Guest Blog From Musick Hund: On Herzog's Oddness

It's not easy to put one's finger on what Herzog's characteristic oddness consists in (is this the same question as how to characterize his oddness?). We can make a start by noting his pervasive tendency to sublime the ordinary, or, if we are sympathetic to his point of view, to create the conditions for reality to appear in its sublimity. And that precise ambiguity between what he creates and how things appear to him is what, perhaps, can be said to be uniquely his and his alone. 

This is an intensely romantic ambiguity from a philosophical perspective--perhaps one way of describing Hegel's dialectic would be to say that Hegel wishes us (those smart or foolish enough to read his texts) to consciously live this ambiguity, acknowledge it, because otherwise we would-be sages have no hope of leading philosophically examined lives. 

Herzog makes such acknowledgement (of the ambiguity between what he creates or reveals with his camera and how things appear to him) the mission of his art, specifically through the depiction of a hubris that, though it may range from the relatively innocent (say, Tim Treadwell) to the near demonic (Aguirre/Kinski) shares the characteristic of wishing to tell oneself a story that is both more compelling and easier to accept than the narrative Herzog's camera--and crucially, later, voice--reveals. Herzog as documentarian seeks to depict his subjects talking to themselves while believing they are telling us/him how things are. 

So, the later emergence of Herzog's voice as an "aid" to his camera is either a betrayal of his art or part of its natural development depending on one's point of view. It might be more accurate to simply observe that Herzog's narrative intrusions in his own voice reveal him to share in the hubris that attracts him as much, or more, than his subjects. So then Herzog's dilemma as an artist (the paradox he wishes to shine a light on) becomes how to honestly document his own self deceptions, or less sympathetically, how to be a humble megalomaniac. 

(All of these threads seem to come together when, on camera in My Best Fiend, Herzog claims to be "clinically sane" but in the same breath matter-of-factly states/confesses that he had only been prevented from firebombing Kinski in his home by the vigilance of Klaus's dog).