I remember reading an interview where an American journalist asked Sophia Loren how she manages to be beautiful. Slightly exasperated, she simply replied that you are beautiful or you are not. I was reminded of that when the CBC’s Matt Galloway asked Werner Herzog for his latest Hot Docs-supported #TIFF20 documentary premiere where the awe inherent in his work comes from and Herzog replied that it’s always been in him. In typical Herzog fashion, he goes on to talk about cataclysms, stardust, extraterrestrials, and atomic bombs.
In Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds, filmmaker Herzog and scientist Clive Oppenheimer take us to the farthest corners of the world to trace meteors and comets and their impact on religions and culture. The premise is alluring (if not fully fulfilled), connecting past, present and future over two hours: How can pre-human events shape our thinking and feeling, as a “simulacrum”, an image or representation of something?
The unexplored Kaaba meteorite at Mecca is a case in point.
With Encounters at the End of the World, Into the Inferno, and now Fireball, Herzog+Oppenheimer are the heirs to Sir David Attenborough’s Nature series. Noticeably, Herzog also reunites with Ernst Reijseger as composer, who scored Herzog’s South American eco drama Salt and Fire. The imagery in Fireball is Herzog’s exquisite own with a lot of crowd-sourced dash cam, cell phone, and stock footage.
We start out on familiar Herzog terrain, South America, with hints of documentary dramatization (see also last year’s
Family Romance, LLC) as we witness a contemporary Indigenous fireball ritual alluding to an asteroid hitting the Yucatan eons ago. Fact and fiction begin to intersect to tell a compelling (enough) story.
It gets a bit technical and “out there” in the middle, and the moment I think it, I hear the classic voice say “it gets so complicated now that we are not going to torture you with details”. Science historian Simon Schaffer of Cambridge University I could have listened to for 140 minutes, I dreamily think to myself – just as Herzog chimes in to comment that Schaffer could have continued without getting boring for the next eight hours. That is how this film works: A smart, well-structured and classically dramaturged made-for-TV doc, where scientist meets mystic and amateur meets pro, and lots of information. As the film goes on, I wonder whether Herzog’s entertaining eccentricity and bizarre humour is starting to rub off on Oppenheimer, as he dons a (subdued) Hawaiian shirt at the island observatory and jests with the papal scientist whether he would baptize aliens.
Overall more interesting than the rocks are the humans. Quirky characters including Wyatt Earp and emotional South Korean explorers populate the film (and eventually a good number of women in what starts out as a very male universe), all looking for messages, explanations, and meaning. What will be our undoing? What could be our salvation? (“Pray”, the priest laughs.)
The filmmakers pique my interest when they go looking for representations of atoms in ancient art. I crave more cultural “excavations”, wanting to hear more about how heavenly phenomena relate to Mayan and other cosmologies (Hindu beliefs are also mentioned but not explored visually or narratively either). I am not sure I am getting many new relevant insights, but the questions raised around divine designs, prophets, and survival, are worthwhile and inviting further fantasies (and why not). On what to do when the next terrible beauties strike our planet (instantly turning us into glass, I do learn), I will have to revisit Lars von Trier’s Melancholia as a sci-fi companion piece to this documentary.
Personally, I could have done with half the time on organic and inorganic molecules and less relative tameness by Herzog, but there is lots to keep you watching (as of November 13 on Apple TV+): Oppenheimer’s sly nerd humour, the scientists’ passion and joy for their jobs and subjects (“Don’t drop the meteorite on your toes – it might break!”), visual references to the world of art and culture to explore further.
All roads lead back to awe and wonder. As Oppenheimer says: Werner is made of special stuff and the material profits from his eye to different perspectives, scales, and collateral musings as he pushes to explain the unexplainable. Frontiers, we have long realized, are never final with Werner Herzog.
by
@JuttaBrendemuhl
image courtesy of Apple TV+
