Directed by Werner Herzog

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.

Directed by Werner Herzog
  • Grizzly Man

    Episode 1

    Directed by Werner Herzog • 2005 • United States
    Starring Timothy Treadwell, Kathleen Parker, Warren Queeney

    Werner 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...

  • Aguirre, the Wrath of God

    Episode 2

    Directed by Werner Herzog • 1972 • West Germany, Mexico, Peru
    Starring Klaus Kinski, Ruy Guerra, Helena Roho

    The 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...

  • Fitzcarraldo

    Episode 3

    Directed by Werner Herzog • 1982 • West Germany
    Starring Klaus Kinski, Claudia Cardinale

    Werner 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...

  • Nosferatu the Vampyre

    Episode 4

    Directed by Werner Herzog • 1979 • West Germany
    Starring Klaus Kinski, Isabelle Adjani, Bruno Ganz

    It 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 ...

  • Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

    Episode 5

    Directed by Werner Herzog • 2009 • United States
    Starring Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Val Kilmer

    Two 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...

  • My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done

    Episode 6

    Directed by Werner Herzog • 2009 • United States
    Starring Michael Shannon, Willem Dafoe, Chloë Sevigny

    What 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...

  • Echoes 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...

  • Lessons 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 ...

  • Little 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...

  • My 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...

  • Wheel 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...

  • The Wild Blue Yonder

    Episode 12

    Directed by Werner Herzog • 2005 • United Kingdom, France, Germany
    Starring Brad Dourif, Donald Williams, Ellen Baker

    Werner 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...

  • Stroszek

    Episode 13

    Directed by Werner Herzog • 1977 • West Germany
    Starring Bruno S., Eva Mattes, Clemens Scheitz

    Werner 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...

  • Woyzeck

    Episode 14

    Directed by Werner Herzog • 1979 • West Germany
    Starring Klaus Kinski, Eva Mattes, Wolfgang Reichmann

    Werner 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...

  • God’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...

  • Huie’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...

  • Ballad 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...

  • Where the Green Ants Dream

    Episode 18

    Directed by Werner Herzog • 1984 • West Germany, Australia
    Starring Bruce Spence, Wandjuk Marika, Roy Marika

    Werner 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...

  • The 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...

  • Cobra Verde

    Episode 20

    Directed by Werner Herzog • 1987 • West Germany
    Starring Klaus Kinski, King Ampaw, José Lewgoy

    This 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...

  • Herdsmen 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...

  • Signs of Life

    Episode 22

    Directed by Werner Herzog • 1968 • West Germany
    Starring Peter Brogle, Wolfgang Reichmann, Athina Zacharopoulou

    Made 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...

  • Even Dwarfs Started Small

    Episode 23

    Directed by Werner Herzog • 1970 • West Germany
    Starring Helmut Döring, Paul Glauer, Gisela Hertwig

    With 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 ...

  • Fata 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...