The work of German filmmaker Werner Herzog affords us a rare chance to think about vanguard cinema in the age of the global culture industries. First associated with postwar "new German cinema," a cinema based on an "autorenkino" art mode of production and a resistance to market pressure, Herzog remains today, more than most consecrated filmmakers, an independent. In contrast to his contemporaries, Herzog's "post-national" films have tended to avoid the direct treatment of social issues and historical topics.[1] Rather, he treats social subjects obliquely, presenting viewers with baffling and frustrating representations that are mediated by the subjective visions and experiences of eccentric individuals and that are rendered in an artistically stylized naturalism. If Herzog has a political motivation that is shared by his contemporaries, it is, as Julia Knight argues, his effort to create a space outside of commercial cinema and the maintenance of film art as an autonomous form.[2] Although most critics today would hesitate to make distinctions between independent and commercial cinema, it is possible to assert that on this score Herzog remains a romantic – a champion of art film in the world market.
Commentators have not failed to remark on the importance of landscape in Herzog's films as external manifestations of the individual psyche. In this essay I take a small step beyond the literality of Herzog's natural/psychic landscapes towards a "cognitive mapping" of the world system that was proposed by Fredric Jameson in his 1992 book The Geopolitical Aesthetic.[3] I do so with respect to Herzog's Encounters at the End of World (USA, 2008) and in comparison with Davis Guggenheim's presentation of Al Gore's public lectures on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth (USA, 2006). I consider the formal qualities of Herzog's film, as Jameson recommends, together with its "non-visual systemic cause": self-consciousness about the social totality and the artist's position within it.[4]
While one could argue that the marxian mode of materialist social theory has been roundly criticized by postmodern and post-structural analysis, one could equally argue that today, the radical democratic project of anti-essentialist postmodernism has run a certain deficit and that the reconceptualization of post-Fordist, neoliberal capitalism reinstates the question of radical struggle. Perhaps the most challenging interlocutor of today's progressive leftists is the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. For Žižek, the contingency that best defines the workings of capitalism as the concrete universal is the very belief that we are in a period that has superceded the radical revolutionary movements of the past.[5] Žižek argues that we should not reject as "mere fantasies" the "paranoiac" ideological dimension of conspiracy theories concerning the logic of global capitalism, and with this, the suturing of the subject in ideological identification. Rather, the postmodern emphasis on decentralized decisions and autopoietic processes, he argues, should be thought to mask forms of socio-economic control and regulation. Against historicist approaches to social difference, Žižek argues that Jameson's theory of cognitive mapping was correct in identifying the dialectical relationship between the universal and the particular. "The Universal," he writes,
"is not the encompassing container of the particular elements, the peaceful medium-background of the conflict of particularities; the Universal 'as such' is the site of unbearable antagonisms, self-contradiction, and (the multitude of) its particular species are ultimately nothing but so many attempts to obfuscate/reconcile/master this antagonism."[6]
It is my view that Herzog's poetic realism affords a radical truth-telling about the ideological dimensions of these antagonisms of the symbolic order. His unremitting resistance to commercial cinema underscores the radical tendencies that runs counter to postmodern ethics.[7]
In his study, Jameson argues that the conspiratorial texts of postmodern cinema are unconscious efforts to discern the forces that confront us in late capitalism.[8] A geopolitical unconscious, he argues, finds expression in the allegory of isolated landscapes. These psycho-topographies operate as a "figurative machinery" through which the struggles between transnational classes can be represented. He writes:
"a host of partial subjects, fragmentary or schizoid constellations can often now stand in for trends and forces in the world system, in a transitional situation in which genuinely transnational classes, such as a new international proletariat and a new density of global management, have not yet anywhere clearly emerged. These constellated and allegorical subject-positions are, however, as likely to be collective as they are individual-schizophrenic, something which itself poses new form-problems for an individualistic storytelling tradition."[9]
The form that Jameson identifies as exemplary in this regard is the conspiratorial allegory, a plot structure that allows for an unconscious identification with the world system. While the medium of its collective dimension is information and communication, the subject of geopolitics experiences life, or "landscape," it in the form of a conspiracy, as an unrepresentable totality. Scrambling the symptoms of global capitalism, the allegorical figures of the conspiracy plot include: non-alienated work, double agents, computers, paranoia, underground worlds, different sensory registers, average aesthetic values, ideas as by-products of production processes, the military, the avoidance of establishing shots, and spatialized perception. The fundamental "problem-form" of the conspiracy film, Jameson argues, is the intersection of the individual protagonist into the web of a hidden social order. This protagonist, possibly a detective, is not so much an individual, "someone who blunders into all this just as anyone might have done," but everyone.[10] For Jameson, the political significance of the protagonist who stands in for everyone is its universal implications. More precisely, the conspiracy is in reality a class war and the protagonist the figure of an unrepresentable proletariat. Admittedly, An Inconvenient Truth and Encounters at the End of the World are a far cry from fiction films like Sokurov's Days of Eclipse, Pakula's The Parallax View or Godard's Passion. Nevertheless, we do have in these films the presentation of middle-class professionals, scientists and managers. We also have the presentation of global commodification and media society leaving its imprint at the furthest reaches of the planet. If the fate of nations was once tied to national allegories, the fate of the ecosphere, and with it, all of humanity, is linked with the fate of today's anti-capitalist, alter-global class war. Given that the most urgent problem of our era is ecology, it is quite reasonable to discover that the cinema has found its aesthetic response.
Cold Convenience
On the surface of things Encounters at the End of the World seems to be a fairly banal undertaking, promising never-before-seen footage of the relatively unknown continent of Antarctica. It was financed by the cable television channel Discovery Films and was sponsored by the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Artist and Writers Program, a U.S. Government program dedicated to advancing and disseminating results to enhance scientific and technological understanding. At the opening of the film, Herzog takes his distance from the Foundation and from the defense contractor that manages the day-to-day operations at the McMurdo Sound settlement. He states the following, along with film images from The Lone Ranger, documentary footage of carnivorous ants, and an illustration of a masked monkey riding a goat:
"My questions about nature I let them know were different. I told them I kept wondering why it is that human beings put on masks or feathers to conceal their identity. And why do they saddle horses and feel the urge to chase after the bad guy? And why is it that certain species of ants keep flocks of plant lice as slaves to milk them for droplets of sugar? I asked them: why is it that a sophisticated animal like a chimp does not utilize inferior creatures? He could straddle a goat and ride off into the sunset."
