Bladders n' Synch: A Screening of Werner Herzog's Happy People

I was in Brad’s Café, the Columbia Journalism school hangout, when I overheard a student mention the name Werner Herzog. I swiveled my chair to interrupt his conversation. One cannot afford to pay heed to social conventions when important matters are possibly at stake. This was Werner he was talking about.

“What did you just say about Werner?” The kid was taken aback by the sudden intrusion, but he understood; this was Werner.

“Oh, well he’s coming to the MFA Film department tonight to present his newest film.”

“Okay, where do I get a ticket?”

His name was Jimmy and the two of us walked through the pouring rain to the MFA building. I had never been there before. If journalists and fictionists are to be caught commiserating on Columbia’s campus there is sure to be trouble. We found out the tickets were reserved strictly for MFA students, so we begged a few of them in the hallway to procure us two. My day had just become much more exciting. I was going to see Werner at 6:30.

I left campus shortly thereafter to go to the divorce attorney’s office where I have a gig filing documents and running papers to the court clerks. While sorting through child support documents and scornful emails between exes I recollected my previous private Werner screening, which occurred in early October.

He was showing his other latest documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Werner Herzog is a German filmmaker who has been making films for nearly half a century, but more recently he has made Hollywood movies (Rescue Dawn, Bad Lieutenant: The Port of Call – New Orleans) and ‘documentaries’ (Grizzly Man, Encounters at the End of the World), which are more like film essays that he narrates himself. German accents have a way of obliterating any grace within the English language, but Werner’s voice avoids this pitfall. The emphatic manner with which he states his words washes out a portion of the normally abrasive German accent, and the final outcome is something that can be poetic, insightful, obnoxious, or comical, or even all of the above, depending on the context and tone. Personally, I can’t get enough of it.

Throughout the day I bothered my girlfriend, Shula, with text messages of fake Werner lines. “Why is it that human beings love pools and lakes, but yet many of us despair the rain? We always want abundance, and so it seems little droplets just won’t do.” When six O’clock rolled around, I filed away the last prenup and made my way back up to Columbia to the Dodge building. Outside the screening room on the fifth floor, the hallway was filled with hipster-like film geeks, perhaps more my speed than know-it-all news geeks. I could have perhaps been one of them had I not missed the application deadline. But no regrets, I have made peace with the Journalism program. Before the film was to begin, I looked for the nearest restroom.

The bathroom was small and though there were panels between the two urinals to protect for modesty, the layout was such that I was uncomfortably close to the pisser to my left. While peeing I noticed that as the man next to me peed, he was sighing and grunting, lost in relief. Washing our hands in the one sink behind us, the man asked me if I had the time. He had an un-kept look; long frizzy black hair and a slight gap in his front teeth. I told him the time. I was curious about these film kids. Who was I dealing with here?

As a journalist I have found that the best way to get a quick cultural gauge of an unfamiliar group of people is to act brashly and then observe the response. When you have to play guinea pig though, there is risk involved. If humor and wit align, there is potential for instant kinship; if not, there can be consequences.

“Pardon me for saying so,” I told the man, as we dried our hands on paper towels, “but that sounded like a good one.”

“Oh, you mean like a good sniffle?” Apparently, he had just sniffled, but I didn’t notice and I have no idea what a good sniffle is.

“No like a good pee.”

“What did you say?” The man was incredulous.

“I said it sounded like you just had a good pee.”

“What the hell are you talking about? Were you just observing my pee?”

“I wasn’t observing your pee. I just noticed certain noises you were making, like a deep sigh, which says to me that you were enjoying the pee. I can’t turn off my senses when I walk into a bathroom, so I noticed it; it’s a good thing. You should be happy.” The man was not happy.

“I don’t expect some dude to be observing me when I’m in the bathroom.”

“What do you think people plug their ears and close their eyes when they are in public bathrooms? Is that what you do? I asked, raising my voice to match the rise in his.

“Well, nobody’s ever said anything to me about my peeing.” I turned to move towards the door.

“Well, how does it feel?” As the door was closing behind me he caught my eye with his.

“Awkward!”

Time for Werner. There was no sign of Jimmy, but someone I was in line with had been nice enough to save me a good seat. I settled in just before Werner walked in to introduce Happy People, a title he told us he loathed but had been asked to keep. The film was not his, he told us, but rather an 89-minute version of a four-hour Russian documentary made by a filmmaker named Dmitry Vasyukov. Werner explained that he had loved the film and offered to cut it down to make it marketable to an international audience. He had also changed the music, used English translators to speak the translations instead of subtitles, and of course, added his own narration. The movie was a fascinating look into the lives of fur-trappers in Siberia, a wilderness one and a half times the size of the United States.

