Backlisted - Of Walking in Ice by Werner Herzog

Episode Date: September 16, 2019

Filmmaker Werner Herzog's journal Of Walking in Ice is the subject of this episode, recorded at the End of the Road festival at Larmer Tree Gardens in Dorset on September 1st 2019. Joining John and Andy is writer and critic Luke Turner (Out of the Woods). Other books under discussion are Time Lived, Without Its Flow by Denise Riley and March of the Lemmings: Brexit in Print and Performance 2016-2019 by Stewart Lee.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)3'59 - Time Lived Without Its Flow - Denise Riley9'59 - March of the Lemmings: Brexit in Print and Performance 2016–2019 by Stuart Lee16'53 - Of Walking in Ice by Werner Herzog* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Other conditions apply. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 Thank you. Thank you. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today, you find us bathed in the warm, late summer sunshine at the Larmotree Gardens in Dorset, in Wiltshire. In Dorset. At the End of the Road Festival,

the very excellent End of the Road Festival, which is amazing because the journey we had to get here was horrific. Snow, ice, tramping for thousands of miles across empty farmland with only crows and sheep for company. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the website that brings readers and writers together. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously.

Our guest today, get ready to clap again, is Luke Turner. Yay! Thank you. Hello, Luke. Hello. Luke is the author of the acclaimed memoir Out of the Woods, which was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize and longlisted for the Polari Prize for first book by an LGBT plus writer. Luke has also been selected by Val McDermott as one of

the 10 most important LGBT plus writers for a British Council and National Centre for Writing Initiative. In 2019 he's been co-curating a programme of arts events celebrating the landscape and people of Epping Forest as part of Walton Forest Stint as the first London borough of culture. Luke's co-founder and editor of The Quietus and writes for a variety of publications. And he is an enigma, ladies and gentlemen, because he likes football,

but he doesn't like the clash. Oh, God. Not the clash argument again. That's a Venn diagram. Don't ever be rude about the clash on social media. It doesn't go very well. Clash fans are like little children who've had a toy taken away. If you go, I don't really like the clash,

they're like, no, I love them, I love them. Everyone in here loves the clash, don't they? You canash. No, I love them. I love them. Oh, everyone in here loves the Clash, don't they? You can feel the waves of hostility. Not everyone, Andy. If you like a podcast with a mournful German accent involved, you've come to the right place. The book that we're here, or that Luke has chosen for us to talk about this morning,

as we've already said, is Werner Herzog's Of Walking in Ice. This was an account of his journey on foot from Munich to Paris in December 1974, a particularly bitter winter, as you'll discover. He went to visit Lottie Eisner, the doyen of the German film industry, who he had heard was dying and walked in order in the Grand Herzogian manner to save her life. It was published first in German in 1978, and then the English translation by Alan Greenberg, which is the one we're reading from, was published by Jonathan Cape in 1980. But before we get onto that, on Bat List, we tend to ask a question of one another at the

beginning of the show. I'll go first this time. John, what have you been reading this week? I have been reading a small, but, I mean, deceptively small book called Time Lived Without Its Flow by Denise Riley. It's published, I think, next week by Picador. Denise Riley is better known as a poet. She's particularly well known for a really, really astonishing collection called Say Something Back about the sudden death, unexpected death of her son. This book is connected to that collection, I guess,

because it's a, as well as being a poet, she's also a philosopher. And this is a, it's always, when you say a philosophical investigation into death, I can feel the audience dripping away. Don't. Bear with me. It is so exquisitely, precisely written, so lacking in self-pity, but also completely looks at death straight in the face and tries to understand the specific thing that happened to her. If I read you the opening paragraph, it will give you, in a way, what the book is about, which she says, paragraph. It'll give you, in a way, what the book is about, which she says, I'll not be writing about death, but about an altered condition of life. The experience that not only preoccupied, but occupied me was of living in suddenly arrested time, that acute sensation of being cut off from any temporal flow that can grip you after the sudden death of your child,

and a child, it seems, of any age. And she takes it from there and she unpacks, basically the first kind of two thirds of the book are notes that she wrote up to, I think, up to about sort of six or seven years after the death of her son. And then the final section is her trying to make sense by looking at the work of other writers from philosophers to poets like Wordsworth and Emily Dickinson to try and make

sense of what she went through. It's totally unforgettable. I mean, I've now read it three times. It's short, but it's so densely packed and makes you think about death in such a different and ultimately, I think, liberating way. One of the things she talks about is the second mourning, which is when you realise that you have to leave this temporal state of suspended animation and go back into your normal life. It feels like a second bereavement because you're leaving that space where you somehow, there was still a presence with the dead person, was still there, you have to leave again. But it's got a lovely, very, very beautifully written introduction by Max Porter, who of course, his first book, A Grief is a Thing with Feathers was also on this theme. But I'll read you one short little bit from towards the end

of, this is several years after the death, towards the end of her notes about, but before she gets onto the essay at the end, and gives you a flavor. But I don't think I've read anything that's made me think more in very many years. It's, as I say, it's called Time Live Without Its Flow, Denise Riley, published on the 19th September by Picador. Time is the person. You're soaked through with it. This enormous lurch into a rested time isn't some philosophical brooding about life's fragility. It's not the same I who lives in her altered sense of no time,

but a reshaped person. And I don't know how she'll turn out. If writing had once been a modest work of shaping and correcting, now all your small mastery has been smashed by the fact of your child's death. That you can't edit. You find yourself noting this but without ever needing or wanting to have recourse to words like sorrow, grief, mourning, as if all those are too familiar, too sepia, and almost decorative, blandly containing. You entertain no reflections either that a life will live its reverberations hanging in the air like a passage of music, nothing so sweetly melancholic.

