Mee Ok Icaro
A PARADOXICAL APOCALYPSE: WERNER HERZOG’S LA SOUFRIÈRE
“The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.”
—Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
A screen of smoke erupts from a rocky panorama—grand, menacing, pure. It conjures the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, in which an anonymous man stands with his back to us at the vanishing point atop a mountain, clouds gathering at his feet. But in the opening of La Soufrière, the little-known thirty-minute film by Werner Herzog, there’s no hint of any human presence—just us, the faceless audience, watching from some future place. Without a dark silhouette overlooking the landscape, the observer is us: for thirty-four seconds we are left in silence to admire the suppressed power of this peak. Finally, Herzog, our self-described “benevolent Caligari,” begins to speak off-camera, hypnotizing us with his brooding Germanic cadence:
In August 1976 there were clear indications that the volcano La Soufrière on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe was about to erupt… an explosion of the whole volcano with the force of at least five or six atomic bombs. Thus, seventy-five thousand inhabitants were evacuated…
Upon reading that a man refused to leave despite these warnings, Herzog rushed to the island the next day, along with two cameramen, to find him.
In the next frame, we are in Basse-Terre, the most vulnerable town on the island, now completely empty. A streetlight flashes meaninglessly in the distance, directing no one. Telephones were still working, we are told, and the air-conditioning and refrigerators in many houses were still on.
Next, a shot of a woman’s shoe, one half of a pair of flats, appears briefly before the camera sweeps up to reveal a gate, cracked open, beckoning us toward an abandoned two-story house. Nearby, a white building sleeps over a deserted street, its clapboard shutters squeezed shut over the windows. This is the police station, Herzog’s voice tells us before adding with a straight face, It was a comfort for us not having the law hanging around.
Welcome to the end of the world.
“[La Soufrière] is a vision of dystopia; a civilization that has outlived its inhabitants,” wrote Brad Prager in The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth. In the solitary shadows of a ghosted island, elegantly shot and with such sweet intention, Herzog seems to be saying: Isn’t it romantic?
Still early in his career, Herzog proves himself a paramount study in paradoxes, claiming his territory somewhere between Romanticism and Realism, while also finding himself standing outside of them. In Paul Cronin’s Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, a roughly six-hundred-page tome comprised of interviews, Herzog insists, “You can’t get a more contrary position towards the Romantic point of view than mine.” And yet, in nearly the same breath he admits, “While almost everything about Romanticism is foreign to me, Caspar David Friedrich is someone I do have great affinity for… Friedrich didn’t paint landscapes per se, he revealed inner landscapes to us, ones that exist only in our dreams. It’s something I have always tried to do.”
But what inner landscape is Herzog showing us? And whose? Isn’t rushing to an all but certain death at the hands of nature the very epitome of Romanticism? Is he not following in the footsteps of the great Romantic figures who honored the passions of youth above all else by either going mad or taking their own lives while in the bloom of their prime?
Romanticism, the rebellious child of the Enlightenment and its love of reason and machines, was, after all, primarily an artistic movement swinging the pendulum back to the primitive and divine. With the chill of the Industrial Revolution at their backs, it was only natural to rush toward the spiritual and the sensual. And yet the Enlightenment was only one bookend of the Romantic era, itself fathering its own defiant child, Realism, which championed the ordinary, planting a mediocre flag in the heart of modernity. By insisting on accurate depictions of the contemporary world, Realism refused to carry Romanticism’s torch, rejecting the impulse to gloss over the sordid unpleasantness of life by falling on the sword of beauty.
Rather than choosing between the two, Herzog splits the difference, juxtaposing the hard reality within this seemingly Romantic pursuit: in the middle of a winding road a mother pig stands with her piglets; a series of shots presenting deserted streets, emptied shop windows, and barren storefronts flicker across the screen. Then, more silent, emaciated four-legged creatures. The world without us, after us. As flies swirl about a dog carcass, he speaks:
We came across donkeys, pigs, chickens, and especially dogs. The dogs had gone without food for days—there was no garbage to scavenge in. They had even stopped barking. We found many of them starving, and the place stank of carrion.
Next: an empty pier. It was as spooky as a science fiction locale, Herzog deadpans. The camera sweeps the dock, looking out at the ocean before moving over the lifeless city and following the pier to its end. It seems to disappear out from under our feet until, suddenly, we are walking on water.
