A Companion to Werner Herzog showcases over two dozen original scholarly essays examining nearly five decades of filmmaking by one of the most acclaimed and innovative figures in world cinema. First collection in twenty years dedicated to examining Herzog’s expansive career Features essays by international scholars and Herzog specialists Addresses a broad spectrum of the director’s films, from his earliest works such as Signs of Life and Fata Morgana to such recent films as The Bad Lieutenant and Encounters at the End of the World Offers creative, innovative approaches guided by film history, art history, and philosophy Includes a comprehensive filmography that also features a list of the director’s acting appearances and opera productions Explores the director’s engagement with music and the arts, his self-stylization as a global filmmaker, his Bavarian origins, and even his love-hate relationship with the actor Klaus Kinski

A Companion to Werner Herzog showcases over two dozen original scholarly essays examining nearly five decades of filmmaking by one of the most acclaimed and innovative figures in world cinema. First collection in twenty years dedicated to examining Herzog’s expansive career Features essays by international scholars and Herzog specialists Addresses a broad spectrum of the director’s films, from his earliest works such as Signs of Life and Fata Morgana to such recent films as The Bad Lieutenant and Encounters at the End of the World Offers creative, innovative approaches guided by film history, art history, and philosophy Includes a comprehensive filmography that also features a list of the director’s acting appearances and opera productions Explores the director’s engagement with music and the arts, his self-stylization as a global filmmaker, his Bavarian origins, and even his love-hate relationship with the actor Klaus Kinski

This edition of Herzog on Herzog presents a completely new set of interviews in which Werner Herzog discusses his career from its very beginnings to his most recent productions. Herzog was once hailed by Francois Truffaut as the most important director alive. Famous for his frequent collaborations with mercurial actor Klaus Kinski - including the epics, Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, and the terrifying Nosferatu - and more recently with documentaries such as Grizzly Man, Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Into the Abyss, Herzog has built a body of work that is one of the most vital in post-war German cinema.

Werner Herzog has produced some of the most powerful, haunting, and memorable images ever captured on film. Both his fiction films and his documentaries address fundamental issues about nature, selfhood, and history in ways that engage with but also criticize and qualify the best philosophical thinking about these topics. In focusing on figures from Aguirre, Kasper Hauser, and Stroszek to Timothy Treadwell, Graham Dorrington, Dieter Dengler, and Walter Steiner, among many others, Herzog investigates the nature of human life in time and the possibilities of meaning that might be available within it. His films demonstrate the importance of the image in coming to terms with the plights of contemporary industrial and commercial culture. Eldridge unpacks and develops Herzog's achievement by bringing his work into engagement with the thinking of Freud, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, Hegel, Cavell, and Benjamin, but more importantly also by attending closely to the logic and development of the films themselves and to Herzog's own extensive writings about filmmaking.

Legendary director, actor, author, and provocateur Werner Herzog has incalculably influenced contemporary cinema for decades. Until now there has been no sustained effort to gather and present a variety of diverse philosophical approaches to his films and to the thinking behind their creation. The Philosophy of Werner Herzog, edited by M. Blake Wilson and Christopher Turner,collects fourteen essays by professional philosophers and film theorists from around the globe, who explore the famed German auteur’s notions of “ecstatic truth” as opposed to “accountants’ truth,” his conception of nature and its penchant for “overwhelming and collective murder,” his controversial film production techniques, his debts to his philosophical and aesthetic forebears, and finally, his pointed objections to his would-be critics––including, among others, the contributors to this book themselves. By probing how Herzog’s thinking behind the camera is revealed in the action he captures in front of it, The Philosophy of Werner Herzog shines new light upon the images and dialog we see and hear on the screen by enriching our appreciation of a prolific––yet enigmatic––film artist.

Werner Herzog's protean imagination has produced a filmography that is nothing less than a sustained meditation on the modern human condition. Though Herzog takes his topics from around the world, the Americas have provided the setting and subject matter for iconic works ranging from Aquirre, The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo to Grizzly Man. Joshua Lund offers the first systematic interpretation of Werner Herzog's Americas-themed works, illuminating the director's career as a political filmmaker—a label Herzog himself rejects. Lund draws on materialist and post-colonial approaches to argue that Herzog's American work confronts us with the circulation, distribution, accumulation, application, and negotiation of power that resides, quietly, at the center of his films. By operating beyond conventional ideological categories, Herzog renders political ideas in radically unfamiliar ways while fearlessly confronting his viewers with questions of world-historical significance. His maddeningly opaque viewpoint challenges us to rethink discovery and conquest, migration and exploitation, resource extraction, slavery, and other foundational traumas of the contemporary human condition.

Werner Herzog came to fame in the 1970s as the European new wave explored new cinematic ideas. With films like Signs of Life (1968); Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972); The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974); and Fitzcarraldo (1982), Herzog became the subject of public debate, particularly due to his larger than life characters, often played by the wild Klaus Kinski. After the success of his documentary Grizzly Man (2005), Herzog became a leading force in a new form of hybrid documentary, and his tough attitude toward life and film made him a director’s director for a new generation of aspiring filmmakers. Kristoffer Hegnsvad’s award-winning book guides the reader through films depicting gangster priests, bear whisperers, shoe eating, revolutionary filmmakers . . . and a penguin. It is full of rare insights from Herzog’s otherwise secretive Rogue Film School, and features interviews with Herzog.

Over the course of his career, legendary director Werner Herzog (b. 1942) has made almost sixty films and given more than eight hundred interviews. This collection features the best of these, focusing on all the major films, from Signs of Life and Aguirre, the Wrath of God to Grizzly Man and Cave of Forgotten Dreams. When did Herzog decide to become a filmmaker? Who are his key influences? Where does he find his peculiar themes and characters? What role does music play in his films? How does he see himself in relation to the German past and in relation to film history? And how did he ever survive the wrath of Klaus Kinski? Herzog answers these and many other questions in twenty-five interviews ranging from the 1960s to the present. Critics and fans recognized Herzog's importance as a young German filmmaker early on, but his films have attained international significance over the decades. Most of the interviews collected in this volume—some of them from Herzog's production archive and previously unpublished—appear in English for the very first time. Together, they offer an unprecedented look at Herzog's work, his career, and his public persona as it has developed and changed over time.

“Hypnotic….It is ever tempting to try to fathom his restless spirit and his determination to challenge fate.” —Janet Maslin, New York Times Werner Herzog (Grizzly Man) is one of the most revered and enigmatic filmmakers of our time, and Fitzcarraldo is one of his most honored and admired films. More than just Herzog’s journal of the making of the monumental, problematical motion picture, which involved, among other things, major cast changes and reshoots, and the hauling (without the use of special effects) of a 360-ton steamship over a mountain , Conquest of the Useless is a work of art unto itself, an Amazonian fever dream that emerged from the delirium of the jungle. With fascinating observations about crew and players—including Herzog’s lead, the somewhat demented internationally renowned star Klaus Kinski—and breathtaking insights into the filmmaking process that are uniquely Werner Herzog, Conquest of the Useless is an eye-opening look into the mind of a cinematic master.