The 2022 documentary Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer, made by German director Thomas von Steinaecker, entered into our local cinemas these days. My fascination with this prolific filmmaker, spanning 60 years of creative work, made me go and see it. It showed itself worth a watch.

The film starts with Werner Herzog driving in a car in Los Angeles telling about his need to tell stories. ”My existence has meaning when I try to tell a story that resides in all of us, about things that have not been articulated yet. That is my equivalent of dreaming.” Herzog is presented as the man of impossible stories, dreams and projects, always looking for images that have not been seen yet. He is the lonesome rider who keeps chasing his dreams, even when others say it can’t be done. When something has entered his mind, he has to do it, otherwise he would lose his dreams and that would be the worst thing happening to him. He uses the illustration of ski jumping: “When all your instincts are telling you that you need to pull back, you must stretch your body into the abyss.” When you jump you have to lean into it. When you shrink back, then things go really wrong.

Herzog is regarded as one of the pioneers of the New German Cinema, the period of the renaissance of German film in the mid-Sixties after the dark period of nazism and WWII. German Cinema was huge in the Twenties and Thirties with iconic directors like Friedrich W. Murnau, Fritz Lang and many others who, threatened by the rise of Nazism in their country in the early Thirties, emigrated to the USA at an early stage in their career. When Lotte H. Eisner, the German-French critic, who with her Jewish background had to flee from Berlin to Paris in 1933, saw Herzog’s first feature film Signs of Life (1968), she said: ”Finally we have good German film again.”

She became Herzog’s mentor and we see her being interviewed in the film. In the next two decades his big dream films like Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Fitzcarraldo(1982) and Cobra Verde (1987) were released. These three films have in common that they have the eccentric Austrian actor Klaus Kinski as its protagonist. The collaboriation of Herzog and the volatile Kinski is film history. In the late Nineties, tired of the bureaucracy in the German film industry, he left for the US and continued to make great documentary films like Grizzly Man (2005), Encounters at the End of the World (2007) and Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010). If you are not too familiar with the work of Werner Herzog, this documentary film may stir you to start exploring the rich bulk of works from this unique director. It will make you think about the dreams that you cherish in your own life and how you deal with them.

Rinus Baljeu, Sept 2023  

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