Abstract
This article articulates a dialogue between Werner Herzog’s films and Martin Heidegger’s philosophy to illuminate human dwelling. In the light of Heidegger’s ideas of dwelling, thrownness, they-self, authenticity, abyss and being-towards-death, I look into the abyss of society as represented by Herzog, considering dwelling with humans in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) and Into the Abyss (2011) as dwelling through language and dwelling in proximity to death. This article’s primary purpose is to redress society’s overly negative connotation as monstrous and unhomely in Herzog and, against the predominant critical interpretations and Herzog’s self-commentary, discover the homely therein. Specifically, this film-philosophy dialogue will shed important light on both Herzog and Heidegger. Heidegger’s philosophical thought enables a creative and insightful reading of overlooked yet significant aesthetic forms in Herzog’s films: the motif of tears in Kaspar Hauser and the jump cuts and close-ups in Abyss. Meanwhile, Herzog’s films work out Heidegger’s paradoxical and etymological wordplay of the abyss that also grounds. Not only do the films affectively effectuate and interrogate the terror and promise of human dwelling in artistic terms, but Abyss also breaks the Heideggerian category of mortality and gestures towards Hannah Arendt’s idea of natality.
Wherever I look I seem to be peering into a dizzying, dark abyss.
– HerzogBeing “is” the abyss.
– HeideggerIn a promotional photograph (Fig. 1) for Fata Morgana (Werner Herzog, 1971), one of Herzog’s earliest documentaries, we see him sitting alone in the desert. While his suntan resonates well with the tonality of the desert, the azure blue in which he is cloaked marks him as a solitary figure in the corner of a desert/picture. At his back are some former houses, the remains of some past human settlements, deteriorating through wind erosion. Thus, the photograph portrays the aspiring director, who was about to dazzle the world with his cinematic visions and was later described by Francois Truffaut as “the most important film director alive” (Herzog & Cronin, 2002, pp. vii–viii), as an asocial character, far away from home, society and human dwellings.
Figure 1: Fata Morgana promotional photo – Herzog in the desert.
No wonder scholars have interpreted Herzog’s films as social criticisms of the most ferocious kind. “Socialization is violence,” argues Brad Prager (2012, p. 13), interpreting Kaspar Hauser (Werner Herzog, 1974). The working relationship in Heart of Glass (Herz aus Glas, Werner Herzog, 1976) implies, as Noah Heringman (2012, p. 277) argues, “contemporary society is a form of slavery.” Drawing on Even Dwarfs Started Small (Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen, Werner Herzog, 1970), Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes, Werner Herzog, 1972) and Stroszek (Werner Herzog, 1977), Noël Carroll (1998, p. 290) claims that “Herzog’s view of organized society is that it is a form of self-perpetuating madness.” Moreover, according to Stefanie Harris (2012, pp. 130–132) and Randall Halle (2012, p. 490), Herzog’s unique visual language, attempting to articulate the extraordinary, the sublime, the adequate image and the ecstatic truth, is by itself a challenge to the mass-produced images that constitute the society of spectacle. In short, as viewed by critics, Herzog denounces society comprehensively on both thematic and formal levels.
Although such interpretations are totalising and unbalanced, as the desert photograph suggests, they are not unfounded. Herzog often speaks vehemently against society. “If the film [Even Dwarfs Started Small] is ‘saying’ anything, it is that it is not the midgets who are monstrous, it is us and the society we have created for ourselves” (Herzog & Cronin, 2002, p. 57). Kaspar, in Kaspar Hauser, “suffered greatly from his contact with people and society” (p. 115), and other peoples, by comparison, are “hideously conditioned,” “transformed as they are into domesticated pigs or members of bourgeois society” (p. 68). Defending a vast array of his characters, both fictional and non-fictional, ranging from “the people we found in the desert who appear in Fata Morgana” to “the aborigines of Where the Green Ants Dream” (Werner Herzog, 1984), Herzog declares, “These people are not pathologically mad; it is society that is mad” (p. 69). It seems that Herzog keeps reiterating, following Jean-Paul Sartre, that “hell is other people.”
This article, however, positions itself against both the prevailing attitudes of the critics and Herzog’s self-commentary, questioning this dominant interpretation of Herzog’s films as sweeping condemnations of society. Socialisation via dwelling with other people, as portrayed by Herzog’s films, is not violence or slavery per se, as Prager (2012) and Heringman (2012) argue. As an attempt to dwell, it is becoming homely in being unhomely, with others and oneself. Here, I take Heidegger’s insight into Hölderlin’s “The Ister” as my interpretive key to Herzog’s films: “What is worthy of poetising in this poetic work is nothing other than becoming homely in being unhomely” (1984/1996, p. 121, emphasis added). Herzog is a cinematic heir of Hölderlin. As Prager (2007, p. 471) notes, “When Herzog speaks of influences, he mentions the poet Hölderlin more often than he mentions other filmmakers.” As being unhomely, dwelling with humans in Herzog’s cinema is threatened by the abyss of society, which engenders the imminent fall of human existence; as becoming homely, the societal abyss also opens up the potential for authentic being. Drawing on Heidegger’s ideas of thrownness, falling, abyss and dwelling as the general theoretical context, I will offer a close reading of Kaspar Hauser and Abyss, showing Herzog’s portrayal of dwelling with humans as violence through language and the perpetuation of death, while also highlighting the prospects simultaneously opened up by this societal abyss. My engagement with Heidegger in this article jumps freely from his early writing, such as Being and Time, and his later works, like the lectures on Hölderlin. His famous turn from the early, more Husserlian, transcendental ego to the later, historical Dasein is irrelevant here. Instead, what I am interested in here is how the dialectics and dynamics of the homely and the unhomely that run through the early and the late Heidegger can be productively articulated into a film-philosophy dialogue with Herzog’s vision of human dwelling. The aim is to adapt and transcend Friedrich Nietzsche (1886/2013, §146), to gaze into the abyss of society, withstand its gaze back and see the potentialities dwelling in it.
