Werner Herzog

Saturday I had the absolute joy to see Werner Herzog speak at the Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville. He only spoke for two hours, but I could have easily sat through several more (he joked about having brought about 48+ hours worth of clips, I told my friends I would attempt to stay up for that). 

I first came across German filmmaker Werner Herzog back in 2005 when I went to the Traverse City Film Festival (put on by Michigan and my hometown native, Michael Moore) and they were showing Grizzly Man. I was freshly 18 at the time, just starting to get seriously interested in the arts, and was especially taken with documentary filmmaking. I thought the way he would digress from what seems to be the main topic to speak about humanity as a whole was really brilliant and interesting. 

For anyone who hasn't seen anything other than the film we watched in class (Cave of Forgotten Dreams) Werner Herzog has had a long and impressive career.  He made his first film at the age of 19, and has made 48 feature length films to date(both fiction and documentary).  His has a sort of obsessive commitment that is very apparent in his films, most especially Fitzcarraldo(1982), in which he actually had the indigenous people who had volunteered to be extras pull a ship - a full size ship - over a mountain for the film. 

He is the only filmmaker who has made a film on every continent, and Roger Ebert once stated that Herzog "has never created a single film that is compromised, shameful, made for pragmatic reasons, or uninteresting. Even his failures are spectacular."

I think it's fairly apparent I'm fangirling out in a major way, but the ways he explores humanity is just very inspiring to me. I highly recommend watching his films, reading his books/articles and just really exploring his body of work. His newest film Into the Inferno just debuted on Netflix, and he has quite a few other films available online. From his fiction films I highly recommend The Ballad of Kaspar Hauser and Even Dwarves Started Small. 

Bonus: He once bet then-student Errol Morris that he would eat his own shoe if he "had the guts" to make pet cemetery film Gates of Heaven. Morris made the film (and went on to make The Thin Blue Line, another marvelous documentary) and Herzog kept his word. You can watch the documentary by Les Blank on Hulu.

Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe