Werner Herzog, documentarist: figures of voice and body

Abstract

German filmmaker Werner Herzog is nowadays seen as a competent documentarist. His last documentaries received worldwide attention, won awards and have been nominated in major class film festivals. Herzog begins his filmmaking carrier in 1962 and formal elements of the documentary language soon take place in his first films. Since then, Herzog directs about thirty films that can be classified as documentaries. An element that can be spotted throughout his documentary oeuvre is his own reflection in the films, through his voice or his body. Herzog's performance in his documentaries goes from a factual narrator to a complex character, indispensable for the film's argumentation. This project rescues Herzog's figure in his documentaries through an analysis of the director's reflexion throughout the decades. Relations between the director's reflexion in the films and documentary film theory will be made, making an connection with paradigms as Cinema Verité and ideas like "Performative Documentary", popularized in the 1980's and up to this date problematized and renewed. This subject-matter is justified by the lack of studies related to Werner Herzog's documentary oeuvre as a whole and for the ineditism of this type of relation between Herzog's own insertion in his films and the matter of reflexivity in documentary film. (AU)