{"id":103307,"date":"2025-08-28T12:55:08","date_gmt":"2025-08-28T12:55:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/103307\/"},"modified":"2025-08-28T12:55:08","modified_gmt":"2025-08-28T12:55:08","slug":"ghost-elephants-review-werner-herzog-embarks-on-a-mission-to-track-down-giant-jumbos-venice-film-festival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/103307\/","title":{"rendered":"Ghost Elephants review \u2013 Werner Herzog embarks on a mission to track down giant jumbos | Venice film festival"},"content":{"rendered":"

Werner Herzog has once again shown his flair \u2013 his genius, perhaps \u2013 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 \u201cghost elephants\u201d, living beyond the human gaze in the vast highland plateau of Angola. He also wants to see if these fugitive elephants \u2013 if they exist \u2013 are genetically related to a particular huge elephant<\/a>, the biggest on record, which is on show at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, named the \u201cF\u00e9nyk\u00f6vi\u201d elephant after the hunter who shot it in 1955.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, intent on finding the \u201cghost elephants\u201d and getting a DNA sample to take back to the Smithsonian \u2013 rather like a Jurassic Park movie \u2013 having first gained permission to do so from a tribal king in a ceremony treated without mockery.<\/p>\n

This film may not have the self-destructive craziness and tragicomedy of Herzog\u2019s documentary masterpiece Grizzly Man<\/a>, which was about an amateur enthusiast\u2019s 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\u2019s 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: \u201cI know I shouldn\u2019t romanticise him but \u2026 surrounded by chickens \u2026 it can\u2019t get better than this!\u201d<\/p>\n

Herzog doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Ghost Elephants screened at the Venice film festival<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Werner Herzog has once again shown his flair \u2013 his genius, perhaps \u2013 for locating passionate quests and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":103308,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,337],"class_list":["post-103307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103307\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}