Review: Werner Herzog’s Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin

In Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin, people claim that the film’s subject was in pursuit of “strangeness.” The British traveler and writer explored often obscure reaches of the Earth, searching for totems, places, and people of mystifying beauty and custom to broaden his empathy and experience while presumably putting him closer to the stirrings of his soul. “Strangeness” in the context of Nomad seems to mean “transcendence,” and Chatwin’s writing mixed adventure, mythology, fact, and poetic rumination into an irresistible cocktail for Werner Herzog, whose cinema is founded on similar obsessions.

As Nomad recounts, Herzog was friendly with Chatwin, who died of complications from AIDS in 1989 at the age of 48. Chatwin was obsessed with Aboriginal cultures, especially their traditions of song and oral storytelling, which inspired his bestselling The Songlines in 1987. A “songline” is a song that’s thought to have created land, or perhaps land created the song. Herzog, who met Chatwin in Australia in the early ’80s, vaguely but intentionally defines the concept, as we’re encouraged to intuit the relationship between Aboriginal art and the vast stretches of land that are tattooed with trails that could have either been fashioned by humankind or the wind and movements of the Earth. The “songline” works for the outsider as a lovely metaphor of seeing music in the existence of our surroundings.

“Documentary” isn’t an especially useful descriptor for Nomad, which is a loose collection of ruminations and pontifications that are mostly undeveloped. The Aboriginal songlines alone justify a film, though Herzog hopscotches between half a dozen other promising subjects across a brisk 88 minutes. There’s the story of a Brontosaurus skin discovered in Patagonia (in actuality the skin of a large sloth), which Chatwin’s grandmother kept in a cabinet of curiosities that sparked the boy’s fascination with exploration. There are also tales of extinct nomadic travelers whom Herzog barely distinguishes, some destroyed by colonialists, sojourns to the astonishing mountains of Wilshire, and recollections of Chatwin watching Herzog work on the extraordinary Cobra Verde, an adaptation of Chatwin’s The Viceroy of Ouidah.

Herzog’s approach here allows him to seize upon textures he savors and move on to something else awe-inspiring without cluttering any tangent or image with exposition. A supplementary subject of most of Herzog’s work, which it shares with Chatwin’s, is restlessness—a bottomless yearning for wonder. With the possible exception of 2015’s stultifying Queen of the Desert, no Herzog work lacks for awesomely uncanny images, many of which compel us to see and re-see the dying Earth we take as a given. One of this film’s greatest images is a close shot of a lizard’s skin, which suggests a craggy, convulsing planet. In this case, an explanation of the lizard, citing various National Geographic-style statistics, might’ve interfered with the meditative quality of the sequence. It’s a relief to be permitted to simply savor the evocative alien-ness of the creature, as we might if we encountered it while on the sort of nomadic wandering that Herzog and Chatwin cherish. And throughout Nomad, Herzog imbues other landscapes and objects—a mysterious shipwrecked vessel, cave paintings of hands that suggest fire, even a disregarded vehicle from Star Wars—with a similar awe, suggesting the porous boundaries between the past and present, the sacred and pop art.

Herzog, though, is also full of hot air. It’s amazing the sorts of sentiments that a filmmaker with his intensity of bearing can get away with in the moment, though the hubris of his methods reveals itself in retrospect. At one point, Herzog interrupts a plug for his 1991 Chatwin-inspired film Scream of Stone to remind a companion, and us, that Chatwin is the protagonist of Nomad rather than himself, which scans as a half-hearted gesture of humility.

More dubiously, Herzog also reuses a trope from Grizzly Man, in which he refuses to share information with the audience as a testament to his own gallantry. In Nomad, the scene concerns a shot of a cover of Theodor G. Strehlow’s monumental book about the ceremonial poetry of the Arrernte people, Songs of Central Australia, which is partially obscured because it’s not to be seen by people outside of the tribal community, even if we’re still given enough information to look it up for ourselves anyway (the image is easily found online), and Herzog still gets to trade on its legend. Such moments suggest that Herzog has rarely truly examined the exploitive implications of his daring and singular pursuits of erudition. Nomad reminds us that the sole remaining undiscovered country for Herzog might be his ego.