Dead as an active filmmaker, but never more alive as a legend and a creative
inspiration, Werner Stipetic is today 60 years old and somewhat similar to one
of his characters, to Nosferatu: not dead nor alive, he is dangerous and at the
same time fascinating.

During the 70’s, when “New German Film”, after half a century once again made
Germany a well of film imagination and novelty, the leaders of this new
generation were two charismatic artists whose worlds were completely different.
Reiner Werner Fassbinder was a man deeply preoccupied by German culture and
history, a social chronicler; he searched for social and world view roots of the
“Here” and “Now”. Werner Herzog, his romantic antipode, dedicated his whole work
to researching of what lies beyond such “Here” and “Now”.

Adventurous and a radical filmmaker, Herzog turned his back not only to the West
and modernism, but also to the ratio, narration and film forms to the extent to
which they survived the modernist revolution. He turned to the Other in every
sense: other civilizations, other places, other mental states, other paths of
cognition. By risking producers’ money, physical suffering and literally lives
of his own crew and himself, he lunged from one extreme undertake into another,
creating one of the most interesting and most dangerous opuses of the whole
modernism period of film.

Werner Herzog was born in München in 1942 as Werner Stipetic, carrying his
father’s Croatian last name. He grew up in the soft Bavarian belly of Europe,
from his early days cherishing adventurous passion for film. Among many myths
about Herzog, there is one which claims that he wrote his first script at the
age of fifteen and made his first film with a stolen camera. A completely
self-taught filmmaker made his debut at the age of 25 with Lebenszeichen,
a metaphysical war drama with many elements of typical Herzog-like form and
content: empty landscapes, long dream like frames, heroes rebelling against the
society and the universe. After that film and until Wo die gruenen Ameisen
traumen in 1984, in 17 years Herzog will make a dozen of films, so different
among themselves in themes and representation, and yet so similar in the risk
they take, fanatic and obsessive searching for the utopian “Other”.

In those films Herzog went until the very end, Do kraja svijeta, za pocetak he
shot in Sahara (Fata Morgana, 1970), in Amazon (Aguirre, gnjev božji
1972, Fitzcarraldo 1980-1), in Australia (Gdje sanjaju zeleni mravi), in
Patagonia (Schrei aus Stein, 1993). He pushed the limits of physical and mental
efforts in the film making process: it is not surprising that his main actor
Mick Jagger left him and the shooting of Fitzcarraldo because he was
mentally destroyed. Herzog never ceased researching alternative mental states:
he made the actors act under hypnosis (Herz aus Glass, 1976), worked with a
schizophrenic actor Bruno S. (Tajna Caspara Hausera, 1974, Strozzek,
1977). He emerged himself into radically Other cultures, including the
aboriginal (Gdje sanjaju zeleni mravi) and that of the Amazonian Indians.
In Tajni Caspara Hausera he exposed Bavarian and German culture to the
eye of an unconditional Savage, a man who grew up without learning to speak,
read or even walk on two feet. It is as if this motif is the simulation of whole
Herzog’s artistic credo that strives towards returning to those times before
western rationality, which for Herzog is the ultimate corruptor. That is why
films, such as Fitzcarraldo or Aguirre are not simply a protest
against colonialism and western centralism, as it is often claimed. They are
films that engage in polemics with West as a thinking system. Should we then be
surprised that Herzog pleaded for film as “an art of the illiterate rather than
of the literate”?

From the middle of 80’s Herzog’s glory faded. He made a few films that were
unnoticed, including the unsuccessful film about alpinism Krik iz kamena
in which he flirted with the Bergfilme of the 30’s and unskillfully stepped into
an area of genre film so unknown to him. In the 90’s he devoted himself to
documentaries and made many fascinating films whose themes are typical
Herzog-like: Amazonian Indians, spiritual revival in the ex USSR. Last year he
made a come back into the mainstream with the co production Invincible, a
lukewarm film with Tim Roth playing Hitler’s astrologer and magician Hanussen.
This mediocre film does not announce Herzog’s big come back.

It is a paradox that, while Herzog as a director is passive, his early films are
blooming once more. Tired from the mainstream, young film authors of the 90’s
gladly rediscover Herzog as a rebellious grandpa and a much needed predecessor.
Herzog’s influence is today much stronger than in his golden years and it can be
traced in works of many filmmakers, such as the Lithuanian Sarunas Bartas,
Scottish Lynn Ramsay or Chinese “sixth generation”. It is no wonder that the
contradictory guru of the new American film Harmony Korine in his own arrogant
way says that Werner Herzog is the only director he values. Out of that very
reason he invited Herzog to appear in his film Julien: Donkey boy. In it
Mr Stipetic personifies the oppressive order which in his own films broke the
father tyrant who molests his schizophrenic child. In one of the cruelest scenes
of the contemporary alternative film, in a garden Herzog washes the boy with the
ice cold water from a hose.

Dead as an active filmmaker, but never more alive as a legend and a creative
inspiration, Werner Stipetic is today 60 years old and somewhat similar to one
of his characters, to Nosferatu: not dead nor alive, he is dangerous and at the
same time fascinating. (Jurica Pavičić)