Re: Herzog, some of his stories are certainly intended as metaphors, but others I'm not so sure about. You can project metaphors onto any of them, but I'm not sure how intentional they are.

I picture Herzog as first and foremost an adventurer. His filmmaking (especially his narrative work) seems to be an outlet for his desire for exploration and challenge. Herzog has admitted to an obsession with geography in interviews. He claims that as a teenager, he perambulated the entire border of the tiny Stalinist communist nation of Albania simply because he wanted to immerse himself in that mysterious and forbidding place without becoming a prisoner of it. He says he wanted to get an idea of what it was like inside that secretive and isolated country while at the same time toying with the very real possibility of being arrested as a spy.

His movies have the common theme of a man trying to operate outside his own natural environment. Sometimes his characters succeed, and sometimes the environment destroys them. Either way, his characters are like stand-ins for the real struggle his actors have to endure by way of his own creative process. His narrative films are all somewhat "documentary", inasmuch as they involve Herzog and his company experiencing very real and immediate adversity within an alien or otherwise difficult environment, and documenting the ordeal. The real struggle within his productions can result simply from inherent challenges of operating in an alien or unforgiving situation (ie. filming Aguirre, The Wrath of God on the Amazon or casting a wholly untrained and inexperienced homeless man in a lead role for Every Man for Himself and God Against All) or it may be deliberately planned and directed by Herzog himself (like the boat-lugging scene in Fitzcarraldo or the malnourished condition of his actors in Rescue Dawn).

So Herzog's filmmaking process often mimics the story he's telling, and his actors' suffering and striving often mimic that of the characters they portray. Is that a metaphor? If so, are the actors' real-life struggles on the set emblematic of the characters' struggles, or is it the other way around?

I would say that certain films, like Every Man for Himself, Aguirre and Where the Green Ants Dream are clearly metaphorical, but for instance I don't really understand how Stroszek relates to capitalism. I see it as more of an existential story, the tragedy of a man who passively allows others to make his life's decisions for him.

Cranius, what am I missing there?

clocker bob wrote:Simmo, why don't you ask Cranius if he denies the existence of a subconscious?

OK then, I will

This is all getting pretty complicated. I'll try and not start talking out my arse:

Brett Eugene Ralph wrote:

Cranius wrote:BUT... music (tone) and visual art (colour) communicate without language. Even poetry relies on

certain asignifying qualities, such as, the sonority of a word, its musical qualities, rhythm and so forth.

I agree, Andrew, but there are such things as visual metaphors, too. Can't a non-representational canvas still be metaphorical in some sense?

Yeah, I'm sure this happens in non-representational art all the time, probably much to the annoyance of abstract painters.

Brett Eugene Ralph wrote:Is something necessarily devoid of "meaning" simply because we don't process it as language? I think there are other kinds of meaning and knowledge besides those that can be explicitly voiced via the intellect. When a guitar solo moves me, I know what the player "means" even if it's beyond my power to verbalize it. Ditto for Jackson Pollock.

It isn't devoid of meaning at all, we just perceive it differently. It effects us in a different way, like a shock to the body, rather than purely through our intellectual or interpretive faculties; through affect transmitted via expression, tone, and various modulations of sound. It bypasses certain linguistic processes. The mode of communication is more direct. Transference might be a better word than communication here.

The more abstracted something becomes, the more it operates like this, until it's just pure affect.

The guitar solo probably might act more like the human voice, transferring emotional content in that manner...like Tim says....timbre.

Music is much harder to talk about than paintings in this respect, because music has a temporal dimension, so it can have dynamic changes in multiple directions. There's usually such an enormous amount going on, it's very hard to isolate what is happening to us without being reductive.

TMidgett wrote:...Wordless sound can function as metaphor the same as anything else.

The influence of wordless sound, functioning as metaphor, is what makes music what it is.

The audio metaphors of rock music are distinguished in large part by timbral content. It is not distinguished as much by the melodic or chordal or lyrical content as we tend to assume it is. All that stuff is important, but it's less important in rock music than in any other kind of music.

Timbre is overwhelmingly crucial to rock music. A particular sound, with particular qualities, can function within rock music metaphorically and have far more power than anything anyone can write down.

Personally, I'm convinced rock music is a special case; it's exceptional. Which is what makes it so exciting. But I'm biased.

big_dave wrote:Cranius, would you say that all music has a semantic or semiotic system of significance?

Obviously it can, but does it always? Why do we listen?

I would argue that anything visual always will, but I'm unsure about music or performance in general.

Music traditionally had societal functions, which it's kind of free from now. Wagner created a whole nationality on the back of his music. He communicated German-ess and German values through his elborate musical rituals. I don't think painting could ever achieve that.

Does it always signify? Hmmm....When I listen to Flying Saucer Attack I'd say it signifies very little. If I listen to ZZ Top, I'd say a lot.

Captain Panic wrote: I don't really understand how Stroszek relates to capitalism. I see it as more of an existential story, the tragedy of a man who passively allows others to make his life's decisions for him.

Cranius, what am I missing there?

It's kind of a critique of the West German situation, trapped between the capitalist west and the eastern bloc. That's a material/historical reality, that would have been implicit at the time it was made. It's not necessarily the subject of the film, but it is the context.

