Werner Herzog on his quest for 'pure' images.

On top of the Tokyo Tower, Wim Wenders runs into fellow German filmmaker Werner Herzog, who laments the dearth of "truthful" images in the world.

[@pseudonymusluna9693]

German native speaker here. I tried my hand at translating the clip, because there are some mistakes in the subtitles at hand, and I saw some discussion in the comments. I'm in no way a professional, so most of the translations of words with multiple meanings are just based on what I feel is right for the context. I've included some notes as well. ⇩⇩⇩ "It is fact that there aren't many images left, like if you take a look out here, it's all obstructed [with buildings]. There are almost no images left possible. One has to dig like an archaeologist with a spade. And one has to see if one can find anything in this insulted landscape. Very often of course, this is connected to risks. And I would never shy away from those [risks], and I see that there is too few people in the world today, who would really take risks for the dire need[1] we have because there are too few adequate images. We desperately need images. Images that correspond to the state of civilisation and to our innermost, our very deepest[2]. So if needed we have to go into the middle of a warzone, or wherever it's necessary. And I would never complain that it's sometimes difficult that we, let's say, have to climb up 8,000m of a mountain to get images that are still pure and clear and transparent.[3] This is almost impossible here. One has to search thoroughly. I would fly to Mars or to Saturn with the next rocket I could board. There is a program by NASA, with that Skylab Space Shuttle, where they maybe take biologists and people who are trying new technological methods in space. I would like to join them with a camera. Because it isn't easy anymore to find anything here in Earth that constitutes the transparency of images. That what once was and... I would go anywhere." [1] "Not"=emergency, need, poverty [2] In English there is something missing that would be described by the words innermost/deepest. In German, Das Innere, or Das Allertiefste, which he's talking about, are already descriptors of something transcendental or spiritual, like a soul or the inner life of a human. I think he's implying the "state of civilisation" (Zivilisations-Stand) should correspond to the state of the inner lives of humans and wants his images to show that. [3] I saw some discussion regarding the word "transparent". The German word "durchsichtig" would perhaps be translated more literally as "see-through" (durch=through, -sichtig=see), but I think (and this is interpretation on my part, so this is my opinion and not fact) "transparent" catches the metaphorical meaning better. Of course he isn't talking about the images he captures being see-through in the way that one can look at a physical copy of the image and see the hand holding it through the material. He's talking about an image which the audience is able to look at the factual image and see "through" it, to grasp meaning beyond what is physically shown on screen. Images like that could capture the state of civilisation or the inner lives of humans. Or both!

[@Navak_]

Thank you. I like your translation much better.

[@brycekhilton]

thank you!

[@vonBottorff]

German as second language here. Yes, the idea of _Bilder_ is not a simple translation to image or picture. He means something more conceptual. It's like there's no good translation for _Feindbilder_ in that you don't literally mean pictures of enemies. It's more _Vorstellungen von Feinden_ . . . which is also fraught. . .

[@jevinday]

Thank you guys for providing some context into this! As a "stupid American" that only speaks English I guess I've always assumed that most translations are correct. Especially in the last 50 years. I guess I was wrong

[@akatraveller]

Thank you for your kind translation

[@RochesFan]

