Final essay for New German Cinema class, Winter 2008.
GONE TOO FAR
The death of new wave cinema.
“This much idiot no one has ever been in the world.”
-Klaus Kinski, on Werner Herzog1
The ego of the auteur has been responsible for some of the greatest artistic works of the late 20th century cinema; an uncompromising vision that will stop at nothing to see ambition explode onto the screen with admirable shock and awe. Auteurism took its greatest form in New Wave cinema. Borne from the creative storm of the likes of Godard and Truffaut, the spirit of their French nouvelle vague was adapted worldwide, resulting in the evolution of such movements as the New Hollywood and the New German Cinema. The focus on the director’s creative vision was influential and prolific, but the seemingly unlimited freedom granted to these minds was politically volatile and ultimately self-destructive. Neophilia, ego and blockbuster commercialism collided spectacularly with two notorious films that epitomized the masturbatory excesses of New Wave auterism: Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982) and Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980). Sprawling epics of incredible length, both may be seen as icons of the New Wave collapse of the early 1980’s. The difference between the two is that where Heaven’s Gate is an unqualified disaster, Fitzcarraldo is a masterpiece.
A cinema of the auteur, New Wave highlighted the role of the director in the film process. Films were to be seen as a form of individual expression, and so a proper New Wave film bears the stamp of its director and their personality. A Fassbinder film can be recognized as such easily. The directors of the various New Wave movements were united in their encyclopedic knowledge of film history and their drive to reinvent what they saw as a stagnant cinema. Drawing from a number of sources, a key signature was that of genre inversion, especially within the New Hollywood. Seeking to exploit formula, they would shock audience’s expectations, mix genres together, and create ironic effects. Successful examples include the neo-noir of Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), the French New Wave musical Une femme est une femme (1961) by Godard, and Fassbinder’s Sirkian melodrama Angst essen Seele auf (1974).
The New Wave directors of many countries were decidedly anti-commercial in their tastes. As such, the New German Cinema would not have survived without the aid of government grants and thus “almost totally dependant on public money for its existence”, and there was little interest in making financially successful films2. Their films were oftentimes too 'highbrow' for the average audience, despite the fact that it was the intention of the New German Cinema to speak of the German experience as told by the everyman. “The economic background of the New German Cinema has meant that it is preeminently a ‘cinéma des auteurs’, an ‘Autorenkino’, where each film, in content and technique, bears the unmistakable stamp of its director. This has been the inevitable result of a system where young, unestablished film-makers have had to be scriptwriter, director, and producer in one, realizing their visions on low budgets, with small teams and tight schedules, yet free of many of the constraints of a commercial production company demands and trade union regulations familiar in the more developed film industries of Britain and the USA. It has been both the strength (artistically) and the weakness (commercially) of the New German Cinema.”3 The New Hollywood directors, in contrast, were initially the darlings of American cinema. Producers realized that these young, rebellious directors created films that spoke directly to the upcoming counterculture audience, earning plenty of profit on generally low-budget films, all while winning awards and pleasing critics. The enormous success of Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) cemented this trend of audience appeal and artistic integrity, and by the early 70’s a pack of young auteurs dominated the American scene. The New German directors did not have this same commercial success; their films were far too demanding on audiences, forcing Germans to come face to face with their past and with current issues. The films were not mere entertainment, but bold statements: the urban terrorism of Volker Schlondorff and Margarethe von Trotta's The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975) or Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's Hitler: A Film from Germany (1978).
Unfortuately, it was inevitable that the cinema of the auteur could not last, and by the end of the 1970’s it was evident that the end was nigh. Speaking from 1979 and as a witness to the collapse of New Wave cinema, John Sandford stated that “the rosy view of the New German Cinema that is widely held abroad does not tally with the view from the inside. The ideal conditions that may have obtained a few years ago in a period of cultural liberalism and economic expansion have faded away”4. The limitless freedom afforded to the directors can be seen as a direct influence on the eventual decline of the New Wave. In Germany the enfant terrible, Fassbinder, began to tarnish his reputation after his lovers and co-workers alike grew tired of his abusive antics. His output began to suffer and although he would see one of his greatest successes with Lola (1981), his self-destructive lifestyle took its toll when he was found dead at the age of 37 in 1982. “Indeed, by the mid 1980s innumerable critics had pronounced the demise of the New German Cinema. This was partly due to the fact that many of the directors most closely associated with it had moved abroad. Herzog, Schlondorff, von Trotta, Wenders, Straub and Huillet had either spent periods working in other countries or emigrated.”5 The New German Cinema’s relentless individualism meant that directors simply were not interested in doing the same thing repeatedly, and directors began to evolve in different directions, often working outside of Germany. (Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo was filmed in the Amazon jungle over a long, strenuous shoot.) Furthermore, by the early 1980’s a change in government removed most of their funding, and many were forced to go these directions in order to remain filmmakers. Never having built a commercial audience and relying on grants to survive, New German Cinema simply weathered away as money dried up, auteurs moved on, and Germany thirsted for commercial American cinema.
