Deep Truth and the Mythic Veil:

Werner Herzog’s New Mythology

in Land of Silence and Darkness
André Fischer, Auburn University
(fschr@auburn.edu)

Abstract:
This article begins with Werner Herzog’s programmatic statements on new images
and deep truth and connects it to ideas of Nietzschean aesthetics, mainly the
Apollonian image and the Dionysian horror. My main argument is that Herzog
contributes to the literary and aesthetic tradition of new mythology within
the medium of film by developing a distinct visual language that tries to express
non-rational truth claims. In a first step I explore how Nietzschean aesthetics
influenced the debates about the mythic image and total cinema in classic film
theory and visual studies. More importantly I show how the desire to create
new mythic images not only influenced Herzog’s discourse on film, but his
actual aesthetic practice. In my analysis of his 1971 documentary Land of Silence
and Darkness (Land des Schweigens und der Dunkelheit) I show how the dynamic
between Apollonian veil and Dionysian Urbild (original image) is effective in
the construction of what Herzog calls “ deep truth ”. This article attempts to
shift the focus away from the fact-fiction debate surrounding most of Herzog’s
documentaries and to concentrate instead on framing Herzog’s claims of
non-rational truth theoretically and locating his work in the aesthetic tradition
of new mythology.

Keywords: Werner Herzog; Land of Silence and Darkness; Nietzsche; Myth

Film-Philosophy 22.1 (2018): 39–59

DOI: 10.3366/film.2018.0061
f André Fischer. This article is published as Open Access under the terms
of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial Licence
(http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits non-commercial
use, distribution and reproduction provided the original work is cited. For commercial
re-use, please refer to our website at: www.euppublishing.com/customer-services/
authors/permissions.
www.euppublishing.com/film

39
 Film-Philosophy 22 (2018)

Among the many self-commentaries and statements Werner Herzog has

produced, repeated, and varied over the years, one topos stands out as
programmatic in terms of myth-creation. On various occasions Herzog
has described his own ambition as a filmmaker as the existential necessity
to create new images, images that correspond to our existential situation.
According to him, we suffer a lack of those images and are surrounded
by ones that, intentionally or not, deceive us about the conditions
of our existence. In an interview in 1980 he makes the following
programmatic statement:

Give us adequate images. We lack adequate images. Our civilization doesn’t

have adequate images. And I think that a civilization is doomed, or is going
to die out like dinosaurs if it does not develop an adequate language
or adequate images. I see it as a very dramatic situation. For example,
we have found out that there are serious problems facing our civilization,
like energy problems, or environment problems, or nuclear power and all
this overpopulation of the world, but generally it is not understood yet
that a problem of the same magnitude is that we do not have adequate
images and that’s what I’m working on: A new grammar of images.
(Blank, 1980)

The question arises: adequate to what? While Herzog is not very

specific wherein the inadequacy of “our images” consists, director Les
Blank (Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, 1980) interprets this with a montage
of fast food and cigarette ads, which leads us to believe that the falsehood
of these images is the actual problem. Although Herzog makes it clear in
this passage that there are “serious problems facing our civilization, ” he
does not say that these problems should be adequately addressed in his
new grammar of images. And even though he declares a “real and holy
war” against commercials and TV shows earlier in the same film, there
seems to be more at stake than merely revealing the falsehood of these
sorts of inadequate images. The lack of adequate images is in itself a
problem of great proportion and urgency because the images at our
disposal do not express and reflect our existential disposition as human
beings in this world. Herzog draws the analogy to generally acknowledged
political problems facing humanity (energy, environment, nuclear power,
overpopulation) to emphasize the crisis of our collective imagination
that he is describing.
In this article, I propose to understand “adequate images” as those
images that capture the world, and what it means to exist in it, in an
emphatically true sense. No other Herzog film addresses the threat of a
lack of images more clearly than his 1971 Land of Silence and Darkness
(Land des Schweigens und der Dunkelheit). I will first trace the idea of an

40
 Herzog’s Mythology in Land of Silence and Darkness

adequate image of the world in contemporary aesthetic and cinematic

discussion, before clarifying Herzog’s understanding of ecstatic truth.
Herzog describes above the production of images as an existential
necessity. His dinosaur analogy underscores that humanity requires a
culture if it were to be more than a species merely sustaining its conditions
for continued existence. Such culture is however not to be understood
as an existential surplus but as an urgent necessity. In other words,
he demands a justification of human existence as self-preservation. This
stance implies the question of the meaning of human existence, as well
as the answer that in a post-Nietzschean world all we have is our
imagination. Whether Herzog was paraphrasing Nietzsche on purpose or
just happened to express the same aesthetic pessimism of The Birth
of Tragedy is less relevant than the soundness of Herzog’s aesthetic
project, namely a program for a new mythology which directly or
indirectly resonates with a Nietzschean quality (Nietzsche, 1999, p. 32f).
As I will show, Herzog’s demand for new images reformulates
Nietzsche’s dictum of the aesthetic justification of the world for the
medium of cinema. Specifically, Nietzsche’s conception of the Apollonian
veil prefigures the ontology of the image that is at stake in Herzog’s
proclaimed existential need for adequate images. Regardless of the
question of Herzog’s personal engagement with Nietzsche’s work, there
is a structural convergence that I aim to uncover.
What Herzog means by adequate images is the productive use of our
imagination that enables us to justify our worldly existence. In Herzog’s
view, failing to make use of this capacity means, eventually, nothing less
than the extinction of the human species. Nietzsche saw the existential
demand for an imagination of the divine under secular conditions fulfilled
in the aesthetic dichotomy of the Apollonian-Dionysian, which he found
realized in Wagner’s musical drama. Herzog’s adequate images correspond
to the mythical images of Dionysus’s tragic myth. Nietzsche explained that
Dionysian horror appears in the Apollonian dream-image, or Lichtbild,
which literally translates as “light-picture” (1999, p. 46). Nietzsche is
obviously talking about ancient tragedy and the possibility of its rebirth.
However, although he is not referring to photography as a medium, he
chooses the then common German word for photography to describe
the relation of Apollonian surface and Dionysian depth, thus alluding to
a new dimension of the mythic image in the Lichtbild (photography) and
Lichtspiel (early German term for cinema). For Herzog, the “illusionist
work ” of the filmmaker is the creation of these “projections of light”
(Blank, 1980) that do not represent a given reality, but rather create a veil
that keeps us from confronting the most devastating truth of existence.
Nietzsche equates this with “Silenus’s wisdom ”, i.e. that the best thing

