An invaluable set. The transfers look as good as I'd hoped they would, but I also love the functionality here. On several films, you can choose between English and German versions (which dictates the language of the titles and the default spoken language) but then you can still change the audio and subtitles to another language on the fly, to see more easily which version might work the best for you. (
Nosferatu is an exception to this, since the two versions are literally two different cuts.) And then there are a number of audio commentaries as well. I've gone through all of these films now on the set, occasionally sampling the different options, but there's still a wealth of material here that I haven't yet explored.
As for the films, no two people are going to agree as to what constitutes "essential" Herzog, but I can't quibble much with the selections here (and, on balance, I prefer this selection to Shout's). We get all the Kinski and Bruno S. collaborations and a number of other key films, all of which are worthwhile in some respect.
Aguirre should need no introduction, and the films chosen to supplement it seem like a good thematic fit to it.
Unprecedented Defense was only his third short film, and it perhaps feels like the early work of a director coming into his own, but Herzog's stamp is easily identifiable here, showing perhaps how a few Aguirre-type characters might have played grown-up with each other during their teenage years.
Last Words is an early absurdist short that toys with how language can be twisted into meaninglessness, and in something of a coup, has perhaps the most reference quality transfer of the whole set.
Precautions Against Fanatics takes
Aguirre's territorial concerns to the racetrack, and then plays them as slapstick. And then there's
Fata Morgana, which traffics heavily in mirage-distorted images that at times only speckle the horizon. I had seen this before on DVD, but seeing it on Blu-ray on a large home theater screen was a completely different experience.
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (more literally/awesomely titled
Every Man for Himself and God Against All) is possibly Herzog's best film, for reasons that are hopefully already widely known.
Land of Silence and Darkness is a good inclusion on this disc, as it seems to somewhat echo Bruno S.'s own early life (despite his not being deaf and blind). It's a bit of a tough watch at times, but also features some arresting images of its subjects lost in their own worlds.
How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck might have made more sense on the
Stroszek disc, but in any event, it's sort of hypnotic and mind-numbing to hear so much language spouted so quickly and yet meaning so little.
Stroszek and
Heart of Glass share a disc, and while they don't have much in common, I will say that they both might have the most satisfying and yet completely out-there endings of any of Herzog's films.
Heart of Glass (partly filmed with the cast and crew under hypnosis!) might also be Herzog's most visually sumptuous film, though
Nosferatu on the next disc gives it a run for its money. Both this and Murnau's version take place in a world where no one has ever heard of vampires before, and where you don't flinch when the pale, lanky guy with icepicks for teeth lunges to suck the blood from your fresh cut, nor when he slowly creeps toward your bed in the middle of the night in a stereotypical monster pose. But if you can suspend disbelief in this regard, Herzog has some marvelous compositions for you here. This is also the Kinski film where he most loses himself in his role.
Next we have
Woyzeck, which has always felt like more of a sketch of a film than a full-fledged one to me. I'm also very curious how it might have turned out if Bruno S. had been cast in the lead role. Rounding out this disc are a grab bag of mid-length documentaries that needed to go somewhere and this disc evidently had the most room for them.
Handicapped Future is a touching film that focuses on children with malformed limbs. (Apparently thousands of children were born this way in Germany in the '50s, as the tragic by-product of a drug commonly taken to reduce nausea during pregnancy.)
The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner is a personal favorite, illustrating how even sports can be made tolerable to watch when properly shot and scored. (Popol Vuh's music is really an integral part of so many of these films.)
Huie's Sermon is mostly a straight filmed performance of a sermon by the preacher that inspired James Brown's character in
The Blues Brothers. A few minutes in, I was wondering what Herzog found so exceptional in this subject to make him be worth filming, and then the rest of the film happened. I do also really like the quote displayed at the end (Herzog was something of a master of doing this), which is a better variation of
this sentiment.
Based on
Fitzcarraldo's performance in the lists projects, I gather that it's the forum's consensus favorite Herzog, which I must confess I find a little perplexing. It's not a bad film, and I do love the imagery of the boat slowly moving up a jungle slope, but even this pales in comparison for me to the boat trapped in a tree in
Aguirre. I also think it's considerably more plausible that Kinski is actually a vampire than that he could ever be an Irishman.
Burden of Dreams (directed by Les Blank) covers the most interesting part of
Fitzcarraldo (its production), though far less of the difficulties there had to do with Herzog and Kinski wanting to murder each other than you might expect. I do wish there had been more coverage of the original version of the film that would have starred Jason Robards and Mick Jagger, which apparently got two-thirds of the way through filming but only gets a brief mention here. I'm very glad that Blank's
Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe is included here as well. Much more than its title would suggest, it provides an opportunity for Herzog to air his views on the creative process, art vs. commerce, boldness in filmmaking, authenticity, the depleted world resource of meaningful film images, and of course, the texture and palatability of shoe leather.
I believe that
Cobra Verde is generally considered an uneven curio, but I find it to be a fine conclusion to the Herzog/Kinski collaborations. There are some really nice hypnotic moments here (like the woman "surrendering her life" through a slow, sultry dance) that seem to set the film in the world of dreams, and Kinski has some great one-liners as well. Finally,
God's Angry Man is another documentary about a preacher of sorts, though this one seems more concerned with governmental conspiracy theories and the business end of things than with sharing the good word. (He saves this for his backup band.) He's actually not all that angry most of the time, though there is a pretty tense sequence where he berates viewers of his TV broadcast for not donating enough to his ministry right then and there (neglecting the fact that his viewers might have been short on funds from over-donating in an earlier scene!). Unfortunately for English speakers, much of the film's dialogue is dubbed over in German and then subtitled in English, though that's how Herzog made the film, so it's no slight against the BFI.
That about covers the films, which is really the main reason that this set exists--to cram high quality versions of as many films as possible onto eight discs. There aren't as many contextual extras here as on, say, the Borowczyk set, but I suppose there's less of a need for them here. (If anything, I would have been fine losing what on-disc extras there are if it meant they could have fit in another Herzog film or two.) The only real complaint, as has already been mentioned to death, is the packaging, which doesn't exactly scream "loving care." Yes, it's flimsy, and extracting the discs feels a bit like playing Operation. Also, somewhat oddly, of the six digipak panels set aside for film stills, one of them is devoted to
Woodchuck of all films, and three others to
Stroszek (none of which feature a bunny rabbit driving a fire truck). I feel like a lot of people may have gotten this set and only really taken in this unfortunate aspect of it. Rest assured, it's more than made up for with the care put into the discs themselves. Here's hoping for more of them!
