AFP-BNS

At the Venice Film Festival on Wednesday, a special Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement was awarded to world-renowned filmmaker Werner Herzog, whose monumental films often explore the conflict between humans and nature.

The festival will also feature the premiere of his latest documentary, Ghost Elephants, which tells the story of a lost herd of elephants in Angola.

The award was personally presented to the German director at the opening ceremony by legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola.

Now 82, Herzog, a representative of arthouse cinema, contributed in the 1970s to the rise of the so-called New German Cinema movement.

Herzog has made more than 70 films, but he rose to fame in the 1970s and 1980s with striking works about obsessive megalomaniacs and the natural world.

In recent years, the German director and fearless explorer has produced a series of documentaries – many filmed in exotic locations – and has appeared in cameo roles in various films, including the animated series The Simpsons.

“Herzog has never stopped pushing the boundaries of cinematic language,” said the festival’s artistic director Alberto Barbera in April, when the award was announced.

“A physical filmmaker and tireless traveler, Werner Herzog constantly roams the Earth in search of unseen images (…) exploring the limits of cinematic representation, tirelessly seeking a higher, exalted truth and new sensory experiences,” he added.

A Filmmaker of the Outdoors

Born in Munich in 1942, Herzog began experimenting with cinema at the age of 15, later gaining fame as a writer, producer, and director.

His long and stormy collaboration with German film icon Klaus Kinski gave rise to such epics as Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), about the search for El Dorado in the Amazon jungle, and Fitzcarraldo (1982), about a mad dreamer obsessed with building an opera house in the upper Amazon. During the filming of Fitzcarraldo, Herzog famously ordered extras to haul a massive steamboat over a hill.

Herzog also directed the gothic horror film Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), the documentary Grizzly Man (2005), and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009), starring Nicolas Cage.

A passionate traveler, Herzog avoids studio shooting, preferring to film on location. He has shot films in the Amazon, the Sahara Desert, and Antarctica.

He often appears in his own documentaries. In Into the Inferno (2016), he ventured dangerously close to active volcanoes, while in Into the Abyss (2011), filmed in Texas, he interviewed a death row inmate and people affected by his crime.

Herzog has also been a prolific opera director, working at Bayreuth, La Scala, and other opera houses. He has published poetry and prose, including the novel The Twilight World (2021), a diary (1978), and memoirs (2023).