Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog (German: [ˈvɛʁnɐ ˈhɛʁtsoːk]; né Stipetić; born 5 September 1942) is a German filmmaker, actor, opera director, and author. Regarded as a pioneer of New German Cinema, his films often feature ambitious protagonists with impossible dreams,[1] people with unusual talents in obscure fields, or individuals in conflict with nature.[2] His style involves avoiding storyboards, emphasizing improvisation, and placing his cast and crew into real situations mirroring those in the film they are working on.
Werner Herzog
- Filmmaker
- actor
- opera director
- author
1961–present
3
Lucki Stipetić (half-brother)
In 1961, when Herzog was 19, he started work on his first film Herakles. He has since produced, written, and directed over 60 films and documentaries such as Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), Heart of Glass (1976), Stroszek (1977), Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), Fitzcarraldo (1982), Cobra Verde (1987), Lessons of Darkness (1992), Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997), My Best Fiend (1999), Invincible (2001), Grizzly Man (2005), Encounters at the End of the World (2007), Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009), and Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010). He has also published over 12 books of prose and directed many operas.
French filmmaker François Truffaut once called Herzog "the most important film director alive".[3] 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".[4] He was named one of the world's 100 most influential people by Time in 2009.[5]
Life[edit]
Early life[edit]
Herzog was born Werner Stipetić[6] in Munich, Germany on 5 September 1942, the son of Elisabeth Stipetić and Dietrich Herzog. His mother was Austrian with Croatian ancestry, while his father was German. When he was two weeks old, his mother took refuge in the remote Bavarian village of Sachrang in the Chiemgau Alps, after the house next to theirs was destroyed during an Allied bombing raid in World War II.[7] He, his older brother Till and younger half-brother Lucki grew up without running water, a flushing toilet, or a telephone. He recounted that his family had "no toys" and "no tools" and said that there was a sense of anarchy, as all the fathers of the village's children were absent.[8] He never saw films, and did not even know cinema existed until a traveling projectionist came by the one-room schoolhouse in Sachrang.[9]
When Herzog was 12, he and his family moved back to Munich. His father had abandoned the family early in his youth, but he later adopted his father's surname (which is German for "duke") as he thought it sounded more impressive for a filmmaker.[10] Herzog made his first phone call when he was seventeen; two years later, he started work on his first film, Herakles.[8] Herzog says that when he eventually met his father again, "fairly late in life", his mother had to translate Werner's German into the Bavarian dialect which his father spoke so the two could communicate.[11] Herzog, aged thirteen, was told by a bullying music teacher to sing in front of his class at school in an effort, Herzog said, "to break my back." When he adamantly refused he was almost expelled. The incident scarred him for life.[8] For several years Herzog listened to no music, sang no songs, and studied no instruments, but when he turned eighteen he immersed himself in music with particular intensity.[8]
At an early age, he experienced a dramatic phase in which he converted to Catholicism, which only lasted a few years. He started to embark on long journeys, some on foot. Around this time, he knew he would be a filmmaker and learned the basics from a few pages in an encyclopedia which provided him with "everything I needed to get myself started" as a filmmaker—that, and the 35 mm camera he stole from the Munich Film School.[12] In the commentary for Aguirre, the Wrath of God, he says, "I don't consider it theft. It was just a necessity. I had some sort of natural right for a camera, a tool to work with".
