Werner Herzog
By:
September 5, 2010
Throughout his prolific career WERNER HERZOG (born 1942) has sought the extremes — of man, nature, and the lengths to which we will go to find meaning, wonder, or the fabled far edges of the earth. His motley crew of outsiders, ranging from Bruno S. to Timothy Treadwell, quest and rage against nature’s mad indifference. But Herzog’s greatest collaborations were with Klaus Kinski, whose freewheeling Method was not only a worthy match for the jungle’s “obscenity” of abundance, but for Herzog; their conflicts are gleefully detailed in the not entirely truthful My Best Fiend (1999). In his mid-career masterpieces Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982), Herzog deployed Kinski to terra incognita, to wrestle whatever dragons he might find, or become. But despite the impossibilities inherent in or imposed upon the quest (in the real story upon which Fitzcarraldo is based, the boat was dismantled and the pieces portaged in small bundles; in the film’s most notorious scene, the entire boat was dragged through the jungle), Herzog often succeeded in grasping his grail: the indelibly passionate image. By mapping the negative spaces of extremity, Herzog has tried to limn what it means to be human, what it means to be wild — and what it might mean to be free.
READ Peggy Nelson on the following Herzog films: Grizzly Man (2005) | Encounters at the End of the World (2007) | Cave of Forgotten Dreams (premiering September 2010 at the Toronto Film Festival)
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