41
 Film-Philosophy 22 (2018)

is not to have been born at all and the second best thing is to die soon
(1999, p. 23).
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche’s critical claim, which most closely
corresponds to Herzog’s demand for new images, is that “without
myth, however, every culture loses its healthy creative natural power:
it is only a horizon encompassed with myths which rounds off to unity
a social movement” (1999, p. 108). Here, myth is the form of the beyond
of knowledge that makes the horrific experience of the unknowable
perceivable, and therefore aesthetic, in the sense that it presents to
us perceptible forms of what is otherwise inaccessible by means of reason.
With reference to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche describes the horrific
experience of reaching the limits of reason, identifying horror and
suffering as the conditions for beauty and aesthetic pleasure. Hence
the cognitive and social functions of myth are a question of aesthetics,
since the experience of the real and that of the imagined are not
separated in this mythic worldview. A distinction between reality and
imagination misconceives the former as non-aesthetic and the latter
as non-cognitive.
The central, yet enigmatic, dictum in The Birth of Tragedy is that
“it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world
are eternally justified” (Nietzsche, 1999, p. 33). This aesthetic
phenomenon is not subject to cognition but is nevertheless attributed
with an absolute truth-value, which only can justify existence. According
to Nietzsche, the world in an absolute sense cannot be known; it can
only be experienced aesthetically. The eternal justification of the world
is for Nietzsche an aesthetic question, but one that transcends the limits
of subjective aesthetic judgment. While in Nietzsche’s image of the
“horizon encompassed with myths” there seems to be still a subject-object
divide, in Herzog’s perspective the aesthetic experience of the world
is framed existentially. The form of experience is not transcendental
but existential, and it is this form of experience that I would conceive as
the mythical appearance of the absolute. In art, this existential experience
is closely connected with the aesthetic production of its semblance,
which Herzog calls for when he insists on the need for new images.
Likewise, Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy thought that the task of
total art was to present this Dionysian abyss through the Apollonian
means of aesthetic semblance. This existential depth, which is veiled and
nevertheless present in the work of art, is crucial to understand Herzog’s
claim for adequacy. After tracing the total ambition of “new images”,
I will analyze the film Land of Silence and Darkness in light of this
discussion and show how Herzog develops a specifically Nietzschean
aesthetic of a veiled Dionysian truth.

42
 Herzog’s Mythology in Land of Silence and Darkness

The Myth of Total Cinema

When cinema was invented in the last decade of the 19th century, many
contemporaries saw Nietzsche’s ambition of the total artwork, which
Wagner’s project eventually failed to satisfy, as being handed over to film.
This heritage was appropriated in various ways by political propaganda in
films by D.W. Griffith (The Birth of a Nation, 1915), Sergei Eisenstein
(Battleship Potemkin [Bronenosets Patyomkin], 1925), and Leni Riefenstahl
(The Triumph of the Will [Triumph des Willens], 1935). Leaving aside the
question of how the concept of total art informed political totalitarianism,
the invention of the cinematograph radically changed usual ways of
viewing and enabled audiences to view the world as a totality. As in Dziga
Vertov’s Kino-Eye, it was new technology that enabled a new image of
the world due to its mechanical reproduction of vision (1984, p. 17ff).
Cinematic vision perceives real features of the world which elude human
perception, and captures these on celluloid to present them to the human
eye. The mechanical and chemical processes of cinematography promise
to make us see the world through images in which the world is more
present than in our everyday perception. This technological revolution
in image production is the first condition for what Herzog calls “new
images”.
André Bazin revisited the mythic rebirth of the world under the
conditions of emerging forms of post-avant-garde realism and insisted
that cinema was an idealist phenomenon realizing “the total and complete
representation of reality” (2009, p. 15). What Bazin called the myth
of total cinema is a variation of the aesthetic utopia of artificially creating
the world again, or, rather, creating a different world. Cinema seemed to
have all the potential to achieve a total synthesis of art and reality but,
as in all utopias, reality was lagging behind, and this led Bazin to the
hypothesis that cinema, as this particular utopia, had not yet been
invented.
Bazin distinguishes between “true realism, which is a need to express
the meaning of the world in its concrete aspects and in its essence” from
the “pseudo-realism of trompe l’oeil, which is content with the illusion
of form” (2009, p. 6). What Bazin calls true realism is the representation
of the world in its own image, which means to show the world as a
perceivable phenomenon, as well as to reveal it as the structure of
our existence. To view the world in its own image entails a concept of
worldhood that goes beyond the totality of entities we identify as present.
With regards to Bazin, Stanley Cavell (1971, p. 18) points out that the
relation between a photograph and its object is very fragile, and that,
ontologically speaking, we see on the screen things that are not present.
Cavell (1971, pp. 40–41) goes on to claim that the re-creation of the

