I haven’t ever read anything written on Herzog, so I guess what I’m writing about may well be a staple of Herzog criticism, but it struck me that during Fata Morgana the movement of the camera bears a peculiar relationship with the objects and relationships that it films. I couldn’t believe it at first while watching it, but never, in the course of the entire film, does the camera ever actually zoom in on the set. We begin with half-a-dozen or more shots of a plane landing in a field, a shifting landscape of water and desert and cloud, punctuated by aberrant images – a man walking across the sand, factories on the far horizon, the tops of huts and shacks like a Lego set sprawled childishly across the thorns and rocks and cacti of the desert. Through all of this, the camera never moves in on its prey; rather, it follows the landscapes in their motion as though it were a car driving along a path, the distances from it of objects that lie off the track of its road being a constant. After a while we are treated to some sharp cuts and jumps, some of which amplify their preceding images – a distant shot of a car followed by a closer angle of the same car, for instance – but all of this is accomplished without the camera ever actually moving in slowly, zooming in upon its images. It’s almost as though we’re watching a series of photographs passing before our eyes without interruption.

About midway through the movie, the camera does begin moving in, tentatively – upon a line of slaughtered animal carcasses juxtaposed with a sardonic take on Genesis, a narrator telling us how heaven decreed that its creations should find protectors and caregivers to nurture them; upon the shapes of tin sheds and houses; upon images of children and beggars; upon a naturalist demonstrating the peculiarities of a monitor lizard he’s holding; upon stones and rock formations; upon sand dunes that metamorphose into waves on water and clouds in the skies with apparently smooth continuity. At moments like this, however, the camera refrains from zooming right in, mercilessly, but instead darts in and out again, in tentative flickering motions, tenderly and surreptitiously. It rests on a place, moves closer softly and quickly, and lingers for a moment or two, slides down the length of the set, before sliding back again. In a sense, the camera is making love to its subjects.

The camera, then, follows a line that is disjointed and discontinuous from the landscape it reveals. Indeed, we’re treated to something more akin to a revelation than an exploration, the voice of the narrators telling a story seemingly running parallel to the actual visual narrative, only touching it at points, to withdraw again. The music follows a similar trajectory – intimations of violence and pain and injustice on the screen immediately followed by soaring melodies, a hymn, an operatic tenor, a rousing blues, successive compositions by Leonard Cohen, as the landscape tears off at a run, past wire meshes and military camps and trucks and crashed planes and far-off hills. (But this landscape rushes past us, we never pass through it.) The relationship of the camera to its objects establishes, then, the form for the relationship forged between the principal narrative elements that keep the film moving.

But the juxtaposition of narrative, visual imagery and music in apparently parallel streams does not result in chaos and the breaking of all perspective, for it reveals deeper preoccupations. A wonderfully reconstructed Biblical creation myth – God transposed to a mythic, probably Central American, creator and creatress, the making of the world through the labours of Genesis – is countered by images of wilful destruction, of death and disease and poverty and misery. An ironical reading of Paradise is counterposed to interwoven images of serenity, serendipity, and violence and desolation. There is a particularly beautiful sequence, where ‘Suzanne’ is played across a barren desert landscape, and the image, in the central stanza of the song, of Jesus as a man dying for a beautiful cause, but bearing a promise of healing that never quite dies out (an image quite at odds with the avaricious greed, bloodlust and powerlust that characterizes so much of the history of practised Christianity), acquires an intense power and poignancy. A politics emerges from the film, an ironical affirmation of Utopia in the face of the banal, the absurd, and the wasted. The camera, which gives all of this light, shape and form – itself a principle of creation and revelation – rivets us to all of this, but also keeps us at bay, reminds us of our status as onlookers by refusing the cinematic depth that zooming close-in shots and slow zoom-outs would have created. We are denied a point of identification with the people and objects on screen, reminded on their awareness of their presence on camera, their unavoidable theatricality. The camera in Fata Morgana is the alienation effect in action.