For one splendid, fleeting moment something mellow flowed through my deadly tired body. … Then she looked at me and smiled very delicately, and since she knew that I was someone on foot and therefore unprotected, she understood me. I was embarrassed and placed my smarting legs up on a second armchair, which she pushed over to me. Someone must have told her on the phone that I had come on foot. “I went to Madame Eisner,” he notes in the final entry “she was still tired and marked by her illness. Not only that, but Eisner does also by book’s end, in fact, it’s hard to say who’s sick and who’s the savior, him or her. As long as he is in movement, in transit, he can’t be pinned down, which means that he remains alive. For many, many miles, uninhabited woods sprawl all around, woods that served as battlegrounds in the First and Second World Wars.”Īt the same time, history is just a gloss, a narrative, superimposed over the moment-to-moment experience of being on his feet.įor Herzog, walking is an act of opposition, not just to the static culture of the towns through which he passes, but indeed to death itself. On the one hand, Herzog’s observations of the countryside are delicate, steeped in history “The forest slowly ends here,” he writes, from just inside the French border, “the fierce hills, too. If that suggests we read “Of Walking in Ice” as metaphor, it is both more and less than that. This, in turn, brings us back to the intention, magical or otherwise, of the walk itself. The implication is that we are always making choices, decisions, that mortality is less a state of being than a state of mind. The power of “Of Walking in Ice,” though, has to do with Herzog: his solitude, his observation, the way he is both bent by and bends landscape to his will. Indeed, Eisner lived for nearly a decade more. As an act of expiation, then, or maybe magic, Herzog decided to walk from Munich to Eisner’s bedside, as if, through such his relentless movement, he might keep her alive.
The inspiration for the project is a phone call Herzog received in late 1974, informing him that a friend, the German film historian Lotte Eisner, was close to death in a Paris hospital. Something similar is at work in this slender book, originally published in 1978 and newly restored to print. If this sounds quintessentially Herzog, quintessentially quixotic, so be it in his films - most notably, perhaps, the hallucinatory “Fitzcarraldo” and “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” - he traces the price, and power, of obsession to both ennoble and dismantle us.
WERNER HERZOG OF WALKING IN ICE FULL
“Why is walking so full of woe?” Werner Herzog asks early in “Of Walking in Ice: Munich-Paris, 23 November – 14 December 1974” (University of Minnesota Press: 128 pp., $19.95 paper), a diary of sorts describing a 600-mile trek through winter that he undertook 40 years ago.