Few filmmakers owe quite so much to the ascent of DVD as Werner Herzog. Six years ago the New German Cinema lion’s reputation was in bad shape; when Michael Atkinson wrote a great, personal appreciation of the director for Film Comment in early 2000, one had the distinct impression that the author was trying to resuscitate an out-of-fashion oeuvre. I was in school at the time, curious about Herzog, and the amount of serious writing I was able to dredge up on him was negligible. By then he wasn’t afforded much more status than cult novelty, a dubiously motivated, decadent, self-styled madman with an affinity for carny types, only slightly more worthy of study than, say, Alexandro Jodorowsky.

Herzog’s turn of fortune from curator/director of anomalous art brut to petrified Auteur Persona timed up nicely with the downhill journey of the riverboat in his 1983 Fitzcarraldo and its myth-making companion piece, Les Blank’s behind-the-scenes Burden of Dreams. Compared to Herzog’s early work, it’s obvious that something had gone lost as the director himself had been pushed to the forefront and become his own subject. A once-intuitive imagistic imagination was gone dull with polish; Herzog was over-articulating, growing reverent of beauty that he’d once indelibly tossed-out. His gypsy backstory, a legend-wreathed delight to early admirer Manny Farber, seemed more cannily eccentric with each ad nauseum repetition of the same handful of anecdotes and sartorial affectations: the first phone call at 17, the epic walking tours, the notebooks filled with microscopic handwriting, the stolen 35mm camera (and all the arrogance of vision it implies)… It was as much as suggested that, by the time Robin Williams trod across Werner’s face in What Dreams May Come, a death knell was sounding.

This all changed when, later in 2000, roughly coinciding with the release of the director’s likable, if distinctly throwback Greatest Hits reel My Best Fiend, Anchor Bay Entertainment began rolling out Herzog’s body of work on DVD. His return to fiction film, the woeful Invincible, as good as proved that that something remained missing, but this was just one niggling flop in an overall reversal of fortune—at present Herzog has a new-ish Faber & Faber interview collection and a coffee table photo book to his name, and one of his three new docs, Grizzly Man, sitting at the very top of the metacritic scale.

New Yorker DVD, finishing the job for Anchor Bay, now allows us to consider some of Herzog’s early work with fresh eyes upon the disc premiere of the director’s first feature film, Signs of Life, and his most essential documentary, Land of Silence and Darkness. It’s a not-to-be-missed opportunity to not just watch these films, but to imagine just how strange they must’ve looked 35 years ago, before generations of cinephiles had lofted Herzog and his Munich peers into the familiarity of the pantheon. Signs of Life is a singular, sundazed movie that jackknifes an hour in on an obscure outburst of insanity. WWII: a cache of three German soldiers are assigned to oversee a munitions depot in a white, desiccant fortress on the occupied Greek island of Kos. The first we meet, the closest the movie has to a star, is the recuperating Stroszek (Swiss actor Peter Brogle), quiet and intent, but with a flare-nosed hobgoblin quality lying just under the surface.

The movie’s first hour is literally “about” slack days of torpid motion and trivial amusements: scratching bare, sunburned feet in dry dirt, hypnotizing a chicken with a piece of chalk (the same scene recurs in Herzog’s Kasper Hauser), building a better roach-trap. It’s an uncommonly lovely film of digressions, built on a fascination with paralytic Mediterranean sunshine and the scattered bloomings of Stavros Xarhakos’s score. The unnarrative template for Claire Denis’s Foreign Legion minutiae-epic Beau Travail is here, as is a model for Denis’s willingness to improv into wherever un-obvious beauty leads the film: Brogle’s head, in profile, against a nighttime sea, a citadel flooded by weeds and wildflowers, the steady thrumming drone of the insects…

Stroszek is, with no fuss of explanation, lost to madness and the movie, gradually scaled back to become a blip in the landscape—then nothing, installed invisibly by a miniature coup as the fortresses’ scurrying one-man army, launching a useless war against humanity. Scenes of fretting Nazi commandants back in the city are all dead air, but the lovely rebellion of a sally of daytime fireworks as good as announces the film as the arrival of a major talent.

Though Signs of Life’s hero recedes long before the final reel, Land of Silence and Darkness has a wonderfully huddled quality throughout with its subjects, the blind-deaf. The film’s starting point is Municher Fini Straubinger, a fiftysomething woman who’s lost her sight and hearing as the result of a terrific fall taken in her teens. With her upright bourgeoisie bearing and clutch of pearls, she could almost make a Marx Brothers’ dowager, but the diligence of her mission, if absurd, is nothing funny. She travels Germany, making contact with the similarly disabled, working tirelessly to alleviate, through muddled contact, the terrible sense of isolation that comes from the absence of vital senses—as much to temper her own loneliness, one suspects, as that of the lost-to-the-world country bumpkins she visits.

Though Herzog never lapses into easy reverence of holy fools and wild children, there is much to think on in the contrast between the documentation of Ms. Straubinger’s constant tread toward contact with a remembered world and the footage from a school for born blind-deaf children, or of those rural afflicted who’ve long ago lost any capacity for communication. For Fini, whose bedrock of measured grammar and middle-class values remains intact, her condition is a fate-ordained asceticism, but 29-year-old born blind-deaf Vladmir Kokol, never touched by education, simply drifts in a fog of unmediated sensation, battering his face with a ball and sqealching his lips like a chimp. Happy? Maybe. I remember a friend of mine who’d been a janitor at a home for the deaf talking about the unearthly noises that would come up at night when the residents were having sex: “I never realized how much we must hold back!” But when Herzog’s camera hangs on to the reverence of an old blind-deaf man lost in the texture of a stumbled-onto tree trunk, I don’t think the implication is that lack or ignorance is really bliss—just very, very different.

One of the school’s teachers discusses the difficulty of imparting abstract moral lessons to the children—“good” and “evil” are boiled down to “helping” or “hitting,” by which definition I think that Silence and Darkness is a good movie; there’s not a trace of put-on to its steady empathy. What a blessing is a truly curious camera; what an abomination one that wants to tell us everything. The film’s sense of inquiry will help me to remember its faces: unself-conscious, haloed by the windows of dark rooms, fogged eyes drifting—Herzog’s famous landscapes give way to an intent, close search for unguess-able inner terrains.

New Yorker has never distinguished itself as a company to deliver anything but the leanest of home video packages, and this is no exception—only Signs of Life has any frills to speak of, in the form of a Herzog commentary shared with doofus straight man Norman Hill, his partner in prior Anchor Bay disc tracks. There are a few unfortunately precise answers to Hill’s squeezed metaphors and inquiries (“The difference between insecticide and genocide is only a little step”), but largely Herzog manages to gracefully defer answering questions like “What is it that pushes Stroszek over the top?” His ego more-or-less reined in, or at least feeling justified here, the old man even has moments of fine insight. At a time when so many movies recall only each other, leaving us primed to watch something else “that reminded me of” as soon as the credits roll, the point of entry that Herzog offers to his work is vital. They “originated out of real life.” Like only a handful of filmmakers—Lumière, Pialat—these are movies that end and leave us eager for the frightful, fascinating world.
—NICK PINKERTON