43
 Film-Philosophy 22 (2018)

world, as opposed to its representation, had always been a myth of art and
that the aim of the cinematic myth is to recreate the world magically.
Bazin’s and Cavell’s seemingly opposing views on the myth of total cinema
converge in the idea of the recreation of the world in its own image,
although neither can be read as fully promoting either representational
realism or illusionism. The world in its own image must contain both
aspects. The notion that creating an image of the world is constitutive
of the subject-object divide is absent from Bazin’s and Cavell’s idea
of the recreation of the world in its own image. Constitutively, myth
blends elements of what is real with the imaginary, a hypothesis on which
both Herzog’s “new grammar of images ” and the myth of total
cinema rely.
The myth of total cinema aims to reach beyond a subjective perspective
of the world and its goods, and to transcend the distinction between
world-picture (Weltbild) and world-view (Weltanschauung). Nietzsche
argues that the world is an aesthetic phenomenon: it is the phenomenal
appearance of the world as world that is at stake. In his essay “The Age
of the World-Picture ” (1938/1977), Heidegger juxtaposes an ancient
Greek and a modern condition. While the essence of the ancient person
is to be perceived (angeschaut) by Being, the modern human pictures
(vorstellen) the world as the appearance of Being (Heidegger, 1938/1977,
p. 130ff). Heidegger sees the act of presenting the world as Vorstellung as
the birth of modern subjectivity and the irreconcilable subject-object
divide. In his view, it is significant for the modern age to have an image
of the world; however, Heidegger does not pursue the idea of the world
in its own image, which is not the image of a subjective representation,
i.e. Vorstellung. Heidegger’s concept of the world-picture asks whether
images can be more than products of subjectivity, that is, if they can be
regarded as beings themselves (Nancy, 2005, p. 5). His rejection of the
world-picture reduces the status of the image to that of representation and
therefore misconceives the ontological status of what world-picture means
for Nietzsche, Bazin and, possibly, Herzog.
My focus on the relation of image and world in cinema allows for an
initial distinction between the ontological status of the image (what is it?)
and the picture as material object (Mitchell, 1994, p. 4). If the essence
of the image is not to be found in its material appearance, one could
suggest that it is constituted in the aesthetic experience of the material
picture, i.e. the perception of the picture as image, or in the case of
cinema, of the rhythmic flow of images (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p. 57). This
would shift the emphasis from the production to the perception of the
world as subjective image, but not change the status of the image (Bild) as
the representation (Abbild) of an always already constituted reality. As

44
 Herzog’s Mythology in Land of Silence and Darkness

Hans-Georg Gadamer (2004) argues, even in the mechanical technologies

of pictorial representation one can extract something from the represented
that is not to be found by looking at it. For him, the difference
between mere pictorial representation and what he calls image is that
representation (Abbild) necessarily relies on a preconception of that which
is represented, whereas the image (Bild) constitutes an autonomous
reality in which the primal image (Urbild) can become present. Gadamer
calls this “an accretion in being ” (Gadamer, 2004, p. 135).
In this sense, images have to be understood as generating something
that is not given, something that only becomes present when being
transformed into an image (Boehm, 1995, p. 332). What we call image
is constituted in the tension between a representation of something
absent and the embodiment of this absence (Otto, 1951, p. 52). Once we
enter the proclaimed age of the mechanical reproducibility of images,
of photography and cinematography, the presence of the image, whose
pre-mechanical effect Benjamin famously saw as auratic, seems to be
overwhelmed by layers of reproduction, and is eventually only an
ideological tool (Benjamin, 2004, p. 270).
Benjamin’s complex discussion of aura has often suffered from
a reductive reception neglecting what Miriam Hansen calls the
“anthropological, perceptual-mnemonic, and visionary dimensions”
(2012, p. 105) of the concept of aura. Within these dimensions,
Benjamin develops an aesthetic concept of aura based on its mythical
foundations. The term aura, then, signifies the existence of an image
beyond its understanding as a mere representation, thus transposing
the primal image (Urbild) from the religious into an aesthetic context.
Benjamin claims that while aura is still present in early photographs,
it is completely absent from film, which is understood as a tool that
demolishes any auratic, pre-photographic beauty. His political motives,
which contested the simulation of aura in mass culture and fascism,
made him oblivious to the potential afterlife of aura in the age of cinema.
I argue that such an aura appears in the work of Herzog.
The link between Benjamin’s and Bazin’s film theories lies in Benjamin’s
idea of aura and Bazin’s concepts of total cinema and his understanding of
the ontology of the image. Like Benjamin’s auratic mysticism, Bazin has
little to say about the immediate presence of the world in the cinematic
image since he sustains the oppositions of image and world, of art and
reality (Arnheim, 1957, pp. 8–34). The myth of total cinema demands,
against Bazin’s later developed realist intentions, images that are highly
stylized and self-consciously artificial in order to highlight indexical
photographs of the real as true images of the world (Gunning, 2008,
pp. 23–40; Peirce, 1998, p. 291ff).

45
 Film-Philosophy 22 (2018)

Bazin’s and Vertov’s early ideas of a new perception of the

world instantiated by the cinema informed the aesthetics of realist and
documentary film in the postwar years. Despite the utopian implications
of making an unseen world present, their claims around cinematic truth
implied an anti-illusionist aesthetic of authenticity, factuality, and
objectivity. The subjectivist auteurs of the French New Wave objected
to naı̈ve proclamations on the immediacy of the cinematic image and
restored the neglected montage as the constitutive element of cinema.
Jean-Luc Godard’s oft-quoted statement that whereas “photography is
truth, cinema is truth twenty-four times per second” (Godard, 1963), only
seemingly agrees with these realist principles, while actually ironizing the
implied truth claim. If there is something like cinematic truth, which
would be the condition for the myth of total cinema, it must be analogous
to Brecht’s constructive realism (Brecht, 2000, p. 164). But where Brecht
needs to artificially construct the reality of a steel factory because it
has become inaccessible to pictorial representation, the cinematic truth
that Herzog wants to reveal is more than that of a social reality since
he seeks to express what is in principle inaccessible by reason. In contrast
to Godard, however, Herzog attempts to achieve cinematic truth not by
means of montage, but by the construction of ecstatic images.

Myth and Ecstatic Truth

The declared enemy of Werner Herzog’s cinematic aesthetic is cinéma
vérité, even though what he means by that applies more to direct cinema
(Wahl, 2011, p. 282). While cinéma vérité’s subjective approach to
documentary is actually quite close to Herzog’s own style, what he
criticizes is the proclaimed transparency and objectivity of direct cinema’s
“fly on the wall” perspective. In his twelve-point Minnesota Declaration
(1999), Herzog dismisses cinéma vérité’s confusion of facts with truth,
stating that “their truth” remains on the surface of things and is a “truth
of accountants”. What Herzog considers to be truth in cinema resides
in other spheres, which we can only access momentarily and by means
of aesthetic construction.

