A study in contradictions, Werner Herzog, more than any of his peers, has embodied German history, character and cultural richness in his work. Yet unlike his contemporaries (Fassbinder, Wenders, Schlondorff), Herzog has set no significant film in his own country in his own time. Instead, his restless nature has taken him far and wide, and his journeys to the edge have provided the impetus for filmmaking renowned for its physical demands on everyone involved. Though growing up in the shadow of remembered Nazi atrocities prompted him to probe the darker aspects of human behavior, Herzog developed a paradoxical style, its surface realism part of a vision that combined 20th-century Expressionism with 19th-century Romanticism. Unifying these disparate elements was his elevation of the grotesque, first in his lensing of dwarfs and the handicapped and later by casting actors like former mental patient Bruno S and the willful, manic Klaus Kinski who could convey his ideal of an absurd universe where ugliness triumphs over beauty.

Herzog's genius for self-promotion makes it difficult to sort the fact from the fiction in his own biography. While he definitely traveled extensively as a young man, visiting Greece, Yugoslavia, England and the Sudan, it is less clear (though certainly not inconceivable) whether he worked as a rodeo rider and smuggled arms and TV sets across the Mexican border (as he claims) during his initial forays to the United States. Courting danger in his personal life progressed logically to a preoccupation with authentic experience as the basis for his films, a monomania resulting in his arrest (as a suspected mercenary) and torture in the Cameroon during the making of "Fata Morgana" (1969). The director twice chose the jungles of Peru to infuse arguably his greatest films ("Aguirre, the Wrath of God" 1972 and "Fitzcarraldo" 1982) with their sense of immediacy, and he allegedly threatened to kill Kinski if he left during the filming of the former, whereas the trials of the latter probably made him want to kill himself.

Dismissive of film schools, Herzog considered his apprenticeship complete with his third short, the scathing anti-war satire "The Unprecedented Defense of Fortress Deutschkreuz" (1966). A similar sentiment was also present in his first feature, "Signs of Life" (1968), although the eventual madness of the wounded German soldier sent from Crete to the island of Cos had more to do with the enforced idleness and alien landscape encountered than anything else. The apocalypse of his second feature, "Even Dwarfs Started Small" (1970), which chronicled a day in the life of a prison comprised entirely of dwarfs and midgets, served as a metaphor for the warped nature of mankind. Herzog followed with "Land of Silence and Darkness" (1971), a documentary about a middle-aged deaf and blind woman whose attempts to help her fellow-sufferers underscored the primitive, incommunicable nature of people. As with the community of dwarfs, the flawed handicapped band symbolized the essentially damaged quality of humanity.

Unrelenting in its concentration on filth, disease and brutality, "Aguirre" functions as an allegory of the fascistic personality, invoking both Germany's glorification of the Nazis and America's oppression of Vietnam, not to mention the general reading that a bestiality lingers beneath the facade of civilized conventions. "Aguirre" opens with an extraordinary shot of an almost endless line of conquistadors and slaves making their way down the valley in the jungle and ends with Aguirre (Kinski), his expedition's lone survivor, adrift, raving down the Amazon on a corpse-strewn raft overrun with hundreds of twittering monkeys. In between, the maniacal conquistador, through intimidation and murder, gains control of his party, declares himself the "wrath of God" and sets off to find El Dorado, the legendary Inca city of gold. As the camera circles around the raft, reinforcing a sense of entrapment and doom, the stunning final image conjures a sense of awe, even admiration, for the heroic madman.

"Every Man for Himself and God Against All/The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser" (1975) documented the true story of a 16-year-old boy discovered standing in the town square of Nuremberg in 1828, unable to walk or talk, having been locked away in a dark cellar and deprived of all human contact since birth. Herzog's choice of Bruno S for the title role was a stroke of genius as the former mental patient's face compellingly expressed the injuries he himself had incurred at the hands of the restrictive machinery of society, establishing the authentic immediacy that was de rigueur for the director's films. Herzog experimented with hypnosis to induce the mass hysteria that overcomes the townspeople of "Heart of Glass" (1976) before reuniting with Bruno S for "Stroszek" (1977), which takes its trio of misfits to Wisconsin and presents the American dream as nightmare. He then let his expressionism run rampant, first in a reverent remake of F W Murnau's "Nosferatu" (1978), followed by a film version of Georg Buchner's 1836 play, "Woyzeck" (1979).

"Fitzcarraldo" and its companion piece, "Burden of Dreams" (1983), Les Blank's behind-the-scenes documentary, attest to the danger and extremism of what is ultimately the defining project of Herzog's career. Perhaps the least of the obstacles facing the director was the monumental task of hauling a 320-ton steamboat over a mountain. Finding himself in the middle of a border dispute between Peru and Ecuador, he moved his location. Jack Nicholson backed out before shooting began, his replacement Warren Oates decided against doing it at the last minute and Jason Robards contacted amoebic dysentery halfway through filming, after which Mick Jagger withdrew to prepare for a Rolling Stones concert tour. It remained for Kinski to save the day, and who better to essay the role of the obsessive Irish expatriate who dreams of bringing grand opera to the deep interior of the jungle. In the end, Fitzcarraldo's inability to bend nature to his will parallels Herzog's psychic defeat at the hands of the picture. The director has not returned to the epic scale since, nor has he had a film widely released.

