快乐的人们

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga: Documentary or Poetry?

http://postdefiance.com/happy-people-a-year-in-the-taiga-documentary-or-poetry/

Nobody tells me what to do…I am my own man.

Such is the claim of one of the virile characters in Happy People: A Year in the Taiga, a documentary co-directed by Dmitry Vasyukov and the prolific German filmmaker Werner Herzog.

These words seem familiar to an American audience, almost stereotypical of the mentality by which we are regularly defined. But the words are spoken by a Russian sable trapper living in the middle of Siberia with nary an outlet to civilization as we know it. “Amurrican?” Far from it.

The film follows a year in the lives of sable trappers in a remote Bakhtian village: a year that, like every other, is a quest to survive the harsh conditions. Herzog and Vasyukov present the narrative as a slice-of-life drama, an everyday epic for which the camera crew is merely along for the ride.

Herzog and company are enthralled with the lives of the men they’re following. In fact, the directorial duo seems more than glad to cooperate with the decidedly masculine culture they document. Women make brief and obligatory appearances; the rest of the time, we spectators follow the Russian men through the wilderness and let Herzog’s narration wash over us.

When that smooth German accent does its best, it easily persuades us of the extraordinary nature of the men we’re watching. Yet Herzog’s narration can be just a little problematic. At one point he rises to sublime heights of description/sinks into the worst kind of glorified othering:

“Now, out on their own, the trappers become what they essentially are: happy people. Accompanied only by their dogs, they live off the land. They are completely self-reliant. They are truly free. No rules, no taxes, no government, no laws, no bureaucracy, no phones, no radio, equipped only with their individual values and standard of conduct.”

As this voiceover overlaps with symphonic music, we see footage of a man steering a canoe upriver by means of an outboard motor. Herzog goes on to tell us that this man’s name is Mikhail Tarkovsky, relation of the acclaimed Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky. In a truly odd juxtaposition, the film insists on the technological self-sufficiency of the Taiga people, while aligning them with modern advancements like the internal combustion engine and one of the most technologically advanced forms of art: cinema.

And Herzog’s narration isn’t the only aspect that rings less as documentary and more as poetry. The invisibility of the camera’s presence that makes this otherwise lovely journey is also problematic. A documentary common practice, to be sure, but Herzog is among the most adept and savvy of documentarians; he knows what he’s doing when he makes the choice to keep the presence of a non-native film crew completely out of the camera’s field of vision. The technique potentially ignores the camera’s very real and very foreign presence on that home turf, keeping at arm’s length a world that it conflictingly wants to bring within our reach.

By distancing the audience from the Siberian snow and its inhabitants, Herzog is free to perform a documentary of poetry, a free-form ode to an idealized people that he profoundly admires and wants us to admire, too. And what’s wrong with poetry? Nothing, of course…but beware of poetry masquerading as simple history.

To be fair, Herzog acknowledges the presence of chainsaws and snowmobiles in this land of self-reliance. And the camera records myriad other technologies that have somehow made their way into this inaccessible wilderness. And herein lies the real hazard of Herzog’s hidden camera: there is no such thing as a “pure” culture since every culture is the progeny and interpretation of others. By holding aloft the Taiga people as “other,” therefore perhaps better, idealization becomes falsification.

Herzog wants us to see this world as unblemished by all that is modern, a time warp into an edenic realm. In so doing, he makes choices about what we see and what we don’t. But enough contradictions slip through the cracks to reveal his construal of this society.

Even a glorified interpretation is an interpretation, not equal to the original.

But to be even more fair, the subjects that Happy People documents deserve our attention. As we complain about spotty 4G service and navel-gaze about “the nature of art” and other such privileged questions, there remain folks in this world whose isolation brings out something we are unlikely to see in ourselves.

When the Siberian trapper says he is his own man, he says it without the pretense that we almost reflexively hear in such a statement. He knows his dependence on the land, the ecosystem of which he is a part. When he recounts his dog’s death at the hands of a bear, we are not likely to roll our eyes at his tears, perceiving his reliance on and love for an animal whose loyalty allowed him to keep on living.

The moral of this story is not: “Eat your dinner; there are starving children in Africa.” On the other hand, it’s not far from it.

