Between his first film, Herakles (1962) and his last, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, (2010), Werner Herzog has made 53 films. Herzog’s filmmaking has seen him pursue stories across the globe, in such diverse countries as the Central African Republic, Germany, Guadeloupe, Pakistan, the United States among others.
Making no distinction between documentary and fiction, the realities portrayed in Herzog’s documentaries are partly manipulated, and his feature films often imitate the documentary form and style, or tell fictionalized stories about real people. He uses the term Illumination to describe the condition of ecstasy that comes from reaching the heart of truth; a truth that requires a ertain level of fabrication. The three films of the retrospective have been selected to cover a broad time span that includes most of Herzog’s film producing years and his efforts to transcend the boundaries of human capacity, of creation and destruction, as well as investigations into language.
(Retrospective courtesy of the Goethe-Institut, Johannesburg) |
