Where the Green Ants Dream

Stefan Drees

A careful and respectful approach to an ancient culture and its clash with modern Western civilization. Herzog has no answers and keeps distance, he doesn't pretend to understand the otherness or the feelings of the aborigines. So he uses precisely selected citations from classical music to create an associative emotional commentary.

Zach Closs

More agency is attributed to non-white characters than one might've expected for 1984, but "Green Ants" still ascribes plenty of otherness to its subjects and wallows in self-deprecating white guilt. Herzog, who 'invented' the native characters and situations for the film, strays a little too close to reality if telling a good story was his only intention. Aesthetically gorgeous and zany as you'd expect from Werner.

anarresti

We have to remember that Herzog has said that he does not understand irony. "For me a chair is a chair. A man is a man". This is a beautiful film, in the marvelous way it presents the clash of cultures. And the humour is up to us. Our own culture is free to interpret, to fill in the voids and laugh where it sees ridicule. And laugh of both sides. Culture needs a place. The most important part of the tile is "Where".

El Biffo

This film is really great, and has a lot of great moments, but totally falls apart with the epic failure courtroom scene at the end. The Aborigines and their mythology are compelling (actually, the myth about green ants' dreams is a hodgepodge of Aboriginal myths, not exactly an authentic myth, but similar).

Wee Hunk

This film is fairly notorious in our family, because our Dad took us to see it when it first came out. He loved weird movies, but none of us kids could make heads or tails of it. So we'll never forget this movie even if we don't know what it was about.

Duncan Gray

An interesting aside for Herzog—you can sense him adjusting uneasily to English, and a lot of this would feel more at home in one of his documentaries. But just when you think you're in for a by-the-numbers PSA, he throws in strange, fascinating wrinkles about how human belief systems, western or indigenous, handle uncertainty with blind acceptance. And he gives his blank-slate hero a fine speech near the end.

Loz Loory

Not an easy film to analyze. For colonial cultures, natural resources exist to be monetized. For indigenous cultures, natural resources exist to be lived with harmoniously. The destruction of native languages and teachings means the ability to read weather and other natural phenomena (ex. via the green ants) is lost. Beautiful apocalyptic footage of tornadoes at beginning and end.

FISCHER

Honnête réflexion sur deux mondes parfaitement antinomiques, à connotation écologique, qui manque pourtant de percutant et de véracité... www.cinefiches.com