humboldt vs. herzog
two germans in the jungle
part nineteen of htgtny is coming next monday! sorry for the delay; the draft’s been getting maybe too long and needs some more time in the oven before it’s sent out to the world, so instead, in true substack fashion, here’s some thoughts on a book i’m reading and a film i watched this past week…
The lights go up. The cameras begin to roll. The studio audience goes berserk, begins thrashing around popcorn buckets so vigorously kernels are flying all over the place, in sheets almost, and the heavily buttered, mid-air kernels are creating rainbows underneath the hot yellow studio lights. Two figures take the stage.
The first is announced, a booming voice overhead, enunciating: Alexander von Humboldt. Born in 1756, Alexander von Humboldt was a prussian researcher, explorer, and polymath who came of age around the time of the French Revolution; Liberté, égalité, ane fraternité embody both his political and his scientific thinking. He pioneered the idea of natural connections within nature, that everything in the natural world, when taken together, creates a wide romantic portrait of life itself as a positive force; he’s called the father of environmentalism and ecology and resurrected the term cosmos from the greek to explain the interconnectedness of the universe. Humboldt bounces his boxing gloves into one another. The gloves look oddly appropriate for the formal dinner-wear he has on: the puffy silk shirt with the crisp white collar. He’s talking into the microphone now but I don’t know what he’s saying because he’s rattling off words so incredibly fast, not to mention in a thick german accent, that everything said all fuses together into one single word, almost. He slams his boxing gloves together again and says, a bit more clearly: “and now I vil kick Monsieur Herzog’s vittle azz.”
“Ja ja,” Herzog says from the sidelines. “Cute idea, Alexander.”
“Werrrrrner Herzog!” Spotlight. Herzog’s face hardens; it’s full of creases like he’s been left out in the sun for days and he’s been looking rather thin in a general way, sporting a mustache like a wide, precise block across his face. He wears a longsleeve off-white shirt, his white work cargo pants are covered in blocky 80s’ era AV equipment, and he smells crazy. The boxing gloves, unlike on Humboldt, look foreign on Herzog. He smacks them together all the same. “It is the miracle of the human spirit which entrances me,” Herzog says to the camera, into the large WWE-logo’d box of the microphone. “It is what keeps me moving along through this world of brutalities.” He claps his boxing gloves together again.
Herzog is a pioneer filmmaker of the German New Wave, perhaps better known in the US for his documentaries (such as Grizzly Man) even though his Nosferatu is probably better than Eggers’s (sorry); but he’s here in the ring, clapping his gloves together, bounding around on his long thin legs — back and forth — and getting ready to fight because he’s also spent significant time in the rainforests of South America to shoot his film Fitzcarraldo.
Fitzcarraldo, to give a quick explainer, is about a European man in the early 1910s who wants to build an opera house in the rubber-trading town where he lives but to do so he has to raise funds by entering into the rubber trade by hauling a pre-war steamship across a mountain between two rivers to get to an unexploited part of the Amazon river basin.
Herzog, when approaching the project, became adamant that the filmmaking would use no special effects and over the course of four years of shooting he paid people from the local indigenous tribes to clear a section of forest and haul a steamship over a mountain for the sake of getting realistic footage of it happening. To be a small bit fair to him, he paid the indigenous workers double the standard; but to be less fair to him, he paid them to do the ridiculous for no reason other than to provide performances and raw labor for European audiences in cinemas. I wonder how many of the laborers on Fitzcarraldo were able to see the final film.
But here we have it. An unstoppable force and an immovable object. The bell goes. The fight begins. Humboldt squares up like a street fighter from the eighteenth century. Herzog like an American boxer.
Alexander von Humboldt.
Sometimes the universe conspires to force us into a new curiosity, a new passion. Sometimes it finds a thread to pull, dropped once and long since forgotten, and reintroduces it to us. This past week I found myself deep in thought about the Amazon rainforest, thinking about its wildlife, its native peoples, about exploitation, etc. etc.; this train of thought — something of an echo of my time majoring in Botany at UW resonating with my time majoring in Global Studies (also) at UW— came to me through two separate legs, the first being this: while I wandered around a branch of the CPL near my apartment last monday, somewhat bummed because the books I had put on request hadn’t yet materialized, I browsed the collection for something interesting to leaf through and I happened across Andrea Wulf’s wonderful little book on Alexander von Humboldt and took it home to read it rather compulsively. This is how I am with good nature writing and good biographies though I will admit there’s a small bit of hesitation and dread that comes along with approaching any biography titled something like The Invention of Nature about some dead European explorer who was alive during the peak of the evils of spanish colonial rule, but at the very least, considering his name is so synonymous with one of my favorite parts of Chicago, I figured, at the very least, I’d have something to rant and rave about at parties if he turned out to be as comically evil as was his time.
