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.