ABSTRACT
Ever since the success of Aguirre in 1972 and of Kaspar Hauser in 1974, the mold of Herzog's cinema has been cast. Graduate students in film classes learnt constructing a Herzog scenario more quickly than they recognized the structural rules of a Gene Kelly musical. It is an indication of success, but also a danger that as an auteur, he is to his audiences a known quantity, a definite set of associations, of remembered and anticipated images, just as surely as to another kind of audience a new special-effects extravaganza promises pleasures already experienced many times before. Indeed, the pleasure may consist of nothing other than the recognition of the same beneath the difference of the referent. Where the Green Ants Dream is both a recapitulation and an attempt to break the mold.
