A dream vision of Bagan in a classic German film

The ancient city of Bagan in central Myanmar

LAST month I embarked on an obsessive quest to watch every feature-length movie directed by German filmmaker Werner Herzog, in chronological order, from his 1967 debut Signs of Life up to the present.

Herzog’s fifth film, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), is based on the true story of a mysterious teenage boy found wandering the streets of Nuremberg in 1828. As he learns to speak, Hauser reveals that he had spent his life up to that point locked in a darkened room. He is unable to say who had cared for him, or who had brought him to Nuremberg.

As concerned citizens strive to educate the boy, Hauser demonstrates an unorthodox way of looking at the world that at first seems irrational. He repeatedly “fails” tests of religious faith, logic and social conformity, and these failures make him an outcast in the eyes of his “well-adjusted” contemporaries. But it becomes increasingly apparent that the young man is more in touch with his humanity than those who test and judge him.

For a long time Hauser is unable to differentiate dreams from reality, and dream imagery plays an important role in the film. These grainy, eerie sequences are quite striking. In one, people trudge in procession up a steep, rocky mountainside, at the top of which Death awaits. In another, a Bedouin camel caravan moves through the Sahara Desert, playing out a recurrent “story” that Hauser is reluctant to recount because he knows how it begins, but not how it ends. 

Hauser dreams of places he has never been, and yet he “knows” what region they are meant to represent. Herzog approaches this incongruity in a typically playful manner. In one scene Hauser tells his adoptive father that he has dreamed of the Caucasus, at which point the film cuts to a shaky, flickering 180-degree pan of a vast plain of green fields and trees, with hundreds of strange, reddish-brown spires towering into the sky.

Watching the film, it took me a moment to realize that I was seeing not a village in the Caucasus, but old documentary film footage of the ancient city of Bagan in central Myanmar.

The shot lasts about 50 seconds. Among the landmarks plainly visible are Dhammayangyi Temple (the largest in Bagan), then Ananda Temple and Thatbyinnyu. As the leftward pan continues, the smaller pagodas in the Myinkaba area loom into sight. The Ayeyarwaddy River is lost in the distant haze, but the mountains beyond are clearly visible.

As far as I could guess, the footage was taken from the top of Shwesandaw Pagoda, now a popular spot from which tourists watch sunsets. Given that the movie was released in 1974, and the footage is in colour, I assumed it must have been shot in the 1960s or early 1970s, when few foreigners were traveling to Myanmar.

Intrigued, the next day I Googled Werner Herzog and Bagan, and came up with nothing. Apparently, few had noticed the source of the footage, or had not cared enough to post anything about it.

I decided to email Herzog directly. I had read that he’s one of the most unpretentious film directors on the planet, but I didn’t necessarily expect a response.

To my surprise, I received an answer less than two hours later, which read: “The footage was shot by Mr Lucki Stipetic during a private trip around 1971 to (then) Burma. The sight was overwhelming and Lucki Stipetic climbed the highest stupa in the middle of the field and did a round shot on Super 8mm.” (Lucki Stipetic, the younger half brother of Herzog, is a film producer and the official head of Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.)

Unanswered in the email was my question about why this particular shot was used to represent one of Hauser’s dreams, and particularly a dream described as having occurred in the Caucasus.

Literal-minded filmgoers might find this wilful “mis-identification” by the director maddening, but I took it as a manifestation of Herzog’s concept of “poetic, ecstatic truth,” a phrase he coined in his “Minnesota Declaration” to represent a truth that “can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization” rather than through facts, statistics or cinéma vérité.

Unlike many artists, Herzog does not seem to feel the need to over-rationalize the content of his movies. In interviews he often admits to not knowing why he included a particular shot in a film, other than explaining that it just felt like it belonged there. In nearly all cases, whether backed by logic or not, it works brilliantly.

Likewise, some critics have observed that Herzog has never provided an “adequate” explanation for why eerie landscapes play such an important role in his films, but he has asserted his belief in the “voodoo of location”: the idea, as described by film critic Roger Ebert, “that locations seep into performances and photography and give a special texture to the film”.

What better image to provide the “texture” of Hauser’s mysterious dream world than the extraordinary landscape of Bagan, regardless of what region of the world the dreamer imagines the vision is meant to represent?

 

 

Rendezvous II street art exhibition in Yangon

Below are a few photos of Southeast Asian street artists at work, at the opening of the Rendezvous II art exhibition in Yangon on February 4, 2013. Artists from Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines took part.