Werner Herzog's documentaries: A record of life on earth

There has to be a bit of irony in the title of Werner Herzog's documentary about a year in the life of a small village in the Russian taiga. In some ways, sure, the fur trappers and their families in this isolated, rugged part of the world are Happy People, completely independent (which must have felt like a particular liberation under Soviet rule and after), living and working outdoors, crafting thing (canoes, hunting traps, lodges, skis) following traditional techniques passed down for many generations. Yet for most viewers this is far from an ideal or idealized life - I for one would go crazy at the lack of culture and society (and variety) and could not have survived a week in these conditions - would have starve to death, frozen to death, drowned in an icy current, chopped of a hand while wielding an ax or adze, been ostracized for failure to pull my weight, or met some other dreadful fate. My people could not have come from there. And then we get some haunting scenes of the native taiga dwellers, probably related to Mongols, consigned to low manual labor, paid a pittance, drinking up their earnings, nothing happy about these poor people - one can only imagine the squalor of their dwellings (we never see them), as the Russians in the village live in pretty primitive conditions themselves. In fact, would have been interesting to see a bit more of their domestic life - most of the film focuses on the practices of the fur trappers. There are some extraordinarily beautiful frames and sequences, especially the ice breaking up on the wide river in the spring, the long boat ride up to the wilderness. It must of taken tremendous work and dedication to make this film, over a period of a year in a very inaccessible locale. The prolific Herzog (co-directed with Dimtry Vasyukov - had to look that up) is developing over time an amazing geographic record of some of the most remote places on earth, remote both in locale (Antarctica, Alaska) and time (French cave paintings), an extraordinary documentary record of life on earth.