Werner Herzog – Radical Dreamer

Werner Herzog has an interesting face, notes Christian Bale in Thomas von Steinaecker’s new documentary. He goes on to observe that one could just point a camera at that face and have people come away thinking they’d seen something deep. Herzog is enough of a presence in the film, as an interviewee, to bear this out, so it is to von Steinaecker’s credit that he goes beyond this and delivers something which will give the Bavarian filmmaker’s fans real food for thought.

There is a vast amount of material which might be considered here. The films. The wild history of how some of them were made. The personal life of one of cinema’s most extraordinary creative talents. One can, however, find much of that documented elsewhere, in one form of another. Von Steinaecker’s interest is in capturing the spirit of it all, and it’s here that he really succeeds.

It began, he told me, with a timeline of five films: Signs Of Life, Aguirre: The Wrath Of God, Fitzcarraldo, Grizzly Man and Bad Lieutenant. There are bits and pieces of others slotted into the mix. We visit the location for the shooting of Even Dwarfs Started Small, hover around the Cave Of Forgotten Dreams and reflect on Encounters At The End Of The World. The likes of Wim Wenders and Volker Schlöndorff recall the early days of the German New Wave when what would later coalesce into a perceived movement was far more random and experimental, and did not get much respect from a conservatively inclined viewing public. There is some consideration of the importance of Lotter Eisner as Herzog’s mentor, and their mutual conviction that his decision to walk from Munich to Paris influenced the universe in such a way as to buy her several more years of life.

His awareness of the precarity of life is brought into sharp perspective in interviews about his childhood, and the times when his mother had too little bread to keep the family fed right through the week. A photograph of her standing with her grown boys is a testimony to another kind of stubborn genius. He takes us back to the places where he grew up, to the hills where childhood games included the construction of unthinkingly dangerous ski jumps, and shows us a building where he used to live. It’s unclear whether or not this is inhabited today – one wonders about possible residents suddenly confronted with a world famous filmmaker peering in through their windows.

This is von Steinaecker’s home territory too, as his accent reveals, and the coincidence may account to some degree for the easy connection between them. Whilst it’s never intrusive, the film makes room for the personal and, perhaps more importantly, for Herzog to meander, interlinking diverse ideas in his inimitable way. In and around this, an impressive collection of A-listers share their thoughts, the likes of Nicole Kidman, Robert Pattinson, Chloé Zhao and even Patti Smith clearly excited by the opportunity to pay tribute.

Clips of Herzog’s work are used sparingly – less for licensing reasons, one feels, than because all that beauty and brilliance would be too distracting, and there is no shortage of other interesting stuff to look at. Nevertheless, for those who are relatively new to the subject, there is plenty to whet the appetite. Whilst others may be left feeling that there is a lot more to be said, that would require, at the very least, a mini-series. Working within constraints, Werner Herzog- Radical Dreamer invites viewers to engage with the magic of it all and, like Herzog himself. bite off a little more than they can chew.