There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as
poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only
through fabrication and imagination and stylization. (Herzog, 1999)

The paradox is that in the two-dimensional image everything becomes

surface and that the product of the deep, ecstatic truth of cinema must
remain on the surface of the image. However, the hermeneutic of depth
and surface hints at the romantic idea of a truth that can only be evoked,

46
 Herzog’s Mythology in Land of Silence and Darkness

rather than represented (Johnson, 2016, pp. 114–116). In Nietzsche,

the function of myth is to reveal these depths by making them perceptible
through sensible forms. While truth remains mysterious, it can be
made visible through the Apollonian image, the veil through which we can
see into the Dionysian depths (Nietzsche, 1999, p. 112). In other words,
the mythical image presents the mysterious Urbild, which is by itself
inaccessible. The mythical image must be understood neither as referential
(sign) nor as substitutive (symbol), but as occupying a position between
the two (Gadamer, 2004, p. 148). With this conceptual vocabulary,
Herzog’s idea of adequate images can be properly framed. While the
juxtaposition of surface and depth and Herzog’s preference for the latter is
by no means surprising, his argument goes beyond merely stating that his
films are deep and cinéma vérité is not.
According to Herzog, “facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre
power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable ” (1999). It is,
however, not only the depicted fact that has this strange and bizarre
power, but the form of depiction, that is, photographic indexicality.
Although Herzog frequently claims that he is actually a writer, which
could lead to the conclusion that the depth comes from the characters or
the narrative, it is the factuality produced by the mechanical and chemical
apparatus of photography through which the deep truth of cinema
is created. So it is only through the penetration of a surface that depth
becomes possible, while the objective truth-claim of the surface regresses
to empty factuality. If truth in cinema is possible it occurs in the ecstatic
penetration of the surface, in the protruding from it (Ames, 2012, p. 10).
The bullet point structure of the Minnesota Declaration offers little
argumentation and seems largely an attack on claims of authenticity by
documentary filmmakers. Delivered in 1999 at the Walker Art Center on
the occasion of a conversation with film critic Roger Ebert, the manifesto
is subtitled with the title of his controversial film Lessons in Darkness
(Lektionen in Finsternis, 1992), which also gave the impulse to Herzog’s
probably most elaborate poetological statement, “On the absolute, the
sublime, and ecstatic truth” (Herzog, 2010). In this text he attempts
to conceive his notion of ecstatic truth in a somewhat theoretical way,
albeit remaining close to his practice as a filmmaker and relying mainly on
stories derived from his work to make his point. At the center of this essay
is his notion of truth and the conditions of its production, namely
construction, narration, staging, and faking. As Brad Prager has pointed
out, Herzog’s concept of truth can be described as Nietzschean in the
sense that “art is a lie that is truer than the truth” (Prager, 2007, pp. 8–9).
Herzog addresses one very simple example of these aesthetic lies at the
beginning of his essay, when he points out that the opening quote to his

47
 Film-Philosophy 22 (2018)

film Lessons in Darkness is not actually by Pascal – “the collapse of

the stellar universe will occur—like creation—in grandiose splendor”
(Herzog, 2010, p. 1) –, but by Herzog himself and only “quoted” to
achieve a state of sublimity among the audience. Before seeing the very
first frame the audience is forced to associate the following images
with cosmic creation and apocalypse. While we are familiar with
epigraphs like “based on true events” in mainstream cinema, Herzog’s
deviation from true events and facts stands in opposition to this practice of
the approximation of fact and fiction in many feature films. Whereas the
former tries to ensure the meaningfulness and relevance of the story
through the seemingly close relation to what really happened, Herzog’s
practice involves a distancing from the factual and an emphasis on the
fictional as truthful. On the flipside of Hollywood films that want to claim
their factual foundations in order to be more convincing, lies Herzog’s
fictional documentary practice which, by means of fabrication, wants “to
reveal a hitherto unnoticed or overlooked facet of reality” (Gandy, 2012,
p. 530). In spite of postmodern interventions, the fact-fiction dichotomy,
characteristic of both documentary and feature films, continues to drive
contemporary criticism that tries to locate Herzog on both sides of the
distinction. It is not only that his documentaries are renowned for their
particular fabrication of truth, but also his feature films are propped by
facts such as: on the set of Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Aguirre, der Zorn
Gottes, 1972) Herzog allegedly directed Kinski with a gun in his hand;
in Heart of Glass (Herz aus Glas, 1977) the cast members were acting
under hypnosis; in Fitzcarraldo (1982) he organized for a steamship to
be pulled over a mountain. The invasion of fiction in his documentaries
is complemented by this insistence that actions in his feature films have
really happened.
The general lack of differentiation of non-fiction film genres has to
do with the difficulty that facts are always part of a narrative, but
nevertheless cannot be easily declared as devoid of any social or historical
content (Nichols, 1991, p. 109). From the perspective of a narrower
understanding of documentary filmmaking there remains a vast space of
filmmaking to which the form of essayism has been attributed. There have
in fact been attempts to place Herzog in this middle ground of the essay
film (Corrigan, 2011, p. 121; Corrigan, 2012, pp. 80–98), and it seems
that his notion of a non-scientific, non-rational truth corresponds to that
presented as characteristic for the essay by György Lukács (2010, p. 28).
In terms of form, however, it becomes problematic to subsume his films
under the formal unity that Lukács sketches out. If there is such a truth
that cannot be adequately expressed in rational thought, then new
expressive forms are necessary, and I have proposed to call these forms

