The CultureCritic guide to Werner Herzog...

Over the past fifty years the Bavarian-born filmmaker has supplemented his impressive and often groundbreaking feature film output with an equally impressive canon of documentaries, showcasing a tendency for unearthing incredible human stories and capturing inaccessible landscapes.

Born into the rubble of post-war Germany, Herzog grew up in a country experiencing a cinematic drought in the wake of Nazi censorship. Along with other (now) household names including Wim Wenders and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Herzog became one of the key figures in a generation often tagged as the proponents of a New German Cinema, enjoying his international ‘breakthrough' with 1972's Aguirre, The Wrath of God. He is still amazingly prolific - last year CultureCritic featured his brilliant black comedy Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, starring Nicholas Cage, and a Herzog / David Lynch collaboration, the drama My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done.

As a man who has been shot (literally) mid-interview, eaten his shoe on film and threatened to kill his lead actor on set, Herzog is certainly made of tough stuff. In the name of filmmaking, he has braved Antarctica, the Vietnamese rainforests and Klaus Kinski. To celebrate the release of Cave, we've rounded up some of his greatest feature documentaries, each accompanied by an independently generated Critometer score, of course.


Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1998)

Like Herzog, Dieter Dengler grew up in the aftermath of World War II, by all accounts not a particularly prosperous or comfortable period. Emigrating to the US, Dengler realized his lifelong dream of becoming a pilot just in time to be drafted for Vietnam, where he was shot down, captured and tortured before escaping. Herzog takes Dengler back to Laos and Thailand to relive his ordeal, mixing interviews with archival footage and reconstructions. Herzog, apparently, was fascinated with the harsh cruelties of both man and nature, and later went the whole hog and made the story into the feature film Rescue Dawn (2007), starring Christian Bale, which he discusses with Mark Kermode in the clip below.

My Best Fiend (1999)

Herzog's lengthy on-off collaboration with German actor Klaus Kinski resulted in some of the director's most lauded films, bookended by 1972's Aguirre, the Wrath of God and 1987's Cobra Verde. To describe their relationship as ‘rocky' would be an understatement. Here Herzog turns the camera on himself, mixing recollections of Kinski with archival footage of the highly-strung actors' jaw-dropping rants and shocking but entirely watchable behavior. A memorable passage sees Herzog recalling the chief of the Peruvian extras featured in Fitzcarraldo offering to kill Kinski as a favour - ‘I said no', states a straight-faced Herzog, ‘but immediately regretted my decision'.

Radio Times - 60%
allmovie - 70%
IMDB - 78%  

The White Diamond (2004)

After his 1982 feature Fitzcarraldo, for which a large steamboat was physically hauled over a mountain in South America, Herzog was no stranger to filming in tropical terrain. Documenting aeronautical engineer Graham Dorrington's attempts to design and fly a tear-drop shaped airship over the Guyanan forest must have been a breeze. Herzog follows Dorrington, who returns to Guyana ten years after an earlier attempt at flight over forest went wrong resulting in the death of his co-pilot, Dieter Plage. This film examines both the history of aviation, and Herzog's acquaintance with a local diamond miner called Marc Anthony, given to philosophical musings (see below).

Radio Times - N/A
allmovie - 70%
IMDB - 76% 

Grizzly Man (2005) 

In Timothy Treadwell, Herzog found a subject to rival Kinski in both intensity and eccentricity. Put succinctly, Grizzly Man documents the story of a man who spends thirteen summers living among grizzly bears in the Alaskan wilds, before he and his girlfriend are killed by one. That's not a spoiler - Herzog reveals Treadwell's grim fate early on. One of the best documentaries of the decade, and perhaps Herzog's finest, the film is an incredible character portrait, revealing Treadwell's genuine belief in a connection between himself and the animals. Features amazing footage shot by Treadwell himself and interviews with close friends.

Radio Times - 100%
allmovie - 80%
IMDB - 79% 

Encounters at the End of the World (2007)

On arriving at the McMurdo Station in Antarctica with cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger, Herzog's mission statement is clear; he's not here to make a documentary about ‘fluffy penguins', but rather to document the lives and dreams of the scientific community who have chosen life in this inhospitable environment. Includes a humorous discussion about the possibility of ‘gay penguins', and a classically poignant Herzog moment in which a doomed penguin heads with determination into the continent's barren interior towards certain death. The shots of the landscape and the watery world under the ice are awe-inspiring: experience on the big screen if you can. 

Cave of Forgotten Dreams is in cinemas from Friday, read the latest reviews here.

Information on Herzog in discussion at Intelligence Squared here.