Herzog,Werner b. September 5, 1942; Sachrang, Bavaria
German filmmaker, producer, scriptwriter, and opera director who made America a topic of many movies. Born Werner Stipetic, film director Werner Herzog is among German filmmakers the one who had the strongest fascination for unusual places (an erupting volcano in the Caribbean, the Amazon River, the African desert) and uncommon people (Native Americans, Aboriginal tribes from Australia, dwarves, blind people, institutionalized patients, and outcasts).
His works show a man of extremes, intensity, and symbols.The young Werner Stipetic spent his childhood on a small upper Bavarian farm until the age of fifteen, when his parents moved to Munich. Their new neighbor was actor Klaus Kinski (1926—1991). After studying history and literature at the University of Munich, Herzog won a Fulbright scholarship offered by the United States to go to the University of Pittsburgh. But Herzog did not attend to his courses and went to Mexico instead. Back in West Germany, Herzog won the Carl Mayer Prize for the best screenplay in 1964. That allowed him to release his first feature film, entitled Lebenszeichen (Signs of Life, 1967), which won the Silver Bear prize for the best debut feature film at the Berlin Film Festival in 1968.
Apart from studying and visiting America in his early adult life, Herzog has often included unusual elements from the “new continent” in his films. Even his first short essay, Herakles (Hercules, 1962, revised in 1965), included some documentary stock shots from World War II raids made by the U.S. Air Force. Similarly, Herzog’s second and third feature films, Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen (Even Dwarves Started Small, 1970) and Fata Morgana (1970), were both shot in a few African countries but also explored the Atlantic region of the Canary Islands. The same year, Herzog produced a documentary made for television, Behinderte Zukunft (Handicapped Future, 1971) that was partly shot in Los Angeles.
In 1972 Herzog gained international recognition with his masterpiece, Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre: The Wrath of God, 1972), his first experience with actor Klaus Kinski. It was shot during two months in early 1972 in the Urubamba Valley and on the Rio Huallaga and Rio Nanay with the Indians of the Lauramarca cooperative in Peru. The script is a fascinating story freely adapted from the memoirs of Gaspar de Carvajal, who wrote about his expedition with the Spanish explorer Don Lope de Aguirre. In 1560 Aguirre tried to find in the Peruvian forest a passage to the mythical El Dorado. In the film, the character of the narrator Gaspar de Carvajal appears under the nickname of “El Negro.” Fever eliminates many soldiers before they can reach their goal, and their obsessed leader, the nihilistic Aguirre, seems to lose his mind. This megalomaniacal adventure of a group of Spanish conquistadors, controlled by the charismatic figure of Lope de Aguirre, was an indirect way to question colonialism, fascism, and power—only twenty-five years after World War II.
Herzog was quite present in America during that period. Another strange film, How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck (1976), a forty-four-minute documentary entirely shot in Fort Collins, Colorado, and New Holland, Pennsylvania, shows the 1976 Cattle Auctioning World Championships, with phenomenal characters, the speed-auctioneers, who can talk faster than the speed of sound! Elements from that experience exploring the musicality of auctioning in rural America would later reappear in Herzog’s film Stroszek (1977). Taken from a script cowritten with Herbert Achternbusch, Herz aus Glas (Heart of Glass, 1976) was shot in many countries (mainly West Germany and Ireland) and in some American states (Utah, Alaska, and Wyoming). To obtain the effect he wanted in some scenes, Herzog had to hypnotize some of the actors. In August 1976 Herzog did a short documentary about an erupting volcano on La Guadeloupe Island, titled La Souffriere (1976).
Herzog returned to the United States to shoot the second half of Stroszek (1977), another satirical story about an outsider, with “actor” Bruno Schlenstein, who played the lead role in The Enigma ofKas- par Hauser (1974), one of Herzog’s most famous movies. Herzog refused to consider Bruno S. (as he was presented in the titles) as an actor, not only because he had no theatrical training, but mainly because Herzog felt that Bruno S. played his own role instead of interpreting a character. Here, we see a strange ex-jailer who emigrates from West Germany to Plainfield, Wisconsin, but cannot adapt to the consumer society that gives him a credit card and offers more than one can afford. His belongings are seized. Every useless object the naive man had bought in just a few weeks has to be sold at an auction. Through this fierce critique of capitalist society (and especially the United States), Herzog observes the inhuman conditions of exploitation of the poor and the uneducated. The soundtrack music is mostly taken from American roots, from countrywestern guitarist Chet Atkins to the blues harmonica player Sonny Terry. During the following years, Herzog carried on with various projects made in Europe, including two feature films starring Klaus Kinski: a remake of Friedrich Wilhelm Mur- nau’s Nosferatu (1978) and a less successful feature adapted from Georg Buchner, Woyzeck (1979).
During the 1980s, Herzog collaborated with Klaus Kinski and the musicians of the Munich group Popol Vuh in two other films. An ambitious project, Fitzcar- raldo (1982) is the epic story of an art lover living in the early twentieth century, nicknamed Fitzcarraldo, who wants to build an opera house for the Indians in Peru to organize a concert of Verdi’s works, given by the legendary opera singer Enrico Caruso. To achieve this, the organizers have to transport a steamboat onto the summit of a hill. The shooting of Fitzcarraldo took more than a year; a village and a boat were built for the project.
The crew lived near the regions occupied by the tribes of Ashininka-Campa from Gran Pajonal, the Machiguengas de Rio Camisea, and the Campa from Rio Tambo, in Peru and Brazil.The documentary Burden of Dreams (1982), directed by American filmmaker Les Blank, is almost as fascinating as Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. It documents the complex making of Fitzcarraldo and illustrates how gigantic Herzog’s project was. We also see two scenes deleted from the shooting of the first version of Fitzcarraldo (1982), with U.S. actor Jason Robards Jr. playing the lead role of Fitzcarraldo (he would later abandon the project, to be replaced by Kinski) and singer Mick Jagger playing Fitzcar- raldo’s assistant, a simpleton character who
disappeared from the final version because Jagger had to leave the set after many months of delays.
Herzog remained very active, although his films became more discrete. A critique of the U.S. dominant posture, Lektionen in Finsternis (Lessons ofDarkness, 1992), is a one-hour documentary about the Kuwaitian oil fields in flames during the first war in Iraq. A film with many transatlantic correspondences, Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997) is the fictional story of a naive young German, born after World War II and fascinated by airplanes, who goes to the United States to become a pilot in the army. He succeeds, but he soon finds himself in Vietnam, during the war, as a prisoner.
In almost fifty films that are either documentaries or fiction, including many lesser-known short essays, Werner Herzog has created a very personal universe that always depicts the uncanny and the peculiar side of the human soul. Apart from directing and producing his own scripts, Herzog occasionally produces other directors’ works, such as The Making of “Hulk” (2003). He also directs operas in Bayreuth, Germany, and Italy.
Yves Laberge
See also Film (German), American Influence on; Fulbright Program; German Students at American Universities; Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm; Wenders, Wim
References and Further Reading
Carrere, Emmanuel. Werner Herzog. Paris: Edilig, 1982.
Herzog, Werner. Cobra Verde. Le-Chesnay and Paris: Jade and Flammarion, 1988.
------. Sur le chemin desglaces. Paris: P.O.L., 1988.
Official Werner Herzog Website. At http://www.wernerherzog.com (accessed May 10, 2005).
Passek, Jean-Loup, ed. Dictionnaire du cinema. Paris: Larousse, 1998.