Contemplative and introspective, a solitary figure in the wild who looks into human affairs with clairvoyant eyes, Hias (Josef Bierbichler), the only unhypnotised and sober character in Heart of Glass, offers an exemplary figure for us to imagine Heidegger’s position in and philosophy of society. Similar to the fictional prophet Hias, Heidegger dwells in the black forest of Freiburg and away from society for most of his life. As represented by Digne Meller Marcovicz’s (1985) photograph, Heidegger, like Herzog in the desert photograph, is a solitary figure wrapped within the aura of primordial nature. No wonder, then, that Heidegger, like Herzog, characterises society in an overall negative tone. Already in his early magnum opus Being and Time, socialisation is, for Heidegger (1927/1962), initiated by a fundamental and unavoidable displacement of the self which he calls “thrownness,” followed by the “falling” of the authentic self into the inauthentic “they-self,” into the society that is essentially an abyss of “not-Being.”
“Man is in thrownness,” writes Heidegger (1947/1993, p. 245) in his first post-war publication, “Letter on humanism.” While this essay is an immediate response to and disagreement with Sartre’s legendary lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” its underlying logic continues the philosophical anthropology and social critique of Being and Time. Thrownness means that we, as human beings, are always and already being there in the world. Hence, he calls human existence “Dasein” (being-there). The spatial prefix “da” refers to the specific historical and social context into which one is always and already emplaced. Heidegger uses the word “throw” and coins the neologism “thrownness” to suggest that this emplacement is essentially displacement, which entails the not-at-home-ness of our being. Because of this precondition of thrownness, in Being and Time, Heidegger (1927/1962, p. 234, emphasis in original) already says, “From an existential-ontological point of view, the ‘not-at-home’ must be conceived as the more primordial phenomenon [of human existence]” in contrast to the “at-home.” In his Hölderlin lectures, Heidegger (1984/1996, p. 105, translation modified) reiterates this point with reference to Sophocles’ Antigone: “Among the unhomely, the human being is the most unhomely.” Yet this existential-ontological homelessness of being human, of thrownness, is not totally negative. As both Hans-Georg Gadamer (1983/1994) and Thomas Sheehan (2015) argue, thrownness also brings forth openness that discloses the manifold potentialities of humanity. Hence, Sheehan (2015) uses the term “thrown-open” to characterise the human existence of Dasein as understood by Heidegger.
As ontologically thrown-open, Dasein is capable of one’s “ownmost potentiality-for-Being” or “authenticity” (Heidegger, 1927/1962, p. 270). One of the central arguments in Being and Time is that, instead of realising their authenticity, modern humans fall into the inauthentic existence of they-self. “Everyone is the other, and no one is himself” (p. 165). “They,” as opposed to the unique, concrete and individualised “I,” stands for the existence that is average, ambiguous and uncharacteristic, the “nobody” (p. 166). Moreover, since being is time, the authentic self is an achievement of what Heidegger calls “ecstatic temporality,” a time that integrates past, present and future, whereas they-self is a dispersal of the self into everydayness, a timeless time that is monotonous, empty and meaningless, an essential point of Being and Time which I will unpack more with the second film.
In relation to society, they-self is our social self, drowned in the “idle talk,” “curiosity” and “ambiguity” of everyday social life:
Idle talk discloses to Dasein a Being towards its world, towards Others, and towards itself – a Being in which these are understood, but in a mode of groundless floating. Curiosity discloses everything and anything, yet in such a way that Being-in is everywhere and nowhere. Ambiguity hides nothing from Dasein’s understanding, but only in order that Being-in-the-world should be suppressed in this uprooted “everywhere and nowhere.” (p. 221)
Despite this apocalyptic tone, however, Heidegger also paradoxically declares that falling “does not express any negative evaluation” and is not “bad and deplorable” (p. 220). This paradox resides in Heidegger’s conceptualisation of the abyss. Abyss or non-being is the undercurrent of Heidegger’s lifelong philosophical project of Being. Featured only once in Being and Time as “the abyss of meaninglessness” (p. 194), Heidegger plays with “the etymological kinship between ‘Grund’ [‘ground’] and ‘Abgrund’ [‘abyss’],” as noted by the two translators, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (p. 194). Namely, connoting meaninglessness and Non-being, abyss (Abgrund) is not the opposition but the foundation, the ground (Grund) of Being. This concept of abyss gains increasing prevalence and gravitas with Heidegger’s later thinking on time and truth as the condition for time to unfold and truth to disclose (Polt, 2014). Its echo is also heard in the concept of “earth” in Heidegger’s (1935/1993) discussion of art as the mysterious and concealed ground, the abyss, that withstands the un-concealment of “world,” the social context. “Earth is that whence the arising brings back and shelters everything that arises as such. In the things that arise, earth occurs essentially as the sheltering agent” (p. 168). Eventually, the idea of the abyss merges with what Daniela Vallega-Neu (2014, p. 140, emphasis in original) calls “the fundamental concept in Heidegger’s philosophy in the 1930s”: Ereignis. Usually translated as “event,” Ereignis refers to “the event of the grounding of the there [the ‘Da’ of ‘Dasein’],” the inception of being and time (Heidegger, cited and translated by Polt, 2014, p. 78). It is the ground that “eludes our search for grounds; it is an abyss” (Polt, 2014, p. 78). Therefore, falling into the abyss of non-being is also the grounding of being.