*
A close-up of the volcano, beautiful and surreal, roils in mist and mystery. Cue Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No 2. As it drifts over the landscape, the aching chords and soaring flute summon the heart-wrenching 1945 film Brief Encounter, which tells the story of an epic love affair that was never to be. We also hear the lifted musical phrase from the song “All by Myself” as it laments the stolen sentiment, Those days are gone… It is as if we are taken into the very heart of fin de siècle Moscow, when Rachmaninoff, unable to marry his fiancée, was lost in a depression so deep not even Tolstoy could inspire him, and then to his rapturous recovery, credited to the hypnotist to whom the concerto is dedicated.
Dreamlike notes in C minor continue to play while the volcano peeks out from behind its vaporous veil, and Herzog’s voice, once again, speaks to us:
Then the situation became very tense during the night… The mountain seemed about to explode, and the last of the scientists had fled… It was said the catastrophe was inevitable within the next few hours.
The concerto breaks into its haunting melody as we loom over the landscape, an aerial shot by helicopter. The nostalgic twinge of the arching arpeggio proves inescapable as a series of frames pass before us—lyrical, balletic, breathless—until, at last, the clutter of buildings gives way to the unsuspecting shoreline, marked by a single strip of road separating the ocean from the island. The sea was full of dead snakes, Herzog states evenly. They had crawled down during the night by the thousands… and fled into the sea, where they promptly drowned.
Driving through the desolate streets flanked by shuttered homes, we feel like we are floating, like we are ghosts. The volcano continues to exhale its gray gases in the distance, while apartment courtyards seem to stare out at nothing in particular—lifeless and bleak. Then suddenly, the La Guadeloupe statue towers over us, the sky above it ominous and graceful. Palm trees lightly undulate. It is almost as if we are in paradise.
*
Following an empty road leading up to the peak, the camera can’t help but notice plumes of smoke spilling out from the slope of the mountain. Still in their car, the crew sneaks around the Army roadblocks, thirty miles in diameter, taking them higher and higher up to the foot of the summit—four thousand feet in all—where the land bursts into lushness once again. As the piano crescendoes to its climax, a young mustachioed Herzog runs toward us, pointing back to the silver clouds of smoke billowing out of the volcano’s lip while the car turns around, avoiding the deadly fumes tumbling down the escarpment. For the first time we began to get scared, he confesses. Then after a shot of road covered in debris, he adds, We decided to carry on.
Herzog and his cameraman ascend on foot, carrying their film equipment as the smoke draws closer, the sides of the mountain exhaling fumes. They are following the electric cables used for the abandoned seismographs at the edge of the crater. The ground was hot and rather unsteady, he tells us as vapors quickly cloak the air. The mountain had split three hundred feet in length.
Herzog then pivots: The people of Guadeloupe perhaps were so aware of danger because in 1902 there had been a catastrophe in the neighboring island of Martinique. The scene is as otherworldly as it is beautiful, with steam swirling into arabesques over the arid landscape until the screen clouds over completely, blinding us with smoke.
*
We find ourselves in another helicopter panorama—this time in black and white. We are flying over a photograph. It is the town of Saint-Pierre, taken in 1901, a town that was also at the foot of a volcano. The warnings… were identical to those of La Soufrière, he explains. This tropical doppelgänger waxes reminiscent of Basse-Terre with its modest, equatorial buildings and cobblestone paths peopled with bodies from a century ago. A piano strokes out the notes to the “Venetian Gondola Song” by the early German Romantic composer Felix Mendelssohn, published after his death. It is thought that this piece was meant for the series Songs Without Words. Herzog begins to speak:
The population intended to flee, but since there was an election which had already been postponed for other reasons, the governor persuaded the people to stay. Only a few hundred left the town. All others remained.
An elegiac camera pans a still image: a packed square with a fountain at its center—men in white suits, women in farming hats. A crowd stands with their backs toward us, looking up at the sky blanketed in dark, foreboding clouds: a sea of fog. Then another image, this one without people, only smoke—and beneath this smoke, an unsuspecting bridge arching over a canal.
This is the last picture taken before the catastrophe, he informs us. Nearly overshadowed by the large buildings looming over them, small figures fleck the beach, staring out into the distance as waves crash onto the shore, forever stranded within that liminal space between foreclosed civilization and the cruel cosmos. The population had grown restless, Herzog continues. Some… still thinking of fleeing.
Suddenly, a luminous bird peels out of the sky, and the explosion that shocks the air so close behind it has the Classical precision of a William Blake hallucination. Beneath it, other panicked birds rush toward the earth.
