The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner - Werner Herzog - 1974

If we can procure one thread that manages to run throughout the twisted catalogue that forms the 40 plus year career of everyone’s favourite German madman Werner Herzog, then it surely that of the wilful outsider, people who transcend societies self imposed boundaries in some form of euphoric personal odyssey. People who stumble along the fine line of genius/fevered craziness, inebriated by their need to push the limits of personal endurance. People who we can’t help but see as varied series of reflections on Herr Herzog himself.

We don’t have to look far to find examples of this, from his infamous exploits with Kinski bringing to life egomaniacal adventurers bounding along the Amazon and through the jungle in Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982), to his documentaries charting the lives of people who choose to outcast themselves in some of the world’s most inhospitable places such as the Sahara in Fata Morgana (1971), Antarctica in Encounters at the End of the World (2007) and in Alaska with a shit load of hungry Bears in Grizzly Man (2005).

The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner proves to be one of the greatest examples of this auteurist trait. Following an astounding opening sequence in which we see a ski ‘flight’ played to us at 1/20th speed set to the mesmeric tones of regular Herzog collaborator Popol Vuh. We meet the titular Walter Steiner, a gangly and unassuming young Swiss man with a penchant for woodcraft and throwing himself 170 metres through the air off ramps with only a pair of sticks on his feet for protection.

Here we enter the mad world of Ski-flying, that’s right, not ski-jumping, but its altogether more extreme offshoot ski flying. Rather than attempt to contextualise the event for us, and attempt meaningful psychological examination of those who take part, Herzog explains it all with the previously mention super slow speed camera footage. This stunning imagery captures perfectly the sheer euphoria (or ecstasy) the competitors feel upon embracing the closest we can come to the grace of flight without evolving ourselves a pair of wings.

Unfortunately, the graceful flight is often not met with an equally decorative landing, and we also get to witness what happens when it all goes horrifically wrong upon returning to terra firma. Though rather than some garish ESPN style ‘When Ski-Flights go wrong!” exploitation, Herzog even lends these scenes an elegiac touch.

It is this conflict of the ecstasy versus the danger that we find Steiner caught it. Steiner was at the time the most amazing ski-flyer the world had ever seen, other top competitors it seemed even avoided events he was involved in, as whatever length the pack would set, Steiner would throw on another 30 metres. This leads to an event in Yugoslavia where Steiner crushes previous records to such an extent that he is left with little safety run off, culminating in him having a bad fall, leaving him bloodied and concussed.

It is here that the film becomes especially interesting, as Steiner wishes to leave the event, but the organisers begin to apply pressure, demanding he perform again for the paying audiences. Here the film begins to raise questions of an athlete’s responsibility to his fans, as Steiner becomes convinced that they only come to watch because of a car-crash mentality bloodlust, waiting for the moment when he pushes the limits just one step too far. We leave Steiner as a melancholy character unsure of his future within the sport.

In a back catalogue peppered liberally with must see pictures, I’d go as far to say that The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner is right up there with the very best of Herzog’s oeuvre. He always seems to be at his best when he transcends the sometimes quotidian seeming nature of the subjects he chooses and wraps them in a dreamlike weave, blurring lines between documentation of an event and artful romanticism. Nowhere is that better found than here.

Los Angeles Plays Itself - Thom Anderson - 2003

The image of the cityscape in cinema has long been a personal obsession of mine, from classics such as Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) and Dziga Vertov’s preeminent montage document Man with a Movie Camera (1929), through to recent exponents of the cinematic city, such as Michael Mann, who never lets a films plot get in the way of presenting his ultra-modernist visions of sleek and cold-hearted corporate glass dome cityscapes, or to reference a very recent and particularly wondrous example, we can consider Terence Davis’ feisty homage to his home town of Liverpool with Of Time and the City (2008). Davis uses historical council documentarian footage to aid in building a picture of his youth as a sepia-toned poem. With Los Angeles Plays Itself, Thom Anderson has no need to visit local councils for such footage in order to present the city he once knew, instead the city he knew can still be found documented in hundreds of thousands of homes around the world.

