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Werner Herzog: Long Takes, Truth and Character

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How much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck (Herzog, 1976)

Werner Herzog was known in the early part of his career (the 1970s and 1980s) for ambitious, well-loved fiction films such as “Fitzcarraldo” and “Aguirre, the Wrath of God”. He was one of the leading figures of the New German Cinema alongside Fassbinder and Wenders.

Today, he’s at least as well known as a documentarian, having directed classics such as “Grizzly Man” and “Encounters at the End of the World”. In his films, he tries to present what he calls “ecstatic truth.”

What does he mean by “ecstatic truth”? In a 1999 interview, he states, “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.”

So, fabrication, imagination and stylization. On the other hand, Herzog defended unbroken long takes – one would think, the opposite of those – in a 2006 article on one of his fiction films. He told the reporter: “Sometimes the beauty or the horror of an image only settles in the mind when it is shown for an extended period.”

In his 1976 documentary “How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck,” about the World Livestock Auctioneer Championship (with digressions into the Pennsylvania countryside), he excels at using long takes to draw viewers into the film, with help from minimal but pointed camera movement. The first four minutes of the movie are a closeup on one auctioneers’s face as he demonstrates his craft. The film starts on an extreme closeup of the man’s face, then slowly zooms out until we ae seeing a medium closeup at 0:50 right when the subject is talking about how he got into the craft because he was intrigued by auctioneers’ ability to hold the attention of several hundred people. Herzog is relying on this ability with this stark intro. Without a cut, the camera zooms back in on an extreme tight shot of the man’s face, as he performs for Herzog while shyness flickers across his face (at 1:40, for example).

Herzog does not divert from closeups until a motivated pan to follow a trophy and cow-milking hand motions at 5:58. The camera zooms back out for the film’s first two-person shot. Herzog deliberately does not cut the take until 6:30, when the auctioneer is finished with his presentation to the camera and allows himself to look self-conscious and nervous.

After that, the film is outside, and the camera is much more active, starting with a tracking shot from a car filming the Pennsylvania countryside. But Herzog will return to the intimate long takes of auctioneers throughout the film (for example, at 17:20).

Perhaps, in this case, the imagination and stylization needed to reveal ecstatic truth comes from his subjects. The long takes get out of their way.

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on “Werner Herzog: Long Takes, Truth and Character”
75 Comments on “Werner Herzog: Long Takes, Truth and Character”

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