The Ecstatic Truth of Werner Herzog’s Short Documentaries

|Malcolm Cooke| Werner Herzog has one thing to say to the proponents of Cinéma Vérité: “‘Happy New Year, losers.’”1 Herzog has always had beef with the idea of documentary as from the perspective of a fly on the wall, a genre of detached and objective reporting of facts. “That… Continue reading

Werner Herzog, Dziga Vertov, and the Search for Truth

|Dan McCabe| In 1999, acclaimed German filmmaker Werner Herzog came to the Walker Art Center for an on-stage interview with the late film critic Roger Ebert. During the interview, Herzog made his “Minnesota Declaration”—a twelve-point denunciation of Cinema Verité, a style of documentary… Continue reading