Viewed in this light, the abyss looming in the background on the frame right of the figure of Hias is both dangerous and promising. It is the society that he leaves behind, with its abyssal meaninglessness and inauthenticity, an abyss, though marginalised and pushed back, that always resides in the background and threatens to devour his being and dwelling. Nevertheless, the abyss also opens up the frame, gestures towards infinity and grounds the Ereignis of his authentic opening up and dwelling. In this spirit, I will reinterpret Herzog’s vision of society, the dwelling with others in Kaspar Hauser and Abyss, as dwelling at the brink of an abyss that both endangers and enables this realisation of authentic being, of becoming homely in being unhomely.
Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells.
– HeideggerDwell on this bedroom scene in Kaspar Hauser (Fig. 2). The camera holds still for eight seconds, quietly observing the mise en scène furnished with domestic comforts. The broad and symmetrical headboard that cuts across the scene inserts a sense of stability and safety. The decorative folds trickling from the curtain in a chromatic continuation of whiteness down to the pillow and Kaspar’s pyjamas enfold the scene within repose and relaxation. The heaviness of the night is softly lit up by the candle and its double reflections. In short, the cinematic language here has created a comfortable house for humans to dwell in. The man dwelling in it, however, is sleepless. The non-diegetic key light that illuminates Kaspar’s face sculpts out an effect of Rembrandt-like chiaroscuro that highlights his wakeful and thoughtful eyes and, more tellingly, a stream of tears winding down his face. These tears of the dweller tear apart the dwelling. They disrupt the smooth serenity of the scene and open up a psychological abyss in this dwelling.
Figure 2: Kaspar Hauser – The sleepless sleeper, the dweller over the abyss.
The face of Kaspar in chiaroscuro resembles that of Rembrandt in one of his last self-portraits (1669). Both their introspective and penetrating gazes radiate wearied resignation about and unflinching honesty towards life and the world. Moreover, like Rembrandt in his own painting, the character Kaspar is also the actor Bruno Schleinstein’s self-portrait. As Herzog tells Paul Cronin (2002, p. 119):
When he [Bruno] was three years old his mother, a prostitute, beat him so hard that he lost speech, and she used that as a pretext to put him away in an asylum for retarded children. He escaped and was caught and ended up spending the next twenty-three years of his life in homes, institutions, asylums and prisons. By the time I met him, Bruno’s treatment at the hands of the authorities had totally destroyed even the most basic human functions within him, including the desire to take care of himself.
Kaspar Hauser adapts the historical story of the foundling Kaspar Hauser to recreate Plato’s allegory of the cave. Like Plato’s prisoners, Kaspar has been isolated and chained in a dark cellar until he is 17. Then, he is thrown into society (an excellent example of Heideggerian thrownness). The story’s unfolding details how he is forced into socialisation, into dwelling with other people, a process primarily facilitated by and reflected in his acquisition of language. Outside the cave, however, while Plato’s philosophers discover the eternal ideas, the language of truth, what Kaspar encounters is misunderstandings, mistreatments, violence and death, mediated and justified by the language of society. “It seems to me that my coming into this world was a terribly hard fall,” he tells Professor Daumer (Walter Ladengast), one of the very few people genuinely caring for him. In essence, Kaspar Hauser tells the story of falling into the abyss of society via language.
The centrality of language in the film’s critique of society is widely recognised and discussed (Carroll, 1998; Prager, 2007, 2012; Steingröver, 2012; Eldridge, 2019). “The theme of the film is unmistakable – language is death” (Carroll, 1998, p. 289). As articulated by Steingröver (2012, p. 472):
Kaspar’s civilizing process occurs through language acquisition and simultaneously represents the beginning of his inevitable demise. […] By introducing the abstraction of language into the non-lingual world of Kaspar, the irreversible process of nature’s alienation has begun, ending in Kaspar’s death.
Nevertheless, what Herzog’s films criticise is a specific type of language and not language per se. It is the language that is institutionalising and schematising, reductive and coercive, which Prager (2007, p. 22) calls “prosaic language.” Heidegger diagnoses this type of language as a major symptom of modern society. “This way language comes under the dictatorship of the public realm, which decides in advance what is intelligible and what must be rejected as unintelligible” (Heidegger, 1947/1993, p. 221). According to Heidegger (1947/1993), the intelligibility of modern language derives from scientific principle, aiming at exactitude, rejecting unpredictability and resulting in a reductive and instrumental representation of the world, which he calls “en-framing.” As a remedy, Heidegger calls for a recovery of poetic language, language that reveals rather than en-frames. This rejuvenation of poetic language via films is exactly the vocation of Herzog.
As Prager (2007, pp. 22–23) argues, Herzog often uses “poetic language” to recover “the sublime […] that which exceeds language’s capacity to express” to restore “our openness to a comparably untarnished world.” In Herzog’s words, “I wanted to provoke poetic language out of people who had never before been in touch with poetry” (Herzog & Cronin, 2002, p. 128). This dialectic between the prosaic and the poetic that motivates Herzog’s experimentation with cinematic language illuminates the paradox that methodologically frustrates Carroll’s (1998) otherwise brilliant article “Herzog, Presence, and Paradox.” Contending that Herzog’s films denounce language, Carroll catalogues Herzog’s invention of cinematic language, including the awe-inspiring images of landscape, the abuse of ordinary language, the alienating composition and duration of shots, and the temporally loose narrative. The paradox, Carroll concludes, is that Herzog ends up creating what he criticises, namely, language. However, this paradox is not as much a problem for Herzog as it is for the analytical philosopher’s self-imposed methodological dogmatism that refuses to recognise the contradictions which are necessary for giving “birth to a dancing star” – thus spoke Nietzsche as Zarathustra (1885/1951).
