Start Your Day with Werner Herzog Inspirational Posters

Wern­er Her­zog is the wild man of cin­e­ma. His movies are stark and ele­men­tal and ecsta­t­ic and are usu­al­ly about a crazed dream­er who strug­gles to achieve an impos­si­ble task in the face of a chaot­ic, indif­fer­ent uni­verse. Think Aguirre, Wrath of God, about a con­quis­ta­dor who goes crazy while adrift along an Ama­zon­ian riv­er. Think Stroszek, about a Ger­man grifter who goes men­tal in the for­bid­ding land­scape of Wis­con­sin while strug­gling to find the Amer­i­can dream. That film famous­ly, inex­plic­a­bly, ends with shots of a danc­ing chick­en.

The ecsta­t­ic truths seen in his movies are reflect­ed in the man him­self. At the age of 14, Her­zog struck out from his native Ger­many for Alba­nia and then Sudan. In 1972, he once walked from Munich to Paris to vis­it an ail­ing friend. In 1977, he shot footage at the lip of a vol­cano at the brink of erup­tion. He’s a film­mak­er who seems to go out of his way to choose loca­tions that are remote and dif­fi­cult — Antarc­ti­ca, the Sahara and the Ama­zon­ian rain for­est — and his shoots always seem to be bedev­iled by intrigue and cat­a­stro­phe. His first fea­ture was near­ly derailed because of a coup d’état. While shoot­ing Fata Mor­gana in Cameroon, he was mis­tak­en for a want­ed crim­i­nal and thrown in jail. Once dur­ing a TV inter­view in the hills of Los Ange­les, he was shot by a ran­dom crazy per­son. Watch it here.

“A BBC tele­vi­sion crew came to see me in Lau­rel Canyon,” as he recount­ed for The New York­er. “They want­ed to inter­view me for the British pre­mière of ‘Griz­zly Man.’ I didn’t want them to film right out­side my house, so we went up to Sky­line Dri­ve. In the mid­dle of the inter­view, I was shot with a rifle by some­one stand­ing on his bal­cony. I seem to attract the clin­i­cal­ly insane.”

Instead of stop­ping the inter­view, run­ning for pro­tec­tion and per­haps going to the hos­pi­tal, Her­zog just con­tin­ued with the inter­view say­ing sim­ply, “It was not a sig­nif­i­cant bul­let. I am not afraid.”

Herzog’s improb­a­ble pen­chant for dis­as­ter, his col­lab­o­ra­tion with the bril­liant, but bat­shit crazy, Klaus Kin­s­ki, and of course, his sin­gu­lar, uncom­pro­mis­ing work have turned him into almost a myth­ic fig­ure in some cir­cles. But it’s these mad, macho dec­la­ra­tions like those above that have real­ly fed the cult of Her­zog.

Recent­ly, some unknown genius turned some of Herzog’s more extreme quo­ta­tions into inspi­ra­tional posters. Lines like “Civ­i­liza­tion is like a thin lay­er of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and dark­ness” are placed along side a shot of a glass of white wine and a sun­set.

So gaze upon them. Absorb the pearls of wis­dom. Find cold com­fort in their bleak, nihilist pro­nounce­ments. They make fine addi­tions to any cubi­cle.

See the full gallery here.

via Coudal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wern­er Her­zog Picks His 5 Top Films

Wern­er Her­zog Offers 24 Pieces of Film­mak­ing & Life Advice

Wern­er Her­zog Los­es a Bet to Errol Mor­ris, and Eats His Shoe (Lit­er­al­ly)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.