Legendary director, actor, author, and provocateur Werner Herzog has incalculably influenced contemporary cinema for decades. This essay collection by professional philosophers and film theorists from around the globe offers a diversity of perspectives on how the thinking behind the camera is revealed in the action Herzog captures in front of it.

Legendary director, actor, author, and provocateur Werner Herzog has incalculably influenced contemporary cinema for decades. Until now there has been no sustained effort to gather and present a variety of diverse philosophical approaches to his films and to the thinking behind their creation. The Philosophy of Werner Herzog, edited by M. Blake Wilson and Christopher Turner, collects fourteen essays by professional philosophers and film theorists from around the globe, who explore the famed German auteur’s notions of “ecstatic truth” as opposed to “accountants’ truth,” his conception of nature and its penchant for “overwhelming and collective murder,” his controversial film production techniques, his debts to his philosophical and aesthetic forebears, and finally, his pointed objections to his would-be critics––including, among others, the contributors to this book themselves. By probing how Herzog’s thinking behind the camera is revealed in the action he captures in front of it, The Philosophy of Werner Herzog shines new light upon the images and dialog we see and hear on the screen by enriching our appreciation of a prolific––yet enigmatic––film artist.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1. I Am What My Films Are: Listening to Herzog’s Ecstatic, Essayistic Pronouncements

David LaRocca

Chapter 2. Herzog’s Sublime and Ecstatic Truth: From Burke’s Physiological Aesthesis to the Dionysian Unveiling

Patricia Castello Branco

Chapter 3. The Conquest of Uselessness as a Practice of Film and Thought

Daniele Dottorini

Chapter 4. Filmmaking and Philosophizing Against the Grain of Theory: Herzog and Wittgenstein

Mihai Ométiță

Chapter 5. Nature and Meaning in Grizzly Man

Marc Furstenau

Chapter 6. Reflections from the Abyss: Herzog’s Philosophy of Death

M. Blake Wilson

Chapter 7. Fake News and Ecstatic Truths: Alternative Facts in Lessons of Darkness

Kyle Novak

Chapter 8. The Great Ecstasy of Werner Herzog: Truth, Heidegger, Apocalypse

Ian Alexander Moore

Chapter 9. The Film Artist as Discoverer of the Marvels of Everyday Life: Toward a Kracauerian

Reading of Werner Herzog

Christopher Turner

Chapter 10. Werner Herzog and Documentary as a Revelatory Practice

Antony Fredriksson

Chapter 11. On Experience and Illumination: Werner Herzog’s Dialectical Relationship with Society

Stefanie Baumann

Chapter 12. Herzog’s Philosophy of Masculinism

Will Lehman

Chapter 13. Herzog’s Post-Tragic Aesthetic: A Kierkegaardian Perspective

Anthony Eagan and Simon Thornton

Chapter 14. Werner Herzog on Circles, Chickens and Impotency

Tyler Tritten

About the Contributors