September 8, 2021–January 4, 2022

Werner Herzog: Lessons of Darkness

The most important film director alive.”

François Truffaut

A visionary artist whose amusingly doom-laden, memeable persona occasionally distracts from the startling originality and go-for-broke ethos of his renegade cinema, the inimitable Werner Herzog is among the most celebrated, storied, and instantly recognizable (by voice alone!) auteurs on the planet. His mighty body of work, an extensive catalogue of fiction and nonfiction films, both of equal repute, dates back nearly sixty years and numbers in the seventies. Still prolific, still possessed by an unbridled spirit of punk-poet creativity, Herzog, now 78, shows no signs of slowing or shedding his faith in the deeper stratum of truth—the so-called ecstatic truth”—attainable through the seventh art.

Born in Munich in 1942, but swiftly moved to the isolated Bavarian village of Sachrang after Allied airstrikes bombed a neighbouring home, Herzog credits the atrocities of war—and the true barbarity of human nature that war unmasks—with forging the brooding, anarchic worldview that informs his life and work. He purportedly grew up without a bed, plumbing, or awareness of cinema’s existence. At 19, he made his first movie with a stolen 35mm camera and information obtained from an encyclopedia entry on filmmaking. With Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Volker Schlöndorff, Margarethe von Trotta, and Wim Wenders, he became a leading figure of the New German Cinema movement and earned widespread acclaim for the beautiful, feverish savagery of his creations. Of course, he also won notoriety for the perplexing, sometimes perilous methods used to labour them into being. The tales are legion—a hypnotized cast in Heart of Glass (1976) is a beguiling instance—but his volatile productions with human-grenade Klaus Kinski, with whom he made five embattled pictures, surely best them all. Among the fabled: the threat of death should Kinski walk while making masterpiece Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), and demands that a 300-ton ship be dragged over a mountain for Fitzcarraldo (1982), a ludicrous display of unchecked hubris, and life-imitating-art excessiveness, which forever hitched the madman genius” label to the director.

Uncanny and uncompromising, Herzog’s films are a nomadic theatre of tragedy and human folly, of romantic fools and delusional dreamers confronted by the cruelties of an indifferent universe. It has resulted in an oeuvre drawn to lessons of darkness—a phrase that serves as title for his apocalyptic 1992 portrait of the Earth aflame, but also a tidy summation of his cinema’s grand, disquieting design. Lessons of Darkness,” The Cinematheque’s most substantial Herzog retrospective since 1996, collects many of the German titan’s most iconic, enigmatic, and ecstatic feats of narrative and documentary filmmaking (though Herzog scoffs at any meaningful difference between the two, natch). The series includes 16 restorations of works produced during the director’s most fertile period—the 1970s to the 1990s—as well as a sprinkling of 21st-century masterworks we’d be remiss to exclude. Welcome, one and all, to Herzog season.

He is a pure artist and maniac and there will never be another one like Herzog.” Harmony Korine

The most vital, mysterious, and righteous moviemaking voice on the globe … It’s time for Herzog to be pantheonized.” Michael Atkinson, Film Comment

One of the greatest and most original of documentary filmmakers.” J. Hoberman, New York Times

A man whose life and career have embodied a vision of the cinema that challenges moviegoers to ask themselves questions not only about films but about lives.” Roger Ebert

This retrospective continues in our next (mid-November to mid-December) programming cycle.

Acknowledgments

The Cinematheque is grateful to Bret Berg of the American Genre Film Archive (Austin) for his assistance. Restorations courtesy of Shout! Factory and the American Genre Film Archive.

Media

List of Programmed Films

Date Film Title Director(s) Year Country
2021-Sep Even Dwarfs Started Small Werner Herzog 1970 West Germany
2021-Sep Fata Morgana Werner Herzog 1971 West Germany
2021-Sep Aguirre, the Wrath of God Werner Herzog 1972 West Germany
2021-Sep The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser Werner Herzog 1974 West Germany
2021-Sep Land of Silence and Darkness Werner Herzog 1971 West Germany
2021-Sep Stroszek Werner Herzog 1977 West Germany
2021-Sep Heart of Glass Werner Herzog 1976 West Germany
2021-Sep Woyzeck Werner Herzog 1979 West Germany
2021-Oct Fitzcarraldo Werner Herzog 1982 West Germany
2021-Oct Nosferatu the Vampyre Werner Herzog 1979 West Germany
2021-Oct Burden of Dreams Les Blank 1982 USA
2021-Nov Ballad of the Little Soldier + Lessons of Darkness Werner Herzog
2021-Nov Where the Green Ants Dream Werner Herzog 1984 West Germany
2021-Nov Cobra Verde Werner Herzog 1987 West Germany
2021-Nov My Best Fiend Werner Herzog 1999 Germany . . .
2021-Nov Grizzly Man Werner Herzog 2005 USA
2021-Dec Little Dieter Needs to Fly Werner Herzog 1997 Germany . . .
2021-Dec Rescue Dawn Werner Herzog 2006 USA
2021-Dec Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2D Version) Werner Herzog 2010 France . . .
Note

Image: Werner Herzog in Les Blank's 1982 documentary Burden of Dreams.