Werner Herzog Between Fact and Fiction
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Culture
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Books & the Arts
/ February 25, 2026
Werner Herzog Between Fact and Fiction
The German auteur’s recent book presents a strange, idiosyncratic vision of the concept of “truth,” one that defines how he sees the world and his art.
Lowry Pressly
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Werner Herzog, 1984.
(Frederic Garcia / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
In 1970 or ’71, Werner Herzog accompanied a pair of deaf-blind women on their first flight in an airplane. The outing was Herzog’s idea, a joyride in a little four-seat Cessna to celebrate one of the women’s birthdays but also to capture their reactions for a film he was making called The Land of Silence and Darkness. The footage from that afternoon displays many of what would become the hallmarks of Herzog’s style over the coming half-century: the daring gambit on the border of exploitation, the obsession with vision and existential loneliness, and the search for poetry at the extremes of human experience. It is an astonishing piece of filmmaking. No matter how many times I have seen it, it never fails to evoke an overwhelming complex of thought and feeling that is hard to put into words. As with the flight itself, one has to experience it to know what it is about, and even then it is hard not to come away with the sense of having encountered something powerfully human that nevertheless lies beyond our capacity to articulate it in speech. As if to confirm this impression, Herzog, whose unmistakable voice and philosophical commentary have become the most recognizable part of both the man and his work, is silent. He doesn’t even ask afterward what it was like.
Books in review
The Future of Truth
by Werner Herzog; Translated by Michael Hofmann
Buy this book
This, too, would become a characteristic of Herzog’s oeuvre: the search for an elusive transcendence over the edge of the ordinary that he calls “ecstatic truth.” Herzog is obsessed with the idea of truth and has insisted for decades that it is the central concern of all his films. This might seem rich from one of the great self-mythologizers of our time, who has never hidden the fact that he punches up his documentaries with fabrication, scripted scenes, and misattributed quotes, and who once described Fitzcarraldo as his greatest documentary. Yet the truth that Herzog has in mind is more like the truth of poetry than the mere facts and shared understanding that he mocks as “the truth of accountants.” As he put it in a 1999 manifesto, “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and …
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Werner Herzog Between Fact and Fiction
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Current Issue
Culture
/
Books & the Arts
/ February 25, 2026
Werner Herzog Between Fact and Fiction
The German auteur’s recent book presents a strange, idiosyncratic vision of the concept of “truth,” one that defines how he sees the world and his art.
Lowry Pressly
Share
Copy Link
X (Twitter)
Bluesky Pocket
Ad Policy
Werner Herzog, 1984.
(Frederic Garcia / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
In 1970 or ’71, Werner Herzog accompanied a pair of deaf-blind women on their first flight in an airplane. The outing was Herzog’s idea, a joyride in a little four-seat Cessna to celebrate one of the women’s birthdays but also to capture their reactions for a film he was making called The Land of Silence and Darkness. The footage from that afternoon displays many of what would become the hallmarks of Herzog’s style over the coming half-century: the daring gambit on the border of exploitation, the obsession with vision and existential loneliness, and the search for poetry at the extremes of human experience. It is an astonishing piece of filmmaking. No matter how many times I have seen it, it never fails to evoke an overwhelming complex of thought and feeling that is hard to put into words. As with the flight itself, one has to experience it to know what it is about, and even then it is hard not to come away with the sense of having encountered something powerfully human that nevertheless lies beyond our capacity to articulate it in speech. As if to confirm this impression, Herzog, whose unmistakable voice and philosophical commentary have become the most recognizable part of both the man and his work, is silent. He doesn’t even ask afterward what it was like.
Books in review
The Future of Truth
by Werner Herzog; Translated by Michael Hofmann
Buy this book
This, too, would become a characteristic of Herzog’s oeuvre: the search for an elusive transcendence over the edge of the ordinary that he calls “ecstatic truth.” Herzog is obsessed with the idea of truth and has insisted for decades that it is the central concern of all his films. This might seem rich from one of the great self-mythologizers of our time, who has never hidden the fact that he punches up his documentaries with fabrication, scripted scenes, and misattributed quotes, and who once described Fitzcarraldo as his greatest documentary. Yet the truth that Herzog has in mind is more like the truth of poetry than the mere facts and shared understanding that he mocks as “the truth of accountants.” As he put it in a 1999 manifesto, “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and …
Werner Herzog Between Fact and Fiction
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Werner Herzog Between Fact and Fiction
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Current Issue
Culture
/
Books & the Arts
/ February 25, 2026
Werner Herzog Between Fact and Fiction
The German auteur’s recent book presents a strange, idiosyncratic vision of the concept of “truth,” one that defines how he sees the world and his art.
Lowry Pressly
Share
Copy Link
Facebook
X (Twitter)
Bluesky Pocket
Email
Ad Policy
Werner Herzog, 1984.
(Frederic Garcia / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
In 1970 or ’71, Werner Herzog accompanied a pair of deaf-blind women on their first flight in an airplane. The outing was Herzog’s idea, a joyride in a little four-seat Cessna to celebrate one of the women’s birthdays but also to capture their reactions for a film he was making called The Land of Silence and Darkness. The footage from that afternoon displays many of what would become the hallmarks of Herzog’s style over the coming half-century: the daring gambit on the border of exploitation, the obsession with vision and existential loneliness, and the search for poetry at the extremes of human experience. It is an astonishing piece of filmmaking. No matter how many times I have seen it, it never fails to evoke an overwhelming complex of thought and feeling that is hard to put into words. As with the flight itself, one has to experience it to know what it is about, and even then it is hard not to come away with the sense of having encountered something powerfully human that nevertheless lies beyond our capacity to articulate it in speech. As if to confirm this impression, Herzog, whose unmistakable voice and philosophical commentary have become the most recognizable part of both the man and his work, is silent. He doesn’t even ask afterward what it was like.
Books in review
The Future of Truth
by Werner Herzog; Translated by Michael Hofmann
Buy this book
This, too, would become a characteristic of Herzog’s oeuvre: the search for an elusive transcendence over the edge of the ordinary that he calls “ecstatic truth.” Herzog is obsessed with the idea of truth and has insisted for decades that it is the central concern of all his films. This might seem rich from one of the great self-mythologizers of our time, who has never hidden the fact that he punches up his documentaries with fabrication, scripted scenes, and misattributed quotes, and who once described Fitzcarraldo as his greatest documentary. Yet the truth that Herzog has in mind is more like the truth of poetry than the mere facts and shared understanding that he mocks as “the truth of accountants.” As he put it in a 1999 manifesto, “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and …
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