Scream Of Stone - Werner Herzog's Lost Masterpiece

With his autobiography out soon, one wonders how much room the director will devote to a film that some consider his greatest work even if he can't stand it himself...

Werner Herzog doesn’t like 1991’s Scream Of Stone. This seems odd since i) it’s a film about one of his favourite things, namely homo sapiens thriving in the world’s harshest environments, and ii) it’s a film he directed! Attend any Herzog retrospective or purchase his collected works on DVD, however, and the odds are slim that his mountaineering epic will be a part of it.

Of course, not everybody has as little regard for Scream Of Stone as the man who made it. Kevin Macdonald - director of One Day In September, The Last King Of Scotland and his own high altitude survival story Touching The Void - is a huge fan of Herzog’s, but has no qualms about declaring Scream Of Stone the director’s undisputed masterpiece.

That Herzog doesn’t feel the same shouldn’t come as a surprise. With a body of work that comprises Fitzcaraldo, Aguirre, Heart Of Glass, Woyzeck, Strozek, Kasper Hauser, Cobra Verde and Rescue Dawn - and that’s just his dramatic output! - choosing your favourite film must be as hard as selecting your favourite child.

Then there are the elements of Scream Of Stone towards which the great man takes great exception. The Americanised screenplay (loosely based upon a story by legendary explorer Reinhold Messner); the reliance on a non-actor Stefan in a key role; a release that was so rushed that, at early festival screenings, the director had to translate the Spanish dialogue live in the theatre as he hadn’t had a chance to properly subtitle the picture - with all these things going against it, you can understand why Herzog prefers to talk about any of his other films before discussing Scream of Stone.

There is more to the movie than missed opportunity and bungled comprise. Scream of Stone is the story of two mountaineers with very different views of the discipline. Martin Sedlmayr (real-life climber Stefan Glowacz) is the competitor, the man bent on doing things first and fastest. Seemingly based upon free climbing pioneer Patrick Edlinger, we first encounter Sedlmayr at an indoor speed climbing event. Upon winning the trophy, Martin’s introduced to Roccia Innerkofler (Vittorio Mezzogiorno, in a role originally earmarked for Klaus Kinski), a climber who considers his craft somewhere between a religion and an art form. Indeed, as Sedlmayr is to Edlinger so Innerkofler is to the aforementioned Messner, a great explorer whose reverence for mountaineering and respect for the planet’s greatest peaks was shaped by the death of his younger brother Gunther on their first major climb together.

Though Sedlmayr and Innerkofler have summited many of the world’s highest mountains, neither has encountered anything quite like Cerro Torre. Jutting out along the border between Chile and Argentina, Cerro Torre belongs to a chain of mountains that resemble the spikes on the tail of a Stegosaur. To climb such a peak is to make a covenant with death. Little wonder then that Ivan, Donald Sutherland’s documentary filmmaker, is desperate to catch the ascent on camera.

You get the feeling Sutherland’s role was originally intended for Herzog who instead makes do with a brief cameo as a TV director. This being a film out to court an English-speaking audience, the presence of a bona fide star is easy to understand. Likewise, Mathilda May’s role as Katharina, the woman over whom the climbers clash, feels like a sop to producers who can’t believe that two men’s fascination with climbing the unclimbable would be sufficient to motivate them.

Worst of all are a pair of performances from Al Waxman and Gunilla Karlzen as a surly American TV producer and the PA out to satisfy his every need. Were these turns any broader, you could be forgiven for thinking the characters had stumbled into Scream of Stone by mistake. But for as long as they’re on screen, one can but worry that an American soap opera has been left shorthanded.

By contrast, Brad Dourif’s character - ‘Fingerless’ - crashes into Scream of Stone from what feels like a different universe. Rather then an unwelcome distraction, Dourif is the essential force at the movie’s heart, a figure so potent we miss him whenever he’s not on screen. First encountered in a fleeting encounter - albeit long enough for the film’s title to be explained - the next time we meet him, we find out that, no only does he claim to have scaled Cerro Torre, but he left six things up there - his name, four of his fingers and… something else, about which the film’s finale revolves.

Obsessed with but two things - mountaineering and Mae West - ‘Fingerless’ is a mercurial figure, angelic one moment, malign the next. Brad Dourif would subsequently become part of Werner Herzog’s stock company, appearing in My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?, The Wide Blue Yonder and Bad Lieutenant. As good as he is in these films, ‘Fingerless’ is one of the actor’s most compelling creations. If the performance is big, that’s because the mountains are big. And since - for all his best efforts - Stefan Glowacz struggles to shoulder the movie’s narrative heft, this charismatic supporting turn is the tank of oxygen that enables Scream Of Stone to scale great heights.

As befits a film about mountaineering, it’s the climbing sequences that truly elevate Herzog’s picture. Our sense of unease increasing whenever Sedlmayr and Innerkofler merely glimpse Cerre Torre, once they’re trying to scale its sheer granite faces, it’s all you can do to keep your eyes on the screen. So what if every safety measure has been taken and non-climber Mezzogiorno is cunningly doubled - at this kind of altitude, not even knowing that both performers made it to the film’s premiere can convince us they’ll escape Scream Of Stone alive.

The other key climbing sequences is the source of the remarkable image at the top of the page. With Sedlmayr in Australia to demonstrate his free climbing skills, the camera slowly pans across the Outback before settling on the image of a man trying to scale an overhang with nothing but his wits and a pouch of Magnesium Carbonate to assist him. Shot with neither safety line or safety net, this astonishing scene fully justifies the casting of Stefan Glowacz. That he looks a bit uncomfortable with his feet on the ground is neither here nor there - it’s thanks to his being so at ease at high altitude that Herzog is able to shoot the sequence without a single cut. Whether you can bare to watch, on the other hand… well, that’s another matter.

The other great thing about Sedlmayr’s free climbing master class is that it’s the one aspect of Scream Of Stone that Werner Herzog really likes. In Nomad, his fascinating documentary about his friend the author Bruce Chatwin, he shows the scene almost in its entirety; a fact that’s all the more fitting what with Chatwin having ‘cameoed’ in Scream, his seminal In Patagonia being one of the books Ivan shares with Innerkofler during the mountainner’s time in Argentina.

Would that the director could see more of the good things in Scream Of Stone. But as the clouds and snowfall make it tricky to take in Cerre Torre in its entirety, so Werner Herzog has plenty of understandable reasons for being blind to his film’s brilliance. As with Sedlmayr and Innerkofler during their ascents, it would appear it is the spectator rather than the sportsman or the coach who sees more of the game.