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- The most important things we learn in this film are Chatwin’s ideas and theories about the world, which are far too numerous to name here. He was fascinated by the world in all its complexities. He also shared a viewpoint with Herzog that traveling by walking was almost a spiritual awakening of sorts, which is where their friendship sprung from.
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Aug 25, 2020 · Because it lacks the kind of big hook that attracted attention to Herzog’s more well-known documentaries, there is the distinct possibility that “Nomad” may be viewed in some circles as a minor effort that's little more than him paying back a metaphorical debt to one of his inspirations.
- Overview
- How did you meet Bruce Chatwin?
- What kinds of stories did you tell each other?
- Couldn’t you have experiences like that without walking? Why is walking so important to you as your mode of travel?
- Chatwin didn’t seem to choose interesting places to visit so much as he seemed to chase ideas that led him to interesting places. Was this approach something that resonated with you?
- The book about your experiences in the Amazon making Fitzcarraldo.
- Much of your work focuses on characters, both real and fictional, who are obsessed with a subject or a goal. Is Bruce one of those characters? I mean, somebody who was just overwhelmed with what he was doing?
- How did his death affect you? Did it affect your approach to your work?
- When you do travel, what do you carry in the rucksack?
- What do you think Bruce would have made of this moment in history where travel’s been almost completely curtailed?
The German filmmaker on the magic of walking, the irrelevance of bucket lists, and his new documentary about Bruce Chatwin.
In 1989 a tattered copy of Newsweek ended up in a tiny village on the edge of the Kalahari Desert and fell into the hands of a homesick English teacher. It contained the obituary of a writer named Bruce Chatwin, who, after years of far-flung travels, had reportedly died at 48 of a rare disease picked up on one of his adventures. The article recounted the legendary story of how Chatwin had quit his job in London by sending his boss a telegram that simply read: “Gone to Patagonia,” which set him onto an illustrious career as a travel writer and novelist.
Several months later, the English teacher was on a long bus ride, when his seatmate, a young French traveler, told him about a German filmmaker named Werner Herzog, who had required his crew to haul a steamship up a hill in the Amazon for a scene in a film called Fitzcarraldo. Herzog had then starred in a documentary about making that film.
That English teacher was me, and such was my introduction to two of the 20th century’s most original storytellers. Ever since, Chatwin’s books and Herzog’s films have been absorbed into the deep folds of my imagination, spurring my own travels, and informing my own writing. To this day, a dog-eared copy of Chatwin’s The Songlines (his exploration of sacred Aboriginal storytelling) is never far from my desk. And the mere mention of brown bears conjures Herzog’s haunting Grizzly Man (a documentary about a man’s fatal obsession with Alaskan bears). Even as I reread the opening paragraphs of this article, I’m slightly embarrassed to note the echoes of a Chatwin story or a Herzog screenplay. But that’s the power of great storytellers—their distinctive voices embed themselves in their audiences.
(Related: These travel books take readers on real-life adventures.)
The fountainhead for Chatwin’s and Herzog’s engrossing stories, of course, was their travels. Each had a penchant for disappearing, often for weeks, sometimes months, following their bottomless curiosities into the most remote corners of the planet—the sand seas of the Sahara, the mountain fastnesses of the Hindu Kush, the endless grasslands of the Eurasian Steppe, the sunbaked barrens of the Outback. In fact, it was in Australia when their paths first crossed in 1983. They remained in touch until Chatwin’s death, which was later revealed to be from HIV/AIDS.
We met in Melbourne, in Australia. I was in the last few weeks of preproduction for the feature film Where the Green Ants Dream in 1983. He was in Australia promoting one of his books. I contacted his publishing house, and they said “He’s somewhere in the Outback.” I said, “If by any chance he makes contact with you again, tell him I am searching for him.”
I didn’t know that Chatwin even knew about my films, but at the time in his rucksack he carried my book, Of Walking in Ice, about when I traveled on foot from Munich to Paris in the beginning of winter.
About traveling on foot. We instantly understood that as travelers we were on foot and nobody else was. Of course, there were backpackers, but they carried their household on their back: their tent, their cooking utensils, their floor mats, their sleeping bag. You just name it. We didn’t. We only had the utmost necessities. That forced us to connect to the world.
When I was traveling from Munich to Paris, my canteen was empty already at 10 in the morning. It was a very hot, dry day. Not a single creek or a river or a faucet anywhere. Nothing. By 5 p.m., when I was so thirsty, I had to knock at the door [of a farmhouse]. When the farmer’s wife opened the door, I simply asked whether she could fill my canteen. But people instantly recognize something special about those who travel on foot. I would be invited in and they would tell me stories from their lives that they hadn’t told to anyone. So that’s the kind of traveling that we both did.
