An insane con­quis­ta­dor, a dwarf rebel­lion, cat­tle auc­tion­eers, ancient cave paint­ings, flam­ing oil rigs, tel­e­van­ge­lism, ski jump­ing, strong­men, Nico­las Cage: at first glance, the fil­mog­ra­phy of Wern­er Her­zog may seem will­ful­ly bizarre. A clos­er look, which reveals his films’ unusu­al mix­ture of fact and fic­tion deliv­ered through images that lodge per­ma­nent­ly in the sub­con­scious, may not dis­pel that impres­sion. But the pro­lif­ic Her­zog, who has steadi­ly worked in and ever more idio­syn­crat­i­cal­ly defined his own realm of cin­e­ma since mak­ing his first short Her­ak­les 57 years ago, is engaged in a con­sis­tent ven­ture — or so argues Tom van der Lin­den in his video essay “The Inner Chron­i­cle of What We Are: Under­stand­ing Wern­er Her­zog.”

“I have always thought of my films as being one big work,” Van der Lin­den quotes Her­zog him­self as say­ing. “The char­ac­ters in this sto­ry are all des­per­ate and soli­tary rebels with no lan­guage with which to com­mu­ni­cate. Inevitably, they suf­fer because of this. They know their rebel­lion is doomed to fail­ure, but they con­tin­ue with­out respite, wound­ed, strug­gling on their own with­out assis­tance.” Van der Lin­den iden­ti­fies that strug­gle as much in Her­zog’s askew dra­ma­tized vision of Kas­par Hauser, the 19th-cen­tu­ry youth who claimed to have grown up in total iso­la­tion, as he does in Land of Silence and Dark­ness, Her­zog’s doc­u­men­tary about the blind-deaf Fini Straub­inger. In Her­zog’s film, such char­ac­ters are not out­siders but “saints, embod­i­ments of the human spir­it that exists with­in each and every one of us, long­ing to man­i­fest itself.”

But then, every Her­zog fan knows how lit­tle sense it makes to draw a line between the “fic­tion” and the “non­fic­tion” in his work. “As well known as Her­zog is for bring­ing real­i­ty into his fic­tion­al films, just as well known is he for bring­ing his fic­tion into his doc­u­men­taries,” says Van der Lin­den, an imper­a­tive that has entailed “unortho­dox direc­to­r­i­al deci­sions.” These include putting near­ly an entire cast of Heart of Glass under hyp­no­sis, releas­ing 11,000 rats into a city for his remake of Nos­fer­atu, and most famous­ly, for Fitz­car­ral­do, a film about a rub­ber baron who drags a steamship over a hill in Peru, drag­ging a real steamship over a real hill in Peru — a sin­gu­lar cin­e­mat­ic effort that inspired a doc­u­men­tary of its own, Les Blank’s Bur­den of Dreams.

“My belief is that all these dreams are yours as well,” Her­zog says to Blank, “and the only dis­tinc­tion between me and you is that I can artic­u­late them, and that is what poet­ry or paint­ing or lit­er­a­ture of film­mak­ing is all about.” On some lev­el, Her­zog’s inter­est in dreams still explains the nature of his film­mak­ing. This man­i­fests espe­cial­ly in his doc­u­men­taries, says van der Lin­den, where he “always seems to wan­der off the actu­al sub­ject by includ­ing a vari­ety of seem­ing­ly ran­dom sto­ries from the peo­ple he encoun­ters. He’s not inter­est­ed in their facts; he’s inter­est­ed in their dreams.” Like no oth­er film­mak­er work­ing today, Her­zog artic­u­lates the kind of truth we feel in our own dreams as well: the “poet­ic, ecsta­t­ic truth” he spoke of in his “Min­neso­ta Dec­la­ra­tion,” which “can be reached only through fab­ri­ca­tion and imag­i­na­tion and styl­iza­tion.” No won­der he’s ded­i­cat­ed him­self to cin­e­ma, still the most dream­like medi­um of them all.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Wern­er Herzog’s Very First Film, Her­ak­les, Made When He Was Only 19 Years Old (1962)

Wern­er Her­zog Cre­ates Required Read­ing & Movie View­ing Lists for Enrolling in His Film School

Por­trait Wern­er Her­zog: The Director’s Auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal Short Film from 1986

Wern­er Her­zog Offers 24 Pieces of Film­mak­ing and Life Advice

To Make Great Films, You Must Read, Read, Read and Write, Write, Write, Say Aki­ra Kuro­sawa and Wern­er Her­zog

