Armond White: Revival of the Fittest

(ENG 282 students--this is a highly recommended film that is one of your options for outside viewing responses)

Revival of the Fittest
by Armond White
Criterion Collection



Revanche begins with a reflection of trees in a lake at twilight. They’re seen upside down—an image of nature reversed—yet the earth is eerily calm. This almost otherworldly illusion arouses a viewer’s awareness of perspective, which is then disturbed by the splash of an object tossed into the middle of the lake. Widening ripples shatter the impression of stillness, and a genuine sense of mystery sets in. Such an intimation of the supernatural typifies Austrian writer-director Götz Spielmann’s unique vision in this film.

Although Revanche is Spielmann’s first film to be released in the United States, it is actually his fifth overall, so his style and tone come to us fully developed. He began his career as a playwright, yet Revanche is thoroughly cinematic in story, look, and pace. Its chronicle of underworld desperation and domestic loyalties observes a plain, uncontrived natural universe whose immanence and splendor are depicted realistically, mysteriously, classically. This is the story of several seemingly unrelated characters whose interconnectedness evokes the quizzical, unknowable facts of existence and announces the potential of faith.

Spielmann’s arrival on the American film scene is exciting for the way Revanche opposes the contemporary trend toward dark pessimism with a vision that contemplates light and, conditionally, belief. At one point, a repentant character is asked, “What would your God say?” and she answers, “He’d understand.” Revanche’s plot resembles classic film noir yet ultimately renovates it: Alex (Johannes Krisch), a strapping ex-convict working as a bouncer at the Cinderella, a bar/brothel in Vienna, schemes to escape that mean world, along with Tamara (Irina Potapenko), a Ukrainian immigrant working there as a stripper and prostitute, by robbing a bank and investing the money in a friend’s bar. An unforeseen turn of events reconnects Alex to his estranged grandfather, Hausner (Hannes Thanheiser), an elderly farmer in a small village, and to the rural life Alex escaped. These events also irrevocably tie Alex’s and Tamara’s fates to those of a couple living near Hausner’s farm, policeman Robert (Andreas Lust) and housewife Susanne (Ursula Strauss). Moving from city to country allows Spielmann to poignantly contrast the experiences of the two couples.

But these characters’ relationships go deeper than dramatic coincidence. By giving both couples equal narrative weight, Spielmann shows striking commonalities among seemingly different people. When Robert complains of being cursed with bad luck, he echoes Alex’s earlier cry of desperation. Each of the four main characters becomes involved in a form of retaliation against life’s unfairness (Revanche is German for “revenge,” as well as “second chance,” as in a rematch). Spielmann’s classical unities and timeless storytelling verities avoid sentimentality and thus seem fresh.

Like that disturbing image of an upside-down lakefront, Spielmann’s charac­ters change our perspective on the world and life as movies conventionally present them. The spiritual conflicts of the dead-end urban underground, where gangsters and hookers deceive and exploit one another, extend to the peaceful-looking countryside, where people live in neat houses and work in respectable professions. Bringing together urban and rural struggle, Spielmann balances mankind’s philosophical quandaries and daily strife, searching for meaning in our shared fate.

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Watching Theology: Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man (2005)

Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man (2005)
Watching Theology



A few summers ago, while most of us were out camping or having a bar-b-q, Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend were being killed and eaten by a starving grizzly bear in Alaska. One of our most significant working directors, Werner Herzog, picked up his video footage and compiled a documentary about the severity of nature and Treadwell's death. In this episode, we look at the tragic life of "the Grizzly Man" as interpreted and remembered by Herzog and his cynicism. Is nature neutral, sinister or - as Treadwell believed - the Disney-like world of compassion and sentiment?

To Listen to the Episode

Benjamin Noys: Antiphusis -- Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man

Antiphusis: Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man
by Benjamin Noys
Film-Philosophy

The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn’t call, doesn’t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don’t you listen to the Song of Life.

----Werner Herzog

At the heart of the cinema of Werner Herzog lies the vision of discordant and chaotic
nature – the vision of anti-nature. Throughout his work we can trace a constant fascination with the violence of nature and its indifference, or even hostility, to human desires and ambitions. For example, in his early film Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) we have the recurrent image of a crippled chicken continually pecked by its companions. Here the violence of nature provides a sly prelude to the anarchic carnival violence of the dwarfs’ revolt against their oppressive institution. This fascination is particularly evident in his documentary filmmaking, although Herzog himself deconstructs this generic category. In the ‘Minnesota Declaration’ (1999)3 on ‘truth and fact in documentary cinema’ he radically distinguishes between ‘fact’, linked to norms and the limits of Cinéma Vérité, and ‘truth’ as ecstatic illumination, which ‘can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization’ (in Cronin (ed.) 2002, 301). In particular he identifies nature as the site of this ecstatic illumination – in which we find ‘Lessons of Darkness’ – but only through the lack of any ‘voice’ of nature. While Herzog constantly films nature he films it as hell or as utterly alien. This is not a nature simply corrupted by humanity but a nature inherently ‘corrupt’ in itself; Herzog’s vision of nature is a kind of anti-vitalism, a horror at the promiscuous vitality of nature.

