We finished watch Werner Herzog's
Happy People last night. It was good, though Herzog's narration was heavy-handed. It's a documentary filmed in the taiga in Siberia, which is very, very remote and extremely difficult to traverse.
It did make me wonder, though, how did he film it? Was there a camera crew of three in the dead of the taiga, following individual hunters around? Besides being logistically difficult, wouldn't that completely change how the hunters behaved?
First, it turns out
he didn't film it at all:
"Happy People" was brilliantly filmed, but not by Herzog. In effect, he found it, and, with permission, appropriated it. The appeal to Herzog is clear -- the film presents yet another encounter at the end of the world.
It all began when Herzog was visiting a friend who happened to be watching a four-hour Russian TV documentary. It told the story of a village on the Yenisei River in the Taiga, the vast forest that spreads across Siberia. The focus was on the village's hunters and fishermen. These men include both ethnic Russians and native Siberian Kets -- the latter are, in effect, an endangered race, like aborigines in many lands.
Herzog was fascinated by what he saw and got in touch with the Russian director, Dmitry Vasyukov, to ask permission to edit the footage into a feature of about an hour and a half. Vasyukov agreed, and he and Herzog share directors' credit.
As for whether the filming changed the hunters' behavior, their behavior had changed before the filming because
they had the idea to film it.
The original film was conceived by two of the hunters and fishermen, Mikhail Tarkovsky (nephew of famous filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky who himself worked in the taiga area, inspiring him to become a filmmaker), who has lived and worked in the area since 1981, and Gennady Soloviev, the woodsman who has been there the longest and who taught Mikhail. Both men are featured extensively in the film, Mikhail also being one of the cinematographers.
I thought these hunters were completely oblivious to media. Tarkovsky really, really is media-aware:
Tarkovsky has written and published numerous short stories about Bakhta and its people and the trappers and natives, which led to the idea for making the film series. Another film based on a novel by Tarkovsky, Frozen Time, has also been produced.[4]
Since the popularity of the TV mini-series, the village of Bakhta has become a tourist spot, with visitors arriving by river boat in the short summer months. Tarkovsky created a museum there that features artifacts and exhibits on the life and work of the trappers, fishermen, boat-builders, craftsmen, and villagers. The museum features a workshop to teach young people practical application on how to live off the land, and to pass down its traditions.[4]
I have to imagine Herzog knew this, too, but didn't want to spoil the isolation narrative. It's still a good movie, but it's about people with feet in both our world and in primal nature, not people who have known nothing about movies and the internet.