Werner Herzog has once again shown his flair – his genius, perhaps – for locating passionate quests and obsessions at the limits of the imaginable. This new film is about South African naturalist Dr Steve Boyes and his mission to discover if there is a hitherto undiscovered mega-species of giant elephants, or “ghost elephants”, living beyond the human gaze in the vast highland plateau of Angola. He also wants to see if these fugitive elephants – if they exist – are genetically related to a particular huge elephant, the biggest on record, which is on show at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, named the “Fénykövi” elephant after the hunter who shot it in 1955.
Boyes has been nurturing this hunch for many years. It is not clear what the scientific basis for his hypothesis is, but he is in constant touch with Kalahari bush trackers in Namibia, whose instinctive understanding of elephants has led him to this vision. He and his team conduct an expedition into Angola, intent on finding the “ghost elephants” and getting a DNA sample to take back to the Smithsonian – rather like a Jurassic Park movie – having first gained permission to do so from a tribal king in a ceremony treated without mockery.
This film may not have the self-destructive craziness and tragicomedy of Herzog’s documentary masterpiece Grizzly Man, which was about an amateur enthusiast’s doomed desire to live among grizzly bears; in fact the quest that Ghost Elephants describes is perfectly rational and irony free, and finally results in (provisional) success. The film is so rich and exotic, if that word has not been discredited in this context. Herzog’s keen eye for the characters and personalities gives it its flavour, and so of course does his unmistakable rasping voice, particularly when he goes into raptures about the day-to-day life of an indigenous villager: “I know I shouldn’t romanticise him but … surrounded by chickens … it can’t get better than this!”
Herzog doesn’t pause to consider the aspects of the great white hunter and great white saviour in all this, perhaps because the implications are so obvious and already so extensively discussed. It is a marvellously warm and engaging study.
