Critics reviews

Given the spectacular nature of Herzog's "embarrassed landscapes," [the film] is unique for calling into question the very notion of spectacle and the embodied capacity to see, or hear, at all. It is of course part of a Herzogian perverse irony that his chosen tool—cinema as a catalyst of the communicable—is put in the service of an ineffable condition, a paradox that divisively figures in his, and this particular film's, reception as either deeply humane or structurally exploitive.

Herzog either does too little (letting the camera run to the point of tedium during interviews in proto-Errol Morris fashion) or too much (the music, the fed lines, esp. the pretentious one that ends the film). Fortunately, as with Grizzly Man, Herzog's meddlings cannot outmatch his basic gift for knowing a good story about the mysteries of human nature, and the film is worth watching for the time spent with people all too invisible in society.

Sights and sounds are film's instruments, yet to Werner Herzog the greatest beauty lurks within those deprived of them... Herzog's is the cinema of the senses, the ecstasy of flight and of surging water breaking through all physical barriers, with the real-life heroine journeying through this astounding documentary with a sense of becalmed peace rarely allowed for the director's fictional explorers.

Watching and hearing Fini treat her patients is like watching Bob Ross paint. In both cases, their methods are mostly intuitive and you probably wouldn't want to hang their final products on your wall, but it's their becalmed craft that compels you, hypnotizes you.

[Through the presence of the deaf-blind,] Herzog makes even hothouse cacti and park trees seem unearthly. It's one of the most powerful of Herzog's many bottomless mysteries—we watch but we cannot see in; likewise, Fini and her compatriots have no or little knowledge that they are being filmed, or what, in fact, that might mean.

While some of these tragically incommunicable individuals make for painful viewing, Herzog also demonstrates the humour and joys of a day at the zoo, or of a first plane flight, where touch and togetherness in suffering offer the sole but undeniable reason for living. The courage on view is astounding, and Herzog's treatment is never voyeuristic or sentimental, but sensuous and overwhelmingly moving.

As a rule, Werner Herzog's documentaries are more unearthly than his fictions. This 1971 study of Germany's deaf-and-dumb population presents its subjects as a privileged class with access to an alternate reality. Herzog shuns the expected tone of social-worker condescension in favor of mystic's awe. A remarkable, unaccountable film, both cold and moving.

Herzog simply films Fini's going about her work with her charges, clearly feeling that the extraordinariness of what he sees requires no comment.

This uncompromising movie—every image shows Fini Straubinger, a German Helen Keller, eyes shifting sideways, or raising her fervent face toward the ceiling, her gaze anywhere but at the camera, since her spatial-sound sense differs from the people shooting the film—is unusually obsessive and awkward, even for a director who has yet to construct a frame that isn't off-kilter.

As perhaps befits the subject-matter, technique is minimal, with only the occasional lyrical outburst, as when a blind woman evokes her last memory from the days when she could see, and Herzog intercuts a ski jump, with the skiers gliding through the air. The poignancy is intense because it is not underlined.