第二篇： by | Steven Boone

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/happy-people-a-year-in-the-taiga-2013

Film director Werner Herzog's voice is so distinct and soothing that those of us who swear by it as a tonic for the soul sometimes assume the man is a household name. I made that mistake recently while chatting with a friend who praised Christoph Waltz's performance in "Django Unchained." "Yeah," I said, "The only person who could play a multilingual, multi-genius German impresario better than Waltz would have been Herzog."

"Wha? What's a hearse hog?"

I played her Herzog's reading of the children's book Go the Fuck to Sleep and his narration for Ramin Bahrani's short film "Plastic Bag." She was hooked. The mellifluous German accent, that rising-falling modulation, worked its magic.

And that was just Werner lending his singular sound to other people's projects.

Herzog's voiceover narration has been as powerful a utility for his own potentially ponderous documentaries as Clint Eastwood's profile has been for the latter's tough-guy dramas. The films could probably stand on their own merits without That Voice, but why should they?

Like "Grizzly Man," Herzog's latest documentary, "Happy People: A Year in the Taiga" is mostly built around another filmmaker's priceless footage. Russian videographer Dmitry Yasyukov shot four documentaries about Russian fur trappers in the Siberian Taiga, a remote wilderness larger than the whole of the United States. Herzog happened upon the films at an L.A. friend's house and became as obsessed with their beauty as he once was with Timothy Treadwell's footage of grizzly bears.

His authorial signature comes through in the way he edits the material and gives it meaningful context through narration. It's a touching gesture, one filmmaker finding the glory in another's images and amplifying it through his own generous and idiosyncratic vision. What Herzog gleans from Yaskyuov's exhaustive material is a simple observation: The men of the Taiga are heroes of rugged individualism.

“They live off the land and are self reliant, truly free,” Herzog intones, as a Klaus Badelt score works to send a chill of admiration up our spines. “No rules, no taxes, no government, no laws, no bureaucracy, no phones, no radio, equipped only with their individual values and standard of conduct.”

In nearly every Herzog documentary there is a speech like this one, wherein the director reveals in plain language his passion for his subject. This particular song of praise says that people who live simply, honestly and responsibly are generally happy people. It also sings of tradition more eloquently than Teyve in "Fiddler on the Roof." Work and tradition abide. One hunter boasts that his skill is an inheritance of a thousand years of practice and refinement.

There is another way to interpret Yasyukov's material, as a bleak, miserablist view of the hunters' circumstances that emphasizes the fact that they hardly ever have a moment's rest. Work is a constant, and nature always threatens to freeze, drown, starve or (in the form of aggressive bears) eat them. This is the perspective a young Herzog might have chosen. “Overwhelming and collective murder” is how he described nature during the making of his bleakest, angriest epic, "Fitzcarraldo." (His grandiose rants were just as fun to listen to when they were depressing.)

Instead, this time we get celebratory scenes of a hunter and his son serenely enduring mosquitoes that swarm over every centimeter of exposed flesh during a dank Taiga summer. Yasyukov's footage exhaustively documents the hunters' work processes, so Herzog uses it to take us through each step of making mosquito repellent from scratch. (To my surprise, it's similar to preparing old-fashioned blackface.)

Though they use manufactured equipment like snowmobiles and wear some presumably factory-made clothing, much of the technology these trappers and their families employ is built from scratch. In a fascinating segment that suggests Herzog and Yasyukov would produce great instructional DVDs ("How to Survive the Apocalypse"), a hunter shows us how to make wooden skis that will outlast the most expensive synthetic designer ones.

Fascination with processes and with the men who master them to become expert woodsmen leaves Herzog no time to address their wives and children, whom we glimpse only at hunting sendoffs and when the men return to their homes loaded down with quarry. Whatever routines occupy the wives is of little interest to either Yasyukov or Herzog. What we do catch of them says that they, too, are very happy people. “I'm alone again,” one wife says, as her man heads out on another long expedition. In a typical arthouse fiction film, she would be the face of uncertainty and despair in that moment. In "Happy People," she just states the fact with a bittersweet smile. Herzog cuts away (or Yasyukov's cameraman stops recording) quickly.