Whereas New German Cinema can be seen as imploding onto itself, the New Hollywood suffered from changing audience tastes. Early New Hollywood films such as Arthur Penn’s Bonnie & Clyde and Mike Nichol’s The Gradate (both 1967) were box office smashes, building egos and making huge profits for production companies, who began to pour money into these young filmmakers. Unlike the New German filmmakers, The New Hollywood was dependent on a mainstream audience to survive. Unfortunately, with the one-two punch of the massively successful thrill-makers Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977), audiences flocked away from the genre inversions and counter-culture irony of New Hollywood to the increasingly mindless joy of the blockbuster. The situation was not helped the directors themselves. By the late 1970’s the New Hollywood auteurs were becoming increasingly ambitious and began to make extravagant demands, spending large amounts of resources on pet projects that increasingly became more obscure. The New Hollywood alienated the very audience that it depended on for its survival. It was this combination of ruthless ego and commercialism that killed the New Hollywood, epitomized by the massive failure of Heaven’s Gate.
It may thus be argued that both movements were the victims of the increasing commerciality of global cinema. German administrators effectively destroyed New German Cinema, the refuge of politically scathing art films, by removing funding. The New Hollywood was destroyed when audiences became no longer interested in the indulgent style. It may be further argued that both movements were also victims of complacency. New German Cinema destroyed itself by simply becoming too obscure and difficult for the new administration to handle. The New Hollywood destroyed itself by becoming far too egotistical to see that it was no longer self-sustainable, or attractive to the audiences on which it depended. But here is where we see the fundamental cultural difference between European and American cinema: the European strive for artistic development, and Hollywood’s goal of making profitable entertainment. New German Cinema remained to the very end a challenging artistic statement, while the final act of the New Hollywood was artistic disaster after another. Both were guilty of endless ego, with Fitzcarraldo and Heaven’s Gate being prime examples in the death of New Wave; but Herzog’s film is a testament to his startling creative vision, as opposed to Cimino’s embarrassing hedonism.
Werner Herzog gained respect from critics and international audiences alike with his wild, intense films that documented the extremes of environment and humanity. No one, however, was expecting the sheer scale of Fitzcarraldo. Filming proved difficult at every opportunity. A three hour epic in the Amazon jungle, it underwent numerous changes during its long production. After lead actor Jason Robards fell ill, he was replaced with Herzog favourite Klaus Kinski, who was apparently so volatile that a native chief offered to murder him. Supporting actor Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones left production to go on tour, leaving Herzog to start filming over again. The environment was obviously challenging, but Herzog’s stubborn style of direction did not make filming any easier. He insisted that a massive 340 ton steam ship, the focus of the film, be dragged over the hill using no special effects6. He “wanted Mario Adorf as captain of the ship, but Adorf refused to do the takes that involved the ship drifting throughout the rapids. Eventually, six men besides Herzog himself volunteered to do it. Of the six, three were wounded; one had two broken ribs.”7 Les Blank’s documentary Burden of Dreams (1982) depicts the chaotic production, showing Herzog’s obsessive drive to complete the film regardless of cost – not even political strife between Ecuador and Peru, where filming took place, would cancel production. Herzog himself appeared to realize the sheer absurdity of the project when he declared “I shouldn't make movies anymore. I should go to a lunatic asylum.”8
Michael Cimino, in comparison, appears to have been the victim of sightless pride when he made his three-hour epic, Heaven’s Gate. His 1978 film, The Deer Hunter, was a deeply personal project and a massive success, winning five Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director. United Artists with their new star director budgeted $11.6 million for his follow-up film, a low-key Western featuring well-known actors9. What Cimino finally presented to them was a 5 and a half hour, $40 million dollar project, an extraordinary sum at that time10. Stories abound of Cimino’s perfectionism. “At one point during filming, Michael Cimino decided that the spacing of the buildings on one of the sets didn't look right, despite it having been built to his exact specifications. He ordered both sides of the street razed and rebuilt at a cost of $1.2 million over the objections of his crew, who reasoned that it would be easier to knock down one side of the street and rebuild it twice as far away, for half the cost.”11 The film features scenes of glorious excess – a yard full of fully costumed waltzing couples; an extended sequence of period-accurate roller skating; agonizing, repetitive battle sequences that used horse meat for extra gore. An attempt at realism resulted in cinematography that featured endless shots of smoke and dust infused sepia, while purposely muddled sound mixing often made key dialogue difficult to understand under the ambient noises of trains and wind. Cimino was out to create his magnificent vision of the anti-Western, regardless of how much money it cost, how long it took, or how many crew members he had to fire.
