In the middle of Werner Herzog's 2019 Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin, the film director is shown conversing with a climbing guide in Patagonia. Behind the two men, there is a vast, ominous landscape of cloudy peaks and grim glaciers. Next to Herzog, the writer Bruce Chatwin's rucksack rests on a stone. The guide starts to talk about Herzog's adventures, particularly the difficulties arising from shooting in the Cerro del Torre for the director's Scream of Stone. Herzog interrupts the man and says that he is not the protagonist of this film and that they should speak instead about Chatwin. It's a signature moment for the documentary, ostensibly about Chatwin, but, of course, also a portrait of Herzog and his particular obsessions. Herzog regards himself as Chatwin's spiritual twin and, ultimately, documenting aspects of his life becomes an account of the director's own adventures. This seems self-indulgent (and all of Herzog's films can be accused of this vice), but, in practice, the film succeeds -- it is probably Herzog's most tender film and, perhaps, his most revealing.
Nomad arises out of a commission by the BBC to produce a film commemorating the 30th anniversary of Chatwin's death. Although there is copious visual material depicting Chatwin, Herzog almost never shows the writer in the documentary -- the portrait is made from Chatwin's prose which is frequently read aloud as counterpoint to the often astonishing images comprising the movie. All of Herzog's trademark subjects are on display: the film is about landscape as a manifestation of the soul, the virtues of exploring the world on foot, and the fact that most treks end in mystery: the more you explore, the more that you realize that the world confronts us with a series of insoluble mysteries. Herzog eschews a chronological or biographical approach to Chatwin's life. Instead, he organizes the material into seven sections that are each, themselves, examples of ecstatic essay-film. The approach is fundamentally fractal -- any part of the film will ultimately yield the whole of the picture. Chatwin died at 49, an early victim of AIDS. Because he had denied that he was fundamentally homosexual, the nature of his malady was concealed at the time of his final illness. Herzog claims to have been present in the hours preceding Chatwin's death. Chatwin's appearance was horrifying -- Herzog includes a tiny film clip of Chatwin's last BBC interview to persuade us of that fact (we see a skull with glaring eyes talking). Herzog showed Chatwin a documentary that he had just completed -- Herdsmen of the Sun. Curiously, this documentary is Herzog's most sexually ambiguous film -- it shows nomadic tribesmen preening and singing for the camera: the men are heavily made-up with white painted faces and they grimace and gurn for the camera, popping out their eyes and displaying their teeth. The bizarre performance is intended to impress a group of rather dour, dark-clad women, all of them entirely nondescript. Herzog scores the men's exhibition to the music of the world's last castrato singing something like "Ave Maria" around the turn of the century. It's an altogether alarming film and Herzog says that Chatwin faded in and out of delirium while watching it. How much of this true is uncertain, Chatwin was a notorious fabulist and so is Herzog.
Much of the movie is about nomads and tribal people rapidly vanishing from the world. Herzog films aboriginal communities in Australia -- his subject is ostensibly Chatwin's The Song Lines about "dream tracks" comprising the relationship between the indigenous people and their landscape. In the course of this part of the film, Herzog butts up against the fact that many of the tribal traditions, chants, and artifacts that interested Chatwin are forbidden to outsiders. The aboriginal informants can't exactly explain how the Song Lines are embedded in their consciousness (which is also the landscape) and old men reciting ancestral poems pause and fall silent -- Herzog isn't certain whether this is because the singer has forgotten the words or is concealing them from the camera. (Chatwin was influenced by an Australian anthropologist who originally collected many of the songs, Ted Strehlow -- some of the film is shot in Hermanntown, an aboriginal settlement where Strehlow's father was a Lutheran minister: we see local folks singing in a Lutheran choir, apparently, to Herzog's dismay. Herzog blurs the cover of Strehlow's book because it is said to depict a magic talisman never to be shown to outsiders or the non-initiate.) Australia is one of three focal points in the film: the other two are Patagonia (the subject of Chatwin's most famous book) and Wales where Herzog stages interviews with Chatwin's widow, Elizabeth, in "the bare ruined choirs" of an ancient and abandoned abbey. (Several "talking head" type interviews with Nicholas Shakespeare were filmed at the Bodleian library, the place possessing Chatwin's archives -- Shakespeare is Chatwin's biographer and a good interview subject. Herzog was given Chatwin's rucksack when the writer died and he is overcome with emotion as he caresses the rugged old backpack next to him.) The film begins in Patagonia exploring the cave where giant sloths once lived --Chatwin's motivation for his trip