Werner Herzog (b.1942,) originally Werner H. Stipetic, is a German motion-picture director, screenwriter, author, actor, and opera director. One of cinema’s most controversial and iconoclastic directors, he is celebrated for his unusual films that capture men and women at psychological extremes. With Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Volker Schlöndorff, Herzog led the influential postwar West German cinema movement.
Born in Munich, Herzog wrote a prize-winning screenplay at the age of 15 and made his first film at 20, before studying at Munich and Pittsburgh. He then worked in American television before starting to make his own short films.
Themes of remoteness in time and space are dominant elements throughout Herzog’s films, which include Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972,) which deals with the exploits of a rebel soldier in Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro’s army in 16th century Peru, Fitzcarraldo (1982,) the story of a misguided attempt to construct an opera house in the Amazon jungle, and Nosferatu (1979,) a version of the Dracula story, all of which featured his long-time collaborator, the actor Klaus Kinski.
Herzog is a prolific documentary filmmaker whose human subjects are often outsiders to a normal society, as in The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1973) and Grizzly Man (2005.) He has also staged several operas and published over a dozen books of prose.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Werner Herzog
Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.
—Werner Herzog
For such an advanced civilization as ours to be without images that are adequate to it is as serious a defect as being without memory.
—Werner Herzog
You should look straight at a film; that’s the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates.
—Werner Herzog
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