Herzog is more energetic, curious, and lively than ever at 78. It's infectious. I just like how much he cares, that might teach us too shake out the temptation of the misanthrope. Here he walks the footsteps of the author of Cobra Verde. "David Bowie wants to make it. No, no, no, no, he can't." It is a long psychoanalysis of something entirely invisible, the spirit and instinct of an author's restless search for curious novelty. As art on the caves--this has those too--and a constant physicality of spaces across the pic; point being he seeks these landmarks, like the classic author exercise of copying classic novels to know your own prose. It is connective, as those hands on the walls invite you to place your own on them. Because everything he says of Chatwin is himself. "The amormpheous dull restless matter... etc..." Both are painfully seeking life as if they know a horrible alternative, that passion must come from the fright of the abyss. The way Herzog fetishize and peruse old texts and journals, these are like excavating ancient books when are relatively recent history is an act of mythologizing himself. He grips the Cobra Verde script with Chatwin's anotations like a giddy boy on Christmas--he is in constant awe of Chatwin in terms of himself, as Herzog says of him, "He was the internet before it existed." That in terms of finding knowledge, tidbits, trivia, as the late night rabbit holes. There is something both honoring and autiobiographical to all this, and very narcissistic. "Would the anontations have helped?" "I don't know I have never even held them!" The first sections feels in search of a documentary... you have the constant feeling this is about nothing, even as it's delivering great mind candies... leylines, the magnetosphere, abo songs, hills... And that isn't a total criticism. As isn't the uncertainty the very spirit of Chatwin? Do we want to see documentaries that know exactly where they're going, or risk mysteries and dead ends? Last is you sort of wonder, why is Herzog seeming so uncharacteristically happy through this... I can only see it as some summation, some coming to peace with his mortality. His friend had gone the other side as the last travelogue. The path is made and there is nothing to fear. This brother once again went first. You get a sense Herzog either wanted to make this doc for decades and didn't know how, or he finally drew the courage and did not realize how right it would be. You wonder if you'd meet a Chatwin, a fellow traveller with mutual and complimentive respect. There are even the Herzog cliches of we cannot show you this, the constant clips of his work, and the embellishments. Stuff like that turned me off from him for many years like a dad who you know all his jokes and tricks, and heard them a thousand times, while new guests were just delighted... and you slink back like 'why do they fall for it'. But something about 2020 returns us to our fathers. Then... the film is off and I'm staring at the black screen abyss. This is what I mean how it's not just them.