Víctor Erice (director of "Spirit of the Beehive") brought up the same problem in finding "transparent images" in a Japanese interview given in 2000, and I found the similarity to Herzog's words so striking that I felt the need to transcribe it for others. The title for this section is "The narratives of the masters have fallen into decay": "That's because things have changed, of course. Both what there is to portray and the means to portray it have been transformed. The pulse of daily life is very different. Both Ford and Mizoguchi were working in the context of stories that were very clear and transparent. Both drew nourishment from the energy found in legend, whether it's the epic legend of the building of the United States as a nation - the western as national epic - or Mizoguchi drawing on Japan's past, a treasure trove of legend. Sometimes they're popular stories. Both draw from a similar fictional world. These days, practically all of that has changed in film. Ford and Mizoguchi worked with ideal models, but the modern era is fundamentally ambiguous. There's no such notion as transparency. Modern life has been stripped of its rituals. Both Ford and Mizoguchi contemplated worlds in which social ritual was still very much in force. And that led to certain forms of representation, and certain characters that served as symbols. In today's society, all those rituals have been shattered. The world is much more opaque. How do you express that opaque quality, that confusion, that chaos? Often the form itself becomes opaque, a play of light and shadow. Taking American film as an example, if we compare the transparency of the western and its formal stereotypes with the ambiguity of the thriller, an expressionistic world of light and shadow - and here we're talking about the '40s and '50s. Imagine comparing it to our world today, full of much more noise and pollution. It's obviously an extraordinary change. It's not a change of cinematographic forms. Rather there are social dimensions of an almost anthropological nature to this change that humanity has undergone. So how do you tackle this new reality we live in? It's very hard. The search for some kind of transparency when practically the entire world is contaminated, when every image is contaminated from the start - here lies the lesson of the masters, but in fact you can't reproduce what they did, because for one thing the world has changed, but narrative too has changed. So when contemporary films imitate all that, in my opinion they can't help but seem affected and artificial, nostalgic and quite likely self-satisfied."

[@taneaellinika]

+RochesFan Very intresting! Could you provide any source with that interview in the original language? I will need it for a paper.

[@RochesFan]

+Vita Contemplativa It was part of a video interview called "Víctor Erice in Madrid" as an extra included by the Criterion Collection with the "Spirit of the Beehive." So if you can track down the DVD release, or if Criterion streams all the extras through Hulu, then that's one way. I still have the original video source, so I could try posting it, or just provide a direct download link of the segment.

[@taneaellinika]

Hello friend, thank you for information! Could you really do that? Any of these streams won't work in my country, and our beloved greek capital controls won't either make it easy to get a DVD copy. Thanks a lot!

[@RochesFan]

+Vita Contemplativa I uploaded them, but kept the videos private. Here's a link to the links: pastebin.com/Dn6QzqRD The portion I quoted is on the third part. Let me know if they work. If not, I'll just make them public.

[@taneaellinika]

Unfortunately all vids are locked. You should propably turn them by option to "unregistered". :) Thanks!

[@ConcaCon]

Perfect cut-off.

[@earth9544]

Very eloquent speaker.

[@z0uLess]

He should film a scholar reading for years and years.

[@DarkAngelEU]

And then paying off their student debts for years and years.

[@ConnieLynchitzWhoElse]

Werner is fucking hilarious in that very particular German way, beneath the stoic frankness lies a self effacing humour that is often lost in the translation.

[@blackstarrysky3465]

That's nice, because he sounds entirely full of shit here.

[@Cooliofamily]

Adequate images

[@Nuruddunya]

i relate to his quest for transparency

[@barflytom3273]

sardrbot. he talks about transparent images, not transparency.

[@Nuruddunya]

@@barflytom3273 do you speak german?

[@barflytom3273]

@@Nuruddunya yes, of course.

[@AnnaLVajda]

It's hard to isolate in a crowd.

[@TheHonestPeanut]

Nah just crap your pants.

[@jasonfuqua4284]

Ol Werner is such a stick in the mud!

[@ms.genevievehennacy]

3:10 Good choice, Wim.

[@croinkix]

this must be why he quickly jumped at taking the flight to mars when Elon Musk had brought it up; might be related to Werner's admiration of Brakhage(though the one he loves most by Brakhage is The Act of Seeing With Ones Eyes as opposed to Dog Star Man) and Malick. The music used while he Werner was interviewing Elon, Mr. Moneybags Mr. Brandnew shoes who doesn't know shit about outerspace he used some piece of music Terry used in Tree of Life, i think it might've been Brahms.

[@buttholesurfer1266]

Fat people are gay

[@robbiezant1]

This translation is completely different from 2 other translations I've seen. Are we sure this one is accurate?

[@gabrieldesouzateixeira2360]

Robert Zant let‘s say it‘s flawed and maybe a bit to free. He doesn’t for example say „decaying landscape“ but „insulted landscape“. The idea that you can insult a landscape is quite special and fitting, I think. And it gets definitely lost in „decaying“.

