Wern­er Her­zog: Rad­i­cal Dream­er review – shine on you crazy German

Film­mak­er. Dream-weaver. Footwear-epi­cure. What­ev­er your impres­sion of Wern­er Her­zog is, this affec­tion­ate docupro­file is unlike­ly to dras­ti­cal­ly alter it. And that’s no bad thing. With­in the open­ing min­utes of Wern­er Her­zog: Rad­i­cal Dream­er, impas­sioned trib­utes from such lumi­nar­ies as Pat­ti Smith, Nicole Kid­man, Robert Pat­tin­son, Wim Wen­ders and, yes, Carl Weath­ers, paint a pic­ture of an almost mytho­log­i­cal fig­ure – a rare and enig­mat­ic cre­ative spir­it with­out parallel.

This doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly tal­ly with the image Her­zog presents of him­self, which lands some­where between kind­ly uncle and glint-eyed loon. That, of course, is the para­dox of Wern­er Her­zog: some­how, all these things can be true at once.

Clips of his act­ing gigs in The Simp­sons and The Man­dalo­ri­an are intro­duced ear­ly on to show how far the cult of Wern­er has spread through­out con­tem­po­rary pop cul­ture. But direc­tor Thomas von Steinaeck­er is a seri­ous fan, and as such he quick­ly moves on from exam­in­ing the unlike­ly mass appeal of his eccen­tric subject.

Retrac­ing Herzog’s hum­ble upbring­ing in the Tyrolean Alps – his fam­i­ly were bombed out of Munich dur­ing World War Two – the film sur­veys his ear­ly life and career, his arrival on the inter­na­tion­al film scene and sub­se­quent relo­ca­tion to Amer­i­ca, all the way up to his recent direc­to­r­i­al endeavours.

Along the way Her­zog reflects on the mak­ing of some of his best-known works, includ­ing Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Fitz­car­ral­do (1982) and Cobra Verde (1987), expound­ing on his fruit­ful yet frac­tious rela­tion­ship with the actor Klaus Kin­s­ki. These sto­ries are already the stuff of cin­e­mat­ic leg­end, but that doesn’t make their retelling any less compelling.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

By becom­ing a mem­ber you can sup­port our inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism and receive exclu­sive essays, prints, week­ly film rec­om­men­da­tions and more.