In Kaspar Hauser, the creative contradiction of language resides in and is exemplified by the abyss of Kaspar’s crying. It is language in two senses: a significant motif, a recurring vocabulary, of the film, which has been hitherto overlooked by critics, and secondly, Kaspar’s authentic self-expression and opening up resulting from his dwelling with others. There are four scenes showing Kaspar crying, and each one marks a step in both his falling into the abyss of society and his authentic self-opening. The first time he cries because of people’s experimentation on him with fire. Burned, he weeps to express the pain. These tears of physical pain are followed by those of existential reflection. Moved by a piece of sonorous, monotonous and lugubrious music played by a blind man called Mr Florian whose “entire family died in an accident,” Kaspar starts weeping and says, “the music feels strong in my chest; I am suddenly so old; why is everything so hard for me?” With the closing up of the camera, the poignant questioning culminates as “people are like wolves to me,” an invocation of the Latin proverb, Homo homini lupus (man is a wolf to man). In Civilization and Its Discontents, published two years after Heidegger’s Being and Time, Sigmund Freud (1930/2002, p. 48) also quotes this line to summarise human beings’ innate aggression towards one another.
From the physical to the existential, Kaspar’s crying voices out not only his fall ever deeper into the abyss of society and its hostility but also the development of his sense of himself, a development that Heidegger would call the realisation of authenticity. A largely and easily misunderstood idea, authenticity, conceptualised by Heidegger as the realisation of one’s “ownmost potentiality-for-Being,” is not a nostalgic fixation with a past identity but a futuristic actualisation of the potential of human Dasein as thrown-open. Therefore, although Kasper’s coming into the social world is “a terribly hard fall,” and dwelling with other humans does corrupt Kaspar’s “basic and uncontaminated human dignity” (Herzog & Cronin, 2002, p. 112), they also enable the opening up of his authentic self, as reflected by the growing expressivity of his crying qua language.
Corresponding to Kaspar’s self-opening is the growth in the complexity of the accompanying cinematic language. The bedroom scene (Fig. 2) with which I started the section depicts the third instance of Kaspar’s crying and employs more sophisticated audiovisual means to conjure up its enigma. The scene is an unmotivated hard cut from an everyday scenario showing Kaspar dining and talking with Frau Käthe, which, unlike the two scenes before, contains no direct provocation of Kasper’s sorrow. Hence, the bedroom scene is a floating signifier that invites but does not determine meanings, a time-image for Deleuzians, which diverts the narrative, evades causal explanation and contains within itself the unaccountable tears of Kaspar. It is an accusation, not of any specific event, but of Kasper’s falling into society as a whole.
Beyond this accusation, it also initiates one of the most poetic scenes of the film. In the slow pace, solemn mood and neo-baroque beauty of Adagio in G Minor, we see a rural landscape with houses reflected in a smooth lake (Fig. 3). The composition, allocating an equal portion of the screen to both the landscape and the lake, the reality and the reflection, intensifies the mirror effect and the oneiric quality of the scene, and amplifies it into a revelation of becoming homely in being unhomely. Seen as a continuation of the bedroom scene, the domestic room of interiority transforms into the world landscape of exteriority, a transformation sustained by the continuous sombre tonality of the colour palette; the tears of Kasper metamorphose into the lake that reflects the world in an abyssal form. His “unblemished dignity,” symbolised by the white swan, is pushed to the background. A boat, which from frame right cuts across the lake, travels on the abyss it is. While Kasper is identifiable by his brown outfit, the person in black who rows Kasper remains a mystery. In this long shot, we cannot see his face. He could be anybody and is nobody, the social “they” in Heideggerian terminology, whose incognito signifies both the abyss (Abgrund) that swallows and the ground (Grund) that supports the potential being of Kasper. Therefore, Kaspar’s crying qua language in the bedroom scene, unmotivated by its forerunner and enigmatically expanded by its afterthought, entails an opacity, a thickness which alludes to an esoteric cosmology radiating inexplicable sorrow and unfathomable beauty.
Figure 3: Kaspar Hauser – The lake landscape as an expansion of Kaspar’s crying into a cosmos in itself.
This opacity of crying as a language is comparable to the bathroom scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s (1960) Psycho. Vacillating between real tears and shower water, Marion’s (Janet Leigh) tear, as Eugenie Brinkema (2014, p. 20) argues, is “a tear that is not a tear,” a tear of pure exteriority and utter falsity, a language that, due to its ultimate indecipherability, is anti-language. Kaspar’s tears are the very opposite. From physical reaction to spiritual resonation to cosmological radiation, they express his interior expansion and authentic self-realisation as thrown-open. As such, they are language par excellence by the criteria of both Herzog and Heidegger. Gradually loosened from causal determination and gaining poetic autonomy, Kaspar’s tears reveal Herzog’s quest for the sublime, the poetic language that can express the inexpressible, the ecstatic truth. Revealing Kaspar’s inner growth of being and its synchronicity with the external, cosmological Being, they reflect what Heidegger (1947/1993, pp. 236–237) in “Letter on Humanism” says: “language is the house of Being, which is propriated by Being and pervaded by Being […] language is the house of Being in which man ek-sists by dwelling, in that he belongs to the truth of Being, guarding it.” By “ek-sist,” Heidegger underscores the particular existence of human beings as dwelling, a dwelling that enables our authenticity through the alignment of the individual being to the cosmological Being. Language, according to Heidegger, is the key to this dwelling. As such a language, Kaspar’s tears, though resulting from his dwelling with humans and falling into society, also unlock the dwelling with his authentic being and the universal Being.