Such a vision is evident in Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man (2005), in which it is
articulated by explicitly raising the question of how a filmmaker should capture
images of nature. The film is structured as an inquiry into the fate of the ‘grizzly man’ – Timothy Treadwell, an amateur bear expert and filmmaker who lived amongst these creatures in the Alaskan wilderness for ten years. Herzog engages in a kind of cinematic ‘duel’ with what he regards as Treadwell’s sentimentalised view of nature. Alongside the film I place the later work of Lacan, in which nature is theorised as ‘antiphusis’ (anti-nature) or counternature. In the 1970s Lacan elaborated a strikingly similar conception of nature to Herzog’s, as ‘internally plagued by “rottenness” [pourriture], by a decay or defect out of which culture (as antiphusis) bubbles forth [boulliner]’ (in Johnston 2006, 36). This is not a simple matter of imposing Lacan’s work as the key to Herzog’s. Herzog vehemently objects to any thematic, academic or critical reading of his films, arguing that ‘[f]ilm should be looked at straight on, it is not the art of scholars but of illiterates.’ (in Cronin (ed.) 2002, 70). This antiintellectualism may well be problematic but it does raise a warning to any critic tempted to impose a psychoanalytic master-code. Instead I choose a more modest approach in identifying a convergence between Lacan and Herzog in their thinking of nature, and also in a certain political scepticism that resonates between them concerning the post-1968 revolutionary movements. In very different forms and styles they both indicate how the deadlock of a mute and corrupt nature also links to a political deadlock around the naturalism of desire and revolution in the 1970s. If ‘mother nature doesn’t call’ then we have to re-formulate any politics of nature, which is, if anything, a more pressing concern
today.

In October 2003 Treadwell and his companion Amie Huguenard were brutally attacked and killed by a wild grizzly bear. It is a macabre fact that Treadwell’s camera was
running at the time of the attack but the lens cap had been left on, leaving an audio
recording of the deaths (which Herzog listens to in one of the most disturbing scenes in the film). Treadwell had collected over one hundred hours of footage over five years at the time of his death. As Herzog states in the film’s Production Notes, when he and his editor Joe Bini came to view this material, much of it never seen:

We could not believe it. It couldn’t have been our wildest fantasy to find something like this, … We had to stop and walk out of the building. Both of
us had quit smoking, and yet we had to smoke a cigarette to take what was coming next. It was one of the great experiences I’ve ever had with film footage. It was so beautiful.

Herzog’s film makes use of his selection from this material, alongside interviews with Treadwell’s friends and family, as well as other more critical parties. Particularly important in structuring Herzog’s film is his own commentary, which makes explicit his interpretation of both Treadwell’s life and actions, as well as the images that we see.

These elements are organised together to structure the film as a demythologisation
of Treadwell, casting him as a self-conscious styler of his own image, a
failed actor who had transformed himself into a new role as the protector of the bears. Herzog makes clear his belief that the bears did not require Treadwell’s protection and that other motives were at work – such as Treadwell’s desire to escape the world of human civilisation and to enter into a ‘primal bond’ with the bears. Of course we have no true access to Treadwell’s point of view, except the chosen statements Herzog has placed on screen. This is therefore an uneven contest and we can view the film as one of antagonism and rivalry between the two filmmakers, one living and one dead, over the conception of nature and their own obsessions. David Thomson’s comment on why Herzog is not the ideal documentarian seems particularly apposite: ‘You feel he has his mind made up about so many things – and so you do not always want to trust what you are seeing’ (2003, 397). Previously Herzog has defended the protagonists of his films as neither marginal nor
eccentric, but as belonging to the same ‘family’ of desperate and solitary rebels against a mad society (in Cronin (ed.) 2002, 68-9). In the case of Treadwell Herzog appears to lack this sympathetic identification. Instead, the structure of rivalry recalls something of Herzog’s relationship with his alter-ego the actor Klaus Kinski – ‘my best fiend’ to recall the title of Herzog’s film on the subject. Coincidentally that relationship was also characterised by conflict over nature.

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