Werner Herzog

Rescue Dawn

A us fighter pilots epic struggle of survival after being shot down on a mission over laos during the vietnam war. Studio: Tcfhe/mgm Release Date: 06/10/2008 Starring: Christian Bale Run time: 126 minutes Rating: Pg13 Director: Werner Herzog

In the tradition of The Great Escape and The Deer Hunter, Rescue Dawn is Werner Herzog's take on the pulse-pounding POW genre. Unlike most such efforts, however, his isn't just based on a true story, it's a remake of his 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly. German-born Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale, who first made his mark in Steven Spielberg's prison camp drama Empire of the Sun) has longed to pilot a plane since he was a boy. When he joins the Navy during the Vietnam War, he gets his wish. Then he's shot down over Laos. Though he survives, Dengler is captured by the Pathet Lao. Through his internment, he meets Duane Martin (Steve Zahn in his finest performance), with whom he becomes fast friends. While Dengler is arrogant and resourceful, Martin is patient and humble. With Dengler's assistance, the prisoners escape, but the untamed wilderness turns out to be just as dangerous (cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger ably captures its cruel beauty). Those who've seen Little Dieter know how this tale ends. Suffice to say, Herzog's reenactment makes for rousing entertainment. If the film has a flaw, it's that the rah-rah finale plays like something from out of a mainstream sports movie. That quibble aside, the actors, including Jeremy Davies as a delusional campmate and Toby Huss as a fellow flyer, are aces. And Herzog, who's been concentrating on nonfiction, like Grizzly Man, proves he can direct a Hollywood-style action epic with the best of 'em. --Kathleen C. Fennessy

Beyond Rescue Dawn

Little Dieter Needs to Fly

Christian Bale Films

More from MGM

Stills from Rescue Dawn

Grizzly Man

A docudrama that centers on amateur grizzly bear expert timothy treadwell. Periodically journeying to alaska to study and live with bears this films explores his compassionate life and the solace he found among these endangered animals as well as the ironic ultimate ending of his life. Studio: Lions Gate Home Ent. Release Date: 09/05/2006 Run time: 103 minutes Rating: R

Grizzly Man could easily have been sensational and exploitative, but in the hands of Werner Herzog, it becomes something extraordinary. Herzog was granted exclusive access to over 100 hours of video shot by amateur naturalist, wildlife advocate and troubled loner Timothy Treadwell, who spent 13 summers in Alaska's Katmai National Park, where he grew to know and love the grizzly bears that lived there. He was also killed by one of them, in October 2003, along with his girlfriend Amie Huguenard, and that seemingly inevitable fate informs every minute of Herzog's riveting combination of Treadwell's video with his own expert filmmaking and unique vision of nature and man. Whereas Treadwell was a naïve nature-lover and social outcast whose sanity was slowly slipping away, Herzog is a pragmatic mythologist who views nature primarily in terms of "chaos, hostility, and murder," and the disparity of their vision results in a magnetic attraction that makes the sum of Grizzly Man greater than its parts. We come to admire the dreamer, the idealist, the failed actor and recovered alcoholic man-child that was Treadwell, and we equally admire the seeker of truth and wisdom that is Herzog. They belong together, in some world beyond our world, where visionaries join forces to create life after death. --Jeff Shannon

Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski: A Film Legacy

The six-film Herzog/Kinski boxed set is a sleek compilation of a visionary cinematic collaboration. The history of cinema is dotted with great directors who have found an actor whose face, voice, and style capture that director's point of view: Josef Von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich; John Ford and John Wayne; Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro. In 1972, the German director Werner Herzog cast Polish actor Klaus Kinski in Aguirre, the Wrath of God--the result was perhaps the definitive film for both. Kinski had previously made almost 100 films, but his malevolent role--as a Spanish conquistador obsessed with finding gold--shot him into international stardom. Though Herzog and the volatile Kinski were at each other's throats through much of the filming, seven years later the director cast Kinski as the tortured vampire of Nosferatu, Phantom of the Night (a color remake of the silent horror classic) and the title character of Woyzeck, based on the classic expressionistic German play about a jealous, unstable soldier who murders his lover. Both films continued the Herzog-Kinski trademark of intense unflinching emotion and the palpable presence of the raw physical world.

