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Werner Herzog
Director / Screenwriter / Producer
1942 - 
Born September 5, Munich, Germany
Key Production Countries: Germany, France, USA, UK
Key Genres: Documentary, Adventure Drama, Adventure, Drama, Avant-garde/Experimental
Key Collaborators: Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus (Editor), Joe Bini (Editor), Popol Vuh (Composer), Thomas Mauch (Cinematographer), Jorg Schmidt-Reitwein (Cinematographer), Peter Zeitlinger (Cinematographer), Klaus Kinski (Leading Player), Lucki Stipetic (Producer), Brad Dourif (Leading Character Player), Henning von Gierke (Production Designer)

Recommended: Signs of Life (1968), Land of Silence and Darkness (1971), Fata Morgana (1971), Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972)*, The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1974), The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974)*, Stroszek (1977), Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), Lessons of Darkness (1992)*, Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997)**, My Best Fiend (1999), Grizzly Man (2005)^, Into the Abyss (2011)
Worth a Look: Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970), God's Angry Man [TV] (1980), Fitzcarraldo (1982)*, Cobra Verde (1987), The White Diamond, (2004), Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans (2009), Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)
Approach with Caution: Heart of Glass (1976), Scream of Stone (1991), The Wild Blue Yonder (2005)
* Listed in TSPDT's 1,000 Greatest Films section; ^ Listed in TSPDT's 21st Century's Most Acclaimed Films section; ** Listed in TSPDT's Ain't Nobody's Blues But My Own section.

 
 
 
Links: [ Amazon ] [ IMDB ] [ TCMDB ] [ All-Movie Guide ] [ Senses of Cinema: Great Directors ] [ Film Reference ] [ Werner Herzog Film ] [ Guardian Articles ] [ Strictly Film School ] [ TIME Interview (2009) ] [ Baseline Biography ] [ MovieMaker Article: The Enigma of Werner Herzog ] [ Conversation with Roger Ebert (2005) ] [ kamera Article ] [ Wikipedia ] [ New York Magazine Article (2007 ] [ Filmmaker Article (2007) ] [ The Believer: Conversation with Errol Morris (2008) ] [ A.V. Club Interview (2011) ] [ Moving Image Source Article (2008) ] [ Werner Herzog's Rogue Film School ] [ Vice Interview ]
Books: [ Every Night the Trees Disappear: Werner Herzog and the Making of Heart of Glass ] [ A Companion to Werner Herzog ] [ Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo ] [ The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth ] [ Herzog on Herzog ] [ Werner Herzog ] [ Werner Herzog (Arte Edition) ] [ The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History ] [ Images at the Horizon: A Workshop with Werner Herzog ] [ Fitzcarraldo: The Original Story
 
Land of Silence and Darkness (1971)Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)Grizzly Man (2005)Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972)
 
     
  "Fond of shooting in difficult locations, he can seem as eccentric and driven as one of his heroes. Recently he appears to have found it difficult to continue making films, but his visionary work of the 70s constitutes a high point of the modern cinema." - Geoff Andrew (The Director's Vision, 1999)  
     
  "It was immediately clear that Herzog possessed a quick sense of narrative; a withdrawn, mobile camera; and a dark, inquisitive humour...As attention fell on Herzog, so his pursuit of extremism became a little more studied; it began to seem more zealous than natural...Herzog pictures were events in the seventies, but they became very hard to see, Fitzcarraldo was the last film to get wide screenings" - David Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2002)  
     
  "Werner Herzog, more than any director of his generation, has through his films embodied German history, character, and cultural richness. While references to verbal and other visual arts would be out of place in treating most film directors, they are key to understanding Herzog. For his techniques he reaches back into the early part of the twentieth century to the Expressionist painters and filmmakers, back to the Romantic painters and writers for the luminance and allegorization of landscape and the human figure." - Rodney Farnsworth (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)  
     
  "One of the best of the new wave of German filmmakers, Herzog has already mastered themes of illusion, delusion, alienation, and hypocrisy." - William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978)  
     
  "There are certainly laws and elements that make a film more accessible to mainstream audiences. If you've got Tom Cruise as a strongman, I'm sure it would have larger audiences, but it wouldn't have the same substance." - Werner Herzog  
     
  "I cannot work fast enough. I cannot cope fast enough, really. And just releasing a film is hard." - Werner Herzog  
     
 
Please note that the rating given for this director (see top-right) is based only on the films we have seen (listed above). Films by this director that we haven't seen include Woyzeck (1978), Where the Green Ants Dream (1984), Portrait Werner Herzog (1986), Bells from the Deep (1995), Invincible (2001), Rescue Dawn (2006), Encounters at the End of the World (2007), and My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (2009).
 8+
 

"Werner Herzog is regarded as one of the most eccentric figures of das neue kino. His films feature inspiring landscapes and controversial actors (the flamboyant Klaus Kinski, the strange Bruno S.) at odds with their world. Herzog is also well known for the making of his films, whether hypnotizing the entire cast in Heart of Glass (1976), dragging a boat through the Amazon jungle for Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), or feuding with actor Kinski… One of the leading figures of the New German Cinema, he has remained a radical individualist and a cinematic visionary for over forty years. His films disturb by their questioning of the bases of human civilization and its values." - Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

 
 
Top 250 Directors
21st Century Top 50 
23 Best Film Directors in the World Today (The Guardian, 2012)
100 Essential Directors (Pop Matters)
Gerald Peary's Magnificent Seven (2006)
The Wild Bunch... 50 of the Movies' Maddest Visionaries
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
 
See Also
Theo Angelopoulos
Francis Ford Coppola
Alexander Dovzhenko
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Robert Flaherty
Jim Jarmusch
Alexander Kluge
F.W. Murnau
Godfrey Reggio (external link)
Nicolas Roeg
Andrei Tarkovsky
Peter Weir
 
Werner Herzog's Favourites
Freaks (1932) Tod Browning, Intolerance (1916) D.W. Griffith, Nosferatu (1922) F.W. Murnau, Rashomon (1950) Akira Kurosawa, Where is the Friend's Home? (1987) Abbas Kiarostami. Source: Rotten Tomatoes (2009)
 
 
 
         
         

 

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