There are certain filmmakers where each utterance becomes a gravitational pull, and Werner Herzog – charming anticonformist, profound depictor of hubris, reality television fan, chicken loather and occasional bullet survivor – is undoubtedly one. His latest, Ghost Elephants, is not only intriguing as the film that accompanied his lifetime achievement award at Venice, but also for the anticipation of how his truly iconic cadence might utter the title words itself (spoiler: Ga host Eh Luh Phunts) might sound like a late-career curio, a footnote in a singular oeuvre already swollen with human tragedy, ambition and misunderstanding of life itself. And in many respects, the film does play as of some of his thematic greatest hits but what emerges is something gentler and more fractured. While its relatively toothless compared to his earlier work, this film, made with National Geographic, peers into the Angolan highlands in search of colossal elephants, and ends up gently reflecting on the ghosts of human longing.
The ostensible protagonist is Dr Steve Boyes, a South African naturalist with a misty-eyed devotion to a museum exhibit: “Henry,” the Fénykövi elephant, felled in 1955 and immortalised behind glass at the Smithsonian. Boyes, clutching a decades-old photo of the taxidermy beast, embarks on a quest to find Henry’s descendants in the wild. It’s a premise that on paper recalls his beloved documentary Grizzly Man, yet Herzog, ever suspicious of both fictional and non-fictional obsession, does not sharpen his knives. Instead, his voiceover purrs around the edges, slyly amused, gently sceptical of its own romanticisation of events.
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The film’s true sympathies lie elsewhere. When elephants finally fill the screen, sliding underwater with a grace that belies their heft, congregating in unspoken bonds shimmering with the gauzy gaze of African heat, the camera lingers. Their enormity feels otherworldly, titans out of sync with the small human concerns that pursue them. The San trackers, particularly a man named Xui who reads prints with all the precision of elite military tracking devices, provide the most grounded counterpoint to Boyes at times when his insights are uncomfortably fixed through a colonialist gaze, yet Herzog also seems to have more true interest in their stories of their connection to these magnificent animals and environments, sketching a push and pull between reverence and entitlement to nature’s spoils.
This is less a fully cohesive narrative than an occasionally overtly stitched together patchwork of filmmaking goals. Audiences with kings are framed with almost impressive mundanity, Boyes’s motive seems at times puerile but sits alongside a musician spending his day transfixed by fixing his instrument; the latter being held with more tenderness in Herzog’s gaze, while he himself questions the true motives behind his fascination with this simpler worldview. The editing has a signature looseness, refusing to promise neat climaxes or conclusions. That refusal may frustrate those conditioned by a far spread National Geographic polish which adheres to a sunnier view of nature, but post-credits, the film as a whole still feels true to Herzog’s own perspective that the world is filled with beauty and an unnerving propensity to destroy it.
What lingers most is not Boyes’s quest but the vignettes stitched around it. An archival clip of elephants strafed from a helicopter leaves an audience audibly sobbing; photographs of Josef Fénykövi, rifle in hand, grinning grotesquely. “Man is on a mission to destroy what he’s part of,” one anthropologist remarks, and Herzog lets the words hang heavy. While it would be easy to read Herzog’s work as a reflection upon his own mortality as a filmmaker, he seems uninterested in chasing closure. He remains elusive, but imbued with affection for human condition, the potential of cinema and beasts too grand for either to truly capture.