The Foundation allowed Herzog more creative control than most sponsored artists to date, which allowed him to present more of the scientific discoveries than others before him. Encounters in some way lives up to the statement he makes in Wim Wenders' Tokyo-Ga that he would be willing to travel thousands of miles in space to capture new images. In Wenders' film, Herzog says:
"There are few images to be found. One has to dig for them like an archaeologist. One has to search through this ravaged landscape to find anything at all. It's often tied up with risk, of course, which I would never shun, but to see so few people today who dare to address our lack of adequate images. We absolutely need images in tune with our civilization, images that resonate with what is deepest within us. We need to go into war zones, if need be, or anywhere else it takes us – to find images that are pure and clear and transparent. I'd go to Mars or Saturn if I could, because it's no longer easy here on earth to find that something that gives images their transparency the way you could before."
This is not too far fetched an association since the inspiration for Encounters came from the underwater film work of Henry Kaiser that is featured in Herzog's Wild Blue Yonder, a science fiction film that uses Kaiser's underwater footage as a substitute for representations of outer space.[11] Kaiser had produced footage taken in small crawl spaces under the Antarctica ice shelf that no one had seen previously. Herzog was so impressed with this footage that it became the impetus for him to travel to Antarctica himself. Consequently, this made him the first filmmaker to have filmed on all seven continents. He asserts in an interview that this causes him to worry that he will soon be discovered by the people at The Guiness Book of World Records. Aptly, the whole business of being "the first" to have done something is presented in the film as part of the lore concerning expeditions to the South Pole. Tacitly, Herzog compares himself to Ernest Shackleton, the leader of the 1907 Nimrod Expedition.[12]
A great deal of technical sophistication was required for Herzog to make his film, with the NSF paying $10,000 per person per day to work in Antarctica. Despite this, Encounters maintains the low-budget production aesthetic that characterizes the work of the Oberhausen filmmakers. His film crew consisted of only himself as sound man and cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger. Besides the underwater footage, the film is mostly about the scientists and McMurdo station staff who have dedicated themselves to working in the Antarctic's inhospitable and ultimately dangerous environment. This cast includes a marine ecologist, a glaciologist, cell biologist, station cook, journeyman plumber, mechanic and forklift driver, a linguist and computer expert, a nutritional ecologist, two volcanologists, a physicist and a zoologist. We encounter all of these people and their work through Herzog's narration, which since films like Herakles (1962), The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1973), La Soufrière (1977), The Dark Glow of Mountains (1984), Wings of Hope (1999) and as recently as Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011) and Into the Abyss (2012), we come to expect as marked by distant reverence, avoiding authoritativeness and documentary seriousness through laconic storytelling and quasi-exploitative irony. The "funk aesthetic" and "mondo" themes of Herzog's work are well worth noting, especially as he used these to great effect in films as diverse as Precautions Against Fanatics (1969), Handicapped Future (1971), Stroszek (1976) and Bells from the Deep (1999). The frank irony of his narration works reflexively to heighten its humanistic and poetic ambition. Herzog will at times let his camera linger on his subjects, well after they have finished talking. These awkward moments are less a manner of revealing his subjects to the viewer than a reverse-parody of formal devices that are routinely used in television productions and that demonstrate that Herzog knows how to use such devices para-tactically, against the grain. Herzog's ethical distance from his subjects allows him to take some distance also from the cultural conventions that sustain the cinematic enterprise and guarantee its reproduction.[13]
As a function of enunciation, Herzog's narration compels us to identify with him more than the scientists. At this stage in his career, we can also assert that Herzog appears in Encounters as a celebrity narrator as opposed to an anonymous professional narrator. In this he is like Michael Moore, whose documentaries cannot be separated from the man himself.[14] The strategy of placing the narrator on screen was developed in the 1960s as a means to move away from authoritarian "voice of god" narration.[15] Although Herzog does not appear within the frame, his narration has the form of a travelogue, making his presence essential to the construction of the film. In contrast to Moore's overtly propagandistic films, Herzog "stylizes" his documentary by inventing or modifying some of the material himself. In one example of stylization, Herzog makes the seal scientists lean down to the ice to listen to the sounds of the seals six feet below their camp. Countless other "manipulations" can be expected to have been inserted, including glaciologist Douglas MacAyeal's statement that iceberg B15 is crying and screeching – a statement that repeats Herzog's famous lines on nature in Les Blank's Burden of Dreams (cited below). This and other techniques do not tie down his film's imagery to the storyline or to the operations of a "subjective camera," but allows the images a relative independence from narrative functions. The disjunction between visual and narrative impulses acts as an almost ethereal form of montage, allowing the spectator to easily pass through the wide mesh of his film. Perhaps because Herzog encourages viewers to identify with him as a guide, his work avoids psychology and displaces it onto images of icy landscapes, underwater creatures and eccentric characters. If cinéma vérité has made use of cinema as political weapon, Herzog would seem to want to restore some innocence to the medium, to play with it (perhaps the way he and the children he grew up with during WWII played with live hand grenades).
Herzog's seemingly playful attitude allows him to cast a friendly glance on the oddball testimonies of the research scientists that he interviews. These include a computer expert whose nighttime musical performance involves squeezing her body into a carrying bag and the station plumber who explains that the shape of his hands and ribs indicate that he is descended from Aztec and Inca royalty. Other staff members are equally quirky though more scientific as they discuss subatomic neutrino particles, volcano etiquette, or the link of Weddell seal milk to research in human weight loss. Throughout the film, Herzog shifts from high seriousness to irony and ridicule. This is nowhere more apparent that in the way that he approaches David Ainley, the reclusive penguin specialist. As he insisted, Herzog wanted to get away from the documentary sentimentality of March of the Penguins. In a humourous take, he seems to want to provoke the taciturn ecologist who has been observing penguins for more than twenty years. Few film columnists fail to mention the questions he asks: "I read somewhere that there are gay penguins. What are your observations?" and "Is there such a thing as insanity among the penguins?" Ainley's matter-of-fact responses bring the strangeness of penguin behaviour to the fore. The prostitution that he uncovers among them is merely a subterfuge used by female penguins to stealing rocks for their nests. As for insanity, Ainley takes Herzog to see a deranged penguin who has broken from the flock and is walking alone towards the mountains. Lone penguins often stray from their flocks and humans are instructed to not interfere with them.