As “the world’s most photographed city” Los Angeles is a place whose history seems to have been created through the lens of the filmmakers who chose to decamp there. As a resident Angelino, Anderson looks to dispel many of the myths that seem to have become part of the regular vernacular when considering the city, and searches for an image of the city lived in by the “39 out of every 40 residents of Los Angeles who aren’t part of the movie industry”.

Therefore rather than a personalised poetic elegy like that presented by Davis, Anderson (usually a tutor at CalArts) presents a heavily politicised audio/visual dissertation that considers the ramifications of living in a city whose double identity has helped in the deformation and reconstruction of large swathes of it, helping create the misshapen segregated beast that the “City of Angels” can be seen as today.

Like a cinematic equivalent of Grandmaster Flash and 2ManyDJ’s, Anderson builds his documentary through the (un-commissioned) employment of hundreds of film clips remixed together to paint a picture of a city whose cinematic representation has distorted it’s geography, history and even its name (though Anderson’s complaints about the abbreviation of the city’s title to L.A. does come across as overly fastidious). Voiceover commentary is provided by Encke King, whose relaxed and muted tone always threatens to veer towards dull though somehow contains just enough bite to keep you attentive for the near three hours duration.

The range of clips employed by Anderson is expansive and to be honest quite superlative. From the obvious and much revered documents of the city seen in the likes of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993) via unexpected delights such as Michelangelo Antonioni’s chimerical Zabriskie Point (1970), Peter Bogdanovich’s debut Targets (1968) and Hal Halicki’s car destruction orgy Gone in 60 Seconds (1974), through to even referencing trash that would be otherwise consigned to an unloved eternity at the bottom of supermarket sale bins such as Virtuosity (1995), Death Wish 4 (1987) and Sly Stallone’s self penned ego massage Cobra (1986).

Anderson gradually layers depth into his essay, beginning with the shallow surface examination the use of Los Angeles’ famous art-deco architecture within films. Before really hitting its stride with a fascinating dissection of the history of downtown’s Bunker Hill district. Anderson finally bares his teeth in the second half with an angry deconstruction of the false histories created for the city.

Even with a running time that makes the documentary seem as sprawling and over-bearing as the city itself, Los Angeles Plays Itself inevitably contains omissions. The most obvious cinematic omission would seem to be Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) a film that like Tarantino’s other early work, happily charts a Los Angeles that lives lights years away from the Hollywood Hills crowd. Though it’s representation of the city as one of small time crooks, bric-a-brac store dwelling rapists and pop-culture hitmen will probably still make Anderson’s blood boil.

As the film draws to a close one also begins to feel there is a large hole in the documentary with its lack of in-depth reference to the multi-ethnic make-up of the city outside of brief reference’s to the Watts riots and the Rodney King beating. This is made up for though with a fantastic closing segment that rather than taking the obvious route of examining what Anderson feels to be the exploitative and unfair representations of south-central Los Angeles as urban guerrilla warfare zones as seen in Boyz in the Hood (1991), and the post ’92 riot crowd such as Menace II Society (1993). He instead pays loving tribute to the black independent cinema movements of the 1970’s, covering such films as Charles Burnett’s much admired Killer of Sheep (1977).

Far from attempting to appeal to the masses Anderson has created a document by a film fanatic and very much for film fanatics. If the subject matter may occasionally appear daunting, a dry as Death Valley humour helps the film along, from comparing the punctilious production of hardcore right-wing cop show Dragnet to the methods employed by Art-House deities Bresson and Ozu, to even admitting the documentary’s title is lifted from an early seventies gay porn flick. Anderson has created a work that any self-respecting film student really should hunt out*.

