Masterpiece 10/10 | Herzog Sings Chatwin

Herzog's nomadlines are the invisible pathways that crisscross life from cosmos to the volcanoes to the great human migration to this current anthropocene epoch to time beyond time, his filmstock ancient tracks connecting dream lines of vanishing cultures, vanishing landscapes, vanishing history, deep truths, deep myths, deep literature, and even deeper philosophy, creating songs of new mythology with a stunning visual language that synthesizes the Apollonian image and the Dionysian horror to express a universal reality rooted in humankind's earliest and deepest experience of the earth.

His friend and collaborator Bruce Chatwin (In Patagonia, Songlines, Cobra Verde) did much the same with his life existence, nomadically travelling across the labyrinth of invisible pathways of Australia known as Dreaming Tracks (Footprints of the Ancestors), which meander all over Australia, exploring cultures and sacred and ancient knowledge, blending his ideas and travel experiences with fiction, history and myth, to deeply experience the earth.

This film is a deeply mesmerizing visual ode to Bruce Chatwin, Herzog's visual language breathtaking. Early in the film Chatwin is mythologized as the wreck of a vessel - in the magnetizing location of Punta Arenas - that stands in every visible way identical to when an enchanted Chatwin himself first photographed it for his first book, In Patagonia, nearly 50 years prior. Herzog's matchcut of the frames amplifies the abandoned ship's ghostly air. The body of the ship's hull does not appeared to have withered in these near five decades, as if time has somehow been forbidden to pass. The waters have not swallowed it, nor has its frame fractured during what storms surely must have passed through this vital channel, the Strait of Magellan, connecting two oceans. Rather, it simply rocks there, gently, solemnly hanging on in the breakwater, a fragile monument, withstanding the erosion of age and defying all toll of the elements. Staggering metonymy.

Herzog's camera then focuses on the free surface in the water, and in the shapes cast by wind upon the shallows, it is impossible not to see these ripples, scattered about the fetch near the prow of the ship body, as anything other than snakelike, animus shapes. These rivulets fleet about, running beneath the surface, as a kind of otherworldly remnant, emblematic of great natural mystery. An irreal image, of a kind we have come by now to expect and love from Herzog.
Nomad one of his most stunning and brutally elegant works, his images captivating themselves. No other living director has so adhered time and again to this patient methodology.

Herzog holds that save for a commission he was offered, he would not have been pressed to reexamine his bond with Chatwin. "I don’t need to revisit the relationship. He and I were so close, on our own individual wavelengths, that he has always been a part of my intellectual, artistic setup. He's always stayed with me."

For all the heart in his oeuvre, the pulsing solidarity with humanity’s most marginalized and put upon, Herzog the director has never before appeared so human. It is an incredible thing to watch someone so storied and near pedestaled in his persona struggle to describe his final moments with his dearest friend. The footage in Nomad of Chatwin’s last days is harrowing to behold, but in Chatwin’s mischievous eyes, peeking out from gaunt folds, there is still, beyond any terminal state, that same sense of the undiscovered landscapes which he sought, and to which Herzog, a kindred spirit in every describable way, has devoted his life's work to reading and playing. "I read the landscape," Herzog says, with a look in his eye that seems familiar. It is that same spark that flashed in Chatwin’s, in every image of the man we see. 

Much more to say but character limited.