Instead, you're living in this instant, this thinnest imaginable sliver of being turns out to be hard-edged. Side views are occluded without any softening penumbra. Your sight is pared down like tunnel vision, yet to your narrowed focus, the dead of this entire city are present all at once, elbowing in the streets. Silhouettes stream everywhere, horses, carriages, cars. Traffic goes, smash right through you wherever you cross a road. Grey ribbons of painless collisions. But these aren't misty or violet tinted, are nothing to do with mourning as you might once have fancied it. This is sharp and harshly clear. Your surrounding fluid of intuitive time

had abruptly drained away. Now you live in an unshaded clarity of dry air. Its translucent simplicity buoys you up. Thank you. Denise Riley is a poet who is for those in the know I think is considered very important and I read Rebecca Thomas's book of poetry Witch earlier in the year and at the back she talks about Denise Riley's influence on her career I think many poets feel the same way but I agree with you first of all say something back the last book of poetry is tremendous but this is I mean I think many many people will have read this a year from now this

new book they're saying louder at the back just louder yeah interference of music those wretched musicians have started going yeah the thing is if i declaim music if i declaim too loud people listening at home will wonder why i'm talking like this clearly so you can hear me project anyway denise riley andy what have you been reading uh okay i've been reading a book the new book which is published in a couple of days time by the comedian stewart lee it's called march of the lemmings brexit in print and performance 2016 to 2019 and this is stewart lee's fifth, and full disclosure, I edited this book, as I did the previous four. And I normally wouldn't talk about a book I've edited on

Backlisted, but I have a very specific reason for wanting to do so with Stuart Lee's new book, which I'll come on to in a minute. The thing about Stuart's books is that they are, unlike many comedians' books, thought through from the ground up. So they tend not to just be collections of things. March of the Lemmings contains his columns from the Observer newspaper that he's been writing for the last three years and the full transcript of his show, content provider, and it also contains introductory essays for all of those things and footnotes, which sometimes run for pages at a time.

And there is, in this this book we worked out his longest ever footnote a three and a half page exegesis on the subject of why people didn't understand one line in content provider and why and why they they were wrong and he was right which sort of underpins a lot of stewart's work So one of the things that's in this book, as I say, are columns from the Observer newspaper, and he's included lots of the reader comments that have subsequently appeared online. What I'm going to do is I'm going to read you the beginning

of one of the pieces and then a few of the comments. This is from a column which first appeared on March 3rd this year, March 3rd 2019, under the title, Why did the BBC let Andrew Neill combust? And it starts thus. This week, supposedly unprecedented spring wildfires raged across dry, bushy and exposed areas. On Monday, having dealt with serious incidents at Saddleworth Moor and 100 Acre Wood, teams of specialised firefighters also attended the small pieces of shredded wheat that live on top of Andrew Neil's head. Footnote. It was the hottest February on record.

Idiots thought it was brilliant and dry stuff was catching fire I thought what else looks dry oh yeah Andrew Neil's hair he goes on he says dozens of grateful weevils were saved from certain death

in the breakfast bisque inferno by the firefighters and rehoused in temporary accommodation in the nearby clumps of Andrew Neil's ear hair while his nostrils became emergency treatment centres for scorched pests. Right, it goes on, right? And that's clearly in a comic mode, right? Many of you, many though not all of you seem to have understood that. Here are some of the below-the-line comments that appeared the day that article appeared online. Typical biased Guardian article...

LAUGHTER Typical biased Guardian article and gerry-unfan-rile and certainly not funny, Patrick R.D. The article above by Andrew Lee tries too hard. It lacks clarity, purpose, and it fails to inform. Shit, piss-wank. Is that the best you can do? My six-year-old can employ more description than that without

having to resort to that kind of pure our language we used to think the guardian a serious newspaper now it publishes garbage like this at least we never thought Stuart Lee who he ed a comic and that's from Andrew Neil Twitter at Oxford with Cameron I believe and that's from Andrew Neil, Twitter. At Oxford with Cameron, I believe. There is a reason why nobody's heard of Stuart Lee and that load of tripe is probably it. And he uses of instead of have. So I could read many, many more.

On and on and on it goes. The reason I wanted to talk about this book is that I fear that this book will not get the coverage that it deserves because it's by a comedian and that comedian is Stuart Lee. So first of all, the media will look at the book and think, well, it's a comedian's book book,

even though it's nothing like one of those books. And second of all, newspapers, because certain of the columns have appeared in a rival newspaper, won't cover it, right? So I think the book will come out and it will sell to people who like Stuart Lee, and that's great, but it deserves a wider audience. And the reason it deserves a wider audience is because being trapped in a book with all those below the line voices raging repeatedly at you, the reader, about whatever they want, regardless of its politics or grammar or the fact they do like Stuart Lee or the fact they don't like Stuart Lee or the fact they've never heard of Stuart Lee or they're a Russian bot or they want to talk about Brexit and they're angry or they don't want to talk about Brexit and they're

even angrier. That's what it's been like living in this country for the last three years. And that's why this is a fantastic book. There isn't a better book, with the possible exception of Ali Smith's seasonal quartet, which has captured what it's like living in a country having a nervous breakdown, like Stuart Lee's new book, March the Lemmings does. So if you think you know what Stuart's about, or if you think this would be only a comedian's book, or if you hate Stuart Lee, and if you are a Russian bot who has been sent here to destabilise me while I talk, you should still read this book. Me and my friend have a conceptual band called Comment Section, all capitals, in which we would play harsh electronic noise and read the comments from the Guardian.

