Directed by Werner Herzog
29 Episodes
An artistic renegade every bit as uncompromising, fearless, and eccentric as the outsiders, oddballs, and obsessives he makes films about, Werner Herzog is a larger-than-life legend who has risked death, hypnotized an entire cast, moved a steamship over a mountain, and eaten his own shoe, all in the name of cinema. Emerging from the New German Cinema movement, he has devoted himself to chronicling the quests of dreamers, holy fools, and madmen in feverish, almost mystical narrative works like AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD (the first of his brilliant and often turbulent collaborations with frequent star Klaus Kinski), STROSZEK, THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSER, and FITZCARRALDO, a film as famous for its hallucinatory images as for its notoriously dangerous production. Also a prolific documentarian, Herzog is fascinated by extreme landscapes (FATA MORGANA, LESSONS OF DARKNESS) and incredible feats of human endurance (LAND OF SILENCE AND DARKNESS, LITTLE DIETER NEEDS TO FLY), seeking “ecstatic truth” in true stories just as bizarre as his fictions.
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1:44:33Episode 1Grizzly Man
Episode 1
Directed by Werner Herzog • 2005 • United States
Starring Timothy Treadwell, Kathleen Parker, Warren QueeneyWerner Herzog’s gripping documentary chronicles one of the most extreme—and ultimately tragic—experiments in human-animal cohabitation ever attempted. For thirteen consecutive summers, si...
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1:33:42Episode 2Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Episode 2
Directed by Werner Herzog • 1972 • West Germany, Mexico, Peru
Starring Klaus Kinski, Ruy Guerra, Helena RohoThe first of Werner Herzog’s legendary—and notoriously tempestuous—collaborations with actor Klaus Kinski is a feverish account of sixteenth-century Spanish conquistador Lope de Aguirre’s...
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2:37:13Episode 3Fitzcarraldo
Episode 3
Directed by Werner Herzog • 1982 • West Germany
Starring Klaus Kinski, Claudia CardinaleWerner Herzog’s infamously arduous productions were already legendary when he outdid himself with FITZCARRALDO, a feat as utterly quixotic and improbable as its protagonist. Klaus Kinski stars as the wild-ey...
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1:46:52Episode 4Nosferatu the Vampyre
Episode 4
Directed by Werner Herzog • 1979 • West Germany
Starring Klaus Kinski, Isabelle Adjani, Bruno GanzIt is 1850 in the beautiful, perfectly-kept town of Wismar. Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz) is about to leave on a long journey over the Carpathian Mountains to finalize real-estate arrangements with ...
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Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
Episode 5
Directed by Werner Herzog • 2009 • United States
Starring Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Val KilmerTwo of contemporary cinema’s most electrifying eccentrics, Werner Herzog and Nicolas Cage, join forces for a thoroughly unhinged pulp fever dream. Not—despite the title—a remake of or sequel to the si...
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1:31:07Episode 6My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done
Episode 6
Directed by Werner Herzog • 2009 • United States
Starring Michael Shannon, Willem Dafoe, Chloë SevignyWhat strange series of events led a man to murder his mother with an ancient sword? Produced by David Lynch, Werner Herzog’s typically idiosyncratic take on a true crime unfolds as a fascinatin...
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1:29:56Episode 7Echoes from a Somber Empire
Episode 7
Directed by Werner Herzog • 1990 • Germany, France
One of director Werner Herzog’s most unsettling explorations of the madness that can seize men’s hearts, this haunting documentary recounts the reign of Jean-Bédel Bokassa, who ruled for eleven years as the self-declared emperor of the Central A...
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54:06Episode 8Lessons of Darkness
Episode 8
Directed by Werner Herzog • 1992 • Germany
“The collapse of the stellar universe will occur–like creation–in grandiose splendor,” announces the quote (attributed to Blaise Pascal, but actually invented by the director) that begins Werner Herzog’s terrifyingly beautiful rumination on the ravaged ...
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1:17:01Episode 9Little Dieter Needs to Fly
Episode 9
Directed by Werner Herzog • 1997 • Germany
Dieter Dengler, a German-American Navy pilot who was shot down over Vietnam in 1966, recounts his experiences as a POW in a Vietnamese prison, tortured and starved until fear and desperation compelled him to make daring escape. Travelling to Laos and Th...
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1:38:41Episode 10My Best Fiend
Episode 10
Directed by Werner Herzog • 1999 • Germany
An engrossing look at one of cinema’s most intriguing partnerships, MY BEST FIEND chronicles Werner Herzog’s legendarily volatile friendship with actor Klaus Kinski. As Herzog delves into his history with Kinski in colorful detail—from the flat Kinski o...
