Venice 2005

"The Wild Blue Yonder"
by Werner Herzog:

Beyond the World, Beyond Cinema
Hassouna Mansouri

A Wild Eye Yonder
Gabriele Barrera

"The Wild Blue Yonder":
Beyond the World, Beyond Cinema
By Hassouna Mansouri

One could be surprised to see Werner Herzog's movie in a parallel section of a film festival. In the 62nd International Film Festival of Venice, The Wild Blue Yonder, the new film by the German director, was screened in Horizons. This section is known for focusing on new tendencies, even new discoveries, in world cinema. Actually, Herzog is a generously inventive filmmaker. He is able to bring something new with each film, either on the formal or the content level. The fact is that the author of Cobra Verde is always looking for different ways to make cinema. That's why it is quite normal for his films not to be in the big roads of the official world film market, but in the small and narrow streets of the new experimental filmmaking.

In The Wild Blue Yonder, Herzog looks for new possibilities of story telling, for a different way of thinking and meditating using images, but still we can find all his aesthetic and intellectual obsessions. The German director is always looking for the meaning of life. He has gone to look for it in very far-away lands, in roads where it is quite impossible for human beings to move, and has always done so in a very radical manner. With Klaus Kinski, he engaged himself in cinematographic experiences where the human civilization was completely absent, in order to find deeper meanings.

Herzog has explored many possible lands on earth. Now, he needed a further one. He goes to look for it in the wild space beyond the world, beyond space and time. That's way his film is a "science fiction fantasy". With this film he transports us amongst stars and galaxies. There is only one actor, Brad Dourif. The other characters are interpreted by the astronauts of the space shuttle STS-43 and the scientists of NASA. The story seems to be perfectly possible according to the actual conditions of human life and scientific researches. Werner Herzog was inspired by the dream of the scientists to one day find a planet where it is possible for men to live. With a deep irony he seems to say it is less and less possible to live on Earth.

The narrative construction of The Wild Blue Yonder is quite complicated. A group of astronauts is forced to turn around after reaching Earth because it is impossible for them to land. Herzog gives many hypotheses for this: a war has destroyed everything; a new unknown disease killed everybody; or perhaps a fatal radiation. Anyway ... the space shuttle crew has to find hospitality in a new world. The situation is very tragic: it is as impossible to go back home as it is to land somewhere. They are blocked between a lost world on the one side, and an unknown world on the other.

Herzog's imagination is even more scenic. An astronaut arrives on Earth and is assimilated as an "extra-terrestrial". This is used as an opportunity to make a statement on the possibilities of life on our world. Men are looking out to very far worlds and seem forgetting to pay attention to this one that is deteriorating constantly, ensuring that one day it will be impossible to live on.

In a kind of ecologic message, the director reminds the audience that we should preserve this world first of all since it is not yet possible to go elsewhere. In earlier films, Herzog brought us very natural worlds, in an attempt to try and understand the origins of human life. With Aguirre and Cobra Verde, for instance, he transports us to tropical and "primitive" lands where there is no sign of the modern civilization. And these vegetal elements appeal to a mystic meditation on the meaning of life.

In The Wild Blue Yonder, the world is mineral, even more it made of light and colours. Nature is more pure, more spiritual. Herzog uses the images of space to describe the travel of the astronauts. Those of the new world are rooted in an aquatic atmosphere. This very clear blue colour reminds, cinephiles, of the experience of watching a Kubrick or Tarkovski. The white colour of stars lost in space is the same as the colour of the ice under which the images are made.

Once more Herzog shows he is a fanatic admirer of chaos, and how much he is against the order that we try to give to our lives, and which makes us loose its authentic meaning. Apparently, man is developing sciences in order to have a better life. But, in fact, he uses them to destroy his own world. Behind this tragic suicidal attitude there is a fatal and natural potentiality for evil. To make this statement, Herzog uses scientific elements and information, and mixes these into a poetic atmosphere — he is one of the few filmmakers able to do so. Art and Science converge in his deep spiritual approach to give us a cinematographic work that is, once more, inclassable.

Hassouna Mansouri
© FIPRESCI 2005

Werner Herzog:
A Wild Eye Yonder
By Gabriele Barrera

Yes, as usual "Truth is stranger than fiction", says Werner Herzog (real name W. H. Stipetic, Munich 1942) in a recent interview published in "Film Comment", August 2005. But his latest work, the absolutely brilliant docu- (science-fiction-fantasy-and-more)- mentary The Wild Blue Yonder (Germany, UK, France, 2005), presented in the parallel sections of the 62nd International Film Festival of Venice, is stranger than any truth, than any realism, than any fiction. So, the metaphysical realism of Werner Herzog's The Wild Blue Yonder deserves the Prize of the International Film Critics.

2005, the Year of Physics, celebrated in all the scientific world. 2005, the Year of the anniversary of Einstein's discoveries in 1905: after the discovery of photons, particles of light, 1905 is the year of the first publications of the theory of relativity and quantum theory. An exceptional effort (with a splendid success) to join separate parameters of Physics (light, velocity, mass, and energy): his effort was rewarded with world-wide popularity. Unfortunately, after one century, the application of the "post-Einstein" astrophysical theories (after the enthusiastic space-conquests in the second half of the twentieth century) is not so popular, so much world-wide reputed, so much full of promise. 2005, the Year of Physics, it's true: but the "post-Einstein" Physics, with the new mathematical theories of the JPL and NASA scientists, is still much discussed. And the latest Space Shuttle mission, 2005, is much disputed and maybe also a little crepuscular. Fortunately, in the artistic ground, the exceptional efforts of Werner Herzog to join separate parameters of the New Physics, of the new science-fiction imaginary (both crepuscular and strangely epical, both foolish and strangely hyper-rational), is rewarded with a peerless film: The Wild Blue Yonder.

The protagonist (Brad Dourif, an alien fallen on Earth from a Wild Planet in the Blue Yonder, stranger than E. T., stranger than Alien, if possible) speaks directly to the audience and overturns all our current notions about science-fiction. One example. The alien's will of destroying humankind. It's not so omnipotent, that's man's projection, a cinematographic invention. The alien is a survivor, a loser, an emarginated being in our society, a visionary and ecstatic searcher for the Signs of Life (Lebenszeichen, Herzog 1967), with a terrible homesickness for his Land of Silence and Darkness (Herzog 1971). All the truth (i.e. the NASA documentary section in Herzog's film) is ingeniously overturned with simple "special effects": the voice of Brad Dourif, the mystic music (by Ernst Reijseger, a 'cellist'), and the strange sounds (by Joe Crabb). The audience views a NASA documentary about the STS 43 Space Shuttle Mission, but the voice of the protagonist speaks and the audience imagines anything else. It's simple, it's genial. And so, the documentary is overturned in a journey of science-fiction — along the Wheel of Time (Herzog 2003) — in the direction of the Wild Planet in the Blue Yonder, out of the Solar System. The sky is a crystal, the air is a strange aquatic atmosphere. The astronauts, in the heart of the Wild Blue Planet Yonder, are like the particles of light, the photons of the Physics of Einstein, in a Wild Big Eye, the Biggest Eye in the world, the Biggest Eye in the entire Solar System. Beyond the horizon, beyond the sky, beyond Astrophysics, the depths of the Big Eye of Cinema are welcomed into The Wild Blue Yonder, the strangest planet of them all. Werner Herzog, in the final credits, says, "we thank NASA for its sense of poetry". Happy Anniversary, doctor Einstein.

Gabriele Barrera
© FIPRESCI 2005

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