More tellingly, this language is also silence. At the start of the film, we are presented with a boundless field of green wheat in an extreme wide shot, blown by the wind, and mellowed, not by the diegetic howling of the wind, but by the non-diegetic, ceremonial and celestial Canon in D Major. On the screen is the epigraph, “Do you hear that horrible screaming all around you? That man usually calls silence?” (from Georg Büchner’s novella Lenz). Kaspar’s crying is the horrible screaming of this silence that increasingly denies and defiles immediate translation and discursive subjugation, but it also brings forth genuine discourse. As Heidegger (1927/1962, p. 208) in Being and Time puts it, “As a mode of discoursing, reticence Articulates the intelligibility of Dasein in so primordial a manner that it gives rise to a potentiality-for-hearing which is genuine, and to a Being-with-one-another which is transparent.” This silence as genuine communication, as authentic Being/Dwelling-with-one-another, is also a recurring theme in Herzog’s cinema. In this regard, Kaspar’s crying is preceded by the tactile signing between the deaf and blind in Land of Silence and Darkness (Land des Schweigens und der Dunkelheit, Werner Herzog, 1971) and followed by the unintelligible murmuring of the Kuwaiti woman in Lessons of Darkness (Lektionen in Finsternis, Werner Herzog, 1992), whose sons have been tortured to death before her eyes.
In silence, we hear from the abyss (Abgrund), the howling of Ereignis, the event that grounds being, space and time. This is the theme of the final tears of Kaspar on his deathbed. Dying, he is irretrievably escaping from other people. The scene, showing Kaspar tightly enclosed by two priests, inversely invokes the last line of The Sorrows of Young Werther: “No priest attended” (Goethe, 1774/2009). Like Werther, Kaspar’s innate being is beyond the subjugation of religious discourse, with or without the priest. Crying, he is leaving human society, this great stage of fools (King Lear: “When we are born, we cry that we are come, To this great stage of fools”; Shakespeare, 1606/2020, 4.5.175), and starts to tell a story of which he only knows the beginning: a caravan lost in a desert; they choose to head north and arrive at a city where the story begins. Hence, it is not actually the beginning of a story but rather the preface of that beginning.
Preceding the beginning of Being, the desert is the abyss that grounds Ereignis, the inception of being (the story), space (the city) and time (the beginning). Corresponding to Kaspar’s storytelling, the film visualises the desert in old footage, creating a nostalgic aesthetic that recalls the inception of early cinema as a new spatio-temporal being. As such, it can be read as Herzog’s declaration to reinvent cinematic language from the ground level and ground the Ereignis of cinema in a new light. Hence, countering Carroll’s criticism against paradox (1998), Herzog paradoxically manages to rejuvenate cinematic language by criticising language. Therefore, although Kaspar’s coming into the world and dwelling with humans is “a terrible fall,” the socio-critical aspect of the film that dazzles the critics and Herzog’s self-commentary, the abyss also grounds the Ereignis of Kaspar’s authentic dwelling with Being through the silent language of crying and Herzog’s reinvention of cinema through poetic language.1
We dwell in proximity to death, which, as the uttermost possibility of Dasein, is capable of the supreme lighting of Being and of Being’s truth.
– HeideggerReading Kaspar’s tears as language, I have examined how Herzog represents dwelling with other humans in an extreme form, namely as the falling into the abysmal society, the escalation of violence that culminates in death. However, in the light of Heidegger, I have also shown that, against the mainstream interpretation of Herzog, the social abyss his films gaze into also opens up new possibilities, that Kaspar’s death is a new beginning, an Ereignis, the abyss (Abgrund) that grounds. Such a reading, however, may seem to have glossed over too quickly the trauma and tragedy of death, the force of the abyss’ stare back. “You do not stare into the abyss long and determinedly enough,” as Nietzsche would say.
To pre-empt this criticism, in this section I will fix my gaze on death in Abyss, the initiator of Herzog’s death-row series of which he says in the interview with Lawrence Krauss, “I am looking into the darkest recesses of our human soul, doing eight films, nine films on death row […] what I saw, not even my worst enemy should ever see in his or her life” (The Origins Podcast, 2021). As its basis, Abyss documents “the most nihilistic crime that I know” (Herzog). The film centres on Michael Perry and Jason Burkett, two perpetrators of a triple homicide: as teenagers, they murdered a woman, Sandra Stotler, her son, Adam, and his friend, Jeremy, in order to steal a car. Thus, even more extreme and abysmal than Kaspar, Abyss represents dwelling with humans as dwelling “in proximity to death,” as unhomeliness per se. Responding to Krauss’s remark that Herzog is fascinated with norm-defying individuals, Herzog says his filmmaking is an inquiry into “the human conditions,” into “who we are and what we are right now.” Both Kaspar Hauser and Abyss exemplify this Herzogian philosophical anthropology on screen, and the latter continues the former’s meditation on the unhomeliness of human dwellings.
Abyss is divided into five chapters, and its first chapter, “The Crime,” brings us directly into the house of the victim, a dwelling place that “looks idyllic and safe” (Herzog). Through a police crime-scene video, the film shows us the house devastated by the criminals in October 2001. Disturbingly, this video, recut by Herzog, juxtaposes in close-up the traces of the crime, such as the blood spot, and domestic details in their most quotidian manner, like cookie dough. This juxtaposition of the unhomely and the homely climaxes in the scene showing the seemingly cosy and uneventful drawing room with the epigraph saying, “It is days after the murder. The lights have been burning and the TV has been left on, untouched.” The everydayness and uneventfulness of the domestic settings intensify the horror of the crime as it creates the impression that our daily routine may also be shattered in the same way. If with Kaspar we still have a somewhat extraordinary and unidentifiable person who suffers, shields and mediates the wolfishness of human beings for us, in Abyss we witness the destruction of a dwelling which is very similar to ours due to its proximity to humans. As such, homeliness is unhomeliness.
