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.

人的本质是自由自在地劳动。 1.挑选木材制作滑雪板，买的滑雪板滑15公里就提不动脚，但自制的滑雪板可以无忧无虑一直滑（超薄且弹性十足的两块薄木板 用麻绳系在鞋上）妈蛋顿时觉得滑雪鞋怎么那么傻呢 2.制作独木舟 一门古老的技艺（唯一能感同身受的事情是皮划艇泛舟湖上真的好快乐啊） 4.夏天摸焦油防蚊子 3.捕鱼 没有什么能比得上新鲜的鱼 4.猎人和狗 忠诚的伙伴 猎人讲述他的狗被熊撕碎的故事 感人至深 5.什么是快乐 一个男人 一条狗 一把斧子 广袤的森林和雪地 生存是唯一的规则 自由所以快乐 6.猎人的哲学 朴实 深刻 一个圈养的城市人能去想象和羡慕荒野猎人的快乐吗？我老在想，自己对田园牧歌的憧憬是一种幻想吗，如果自然的劳作最快乐，那农村人为什么愿意进城，说明手机还是比种地好玩，种地还是苦。猎人说一条狗关了6个月就会永远丧失能力，办公室坐久了，格子间就是天地。 归根结底，无论干什么，能吃苦，才配得上自由。

电影里，好多我喜欢的元素。例如就目前来说，因为在准备新房装修，所以看了很多家具，主题都是实木居多。然后电影里，哇塞，好多的原木，还有会木工的猎人，做了好棒的木屋和独木舟。然后，还有我一直想养的，因为没能力养而没能成真的狗，好多好漂亮的狗。猎人说，在狗三个月的时候，他就可以看出来这是不是一只好狗了，而且绝无差错，而我呢，能拥有一只狗就不错了。还有好多鱼，我很喜欢钓鱼，而他们那儿好多鱼，不但多，而且个头也很大。还有南方人非常羡慕的雪！一直想体验一下滑雪，奈何在南方，人造雪场，一个小时好几百，又钱包伤不起。还有很漂亮的景色，空旷自然，让人返璞归真。

评论说西伯利亚的生活条件好艰苦，并他们不快乐。从片里人们传递的表情来看，他们确实很辛苦，而且未来的地区发展并并不乐观。人越来越少，经济也越来越差了。但是从个人来说，猎人们的快乐，并没有离开他们。

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？

在寒冷的西伯利亚针叶林里生活着一些勤劳，智慧，敦厚的人们，以打猎，捕鱼，采果为生，在少有的高科技中生活，他们以木板做的滑板作为交通工具，独木舟作为捕鱼时的船只；打猎却有取舍，伐木只求所需，根据万物生长判断大自然的变换，安排着各种生活，没有制约却有着自律，充分享有自由，过得有滋有味。人们享受这样的劳作，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。仿佛梭罗生活的瓦尔登湖，自给自足，与周围和谐共处，回归自然状态，在大自然春夏秋冬的更替中，人类需要劳作，猎人说一条狗关了6个月会永远丧失能力……少了现代生活中的便利，也没有欲望和金钱带来的焦虑，戾气和茫然。更适合针对现下的疫情，人与自然的相处之道重新被重视！“在全然褪去社会属性，却依然有自己遵循的个人准则和行为标准，从心所欲而不逾矩”，这就是happ

在寒冷的西伯利亚针叶林里生活着一些勤劳，智慧，敦厚的人们，以打猎，捕鱼，采果为生，在少有的高科技中生活，他们以木板做的滑板作为交通工具，独木舟作为捕鱼时的船只；打猎却有取舍，伐木只求所需，根据万物生长判断大自然的变换，安排着各种生活，没有制约却有着自律，充分享有自由，过得有滋有味。人们享受这样的劳作，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。仿佛梭罗生活的瓦尔登湖，自给自足，与周围和谐共处，回归自然状态，在大自然春夏秋冬的更替中，人类需要劳作，猎人说一条狗关了6个月会永远丧失能力……少了现代生活中的便利，也没有欲望和金钱带来的焦虑，戾气和茫然。更适合针对现下的疫情，人与自然的相处之道重新被重视！“在全然褪去社会属性，却依然有自己遵循的个人准则和行为标准，从心所欲而不逾矩”，这就是happy people的快乐源泉！

以前纳闷俄罗斯人为何嗜伏特加如命，那句谚语说，冬天的夜里，俄罗斯的光棍更愿意搂着一瓶伏特加，而不是一个老婆，有老婆之人第二天成了光棍。

现在才真正体会到，伏特加俨然是他们的暖肠之酒。俄罗斯人强烈的生存欲望与西伯利亚极寒的冷酷相互磨砺，那样极烈的酒，大概只有它才能够抵御这严酷的自然环境，帮助他们熬过这漫漫寒冬吧…

巴哈提雅村，这个位于西伯利亚中心地带的村庄，只有几百人的村庄，却拥有一个国家般大小的广袤土地，而四周的无尽原野将这里紧紧包围。生活回馈给他们的是望不到尽头的针叶林，以及除他们以外，谁也无缘欣赏到的寒地绝美风景，这大概是上帝最无价的待遇。

冰原环境与家庭生活冷暖交割，冬去春来，你会发现，时间在这里流逝的无足轻重。春季来临，冰层解冻，整个冰川在西伯利亚最大的叶尼塞河里流淌时，你也会动容于人们究竟凭了什么才在自然美丽又残酷的造物下活得如此生机勃勃…

所有的人在苦寒之地收藏了一整个房间的蓄势待发，等极夜结束的时候，折断根茎，插上一朵铁质的花。于是心脏重新活蹦乱跳，而不会饿死，冻死在这“丰饶”的被诸神遗忘了的地方…

—《快乐的人们》.有感