Dir.: Werner Herzog. Closed-captioned English & Español subs (cc).
From the book "Film As A Subversive Art" by Amos Vogel:
"Films are now emerging from Germany that reveal, perhaps for the first time, the true state of mind of a country that has undergone fascism, total war, destruction, and killed its Jews; these films may be considered examples of a new, complex humanism tattooed -- for a change -- on the skins of shell-shocked, psychologically maimed Aryans. Such a film is Fata Morgana (cruelly disregarded by critics), which may some day be viewed as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari of the New German Cinema with its declaration of independence from the old, and shedding of both the commercial film and imitative avant-garde. Fata Morgana is a sardonic, melancholic comment on man in the universe, its subtle and hallucinatory images accompanied by texts from sacred 16th century creation myths of Guatemalan Indians and the 1970 German avant-garde. It moves on a poetic, visual level, has no conventional plot, but cunningly employs the trappings of surface reality (sandscapes, barbed wire, industrial debris, natives that do not fit their environs) to probe depths beyond surrealism and metaphysics. The land, though Africa, is a landscape of the mind, archetypal and eternal. The immense, inhuman grandeur of primeval dunescapes, waters, and horizons is caught in sensuous travelling shots revealing man's triumphant and empty rape of the land: flaming red girders of abandoned factories in the middle of deserts, their initial purpose unfathomable, masses of abandoned vehicles, steel pipes, barrels, military supplies, rotting symbioticallty with animal cadavers in intimate, frozen family tableaux that melt into the soil before our eyes; emaciated black children and strange old men in mysterious, poverty-stricken habitats -- all of this permeated by sand, nameless dread, flies, and an insufferable sun made visible in heatwave distortions which lend objects and "sets" a hallucinatory quality. "In Paradise," says the narrator, "man is born dead"; and Herzog refers to Hieronymus Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights": his paradise, too, contained God's fatal errors from the start (visible only in corners "so that the painter would not be branded as heretic"). Among Herzog's ideological weapons are absurd, bizarre tableaux: a determined young German woman, senselessly making black children repeat "Blitzkrieg is madness" in German (all of them knee-deep in water); a ridiculous frogman with fins and snorkel, holding on to a huge turtle while breathlessly informing us that it has flippers to move, a mouth to take nourishment, and "a behind where it comes out again"; a sweating, maniacal lizard-lover (obviously affected by years in the African sun), his square-jawed German visage distorted behind black glasses as he sadistically manipulates the animal, comments on its habits, and attempts to avoid its bites (flies hover over festering wounds on his hands, inflicted earlier). The strongest sequence involves a catatonic drummer and a female pianist on a tiny stage in a brothel, who perform like robots, endlessly and off-key: "In the Golden Age, man and wife live in harmony", the commentator says, as they are photographed head-on, with all the merciful cruelty of a humanist filmmaker who must show everything. At the end, they remain immobile and there is no applause.
Stylistically, the film consists of a series of extended travel shots moving along a horizontal axis, reminiscent in their ideological intensity of Godard's Weekend highway sequence; these are interrupted by stylized, frequently immobile set pieces, in which the always anonymous protagonists address the camera directly in medium shot or close-up. The result is an interior travelogue, an obessive, hypnotic, and iconoclastic "comment" on technology, sentimentality, and stupidity, filled with everyday objects that reveal their frightening secrets; images, camera movements, and montage hewn as if from stone; a poetic, epic mood, perversely corrupted (and hence, elevated) by a sardonic, suffering magician, tremblingly aware of our limited possibilities, outrageous perseverance and almost lovable ridiculousness. With this film, Herzog fulfils the promise of genius implicit in his earlier Signs of Life and Even Dwarfs Started Small, progressing to a level of artistry at once more subversive and more inaccessible; for here, working solely with the materials of reality, the filmmaker in a cosmic pun on cinema verite recovers the metaphysical beneath the visible. It is only in such works that we achieve intimations of the radical new humanism of the future."
English subtitles: https://skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Share/FataMorgana-1971.srt?cid=a79c0f657a...
Subtítulos en Español: https://skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Share/FataMorgana-1971-espanol.srt?cid=a7...