48
 Herzog’s Mythology in Land of Silence and Darkness

mythical. Lukács’ “events of the soul” (Seelenerlebnisse) drive towards

expressive forms, but the form of the essay is mainly an intellectual form, a
form of thinking, a discursive form, and therewith lacking the iconic
qualities as momentary appearances of truth in the image.
Adorno’s (1991, p. 19) discussion of the essay as form proceeds along
similar lines, and even though he denies the close affinity between
essay and myth for well-known reasons, he nonetheless underlines the
subversion of acknowledged truths in order to establish the truth of the
essay. The dialectic of myth and reason is reflected by that of nature
and culture, which the essay unfolds and unmasks as both mediated and
damaged. Herzog’s explorations of the terrain in between fact and fiction
on the quest for truth surely cannot be defined as essays in this sense of a
critical investigation of reality, but maybe in a more general sense as the
figuration of the given towards an experience of the totality of life (Lukács,
2010, pp. 42–43). Even if Herzog’s films and the stories he weaves around
them were to be regarded as essays, his work would still differ from
more subjective essay-filmmakers such as Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, and
Jean-Luc Godard to the extent that he does not depart from the immediate
material and social surroundings of Western capitalism (Rascaroli, 2009).
Also stylistically Herzog’s work is different from most film essays,
which often rely on montage in order to structure the imaginative
thought-process of the essay, since he rarely makes use of montage and
generates his “true images ” via a less technical mise-en-scène. The truth
he is looking for in his films is one that resides not in between the images
like in montage theory, but behind, or beneath them, in a depth that is
revealed momentarily by the image. The depth that Herzog insists on has
to be understood in this way, as an ephemeral form of truth experience,
and not as the depth of hermeneutic interpretation, which can be
fathomed by means of understanding and brought to the light of reason.
In his written essay on ecstatic truth Herzog chooses “to stay on the
trusted ground of praxis ” (Herzog, 2010, p. 3), which means that he is
suspicious of intellectual endeavors that are not grounded in practical
world experience. He opens with a story from the shooting of Fitzcarraldo
(1982) in the Peruvian jungle, a fertile setting for Herzog’s staging of
truthful events. The indigenous people on whose land he wanted to shoot
his film would only collaborate if he helped them in gaining a legal title
to their land, on which they had lived for generations, but of which
they had no documentation. During an audience with the Peruvian
president Herzog argued “that hearsay could serve as a valid form of
evidence” and that while hearsay is “generally inadmissible as evidence, it
is not absolutely inadmissible” (2010, p. 4). The Machiguenga people
received the legal title to the land, due to a claim that was repeated by

49
 Film-Philosophy 22 (2018)

so many “that it had come to constitute so manifest a truth” (Herzog,

2010, p. 4) that had to be accepted in front of a legal court.
In Herzog’s narrative he is himself telling a story that manages to invert
the factual truth and to construct an existential truth. While one can easily
take this story apart as an example of mere rhetoric and regard the claim
of fictitious truth as the well-known postmodern erosion of the factual,
what is at stake is again the truth inaccessible by means of facts.

We must ask of reality: how important is it, really? And: How important,
really, is the factual? Of course, we can’t disregard the factual; it has
normative power. But it can never give us the kind of illumination, the
ecstatic flash, from which Truth emerges. […] Sometimes facts so exceed
our expectations—have such an unusual, bizarre power—that they seem
unbelievable. But in the fine arts, in music, literature, and cinema, it is
possible to reach a deeper stratum of truth—a poetic, ecstatic truth, which
is mysterious and can only be grasped with effort; one attains it through
vision, style, and craft. (Herzog, 2010, pp. 7–9)

Herzog ends his essay with a discussion of Longinus’ notion of the sublime
in order to emphasize that truth is a form of momentary experience,
rather than something to possess, and to stress his point that it can be
created by the means available to the artist. Not only is Herzog “taking
the liberty to apply that notion to rare and fleeting moments in film”
(2010, p. 10), but he also invokes that Longinus is applying the same
method as he does when faking a quotation from the Iliad. Finally, he
stresses Longinus’ notion of unconcealment (alétheia) as a gesture related
to cinema in the way that it transforms reflections of light in order to
elevate (erheben) the spectator to a higher state of sublime or ecstatic
existence:

Thinking through language [im sprachlichen Denken], the Greeks meant,

therefore, to define truth as an act of disclosure—a gesture related to the
cinema, where an object is set into the light and then a latent, not yet visible
image is conjured onto celluloid, where it first must be developed, then
disclosed. (Herzog, 2010, p. 11)

To be sure, probably none of Herzog’s reflections could hold up in a

philological or philosophical seminar, and it almost seems as if he wants to
avoid becoming a theoretician of his own work when insisting that he is a
man of praxis even when writing a theoretical essay. In whatever way one
regards Herzog’s reflections on his own work, which he has produced in
countless interviews and DVD commentaries, they are an integral part of
his artistic persona and therefore not external to the work. However, the

50
 Herzog’s Mythology in Land of Silence and Darkness

question whether Herzog can be seen as a modern myth creator along the
lines of cinematic re-creation of the world can only be shown through an
engagement with his films.
Herzog’s approach to filmmaking is guided by an urge to produce
new images, which are new in the sense that they attempt to show
the world as our existential horizon. The existential truth that these
images reveal is a fictitious construction of factual material. Herzog’s
confusion of fact and fiction wants to elevate the status of fiction to that
of existential or ecstatic truth, meaning that truth can only become
a form of experience as a momentary image. Such images provide a
totality of the world in the epiphany of their appearance. Whereas
totality in the factual sense is both unattainable and devoid of any
truth-value beyond what Herzog calls the “truth of accountants”, the
stylized and enhanced facts he presents in his films evoke the world as
an aesthetic phenomenon (Mitcheson, 2013, p. 362). Herzog’s aesthetic
imperative could be thus framed as such: the existential need for a
view of the world cannot be achieved by factual representation and
must hence be evoked by the mythic epiphany of the image. With them
Herzog aims to achieve a justification of the world by aesthetic means, or,
in his terms, to produce images that are adequate to what it means to be
in the world.

