Werner Herzog: we lack adequate images
...There are few images to be found. One has to dig for them like an archaeologist. One has to search through this ravaged landscape to find anything at all... It's often tied up with risk, of course, which I would never shun, but I see so few people today who dare to address our lack of adequate images. We absolutely need images in tune with our civilization, images that resonate with what is deepest within us. We need to go into war zones, if need be, or anywhere else it takes us...to find images that are pure and clear and transparent... I'd go to Mars or Saturn if I could...because it's no longer easy here on this Earth to find that something that gives images their transparency the way you could before.
You're going to be lonely with them all gone.
–Werner Herzog, Tokyo-Ga, dir. Wim Wenders, 1985
Give us adequate images. We, we lack adequate images, our civilization doesn't have adequate images. And I think our civilization is doomed, is gonna die out like dinosaurs if it does not develop an adequate language or adequate images.
–Werner Herzog, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, 1980
Werner Herzog declares a Holy War on commercial images:
"you're going to be lonely with them all gone"
I'm reading Max Lury's No Ghosts, 2026, at the moment, and this, in relation both to images and to ghosts, appears to be one of its themes: the mortality of images; or, images unto death.
It's like a valve has opened, of automatic vision. From it drains relations to the past, to where we have come from, in every sense, affecting our sense of where we are going to. The problem is not the falsification of the past, for example AIs hallucinating historical facts. The problem isn't, as I wrote in "Symphony," that the fake escapes—or it is this entirely, that fakes escape and live among us, and even take over political leadership; they are inadequate images. For some reason this makes them especially suitable for roles in government.
Where have they come from? time, the weird crystals of time, in which images and realities exchange places. (I write about that here.)
The problem is they are going into the future. Missing those images, the ghosts, our antecedents, our ancestors, they've replaced, we're going to be lonely in their company.