But Humboldt turned out to be quite an interesting product of eighteenth century enlightenment thought. Born in Prussia in 1756, Alexander Von Humboldt was a Prussian researcher and polymath who came of age around the time of the French Revolution’s more optimistic period and with that, his greatest achievement — or I should say, the central theme tying together all his work — was his fusing those ideals with German romanticism, perhaps best embodied by Goethe’s works (a close friend of Humboldt’s, Mephisto’s character in Faust is supposedly inspired by Humboldt), and with a heavy empirical analysis of the natural world through expeditions.
He weaves these threads together as he wrote for twenty years, digesting all the measurements taken, about his multi-year journey through South America, across the Andes, through the Amazon, later through Russia, and he could viably be seen as first real writer of Ecology and Enviromentalism. Of course Enviromentalism is an offshoot of the Englightenment in Europe, and of course it’s tied back to the New World. The Graeber Thesis that the Enlightenment in Europe was kicked off by indigenous critiques of the European system seems more and more plausible every time I return to the idea.
I should also mention here before I get yelled at in the comments that Humbodlt, despite his time, was adamantly anti-colonial and anti-slavery; he was horrified by the conditions of the slaves in the United States, horrified by the treatment of natives under Spanish Rule — his multi-volume book on the political economy of the South American colonies were so critical of colonialism that Humboldt was not in any way, shape, or form allowed from setting foot in any colonized countries ever again (despite lobbying the East India Trading Company for decades to allow him access to India so he could explore the Himalayas) because of his condemnations the evils of Spanish control in South America. And there’s a section of Wulf’s book which details Humboldt’s friendship with Simon Bolivar well before Bolivar returned to South America to begin the decades-long campaign for liberation against the Spanish crown, and Humboldt’s main concern about the endeavour when Bolivar brought it up to him in conversation as a personal dream, was that Boliver was of Creole birth and being from such a privileged class wouldn’t necessarily make him the best representative for the average indigindous Peruvian or Venuzuelan. Any enlightenment thinker worth their salt is going to stand for representation, it seems.
And the key to understanding Humboldt’s place in history is to understand that he’s the clear connection between the spark of thinking that sparked revolutions across the world for human equality and liberty and the writings of Thoreau, Darwin, the genre of nature writing, and the entire fields of ecology and environmentalism.
A lot of what he was doing was taking constant measurements wherever he went, trying to figure out why something was that way (such as climate zones, the magnetic shape of the Earth, etc), corroborating his theories and hunches with the native population, and writing long letters back to Europe about his findings. That’s not to say he properly cited the local natives much beyond his being generally, again, very anti-colonist, but he did certainly play a major role in the public perception of South America in the world, a public perception previously tainted by the only European writer who had been allowed in the colonies before having written that the animals and plants of the new world are feeble and smaller than their European counterparts, and Humboldt explained the grandeur of the South American country and its peoples in romantic flowing prose.
I think it’s reasonable to say he was the first mainstream, widely-read ecologist to explain to the common European reader (in the heart of the colonial empires, mind you) the reasons as to why deforestation causes the evaporation of lakes and how overdevelopment causes the destruction of native ecological structures. That’s something. That’s significant. Bringing a New World view of the world into the institutions means something. Maybe even more than that as David Graeber and David Wengrow would argue that such a sharing of knowledge across the Atlantic was the genesis of the Enlightenment notions of political liberty and equality in Europe.
Werner Herzog was a well-meaning filmmaker (though his reasons for doing many of the things he does seem as mysterious to him as they do to us, hence the mystique).
Many of Herzog’s films are fantastic and I do think that Ebert, for all his flaws, put it perfectly that even Herzog’s flops are fascinating portraits of a man who’s ambitions and instincts draw together to make his filmmaking into almost a performance art in itself. For this one, Fitzcarraldo — aka the film where a bunch of indiginous South Americans haul a steamship over a mountain “for the sake of Opera” or whatever; aka the film in which Klaus Kinski went so insane on and off camera to warrant a documentary by Herzog about how insane Kinski was (inspiring, in turn, a truly wonderful Documentary Now! episode) – this rings especially true.