In 1982, Fitzcarraldo carried this ethos to new heights as Kinski portrayed a man who, in order to bring grand opera to the depths of Peru, has a huge steamship hauled over a mountainside using ropes, pulleys, and human endurance. The mad ambition of the film matched that of its hero as Herzog repeatedly placed crew and actors at risk of their lives. Nonetheless, the love-hate relationship between the director and his star carried them into one last film, the uneven but still remarkable Cobra Verde, about a Brazilian bandit sent to Africa to reopen the slave trade. After Kinski's death in 1991, Herzog made a documentary, My Best Fiend, about their decades of collaboration; the result rivals their previous work as a testament to human extremity. --Bret Fetzer

Aguirre, the Wrath of God

Kinski stars as the mad \""Aguirre\"" who sets out with his daughter and a band of Pizarro's conquistadores down the Amazon in search of El Dorado.
No Track Information Available
Media Type: DVD
Artist: KINSKI/GUERRA/NEGRO/ROJO/RIVER
Title: AGUIRRE-WRATH OF GOD
Street Release Date: 10/24/2000
Domestic
Genre: ACTION / ADVENTURE

Quite simply a great movie, one whose implacable portrait of ruthless greed and insane ambition becomes more pertinent every year. The astonishing Klaus Kinski plays Don Lope de Aguirre, a brutal conquistador who leads his soldiers into the Amazon jungle in an obsessive quest for gold. The story is of the expedition's relentless degeneration into brutality and despair, but the movie is much more than its plot. Director Werner Herzog strove, whenever possible, to replicate the historical circumstances of the conquistadors, and the sheer human effort of traveling through the dense mountains and valleys of Brazil in armor creates a palpable sense of struggle and derangement. This sense of reality, combined with Kinski's intensely furious performance, makes Aguirre, the Wrath of God a riveting film. Its unique emotional power is matched only by other Herzog-Kinski collaborations like Fitzcarraldo and Woyzek. --Bret Fetzer

Nosferatu: The Vampyre/Phantom Der Nacht

Werner Herzog's remake of F.W. Murnau's original vampire classic is at once a generous tribute to the great German director and a distinctly unique vision by one of cinema's most idiosyncratic filmmakers. Though Murnau's Nosferatu was actually an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, Herzog based his film largely on Murnau's conceptions--at times directly quoting Murnau's images--but manages to slip in a few references to Tod Browning's famous version (at one point the vampire comments on the howling wolves: "Listen, the children of the night make their music."). Longtime Herzog star Klaus Kinski is both hideous and melancholy as Nosferatu (renamed Count Dracula in the English language version). As in Murnau's film, he's a veritable gargoyle with his bald pate and sunken eyes, and his talon-like fingernails and two snaggly fangs give him a distinctly feral quality. But Kinski's haunting eyes also communicate a gloomy loneliness--the curse of his undead immortality--and his yearning for Lucy (Isabelle Adjani) becomes a melancholy desire for love. Bruno Ganz's sincere but foolish Jonathan is doomed to the vampire's will and his wife, Lucy, a holy innocent whose deathly pallor and nocturnal visions link her with the ghoulish Nosferatu, becomes the only hope against the monster's plague-like curse. Herzog's dreamy, delicate images and languid pacing create a stunningly beautiful film of otherworldly mood, a faithful reinterpretation that by the conclusion has been shaped into a quintessentially Herzog vision. --Sean Axmaker

Fitzcarraldo

An Irishman, Fitzgerald (Fitzcarraldo to the Indians), struggles to bring his dream, an opera house in the Amazon jungle, to reality.
Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: PG
Release Date: 2-NOV-1999
Media Type: DVD

Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald (Klaus Kinski), known as Fitzcarraldo to the native Peruvians, is an avid opera lover and rubber baron who dreams of building an opera house in the Peruvian jungle. To accomplish this, he plans to reach an isolated patch of rubber trees and make his fortune. But these trees are not directly accessible by river because of dangerous rapids, so Fitzcarraldo runs his ship as close as possible via an alternate river and then enlists the aid of the native Peruvians to drag his ship over a mountain to the desired area. However, the natives seem to have their own agenda in so mysteriously acceding to Fitzcarraldo's wishes. The results manage to both mock and affirm the dreams of determined figures like Fitzcarraldo, making absurdity out of the stuff of human endeavor without negating the beauty of that effort. There is hardly a more awe-inspiring or arresting image than that of Fitzcarraldo's ship pulling itself up the mountain with cables and pulleys, or of the ship resting in mid-ascent as seen through the thick morning fog of the jungle.

The tortured production history of Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo (ably recorded in Les Blank's documentary Burden of Dreams) tends to take the spotlight away from this deeply mesmerizing film. And that's unfortunate, because the film itself is even more fascinating than the trials and tribulations, amazing though they might be, that led to its being made. Part of the problem is the film's deliberate, some might say ponderous, pace, which invites the viewer to experience the slow immersion into the jungle that Fitzcarraldo and company experience. Herzog did something similar in Aguirre, the Wrath of God, sometimes aiming his camera at the river rapids for extended periods of time, with hypnotic results. This could never happen in a Hollywood film, and it should be treasured. --Jim Gay

