Margaret Herzog As An Auteur

The director is known as a filmmaker who has the head creative vision of a film and thereby gives a film a distinctive and recognizable individual style. The macro and micro aspects of a film such as color, costume, actors, set design and score tend to be seen often throughout the director’s work and films and highlights their individual voice, vision, and ideologies. For example, a director may use the same actors in all their films, so they could be classed as an auteur just by this individual factor. I will be discussing Werner Herzog as a director and if he can be classed as an auteur, and how the vision in his work creates meaning in his mise-en-scene.

Werner Herzog was born in 1942 in Germany and has developed his craft as an author,

Straight away this style could suggest he is an auteur by his recognizable narrations both on and off camera. Herzog’s films are often powered by his own personal opinions and ideologies whilst his style and vision are made clear by the way he mixes his documentary styles with his feature films. By doing this he mixes the documentary style form and its connection with the truth by adding his own visions into his narratives. Herzog is focused with the philosophical questions and ideologies of human behavior, as seen in his documentary Into the Abyss (2011) which follows the story of a murder on a Texas town in the early 2000’s, as Herzog interviews the inmates on waiting on death row. In all his films, he usually discusses life, mortality, and the speed of life in humans. The continued use of personal ideology and narration may show his auteur title and his recognizable

Especially in his documentaries, Herzog uses locals to benefit from what he calls the "ecstatic truth." He casts many non-actors to both play the roles in the film whilst also in general being themselves on camera to enhance the narratives reality. On the other hand, Herzog relationship with an actor named Klaus Kinski is also recognized as one of the most famous partnerships in cinema. Herzog and Kinski have worked together on many films, such as Fitzcarraldo (1982), and Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972). Herzog using this actor in his films repetitively shows his own personal and creative voice whilst also allowing audiences to easily recognize the film as one of Herzog’s. As a comparison, Tim Burton has been known to consistently cast actors such as Johnny Depp in his films and he has been classed as one of the most famous director and auteur in cinema due to his darker vision and trade mark mise-en-scene when populating the