Scenarios
Aguirre, the Wrath of God; Every Man for Himself and God Against All; Land of Silence and Darkness; Fitzcarraldo
Werner Herzog
Translated by Martje Herzog and Alan Greenberg
Werner Herzog doesn’t write traditional screenplays; he writes fever dreams brimming with madness, greed, humor, and dark isolation that can shift dramatically during production—and have materialized into extraordinary masterpieces unlike anything in film today. Harnessing his vision and transcendent reality, these four pieces of long-form prose earmark a renowned filmmaker at the dawn of his career.
A compulsively readable, probing collection. It’s equal parts challenging and satisfying, infuriating and enlightening.
Publishers Weekly
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I do not follow ideas, I stumble into stories or into people; and I know that this is so big, I have to make a film. Very often, films come like uninvited guests, like burglars in the middle of the night. They are in your kitchen; something is stirring, you wake up at 3 a.m. and all of a sudden they come wildly swinging at you.
Werner Herzog doesn’t write traditional screenplays. He writes fever dreams brimming with madness, greed, humor, and dark isolation that can shift dramatically during production—and have materialized into extraordinary masterpieces unlike anything in film today. Harnessing his vision and transcendent reality, these four pieces of long-form prose earmark a renowned filmmaker at the dawn of his career.
$22.95 paper ISBN 978-1-5179-0390-9
248 pages, 5 b&w photos, 5 3/8 x 8 1/4, October 2017
Werner Herzog has produced, written, and directed more than seventy films. He grew up in a remote mountain village in Bavaria and now lives in Los Angeles, California. He is author of Of Walking in Ice: Munich–Paris, 23 November–14 December 1974 (Minnesota, 2015) and Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo.
A compulsively readable, probing collection. It’s equal parts challenging and satisfying, infuriating and enlightening.
Publishers Weekly
Herzog seems to peer nonstop into the abyss . . . combining vainglory, cruelty, and madness. Those are the coordinates at which Herzog geolocates humanity.
Bookforum
Scenarios contains more than merely dialogue in cold type. Herzog’s screenplays read like novellas—the characters are fully thought-out and the settings are vividly described, albeit in long, medium and close shots.
Shepherd Express
Herzog doesn’t write traditional scripts. Instead, Herzog writes scenarios which are like a hybrid of film, fiction, and prose poetry.
Film International
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Shepherd Express: Werner Herzog's Poetic 'Scenarios'
Although he hasn’t entirely abandoned feature filmmaking, Werner Herzog is best known nowadays as a prolific documentarian. But when he first came to attention, in the 1970s, the German director earned his reputation as one of his country’s foremost art house directors, rivaled only by Wim Wenders and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
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With Werner Herzog's Scenarios and Scenarios II.
Should become essential reading for cinephiles and scholars of Herzog’s work.