Werner Herzog: radical dreamer

Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer

I have a passing familiarity with Werner, partly as an auteur in philosophy rather than technique but also in films. He exists as the guy who made the film about the jewel thief I liked, or more precisely, that film Grizzly Man is entrenched, and the one about cave paintings that outstayed its welcome, I have seen the vampire one. But like most people, he exists as much as a caricature than a real director, the icon of autobahn in our passive prejudices of nihilism and brutalist architecture.

Radical Dreamer, though, manages to take the conventional elements of talking heads and clips and elevate them into an interesting take on how he shows, not tells, throughout all his films.

Covering the films from his outset, many I have heard of but never seen, and the earlier works with their sense of vaudeville, such as Dwarves’ Not Growing Up.  We notice the dry humour of his life but also in a clipped sense as we progress with the upheavals that rely on patronage or critics rather than popular opinion. It’s quite a fascinating piece not just of him but of art and the respect for its attempt, even in the face of abject commercial failure. 

This is not a warts-and-all-all film by any means, though. The focus on his relationship with Klaus Kinski seems to elude to poor treatment of both of the other cast, and indeed, watching a monkey be squeezed into shitting itself with fear is not a comfortable moment. 

It also never addresses and fulfils by omission this notion that artists have some sort of macho cunt license in the pursuit of their art. Well, I have been making art. A.i art. Numerous variations of leggy women face fantastical monsters; some are pretty bizarre and fascinating, but that does not detract from what I’m doing, and neither does this.

The film does run quite briskly and has a certain verve to it, looking at what Herzog does as a patron now to pay it forward for those who put themselves out for him, and there is a certain elegiac quality that makes this a pleasant matinee feature. I suspect I would have gotten far more being a Herzog hardcore, but as a social text more about the industry changes than one man, it is an exciting piece.

So is it a watch? It is warm and loving of the lead in its way, but it’s ultimately not the intense window to the soul or the industry one might want. It’s worth watching but on a wet Sunday. Sky arts. And a particular coffee and contemplation of an afternoon.

And avoid bears