Werner Herzog and Apichatpong Weerasethakul are the living artists best at making wilderness feel wild, albeit in different ways. While Apichatpong incorporates some animism, albeit not without irony, Herzog’s view of nature is more Nietzchean. The themes of his first novel The Twilight World, translated into English by Michael Hofmann and published by Penguin last month, resembles the making-of documentary Burden of Dreams at least as much as it does any of his own works. The plot follows Herzog’s friend Hiroo Onoda, infamous for continuing to fight the Imperial Japanese Army’s war on Lubang Island in the Philippines until 1974. Herzog has no interest in the politics or morality: Onoda’s detachment kills, as soldiers at war do, and nobody gets particularly worked up about it. Instead, he treats Onoda as someone with an absurd job he has no alternative but to carry out, like a man who must drag a ship over a mountain. Unlike in his Peruvian movies, the jungle itself is survivable: the risk of suddenly dropping dead from snakebite or dengue seems low. The real dangers are guns and loss of faith.
Herzog’s most potent weapon over the second half of his career has been his voice, used to narrate his documentaries and tell underlings to chew their own fingers off in Tom Cruise thrillers. I didn’t listen to his audiobook reading of The Twilight World, but the novel is short enough that you can read it yourself out loud in a slightly menacing Bavarian accent. The book’s weakest aspect is that the characters come across as puppets, performing their lines dutifully and never threatening to shoot the director. If you’re looking for all Herzogisms all the time, you’d be better off reading Of Walking in Ice, his diary of the time his friend in Paris was sick and he decided to walk over to visit her, from Munich. Still, The Twilight World has enough of them to keep fans interested: “The jungle does not recognize time. They are like two alienated siblings who will have nothing to do with each other, who communicate, if at all, only in the form of contempt.”
With Memoria, currently leisurely taking a city-by-city roadshow tour of the US, Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Joe to fans) has also gone intercontinental, constructing his rural-as-respite-from-the-city (unless you die) around Tilda Swinton in Colombia. This time Apichatpong is much more interested in megalopolis life than usual, shooting Bogotá shops and unappetizing-looking waffles with high interest. He’s particularly interested in the medical and anthropological programs of the National University of Columbia, reminding us that useful knowledge does come from urban agglomeration sometimes. Still, by the end Apichatpong has decided to pay more attention to trees and clouds, as usual. One character who has something like an eidetic memory prefers to live a repetitive, movie-free life in Pijao in the coffee altitudes because of the low-stimulus surroundings, allowing him to discern the life story of every rock. Perhaps it’s Apichatpong’s relative unfamiliarity with the surroundings that mean he doesn’t bring out its pleasures and malevolences as he did in, say, Blissfully Yours or Cemetery of Splendour, but every one of his movies is an event and it takes me a decade to work out how good they are in any case.
Memory aside, Memoria is about sound and its absence (and also decay and the lack of it, but I’ll let the necrometal bloggers talk about that one.) Swinton’s character is ostensibly suffering from Exploding Head Syndrome, hearing a noise in her head similar to the slam in Clipse’s “Grindin”. There’s a funny update to The Conversation in which a recording engineer tries to synthesize the sound based on her description and feedback: she asks for a rounder noise, and everyone who remembers mid-2000s thinkpieces about the clipping wars will cringe at the result. The other key human-made sound is a symphony of car alarms; Apichatpong sprinkles the two motifs into the movie sparingly like an edgelord Beethoven. Sometimes birdsong is heard as a contrast; sometimes it rains too much to hear anything else. And sometimes when looking for your recording engineer friend who may not actually exist, you stumble into a piano-guitar jazz quartet performance, where been able to see the participants interact with each other means you know your head won’t explode for a while.