Without a doubt, this tragic image of "suicidal" penguins captures the Herzogian collapse of romantic figure and landscape as well as the subject of global warming, about which it can be said that humanity is racing towards its own annihilation. Athough Herzog declines to respond directly to the interviewers' suggestions that Encounters brings to mind the possibility of species extinction, quite a few scenes in the film address this serious subject through ironic humour. First, an exercise at the "Happy Camper" survival school finds a group of men involved in a "white out" simulation exercise. Wearing buckets on their heads, they veer off course in what their instructor refers to as a "cascading error phenomenon." The scene is a fitting send up to Bruegel's 1568 painting Blind Leading the Blind. Elsewhere, Sam Bowser, a cell biologist, expresses his horror at the violence of the underwater sea world he explores. His sense of fascinated horror is alluded to by the 50s sci-fi thriller Them that he and his crew are depicted watching on a computer screen. From the computer we overhear a voice intoning: "I tell you gentlemen, science is agreed that unless something is done quickly, man as the dominant species on earth will be extinct within a year; civilization itself – threatened with annihilation." Herzog engages Bowser on the terms of his own geek culture: "Do you think that the human race and other mammals fled in panic from the oceans and crawled on solid land to get out of this?" Bowser replies: "Yeah. I think undoubtedly that's the driving force that caused us to leave the horrors behind, to grow and evolve into large creatures to escape what's horribly violent at the miniature level."
In this and other scenes Herzog cannot ignore the fact that we have come to know the Antarctic as "canary in the coal mine" number two from Davis Guggenheim's presentation of Al Gore's research in An Inconvenient Truth (USA, 2006) – canary number one being the Arctic. In this film, the former U.S. Vice-President narrates a scientific account of global warming and what can be done to counter it. Without going into great detail, it is enough to say that its images of melting mountain ice caps and melting icebergs in the Arctic, Greenland, and Antarctica have left an indelible impression on audiences and has re-energized the global effort to make climate change a priority for international energy agreements, from Kyoto to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen. The scientific keystone to Gore's talk is the discussion relating to the research of his former university teacher Roger Revelle, the scientist who first proposed measuring the CO2 in the earth's atmosphere. This basic research has since been undertaken in Antarctica, where ice core samples have allowed scientists to test atmospheric carbon dating as far back as 650,000 years. These measures have revealed that temperatures since 1900 have been the warmest in the past 1000 years with recent warm temperatures being unprecedented. As well, the core samples have revealed that the long range CO2 concentration has been below 300 parts per million and is currently close to 400 ppm. It is expected to climb to 550 ppm within the next century, an increase that will surpass the "safe path" for global surface temperatures, contributing to flooding, hurricanes, the melting of icebergs, droughts, water shortages, and along with this, the displacement of millions of people, economic competition, unpredictable wars and geopolitical conflicts.
Gore takes his audience to some of the same places Herzog visits. He explains that Antarctica is the largest mass of ice on the planet, and is much colder than the Arctic. The American National Science Foundation comprises the largest human presence on this neutral territory with stations on Ross Island and McMurdo Sound, just South of New Zealand. Going against the rather rosy picture presented in the popular documentary, March of the Penguins, Gore informs us that Ross Island has experienced some of its first rains and that the Emperor penguin population has declined by seventy percent in the last fifty years due to global warming and the thinning of land ice.[16]
The facts presented in An Inconvenient Truth, when compounded, are overwhelming. Because of this, the producers insisted on making Gore, against his better judgment, the central character in the film. The figure of Gore and his personal stories about his upbringing, his son's near-death experience and his sister's death from lung cancer, are used as a dramatic means to create sympathetic identification with the film. This documentary technique is ostensibly helpful in bringing home Gore's message: "Not only does human-caused global warming exist, but it is also growing more and more dangerous, and at a pace that has now made it a planetary emergency." Gore's narration thus shifts from expository direct address on climate research to a somewhat hokey earnestness about personal recollections. These accounts are used to help present Gore as a passionate individual. They help him present his message of a generational mission to come together to face the climate crisis. Here, however, we find another, political, reason for identification with Gore. Not only is he the former Democratic Vice-President of the U.S., he is also the son of a wealthy family and Tennessee State Senator. Gore's birthright and southern manners paradoxically make him a "non-political" advocate of environmentalism inasmuch as he is not in the employ of a corporation with interests in energy. The limits of Gore's neutrality, however, come to the fore in the film's closing "post-ideology" message. He first compares the bourgeois democratic struggles of the French and American Revolutions to those of anti-racism and women's right to vote. From anti-apartheid in South Africa he goes on to the international effort to conquer diseases like polio and small pox. And from there the entire world is said to have worked together to bring down communism, which of course is probably the biggest "success story" that Gore can use to persuade American audiences to become aware of the warming crisis and, against mass media disinformation, feel reassured that the crisis can be averted through free market measures and consumer action.
In contrast to Gore's environmentalist purpose, Encounters was motivated by Herzog's desire to venture out with his camera and to create new images. For his vision of ecstatic truth to be realized, the audience must neither be informed nor entertained, but must be allowed to believe what they see. More than anything it is this cinematic reality that Herzog presents to viewers as basic training in survival school. Everything else at the McMurdo Sound station is described by Herzog in the terms of touristic disappointment. McMurdo is described as an "ugly mining town," a colonial outpost with climate controlled housing that resembles cheap motels, its own radio station, a bowling alley and "abominations" such as an ATM machine, yoga classes, and an aerobics studio. A cafeteria cook explains to Herzog that the 1000 or so scientists stationed there get cranky when they don't have access to Frosty Boy ice cream.
