Two movements of different nature carry the beginning of the film. There is the energy of legends, of the enlightened who haunt the landscapes that we associate with exoticism, even savagery. There is a mythical beast, an earthly “Moby Dick”, perhaps even a whole herd of these elusive and extraordinary monsters.
And then there are incontestably real beings, this giant elephant exhibited at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, in the United States, these bushman trackers of the Kalahari, the maps which explain this area of Angola whose rivers irrigate the entire south of the African continent.
And again, in the background but not forgotten, not forgettable, the atrocious civil war which ravaged the country for a quarter of a century (1975-2002) in the indifference of the rest of the world, except the great powers who had profits to reap from the blood and death of the Angolans.
Between hallucinated reverie and equipped research stand two men, the explorer Steve Boyes and the German filmmaker Werner Herzog. One states what the other expresses through his way of filming and editing: the reluctance to disentangle the authentic from the legendary, the consideration for myths as much as for real beings, a dizziness where science and dreams converge towards an absent center, which does not mean non-existent.
The impressive beauty of the film lies in its way of welcoming with equal consideration the exploits of an extravagant expedition and the calm concentration of a very old man who tunes an instrument such as has existed for 40,000 years, within his people who are also called San. Or a tree and the traces on its bark, a bird, an insect.
Werner Herzog has made some eighty films, which care little about whether they are fiction or documentaries. Some short films are epics (for example, The Great Ecstasy of the wood sculptor Steinerreleased in 1974), some documentaries are mind-blowing adventure films (for example, Grizzly Man2005), certain fictions are relentless documents on the relationship to reality (for example, Family Romance, LLCreleased in 2020) and the relationship to the presence of the inexplicable in everyday life (choose between Fitzcarraldo And The Land Where Green Ants Dreamreleased in 1982 and 1984).
When he met the founding biologist of the Okavango Wilderness Conservation Project (National Geographic Okavango Wilderness Project), the German director is faced with an almost perfect incarnation of what he himself has continued to explore with the means of cinema for sixty years.
Following Steve Boyes, the quest for a quadrupedal grail begins, and even for a whole troop of grails, cousins of the one nicknamed Henry, the 11-ton plantigrade enthroned in Washington, the largest known land animal. This quest is only possible thanks to the arrival, one by one, each singular and impressive, of the three characters who are the San trackers.
From the improbable and disturbing images of elephants filmed underwater to attentive listening to the words and gestures of the trackers, without ever pretending to enter into their way of inhabiting the earth, the filmmaker achieves an accuracy beyond modesty and the passion of the unknown.
And, as at the time of Dwarfs started small too (1970) andIn the land of silence and darkness (1971), far from the image of the adventurer director – not false but so partial – which is too often associated with him, the beauty of Werner Herzog’s cinema blossoms in the delicacy of the approach to humans and those other than humans, without complacency or paternalism. Perhaps even more, the great art of this filmmaker is born from his ability to assemble these different registers, these different relationships with the world, these different forms of film.
So, Ghost Elephants circulates from the manufacture of a deadly poison to the crossing of rivers carrying all-terrain motorcycles at arm’s length, from the sophisticated laboratory installations of several major American universities to the knowledge coming from the depths of the ages of those who know how to exist in this environment. Deploying the spectacular, comical, frightening and magnificent twists and turns of a journey that is also completely real and partly dreamed, the film takes us on the trail of living beings who invoke the very idea of life.