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Hav­ing moved to Korea a cou­ple weeks ago, I won’t have the chance to par­take this year in the beloved insti­tu­tion of Amer­i­can cul­ture known as Thanks­giv­ing. (Korea has its own Thanks­giv­ing, but it hap­pened two months ago.) Maybe you live in the Unit­ed States and thus almost cer­tain­ly have a Thanks­giv­ing din­ner of some kind, big or small, com­ing soon. Or maybe you, like me, live else­where in the world, and thus in a place with­out the same tra­di­tion. Either way, you can sure­ly par­take this Thanks­giv­ing in the beloved insti­tu­tion of Amer­i­can cul­ture known as the work of William S. Bur­roughs.

Here we have a short film of Bur­roughs, best known as the author of a body of con­tro­ver­sial and exper­i­men­tal lit­er­a­ture, includ­ing books like Junky and Naked Lunch, shot by Gus Van Sant, best known as the direc­tor of films like Good Will Hunt­ing, My Own Pri­vate Ida­ho, and Drug­store Cow­boy, the last of which includes a mem­o­rable appear­ance by Bur­roughs him­self.

It cap­tures Bur­roughs read­ing his poem “Thanks­giv­ing Day, Nov. 28, 1986,” also known as his “Thanks­giv­ing Prayer.” Van Sant shot it two Thanks­giv­ings after that one, in 1988, the year before Drug­store Cow­boy (and six years after adapt­ing Bur­rough’s sto­ry “The Dis­ci­pline of D.E.” into an ear­ly short film).

Bur­roughs, a life­long crit­ic of Amer­i­ca, fills his prayer with bit­ter­ly sar­cas­tic “thanks” for things like “a con­ti­nent to despoil and poi­son,” “Indi­ans to pro­vide a mod­icum of chal­lenge and dan­ger,” “the KKK,” and “Pro­hi­bi­tion and the war against drugs” (about which his char­ac­ter in Drug­store Cow­boy had some par­tic­u­lar­ly choice words). He ends by express­ing iron­ic, Great Gats­by-quot­ing grat­i­tude for “the last and great­est betray­al of the last and great­est of human dreams.”

Like him — like most every­body — I have my own, if less deep-seat­ed, frus­tra­tions with our home­land, and per­haps in leav­ing I sub­con­scious­ly emu­lat­ed his stretch­es of expa­tri­atism in Mex­i­co, Eng­land, France, and Moroc­co. But I sin­cere­ly doubt that I’ve had my last Thanks­giv­ing on U.S. soil; for all its fail­ings, Amer­i­ca remains too inter­est­ing to stay away from entire­ly. After all, what oth­er coun­try could pos­si­bly pro­duce a writer, a per­son­al­i­ty, or a crit­ic like William S. Bur­roughs?

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How David Bowie Used William S. Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Method to Write His Unfor­get­table Lyrics

The Mak­ing of Drug­store Cow­boy, Gus Van Sant’s First Major Film (1989)

William S. Bur­roughs Teach­es a Free Course on Cre­ative Read­ing and Writ­ing (1979)

The Dis­ci­pline of D.E.: Gus Van Sant Adapts a Sto­ry by William S. Bur­roughs

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The ori­gin of dra­mat­ic sto­ry­telling in cin­e­ma is often traced to a sin­gle movie, D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. It also hap­pens to be a film that cel­e­brates the racist vio­lence of the Ku Klux Klan, based on a nov­el, The Clans­man, that does the same. The film’s tech­ni­cal achieve­ments and its racism became inte­gral to Hol­ly­wood there­after. Only rel­a­tive­ly recent­ly have black film­mak­ers begun enter­ing the main­stream with very dif­fer­ent kinds of sto­ries, win­ning major awards and mak­ing record prof­its.

This would have been unthink­able in the 1920s, a peri­od of intense racial vio­lence when black WWI vet­er­ans came home to find their coun­try armed against them. “When the sol­diers returned,” writes Megan Pugh for the San Fran­cis­co Silent Film Fes­ti­val, “Jim Crow still reigned supreme and lynch mobs con­tin­ued to ter­ror­ize the South.” Hol­ly­wood pla­cat­ed white audi­ences by only ever fea­tur­ing black char­ac­ters in sub­servient, stereo­typ­i­cal roles, or cast­ing white actors in black­face.

