There is just one Werner Herzog. The stoic German who, after being shot throughout an interview, replied in his signature deadpan, “it isn’t a big bullet,” has an affinity for these on the finish of the world — dying row inmates, loners, mystics. Throughout his extraordinary physique of labor he has slipped between fiction and documentary with the convenience of a person who doesn’t worry dying. Now, aged 82, he has been steadily making documentaries exploring a combination of contemporary and historical phenomena — something that permits him to journey and interview fascinating oddballs. “Ghost Elephants” arrives with slightly additional fanfare, premiering in Venice alongside the competition awarding him a lifetime achievement award within the type of an Honorary Lion.
On the floor, “Ghost Elephants” seems to be a throwback to certainly one of Herzog’s canonical classics “Grizzly Man” (2005). Unwell-fated American bear fanatic and filmmaker Timothy Treadwell and residing South African conservationist and explorer Dr. Steve Boyes are each males extra comfy residing inside nature than amongst their fellow people. We meet Boyes misty-eyed at The Smithsonian Nationwide Historical past Museum as he stands earlier than the taxidermied corpse of the most important bull elephant to be exhibited in any museum. This, he explains, is “Henry” and Boyes has carried a photograph of him round for a decade, solely now seeing him for the primary time. It’s his dream to search out the residing descendants of Henry who he believes might roam in an elevated Angolan plateau nicknamed “the supply of life.”
The hubristic nature of the expedition that follows, and the landscapes captured, recall to mind a really totally different Herzog title. Though Boyes is way mellower than the wild-eyed Klaus Kinski, the pointless want to make inroads in a land that doesn’t want him evokes one thing of “Fitzcarraldo” (1982). This judgement is mine, for Herzog is way subtler and extra ambivalent in his framing of Boyes, not totally suggesting on this movie — made for the Nationwide Geographic with Disney cash — that his topic is a loon however, equally, not leaving that interpretation off the desk.
If Herzog has been compelled by the character of the task to point out reserve within the depiction of his main man, he’s extra full-throated on the subject of his portrayal of the elephants in query; within the gulf between his enthusiasms, it’s doable to see the place his strongest sympathies lie. For though the scene at The Smithsonian initially appears set as much as introduce us to Dr. Steve Boyes, it additionally introduces us to Henry, an impressive mammal technically known as “The Fénykövi Elephant” after his killer, Josef Fénykövi.
To contextualize Henry, Herzog makes probably the most of time spent in Namibia, the place Boyes has gone to discover a crack group of grasp trackers from the Ju/Hoansi San Bushmen within the Kalahari, one of many oldest cultures on Earth whose language contains clicking. We meet a person named Xui who can “learn tracks like a newspaper.” We additionally meet an aspiring soccer participant turned anthropologist who tells the story of how Henry was shot after which chased for 15km in stark, brutal phrases.
Herzog inserts a clip from the 1966 movie “Africa Addis” of a household of elephants being gunned from a helicopter (anecdotally, a member of the viewers was sobbing), in addition to pictures of a grinning Fénykövi in entrance of the wrinkled mountain of Henry’s fallen physique. The absurdity of males pondering it’s an achievement to destroy lovely creatures comes throughout in highly effective phrases. Because the anthropologist places it, “Man is on a mission to destroy what he’s a part of, which is biodiversity.” It’s onerous to not keep in mind certainly one of Herzog’s most iconic and indelible strains, “I consider the widespread denominator of the universe isn’t concord, however chaos, hostility, and homicide.”
Instances have modified and big-game looking is out of style, though coming so quickly after harrowing photographs of elephant poaching, it’s alarming once we witness the trackers working a lethal poison right into a dart. “Ghost Elephants” is nothing if not a movie which commits to asides, and it’s compelling when Xui tells a narrative of his personal brush with the poison. Certainly, it’s within the patchwork of vignettes that unfold round Boyes, reasonably than the portrait of the person himself, that the movie breathes and Werner Herzog’s auteurial colours flourish.
His whimsical adoration of the mighty beasts on the coronary heart of issues is expressed in footage of elephants transferring underwater. These sequences — and cut-aways to different uncommon beasts — supply a magical respite from the underbaked plans of a person whose motive to find the ghost elephants is rarely totally articulated. The implication is it’s a part of a conservation effort and but, as Dr. Boyes, Werner Herzog, San Bushman trackers, and trackers from the Luchazi tribe make the 2-day journey from Namibia to the Angolan highlands, the tip aim isn’t given any anticipatory gravity.
Herzog weighs each scene equally, not utilizing one to hype up the subsequent. An viewers with the King of Nkangala — whose permission is required to trace the ghost elephants — unfolds as casually as footage of a tribesmen spending all day fixing his instrument. There’s, in truth, extra awe to the latter sequence as expressed in narration: “I do know I shouldn’t romanticize him however I do know that … surrounded by chickens … it doesn’t get any higher than that.”
It is a jazz movie held collectively by Herzog’s distinctive narration with its irreverent humorousness. It’s each irritating and intriguing to be stored in ignorance concerning his true views on Boyes. His delicate negging on the level of narrative climax is entertaining, but it does additionally affect the construction of “Ghost Elephants” itself, denying us an overarching sense of perspective. The pleasure of listening to Herzog communicate comes from his bracing candor, so it’s onerous to not really feel that one thing is amiss in his implication-driven tackle Boyes.
Nonetheless, for these prepared to piece the image collectively from its most superb sections, that is an affectionate and affection-inducing pursuit of actual animals and unreachable desires.
Grade: B
“Ghost Elephants” premiered on the 2025 Venice Movie Pageant. It’s at the moment in search of U.S. distribution.
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