How can the curse of violence be banned? Werner Herzog has repeatedly addressed the issue of capital punishment in the US. In “Into the Abyss” he uses archive material and interviews to reconstruct a triple murder. Herzog interviews the people involved, talking to the condemned murderers Michael Perry and Jason Burkett, to family members, a priest and a former executioner. What did these people see when they looked into the abyss? Can death be pictured at all? Each of these persons tells a different story, while the film’s subtitle suggests yet another interpretation.

Kristina Jaspers

“Oh oh, this feels a little bit too close to home,” Dieter Dengler says into the camera when a few young Lao men tie up his hands again in the country of his torturers. Herzog sends his protagonist, who was shot down over Laos during the Vietnam War and spent six months in prison under inhuman conditions, on a psycho trip of a different kind. The film became a strategic model for working with re-enactments, for example in “The Act of Killing” (2012) by Joshua Oppenheimer, co-produced by Herzog. Herzog himself re-made the material into a feature film starring Christian Bale.

Kristina Jaspers