| Summary: | Peer reviewed: True Acknowledgements: This article has been incubated for a long time and has thus accumulated many debts. First, it derives from the first chapter of my MPhil thesis, of which Martin A. Ruehl is the supervisor. Laura McMahon and Catherine Wheatley examined and helped to improve the thesis. The rewriting spans my DAAD scholarship at Heidelberg University and my PhD studies at the University of Cambridge, funded by the Queens’-Daim Zainuddin Scholarship. Cecília Mello and my PhD supervisor, Isabelle McNeill, offered crucial emotional and intellectual support during the darkest time of revising the piece. The two anonymous reviewers’ feedback is extremely dedicated and rigorous, which helped me clarify some essential aspects of my argument. Robbie Spiers, with whom I discuss most of my ideas, has proofread the piece twice. All errors and blind spots left are mine. Publication status: Published <jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This article puts Werner Herzog’s films in dialogue with Martin Heidegger’s philosophy to answer the question of how to dwell, to be at home with nature. I argue that an apathy–empathy aporia blockades the discussion of the nature–human relationship in Herzog’s cinema, which tends to view his representation of nature as either entirely apathetic to human flourishing or totally identifiable with being human. Both versions of nature fail to do full justice to the nuanced vision of nature in Herzog, especially its dynamics and problematics as a safe place. To address this problem, I will closely read and compare three of his films across his career: Aguirre, The Wrath Of God (1972), Grizzly Man (2005), and Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (2010) in the light of Heidegger’s philosophy. Drawing on Heidegger’s thought on dwelling, technology, being-in-the-world, temporality, Gelassenheit, and Care, I move away from the standard paradigm and reinterpret the nature–human relationship in Herzog as a negotiation between the homely and the unhomely in ...
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