likely have the same insatiable passion. Among them, Dengler, survivor of a crash and months grounded by enemies, is a hero and that speech is his valedictory for being the most human, although crazed and stubborn, of them all.