Faith only luggage

On the way ice Munich-Paris from 23-11 to 14-12-1974, small dense and fabulous book is the true story of a pilgrimage to Bavaria to Paris began on 23 November 1974 and ended on December 14 the same year. At the announcement of the imminent death of her friend Lotte Eisner, great critic and film historian, Werner Herzog decided to walk a long journey that will allow it to link Munich to the French capital, where Lotte Eisner lives (but How much longer?). Preparations are short: it is with his soul and his whole bodies that Werner Herzog must accomplish this path and resolutely alone.

Accompanied by cold, loneliness, rain, excitement, rage, Herzog works with, pegged to the body, thought that if he performs the act of pure faith to the end Lotte Eisner will not die. The filmmaker tells the nights of breaking in isolated cottages in the Black Forest, to take some rest and shelter for a time of bitter cold; and gray and gloomy days trampled in a yellow mud on the lookout for some fainted or drowned sun. What drives Werner Herzog during this long and dangerous journey may be akin to magical thinking, which has often been undermined by Christianity and more recently by psychoanalysis which ny saw quune kind of primitive residue dune distant time where lived the man slag in caves and navait neither heating nor running water: an ancient era when the man does not believe in god Progress, worshiped gods of nature, was one with the earth and that doing navait whatnot short of modern technology, a world of lunatics neither more nor less! Once a thing is beyond us, our narrow and coldly rational society can not help to want at all costs to enclose it in a symptom, a pathology. As historian Tacitus Roman said: "The more corrupt a society is, the more it multiplies the number of its laws", I would say that the more a society is sick, she invents more symptoms to create more confusion.

Baste! After many obstacles, Werner Herzog manages to Paris and her friend - who according to the omniscient Western medicine should pass away long ago - is still alive. A few years later, it is still the case. These are things that can not be explained, which belong to the most unfathomable mystery. Exhausted, Lotte Eisner once said to his friend director: "Werner, you have cast a spell on me, you mavez forbidden to die, today i almost 90 years, I'm blind, I can not read, so must be removed this spell for me to die. "For fun, Herzog agrees. And 15 days later, Lotte Eisner finally dies.

Where does life begin and where death? Broad question for which we have no answer.
In a world frozen to the bone, here is a book that warms, words that flow into the throat and a hot water spirits.
Down the road of ice, there is a heart that still beats, as a glowing ember.

Thibault Marconnet
March 19, 2015