Now here’s an interesting game: list the most significant German film directors of the 1970s on. Now restrict it to those directors who have more than 60 feature films to their name, including a Nicholas Cage vehicle and 31 full-length documentaries. Then cut it down to those who have directed at least 18 operas plus a concert film of The Killers. And now omit anyone who hasn’t also acted in The Mandalorean and Jack Reacher, and has voiceover credits for The Simpsons, American Dad, Rick and Morty, and Penguins of Madagascar.
Not there yet? How about he made the cast and crew haul a 320-ton steamship over a mountain because that was what the script required and he didn’t want to (or couldn’t afford to) use special effects?
Werner Herzog is a very special filmmaker, credited with saying “I’m looking for a new grammar of images, images that fit our era, images never yet seen”. He’s associated with the German New Wave, along with the likes of Wim Wenders, Volker Schlöndorff, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Margarethe von Trotta; it was all part of a rejection of their grandparents’ past and their parents’ approach to remaking post WWII German. They wanted cinema to be recognised as equivalent to other art forms (and thus equally deserving of public support); they wanted to embrace popular culture (especially from America) while criticising mainstream politics (especially from America); they emphatically stressed the primacy of the auteur.
And none stressed the auteur approach more than Werner Herzog. His career fizzes with quirky, inspirational ideas, often moving into production while the thought was still fresh and before scripts or budgets or financing had been sorted out. Herzog’s films are difficult to characterise but always quite identifiable; his protagonists are often people with impossible dreams, individuals who find themselves in conflict with nature or reality, lonely dreamers whose obsessions border on madness, people won’t allow themselves to be deprived of the right to an independent life despite their manifest physical or social disadvantages. That’s what links the Nicholas Cage vehicle Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (surely one of the least felicitous titles ever) to his great collaborations with Klaus Kinski like 1972’s Aguirre: Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo or Grizzly Man, his 2005 account of Timothy Treadwell, the American who studied and lived among grizzly bears in Alaska and was mauled to death.
It’s also seen in his fascination with extremes, not just in the landscapes of his feature films but in his documentaries – like the Antarctica in The End of the World (2007) or the Sahara in Fata Morgana (1971) where the desert acquires an eerie, poetic life of its own; meteorites in his collaboration with Clive Oppenheimer Fireballs: Visitors from Darker Worlds (2020), which centres on meteorites; volcanoes in The Fire Within, a paean to Katia and Maurice Krafft’s fiery love for volcanos and each other that was released earlier this year.
His most recent film, Theater of Thought, opened at the Toronto International Film Festival on 9 September. It’s about one of the biggest, boldest, most baffling, most amazing subjects of them all: the human brain. “There was always a deep fascination about what goes on in our minds: what makes us love, fall in love, hatred, language, architecture, our ideas, our movies, everything,” Herzog said. “And it’s all created in our brains.”
Herzog turned 80 at the start of September (and he’s not slowing down: reportedly there are at least two projects in production right now) and the Goethe Institut is celebrating his birthday with a programme of five films from his extensive portfolio – all available free to view now via Goethe On Demand, the Goethe Institut’s streaming platform. They’re in German with English subtitles, and they will be available until 11 October.
Land des Schweigens und der Dunkelheit | Land of Silence and Darkness (1971)
By comparison with his later work Herzog’s first proper documentary is one of his most conventional creations, but it has many of his themes. it’s an 85 minute ‘report’ (as he termed it) on a closed, insulated world where people survive against all obstacles. Fini Straubinger, deaf and blind since adolescence, communicates with those who are even less fortunate – children deaf-blind boys from birth who barely know how to swallow let alone learn the alphabet, a woman who forgot how to use Braille and was erroneously incarcerated in a sanitarium, society at odds with its stragglers and outsiders. It’s unnerving, haunting, and hopeful, a look at what it means to be human.
Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes | Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)
A cinema classic. Set in 1560 and following an expedition to find El Dorado under the leadership of a megalomaniacal conquistador named Don Lupe de Aguirre, this brilliantly realised film declares Herzog’s thirst for grand truths and eternal mysteries in its every fibre. The fiery on-set relationship between Herzog and Klaus Kinski produced a superlative performance; the gradual mental and physical self-destruction as the party forges into unmapped territory becomes palpable as the film progresses. (Later Herzog said the film was made for very little money. – “When you look at the film, you think that nobody could do it for under $60 million. The grand total budget was $340,000.”)
Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht | Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)
This version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, an homage to FW Murnau’s 1922 silent film of the same name, has Count Dracula moving from Transylvania to Wismar, spreading the Black Plague across the land. Dracula. It is easy to see why the story appealed to Herzog: Dracula just happens to be a bloodsucking monster, but in another light he’s moody loner with an air of mystery, attempting some otherworldly pursuit. The result is one of the more sympathetic portrayals of the character that you will find, not least because of a remarkable performance from Herzog’s regular leading man of this time, Klaus Kinski.
Fitzcarraldo (1982)
A genuine epic, staggering in its scope and scale: Brian Sweeny Fitzgerald (Klaus Kinski again) is determined to build an opera house in the middle of a South American jungle and needs a steamboat to provide the trade that will finance. Herzog’s film matches Fitzgerald’s ambition, and the epically fraught production included Herzog’s insistence on getting that steamship over a hill without the use of special effects. It’s a completely unique film that delivered Herzog’s only Best Director award at Cannes.
Lektionen in Finsternis | Lessons of Darkness (1992)
More visual essay than documentary, Lessons Of Darkness plays out like an epic ballad depicting the deformed state of the Kuwaiti landscape after the first Gulf War. There’s an eerie atmosphere and extraordinary Mars-like visuals that deliver some of the director’s darkest imagery. Divided into 13 chapters with titles like ‘Satan’s National Park’ and ‘Life Without The Fire’, it has scarcely any interviews and a very spare narration (by Herzog himself) to accompany the visceral visions of hell on Earth.
Goethe Institut is also planning in-person screenings in Abu Dhabi, again free (but you’ll have to pre-register). So far one has been arranged: Mein liebster Feind | My Best Fiend, Herzog’s 1999 documentary tribute to Klaus Kinski who had died of a heart attack in 1991. My Best Fiend turns out to be a fitting way to remember a difficult professional, an eccentric performer, and a successful collaborator, while at the same time having much to say about Herzog himself.
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