A Companion to Werner Herzog

Continually blurring the line between fiction and reality, Werner Herzog has made a career of crossing boundaries and reinventing himself. Since his early emergence as a leader in the New German cinema, Herzog is now widely recognized as one of the most acclaimed and innovative filmmakers of the modern era—as well as one of its most controversial and enigmatic figures.

A Companion to Werner Herzog presents more than two dozen original scholarly essays that probe deeply into various aspects of Herzog’s career and eclectic body of cinematic work. Contributions from internationally recognized film scholars and Herzog experts offer fresh perspectives on such topics as Herzog’s engagement with music and the arts, his self–stylization as a global filmmaker, the director’s Bavarian origins, and even his visionary collaboration—and love–hate relationship—with the late actor Klaus Kinski. Filled with illuminating insights, A Companion to Werner Herzog offers a long–overdue exploration of the life and artistic contributions of one of the true giants of international cinema.

Notes on Contributors viii

Acknowledgments xiv

Werner Herzog’s Companions: The Consolation of Images 1
Brad Prager

Part I Critical Approaches and Contexts 33

1 Herzog and Auteurism: Performing Authenticity 35
Brigitte Peucker

2 Physicality, Difference, and the Challenge of Representation: Werner Herzog in the Light of the New Waves 58
Lúcia Nagib

3 The Pedestrian Ecstasies of Werner Herzog: On Experience, Intelligence, and the Essayistic 80
Timothy Corrigan

Part II Herzog and the Inter–arts 99

4 Werner Herzog’s View of Delft: Or, Nosferatu and the Still Life 101
Kenneth S. Calhoon

5 Moving Stills: Herzog and Photography 127
Stefanie Harris

6 Archetypes of Emotion: Werner Herzog and Opera 149
Lutz Koepnick

7 Coming to Our Senses: The Viewer and Herzog’s Sonic Worlds 168
Roger Hillman

8 Death for Five Voices : Gesualdo’s “Poetic Truth” 187
Holly Rogers

9 Demythologization and Convergence: Herzog’s Late Genre Pictures and the Rogue Cop Film in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call—New Orleans 208
Jaimey Fisher

Part III Herzog’s German Encounters 231

10 “I don’t like the Germans”: Even Herzog Started in Bavaria 233
Chris Wahl

11 Herzog’s Heart of Glass and the Sublime of Raw Materials 256
Noah Heringman

12 The Ironic Ecstasy of Werner Herzog: Embodied Vision in The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner 281
Roger F. Cook

13 Tantrum Love: The Fiendship of Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog 301
Lance Duerfahrd

Part IV Herzog’s Far–Flung Cinema Africa, Australia, the Americas, and Beyond 327

14 Werner Herzog’s African Sublime 329
Erica Carter

15 Didgeridoo, or the Search for the Origin of the Self: Werner Herzog’s Where the Green Ants Dream and Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines 356
Manuel Köppen

16 A March into Nothingness: The Changing Course of Herzog’s Indian Images 371
Will Lehman

17 The Case of Herzog: Re–Opened 393
Eric Ames

18 The Veil Between: Werner Herzog’s American TV Documentaries 416
John E. Davidson

19 Herzog’s Chickenshit 445
Rembert Hüser

20 Encountering Werner Herzog at the End of the World 466
Reinhild Steingröver

Part V Toward the Limits of Experience Philosophical Approaches 485

21 Perceiving the Other in the Land of Silence and Darkness 487
Randall Halle

22 Werner Herzog’s Romantic Spaces 510
Laurie Johnson

23 The Melancholy Observer: Landscape, Neo–Romanticism, and the Politics of Documentary Filmmaking 528
Matthew Gandy

24 Portrait of the Chimpanzee as a Metaphysician: Parody and Dehumanization in Echoes from a Somber Empire 547
Guido Vitiello

25 Herzog and Human Destiny: The Philosophical Purposiveness of the Filmmaker 566
Alan Singer

Filmography 587
Compiled by Chris Wahl

Index 611

Brad Prager is Associate Professor of German and an active member of the Program in Film Studies at the University of Missouri. He has authored two monographs: Aesthetic Vision and German Romanticism: Writing Images (2007) and The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (2007). His articles have appeared in New German Critique, Studies in Documentary Film, Art History, and in the Modern Language Review. Most recently he has co–edited the collections The Collapse of the Conventional: German Film and its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty–First Century (2010) and Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory (2008).