TY  - JOUR
A1  - Völker, Oliver
T1  - Whiteout: animal traces in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly man and encounters at the end of the world
T2  - Humanities
N2  - Literary animal studies are confronted with a systematic question: How can writing, as a human-made sign system, represent the nonhuman animal as an autonomous agent without falling back into the pitfalls of anthropomorphism? Against the backdrop of this problem, this paper asks how the medium of film allows for a different representation of the animal and analyzes two of Werner Herzog’s later documentary films. Although the depiction of animals and landscapes has always played a significant part in Herzog’s films, critical assessments of his work—including those of Herzog himself—tended to view the role of nature imagery as purely allegorical: it expresses the inner nature, the inner landscapes of the film’s human protagonists. This paper tries to open up a different view. It argues that both Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World develop an aesthetic that depicts nonhuman nature as an autonomous and lively presence. In the close proximity amongst camera, human, and nonhuman agents, a clear distinction between nature and culture is increasingly blurred.
KW  - animal agency
KW  - filmic representation of animals
KW  - material ecocriticism
KW  - Moby-Dick
KW  - Werner Herzog
Y1  - 2017
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/45145
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-451451
N1  - © 2017 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
VL  - 6
IS  - 89
SP  - 1
EP  - 7
PB  - MDPI
CY  - Basel
ER  -