Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin - Herzog retraces a friend's global journey and (naturally) stares into the human soul

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B-plus

Three decades is a long time to wait to eulogize a friend. But Werner Herzog does things according to his own timetable. 

And, as we discover in the documentary Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin, both Herzog and his onetime brother-in-strangeness Bruce Chatwin, were believers in a non-rushed journey. The English travel writer and novelist considered walking “a sacrament,” a sentiment shared by Herzog.

Thousands of years of ghosts wave at Werner as he follows his late friend Bruce Chatwin’s footsteps.

Indeed, despite the years that have passed since Chatwin’s death from AIDS in 1989, seldom have bonds of brotherhood and friendship seemed so obvious and enduring. 

The artifact of their friendship – and the MacGuffin of the documentary – is a rucksack Herzog inherited from the professional traveler, which has seen many more thousands of miles atop the back of its newest owner.

Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin begins with one of the more resonant connections between the two, their love of florid embellishment. It begins with a Chatwin family legacy, a piece of “brontosaurus skin,” a memory that led the then-twentysomething Chatwin to its place of origin in South America (where it was correctly and more prosaically identified as a 10,000-year-old remnant of an extinct giant sloth), to the discovery of a wrecked merchant vessel and to the collective experience of what became Chatwin’s  acclaimed first book In Patagonia.

With an eye to vistas and heights, Herzog’s camera follows his friend’s path to Australia, where we absorb the Aboriginal notion of the world as covered in “lines formed by dreams and song,” with “songlines” being energy pathways that they ostensibly use for navigation. There, Herzog reacts with Teutonic disapproval to the sight and sound of the young Aborigines being sequestered for hymns (“It does not feel right to me, how the missionaries transformed the mission of song into Lutheran piety.”)

Throw in footage of locals measuring “energy waves” supposedly emanating from the Gop Cairn, the largest Neolithic mound in Wales, and you get a sense of the fanciful tales that fascinated Chatwin.

In Tierra del Fuego, we see century-old photos of its last nomadic peoples, and ponder the millions of years of human nomadic existence against a few thousand years of people living in cities (which Chatwin - or is it Herzog? -  reckons is the beginning of the end of our species. It is sometimes hard to tell whether we’re listening to the subject’s words and philosophy or the filmmaker’s, similar as they are).

Some of the retracing of steps evokes Herzog’s own work (he meticulously films ancient hand prints on a cliff wall, echoing his 2010 documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams).

Later, in a literal intersection of the director and his subject, we see the still-handsome, dying Chatwin joining Herzog on location in West Africa for his 1987 adaptation of Chatwin’s novel Cobra Verde (Herzog’s last film with his insanely difficult leading man Klaus Kinski). 

Closing with scenes from Herzog’s mountain climbing film Scream of Stone (which Chatwin was fascinated to hear about, but too weak to visit), we are reminded of the director’s later major turn to documentaries, and his fascination for the world’s extremes. Despite the participation of the traveler’s wife and biographer, Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin is as much about Herzog as it is about his subject. You can be a fan of either and enjoy the film and its voice, so seamlessly did they apparently share a vision of the world.

Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin. Written and directed by Werner Herzog. Starring Bruce Chatwin, Nicholas Shakespeare and Elizabeth Chatwin. Opens Friday, December 20 at the Ted Rogers Hot Docs Cinema.