So this looks like really good material for the band. We'll sell it on the merch store, if you like. The book chat will continue on the other side of this message. Two freshly cracked eggs any way you like them. Three strips of naturally smoked bacon and a side of toast. Only $6 at A&W's in Ontario. Experience A&W's classic breakfast on now. Dine-in only until 11 a.m.

When you're working out at Planet Fitness, it's a judgment-free zone, so you can really step up your workout. That's why we've got treadmills. And our team members are here to help, so you can be carefree with the free weights. There are also balance balls, bikes, cables, kettlebells, and TRX equipment. But, like, no pressure. and our team members are here to help so you can be carefree with the free weights they're also balance balls bikes cables kettlebells and t-rex equipment but like no pressure get started for one dollar enrollment and then only 15 a month hurry this one dollar enrollment sale of planet fitness end july 18th 49 annual fee applies see home club for details I mean, Herzog was, thanks to the wonderful twin box sets

you used to be able to get for about 20 quid in FOP. They don't seem to have done them anymore because now there's an expensive fancy BFI edition. But I remember wanting to get something to watch and it was like, Herzog, heard of him, I'll buy these box sets. And all of those films just blew my mind, the Kinski collaborations and so on. The book I bought just randomly.

I saw it when this edition came out, and I thought, oh, Herzog wrote a book. It's nice and short, isn't it? I'll buy that. And it was a time when I was starting to think about writing about place and nature and things like that. And I was finding a lot of the kind of nature writing TM books frustrating you know I was in Stoke Newington

Library a bookshop rather one day and I looked up and there was the nature writing shelf and it was just like flocks of twee woodcut birds and flowers and I was just like I can't I don't want to do a book like this and I and this book it's I find it interesting my two favorite nature writers for want of a better term are Werner Herzog and Derek Jarman and you know many ways I'd have talked about modern modern nature to talk about but I've talked a lot about it in the out of the woods kind of interviews and so on um and this you can read this book it's pretty much in one go. And it's just this, like his films, you get the sense of the landscape,

you get the sense that he's possibly, this walk is not a truthful narrative. And it's very vividly painted. It's psychedelic in some ways. If you can have cold psychedelia of walking in ice is it. And I just love it. It's entertaining as well it's a fantastic book um he said it was more dear to him it's interesting story there are a couple of origin stories one story is that he was actually going to walk to you can't tell that story can i

no i'm going to stop you nick could you play clip number three because the author'm going to stop you. Nick, could you play clip number three? Because the author is going to set the book up for us. Yeah, Lotte Eisner, again, back to her. She must have been about 80 when a friend of mine called from Paris, come quickly, she's dying. She had suffered a massive stroke. And for a moment, I didn't know what to do. It was such a deep shock and something surged inside of me and I knew you're not gonna fly to

Paris you are gonna walk and I have to it's it was like a pilgrimage I just grabbed a duffel bag and grabbed some solid shoes put them on and I knew I will walk the shortest quickest route to Paris a straight line I took a reading from the compass and it was the beginning of winter with snow storms and hail and ice. And I walked for almost four weeks and I knew I would not allow her to die. I would not permit her. And she was so important for me and also for the whole new generation of German filmmakers at that time. She gave us legitimacy. She declared us as the real new German culture that was not barbaric like the Nazis.

So she was so important for us that I would not allow her to die. And it's strange because while I walked, I wrote a little diary, and sometimes when I stopped, or sometimes even while I was walking, I wrote and scribbled notes and I published that as a book later, which is called Of Walking in the Ice. And I think Of Walking in the Ice is better than all my films together. I think that's the really interesting thing that he again and again in interviews and then this excellent collection

of first person interviews he often says I will be more remembered for my writing and my prose than my films that my prose is more significant than my filmmaking he loves walking he comes back to

walking again and again as a sort of a metaphor. So many of his characters are also film walking. He was a great friend of Bruce Chatwin. And again, he sort of buys into Chatwin's theory that things went wrong for human beings when we stopped being nomads and became sedentary. So tourism is a sin, and walking is a blessing.

It's in one of his many manifestos. But actually, Andy, that wasn't what I was going to say, so the interruption was that the apocryphal story was that he was in fact, was going on a walk to Cannes to arrange the press screening, he was going to walk from Munich to Cannes to arrange the press screening of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, his great 1974 film.

But in fact, he got the news about Lottie Eisner. So there's always, it's a classic bit of Herzog, he's always turning his own life into sort of mythology. He's always looking for the angle. He's just a born storyteller. And he has a creative relationship with facts. The accountant's truth, as he calls them. He has a theory that what matters is the ecstatic truth,

what he calls the ecstatic truth, which is not necessarily the truth. There's a brilliant film I watched this week at John's suggestion, Cave of Forgotten Dreams. We've each chosen a favourite Herzog film to talk about because they all have some kind of relationship with this book, some sort of morphic resonance, he would like that idea, with the book. But the one I chose was a more recent film, 2006 I think, A Cave of Forgotten Dreams. It ticks all the Herzog boxes, I think it's a masterpiece. It appears to be completely accessible.

