Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin (2020)
Were Werner Herzog and Bruce Chatwin soulmates? The strange synchronicity of their friendship recurs throughout the German director’s rambling documentary on the late British author. Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin recounts how they continually crossed paths in the far corners of the world as they searched for material for their next film or book.
Nomad becomes elegiac as Herzog retraces footsteps from his own past. Chatwin died at age 48 in 1989 and the intellectual curiosity and off-road adventures they shared seem long ago. Chatwin was a novelist but remains best known as a travel writer for In Patagonia (1977) and The Songlines (1987). Pedantic critics have accused him of playing loose with facts. As biographer Nicholas Shakespeare tells Herzog, Chatwin “embellished facts to make them truer.”
Herzog shared with Chatwin a quest for glimpsing the reality behind appearances, the larger truths that transcend the details. As peripatetic as its title, Nomad roams between the standing stones of Neolithic Britain and the Australian Outback, the Black Mountains of Wales and the painted caves of Patagonia, as Herzog visits some of the places that inspired Chatwin. Both men went in search of the weirdness that expands conventional pictures of reality and for traces left by lost belief systems ground to dust by the relentless advance of Western civilization.
Chatwin came to believe that homo sapiens evolved as a migratory species; our ancestors’ original sin may have been to settle down. His world travels and restless life mirrored his belief. Chatwin shared with Herzog a concern over the monoculture that dominates the world at the expense of other possibilities and threatens to thoughtlessly destroy itself. Our species may go extinct like the giant sloth whose scrap of fur kindled Chatwin’s imagination when he discovered it in his parents’ cabinet of curiosities. Herzog narrates Nomad in his familiar lugubrious voice as he winds his way across a world of places and ideas.
To read more film reviews, click here.
To read more articles by David Luhrssen, click here.
