History as chaos Werner Herzog’s historical films

Film Series at Cinéma du Musée
August 29, 2024 – December 5, 2024
 
A leading voice in international cinema for over 50 years, German director Werner Herzog continues to make a profound mark on the seventh art with his provocative, often brutal vision of the world he seeks to capture. An uncompromising filmmaker, Herzog refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed into any particular genre, claiming only and always the search for truth.

In his work, this truth is largely expressed through two types of project: documentary and historical films. In the former, Herzog allows himself a dose of fiction, a stylization capable of shaping the viewer's emotions. In the latter, it's the obsession with nature, and certainly the use of many non-professional actors, that instills the movie with a convincing verisimilitude. Cinema, he argues, requires us to modify facts to such a degree that they come closer to truth than to reality. Not to describe, but to capture nature, the nature of the world and the humanity it contains, in all its physicality.

The five films chosen for this cycle vividly express this conception of history as chaos. Each of the works presented here is traversed by two axis. The first, and most important, is the landscape: Herzog's landscape is not a setting, it is the very subject of the film, both testimony to and allegory of the story being told. The second axis is the body, the flesh that expresses and exults in the pain, fragility and madness that make lies impossible. The torn body, the insane body, can only be honest and true: it becomes a space of contact between director and viewer, united by emotion, vertigo and dismay. For Herzog, truth is written at the end of hell.

Pascal Bastien
Faculty of Humanities | University of Québec in Montréal