Customer Reviews

Where the Green Ants Dream

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There is amazing beauty in the stark outback of Australia where Herzog filmed this drama. It's the simple story of Aboriginals who are trying to save their reality from the onslaught of civilization.

Herzog turns the story into pure poetry which opens your mind to other versions of reality. All the characters he introduces are amazingly rich and complex. The are no absolute good or bad characters. Instead there is a world full of people who must act within the rules of their own particular realities.

I'm watched it multiple times and the film always shakes my belief in the "absolute truth" of my metaphysical system. Each time I realize that perhaps my version reality is not the only possibility. This is not a bad experience, rather it opens new worlds for me to explore.

I recommend this video for those who have an open mind. The video quality is so - so, but that only adds to the charm of the movie.

I have never seen a Herzog film I haven't liked, just some more than others. This is an in-betweener, but excellent, as always. Similar in stark landscapes to "Fata Morgana", "Where the Green Ants Dream" offers barren vistas, mounds of dirt, holes in the ground, and apocalyptic hovels. The character of the anthropologist sums up the film best when he describes modern Western technology and what it has done to the biosphere as a man on a train who knows the tracks ahead are out and all he can do is run to the rear of the train. Definitely one of Herzog's more accessible stories, and perfect for viewing in an anthropology course. The ending reminds me of classic J.G. Ballard, in which the dynamic character chooses desolation over re-integration into the hellish culture from which he came. And, yeah, there's a bit of "Mad Max" in the apocalyptic theme as well.

This and a few films by Aki Kaurismaki, and Wenders' American Friend are the only ones that I need to see more than once. I've seen this movie about a dozen times and its understated tragedies are compelling without shrieking. Great video, if you can find a copy. There is a good essay about this film by a follower of Jean-Francois Lyotard in the book Judging Lyotard.

If you have seen other movies by Werner Herzog (e.g. Aguirre the Wrath of God), this movie might remind you of his familiar theme of the collision of modern out-of-balance civilization with savage or state-of-nature blissful mysticism. A land dispute pits a powerful Australian mining company against a group of Aborigines who believe this sacred land is where mythical green ants dream (the title of the film). But unlike the straightforward good guy vs. bad guy movie, this plot unfolds amidst a slow but definite transformation of the characters on both sides of the dispute (and the judge who medaties the dispute), all of whom live through this encounter in different ways. Don't worry -this movie does not beat a pious message into your head.

Modern civilization and primitive tribal groups do not have the same worldview - and it is this discrepancy that is examined in
Werner Herzog's excellent Australian film. A mining company has located a terrific reserve of valuable uranium in the desert of the outback...but the only problem is that the Aboriginal elders are guarding this land as one of their holiest sites..for here the green ants dream.

These green ants - actually green termites, have a special sense
that orients them to the earth's magnetism so they are wonderful
predictors of weather. If their homes are dug up, then the
Aborigines' universe, their sense of time and place, will be
uprooted. So the people attached to the land argue in court
their right to this ancestral holy spot.

Some of the village elders are depicted by wonderfully wise
Bushmen. That alone makes this a fabulous film. The director treats his themss with dignity and quiet power. See it.

Werner Herzog is the perfect and unique embodiment of the always worried, irreverent, unsatisfied and non conformist director that enjoys to walk on the razor edge and delights to expose limit situations at the eve of reach the boiling point.

That's why his entire cinematography has been signed for newness and original proposals, featured by unexplored territories and unthinkable stages.

In this case, we assist to the clash of two civilizations, visibly differenced , the ancestral aborigines and the western way of life, where the myth and the progress will collide like the unavoidable crash of two trains displacing each one, in opposite senses.

A company will settle in the middle of the Australian desert, in order to explore and exploit uranium reserves. But they will be faced for ancestral tribes who oppose them due they will interrupt the dream of the green ants.

A movie dedicated to Herzog' s mother, with intriguing and sharp reflections all the way through, when this case be discussed in the Supreme Court, through a very interesting trial, where the happy ending will be absent.

The final sequence will invite you to think and reflect.

'Where the Green Ants Dream' depicts the clash of two diametrically opposed cultures - that of the white man and that of the Australian Aborigine; the first expresses an attitude of contempt towards the natural world, the second an attitude of respect.

The culture of the white man is based squarely on the scriptural injunction "And man was given dominion over all things upon this earth" (Genesis 1:26). "Dominion" leads to domination, and it is the rage to dominate which has spawned a Culture of Violence (very much in evidence in the movie with its shots of heavy machinery and its landscapes devastated by mining operations), a culture that has now overspread the whole world and threatens to bring all life to an end.