The ice cream machine is Herzog's shorthand synecdoche for human nature, a micrological detail with metaphysical implications. Like the intangible neutrino particles, this champion of the station's mass culture tells us something about who we are. Herzog strikes a note of despair. As he says towards the end of the film:
"For this and for many other reasons our presence here on the planet does not seem to be sustainable. Our technical civilization makes us particularly vulnerable. There is talk all over the scientific community about climate change. Many of them agree the end of human life on this earth is assured. Human life is part of an endless chain of catastrophes – the demise of the dinosaurs being just one of these events. We seem to be next. And when we are gone, what will happen thousands of years from now in the future? Will there be alien archaeologists from another planet, trying to find out what we were doing at the South Pole?"
Herzog defamiliarizes the present when he projects into the future, stating that after climate change has melted Antarctica's icebergs, the Frosty Boy machine may be the last mysterious artifact of human civilization that will be discovered by alien archaeologists. Here his narration comes closest to the words spoken by Brad Dourif as the alien from Andromeda in Wild Blue Yonder: "You see us as these technologically advanced superbeings who destroy New York City in two minutes flat. Well I hate to say this but we aliens all suck. We're failures." But of course this tragic note like so many others is designed to put meaningful experience into perspective. As Herzog surmises: "I'm not into the business of penguins and I'm not into vanilla ice cream sentimentality about wild nature."[17]
Wild Blue Yonder, subtitled A Science Fiction Fantasy, is in fact the parent film to Encounters. Its storyline transforms NASA's Space Shuttle mission STS-34 into futuristic space travel and Kaiser's underwater footage from Antarctica into images taken by the human astronauts on the planet Andromeda. A despairing alien, long ago marooned on earth, recounts how humans reached his planet with the intention of turning it into a colonial mining operation, along with gyms, aerobics classes, bars and shopping malls. These fictionalized ideas come from interviews with NASA scientists who, in their more "utopian" moments, imagine possible futures for humankind. Whereas Wild Blue Yonder mixes documentary film footage into a dystopian yet beautiful science fiction fable, Encounters takes the fantasy aspect of the former and applies it to real life, with Antarctica becoming the measure of what remains of human dreams to escape from a dying planet.
What, in the end, does Encounters have to say about global warming? Two figures here seem to confront one another. On the one hand we have the plumber, David Pacheco, who assures Herzog that global warming is real. "I'm a green person," he confides. "I build adobe homes – solar homes. I'm a contractor back home too. It's so hard for a small minority to make it, but...." His words trail off as he joins his fingers together, a remider of his Aztec descent. In contrast to this working-class advocate for green renewables, the glaciologist Douglas MacAyeal provides some of the data that is fueling global environmental consciousness. He describes the enormous icebergs he is studying in dramatic terms, as mysterious and frightful living entities:
"They're so big, there's an element of fear. We don't know really what's gonna come ahead when they eventually begin to melt in the ocean beyond Antarctica. (...) I'd be happy to see Antarctica as a static, monolithic environment – a cold monolith of ice – sort of the way people back in the past used to see it. But now, our comfortable thought about Antarctica is over. Now we're seeing it as a living being that's dynamic, that's producing change – change that it's broadcasting to the rest of the world – possibly in response to what the world is broadcasting down to Antarctica. Certainly on a gut level, it's going to be frightening to watch what happens to these babies [melting icebergs] once they get North."
This interview with one of the most important scientists at McMurdo station is cut short as he has less than one hour to interview with Herzog before his plane takes off. How did people see Antarctica one hundred years ago? Herzog closes his interview with MacAyeal with black and white film images of Shackleton and his colleagues on a fake set with papier mâché icebergs. This is Herzog's moment of truth. As he puts it in an interview for the film:
"I made some other films with an apocalyptic note, Lessons of Darkness, most notably, and Fata Morgana. However, I do not think that the end is imminent, but one thing is clear: we are only fugitive guests on our planet. Martin Luther, the reformer, was asked: "What would you do if the world came to an end tomorrow?" He replied: "I would plant an apple tree." I would start shooting a new film."[18]
The Theorist's Truth
Against all of Herzog's assertions to the contrary, and in order to uphold the argument that there is a definite political and even didactic dimension to Encounters, it is necessary to state the filmmaker's "faustian" relationship to the demon of aesthetic autonomy, especially as it is performed in his latest series of documentaries, The White Diamond (2004), Grizzly Man (2005), The Wild Blue Yonder (2005) and Encounters. At the 2009 New Orleans Film Festival, Herzog made the provocative statement: "I call upon the theoreticians of cinema to go after this one [Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)]. Go for it, losers."[19] Losers? We should perhaps respond to this challenge with the following lines from Murnau's Faust: "For now before the judge severe, no crime can pass unpunished here. All hidden things must plain appear." For this it is necessary to think theoretically alongside Herzog's effort to challenge industry standards through an identification with the symptoms of the contemporary film world. The estranged forms that inspire Herzog's work are not merely occasional but reflect his belief that human nature is essentially second nature, alien, threatening and sorrowful.
Perhaps no statement better captures Herzog's vision of art as the height of human folly than this statement from Les Blank's 1980 documentary, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe:
"Who is society? I don't know. I've kept wondering, ever since I've been in contact with audiences, what the value of films was. I don't know, it gives us some insight. It doesn't change people or cause revolutions. Films might change our perspective of things and in the long term may be valuable, but there's a lot of absurdity involved as well. As you see it makes one into a clown. (...) What we do as filmmakers is immaterial, and doing that all your life, it makes you just a clown; it's an inevitable process; it's illusionists' work and it's just embarrassing to be a filmmaker and to sit here like this."
Two years previously, as the subject of Christian Weisenborn and Erwin Kensch's I Am My Films (1978), Herzog explained his theory of film:
"None of the documentaries I've made have been cinéma vérité. I think cinéma vérité is something we should get rid of pretty soon and consign to oblivion. It's only the simplest of truth. There are more dimensions of truth in films than that offered by cinéma vérité."
