The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (review)

It is a welcome sight to find Werner Herzog, one of the most intriguing figures of international cinema over the last forty years, featured within Wallflower Press's "Director's Cuts" series. More welcome still are the finesse and care that Brad Prager brings to the project. Given the director's prodigious output (some fifty films and counting), the author is to be praised for a meticulously researched and clearly written account of that entire body of work, much of which challenges standard conceptions of film genre and all of which challenges the viewer's conceptions of cinematic form. Rather than commenting on a chronological filmography (which does appear in the appendix), Prager is inspired to group the works diachronically by recurrent themes and motifs. The merits of this book go far beyond its usefulness as an introduction to this enigmatic oeuvre, for Herzog scholars will encounter much here that is new to them. The volume's greatest strength lies in Prager's ability to contextualize the films amid the debates they engender without losing sight of the vital impulse within them toward the elements listed in his subtitle: aesthetic ecstasy and truth.

Engaging with Herzog leads one on a path that is littered with snares, and this author manages to step in and out of them for the most part without getting caught. First, there is the problem of defusing Herzog by placing him in a tradition—German or romantic, sometimes both. The specters of romanticism hang a bit heavy over especially the first half of the book concerned with "madness" (on large and small scales), "mountains and fog," and "faith." It is, as Prager concedes, "inconceivable" that many of Herzog's images and scenarios are not tied to romantic ideas. At the same time, they are the product of a thinker "hoping to set himself apart from them." This is a world in which "the subject is understood to be at an irreconcilable distance from the natural world and one for whom the divine plan, if there is one, remains so deeply buried beneath shadows and fog as to be inaccessible and ultimately—as far as our experience is concerned—irrelevant" (85).

Irrelevant, too, in Herzog's oft- stated opinion would be the pursuit of direct political statement in his films, and posing that question is the second trap awaiting those wrestling with his problematic work. In Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth, the author carefully maneuvers around the ways questions regarding neocolonialism, racial and gender politics, and the exercise of power over one's filmic subjects have been used to incite and frame the discussions. Acknowledging that the films themselves seem to invite these questions, Prager simultaneously points out the legitimacy of much criticism of Herzog and its inability to come to grips fully with the aesthetic power of his works. As a book balanced between address to an informed but general audience and to scholars as well, this is not a study that can thoroughly investigate the less overt, and hence potentially deeper, political dimensions of Herzog's phenomenological approach to the aesthetic. Nonetheless, through careful consideration of the works and the director's glosses, Prager skillfully steers the reader to that as the arena in which the most satisfying answers might be sought.

And here we approach the final trap, namely allowing Herzog—notoriously garrulous about the uniqueness of his life, work, and apprehension of the aesthetic—to dominate how we can approach his films. While not entirely successful in extricating himself here from "Herzog, the tar- baby" (for example, Cronin's Herzog on Herzog appears by far the most frequently cited work), Prager remains about as independent as one can hope in the context of writing a single- director introduction to a still- living subject. He creates this distance through humor: not by cracking wise at the director's expense (easy enough when fixated on his monomania) but rather by finding the humor structured into his words and works...