Recognized as a filmmaker for his very famous films such as “Aguirre, the Wrath of God”, “Fitzcarraldo” and “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser”, Werner Herzog also devoted his life to writing. With the publication of his memoirs, he looks back on his life, the tragedy, the creation, those who inspired him and the mark he thinks he will leave in the history of cinema.
“My generation grew up in the ruins of war”
The life of Werner Herzog is entangled in writing and cinema. In his eyes, his writings will survive much longer than his films. Besides, “It’s not really a memoir that I’m publishing, it’s not a chronological continuation of my life but pure prose, he corrects. The strength of the book lies in the pleasure of telling stories.”. Born in 1942 in Munich, Werner Herzog spent the first years of his life in an unusual family historical climate: “my generation grew up in ruins, 720 towns were razed in Germany. You have to be able to imagine it. We were bombed, my mother, my older brother and me, when I was only two weeks old My mother took refuge in the mountains. From there, I had a wonderful childhood despite the hunger, destitution and weapons scattered around the areas I frequented.. The filmmaker says he has no particular memories of the denazification in the post-war period. “I understood much later thanks to Lotte Eisner [historienne et critique du cinéma ayant fui le nazisme NDLR] what Nazism was. On this point, she taught me much more than my parents”he remembers. From the poet Friedrich Hölderlin recovered by the Nazis Werner Herzog quoted in his memoirs, he remembers from him that he went “at the limit of language, where it is nothing more than a fragment, where it leads to madness”. This poet was undeniably a great source of inspiration for the filmmaker.
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“Fitzcarraldo” and the filming of improbable scenes
Werner Herzog then returns to the filming of “Fitzcarraldo” and the famous scene of the passage of a boat over the peaks of a mountain. It weighed 320 tonnes and the ship was physically passed over a mountain pass, which says a lot about the completely mind-blowing, even crazy dimension of the shooting and the film. “It’s not madnesshe replies. I am an extremely professional person. But indeed, the enterprise ended in a sort of hallucination or brutal fever in the middle of the jungle. The story was so intense, there was this urgency within me. So we hoisted this boat up the mountain, what’s more, with technology worthy of the Stone Age.”he remembers. Klaus Kinski, the film’s lead actor, is portrayed by Herzog like a being on the verge of madness: “he was destructive. He was a rabid beast that had to be tamed to be able to transcribe the madness into a film. It was my job.” This actor, on the other hand, is not the extension of Werner Herzog : “I’m a storyteller, and stories become urgent at some point. I get so much pleasure out of telling a story that it resulted in a film like ‘Fitzcarraldo'”.
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