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Inner and outer space, in the realm of the senses. "I will tell you a poem reflecting on our condition." Blind and deaf since youth, Fini Straubinger sits on a park bench and describes an animal's antlers, eyes darting with quiet ardor as she transports the shapes in her mind to the documentary lens. Werner Herzog accompanies her through Bavarian institutions as she meets fellow wanderers ("Hello, my sister in destiny," she greets a recluse in the asylum) and helps them with the loneliness of private worlds. Eliot's "raid on the inarticulate," Bach for the exaltation of flight, a cherished erinnerung. Deafness is constant noise rather than silence while blindness is comprised of "all kinds of colors," she explains, not limitations but elements from an alternate consciousness. Touch is the key to perception: Straubinger caresses a hothouse cactus and cradles a baby chimp, children learn the pronunciation of words by feeling the vibrations in the speaker's throat, signs and meanings come together in the palm of a hand. The liquidity of barriers, the miracle of connection. As fiercely averse to facile sentimentality as the filmmaker, the humanitarian outlines a domain where the emotional and the painterly are inseparable—flowers and birds and dark rivers flowing slowly, "like a melody," toward a rocky lake. An alphabet of dashes and dots on a glove, a most direct allegory for the system of tactile codes known as cinema. Amid the Géricault portraits, young Vladimir in his room suddenly smiling as he hugs a portable radio (cp. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser). An envoy between kingdoms, the real-life heroine is last glimpsed with a sense of becalmed peace rarely afforded by bedeviled Herzog explorers. "If a world war broke out, I wouldn't even notice." Cinematography by Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein.
--- Fernando F. Croce |