Many years later he would concretize this statement with his "Minnesota Declaration," which compares the filmmakers of cinéma vérité to tourists. "We ought to be grateful", he surmises, "that the Universe out there knows no smile." Oddly, it is the denatured worlds of science and science fiction that combine best with Herzog's dark vision of the struggle for survival. Anthropology, earth science, linguistics, biology and geography – all of these act as formal structures onto which Herzog can hang his laconic wisdom. His "post-ideological" posture allows his films to work comfortably with any field of inquiry except, it would appear, politics, political economy and sociology, areas that Herzog associates with propaganda. If a politician should appear in Herzog's work, he should be a cannibal (Echoes from a Sombre Empire, 1990), the monarchical viewer of traditional dances (Jag Mandir, 1991) a televangelist (God's Angry Man, 1980) or a black preacher (Huie's Sermon, 1980).
The cultural sources of Herzog's vision are well defined by Lotte Eisner, the film historian that Herzog claims as his generation's link to the German cinema of the 1920s. Eisner's seminal work, The Haunted Screen, lists the following as the characteristics of Expressionist cinema: brooding speculation, metaphysical meaning, obscure language and metaphors, a reaction towards naturalism, visionary subjectivism, abstraction of the individual, anti-psychologism, spasmotic ecstasy set against the orchestrations of a mechanical universe.[20] Eisner is correct to recognize that the Expressionist "quest for the dark side of existence" and the gloomy solitude that is "cherished by the Faustian soul of northern man," represents a misadventure, a paroxysm that is mistaken for dynamism.[21] Such romanticism finds its purest expression in the dualism of characters like Caligari, the eminent doctor who doubles as a fairground huckster. And here Eisner comes closest to the class element that could best explain the real dynamism of German historical progress in the interwar period: the new lower-middle-class bureaucracy, "besotted with eating and drinking."[22] "All those town-clerks," she writes, "municipal archivists, qualified librarians and magistrates must surely hide beneath their municipal exteriors some vestige of sorcery liable to come to the surface at any moment."[23]
Perhaps it is this obscene, submerged history of the rise of modern industrial firms and the film culture that was built around it that "explains" Herzog's drive to avoid what he calls the "accountant's truth" and to privilege the legitimacy of an image-based "ecstatic truth." Herzog avoids the pitfalls of politically correct tendency film through a seamless montage technique that blends sociological avant-gardism with a cultural conservatism. In this there is not just a bit of Nietzschean contempt for documentation and a happiness in the capacity for "feeling unhistorically." In keeping with Marxist tendency critique, it is necessary for a theoretical analysis to not reduce the objectivity of his films to the surrounding reality. In the end, there is no politically correct position from which to interpret the film. This lack of critical vantage point locates the struggle for meaning, the effort to produce a cognitive mapping of the world system, on the terra incognita of everyday life and within the forms of mass culture.
The key to social experience in Herzog's film is interpreted and becomes meaningful through individual phenomena, real and invented: the forklift driver who wants to jump off the margins of the world map, the computer expert who traveled from Ecuador to Peru in a sewer pipe, the traumatized utility mechanic who survived communism and who now keeps a packsack ready at all times in case a new situation requires a quick escape. For all of the human inventiveness and beauty of the world, the state of things tends to stabilize (post-)industrial relations of production with its final outcome in the experience of solitude, a loneliness that is assuaged by mass culture: gastro porn like Frosty Boy, entertainments like 50s B-films and activities like bowling and yoga classes. In this, the stuff of audience psychology and dispositions, Herzog depicts the conditions of possibility for social change. As Siegfried Kracauer once wrote, the Germans possess an "emotional humor which tries to reconcile mankind to its tragic plight and to make one not only laugh at the oddities of life but also to realize through that laughter how fateful it is."[24]
On the subject of art and politics, Herzog's critics tend to play into his game of self-absorption and self-mythologizing. For Timothy Corrigan, this "hermeneutical impasse" is a problem worthy of attention. Corrigan writes:
"The challenge and difficulty of Herzog may be simply that he is the essential fatherless child of contemporary cinema, where politics and history tend to vaporize in the substance of images which represent them and where the critical viewer is always and only threatened by his or her own fantasies."[25]
For Corrigan, Herzog's "athletic" resistance to measured debate and discussion operates as a sort of naïve avant-garde guerrilla warfare with mass culture. While he both assimilates and complicates Hollywood codes, his combative stance and aggressively innocent vision is projected onto characters and images, including his own cultivated image, which he calls attention to through self-promotion and through the lengths to which he will go to realize his films. Corrigan remarks upon the "ethically reprehensible" and repressive irony that Herzog shows toward his subjects. His blurring of distinctions between fact and fiction manipulates his subjects as much as his audiences and it is not for nothing that people have criticized some of his films, especially Even Dwarves Started Small (1970), La Soufrière (1977), Fitzcarraldo (1982), Ballad of the Little Soldier (1984) and Lessons of Darkness (1992). Corrigan is correct to state that the ambiguities that are generated by these films can only be resolved by the audience's recourse to extra-cinematic contexts.[26] The question for us, then, is the extent to which Herzog's quest to produce "never before seen images," without which he believes civilization would perish, challenges dominant regimes of representation.[27] While Herzog confronts reality through the "hypnotic grip" of the material image, his "childlike" relation to the world may not be as regressive as we might think. From the point of view of Lacanian psychoanalysis at least, the narcissistic relation to the image sustains a critical relation to the Real of representation that presupposes a dialectical link between the unconscious and bodily drives.