Thus, Abyss puts dwelling on trial in its most normal and most abysmal fashion: dwelling with humans as dwelling in proximity to death. Yet death, as Heidegger (1957/1991, p. 112, translation modified) argues in The Principle of Reason, is also “the uttermost possibility of Dasein” and “capable of the supreme lighting of Being and of Being’s truth.” A leitmotif already established in Being and Time, being-towards-death is identified by Heidegger (1927/1962) as the authentic mode of being for humans. The realisation that one must die and must die alone, according to Heidegger, can pull us from falling into the anonymous they and motivate us to actualise our individual potential as the authentic self, the thrown-open. Hence, in “Building Dwelling Thinking,” Heidegger (1951/1993, p. 352) emphasises mortality as the essential condition of human dwelling: “The mortals are the human beings. They are called mortals because they can die. To die means to be capable of death as death.” By comparison, Herzog’s Abyss, I argue, is a tale of death as well as a tale of life; it can be viewed as an interrogation and criticism of this Heideggerian idea of humanity as mortality, of human dwelling as dwelling in proximity to death. Representing a real and horrific homicide, Abyss, as a tale of death, while thematically aligned with Heidegger, lays more concrete, existential and affective weight on Heidegger’s perhaps too abstract and one-sided conceptualisation of death and its consequence. As a tale of life, it is sympathetic to Hannah Arendt’s (1958/1998) criticism of Heidegger’s theory of mortality with the concept of “natality,” humanity as being-born.
Hence, my approach to the film is different from those of Barnaby Norman (2013) and Laurie Ruth Johnson (2016). Though from different perspectives, the Derridean (Norman) and the romantic (Johnson), both scholars focus on the representation of death in the film. Despite the nuance of their discussions and their intellectual affinity to my project, they tell only half the story. Where is “a tale of life” that occupies half of the subtitle? Conversely, I argue that the Abyss that we look into is of both death and life, of both mortality and natality. To demonstrate this, I will close read the jump cuts and close-ups, two salient aesthetic tropes in this film which are unique to Herzog’s oeuvre yet overlooked by both scholars.
In general, Herzog dismisses close-ups and jump cuts. “Close-ups give a feeling of intrusion; they are almost a personal violation of the actor, and they also destroy the privacy of the viewer’s solitude,” says Herzog (Herzog & Cronin, 2002, p. 109). That is why “I strive to keep away from them” (p. 109). As for jump cuts, Herzog calls them “unnecessary,” something that “gives you a phony impression that something interesting might be going on,” which is actually “an empty film” (p. 162). Hence, the proliferation of both close-ups and jump cuts in Abyss marks its peculiarity in Herzog’s filmmaking.
These two hallmarks of Abyss proclaim themselves at the very beginning of the film in an interview with Richard Lopez: a jump cut in close-up. Lopez, the death house chaplain whose occupation is to accompany the convicted to the gurney of death row, makes his living by dwelling with death. “For someone on the gurney, I cannot stop the process for them. But I wish I could,” says Lopez. After three seconds of silence, a jump cut occurs that disturbs a more than one-minute long take of Lopez in mid-close-up. We see a sudden dislocation of Lopez’s head from mid-left to mid-right, as if mimicking the death he is mourning. Such jump cuts creep into every interview. The interviewees are the relatives and friends of the murdered and the murderers or people related to the crime and punishment. Therefore, like Lopez, they exemplify Heideggerian dwelling with humans as dwelling in proximity to death.
As sudden truncations of visuality, these jump cuts, which constantly yet unexpectedly disturb the visual integrity of the film, effectuate Heidegger’s theory of mortality. Death, as Heidegger (1927/1962, p. 291) argues in Being and Time, does not mean the “demise” or final moment of life. As Richard Polt (2014, pp. 71–72, emphasis in original) clarifies, “Heideggerian ‘death’ is really mortality: a possibility rather than an actual event.” It is the perpetual possibility of non-being, of falling into the abyss of non-being. The jump cuts, with frames deliberately taken out to disrupt the film’s spatial-temporal continuity, create the sensation of the abyssal death that sneaks in and tears open the seemingly seamless transition that characterises everyday human existence. Hence, with ubiquitous jump cuts, the film evokes a disorienting and vertiginous visual effect of gazing into the abyss of death, the mortality of humanity, our being-towards-death and dwelling in proximity to death.
While the jump cut affirms Heidegger’s idea of mortality, the close-up that frames the jump cut sheds critical light on this idea and its consequence. As cinematic microscopy, close-ups enable and demand closer inspections of “the supreme lighting of Being and of Being’s truth” that the abyss of death opens up. In close-up, we see the entire drama of Lopez’s facial expression meticulously unfold before us, reacting to the human mortality that he gazes into and dwells with. Turning his head from left to right, he almost subconsciously pokes his tongue out to dissipate the choky-ness of the oppressive atmosphere; heavily breathing out a long-held breath, he wipes off his tears and leans his head down pensively into the shadow of introspection; then, he gradually lifts up his head with a faint smile diluting the melancholy and turns his head right, in a fatalistic solemnity, looking into the void of the frame right (Fig. 4).
Figure 4: Into the Abyss – A facial drama of dwelling in proximity to death.
This dramatisation of facial expressions in close-up, backed up by rows of Christian crosses receding into the horizon and underscored by a solemn soundscape, commands a more thorough reflection on the existential burden of humanity as mortality. The sense of oppression, the pensive introspection, and the transformation of moods, which the close-up of Lopez affectively conveys, warns against a facile acceptance and celebration of the Heideggerian being-towards-death. The trauma manifested therein admonishes a skin-deep understanding of “the supreme lighting of Being and of Being’s truth,” of dwelling in proximity to death.
A comparison with Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (À bout de souffle, 1960) makes the point. Breathless employs jump cuts in a lavish, if not abusive, way. Be it a sensationalist device, a necessary improvisation or a psychological manifestation, the jump cuts in Breathless are characterised by a nihilistic playfulness, a nonchalant disrespect of life and death, a breathlessness resulting from the unbearable lightness of being (Raskin, 1998). In short, jump cuts in Breathless are symptomatic of a frivolous and inconsequential (ab)use of being-towards-death. If we are all going to die, and will potentially die at any moment, then why care for anyone or anything? Conversely, Abyss’s combination of jump cuts and close-ups enacts a critique of Heidegger’s idea of humanity as mortality. Enabling and enforcing inspection and deliberation, the close-ups in Abyss endow this film with gravity, the unbearable heaviness of being.
