Deep Truth and the Mythic Veil: Werner Herzog's New Mythology inLand of Silence and Darkness

This article begins with Werner Herzog's programmatic statements on new images and deep truth and connects it to ideas of Nietzschean aesthetics, mainly the Apollonian image and the Dionysian horror. My main argument is that Herzog contributes to the literary and aesthetic tradition of new mythology within the medium of film by developing a distinct visual language that tries to express non-rational truth claims. In a first step I explore how Nietzschean aesthetics influenced the debates about the mythic image and total cinema in classic film theory and visual studies. More importantly I show how the desire to create new mythic images not only influenced Herzog's discourse on film, but his actual aesthetic practice. In my analysis of his 1971 documentary Land of Silence and Darkness (Land des Schweigens und der Dunkelheit) I show how the dynamic between Apollonian veil and Dionysian Urbild (original image) is effective in the construction of what Herzog calls “deep truth”. This article attempts to shift the focus away from the fact-fiction debate surrounding most of Herzog's documentaries and to concentrate instead on framing Herzog's claims of non-rational truth theoretically and locating his work in the aesthetic tradition of new mythology.