I mean, it starts with some fabulous music. The music is music. He's amazing on music, Herzog. Again, one of the stories he tells about his childhood is he had no music for 10 years because one of his teachers asked him to sing in front of the class. And he refused.

And there was a battle of wills. And in the end i learned you know the important lesson to never be beaten down by these bastards so he doesn't sing but then it means he can't listen to music and on any form and then later on music is unlocked for him i can't remember what the book by what particular mode but it's unlocked for him and then he educates himself and he chooses the music in his films incredibly carefully. And Eric Reischlinger, the cellist, composed an amazing score. So it starts, as it often does, with amazing music

and then a slow pan across a frozen vineyard, and then he starts in his inimitable way narrating the documentary, and he sets up the biggest discovery that is made in the caves near here is the greatest discovery in the history of human culture. So you think, fuck, how are you going to live up to this? And indeed what turns out, the second thing is there has to be difficulty in a great Herzog film, you know, filming in the jungle or impossible. Well, this is difficult because it's a cave

and the only access to the cave is through a tiny... You can only have three crew. Carbon dioxide builds up so quickly you can only film for an hour at a time. But being Herzog, he's decided, he's been persuaded by his great cinematographer who is called Peter Reitlinger that he should film it in 3D.

So that is difficult enough if you're in a studio. And then he goes into the cave, and it is the most incredible preserved cave, Chauvet Cave. It was discovered in 1994, and it is the most perfectly preserved paleolithic cave paintings that you've seen anywhere. And there's a brilliant scene where he's talking to one of the researchers who's been working on the film.

He manages to elicit that he was a circus performer before he was an archaeologist. And then he said one of his favorite things, again, is this idea that facts are like learning about the... It's like the New York City telephone directory. You know all the names and telephone numbers, but you don't know why Jonathan cries himself to sleep at night and the idea is that you can't work out we don't know what these paintings mean but we feel some sort of connection so I watched all of the film 80 minutes of this incredible nature documentary the Herzog voice quite straight in lots of ways have you seen it

no I'm not saying okay so right okay so right, okay, slight spoilers. And then... Big spoiler, but it doesn't matter. And then it comes to the end, and I'm thinking, this film's 90 minutes. There's 10 minutes still to go. Things come off on screen saying, post-script. There's like a seven-minute scene with Herzog filming some mutant,

what he calls mutant albino crocodiles who live next to a nuclear power station which is 20 minutes from the from the caves and him musing on what they mean and perhaps we are mutant albino crocodiles ourselves looking back through the vertiginous passage of time like the cave paintings look at us and there's this incredible long shot of two mutant albino crocodiles staring at one another end of film i go into it god this is the most amazing inspiring God, you know, the ecstatic truth. And then I realised that there are no such thing as mutant albino crocodiles. And he made it all up. Did you know that? I didn't even know. I have a letter to deliver to a thoughtful young fellow milling about the literature tent and I think that's it. Sorry, everyone.

A lady dressed in a postman's outfit has just come on, interrupted a podcast on stage, right? Yeah, you may well laugh, postie. Pretty good. We're just about to make a brilliant... We've got to do that whole fucking Herzog anecdote again. Right? That took ten minutes to fucking set up.

People over there are falling asleep as it is. Right, That took ten minutes to fucking set up. People over there are falling asleep as it is. Gee, right, what is it? What's the payoff? Come on. No, let's stay. Let's see what the gag is. Come on.

It's a poem, Andy. Oh, for fuck's sake. It's a poem by no one's standards, but maybe for later. All right. Anyway, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Woo-hoo! Round of applause. The point is, I responded to the documentary to the moment of ecstatic truth. Powerfully, the emotional truth of it. Doesn't really matter if he made it up. What he made up was something that connected into the bigger story that he wanted to tell.

And he often does that in the encounters at the end of the world, the film shot in antarctica there's the very famous scene with the penguin that's walking off into the great center of the continent to its certain death and leaving its comrades behind uh and then there's another shot later on of some some divers and the penguins sort of walk through their camp and apparently that's just that was completely made up as well but you're right in that in that untruth there is he manages to i think a lot of his films have these kind of moments often involving animals and things where he's trying to tell the truth even though it's completely fraudulent um he also nature we'll talk about nature and her in a moment and animals

as you mentioned that clip about uh the the famous shot of the penguins, Luke, also chickens loom large in the work of Werner Herzog. We've got a clip here of Herzog talking about why he dislikes chickens so much, but why they figure in his films. The enormity of their flat brain, the enormity of their stupidity is just overwhelming. You have to do yourself a favor when you're out in the countryside and you see chicken. Try to look a chicken in the eye with great intensity.

And the intensity of stupidity that is looking back at you is just amazing. By the way, it's very easy to hypnotize a chicken. of stupidity that is looking back at you is just amazing. By the way, it's very easy to hypnotise a chicken. They're very prone to hypnosis. And in one or two films, I've actually shown that. Yeah, he does. In fact, in Casper Hauser, he shows you how to hypnotise a chicken just because. Yeah, he said, I am the first person to have noticed this.

There's an amazing bit in... He says, chickens when roasted are acceptable to him. But there was one chicken, one chicken Werner loved, and many years ago I became fascinated by a rooster named Weirdo, who weighed over 30 pounds. His offspring, Ralph, was even bigger. The man who had raised these extremely aggressive animals had been forced to singe off their spurs with a blowtorch. Then I found Frank, a miniature horse, specially bred from 16th century Spanish stock, who stood less than two feet high.

