Ferocious Reality

A look at the illustrious director's paradoxical relationship with documentary.Werner Herzog has directed almost sixty films, roughly half of which are documentaries. And yet, the filmmaker declared: "There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization." Ferocious Reality is the first book to ask how this conviction, so hostile to the traditional tenets of documentary, can inform the work of one of the world's most provocative documentarians.