There are two things I love about Werner documentaries: one is they are fascinating; and two is Werner. He knows how to connect to his subjects so that they instantly become whole characters. When Werner questions scientists, he not only asks about their area of expertise, but about their dreams and they answer him without missing a beat. No matter what his films are about on the surface, they are always journeys into something much deeper and universal; they plunge into the unconscious. And then of course, there is his narration. All of Werner’s documentaries, or film essays as they have been called, have one or two moments where his voice is so serious, resounding, and intense about something that is visually implicit, that it borders on comedy. In one scene of his film Encounters at the End of the World, a scientist explains that penguins sometimes get confused and run away from the ocean and into the mountainous interior of the arctic. When Werner’s camera finds one such penguin waddling off into the mountains he chimes in. “…with 500 kilometers ahead of him, he is marching towards certain death.” Happy People, has these classic Werner moments too. At one point the filmmaker interviews a veteran from the Soviet War who becomes too overcome with emotion to continue speaking. While the man cries on camera Werner says in voice over, “This man has been so traumatized by the war, that he cannot continue to speak about it.”

His interactions with audiences also have a peculiar humor to them both because of the way he strings sentences together and because of his ardent tone. Over the course of the 30-minute Q&A that followed the screening of Cave of Forgotten Dreams, unfazed by the New York audience, Werner bashed New Age philosophy, psychotherapy, and yoga, which he called, “an abomination.” After the Happy People screening he again took a shot at yoga, and stressed the importance of traveling on foot, “and not with these ridiculous backpacks and sleeping bags and all that, but just a rucksack and you go.” My favorite line of the evening was when after stressing the importance of reading, Werner listed a few of the books that were required reading for anyone who enrolls in his film school in the UK. There were some odd choices in the mix. Someone questioned him about one in particular to which he answered:

“Yes, absolutely, I require all of my students at the Rogue Film School to read The War on Commission Report.”

On a more serious note, as fascinating as Happy People was, I was equally enthralled with the story of how Werner came across the original four-hour Russian documentary. He was driving by his friend’s house in Los Angeles and noticed that there was a parking spot. “There is never a parking spot there,” he tells us, “so I took it.” After knocking on his friend’s door he was invited in. His friend paused the film he was watching so that they could chat but before leaving, Werner told his friend to play part of the movie. “And I ended up staying to watch the end of this four hour Russian film about hunters in Siberia.” As soon as it ended Werner asked his friend to rewind it back to the beginning to watch again.

“And I thought one should make an international version of it,” he explained.

I chatted with Werner briefly before leaving and he said that by living his life through his intuition he frequently stumbles upon “gifts” such as this film. Even in going to see Werner films, I have had strange serendipitous experiences. In order to acquire a ticket to the screening last month, I waited in an hour-long line outside of a box-office that was selling tickets to at least 20 other events as part of the New Yorker Magazine Festival. The woman one spot in front of me was not only also in line to get tickets to the new Werner film, but she had also spent time in working in the Locations departments in the film industry (albeit a bit higher up than me; she is Woody Allen’s NY Location Manager). The two of us formed an instant bond. More recently, having impressed myself by sneaking into the sold-out Halloween Phish show based on an intuitive sense that I could, I have noticed my own intuition bearing fruit. Hearing this lesson from Werner was very timely. Even the way I happened to hear about this screening from Jimmy was a random occurrence. And, that’s not all.

Before making the hour-long trip home to Brooklyn, I thought it a good idea to relieve myself. I went back to the same bathroom and took the one open urinal; the one on the right, where I had relieved myself pre-Happy People. Looking to my left, I did a double take. It was him; frizzy hair, gap in the tooth, shaggy look. He had to have noticed me, yet he didn’t say anything. There was, however, no way in hell that I was not going to comment on the situation. Werner had taught me otherwise. What makes this happening even weirder is that he didn’t even go to the Werner film. This wasn’t just the pre-relief, post-relief encounter of two men attending the same event. This was something grander; bladders in-synch. I looked at him closely to make sure he was in fact the guy, and then I cut in on the sound of our respective streams.

“Come on. What are the chances? This is funny. You can laugh.” He looked at me blankly, zipped up, then turned around to head to the sink. “Just admit it, it was a great piss you had earlier. Am I wrong? Why can’t you admit that you had a great pee?” At this point I was at the sink too. He looked at me blankly.

“Who are you?” He asked. “I’ve never seen you. You’re just here for the event, right? I nodded.

“Figures.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” I asked. “Figures what? Do you like Werner?”

“Eh, I could take him or leave him.” He was drying his hands now with a paper towel.

“Ok, I see. So you’re saying figures that I would like him. You’re saying you can take or leave me? You don’t like me, do you?”

He chucked the used paper towel in the trash, looked me in the eye and said, “Kid, I don’t even know you.” Then he turned and walked out.

“Just admit it,” I screamed after him, “It was a great pee.”

I wonder what Werner would have thought of all this. I think he would have sided with me. “Yes,” he would have said, “great pees and traveling on foot, these are two things essential for every man to live a full existence.” I walked to 96^th Street before hopping the subway home.