During Herzog's last years of high school, no production company was willing to take on his projects, so he worked night shifts as a welder in a steel factory to earn the funds for his first featurettes.[13] When he finished school, but before he formally graduated, he followed his girlfriend to Manchester, England, where he spent several months and learned to speak English. He found the language classes pointless and "fled".[14][15] After graduating from high school, he was intrigued by the post-independence Congo, but in attempting to travel there, reached only the south of Sudan before falling seriously ill.[16] While already making films, he had a brief stint at Munich University, where he studied history and literature.[17] Herzog subsequently moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in order to study at Duquesne University.[18]
Early and mid-career: 1962–2005[edit]
Herzog, along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders and Volker Schlöndorff, led the beginning of the New German Cinema, which included documentarians who filmed on low budgets and were influenced by the French New Wave. He developed a habit of casting professional actors alongside people from the locality in which he was shooting. His films, "usually set in distinct and unfamiliar landscapes, are imbued with mysticism."[19] Herzog says his youthful experience with Catholicism is evident in "something of a religious echo in my work".[20]
In 1971, while Herzog was location scouting for Aguirre, the Wrath of God in Peru, he narrowly avoided taking LANSA Flight 508. Herzog's reservation was cancelled due to a last-minute change in itinerary. The plane was later struck by lightning and disintegrated, but one survivor, Juliane Koepcke, lived after a free fall. Long haunted by the event, nearly 30 years later he made a documentary film, Wings of Hope (1998), which explored the story of the sole survivor.
Herzog and his films have been nominated for and won many awards. His first major award was the Silver Bear Extraordinary Prize of the Jury for his first feature film Signs of Life[21] (Nosferatu the Vampyre was also nominated for Golden Bear in 1979). Herzog won the Best Director award for Fitzcarraldo at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival. In 1975, his movie The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury (also known as the "Silver Palm") and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the Cannes Festival. Other films directed by Herzog nominated for Golden Palm are: Woyzeck (1979) and Where the Green Ants Dream (1984). His films have been nominated at many other festivals around the world: César Awards (Aguirre, the Wrath of God), Emmy Awards (Little Dieter Needs to Fly), European Film Awards (My Best Fiend) and Venice Film Festival (Scream of Stone and The Wild Blue Yonder). In 1987, Herzog and his half-brother Lucki Stipetić won the Bavarian Film Award for Best Producing for the film Cobra Verde.[22] In 2002, he won the Dragon of Dragons Honorary Award at the Kraków Film Festival.
Herzog once promised to eat his shoe if Errol Morris completed a film project on pet cemeteries that he had been working on, in order to challenge and motivate Morris as he perceived Morris to be incapable of following up on the projects he conceived. In 1978, when the film Gates of Heaven premiered, Herzog cooked and publicly ate his shoe; the event was later incorporated into a short documentary, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, by Les Blank. Herzog suggested that he hoped the act would serve to encourage anyone having difficulty bringing a project to fruition.[23]
In the winter of 1974, German-French writer Lotte H. Eisner (a friend and mentor of Herzog since the late 1950s) fell gravely ill; Herzog walked from Munich to Paris, believing that she would not die if he did so.[24] During these travels, which took him three weeks, he kept a diary that would eventually be published as Of Walking in Ice. Eight years later, the 87-year-old Eisner allegedly complained to Herzog of her infirmities and told him, "I am saturated with life. There is still this spell upon me that I must not die—can you lift it?" He says that he agreed to do so, and she died eight days later.[25]
Film theory[edit]
Style[edit]
Herzog's films have received considerable critical acclaim and achieved popularity on the art house circuit. They have also been the subject of controversy in regard to their themes and messages, especially the circumstances surrounding their creation. A notable example is Fitzcarraldo, in which the obsessiveness of the central character was reflected by the director during the making of the film. Burden of Dreams, a documentary filmed during the making of Fitzcarraldo, explored Herzog's efforts to make the film in harsh conditions. Herzog's diaries during the making of Fitzcarraldo were published as Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo. Mark Harris of The New York Times wrote in his review: "The movie and its making are both fables of daft aspiration, investigations of the blurry border between having a dream and losing one's mind."[58]
Herzog has said that our civilization is "starving for new images"; in a 1982 interview with Roger Ebert, he explained that "We do not have adequate images for our kind of civilization...We are surrounded by images that are worn out, and I believe that unless we discover new images, we will die out." He has said it is his mission to help us discover new images: "I am trying to make something that has not been made before."[59] He is proud of never using storyboards and often improvising large parts of the script. He explains this technique in the commentary track to Aguirre, the Wrath of God.
In 1999, before a public dialogue with critic Roger Ebert at the Walker Art Center, Herzog read a new manifesto, which he dubbed Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema.[60] Subtitled "Lessons of Darkness", after his film of that name, the 12-point declaration began: "Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants." Herzog explained that "There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization" and that "facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable."[61] Ebert later wrote of its significance: "For the first time, it fully explained his theory of 'ecstatic truth.'"[62] In 2017, Herzog wrote a six-point addendum to the manifesto,[63] prompted by a question about "truth in an age of alt-facts".[64]
His treatment of subjects has been characterized as Wagnerian in its scope, but film theory has in recent years focused on the concept of the ecstatic and the nomadic character of his film. The plot of Fitzcarraldo is based on the building of an opera house and his later film Invincible (2001) touches on the character of Siegfried.[65] Herzog's documentary The Transformation of the World into Music goes behind the scenes of the Bayreuth Festival. Herzog has directed several operas, including Mozart's The Magic Flute, Beethoven's Fidelio, and Wagner's Parsifal.
Teaching[edit]
Critical of film schools,[66] Herzog has taught three cinema workshops. From 2009 to 2016, he organized the Rogue Film School, in which young directors spent a few days with him in evocative locations.[67] What exactly goes on at the rogue film school has been clouded in secrecy, but director and writer Kristoffer Hegnsvad report from his stay there in his book Werner Herzog – Ecstatic Truth and Other Useless Conquests: "The first thing you notice is his enormous presence. His self-confidence sends shockwaves through a room every time he opens his mouth or make eye contact; he adopts a stance of exalted calm, as though he has achieved some kind of mastery – not just over his own mind, but over the capriciousness of the world" ".[68] Lessons ranged from "How does music function in film?" to "The creation of your own shooting permits".
In 2018, he held "Filming in Peru with Werner Herzog", a twelve-day workshop in the Amazonian rainforest, close to the locations for Fitzcarraldo, for new filmmakers from around the world. Each made a short film under Herzog's supervision.[69] Herzog was enthusiastic, and said of the resulting films that "the best 10 of them are better than the selections for best short film at the Academy Awards".[70] Workshop participants included directors Rupert Clague and Quentin Lazzarotto. Herzog is also on the website MasterClass, where he presents a course on filmmaking, entitled "Werner Herzog teaches filmmaking".[71][72][73] In a discussion with Errol Morris at the Toronto Film Festival, Morris, who was influenced by Herzog's early films, joked that he considered himself one of the first students of the Rogue Film School. Regarding Herzog's influence on him, Morris quoted Gabriel García Márquez's reaction to reading Kafka for the first time: "I didn't know you were allowed to do that."[74]
Personal life[edit]
Herzog has been married three times and has three children. In 1967, he married Martje Grohmann and they had a son named Rudolph Amos Achmed (born 1973).[75] They divorced in 1985.[76] He later began dating Austrian-German actress Eva Mattes, and they had a daughter named Hanna Mattes (born 1980) before splitting up.[77] He married Christine Maria Ebenberger in 1987,[78] and they had a son named Simon (born 1989).[79] They divorced in 1997.[80] Herzog moved to Los Angeles in 1996 and married Russian-American photographer Elena Pisetski in 1999.[81]
Herzog is a voracious reader. As required reading for the Rogue Film School, he has listed J. A. Baker's The Peregrine, Virgil's Georgics, and Ernest Hemingway's The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. Suggested reading includes the Poetic Edda as translated from Old Norse by Lee M. Hollander, Bernal Díaz del Castillo's Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (The True History of the Conquest of New Spain), and the 888-page report published by the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy.[82]
Herzog has been described as an avowed atheist.[83] In addition to standard German and his native Bavarian, he speaks English, French, Greek, Italian and Spanish.[84] He can also read Latin and Ancient Greek.[11]