Against these oppres­sive rep­re­sen­ta­tions, black film­mak­ers like Oscar Micheaux and George and Noble Jack­son “used cin­e­ma to con­front Amer­i­can racism,” respond­ing to Grif­fith with films like Micheaux’s With­in Our Gates and the Jack­sons’ uplift­ing The Real­iza­tion of a Negro’s Ambi­tion. There were also sev­er­al white film­mak­ers who made so-called “race movies.” But most of their films avoid any explic­it polit­i­cal com­men­tary.

These include the films of Richard Nor­man, who between 1920 and 1928 made sev­en fea­ture-length silent movies with all-black casts, “geared toward black audi­ences.” He made romances, come­dies, and adven­ture films, cast­ing black actors in seri­ous, “dig­ni­fied” roles. “Instead of tack­ling dis­crim­i­na­tion head-on in his films,” writes Pugh, “Nor­man cre­at­ed a kind of world where whites—and con­se­quent­ly racism—didn’t even exist.”

Though we may see this as a cyn­i­cal com­mer­cial deci­sion, and its own kind of appease­ment to seg­re­ga­tion, the approach also enabled Nor­man to tell pow­er­ful, alter­nate-uni­verse sto­ries that a more real­ist bent would not allow. 1926’s The Fly­ing Ace, for exam­ple, Norman’s only sur­viv­ing film, is about a black fight­er pilot return­ing home to “resume his civil­ian career as a rail­road detective—without remov­ing his Army Air Ser­vice uni­form, a con­stant reminder of his patri­o­tism and val­or.”

Nor­man tells the mov­ing sto­ry of Cap­tain Bil­ly Stokes (see Part 1 at the top), “a mod­el for the ideals of racial uplift,” despite the fact that “African-Amer­i­cans were not allowed to serve as pilots in the Unit­ed States Armed Forces until 1940.” One might say that rewrit­ing recent his­to­ry as wish-ful­fill­ment has always been a func­tion of cin­e­ma since… well, at least since The Birth of a Nation, if not fur­ther back to The Great Train Rob­bery.

Nor­man takes this impulse and dra­ma­tizes the life of an impos­si­bly hero­ic black WWI ser­vice­man, at a time when such men faced wide­spread abuse and dis­crim­i­na­tion in real­i­ty. While he insist­ed that he only made genre films, and avoid­ed what he called the “pro­pa­gan­da nature” of Micheaux’s films, it’s hard not to read The Fly­ing Ace as a polit­i­cal state­ment of its own, and not only for its oblique top­i­cal com­men­tary.

The film cen­ters on pos­i­tive, com­plex black char­ac­ters at a time when stu­dios made quite a bit of mon­ey doing exact­ly the oppo­site. Nor­man gave black audi­ences heroes of their own to root for. In The Fly­ing Ace, Cap­tain Stokes not only returns from fly­ing dan­ger­ous mis­sions for his coun­try, but he then goes on to cap­ture a band of thieves who stole his employer’s pay­roll. The char­ac­ter “nev­er would have made it onscreen in a Hol­ly­wood movie of the time.”

Nor­man estab­lished his stu­dio in Jack­sonville Flori­da, at the time con­sid­ered “the Win­ter Film Cap­i­tal of the World.” Many major stu­dios decamped there from New York until WWI, when they moved west to L.A. Nor­man, who grew up in Mid­dle­burg, Flori­da, made a for­tune invent­ing soft drinks before turn­ing to movies. He returned to his home state to find lit­tle com­pe­ti­tion left in Jack­sonville in the 1920s.

His stu­dio would become “one of the three lead­ing pro­duc­ers of race films in Amer­i­ca,” next to the Micheaux Film Cor­po­ra­tion and the Jack­sons’ Lin­coln Motion Pic­ture Com­pa­ny. In 2016, Nor­man Stu­dios was des­ig­nat­ed a Nation­al His­toric Land­mark. The filmmaker’s son, Richard Nor­man Jr. became a pilot, inspired by The Fly­ing Ace, and has plans to turn the build­ing into a muse­um cel­e­brat­ing Jack­sonville’s, and Nor­man’s, cin­e­ma lega­cy.

via Silent Movie GIFS

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the Pio­neer­ing Films of Oscar Micheaux, America’s First Great African-Amer­i­can Film­mak­er

Watch D.W. Griffith’s Silent Mas­ter­piece Intol­er­ance Free Online — It’s the “Ulysses of the Cin­e­ma!”

101 Free Silent Films: The Great Clas­sics 

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness