Every Man for Himself and God Against All

May 1, 2023

Born in 1942 Munich and raised in Bavaria, internationally celebrated director Herzog has made more than 60 feature and documentary films, directed numerous operas, appeared as an actor, and exhibited an art installation at the 2012 Whitney Biennale. He became interested in film at age 15 and made his first film at age 19 (only two years after making his first phone call), and the rest is history. This life-and-work chronicle will likely be worthy of its own film. Prepub Alert.

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August 1, 2023
Herzog in all his extravagant, perspicacious glory. Now 80, the acclaimed director, documentarian, and author, a "product of my mistakes and misjudgments," recalls his "archaic," poverty-stricken early years in the Bavarian Alps on the edge of a war before digressing into the making of The Wild Blue Yonder, "a completely fantastical science fiction film." Throughout, Herzog is witty and captivating as he recollects all kinds of odd, curious, and outlandish events, people, and injuries--maybe, he speculates, some memories aren't real. Discussing ski jumping as a boy, he shifts to a film he made about it. When the family moved to Munich, the author met the maniacal Klaus Kinski, who would appear in his films. "I knew what I was letting myself in for," he writes. Herzog's brief time at university was a "sham"; he was already making films. "Even physically, I was hardly ever there; there were entire semesters when I showed up once, maybe twice," he writes. The author became a Catholic as a teenager, and while he later left the faith, he admits to a "distant echo of divinity" in some films. "There are various recurring tropes in my films," he notes, "that are almost always derived from personal experience." Past and present mix as Herzog rambles widely from job to job, country to country, memory to memory. He chronicles how he learned from others' bad films, scrambled to raise money for projects, and acted in other people's films, and he touches on the genesis of his own. The atmosphere in Aguirre, the Wrath of God was "dire," and Herzog swapped his "good shoes for a bathtub full of fish" to feed his starving crew. During the filming of Fitzcarraldo, almost everything went wrong. "I don't see the things that fascinate me as esoteric," he writes near the conclusion of the book, which ends midsentence. Fans and neophytes alike will relish the opportunity to delve deeply into Herzog's fascinating mind.

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October 9, 2023
The idiosyncrasies of filmmaker Herzog (The Twilight World) are on full display in his eccentric if unreflective memoir. Herzog was born in Munich in 1942 and soon moved with his mother and brother to a farm in the remote town of Sachrang to escape Allied bombings. As a young teen, he returned to Munich and, convinced after a spiritual experience while working on a fishing boat that he wouldn’t live past 18 (he writes of the episode that he was “bedded in a cosmos without compare, above, below, all around a speechless silence”), began making films because he assumed “they would be all that was left of me” after his premature demise. He explains that he learned almost “all there is to know” about moviemaking from “the thirty or forty pages on radio, film, and TV in an encyclopedia” and expounds on the making of his most famous films, revealing that Jack Nicholson turned down the lead in Fitzcarraldo because he “only took parts that left him free to watch Los Angeles Lakers’ games.” The prose is often beautiful and there’s no shortage of prime Herzog-isms (“I always wanted to direct a Hamlet and have all the parts played by ex-champion livestock auctioneers”), but the director offers disappointingly little in the way of emotional introspection. Still, Herzog’s fans will want to check this out.

October 15, 2023
Like his films (Fitzcarraldo, say, or Aguirre, the Wrath of God), Herzog's memoir is a decidedly nontraditional piece of storytelling. It's a collection of memories, each told as a self-contained story, with no connecting material to thread them together. Here's Herzog describing how he grew up in extreme poverty. Here he is telling us how a childhood desire to fly led him, years later, to make his 1974 documentary about a famous ski jumper. Here's how he got cast in the Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian. The book is written in a literary voice that is outspoken and conversational, and it is peppered with eccentric details such as "My knowledge of milking came in handy many years later with the astronauts who made up the crew of one of the Space Shuttles." (The translation by Hofmann, who has also translated books by Wim Wenders and Franz Kafka, is delightful.) A fascinating portrait of an inventive and idiosyncratic filmmaker.

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