Self-styled animal rights activist Timothy Treadwell spent thirteen summers alone among wild grizzly bears. Herzog bases his film on Treadwell’s video recordings. He talks of a “story of astonishing beauty and depth, of ecstasy and deep inner perturbation” which fascinated him. The film opens in the idyllic Katmai National Park in Alaska, the ideal habitat for brown bears. But Herzog’s voice-over introduces the dramatic end of Treadwell’s life from the start. The film says more about “inner human nature” than about an untouched landscape, the director says.

Kristina Jaspers

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

“Is the Internet dreaming of itself?” Curious and contemplative, but free of cultural pessimism of any kind, Herzog addresses the different aspects of the World Wide Web. What possibilities are opened by digital networking and artificial intelligence? What dangers lurk in anonymous networks? Herzog’s film is less a critical analysis than a multi-voiced essay where you can watch originals think. The spectrum of interview partners ranges from Tesla CEO Elon Musk to a group of people with electromagnetic hypersensitivity.

Kristina Jaspers

Werner Herzog has appeared as an actor in several films in the past few years and has a number of cameos in his own films under his belt. In “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe” by Les Blank we see him pay for a bet he lost against Errol Morris: if the latter succeeded in getting a theatrical release for his film “Gates of Heaven”, Herzog would be ready to do what the title describes. The director gives his all to live up to his credo that film must be physical, evoking not only Charlie Chaplin in the process. Two years later, Les Blank was to make the documentary “Burden of Dreams” about the shooting of “Fitzcarraldo.”

Kristina Jaspers