Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin (2019) User Reviews

A Writer Like No Other: Herzog's Tribute to Chatwin

[partha-partha-som · 8/10 · 1 January 2021]

In the beginning of Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin, Werner Herzog notes: "Bruce Chatwin was a writer like like no other. He would craft mythical tales into voyages of the mind." Herzog himself has a strange ability of transforming the most brutal and horrific aspects of nature and society into poetry of the soul. It is even more astonishing if one notes how unromantic his treatment of nature actually is. In Grizzly Man (2005), Timothy Treadwell's enthusiasm for the bear is undercut by Herzog's voice pointing out the indifference of the beast to human sentiments. The British travel writer and Herzog's long-time friend Bruce Chatwin possessed a similar fascination with nature, landscape, and people, especially Aboriginal communities and nomadic tribes. Made with a lot of love and care, Nomad is Herzog's tribute to his friend. Instead of facts about Chatwin's life, we are offered a portrait of his soul. Herzog's documentary goes to the places Chatwin cherished in his life. And the result is mesmerizing.

Nomadic or Cultural Colonialist: Chatwin's Life Anecdotess

[babyjaguar · 7/10 · 5 September 2020]

Herzog's personal documentary exploring his friendship with Bruce Chatwin. Chatwin who passed in the early 90sfrom AIDS complication was known for his travelogs. Notably his heavily-published and translated travels to South America, Australia and Africa, Chatwin had been admirer of Herzog's films and had seen these films as cinema in it's "purest form".

This particular documentary focused on Chatwin's life divided into chapters. It looks into what inspired his interests into what is "nomadic" or the idea of "walking". The film is shot within the landscape where Chatwin found that inspiration.

Nowadays, within some intellectual circles, it seemed rather critical when scholars or intellectuals (especially white European males) go into places where it is people of color. For some, it echoes colonialism, or seen as "neo-colonialist".

In some ways, this film's intentions become questionable: is it still glorifying white male travels to exotic places? Or is just a humble tribute to Chatwin's travelogs.

In one of its chapters Herzog stumbled upon the idea with Chatwin's interests with Australian Aboriginal people's idea of landscape. Herzog's interviews with Aboriginals who safe-guard research material on Aboriginal thought, looking one of Chatwin's books on travels with Aboriginal shamans.

This film with it's rather questionable intentions, it still very interesting with its location shots in Latin America and Africa. But it can also be seen as a time capsule on what the last of the last internationally-known white male interest with the "exotic" or "otherness" (a world that had no internet or social media and now social distancing).

"The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot."

[dennis-11345 · 10/10 · 28 August 2020]

This film might speak to you, or whisper to you. As with any film by Werner Herzog, it lives in feelings and images, not words. As a first approximation you could think of it as an exploration of some different forms of strangeness: anthropological, mythical, archeological. But it's not a scientific search for explanations. Essentially it asks: "What IS this!?!?" More a yearning than a search. A yearning for visceral contact with what, in our species, is ancient, mysterious, and possibly glorious.

Quotations: Werner Herzog: "The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot." The last sentence Bruce Chatman wrote: "Christ wore a seamless robe." Chatwin's biographer and editor of his letters, Nicholas Shakespeare: "He tells not a half-truth but a truth and a half."

The most touching Herzog documentary

[ReadingFilm · 23 September 2020]

Herzog is more energetic, curious, and lively than ever at 78. It's infectious. I just like how much he cares, that might teach us too shake out the temptation of the misanthrope. Here he walks the footsteps of the author of Cobra Verde. "David Bowie wants to make it. No, no, no, no, he can't." It is a long psychoanalysis of something entirely invisible, the spirit and instinct of an author's restless search for curious novelty. As art on the caves--this has those too--and a constant physicality of spaces across the pic; point being he seeks these landmarks, like the classic author exercise of copying classic novels to know your own prose. It is connective, as those hands on the walls invite you to place your own on them. Because everything he says of Chatwin is himself. "The amormpheous dull restless matter... etc..." Both are painfully seeking life as if they know a horrible alternative, that passion must come from the fright of the abyss. The way Herzog fetishize and peruse old texts and journals, these are like excavating ancient books when are relatively recent history is an act of mythologizing himself. He grips the Cobra Verde script with Chatwin's anotations like a giddy boy on Christmas--he is in constant awe of Chatwin in terms of himself, as Herzog says of him, "He was the internet before it existed." That in terms of finding knowledge, tidbits, trivia, as the late night rabbit holes. There is something both honoring and autiobiographical to all this, and very narcissistic. "Would the anontations have helped?" "I don't know I have never even held them!" The first sections feels in search of a documentary... you have the constant feeling this is about nothing, even as it's delivering great mind candies... leylines, the magnetosphere, abo songs, hills... And that isn't a total criticism. As isn't the uncertainty the very spirit of Chatwin? Do we want to see documentaries that know exactly where they're going, or risk mysteries and dead ends? Last is you sort of wonder, why is Herzog seeming so uncharacteristically happy through this... I can only see it as some summation, some coming to peace with his mortality. His friend had gone the other side as the last travelogue. The path is made and there is nothing to fear. This brother once again went first. You get a sense Herzog either wanted to make this doc for decades and didn't know how, or he finally drew the courage and did not realize how right it would be. You wonder if you'd meet a Chatwin, a fellow traveller with mutual and complimentive respect. There are even the Herzog cliches of we cannot show you this, the constant clips of his work, and the embellishments. Stuff like that turned me off from him for many years like a dad who you know all his jokes and tricks, and heard them a thousand times, while new guests were just delighted... and you slink back like 'why do they fall for it'. But something about 2020 returns us to our fathers. Then... the film is off and I'm staring at the black screen abyss. This is what I mean how it's not just them.