Spanish stock who stood less than two feet high. I told Frank's owner that I wanted to film Ralph chasing Frank with the tiniest midget riding him around the biggest sequoia tree in the world, more than a hundred feet in circumference. It would have looked extraordinary because horse and rider together were still smaller than Ralph the rooster. Unfortunately, Frank's owner refused. My horse isn't going to show up for that, he said. It will make him look stupid. So another thing about Herzog is he doesn't really... Well, I was going to save this one up, but let's just listen to it.

He doesn't really do irony. There's a great amount of humour in his work, and we'll listen to Luke read a bit from Walking in Ice in a second, which will hopefully demonstrate that. But he doesn't really do irony, and this is Herzog talking about that and what happens as a result of that. Someone who does not know irony, for example.

I do understand humour, but I take things literal. For me, a man is a man. I cannot distinguish a gay man from a straight man. I just cannot distinguish. And I saw a filmmaker whom I know since 35 years, John Waters. John Waters, just two weeks ago or so. John Waters. And I turned to my wife.

We talked backstage because we were both introducing or speaking at an event for the founder of New Line Cinema, who is a friend of both of us. After 35 years of knowing John Waters, I turned to my wife and I said to her, I have the feeling this man is gay. Which is in a way wonderful, because I took him as John Waters. And I love the man.

I love him dearly. He's a wonderful, he's the boldest of the bold filmmakers. I wish I had the guts of this man. And he's very, very dear to my heart. But for me, this is a man. Yes, a man is a man. There's a lovely thing he says, that you learn more about the shape of a town

from its outskirts than from its centre. He does choose eccentric, liminal characters to tell stories. But his tolerance, his kind of generosity, his humanity, I think, he gets the reputation. In fact, particularly in this country, I think, he gets the reputation. In fact, particularly in this country, I think, around Les Blanc's film of the making of Fitzcarraldo,

which was controversial. Some of the native Indian population that worked on the film were allegedly, I think, possibly killed. It was difficult. And Herzog being Herzog has a sort of, and because he's German and because I think he's had a lot of bad press. But in fact, the stories that he tells, I think, and his sympathy, he doesn't do any research.

And he does these amazing things. He drops these kind of bombs on people. There's an amazing thing at the beginning of Into the Abyss, which is a film about two teenagers on death row. And he's talking to a priest, a pastor, and you get the usual flannel. And then somehow the pastor, he plays golf and there's a squirrel. And he said, tell me something about your encounter with a squirrel. And then the pastor tells and then completely breaks down and you get the truth.

He is a remarkable, instinctive kind of creator of stories. And that is what he's doing in Of Walking in Ice. Of Walking in Ice, those of you who have read it will have realised, it kind of segues in and out of a dream state. He says he doesn't dream when he's asleep, but he dreams. One of the reasons he likes walking is that he dreams while he walks his mind wanders literally figuratively and he tries to capture that feeling of waking dreaming so when you're reading the book from sentence to sentence you can't be sure if what

you're being told is physically present or not Luke would you read us a bit? Yeah. So this bit I picked because Werner Herzog read it himself. So I thought it probably had some significance to him, which is why he picked it on a very interesting documentary where the writer Robert Pogue Harrison interviews him kind of about J.A. Baker's The Peregrine, which I think this book has a lot of kinship with. One of his favourite, favourite books. It is, yeah.

I don't even want to know what the J-A stand for. I just feel such a kinship with this man. It is slowly getting lighter, but still a dampness in the air, the landscape gloomy and gray. In chassis, a truck sucks milk from cans into its tanks. A great lucid decisiveness about my fate surged up inside me. I shall reach the river Marne today. Sir Fontaine is dying away. Abandoned houses. A big tree has fallen across a roof a long time ago.

Jackdaws inhabit the village. Two horses are feeding on the bark of a tree. Apples lie rotting in the wet clay soil around the trees. Nobody's harvesting them. On one of the trees, which seemed from afar like the only tree left with any leaves, apples hang in mysterious clusters close to one another. There isn't a single leaf on the wet tree, just apples, wet apples, refusing to fall. just apples, wet apples, refusing to fall. I picked one. It tasted pretty sour, but the juice in it quenched my thirst. I threw the apple core against the tree, and the apples fell like rain. When the apples had grown still again, restful on the ground, I thought to myself that no one

could imagine such human loneliness. It is the loneliest day, the most isolated of all. So I went and shook the tree until it was utterly bare. In the midst of the stillness, the apples pummeled the ground. When it was over, a haunting stillness grabbed me and I glanced around,

but no one was there. I was alone. At an abandoned laundry, I drank some water, but that was later Brilliant But the way that when you read those words And you're instantly there watching Herzog

