For the last couple of decades, Werner Herzog has kept returning to a peculiar specialty: the wonders of nature, often as seen through the eyes of a specific scientist or adventurer. He’s tackled bears in “Grizzly Man,” Antarctica in “Encounters at the End of the World,” 30,000-year-old paintings in “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” volcanoes in “Into the Inferno,” meteorites in “Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds” and now African elephants in “Ghost Elephants,” which premiered on Thursday at the Venice Film Festival.
This trend isn’t necessarily new for Herzog – you can trace its roots back to one of his first nonfiction movies, 1971’s “Fata Morgana,” about mirages in the desert. But it brings out a continuing desire on his part to find the poetry in nature and in those who explore it. He doesn’t approach these topics as a strict documentarian would, though; the most memorable sequence in his doc filmmaking over the last couple of decades may well be his reverie at the end of “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” where he conjures up entirely fictional (though he doesn’t tell you that) radioactive albino crocodiles in the river that flows near where some of mankind’s oldest artworks reside.
So when Werner gets all Herzoggian about mysterious mammoth elephants in “Ghost Elephants,” we can be sure that he’s looking beyond the facts to the myths and legends that make them worthy of his attention. And you could even say that his interest in the subject makes this a suspense movie of sorts, the suspense being how long it’ll take Herzog to say something profound and mystical in his inimitable (or, rather, very imitatable) Teutonic tones.
In this case, the suspense is short-lived. “Ghost Elephants” doesn’t feature a lot of the filmmaker’s trademark reveries, particularly when it comes to its relatively straightforward voiceover. (It’s “we went there, we did that, he said this” kind of stuff.) But as an off-camera questioner, it only takes him about 10 minutes to invoke Herman Melville and ask his ghost-elephant expert, Dr. Steve Boyes, “Is it almost like going after the white whale? The unknown, the mysterious?”
Dr. Steve’s answer is yes, because if you want to hang out with Werner, a taste for the myterious is pretty much de rigeur. What’s interesting is that Boyes then admits that maybe the ghost elephants don’t exist at all — or maybe they do exist, but their expedition won’t find them and he’ll spend the rest of his life looking. And when he repeats the same line about 40 minutes later, you wonder if he and the filmmaker are setting us up for disappointment or justifying it to themselves in advance.
Regardless, the hunt is pretty cool. It starts at the recently-maligned Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where Boyes and Herzog go face-to-face with Henry, a reconstituted 13-ton elephant who is considered the single largest specimen of a land animal on Earth.
The theory is that the ghost elephants, called that because they’ve left traces of their presence but don’t have any documented sightings by humans, are related to Henry and may have been living for centuries in the Angola Highlands, a remote high-altitude region about the size of England that is considered “the water tower of Africa.”
The leisurely paced 99-minute film, made with National Geographic, gets elegant with slo-mo underwater shots of pachyderms and takes a lot of time to set up the expedition, meeting the Kalahari bushmen and hanging out with Namibian trackers and tribal hunters from a variety of African regions that can lay claim to being the birthplace of humanity.
There’s a tutorial in making deadly poison from the cocoons of beetle grubs, heartbreaking footage from the heyday of big-game hunting and looks at the daily life in some tribal communities. The film shows footage of a tribal elder spending his day repairing a small stringed instrument while chickens run around him, and Herzog just can’t help himself. “I know I should not romanticize this,” he says, “but surrounded by chickens, it cannot get any better than this.”
We’re not going to spoil what the trackers do find, because the movie is about the journey, not the result. Suffice it to say that it’s not as bad as Boyes fears or as fabulous as we’d like, and that lots of labs are still doing lots of tests whose results will be published at a later date.
In a way, this makes “Ghost Elephants” a case of Herzog lite, at least when it comes to his mystical nature docs. It’s fascinating but not revelatory, thought provoking but not mind blowing. And since it’s for NatGeo, the filmmaker probably can’t get away with any of that radioactive albino crocodile stuff, though crocs do at least threaten to make an appearance.
At any rate, it’s a look at a wonder of nature that has been there for a long time.
We’re talking about Werner Herzog, of course.
