From walking in the ice

Equipped with a match sack and a compass, Werner Herzog heads towards Paris. It is cold, with melting snow and ice; there is no mobile phone on Herzog's path, no publisher providing funds, and no video team waiting at the daily stopover hotel. What today is an extreme form of media walking is here enveloped in the aura of Lenz's confusion and sometimes borders on self-stylization as the 'man of suffering.' Later, as in Fitzcarraldo, he will pull a ship through the jungle, but here he endures physical pain: exhaustion, inflamed Achilles tendon, and unconscious perseverance. It is the physicality that becomes his condition for truth, and the seemingly hopeless nature of this endeavor that he insists on pursuing against all logic. "Better the meaninglessness, if it is one, tasted to the dregs," he notes shortly before reaching Paris, as he is close to giving up.