It's Werner Herzog Day!

If you're wondering why Werner Herzog's been trending, it's because today is Werner Herzog Day. Here's why Arjun Sajip thinks you should care.

‘Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity. It is a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity. They are the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creatures in the world.’

These mildly unnerving words were spoken by maverick German film director Werner Herzog, and if you’re wondering why he has been trending on Twitter, it’s because today is the (somewhat arbitrarily assigned by the BFI) day for celebrating the great man’s work. It’s Werner Herzog Day.

François Truffaut once referred to Herzog as ‘the most important film director alive’; casting your eye over the 71-year-old’s illustrious filmography, you’d be hard-pressed to argue much. A truly uncompromising figure, he first rose to (relative) prominence with his 1970 film Even Dwarfs Started Small , about a group of dwarfs rebelling against the custodians of the institution in which they’re held captive. Filming was so dangerous (one dwarf caught fire) that Herzog promised his cast he would jump into a cactus patch if production wrapped with no more than two injuries. The cast fulfilled this condition, and so Mr. Herzog dived into the cactus patch. ‘Getting out,’ he said later, ‘was a lot more difficult than jumping in.’

Other unconventional behaviour includes cooking and eating his shoes (which were boiled with garlic, herbs, and stock for five hours); threatening to shoot actor Klaus Kinski and himself; and having a 320-ton ship hauled over a mountain to achieve a realistic depiction of obsession, determination and madness. His films (of which Aguirre, Der Zorn Gottes, Fitzcarraldo and Grizzly Man are possibly the most well-known) are like no other: feverish, compassionate, insightful, and beautifully humanist. In more recent years, he has become increasingly interested in documentaries, focusing his lens and his unique mind on the natural world and man’s relationship with it; but I’ll remember him just as much for his startling fictional portrayals of megalomania, spiritual hunger and the complex nature of innocence.

At Rough Trade East at 18:30 today, you can catch a free screening of one of his rarely exhibited documentaries, The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, about the eponymous ski-jumper. From 18:00, DJ Cherrystones will be playing a set of Herzog-inspired German film music; the documentary itself will be presented by a BFI film expert. Don’t miss it!

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