This gravity of being in Abyss is most evident in the close-ups of Perry and Burkett, the perpetrators of the homicide and its resultant unhomeliness. When Perry says, “I regret it every minute now,” the film, as if determined to aggravate his remorse, cuts to a close-up of him and underlines his next phrase, “cherish every minute.” Similarly, when Burkett reveals that “I was born with neuroblastoma,” the film cuts to a close-up to emphasise that “I had eighteen surgeries about the time I was five” (Fig. 5). Thus, both close-ups are motivated as emphasis on the preciousness and precarity of life, which are further accentuated by the scrutiny of these close-ups.
Figure 5: Into the Abyss – Jason Burkett, imprisoned for life.
Here, Herzog’s cinematic microscopy, examining the gravity of life, offers us what Heidegger in Being and Time calls “moment of vision” (Augenblick). While Augenblick is usually translated as “moment,” as Macquarrie and Robinson (in Heidegger, 1927/1962, p. 376) remark, “Heidegger has in mind its more literal meaning – ‘a glance of the eye,’” which is exactly what the close-ups effectuate. Heidegger (1927/1962, p. 387, emphasis in original) uses this concept to designate “that Present which is held in authentic temporality and which thus is authentic itself.” It means the present that is integrated with the past and the future, in contrast to the inauthentic present that is severed from the temporal wholeness and fallen into the monotonous everydayness. Meeting the glances of Perry and Burkett in close-up during their confessions, we see the weariness and bleakness emanating from their eyes, “looking into the darkest recesses of our human soul” (Herzog) and looking at its devastated prospects. Thus, this glance of the eye, brimming with nihilism, offers us a glance into their present dwelling situation of imprisonment, their unhomeliness: an outcome of their regrettable and miserable past and a step to their gloomy future (death penalty for Perry and life imprisonment for Burkett). In this moment of vision, past, present and future are emphatically and affectively integrated, which brings forth “the supreme lighting of Being and of Being’s truth”: the responsibility of life as the gravitas of Being.
While the previous three chapters of the film still, albeit critically and affectively, operate within the Heideggerian logic of being-towards-death, its two ending chapters exceed this philosophical category. The film’s “supreme lighting of Being and of Being’s truth” in “A Glimmer of Hope” gestures beyond Heidegger’s humanity as mortality and towards Arendt’s humanity as natality. Bearing the gravity of being for more than an hour, as if it is the necessary burden of pregnancy, the film, at last, gives birth to a long shot of a suburban daybreak. This shot introduces a prospective birth: Melyssa Burkett, who falls in love with Jason Burkett and, in the process of sorting out his court paper, marries him, and bears him a child (Fig. 6). The imageries of the suburb, daybreak and sunlight resonate with the symbolism of Nativity, the birth of Jesus, as, for example, represented in Paolo Veronese’s The Adoration of the Kings (1573). Melyssa is impregnated through artificial insemination, whose “unnaturalness” again references the Nativity: Mary’s impregnation with Christ as a virgin. Thus, starting with the Christian cross symbolising death (Fig. 4), the film loops itself with the Christian symbolism of birth at its end.
Figure 6: Into the Abyss – The close-up of the embryo foregrounding human natality.
“A child has been born unto us.” From this “glad tiding” in the Gospels, Arendt (1958/1998) derives her central concept in The Human Condition: natality, the human fact of being born. She (1958/1998, p. 9) argues that “the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew.” As such, natality is “the miracle that saves the world” and “can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope” (p. 247). Although Arendt never references Heidegger in The Human Condition, she admits in a letter to him that “I would have asked you [Heidegger] if I might dedicate it to you; it came directly out of the first Freiburg days and hence owes practically everything to you in every respect” (Arendt & Heidegger, 2004, pp. 123–124). Arendt’s stress on natality, as Karin Fry (2014) argues, is a criticism of Heidegger’s emphasis on mortality in Being and Time, of which Arendt is the “muse”; “he will admit to her that without her he could not have written that work” (Safranski, 1994/1998, p. 140).
The image of the embryo (Fig. 6), thus viewed as a close-up of natality, is a redemption of the mortality in the film. In close-up, we see the child of Melyssa and Jason Burkett taking on shape. His “powerful jaw,” as Melyssa comments, already bears similarity to Jason’s (Fig. 5). Thus, this trace of the criminal father, instead of being eradicated or denied, is emphatically acknowledged by the close-up and redeemed by the about-to-be-born child’s “capacity of beginning something anew” (Arendt, 1958/1998, p. 9). Conceived in the abyss of the father’s crime yet cherished, as the affectionate enclosing fingers suggest, by the mother’s love, he embodies a glimmer of hope that can potentially forgive the father’s criminal past and promise a new future. As such, he incarnates natality, “the miracle that saves the world” and “can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope” (p. 247).
According to Arendt, this miracle of natality and promise of a future is predicated upon the human capacity to forgive. “The faculty of forgiving,” says Arendt:
serves to undo the deeds of the past, whose “sins” hang like Damocles’ sword over every new generation […] Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer’s apprentice who lacked the magic formula to break the spell. (1958/1998, p. 237)
Abyss, nevertheless, is more critical than Arendt regarding love’s “clarity of vision” and whether the “who” and the “what” of a person can be so easily decoupled. In the interview, Melyssa denies that Jason has committed the murder: “I am saying that Jason did not kill one, two or three people; Sandra, Jeremy and Adam were not killed by Jason.” However, under Herzog’s questioning, it seems that Melyssa’s denial requires a leap of faith. Though she is more than familiar with the documents of Jason’s case, on this crucial point, she can only believe what Jason has told her. Herzog, however, puts more weight on her faith by bringing up the phenomenon of “death row groupies,” the idea that death row inmates gain a rock star–like status and women become infatuated with them. Showing adequate awareness of this phenomenon, Melyssa rejects this label. With this duel between Herzog and Melyssa, Abyss leaves the decision to us and thus involves us in this action to forgive. Either we believe in Melyssa’s clairvoyance which sees through the “what” of Jason’s deeds and into the “who” of him being innocent, thus fully agreeing with Arendt here, or we can be more inquisitive like Herzog.
