The extreme pilgrimage that Werner Herzog undertook

In November 1974, the filmmaker Werner Herzog (Munich, 1942) received the news that film critic and historian Lotte Eisner was very ill. Contradicting the cliché that creators fear and despise critics and scholars, Herzog reacted with a mixture of filial despair and fervent, devoted gratitude.It is understood. Eisner, Jewish and communist, had fled Germany just as Hitler came to power and, after many journeys in exile in France, she became the right hand of Henri Langlois, founder and director of the Cinémathèque française. As a curator of the cinematheque, Eisner undertook a rescue operation for as many German films shot before Nazism as she could. And, in parallel, she wrote books about the artistic movement that had produced the most masterful results: expressionism. As if that were not enough, while recovering the tradition of the foundational classics (Wiene, Murnau, Lang, Pabst, Stroheim, Sternberg), Eisner also supported what became known as New German Cinema, the generation of young filmmakers who appeared in the late 60s, among whom were such powerful and personal names as those of Fassbinder, Wenders, Schlöndorff, and Herzog himself.To be guided by an irrational superstition

Herzog's simultaneously filial and devoted reaction to the news of Lotte Eisner's imminent death is explained by the fact that he admired her, was grateful to her, and felt indebted to her. He saw her as a kind of wise, savior, and provider goddess: without her and her work, German cinema would have no past and could not have had a future. If we take all this into account, the decision Herzog then made to try to save Eisner will not seem strange to us: to begin an admiring pilgrimage from Munich to Paris, in the depths of the European winter, nearly eight hundred kilometers covered at full speed. Herzog was not guided by a rational and logical conviction, but by an irrational superstition that took on the dimension of a supreme and transcendental conviction: if he arrived on foot in time to visit her, she would not die.During the three-week pilgrimage, Herzog took notes, and shortly after he published a book, Of Walking in Ice, which reaches us now in English edited by Flâneur in a translation by Ramon Farrés and with a careful and informative afterword by Chantal Poch. It is a book that has the vivid and tense schematism, unelaborated but incisive, of notebooks. Sometimes telegraphic, the book has a global stylistic dryness and abruptness, with brushstrokes of dreamlike texture and flashing reflections of a hallucinatory tone.Herzog is a reader of landscapes, an interpreter of environments, a thermometer of hostile situations –he has worked in jungles, in Antarctica, in deserts...–, and here he demonstrates it by focusing the text on his physical relationship with the territory and the climate. There are abundant notes about physical pain, about the impact that wind, snow, cold, sleet, and damp fog have on his body. With sentences that seem disconnected and paragraphs made as if by an alluvium, in which descriptive notes, sketches of ideas, and accounts of concrete actions are mixed –now I sleep in a haystack, now I arrive at a village, now I feel a strange fraternity with the crows that fly over me–, Herzog tirelessly narrates his exhausting walk.The question is: if the author of these notes were not Werner Herzog, the adventurous filmmaker who filmed Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo and Grizzly Man, among so many other films, would we read the book with the same interest and the same predisposition? The answer is obvious: no. But the fact is that the author of these notes is Werner Herzog. The authorial aura is there and it is noticeable. Furthermore, there are not a few themes or elements of Herzog's cinema that are also present here: the X-ray of a lonely man, half megalomaniac and half deranged, who finds himself in an extreme situation that he has sought out for himself; a physical experience of the world; a constant impression of improvisation directed with intention; a deliberately abrupt and imperfect formalization of a way of living life and of being in the world, all told with a visceral and highly intelligent tone...The second best thing that can be said about Of Walking in Ice is that it is pure Herzog. The best thing that can be said about it is that Lotte Eisner did not die until many years later and that, therefore, Werner Herzog and his stubborn footsteps saved her.