Forgotten Dreams: Revisiting Romanticism in the Cinema of Werner Herzog by Laurie Ruth Johnson (review)

"I don't belong there," Werner Herzog says in an interview, in reference to his relationship to German Romanticism. Yet as Brad Prager pointed out almost fifteen years ago, critics have repeatedly made the connection between Herzog's films and the literary-philosophical movement that flourished in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As her new book's subtitle makes clear, Laurie Ruth Johnson is "revisiting" this debate. Rather than posit a completely new answer to the question "Is Herzog a Romantic?," she argues cogently and in more detail than has been done elsewhere that his films are indeed indebted to, and readable through, certain features of German Romanticism, especially the early Romanticism of what Johnson refers to as the "constellation romantics" (141). This emphasis on the first years of German Romanticism allows Johnson to analyze how incomplete and nonlinear structures inform and inhabit multiple Herzog films.

After an introduction wherein she describes the "alternate discourse of romanticism" that is so important for her analysis (6), Johnson proceeds to demonstrate how critical the Romantic idea of apperception is for Herzog, especially in the films Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Wild Blue Yonder, Fitzcarraldo, and Invincible. Johnson's interpretation of these films is insightful, especially regarding the ways that the self-awareness of perception facilitates the difference between viewer and viewed. Her conception of "aesthetic others" in Fitzcarraldo is a particularly trenchant way to describe the gulf between the European colonizers and the indigenous population. Her discussion of the role of clairvoyance in Invincible ties together disparate manifestations of early nineteenth-century occultism as predecessors of the Jewish strongman's prescience of the upcoming Holocaust (the film is set in 1932).

Chapter 2 uses the figure of the arabesque to elucidate how nonchronological narratives function in films such as Encounters at the End of the World, The White Diamond, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, and Wings of Hope. Each of these films features characters who have experienced trauma. Through strategic reenactments and partially staged interviews, Herzog attempts to elucidate these traumas but also always stops before the protagonists can reveal everything. As Johnson puts it, the big question is how "to approximate metaphysical truth in a post-metaphysical age" (114). Relying on Romantic concepts of the arabesque, Johnson develops readings that show how Herzog comes close to the truth but never "diagnoses" anyone, a situation that raises the question of the amount of psychology or psychoanalysis that Herzog's work contains.

Johnson takes up the question in several chapters. It plays a part in her analyses of The Dark Glow of the Mountains and Grizzly Man. Both films feature characters interviewed (or, in the case of Grizzly Man, self-interviewed) in the confined spaces of tents and also shown among sublime (in the Romantics' sense of the term) landscapes. Johnson adeptly discusses how these claustrophobic spaces interact with the unspoken truths of the main characters (Reinhold Messner's inability to talk directly about his brother's death on Nanga Parbat in the former film, and Timothy Treadwell's erasure of women in his own narratives in the latter). Indeed, one of the book's important sections details how Herzog reinstates women into the narrative of Treadwell and his time among the grizzly bears of Katmai National Park. In light of the criticism of the paucity of women in Herzog's work, this is a well-noted point (164–66).

The chapter on man and animal discusses not only Grizzly Man but also the infamous final scene of Stroszek as well as Herzog's adaptation of Nosferatu. Johnson points out that Herzog's remake is set in the Romantic era and that this film is, more than any other, Herzog's acknowledgment of his neo-Romantic and neo-Expressionist debt to German cinema, which itself is indebted to the alternate discourse of Romanticism detailed by Johnson (178). The final full chapter, "Sound and Silence," investigates the often otherworldly music of Herzog...