*and hunt out you will have to do, as due to the abundance of unlicensed film clips this is unlikely to ever see a DVD release. Of course searching the darker more legally dubious corners of the internet may help in yielding positive results, not that I could ever promote such ideas.....

Woodstock - Michael Wadleigh - 1970

To pigeonhole Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock as merely a ‘concert film’ would be to do it a great disservice. The documentary only spends around 40% of its running time showing some of the acts playing at the festival, the other 60% devoted to capturing the atmosphere and attendees of this return ‘to the garden’. The film as viewed from a perspective of almost 40 years after the fact, acts as an insightful time capsule into the fears, exigencies and aspirations of a supposedly sanguine generation whom have taken on a mythos of misinterpreted romanticised conjecture as the years have passed.

As we see the festival organisers and attendees spout their peace will out rhetoric, as well as the humour now evident in their naivety of a music festival as statement of cultural rebellion, there is a sense of melancholy in seeing all this hope and righteousness that would soon waste away (head down to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco today to see the crushingly gentrified and strung out remnants of the scene).

If all the legends were believed, then it would seem that the second half of the 1960’s for American youths was nothing but a big love in of flowers, good drugs and free love, where any problems could be resolved with a harmonious sense of vicissitude. Yet in reality by this point (July 1969) the bubble had burst on the ‘hippie’ ethos; the Vietnam war was at its appalling peak (the horrors of events such as My Lai still fresh in the mind). Many contemporaries were being imprisoned for protests and avoiding the draft. Promoters of the mind expansion ideals such as Timothy Leary were being revealed as frauds. Richard Nixon had ushered in a new era of republican rule following the assassination of Robert Kennedy in the build up to the 1968 presidential elections, and just days before the festival took place The Manson Family committed their famously brutal murders of Sharon Tate and friends, for many signalling a death knell for the idealistic commune family scenarios. We could therefore take the rather pessimistic (but not inaccurate) view of Woodstock as the wild last stand of the ‘free love’ generation.

In fairness whilst Woodstock does not refer explicitly to the wider context of troubles outside the festival setting (other than Country Joe & the Fish’s comic karaoke rendition of scathingly anti-Vietnam war anthem “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die-Rag”), Wadleigh doesn’t attempt to disguise the fact that the festival’s “3 days of peace, love, music” was beset by many problems.

Therefore we see torrential winds and rains pounding the site on the first day, turning the site into a virtual disaster zone (which much to the chagrin of the attendees no doubt, had to receive aid from ‘the man’ in order to cope). We see that many of the young attendees weren’t completely at peace with their world, inside they were disillusioned, frantic and just wanting to be accepted for what they were in an America that still looked upon non-conformist lifestyles with considerable disdain.

We also see music wise, that not every performance was a classic. Some of the bands perform way under their standards (Jefferson Airplane), others seem oddly out of place (Sha-Na-Na), and humorously it reveals that the festival’s most celebrated performance (that of Sir Jimi of Hendrix) was only actually witnessed by a small remaining crowd on the last day, with most of the attendees having packed up and left by that point.

There are of course some stunning performances to see, the aforementioned Hendrix performance is as ‘electric’ as the legend goes. At the other end of the guitar spectrum, Richie Havens creates wonders with just an acoustic to hand, and credit must go to Santana’s young drummer who is quite possibly the most amazingly gifted, grunting, gurning, drumming wunderkind I have ever seen.

Viewed as a documentary, the film does not attempt to pose or answer any of the wider contextual questions that could have been posed, or even that of why people would want to spend three days together caked in mud. Wadleigh is happy to present an observational account of events, often making appealing use of split screen in order to show interviews and present a wide array of images at the same time.

And it’s these images that give the answers to anyone looking to question this ‘cultural happening’, people were looking for a communication in a world of increasing isolation, even in the eye of the storm, creed, colour, sexual orientation, personal presentation, none of this mattered. Essential viewing and an essential cultural artefact, you dig?