Werner Herzog is the director of many films and documentaries that show life in extremes. He is famous for his visionary film-making and for putting himself in extremes and danger for his films. The film I just saw and recommend to you is his latest: Encounters at the End of the World
In Grizzly Man I saw Herzog's reverence for realism. It is a documentary about Timmy Treadwell, the man who lived with grizzly bears for over 6 summers, alone and unprotected. One of my first impressions from the film was that he reminded me of Hamlet. Like Hamlet, he starts off pretty normal. Then, one begins to question Timmy's sanity. Eventually it is clear that he is crazy, but it is obscure how crazy and when he actually goes crazy. However, by the end both Hamlet and Timmy have saving characteristics, leaving the reader/viewer bewildered as to whether the protagonist is crazy or not.
"He's famous for moving between fiction and nonfiction -- sometimes within the same film -- and for dismissing the distinction between the two as arbitrary" (ref).
In Rescue Dawn I saw yet again Herzog's respect for the real events in an individual's life. It is based on the survival of Dieter Dengler's, a US fighter pilot, after being shot down in Laos. Through jarring but not gratuitous images Herzog draws one into the experience and creates feelings of sympathy. It is what I imagine to be the antithesis of Mel Gibson's intentions in The Passion of the Christ. Fear is the heart of the feelings evoked from his "realistic" images. While equally convincing are the horrors that face the protagonist in Rescue Dawn, they are conveyed in a manner that is respectful to the sufferer. Fear is not the outcome in the viewer but respect.
Herzog's view of the world that we see : nature and humanity, is truly something that we all could use an extra dose of. In the words of Arthur Conan Doyle, "Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius" (The Valley of Fear).
That is what we humble viewers get simply from the purchase of a movie ticket: Herzog's unfailing ability to see art and genius in the world around us. He brings us the world of Antarctica via cinema in Encounters at the End of the World. His aspirations tend toward the Luddite's as he brings together sounds, cinematography, landscape, clips from the rarely explored and even less understood, and the individual who is always looking in the opposite direction in a great artistic masterpiece. In as much as art asks questions, the documentary begins with questions that might easily have answers through science or pop culture or simply societal trends and needs. The Iliad and the Odyssey are both mentioned at the beginning of the film suggesting that the film is a journey for the dreamer. It asks questions about the end of the human race, global warming, and emphasizes the disharmony in the juxtaposition of human and nature. The answers only create more questions, but in the end the universe is said to only be beautiful because we can see it, hear it.
The places and people in this film are like the penguin it shows that for unknowable reasons journeys away from the nesting sight and not toward the ocean, but straight into 5,000 miles of nothing but ice and mountains. The reasonable outcome is certainly eventual death. Everyone in this site on Antarctica is like that penguin. While the world turns to milk and honey, they went the other way. They went to a place not meant to sustain human life. Our own nothingness is everywhere manifest in this film, until the end. Herzog said, "this is probably the deepest film I've ever made" (The LA Times).
Throughout the movie this scripture kept knocking at the door of my mind:
Moses beheld the world and the ends thereof, and all the children of men which are, and which were created; of the same he greatly marveled and wondered.
And he said unto himself: Now, for this cause I know that man is nothing, which thing I never had supposed.
Moses 1:8, 10
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