Blind Myth: In the Land of Silence and Darkness

Herzog’s goal is to produce cinematic images that show something
beyond what is perceptible to our senses, but in an emphatic sense true,
which is also why Deleuze has called Herzog “the most metaphysical
of cinema directors” (1986, p. 185). His films can be regarded as a strategy
to reactivate our senses in order to perceive the world in a way not
accessible in everyday perception. In his 1971 documentary Land of
Silence and Darkness about the life of the deaf-blind Fini Straubinger,
Herzog tries to capture the way in which people that are handicapped
in their sensory perception interact with the world. As Gertrud Koch
(1986, pp. 73–86) and Randall Halle (2012, p. 495) have pointed
out, the central question of this film is the paradox of displaying in
the audio-visual medium of film the experience of that which has no
access to audio-visuality. Throughout the film we follow the middle-aged
woman Fini in her daily business as community leader and representative
of the deaf-blind and mute in Bavaria. We see her visiting other deaf-blind
and mute people, promoting the teaching and learning of the deaf-blind
alphabet, and undertaking trips with the community to the zoo or the
botanical garden. The film opens with a black screen, to which we hear
Boccherini’s Cello Concerto No.2, and Fini describing some of her

51
 Film-Philosophy 22 (2018)

Figure 1 Figure 2

earliest visual memories, which then appear as an image (Figure 1): “Ich
sehe vor mir einen Feldweg, der quer durch ein ungebrochenes Feld führt
und darüber fliegen eilige Wolken” [“I see in front of me a path that
leads across an unbroken field and above hastily flying clouds”] (Herzog,
1971).
Her narration continues with the description of ski jumping men that
she had seen when she was a child, an image she vividly remembers
and hopes that we (“Sie”), too, could see it once. A montage of ski
jumpers follows, to the continuous soundtrack of Boccherini’s concerto.
The sequence ends with an inter-title on which we can read a quotation
we are inclined to attribute to Fini: “Es ist ein solches Erschrecken, wenn
mich jemand berührt. Beim Warten vergehen die Jahre” [“It is such
an affright, when someone is touching me. While waiting, the years pass
by”] (Herzog, 1971). While touching is Fini’s physical relation to the
world, her vision connects her to the realm of the supersensible or
metaphysical, which remains invisible to us. With the exception of the
first frame, Herzog is not trying to find direct visual expressions for the
deaf-blind experience and shows instead the deaf-blind as deprived of
their senses and relying on touching. While Herzog certainly pays close
attention to the tactile relation to the world, the images of Fini touching
an airplane, a cactus, or a chimpanzee strikingly present us the disparity of
“their touching” and “our seeing.” The haptic quality of the images only
emphasizes the inaccessibility of the deaf-blind world to us, and thus
refers us to the limitations of our own experience (Carroll, 1998, p. 292).
These images reside in between the Land of Silence and Darkness and the
supersensible world and point in both directions at the same time.
The title does not refer to the place Fini inhabits, but rather to one
that threatens her being, for as long as there are images in the form of
memory or imagination and ways to express them, she is living among
humans. Facing this existential danger of imagelessness, every image is of

52
 Herzog’s Mythology in Land of Silence and Darkness

urgent importance and a means of survival. Without the possibility to

express them, Fini would be lost like the boy Vladimir, whom she meets
and who was born deaf-blind and never learned to communicate in any
way. While the way he experiences the world can only appear negatively
in the film, Fini is a figure between the world of the deaf-blind and
our world.
The images Herzog projects in order to convey Fini’s descriptions are
foundational for his cinematic language. The opening grainy black and
white shot shows a path winding through a field over which thick clouds
are passing hastily (eilig). Even before knowing Fini’s fate we see that this
image is precious and that it offers an existential dimension, namely a
ground, a horizon, and openness. The horizon we see in the image stands
in for the existential horizon that Nietzsche urged to encompass with
myths. Fini’s horizon consists of such images as much as ours, but it is
only through her situation that we can see the precariousness of our state.
The opening image cuts back to the black screen and we first hear Fini
remembering the image of the ski jumpers before we can see the sequence
of human bodies gently floating by. While the first image opens up the
world as an existential horizon, the following one displays the rising
human existence as actually protruding from the ground and hanging in
the open before landing safely. With this imagery, which undergoes
further development in the film The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner
(Die große Ekstase des Bildschnitzers Steiner, 1974), Herzog tries to
capture the ecstatic truth of existence similar to the Heideggerian
sense as holding oneself out into nothingness (Heidegger, 1998, p. 91).
The two vivid images of Fini’s memory tie her to the world and
keep her from falling into eternal darkness and silence and we
see throughout the film her tremendous efforts to defend her place in
this world. As has been pointed out several times, the film does not
suggest that the actual sensual experience of the deaf-blind can be equated
with total silence and darkness, but is experienced by Fini as hearing
“a constant noise” and seeing “odd colors ” (Koch, 1986, p. 77). While
the imagined absence of light or sounds does not express the physiological
experience of the deaf-blind, it provides Herzog with an empty canvas
on which he can project images of limited, distorted or fading
imagination.
If I was a divinely gifted painter, I would depict the fate of deaf-blindness in
the following way: Blindness as a dark stream, which flows melodically,
slowly but steady, towards a slope. On the left and right there are beautiful
trees with flowers and lovely singing birds. The other stream coming from
the opposite direction would have to be totally clear and transparent. Also

53
 Film-Philosophy 22 (2018)

this stream would have to flow slowly, but silently downwards. And then at
the bottom would be a dark and deep lake. At first there would be rocks on
both sides where the two streams flow into the lake, on which the water
painfully hits and foams and whirls, after which slowly and cautiously flows
together into this dark basin. And this water would be totally still, and
would have to drizzle from time to time: this would have to represent the
power of the soul of deaf-blindness. (Herzog, 1971)

