Happy Birthday Werner Herzog!
I'm a day late, but all the same, every year, on September 5th, we should all take a moment and contemplate the life and passions of the German filmmaker Werner Herzog.
It is impossible to over-estimate how great an artist this man is, and how fortunate we are to have his example to look up to.
Here is a man who has chosen to live and work in a field absolutely beset by compromise and commercialism, and yet has managed to produce an body of bold artistic visions and never once compromise, or make a decision for money.
From such great films as Aguirre: the Wrath of God to documentaries like Grizzly Man, his subjects are the marginalized, the outsiders, those who live at the edges of both civility and reason. He makes films about people who go to extreme (sometimes even foolhardy) lengths to achieve their goals. And he, himself, often goes to equally extreme lengths to chronicle them. More than one person has commented that he is more obsessed than the obsessed people he films.
As a prime example: there was once a man named Brian Fitzgerald who, in order to make use of a plantation of rubber trees, disassembled a 30-tonne boat and moved it, piece by piece, over a large hill so he could reassemble it and put it in the river on the other side.
Herzog made a film about this man called Fitzcarraldo. And, in the film, Herzog moved a 300-tonne boat over a large hill all in one piece. In the middle of the Amazon rain forest, 1100 km from civilization, while being attacked by natives. In order to chronicle the actions of a crazed, obsessed man, Herzog performed an act several orders of magnitude more crazed and more obsessed.
Another: he once walked from Munich to Paris (about 850 km or 500 miles) to be at the deathbed of a friend because he was convinced that she couldn't die until he got there. And indeed, she lived for another 8 years.
He is not a creature of theory, or marketing. He spares no thought for target audience or box office receipts. He is a creature of visions, of bold, powerful visuals crafted and driven by the mysterious pulses of his own passionate soul. In an age when everything we consume is created and vetted by committee and cynically manufactured for maximum impact, Herzog stands like a titan among the ruins: an artefact of a mythic past, a force unto himself, a veritable Avatar of the artistic spirit.
As the film-critic (and his biggest fan) Roger Ebert once said: "You and your work are unique and invaluable, and you ennoble the cinema when so many debase it.”
So Happy Birthday, Werner Herzog. You have made the world a brighter and more colourful place for those who treasure both great art and great artists. For you who live with urgency and integrity, you who stand when others bow and you who howl when others whisper, for you, we will always be grateful.
This message was last edited by the user at 16:06, Wed 06 Sept 2017.