The Boundless Landscape

Capuchin Friar by the Sea by Caspar David Friedrich
Oil Painting
(used with the courtesy of www.humanitiesweb.org)

I've been reading about Caspar David Friedrich, German landscape painter from the 1800's, and his boundless landscapes. The sentiment that I get a whiff of even by studying pictures in books is expressed exquisitely by Carl Gustav Carus, one of Friedrich's disciples, in the following words:

Stand on the peak of a mountain, contemplate the long ranges of hills...and all the other glories offered to your view, and what feeling seizes you? It is a quiet prayer, you lose yourself in boundless space, your self disappears, you are nothing, God is everything. (1)

Immediately German filmmaker Werner Herzog came to mind. Other than with my own eyes, the times I've experienced said feeling profoundly was through Herzog's films like Fitzcarraldo, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Grizzly Man, and the portions I've seen of Encounters at the End of the World. Here's a still from Fitzcarraldo:

Still from Fitzcarraldo
(used with the courtesy of http://brzinnyc.blogspot.com/2004_04_01_archive.html)

Conveniently, this shot of actor Klaus Kinski even includes Friedrich's Ruckenfigur motif, that of showing a figure, male or female, from the back. The scene from the film that I recall so vividly, and of which I draw a sufficient parallel to the mood of Friedrich's work, is that when Fitzgerald (Kinski), is playing opera as his boat of disgruntled natives travels down the river. In this particular scene, Herzog highlights Fitzgerald's small presence in the vastness of Peru's landscape. The connection between how impossibly grand and brilliant nature is and how diminutively small Fitzgerald is easily relates to Friedrich's rendering of the monk by the sea. And Friedrich's Woman in the Morning Sun among others.

In the more than a century of separation, however, one big difference changed from Friedrich's perspective to Herzog's. Friedrich's boundlessness was a mirror of God's infinity while Herzog's is one of The Great Void. Friedrich wanted to exhibit the religious presence of nature while Herzog wants to show the terrifying, indifferent beauty of it. Don't associate "religious presence," however, with joy. Friedrich, despite God's existence, felt painful isolation in the "anxious silence" of landscapes similar to the way Herzog does.

In the Friedrich works I've "seen" (by way of reproduction), the landscape dominates the helpless figures. And while the same occurs in Herzog's films, in Fitzcarraldo, Fitzgerald attempts, unsuccessfully, to fight against the deafening quiet of nature by playing opera. It's an astounding scene in which opera represents civilization and the riverscape, the harsh brutality of existence. Herzog remarked of the jungle, "The birds don't sing; they scream out in terror." While Fitzgerald screams, Friedrich's Friar stands defeated.

(1) Taken from An Outline of 19th Century European Painting by Lorenz Eitner