Do this strange ritual with the apple tree It's just incredible And he goes on this journey and he appears in these towns and you know he's viewed with a certain amount of suspicion not least because he does burgle everyone's houses breaking into people's houses just their holiday homes to stay and obviously looks i mean there's a terrible he's always drinking milk for some reason he gets really thirsty and then he throws the milk up. So it is about loneliness. And the thing about nature is always,

nature is not a benign thing. It's like, you know, you're mutant crocodiles. It's not stable and it's not benign. I mean, that was the biggest thing for me with his work was this view of nature as we are part of it. But one thing actually, though, I think with this book, because it's this incredible wintry landscape and it's such a subversion of the alpine ideal that we see in the great ecstasy of the woodcarver Steiner,

the kind of beautiful landscapes he's skiing off. And that film came out at the same time. And we think of these German Bavarian mountainous landscapes and the border of France and Germany as being quite picture postcard um especially perhaps in the winter and reading the book sort of occurred to me I was thinking about it this week it's like that famous painting by Bruegel the uh hunters hunt in the snow which you look at it it's on Christmas cards and it's lovely but then you look at the picture again

and the hunters are sort of bent double depressed their hunting dogs are very thin. They've only killed a small fox. The water mill is frozen solid. You know, actually, within this thing that is used, literally, on picture postcards, there's starvation and suffering and struggle. One of the Herzog themes is figures in a landscape. You know, he likes to find a hostile terrain, put people into that terrain and see

what happens. It could be an urban terrain or a jungle or what have you. And this is a clip from the documentary Burden of Dreams, which is about the making of Herzog's film Fitzcarraldo, which was made in the Peruvian jungle in the rainforest in the early 1980s. And near the end of the film, this happens. It's an unfinished country. It's still prehistorical. The only thing that is lacking is the dinosaurs here. It's like a curse weighing on an entire landscape. And whoever goes too deep into this has his share of that curse. So we are cursed with what we are doing here.

It's a land that God, if he exists, has created in anger. It's the only land where creation is unfinished yet. Taking a close look at what's around us, there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we, in comparison to the enormous articulation we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel a cheap novel but when I say this I say this all full of admiration for the jungle.

It is not that I hate it. I love it. I love it very much, but I love it against my better judgment. Enjoy your festival! I absolutely love that bit, and I quote from it in Out of the Woods, because for me it became this little mantra I had in my head going through the forest, because what Werner Herz Herzog was brilliant doing with nature he's like you don't have to go to the jungle to see this um the the fornication murder and rotting away he says elsewhere in that in that quote it's in this woodland we're in now you know and he's brilliant at doing that taking these places as ciphers for all of nature and the film you know the, again, the other day is Grizzly Man,

which is one of his, again, one of his later works where there was this guy, Timothy Treadwell, who was living in Alaska, hanging out with grizzly bears and shooting all this tons and tons of hours and hours of footage of these bears, which he thought he was trying, he was protecting from terrible humans who were poaching them,

even though there wasn't any poachers in that area. And Herzog edited together a documentary using that footage but also interviews with Treadwell's friends and people who knew him because he actually ended up getting eaten by a bear killed and eaten by a bear as did his girlfriend who seemed to have been dragged to the the Alaskan wilds against her will. And it's a fascinating film now, because Treadwell is just the least sympathetic character. He's an absolute idiot. He's just obsessed with these bears. He has these cutesy chats about them and with them, you know,

and he's there going right up to massive great bears. And, you know, obviously that didn't go very well. And you're kind of like, why didn't the bears eat him earlier I mean this this absolute prick he's he's he's really really really irritating character if you created him in a work of fiction he would be unbelievable you would you couldn't conceive of somebody so utterly annoying and apparently and he'd be find out there's this incredible sense of why he ended up as he did. And apparently he lost out on a role in Cheers to Woody Harrelson. And that sent him on a spiral into addiction.

And which is just, it's a remarkable story. But that has this sort of, you know, the Timothy Treadwell is that archetypal man adventurer thinking he can go into the wilderness and connect with it and he can connect with the bears. And there's a great quote from Herzog in the end because there was a final bit of not footage because the lens cover was on when Timothy Treadwell and his partner were eaten, killed and eaten by the bears. And you see not Herzog's face as he's listening to it,

but Treadwell's friend, the camera's filming her face eaten, killed and eaten by the bears. And you see not Herzog's face as he's listening to it, but Treadwell's friend, the camera's filming her face. And she's just desperately looking for what Herzog's reaction is. And it's just, that's an incredible clever shot. But the way it ends, when he's talking about the bear, Treadwell and his relationship with the bears, he says, and what haunts me is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature.

To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food. But for Timothy Treadwell, this bear was a friend and a saviour. And I love that he has this sort of respect for Timothy Treadwell, this bear was a friend and a saviour. And I love that he has this sort of respect for Timothy Treadwell. I think as a filmmaker as well,

I mean, the footage is shocking. He was an accidental filmmaking marvel, really. Grizzly Man is also very interesting. In a sense, that film is Herzog's greatest hits because it's a film about Werner Herzog. The idea that you would go and do something and push yourself and others beyond the boundary of acceptable behaviour

to get what you want from the end product, that's a very Herzog thing about how Herzog makes his films. Also, I re-watched Grizzly Man Luke and one of the things that struck me about the film and how he frames that material is actually fascinatingly it it can I think you can read it as a film about America is a film about what it what it is to be American how you are expected to thrive in an environment and be the best and live your dreams. And what you actually see is Treadwell presented to you as this American ideal.

And when he was talking to the camera, I was thinking, who does this guy remind me of? Oh, yeah, it's Donald Trump. It's like seeing that guy who has really inhaled everything and then is trying to expel it in a way that is going to work for him regardless of the cost to anyone else. He reminded me of Julian Assange was the person I got. Maybe it's just people we want to see eaten by bears.

