Werner Herzog

"From the fascinating films of Werner Herzog, Joshua Lund crafts a striking book that sheds light on the political significance of a range of aesthetic issues. Behind Herzog's films stands the ghost of America, confronting us with the tragic powerlessness of her heroes and meditating on the historical failure of her cultural-economic model. We have never seen Herzog's films with greater clarity."--Luc Vancheri, author of Psycho: La leçon d'iconologie d'Alfred Hitchcock  "This is a book that was written to be read. With a view to shedding light on Herzog's notoriously hard-to-pin-down politics, Lund focuses on the idea of "America as it figures in Herzog's oeuvre, treating it as a broad and privileged category for reflecting on capitalist modernity. Each of the main chapters of Werner Herzog centers on a single film, tracing the arc of its plot, elegantly interweaving observations about other Herzog films, unusual historical and literary material, and commentary on the growing critical literature. It does all this without devolving into an easily forgotten scholasticism. Lund's concerns go to the heart of what is so powerful and disorienting about Herzog's work. By the end of each chapter, one has been expertly led along an unpredictable path to a fresh apprehension of the films. The book has everything that one wants from film criticism: excellent writing; suspense and surprise; erudition; and most of all, a strong and irreverent critical voice, worthy of Herzog's own renegade sensibility."--Salome Aguilera Skvirsky, author of The Process Genre: Cinema and the Aesthetic of Labor