to Patagonia was to visit the place where a family artifact, a mummified patch of giant sloth fur and bones, was found by his grandfather. Herzog is matter-of-fact about the tourists crowding the cave. (Since Chatwin's book was published, the remote cave has become a well-known tourist destination.) He is similarly matter-of-fact about the New Age folks at Avebury literally hugging dolmen, chanting, and using dowsing rods to trace ley lines in the landscape. Herzog doesn't seem to have contempt for these New Age pilgrims and, in fact, the theme of the ley lines charged with energy crisscrossing the land intrigues him and finds a visual correlate in beautiful aerial images made by drones indefatigably surveying the terrain below and coursing forward straight as an arrow toward the horizon. Chatwin visited Herzog when he was filming Cobra Verde in Ghana -- the movie is a free adaptation of Chatwin's novel The Viceroy of Ouidah -- and this provides an excuse for the director to showcase some spectacular footage from that film, particularly a battle shot with 800 naked Amazons and the appearance of a king carried on a sedan, the man garbed in daisy-yellow robes. (The king carried on his sedan correlates to Chatwin's weakness at the time and Herzog's promise to have him hauled around the film location on "hammocks" borne by porters -- Chatwin had rallied and this turned out to be unnecessary.) The film is also notable for fantastic and disturbing pictures of tribal people at Tierra del Fuego, taken at the end of the 19th century. The images show naked men, covered in bizarre paint, sometimes wearing weird geometrically shaped hats that cover their faces. In one photograph, naked men are sprawled across a dismal-looking meadow -- Herzog says that "we know only one thing: that they are not dead. Perhaps, they are somehow performing death." Again, the remarkable images conclude in mystery -- the tribal people shown in the pictures are extinct and we have no idea as to the meaning of the elaborate rituals shown in the photographs. These scenes rhyme with footage of a rock shelter in Australia where there are hundreds, if not thousands, of handprints on the stone walls. Again, we have no idea what the prints mean. Herzog defamiliarizes the images, saying that the longer we look, the stranger they seem and, at last, the viewer experiences a sort of febrile and visionary sense that the rock face is somehow porous and that the marks signify spirits trying to wriggle out of the stone or, in the alternative, traces of shamanistic practititioners who were attempting to enter into the rock itself. There is an alarming sequence showing a man climbing without rope or equipment, ascending over an impossible-looking overhang. (This is part of Scream of Stone). The film's mysterious final shot, a slow march up an ancient lane, seemingly in Wales, is particularly memorable and lovely. The movie's remarkable images are wonderfully enhanced by the soundtrack -- choral music that seems in equal part immeasurably antique and modern, voices mingling and rising like some kind of rapt combination of Arvo Part and Byzantine chorale.
Herzog's diary about his trek overland from Munich to Paris Going on Ice is a draft for the sort of prose that Chatwin successfully accomplished in his travel book In Patagonia -- in fact, Herzog's book is less entertaining, perhaps (after all it depicts waste-lands in Europe) but just as well written. And there's no reason to doubt that Herzog is, in many ways, close spiritual kin to Chatwin. Herzog is more ebullient and he comments, at some length, about Chatwin's weird shrieks when he laughed -- there was something, Herzog maintains, inevitably death-haunted and, even, lonely and anxious about the Englishman (who nevertheless seduced everyone he met and was always the center of attention.) Herzog neglects the other side of Chatwin's character. Two of Chatwin's novels are about people who never moved anywhere at all, people who were sedentary all their lives -- these are the books Utz and On the Black Mountain. Chatwin had been Sotheby's youngest shareholder, and he was intrigued by the antithesis of nomadic wandering -- that is, remaining in one place to conserve artifacts or a collection that one has amassed. (In Utz, the protagonist is a collector Dresden Meissen china and will not leave Communist Czechoslovakia because he is unwilling to abandon his precious porcelain; in On the Black Mountain, two men, twins, spend their whole life in a cottage under a dark mountain, sharing the same bed if I recall correctly.) Chatwin was interested in artifacts, objets d'art and understood that these things could bind us -- even fetter us -- to one place. Herzog's idiosyncratic portrait of Chatwin neglects this aspect of the writer and The Songlines, probably Chatwin's most accomplished book, can be read as a kind of nomadic wandering that is, nonetheless, so rooted in place that it, paradoxically, doesn't advance at all. But, as I have noted at the outset, Herzog's film is as much a self-portrait as it is an attempt to represent Bruce Chatwin and, as always, the director ends up with a remarkable palimpsest, an image in which his own features are continuously blurring into images of Chatwin.
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