Psychoanalysis provides a key not only to the unconscious linguistic nature of the ("non-linguistic") image, but also to the situation in which the storyteller finds himself. The image that Herzog uses to introduce Encounters is a masked monkey on horseback. This strange image acts as an allegory for the paradox of vision in which subjectivity appears to come before social reality. Vision as the index of the condition of possibility of the social world, the quasi-transcendent noumenal knot, is projected by Herzog onto characters like Kaspar Hauser, the blank slate who murmurs: "I want to become the kind of rider that my father was." Certainly Lotte Eisner was such a figure of ventriloquism for Herzog and it is for good reason that she appears in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) and as a narrator in Fata Morgana. According to Dana Benelli, Herzog viewed Eisner as keeper of the secrets of the German film tradition.[28] We should see in this more than just a relation of respect since for Herzog such secrets are perhaps "best kept" and not divulged to audiences. What Eisner narrates in Fata Morgana is a myth of creation: "In Paradise," she says, "man is born dead." Surely Herzog's auteurist mythology is itself a mystic operation designed to counter the dry empiricism of science. Such spiritual survivalism, the effort to transcend the death of the soul, is itself a metaphor for capital. The money economy and the world of administered culture thus loom large in Herzog's efforts to cheat death. For fear of being found out the artist must remain silent, on the one hand, not divulging art's secrets, and on the other, driven to communicate through the lure of images and music. This mythic silence has its end in the laughter of the audience. For example, the fascinating musical echolalia of the auctioneers in How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck (1976) ends in the last laugh of the gavel. Surely, the auctioneer's artifice amounts to more than just a means to make money. Likewise, cinema carries the stigma of the division of labour as the filmmaker enters a transferrential relation with a fallen world.
The question for many critics, including Corrigan, is whether or not Herzog has been the good soldier he has wanted to be, whether he and the other filmmakers of his generation have succeeded in challenging the patriarchal cinema of the heimatfilme or of Hollywood. My argument is that Herzog has not evaded his responsibilities but has consistently engaged in a practice of sharing his responsibility with certain selected others – sharing the guilt, so to speak. As Thomas Elsaesser once asked, "Is Herzog not doing battle on his heroes' backs? Are they not inevitably the foot soldiers thanks to whom the machinery of his own filmmaking can fight it out with the juggernaut of the commercial film industry?"[29] Encounters is but a minor skirmish against the capitalist machinery. Has it been -- can it be successful? If one looks at this from the perspective of the theory of the avant garde, Herzog finds himself in a new situation which has not hitherto confronted the neo-avant garde. According to Peter Bürger, hibernation is the strategy that the neo-avant garde resorts to as the culture industry falsely sublates the autonomy status of art.[30] Life remains unchanged; realism and avant-gardism remain side by side. Herzog's strategy is to not attempt to form a new avant-garde while at the same time not abandoning its logic. In this he is fully cognisant of the fact that successful revolutions in culture have been fought and won before him. It is this accumulated capital within the sphere of autonomy that permits him to keep a prudent distance from the political vanguard.[31] No doubt Herzog only faintly regrets the political message of his film as he asserts: "I don't see it as an environmental film, it's on a much deeper level: how people are dealing with this earth. It would be awful to see this film as a film on ecology."[32] It would be equally contemptible if we ourselves adopted the stance that is allowed the Aborigines in Where the Green Ants Dream: "Too many silly questions. Your presence on this earth will come to an end. You [white men] have no sense, no purpose, no direction." We should take inspiration from native consciousness while accepting the limits of cultural appropriation.
It is clear that Herzog is not going to take up the task of protesting against environmental degradation. What he offers instead is a view of the environment as a "bucket shop" or a "cash cow." In the age of renewable energy, carbon trading, resource sharing and energy offsets, the environment in which we live is poised to become another investment scheme controlled by corporate elites and developed countries. According to Tom Athanasion and Paul Bear, today's battle against global warming is being fought as a battle for and against the commercialization of global ecological resources.[33] Herzog obliquely represents this problem in the survival training scene where a handful of new recruits heads out of their enclosure wearing white buckets on their heads. This humourous imagery of protection against snow blinding is accentuated with the smiling faces that are hand-drawn on the square buckets. It operates as a means for Herzog to confront the desire of the Other as the obscene socio-symbolic mandate to keep consuming in the face of unimpeded economic growth and environmental degradation. The mystery of all this is that despite all that we know about the disastrous state of things, we can still be moved by magical underwater worlds and, through neutrino and monifora research, we can continue to speculate on the origins of the universe.
If I have made an argument about projection, I should also address its radical contradiction, especially as Herzog himself is sensitive to this. During the filming of Fitzcarraldo, Herzog became annoyed with the fact that Klaus Kinski found everything in the Amazon jungle to be erotic, a misplaced sentiment that Herzog associated with environmentalist tree huggers. In his documentary on the filming of Fitzacarraldo, Burden of Dreams (1982), Les Blank records Herzog making the following legendary statement, a precaution against fanaticism:
"Of course we are challenging nature itself and it hits back. It just hits back, that's all. And that's what's grandiose about it and we have to accept that it is much stronger than we are. Kinski always says it's full of erotic elements but I don't see it as so much erotic. I see it more to be full of obscenity. Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn't see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away. Of course there's a lot of misery, but it is the same misery that's all around us. The trees here are in misery and the birds are in misery. I don't think they sing, they just screech in pain.
It's an unfinished country. It's still prehistorical. The only thing that is lacking are the dinosaurs. It's like a curse weighing on the entire landscape. And whoever goes too deep into this has his share of that curse. So we are cursed with what we are doing here. It's a land that God, if he exists, has created in anger. It's the only land where creation is unfinished yet. Taking a close look at what's around us, there is some sort of harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle, we in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid, suburban novel – a cheap novel."
Herzog is more or less resigned when it comes to human nature. According to Brad Prager, Herzog chooses the sensual effects of cinema over his films' potential or perceived politics.[34] While as a filmmaker he sticks to his quest for the "ecstatic truth" of cinematic poesis over the "accountant's truth," I agree with Prager that it remains the theorist's responsibility to provide some context for his films, to provide the responses that remain unanswered in his film's poetic inscrutability.[35] In this, Herzog's "holy war" against commercial culture is also our own. It is a battle in which, as Prager asserts, Herzog "tests his audiences' willingness to ignore political issues."[36] The risk that Herzog takes, I would argue, is the possibility that in the conflict between fantasy and rationality the image does not produce enlightenment but anxiety. In this he is indeed a paternal figure, and it is impossible to know what it is that Herzog wants from us.
