Three ideas towards a geocinema in Werner Herzog

Abstract

This paper investigates Werner Herzog’s filmography, especially from 2000 onwards, whilst guided by the hypothesis that this filmography points towards a cinema of the Earth, which we suggest calling geocinema. Serving as guidance for a mapping of signs and cinematographic ideas in movies such as Grizzly Man (2005), Encounters at the End of the World (2007), Into the Inferno (2016), Fireball (2020) and others, such hypothesis also consists in perceiving and making possible to think of an événementiel sensibility of the herzogian work on climate catastrophes and planetary relations between humans and other modes of existence. This geocinematographic thinking makes itself noticeable in three audiovisual ideas: a tension between the Small and the Large, in which the difference of scale demonstrates the limits and potentialities of the relation between human and beyond-human; an encounter with the event Gaia, which makes the Earth’s catastrophic indifference towards humanity visible; a perspectivist encyclopedism which collects characters drawn towards abyssal zones. The three ideas are translated considering Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy that describes acts of creation not from the point-of-view of its phenomenal materiality, but as singular operations of thought which populate an oeuvre. This way, the analysis of ideal intensities leads to considering that the geocinematographic thinking that permeates Herzog’s movies indicate ways of living with catastrophe through a sensible ethics of the event.