Then, the next day this here: it is an actual photo and not a painting. A dead cow in the water and, to the right in the background, hard to make out, the half-sunken wreck of the Canadian ship Roraima. It had been tied up to take on refugees. It sank with all hands, and not one soul survived.
The following frame is but another lifeless, colorless photograph in ruins. A single wall remains standing—defiantly, absurdly—with stairs leading up to the sky, smoke still rising from the dark ashes of a smoldering town. The people had been charred to a cinder, thirty thousand dead in all… The whole thing could only have taken seconds.
In the next scene, branches cast their expressionistic shadows against a lone black door surrounded by a grim stone enclosure.
And then they found one survivor, just one. It was a young thief, Cyparis, who was in prison. The miracle… is that he only survived because he was the baddest guy in town…
Filling the screen is a handsome, regal Black man in profile peering back at us over his shoulder from within the frame’s imperial silence. He was placed in an underground solitary confinement, Herzog reports credulously, almost monotone. When the blast of the heat struck, he threw himself to the ground and suffered severe back burns.
In the hospital, the same man—pathetic, shut eyes, slouched posture—now sits on the edge of a bed, a blanket carelessly slung over him. Later he was exhibited as a sideshow attraction in an American circus and lived until 1956, Herzog states without irony, as he once again turns him into a circus sideshow—one that lives on. This man, like an existential highway accident from which we cannot turn away, breaks the fourth wall, staring directly at us—out into the present perfect. Cyparis himself may have come and gone, but we, his voyeurs, remain.
*
What are we to make of all this? Herzog here feels fully Romantic, walking toward the gaping mouth of a trembling volcano with two other men like a Holy Trinity turned suicide pact, as he reflects upon the wondrous power of nature at its most amoral. He sees that it is here on this dying island, devoid of human life, that the film truly opens: this is a story about people. But the men we are about to meet cannot afford Romanticism, history, or a one-way ticket. They remain on the island because poverty is real and reality is free.
Returning us to the palette of the present, away from the wistful redolence of sepia or chiaroscuro, Herzog has us floating with the clouds as they drift over a jade mountaintop. For a moment, we forget it is smoke. Another piece, the prelude from Parsifal, begins to play, evoking the third act when the main character collapses to the ground at the sight of the Holy Grail and a dove appears above his lifeless body. It is an apt choice, composed by Richard Wagner, the culminating heir of Romanticism or “the last Romanticist,” alerting us to the mortal danger Herzog has entered in search of his Grail: the man who refused to leave. Deep, lovely fissures running into the darkness of where the mountain has been ripped open remind us of how beautiful nature is—when no one is there. Eventually the mountains grow bare, the smoke thickens, and a waterfall trickles to the ground as if out of a quaint faucet trickling out in the tiny distance until, suddenly, the music ends. We have found our ignominious chalice.
A man lies upon the ground, asleep. He is the one we’ve been searching for. His gray puffs of hair wisp away from his dark face like threads of smoke, as his head rests on a makeshift pillow shared by a black and white cat, curled up into a ball. They wake him. As he speaks, the camera pulls us closer to his face, his toothless mouth forming his apocalyptic words.
“I’m here because it is God’s will. I am waiting for my death,” he declares, steadfast in his metaphysical clarity, before adding, “And I wouldn’t know where to go anyway. I haven’t a cent. I am poor.” He goes on to insist he is not afraid to die, that God “has ordained this for us” while he continues to lie on the ground. Then he looks away.
Next we see a second man sitting against a stone barrier, much like the hundred-year-old prison wall from Martinique. “Aren’t you afraid?” Herzog asks in French. This man, too, swears that he is not. But instead of proclaiming a resolute surrender to God and nature, he replies with his own question: “What difference does it make?” Next to him, a pig digs through trash.
Returning to the first man, Herzog prompts, “Tell me something about your life.” The man declares that he is waiting for death and demonstrates how: by playing dead. He lies on his back with his hands to his sides, palms facing up—a Christ figure, ready to ascend, or perhaps a poor man’s Nietzsche who can’t afford to believe that God is dead. When Herzog asks, “What have you got to lose?” the man doesn’t answer and instead sings a pleasant little tune, as if he were a child.
