“Of the Creatures who are doomed to perish, to fall”: Mythology and Time in Herzog’s Apocalyptic, Science Fiction Films (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Ecstasy of Time Travel in Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams
The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth, ed. David LaRocca (Lexington Books, 2017), 209-24
Documentary film is that genre of filmmaking that lays bare the fact of all film, which is that it presents "a world past" (Cavell, The World Viewed). This fact of film seems to point to a paradox of time in our experience of movies: we are present at something that has happened, something that is over. But what if we were to take this fact to show that film has the power to place us outside our ordinary, unreflective relation to time? In this essay I examine three pre-cinematic descriptions of relations to time – in Emerson, Thoreau, and Weil – that anticipate the paradox of time inherent in film. I then put that examination to use in a reading of Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a film ostensibly about prehistoric cave paintings but whose achievement is its declaration, not to document some past time, but to liberate the present moment.
The Great Ecstasy of Werner Herzog: Truth, Heidegger, Apocalypse
The Philosophy of Werner Herzog, ed. M. Blake Wilson and Christopher Turner (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020), 135–152
For decades now, the German filmmaker Werner Herzog has been promoting the idea of ‘ecstatic truth’ as opposed to ‘cinéma vérité’ or to what he mockingly calls ‘the truth of accountants.’ Truth is illumination, revelation, an unveiling of what ordinarily lies hidden. Far from merely reproducing the visible, however, Herzog makes and moves images to disclose the invisible, to reveal truths that are literally ecstatic, standing out beyond what is otherwise accessible. Yet this revelation cannot occur unless we, as viewers, are transported beyond the everyday realm. We too must stand outside of ourselves. Herzog aims to make us ecstatic. In this paper I first analyze portions of Herzog’s rare programmatic speech “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth” (§1). I then show how many of Herzog’s ideas are prefigured and illuminated by Martin Heidegger’s understanding of truth, especially as it relates to the work of art (§2). Next I turn to several scenes in Herzog’s films to show how he puts his theory to work. I first discuss the ethereal ski-jumps in The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (§3), and then examine Herzog’s use of Richard Wagner at the beginning of Lessons of Darkness and Lo and Behold (§4). I conclude with a few words on the significance of ecstatic truth in our purportedly ‘post-truth age’ (§5).
"Locked in History": Werner Herzog between Past and Future [with full text]
Colloque international Cinéma & Philosophie "Mais je vois quelque chose que les autres ne voient pas", 2019
Werner Herzog has been a great fictionalizer of past eras and searcher of ancient traditions as much as a fascinated observer of the new possibilities that technology announces for the future. The aim of this paper will be to explore how these two antagonistic interests co-habit his filmic world and try to elucidate on a possible meaning for this apparent contradiction. Presented at the Goethe Institut Paris on 6th November 2019. Part of the Colloque International Cinéma & Philosophie "Mais je vois quelque chose que les autres ne voient pas" about Werner Herzog, organized by Université Paris 8, Université de Liège, Universidade Nova de Lisboa and Goethe Institut Paris.
The relationship between myth and catastrophe can help us understand Werner Herzog's filmography. Taking as a reference this relationship, and analyzing character and landscape narratives, I will compare Herzog's filmography with some contemporary Latin-American films to show that, even if these films resonate with the language of catastrophe of the German director, they objectivize catastrophe to the point of demystification.
The Prehistoricity of Cinema: Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Film-Philosophy, 2023
This article argues that Werner Herzog's 2010 film Cave of Forgotten Dreams both enacts and undermines a desire for origins that was characteristic of 20th century modernist discourse. I argue that the aim of the film is literally to embody the origin of cinema, as figured in the recurring motif of projected light playing across the darkened walls of Chauvet Cave, the earliest known site of prehistoric painting. Drawing on texts by Wilson Harris, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, this article demonstrates that the phenomenology of the film's cave scenes and of its archaeological reconstructions produces not a straightforward self-presence at the scene of origins, but rather an "anachronic" or split temporality that links an imagined state of primordiality to the contemporary moment in a way that eludes the problematic modernist criterion of psychological authenticity. By failing to produce an immersive illusion of prehistoricity, the film is constantly thrown back onto its own simple act of "monstration", or showing, without any transcendental ground. Instead of revealing a moment of origin, then, Cave of Forgotten Dreams plays the shifting role of what I describe, following the art historian Whitney Davis, as an ever-displaced "Figure 1" in an imaginary history of cinema.
Inner and deeper: Motifs of fiction in Werner Herzog's films
CINEJ Cinema Journal, 2019
The emphasis on the mix of facts and inventions has prevailed in the studies about Bavarian director Werner Herzog's treatment of fiction, leading to the same result again and again: for Herzog, poetic truth is more important than factual truth. But how can we go beyond this conclusion? This paper will try to open an alternative path of analysis more adequate to his philosophy of filmmaking, one that works through the detection of visual and narrative motifs in his films, thus searching the impact of Herzog's idea of fiction into his poetics.
Werner Herzog and the Posthuman in Encounters at the End of the World and Cave of Forgotten Dreams
A collection of post-humanist themes in two documentaries by Werner Herzog relate in their use of landscapes, technology, animals, and sound. While many scholars embrace a romantic humanist approach to analyzing Herzog, his work also lends itself to a detailed critique of the traditional Cartesian ego. This essay considers the philosophical contributions of Bergson, Deleuze, von Uexkull, Haraway, Lippit, Bogost, and Stiegler in interpreting images and interviews. The filmmaker’s consistent experiments with altered spaces, embodied modernity, and cinema’s technological and psychological power inform an analysis that points toward a more progressive ethics. Self, technology, and environment merge and create new possibilities for cinematic experience.