In November 1974, film-maker Werner Herzog learned that his mentor German film scholar Lotte Eisner had suffered a massive stroke in Paris and was at death's door. In a grand gesture worthy of any number of the enigmatic characters who populate his films, Herzog immediately set off on foot from Munich on a pilgrimage to Paris, intending to walk a ‘million steps in rebellion against her death’. Burdened only with a new pair of boots, a jacket, compass and duffel bag, he somewhat mystically believed that Eisner would not die as long as he walked all the way to her doorstep. Herzog kept a journal of his trek, publishing it four years later as Of Walking in Ice.

Reading Herzog's Of Walking in Ice –organised in diary form around succinct chapters for each day walked and narrated in short bursts of dream-like, hallucinatory passages in which he portrays himself in often gloomy surroundings – feels like watching a Herzog film screened in one's mind. Herzog recognises this himself, stating:

In her review of the book, Helen MacDonald called it a record of the ‘wreckage of history and myth’, a description that could easily apply to Herzog's entire cinematic oeuvre. With each documented step, Herzog jars the reader through an onslaught of ambulatory images and thoughts marching against the conventional beat of the ‘rest of the world in rhyme’ as he navigates blizzards, despair, stray dogs and wild forests in his ritual pilgrimage of hope. Cross-cutting between moods of gut-wrenching anguish and ecstatic delirium, Herzog's mental road movie leaps from harrowing scenes like this one: