Celebrating Werner Herzog!

On 5 September 2022, Werner Herzog celebrated his 80th birthday. His work has had a decisive influence on New German Cinema and makes him an important representative of international auteur filmmaking. To mark the occasion, we take a look at five films from his rich oeuvre.

Werner Herzog, along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz, Volker Schlöndorff and Wim Wenders, is part of the first generation of New German Cinema. After the “Oberhausen Manifesto” of 1962, in which young filmmakers renounced commercial and conservative cinema of the post-war period in the Federal Republic of Germany (“Old cinema is dead. We believe in the new.”), these auteurs created films using very limited economic means, learning to extract both the greatest possible authenticity and the greatest possible aesthetic effect from their sets (which couldn’t cost anything) and actors (often amateurs or young inexperienced actors). This resulted in a unique mixture of very direct visual naturalism and poetic stylisation in the dialogues and in the acting; a strangeness in the familiar, an irreconcilability between the characters and their environment. In this, method and message corresponded to each other: This cinema was about people who are not really at home where they live, about the fact that as a young person you can’t quite decide whether you are liberating yourself or whether you are simply being left alone.

Georg Seeßlen

Wednesday, 18.01.2023

5 pm
Land of Silence and Darkness
1971, Eastmancolor, 85 min

Herzog’s sensitive documentary film approaches the lives of deafblind people, whose perceptive abilities require a unique relationship to their environment. It reveals a basic human need to perceive the outside world and to see oneself as part of it.

6:30 pm
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
1972, Eastmancolor, 93 min

Herzog depicts colossal failure in this delusional legend of conquest about a Spanish expedition that fights its way through the jungle of Peru in 1560. In search of the legendary golden city of El Dorado, doom draws ever closer the further the troop advances.

Thursday, 19.01.2023

3 pm
Fitzcarraldo
1982, Eastmancolor, 157 min

Fitzcarraldo is a fantasist who seeks to realise his bold dream of an opera in the jungle. Herzog’s epic film became famous above all for the ship being pushed over a mountain, opera arias echoing through the jungle and numerous legends surrounding the film’s production.

6 pm
Lessons of Darkness
1992, colour, 52 min

Shortly before the end of the Second Gulf War, Iraqi troops set fire to oil fields as they retreated from Kuwait. Herzog and his cinematographer sought to capture the incomprehensible, the apocalypse, with cinematic means and to show what was left behind.

7 pm
Nosferatu – Phantom of the Night
1978, Eastmancolor, 103 min

Based on Bram Stoker’s horror novel DRACULA (1897) and its famous silent film version NOSFERATU (F.W. Murnau, 1921), Herzog retells the frequently adapted vampire story by linking the imagery of the German classic and his own visual cosmos.

For age group 18 years and above.