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 or contributing editor of twenty-one books, including The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman, Movies with Stanley Cavell in Mind, The Philosophy of Documentary Film, Metafiction on Screen, and from Oxford University Press, Metacinema. His website is www.davidlarocca.org.