Bruno S is a naive, simple man, but with the soul of an artist. He's stuck in a miserable situation, yet his stuggles are heroic, like all of Herzog's characters. He still has some place in society as a street musician and he has a kind of family in the old man and young woman. He's lured by the dream of freedom to America, but his misery is just compounded by the harsh economic reality there; a country where he has no place, no social framework. He's unable to translate himself into that idiom and his 'family' dissolves. American individualism offers him no freedom; its freedoms seem illusory. Herzog describes it with the two farmers on tractors, making sure each sticks to their boundaries. He can't produce his own life there, so he dies.

I would argue still that it's not really metaphor, it's unmediated reality presented to us for critique. Herzog tries to make it as close to reality as possible. He heightens the reality, by intensifying the situation (I think Cassavetes does the same). Bruno S really is a street musician with mental instability. The location at the end, with it's miserable side-show and the dancing chicken, is a real place.

The imaginary and the real are within a hair's-breadth.

Cranius wrote:Wagner created a whole nationality on the back of his music. He communicated German-ess and German values through his elborate musical rituals. I don't think painting could ever achieve that.

But for sure Wagner had to go beyond the musical and into the visual and the mythological to achieve his aims, which is also telling.

And as long as we're frying the big fish, I'm reminded a lot of the words of (the pure musician) Beethoven. Paraphrased:

"The only thing that music will do is give you an insight into the mind of the artist that created it."

I can go a long way with that, though possibly it's the final instance of every form of expression. And Luigi, too, apparently felt he should reach beyond the confines of pure music (by including Schiller's poem in the 9th) in order to attain the universal.

As for the societal connotations of art, I'd say architure is, almost by definition, most specific with regard to that, by a wide margin. The imposed order of neo-classical architecture (adopted by virtually every society with universalist claims in the past two thousans years) was always explicitely metaphorical. Which may pose the question whether the use of metaphor is ultimately a device to objectify what is in essence individual expression?

All language is metaphor, and language is a tool of public expression. Private languages aren't strictly languages. Are private metaphors still strictly metaphors?

Just thinking out loud here.

Nosferatu is a faithful re-make of one of the greatest and most iconic films of all time. In typically perverse fashion, Herzog was paying explicit tribute to the history of cinema generally, and German cinema in particular, during a time when that was a completely unfashionable thing to do.

Nosferatu is not a "Herzog film." You might think there are "Herzogian" elements, but when you watch the original it becomes clear that Herzog's re-make is extremely faithful (perhaps to its detriment).

Rotten Tanx, check out the original sometime.

In order to keep this thread "PRF," here is a picture of an obese woman, and an image related to the Illuminati.

How could you vote crap on metaphor?

sunlore wrote:As for the societal connotations of art, I'd say architure is, almost by definition, most specific with regard to that, by a wide margin. The imposed order of neo-classical architecture (adopted by virtually every society with universalist claims in the past two thousand years) was always explicitly metaphorical. Which may pose the question whether the use of metaphor is ultimately a device to objectify what is in essence individual expression?

Apparently, that's why the Houses of Parliament (Westminster Palace) is built in the Gothic style, so that our democracy would not be confused with French or US style republican democracy, which favoured the neo-classical. Perhaps in deference to our German sovereigns.

sunlore wrote:Which may pose the question whether the use of metaphor is ultimately a device to objectify what is in essence individual expression?

In short, yes.

Nietzsche is maybe one of the best philosophers of metaphor. He writes in metaphor. For him metaphor is the mask of appearances behind which there are only more metaphors; more masks, more illusory 'truths'. Truth is a 'movable host of metaphors'. Therefore metaphor only becomes problematic when it becomes representative of 'Truths', fixed in concept and unmovable. He'd say that this happens over time, what was fluid, becomes ossified. This also happens through language itself, which reduces the continuous flow of nature and leads us to a perspective that is simplistic, separating objects in the world from each other (atomism). This is possibly why Nietzsche writes in poetics, to allow his metaphors to be continually mobile.

As a result he bases his affirmative philosophy in 'pre-objective' nature and actual 'being-in-the world'. So for him individual identity--the isolated soul that this atomisation brings about--is incompatible to the continuous, homogeneous flow of things. Through this he forms his critique of morality and Free Will (the ego). He also thinks the presupposition of freedom is oppressive. That's why he sets about demolishing the presumption of Free Will and moral idealism, which allows him to invent a new concept of affirmative, joyful, 'gay' freedom. This joy is based in the actual.....like Herzog's films.

So it's maybe not that Herzog's films aren't metaphorical, they just have a different, positive perspective, that is open to the external, to nature. The metaphors employed never rest long enough to become reducible; they swarm. That way they more resemble reality.

Abductor wrote:In order to keep this thread "PRF," here is a picture of an obese woman, and an image related to the Illuminati.

100 POINTS

Cranius wrote:So it's maybe not that Herzog's films aren't metaphorical, they just have a different, positive perspective, that is open to the external, to nature.

A righteous observation, though I was personally slightly taken aback by Herzog's commentary over the shots of the polar abyss in Grizzly Man: "It seems to me that this landscape in turmoil is a metaphor for his [Treadwell's] soul." It sort of short-circuited a symbolic loop in that film and it struck me as unnecessary. On the other hand, I can see how that section is material in setting up a kind of metaphorical funhouse (now there's your meta), which may serve as a commentary on the "homogenous flow of things," as you note. I don't know.

Maybe unrelated, but a good bit anyway: I read in an interview with Herzog about him making Nosferatu that he, upon finding out that the rats who he had sent to Holland were white instead of grey, had them all painted by a local farmer.

Herzog, Painter of Rats