Landscape Beyond Time. Asian Jungle in Werner Herzog's Films and Prose

Abstract

The subject of the article is the images of Asian jungles presented in two closely related films by Werner Herzog: the documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997) and the feature film Rescue Dawn (2005), as well as the novel The Twilight World (2022). The author analyses how the German director transforms the landscape of a real place into a timeless and universal landscape of the soul. To do so, she describes the jungle as a location in which the films discussed in the article are set and then shows how using his characteristic formal means, the director transforms it and subordinates it to the dominant aesthetic ideas of his cinema.