Incorporeal You
Signs of Life (1968)
directed by Werner Herzog
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Encounters at the End of the World relied on a little humor to give the loneliness of its characters enough leeway to look brave. Critics read it as repetitiveness, but it seemed to me more like a measured admission of defeat. The snow-mad penguin, as the cell biologists' feathered counterpart, was less an easy riff on the director's obsession with chickens than a clumsy stab at fiction. Herzog didn't find the people he wanted to at McMurdo Station, and since this was a documentary about people - paid for by people - he couldn't pursue the less structured images that have made his past non-fiction so beautiful.
The quiet madness of Signs of Life prefaces every Aguirre and every Kinski anecdote to come, but is temperamentally much more in line with Herzog's hero Satyajit Ray. Full of summer heat and the same crickets that whisper through every coastal Mediterranean production of the French New Wave, the images sing a story of the elements along the chalk-white ramparts where sun and sea convene in the hair of men. In black and white, of course, which some would argue, in light of Fitzcarraldo, is like a thought waiting to be written down. Except that, instead of something we marvel at - the man in the bell tower, the boat - this is already a part of us, drawn out in rocket flares against the night sky.
directed by Werner Herzog
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Encounters at the End of the World relied on a little humor to give the loneliness of its characters enough leeway to look brave. Critics read it as repetitiveness, but it seemed to me more like a measured admission of defeat. The snow-mad penguin, as the cell biologists' feathered counterpart, was less an easy riff on the director's obsession with chickens than a clumsy stab at fiction. Herzog didn't find the people he wanted to at McMurdo Station, and since this was a documentary about people - paid for by people - he couldn't pursue the less structured images that have made his past non-fiction so beautiful.
The quiet madness of Signs of Life prefaces every Aguirre and every Kinski anecdote to come, but is temperamentally much more in line with Herzog's hero Satyajit Ray. Full of summer heat and the same crickets that whisper through every coastal Mediterranean production of the French New Wave, the images sing a story of the elements along the chalk-white ramparts where sun and sea convene in the hair of men. In black and white, of course, which some would argue, in light of Fitzcarraldo, is like a thought waiting to be written down. Except that, instead of something we marvel at - the man in the bell tower, the boat - this is already a part of us, drawn out in rocket flares against the night sky.
posted by NPK at 2:43 PM
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