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.

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga 2010 Dmitry Vasyukov, Werner Herzog

看了小森林后想起Herzog这部纪录片 森林中的猎人和狗 同样是表现一种前工业时代的生活方式 猎人的话清醒至极 显然他对自己的生活有充分的自省 他说“猎人是诚实的” 爱他得猎狗 知道如何训练他们 但仍然和他们保持距离 他清楚人和家畜之间的情感和界限 人和自然之间的法则 人从未凌驾于自然之上 只存在于自然之间 这个朴素的思想可以推及到现代社会 尽管在人类视角下似乎是智人主宰了地球和地球上其他种类生物 但这和蚂蚁筑建巨大的蚁穴并无两样 倾覆只是一夕风雨 人类为之自傲的文明即使以地球的时间尺度衡量也只是沧海桑田

这个猎人几乎是同Herzog的镜头一样冷静而理性 他过着一种质朴理性的生活 康德的道德律和星空同存于猎人心中

记得尼采好像也说过类似的话 人类的平静生活需要仿效西伯利亚农村和东方的村落中的生活态度 但这并非在否定工业社会和现代文化 城市中有太多的影响人判断力的表象和遮蔽 未被现代工业开发过的森林和农村环境相对简单 人对自我的认识和感受也就相对清晰 而现代人对自我和自我感受的要求空前提高 代表或者伪装成这类文化的消费产品也逐渐占据市场 用消费满足精神需求从来都是饮鸩止渴 另一类人回归理性式禁欲甚至宗教式禁欲 历史已经证明违反人类自然欲望的行为最终会导致更多的危机 制度的不完善和理性的不完善导致现代社会最终的方向危机重重 历史的终结不会是现代社会 而是世界大战 核危机 流行疫病 外星人 或者彗星撞地球

今天看的这部电影虽然只有短短的90分钟的时间，但是在这90分钟的时间里面，我却享受到了一种独有的快乐，这种快乐让我明白生命其实还有另外一层含义，生命的另外一层含义让我认认真真地思考过，让我勤勤恳恳地感受过。

这里是赫尔佐格的巴赫塔，这里是地球上的天堂，这里砍伐树木，建造渔船，捕鱼，收获食物，四季分明的天，一切的一切都显得那么的恬淡安静，一切的一切都显得那么引人入胜，一切的一切都让我体会到了一种快乐。

我看着漫天大雪的情景，冥思良久，然后陶醉于其中的盛景。

然后思索，如果这部电影是在大银幕上看到的话该有多么地好，那样的话我会更加身临其境，更加想要去看一看这个地方。

这电影里的人生，是我永远的梦境

看到这部电影的时候，镜头刚刚开始，我就被电影里面的一种岁月斑驳的声音吸引了；这种声音引人入胜，我觉得这种声音真的太让我震撼了，生命中怎么会有一种声音，一出场...便让我体会到了一种“生机”，我觉得这段声音完完全全可以放给全人类听一听的。

再往后，就是这里的人们生活的痕迹。

这里的猎人们来到了这个地方，生活着，然后打猎。虽然这个地方很孤独，连讯号也没有，但是我还是觉得....他们很快乐，他们比我快乐，他们在和狗狗一起生活的过程之中体会到了数不尽的快乐，他们明白生的含义，明白自己的追求，为了自己打猎的愿望一直一直坚持着，一直一直不放弃。

夏天的时候，这里有很多很多的蚊子，蚊子出现的时候...他们只能够依靠桦树烤出来的焦油来抹在自己的身体上，脸庞上才能够抵御这些蚊子，如果不抹的话，这些蚊子可能会把狗狗的血给吸干吧，而且这些蚊子在人的身体上静静地趴着，伺机而动。我觉得这样反手一下我就能结束十几只蚊子的生命吧，毫不费力。

然后打的自己满手是血。

即使是到了夏天的时候，这里依然还是很冷的。即使如此，这些蚊子还是很猖狂。

夏天的时候，也是大家制作独木舟的时候。看了一下他们用的木头，全都是纯实木，非常好的一种工具，他们用的这种制作独木舟的木头还必须用那种最好的木头，这种木头长得很漂亮，很直，所以说他们才会被选用。

刚开始这些木头有了独木舟的雏形之后，我还是觉得挺好看的。可是再往后，这邪恶木头被涂上了黑乎乎的油漆的颜色...我瞬间就懵了；果然我还是看颜值的。

然后还是觉得在巨大的现实世界之中空虚寂寞的我，看起来显得如此的孤独。

自由的生活总是那么令人向往

在无穷无尽的树林和无穷无尽的寒冷里面，猎人们按部就班地工作，孤独，与狗狗相伴着，你看不出任何情绪，他们却说这其实就是他们热爱的生活，这其实就是他们的生命，如果有朝一日，你不让他们过这样的日子的话，他们觉得自己的生命简直已经没有了任何的意义。

这就是这些人生存的意义，这其实就是生命。

我看着这些猎人们，日出而作，日落而息。依靠一些原始的方式在河边捕鱼，制作独木舟，做饭，打猎...

看上去很苦很苦，可是他们看上去又是那么地快乐，那么地幸福，那么地知足。

我冥思良久，觉得说：“可能这就是我不曾拥有的东西吧。”我不曾拥有这样的快乐，我不曾拥有这样的坚定，我不曾拥有这样的满足，我什么都没有。

这里的人们，有勤劳的，也有酗酒的机会主义者，有猎人口中自己贪婪的同行，也有那些依靠制作独木舟生存的人。这里广袤无垠，人只能够与狗狗相伴，但是只要勤劳，你就可以得到很多很多的东西。

“勤劳，”取之有道。

这里的人们自由、独立、忠诚，这是一片净土，也希望这里永远是一片快乐的净土。

我真的太喜欢这部片子了，不是告诉自己这部片子很棒我要喜欢它的那种喜欢，是可以看哭，是看得心里酸酸涩涩，思绪涌动的那种喜欢!这里是西伯利亚，巴赫塔，位于俄罗斯北部叶尼塞河畔的一个村庄，镜头对准了这里的一部分人——猎人!哦我的天，一个人拥有1500km²的广大土地，在这里过着自由自在令很多人羡慕的生活，却也是在很多人眼里根本承受不了的生活! 短短的90分钟的片子，经历了从一年冬天到下一年冬天。冬天，零下五十度的气温，远离村庄远离家人在狗狗的陪伴下在针叶林里度过几个月!白天带着狗狗打猎，检查陷阱的收货，凿冰捕鱼，晚上回到夏天搭建的屋子里;夏天忍受巨多的蚊子，开始为冬天做准备! 我觉得他们的生活在现代化充斥的今天是难得的，是令我感觉到震撼和敬佩的，但扪心自问，我羡慕吗？我不知道……我向往吗？我不敢向往，我在这里根本活不下去…… 他们，延续祖辈的生活方式 按照祖辈传承下来的经验和技能在这里生活，每天忙碌而辛劳，冬天酷寒，夏日难耐，他们会享受自己自由的生活还是偶尔也会感慨生活的艰辛?我只能说子非鱼…… 他们与狗狗的情谊太令我动容了!那只勇敢地扑向熊的狗狗，让我面部肌肉抽动，眼泪扑簌簌地掉下来……他们冻得通红的双手和面颊，令我心中酸酸涩涩，日复一日、年复一年这样的生活啊！ 影片最后远去的背影……这就是生活吧！

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。 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。 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。 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？