Favourite Werner Herzog films

Simon: Stroszek (1977)

"Stroszek is a brilliantly messy film that follows three Germans escaping violence and humiliation in Berlin to chase the American Dream in the US. What begins as freedom in New York gradually dissolves into poverty and isolation on the prairies of Wisconsin. In the final sequence, surrealism and sorrow mingle with the emptiness of a roadside attraction, as Stroszek rides a chairlift up the mountain, leaving behind chained chickens dancing below."

Simon, Volunteer.

Sue: Grizzly Man (2005)

"It’s like a true crime documentary but with bears; one of my fave found footage films. Bizarre, beautiful, eerie and tragic."

Sue, Projectionist.

Ian: Stroszek (1977)

"Werner Herzog’s first narrative feature shot partly in America. Bruno S. (who Herzog considers the greatest actor he ever worked with) plays a mentally ill street performer who eventually leaves his native Germany for America for a better life with his elderly friend and the sex worker Eva. It’s one of the most heartbreaking but hilarious films about the American Dream gone sour. The film was made a gift to Bruno S. after Herzog cast Klaus Kinski over Bruno in his version of Woyzeck; the German section holds many parallels to Bruno’s real life. The film is notoriously known for being the final film Ian Curtis watched before committing suicide on the eve of what would’ve been Joy Division’s American tour. Coincidentally, David Lynch was shooting The Elephant Man in London and caught the same transmission of Stroszek on BBC 2 at 9pm on the 17th of May. It’s interesting to think about how one film could have such different reactions, with Ian seemingly using it as some kind of ritualistic step into his self-destruction and Lynch finding the film utterly life-affirming. Curtis and Lynch might both be gone now, but the chicken keeps on dancing.

On just a quick side note, I met Werner Herzog once. I was standing in the very long press queue for Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire at the London Film Festival, and I spotted Werner Herzog walking down the street. I quickly ran over and said hello and asked for a photo and in his distinctive Bavarian accent (he doesn’t consider himself German!) asked 'if I wanted a selfie?' and I said 'a normal photo would do' and the representative from Dogwoof gladly took a photo of us in Leicester Square."

Ian, Volunteer.

Martha: The Fire Within: Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft (2022)

"I love all the films I’ve seen by Werner Herzog, but one that will stay with me forever is the utterly mesmerising documentary The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft, which reflects on the legacy of the French couple Katia and Maurice Krafft. The Kraffts became obsessed with their volcanology, got insanely close to volcanoes and captured some wild footage of volcanic activity. While watching, I flickered between feelings of reverie and awe at the most captivating visuals I’ve ever seen, perfectly paired with dramatic choral music, as well as horror and dismay that the couple repeatedly risked their lives for this footage and to get so close to one of nature’s scariest beasts. They were perhaps kindred spirits with Werner Herzog who also goes to extreme lengths for his passion, maybe best demonstrated by his making of Fitzcarraldo, one of the most dangerous productions in film history, in which Herzog got his crew to manually haul a 320-ton ship up a steep hill. So, maybe their shared brilliant madness is what drew Herzog to the Kraffts, and I'm so glad it did because what he's created in this film is breathtaking."

Martha, Digital Marketing Coordinator.

Charlie: The White Diamond (2004)

"Werner Herzog's 2004 documentary The White Diamond tells of a subject that is not only typical of the director's filmography, but may actually provide more of an analogue for the filmmaker himself as an artist than any of his other works. 

Herzog has always sought after highly individual personalities in his films, whether they be the crazed and perverse characters of Aguirre, Woyzeck, or even My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?, or the tenderly curious anomalies of Kaspar Hauser, Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World. His quarry in this film, Dr. Graham Dorrington, falls into the latter category. Here is a man who, in the opening of the film, speaks confidently and succinctly about his life's work in aeronautics, and yet, in his eyes, even in this early introduction, we can see a fragility; a subtle, wavering neuroticism that only pervades and intensifies over the remainder of the runtime. In this way, he reminds us of Herzog himself, if only he had the introspective capacity to project self-doubt. 

Herzog treats his subject with his signature style and musings that are all his own. Yet, he is no game-changer. 

Herzog's often rough-and-ready methods have tended to place greater importance on the realisation of vision at any cost over a real concern with advancing the form. The access he has had over the years to incredible locations, like in his Cave of Forgotten Dreams, or the merciless productions of his rainforest-situated oeuvre, might lead some to think that his films are more groundbreaking than they actually are, when, from a formal point of view, Herzog has only ever really been a pioneer of his own imagination. In the tangible world of art, even his most experimental films, like Fata Morgana and The Wild Blue Yonder, employ techniques that have been largely explored to greater extremes by numerous other filmmakers before him. 

But in the end, that doesn't matter. Because likewise, Dr. Graham Dorrington's improvements on the design of the airship are only substantial and fit enough for his own very singular and narrow purpose - here, that of photographing the canopies of the Amazon. How likely is it that Dorrington's model will find use outside of this field? Not very - and, in the years since, it hasn't. In the film, nevertheless, it comes to perform its lonesomely neoclassical post beautifully. The same can be said for Herzog and his work. Do we as a culture possess any more 'adequate images' today than we did back in the '80s, when Herzog ate his shoe? Perhaps not. He may not have exerted as much explicit influence on subsequent filmmakers as some of his contemporaries, nor be much understood by the masses, but he, like Dorrington, seems most at home this way, allowed to hover quietly and untethered above a jungle of noise in blissful idiosyncrasy.

When you're watching a Herzog film, by turns intriguing, baffling, compassionate, indulgent and hilarious, as they often are, there's no denying: he's flying this balloon, and, if you fix your attitude, he might just let you ride along with him."

Charlie, Volunteer.

Fitzcarraldo is showing at HPPH on Sun 18 May at 14:00 and the 4K restoration of Burden of Dreams is showing from Sat 24 May.