The only Werner Herzog film you’ll never see: “A rooster is the leading character”
It’s common knowledge among his fans that Werner Herzog is obsessed with chickens, yet, sadly, his film that centres mostly on the dumb farm animal is the one that we’re almost guaranteed to never see.
Unlike most filmmakers, Herzog’s main concern doesn’t seem to be the release and reception of his films. This makes him an artist in the most pure sense. He seems to be simply making his films because he has a vision, a whim, some sort of divine creative inspiration, or just because he wants to. Usually, it seems like he has some wacky universal ‘truth’ he’s trying to get at.
For him, it’s about the art, not the audience. Where many make just to sell or receive praise, Herzog simply makes. It just so happens that most of his creations have seen the light of day. Some six feature-length films and documentaries have made him the revered, if not enigmatic, figure that he is today.
Speaking to Rolling Stone, he explained that upon filming his desert sci-fi, Fata Morgana, he had zero intention of releasing it to the world. “I’ve made a film now, but it has to be untouched,” he said, “There shouldn’t be any brutality. It shall be untouched, anonymous. I will keep it and show it only to my very best friend before I die.” This all despite the laborious production of the film, which included several arrests in Cameroon. To Herzog’s dismay, however, he was ‘tricked’ into releasing it.
But there is one Herzog film that remains unreleased, and some say lost to us. “I have a short film that I’ve not shown to anyone for 12 years,” he said, way back in 1976. The film, Game in the Sand, was written and directed in 1964 and still hasn’t seen the light of day. He might make it seem that this is for similar reasons to Fata Morgana, naming that film’s frailty, how it might be misunderstood.
“A rooster is the leading character in the film, by the way,” he explained, “It’s about four children and a rooster”. To those who know Herzog, this isn’t even that bizarre of an announcement. But what could be so perplexing and so beyond the realms of understanding about a 12-minute film focusing on four children and a rooster?
Well, given his reputation for eccentric and sometimes unethical approaches to filmmaking, fans have speculated as to the fate of the chicken. Whether it was the boiling of rats in dye for Nosferatu or making his lead actually drag a boat over a mountain or an actor getting run over by a truck, Herzog’s film sets are not known for being beacons of health and safety for animals or humans. I imagine he’s one of those older people who believe the world is being ruined by health and safety gone mad.
Surely it can’t get any worse than what he’s already put out into the world. Well, in the years since his Rolling Stone interview, he’s hinted that the shooting of the short film got out of hand, so much so that he abandoned it. There have also been references to the rooster being buried up to its neck. And given the cruelties children can inflict out of curiosity, it has me thinking that poor rooster mustn’t have made it out alive if they were given free rein with it.
Mostly, other fans and I alike want to see the film, given Herzog’s long and somewhat hostile obsession with poultry. From hypnotising chickens for Stroszek to claiming he only likes them Kentucky fried, I want to know how far his hatred for the animal can go. And was the contempt perhaps borne from his own unreleased film? Does he hold the rooster responsible for the fate of Game in the Sand? Sadly, we’ll probably never know.
