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On Movies: Herzog's 'Happy People' fascinates; 'Emperor' falls flat

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, March 8, 2013: In 2007, the German director Werner Herzog released a film called "Encounters at the End of the World." The subject was Antarctica and those who love it, but the title could have described the whole of Herzog's prolific career. Herzog has directed about two dozen documentary features, beginning in the late 1960s with "The Flying Doctors of East Africa," and 19 dramatic films.

In almost all of them, Herzog shows his fascination with places and people not just off the beaten path but on the edge of the known universe. I don't think it's over simplification to say that Herzog seeks out kindred spirits for his films -- people who, to quote Jack Kerouac, "are mad to live." And he finds them in the strangest places.

Herzog's most famous narrative film is "Fitzcarraldo" (1982), the chaotic saga of an opera-obsessed man who drags a steamboat over a mountain in the Amazon. To make that movie, Herzog and crew basically dragged a real steamboat over a real mountain in the real Amazon. The whole crazed affair, made more insane by the antics of the volatile star Klaus Kinski, was recorded by the American filmmaker Les Blank in a marvelous documentary called "Burden of Dreams." "Burden of Dreams" is probably a better film than "Fitzcarraldo." It's funnier, that's for sure.

In recent years, Herzog's documentaries have been more notable than his fiction films. True to his history, he has of late continued to choose subjects and locales that are fascinating and offbeat -- a man who foolishly tries to make friends with Alaskan grizzly bears; haunting prehistoric art in the rarely seen depths of a French cave; men on death row waiting to die, The new Herzog documentary, "Happy People: A Year in the Taiga," fits the pattern. A remarkable accomplishment, "Happy People" records a year in the life of the inhabitants of a small, thoroughly isolated village in Siberia.

Every winter, in cold that can exceed 50 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, hunters from the village travel more than 100 miles into the snowbound wilderness to trap sable. Almost everything the villagers do the rest of the year is in preparation for that winter trek, and "Happy People" tells the story of that year with stunning images and a compelling sense of the high drama that fills every day of the villagers' precarious existence.

"Happy People" was brilliantly filmed, but not by Herzog. In effect, he found it, and, with permission, appropriated it. The appeal to Herzog is clear -- the film presents yet another encounter at the end of the world.

It all began when Herzog was visiting a friend who happened to be watching a four-hour Russian TV documentary. It told the story of a village on the Yenisei River in the Taiga, the vast forest that spreads across Siberia. The focus was on the village's hunters and fishermen. These men include both ethnic Russians and native Siberian Kets -- the latter are, in effect, an endangered race, like aborigines in many lands.

Herzog was fascinated by what he saw and got in touch with the Russian director, Dmitry Vasyukov, to ask permission to edit the footage into a feature of about an hour and a half. Vasyukov agreed, and he and Herzog share directors' credit.

"Happy People" is divided into four seasons, beginning with spring, which to the American eye looks like the dead of winter. The film tracks the seasonal changes as hunters and their families and neighbors begin preparing for the next winter. We watch the seasons unfold, often from the point of view of the villagers. Cameras are seemingly perched on the shoulders of fishermen in homemade dugout canoes battling upstream through boulder-strewn rapids deep and cold with snowmelt. We follow from a few feet behind as trappers in a blizzard slide across the surface of waist-deep snow on hand carved skis, with their dogs running beside them. The cinematography is, at times, astonishing -- at one point, we are given a fish-eye underwater view of villagers catching pike through a hole in the thick ice that covers the river most of the year.

Much is made, and rightly, of the close relationship between the trappers and their dogs, which resemble huskies. One long-bearded trapper reflects philosophically on the training of a dog and remarks that those who try to teach a dog through cruelty will end up with an untrustworthy animal. As if to demonstrate the qualities of a properly trained companion, the man rides his snowmobile all day and much of the night from a remote cabin to his village, and his dog, astonishingly, gallops right behind and arrives home less than a minute after the trapper.

I heartily recommend "Happy People"; and my only quibble is one I have in general with Herzog's documentaries. In his voiceovers, he sometimes tells us what to think despite the fact that he is so good at showing us what to see. For example, the title of "Happy People" comes from a voiceover description Herzog makes about the Siberian villagers. One longs to respond, "Well, sometimes they're happy, sometimes they're blue." Fortunately, thanks in great part to Dmitry Vasyukov and his camera crew, what Herzog shows us is a lot more complicated and a lot more interesting than what he tells us.

Opens Friday, March 8

'Emperor'

The principal pleasure of the otherwise plodding historical drama "Emperor" comes from watching Tommy Lee Jones ooze ego in the role of Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

The movie is set in the rubble of Tokyo and environs in 1945, and MacArthur is in charge of rebuilding the nation. He has assigned Gen. Bonner Fellers (Matthew Fox) the task of determining whether or not certain once-powerful men, including Emperor Hirohito, should be executed as war criminals.

While traveling about with an interpreter questioning former military and political leaders, Fellers is also searching for the Japanese girl he fell in love with on an American college campus before the war. Nothing particularly surprising happens, although I kept waiting for Tommy Lee Jones to poke someone in the eye with his humongous corncob pipe.

Opens Friday, March 8

Harper Barnes
Harper Barnes' most recent book is Never Been A Time: The 1917 Race Riot That Sparked The Civil Rights Movement