WERNER HERZOG

The maverick German auteur Werner Herzog has built up an extraordinary body of work in fiction and documentary since starting out as one of the leading figures of the New German Cinema in the 1970s. In truth, Herzog has never been part of any school or group. He has always been as much on the edge of events as any of the characters in his films. Herzog has chosen to look away from the usual centres of interest, not because he believes that incidental or marginal things are in some way especially revealing, but because he perceives the world around him in terms of extremes, and he aims to shock his audiences into recognising the truths of his perceptions. “It is a very personal cinema that I am making,” he once said. “It comes out of a very, very deep fascination. I try to show that fascination to others, and to articulate things that others are unable to articulate.”

As demonstrated in his most famous films of the ’70s and ’80s—Aguirre, Wrath of God, Nosferatu, The Vampire and Fitzcarraldo—Herzog’s obsessive interest in man’s irrationality and capacity for madness clearly goes back to the nineteenth century German Romantics. At the same time though, his films have a characteristically modern sense of detachment and objectivity. In a sense, Herzog intends all his films to be seen as documentaries: they all rest heavily on realities at hand during the shooting (the locations, the weather, the performers, the props), and they document those realities quite scrupulously. In his 1999 “Minnesota Declaration”, Herzog laid out the principle of his personal documentary style, attacking the failure of cinema vérité to go beyond a superficial “truth of accountants”.