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I generally don�t approve of abridgements, be they literary or cinematic. Especially cinematic. With certain works of literature, like William T. Vollmann�s seven-volume Rising Up and Rising Down, there are understandable practical and economic considerations that go into an abridgement (like the fact that I�m more likely to spend nineteen dollars on the abridged edition than three hundred dollars on the multivolume edition). But with cinema, a film is most likely to be abridged if it�s a foreign masterpiece and Harvey Weinstein has purchased the American distribution rights and has decided he wants to butcher it (see Farewell, My Concubine; Tears of the Black Tiger, and Dragon, among other victims).
The abridgement of the film that became Happy People came about in a different manner. Russian documentarian Dmitry Vasyukov made a four-hour television documentary about the lives of Russian sable trappers living in Nowheresgrad, Siberia. These old-timey trappers are arch-individualists who pursue a traditional lifestyle (or as traditional as you can get with snowmobiles and chainsaws) in one of the most desolate wildernesses on the planet. So this film was already very Herzogian. All it needed was the eccentric German�s signature idiosyncratic English-language voice-over. And so the film was brought to Herzog and his people, and they cut it down to a ninety-minute theatrical version with a Herzog narration. The opening titles say the film was directed by Dmitry Vasyukov and Werner Herzog (in that order), which is interesting, as there�s no evidence that Vasyukov and Herzog ever met. Certainly, there doesn�t appear to have been any direct collaboration between them.
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| Herzog, as photographed by "erinc sailor" on Flickr. |
I�ve always been pretty ambivalent about Werner Herzog. I find his German-language fiction films of the seventies to be a pretty mixed bag which hasn�t always aged well (unlike the films of his fellow New German Cineastes, like Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Volker Schlondorff, which remain excellent; Herzog�s fiction films, by contrast, tend to look older than they are and uglier than they need to be). I think Herzog�s documentaries are pretty mixed as well. I�m not as enamored of his voice-over as a lot of other people seem to be; certainly, in Happy People, he doesn�t have that much to say that Vasyukov�s images can�t say for him. One gets the distinct impression that Vasyukov�s film was already complete, and that anything Herzog adds to it is merely superfluous.
This includes the thesis advanced in the title, that the trappers are fundamentally happy people. Herzog says Herzogishly, �Now out on their own, the trappers become what they essentially are: happy people.� The dictum �to become who you are� was first issued by Pindar and taken up later by Nietzsche, but Herzog does little to substantiate his assertion that this is how the trappers live. He suggests that their industriousness and their isolation render them happy in a way that your typical city-dweller isn�t, but he doesn�t say why. �The trapper is one of the few to witness the beauty of space, cold, and silence,� Herzog says sententiously. But the trapper is also one of the few to witness a bear tearing his dogs apart and who then has to shoot the bear in the face when it tries to kill him and then he tries to save one of his dogs whose intestines are hanging out but she dies in his arms (we don�t see this in the film, mind you, but one of the trappers recounts the story of when this happened to him). Herzog also fails to reconcile his notions of happy primitivism with the plight of the few native Siberians we encounter in this film; they are plagued by alcoholism and poverty and their primitive condition and �closeness to the taiga� can hardly be said to make them happy. Maybe there are political considerations here; perhaps the ethnically Russian trappers owe some of their happiness to the benefits of their whiteness; if so, Herzog isn�t interested in pursuing it. In fact, there�s a lot Herzog isn�t interested in pursuing in this movie. But luckily, Vasyukov has already pursued enough lines of inquiry to make for an engaging film. If only Herzog could have kept quiet.
