‘Herzog’: Survey of Idiosyncratic Filmmaker

“Apocalyptic Embrace: The Films of Werner Herzog,” which runs Thursday through Sept. 11 at the Directors Guild and continues Tuesdays and Thursdays Sept. 12 through Sept. 28 at the Goethe Institute, offers a comprehensive retrospective of the most idiosyncratic of the New German Cinema pioneers. Sponsoring the event is the German Film Export-Union.

Opening the series Thursday at 7 p.m. is the premiere of “Bells From the Deep: Faith and Superstition in Russia” (1994), and its first image, that of a man lying prone on a frozen lake trying to peer through the ice, is quintessential Herzog, whose abiding theme is the quest for the extremes of human experience. A visionary who moves back and forth between narrative films and documentaries, Herzog takes an epic view of the Earth, in which he and his heroes seem forever in search of some earthly paradise--a characteristically Germanic endeavor--only to discover, more often than not, a sick planet.

That man in “Bells From the Deep” is, in fact, hoping for a vision of the sacred sunken city of Kitzeh, which according to Siberian folklore was saved from a Tartar invasion by an act of God, who submerged it in an instant, then covered it with a lake. With an enduring ability to create sublimely beautiful images from devastated landscapes as well as idyllic vistas, Herzog has explored the world of the deaf and blind, captured the thrill of ski jumping, protested the desecration of Kuwait, covered a volcano that failed to erupt and reported on a tribal male beauty contest in Africa.

Although Herzog has been concentrating on documentaries in recent years, he is best known for a series of bold, often outrageous and darkly humorous collaborations with the late Klaus Kinski, an actor with such passionate intensity that he became the filmmaker’s perfect alter ego. Their first film, the 1972 “Aguirre, Wrath of God” (Saturday at 7 p.m.) cast Kinski as a 16th-Century Spanish conquistador in a mad, vain search for gold in the Peruvian jungle. They were then drawn to Georg Buchner’s “Woyzeck” (Sept. 21 at 7 p.m.), which became a 1978 film of the utmost simplicity and starkest imagery as Kinski plays a desperate, haunted army private, a virtual slave cursed with the capacity to think.

Herzog and Kinski then signed on with 20th Century Fox for his astonishingly beautiful and daring 1979 “Nosferatu, the Vampyre,” an homage to Murnau’s 1922 “Nosferatu,” in which Kinski is a hideous, pathetic Count Dracula craving for love. With the sprawling 1981 “Fitzcarraldo” (Sept. 28 at the Goethe Institute), which nakedly aspires to greatness, they returned to Peru to tell about a turn-of-the-century Irish adventurer determined to haul a 320-ton boat over an isthmus to tap a fortune in rubber to finance an opera house in Iquitos.

Even more compelling than this fascinating film is Les Blank’s 1982 “Burden of Dreams” (Sept. 11 at 7 p.m.) about the making of “Fitzcarraldo,” in which Herzog, although not exactly unaware of the camera being pointed at him, seems in danger of becoming even more obsessive than Fitzcarraldo himself. The Herzog-Kinski collaboration came to a sad end with the never-released African adventure “Cobra Verde,” significantly absent from the retrospective.

A key Herzog film, the 1975 “The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser” (Sunday at 5:15 p.m.), Herzog’s retelling of the young man, an apparent “wild child,” who appeared on the streets of Nuremberg in 1828, is charged by the pathos of Bruno S., a former mental patient who appeared in several Herzog pictures.

One of Herzog’s least-known but finest films is the 1976 “Heart of Glass” (Sept. 26 at 7 p.m.), an allegory of ever-widening implications centering on a psychic herdsman (Josef Bierbichler) whose village has been struck with disaster when the foreman of the local glassworks, the town’s sole industry, has died, taking with him the secret of making its prized ruby glass.

Herzog will make several appearances at the Directors Guild and will read from his works in both English and German at the Goethe Institute Sept. 12 at 7 p.m.

American Cinematheque: (213) 466-FILM; Goethe Institute: (213) 525-3399.