I don't know. He's very good, though. He says that these people who are on the edge of things, he said, but they're not freaks to him. They're aspects of ourselves. He says, if you're a scientist and you want to find out about the inner structure of some matter, you will put it under extreme pressure

and under extreme circumstances. People under extreme pressure give you much more insight about what we are, about our very innermost being. And I think that's the sort of the Herzog experiment, the kinship between all the crazy characters, the good and the bad. And that also extends to his fiction, I think, because there's a scene in Grizzly Man

where Timothy Treadwell sets up the camera with this beautiful landscape behind him, and he's doing his little end-of-season report, but he just goes on a demented rant against the park service, and Herzog turns the volume down because it's it's very individual attacks and he says I have seen this madness on film sets before and you instantly think of Klaus Kinski in My Best Fiend and the deranged

rants with which Kinski used to deliver it kind of everybody in the crew. Herzog says he always takes two books onto a film set. Do you know what those two books are? They're Livy's Second Punic Wars, because you need to be a general, and Luther's translation of the Bible, because you need the book of Job to hand. And we've got a clip here. One of the things about Of Walking in Ice is I don't think a writer writer would have written this book. I think it has a way of processing images and then relating them to the reader, which is filmic. But not only filmic, it's particular to Herzog's way of making films. So you can...

I almost feel if you read this book and you didn't know who it was by, you'd think, wow, this is reminiscent of Werner Herzog, right, except on the page. But also he's very bookish. So we have a clip now of Herzog talking about the importance of reading. Film students, they do read a book about editing, but nobody has read, let's say, books or dramas of Greek antiquity or God knows what.

And I keep saying to them, you have to read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read. If you do not read, you will become a mediocre filmmaker at best, but you will never make a real good film. I see hardly any films. I see three, four films a year, but I do read. Of course, I've written myself prose and some poetry, and I am fairly certain that my written work will outlive my films because the substance of books has nothing in between. You see when you make a film you have cameras and production money and actors, psychology, a lab or post-production, editing,

you just name it, many, many layers of very vulnerable elements. And when you write, you just write and there's nothing else. It's a direct form, a completely direct form of expressing something. He's really obsessed as well with language and preserving language and the way words work. And something that comes up quite often in interviews in his writing is his concern for disappearing languages. And he said at one point, tree-huggers and whale-huggers are embraced in their weirdness,

but no-one cares about the last speakers of a language. And I think partly it's because he grew up speaking... His father spoke a Bavarian dialect, and his mother would translate for him. And I think he's obviously grew up with this sort of intense fascination with how language works. He was also very sick when he was a child. In fact, there was a connection that I hadn't made

with an English writer who's similarly kind of self-taught, Alan Garner, who had a similar problem where he was a kid and because he was a kid he had to make stories. There's an amazing essay by Garners called The Edge of the Ceiling where he populates the ceiling with an imaginary world. And the same very similar story that Herzog tells about being wrapped in a blanket and finding a thread and creating a whole kind of series of stories about this thread.

So that thing time and time again you come back to is he trusts himself, he trusts his own judgment. There's a little, just a little bit from the book about words and their meanings. As I walk, the word millet, which I've always liked so much, just won't leave my mind. The word lusty as well. Finding a connection between the two words becomes torture. To walk lustily works. To reap millet with a sickle also works. But millet and lusty together doesn't work. A dense woodland unfailingly comes to pass.

Atop the peak of a mountain pass, two trucks converge, the cockpits coming so close that one driver can climb over to the other one without touching the ground. Together, never speaking a word to each other, they eat their lunch. They've been doing this for 12 years, always on the same route, always at the same place. The words are exhausted, but the food can be bought. The forest slowly ends here, the fierce hills too. For many, many miles, uninhabited woods sprawl all around, woods which served as battlegrounds in the First and Second World Wars. The countryside becomes more open and spacious. An irresolute rain drizzles down, staying at a rate where it doesn't matter much.

My output of sweat is prodigious as I march lustily, thinking of millet. Everything's grey on grey. Cows loom. I encountered a provisional enclosure for sheep. The sheep freezing and confused, looking at me and cuddling against me as if I could offer a solution. The solution. I've never seen such expressions of trust as I found on the faces

of those sheep in the snow. Sheep good, chickens bad. He's so interesting. I mean, the thing about Herzog as well is he's developed that thing, actually, like I was thinking of Alfred Hitchcock, where he's become a figure in popular culture, partly through turning himself into a caricature of himself when he needs to.

So he's the only voice you hear in the new Star Wars trailer, which went crazy last week. He's appeared in Simpsons, American Dad, all those things. But also, this use of music we were talking about earlier. Now, there is no actual prize, but who can tell me what album, what very famous album, this piece of music comes from. Oh, somebody's got their hand up. It's a Kate Bush album. A Kate Bush album.

It is a Kate Bush album. A round of applause for that gentleman. Thank you. So that is actually Zincaro by the vocal assemble Gordela. And it's from Nosferatu. It's from Side 2 of the... It's from the ninth wave, Side 2 of Hounds of Love. It's from the track Hello Earth.

