Werner Herzog - Selfportrait / Selbstportrait (1986)

Full version (deutsch / english subtitles). In this production directed by Herzog himself, "Portrait Werner Herzog" shows him at a time and from a cultural angle that countless more recent interviews and profiles don't. We see his footage of Munich's elaborately boisterous Oktoberfest; we see him in the green Bavarian valley of his youth. "I'm the kind of person who travels on foot," he explains, "even for long distances." This leads to the story of his walk from Munich to Paris to visit the ailing film critic Lotte Eisner (whom Herzog calls "the consciousness of the new German cinema"), which became his book "Of Walking In Ice". He speaks of hypnotizing an entire cast for "Heart of Glass", of fighting the aggressively filmmaking-unfriendly Peruvian jungle to shoot "Fitzcarraldo", and of planning a never-realized Himalayan film starring frequent (and frequently volatile) collaborator Klaus Kinski. "Here we can truly see how hard it is to make a film," so Herzog sums up his struggle, "but this is my life, and I don't want to live it in any other way." In that respect, nothing has changed in 25 years.

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