Set aside the question of ownership of this text that Fini presents, the
image we are given is a linguistic or even ekphrastic one, and one that
unfolds in time as the succession of its elements. The image is presented as
a poetic inner vision intended to express the collective fate of the deaf-
blind, while Fini acts as their spokesperson capable of such poetic
expression. Articulated throughout in the subjunctive form and in Fini’s
unsteady voice, the image that is constructed does neither present a
beautiful, nor sublime or horrific landscape as the reflection of deaf-
blindness. It is an image that irritates in many ways as it appears at first as
a cliché of landscape painting that is distorted, out of focus, or seen from
multiple perspectives. The naı̈ve imagery of beautiful trees and singing
birds is thwarted by the two streams, one crystal-clear the other dark,
which create an effect of disorientation. Are we standing on the banks
of one of the rivers, or are we moving with the flow? Do we still see
the beautiful trees once we arrive at the lake, or is this a sequence of
distinct images? How does the slow and steady flow of the water agree
with the painful dashing against the rocks, given that such synaesthesia
is representable? These are not paradoxes, but rather fragments of images
that resist a harmonious assembly.
Obviously, this is poetic language, which is in no way obliged to be
coherent, but it is a precarious poetry. Poetic language, including pictorial
language, aims to go to the margins of what is expressible, but it always
departs from the center of linguistic or pictorial literacy. Fini’s visual
language only exists in the periphery of such literacy, which is the reason
for the discrepancy between her vision, her language, and the imagery that
her words form in the mind of someone able to see physical images. This
makes Fini’s vision radically different from poetic, religious or profane
sense of seeing, and as she is able to express these visions they become
accessible in their strangeness. Aimed to express the way a deaf-blind
person experiences their fate, Fini’s inner vision distorts our visual sense
and makes us see an appearance of something we have no access to, but
that is nevertheless real.
Fini’s visualization of her sensual experience is thus utter difference as
its references are damaged, and this distortion is what is transmitted

54
 Herzog’s Mythology in Land of Silence and Darkness

between her vision and ours.1 The image that is created is ecstatic in
the sense that it protrudes from the inaccessible ground of blindness
(or rather darkness) and it is true in the sense that it presents us the
inaccessibly of blindness. This is the ecstatic truth claim at the center
of Herzog’s aesthetic ambition that is connected to the truth claim of
myth. Mythical truth constitutes itself in appearances of the inaccessible
depths of existence where the light of reason does not reach. These
sensual appearances provide momentary glimpses at the absolute without
manifesting it in an icon or a divine law.
Whether Herzog or Fini herself authored the text quoted above, Fini
is capable of expressing her visions, whereas many of the people she is
trying to help as her Schicksalsgefährtin [companion in misfortune] have
either lost their ability to communicate or have never learned it. One
person she visits is Else Fehrer, a deaf-blind woman who could only
communicate with her mother and who lives after her mother’s death
in a mental institution where she, as the commentary explicitly states,
does not at all belong. Having lost almost her entire cognitive and
communicative abilities, Else’s limitation to inner vision stands in contrast
to the image we have of her. Her fascinating gaze seems directed, focused,
and clear, as if an inner sight could penetrate her physiological blindness.
In one long shot her blind gaze is juxtaposed with a rather active
performance for the camera by one “madwoman”, whose variety of
postures and facial expressions stand in contrast with Else’s steady stare.
The seeming clarity of her view that meets our eye is redirected towards
her interior and appears to give us access to her worldview without
images. The “madwoman”, on the other hand, seems to experience (or
suffer from) an overabundance of sensual attractions, to which she
responds by enacting different types.
Gertrud Koch (1986) has argued that Herzog tries to invoke a contrast
between the blind seer (Else) and the “industrious image-copier ” (“the
madwoman”), stating that the director erects this mask of fiction in order
to stage himself as the priest mediating higher truths. While the evocation
of higher, or rather deeper truths is indeed essential to Herzog’s aesthetics,
Koch’s juxtaposition of the authentic and the inauthentic image projects
her Benjaminian rejection of Herzog as a regressive neo-romantic onto a
visual language that is much more ambiguous. Particularly madness is a

1. At the end of her vision she admits the difference between her inner image and its
representation through language: “ Ich kann es nicht anders darstellen. Es ist innen
drinnen, aber man bringt es doch nicht so in Worte raus ” (“ I cannot put it differently.
It is inside, but one does not quite manage to put it into words ”).

55
 Film-Philosophy 22 (2018)

Figure 3 Figure 4

theme that runs through many of Herzog’s films as a state of ecstatic truth,
making it seem unlikely that the “madwoman ” should represent the
culture-industry as a subject to the pictorial exorcist Herzog (Koch, 1986,
p. 81).
Koch is engaged in an argument linked to Habermas’s (1987) project of
the continued modernity, which tries to establish criteria for a progressive
aesthetic discourse. She contrasts this discourse with aesthetic modes
that allegedly have been overcome by the historic avant-garde and the
technological and political development in the field of art, and particularly
cinema. Besides Benjamin’s concept of the lost aura Koch bases her
argument on Habermas’s rejection of new mythology in the mode
of Nietzsche and Heidegger as a false immediacy, which goes back to
Adorno’s rejection of the jargon of authenticity. The aesthetic justification
of the world must, in Habermas’s terms, be reflected by a critical
subjective consciousness in order to inherit the absolute claim of
mythology. For Koch the tradition of the radical avant-garde, which
gets few and mostly negative conceptual contours through the example of
Herzog’s film, seems to be the valid paradigm of aesthetic progression,
while the historicity of this paradigm is not questioned. Only against this
tradition can a label such as “neo-romantic regression ” be effective,
whereas it means very little when the perspective is shifted from the
Marxist dynamic of history (and art) towards the visual language of the
film itself. Here one has to renegotiate the relation of inner vision,
photographic indexicality (or the real), and the aesthetic surplus that
emerges through effects of stylization.
Koch’s main charge is that Herzog naively translates his romantic
worldview into metaphors, while degrading if not abusing his subjects
(human beings) to the role of material of aesthetic construction. As seen in
the discussion of Fini’s inner vision, the construction of images resists
representational visual language and opens by means of distortion,