Dir.: Werner Herzog. Closed-captioned English & Español subs (cc).
ReplyDeleteFrom the book "Film As A Subversive Art" by Amos Vogel:
"Films are now emerging from Germany that reveal, perhaps for the first time, the true state of mind of a country that has undergone fascism, total war, destruction, and killed its Jews; these films may be considered examples of a new, complex humanism tattooed -- for a change -- on the skins of shell-shocked, psychologically maimed Aryans. Such a film is Fata Morgana (cruelly disregarded by critics), which may some day be viewed as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari of the New German Cinema with its declaration of independence from the old, and shedding of both the commercial film and imitative avant-garde.
Fata Morgana is a sardonic, melancholic comment on man in the universe, its subtle and hallucinatory images accompanied by texts from sacred 16th century creation myths of Guatemalan Indians and the 1970 German avant-garde. It moves on a poetic, visual level, has no conventional plot, but cunningly employs the trappings of surface reality (sandscapes, barbed wire, industrial debris, natives that do not fit their environs) to probe depths beyond surrealism and metaphysics.
The land, though Africa, is a landscape of the mind, archetypal and eternal. The immense, inhuman grandeur of primeval dunescapes, waters, and horizons is caught in sensuous travelling shots revealing man's triumphant and empty rape of the land: flaming red girders of abandoned factories in the middle of deserts, their initial purpose unfathomable, masses of abandoned vehicles, steel pipes, barrels, military supplies, rotting symbioticallty with animal cadavers in intimate, frozen family tableaux that melt into the soil before our eyes; emaciated black children and strange old men in mysterious, poverty-stricken habitats -- all of this permeated by sand, nameless dread, flies, and an insufferable sun made visible in heatwave distortions which lend objects and "sets" a hallucinatory quality. "In Paradise," says the narrator, "man is born dead"; and Herzog refers to Hieronymus Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights": his paradise, too, contained God's fatal errors from the start (visible only in corners "so that the painter would not be branded as heretic").
Among Herzog's ideological weapons are absurd, bizarre tableaux: a determined young German woman, senselessly making black children repeat "Blitzkrieg is madness" in German (all of them knee-deep in water); a ridiculous frogman with fins and snorkel, holding on to a huge turtle while breathlessly informing us that it has flippers to move, a mouth to take nourishment, and "a behind where it comes out again"; a sweating, maniacal lizard-lover (obviously affected by years in the African sun), his square-jawed German visage distorted behind black glasses as he sadistically manipulates the animal, comments on its habits, and attempts to avoid its bites (flies hover over festering wounds on his hands, inflicted earlier). The strongest sequence involves a catatonic drummer and a female pianist on a tiny stage in a brothel, who perform like robots, endlessly and off-key: "In the Golden Age, man and wife live in harmony", the commentator says, as they are photographed head-on, with all the merciful cruelty of a humanist filmmaker who must show everything. At the end, they remain immobile and there is no applause.
Stylistically, the film consists of a series of extended travel shots moving along a horizontal axis, reminiscent in their ideological intensity of Godard's Weekend highway sequence; these are interrupted by stylized, frequently immobile set pieces, in which the always anonymous protagonists address the camera directly in medium shot or close-up.
ReplyDeleteThe result is an interior travelogue, an obessive, hypnotic, and iconoclastic "comment" on technology, sentimentality, and stupidity, filled with everyday objects that reveal their frightening secrets; images, camera movements, and montage hewn as if from stone; a poetic, epic mood, perversely corrupted (and hence, elevated) by a sardonic, suffering magician, tremblingly aware of our limited possibilities, outrageous perseverance and almost lovable ridiculousness.
With this film, Herzog fulfils the promise of genius implicit in his earlier Signs of Life and Even Dwarfs Started Small, progressing to a level of artistry at once more subversive and more inaccessible; for here, working solely with the materials of reality, the filmmaker in a cosmic pun on cinema verite recovers the metaphysical beneath the visible. It is only in such works that we achieve intimations of the radical new humanism of the future."
English subtitles: https://skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Share/FataMorgana-1971.srt?cid=a79c0f657a...
Subtítulos en Español: https://skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Share/FataMorgana-1971-espanol.srt?cid=a7...