Landscape, Second-Order Observer, and Stimmung
Traces of Caspar David Friedrich in Werner Herzog’s Cinema
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35699/2238-2046.2026.58469Keywords:
Caspar David Friedrich, Werner Herzog, Stimmung, landscape, second-order observerAbstract
Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature (2025), the most recent exhibition of the German
artist at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, reaffirms his relevance and invites
reflection on his contemporary resonance. This paper examines the presence of Friedrich’s
Romantic imagery in Werner Herzog’s cinema, proposing the hypothesis that the
filmmaker reworks Friedrich’s sublime not merely as an iconographic reference but, above
all, as an aesthetic and sensory experience articulated through the concept of Stimmung.
The analysis seeks to demonstrate how the melancholic atmosphere, the relationship
between diminutive human figures and grand landscapes, and the motif of the secondorder observer – or the dorsal position of characters facing the vastness of nature –, all central to Friedrich’s painting, reappear in films such as Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), Heart of Glass (1976), Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979), and Fitzcarraldo (1982). In these works, nature emerges as sublime and indifferent to human destiny. Unlike broader studies on Romanticism in cinema, this paper emphasizes the specificity of the dialogue between Friedrich and Herzog, contributing to reflections on landscape, atmosphere, and subjectivity in painting and film.
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