[@BrettonFerguson]

Probably not. What is a transparent image?

[@BrettonFerguson]

Answer: A Window.

[@pkobain99]

Criterion is way different. “One has to search through this ravaged landscape to find anything at all”

[@jansarstedt1063]

Its partially pretty inaccurate.

[@orlandoguerrero7089]

Is there any idea of why Herzog was on Japan at the time? In "Tokyo-ga" you can also see Chris Marker, who was probably taking images for his film "Sans soleil", but what was Herzog doing at the time to be in japan?

[@jamesminnow]

He was stopping there on the way to Australia to film Where The Green Ants Dream

[@orlandoguerrero7089]

@@jamesminnow jajaj that's great, thanks for the info!

[@niklas0000]

this man should film penguins

[@tannenman]

What film is this from, if any?

[@extraitsdelavandes4816]

it is from the documentary Tokyo-Ga by Wim Wenders

[@tannenman]

Thank you!

[@GhoulishGwyn]

You can get it as a bonus feature in the Criterion edition of Late Spring.

[@xinzukin]

He asked Elon Musk in one of his documentaries if he can go to Mars haha

[@sirtrix.]

Well that was many years ago. Back then Musk was not that sucessful

[@Snappy-ut4bj]

Bachelor Nanny!

[@boyblob]

I'll be honest, I don't fully understand. But I'd like to have a better understanding. Guess I'll start with the stuff @RochesFan posted about.

[@Jagnon123]

Look up the society of spectacle.

[@Gerguzalbutzelnikoskech]

My interpretation is, in short, that with a metropolis like Tokyo, and any other for that matter, there is an overwhelming abundance of objects, infrastructure, construction etc etc. Symbols of mankinds unending hunger for consumption and entertainment, a lack appreciation of the natural order of things; we always have to keep busy and moving towards something no matter what, at the expense of everything else. Less is more.

[@heh2k]

Too much edge noise (when you look from far, and see many buildings), and a lack of bright colors. That's what I'm guessing. Only watched until 1:42.

[@AMeanDude]

What is he going on about?

[@hhandle]

Concrete jungle

[@alexbozzy1635]

What’s the deal with Germans and their need for purification?

[@Sallahaddin1]

so that is why he said to Elon Musk that he would like to go to Mars

[@illuminati.official]

I honestly have no idea what he's going for and kind of suspect he's full of shit, but part of the excitement of art is letting these batshit iconoclasts called Artists go down their obsessive rabbit holes with the benefit of the doubt, because they might come back with something you _can_ start to appreciate. I'm absolutely sure that Herzog here had something coherent in mind, but you can't expect the process to make any sense to an outsider.

[@jaymanxyz2]

I agree, I felt the same way when I first saw this in Tokyo-Ga. I was a bit amused by it actually, and couldn't help but laugh out loud when I read an IMDB reviewer refer to this as "Werner Herzog's maniac speech about his search for 'clean, pure images.'" But you're right- he probably does have some insight at the bottom of it all.

[@andrewaronson3364]

Same with David lynch

[@Everiony]

Right?! His speech also felt so arrogant towards Japan. In the German original it's even more obvious. He calls tokyo rotten and "destroyed" and unpure. I watched his interview a bunch of times and it just doesn't add together. His words don't really have any meaning, he never really explains what he means by that "clean" image.

[@cloudyriver]

I mean that's what art is about... you either decide to judge an artist no matter what your understanding or appreciation of his art is or you decide to go along with the artist and you're curious enough to learn more.

[@xfloodcasual8124]

@@Everiony Man, 20 years ago I got sorta well known for some art (music) I made and was asked to do a bunch of interviews. So I looked back the other day and I have absolutely NO idea what I was saying lol. It was stuff just like Werner is saying here about conceptual and existential ideas about image and sound and audience, and I knew I had something in mind at the time, but I have no clue and its vague and strange and I'm sure nobody understood it and it probably just lead to a mystique. I think a lot of artists don't know what they are saying half the time, at least younger ones, so I take it with a grain of salt.

[@Chrisbajs]

What drivel. Also, the translation sucks.