The dogs, on the other hand, receive rapturous attention. One thing I learned from "Happy People" is that a dog in the Taiga is like a horse in the American Frontier: not merely a “best friend” but a lifeline. A brooding hunter becomes emotional when recalling a dog who gave up her life defending him from a bear attack. We see the dogs set to work with military discipline. Herzog adds some stirring, heartening Badelt music to a scene of a dog keeping pace with his master's snowmobile for nearly a hundred miles.

So the focus is tight, but the love comes through in many ways. Herzog mentions that one of the fishermen who shot some of the footage is a relative of the great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. The instant that name came up, I was struck with memories of all the odes to Russia's natural beauty in Tarkovsky's nostalgic films. It made me consider that Herzog might have taken on this project as a gesture of German-Russian relations—an interdependent association now, but historically one of horrific wars. Imagine a Japanese filmmaker celebrating Chinese traditions. (Actually, there are films like Kenji Mizoguchi's Japanese take on Chinese history, "Princess Yang Kwei-fei," and they tend to be weirdly interesting.)

The fact that Herzog shot none of the footage comes across most strongly when we briefly visit a couple of indigenous Taiga people. They build a boat with staggering precision, row it out onto the icy waters, and then they are gone from the film. I can't imagine Herzog having access to folks whose traditions go even further back than the Russians leaving it at that.

All of this apparent Walden-like freedom struck close to home for me—or would, if I had a home. I stepped off the grid in New York City four years ago, trying to find a simpler way to live that would free me of corporate wage-slavery. Four years later, I've found that such freedom is virtually impossible in American cities. To live as free and clear as the men of the Taiga do, I would have to go to a farm, a commune—or the Taiga. On a landscape of concrete, there is no hunting or homesteading, just purchasing and renting. Parks and community gardens preserve some testy relationship with the natural world, but, let's face it, the world I and most folks reading this essay occupy keeps us dependent upon corporate delivery systems for our survival essentials. Are we happy this way?

Herzog, whose films have captured ecstatic faces in prisons, asylums, rainforests and arctic base camps, would probably answer, “That is up to you, my friend. You must work with whatever you have been given,” in a voice that could make a man caught in a bear trap smile.

最近看快乐的人们，一部纪录片，讲一群生活在西伯利亚的人们一年四季如何生活的，砍伐树木，建造渔船，捕鱼，收货食物之类的。这部纪录片的名字虽然叫快乐的生活，但条件真的很艰苦，感觉完全快乐不起来。冬天，大雪纷飞，那个寒冷劲儿，压在屋顶上的雪会把屋顶压垮。而夏天，到处都是蚊子，不管是人还是狗，都被蚊子包围着，只有在出风口才能稍微好一点。猎人们就用土办法，自己熬焦油，给自己、小孩子、家里的猎狗，都涂上厚厚的一层焦油，晚上洗澡把它洗掉，第二天依次往复。nn可是这样艰苦的生活条件，依然可以很快乐，原因就在于可以发挥人的自主性。就像一个老猎人说，在前苏联时期，他最喜欢被分到当猎人的工作，因为没有人催促，没有人指挥，他可以自己决定什么时候开始、什么时候休息，他拥有充分自由。虽然条件很艰苦，但他们却可以用双手去制造工具，用工具去克服各种困境，这样的生活，虽然很艰苦，却很有滋味。nn在现代生活中，我们常常会犯拖延症啊什么的，一方面是因为我们已经被现代技术给宠坏了，习惯了即时享乐、有求马上应的生活节奏；另一方面可能是因为我们要做的很多事情都是被安排的。一个人主动去做什么，和他被安排去做什么，哪怕是一样的事情，但是感受是截然不同。你有没有发现对于你喜欢做的事情，哪怕没有被安排，哪怕很艰难，你都是甘之如饴、乐此不疲的。nn所以呢对症下药，要想跨过拖延症，一方面是延迟享受，把手机掏出来耍的时候，先数120下。另一方面，真诚的对面对工作和生活，不喜欢的事情先拒绝一下，拒绝不了再做，你也对得起自己了。对于喜欢做的事情，就持之不懈的坚持下去，哪怕没有什么产出，享受这个过程本身就是一个胜利了。如果没有发现自己特别感兴趣的事情，那么不妨多尝试一下、发掘一下，多给自己机会。特别是如果你像我一样，小时候沉迷学习，没有机会发展兴趣爱好，不妨长大了补一下这门功课，多探索一下自己的未知性。其实想想，我们一直急着去了解别人、建立关系，为什么不先静下心来，了解一下自己、探索一下自己、宠爱一下自己、做自己最好的小伙伴？