The masturbatory excesses of the films are obvious to even the most aloof viewer. Both feature long, drawn out, somewhat thin plots that intentionally left the audience bewildered. Their demanding directors insisted on accurate, over-the-top production design. Their difficult locations resulted in chaotic productions. Both filmmakers shot much more film than they could ever possibly need, with Herzog starting filming over again after troubles with the cast and Cimino shooting over 1.5 million feet of film12. The question that strikes this author however, is that despite the films’ similarities of obsessive auteurs who had little regard for any one else, what makes Fitzcarraldo so good, while Heaven’s Gate so poor?
The fundamental difference between the films also reflects the differences between their respective movements. As a primarily commercial trend, the New Hollywood was ultimately slave to mainstream tastes and what producers thought that taste was. Had Heaven’s Gate been allowed to run its full length of five and a half hours, what appears now as a sloppy, meandering and confusing narrative may have come into clear focus. As it stands, the bastardized edit is a boring mess with half-stories and characters that lead nowhere, with only self-indulgent sepia left to entertain the audience. Fitzcarraldo enjoys a narrative focus that Cimino simply wasn’t allowed to depict. The fault though lies entirely on Cimino, who should have been fully aware of his limitations, and should have never spent more than four times his budget when it was unnecessary. Fitzcarraldo remains true to European art cinema as a unique and astonishing vision, and one that is completely unapologetic. Heaven’s Gate is merely another genre inversion, and an auteur film made in a period when audiences were sick of auteurism – and when a movement relies on mainstream audiences to keep funding a creed of individualistic creative thought, alienating your source is none too wise.
It is tempting to link this narcissistic blindness of the late New Hollywood to what could be interpreted as a fundamental American characteristic. Chalmers Johnson, whom postmodern culture critic Cintra Wilson describes as a man with “outrageous smartness” and “possessor of one of the world’s sexiest brains”, recently wrote a scathing criticism of American imperialism and what he believes is its inevitable collapse13. “It's evident that Nemesis—in Greek mythology the goddess of vengeance, the punisher of hubris and arrogance—is already a visitor in our country, simply biding her time before she makes her presence known.”14 Michael Cimino paid respect to this goddess when he, many years after the disaster of Heaven’s Gate, took full responsibility for its failure. Nemesis struck when Francis Ford Coppola, auteur of The Godfather, followed his 1979 masterpiece Apocalypse Now (which could be compared quite successfully with Fitzcarraldo) with One from the Heart (1982). The New Hollywood musical cost an estimated $26 million to produce, and was known during filming for its massive, perfectly rendered sets and Coppola’s trademark perfectionism. Nowadays it is better known as the film that grossed $636,796 and nearly bankrupted a creative genius, who to this day is apparently still paying off the debt15.
Nemesis is a cruel goddess, but it appears that she will pass by some filmmakers. Werner Herzog may have been guilty of incredible hubris and arrogance when he made Fitzcarraldo, but perhaps staggering creative achievement is a suitable sacrifice to her. If we compare the post-New Wave careers of Herzog and Cimino, it becomes evident that this sacrifice is self-serving. Fitzcarraldo is remembered as the film directed by the brilliant eccentric that still makes masterworks to this day. Cimino is forgotten, and Heaven’s Gate will forever be known as the film that killed a studio and sealed the final nail into the New Hollywood coffin.
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References
"Fitzcarraldo." Internet Movie Database. <http://imdb.com/title/tt0083946/trivia>.
"Heaven’s Gate." Internet Movie Database. < http://imdb.com/title/tt0080855/trivia >.
Johnson, Chalmers. "Empire v. Democracy." [Weblog TomDispatch.com] January 30, 2007. <http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/160594/chalmers_johnson_nemesis_on_the_imperial_premises>.
Knight, Julia. "New German Cinema, 4th edition." Routledge. <http://www.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415409285/resources/newgermancinema.pdf>.
"One from the Heart." Internet Movie Database. <http://imdb.com/title/tt0084445/business>.
Sandford, John. "The New German Cinema." German Life and Letters 32 (3)(1979): 206-228.
"Werner Herzog." Internet Movie Database. < imdb.com http://imdb.com/name/nm0001348/bio >.
Wilson, Cintra. "Dregublog." <http://www.cintrawilson.com>.
