Description
Book SynopsisLegendary director, actor, author, and provocateur Werner Herzog has incalculably influenced contemporary cinema for decades. Until now there has been no sustained effort to gather and present a variety of diverse philosophical approaches to his films and to the thinking behind their creation. The Philosophy of Werner Herzog, edited by M. Blake Wilson and Christopher Turner, collects fourteen essays by professional philosophers and film theorists from around the globe, who explore the famed German auteur’s notions of “ecstatic truth” as opposed to “accountants’ truth,” his conception of nature and its penchant for “overwhelming and collective murder,” his controversial film production techniques, his debts to his philosophical and aesthetic forebears, and finally, his pointed objections to his would-be critics––including, among others, the contributors to this book themselves. By probing how Herzog’s thinking behind the camera is revealed in the action he captures in front of it, The Philosophy of Werner Herzog shines new light upon the images and dialog we see and hear on the screen by enriching our appreciation of a prolific––yet enigmatic––film artist.
Table of ContentsContents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1. I Am What My Films Are: Listening to Herzog’s Ecstatic, Essayistic Pronouncements
David LaRocca
Chapter 2. Herzog’s Sublime and Ecstatic Truth: From Burke’s Physiological Aesthesis to the Dionysian Unveiling
Patricia Castello Branco
Chapter 3. The Conquest of Uselessness as a Practice of Film and Thought
Daniele Dottorini
Chapter 4. Filmmaking and Philosophizing Against the Grain of Theory: Herzog and Wittgenstein
Mihai Ométiță
Chapter 5. Nature and Meaning in Grizzly Man
Marc Furstenau
Chapter 6. Reflections from the Abyss: Herzog’s Philosophy of Death
M. Blake Wilson
Chapter 7. Fake News and Ecstatic Truths: Alternative Facts in Lessons of Darkness
Kyle Novak
Chapter 8. The Great Ecstasy of Werner Herzog: Truth, Heidegger, Apocalypse
Ian Alexander Moore
Chapter 9. The Film Artist as Discoverer of the Marvels of Everyday Life: Toward a Kracauerian
Reading of Werner Herzog
Christopher Turner
Chapter 10. Werner Herzog and Documentary as a Revelatory Practice
Antony Fredriksson
Chapter 11. On Experience and Illumination: Werner Herzog’s Dialectical Relationship with Society
Stefanie Baumann
Chapter 12. Herzog’s Philosophy of Masculinism
Will Lehman
Chapter 13. Herzog’s Post-Tragic Aesthetic: A Kierkegaardian Perspective
Anthony Eagan and Simon Thornton
Chapter 14. Werner Herzog on Circles, Chickens and Impotency
Tyler Tritten
About the Contributors