A final impoverished man, the third man, stands in front of a building, asserting that he does not fear death, while also casually mentioning that he might flee later that day. He supposes that he would like to see his fifteen children again. But no, he is not afraid of dying, he repeats, while standing in the crosshairs of a four-way stop. Then he turns his head and, for a moment, we are all looking at the volcano towering above a street lined with colorless, concrete buildings. “We all have to die one day. I’m not afraid of a single thing…,” he avows before adding, “but if you’ll take me to Pointe-à-Pitre with you, I’ll go along.”
*
By documenting the stark absence of people throughout, the human story Herzog has actually been telling comes into sharp relief: those who remain are simply too poor to leave—and they are prouder than they are poor. What began as a romantic quest for the Grail ends with three oracles espousing the truth of poverty. In the first half of the film, nature threatens to deprive humanity of its existence, but in the second half, civilization denies men their humanity.
As with physics, when the modern philosopher scrutinizes life too closely, the ordinary laws of our social universe break down. Like the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant who set concepts against each other to prove the impossibility of both, Herzog takes us to the edge of reason, disarming Romanticism and Realism, while teasing us with them. He seems to be saying, All roads lead to the opposite of truth.
And yet, ever faithful to the paradoxical, he is showing that they are also hardly false: La Soufrière is nostalgic and dystopic—and seemingly bereft of reason, pure or otherwise. We are standing precisely in the shadows of the colonialism that the Enlightenment justified before it gave birth to Romanticism. Kant himself laid out the scientific rationalization for modern racism, a biologically grounded hierarchy of humanity, and Adam Smith provided the structure of modern capitalism, which would enrich Europe using the weapon of the white supremacy that continues today. And now we have met three descendants of the colonized, left to die at the foot of a volcano, killed not by nature, but by philosophy.
*
As this cinematic meditation nears its end, it is life rather than death that impresses itself on the young Herzog before the film closes. He states: In my memory it is not the volcano that remains, but the neglect and oblivion in which those black people live. In the penultimate act of the apocalypse, Herzog shuns Romanticism in favor of Realism, choosing unvarnished truth over the idyll, the political over the metaphysical. “The film has a politics,” Prager points out. “It means to show the pathos in the poverty of its protagonists.”
Herzog then closes the film with the paramount paradox, its final chapter titled, “An Inevitable Catastrophe That Didn’t Take Place.” A fourth and final piece of music begins to play, the concluding movement from Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods. It is the funeral march of the tragic hero Siegfried, the epic slayer of fire-breathing dragons—Herzog’s antithesis. As the notes drift like the smoke wafting across our screen, coyly covering and uncovering the shadowy mountain, Herzog’s voice too floats over these quiet melodies and haunting images for the last time.
It will always remain a mystery why there was no eruption. Never before in the history of vulcanology were signals of such magnitude measured and yet nothing happened.
We leave the volcano no different than we found it: sacred, godless, cruel—and filled with redolent grace.
*
La Soufrière begins by asking the question: Is there a place for the Romantic in the face of the apocalypse? In this way Herzog absolutely breaks from the German Romantic tradition, refusing to glorify some preternatural aesthetic. And yet, when staring into the abyss, he can’t help but notice its beauty. True Romantic heroes die young, and though he appeared to be slated for certain death, he lives. Herzog will never be a true Romantic: fate turned out to be chance.
La Soufrière nonetheless is Romanticism ad absurdum—it follows itself so far down its own logic, it isn’t itself anymore. Even Herzog himself tells Cronin, “There was a deep sense at the time that making the film was the right thing to do, though today, looking back, I’m not so sure…” Indeed, after demanding we never look away from the truth, he dissolves into an unclaimed space adjacent to Romanticism, as ambivalent as the volcano itself. Like Doctor Caligari, Herzog conjures forth a dream anchored in a chilling, igneous reality. But just when we think we’ve got him, he pivots once more, confessing that in the end “the volcano didn’t feel real to me… it was just a projection of light on a piece of celluloid.”
Well, so much for Realism. After all that smoke, it was mirrors.
MEE OK ICARO is an award-winning literary prose stylist and occasional poet. She is the winner of the inaugural Prufer Poetry Prize, runner-up in the Prairie Schooner Creative Nonfiction Contest, and a finalist for the Scott Merrill Award for Poetry and the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction. Her writing appears in the Boston Globe Magazine, The Georgia Review, The L.A. Times, Pleiades, River Teeth, Witness, and Michael Pollan’s “Trips Worth Telling” anthology. She is also featured in the docuseries (Un)Well on Netflix.
