ICYMI - Chris Knight: 'Nomad' is a filmmaker's ode to his dear friend and writer Bruce Chatwin
British writer Bruce Chatwin and German filmmaker Werner Herzog are contemporaries with a shared interest in, as Herzog puts it, “wild characters, strange dreamers and big ideas about the nature of human existence.”
Or rather, they were. Chatwin died in 1989. He lived long enough to visit the set of Cobra Verde, Herzog’s adaptation of his novel The Viceroy of Ouidah. He described Herzog’s presence on the bonkers shoot as “a monument of sanity in a cast of nervous breakdown.” Nomad is Herzog’s paean to Chatwin in eight chapters, touching down in Australia, Wales, Patagonia and more, where the peripatetic writer had travelled to study art, archeology and anthropology.
The filmmaker, never shy about inserting himself in his own documentaries, also interviews Chatwin’s widow and his biographer, Nicholas Shakespeare, who notes: “Bruce didn’t tell half-truths. He told a truth and a half. He embellished what was there to make it even truer.” No wonder he and Herzog got on so well.
The film runs a mere 85 minutes, and as such can only function as a brief introduction to Chatwin’s life and work. But you may find yourself yearning to know more about the man. “He was the Internet,” Herzog says of his polymathic, analogue-era friend, “at a time when technically it did not exist.”Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin opens Dec. 20 at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers cinema in Toronto.
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