赫尔佐格：“某天我正开车行驶在洛杉矶，忽然意识到有位朋友就住附近。通常，他家附近根本就没空余的停车位，但那天正巧有个空位，于是我就停好车，登门造访了。进屋的时候，他关上了刚才还在看的电视机。但就在那一瞬间，我还是注意到了，巨大的等离子屏幕上，那些画面挺有意思的。聊过之后才知道，那是由俄罗斯年轻导演德米特里·瓦修科夫（Dmitry Vasyukov）拍摄的一套电影，它由四部分组成，各长一小时。影片说的是西伯利亚北方针叶林里的猎户。他用了一整年拍摄这套作品，四段影片各自代表一个季节。那些画面拍得相当不俗，将那些猎人拍出了一种近乎于史前人类的感觉。可惜，整套影片加在一起，长度过长，配乐也做得很糟糕。于是我也就是顺口一说，建议这电影要重新剪个海外发行版，配乐重新做，再加个旁白，片长也要控制在九十分钟内。知道这件事后，德米特里乐坏了。最终，我用了几周时间，重新剪辑了影片，编撰并录制了旁白部分，还找来克劳斯·巴代特（Klaus Badelt）重新做了配乐。因为这片子并不是我拍摄的，太多的东西我也说不出来，我只知道，我热爱这些俄罗斯人还有他们的狗，我热爱他们在这前不着村、后不着店的地方，就靠着这几间小木屋和脚下这片土地生存下来的方式。他们是真正意义上自由、快乐的人，不受制于规矩、税收、政府、法律、官僚、电话和广播。不管是制作一整套滑雪板，还是拿一整棵树挖成独木舟，他们依靠的只是自己专业的生存技能，还有他们自己的一套价值观、行为标准和行事规矩。他们尊重自然，鄙视那些侵入他们领地，滥捕滥渔的商业化猎人。片中拍到的那些猎户里，有一位后来托人给我传来消息，说他很担心观众看过影片之后，会觉得他们这些人生活得很可怜。但我觉得，他们显然都是些很有自豪感的人，我对他们只有尊敬和羡慕。那也是我的理想，能在西伯利亚的孤独地带，能在这片面积相当于美国一点五倍的土地上，过上个一年。”

转载自《赫尔佐格谈电影》第460页

这里的春天冰河溶解，流动，缓缓而壮观；夏天有铺天盖地的蚊子；秋天人们和金花鼠一齐收集松果，用比锤哥的还霸气的大锤子。
他们的春夏秋都是在为冬天做准备。因为冬天是狩猎的季节。

“现在，猎人们只身闯荡。他们回归了自己的本来面目，快乐的人们。只有几只狗陪伴着，远离故土。他们完全靠自己。他们自由自在，没有规则，没有税收，没有政府，没有法律，没有官僚组织，没有电话，没有收音机。只带着他们自己的价值观和行为准则。”

从一个猎房到另一个猎房，在这个taiga林的世界中，掌握所有的生存技能，摸索与狗的相处方式，见证空旷、寒冷与沉寂之美。这一切就是他们的快乐。

看着雪地摩托在针叶林间和冰面穿行，好想哭。我也有过类似的快乐，和他们相比，就像一眨眼那么短。

这部片子也感觉有点短。这样的快乐永远看不够。

今天刚看，还是一向的赫尔佐格的风格，内敛，冷静的记录着一个村庄的人们在一年四季的生活，有勤劳的，也有酗酒的机会主义者，还有猎人口中道出的自己的贪婪同行，能最终在这片茫茫的西伯利亚针叶林里生活快乐的秘诀其实是：勤劳，取之有道，顺应季节和万物的生长。非常像咱们中国的道家文化，而赫尔佐格为了透露这个秘诀也耗费了整整一年，非常欣赏他这种润物细无声的风格，当镜头最后落在那只奔跑的哈士奇身上的身上，我想连赫尔佐格都很羡慕那只紧紧跟随在主人身后但整个风雪长路却始终没有乘雪橇的狗吧：自由，独立，忠诚。和自己敦厚却不失智慧的主人永远的归属在这片雪白的净土之上...