Herzog, Werner

Herzog, Werner (1942- ), German film director, born Werner Stipetic in Sachrang, Bavaria. Herzog made his first short films in 1962 as a student at the University of Munich, and, after a brief period working in the United States for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), went on to make a number of documentaries, as well as the feature films for which he is best known.

Herzog’s surreal fantasies include Auch Zwerge Haben Klein Angefangen (1970; Even Dwarfs Started Small), which had a cast of dwarfs; Herz aus Glas (1976; Heart of Glass), for which the actors were hypnotized; Nosferatu, Phantom der Nacht (1979; Nosferatu the Vampire), a scene-by-scene reworking of the classic horror film by F. W. Murnau; and Fitzcarraldo (1982), in which an Irishman obsessively pursues his dream of building an opera house in the heart of the Amazonian jungle. Among his re-creations of historical events are Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (1972; Aguirre, the Wrath of God), the story, filmed in the Amazon Basin, of an expedition by 16th-century Spanish adventurers, and Jeder für Sich und Gott Gegen Alle (1974; The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser), the true story of a man kept in an underground room from birth. He has also made films adapted from literary sources, such as Woyzeck (1978), a play by Georg Büchner.

By the mid-1980s Herzog was probably the most celebrated of German directors, with a string of award-winning films to his credit. At that point he turned to making documentaries, which, like his films, offer a strong, personal—at times mystical—vision of the world around him. While often Expressionistic in style, they offer a realistic depiction of life, with its cruelty and hardships; examples include Herdsmen of the Sun (1986), a poetic description of the lives of the Wodaabe tribesmen, Lektionen in Finsternis (1992; Lessons of Darkness), about the Kuwaiti oilfields at the end of the Gulf War; Bells from the Deep: Faith and Superstition in Russia (1993), an exploration of religion and superstition; and Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997), the true story of a German-born American who has been on both the losing and the winning sides of war; having experienced the Allied destruction of his village as a child, Dieter Dengler flew missions in the US Navy during the Vietnam War, was shot down and captured, and survived torture, disease, and brutality in a prisoner-of-war camp. Among Herzog’s subsequent documentaries are: Wheel of Time (2003), in which the director observes the rituals of Tibetan Buddhist monks at the Kalachakra festival in India; The White Diamond (2004), documenting a unique aerial expedition to explore the Guyanan rainforest; Grizzly Man (2005), about the life and violent end of the eccentric American grizzly bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell; and The Wild Blue Yonder (2005), a poetic mixture of documentary and science fiction in which an alien visitor to Earth relates the story of a human expedition to his frozen home planet in the Andromeda system.

He returned to feature films in 2001 with Invincible, based on the true story of 1930s Jewish strongman Zishe Breitbart, whose popularity in Germany contradicted the Jewish stereotypes promulgated by the Nazis.