Herzog has not stopped making films, but he is primarily a documentarian these days, often employing his much-loved 360-degree pans in the rendering of his sublime landscapes. Even during his heyday in the 70s, he continued to intersperse amongst his features short works like the 47-minute "The Great Ecstacy of Walter Steiner" (1975) and "La Soufriere" (1976), for which he journeyed to an evacuated Guadeloupe island to photograph the eruption of a volcano which never occurred. He made two highly-acclaimed short films in 1984, "The Ballad of the Little Soldier", which drew protests from pro-Sandanistas that Herzog was in league with the Contras and CIA, and "The Green Glow of the Mountains", full of the exotic scenery that was the backdrop for Reinhold Messner and his partner Hans Kammerlander's mountain climbing heroics in Pakistan. Among his other nonfiction titles are "Herdsman of the Sun" (1988), a record of the sub-Saharan Wodaabe tribe, and "Lessons of Darkness" (1992), a look at the environmental impact of the 1991 Gulf War on Kuwait, which aired on the Discovery Channel. His last film to date was "Dieter Dengler Needs to Fly" (1997).

For his next film, the documentary “My Best Friend” (1999), Herzog explored the chaotic life and career of his old friend, Klaus Kinski, who once called the director a “blowhard” and a “sadistic, treacherous, cowardly creep.” The tumultuous professional and personal relationship resulted in nasty on-set encounters and various death threats, including a serious consideration by Herzog to firebomb Kinski’s house. Herzog also blithely recounted directing the actor in “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” with a loaded rifle at the ready and a threat to shoot Kinski if he walked off set; Kinski scoffed at Herzog’s claim in his autobiography. He also recalled the filming of “Fitzcarraldo,” where Peruvian natives, sick of his crazed antics, offered to kill the actor. But Herzog declined, stating that he still needed to direct him in the movie. Herzog later regretted missing his opportunity. Meanwhile, “My Best Friend” made the festival rounds, including Cannes, Telluride and the Chicago International Film Festival.

Herzog returned to fictional narrative—his first released in the U.S. since “Scream of Stone” (1991)—with “Invincible” (2002), starring Tim Roth as the sinister owner of the Palace of the Occult in Weirmar Berlin, where a former blacksmith from Poland (Jouko Ahola) arrives to perform as a strongman. As anti-Semitism spreads and the Nazis increase their power, the strongman, plagued by nightmares, returns to Poland convinced he’s commanded by God to warn fellow Jews of the impending danger. Blending fact and fiction, Herzog eschewed a melodramatic handling of relations between Nazis and Jews, and instead favored a slow and hauntingly stylized tone. In casting Ahola—an untrained actor—as the kind-hearted, but naïve strongman, Herzog added goodness and optimism into his film—rare for the typically dark and complicated director.

In his next documentary, “Wheel of Time” (2003), Herzog observed the creation of the Kalachakra sand mandala, or wheel of time, a collage of images representing the stages of Buddhist enlightenment. For the first eight of twelve days, Buddhist monks make the wheel from sand ground of white stone and mixed with opaque water colors. The last four days are spent initiating students and ends with the Dalai Lama thanking the 722 deities for participating, followed by sweeping away the sands. Herzog was invited by the monks to film the ritual, but he initially wanted to decline because his knowledge of Buddhism was wanting. He eventually accepted and created a film with beautiful images, including the opening scenes of teeming crowds in saffron robes roaming the streets of Bodh Gaya, the town where Buddha sat under a tree and became enlightened, at the start of the initiation. The film proved to be another foray into gentler, more calming waters for Herzog.

With “White Diamond” (2004), a documentary about airship engineer Dr. Graham Dorrington, who embarks on a trip to the Kaieteur falls in Guyana to fly his helium-filled balloon above the trees, Herzog explored one man’s unflinching will to conquer nature. Though not nearly as maniacal as Kinski, Dorrington provided an element of lunacy to the effort, a common denominator in many of Herzog’s films. Lurking death also factored in: Twelve years prior to Dorrington’s expedition, friend Dieter Plage plummeted to his death in a similar experiment.

For “Grizzly Man” (2005), Herzog again ventured into the wilds to follow the path of a half-crazed man hell-bent on penetrating nature. This time, however, the subject, Timothy Treadwell, a self-avowed grizzly bear activist who went to Katmai National Park & Preserve every summer to live with the Alaskan brown bear, was already dead before Herzog began work. Treadwell brought a camera to the refuge his last five summers and documented himself, leaving Herzog to piece together clips from over 70 hours of footage with his own interviews conducted after the activist was eaten by a rogue bear in 2003. The result was a probing and entertaining look at a man at war with nature, human civilization and himself.