The latter option, moreover, does not deprive us of this faculty of forgiveness. Besides love, the other condition for forgiveness which Arendt recognises is “respect.” “Respect, not unlike the Aristotelian philia politike, is a kind of ‘friendship’ without intimacy and without closeness.” However, “because it concerns only the person, [it] is quite sufficient to prompt forgiving of what a person did, for the sake of the person” (Arendt, 1958/1998, p. 243). This respectful forgiveness is closer to Herzog’s position in the film and how the film situates us. As Herzog said to Perry in their very first interview, “When I talk to you, it does not necessarily mean that I have to like you, but I respect you, and you are a human being, and I think human beings should not be executed” (added emphasis). Herzog reiterates this point in his interview with Krauss. Thus, the making and watching of this film is an action of forgiveness through respect. Looking Into the Abyss, we forgive Perry and Burkett by trying to understand who they are through examining what they have done from as many perspectives as possible. This forgiveness, as Herzog says, does not necessitate our love of them but does entail respect for them as human beings, that is, recognised members of society who deserve a hearing and with whom we dwell. As the daughter of the murdered Sandra said of her final encounter with Perry at his execution, “He looks like a boy; I had created a huge, evil, murderous monster in my head; it was just a child.”
Therefore, initiated by a crime that is anti-dwelling and unhomely to its extremity – a triple homicide that shatters a family – the story turns out to be a birth of a family, a new possibility of dwelling with each other as fellows of this human society. Though “unexpected,” as Herzog confesses (Herzog & Cronin, 2014, p. 420), “Into the Abyss is a life-affirming film.” Through forgiveness, dwelling in proximity to death transforms into a dwelling that promises the natality of life. Being unhomely eventually becomes homely again.
Into the Abyss could have been the title of several of my films. Walter Steiner, Fini Straubinger, Reinhold Messner, Timothy Treadwell and the men on death row are somehow all part of the same family. They belong together.
– Herzog (Herzog & Cronin, 2014, p. 413)One can easily add to this family in the abyss many, not to say most of the other protagonists in Herzog’s films: Bruno Stroszek (Bruno Schleinstein) who finds a home in neither the old world of Germany nor the new world of America, and finally shoots himself; Count Dracula (Klaus Kinski) in Nosferatu, who lives alone in a desolate castle and is unable to die; Dieter Dengler in Little Dieter Needs to Fly (Werner Herzog, 1997), a US pilot who was shot down over Laos and struggled to escape Vietnamese captors; Juliane Koepcke, “around her there’s nothing but a yawning abyss,” in Wings of Hope (Julianes Sturz in den Dschungel, Werner Herzog, 1998); to name but a few. Hence, Richard Eldridge (2019, p. 128) rightly remarks that “Herzog’s major fiction films typically focus on a single protagonist who is radically ill-suited to the prevailing conditions of social life.” All that needs to be added is that this is also true for most of his documentary protagonists. “Wherever I look I seem to be peering into a dizzying, dark abyss” (Herzog & Cronin, 2014, p. 413). In Herzog’s cinema, dwelling with humans is dwelling in various abysses.
This abysmal dwelling in society, however, is not entirely negative or hopeless. In this article, I have argued that Herzog is not simply a misanthropist, as most critics portray him. Rather, one should view his films as staring into the abyss of society, withstanding the abysmal terror of its stare back, and discovering the potential of the authentic being it opens up. As I argued, Kaspar Hauser and Abyss show that dwelling with humans, via language and in proximity to death, both constitute a falling into the social abyss of violence and destruction and open up the prospect of new beginnings, what Heidegger calls Ereignis.
Viewing Herzog’s films from a Heideggerian perspective sheds new light on both. Heidegger’s philosophical thought enables a creative and insightful reading of overlooked yet significant aesthetic forms in Herzog’s films: the motif of tears in Kaspar Hauser and the jump cuts and close-ups in Abyss. Meanwhile, Herzog’s films work out Heidegger’s paradoxical and etymological wordplay of the abyss that also grounds. Not only do the films affectively effectuate and interrogate the terror and promise of the abyss of society in artistic terms, but Abyss also breaks the Heideggerian category of mortality and gestures towards Arendt’s idea of natality. “In the age of the world’s night, the abyss of the world must be experienced and endured,” says Heidegger (1926/2001, p. 90) in “What Are Poets for?,” “but for this it is necessary that there be those who reach into the abyss.” Herzog, as a cinematic poet, not only reaches into the abyss but grounds a family for various homeless characters in it. To dwell therein is to ground in the abyss, overflowing with the threat of death and the prospect of life.
1. One reviewer of this article has pointed out that “Herzog’s visual images or use of cinema as a medium of truth-disclosure (‘ecstatic truth’) is not primarily linguistic or language-like in character.” This non-linguistic aesthetics certainly plays a considerable role in Herzog’s film. However, since the entirety of this section concentrates on language in terms of Heidegger’s philosophy of language, Herzog’s cinematic language and the thematisation of language in Herzog’s films, it may be too much of a diversion to explore this non-linguistic aspect here, which deserves an in-depth discussion on its own terms. Nevertheless, I am grateful for this insightful reminder from the reviewer.
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