Werner Herzog (1) (1942–)

I haven't seen a lot of his films, but "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" completely captivated me. I knew of his stormy, bizarre relationship with Kinski, and "Nosferatu" was eerily irresistible. Seeing him interviewed here and there, I found his dry, solemn manner unexpectedly endearing, like an eccentric but beloved uncle, telling stories that were weird and funny and bewildering all at once. This memoir is like that.

Rambling, discursive, he starts out telling one story of something, which show more reminds him of some other incident, which he proceeds to tell, and eventually meanders back to finish the story he started with. It takes some getting used to. He likes and admires a lot of people, and they seem to like him, do him favors, help him out, work with him... and working on a Herzog film can clearly be an exercise in fortitude, patience, and extreme tolerance for chaos and danger. Absolutely everything fascinates him, and triggers a torrent of imagination and questions and exploration, and he wants to make films of all of it. Yet he describes it all in a low-key, quiet, confident voice, as though all these wild and strange ideas and incidents and people and situations are just quite interesting - no judgement, no shock, no recoil, but a sort of calm rumination. And then he will make a pronouncement that he thinks the entire twentieth century was a mistake. Or confesses with enormous admiration that it took him two weeks to read the first paragraph of Thomas Bernhard's novella Walking because the opening lines were so stupendous. The opening line reads: "There is a constant tug-of-war going on between all the possibilities of human thought and all the possibilities of a human mind’s sensitivity, and between all the possibilities of human character." And the entire novella consists of three paragraphs. No wonder it took him that long.

I'm still not sure I want to tackle "Fitzcarraldo" or "Aguirre, Wrath of God," or "Grizzly Man." I did watch the episode of the Simpsons ("The Scorpion's Tale") with Herzog portraying a German pharma executive. That alone would make me fond of him. And his memoir is funny, oddly charming, and quirkily engaging. show less

Herzog’s previous books haven’t exactly played nice with the truth. In Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir he’s downright contemptuous to the very idea of a universal truth and plainly states his memoirs will be full of lies, to further a better telling of the stories. Likewise in The Twilight World he makes it clear the narrative is as much fiction as fact. His movies return from time to time in this book as well, as points and counterpoints to the flights of fancy by show more which he jumps from one topic to another; the Emperor Nero, Potemkin Villages, Mike Tyson’s knowledge of Pepin, AI and generative video.

It's full of Herzog-isms: “It’s like a house that’s lit up in all its corners, it becomes uninhabitable”, on the topic of “overanalyzing” alien abductions. And on the topic of quotes he describes inventing an attribution to Pascal for "The collapse of the stellar universe will occur like creation in grandiose splendor” from Lessons of Darkness - a quote of his own invention.

On the one hand he's "opposed the foolish belief that equates truth with facts” but on the other, the holocaust has evidence of “such density, such overwhelming force, that it must be accounted true, even if facts aren’t everything.”. It's difficult to discern a coherent through line. Herzog's apologetics for his own fibbing is that the audience somehow should know the difference when the work is fiction, yet he uses the example of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds causing panic in the closing - a factoid that itself might be heavily overblown, adding an extra dimension of confusion in Herzog confusing fact and fiction about a fictive work taken as fact (I've not been this confused since writing a review for Garth Marenghis fictional fiction).

The most illustrative to his point about malleable truth comes from his project covering rentable family members in Japan. From the phenomenon itself being both enacted in, and the subject of his own film, to the choice of the company to provide an actor pretending to be a client to be interviewed, with the motivation that a real client could never be truthful about their motivations. Did we learn more from the lie than we would of the truth? How can we square that with Herzog issuing warnings about fake news and generative AI? show less

What is Herzog without his trademark staccato delivery? Get the audiobook.

The Twilight World is the story of Hiroo Onoda's ongoing guerilla war long after WWII ends, but it's not a true story and Herzog tells you that up front. If you're interested in the facts you shouldn't read this. This is Herzog's dream of the meaning of Onoda's alternate reality opposed to the world that has moved on from the war he's still fighting. Herzog makes the Chuangzi line about the man waking from a dream who show more doesn't know if he dreamt he was a butterfly or is the butterfly dreaming he is a man central to the narrative, but never mentions it directly. We follow Onoda and his compatriots POV as their version of reality is repeatedly tested, and Herzog lets him be a mouthpiece for the changing tides of history, the continual wars in Asia, the technological sweep of jet planes to satellites, attempted to be understood by a man frozen in time. We never dig deep into the ethical questions of the people who died, but get a heroic account where Onoda is simply respected if not revered after his fight ends, a symbol of the unwavering Japanese fighting spirit mythmaking that saturated their culture and almost prevented the surrender. The book ends in an almost Lynchian fever dream of images, which along with the idiosyncratic way Herzog looks at the world through this story reminds you that this isn't "based on a true story", but something that was revealed to him in a dream. show less

Logged as print due to a lack of audiobook version on Goodreads.

I don't know why they even made a print version when Herzog's voice adds so much to the telling. Herzog makes it explicit in this book he doesn't care for truth as in fact, but in truth as in poetry, and that in turn makes it difficult to judge just how much of his own memories are truth as in fact. If not for the well documented nature of his many adventures and bizarre obsessions it would be easy to see these as the rantings show more of some fabulist sat at a bench outside the local pub.

Memories from many of the films are there, though the relationship with him and Kinski is only given an abbreviated version. In many cases, with the how already known, he elaborates more on the why or gives some snapshot incident (a man bitten by a snake who decides to cut his foot off with a chainsaw for instance) in connection to them. A lot of people also figure in the book, but most of the known names are given short shrift, in comparison to people that reach Herzog's obsessions (like Hans Siegel). His lovers are similarly kept at arms length, while we get a deep dive into the identical mirror twins he wanted to make a movie about. Herzog admits to being a bit of a recluse with few friends and this personal distance to the people in his life might be taken as a courtesy, though it's interesting that when he locks in on some interesting subject matter, all such barriers fade away.

Sometimes people are loath to write their memoirs as it tends to signal their productive days are over, but you never get a sense of Herzog's 81 years of age. He starts listing projects he's left undone or still wants to do with an urgency and cacophonic variety as if he were just getting started in his career and felt an opportunity to solicit some interest in future projects.

In all, a good memoir not so much in the juicy stories it contains, but as a self-portrait of the scattershot mind and creative process of Herzog himself. With the material in the book containing some biographical material, some research notes, tips for filmmakers, reflections on the creative process, it's only really kept together by his own narrative voice. show less