56
 Herzog’s Mythology in Land of Silence and Darkness

stylization, and the paradoxes of blind vision, which Koch actually

described very accurately. Fini’s perspective becomes ours because the
transformation of her vision into ours is precisely not representative or
metaphorical (Ames, 2012, p. 21). The depth of an imageless existence,
which we see in many variations throughout the film, is by itself not
representable, but appears negatively in Fini’s vision or in the image of
Else Fehrer’s blind gaze.
The fate of the deaf-blind, or rather their condition, is not the central
issue in this film. Although the film’s subject is portrayed in a very sensible
way, Herzog’s actual interest lies elsewhere. What is at stake is the
experience of primal imagery, which Herzog shows us through the
perspective of the deaf-blind, who either suffer from a lack of images or
are unable to express their inner visual world. Their images remain either
in the dark as they cannot be reflected or communicated at all, or, when
translated into words, lose their suggestive power. This raises the larger
question of the emergence of the image from the ground of nothingness.
But it also reveals Herzog’s position as a visionary, who is confident of his
ability to express our collective dreams and to capture them in the
cinematic image. Rather than trying to find correlations to the inner visual
world of the deaf-blind, Herzog discloses their vision through a positive
view of the negative experience of the deaf-blind. What we see is not how
Herzog thinks that they see the world, but we see them having to connect
their disparate sensual experience to a world that we as an audience can
see and identify very clearly. The existential struggle for primal images, for
a view of the world, is thus presented indirectly by showing a
fundamentally different sensual experience through the familiar surfaces
of reality. We see the deaf-blind having other images of the same world
and their visual disconnection to the world, being made visible to us,
reflects and radically challenges our perception, while hinting at the
possibility of seeing the world in its own image.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adorno, T. W. (1991). The Essay as Form (S. W. Nicholsen, Trans.). In R. Tiedemann
(Ed.), Notes to Literature (pp. 3–23). New York: Columbia University Press.
Ames, E. (2012). Ferocious Reality: Documentary According to Werner Herzog. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Arnheim, R. (1957). Film and Reality. In Film as Art (pp. 8–34). Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Bazin, A. (2009). What is Cinema? (T. Barnard, Trans.). Montreal: Caboose.
Benjamin, W. (2004). The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. In
H. Eiland & M. Jennings (Eds.), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings vol. 4 1938–1940
(pp. 251–283). Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press.
Boehm, G. (Ed.). (1995). Was ist ein Bild? Munich: Fink.

57
 Film-Philosophy 22 (2018)

Brecht, B. (2000). Brecht on Film and Radio (M. Silbermann, Trans. & Ed.). London:
Methuen.
Carroll, N. (1998). Interpreting the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cavell, S. (1971). The World Viewed. New York: Viking Press.
Corrigan, T. (2011). To Be Elsewhere: Cinematic Excursions as Essayistic Travel. In The
Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (pp. 104–130). Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Corrigan, T. (2012). The Pedestrian Ecstasies of Werner Herzog On Experience,
Intelligence, and the Essayistic. In B. Prager (Ed.), A Companion to Werner Herzog
(pp. 80–98). Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell.
Deleuze, G. (1986). Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam,
Trans.). London: Athlone Press.
Gadamer, H.-G. (2004). Truth and Method. New York: Verso.
Gandy, M. (2012). The Melancholy Observer: Landscape, Neo-Romanticism, and the
Politics of Documentary Filmmaking. In B. Prager (Ed.), A Companion to Werner Herzog
(pp. 528–546). Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell.
Gunning, T. (2008). What’s the Point of an Index? or, Faking Photographs. In K. Beckman
& J. Ma (Eds.), Still/Moving: Between Cinema and Photography (pp. 23–40). Durham:
Duke University Press.
Habermas, J. (1987). The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press.
Halle, R. (2012). Perceiving the Other in the Land of Silence and Darkness. In B. Prager
(Ed.), A Companion to Werner Herzog (pp. 487–509). Hoboken, New Jersey:
Wiley-Blackwell.
Hansen, M. B. (2012). Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and
Theodor W. Adorno. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Heidegger, M. (1938/1977). The Age of the World-Picture (W. Lovitt, Trans.). In
The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays (pp. 115–154). New York: Harper
& Row.
Heidegger, M. (1998). Pathmarks (W. McNeil, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Herzog, W. (1999). Minnesota Declaration. Retrieved from http://www.wernerherzog.com/
117.html
Herzog, W. (2010). On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth. Arion: A Journal of
Humanities and the Classics, 17(3), 1–12.
Herzog, W. (2014). A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin. London: Faber
& Faber.
Johnson, L. R. (2016). Forgotten Dreams: Revisiting Romanticism in the Cinema of Werner
Herzog. Rochester: Camden House.
Koch, G. (1986). Blindness as Insight: Visions of the Unseen in Land of Silence and Darkness.
In T. Corrigan (Ed.), The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History
(pp. 73–86). New York: Methuen.
Lukács, G. (2010). Soul and Form (A. Bostock, Trans.). New York: Columbia University
Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). The Film and the New Psychology (H. L. Dreyfus &
P. A. Dreyfus (Trans.). In Sense and Non-sense (pp. 48–59). Evanston: Northwestern
University Press.
Mitchell, W. J. T. (1994). Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

58
 Herzog’s Mythology in Land of Silence and Darkness

Mitcheson, K. (2013). Perspectivism in Nietzsche and Herzog: The Documentary Film as a

Perspectival Truth Practice. Film-Philosophy, 17(1), 348–366.
Nancy, J.-L. (2005). The Ground of the Image (J. Fort, Trans.). New York: Fordham
University Press.
Nichols, B. (1991). Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Nietzsche, F. (1999). The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings (R. Speirs, Trans.).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Otto, W. F. (1951). Gesetz: Urbild und Mythos. Stuttgart: Metzler.
Peirce, C. S. (1998). Syllabus: Nomenclature and Division of Triadic Relations, as Far
as They Are Determined. In The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings
(1893–1913), vol. 2 (pp. 289–299). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Prager, B. (2007). The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth. New York:
Wallflower.
Prager, B. (2012). A Companion to Werner Herzog. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Rascaroli, L. (2009). The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film. London:
Wallflower.
Vertov, D. (1984). Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov (K. O’Brien, Trans.). Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Wahl, C. (2011). Das Authentische und Ekstatische versus das Stilisierte und Essayistische:
Herzogs Doku-Fiktionen. In C. Wahl (Ed.), Lektionen in Herzog: Neues über Deutschlands
verlorenen Filmautor Werner Herzog und sein Werk (pp. 282–329). Munich: ET+K.
Walser, R. (1915). Kleine Dichtungen. Leipzig: Wolff.

59