And what happened was Kate Bush was watching Nosferatu the Vampire and she heard a bit of choral music and she thought, oh, that'll work. So what she did in the Kate Bush style was she went to huge time, trouble and expense to notate it, score it, re-record it so it sounded exactly like it does on the soundtrack for Nosferatu and it still wasn't good enough so they just used it off Nosferatu. I think thinking about Herzog and music

and his cultural context in Germany is really interesting. Andy's wearing his Kraftwerk Autobahn T-shirt. And those groups, I mean, I also sort of got into Werner Herzog films when I was first discovering people like Cannes and Kraftwerk. And those artists, the musicians, will talk about how they came up with this sort of visionary sound because they had no culture. Their culture was the Second World War. Their parents were complicit in Nazism. So they really had to build everything up from nothing. And I think Herzog's films exactly fit that tradition, which is why it's so interesting he worked with Popopu

because they were very much one of those groups. It was this creation of a new narrative and a new truth for them as German artists. And I sort of feel that's what Herzog was doing. He was very much alive. He was alive in 1940. He remembered the war. And he very much grew in the post-war period of rationing and so on.

He once said that he envied his friends because he was taken out. Another great Herzog story, his mother found him under a thick layer of shards of glass and brick so they decided to move out to the countryside but he was always envious of his friends who'd stayed and played in the ruins. There were no fathers, nobody to tell them what to do do one thing i want to say about of walking in ice is it's frequently

very funny yeah irony or no irony uh and there's a scene uh which i will edit on the fly which if it happened on friday the 6th of de 1974, I'll eat my shoe. Is this the Kodak? I just, I feel there may be some ecstatic truth at work here. Before going to sleep, I took a stroll into town on my still sizzling soles. There was a procession with brass bands, cherry bombs and little girls marching in parade, plus parents, children, and behind them all, a float being towed by a tractor. On top of the float, which was surrounded by torch-bearing members of the volunteer fire brigade, Santa Claus stood, tossing candy from

a cardboard box among the children, who flew after it with such abandon that a couple of boys, diving headlong for some sweets that had been flung too far crashed hard against a closed door. Santa himself looked so moonstruck that I almost suffered a stroke. When he appeared with his sunglasses up on the balcony, I was completely convulsed by a paroxysm of laughter. A few people gave me strange looks and I retreated to the bistro. While eating my sandwich, I ate one end of my scarf as well, which cracked me up so much inside that the whole table started to shake, though outwardly my face gave no signs of laughter.

And then he says at the end this is this is tomorrow i'll make myself switch roadsides now and then as long as i walk crisscross i didn't notice a thing the souls burn from the red hot core in the earth's interior the loneliness is deeper than usual today i'm developing a dialogical rapport with myself and in a sense that's what the book is it's herk sog walking for a month talking to himself coherently incoherently in and out of the dream state it's we always say this on backlisted when's true, and in this case it is true rather than the ecstatic truth, it's the actual truth. This isn't like any other book.

No. Most books are like other books, but this one isn't, and that in itself is a reason for reading it. It's like a kind of trippy fairy tale. I mean, it is. The good news is also Lottie Eisner didn't die. She lived for another two years. She wasn't even ill.

But that story's remarkable, isn't it? But the one where she has to ask him for permission to die. To die, yeah. When she's actually dying. She felt that she was being held back by some strange force, so she asked Herzog to release her. And he's very matter-of-fact about it. She couldn't watch films anymore, she couldn't read,

she was suffering, and she said, Werner, you've put this curse of life on me. And he says, sort of almost quite pleased with himself, she died 14 days later. It's worth saying that the book that Luke is holding, If You Want More Herzog, that is an absolutely

I mean, I think one of the great collections of interviews with an artist. It's incredible. Can I, have we got time for one bit, which kind of goes to the fundamental core of Herzog. So he gets asked, is Herzog your real name? It's my father's name.

My parents divorced when I was five or six, at which point my legal name became Stipecik, which was my mother's maiden name. My parents divorced when I was five or six, at which point my legal name became Stipecik, which was my mother's maiden name. I always felt much closer to my mother, but chose to work under the name Herzog, in part because it means Duke in German. I thought there should be someone like Count Basie or Duke Ellington making films. It is hostile and murderous out there in the universe. What looks friendly to us is actually 200,000 atomic explosions every second. The sun is a tiny grain of sand, and there are many even nastier suns out there.

Down here, we humans are living proof that things have gone warped. Perhaps changing my name has somehow protected me from the overwhelming evil of the universe. Which is magnificent. I only asked him what his real name was. So unfortunately, that's where we must rest and pause on our journey into a dark and essentially unforgiving universe. Thank you to Luke for a brilliant choice of book.

Thank you. Thank you to Nicky for always making us sound better than we actually are. Thank you to Unbound for putting up the cash. And thank you to all of you for coming and making such a lot of noise. It's been amazing. And you can download all 100 episodes of Batlisted.

There's 100 hours of this shit. It's unbelievable, mate. 100 hours of me and Mitch going, extraordinary. Would you call him, I think he's a master storyteller. A master storyteller. Hooray! A master storyteller. We'd also like to thank, because we've just passed 100 episodes,

we'd like to thank all the guests over the last few years who've been brilliant. We'd like to thank our listeners who have taken us over a million listens. Thank you much we're tremendously grateful uh we'll be back in a fortnight where i think the book we're going to be talking about is the soul of kindness by elizabeth taylor the writer not the actress and we will be joined by returning guests, Karma Khalil and Rachel Cook. So join us then. And we're always pleased if you contact us on Twitter,

Facebook and Boundless. Be careful out there. Thanks very much, everyone. Thank you. patreon.com forward slash backlisted, where you also get bonus content of two episodes of Locklisted, the podcast where we talk about the books and films and music that we've been listening to over the last couple of weeks.