Herzog vs. Malick on Nature
Warning: Below is a very facile analysis, if a few observations and questions can even be called that. But I want to get a discussion going...
Watching this film I thought of how Werner Herzog and Terrence Malick feel about each other. One has made 65 films, and the other only six. One is a poet and a philosopher and the other is a poet-philosopher-explorer. They overlap in these areas, being all of them, sometimes being one or the other. The Venn diagram would be pretty significant.
Both deal with nature and set it to classical music. But how do they view nature in their respective philosophies? Malick seems to be a holy pantheist about it (please correct me if I'm way off base). He considers it spiritual and human beings spiritual. Herzog seems to see nature as an unrelenting, inexorable gigantic force that will destroy and out live us. It impossibly cannot be tamed. Malick also has this spirit but it's a more humanistic one. I wonder what his global warming film will look like. Herzog does share some of Malick's spiritual humanism, most notably, from what I've seen--and I must admit I've woefully seen few Herzog films--in Cave of Forgotten Dreams where he claims the cave artists invented God and the soul. But he seems to be pessimist and fatalist on how humans beings are and how they are with nature, while Malick appears to be the optimist.
Not sure about Malick's theology, if he has one, if he s a Christian, or is just a philosopher explicating Christianity, but he seems to place his faith a lot more in humans than Herzog does, though his humans in the fictional films are archetypes rather than the brilliantly odd and eccentric people Herzog finds. So these are my thoughts. Go see this movie. It's beautiful and haunting and I was reminded under the sea with the water and the strange animals of Malick's creation of the universe scene from his best film--one of the best ever to this non cinephile--Tree of Life.