"Quelqu’un a-t-il déjà entendu soupirer des pierres?" (W. Herzog). Du corps à la ruine (et retour)

The work of Werner Herzog has been marked from the outset by two great obsessions: the body and the ruin, both of which will permanently reappear throughout his work, whether cinematographic or literary. In Herzog's work the ruins are less the result of the passing of time or the trace of a frozen past, than the complex expression of a specific link between mankind and its environment. Either the result of a Western modernity that has destroyed an authentic landscape, or the product of a nature that has regained its rights over the Western man who tried to invade it, ruins in Herzog films are often commented as signs of the director’s seemingly contradictory tendency: on the one hand, a critique of Western and colonizing modernity; on the other hand, a romantic aestheticization of death and of the fight against a hostile or indifferent nature, which has led some commentators to accuse the director of reviving a fascist aesthetic.
Herzog's first film Herakles (1962) has been mostly considered as a marginal production. However, taking up Emmanuel Burdeau’s assumption that Herzog’s first short film is actually the programmatic matrix of his entire work (Burdeau, 2017), we will first show that Herakles poses two fundamental elements in Herzog's work: on the one hand, ruinification as a circular process; on the other hand, the ruinification of the body. In the second part of our paper, Lessons of Darkness (1992), one of Herzog's films that is almost entirely composed of ruins and that seems to expose itself most radically to the reproach of an aestheticization of death and destruction, will enable us to show that the process of ruinification of the bodies which could appear, a priori, as a secondary element of the film, is the driving force of his representation of reality.