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser

In his widely acclaimed attempt to fathom The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, director Werner Herzog probes a real-life mystery that has puzzled German society for nearly two centuries. In the title role, Herzog ingeniously cast the equally mysterious street musician Bruno S., whose mesmerizing performance is unique in the history of film. Isolated since infancy in a dank cellar, the now-adult Kaspar is abandoned in 1820s Nuremburg by his unknown custodian; townsfolk futilely speculate on his origins, and he's shaped by a bourgeois villager who places rigid, conflicting restraints on his new and peculiar perspective on the world around him. It's telling that Herzog's preferred title is Every Man for Himself and God Against All, for this is an eerily effective cautionary tale about an innocent man of nature who moves from one prison to another in a cruelly fateful universe. The mystery lingers, making The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser a deep, resonant reflection on the nature of humanity. --Jeff Shannon

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser - The true and mysterious story of Kaspar Hauser, a young man who suddenly appeared in Nuremberg in 1828. He had been held captive in a dungeon for his entire life that he could remember, and had only just been released, for reasons unknown. Who is this man, and who would want him dead?

Little Dieter Needs to Fly

Educational Media Network-Winner Golden Apple 1999 Biarritz International Festival of Audiovisual Programming-Winner Silver FIPA 1999 San Francisco International Film Festival-Winner Golden Spire 1998 International Documentary Association- Winner IDA Award 1997 Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival-Winner Special Jury Award As a young boy Dieter Dengler watched as Allied planes destroyed his village. From that instant he knew that he wanted to fly. So at 18 he moved to America enlisted in the Navy and was promptly shipped off to Vietnam. During one of his first missions however Dengler was shot down over Laos and taken prisoner. Despite torture and starvation-at one point he weighed 85 pounds-he escaped and after a harrowing journey through the jungle on foot returned home. Today even comfort and success cannot dispel the demons of his past. In this remarkable award- winning documentary director Werner Herzog returns to the jungle with Dengler to tell an incredible tale of courage and survival against impossible odds.System Requirements:Run Time: 74 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: NR UPC: 013131520699 Manufacturer No: DV15206

The White Diamond

It's a good bet there are no directors who float between feature and documentary filmmaking as smoothly as Werner Herzog. The White Diamond (2004) is a companion piece of sorts to his well-received Grizzly Man. Both are about eccentric dreamers who travel to harsh landscapes following their dream with tragic consequences. In other words, perfect "Herzogian" fodder. Two important differences: White Diamond is filmed in the standard way (not piecing together another's videotape) and the tragedy occurred years before cameras rolled. Dr. Graham Dorrington is a man driven to fly. The Cambridge scientist creates new types of airships to explore the canopy of tropical rain forests. Herzog and his crew follow Dorrington to Guyana to see if this new-age dirigible can bring us closer to this fragile and important ecosystem. The film is less about what those discoveries might mean and more a portrait of a man. This is not Dorrington's first attempt to go to the jungle. A haunting accident a decade earlier in the forests of Borneo nags at him and Herzog prods Dorrington's recollections. The 90-minute film has some very rich side trips well worth taking: a legend of the gigantic Kaieteur Falls, the diamond mines of the area, and getting to know one of the hired porters. Herzog injects his own thoughts and gets into the action (he's on the initial flight, much to the chagrin of some of the team members) while delivering a satisfying, gorgeously shot film. --Doug Thomas

Acclaimed filmmaker Werner Herzog (Grizzly Man ,Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo) follows enigmatic airship engineer Dr. Graham Dorrington as he embarks on a trip in the heart of Guyana to test his new helium-filled invention above the rainforest. Dubbed the "white diamond" on account of its unique teardrop shape, the expedition begins with some early mishaps but is soon airborne high above the treetops. With every success though, Dorrington is haunted by a similar expedition twelve years ago that killed his friend as they were testing an airship much like the "white diamond." Herzog magnificently captures Dorrington's struggles to atone for what he calls "a stupid, meaningless accident" while at the same time presenting stunning never-before-seen images of the true beauty of nature.

Stroszek

Stroszek is one of Werner Herzog's most accessible films, and one of his best. Herzog's clever use of kitschy folk music is just one perfect element in this mesmerizing, seriocomic "ballad" of America, in which a trio of unlikely friends leave their dreary lives in Berlin, certain that wealth and comfort await in America. Their naive American dream turns sour in rural Wisconsin, and the title character (played by Bruno S., the fascinating nonactor from Herzog's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser) becomes an insanely tragic figure, celebrating a bitterly absurd Thanksgiving in the film's unforgettable closing scenes. By fusing his own intuitive, enigmatic style with factual details from the life of Bruno S., Herzog captures the elusive "ecstatic truth" that motivates his enduring cinematic vision. While deepening one of the most unusual actor-director collaborations in the history of film, Stroszek presents an American nightmare that's funny, bizarre, and deeply, magnificently human. --Jeff Shannon

Bruno Stroszek is released from prison and ekes out a living as a street musician. He befriends Eva, a prostitute down on her luck. After they are harried and beaten by Eva's pimps, they join Bruno's neighbor, Scheitz, an elderly eccentric, when he leaves Germany to live in Wisconsin in search of the American dream.