My friend
and I watched Fitzcarraldo last Wednesday on his recommendation. I had never heard of it but it looked perfect in the square of my CRT — god I love this thing. Little did I know this was a film about the jungle.I think the both of us were most transfixed by the opening shot of the opera in which, in the bottom left corner, a woman sings and performs the part which is being performed on the stage by an actor in drag. The voiceless providing a voice for the performers. This has to tie into whatever Herzog is attempting to do in terms of allegory with the native people he uses throughout the film — some might say exploits — but I can’t quite make heads or tails of it, or maybe the heat wave is finally getting to my head.
Anyways, the shoot took around 4 years to complete. The tensions with the native population gradually increased. An airplane crashed. A crewman was bitten by a deadly snake and quickly amputated his leg. After one off Kinski’s physical, screaming crash outs late in shooting, a local tribe’s chief offered to kill him for Herzog, who declined the offer, saying they had to finish the shoot first. The work was brutal and dangerous.
Here’s a quote from Burden of Dreams, a documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo, from Herzog himself. At this point in the film, Herzog looks twelve years older than he did at the start. It’s likely that he is only three years older than he was at the start.
“Of course we are challenging nature itself. And it hits back. It just hits back, that’s all. And that’s grandiose about it and we have to accept that it’s much stronger than we are. Kinski always says it’s fully of erotic elements, I don’t see too much erotica, I see more full-on-obscenity — it’s just, nature here is vile and base. I wouldn’t see anything erotical here, I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away. Of course there’s a lot of misery but it is the same misery that’s all around us. The trees here are in misery and the birds are in misery I don’t think they sing they just screech in pain. It’s an unfinished country, it’s still prehistorical. The only thing that’s lacking here is the dinosaurs. There’s like a curse weighing on the entire landscape. And whoever goes too deep into this has his share of that curse, so we are cursed with what we are doing here. It’s a land that God, if he exists, has created in anger. It’s the only land where the creation is unfinished yet… Taking a close look at what’s around us, there is some sort of harmony. It is harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we, in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle… we in comparison to that enormous articulation… we only sound and look like unpronounced and unfinished sentences in a stupid suburban novel… a cheap novel…”
Sounds like the production wasn’t going too well for Herzog.
The jungle was never going to cooperate fully. When they cleared the trees over the mountain so they could lay the tracks down to haul the steamship over, the ground quickly became a waist deep pack of mud. The tides went down well before they were supposed to for the final shot of the film, which had to be delayed a full year. It was a brutal four years.
And by its end, there’s no Humboldtian wonder conveyed of the jungle and of the wild places. Klaus Kinski’s character sells his steamship and uses the funds to pay a troupe of Opera singers to come down and perform on the very steamship that was hauled over the mountains. It comes across as a flat feat of gentrification, “european high art” brought to the densest jungle in the world. Something about it all makes me feel cynical.
But Herzog’s work does, in its own way, open up the jungle to our eyes. Footage from the set is probably the last to be shot before South America modernized more fully. It’s a glimpse into the jungle of the past. Ripples break through the film of the pure wilderness, the sweat, the encroaching jungle. The tribes having such a large role in the film reveal the people, in a way, as they were at the time, somewhat akin to Sean Baker’s work in the Florida Project of depicting the residents of a housing project in Orlando as they are through the lens of performance. Whether this is exploitative or not is a real question; but quickly condemning seems more and more silly to me in cases such as these because where does exploitation end and positive representation begin? I suppose we can count on history to guide our hand. I heard from a friend, when discussing his legacy, that Humboldt is still celebrated in Peru for the way he wrote about the tides of the ocean; Herzog is, unsurprisingly not remembered as fondly for employing natives to carry a pre-war steamship over a mountain for the sake of his allegorical film. As Alexander Mooney writes in his wonderful commentary on Burden of Dreams, the behind the scenes documentary on the making of Fitzcarraldo, as Herzog’s photograph is depicted in negative, “the subject becomes a ghost, the devil becomes benevolent and merciful, and the camera becomes a mirror.” But maybe it’s the background, rather, that should catch our attention.
Who won the match? Probably Humboldt. But Herzog gets points for trying.