Last of the Auteurs
Herzog in Siberia
Back in 1954 François Truffaut coined the term auteur (the French word for author) to describe how certain directors shape their films according to a unique creative vision. According to auteur theory, directors such as Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and Jean Renoir put their stamp on each and every film they made, no matter who wrote it or who acted in it.
If, as I have argued, such directors are mostly a thing of the past, it is some consolation that there is at least one exception to the bottom-line, cookie-cutter mentality that has hijacked the movie industry. Werner Herzog in many ways is the last of the auteurs. At the age of seventy, he still sticks stubbornly to the aesthetic and moral imperatives that he obeyed back in 1972 when he wrote and directed “Aguirre, Wrath of God”. The eponymous conquistador, who led a small band of soldiers down the Amazon in search of El Dorado, the legendary city of gold, until he was driven insane, was the prototypical Herzog hero—someone who defies social convention and urban civilization in pursuit of quixotic goals.