In direct contrast to the white man's aberrancy, the Aborigine, whose more sane world-view has enabled him to survive the harsh and arid desert environment of Australia for 40,000 years, sees himself not as having been given "Dominion" but as having been given Guardianship. For him the earth and its creatures are sacred, and he sees it as his duty to guard and preserve this precious inheritance so that it might be passed on intact and unspoiled to future generations. Here is how he views the white man:

"You white men are lost. You don't understand the land. Your presence on this earth will come to an end. You have no sense, no purpose, no direction."

The Aborigines feel themselves to be of the land. They feel, in a very deep way that perhaps we will never understand, that they have sprung from the land and that they _are_ the land. It is the land that gives them their being and their identity. Without it they are nothing.

During the land rights trial which the Aborigines hope will restore their rights and help them bring an end to the rape and spoliation of their land, a white witness makes this point:

"Progress? Here you talk about progress over and over again. And where does it lead the Aborigine? It is progress into nothingness."

But the truth of the matter is that our much-lauded 'Progress' is not only leading the Aborigine into nothingness, it is leading all of us into nothingness. Our Culture of Violence has spawned an Industrial juggernaut which is rapidly (and quite deliberately) turning the planet into a polluted and ravaged wasteland, and this orgy of destruction must inevitably result in the extinction of all life.

'Where the Green Ants Dream' is an extremely relevant movie that I have no hesitation in recommending to the thoughtful, and to those who are not in denial about the true nature of the modern world.

This movie is Bruce Spence as wished for. It's Australia on display, it has become one of my favorite Australian films of all time. The aboriginals are really good. I can't say exactly what hits me, because its not a flashy pop culture type of thing. It's about a big truth heading our way, and everyone has a different name for it and various ways of understanding it. If you don,t have any any depth or imagination it will just sail on past you. Feel lucky if you haven't seen it yet, because it's something to look forward to.

He tells us a tale plain and simple. Wisdom of centuries against the science of the modern man. Complete essence of communication is summed up with one single character that appears for a brief moment and touches your heart...the last surviving man of a tribe who never speaks because there's no one who will understand him. Highly reccommended for people who like to use their intellect when watching films.

I was thrilled when this film was released on DVD. I am a Herzog fan, but this is my favorite movie of his, and one of my favorite movies of all time. The film is both heuristic and didactic. The Aborigines have been in Australia for 60,000 years, and the entire eco-system has been utterly shaped by their intervention and influence. There are so many important lessons in the film and so many brilliant metaphors. It becomes possible for someone raised in modern western civilization, with a materialistic, scientific world view, to get just a glimmer of a vision into an entirely different perception of the world and our relation to it. There are all these luminous little moments, strung together like so many brightly colored beads, each of them a fable that unfolds one of the deep mysteries of human experience:

The place in the supermarket where the fathers go to dream the souls of their unborn children because a Dream Tree used to stand there.

The Old Wise Man who tells the geologist, after hearing a useless presentation of a few scientific principles, that he knows nothing--he doesn't even know that this Earth is his Mother.

The folks who build a landing strip that is about the size of a suburban driveway, because, after all, it is only the image of the thing in the Dreamtime that is truly real.

The Old Man who is unable to answer questions put to him by attorney's in a court of law, because he is the last of his tribe, and he has no one left to speak to. So he stands silent. I resonate strongly against all these metaphors--I too, feel as if, one by one, all the members of my tribe are dropping in their tracks, and soon, I too, will be without anyone with whom to share a common frame of reference.

The blindness of Europeans with respect to traditional societies and archaic realities prevented them from accurately recognizing that the Aborigines had one of the most advanced and highly sophisticated spiritual cultures on the face of the Earth- they hunted them like animals and paid a bounty on their heads. Their tribal lands were ruthlessly exploited--and yet, the English turned to them to learn how to apply natural filters to a stream in order to produce a source of potable water. Sad, sad, sad. The descendants of these people from the beginnings of time were finally recognized as a national treasure, but not before they were almost extinguished. The images that Herzog managed to capture sink deeply into the unconscious, like whale songs reverberating to the bottom of the Marianas trench. We may have fallen asleep, and lost our connection to the Old Ones, but they are as close as the next Dream.

The real encounter between Modern and Archaic Realities is brought into Bas Relief with this film, and the futility of modern life is driven home. Here is a little clue as to how some people manage to avoid the ever creeping, spiritually suffocating banalities of modern existence by protecting those secret things that are important to their feelings, that have revealed their sacred nature in personal epiphanies that can never be shared with the uninitiated.