Communing with Nature’s Power: Fury, Fear, and Awe

Werner Herzog has a fascination with nature. Many people do; it’s one of Gardner’s nine intelligences. Which might be why it comes up in so many of his projects. He doesn’t usually fixate on its tranquil or useful aspects, though. He fixates on its raw destructive power. And it’s never alone. He rarely tells a story about nature where some natural phenomenon is its object. He tells stories, among other things, about people who must respond to nature’s power. 

Two different personalities seem to capture Herzog: there are those, like himself, who are transfixed at a distance by nature’s destructive power, and there are those, like the subjects of his stories, who must immerse themselves in it and interact with it to the greatest extent possible. The fascination of the distantly awed personality type with the immersively mesmerized personality types reflects something from Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy, wherein the default state of being for most people confronting the drudging meaningless of life leads them into the pull of nihilism. Certain rare individuals however see this same meaninglessness and resist it at the level of their being. They boldly look to the world and to their lives and assert that all of this has meaning and it’s a meaning that they’ve synthesized for themselves. Such individuals live vigorously and inspire the others out of their nihilistic inertia into vibrant motion. Given Herzog’s openly acknowledged nihilism, I believe that he, and the characters that share his distant hypnosis, are transfixed by the characters who must immerse themselves in the most dangerous aspects of nature in order to commune with it, as much as they are transfixed by nature’s fury, in the same way that Nietzsche’s nihilists are inspired by his dogged meaning-creators. 

This duality of personas can be seen in three of his notable works, namely, Into The Inferno (2016), Grizzly Man (2005), and Fitzcarraldo (1982).

Into The Inferno is a documentary about volcanoes and their roles in various human societies. He takes the time to acknowledge his own fascination with volcanoes before introducing a volcanologist named Clive Oppenheimer, with whom he bonds over their mutual feeling that they are content observing a volcano from afar. The documentary then compares them to Maurice and Katia Krafft, two volcanologists who craved immersion and who ultimately died in a volcanic event from Mount Unzen in 1991. Herzog seems especially interested in them, later memorializing this intrigue by making an entire documentary about them in 2022 (The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft). He and Oppenheimer comment on the Kraffts’ devotion, on their need to be as close as possible to the most dangerous parts of a volcano. You get the sense that at some level Herzog is fascinated by the personalities that need to feel like they’re united, up close and personally, with these tremendous wells of earthen rage. He goes on to speak of the different societies that have developed around volcanoes, exploring their cultural associations, all the while implicitly concerned with human attitudes toward nature’s might. It’s not a stretch to say Herzog found the Kraffts inspirational and equally notable is his inclusion of the deaths of the Kraffts at the hands of the volcano. These meaning-creators who existed in communion with nature’s power were ultimately consumed by the same fury they’d devoted their lives to understanding. In Herzog’s world, nature wants us dead and understanding it is taming it, an act of foolish defiance. In his world, nihilism always wins.

Grizzly Man is almost entirely a found footage documentary. Herzog relies on footage captured by Timothy Treadwell himself while merely giving context through narration. He paints the picture of Treadwell as a man who was deeply fascinated by the awe-inspiring power of the Grizzly bear. The difference between a grizzly and a volcano however is that one is sentient, which injects a novel layer to a study of a man who must immerse himself in nature’s power by interacting with it. Here Treadwell is the ecstatic, eccentric personality who must commune with nature’s extremes in this way. While Herzog himself, as a commentator, becomes the complementary personality of one who would sit at some distance, equally in awe of both the Grizzly and the man who would befriend it. Through Herzog’s reflection on Treadwell we learn that this natural ferocity is much more layered than with its inanimate forms. It serves as a remarkable study on humanity as it stands in contrast to, and in comparison with, the behavior of an animal on which we have little insight, outside of situations of desperation. Ultimately though nature’s ferocity spirals out of control, claiming its reverent acolyte in tribute, just like it did with the Kraffts.

Unlike the previous two films, Fitzcarraldo is not a documentary; it’s a fictional narrative written and directed by Herzog. One of his earlier works, the film tracks the beginnings of his infatuation with nature. Here nature isn’t usually presented with meditative lingering imagery though. It’s presented as an obstacle only rarely given screen time, to reflect its main character’s view of it. The story follows Brian Fitzgerald, played by Klaus Kinski, an Irishman obsessed with building an opera house in a remote part of South America during the age of colonization. For him this goal represents a desire to tame the natural world and bring European refinement to those indigenous humans who follow its laws. His Quixotic quest to drag a gigantic boat over a mountain, in order to circumvent the whirlpool that prevents him from accessing a certain segment of the river’s bank, somehow ends up succeeding. Herzog’s message is clear, humanity can triumph over nature. However the indigenous people sacrifice the boat to the whirlpool in order to stay in the good graces of nature’s laws. Herzog’s message is clear again, nature always wins in the end. In this story, Fitzgerald has the eccentric, obsessed personality type, where his singular obsession places him in opposition to nature, rather than in awe of it, as was the case with Treadwell and the Kraffts. Meanwhile the ship’s captain, a stand-in for Herzog, who stakes his life by following Fitzgerald on this seemingly impossible mission, represents the more distant personality type, respectful of nature’s power and intrigued by the eccentric one. He follows Fitzgerald out of some combination of respect for his vision and morbid curiosity with nature’s fury, willing to brave the most dangerous parts of the indigenous world in his Conrad-ian quest.

Through these three character types, Werner Herzog explores humanity’s relationship with nature. Through his astute articulation of these personality types he, knowingly or unknowingly, finds his way toward Nietzsche’s articulation of similar personality types. Nature’s fury becomes the awesome gravity that brings to it the gazes of the common man, mesmerized and in fear, and those defiantly inspirational individuals who must commune with it. Herzog, through these personality types and his camera, seems to see in nature something at once powerful and destructive. If he were searching for meaning in it, he might well find something human there as well.