Short Films by Werner Herzog - DVD Review

One of the more gratifying occurrences in cinema this year is the remarkable resurgence of the great German filmmaker Werner Herzog. One of the stars of the new German cinema of the '70s, along with Fassbinder, Wenders, and others, he contributed such classic works as The Mystery of Kasper Hauser, Aguirre, Wrath of God, and Fitzcarraldo.

Most of the protagonists of these feature films and many of his documentaries are men going to the very edge of their existence, taking massive risks and in the process discovering, and pushing to the limit, the power of their potential as human beings. However, while still making important and brilliant work (such as the astonishing and lyrical Gulf War meditation Lessons of Darkness), he has been seemingly somewhat dormant in the past decade or so.

This year, however, Herzog has reestablished himself as a cinematic force to be reckoned with, releasing no less than three documentaries in the past few months: The White Diamond, about an explorer flying over the Amazon in a self-built flying machine, not only to break new ground in exploration but to assuage his grief at the death of his best friend in a previous expedition; The Wheel of Time, following the pilgrimage of Buddhists to the site of Prince Siddhartha's enlightenment; and the brilliant and chilling Grizzly Man, a portrait of nature enthusiast and amateur filmmaker Timothy Treadwell, whose obsessions and delusions of intimacy with his adopted bears, led to him and his girlfriend being mauled to death.

Now on DVD, we have the opportunity to see three early short documentaries made during Herzog's creatively fertile period in the 70's, in the collection Short Films by Werner Herzog, recently released by New Yorker Video. In the DVD liner notes, Herzog remarks that he makes no distinction between his documentaries and his fiction features. Indeed, the term "documentary" seems an inadequate, if not inaccurate, description of these works.