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A long time has passed since Werner Herzog revealed himself to be an unequalled figure in New German Cinema. In recent years, he has returned to the fore, but this time thanks to the reverberations of films such as Lessons of Darkness, My Best Fiend, The Wild Blue Yonder and Grizzly Man. The fact that Herzog is in the news now for his documentaries has nothing paradoxical about it, nor is it an indication that something has changed in the focus of his work: in fact, of the fifty films he has made in his career, only a fifteen are fiction. And some scholars hold that what will remain of Herzog’s work will not be these narrative fiction films, but rather his much darker documentary production. Documenta Madrid 06 offered a first occasion to
look it over: that retrospective is now complemented by this book, which has its own novelty as well, since it focuses on the task of reappraising the non-fiction work by Herzog.
The controversial figure of Herzog from Aguirre, The Wrath of God, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, and Fitzcarraldobecomes much more present when it confronts the real world. It is the figure of a visionary who scorns the “truth of accountants” of documentary film in favor of using it to go after the ecstasy of the truth, like Capitan Ahab after his white whale. And by coming to the same limits: Herzog believes human beings reveal themselves in the extremes, and that the mission of the filmmaker is to reach the end of the world in the search for essential images, ones that have not been contaminated by our media society. A program of maximums, a program of gobsmacked anthropology, one that searches for epiphany not in the fantastic hypertrophied imagination, but rather in the extreme real. A hardened traveler, but not in the tradition of the internationalist and social-conscious documentary, Herzog visited the desert (Fata Morgana, 1970) and climbed tropical volcanoes (La Soufrière, 1977); he filmed post-apocalyptic scenes of postwar Kuwait (Lessons of Darkness, 1992) and the lost paradise of an Amazonian tribe (in his segment of Ten Minutes Older, 2002). The frequent fabrications that set his films apart have prevented Herzog from being fully accepted by the documentary institution: his films do not appear in the historical manuals of this trade. It might be said, instead, that Herzog makes documentaries for those who do not like documentaries. They are pieces that reveal a personal and non-transferable vision: that of a film shaman who likes walking dangerously on ice and fire.