Last Words
One of the ways that we could begin to evaluate the success of Herzog's recent work is to perform the reductive operation of considering Encounters at the End of the World in terms of its social context. What has been the predominant political order of the 2000s if not an authoritarian finance capitalism that is bent on privatizing all public goods and engaged in colonial wars motivated by energy extraction, and this, at a time when climate change requires a wholesale rethinking of the free market mentality. In one of his last books, Žižek makes the link between the ecological crisis and political action with the view that the Left can no longer presume that time will see us through. Instead, trust in people and a strict egalitarian justice requires that we rethink the liberal principles of the free market and with it, the presumption that all of our actions should be "democratic." We should be prepared to make large-scale collective decisions that run counter to economic growth.[37]
Elsewhere, Žižek suggests that we should stop trying to humanize violent liberalism. If 1989 represented the collapse of communism, what we have experienced since then is not greater freedom, but the steady erosion of the foundations of social democracy and the welfare state. The paradox is that we continue to act as though liberal ideology and the mechanisms of the free market actually work, that is, even if we don't believe in them. Our postmodern liberal utopia prevents us from imposing a positive good for fear of the tyranny of Left ideology, associated on an overt level with Stalinism and state socialism, but more insidiously with the worry that all ethical motives are merely contingent and as such mask private interests.[38] The trick of capitalism, he argues, is that even when we think we act only for our own particular interests, or when we assert our particularity, our actions are nevertheless universal. According to Žižek, we are more universal than we think. The orthodox Marxist version of this is that I, as a worker on the free market, am not just what I am, but an abstract working force with unequal market power with regard to the greater capital of the employer. The nature of our post-political age is that it considers liberal-democratic capitalism to be the best possible society, even where it is combined with state socialism or religious fundamentalism.
In a lecture on "Ecology as the New Opium of the Masses," Žižek lists ecology as one of the major antagonisms that poses a real threat to the infinite expansion of market logic. He argues: "In spite of the infinite adaptability of capitalism, which, in the case of an acute ecological catastrophe or crisis, can easily turn ecology into a new field of capitalist investment and competition, the very nature of the risk involved fundamentally precludes market solutions."[39] The radical implication of the environmental threat is that it no longer holds that whatever we do, history will go on. The twist in his argument is that it is today's Excluded, the newly proletarianized in China and the Third World, the Palestinians trapped behind apartheid walls, and the millions of slum dwellers in South America, Mexico City, Africa, India and South-East Asia who today directly stand for universality. It is their reality that poses a threat to state control of the market. Without considering this excluded domain, he argues, ecology loses its subversive edge. The problem, then, is that one can fight for ecology but not question the ideological conditions that separate the Included and the Excluded. Ecology, as it currently stands in liberal and social democratic discourse, allows us to ignore the true universality. What we get instead, and to extrapolate here a little, is something along the lines of Melissa Etheridge's I Need to Change, the song from the end of An Inconvenient Truth. The song was written to accompany the film's closing recommendations on how to take personal action on climate change: write to your government representative, miminize your energy use, purchase energy saving appliances, buy things that last, eat less meat, don't buy bottled water, take mass transit, etc. Here Al Gore's idea that we should "rise ourselves above history" expresses the contradiction through which political action merges with consumption and is reduced to the private realm. Fear of radical political solutions buttresses a post-political biocapitalism that seeks to leave behind old ideological struggles, as encapsulated in the film with images of the Western side of the Berlin Wall defense system being smashed with sledgehammers. The way that this political fear is displaced today, however, is through fear of environmental disaster, which becomes a new form of global ideology, a new opium for the masses based in a real dread of change.
The upshot for Žižek is that we should accept the contingency of our existence and the utter groundlessness of nature.[40] In An Inconvenient Truth Al Gore presents a slide of the scales of justice with gold bars on one side and the earth on the other. His argument is that choosing one against the other is a false choice since we need the earth's protective atmosphere to survive. However, the radical contingency of choice implies that we could, for fear of the necessary change, make the wrong decision and choose to act in a self-destructive manner. Today, Žižek argues, the real problem is believing in and assuming responsibility for this radical uncertainty: "we find ourselves constantly in the position of having to decide about matters that will fundamentally affect our lives, but without a proper foundation in knowledge."[41] Belief in ecological catastrophe and the inevitability of neoliberal governance both come to function in terms of fetishistic disavowal. We believe in it and we don't believe in it.
In this, Žižek asserts, we have not only a way of understanding ideology, but culture, which relies on a big Other, a social unconscious or superego, that does not know. In contrast to the function of the analyst, who acts as the "subject supposed to know," the elementary rule of culture, according to Žižek, is to know when and how to not know, to not notice, or "to go on and act as if something which happened did not happen."[42] From this point of view, we must come to believe that the catastrophe is possible since we do not have the knowledge that would allow us to make the qualified choice that betrays the fact that no real choices are on offer. The difference between Gore and Herzog, then, is not the difference between art and politics, but a difference in the idea of nature and of human nature. Encounters at the End of the World offers less the chance to meet interesting people and reassure us about human inventiveness than the possibility of breaking the spell of imaginary captation in both the ecological crisis and its neoliberal political coordinates. It does so by avoiding the deadly fascination with the truth of nature.
This essay was written in November 2009. It was first submitted to the Canadian Journal of Film Studies, which turned it down after a peer reviewer suggested I should provide more formal analysis and possibly get rid of the material on Jameson and class struggle. It was then sent to Cinema Journal, which also turned it down. New German Critique liked the essay and said it was theoretically sound but did not fit any of their upcoming themes. Screen later turned it down as well. I'm publishing it here for the first time because I can't bear the idea of keeping it to myself. It was a pleasure to research this essay, a process that involved screening approximately 40 Herzog films, which are now distributed by Herzog through Anchor Bay Entertainment. Thanks to the Goethe Institut in Montreal for lending me so many of these films as well as Eisner's The Haunted Screen. As the librarian said: "Ça c'est un livre."
