Hero Worship
Iconoclastic filmmaker Werner Herzog is every bit as fearless as his madcap subjects By Andre Mayer
Image credit: Lena Herzog/Courtesy Lions Gate Film
If there’s one enduring moral in the films of Werner Herzog, it’s that outsized ambition can drive men to madness. In a career spanning four decades, the German director has shown a fascination for subjects who undertake perilous journeys in pursuit of quixotic goals. Herzog’s fictional desperados have included a Brazilian slave trader (Cobra Verde), a brazen impresario who wants to build an opera house in the wilds of Peru (Fitzcarraldo) and the poster boy for misbegotten desire, Count Dracula (Nosferatu the Vampyre).
But the most tragic of all Herzog’s heroes is a real person: Timothy Treadwell, the subject of the 2005 documentary Grizzly Man. Treadwell was a naturalist who, starting in 1990, spent his summers communing with bears in Alaska’s remote Katmai National Park. Largely comprising Treadwell’s own video footage, Grizzly Man shows how the young American sentimentalized the predators, viewing himself as their protector. In 2003, naïveté and nature collided when Treadwell and his girlfriend were mauled to death.
Although Herzog exercises better judgment, the filmmaker is just as dauntless as his subjects. Perhaps his gutsiest feat was making five films with another fanatic: the notoriously deranged late actor Klaus Kinski. Herzog chronicled their cruel rapport in the 1999 documentary My Best Fiend, which revealed that the director had to threaten his star with a loaded rifle to make him finish 1972’s Aguirre, The Wrath of God. While his movies are often parables about thwarted aspirations, they are also infused with compassion—as though Herzog sees, in his subjects, a reflection of his own zealous nature.
Hot Docs screens six of Herzog’s documentaries, April 28 to May 7, then awards the director, May 5. Screenings $10. Various venues, 416-203-2155, www.hotdocs.ca. Cinematheque Ontario shows five films from Herzog’s fictional oeuvre (April 29 to May 4, $11.50), then hosts an interview with him, May 6. $15.50. Isabel Bader Theatre, 93 Charles St. W., 416-968-3456, www.bell.ca/cinematheque.
TEST Originally published May 2006
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Hero Worship
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