Every Man for Himself and God Against All
A Memoir
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3.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Legendary filmmaker and celebrated author Werner Herzog tells in his inimitable voice the story of his epic artistic career in a long-awaited memoir that is as inventive and daring as anything he has done before
Werner Herzog was born in September 1942 in Munich, Germany, at a turning point in the Second World War. Soon Germany would be defeated and a new world would have to be made out the rubble and horrors of the war. Fleeing the Allied bombing raids, Herzog’s mother took him and his older brother to a remote, rustic part of Bavaria where he would spend much of his childhood hungry, without running water, in deep poverty. It was there, as the new postwar order was emerging, that one of the most visionary filmmakers of the next seven decades was formed.
Until age 11, Herzog did not even know of the existence of cinema. His interest in films began at age 15, but since no one was willing to finance them, he worked the night shift as a welder in a steel factory. He started to travel on foot. He made his first phone call at age 17, and his first film in 1961 at age 19. The wildly productive working life that followed—spanning the seven continents and encompassing both documentary and fiction—was an adventure as grand and otherworldly as any depicted in his many classic films.
Every Man for Himself and God Against All is at once a personal record of one of the great and self-invented lives of our time, and a singular literary masterpiece that will enthrall fans old and new alike. In a hypnotic swirl of memory, Herzog untangles and relives his most important experiences and inspirations, telling his story for the first and only time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The idiosyncrasies of filmmaker Herzog (The Twilight World) are on full display in his eccentric if unreflective memoir. Herzog was born in Munich in 1942 and soon moved with his mother and brother to a farm in the remote town of Sachrang to escape Allied bombings. As a young teen, he returned to Munich and, convinced after a spiritual experience while working on a fishing boat that he wouldn't live past 18 (he writes of the episode that he was "bedded in a cosmos without compare, above, below, all around a speechless silence"), began making films because he assumed "they would be all that was left of me" after his premature demise. He explains that he learned almost "all there is to know" about moviemaking from "the thirty or forty pages on radio, film, and TV in an encyclopedia" and expounds on the making of his most famous films, revealing that Jack Nicholson turned down the lead in Fitzcarraldo because he "only took parts that left him free to watch Los Angeles Lakers' games." The prose is often beautiful and there's no shortage of prime Herzog-isms ("I always wanted to direct a Hamlet and have all the parts played by ex-champion livestock auctioneers"), but the director offers disappointingly little in the way of emotional introspection. Still, Herzog's fans will want to check this out.
