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.

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As a big Terrence Malick fan I've only been recently introduced to Werner Herzog by watching ''an evening with Werner Herzog'' on youtube and Encounters at the end of the world. It's a funny thing to see this topic because when I witnessed Herzog talking for the first time with his immediately apparant wisdom I almost instantly thought of Malick and how the two would interact.

One distinction I would add to your list is that Malick is very private and almost unreachable while Herzog is much more open. I've seen all of Malick's work multiple times (With the Tree of Life and The Thin Red Line as my favorites, which I've both seen 3 times). I haven't really seen anything of Herzog yet but I'm fascinated by his character and plan on watching more of his stuff in the near future. I especially can't wait to see the cave of forgotten dreams, as I've visited some of the regions and caves in southern France myself.

Anyways the first impression that I got of Herzog was that he was a man interested in the bizarre and the outwards exploration (he mentions space exploration a lot of times), while Malick in my opinion is more of an inwards orientated person, focussing on the beauty and glory that is already around us and movies that, although great in scale, always focus on deeply personal elements.

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Our experience with and thinking on these two film makers is so alike, that I'm wondering if you're a real person and not a projection I created from my head. :). Though my other personality isn't so worldly; I've never been to the south of France, but would love to go, because it's France, it Europe, and you'd be crazy not to love such history, culture and nature.

Definitely see Cave. It came out the same year as Tree and both were spiritual experiences for me. At four separate occasions during The Tree of Life, I thought, "This is the greatest movie I've ever seen." I was just completely blown away by: the sheer gorgeousness, the sheer monumental ambition, the deep and holy humanism. This was a movie that was no less than about everything, a holy book, on life, love, science, the world, philosophy and faith. I'm not a believer, but I believed then and there, while watching the movie. I don't think there's a supernatural God, but this movie is him in cinematic form. It validates the existence of a myth.

As for Thin Red Line, see my post on its IMDB page message board, if you care to.

But one thing I will say about your good point about the directors contrasting public personas. Malick is private, but I hate, hate, when the media, in their egotistical entitled arrogance, call him a recluse. He is NOT a recluse. No one who's made the breath of films he's done, no one who wrote the soldiers' vernacular and idiom in Line, would retreat away from the world. If anything, his six films show he deeply loves the world, and is deeply in it. He didn't make a movie for twenty years (I have to get the story, if its out there, on that: how did he support himself? Most importantly, why didn't he make any films?) but we know he lived in part in Paris, taking part in its culture, and writing. Fun fact: according to the Days of Heaven audio commentary, one of his producers reveals that he wrote The New World right after he made days, in Paris. Apparently he writes his movies all at once, spends years going back and forth on them, while doing other things.

But as I was saying, no one like that, who is intensely curious on the world and in the thoughts and hearts of people is a recluse. Who's that incredibly well read in literature, philosophy and film. He's not Emily Dickinson, spending her life in the same house in the same town; he's a man of the world. He just doesn't do press. As you can tell, I really hate it when the stupid mass media label him this.

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I just finished watching Encounters, which I thought was stunning, and was struck by the same thoughts regarding the parallels between Malick and Herzog. Like Lin301, I am fairly new to Herzog's films having only seen a couple of his documentaries, Grizzly Man and Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which I was also blown away by. I am also a huge Malick fan and regard Tree of Life as one of the greatest films.

I'm fascinated by this discussion of both directors' tendency towards humanism and spirituality. I'm tempted to agree with the OP that Malick is the more spiritual one but I am deeply fond of Herzog's obsession with humanity, his relentless pursual of strange and wonderful characters. It seems like no matter what the subject of the documentary, it will always, above all, be about humankind. For me, it's his subjects, the characters he discovers, which bring his documentaries to life and make them so compelling. Ultimately, Herzog seems to be more captivated by abnormality and, as the OP says, eccentricity. I believe this to be one aspect that makes Herzog stand out as a filmmaker and gives him that slight edge over Malick.

I am eagerly anticipating Malick's Voyage of Time and how it will look held up against Encounters. I'm in awe of both directors' use of music to give life to their images.

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