Werner Herzog/Rogue Filmmaker

In Werner Herzog / Rogue Filmmaker, David LaRocca draws from a fan’s resolute passion for his subject to face head-on vexing Herzogian notions such as ecstatic truth, the sublime, and the beguiling spirit that animates the fittingly titled Rogue Film School, which the author attended. In our distracted, dissipating times, Herzog is an icon of penetrating acuity, vigorous resolve, poetic straight-talk, and provocative medial experiments–someone with the mettle to mount visionary adventures: shouldered, provisional, failed, recuperated. In these pages, LaRocca follows the more than half-century-long footpath by which Herzog became his own genre: with fabricated films of daring, life-lived-at-the-limits intensity; artful literary innovations; and a persistently roving persona. Marshaling the awe suited to philosophical investigations, LaRocca tracks the study of Herzog from first forays to the fraught present moment, including critical dispatches on autobiography, parody, and artificial intelligence. As with any Herzogian enterprise, this one isn’t for the faint of heart.

David LaRocca is the author of Emerson’s English Traits and the Natural History of Metaphor, and the editor of many books, including The Bloomsbury Anthology of Transcendental Thought, The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman, The Philosophy of War Films and The Philosophy of Documentary Film, as well as several volumes about Stanley Cavell. www.davidlarocca.org.

^{Werner Herzog/Rogue Filmmaker (2024)
Paperback ISBN 978-1-942782-72-8 384pp 5×8 inches
Hardback ISBN 978-1-942782-73-5 384pp 5×8 inches}