Image Philosopher - Herzog

Werner Herzog is one of the pioneers of "New German Cinema" in the 1960s and 1970s. He is also known as a member of "The Four Heroes of New German Cinema" with Fassbinder, Schlondorff and Wenders. Being the most active contemporary film director, he creates new works every year. As a distinctive and maverick film director, Herzog has pretty clear and independent movie ideas. On the one hand, he considers the film as a window through which he can observe the world and show his thoughts and ideas, doubts and confusion. In films, he often portrays the marginalized characters that are crazy and paranoid and records the natural landscape that attracts him. To this extent, the film acts as a tool for him to express his personality. On the other hand, as a philosopher in the film field, Herzog is good at thinking over film images in a philosophy way and discussing and analyzing the mental attitude as well as the contributing factor of film images. The audience can find their own shadows in the character image of the film, for which films can have an important position in caring the real world and human society.Herzog puts the film as a tool of personalized expression and philosophy thinking, reflecting his strong individual will and philosophized meanings. Under the autonomous and individual filmmaking concept, Herzog tends to seek for extensive cooperation on the basis of adhering to independent production in order to produce films with higher ideology and artistry while smaller cost. He recovers the production cost of films and gains some box office by showing films in the cinema, screening them at the television stations and selling DVD movie discs and so on, forming a set of very successful film operation system.On the film shooting, Herzog's biggest contribution is breakout of the constraints of genre film. He mixes the documentation and fabrication together into his film. On the one hand, he injects fabrication and subjective factors into the documentary, pursuing the inner truth of things. On the other hand, he pays attention to selecting real events and characters and requires the actors'natural performance during the process of insisting on the authentic scene shooting in order to show a severe documentary style. Herzog's films embody an obvious cross-class feature by putting the fiction into documentary while making the feature film have the sense of reality.On the presentation of time in Herzog's films,Herzog"records"and"state"the original story time by long shots while he compresses, expands and reorganizes the text time by "Montage". Besides, he rolls out the carpet of the text time with the guidance of the original story time, widening the time span and developing a sense of crossing from the past to the present. On the aspect of space construction in the film, Herzog unifies the vast geographical space, the artistic lens space and the meaning space that concerns about reality together into the movies. Not only does the geographical space embody Herzog's insistent ideas of authentic shooting but also reflects his preference of the natural landscape which can give him inspiration. The lens space, which is constructed by Herzog's artistic means such as edition of scenes, selection of color and light and integrated utilization of different sounds and so forth, illuminates his personal thoughts and shooting techniques. Finally, it is the very lens space that in turn can serve the meaning space which shows consideration for human reality.The character images in Herzog's films can be divided into two types: One type images have supermen's will and madmen's characters. They resist the fate and secular society with superman's will; at the same time, they also try to challenge nature and the limits of human existence with the devout attitude on the basis of their worship and love of nature. The other group is form by tyrant, mind master and vampire, who have been alienated in mental, physical and even observable behaviors and so on. Those characters lost their conscious dynamic role, being enslaved by material force and mental force and undergoing a fundamental change in human nature. Herzog engages in a philosophical, profound reflection and exploration of the fate on the basis of shaping and showing these paranoid, crazy, lonely and alienated images.