Text: Roger Albert
Translation : Joshua
Wiener Herzog's films don't rely on "acting" in the usual sense. He is most satisfied when he finds an actor who embodies the essence of a character, which he then studies with great enthusiasm. An example is Bruno S, a long-undisclosed actor who is actually a busker and forklift operator. He is a central character in two of Herzog's films, "The Jasper Jose Maze" and "The Wanderers of Struce". Even though he was the son of a prostitute and spent 23 years in a mental hospital, Herzog was convinced that he was not crazy.
Bruno is a strange and stubborn man, childlikely blunt and stubborn. In Jasper Jose, he looks around, sometimes even slyly aiming at the camera on one side, giving the impression that he is not looking at the audience, but at us (It doesn't feel like he is looking at the audience , but through us). He probably couldn't play anything but himself, and that's why Herzog needed him. In the film's commentary, Herzog says that in Germany he was slandered for taking advantage of mentally handicapped people, but if you study Bruno sympathetically with a little sympathy, you'll find that by his lights=? in the light of him), he was actually using Herzog. In the commentary, Herzog described him as "the unknown soldier in the movie".
Jasper Jose is a real historical figure. One morning in 1828, he appeared in a town square carrying a Bible and a letter. In the movie, as in reality, he is kept in a basement by an unknown guard for the first 20 years of his life. After being adopted by the town government and a kind-hearted couple, he began to learn to read and write, and even talked about the piano. Jasper speaks like he's a fascination for him every day: "What are women good at?" "I came into this world like a violent fall." Think of when he said "I dreamed... ..." the concept expressed.
For Herzog, the line between fact and fiction is constantly shifting. He is not concerned with precision, only with effect, with transcendent ecstasy. "Jasper Jose" does not tell a story by recounting the protagonist's experience, but a mosaic of astonishing acts and images: a group of penitents who struggle to climb a mountain, a group of deserters led by a blind man Merchant, a stork that has just caught a bug. These images have little to do with Jasper other than to reflect and illustrate his struggles. Herzog had no interest in "unraveling" the mysteries of the lonely fellow. It was the mystery that attracted him.
Look at all the work of the 1942-born director, who has made at least 54 films, and you'll find a variety of characters embodying the qualities Herzog wanted to draw attention to. In Glass Spirit (1976), Herzog hypnotize the entire cast in his attempt to portray a village deprived of its livelihood. In A World of Silence and Darkness (1971) and Midgets Grow Up (1970), he tried to imagine the inner lives of blind, deaf, and dwarfs. These people are not bound by their physical flaws, instead they gain a certain freedom by being able to enter areas that normal people cannot. He made two films about the German Dieter Dangler, the documentary "Little Dieter Wants to Fly" and the feature film "Seeing the Sun Again". In the first film, Dangler, who served in the Navy, played himself, recounting a harrowing escape from a Viet Cong prisoner-of-war camp through the jungle. In the second film, he was played by Christian Bale. Herzog has explained that he fabricated several accidents in the documentary, and the feature is in a way a documentary about the ordeal of making itself); Bell looked scrawny; the real Dangler was 85 pounds. Bell's performance was somewhat modeled after Moses Treadaway, who walked unprotected among a pack of grizzly bears in Herzog's 2005 documentary "The Grizzlies," which was based on Treadaway's A 2005 documentary based on video footage Treadwell took before find himself mistaken. There's also Jouko Ahola, a Finnish powerlifter who was twice named the world's strongest man, whom Herzog used as the protagonist of "Made by the Nazis" (2001). The film is about a Polish strongman, a Jew, who fits the Aryan ideal of Berlin during Hitler's time. He's not an actor, but he's the perfect person for the role.
It's true that Bell is a professional actor, but he's also hired to play what he can embody and do what he can. Consider the example of Klaus Kinski, Herzog's many films - "Aguirre, God's Wrath" (1972), "Overland Boat" (1982), "Nosferatu" ( 1979), "African Slave" (1987), "Walcek" (1979) star. An actor who's done 135 movies, but Kinski told me he's only seen two or three of them. A man of towering rages and terrifying rampages, which at one point allegedly had him at gunpoint with Herzog. The subject of "my best fiend" (1999), Herzog's savage documentary about the man he loved and reviled. Kinski in Herzog's films should not be seen as an actor, but as some kind of tool to advance the film.
In some ways, Herzog's most iconic film is "The Rapture of Carpenter Steinel," a documentary about a ski jumper. That guy was so good, if he didn't take the initiative to descend midway, he would fly over the landing area and land in the parking lot. Instead, his talent became a limitation, and he dreamed of flying forever in the air. So many of the protagonists in Herzog's films, real or fictional, have such dreams of escape, and they are all too egoistic to accomplish his goals without thinking (and are so intensely themselves that they carry his purpose unthinkingly).
Jasper Hershey is a lyrical film about the least lyrical people. Bruno S is as solidity as the horses and cows he often surrounds himself with, the way he faces the world reminds me of WG Sebald about people and animals looking at each other through a gap of mutual incomprehension the comment of. The film's locations, natural world details and music all embody the world Jasper dreams of after escaping his immutable dungeon. He never had a dream in the dungeon, he explained. I thought maybe it was because he knew nothing but dungeons and had nothing to dream about.
The film is often compared to Truffaut's "Wild Child" (1970), which also takes place in the same century and tells the story of a boy from a big forest, perhaps raised by animals. A psychiatrist tried to "civilize" him, but could not change his natural nature. Jasper was also the subject of research. In the film, a professor tests Jasper with a riddle of two villages: one with people who don’t tell the truth, and the other with people who don’t tell lies. When you meet a man on your way to these two villages, Jasper is asked, what question do you have to ask him to be sure which village he is from? "I'll ask him if you're a tree frog?" Jasper replied with a hint of smugness.
There is also a British playboy Stanhope in the movie. He introduced Jasper to outsiders as his "guardian", but unexpectedly found that his guardian did not like to be exhibited at a masquerade party. Jasper seemed delighted to allow the village to use his vaudeville performances to pay off debts, but a Brazilian flutist who accompanied him thought the village would starve to death if he stopped performing. To prove he was Brazilian, he opened his mouth to speak in his native tongue, forgetting his prophecy.
The German title of the film can be translated as, "Every man for himself, God against all." This seems to be a generalization of Jasper's thinking. The prisoner's ancestry has attracted investigators of all stripes from the moment he first appeared. Is he a secret heir to the throne? The illegitimate child of a rich man? We had previously caught a glimpse of the man who locked him up and released him, standing behind him and kicking his boots to force him to walk. Who is this guy? never explained. He may be the personification of Jasper's fate. Maybe someone is standing behind us, kicking our shoes. We are poor mortals who always dream of flying.
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