How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck...

How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck (1976)

** (out of 4)

Werner Herzog documentary about cattle auctioneers is rather strange to say the least. We really don't learn anything about the actual auctioneers except how they got into the business. It seems Herzog's main interest is just listening to them speak their fast talk and asking them what it means when they say it slowed down.

I've seen quite a few of Herzog's documentaries and this one isn't the best but he has many great ones out there.

You can buy this film from Herzog's website.

For the most part any documentary that Werner Herzog has made results in you seeing something in a new light, even if you don't like the subject. There is always a reason behind anything he has taken a look at. The subject here is auctioneers. I wouldn't have thought twice about a film about men who sell live stock for a living, however having seen a good number of Herzogs films I decided to give this one a shot as well. What fascinates the director is the sounds the men use. It seems to be more music or singing rather than talking;the words becoming a poetry thanks to the cadences. Its a weird sensation. Granted the magic goes away when the film ends and you watch auctioneers at work away from the film, however during the 44 minutes the film runs you are in the hands of a master who makes you believe that music and poetry is something other than what you think it is. Definitely worth a look.

Rather tiresome Herzog documentary, in which he performs his usual variation on Brechtian alienation by providing his audience with space to think, and then hitting them over the head anyway. The subject matter is the 1976 Cattle Auctioneering World Championships, wherein a bunch of rednecks speedyodel at cows. Herzog would use this phenomenon with great dramatic power in his similarly bludgeoning treatise on America, STROZZEK, but without a fictional framework, the subject becomes monotonous and irritating.

Herzog sees these auctioneers as a major site of American capitalism. Unlike other World Championships, where a skilled jury honour the most successful, this competition is strictly business, the jurors voting for the man they'd most like to represent them. Herzog compares this to the Amish community - enemies of capitalism - in whose town the event takes place. This is an easy jibe, and one that ignores the possible intolerance and repression that can breed in such close-knit groups.

The film is full of such contentiousness. Herzog is a last bastion of righteous modernism in a prevaricating post-modernist age of crisis, confusion and doubt. All his films are made with a firm point of view, offering an unproblematic alternative, but his attacks on convention and tyranny can be rather tyrannical themselves. Herzog appropriates everything. Take, for example, the issue of voices. He interviews competitors. They speak in English, but he talks for them, over them, in German, speaking for them. If the subtitles (another level!) are anything to go by, he's also translating them without due precision, and subtleties of meaning are lost. If his English isn't good enough, it's a mark of his arrogance that he thinks this doesn't matter.

Herzog points out that there is a strange musicality to the auctioneering. He then makes us endure the art for over 20 minutes, presumably to give us time to ruminate over it. So we do. Sometimes it sounds like yodelling, at others babbling dictators, at others raving evangelists. We think about how this 'new' language (both verbal and body) developed, and note the disparity between its local specificity, almost ethnicity, and its centrality to an international capitalism. We may even note the link between the auctioneers and the cattle they're selling, in the businessmans' minds.

All this will probably come to you after two minutes, but Herzog refuses to stop, piling on these yokels whose meagre curiosity value has long since waned. Can you imagine - 20 minutes of cattle moving from one pen to another, buyers whooping, and this insane, ghastly yodelspeak ringing through your ears like a trapped bluebottle. Then - then! - after you've been given time to make up your own mind, Herzog comes along and tells you what he thinks anyway! And guess what? It's exactly the same as what you'd figured out for yourself! Arrrrgh!

(The film has one value though. Canadians really do speak as SOUTH PARK suggested. Which, when you think aboot it, is unfortunate.)

Werner Herzog's obsession with small-town America continues in HOW MUCH WOOD WOULD A WOODCHUCK CHUCK?, a short documentary that's filmed during the world speed-talking auctioneer championships in the USA. While there are a few digressions involving the Amish (always a welcome subject for cinema), for the most part this is a static documentary in which the auteur sets his camera up and leaves it filming various contenders, all of them trying their best to out speed-talk the competition.

I was first introduced to this kind of speed-talking in Herzog's follow-up film STROSZEK, and it's amazing to listen to. Watching the contenders practising and talking about their backgrounds adds to the experience. Some may find the lengthy competition scenes a little wearying due to their similarity, but I was never less than amused by listening to these guys doing something I could only dream of.

They talk so fast that you need ears like a super-hawk to really decipher what they're getting at, but it's this speed at going about selling goods that interest Werner Herzog so much. He's said in interviews that it's almost like "the poetry of capitalism", as these high-stakes auctioneers, selling off cattle within a matter of seconds, are in a unique little world unto themselves and their small audience, mostly full of small town yokels and Amish. This doesn't make his documentary on them particularly exceptional, however, as it's a little too long and a little much without a lot of human interest; we don't know who most of these ultra-fast talkers are. It is, however, quite funny at times to see them go this fast, perhaps in a sort of detached way (then again, how can one who's never been to a cattle auction know anything about what it's like to see mouths go at a mile a minute).

It's great to see when he's interviewing one guy and he starts explaining how he auctions, and at first in regular speed soon as a sort of reflex goes off into his ultra-fast speaking voice. I also liked getting into the groove of the competition, as it were, seeing how despite it being still at lighting speed with numbers and calls it can be understood which ones are the slower ones. Although Herzog fares a lot better using the auctioneer in his fiction film Stroszek- Scott McKain is the one featured in the scene where Stroszek's items are sold off in an immediacy that is purely staggering and, as it's so unexpected following the pace of that film, is one of the most hilarious scenes of the 70s in cinema- it's a fine little portrait of a group that is somewhat representative of the fun that's missing in more run of the mill acts of commerce. You're not going to see this kind of auction at an art gallery in midtown New York, only in a Herzog film.