Horizon

Werner Herzog, Non-Fiction, Part I

Death for Five Voices

Sometime in 1995 or earlier, Werner Herzog went to Italy with a small crew to film the old castle of Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, died 1613. While wandering through the palace, filming cracked walls and collapsed ceilings, the sound of bagpipes rings deafeningly through the ruin. Looking for the source, the crew come upon a man moving from room to room with his pipes, standing in corners as if looking for a particularly interesting acoustic effect. When the stunned crew ask the man what he's doing, he says he's plugging up the cracks in the walls with music so the evil spirit can't escape.

So begins Herzog's portrait of Don Carlo Gesualdo, widely considered the best composer of Renaissance madrigals, foreshadower, two centuries before his time, of Wagner, posthumous recipient, as Gesualdo fans like to remind people, of a "pilgrimage" by Stravinsky, murderer and lunatic.

Cinematic portraiture is not new to Herzog, and no one familiar with some of his non-fiction films will be surprised at his astonishing ability to home in on the "ecstatic detail" in any situation, presenting whatever he finds seemingly unvarnished and in all its bizarre glory, something especially impressive when the subject of his film has been dead for centuries. Unlike earlier work in the genre, such as Little Dieter Needs to Fly and Wings of Hope, Herzog can only approach his subject obliquely (or, let's say, more obliquely than usual), and this makes it all the more astonishing that he and his team recognized and incorporated such details as, for instance, the eerie symbolism of a very large dog play-biting a very small puppy before panning up to show the town palace in which Gesualdo murdered his wife and her lover in 1590.

Perhaps on account of this being a portrait of someone dead for centuries (a first for him, as far as I know) Herzog's two great skills are here sharper and more impressive than ever. Apart from having eyes in the back of his head, he seems immune to the clouding effect of superficial relevance. To Herzog anything that happens while touring the Prince's ruined castle or filming a consort in performance might be the way to a truer understanding (or at least a truer representation) of his subject, and his instinct for this is unfailing. This makes him unique among "documentary" filmmakers and certainly one of the greatest.

If I seem to have just said that Herzog's great strength in non-fiction is his complete disregard for relevance (as normally construed), you have read me right. In a wider sense, Herzog has little regard for facts in general. Death for Five Voices is as much interested in the stories about Gesualdo as in the facts as we know them, and Herzog seems to deliberately contrast bland interviews with Gesualdo experts with interviews of local chefs, doormen, janitors, and so on. Most of the experts seem to be American or English for some reason, and have an annoying tendency to read from their notes as if lecturing on camera, something Herzog surely was careful to catch within his frame where most filmmakers would not.

Much more interesting are his interviews with the people he randomly meets, and with various local experts. In one of the best scenes of the movie, Herzog interviews a chef in his kitchen with his wife. Herzog has given the man a copy of the menu for Gesualdo's wedding the night before, and the man excitedly talks about the extravagance and scale of the party while his wife, appalled at her husband's enthusiasm, keeps exclaiming in exasperated tones that Gesualdo was a devil. It's hard not to feel, as Herzog seems to, that these people, regardless of how unreliable or exaggerated their stories might be, are in some sense telling the truth where the lecturers are not.

Posted by Alan Hogue at July 21, 2004 11:13 AM