Wern­er Herzog’s ski jump­ing film is essen­tial view­ing this Win­ter Olympics

A com­mon trait among Wern­er Herzog’s male pro­tag­o­nists – from Tim­o­thy Tread­well to Fitz­car­ral­do to Aguirre – is a fla­grant dis­re­gard for their own per­son­al safe­ty in pur­suit of some­thing greater. It’s tempt­ing to think of Her­zog only in these heav­i­ly roman­tic terms. Yet with 1974’s The Great Ecsta­sy of Wood­carv­er Stein­er, a short doc­u­men­tary about ski jumper Wal­ter ​“Wood­carv­er” Stein­er, the idio­syn­crat­ic Ger­man direc­tor reveals some­thing more.

It makes sense that Her­zog would choose to make a sports movie cen­tred around a pur­suit as bizarre as ski-jump­ing. Watch­ing it is like being dropped into a strange, apoc­a­lyp­tic future, where wiry men wear­ing space-age hel­mets careen down long, pur­pose-built ramps before can­non­ing off at the end, until they are inevitably brought down to earth, either with expert grace or imme­di­ate destruction.

Few oth­er sports have the abil­i­ty to inspire awe to fear in spec­ta­tors simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, and indeed most of Steiner’s agi­ta­tion in the film con­cerns his per­son­al safe­ty, judges extend­ing the height of ramps so that com­peti­tors will reach ever greater dis­tances at even greater risk, and not pay­ing atten­tion to weath­er con­di­tions that would make land­ing on snow from a great height, well, risky.

To Herzog’s mind, Stein­er was the great­est ski fly­er of the 1970s – ski fly­ing hav­ing derived from ski jump­ing with a view to achiev­ing greater dis­tances. When we meet Stein­er, he appears to be at a cross­roads, where his love of the sport has become com­pli­cat­ed by his own mor­tal­i­ty. ​“We’re approach­ing the lim­it,” he says at the start of the film, sug­gest­ing that were it not for the thrill of fly­ing, he might go back to jump­ing from short­er ramps.

It’s here where the kin­ship between Stein­er, Tread­well and Fitz­car­ral­do begins to emerge, and it’s here that Steiner’s calm­ness calls to mind anoth­er of Herzog’s great lead­ing man, Bruno S. In one sense, Stein­er is a lens through which all of Herzog’s pro­tag­o­nists can be viewed, some­thing also reflect­ed in the shots of the ski jumps them­selves. The extreme slow-motion, cou­pled with the sheer length of time Stein­er spends in the air, serves to empha­sise the odd­ness of his body shape, and the odd­ness of the action in gen­er­al. ​“Inhu­man” is how Her­zog describes it at one point, which should be under­stood as a very lit­er­al descrip­tion – this ani­mal is not behav­ing as we would expect this ani­mal to behave.

A pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with ani­mals is a recur­ring motif in the cin­e­ma of Wern­er Her­zog : psy­che­del­ic igua­nas in Bad Lieu­tenant; using a tur­tle to explain the ori­gins of the world in Fata Mor­gana; danc­ing chick­ens at a road­side attrac­tion in Stroszek; the focus on the cave paint­ings of the hors­es in Cave of For­got­ten Dreams. Herzog’s clas­sic ​“the com­mon denom­i­na­tor of the Uni­verse is chaos, hos­til­i­ty and mur­der,” quote from Griz­zly Man is not about war and vio­lence so much as it is about the unpre­dictabil­i­ty of human behav­iour. He shows this when­ev­er an ani­mal pops up in one of his films – it’s just that in the case of The Great Ecsta­sy of Wood­carv­er Stein­er, the ani­mal hap­pens to be human.

One thing to say about Her­zog that some­times gets over­looked is that he’s a pop­ulist. He’ll pop up in Jack Reach­er, or extol the virtues of Wrestle­ma­nia, because in his mind, that’s where his films cul­tur­al­ly sit. This absorb­ing doc­u­men­tary delib­er­ate­ly plays up to the tropes of a sports movie, shoot­ing the train­ing regimes of Steiner’s Sovi­et Union oppo­nents and util­is­ing a rous­ing, anthemic sound­track for the great land­ings and moments of adu­la­tion (think Any Giv­en Sun­day but for ski jump­ing). And it does so because ambi­tion, rival­ry, ath­leti­cism and human dra­ma are com­mon across all sport – even the weird ones you only remem­ber when the Win­ter Olympics are on.