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.
-
1:24:38Episode 1Land of Silence and Darkness
Episode 1
Directed by Werner Herzog • 1971 • West Germany
Werner Herzog’s first feature-length documentary follows Fini Straubinger, a woman who has lost her hearing and sight, as she travels to visit others without the use of those two senses. Through her interactions and the incredible stories of the pe...
-
1:49:31Episode 2The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
Episode 2
Directed by Werner Herzog • 1974 • West Germany
Starring Bruno S., Walter Ladengast, Brgitte MiraBased on real events, THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSER tells the story of a young man imprisoned in a basement dungeon for the first seventeen years of his life, devoid of human contact, until his captor...
-
45:27Episode 3The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner
Episode 3
Directed by Werner Herzog • 1974 • West Germany
A sports documentary only Werner Herzog could make, this mesmerizing portrait of the human drive for transcendence features a quintessential Herzog hero: Walter Steiner, a champion ski jumper who also works as a carpenter, creating deeply personal ...
-
1:34:56Episode 4Heart of Glass
Episode 4
Directed by Werner Herzog • 1976 • West Germany
Starring Josef Bierbichler, Stefan Güttler, Clemens ScheitzIn the late eighteenth century, a Bavarian village succumbs to madness as the townsfolk search for the secret to creating the unique ruby glass that is their lifeblood, lost to them whe...
-
46:24Episode 5How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck?
Episode 5
Directed by Werner Herzog • 1976 • West Germany
Werner Herzog heads to New Holland, Pennsylvania, to document the World Livestock Auctioneer Championship, focusing on the strange, staccato musicality of the language of auctioneering: in his words, “the last poetry possible, the poetry of capital...