Werner Herzog

Date of Birth: 05/09/1942

One of the ideologists of the "new German kinovolny", directed by Werner Herzog (born Werner Stipetiд?) was born in Munich on Sept. 5, 1942. He spent his childhood in a small Bavarian village, and in 12 years he and his mother-Yugoslav returned to Munich. The family lived in abject poverty, and the only outlet for the boy was cinema. Even with 14 years Werner begins to write an outline of scenarios, and offer them to local producers. Later, while studying at university, he worked at night at the factory to get money for their own short films (the first one, "Hercules", Herzog took off in 1962 - by his own admission, to steal a camera). In 1966, the director continued his education in the United States, where, among other things, shot by order of NASA.


Wealth first feature film, "Signs of Life" (1968), Herzog shot in Greece. The story of three German soldiers guarding the warehouse of clothing on the island of Kos, one of which is gradually going mad, immediately won the Silver Bear, Berlin Festival. Kafkaesque themes of loneliness, the growing madness and ostraneniya "man in an unusual and strange situation thereafter becomes a leitmotif in the work of Herzog. His next picture, "and dwarfs started small," is a shelter for midgets as a microcosm, where the collapse of all social foundations. The film "Aguirre, . Wrath of God "about the frantic Spanish conquistadors, . tends to find El Dorado, . forced to talk about Herzog as the leading German filmmaker of his generation (and became one of the first major roles permanent actor Herzog Klaus Kinski), . and the next picture, . "Every man for himself, . God against all ", . brought him the Jury Prize Cannes Film Festival 1975,
. Provocative and radicalism Art director sometimes accompanied by very non-traditional methods of work: for example, on the set of "Glass Heart" actors were ... under hypnosis.


The eighties began to Herzog's filming of the fundamental "Fitzcarraldo" - a three-hour picture of the obsessed music lover who in order to put the opera on the Amazon, ready to drag the ship over a mountain pass. According to the participants of the crew, during the three years of training and nine months shooting the director had behaved with no less manic than his prototype. After the movie (who brought his Cannes prize for best director) Herzog even going to get away from the big movie, because, in his own words, he felt that it destroys the identity. But instead he took off - this time in Africa - now "Where the Green Ants Dream" about the invasion of civilization in the life of an ancient tribe. All the films of Werner Herzog's extremely distinguished author attitudes towards them of their creator - Herzog himself wrote the script and (sometimes) music sets on the court's total control over the behavior of actors, and personally produces his paintings. In recent years, directed mainly dealt with television movies, and probably will not come back in a big cinema.