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1:23:31Episode 11Wheel of Time
Episode 11
Directed by Werner Herzog • 2003 • Germany
In this wondrous documentary about the power of spirituality, director Werner Herzog travels to Bodh Gaya, India, to capture the pilgrimage of hundreds of thousands of Buddhists, who make the arduous trek there to partake in a momentous six-week initiat...
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1:20:38Episode 12The Wild Blue Yonder
Episode 12
Directed by Werner Herzog • 2005 • United Kingdom, France, Germany
Starring Brad Dourif, Donald Williams, Ellen BakerWerner Herzog’s ability to find otherworldly wonder wherever he points his camera is on display in this sublime experimental science-fiction odyssey, in which he makes striking u...
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Stroszek
Episode 13
Directed by Werner Herzog • 1977 • West Germany
Starring Bruno S., Eva Mattes, Clemens ScheitzWerner Herzog’s tragically absurd tour through 1970s America stars the singular Bruno S. as an ostracized, alcoholic Berlin street musician who, joined by a prostitute (Eva Mattes) and his eccentric el...
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Woyzeck
Episode 14
Directed by Werner Herzog • 1979 • West Germany
Starring Klaus Kinski, Eva Mattes, Wolfgang ReichmannWerner Herzog ventured into the dark depths of madness once again with this adaptation of the unfinished stage play by Georg Buchner, the story of a real-life nineteenth-century barber turned...
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45:40Episode 15God’s Angry Man
Episode 15
Directed by Werner Herzog • 1981 • West Germany
Werner Herzog’s portrait of all-American demagoguery focuses on Gene Scott, a televangelist whose fiery on-air tirades—against everything from the FCC to his own viewers—are contrasted with a behind-the-scenes portrait of an isolated, self-obsessed...
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41:56Episode 16Huie’s Sermon
Episode 16
Directed by Werner Herzog • 1981 • West Germany
Werner Herzog’s fascination with both religious mysticism and American subcultures leads him to a Black church in Brooklyn, where he documents a fire-and-brimstone sermon by the minister Huie L. Rogers. As Rogers’s explosive oratorical style reache...
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46:02Episode 17Ballad of the Little Soldier
Episode 17
Directed by Werner Herzog • 1984 • West Germany
Focusing on a group of Nicaraguan Miskito Indians embroiled in a civil war against the Sandinistas they once called allies, BALLAD OF THE LITTLE SOLDIER takes an intimate look at the conflict from the perspective of the children being used by the M...
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1:40:18Episode 18Where the Green Ants Dream
Episode 18
Directed by Werner Herzog • 1984 • West Germany, Australia
Starring Bruce Spence, Wandjuk Marika, Roy MarikaWerner Herzog heads to the Australian outback for this typically idiosyncratic variation on one of his pet themes: the uneasy relationship between modern man and nature. When an Austra...
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46:22Episode 19The Dark Glow of the Mountains
Episode 19
Directed by Werner Herzog • 1985 • West Germany
Werner Herzog’s career-long concern with individuals who test the limits of human achievement receives one of its most extraordinary expressions in this portrait of mountaineers Hans Kammerlander and Reinhold Messner. Following the pair as they emb...
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1:50:20Episode 20Cobra Verde
Episode 20
Directed by Werner Herzog • 1987 • West Germany
Starring Klaus Kinski, King Ampaw, José LewgoyThis final collaboration between best fiends Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski plumbs the horrors of colonialism in a delirious cinematic nightmare. COBRA VERDE tells the story of a Brazilian rancher turn...
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50:31Episode 21Herdsmen of the Sun
Episode 21
Directed by Werner Herzog • 1989 • Germany
Werner Herzog travels to the Sahel region of central Africa to document the unique courtship rituals of the nomadic Wodaabe tribe, whose men paint themselves in makeup and engage in an elaborate beauty pageant in hopes of attracting a mate. With rare in...
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1:30:24Episode 22Signs of Life
Episode 22
Directed by Werner Herzog • 1968 • West Germany
Starring Peter Brogle, Wolfgang Reichmann, Athina ZacharopoulouMade when he was only twenty-six years old, the first feature film by Werner Herzog already displays many of his signatures—moments of odd, idiosyncratic poetry in a story of men livin...
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1:36:07Episode 23Even Dwarfs Started Small
Episode 23
Directed by Werner Herzog • 1970 • West Germany
Starring Helmut Döring, Paul Glauer, Gisela HertwigWith his brilliantly anarchic second feature, Werner Herzog took his place as the enfant terrible of the New German Cinema. Cast entirely with dwarf actors, the film follows the chaos that erupts ...
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1:16:26Episode 24Fata Morgana
Episode 24
Directed by Werner Herzog • 1971 • West Germany
Considered by many to be the quintessential masterpiece among Werner Herzog’s early works, FATA MORGANA can be described as an expressionist documentary. Consisting of three parts, the film is an absorbing collection of images shot in an around the...