Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog Stipetić, known as Werner Herzog, is a German film director, producer, screenwriter, author, actor and opera director. Herzog is considered one of the greatest figures of the New German Cinema, along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, Werner Schröter, and Wim Wenders. Herzog's films often feature heroes with impossible dreams, people with unique talents in obscure fields, or individuals who are in conflict with nature. French filmmaker François Truffaut once called Herzog "the most important film director alive." American film critic Roger Ebert said that Herzog "has never created a single film that is compromised, shameful, made for pragmatic reasons or uninteresting. Even his failures are spectacular." He was named one of the 100 most influential people on the planet by Time Magazine in 2009.

Biography

Werner Herzog is a non-canonical director who works with a specific and extraordinarily consistent visionary approach. Herzog tends to investigate the connection between nature and human beings; even if, most of the time, his films deal with dilated times and absurd spaces eg 'The Wild Blue Yonder'. Herzog's documentariestend to be shot in a obserbvational mode and lets the archive footage as well as the lives of the people he follows and interviews speak for themselves, letting the audiene gain a better and more realistic experience of the people's lives. He will sometimes narrate (often the opening) the documentary and infrom hte audience of the events taking place. One of the main features Herzog’s approach to filmmaking is his ability to work using non binding and not very detailed screenplays which tends to flow into his documentary methods as well however there tends to be more structure although he allows the subject of the documentaries to create their own path. The majority of Herzog’s films have been shot without storyboard, and have thus been based on an absolute freedom of expression. Van Wert writes: “At first glance eclectic, obsessive and renegade the documentaries of Werner Herzog do, finally and inevitably, fit into the elaborate intertextual fabric of his fiction films”

Styles/ Conventions

• Echoes From a Somber Empire (1990)

• Jag Mandir (1991)

• Lessons of Darkness (1992)Bells from the (1993)

• The Transformation of the World into Music (1994)

• Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices (1995)

• Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997)

• My Best Fiend (1999)

• Wings of Hope (2000)

• Wheel of Time (2003)

• The White Diamond (2004)

• Grizzly Man (2005)

• Encounters at the End of the World (2007)

• Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)

• Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (2010)

• Into the Abyss (2011)

• The Flying Doctors of East Africa (1969)

• Handicapped Future (1971)

• Land of Silence and Darkness (1971)

• Fata Morgana (1972)

• The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1974)

• How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck (1976)

• Huie's Sermon (1981)

• God's Angry Man (1981)

• Ballad of the Little Soldier (1984)

• The Dark Glow of the Mountains (1984)

• Herdsmen of the Sun (1989)

Glossary