Cobra Verde
Werner Herzog 1987
I watched this quite a while ago now, but didn’t manage to follow up
on my desire to write something about this particular sequence. Another
go, this time from memory. Towards the end of the film a ‘nun’s choir’
come into the walled section of the fort from which Francisco Manoel da
Silva (Kinski) is running his slave trade outpost. The dozen or so young
girls, framed at the back by a few male singers and percussionists,
form a mass just ahead of the archway, pressing into the image in a
lateral way, spreading out like a surface, as if reluctant to step into
the full light of the courtyard. Da Silva has just walked through a
group of male slaves, clinically grabbing heads and checking teeth (a
horrible stocktake) and the emergence of this group of musicians and
dancers is absolutely transformative – especially to Kinski. For one
thing, the way the group comes up to the camera, and in particular the
affecting, somehow invulnerable manner of the young woman who seems to lead the performance, seems to grow in the scene like an unstoppable contagion.
The main singer – who is undoubtedly the focal pull of the group, and who, every now and then, winds up the formation of figures with a muscular twirl, as if resetting the torsion
that they are working on the film/image – and the surrounding women,
address the camera straight on, smiling and winking wryly – looking
through everything, all equipment and apparatus. There is no clear
indication that we have assumed a character perspective, that we have
cut to inhabit Kinski’s viewpoint, but this remains poised and
uncertain. For then, Kinski breaks out from the frame edge and
infiltrates the choir. There is something additional in this gesture I think – it’s like both Kinski and da
Silva splits from themselves, drifting like a pale, and now benevolent
apparition in the midst of the intense mass of the choir. Something that
steps outside of the film here – not simply a breaking of the fourth
wall or the consistency of characterisation – or at least there is
nothing so upfront about its lack of containment, so to speak.
Yet that’s what it seems to be at work here – this sequence, however
instigated by Herzog, whether it became found its way into the film by
design, accident, etc. it ends up blossoming unchecked in the material
of the story, and the matter of the image. It overloads the narrative
and historical setting, breeding over the ‘location’ like a fungus. It
refuses to be assimilated on anything but its own terms – those of a
singular performance, tied to an index of event that cannot be utilised
in the generation of sustainable fictions. I’m tempted to say that it
becomes extraneous, but this is not to be thought in the sense
of any superficiality or as anything reductively ornamental. It is
rather that it becomes a figure of brutal authenticity and, more
importantly, materiality. This reference to materiality is echoed in
what Gilles Deleuze says about what he considers Herzog’s emphasis on
the materiality of images, producing a physical presence of the image
that in this case could be linked both to a people’s nobility and
vulnerability – a performance of disjunction that seems to protrude from
the surface of the film, to come out and dismiss its construction through an integrated (paradoxical) display of porosity and imperviousness.