Left:
In this photo taken on Christmas Eve 1960, a 20-year-old Bruce Chatwin examines antiques in Sotheby’s upstairs warehouse.
Photograph by Bettmann, Getty Images
Right:
It’s how we are made as homo sapiens. We are biologically organized to cover distances on foot. That’s what we did for tens of thousands of years until we started to use horses, of course, until the mechanical age. And I would not call it “walking” because it’s not going out for a stroll or going out for a “power walk” or ambling in your city. It’s “traveling on foot.” You are reading the world, learning the essence of the world. Chatwin always liked my dictum: “The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.”
(Related: Paul Salopek was walking the global trail of our ancestors when pandemic struck.)
It’s an attitude of curiosity. It is your sense of the essentials. It’s your sense of the absurd. Sometimes it’s a world view which shapes a world view. He had that in him. And we recognized each other because in a way, I have it in me. Look, for example, at the Conquest of the Useless. That’s a book you should read.
It is not a book on the making of a film. It’s about fever dreams in the jungle. We went through catastrophes every single day. And when I speak of catastrophes, I mean real ones. We had two plane crashes. We ran into a border war between Peru and Ecuador. And another incident, my camp for 1,100 people was attacked and burned to the ground. And on ...
No, I think obsession is not the right word, but he had a profound, existential, curiosity about the world. He would follow a thread, and he would not be stopped from pursuing that thread and figuring it out.
When he was on his deathbed, he called me to come visit him. He wanted to see my new film on the Wodaabe nomadic tribesmen in the southern Sahara, which I had just finished. I brought the film, but it was a shock because he was very busy dying. He was unconscious much of the time, but he would have lucid moments, and he’d say show me the film, show me the film. I had a small projector. I showed him 10 minutes of the film, and then he would lapse into a coma again.
It was terrifying to see a man like him dying. He spoke about his legs: “My left boy is hurting. Can you rearrange my legs?” They were just bone, only spindles. He was a skeleton and his face wasn’t there anymore. There were only glowing eyes in the skull.
He would shout out in moments of semi-lucidity. “I’ve got to be on the road again. I have to be on the road again. My rucksack is too heavy.” So I said to him, “Bruce, I can carry it. I’m strong. I’ll be the one who carries your rucksack.” That calmed him. And then he would watch another 10 minutes. Eventually he watched the entire film.
He was embarrassed to die in front of me—because he was only 48 hours away from really dying—and he asked me to leave. He said to me, you have to have my rucksack. You are the one who should carry it. His wife later sent it to me. It’s not a token nor a symbolic sort of gift. I use it even now.
In Patagonia, when I was filming Cere Torre, I was hit by a blizzard on a ridge and nobody could help us. We were three men, and we had to dig ourselves into a little ice cave not much better than a big barrel. I was sitting on his rucksack, which I had on me at the time. We had no sleeping bag, no tent, no rope, no mountain climbing gear, nothing. For 55 hours we were caught in this blizzard, and for 55 hours I sat on his rucksack. It was good because I would have lost some more body temperature sitting on the ice.
It’s a practical thing for me. It’s in the little closet next to my mosquito net and my canteen. Just the essential things that I would need.
In Chatwin’s rucksack, I would carry a second pair of underwear, socks, toothbrush, just the very essentials. A canteen. I always carry a pair of binoculars. And I carry a notebook and a pen. Tiny notebooks. They fit in my shirt pocket so that I can access them instantly. I write in miniature. And sometimes I would write while walking. It’s crooked...
I don’t know. He probably would have welcomed it, because he was against tourism and tourism is destroying so many cultures. I have a dictum: “Tourism is sin and traveling on foot virtue.” He liked it. And now tourism is severely curtailed.
Aug 25, 2020 · “Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin” is Herzog’s long-gestating interrogation into the work of Chatwin, who died in 1989. It’s also a tribute to a clearly much-missed...
- Werner Herzog
Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin is a 2019 British documentary film by German director Werner Herzog. It chronicles the life of British travel writer Bruce Chatwin and includes interviews with Chatwin's widow, Elizabeth Chatwin, and biographer Nicholas Shakespeare , as well as detailing Herzog's own friendship and collaboration with the ...
May 2, 2019 · Chatwin’s itinerant disposition led him to study nomads, and Herzog ably conjures the man’s attraction to the intersection of nature, history, dreams, and myth — a mutual...
May 1, 2019 · By John DeFore. May 1, 2019 1:07pm. Tribeca Film Festival. “Bruce Chatwin was searching for a strangeness” as he traveled to remote parts of the world, Werner Herzog says early in Nomad: In the...
Aug 26, 2020 · Werner Herzog turns the camera on himself and his decades-long friendship with the late travel writer Bruce Chatwin, a kindred spirit whose quest for ecstatic truth carried him...
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