For Herzog, music is an equal partner to imagery and spoken words, tasked with facilitating the unveiling of the sublime. The director shows no interest in a film score functioning as mere commentary on the visual track, nor as a narrative layer adding literal meaning to images: music is what captures that state of ecstasy through which the deepest truth reveals itself. If truth were merely a succession of facts, music could claim no right to partake in profound vision. But truth is a solitary, exhausting quest culminating in a moment of radical illumination: there the woodcarver Steiner lands from his flight; there the magical power of music does its work.
Jean and Joan Holbrooke think, speak, even stumble over words in unison – a slip they once made together in court gives the film its title. Drawing on twins Freda and Greta Chaplin, known in 1980s Britain for their total symbiosis, Herzog turns the tale into a visionary fabl...
Whether Herzog called upon Florian Fricke and Popol Vuh to craft layers of sonic hypnosis for the exploits of Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo; or drew on world music with startling, decontextualizing intent – such as using the deeply Sardinian polyphony of the Tenores di Orgosolo for his most visionary documentaries; or turned, as in recent years, to Ernst Reijseger, a classically trained composer steeped in the European avant-garde; or followed the advice of Kubrick, who found it absurd to compose new music when so much magnificent work already existed, weaving expansive excerpts by Wagner, Verdi, Rachmaninoff, and Handel: ultimately, for Herzog, music has always meant ecstasy and truth.
One never comes closer to absolute imperturbability – Werner Herzog’s secret trademark – than in Fata Morgana, one of his earliest works. The priceless musical duo appearing in the third part of the film represents, for Herzog, a true Golden Age.
Herzog wrapped shooting on Aguirre in February 1971, and just a month later he was in Planica, in the former Yugoslavia, filming Walter Steiner’s ski-flying leaps. “We are approaching the limit,” Steiner declared, protesting against organizers who pushed athletes to jump ever higher, turning jumping into outright flight. The shots of skiers crashing in extreme slow motion, underscored by Florian Fricke’s haunted score, carry us precisely where the limit is relentlessly breached…
On January 16, 1888, for the memorial mass marking the first anniversary of the death of Joseph-Michel Le Soufaché, one of Paris’s most prominent architects, Fauré composed and conducted “un petit requiem.” It was entirely out of step with the grand requiems written up to that point: a soothing piece of music celebrating death as “a happy deliverance, an aspiration toward afterlife” rather than a terrifying warning of eternal damnation for sinners. Herzog chose it for the soundtrack of what remains one of his masterpieces of irony.
Herzog arrives in Siberia, and immediately, alongside visionaries and shamans, the local eccentrics and oddballs step forward to have their say. Here, Herzog’s world-music instincts were captivated by the throat singers of the Tuva Republic – though at the time, the entire Western world was fascinated by this overtone singing technique producing multiple notes at once.
t is not Herzog’s finest documentary, it must be said – probably because not even a spirit as unflappable as Herzog feels entirely at home with commissioned work, and this project was commissioned by ZDF, Germany’s second public television channel. Yet it remains astonishing that Herzog’s omnivorous curiosity reached Basilicata, confronting in one of his signature hand-to-hand engagements that figure of existential and musical extremes: Gesualdo da Venosa – composer, recluse, murderer.
