Uncivilized Men: Umwelt, Nature and Aesthetic Alienation in Werner Herzog’s <i>The Enigma of Kasper Hauser</i> and <i>Aguirre, the Wrath of God</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing on films such as The Enigma of Kasper Hauser and Aguirre, the Wrath of God , I examine the portrayal of nature in the films of German director Werner Herzog. I argue that the filmmaker aesthetically alienates nature and that this experience facilitates viewers perceiving the world through a different consciousness, creating an immersive experience that is outside of a narrative perspective. This can lead spectators to lose themselves in the film’s unfolding reality in an embodied state of diverse meanings and affects. I contextualize this experience of alienation in terms of the concept of Umwelt and the phenomenological realism of film theorist Siegfried Kracauer. In cinema, the Umwelt can relate to narrative structure and how the natural world can symbolize emotional aspects of the story while disrupting the linear narrative flow. Additionally, Umwelt can involve the use of optical techniques to create unfamiliar experiences of the world. I demonstrate not only how Herzog applies both these elements in his films, but also how these Umweltian images relate to Kracauer’s notion that film is able to redeem “physical reality.”
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".