A sense of awe

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Friday, August 9th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: a life of curiosity and wonder on display through the films of Werner Herzog.

Here’s movie reviewer Max Belz.

MAX BELZ: Every summer Timothy Treadwell visited Alaska to film grizzly bears and capture his brushes with them, sometimes getting so close he touched their snouts. He claimed he had a special bond with the animals.

TIMOTHY TREADWELL: I’m out in the prime cut of the big green. Behind me is Ed and Rowdy, members of an up and coming sub-adult gang. They’re challenging everything—including me. Goes with the territory.

This is the premise of the documentary Grizzly Man, and it’s the kind of story filmmaker Werner Herzog, now 81, has told over and over: people teetering on insanity, trying the impossible, and fighting nature to the bitter end.

TREADWELL: Well, I just want to discuss that fight with Mickey Bear right here. He’s right next to me here in the Grizzly Sanctuary on the tide flat, off to camera left.

Werner Herzog may not be a familiar name: He was part of a group of German directors in the 60s and 70s who worked with small budgets and bold themes. Many of his movies are not typical commercial fare. Instead, they bring intense curiosity to strange and wondrous subjects—like Dieter Dengler who escaped from a Laotian prison camp during the Vietnam War.

DIETER DENGLER: I was shot down over Laos 1966 in the early phase of the Vietnam war. I never wanted to go to war. I only got into this because I had one burning desire and that was to fly.

Herzog’s memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All came out in English in December 2023. In it, he writes about his youthful ambitions, "I knew that outside of our tight valley there was a whole world that was dangerous and special. Not that I was afraid of it; I was curious to know it."

WERNER HERZOG: And this sense of awe and this sense of discovery never left me.

Herzog was born in Munich during Nazi rule, and he recollects a poor, but happy childhood, raised by a single mother. His book details a life of adventure.

HERZOG: We took responsibilities and we had no toys, but we invented our toys and we invented our games and it was a wonderful, great childhood.

Much of his early work was inspired by real events. One of those movies is Aguirre the Wrath of God, about a rogue Spanish conquistador. Another is Fitzcarraldo which tells the unbelievable story of a rubber baron who hauls a steamboat over a mountain to reach an untapped rubber forest in Peru.

MAN: We can’t go much further or we’ll run onto a sandbank. That slope may look insignificant, but it’s going to be our destiny.

In fact, the experience of making Fitzcarraldo in the jungle was itself so intense it spawned a documentary called Burden of Dreams. Herzog’s protagonists, like the filmmaker himself, are often men gripped by an unreachable dream.

WOMAN: Herzog is stranded in the jungle with a 300 ton steamship that won’t move. And time is running out. He needs money to move the ship, but no one will invest unless the ship moves first.

His later years produced more documentaries, some of which are fitting for family viewing.

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga, for example, looks at Siberian trappers and their way of life. Encounters at the End of the World and Cave of Forgotten Dreams take viewers to Antarctica and some of the oldest cave paintings in the world. Many of his movies stream for free at kanopy.com, a service offered through local libraries.

HERZOG: The ice covering the river is still solid, making it easy to travel the vast distances. The trappers need to prepare for their work.

One of the most peculiar stories about him is that he pledged to eat his own shoes to challenge fellow filmmaker Errol Morris to complete—and distribute—his first movie. Morris succeeded, and Herzog held up his end of the deal: in 1979, he ate his cooked shoes in front of a crowd in Berkeley, California.

HERZOG: I didn’t mean to eat this shoe in public. I intended to eat it in the restaurant, but I was pushed a little bit into it. And it makes sense to some extent because it should be an encouragement for all of you who want to make films and who are just scared to start.

This story illustrates Herzog’s support and commitment, and his life’s work is charged with a fascination for the created world. He says the cosmos is full of wonder, and even menace, and he has spent his life using his camera–and sober narration–to bring out these powerful features.

Werner Herzog’s perspective and his subjects–whether grizzly bears or volcanoes–point to the meaning and order of creation in all its fury and beauty. And these things are worthy of our unbroken attention.

I’m Max Belz.

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