Cold Open · Essay · aug 31, 2023

The Ecstatic Truth: The Films of Werner Herzog

Timed to coincide with an Eye Filmmuseum retrospective and the return of Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, Wrath of God to LAB111's screens, this episode takes on one of cinema's great obsessives. Werner Herzog's concept of ecstatic truth — the idea that cinema's job is not to document reality but to find the truth that lives beneath it — is the thread running through every rubber boat hauled over an Amazonian mountain, every conductor at the edge of collapse, every man who walked into a volcano. An episode about what it means to believe in cinema this completely.

By Elliot Bloom

Film Journalist · Celebrating Cinema

With an oeuvre-spanning exhibition in Eye Filmmuseum, and multiple classics like Fitzcarraldo (1982) and Aguirre, Wrath Of God (1972) returning to the big screens of LAB111, we sit down to discuss the ‘ecstatic truths’ and brilliant fictions of German film auteur par excellence: Werner Herzog.

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