Notes
1. This has been the case, especially, with the German filmmakers Kluge, Reitz, Von Trotta, Sybergerg, Sander, Schroeter and Schlorndorf. See Julia Knight, New German Cinema: Images of a Generation (London: Wallflower, 2004) 23.
2. Knight, New German Cinema, 29.
3. Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, [1992] 1995).
4. Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic, 2.
5. See in particular Žižek, "Over the Coalition Rainbow," in The Parallax View (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006) 359-65, and "The Crisis of Determinate Negation," in his In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008) 337-80.
6. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006) 34-35.
7. See for example Brad Prager's description of Herzog's "paternal" demeanour in The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (London: Wallflower Press, 2007) 201.
8. Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic, 3.
9. Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic, 5.
10. Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic, 34.
11. Henry Kaiser is credited as the Producer of Encounters and received the NFS grant along with Herzog. He is also credited with the music for the film along with David Lindley. Choral music from the Philip Kontev National Folk Ensemble, the Female Choir of the National Music School of Telavi and the group Basso Profondo add a dimension of spirituality to the film, and was encouraged by the Ross Sea divers who refer to the natural vault under the sea ice as "the cathedral."
12. Eleanor Wachtel interview with Werner Herzog for the CBC radio show Writers & Company, November 15, 2009.
13. On the function of vanguard art as a means to reproduce culture and its social coordinates, see Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, trans. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, [1983] 1993).
14. Herzog has in fact taken the DVD commentary and supplement to a new level of interest for fans, with further confusions of fact and fiction to keep things interesting. The DVD for Encounters includes: Under the Ice, 35 minutes of underwater footage; Above the Ice; Dive Locker Interview: Werner Herzog Talks with Rob Robbins and Henry Kaiser, an 18 minute extra on Antarctic diving; South Pole Exorcism, an 11 minute scene of engineers attempting to exorcise a piece of equipment; Seals and Men, 3 minutes of footage with the music of David Lindley; a 66 minute interview between Herzog and filmmaker Jonathan Demme; and lastly, a full-length commentary with Herzog, cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger and diver Henry Kaiser.
15. Chuck Kleinhaus, "Pornography and Documentary: Narrating the Alibi," in Jeffrey Sconce, ed. Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007) 103.
16. See Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It (New York: Rodale, 2006) and Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis (New York: Rodale, 2009). See also Mark Lynas, High Tide: News from a Warming World (London: Harper Collins, 2004) and Jeremy Leggett, Half Gone: Oil, Gas, Hot Air and the Global Energy Crisis (London: Portobello Books, 2005).
17. Cited in Aaron Hillis, "Interview: Werner Herzog on Encounters at the End of the World," IFC.com, available at: http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/06/werner-herzog-on-encounters-at.php.
18. Herzog cited in Roger Ebert, "Werner Herzog: 'Tell me about the iceberg, tell me about your dreams," Chicago Sun Times (July 7, 2007), available at: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com. Incidentally, Encounters at the End of the World is dedicated to Roger Ebert.
19. Cited in Michael Gottwald, "New Orleans Film Festival Review: Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant," Cinema Blend (October 16, 2009), available at: www.cinemablend.com/new/New-Orleans-Film-Festival-Review-Werner-Herzog-s-Bad-Lieutenant-15400.html.
20. Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1952] 1973), 8-19.
21. Eisner, The Haunted Screen, 15, 51.
22. Eisner, The Haunted Screen, 109.
23. Eisner, The Haunted Screen, 109. The everyday life of the newly created class of white-collar employees is expertly described by Siegfried Kracauer in his 1930 text, The Salaried Masses: Psychological History of the German Film, edited by Leonardo Quaresima (Princeton: Princeton University Press, [1947] 2004).
24. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany, trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, [1930] 1998) 20.
25. Timothy Corrigan, "Introduction," to Corrigan, ed. The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History (New York: Methuen, 1986) 19.
26. Corrigan, "Introduction," in The Films of Werner Herzog, 13.
27. In Les Blank's Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, Herzog states: "Our civilisation doesn't have adequate images, and I think a civilisation is doomed or is going to die out like dinosaurs if it does not develop an adequate language or adequate images. I see it as a very, very dramatic situation. For example, we have found out that there are serious problems facing our civilisation, like energy problems, or environmental problems, nuclear power and all of this, or over- population of the world. But generally it is not understood yet that a problem of the same magnitude is that we do not have adequate images, and that's what I'm working on – a new grammar of images."
28. Dana Benelli, "The Cosmos and Its Discontents," in Corrigan, ed. The Films of Werner Herzog, 98. On Herzog's relation to Lotte Eisner, see Ray Cronin, ed. Herzog on Herzog (New York: Faber and Faber, 2002).
29. Thomas Elsaesser, "An Anthropologist's Eye: Where the Green Ants Dream," in Corrigan, ed. The Films of Werner Herzog, 134.
30. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1984] 1999) 52.
31. See Pierre Bourdieu's discussion of supply and demand in The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, [1992] 1995) 249-52.
32. Herzog cited in Elsaesser, "An Anthropologist's Eye," 136.
33. A new carbon colonialism is on the horizon they argue, premised on the existing undemocratic system of free market capitalism. See Tom Athanasion and Paul Baer, Dead Heat: Global Justice and Global Warming (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002) 99.
34. Prager, The Cinema of Werner Herzog, 3.
35. Prager, The Cinema of Werner Herzog, 95-97.
36. Prager, The Cinema of Werner Herzog, 201.
37. Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 460-461.
38. Slavoj Žižek, "The Liberal Utopia," Lecture presented at the University of Athens, October 4, 2007, available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMp8P3C_J7l.
39. Slavoj Žižek, "Censorsip Today: Violence, or Ecology as a New Opium of the Masses," Lecture presented at the Jack Tilton Gallery, November 26-28, 2007, available at: http://www.lacan.com/zizecology1.htm.
40. This in fact is the basis of the social ecology movement. See for example, Murray Bookchin, Remaking Society (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1989).
41. Slavoj Žižek, "Censorsip Today: Violence, or Ecology as a New Opium of the Masses."
42. Slavoj Žižek, "Censorsip Today: Violence, or Ecology as a New Opium of the Masses."
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