Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog has produced some of the most powerful haunting and memorable images ever captured on film. Both his fiction films and his documentaries address fundamental issues about nature selfhood and history in ways that engage with but also criticize and qualify the best philosophical thinking about these topics. In focusing on figures from Aguirre Kasper Hauser and Stroszek to Timothy Treadwell Graham Dorrington Dieter Dengler and Walter Steiner among many others Herzog investigates the nature of human life in time and the possibilities of meaning that might be available within it. His films demonstrate the importance of the image in coming to terms with the plights of contemporary industrial and commercial culture. Eldridge unpacks and develops Herzog''s achievement by bringing his work into engagement with the thinking of Freud Merleau-Ponty Nietzsche Hegel Cavell and Benjamin but more importantly also by attending closely to the logic and development of the films themselves and to Herzog''s own extensive writings about filmmaking.