Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer - A Light Life's Journey, from Psychodrama Auteur to Philosopher Poet
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B-plus.
Thomas von Steinaecker’s documentary, Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer, offers an enjoyable, if fairly light portrait of the German filmmaker and survey of his 60-plus year career.
An agreeable memory jog or primer, it’s a film which could serve as ideal opening night set-up to a retrospective on his prolific filmography.
The director, now 81, Herzog shares the screen with a starry slate including fellow directors (Wim Wenders, Volker Schlöndorff, Chloé Zhao, Joshua Oppenheimer) celebrity actors (Nicole Kidman, Robert Pattinson, Christian Bale, Carl Weathers) and rock poet Patti Smith, who compares Herzog’s work to “an exquisitely sour and sweet fruit you’ve never tasted before.”
Herzog: “It’s an injustice of nature that we do not have wings.”
In a linear recounting of Herzog’s humble beginnings and precocious self-confidence and eventual success, details are filled in by his brothers, producer Lucki Stipetic and Tilbert Herzog and first wife, Martje Grohmann. Clips from films such as the absurdist sophomore feature, Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) and Les Blank’s 1980 short, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe are welcome additions.
Various commentators address Herzog as a public personality, one who has blurred the line between esteemed auteur and pop culture icon in a way that has few parallels since Orson Welles.
Younger audiences may know him primarily for his distinctive consonant chewing German accent. Wenders suggests Herzog invented the way he speaks, presenting an image to Americans of a “likeable but somewhat fanatical German.” The gloomy caricature has been elevated in television performances on The Simpsons and in season one of Jon Favreau’s series, The Mandalorian.
Cinema buffs will also know him as a key figure in the New German Cinema from the late ‘60s to ‘80s, along with the late Rainer Werner Fassbender, Wenders and Schlőndorff. The film reminds us how Herzog, and his volatile star Klaus Kinski, engaged in a series of psychodramas of obsession and ordeal, both on and off-screen. The result was some of the most celebrated films of the era, including Aguirre The Wrath of God, Nosferatu The Vampyre and Fitzcarraldo.
In Germany, Herzog’s colleagues tell us, his career is seen as having peaked with his last major fiction film, Fitzcarraldo in 1982, the year he turned 40. But since moving Los Angeles in the ‘90s, Herzog created a remarkable original body of poetic documentaries of extreme existence, includng Grizzly Man (2005), Encounters at the End of the World (2007) and Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) that explore the frontiers of fear and awe.
Perhaps the defining Herzog quote from his later period comes from his narration of Grizzly Man, about videographer Timothy Treadwell, who was killed by one of the grizzlies he admired. Contrasting himself to Treadwell, Herzog said: “I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder."
There’s a kind of religiosity in believing the universe is actively hostile to humanity. If you take the statement seriously. Of course, as Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer reminds us, Herzog is something of mischievous put-on artist, given to stunts and legend-building, and semi-serious grandiosity: “It’s an injustice of nature that we do not have wings,” he gravely declares at one point in the film. This is not an argument with the universe that can be easily remedied, though one can dream.
Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer. Directed by Thomas von Steinaecker. Opens Friday, January 19 at the Ted Rogers Hot Docs Cinema, Toronto; Vancouver International Film Centre (VIFC), Vancouver; Playhouse Cinema, Hamilton. Jan 26: Princess Cinema, Waterloo; Hyland Cinema, London.