TIFF20: Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds
Clive Oppenheimer brings out the best in Werner Herzog. The British volcanologist Oppenheimer met the famous Bavarian director in Antarctica while Herzog was filming Encounters at the End of the World (2007)—in which he’s featured—and the two struck up a friendship. They partnered together for Into the Inferno (2016), which took them around the globe to explore volcanoes and our cultural fascination with them. Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds, which screened digitally at TIFF20, continues the approach of Into the Inferno, with Oppenheimer in front of the camera and Herzog behind it as the two of them explore the scientific subject of meteors in various locations across the world.
The film is a wide-eyed examination of natural wonder, full of Herzog’s peculiar awe at the natural world, which he finds both terrible and awesome. Herzog narrates with his famously ornate and fabulous diction and Oppenheimer interviews subjects to get at the heart of the science that determines why some objects fall from the heavens, bringing matter from the dawn of time along with them.
As is typical to Herzog documentaries, Fireball avoids talking heads, infographics, and bland lines of questioning. As he demonstrated in Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)—likely his best documentary of the past decade—he’s as interested in the eccentric personalities behind the science as the science itself. He’ll hold on awkward medium-wide shots of the interview subjects silently watching him behind the camera, or include a shot of naked excitement on the faces of the subjects when they forget they’re being filmed. This formal approach personalizes the subjects and makes them more than bland dispensers of exposition. It’s one of the main reasons Herzog’s documentaries have so much personality.
Fireball demonstrates the same wide-ranging focus as many of Herzog’s recent documentaries, with shoots in Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Norway, France, Hawaii, Italy, Antarctica, and an island off of Papua New Guinea. But unlike Herzog’s recent documentary Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World (2016), for instance, a core thematic vision runs throughout all the segments, making each venture to a new location seem like a natural progression of the visit to the last one, and not just a random assembly.
The film’s approach is best summed up by a Jesuit priest working at the Vatican Observatory outside Rome, who states that you cannot be a scientist without being awed by reality and made curious about its mechanisms. When Oppenheimer presses him to expound, he summarises the paradoxical approach that is befitting a scientist priest: the knowledge of why a meteor streaks brightly across the night sky makes its aesthetic beauty all the more precious. Knowledge of the material mechanisms of the world deepens an appreciation of its spiritual power and aesthetic appeal.
Thus, meteors are a perfect avenue for Herzog to explore this tension between the natural world and its spiritual implications. They come from the heavens and contain particles from the birth of the universe, but they also hold deep spiritual meaning for various cultures. Each location Herzeg and Oppenheimer visit draws out this metaphysical tension, which has been a longstanding thematic interest in Herzog’s career. In Saudi Arabia, Herzog and Oppenheimer send in a cameraman with a cellphone to record the adoration of the Black Stone of the Kabah, which God sent to earth within Islamic lore, connecting heaven and earth at the location of what would become Mecca. For Muslims, the meteorite is a physical reminder of God’s intervention and involvement in the world. In Merida and Chicxilub, Mexico, Herzog examines the crater of the meteorite that likely killed the dinosaurs, showing another way that a meteorite has had untold impact on our planet, in this case, by detonating a force more powerful than 10,000 nuclear bombs and wiping out an entire generation of species.
Not all meteorites have as much impact on our planet as the Black Stone or the Chicxulub impactor. In Norway, Herzog and Oppenheimer meet with Jon Larsen, a popular jazz musician who is an amateur geologist in his spare time. Larsen meets them on the roof of a massive sports facility in Oslo, where he demonstrates a makeshift way to collect micrometeorites, more commonly known as space dust. Later, they analyze the particles in a home lab and share the astounding, highly-magnified images of the micrometeorites, which capture the fantastical visions of the nebulas in which they were born. None of Larsen’s meteorological findings are life-changing, but they are astounding, both in how they fill Larsen with meaning and purpose, while demonstrating the awe-inspiring beauty of the physical world.
This personal approach to exploring the cosmic reaches its peak when Oppenheimer and Herzog head to a Korean research station in Antarctica (both filmmakers making a return visit to the continent over a decade after Encounters at the End of the World). There, they meet with a scientist who radiates enthusiasm with every discovery. Herzog shows archival footage of the scientist coming across a massive meteorite on the icy expanses of the pole and dropping to his knees in ecstatic tears before making a snow angel in joy; Herzog revels in the humanity on display. This is accentuated moments later as Oppenheimer joins the scientists on a walk across the ice, where meteors can be found deposited across the ice sheet. Herzog shows the search party walking in a wide line across the ice and stopping as one figure jumps excitedly at a discovery. In a happy moment of coincidence, it’s Oppenheimer who makes the discovery, finding the largest meteorite of the season. The excitement of the moment is palpable.
These moments of human joy do not indicate that Herzog has become a mushy sentimentalist in Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds. A caustic description of the rundown port town of Chicxulub as “so godforsaken it makes you want to cry” demonstrates that Herzog’s brutal honesty remains intact. But the film captures Herzog’s innate curiosity in the world around him, not only in the scientific marvels like meteorites that demonstrate the world beyond, but also the eccentric human personalities that make such discoveries possible.
It’s fitting that the film ends on an island between Australia and Papua New Guinea where Indigenous inhabitants revere meteorites and traditionally believe that meteors carry the dead to the afterlife. Excited by the presence of Herzog and his crew, the local inhabitants put on a fire dance display, which hasn’t been performed for 50 years. Herzog closes on the image of the dancers on the beach as their families watch on, chanting and playing drums. Even today, in this small corner of the world, a meteorite can define spiritual meaning as well as move people to song and dance. Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds captures this profound spiritual depth and physical joy in a manner only possible by someone as eccentric as Herzog.
8 out of 10
Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds (2020, UK/Austria/USA)
Directed by Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer.