Ferocious Reality

Book excerpt: Over the course of his career Werner Herzog has directed almost sixty films, roughly half of which are documentaries. And yet, in a statement delivered during a public appearance in 1999, the filmmaker declared: "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 stylization." This book asks how this conviction, hostile to the traditional tenets of documentary, can inform the work of one of the world's most provocative documentarians. In close, contextualized analysis of more than twenty-five films spanning Herzog's career, the author makes a case for exploring documentary films in terms of performance and explains what it means to do so.--From publisher description.