A Companion to Werner Herzog ed. by Brad Prager (review)

If there are Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, there are many more ways of looking at Werner Herzog. At least 26 of them are here, in as many chapters arranged under the headings “Critical Approaches and Contexts,” “Herzog and the Inter-arts,” “Herzog’s German Encounters,” “Herzog’s Far-Flung Cinema: Africa, Australia, the Americas, and Beyond,” and “Toward the Limits of Experience: Philosophical Approaches.” Most of the chapters have a German cultural studies emphasis and are by North American or British authors, several of whom have significant publications on Herzog of their own. Like Herzog’s work, the book is captivating, vast, daunting, and maddening. It’s not an easy read—and likely very few will read straight through from front to back.

Given the high hardcover price, most readers will likely use the e-book that Wiley distributes (already in libraries) to search for topics and films that concern them at the moment. In addition to critical insights on the “canonic” Herzog, they will find it rewarding to venture into the less familiar territory the book opens up. Although there is no general overview linking the chapters together, Prager does provide an introductory chapter situating Herzog in film and cultural history. This will be the most accessible part of the book; the rest presumes quite a degree of familiarity with Herzog, the debates his work has engendered, and the cultural and intellectual context.

The book could well provide the core of a graduate seminar, providing a basis for further investigations of most of the key issues. Many of the texts enter into productive dialog with each other, with prior work by Prager himself (The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth, London 2007 [ed. note: see review in Monatshefte 101.1, Spring 2009, 146–147] as well as Aesthetic Vision and German Romanticism: Writing Images, Rochester NY/London 2007 [ed. note: see review in Monatshefte 100.2, Summer 2008, 300–303]) and with Herzog’s own words. These come primarily from the “Minnesota Declaration” (1999) and Herzog on Herzog (Paul Cronin, ed., London 2002).

The publisher advertises that this is the first major Herzog survey in English in 20 years: in fact, a new Herzog has also emerged in that time. The book provides original scholarship on well-known early works while introducing other topics not previously in the spotlight. It provocatively raises the question—without presuming a single answer—whether Herzog is one filmmaker or several artists at once: Herzog as a new German Cinema director, as a documentarist, an opera director, a visual artist, and as an actor or a vocal presence in his films and the work of others. To a greater extent than other German filmmakers, Werner Herzog, I would argue, has repeatedly reinvented himself while being also remarkably consistent.

Uncovering the many layers of interaction with Nature, marginalized people, visual and cultural artifacts, sound and music, this book admirably demonstrates the artistic productivity of the consistent tension between Herzog’s “ecstatic truth” (his connection to the Romantics) and the many artistic forms it has taken. A chameleon who has successfully adapted to various media industries while decrying the soullessness of modern industrial culture, Herzog can participate in contemporary society and seem non-judgmental on the one hand while showing it to be irretrievably doomed on the other. But of course, what could be more Romantic than the idea that the best thing for the planet might be for humans to disappear?

Given the compelling reasons to connect Herzog to so many poetic and philosophical visions from German culture, the emphasis on these aspects in this Companion is understandable. But the focus on “ecstatic truth” both in the films and in the criticism makes me argue for the value of what Herzog dismisses as “accountants’ truth” as well: How does Herzog actually make his films work? How has he created the artistic persona that now amounts to...