A Form of Proto-Cinema: Aesthetics of Werner Herzog's Documentary Essayism
2016; Issue: 97 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2562-2528
Autores Tópico(s)Visual Culture and Art Theory
Resumo[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Looking at thirty-thousand-year-old drawings found in Chauvet Cave, Werner Herzog, in his Cave of gotten Dreams (2010), guides audience with his voice-over imagine Palaeolithic period. He presumes that the play of light and shadow from torches had an effect on these images. He also reflects on aura of cave by sharing with viewer that his team overcome by a strange irrational sensation as if [they] were disturbing Palaeolithic people in their work [...] It felt like eyes upon [Herzog and his team]. Rather than pursuing an objective documentary truth, Herzog, throughout film, questions how contain Chauvet cave visually by using film as medium. Early in film, he points out that these animal figures were drawn with eight legs, suggesting movement: For them, animals perhaps appeared moving, living [...] almost a form of proto-cinema. (1) Herzog, these drawings felt like frames from an animated film. This statement reflects filmmaker's attempt to expand cinema beyond its historically developed language and of looking, which, as Koepnick suggests, complicate[s] what we today should consider an image in first place. (2) We borrow Herzog's use of term protocinema refer his pristine, unique, original form of essay filmmaking that centres on his cinephilic, performative engagement with documentary as genre. This discussion capitalizes upon various aesthetic aspects embedded in Herzog's filmmaking--from on-screen (re)presentation (3) of his documentary subjects' urge create and re-invent, his off-screen interventional address at filmed material. We discuss ways in which Herzog turns seemingly factual things he documented into questions and uncertainties through a series of artful acts and proto-cinema gestures. What make this transformation possible especially in films Grizzly Man (2005), Encounters at End of World (2007) and Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) are filmmaker's persistent interventions--both as director and as participant observer--in pro-filmic events as well as his stylised touches narratives during post-production including his editing decisions, use of sound and voice-over narration. The subject matters that these documentaries originally deal with multiply and turn into remote questions that are not merely voiced by filmmaker's on- and off-screen comments, but also implied through his aesthetics of filmmaking. Rather than reinforcing a documentary truth claim, Herzog's subjective interventions in each film create an alternate narrative of questions and uncertainties that challenge and co-exist with these otherwise participatory documentaries. The story of Timothy Treadwell's passionate bonding with grizzly bears in Grizzly Man, encounter with travellers and inhabitants of Antarctica in Encounters at End of World, and pro-filmic enactment of witnessing Palaeolithic drawings of Chauvet Cave (and its enthusiasts) in Cave of Forgotten Dreams go beyond documentation in Herzog's narration. The filmmaker's essayistic approach here transforms documentary spaces and settings into sites of cinephilic encounters and explorations. Recalling formal-essayistic modes that Timothy Corrigan identifies in his quasi-historical survey of essay film--namely (i) expressive portrayal, (ii) travel/ogue, (iii) diaries, (iv) editorial and (v) refractive cinema [as filmic interrogation] (4) --we argue that Herzog's filmmaking relates these in an oblique--if not ambivalent--way. Despite Herzog's insistent refusal of such distinctions between documentary and fiction, wider context of these films' circulation as documentaries also reflects this ambivalent position. In this paper, we explore aesthetic intricacies of Herzog's documentary essayism and argue that it is primarily Herzog's subjectivity as a filmmaker and as a cinephile that defines his essayistic approach. …
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