Laurie Ruth Johnson. Forgotten Dreams. Revisiting Romanticism In The Cinema Of Werner Herzog

New York, Rochester: Camden House, 2016. — 322 p.Werner Herzog (b. 1942) is perhaps the most famous living German filmmaker, but his films have never been read in the context of German cultural history. And while there is a surfeit of film reviews, interviews, and scholarly articles on Herzog and his work, there are very few books devoted to his films, and none addressing his entire career to date. Until now. Forgotten Dreams offers not only an analytical study of Herzog's films but also a new reading of Romanticism's impact beyond the nineteenth century. It argues that his films re-envision and help us better understand a critical stream in Romanticism, and places the films in conversation with other filmmakers, authors, and philosophers in order to illuminate that critical stream. The result is a lively reconnection with Romantic themes and convictions that have been partly forgotten in the midst of Germany's postwar rejection of much of Romantic thought, yet are still operative in German culture today. The film analyses will interest scholars of film, German Studies, and Romanticism as well as a broader public interested in Herzog's films and contemporary German cultural debates. The book will also appeal to those interested in the ongoing renegotiation - by Western and other cultures - of relationships between reason and passion, civilization and wild nature, knowledge and belief. Laurie Ruth Johnson is Associate Professor of German, Comparative and World Literature, and Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Introduction: Werner Herzog’s Films and the Other
Discourse of Romanticism
1: Image and Knowledge
Ironic Self-Consciousness in Cave of Forgotten Dreams(2010)
Romantic Melancholy in The Wild Blue Yonder (2005)
Aesthetic Others in Fitzcarraldo (1982)
Traces of the Magical in Invincible (2000)2: Surface and Depth
The Arabesque and the Secret in Encounters at the End of the World (2007)
Surface and Depth, Secret and Memory in The White Diamond (2004)
Trauma as Adventure in Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997)
Walking as Remembering in Wings of Hope (1999)3: Beauty and Sublimity
Sublime Spaces in The Dark Glow of the Mountains (1984)
Human Wrath and Sublime Nature in Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)
Endless Approximation in The Great Ecstasy of Wood-Carver Steiner (1973)
Sublime Risk in La Soufrière (1977)4: Man and Animal
Aesthetic Vision Deferred in Grizzly Man (2005)
Man and Chicken in Stroszek (1976)
Monstrous Belief in Nosferatu (1978)5: Sound and Silence
Listening in the Silence in Land of Silence and Darkness (1971) and Heart of Glass (1976)
Sound and Nostalgia in Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (2010)
The Critical Potential of Romantic Melancholy in Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, A Tale of Life (2011)Conclusion: Herzog’s Romantic Cinema